As a result, the first twenty-five years of economic life were a crazy quilt of barter, IOUs and sliding coinage—guineas, johannas, guilders, mohurs, rupees, Spanish dollars and ducats, left in the colony by visiting ships. At one point in 1800, even the English copper penny was declared to be worth twopence. Official prices were given in sterling but the only notes with full sterling value equal to their face value were of two kinds: government bills of exchange on the British treasury, and paymaster’s notes issued to the officers of the New South Wales Corps, which were consolidated as bills on the regimental treasury in England.
Of the two, the Rum Corps notes were much preferred, although the government could enforce the use of its own paper in settlement of debts up to £300. Rum Corps paper carried premiums of as much as 25 percent against copper cash, let alone personal IOUs, which no one trusted and whose use as circulating currency was finally proscribed by Governor Bligh.17
The convicts got the worst of these economic arrangements, of course. Their paid labor was mercilessly exploited by the means of payment, which was mainly in kind, at the prices of goods fixed by the free settlers. Sometimes they would be forced to take imported goods they did not need at all: white cotton dress stockings, for instance, or “sheeps’ rumps” (lambskins) imported from Cape Town. In the heyday of the Rum Corps, sugar was 7s. a pound, tea 6s. an ounce, and spirits 20s. a bottle. King had known rum to go as high as £8 a gallon.18
Even when a convict could get cash wages, he received them not in sterling but in the depreciated “currency” of the colony. In 1814, some little while after Governor Macquarie had begun to deflate the exorbitant prices of the 1800s, the convict weaver Thomas Holden wrote to his parents in Bolton,
Dear Mother, things in this Country is very dear, mens hats is too pounds too shillings and stockings ten shillings per pair and shoes 16 shillings per pair. sugar 3 shillings per pound and butter 7 shillings per pound … although the Prices is so high we are very glad to get [them] at any price.19
As an assigned man, Holden added, he was earning £20 a year in “currency,” but that was only worth £12 in English money. In general, by 1820, the assigned man was paid in kind for overtime work at prices 40 to 70 percent above wholesale cash prices, and 25 to 35 percent over retail. He could (and some did) appeal against this gouging to a magistrate, but magistrates, being settlers themselves, “must naturally feel an interest in support of charges that have the effect of diminishing the price of labour to themselves as well as to others.” They always favored paying convicts in store goods rather than money.20
The most sought-after commodity of all was rum, a word which stood for spirits of all kinds—arrack, aguardiente, poteen, moonshine—but which meant, especially, imported liquor from Bengal. In this little community (less than 5,000 people in 1799; about 7,000 in 1805; just over 20,000 by 1817), nearly all the men and most of the women were addicted to alcohol. In Australia, especially between 1790 and 1820, rum became an overriding social obsession. Families were wrecked by it, ambitions destroyed, an iron chain of dependency forged. Many colonists drank with an oblivion-haunted thirst, determined to blot out the harsh tenor of their lives. In the heyday of the rum monopoly, William Bligh recalled,
the thirst after spirits was so very strong that [the settlers] sacrificed every thing to the purchase of them, and the prices were raised by that monopoly to so high a degree that it was the rum of many of those poor people.21
Governor Bligh, who was firmly sympathetic to the plight and interests of struggling small farmers and sometimes supported them against the Rum Corps officers, saw rum as an instrument of debilitation that helped an elite maintain its power, even as it was debauching the quality of labor. Settlers would leave their farms and come forty miles into Sydney, a four days’ round trip, to pick up a gallon of spirits, “in doing which they spent ten times more than it was worth, and lost their time in agriculture.”
It may be that the reproofs of lower-class colonial boozing that came from the upper colonial crust should be treated with caution, like the pronouncements of Marsden and others on convict sexuality. If everyone had been drunk, the colony could not have survived. And yet there is little room for doubt about the hold rum had on the embryo society of New South Wales; and its evangelical pastors, first Richard Johnson and then Samuel Marsden, were powerless to stop it.
Because most convicts would rather be paid in rum than anything else, it gave great leverage to the wealthy landowner, who could secure any amount of overtime labor with a broached barrel. “You may get more ground worked for a little spirits than you can for anything else, and that I fancy is the reason of labour being so high,” declared John “Little Jack” Palmer, Captain Phillip’s former purser on the First Fleet who had risen to be the official banker and contractor to the early settlement. When Major George Johnston of the New South Wales Corps received a grant of 2,000 acres from Governor King as his official reward for crushing the Irish rebellion of 1804, he “used to barter spirits to pay the labourers for clearing our grounds,” although it was not always easy to get the governor’s permission to buy as many barrels of liquid incentive as he wanted.22
Naturally, the prudent master would find a balance between the quantity of liquor served out as a special indulgence to his men and the amount of work he needed done the next day. At Camden Park, the Macarthurs made it a rule to give steady workers a bonus in Cape wine. Colonial Australia showed little interest in beer or ale. It was rum that could make or break a man’s prosperity, and although civil and military officers controlled the rum trade by getting first access to incoming cargo and selling the liquor at an initial markup of 500 percent, every small businessman tried to dabble in it, while judges, lawyers, surgeons, ministers and missionaries all got into the trade.
Long after the Rum Corps was recalled to England in 1810, the fledgling economies of New South Wales and Van Diemen’s Land—particularly as they affected convicts—remained tied to a kind of rum standard. Quality hardly mattered. Real Jamaica rum, landed at 6 shillings a gallon, reached the small settlers land convicts at £2 to £4; but it was the first victim of the efforts of King and Bligh between 1800 and 1810 to fix rum prices, since their standards abolished the shippers’ profit margin and sometimes sent the boats away at a loss. Bringing spirits from England became “a losing trade,” but there was liquor from Bengal, half the price at 10 shillings a gallon. Cheap Bengali rum, even with restrictions, was the most profitable kind and it did incalculable social damage, from the bottom of the colony to the top.23
The civil establishment bore its quota of fuddled incompetents, from Richard Atkins (1745–1802), Governor King’s deputy judge-advocate, to William Gore (1765–1845), acquaintance of Palmerston and the provost-marshal of New South Wales under Bligh, who became (in the words of a later governor) “so totally abandoned to drinking that I fear He is for ever lost to Society.”24 This sad, detested creature was transported to the penal settlement at Newcastle for shooting a trespassing soldier of the 48th Regiment, and he died at the age of eighty, penniless and disgraced, his body left for several years unburied along with his wife’s beneath a heap of palings on his farm. The Sydney suburb of Gore Hill bears his name.
The convicts were even less able to stay off the rum, since their need for oblivion was worse. “Intemperance is the greatest curse we have on our land,” wrote a convict named John Broxup, claiming that booze caused “three-thirds [sic] of the crimes that are committed.” If a young assigned man managed to live soberly it was a cause for congratulation, to be mentioned in letters home: “Your son Richard I can say is very steady for though liquor is very cheap”—it is 1832 and the price of rum has dropped to 2 shillings a pint—“and he have the means and opportunity of getting it he never gets more than do him good,” a convict scribe added to a letter home from Richard Dillingham, a convict in Van Diemen’s Land.25
But most convicts would have found an anthem in the “Rum Song,” supposedly of penal days:
Cut yer name across me backbone,
Stretch me skin across a drum,
Iron me up to Pinchgut Island
From today till Kingdom Come!
I will eat your Norfolk Dumpling
Like a juicy Spanish plum,
Even dance the Newgate hornpipe,
If you’ll only give me rum!*
Some authorities thought that the only solution was prohibition, which Governor Thomas Brisbane tried to enforce on Newcastle and the Hunter River Valley settlers in 1824. Ships entering Newcastle Harbor had to be placed under bond whether they carried liquor or not, because the mere sight of a possibly rum-laden boat caused “confusion and wild uproar.”26
The English authorities had transported Gin Lane to Australia, and the harsh conditions of colonial life made for heavy drinking. Yet the relationship between drink, wages and work had long been ingrained in England. Benjamin Franklin, for instance, had been astonished to see that his fellow printers in London drank three-quarters of a gallon of strong ale every day at work, supplied against their wages, while the habit of paying workers and craftsmen on Saturday nights from a table in a public-house—thus assuring that all but the teetotaller would drink a hole in his salary before he got home—did not die out in London until the 1820s. Certainly, few convicts were likely to feel that their rights were under attack if their masters part-paid them in rum, and none complained about it.27
iii
THE MAN WHO cleaned up this system was Lachlan Macquarie (1762–1824), the last British proconsul sent to run New South Wales as a military autocracy. In guts, moral vigor and paternal evenhandedness, as well as in his bouts of self-righteousness and bull-headed vanity, Macquarie was a fine early example of that breed of Scottish administrators who kept the engine-room of Empire working throughout the nineteenth century. The son of a Hebridean tenant farmer, related through his mother to the Highland laird Maclaine of Lochbay, he was to become the laird of New South Wales, ruling his anomalous fief from January 1810 to December 1821—the longest tenure of any Australian governor.
Macquarie had risen through the British Army as a career officer, serving with increasing distinction for nearly twenty years in India and the Middle East. By his fortieth year he was a thoroughly seasoned Empire hand: a good organizer, resentful of critics, used to prompt obedience, socially rather creaky but shrewd about the needs of those who fell under his power—an “awkward, rusticated, Jungle-Wallah,” in his own words, ramrod-like in port and bearing, with a bony jaw and eyes as hard as cairngorms.
But he was not too awkward to look after his career. In 1807 Macquarie transferred to a new regiment, the 73rd Highlanders. He then learned that it was being sent to New South Wales to clean up the chaos left in the wake of the Rum Corps’s 1808 rebellion against Governor Bligh. Its commander would be the colonial governor, since the mutiny against Bligh had shown that a naval governor could not necessarily depend on the army’s allegiance. But the commanding officer of the 73rd did not want to go, so Macquarie started lobbying for the post. In 1809 Lord Castlereagh confirmed his appointment as governor of New South Wales. With his wife and his regiment, he sailed for Sydney in May 1809, and was sworn in there on the first day of 1810.
Macquarie’s orders were to arrest the leaders of the Rum Rebellion—John Macarthur and the corps’s naively seditious second-in-command, Major George Johnston, who had arrested Bligh and taken charge of the colony—and to send them back to England for trial. But they had sailed for England already, to take their case before the government. Bligh himself came back to Sydney from his exile in Van Diemen’s Land a fortnight after Macquarie’s arrival, raging against the rebels in his foul “tarpaulin” lingo. Macquarie ignored him; he, not Bligh, was governor now. Bligh sailed back to England soon after and never saw the blood he wanted, for Johnston was cashiered, not hanged, and Macarthur, “the great perturbator,” returned to New South Wales in 1814, his wings clipped (though not for long) by an order to stay out of public affairs.
Macquarie cancelled all the civilian and military appointments and revoked all the pardons, leases and land grants made in Sydney between January 26, 1808, the day of the Rum Rebellion, and his own arrival. He reinstated all dismissed officers and got rid of Macarthur’s drunken stooge of a judge-advocate, Richard Atkins, replacing him with Ellis Bent (1783–1815), the first decently trained professional lawyer to hold office in Australia, who had come out with him on the same ship from England. Firmly seated now, all reins in his hand, Macquarie began the inchmeal conversion of a jail into a colony.
It was not an easy task. He could not, for instance, abolish the social addiction to rum by an act of will. The Rum Corps was gone but the thirst remained. However, as the farms spread, and free settlers seeped in and emancipated convicts got their land grants and businesses other than farming grew on the coast—mainly whaling and sealing—so the economy of New South Wales diversified and could no longer be ruled by a primitive cartel. The rum monopolists’ day would therefore have ended anyway, but Macquarie hastened it by a series of enactments against drinking: Public-houses were to shut on Sundays and there was, instead, mandatory church parade for convicts; the number of licensed houses was sharply cut; a stiff duty went on imported spirits in the hope of pricing drunkenness out of existence. This last measure failed, as it was bound to do; despite Macquarie’s brisk reports of moral improvement, it only caused more colonists than ever to drink themselves into debt.
His attitudes to convicts mattered more than his war on appetite. He rejected the idea that convict labor was a pool from which officers and a few favored settlers could enrich themselves. Convicts were there to be punished but rehabilitated through work. Macquarie saw that Emancipists so outnumbered emigrant settlers that Australia was bound to be an Emancipists’ country, its political reality shaped by them and their descendants. If emancipated convicts were not given back their rights as citizens, New South Wales would become as riddled with false dreams of aristocracy as the American South.
Emancipation pointed a convict back into respectable society, which must receive him. With the flurry of capital letters that usually signalled his moral enthusiasms, Macquarie told Castlereagh that emancipation was “the greatest Inducement that Can be held out to the Reformation of the Manners of the Inhabitants.… [W]hen United with Rectitude and long tried Good Conduct, [it] should lead a man back to that Rank in Society which he had forfeited and do away, as far as the Case will admit, with All Retrospect of former Bad Conduct.”28 And for the emancipated to grasp the normal responsibilities of citizenhood, they must be shown that they had rights while they were still in the larval stage of convict serfdom. Macquarie’s respect for the potential of convicts was noble. Yet it led to his political ruin at the hands of the “Merinos” and their allies in England, who believed in unrelenting exploitation of the convicts; and he died a broken man, obsessed with his detractors and their myriad calumnies.
But that lay in the future. What Sydney saw, at the beginning, was the vigorous administrator in his late forties, for whose attention no matter was too trivial. Whenever a convict transport disgorged its cargo in Sydney, Governor Macquarie was there to meet it. A convict remembered the ceremony that greeted the disembarked prisoners:
The Governor, Superintender, and Doctor, &C., comes; the Governor addresses them, by saying what a fine fruiteful country they are come to, and what he will do for them if there conduct merits it; likewise tells them if they find themselves anyways dessatesfied with there employer, to go (immediately) to the madjestrate of the district, and he will see him righted.29
All convicts were initiated to Australia with this fatherly speech from the governor. By telling the new arrivals “what he will do for them,” Macquarie made it plain that the channels of patronage were as much in operation here as the chains of the law. No matter who their master was, they would always be working for the government.
At first Macquarie complained of the shortage of labor and asked the
government for more convicts. But for the first five years of his rule, not enough ships could be spared from the war against Napoleon to send them out. So he was faced with a ticklish balance. He would assign men and women to free settlers as far as it was necessary; he had no bias against the farmer and his need for labor. But he felt convict labor was best used in government service, where Authority could judge its incentives nicely and measure the reformation of each person instead of depending on second-hand reports from masters.
It would be better for the colony, too. For Macquarie was appalled by the shoddy look of Sydney: an unplanned straggle of shacks “in most ruinous decay,” perched on the rim of the shining, amethyst, many-lobed harbor. The judge-advocate’s residence was a “perfect pigstye,” and the convict barracks at Sydney and Parramatta were beyond mere disgust. There was no proper hospital. The churches were huts—a fact particularly repugnant to Macquarie, who believed religious practice would reform his sinners. The town streets were dusty tracks in summer and ditches after a rain, and no sewers existed. Beyond the town’s perimeter, the roads (except for the toll road to Parramatta) could scarcely be negotiated by a cart.
The Fatal Shore Page 43