Australians

by Thomas Keneally

  At 12.30 in the afternoon, the governor wrote back to say he had no power to replace Atkins, and without the judge-advocate, the court could not legally sit. Next Bligh sent a note to the officers demanding a return of the judge-advocate’s papers. The officers refused. The papers, according to Johnston’s later report, ‘led to a discovery that the whole plan of the trial had been arranged, and every question prepared that was to be asked [in] the evidence of the prosecution, by the infamous Crossley’.

  While this correspondence was in progress a number of armed constables, most of them convicts, were standing and joking outside the court ready to re-arrest Macarthur and drag him to gaol. The officers instead remanded Macarthur on his previous bail. Late in the afternoon, Bligh’s orderly sergeant was sent out to Johnston at Annandale to ask him to come to Government House. Johnston answered that because of his fall he was unable to travel or write.

  The following morning at nine o’clock, William Gore, the provost-marshal, arrested John Macarthur at the house of his friend, Captain Abbott. The policeman took Macarthur to gaol, but the officers in the court again wrote to Bligh demanding that he appoint another judge-advocate. The governor spent some hours in consultation with his legal advisers, including the despised George Crossley, the convict lawyer. At last Bligh wrote to Captain Fenn Kemp and the other five officers of the criminal court requiring them to present themselves to face a charge of treasonable practice at Government House at nine o’clock the next morning. A few minutes later a dragoon arrived at Annandale with a letter from the governor, which informed Johnston that six of his officers had been so charged. By his own confession Johnston enjoyed ‘temporary forgetfulness of my bruises’ and immediately set off in his carriage for the town. In the late afternoon, Johnston turned up not at Government House, but at the military barracks on Sydney’s opposing, western, ridge. The instruction went out about the parade ground and neighbouring billets for off-duty soldiers to accoutre themselves for action.

  Amongst those who had been at Government House that day was Bligh’s United Irish friend the Reverend Henry Fulton, now a magistrate appointed by Bligh, and a very different one from the God-of-Wrath Reverend Marsden of Parramatta. Back home for his dinner, he noted the activity occurring on Church Hill. Fulton rushed to warn Bligh, who was about to sit down to dinner with Robert Campbell and with his daughter in her mourning weeds.

  BRINGING A GOVERNOR DOWN

  One of the officers intimately involved in the uprising against Governor Bligh was Tipperary-born William Minchin, who seems to have realised that the way to prevent problems was ‘to arrest him before he arrests us’. Minchin’s attitude to Bligh was partly influenced by Bligh’s treatment of Michael Dwyer, a famously respected Irish rebel, suddenly sent to Norfolk Island. Minchin, Dwyer’s neighbour in the area to the south-west of Sydney named Cabramatta, had helped support Dwyer’s family following his banishment.

  Major Johnston, on his arrival at the barracks, immediately released Macarthur who suggested that a letter be prepared and signed by all the civilians present calling on Johnston to arrest Bligh and take over governance of the colony. Macarthur supposedly leaned on the barrel of a cannon to write the letter that declared, ‘Sir, the present alarming state of this colony, in which every man’s property, liberty and life is endangered, induces us most earnestly to implore you instantly to place Governor Bligh under arrest, and to assume the command of the colony. We pledge ourselves, at a moment of less agitation, to come forward to support the measure with our fortunes and our lives.’

  Johnston would later urge a number of pressing reasons for accepting this letter. First, at the barracks he saw ‘all the civil and military officers collected, and the most respectable inhabitants in conversation with them. The common people were also to be seen in various groups and every street murmuring and loudly complaining.’ It was known that the governor was shut up ‘in counsel with the desperate and depraved Crossley, Mr Campbell, a merchant . . . and that Mr Gore [the provost-marshall] and Mr Fulton [the United Irish chaplain] were also at Government House, all ready to sanction whatever Crossley proposed or the Governor ordered’.

  So the gentlemen entreated Johnston ‘to adopt decisive measures for the safety of the inhabitants and to dispel the great alarm’. It was thought, said Johnston, that the officers making up the court would be thrown into gaol, and it was expected that would be merely the first exercise of excess by the governor.

  Johnston accepted the document, compelled, in his account, by the many signatures supporting it. Certainly a number of the disgruntled were at the barracks that day holding a meeting on the situation. Bligh would later say that the military took the petition around after the fact and persuaded over a hundred and fifty to sign it. Whatever the case, Johnston accepted it as his warrant, and the corps, about four hundred available that day from the Sydney garrison, formed up with its band and set off down the hill to Government House on the opposing rise to the refrain of ‘The British Grenadier’.

  The merchant, Robert Campbell, wrote that he and the governor had just drunk two glasses of wine after dinner when they were told, probably by the Reverend Fulton, that Macarthur had been let loose. The governor went upstairs to put on his uniform and called out to his orderly to ready his horses. Perhaps he meant to face the rebels on horseback, perhaps he intended to flee to his supporters along the Hawkesbury with his daughter. Bligh began working in ‘his bureau or trunk’ and extracted a number of papers. It was then that he heard Mary Putland raging at the Rum Corps, who had turned up at the gate and forced their way in. As a witness said, ‘The fortitude evinced by Mrs Putland on this truly trying occasion merits particular notice . . . Her extreme anxiety to preserve the life of her beloved father prevailed over every consideration and with uncommon intrepidity she opposed a body of soldiers who, with fixed bayonets and loaded firelocks, were proceeding in hostile array to invade the peaceful and defenceless mansion of her parent.’ She welcomed the rebels to stab her through the heart but to spare the life of her father.

  Campbell and the Reverend Fulton put up a good defence at the front door by refusing to open it, but at last the corps entered via Mrs Putland’s bedroom and other doorways, and a search for the governor began. According to Bligh’s account he was captured while attending to official papers. ‘They soon found me in a back room,’ he wrote, ‘and a daring set of ruffians under arms (headed by Sergeant Major Whittle), intoxicated by spiritous liquors, which had been given them for the purpose, and threatening to plunge their bayonets into me if I resisted, seized me.’

  According to Johnston, writing some months later, ‘After a long and careful search he was at last discovered in a situation too disgraceful to be mentioned.’ A contemporary cartoon showed him being extracted from under a small bed in full uniform by the searchers, and the image is often accepted as literal truth.

  Johnston was in charge of the overthrow, but the revolutionary hero Macarthur was carried by his supporters shoulder-high through the town for a night of jubilation. There was general joy even amongst convicts, and bonfires and illuminations, to celebrate deliverance from Governor Bligh. ‘Even the lowest class of the prisoners were influenced by the same sentiments, and for a short time abandoned their habits of plundering. The contemplation of this happy scene more than repaid me for the increase of care, fatigue and responsibility to which I had submitted for the public benefit,’ wrote Johnston. Bligh and his daughter would be stuck as detainees in Government House for the next year.

  The Sydney rebels, after deposing Bligh, sought an undertaking from him that if he were released from detention he would sail to Britain. But he consistenly refused to give his word on that. In early 1809, however, he agreed to go if he was allowed back on board his ship, the Porpoise, and it was only after it sailed from Sydney that he declared the promise had been extorted by force—a credible enough view. He turned for Van Diemen’s Land and sailed up the Derwent, looking for hospitality from Lieutenant-Governor David
Collins, Phillip’s old friend and former secretary, who had founded the settlement of Hobart, after abandoning what he saw as a less desirable site in Port Phillip Bay in present-day Victoria. Collins was in two minds about what had happened in Sydney and was politely remote, giving Bligh accommodation but refusing to become outraged by his situation. During his presence ashore and a-ship in Hobart, Bligh was criticised by Collins for behaviour ‘unhandsome in several respects’. Part of this unhandsomeness in Bligh had consisted of compelling local boats to supply the Porpoise with produce and paying them with bills he personally issued.

  Mary Putland was with him throughout this time. Bligh and Mary left Van Diemen’s Land on the Porpoise only after he was assured that Governor Lachlan Macquarie had arrived in Sydney. A long period on the Porpoise and in Van Diemen’s Land, in the company of her aggrieved but irritable father, must have been a time of exceptional stress for Mary, one that she bore with a conviction that her father was transparently in the right. But when the golden-haired Colonel Maurice O’Connell, native of Kerry and a handsome talker, came aboard the Porpoise in Sydney Harbour to greet Bligh on his return, Mary determined with her normal strength of mind that she would marry him. The marriage took place at Government House in early May 1810, and a few days later William Bligh returned to England. The O’Connells would leave with the 73rd Regiment to serve in Ceylon (Sri Lanka) in 1815, and in time the colonel became a major general and was knighted, returning to Sydney in December 1838 to command the forces in New South Wales. His and Mary’s son, Maurice Charles, was his military secretary, and Mary bore one other son and a daughter, maintaining throughout her life her integrity, and the slightly tempestuous firmness of character she had inherited from her father.

  CHAPTER 12

  COMES THE AVENGER

  On New Year’s Day in 1810, the brief and unhappy interregnum of the officers of the New South Wales Corps was put to an end by the landing of a sandy-haired Scottish colonel and his own regiment of infantry, the 73rd. Although he was to be the last autocratic governor, his name was one to be much honoured in the Australian continent—roads, rivers, suburbs and a university would one day have his name attached to them. Yet Lachlan Macquarie, a man lacking patrons, may have been, at 48, the oldest lieutenant-colonel in the army. His father had been a humble tenant farmer from the Hebridean island of Ulva.

  That hot day the 73rd marched to the parade-ground on Barrack Hill, the same parade-ground from which the 102nd had moved out two summers before to depose Bligh. The first legally trained deputy judge-advocate, Ellis Bent, who had come to Australia on the same ship, Dromedary, as Macquarie and his wife, Elizabeth, shaded himself under an umbrella and read the new governor’s commission. In a strong speech, Macquarie promised justice and impartiality, hoped that the upper ranks of society would teach the lower by example, demanded that no one should harm Aborigines, and said that anyone sober and industrious would find a friend and protector in him.

  He made quite an impression. No one would have guessed he could be volatile and resent criticism; no one could have guessed how he and Elizabeth still mourned their lost baby daughter; or that when he returned to London after fifteen years service in India he had felt like an ‘awkward, rusticated, Jungle-Wallah’. He was august and stable rule incarnate.

  D’Arcy Wentworth, former Irish highwayman and now principal surgeon of the colony, appointed after Bligh’s overturn, felt uneasy about the man’s intentions. Macquarie’s secretary had posted a British government proclamation at Barrack Square declaring His Majesty’s ‘utmost Regret and Displeasure on Account of the late Tumultuous Proceeding in this His Colony, and the Mutinous Conduct of certain persons therein’. All appointments and land grants made under the authority of Bligh’s deposers—Paterson, Johnston and Foveaux— were nullified.

  It soon proved, however, that Macquarie was not going to enforce the letter of these proclamations. He let the 102nd Regiment—the Rum Corps—stay in quarters at Barrack Square and had his 73rd billeted at Grose Farm, five kilometres out of town, growling and living on bread and potatoes. Elizabeth Macarthur was an old friend of Mrs Macquarie and visited Government House, and so did the former rebel officers, even though Macquarie had been ordered to arrest Johnston and Macarthur, a task he was saved from by the fact they had both left New South Wales. The 102nd was to be returned to England in official disgrace in any case, and perhaps Macquarie’s less than punitive actions were a pragmatic attempt to prevent the colony dividing all over again. When Bligh arrived on his ship, Porpoise, from Van Diemen’s Land, he was no longer governor, but found he would have been ritually reinstalled for a day had he been in Sydney earlier. Though Bligh would be entertained by Macquarie until the Porpoise left for England in May, to allow Bligh to prosecute the rebels, he developed dark suspicions that Macquarie had opened his mind to them.

  But D’Arcy Wentworth found he was still chief surgeon, and thus considered Macquarie a wise ruler.

  WENTWORTHS RISING

  D’Arcy Wentworth’s three sons had a desperate love for their father, and the elder one, William Charles, also loved desperately those who smiled on D’Arcy, and hated with passion those who despised him. For he had spent his early childhood in the little house at Queensborough, Norfolk Island, when D’Arcy seemed prospect-less, and the chief food of the house, other than the occasional mutton bird, fish and turtle, was sea rations. On Norfolk, Wentworth, praised for his competence, impatiently awaited clarification of when his posts might become official.

  D’Arcy had gone on residing with the convict Catherine Crowley. In narrow Norfolk, doubts must have been muttered about the little boy, William’s, paternity, but D’Arcy remained devoted to the child, and the child would repay him. New authority had not made D’Arcy a martinet. He was liked by gentlemen and convicts both, because of his democratic manner. Without being a philosopher, he had imbibed some of the spirit of democracy driving the American and the French Revolutions, and the coming trans-sectarian rebellion of United Irishmen, many of them of his and higher class, which would break out in Ireland in 1798. He had also had many lessons in the fragility of life, and of the thin filament that lay between respectable and criminal society. Norfolk Island had been his purgatory, and during it, as superintendent at Queensborough, he had developed a gift for supervising agricultural work and for breeding livestock.

  D’Arcy had served without pay as an assistant surgeon for some thirty-one months and as a superintendent of convicts for fifteen, when King, then commandant of Norfolk Island, wrote to the Home Office reminding Undersecretary Nepean of Wentworth’s good behaviour and calling him ‘a real treasure’. Two thousand bushels (73 m3) of maize and five hundred bushels (18 m3) of wheat had been produced under his supervision. King sent a letter to Earl Fitzwilliam too, asking him to use his influence to benefit his exiled kinsman. Fitzwilliam wrote back assuring King that he had spoken to one of the undersecretaries at the Home Office and that D’Arcy would be officially confirmed in the post of assistant surgeon.

  Soon D’Arcy was raising swine on his own 60-acre (24-hectare) block given him by King. By May 1792 he received £11 2 shillings for selling six cows to the government, and on 3 May 1794 he sold a supply of pork for £20 7 shillings. Between January and May 1794 he sold grain worth £105 to the public stores. But Major Grose refused to honour the bills which King drew on the Treasury until instructions had been received from Britain. In the economic slump thus caused, Wentworth took advantage by acquiring two additional farms of sixty acres each, running goats on one and pigs on the other.

  By the end of 1794 the island’s population was made up of settlers and expirees as well as convicts and officials. There was a variety of trades involved in the economy and wheat, maize, potatoes, sugar cane, bananas, guavas, lemons, apples and coffee were all farmed. There were two windmills and a watermill and at Cascade Bay a long wharf.

  On 3 October 1795, the Asia, an American ship from New York, berthed at Norfolk, and D’Arcy was amongst
the settlers who supplied her with meat and vegetables in exchange for tobacco and spirits.

  Wentworth, much trusted by Mrs King, treated the bibulous King for gout and ‘an almost fixed compression of lungs and breast’. By supporting King, Wentworth gained in status, and King cherished hopes of impressing Earl Fitzwilliam, who could perhaps help him achieve the governorship of New South Wales.

  Against D’Arcy’s income, Cookney, Earl Fitzwilliam’s London agent, began to send shipments of trading goods: cloth, linen, china, combs, paper, pens and general groceries. There were gowns and ribbons of blue, lilac and pink. Wentworth charged moderate prices to maximise goodwill. But for all his growing prominence on the island, he was still seen by some of the establishment as tainted by convictism. By July 1795, he wrote to David Collins about his continued disappointment at the Home Office’s failure to commission him as assistant surgeon, and asked to be allowed to return to England. King supported the request. ‘How far Mr Wentworth can be spared, I must submit to the Governor; as well as the propriety of his being detained to perform an Office for which he does not receive emolument.’