The Fatal Shore

by Robert Hughes

  The result was a widespread system of arbitrary arrest, without habeas corpus for innocent men fettered in the crude farm lockup with the “log on their toes.” Alexander Harris, whose books Settlers and Convicts was the only substantial account of life in penal Australia from the free worker’s side, told of one “native lad” who had to spend seven weeks out of three months marching in handcuffs under the Bushranging Act; arrested by a farm constable in a distant area of the Hunter River, he had to walk at a horse’s stirrup 250 miles to Sydney. Once cleared, he set out in the opposite direction—southwest, toward the Murrumbidgee—and was arrested again and forced back to Sydney, to prove his name all over again. Such exasperations were so common that the Currency did not even sue for wrongful arrest—but then, they were workingmen and did not have the money to litigate, so they grumblingly accepted their fate in what would become the usual Australian manner: cursing authority, but obeying it all the same. “Whole shoals of men, both emigrant and freed, are daily passing to and fro from one police office to another ‘for identification,’ ” Harris noted. “Yet I have never seen one syllable [written] on the subject.”67

  Common oppressions make common causes, and by the end of Macquarie’s governorship, Emancipists and Currency were ranged together against the Exclusives. The Anglophile “aristocracy” was scorned as a thin, derivative elite whose standards had little of benefit to add to the emerging folkways of life in New South Wales. The Currency felt they were disenfranchised and the Emancipists knew they were. Looking for a tribune, they soon found him—a slouching, copper-haired, rasping mixture of Irish rage, English manipulation and pure Australian brashness named William Charles Wentworth (1790–1872), “the Great Native.” Wentworth’s birth had put him neatly between all factions. He was a Currency bastard begotten by a free man on a convict woman, with more than enough property to qualify as a Merino. But his father, D’Arcy Wentworth, was only free by a hair, and conservatives thought of him as an Emancipist.

  The Wentworths came originally from Yorkshire and were related to one of the great English families, the Fitzwilliams. D’Arcy Wentworth, son of a Protestant pub-keeper in Northern Ireland, had been born in Armagh around the year 1762. He grew up a man of great charm, cheerful, gregarious, and liberal in his political views. After duty as a medical ensign in the Irish Volunteers, he went to London to continue his medical studies. The Fitzwilliams gave him social introductions and soon this personable lad was living far beyond his means. He came up on three charges of highway robbery at the Old Bailey in 1787. Acquitted of all three, he was haled before the court again in 1789 on yet another robbery charge. At the start of this fourth trial, Wentworth, who cannot have been too sure of his innocence, asked his counsel to tell the judge that he was going to Botany Bay anyhow; in fact he had got a post as an assistant surgeon. He was acquitted a fourth time, but now he had given his word and had to go. He sailed on Neptune, the hell-ship of the Second Fleet. A third of her five hundred convict passengers died, but Wentworth survived and so did a twenty-year-old girl named Catherine Crowley, transported for stealing cloth. By the end of the voyage she was heavily pregnant by D’Arcy Wentworth. Their son, William Charles, was probably born at sea on the way to Norfolk Island, where D’Arcy Wentworth became an assistant in the hospital.

  D’Arcy Wentworth went on to make a fortune in land, rum and trade. As a doctor, he was mediocre; but as a public figure, he stood large in the tiny colony. When he died in 1827, the funeral cortege was a mile long. With tact and care, he had managed throughout his life to avoid the crab-basket quarrels and ignore the slights of colonial society. Not even the censorious pen of John Bigge could accuse him of social climbing. “Mr. Wentworth has very rarely mixed in the society of New South Wales altho’ he has always been distinguished by propriety of demeanour when invited to partake of it and has been observed to shun rather than court attention.”68 In private, there was plenty of courting. He sired (and supported) at least seven other children by various mistresses in Australia, and his tombstone bore the sly scriptural text, “In my Father’s house there are many mansions.”

  From the beginning, the Exclusives disliked him as a rake, a liberal and a convict manqué. His son William Charles, idolizing his father, heard and resented their whispers. The boy went to school in England and came back to New South Wales in 1810, a rawboned lad with thin skin and blood in his eye, just in time for the first clashes between Macquarie and the Exclusives over the Emancipists’ rights to serve as jurors and magistrates. He wrote “pipes” against John Macarthur and Macquarie’s lieutenant-governor, Lieutenant-Colonel George Molle of the 46th Regiment, whom Wentworth thought a hypocritical anti-Emancipist. His couplets offered “dirty, grovelling Molle” “some bum-tingling kicks” and a “mutton fist upon thy bleeding nose.” No doubt Wentworth, who moved gracelessly but had shoulders like an Irish ox, could have made good on this threat. But since the verse was anonymous and not printed, there was little Molle could do.69

  In the meantime, William Charles had larger matters on his mind—in particular, the crossing of the Blue Mountains, a feat that he accomplished with Blaxland and Lawson in 1813. He was a public figure in the colony by then, and one of its largest landowners (Macquarie, never adverse to the exercise of patronage, granted him 1,750 acres at Parramatta in 1811 and a further 1,000 for penetrating the ranges). In 1816 he set off to England again to study law. His aims were large: He would study the British Constitution so that he could draft one for Australia; and in the meantime he hoped to marry Elizabeth Macarthur, daughter of John, so as to form a great colonial dynasty, Merino inseminated by Currency. In this he was rashly overconfident, since the fierce, aging John Macarthur well knew that young Wentworth had written an anonymous “pipe” against him before quitting New South Wales.

  By 1819, his marriage plans had foundered and his touchiness about his father was more inflamed than ever. When Henry Bennett, an English MP, publicly insinuated that D’Arcy Wentworth had been transported as a convict, William Charles bullied a public retraction from Bennett. Thus, the future “Emancipists’ friend” could explode at the mere suggestion that he was an Emancipist’s son. He remained hypersensitive about his family name for the rest of his life: “I will not suffer myself to be outstripped by any competitor and I will finally create for myself a reputation which shall reflect a splendour on all who are related to me.” In his deeper heart, Wentworth believed as strongly in the “convict stain” as any Englishman or Exclusive, and part of him longed to be English; hence the frustrated ambition of his later life, the creation of a new nobility, derided by his opponents as the “bunyip aristocracy” and modelled on the Whig aristocracy of Georgian England.70

  At first the Emancipists were not so much his friends as his enemies’ enemies. But Wentworth saw that the issue of Emancipists’ rights could levitate him quickly into the public eye, since Currency so far outnumbered Sterling in Australia. So he wrote a tract, arguing that Australia should cease to be a jail and become, instead, a free colony with its own elected government, rivalling America in its attraction for the English emigrant. “A native of New South Wales,” he put on the title page—the first time an author had claimed Australian identity. Inside, he argued for government by a legislative council, nominated, and a small assembly, elected. Ex-convicts should be able to vote for any candidate and stand for any office. But Wentworth’s own conservatism rejected the principle of “one man, one vote”; the legislative council would bear “many resemblances to the House of Lords” while landed property was “the only standard by which the right of electing, or being elected, can in any country be properly regulated.” He defended Macquarie’s Emancipist policy and bitterly attacked the Exclusives:

  The covert aim of these men is to convert the ignominy of the great body of the people into a hereditary deformity. They would hand it down from father to son, and raise an eternal barrier of separation between their offspring, and the offspring of the unfortunate convict.71

&
nbsp; His book ran through three editions in Sydney but fell flat in England. “A Botany Bay parliament would give rise to jokes,” the Reverend Sydney Smith sniffed in the Edinburgh Review, and as for juries, what settlement in New South Wales could produce four dozen men fit to serve on one?72

  But Wentworth began lobbying in London. Soon after he got there, the King’s Bench invalidated all pardons, conditional or absolute, granted by past governors of New South Wales. This was a disaster for the Emancipists (for one thing, it invalidated all their titles to property], and in 1821 they met to draft a petition to the Crown, pointing out the “infinite danger and prejudice” to which it exposed them and demanding the restoration of their rights. “It has been by their Labour, Industry and Exertions,” the ex-convicts begged to remind George IV, “that this Your Majesty’s Colony … has been converted from a barren Wilderness of Woods into a thriving British Colony.”73 Governor Macquarie forwarded the document with strong endorsements to London. It bore 1,368 signatures—a quarter of the Emancipist population of New South Wales.

  The secretary of its drafting committee was the ex-convict lawyer Edward Eagar, whose modest practice in New South Wales had been wiped out by Jeffrey Bent. Eagar brought the petition to London, and his fare was paid by the Emancipist doctor William Redfern, who went with them. Wentworth helped them lobby the government for validation of colonial pardons, trial by jury and representative government. They did not succeed—at least, not immediately—but their presence in London helped plant the awareness that Emancipists were not just inferior social abstractions in a distant colony but people of British blood with a cause. Lobbying and letters mattered a great deal in shaping official English policy toward Australia. This was the unintended result of setting up an authoritarian, penal regime there. New South Wales had neither free press nor parliament; English officials did not suppose its governor’s reports told the whole sociopolitical story; and so unofficial letters from the antipodes to men of influence soon found their way to upper Tory and Whig circles. Only a free assembly in Australia could have reduced this exaggerated power of private correspondence, by supplying a record of debate on issues. Failing that, lobbyists had to pull what strings they could reach.

  In 1823 Wentworth wound up his law studies in London and went to Cambridge. This was merely to brown the crust, as he did not work for a degree. His time was taken up writing a lengthy poem in heroic couplets, his entry for the chancellor’s gold medal, whose set subject that year—by a happy coincidence—was “Australasia.” If he could win this, he reasoned, he would become a public literary man as well as a lawyer and political aspirant—the thirty-three-year-old Byron of the antipodes. Alas, the Native’s verses, creaking with trope and figure, came in second. Yet second place was better than none, especially when viewed from Sydney; and Wentworth’s peroration, in which Britain sinks in decadence while her old values rise brightly in Australia, would be quoted there for years to come:

  And, oh Britannia! shouldst thou cease to ride,

  Despotic Empress of old Ocean’s tide:—

  Should thy tam’d Lion—spent his former might—

  No longer roar the terror of the fight;—

  Should e’er arrive that dark disastrous hour,

  When bow’d by luxury, thou yield’st to power;—

  When thou, no longer freest of the free

  To some proud victor bend’st the vanquish’d knee;—

  May all thy glories in another sphere

  Relume, and shine more brightly still than here;

  May this, thy last-born infant,—then arise,

  To glad thy heart and greet thy parent eyes;

  And Australasia float, with flag unfurl’d.

  A new Britannia in another world.

  The poem sank without a trace in England, along with its dedication to Lachlan Macquarie and its defiant signature, “by W. C. Wentworth, an Australasian.”74

  He sailed back to Sydney in 1824 with a printing press and started a newspaper, The Australian, the first of a line of nationalistic, pro-Currency, pro-Emancipist journals whose eventual heir in the 1890s would be The Bulletin. It was meant to compete against the moribund Sydney Gazette, whose every word was vetted by Government House.

  Two years earlier, Lachlan Macquarie, hailed in departure as the “Patriot-Chief,” had retired to England, and to his obsessive, time-wasting efforts to rebut the criticism of the Exclusives’ allies, chiefly Bigge and Marsden. His successor was another Scottish protégé of Wellington’s, Brigadier-General Sir Thomas Brisbane (1773–1860). Brisbane had one main thing on his mind. He had been instructed to carry out Bigge’s recommendations that security and discipline be tightened up in the colony, so that it would once more become a place of dread and cease to be seen by the poor as one of possible opportunity. Macquarie’s detractors had accused him of granting too many tickets-of-leave too early; Brisbane would cut down their number and make sure that sentences were fully served. He had Norfolk Island reopened as a place of terrible secondary punishment, “the ne plus ultra,” as he put it “of convict degradation.” But at the same time, he realized that the colony had grown to the point where not every detail could be overseen by the governor’s office. To the dismay of the Exclusives, he decided to free the press, thus giving Wentworth his inch.

  The Native Son promptly grabbed a mile. In a few months The Australian became so popular that most native-born Australians and every Emancipist accepted him as their tribune. Nobody in Australia had ever built a political base so strongly or so fast. In speeches and editorials, Wentworth hammered away at the issues of jury trial and political representation for Currency and Emancipists, at the prejudices and pretensions of the Exclusives. On the thirty-seventh anniversary of white settlement in Australia, January 26, 1825, eighty of the leading Currency met at a Sydney hotel for a banquet given by Wentworth and Redfern. Michael Massey Robinson, the convict bard who had been Macquarie’s poet laureate (to his pique, the post was not renewed by Brisbane) was seventy-nine now and doddery from years of rum; but he roused himself to compose an Emancipists’ toast in jingling couplets. It disclaimed Republican sentiments; the Emancipists were Britons reclaiming their ancient rights. Mercy and Justice made the allegorical appearances and agreed to foil the plans of the Exclusives: “Your names shall, unstain’d, to your children go forth / Distinguished for virtue—remember’d for worth.” It ended with glasses raised to Australia:

  Then to thee shall our hearts’ purest homage be given,

  And the toast that succeeds be: “The land, boys, we live in,”

  Governor Brisbane sympathized, up to a point, with such feelings. He hardened the line on convicts under sentence, but his policy toward the Emancipists was virtually an extension of Macquarie’s; and he thought Exclusivist attitudes not only pretentious but unworkable, given the human material of which Australia was composed. He was also tolerant in religious matters. Although he was not fond of Irish Catholics, to whose “barbarous ignorance” he ascribed “every murder or diabolical crime that has been committed in the Colony since my arrival,” he felt the best way of saving them from barbarism was for the government to subsidize the building of their long-delayed diocesan church in Sydney to the tune of £3,000, a proposal that struck horror into Protestant hearts.75 He also incurred Marsden’s wrath by suggesting that the Protestant clergy should live on their stipends, not their trade. For these reasons as well as his amateur passion for astronomy, the Exclusives nicknamed him “the stargazer” and bombarded their official contacts in London with hate-letters about him. He was recalled to England at the end of 1825, but he tacitly showed his opinion of the Macarthurs and Marsdens by allowing Wentworth and his friends to hold a public meeting in Sydney whose object was to frame a farewell address to him.

  This was the first public political meeting of any kind ever held in Australia, and Wentworth made the most of it, turning it into a forum from which to dare “the yellow snakes of the colony” (meaning the Exclusives) to c
ome out of their holes. The Exclusives had pursued Macquarie and now Brisbane with “a deadly hostility,” “a system of persecution,” private calumnies of every sort, turning the public and ministry of England into “the dupes of their habitual and filthy misrepresentations”; but now, where were they? Not “manfully” opposing him and his majority, but skulking in silence. All this robust invective, and more, was duly reported in The Australian.

  But the reforms that the Emancipists and Currency wanted were slow in coming. In 1823 a British Act of Parliament had created legislative councils for both Van Diemen’s Land and New South Wales, whose administrations were formally separated. This was a slight gain, for it meant that the governor was no longer a complete autocrat. But the councils were tiny, appointed by the governor himself, and could do no more than advise; only the governor could initiate a new law in the colony. In 1828 another act increased the size of the legislative council to fifteen people, none elected, all appointed. Not until 1842 did the legislative council acquire members who could present issues for public debate—twenty-four men out of thirty-six. But each representative had to own at least £2,000 in landed property, so that, even if all its members were not “pure Merinos,” they had to be as rich as one before getting elected. As a democratic body, this “Squatters’ Council” left much to be desired. Wentworth, irresistible in coarse oratory and an expert on procedure, became its de facto leader. But transportation to New South Wales had been abolished in 1840, and the convict presence in New South Wales, which stood around 45 percent of the total white population at the time of Brisbane’s departure, had dwindled to a mere 12 percent. The social tensions of convictry were winding down (though not in Van Diemen’s Land) and the role of the Emancipists’ tribune was less politically useful. The issue of Emancipists’ rights fizzled out before it could create an Australian democracy.