Australians: Origins to Eureka: 1

by Thomas Keneally

  He went into partnership with another entrepreneurial emancipist named Daniel Cooper in 1825, and they formed an enterprise which involved import and export, the buying of wool, shipping, whaling and sealing. He was back living in London when he met Peel.

  Their venture would not be a happy one. To begin, Peel concealed his partnership with an emancipist from the Colonial Office. And when he ulti-m ately received his land grant south of Perth, he faced angry charges that he had been favoured by his cousin, the Home Secretary Robert Peel. By his agreement with the Colonial Office Peel had been granted priority to 250 000 acres (101 250 hectares), which he chose off the map on the southern banks of the Swan and Canning rivers, with a further 250 000 acres to be allotted once he had landed four hundred settlers. After twenty-one years, if improvements had been made on this first half-million acres, the remaining half-million would be allotted. The other problem for Peel was that the press, which did not understand the vastness of Western Australia, declared that after a 250 000-acre grant, there would be nothing left for settlers.

  The government announced in January 1829 that the first shipload of immigrants was to be landed before 1 November 1829 if priority of choice of land was to be retained. The Peel settlement failed, in part because of native resistance, and Peel, dressing in hunting garb, was left to haunt the landscape in old age. The Gilmore, the Peel-Levey partnership’s first ship bearing 179 recruited immigrants, put to sea, but would arrive in New Holland six weeks late and by then his best land had been chosen by others.

  TALKING TO THE SULKY ONE

  Much earlier than Peel’s arrival, on 2 May 1829, Captain Fremantle of HMS Challenger took possession on behalf of Stirling of a large stretch of land at the mouth of the Swan River. Stirling arrived on 18 June with his wife, civil officials and a small detachment from the 63rd Regiment on the store ship Parmelia, and proclaimed the colony on a bright afternoon beneath Mount Eliza. Rarely had a settlement been made on the basis of so little knowledge of the nature of the hinterland. It was decided that there would be a port at the river mouth, later named Fremantle, and a main site upriver, just beyond the point where the river named the Canning entered the Swan. This settlement would be named Perth, to honour the seat Sir George Murray held in the House of Commons. It was already the meeting place of a tall and sinewy people who called themselves Bibbulmun, though they would later be more commonly named the Nyoongar, the word in their language for ‘man’. In the cosmos of the Bibbulmun the most significant creature was the Rainbow Serpent who had to be persuaded, flattered and appeased ceremonially into continuing to provide the elements of life. The Bibbulmun often called the Rainbow Serpent ‘the Sulky One’, because they knew from millennia of experience that their beloved country required exertions, priestly and physical, from them, and that the Sulky One must be conciliated into making plenty possible.

  Now the arrivals, knocking down a tree, raising a rag, singing a song, unleashing thunderous smoke into the air, were also placing themselves in the power of the Sulky One. And many of them were ambiguous about it, and many others appalled.

  On the Warrior, for example, everyone was dissatisfied with the rations provided for the voyage by Mr Sempill, the charterer. One passenger wrote, ‘The rascality of Sempill has at length arrived at a crisis altogether intolerable.’ But more crucial was the quality of the water. It was difficult even for a cabin passenger to get sufficient to keep flesh clean. Aboard the Warrior were a number of young men of the Bussell family, the orphan children of a Church of England minister. John Bussell had met up with a Captain Molloy, who was already intending to emigrate, at a ball in Southampton, and decided that his three younger brothers needed somewhere spacious. The four brothers travelled steerage to save money but had dogs and some poultry with them, a corn mill, an Encyclopaedia Britannica, compasses and a thermometer.

  The town of Fremantle, said one Warrior passenger, ‘was composed of a good number of miserable-looking tents, most of which were grog shops’. And George Bussell at first saw the sand surrounding the settlement as snowdrifts, ‘a delusion, however, most forcibly contradicted by the intense heat of the sun and the glare it occasions’.

  Fremantle could be seen as graceless with its one hotel. In unloading his cattle, Captain Molloy, a middle-aged and retired captain of infantry, saw them dash away into the scrub, since there were no stockyards to hold them. Goods were simply unladen anywhere on the beach. ‘I was obliged to keep watch night and day,’ said one passenger, for though there were no convicts there were still thieves and desperate people. The places where a settler’s goods and furniture were landed were widely scattered, dependent on the tide and which beach was chosen by a particular lighter. Women wept for broken china and broken and sea-ruined furniture.

  Vernon Bussell described his Fremantle tent thus: ‘The pole was surrounded with guns, three double barrels, two single and three rifles. Over them were hung four braces of pistols and two cutlasses, the table a slab of wood supported by three desks and our seats consisting of a saucepan and a bucket turned upside-down and the door crowded with dogs, who were not allowed to come in.’ One had to be very young like Vernon, or a particular kind of human, not to be a little chastened by the conditions.

  Newly arrived colonists were to enrol their names in the register, receive permission to reside, and call on the governor. A charter boat would take people up the Swan River to the settlement of Perth. The river, its wide reaches, black swans and verdant foreshores were enchanting to many, and consoled them in the extreme choice they had made. But the settlers who came by Warrior were told that the best land, along the Swan and the Canning, was already taken. The officers of HMS Sulphur and HMS Challenger, who had arrived in 1829, had taken up most of the river frontages. ‘It was the opinion of not a few that the Governor had acted very improvidently in giving . . . an extent of river frontage to one individual. It would perhaps have been better, to have made a square mile [2.3 km2] the maximum of any grant on a river.’

  One visitor to Perth noticed idle servants infesting the main street—‘hulking lazy fellows and exceedingly insolent; but what else could be expected, from their previous character, having been, I believe, mostly taken from the workhouse?’ Those who had expected that the earth and their servants would be tractable were disappointed on both scores.

  On a large eucalyptus tree the written newspaper of the place was attached, in the form of public and other notices. A visitor, EW Landor, saw the governor’s written permission for one individual to practise as a notary, another as a surgeon, and a third as an auctioneer. ‘There did not appear to be an opposition tree, and so much the better; as although a free press may do good to a community arrived at a certain state of perfection, yet I think it may be doubted how far it can be serviceable in an incipient colony.’

  Three hotels had been licensed by January 1830. If tent life got too much for a family, they might stay, perhaps, in the one named the Happy Immigrant.

  The governor’s house was on the banks of the river, ‘a commodious wooden building’. Captain Stirling’s young wife, twenty-three years old, despite her wealthy background endured the fierce summers with grace, and with what everyone agreed was a lack of pretension which might have been welcome in her husband. A young gentleman visiting for tea said that she was ‘a pleasant contrast to the bridling and haughtiness of some half-bred persons whom I remember at home’.

  Before he left London, Captain Stirling had been offered a grant of 100 000 acres (40 500 hectares) with priority of choice. He (and his brother) hoped to select land in Geographe Bay, south of Perth. Settlers would later claim that Stirling continually changed his mind about where to choose land, ‘and on the discovery of any new or fertile district he has immediately appropriated the best part of it to himself, thus severely checking enterprise and the spirit of exploration amongst the settlers, who cannot afford either the time or the money to explore land for the Governor’.

  Indeed in Western Australia were avail
able acreages that would make a European’s head spin, and it was a proud feeling to write home and boast of the extent of grants, but the size of the enterprises required a labour force which generally did not exist.

  EW Landor describes his and his brother’s experience. Having been condemned to death by three eminent physicians, and being unable, like the wealthy, to go to Italy, his brother had had the climate of Swan River recommended to him. ‘My younger brother . . . was a youth not eighteen, originally designed for the Church, and intended to cut a figure at Oxford; but modestly conceding that the figure he was likely to cut would not tend to the advancement of his worldly interests, and moreover, having no admiration for Virgil beyond the Bucolics, he fitted himself out with a Lowland Plaid and a set of Pandaean pipes, and solemnly dedicated himself to the duties of a shepherd.’ Landor and his brother left England in April 1841, taking with them a couple of servants, four rams, a bloodhound, a mastiff bitch and a handsome cocker spaniel. They also shipped a vast assortment of useless lumber. ‘Nine-tenths of those who emigrate do so in perfect ignorance of the country they are about to visit and the life they are destined to lead. The fact is, Englishmen as a body know nothing and care nothing about colonies. My own was merely the national ignorance.’ The Englishman’s idea of a colony, said Landor, was of a miserable place, a black hole, where exiled spirits sighed for a glimpse of the white cliffs and a taste of ‘the old familiar green-and-yellow fog of the capital of the world’.

  As for the Bibbulmun, ‘When we first encountered on the road a party of coffee-coloured savages, with spears in their hands, and loose kangaroo-skin cloaks (their only garments) on their shoulders, accompanied by their women similarly clad, and each carrying in a bag at her back her black-haired offspring, with a face as filthy as its mother’s—we by no means felt inclined to step forward and embrace them as brethren.’

  Landor quickly pressed his legal qualifications with Stirling and was appointed commissioner of the Court of Requests while his previously sickly young brother ran the family farm. Such honest settlers were further discontented when those who had been granted good land near the settlements did not remain there or develop it. Early on, the common talk when settlers got together was about their having been misled by the reports of Captain Stirling and Mr Sempill. As a later-comer, Landor described the country thus: ‘The first impression which the visitor to this settlement receives is not favourable. The whole country between Fremantle and Perth, a distance of ten miles [16 kilometres], is composed of granitic sand, with which is mixed a small proportion of vegetable mould. This unfavourable description of soil is covered with a coarse scrub, and an immense forest of banksia trees, redgums, and several varieties of eucalyptus. He also notices the xanthoreas or grass tree.’ However, ‘the traveller at his night bivouac is always sure of a glorious fire from the resinous stem of the grass tree, and a comfortable bed from its leaves’.

  Perth looked attractive to the Landor brothers, with its luxuriant gardens of grapes and figs, melons and peaches, bananas and plantains. ‘The town has a never failing supply of fresh water from a chain of swamps at the back, and the well is fed by them and never dry . . . No park in England could be more beautiful than the grounds around some of the dwellings.’

  Yet the fate of many a Western Australian settler was a hard one. At first, said Landor, the settler was satisfied with finding that he could sell enough produce to pay his way, as long as he lived economically and showed a reasonable degree of good management. But unexpected expense, such as an illness or legal fees, could throw his economies awry. ‘He forgets, however, the principles on which he came out to settle; he begins to complain that he is not making money. It is true he leads an easier life than he did in England; he is not striving and struggling for existence as he was there, but he is making no money. His wife asks him daily, in the pleasantest connubial key, why he brought them all from England, to bury them there, and see nobody from morn to night? What, she urges, is to become of their children? Will Jonadab, their firstborn, be a gentleman like his maternal ancestors? But how, indeed should he, with the pursuits of a cow-boy and the hands of a scavenger? . . . Is she to endure this forever, and see her daughters married to men who wear long beards and blucher boots?’

  But Stirling never grew sick of it. He stuck on, and administered the Swan River settlement from June 1829 until August 1832, when he left on an extended visit to England during which he was knighted, and he was then back as governor from August 1834 until December 1838. He was succeeded by a young bureaucrat named John Hutt, a bachelor whom colonial maidens considered with interest but who earned a certain unpopularity for following Whitehall’s orders too exactly.

  One of the issues facing Hutt was whether the natives were British subjects or not. The Nyoongar were unwittingly in something of a cleft stick—if not subjects, they could be shot; if subjects, they frequently came foul of the law. ‘By declaring the savages to be in every respect British subjects,’ wrote Landor, ‘it becomes illegal to treat them otherwise than such.’ Thus, ‘the poor native, who would rather have been flayed alive than sent into confinement for two months previous to trial, whilst his wives are left to their own resources, is heavily ironed, lest he should escape, and marched down some sixty or seventy miles to Fremantle Gaol, where the denizen of the forest has to endure those horrors of confinement which only the untamed and hitherto unfettered savage can possibly know’.

  OH MR WAKEFIELD

  Handsome Mr Hutt, the new governor at Swan River, was a disciple of a visionary Briton named Edward Gibbon Wakefield, a flawed yet passionate seer. Wakefield’s father had been a friend of the utilitarian philosopher Jeremy Bentham, and his grandmother, Priscilla Wakefield, was one of the founders of the Savings Bank in England. Edward Gibbon, historian, was a relative, and Elizabeth Fry, the famed Quaker prison reformer, his cousin.

  As a young man Wakefield, on leave in 1816 from service as secretary to the British envoy at Turin, eloped with Eliza Ann Frances Pattle, a ward in Chancery. Through the influence of the Lord Chancellor the marriage was approved by parliament and Wakefield went back with Eliza to the Turin legation. The couple had a daughter, and then a son, ten days after delivery of whom, in July 1820, Eliza died.

  Wakefield had a substantial income from this marriage. And yet in 1826 he abducted a fifteen-year-old heiress, Ellen Turner, from her school, married her in Gretna Green, then fled to Calais. Ellen was persuaded to return to her parents and Wakefield came back to England to stand trial. He and his brother William, the latter as accomplice, were convicted of statutory misdemeanour, and on 14 May 1827 were each sentenced to three years imprisonment. Had he received a seven-year sentence, as was not uncommon with abductors, he would have been transported. This time parliament annulled the marriage.

  Wakefield was an enquirer and while he was in Newgate he examined his fellow prisoners and tried to assess how effective their punishments were, and as a result of his study produced a tract, Facts Relating to the Punishment of Death in the Metropolis and also Swing Unmasked, or the Causes of Rural Incendiarism. Two years later, he produced a further two pamphlets on punishment and populist politics.

  While still imprisoned, he devised a plan for colonising ‘Australasia’, published in June 1829 under the misleading title A Letter From Sydney, The Principal Town Of Australasia. It would create a stir in Sydney when it arrived the following December. In Australia it was reviewed as having been written by ‘a penny a liner from Grub Street’. That did not negate its influence.

  Though he had never visited the southern continent, Wakefield claimed in the pamphlet that the Australian colonies were suffering from chaotic granting of free land, shortage of labour and consequent dependence on convicts. He argued for a more systematic exploitation of ‘the wasteland’ of the Crown as a means of providing money for the emigration of labourers. If the price for Crown land were made sufficient, high enough to discourage labourers from immediately acquiring land they could not use, s
uch tribulations as those of Thomas Peel of the Swan River settlement would be avoided. Settlement should expand in contiguous blocks and the volume and pace of immigration should be related to available land. Deficiency of labour and a congenial society would attract capital, encourage immigration, assure prosperity and justify the rights of the colony to elect representatives to its own legislature. British society, in its most advanced form, would thus be transplanted to everyone’s benefit.

  The social structure Wakefield envisaged was hierarchical but mobile, allowed for free institutions, and would consult settlers on such matters as the appointment of officials and land sales. The pursuit of self-interest (as defined by Adam Smith, whose work he had edited), would lead to ineffable social harmony, Wakefield claimed.

  Wakefield was an awkward speaker but had a great deal of personal magnetism. And though there’s something inherently comic in a man dreaming up colonial schemes for Britons to apply their dreams, capital, bodies, families and breath to while in Newgate, it cannot be denied that Wakefield’s theories had serious results. The Spectator wrote:‘The imprisonment of Mr Edward Gibbon Wakefield in Newgate will probably prove the source of the most essential benefit to the country.’

  Indeed, Wakefield’s ideas made up what one historian calls ‘a seductive package’. Like the Greek colonies of old, the new colonies Wakefield proposed were to have balanced populations based on all classes of society; they would be extensions—not denials—of civilisation. Through such colonies ‘Britain would become the centre of the most extensive, the most civilized and, above all, the happiest empire in the world’. Wakefield’s claim that his theories were scientific, though perhaps shaky, gave them an attraction to the enlightened. In the penal colony autocratic and temporarily appointed officials had little common feeling with the pulse of colonial life. A Wakefield colony, in contrast, would be a true society. Having harboured colonies of the fallen, the enemies of God, society and reason, Australia was now to become the continent of model and reasonable and Christian settlements. In particular, the area now known as South Australia would be home to these idyllic societies.