Australians

by Thomas Keneally

  In January 1796, Wentworth warned Earl Fitzwilliam that since he had not received a single shilling for his service, he would return to Europe. He told Fitzwilliam he had no desire to stay more than an hour in London, nor the smallest objection to re-embarking for New South Wales. Wentworth had sold one of his farms, but kept two others in the hope he could obtain through Fitzwilliam’s kindness a situation which would enable him to come back to the island.

  This seemed to be a ruse. Only if he failed in Sydney would he think of departing for London. But he hoped that the thought of his notorious relative reappearing in Britain might motivate Earl Fitzwilliam to do something, even though this was a time of great turbulence and distress for Fitzwilliam, recently stood down as Lord Lieutenant Governor of Ireland. Not being aware of any of this, King wrote to Fitzwilliam saying that Wentworth’s future conduct in life would be marked by the ‘same propriety of behaviour which has procured him the general esteem of everyone here’. He hoped that liberality of soul ‘will consign his former wanderings to oblivion’.

  That same day D’Arcy and his time-expired wife and son boarded the Reliance and sailed for Port Jackson. The five-year-old, rather wizened, William, a clever child who would grow to dominate this locale, saw Port Jackson and Sydney Cove for the first time. The governor, Hunter, though in theory an autocrat still, did not have the power Phillip had enjoyed, because the military oligarchs and their friends ran the colony. Wentworth tried not to make enemies of any side and felt out his way. In 1797 he was plaintiff for recovery of debt in eight cases before the Court of Civil Jurisdiction against prosperous settlers to whom he had supplied trade goods, and sent the proceeds of these cases to cover his debts to Earl Fitzwilliam and to commission Cookney to purchase more goods for him. He received pay for the four years he had acted as assistant surgeon on Norfolk Island, and his belated salary as superintendent of convicts. Cookney sent goods to the combined value of these sums, and D’Arcy was suddenly a well-off New South Wales merchant.

  In May 1798, he received two treasury bills for sales to the commissariat, one for £1000 and one for £500, and planned to invest them in the colony rather than remit them to England. He took to wearing a watch, a ring and knee buckles. Governor Hunter did not see him as an enemy, like many of the officers, and invited him to dine at Government House on Christmas Day.

  In May 1799 D’Arcy became assistant surgeon at Parramatta. Hunter would grant him 140 acres (57 hectares) there, a couple of kilometres from the Macarthurs at Elizabeth Farm. His acreage was bounded by creeks on either side and by the road to Sydney on the south, and the land lay some six kilometres east of Parramatta township. Here he established his country seat, Home Bush.

  As fear increased that the United Irishmen and Defenders would rebel, D’Arcy enlisted in the local loyalist volunteer body with the rank of lieutenant, and his commandant was the Scots emancipist Andrew Thompson, later manager of Bligh’s model farm. The floggings that followed the aborted uprising must have appalled D’Arcy, but he kept his counsel on these things. In a sense, he still wanted to keep his head down, and was happy to live in relative seclusion with his convict spouse at Home Bush. Dr Margarot, the Scottish Martyr, wrote of Wentworth: ‘A noted highwayman after repeated escapes owing to great protection and interference is at last transported; he ranks as a gentleman, sits at the Governor’s table, plunders the colony and amasses a fortune after having twenty times deserved to be hanged.’ This was the characterisation which D’Arcy was trying to escape.

  Often character attacks were in verse and were left in the street for people to read. And Brigadier General Grose wrote to Major Foveaux on 25 June 1799 noting that some officers of the New South Wales Corps had been so indiscreet as to admit Wentworth to their company. If the Duke of York should learn of any officer disgracing himself by such an association, the officer would be turned out of the service, said Grose. But Wentworth even raised the possibility of buying a commission so that he could associate with officers.

  King, returning to New South Wales in April 1800, was advised by Surgeon Balmain to exclude Wentworth from his table, even though Balmain was counted by Wentworth as one of his closest friends.

  Catherine Crowley, mother of the boys, had died on 6 January 1800 aged twenty-seven, and her burial at St John’s, Parramatta, was conducted by Samuel Marsden. William, then nine, was still small, clumsy and squinting, but he sometimes accompanied his father while D’Arcy transacted business. The attachment remained intense.

  D’Arcy had acquired one of the best houses in Sydney and a chaise and horses, and employed two Irish male convicts in 1800, and the next year a female assignee. Governor Hunter had liked him and said that he had behaved ‘not only in his official situation but upon all other occasions with the most exact propriety’. But the arrival of King, his champion, actually crimped D’Arcy’s activities as the new governor forbade spirits from being landed from any ship without prior approval and written consent. Wentworth did not publicly go against his friend, King. But King summoned him and asked him about the origins of a pipe found in the street which depicted the governor as a tyrant:

  But damn me, while powerful, I’ll do what I can,

  According to what I proposed as a plan,

  To make all subservient, humble, and poor,

  Take women and children all off from the store,

  Crush all independence and poverty plant . . .

  By 1803, when a cask of Wentworth’s madeira was seized on a technicality, Wentworth petitioned the British government and went over at least in part to Macarthur’s world view.

  THE CONVICT’S CHILD GOES HOME

  In 1802 William Charles Wentworth, twelve years old, and his brother D’Arcy, nine, sailed from the world they had always known on the Atlas, a ship which traded goods in China and at Calcutta before reaching its destination. In Britain, the conscientious Cookney, Earl Fitzwilliam’s agent, acted as their foster father. He sent them to the Reverend Midgley’s school in Bletchley, attended also by three of his own sons, and jovial Mrs Cookney welcomed them in the holidays. Letters from William to his father say they were happy at school, and were looking forward to seeing the kindest of parents again. They were eventually joined by their younger brother John, who arrived with the early symptoms of scurvy.

  Major Foveaux, one of the rebels against Bligh, was strongly against the Wentworth boys returning to New South Wales, and advised military careers in India, but D’Arcy hoped William would become vendue master, that is, an auctioneer of confiscated goods, or provost-marshal in the colony. But William came home, however, as a young man in 1810 with some accomplishment in Latin and Greek but without any professional training or government appointment. On his arrival, D’Arcy wrote to Earl Fitzwilliam for help in procuring the office of provost-marshal, but Fitzwilliam thought William too young. In 1811 D’Arcy’s rapidly increasing influence with Macquarie enabled William to become acting provost-marshal.

  Young William, though their future champion, does not seem to have known any emancipists—the time-expired convicts—very well at this stage except for the successful ones: Simeon Lord; William Redfern, the Nore mutineer, who had been accused of participating in the naval mutiny at the Nore in 1797; and James Meehan, United Irishman and Assistant Surveyor. Lord was a fellow magistrate of D’Arcy’s, and Redfern was D’Arcy’s medical assistant and a family friend. William did not much admire the retired officers who had stayed to make their fortunes in New South Wales. He despised their low origins, their gimcrack manners and postures and their aristocratic ambitions. The most precise expression of this attitude was a pipe on John Macarthur and his family which he probably wrote about 1811, comparing a family like the Wentworths, representatives of true nobility, with the barbarian ancestors of the Scottish ‘staymaker’ or corset maker. Meanwhile, he rode his father’s horse Gig to a well-publicised victory in Sydney’s Hyde Park; he was involved in committees to compliment Governor Macquarie; and was a witness at the wedding of Simeo
n Lord. His closest friend was young George Johnston, son of the Scots officer of the same name and the Jewish convict woman Esther Abrahams. But there does not seem to have been a day when the shadow over his father, the murmurs about D’Arcy’s being a convicted highwayman and himself a convict bastard, left him.

  William liked the free settler Blaxland brothers too, and was willing to join with Gregory Blaxland and William Lawson, a surveyor, in an attempt to find more land beyond the Blue Mountains. Given D’Arcy’s standing with Macquarie, Blaxland hoped that with young Wentworth in his party, Macquarie might soften his disapproval of himself and his brother, both supporters of the rebels against Bligh. In 1812 William Charles Wentworth had received a grant of 1750 acres (709 hectares) on the Nepean River and he probably made a number of exploratory probes into the nearby mountain range with James Meehan.

  D’Arcy boasted to Fitzwilliam of William’s primacy in the expedition over the mountains, which had found ‘a second Promised Land’. In the meantime D’Arcy himself treated Mrs Macarthur’s spasms, and certain problems of the governor. Lachlan Macquarie had recurrent urinary problems arising from a bout of syphilis he had suffered in Egypt some years before, as well as dysentery and fever and stress from overwork. By 1810 D’Arcy was principal surgeon, commissioner of police, treasurer of the police fund, magistrate, commissioner for the turnpike and hospital contractor.

  IN THE HEART OF EMPIRE

  In 1816, D’Arcy Wentworth sent his son William back to Britain in the hope he would achieve a commission in the Guards, but the war against France had ended and made that an unlikely career. Landed at Plymouth, William took the stage to London and arrived in Cookney’s warm parlour late in the year, where he sought guidance as to whether he should enter the bar or the church.

  He was the sort of young man to whom the sensational romantic poet Lord Byron spoke: gallant, prideful, full of yearning, noble of breeding but carrying a twitchy pride and a mysterious shame. He ultimately resolved to study law, but at the same time thought it politic to reassure his wealthy relative, Earl Fitzwilliam, that it was not his intention to abandon the country that gave him birth. ‘I am sensible of the sacred claims which it has upon me—claims which in its present despised state and indigent situation, I should blush ever to be supposed capable of neglecting.’

  In February 1817 William enrolled as a pupil at the Middle Temple and declared that he was the son of D’Arcy Wentworth Esquire of New South Wales. He had decided against attending Oxford first, telling his father he was already a better classical scholar than nine out of ten of the graduates. Besides, at Oxford he lacked the means to mix with the nobility and would be treated as one of the vulgars.

  He frequently called on the Macarthurs in London, a family he had earlier secretly lampooned. In exile, Macarthur received him kindly as did Macarthur’s 22-year-old son, John, who had studied at Cambridge and would soon be admitted to the bar. William had an ambition to marry Macarthur’s eldest daughter, Elizabeth, and saw it as a dynastic union. It would be ‘the formation of a permanent respectable establishment in the colony,’ he told D’Arcy, and ‘the accomplishment of those projects for the future respectability and grandeur of our family’. So now the staymaker’s daughter was a suitable bride.

  Back in Sydney, which Macquarie was improving with the buildings of the contract-forging convict architect Francis Greenway, William’s brother John and his friend, young George Johnston, had distributed pipes ridiculing Alexander Riley, the officers of the 46th Regiment, which had landed in the colony in 1814, and George Molle, the lieutenant-governor. All the pipes were motivated by slights against D’Arcy:

  Of all the mongrels, that to wit lay claim,

  The basest bred, that e’er prophan’d the name!

  And now farewell thou dirty, grov’ling M’ll”

  Go with thy namesake burrow in thy hole.

  Molle brought D’Arcy before a bench of magistrates for gross disrespect and contempt in aiding and abetting the publication of the pipes. D’Arcy admitted he knew who wrote them, and that it was not his clerk, Lathrop Murray, a convict bigamist for whose punishment some officers were baying. It was indeed his son William, but D’Arcy was let go as not subject to military jurisdiction. However, the officers of the 46th had their revenge by making a public statement saying the libels came ‘from the hand of men so much our inferiors in rank and situation, that we know them not but among the promiscuous class, which (with pride we speak it) have been excluded from intercourse with us’.

  *

  In Paris in 1817, waiting for the law term in London to commence, William Wentworth began writing his statistical, historical and political description of the colony of New South Wales. There were also some bitter letters exchanged with young John Macarthur over William’s borrowings. William typically told his father he would ‘pay Macarthur off in his own coin’.

  Before he went to France, William had made contact with a reforming member of parliament named Henry Bennet, a rallying point for disgruntled colonials, particularly those who wanted to complain about Macquarie’s supposed indulgence towards emancipists. Like Jeremy Bentham, Bennet wanted to prove transportation cost too much, failed to punish, and generated debauchery. Many bureaucrats and Lord Bathurst, the Secretary of State for the Colonies, already believed it.

  Bennet had received for presentation to parliament a petition put together by one Reverend Vale and his solicitor Moore, both of Sydney, concerning the punishment of three men who entered the public domain and were sentenced to twenty-five lashes each. Vale and Moore in fact had a grievance towards Governor Macquarie—they had seized the American schooner Traveler in Sydney Harbour and claimed her as a prize, and had been punished for it, in Vale’s case by a charge of subversion.

  From his rooms opposite a riding school in Pimlico, Wentworth had written to warn Bennet that the people who designated themselves settlers in the ‘petition from certain inhabitants of New South Wales’ were impostors. ‘The fact is, the greater part of them are publicans and shop-keepers of the lowest description, who live by preying upon the very vitals of the settlers.’ The petition which Mr Bennet had tabled in parliament was full of distinct falsehoods and calumnies, he wrote, and Wentworth had offered to meet Bennet and set him straight. Wentworth had thus been able to tell Bennet that in seven years acquaintance he had never known the New South Wales government to interfere in any of the rights of free people in reference to either persons or properties.

  He reported to his father: ‘I succeeded in convincing Mr Bennet that so much of the [Vale-Moore] petition as reflected on the Governor’s conduct was entitled to no credit, and I am convinced had he seen me before he presented it to the House, that it would never have obtained publicity.’

  In 1818 William at last got into chambers at the Temple, which cost his father a great deal to furnish and fit out. He might now become an English jurist, but ‘It would require £500 to purchase anything like a tolerable library . . . a soldier might as well be without arms as a lawyer without books.’ As soon as his book on New South Wales was published, he told D’Arcy, he would wait upon Earl Fitzwilliam to present him with a copy.

  In 1818 D’Arcy turned fifty-six. Maria Ainslie, a 43-year-old convict from Nottingham, had been the woman of the house at Home Bush since the death of Catherine Crowley. All the Wentworth boys loved her for her affectionate nature and lack of pretension. But now D’Arcy, wishing to replace her, had decided to move her from Home Bush to a cottage he owned in Sydney. His son John took offence at the proposal, and refused to talk to the young Mary Anne Lawes, a free servant who had abandoned her husband to become D’Arcy’s new mistress. John swore he would not remain under the same roof as Lawes. William regarded the 25-year-old Mary Anne as an opportunist ‘who for the single sake of ameliorating her condition . . . has abandoned her child, her husband . . . burst asunder the ties of nature as of society and stigmatised herself by the violation of every duty’. He described his father as being ‘long pa
st the prime of life when he should have expected to inspire love’, and hoped that he would have his eyes opened to the folly and disgrace of his conduct. ‘In any other person I should reprobate such a miserable infatuation—in him, I can only pity and forgive it.’ He saw his father as surrounded by a set of harpies waiting for his last sigh to seize and pillage the fruits of a life of industry and exertion.

  Worse surprises were on their way. In 1820, his brother John would die at sea of yellow fever. But it was the previous year that the greater shock came. William was not fully aware till 1819 of his father’s four trials for highway robbery. He had heard rumours in Sydney, but probably dismissed them as low-bred jealousy. Now he read in print of the shame of his father’s past, exposed in the vivid prose of the House of Commons reformer, Henry G. Bennet.

  In his zeal, Bennet was willing to tell anyone about the sins of New South Wales, and in his Letter to Lord Sidmouth (the Home Secretary) of February 1819, a notable tract of more than 130 pages, pointed to D’Arcy Wentworth as a prime instance of the New South Wales malaise. Wentworth, said Bennet, was not only a highway robber but had been transported for it, and was now superintendent of police, a magistrate lenient to spirit retailers, and the principal surgeon to boot.

  Bennet hoped the ruling Tories would be embarrassed to hear of such a situation. He urged the government to set up a Legislative Council in New South Wales to curb the ‘arbitrariness’ of the governor.

  William was crazed with rage. The furious young colonial presented himself at Bennet’s house ready to seek an exoneration of blood, in blood. Already known for his dishevelled hair, in-turned eye, grating voice and clumsy walk, and now engorged with fury, he must have been frightening to behold. He was admitted to Bennet’s study, where the gentleman ‘changed colour and showed other signs of agitation . . . I commenced by observing that he had permitted himself to give to the world one of the most infamous libels that had ever been published.’ Bennet was shocked and agreed that if D’Arcy was not a convict, ‘he [Bennet] would make the most ample atonement for what he had written’.