The Fatal Shore

by Robert Hughes

  It was in the person of the governor, therefore, that the class divisions of the colony found their basis, their reassurance. If a governor leaned toward populism, showing favor to small farmers or ex-convicts, immense resentments could be released, as they were against Lachlan Macquarie. It is not easy to exaggerate the entrenched mentality of the dozen or so clans, starting with the Macarthurs and their allies like Samuel Marsden, who made up the leading free families of Australia between 1800 and 1840.

  John Macarthur (1767–1834) and his wife Elizabeth Veale (1767–1850) were the founders and prototypes of the colonial gentry. Macarthur was the son of a Plymouth mercer and corset-maker, a choleric man with a rage for gentility, who saw plots and insults everywhere and was as touchy as a Sicilian. He wasted half his life in imbroglios. Known to Emancipists as “Jack Bodice”—a nickname that reduced him to rage—and to his administrative enemies as “the perturbator,” he quarrelled furiously with judges, clergymen, sea captains and traders, and with a succession of governors from Hunter to Darling. From prison in 1808, he masterminded (if that is the word for so half-cocked and rash a gesture) the Rum Corps’s putsch against Governor Bligh.5

  The fruit of his spleen was exile; he had to spend all but four years of the period 1801–17 in England, while his wife Elizabeth, most resourceful and levelheaded of women, bred their sheep and ran their growing estates by the Nepean River in Camden. Off the land, Macarthur was a poor businessman, betrayed by his enthusiasms and his hatreds alike. He was rarely conscious of any line between private and public interest, except when scrutinizing the behavior of his enemies. He died mad. None of this tarnished Macarthur’s name as the doyen of Australian pastoral conservatism.6

  Macarthur had come out as a New South Wales Corps ensign on the Second Fleet in 1790 with his wife, their baby son and a maid. Francis Grose, the army governor, favored him and made him paymaster of the Rum Corps. Macarthur started small, with a mixed-breed herd of about a thousand sheep. He got all the land and convict labor he wanted from Grose and his successor Paterson. But the next two governors, Hunter and King, were navy men who saw no reason to do inside deals with Macarthur or to give him special patronage. “Jack Bodice” took this to mean war. His basilisk campaigns of innuendo against Government House reached their climax in September 1801 in a quarrel, and then a pistol duel, with his own colonel, whose allegiance Macarthur had tried to suborn from Governor King. He winged the colonel in the shoulder, and King, incensed by the doings of “this perturbator,” arrested him for trial. But he could not be given a court-martial in Sydney, because—King believed—his fellow officers would have supported the Rum Corps against the Navy with an acquittal. So he was sent back to be tried in England. This, by one of the bizarre flukes that often seemed to govern colonial life, made Macarthur’s fortune.

  His sole punishment for shooting turned out to be a free ticket to London, with wool samples. King’s strategy backfired, as the English court-martial acquitted Macarthur. Before leaving, Macarthur had bought 1,250 more mixed-breed sheep from a brother officer, Major Foveaux, thus making him the biggest sheep-owner in Australia. The main source of first-class wool for the growing English textile industries had been the merino flocks of Saxony and Spain. But Europe was under naval blockade and the English woollen industry was in crisis. It looked as though no more merino fleeces would be reaching England. Even with his coarse hanks of colonial wool, Macarthur’s timing was perfect. He found the government more than willing to encourage the raising of fine wool in Australia. He got Treasury permission to buy and export some merino sheep from a small specimen flock owned by George III. He also persuaded Lord Camden to give him a special land grant on which to raise these aristocratic beasts—2,000 acres around Mount Taurus, by the Nepean River, an area called the Cowpastures, the finest known grazing land in New South Wales (which he later renamed Camden). Macarthur sailed back in triumph in 1805 on his own whaling ship, rechristened the Argo after the vessel in which Jason sought the Golden Fleece.7

  The pure merino, two centuries ago, was a tricky and delicate animal, a pompous ambling peruke, unused to Australian heat and Australian grass. Its virtue lay in the size of its fleece and the quality of its wool. But to flourish in Australia the strain had to be cross-bred. Although Macarthur did not, as he often claimed, introduce the merino to New South Wales (both pure and cross merinos were owned by “Little Jack” Palmer and the Reverend Samuel Marsden before him), he turned it into the staple of Australian export by crossing it with hardier types, Bengal and Afrikaner Fat-Tail, while conserving a pure merino flock to improve the strains.8

  Before long, “pure Merino” was colonial slang for any member of the pastoral elite, starting with the Macarthurs; and by 1808, when he had to run for England and stay there nine years, leaving his stud in charge of Elizabeth and his growing sons, Macarthur was the largest sheep-owner in New South Wales. In his absence, Elizabeth bought, built and bred their holdings far beyond the original Cowpastures grant, to 60,000 acres.

  Few ways of life, one would think, demand more evenness of temper, perseverance, instinctive sympathy and financial prudence than stock-farming. Yet the curious fact is that both the founders of Australian sheep-farming were melancholics, given to attacks of extreme anxiety—the very opposite of the contented squire. Alexander Riley (1788–1833) was a genial Irishman most of the time, but his black fits were almost as bad as Macarthur’s. Riley had followed his two sisters, who married Rum Corps officers, from Ireland to Australia. He began as a general trader, raising sheep on the side at his station, Raby, near Liverpool. His coup, which would transform Australian grazing, was to bring in Saxon merino sheep, a better stapled and hardier strain than Macarthur’s Spanish merinos. In 1825 he landed a whole flock of them, each like a woolly pasha in its own padded pen. He wheedled from the government a grant of 10,000 acres of prime land, but further out, near Yass, on the western limits of settlement. He called this station Cavan, after his family’s district in Ireland. The essential bloodlines of Australian sheep-breeding run back to Camden and Cavan.

  Riley and Macarthur were very different men. Macarthur had a plantation mind and could not keep his fingers out of politics. Riley shied away from public affairs and expected the convict system to wither away, leaving a society of free men whose elite were graziers. The contrast between them reminds one of the dangers of generalizing about early pastoralists as though they were units in a class, not individuals. And yet the values of most well-off free men in early colonial Australia were certainly closer to Macarthur’s than to Riley’s, especially since very few of them were Irish.

  What was the ideology of the Merinos and those who aspired to their company—of the Exclusives in general? Mainly, gut Tory conservatism, reinforced by the doctrines of the established Church of England. Like the English squires they emulated, they hated all things French and were apt to treat any kind of Emancipist restiveness as unbridled Jacobinism.

  They thought themselves uniquely fitted to hold power in the colony—indeed, that no others were suitable. Not the Emancipists or their children, for the “taint” of convictry was ineradicable and hereditary; stock-breeding encourages a rigid view of genetic inheritance. Not the growing class of city traders and entrepreneurs, no matter how much money they were beginning to make, for trade was ignoble beside land, although much could be forgiven for a suitable dowry. Not the new-chum settlers, who were coming in growing numbers after 1820, for their roots in the land did not go deep enough, and they did not have the big holdings. Not being able to idealize their origins, the early Exclusives fetishized their achievements fiercely and rigidly, seeing themselves as an island of order in a lake of arrivisme and crime. They knew that what was good for them was good for the country.

  They felt threatened by the rise of new money, generated by trade and property deals. Prudently, they married their offspring into the merchant families, crossing their lines as they had crossed their sheep for economic hardihood. Less realistically
, they tried to cripple the Emancipists politically.

  Was their conservatism nothing better than an exploitive, “un-Australian” style of baronial laissez-faire? This was the picture created by the Emancipists from 1815 onward—the pseudo-squire in an antipodean landscape, owning the land but not belonging to it; but it was mainly a rhetorical device.

  In the 1830s this rhetoric was inflamed by the exacerbated quarrels between colonial conservatives—mainly landowners who had settled the Hunter River Valley in the 1820s—and their liberal governor Richard Bourke (1831–37). Appointed to office by the Whigs in England, Bourke had pushed through a number of reforms that endeared him to the Emancipists, the chief one being a new law which, in 1833, allowed criminal cases to be tried by civil juries and permitted former convicts to serve as jurors. This important enlargement of Emancipists’ rights was viewed with horror by conservatives. What anarchy, they asked, might not be unleashed by courts which allowed felons to try criminals? Bourke also restricted the power of landowners over their assigned servants, by decreeing that disciplinary sentences of flogging for offenses against the labor code now had to be given by two magistrates, not one, and setting their limit at 50 lashes instead of 100. Getting two magistrates to judge such cases was not a problem in the settled districts, but up in the Hunter River Valley it took time and trouble. There, a plantation mentality reigned among the big settlers, and they were furious at Bourke for his “leniency.” Emancipists and colonial liberals sided with Bourke, and in the crossfire of insult and polemic Bourke’s critics were painted as iron-souled blimps, men who would have been more at home among slaves on the banks of the Mississippi than in New South Wales.

  The emblematic figure was “Major” James Mudie (1779–1852), cashiered marine lieutenant and failed medal publisher, now a rich man and a colonial magistrate, who called his homestead Castle Forbes and was said to have treated his assigned men so badly that they were driven to rebellion.* He pictured Governor Bourke as a shallow and misguided humanitarian, practicing (as Mudie later termed it) an “anti-penal, anti-social and anti-political system” which would lead the colony to “unbridled crime and lawless anarchy, and … its violent and sanguinary separation from the Empire.”9 (Moderation in attack was not a colonial habit, and certainly not Mudie’s.) In 1836 Bourke struck back by depriving Mudie (along with thirty-six others) of his magistracy. This loss of caste was too much for Mudie, who sold up and returned to England, vowing revenge. It came in the form of a hastily written book with the felicitous title The Felonry of New South Wales (1837). “Felonry,” Mudie explained, was his own word, encompassing all of the “criminal population” of the colony, including the Emancipists, no matter what their wealth or professional standing. It corresponded, he said, to the orders of the old world—“the tribe of apellatives distinguished by the same termination, as peasantry, tenantry, yeomanry, gentry, cavalry, chivalry, &c.” Such people, he argued, were “for ever infamous … infamous in law … unworthy of future trust”; they and their offspring should be disenfranchised forever. There was not the slightest chance that Mudie’s tirade could affect social relations in the colony, or be taken seriously outside a small group; but it certainly reinforced the Emancipist claim that men like Mudie were foreigners to New South Wales and outsiders to its social realities.

  Yet most Exclusives, however rapacious and snobbish they were, identified themselves with Australia while drawing their models of hierarchy from England. The idea that egalitarianism was a true index of patriotism is mere piety. The Exclusives were more than marsupialized Englishmen; and against the boasts and toasts of the Emancipist party, one might set this, from James Macarthur in London to his aging father in 1829:

  I shall now sit down peaceably and contentedly amongst our sheep-folds and under the shade of our own fig-trees … putting more trust in our own efforts, than in the acquaintance and connexions who have too many troubles of their own in this Country to think of the complaints of poor Australians.… [T]here are few people in England with whom I would willingly change places.10

  Eden as property. It is hardly a populist utterance, but one cannot deny its Australian-ness.

  In any case, no one held the exclusive rights on ambition or greed. It was William Charles Wentworth, the Emancipists’ trumpet, who in 1852 came round to lobby with James Macarthur for the creation of a hereditary colonial noblesse, the “bunyip aristocracy,” which, fortunately, the Crown saw no reason to create. No Merino ever came close to the kind of transaction that Wentworth, once cursed by them as a republican, a Jacobin and a leveller, attempted in 1840, when he and some associates gulled seven Maori chiefs into selling them about one-third of New Zealand—the largest private land deal in history. (It was, however, quashed by government order.) When it came to dividing the colonial pie, Whigs could behave exactly like Tories, Emancipists like Exclusives.

  ii

  RILEY DIED in 1833, Macarthur a year later. Neither lived to see the wool industry dominate Australia’s economy. That did not happen until well into the 1830s, and when it did the graziers would be “home on the sheep’s back,” as the phrase went, for the next century. Wool became so big an export, so essential a part of the Australian imagination, that it is hard to imagine as a secondary industry. Yet for most of the convict period in New South Wales, it was. Between the failure of the naval-supply plans for flax and timber, and the enthronement of the sheep—that is, for about the first half-century of white settlement—much of Australia’s export wealth came from whaling and sealing, both trades dominated by Emancipists and their sons, the “Currency lads,” native-born white Australians.

  “The fisheries,” as sealing and whaling were collectively known, were of an abundance hardly imaginable today. The southern oceans were a vast, undisturbed sanctuary for the black whale, the sperm whale and the fur seals. Every season, the huge cetaceans cruised north from Antarctica in millions, to mate and calve in the tranquil bays and estuaries along the coasts of New Zealand, Van Diemen’s Land and southeastern Australia. In the early 1800s, Hobart’s estuary was dangerous for small boats, which could scarcely steer between the pregnant and calving black whales. Whalers could sally out in dories and kill thousands a year. Because it did not need large vessels, bay-whaling was a cheap trade and easy for Emancipists to get into. It had been plied in Australian and New Zealand coastal waters since the 1790s; the first whalemen came on the Third Fleet.

  Whaling in Australian waters could not, of course, be confined to colonists. In 1803 Pitt’s administration opened the whole Pacific Ocean east of 180° to unlicensed whalers. Scores of whaling ships, reeking and storm-battered, years out of Nantucket and Sag Harbor, came in for the killing. Colonial whalers learned from the American captains, those driven ancestors of Ahab, pressed on by flinty Quaker fleet-owners. By the 1820s, exports of whale oil and whalebone were paying for much of the iron, cloth, tools, salt provisions, tea, rum and Far Eastern luxury goods that came into the colony. The rest was bought with profits from sealing.11

  Every beach of the Tasman Sea, each wild promontory of Bass Strait, every rock west of Kangaroo Island off South Australia bore teeming rookeries of seals and sea lions. They had no natural enemies and knew nothing of man except for the occasional Aborigine hunter. Tens of millions of them were wiped out in less than thirty years.

  The sealers killed year-round, clubbing their prey to death. Because there was no closed season in mating and pupping time, pregnant seals were killed in myriads and the pups were left milkless on the rocks to starve. Disturbed in their ancestral rookeries, which soon became bogs of putrefaction—for the sealers took only the skins and left hills of flayed carcasses behind—the seals stopped breeding and abandoned their haunts. “The whole of this valuable trade is threatened with a speedy & total annihilation,” an official warned Lieutenant-Governor Arthur in 1826. The idea of appealing to the sealers was, of course, a joke. Most were the scum of the System, escaped convicts gone wild on a bitter shore:

 
The Islands … afford constant shelter, and secure retreats, for runaways and villains of the worst description. Amost every rock throughout the strait has become the habitation of some one or more amongst the most desperate and lawless of mankind. The whole of the Straits seem to present one continued scene of violence, plunder and the commission of every species of crime.—Natives, chiefly black women, are occasionally stolen from the mainland and actually sold to the leaders.… [F]rom 10 to 15 children, the offspring of these poor Creatures and of their oppressors, are now or were lately to be met with on the several Islands.12