Australians

by Thomas Keneally

  As a young man, one of the spikiest, William Charles Wentworth, stood up for the Currency, especially the children of convicts, since he was the son of an Irish gentleman of doubtful legitimacy but also of an Irish convict woman. He accused the wealthier free settlers of wanting ‘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 convicts.’

  There were certainly ways in which Currency lads and lasses were pioneering social arrangements unlikely to be seen in other places on earth. Sarah Podmore was the New South Wales born daughter of Richard Podmore, who had been a member of the New South Wales Corps, but he stayed on as a shoemaker, working as the employee of an ex-convict in York Street, Sydney. In 1825 Sarah sought the governor’s permission to marry a convict named Joseph Spencer, who had arrived in the colony in 1815, sentenced to transportation for life. In the 1828 census Sarah Spencer née Podmore was listed as native-born and her husband, a ticket-of-leave man, that is a convict whose behaviour had been good enough to enable him to be given prior to his sentence expiring permission to work on his own behalf, had been assigned to her as a servant, working as a butcher for her in the town of Liverpool, south-west of Sydney.

  Most of the native-born children grew up on modest but adequate farms, and the lack of day-to-day discrimination at that level led to marriage between children of free settlers and the children of convicts. Marriages also took place between sons and daughters of men and women who had been convicted together in Britain, or had arrived on the same ships, or had served in the Royal Marines or New South Wales Corps. Mary Merrick, the daughter of two ex-convicts, married Robert Martin, whose free settler parents had received 100 acres (40.5 hectares) at Mulgrave Place near Penrith as a land grant from Governor King. Mary, her husband and their two children were living with her parents-in-law at Richmond, on the Hawkesbury River, in 1828. Eliza Lydia Griffiths was born in Sydney in March 1794, the daughter of a New South Wales Corps private, Michael Griffiths or Griffin, and his ex-convict wife. Lydia married John Benn, a native-born son of two convict parents and a settler of Pitt Town on the Hawkesbury floodplain.

  Farmer Richard Cheers, an ex-convict who received a grant of 30 acres (12 hectares) at Eastern Farms near Ryde in 1792, was leasing half an acre ‘on the west side of the cove in the town of Sydney’ in 1797, and in 1806 was resident there with his wife, the ex-convict Esther Weaver, and their three native-born children. Originally sentenced for stealing from a man who had refused to sleep with her, Sarah Burdo, one of Lady Penrhyn’s midwives, married Private Isaac Archer in 1794, and they later settled at Field of Mars, an area along the Parramatta River put aside for marine land grants. By 1802 they had six children. Sarah farmed with her husband and still acted as a colonial midwife, and by 1828 was living in comfort in Clarence Street, Sydney.

  Pierce Colletts, a United Irishman convict who arrived with his free wife in 1801, had 70 acres (28 hectares) in the Nepean district in 1806. The convict father bred his sons James and Joseph ‘to the care and management of a farm’. By 1828 he was an innkeeper at Bathurst, and had 200 acres (81 hectares) there, living a contented life being looked after by his ‘Colleen Bawn’, his beloved native-born daughter.

  Matthew Everingham, son of an earl, whose crime had been to steal legal textbooks, had wed Elizabeth Rymes, Spitalfields bed-linen thief from the Second Fleet, and they lived on a farm at Prospect that Watkin Tench had once visited and been not much impressed by. Yet Elizabeth Rymes would give birth and habitation to nine small ‘cornstalks’ or Currency children.

  The native-born children rode their farm horses bareback down dusty tracks, fished and swam in creeks and rivers, and learned bushcraft from each other and local Aboriginal children. A confusing range of opinions would be uttered in Britain and in New South Wales about these national children, just as had been uttered about their parents. It was assumed by many that they must be criminal spawn, abandoned by their ‘unnatural parents’ or raised amidst scenes of criminal activity and daily debauchery. In fact the colonial experience and later research shows, as the historian Portia Robinson says, that they grew up ‘a remarkably honest, sober, industrious and law-abiding group of men and women’. By comparison with British society, the family life of the New South Wales children of ex-convicts and ex-soldiers would be shown, by a government muster taken in 1806, to have been very stable and sturdy. In New South Wales the child labour, hunger and vicious treatment which characterised the factories of Great Britain were missing. Though convict families sometimes lacked funds, they sought to apprentice out their children to equip them with a trade so that they would not be tempted into the youthful follies that had seen their parents transported. Former convicts (including, for example, James Ruse) spoke to other emancipists about apprenticeships for their sons, and many found work in the government dockyards and lumber yards. James Kelly, son of a ship’s cook and the convict Catherine Devereaux, serving a sentence of life, was placed with Henry Kable and James Underwood, and by the time he was twenty he knew how to handle a vessel in the wild waters south of Australia and had survived shipwreck at the astoundingly remote sub-Antarctic island named in Macquarie’s honour. Other places for apprenticeships were Simeon Lord’s enterprises, which trained colonial youths in a number of crafts associated with shipping and chandlery.

  Alexander Harris would write that ‘The Australians, we must now remark, are growing up a race by themselves; fellowship of country has already begun to distinguish them and bind them together in a very remarkable manner. Whenever they come in contact with each other, even when considerable difference of rank exists, this sympathy operates strongly.’

  Nor were they all artisan mechanics, like those trained by Kable, Underwood and Lord. Charles Tompson, transported in 1804, married a native-born girl from the Sydney Orphan School named Elizabeth, and as a literate convict was prized by government. He would come to acquire small businesses in the city and 1500 acres (608 hectares) on the Hawkesbury. Particular about his son and namesake’s education, he had young Charles taught in the Windsor government school run by the ex-convict Joseph Harpur, an erstwhile Irish highwayman. Harpur’s son also attended, and shared poetic and literary tendencies with Charles Tompson. Young Charles went on to be taught by the Reverend Henry Fulton, the United Irish sympathiser and graduate of Trinity College Dublin. Charles Tompson was the first Currency lad to express the feeling that the world from which his elders came, which they spoke of daily and which he was unlikely ever to see, was a very different one from his extreme southern world. He asked of the Australian spring:

  Thou who, unexpected, steal’st serene

  Into the bosom of the fertile year

  Tell me of climates that I ne’er have seen

  And let me feel the fragrance thou dost bear.

  As a young man he would complain to Governor Brisbane about the way emigrants were greeted to Australia with land grants. ‘Your correspondents, the Australians, are not unreasonable—they are not envious—but the soil is their birthright, their legitimate inheritance!’ Lads of industrious habits expected the governor to come good with land, and had done so with some confidence at least since the time of King’s administration. The idea of purchasing land was outside their expectations and was seen as a form of imposition.

  Before the arrival of Macquarie land grants to the native-born were closely related to the wealth or position of the parent: to those settlers who possessed much, much was further given. The way Macquarie granted land to the native-born, predominantly in lots of 60 acres (24 hectares) made it seem that he judged their claims to be above those of ex-convicts but below those of the free settlers. (Later, as a result of Bigge’s recommendations, Darling became the first governor to be ordered not to settle his ex-convicts on small allotments.) Unlike Macquarie, his successor, the godly Brisbane, a keen astronomer, agreed with Bigge and harbo
ured a primary concern not for the ex-convict settlers but for the free sections of the community. ‘The bad character of the masses of Inhabitants must in itself be for many an extreme difficulty to settlers from Europe.’ He undertook a process of excluding the children of convicts from being granted land, the very policy against which young Tompson complained.

  In the meantime, Tompson and Harpur went hunting together, and they would harbour similar nationalist emotions, and Tompson wrote a not con-sis tently gifted song for the anniversary of settlement:

  Then live, Australia! Nation young and mild!

  Rear still bright Mercy’s banner high unfurled

  Pardon and peace for Britain’s fallen child

  Refuge for all the oppressed of all the world.

  In 1826 his Wild Notes from the Lyre of a Native Minstrel was the first book of verse published by a native son. Charles Tompson dedicated it to the Reverend Fulton. To a boy like Tompson, the experience of a man like Fulton, urbane and generous, would have been a form of liberation.

  Like all colonial children, some were creatures of action suited to a raw environment. Others were already concerned to define themselves. The business of worrying over being Australian had begun.

  THE POACHING WARS

  By the 1790s the authoritarian tendency of British society had cut into all aspects of urban and country life and typified a particularly savage stage of the ancient poaching wars between landed gentry and peasants increasingly squeezed by the Enclosure laws. As enclosure continued throughout the first three decades of the nineteenth century, anti-poaching laws, which already carried the death sentence in some cases, became more strenuous still. In 1828, landlords and gamekeepers were delighted to see a new Night Poaching Act which would increase the sentence for being caught anywhere with the tools of poaching, even in an accused’s own premises and quite outside the landlord’s grounds, to transportation for fourteen years. The mere intent of poaching could make a man an involuntary Australian. Squires and gentlemen had argued that they were ‘entitled to properly regulated . . . amusement and relaxation after the performance of their public duties’ and that their residence on their estates had saved the country from anything like the horrors of the French Revolution and contributed instead to the ‘virtue and civilisation of the English peasant’.

  Not that the poaching class went utterly without sympathy. In the debates leading up to the new Night Poaching Act one of the Whig Lords declared: ‘The recipe to make a poacher will be found to contain a very few and simple ingredients which may be met with in every game county in England. Search out a poor man with a large family, or a poor single man having his natural sense of right and wrong, give him little more than natural disinclination to work, let him exist in the midst of lands where the game is preserved, keep him cool in winter, by allowing him insufficient wages to purchase fuel; let him feel hungry upon the small pittance of parish relief; and if he be not a poacher it will only be by the blessing of God.’

  Folksongs—from the famed ‘The Lincolnshire Poacher’ to plaints about and celebrations of poaching—came from Britain, Scotland and Ireland and generally mention transportation as its outcome.

  Squire Jackson he was unequalled for honour and for reason,

  He never turned traitor nor betrayed the rights of man.

  But now we are in danger from a vile deceiving stranger

  Who has ordered transportation for the boys of Mullaghbawn.

  Indeed amongst the rural poor of Britain, for whom meat had become a scarce commodity since 1750, an enjoyment of the physical challenge of getting some game combined with feelings of defiance against the order of things to produce the crimes of the poacher. Particularly when they operated in parties, poachers might discuss political ideas, darkly asking each other at the local inn whether Genesis did not appoint man, not squire, to dominance over the world of animals. One critic of the landlords satirically wondered whether ‘there was some sovereign medicinal value in the blood and juices of these animals’ which caused the landlords to covet their wildlife so passionately. Peasants intending to hunt for food for their families thus might seek to bind each other to solidarity by taking an oath, and they would thereby become that institution of sedition so dreaded by the authorities: a ‘combination’. Such poachers did not consider themselves part of a criminal class, but casualties of tyranny.

  A typical poaching incident occurred in 1816 at Berkeley on the River Severn estuary. A poacher trespassing on the estate of Colonel Berkeley was killed by a spring gun set up in the foliage to be tripped off by intruders. This death brought on an outbreak of acts of defiant poaching by outraged young men of the district, and by habitual poachers too. Middling farmers and men with political ideas were willing to participate. A local radical lawyer, 26-year-old William Adams Brodribb, lived with his wife and small children in the village of Moreton, within a long walk of Berkeley Castle, and Colonel Berkeley seemed to Brodribb, a man influenced by Spencean ideas, to be a biblically unjust landlord of the type who would never enter heaven but would make a hell on earth. Brodribb had an ideological sympathy for the poachers, and on the night they gathered at an inn for a punitive poaching expedition against Colonel Berkeley, swore them in, no doubt using a formula common to the forming of secret societies, invoking solidarity, the rights of man and biblical condemnations of wealth. Taking their oath, the poaching party saw themselves as protesters and, almost in the anti-Napoleonic Spanish tradition, guerrillas. They blackened their faces (itself an offence) and intended as instruments of justice to clean out Colonel Berkeley’s game. One of their leaders, a young farmer named Allen, specifically forbade the party to fire at gamekeepers, detested because of their setting of man-traps and other instruments of ambush. But as they entered the grounds of the castle, the party of sixteen were fired on by a group of five keepers, and in the overpowering return fire one of the keepers, a man named Ingram, was killed.

  The poachers retreated, washed their faces in a stream, and went home. By the first light of day, Colonel Berkeley was gathering a small army of his own to hunt the members of the party down. Eleven of the poachers involved in the affray were caught through Berkeley’s strenuous efforts, which included the employment of a Bow Street runner. Amongst those rounded up, though he had taken no part in the poaching expedition, was the attorney-at-law, urbane and godly William Adams Brodribb, father of three. Brodribb was summoned to Berkeley Castle to face a group of magistrates, fellow landowners to Colonel Berkeley, all of whom were known to him and all of whom had some respect for him. He stood accused of administering an illegal oath, and he made his case worse by not denying it and declaring that landlords such as the colonel had brought it all on themselves by setting man-traps.

  In Gloucester gaol to the north of their village the captured poachers were able to receive legal advice from their fellow inmate Brodribb. All eleven of them faced the death sentence, and were in the end found guilty of murder or abetting murder by a weeping jury, who thought they were too young and decent to die. Nine of them were recommended to mercy. The tears of the jury were testimony to community ambiguity about the crime the men had committed, evidenced by a ballad of the time:

  The law locks up the man or woman

  Who steals the goose from off the common,

  But leaves the greater villain loose

  Who steals the common from the goose.

  Lord Eldon, the Lord Chancellor who later introduced a new night poaching law, was like many Englishmen in that he thought poaching a sport and confessed he had tried it himself as a boy. And in the Berkeley court was a local doctor, Edward Jenner, the pioneer of inoculation against smallpox, who wrote, ‘My intention is to quit this place, rendered dreary by the tragic scene at this instant about to be enacted on the horrid platform . . . They certainly did not go out to commit murder.’

  The next day, the young lawyer Brodribb himself stood trial. He was well-represented and respectably dressed in black, but the jury found him gui
lty and he was given the statutory sentence of seven years transportation.

  All the poachers were reprieved at the end, and were to become Australian transportees. Brodribb was the first to be sent to the old Justitia hulk in the Thames that spring, but all of them made it on board the Sir William Bensley when it sailed in late summer and entered Port Jackson in March 1817. Brodribb’s wife and children would ultimately join him, and he would practise law and acquire land in Van Diemen’s Land.

  THE SEALERS’ L IFE AND GOVERNANCE

  It was Surgeon George Bass and Matthew Flinders, two adventurous Lincolnshire men, who first gave news of the abundant islands and seal populations of Bass Strait, which separates the Australian mainland from Tasmania. In 1798, the Sydney Cove had been wrecked in the Furneaux Islands of the strait. Two rescue operations to take survivors away from the beaches they had been swept up on were conducted by both Bass and Flinders, and on return to Sydney both men reported specific colonies of seals and their location. That same month, May 1798, an American captain, Charles Bishop of the brig Nautilus, arrived in Sydney after an unsuccessful attempt to seal in the Pacific and American waters. He refitted and set out on the first commercial sealing voyage in Australia, at first in company with Flinders and Bass on their handy sloop Norfolk. Bass and Flinders were naval officers and not interested themselves in seal harvesting. They wanted to circumnavigate Van Diemen’s Land, and show that there was a faster way to Sydney, through Bass Strait (which Flinders had graciously named for his friend), than rounding the dangerous southern capes of Tasmania. ‘Mr Bass and myself hailed it [the circumnavigation] with joy and mutual congratulation, as announcing the completion of our long wished-for discovery of a passage into the Southern Indian Ocean,’ wrote Flinders.