Eyre, defeated by the dryness and harshness of the country north of Adelaide, decided to try in 1841 to find a path across the south of the continent to the new colony in King George’s Sound, south-east of present-day Perth. The region he would cover was one of the most desolate and apparently featureless on the Australian continent. His journey was in a sense a long romance with the possibility of perishing by thirst, since there was no running water along the way, and frequently it was only the local knowledge of Aboriginals the party encountered that enabled them to drink. To the desert tribes—the Murmirming, the Ngadgunmaia, the Warangu—this flat and desolate country was a precious home to whose resources they were ceremonially bound by ancestry, which they praised and revivified in song, and for which they were grateful. To Eyre, Orpheus in the underworld, it was a great test. Surviving the unendurable became the entire point of the expedition, in a landcape treacherous not least for its lack of European-style reference points—mountains and rivers and benign springs.
The Aboriginal people of the interior used various way markers, in comprehensible to Europeans, to plot courses in what we would call a ‘desert wilderness’—a term meaningless to the Diyari people, for example, who inhabited country between the Simpson Desert and the Sturt Stony Desert, separated from the Strzelecki Desert by Coopers Creek.
The Diyari used toas, symbolically painted pieces of wood placed in the ground as important means of communication. The heads of toas, often made of gypsum decorated with dots, circles and winding lines, infallibly told one clan where the other was. As with other desert people in the interior of Australia, the Diyaris’ movements were dictated by the availability of water. An individual clan would be able to strike out into its traditional country during the winter rains and make use of the standing water which, as warmer weather came, evaporated. They would then retreat to the waterholes along Coopers Creek and the soak holes of the Simpson Desert. Lake Eyre itself would be dry for years on end. In such a country, their indicative markers were life-saving road maps.
The ultimate European endurer was Friedrich Wilhelm Ludwig Leichhardt. Leichhardt was a Prussian, and it is said that part of his motivation for coming to Australia was to avoid Prussian conscription, mainly because it would be an interruption to his passion for the sciences. On arrival in Australia he had hoped to be appointed Director of the Botanical Gardens in Sydney, but did not achieve that post.
His first expedition involved a journey from the Darling Downs, west of Moreton Bay and Toowoomba, to the now phantom settlement of Port Essington on the Coburg Peninsula in the present Northern Territory. He was sponsored by merchants and pastoralists, and on his way across this occasionally arid and then tropic zone, he lost to Aboriginal spears the brilliant and genial young English ornithologist John Gilbert. He arrived in Port Essington—it is said his party staggered in—in December 1845. Returned to Sydney, he too became a licensed hero, having found land of pastoral value, even if it was only gradually taken up, and received subscriptions not only from government but from private citizens. Now his dream was of the ultimate—the crossing of the continent from the Darling Downs to the Swan River in Western Australia. The first attempt was abortive, and it was rumoured that Leichhardt, as competent as he was in the natural sciences and in observing the country through which he passed, was incompetent with men. He was not to be dissuaded, however. He set out again, preferring to skirt the northern edge of the central deserts, and, beyond the last outstation, he disappeared. A number of expeditions were sent to find him but did not succeed, and the Leichhardt legend abounded with rumour and does so to this day. It is not uncommon even now to hear stories of someone who knows, or met an Aboriginal who knows, where Leichhardt finally perished.
By 1860, there were two major parties dealing with the mysteries of central Australia. One was that of John McDouall Stuart, the South Australian government’s nominated explorer for crossing the Australian interior from south to north. The second was led by a Victorian, a former goldfields police magistrate and Galway man with all the strengths and weaknesses of his background. Robert O’Hara Burke travelled in co-leadership with an English surgeon, William John Wills. Both of these sets of expeditioners desired to pass through the furnace and stand on Australia’s northern coast.
CHAPTER 16
MERRIE ENGLAND
In Britain prior to the Reform Bill in 1832, and even afterwards, people compared their narrow rights in reality to what they might be in a just society. In 1820, a series of protest marches were held in Scotland in favour of a general strike. The protesters were autodidact artisans of a different social class than the more famous Scottish Martyrs of earlier in the century. They were chiefly weavers, who on the eve of the industrialisation of their craft could still work their own hours, acquire literacy and ideas and read the Scottish radical newspaper Black Dwarf. There was armed conflict between the protesters and troops at Bonniemuir, while troops who fought their way into Greenock to repress a march had to fight their way out again, killing eight people. Nineteen Scottish social radicals were sentenced to transportation to New South Wales.
It could be said of this second shipment of ‘Scottish Martyrs’ that, like Dr Margarot before them, they did not abandon their so-called radical views, and did not fail to pass their progressive expectations on to their young, and those they befriended. John Anderson, one of the transportees, would from 1823 until his death in 1858 be the widely respected schoolmaster at the Presbyterian school held in the little church at Ebenezer near Lower Portland on the Hawkesbury River. Another, Thomas McCulloch, became a popular publican and landowner.
Their views were echoed, in 1825, by the journalist William Cobbett who toured southern England reporting on its cultivation and the standard of living of its labourers. The demobilisation of the military in 1815 had put 250 000 soldiers and sailors back in the job market when prices were falling. Farmers cut the wages they paid for labour further as the parish rates they had to pay rose to cover poor relief. ‘Judge, then, of the change that has taken place in the condition of the labourers!’ lamented Cobbett. ‘And, be astonished, if you can, at the pauperism and the crimes that now disgrace this once happy and moral England.’ The land produced, on average, he said, what was always produced, but there was a new distribution of the produce. From the grounds of the big manor house, the labourers had retreated to ‘hovels, called cottages’. But the threshing machine reduced the need for farm workers in any case. Threshing machines soon became targets for angry peasants, who thus became future transportees.
Crime fell in the good harvest years of 1828 and 1829. But in 1830 riots broke out in the counties across the south and in the midlands, where a great deal of enclosure had occurred, when threshing machines cut down on the need for labour, and workers and their families were forced to apply for poor relief, of which there was not enough to go around. Illegal combinations of labourers, the English equivalent of the Ribbonmen, began to post threatening notices signed ‘Captain Swing’, their mythic avenger. They also began to wreck machines, burn barns and hayricks, and hough (that is, cut the tendons in the legs of) cattle.
The conservative Australian press, such as the Herald, reported the onset of British mayhem, knowing that it would lead to the possibility of fire-spitting radical convicts turning up in New South Wales. A letter from Salisbury published in the Sydney Herald of 13 June 1831 shows that as sympathetic as the riots might appear to a liberal mind, they could also be anarchic and savage. A machine foundry was burned down near Salisbury and the mob took a clergyman, and dragged him along the road with a halter around his neck.
There were seven fires in one night. Word was brought that the populace was pulling down Mr White Churcher’s farm; the cavalry marched out, and drew up across the London Road; such a scene ensued—the cavalry were attacked and obliged to fly before the crowd, who poured into Greencroft, where they were met by the special constables; the bells of all the churches tolled in alarm, and the staffs went to work,
a horrible battle was fought for about an hour, when the constables drove them off. The machinery at White Church Brewery is broken, and sundry barrels of beer were drunk. Milford Mill machinery I saw dashed to pieces, all the neighbouring farmers have had their machinery destroyed, and have been obliged to come down with contributions besides. Blankets and broken machinery are swimming down Salisbury Street. All the shops are shut and the terror is universal.
Some argued that it was the savagery of the authorities that drove events to such an extreme. In any case, for their participation, a total of four hundred and seventy-five rioters were sentenced to be transported, mostly for arson, including the burning of machines. It was not uncommon to have brothers, or fathers and sons amongst the transported rioters. Back in England, between November and January, the hardest time of year, the threshing machine was blamed at many a needy hearth for the hunger of the family.
In September 1831, when the Tory-dominated House of Lords rejected the Reform Bill, there were serious attacks and disturbances throughout England. In London the houses owned by the Duke of Wellington and the bishops who had voted against the bill were attacked. At Nottingham the castle was burned down and there were serious riots in Derby, Worcester and Bath. Dragoons were brought out to attack the crowd in Bristol who burned down one hundred houses, including the bishop’s palace, the Customs House and the Mansion House. The mob, like the one which started the French Revolution by liberating the Bastille, set their torches to a number of unpopular citizens’ houses and released prisoners from the gaols. ‘One body of Dragoons pursued a rabble of colliers into the country, and covered the fields and roads with the bodies of wounded wretches, making a severe example of them.’ In London, the government, ‘frightened to death at the Bristol affair’, gave the military carte blanche against ‘the malcontents’. Despite the malcontents already transported, the entire United Kingdom was on the edge, and as always the penal colonies of Australia waited to receive the minor or occasional major actors.
A STEERAGE PASSENGER
Henry Parkes, a young journeyman ivory- and brass-turner from Birmingham, was a bounty immigrant; that is, he had his passage paid for, either in large part or in full, under a system operating from 1828 onwards. It used government funds raised through the sale of Crown land to reward shipping companies for landing healthy free immigrants in Australia. The system was at its height between 1837 and 1843, the period in which Henry Parkes and his young wife, Clarinda, travelled to Australia.
The emigrants were recruited by the Emigration Commission, with the system geared towards robust young individuals and families with small children. It was a profitable business if the shipowner and the emigration officials chose wisely. By 1840, for example, an amount of £19 was paid to shipowners for emigrating unmarried female domestics or farm labourers aged fifteen to thirty. Thirty-eight pounds was the bounty paid for man and wife emigrants, £5 per child up to seven years, and £10 for those between seven and fifteen. The control exercised against the danger that the unscrupulous would fill ships with sick and unemployable emigrants was that authorities in Sydney had the right not to accept those selected in bad faith, or to withhold payment of the bounty for them.
The bounty immigrants came not only to the Sydney area, but from 1839 to the Port Phillip District as well. By March 1841, the population of Port Phillip was 16 671, but it grew to over twenty thousand by the end of the same year because of the arrival of bounty immigrants. Sadly, they landed just in time for an Antipodean depression, the first great shake-out of the nascent Australian economy, and so did the young Parkes couple when they at last got to Sydney in 1839.
Parkes was a literate young man of ideas, an autodidact. He had been intermittently educated at Stoneleigh parish school, but while still a child worked in a brickpit and on a rope walk, a long narrow building where laid out hemp was twisted into rope, before being apprenticed successfully to a brass- and ivory-turner. While still an apprentice, like thousands of others he educated himself in the library and lecture hall of the Birmingham Mechanics’ Institute. At the age of seventeen he joined the leading Birmingham Chartist Thomas Atwood’s Political Union, and publicly and proudly wore its badge. Throughout Parkes’s adolescence, Birmingham was the Chartist capital of Britain, and men organised passionately either to petition for their rights or exact them by force. There would soon be revolutionary marches and gestures in the city’s streets. The belief Henry and other young Chartists shared was that England held for them no future unless they could wrest from it the objectives of their People’s Charter: universal suffrage, vote by ballot, annual parliaments, payment of parliamentarians, abolition of property qualifications for members of parliament and equal electoral districts.
Parkes married Clarinda in 1836, and started his own ivory- and brass-turning business in 1837. The couple regularly attended Carr’s Lane Independent Chapel, a Congregational chapel where a remarkable preacher, John Angell James, could be heard. Though aging, Pastor James impressed the young man by delivering two-hour sermons, exquisitely polished, from memory. Those fires not yet lit in Henry by Chartism were ignited by the Reverend James. In these two passions, the chapel and the Charter, he had much in common with many of the respectable young radicals who would be selected for emigration. They must have been aware that they might equally, as a punishment for too much Chartist exuberance, become convicts, as the Welsh Chartist John Frost and his associates Zephaniah Williams and William Jones had. For leading a Chartist riot in Newport, Monmouthshire, they would in 1840 be transported to Van Diemen’s Land.
Henry Parkes and Clarinda had married without the full approval of Mr Varney, Clarinda’s father, and it seemed to be more Henry’s poor prospects and political pretensions than his character which influenced this idea. Just how much Varney’s hostility weighed in the scales of young Parkes’s going to Australia, we do not know, but it must have had some part, and similar hostility from the potential emigrants’ parents must have figured in the emigration of many young couples. So when Henry’s ivory-turning shop failed in 1838, he and Clarinda were willing to give London a try, far from Mr Varney’s reproach.
The agenda they seemed to have agreed on was that they would give their homeland one more chance in the capital, and if that did not work, they would emigrate. They found lodgings at Haddon Gardens, a furnished room and a good-sized dressing closet where, Henry informed his sister Sarah, they kept bread and cheese and coal.
Throughout that winter they were always short of money. Henry could not put his lathe and other tools to work because he could not afford to collect them from the wagon office. By 6 December, Henry visited the Emigration Commissioners office in Park Street, Westminster because they had made up their minds to emigrate to Australia. He had to be persuasive though—the officials at the office would not at first give him a passage because he was a turner, and therefore self-employed and unlikely to be employed by any settler. He complained, ‘There are crowds of applicants every day at the Immigration Office for them to choose out of . . . They will not take anyone who has a young and helpless family, except such mechanics as carpenters, masons, smiths, shoemakers, etc. etc.’
But he and Clarinda were accepted in the end. In the meantime there were many certificates to be acquired—a certificate of good behaviour and references from four respectable citizens of Birmingham. They had been counselled that they would be at sea for four months, and ‘as there is no washing allowed on board, we must have at least fifteen changes of clothes etc. each, be they ever such poor ones.’ Henry’s sister and mother were pressed into labour to make them. His well-used books, including the works of Shakespeare and the novel Caleb Williams, were exchanged for shirts and pants.
William Godwin’s 1790s classic, Caleb Williams, was a book which spoke to the young Parkes’s condition. It concerned a young worker who felt himself a victim of ‘unrecorded tyranny’. Like Parkes, he was literate and political, and ‘my improvement was greater than my condition in life afford
ed room to expect’. Now Caleb’s tale would help clothe Henry for emigration. Like many emigrants, Parkes gathered seeds to take with him, half a pint of marrow-fat peas, half a pint of scarlet runners, and fine carrot seeds.
The young couple could not wait to go. The Australian colonial propaganda Henry had read at the shipping offices and elsewhere led him to believe, as he told his sister at home in Birmingham, that in Australia mechanics could earn a whopping 40 or 50 shillings a week. Sugar cost a mere 2 shillings a pound, tea 2 shillings, beef tuppence a pound, wine sixpence a bottle, and rent was only 4 shillings. ‘My hopes are not extravagant, though I make sure of getting rich and coming home soon to fetch all of you. I had forgotten to say the climate is the healthiest in the world.’
But fast escape was impossible. The ship that was leaving before Christmas, and could have delivered them from the discomfort of the rest of the winter on land, was fully occupied, and the next ship would not leave until the end of March. Clarinda and Henry had to endure a cold, final English Christmas. In the months they had been in London, they had been able to afford only one piece of bacon, and it had tasted like a mix of soap and fish. Their water came from the Thames, into which all the city’s sewage and putrefaction—bodies human and animal, and the offal of Smithfield—drained. The cold fogs choked Henry and at night the noise of gin-soaked Cockneys and howling of cats frayed the couple’s nerves.
Henry had time to compose his farewell verses, The Emigrant’s Farewell to His Country. Many such farewells would be written by yearning young men and women awed by the decision they had made, but his has survived.
I go, my native land, far O’er
The solitary sea, to regions, where the very stars
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