Australians

by Thomas Keneally

  As the Currency poet Charles Harpur vividly declared in 1845,

  Hark Australians! Hark, the trumpet

  Calls you to a holy fight!

  Round the Evergreen, your standard,

  Gather, and as one unite!

  Shall the Monarchists condemn us

  Into slavery and shame?

  Or shall Truth endiadem us

  With the stars that write her name?

  Shall yon bright blue heaven, in roofing

  This green golden land, afford

  But a wide and splendid dwelling

  For the villain and his lord!

  And not a great dome of merit—

  Not an open region be

  For the outward marching spirit

  Of immortal liberty.

  Down with Wentworth! Down with Martin!

  Murray, Marsh and all their clan!

  Sticklers for the rights of cattle—

  Sneerers at the rights of man!

  We were slaves—nay, we were viler!

  Soulless shapes of sordid clay,

  Did we hound not from our Councils

  Wolves and foxes such as they . . .

  By the equalising glory,

  Of the cause with which we start!

  By the blood of honour thrilling,

  Through each patriotic heart!

  By the majesty of manhood

  Righteously and nobly free,

  We will pause not till Australia

  All our own—our own shall be.

  In the atmosphere in which he wrote this, Harpur knew that in New South Wales a little over one thousand people occupied 44 million acres (almost 18 million hectares), and a similar disproportion in land ownership existed in the Port Phillip region.

  THE TOYSHOP MOB

  By 1848 Henry Parkes, former bounty immigrant, was a political force. The room behind his shop in Hunter Street, which sold everything from ivory by the tusk and pound to musical instruments, stationery, desks, whales’ teeth, boxing gloves, pomade pots and Malacca canes, was a meeting place for the literary and political radicals of Sydney. Some called this grouping ‘the toyshop mob’.

  In February 1849, Earl Grey announced the resumption of transportation to New South Wales. He had yielded to the desires of the pastoralists, and was sending to the colony a number of trusty convicts known as ‘exiles’ on a ship named Hashemy. Parkes’s parlour was one of the epicentres of outrage at Earl Grey. Even though Parkes’s short-lived paper was named the Empire, the air was full of republican rhetoric, particularly from the Reverend Lang and a little dandy of a Currency man, Daniel Deniehy. Respectable liberal leaders of some means would fight for control of this newest cause, since they were frightened that the toyshop radicals would use the betrayal by Earl Grey to take New South Wales in some drastic revolutionary direction. After all, only the previous year, the French had overthrown a king and installed a poet, Lamartine, as president of France. As for the Irish working classes and former convicts, their brothers and sisters at home, in that most distressful country, were dropping into ditches, fodder in their hunger for opportunistic diseases. The Legislative Council would condemn Earl Grey’s decision, to make possible revolutionaries feel they had friends at the top.

  Shops closed the Monday after the Hashemy arrived in Sydney in June 1849, and thousands of people made their way to Circular Quay. Parkes had hired a horse-drawn two-decker omnibus which carried a banner declaring, ‘Defiance’.

  Rain began to fall, but the crowd did not move. Parkes’s friend Robert Lowe was there, though no longer popular with the lower classes who had helped elect him to the Legislative Council. Even so he got a laugh when he said he no longer wanted to be identified as a ‘toy’ of Parkes’s Constitutional Association, so-called to assure the enemies of the ‘toyshop’ that all they wanted was reform within the British Constitution, a claim which would prove itself utterly true in Parkes’s case. But when he spoke at length, Lowe was aflame. ‘I can see from this meeting the time is not too far distant when we assert our freedom not by words alone. As in America, oppression is the parent of independence, so will it be in this colony . . . And as sure as the seed will grow into the plant, and the plant into the tree, in all times, and in all nations, so will injustice and tyranny ripen into rebellion, and rebellion into independence.’

  This statement, said the Herald, was met with ‘Immense Cheering’. But the truth was that most people there that day were looking for redress within the British Constitution; they did not want, or even contemplate, independence. Even Lowe might have been merely raising the American Revolution as a spectre to frighten the British government into constitutional action.

  But when a delegation, including Lowe and Parkes, took the motions and petitions from the meeting to Government House, they found the garrison out and guarding the fences of the Government Domain. Let in, they met the new governor, Sir Charles FitzRoy, the aristocrat who combined earthy tastes with superciliousness towards political activists, particularly lower-class activists like Parkes. The governor said he had assured the people of Port Phillip that the prison ship Hashemy would not land its cargo there, and so it would have to dock in Sydney. The delegation left in the cold of a June dusk, outraged at FitzRoy.

  The exiles aboard Hashemy must have looked at the shore and longed for a landing, and wondered why, when in the past far worse lags had been landed, they could not be brought ashore without creating a vast public riot. But travellers on two bounty emigrant ships also in the harbour looked at Hashemy with a jaundiced eye too. They had been promised an Australia where in the main they would not have to compete for their bread against convicts. Scots who had escaped the potato blight of the Highlands but not yet landed, glowered at the Hashemy trustys.

  The governor’s ill-grace was a great rallying call for another mass meeting a week later. A few years before, the loss of his young wife, whose skull had been crushed in a coaching accident at Government House, Parramatta, when FitzRoy had been demonstrating his talents as a ‘whip’, had brought from the colonists an extraordinary outflow of public grief. Since then, however, FitzRoy and his sons had scandalised many with their sexual appetities.

  From the top of his bus, Parkes said that now the heavens smiled on their endeavours whereas the week before they had wept for the gross injustice represented by the convict ship. Lowe spoke to a motion upbraiding the governor for his rudeness. Parkes then spoke to a motion moved by the lawyer Alexander Michie—‘That it is indispensable to the well-being of the colony and to the satisfactory conduct of its affairs, that its government should no longer be administered by the remote, ill-informed, and irresponsible Colonial Office, but by Ministers chosen from and responsible to the colonists themselves, in accordance with the principles of the British Constitution.’

  The convicts were nonetheless landed from Hashemy, and some were applied for as assigned servants now that that was again temporarily possible, and the rest were sent up to Moreton Bay. But it was apparent to FitzRoy and Earl Grey that no more convict transports could come to Sydney.

  CHAPTER 27

  EAST INDIAMEN

  The abolition of slavery in Britain in 1833 had helped create a system of indentured labour by which large numbers of Indians were shipped to Britain’s African and West Indian colonies as a cheap labour force. Some entrepreneurs and pastoralists in Australia, faced with the end of transportation, now thought of Asian labourers as an answer, particularly in light of the harsh economic conditions of the late 1830s. Though there was already a great deal of commercial and general contact between Calcutta and Sydney, Australian progressives were opposed to the concept of indentured labour, and Australian craftsmen and workers did not want to compete against ‘coolies’, whose labour was so much cheaper than their own.

  Nonetheless, in 1836, John Mackay, who had arrived from India where he had lived for twenty-eight years, began to test the interest on the part of New South Wales pastoralists in importing coolies, and in conversati
on with an uneasy Governor Bourke told him that their clothing was simple and scanty, their dwellings small, yet they produced work fully equal to Europeans in any agricultural job ‘excepting the plough’.

  Those, like Mackay, interested in employing coolies were quick to point out that when the indentured labourers returned to India, they would take with them ‘not only improved manners, customs, arts, agriculture and laws, but also the blessings of Christianity’. And so, the opponents of slavery were told, this was not slavery; this was the spreading of the light.

  The edgy governor therefore received ‘the Hill Coolie Proposal’, a letter from ‘certain flock owners’ begging him to consider ‘the urgent necessity that exists of sending to Bengal for shepherds, cow herds, labourers and household servants’. The government was expected to pay the expenses of recruitment, passage and provisions during the labourers’ voyage to Australia.

  Through June and July 1837 a Legislative Council committee of landowners considered the matter. Hannibal Macarthur and John Blaxland were members, and the chairman was Colonel Kenneth Snodgrass, the Scot who had earlier authorised Major Nunn’s murderous expedition against the Kamilaroi. John Mackay argued before the committee that Hindus should be recruited, because in his opinion Muslims were more addicted to opium, wine and spirits. William Charles Wentworth, stepping down to make his own submission, disapproved on the grounds that Indians would destroy racial purity. William Lawson mildly objected to the scheme as it would not provide a ‘permanent increase in the labouring population’. The Indians, if recruited, were to be eunuch agricultural labourers.

  Some of those giving evidence were on the edge of bankruptcy, given the slump in the price of wool and the long-running drought, and their attitudes towards labour costs were thus influenced. All of them were about to take heavy losses, including Hannibal Macarthur. Among these witnesses was John Edie Manning, registrar of the Supreme Court of New South Wales, a young man with a wife and five children whom he had brought to the colony. As Colonial Director of Intestate Estates, he had hoped to be able to derive income through their custody and administration, but due to reforms he lost that perk. He also had land grants at Rushcutters Bay, but when these were sequestered in 1841 his debts amounted to £30 000. In the end he was not saved from bankruptcy by Indian labour, and there is doubt that he would ever have been.

  The committee’s report came down in favour of more migrants from Britain, but noted briefly that Indians were a hardy, industrious race likely to give ‘immediate and temporary relief ’ to the labour shortage. There were problems with the paganism, habits and colour of the Indians, the report said, and yet, out of necessity, the committee concurred in the expediency of granting a bounty of £6 sterling for every male Dhangar, or hill labourer, of Bengal, who would be embarked before the end of 1837. The governor, Sir Richard Bourke, forwarded the committee’s rather apologetic recommendations to the Colonial Secretary, Lord Glenelg.

  The coolies left Calcutta on the Peter Proctor with a native surgeon in 1837 and reached Sydney in late 1837. In February 1838 fifteen coolies absconded from two properties in the Sydney basin, Mr Abercrombie’s of Glenmore Distillery and Mr Haslingden’s property. The chief constable of Parramatta apprehended them hiking west near the modern township of Wentworth Falls, with the ambition of walking home to India. Appearing before a bench of magistrates seven days later, one of them, Madhoo, complained of insufficient food and clothing as well as the non-payment of wages for the two months they had been working. The rags they had on, the Monitor reported, seemed to be the tattered remains of the clothing in which they had left India. They were also not getting enough dholl and rice to keep them well-nourished.

  Mackay was prepared to drop charges if the labourers would return to employment. Madhoo agreed on condition that they received sufficient food and pay, and clothes were issued monthly. Here was something convicts had been unable to apply in any coherent way without being destroyed by it—industrial action. It was not the first such case in Australia, but an early one.

  Edward Smith Hall of the Monitor wrote about these ‘unhappy maltreated Heathen British subjects’. The coolies of Mr John Lord were working well, however, on the remote Williams River in what would become Queensland, and Mackay complained that the Indian coolies who went west had been ‘seduced to abscond’ by local progressives. Though the Herald said ‘More and more labour from India should be the cry of the colonists of New South Wales’, there were attacks from the Australian against the ‘Eastern slave trade’. It reported that of ten unfortunate coolie passengers on the Emerald Isle in 1838 from Calcutta to Sydney, two ran away at Mauritius, one of them died in a miserable condition on the beach at Adelaide in South Australia, and another perished in a state of idiocy brought on by cold, hunger, ill-usage and neglect.

  In July 1838 the New South Wales Legislative Council passed new resolutions in favour of continuation of convict transportation, because in some ways it was beginning to seem more acceptable than immigration from India. Sir William Molesworth in the House of Commons that year denounced the importing of Indian labourers into New South Wales as ‘a new species of slave trade’. The Australian asked more potently, ‘Shall this, our country—shall Austral-Britain— become the Emporium of the Eastern slave trade? Shall our future generations be a mixed race? Shall the inveterate prejudices of colour and caste—shall Hinduism and Mahomedanism—be transplanted and take deep root in this Christian, British soil!’ In terms of humanity towards the coolies themselves, some argued that the Indians were so poorly informed on where they were going to work that they thought Mauritius was a company village in India, and were appalled when they found themselves at sea.

  In 1838, the British Cabinet initiated a bill for the protection of the coolies, and there was an order-in-council that the human traffic should stop until regulations could be worked out to protect the recruited labourers. Legal opinion was clear that this applied to Australia also. In January 1839 a petition was drawn up by pastoralists and addressed to the Queen and both Houses asking for the continuation of convict transportation and assignment. The petitioners agreed that one cheap alternative to transportation would indeed be to supply themselves with coolie labour from India, but that would ‘inflict on this colony injury and degradation only inferior to what has occurred in the slave states of the union in America’.

  Major Lockyer of Ermington outside Sydney, who had spent sixteen years in India, was one who criticised convict thieving and claimed that convicts cost twice as much as Indians. People of like mind to him had not abandoned the coolie option. Indeed in June 1841 a petition for coolie labour was signed by 202 colonists.

  Governor Gipps, however, like Bourke before him, commented negatively on the evils which would result from coolie labour. And once the governor opposed indentured labour, James Macarthur declared he had strong views against it too, and withdrew his petition. Many landowners were angry with Gipps, and the Herald accused Macarthur of ‘mawkish sensibility and courtly simpering’.

  That same year James Stephen at the Colonial Office in Whitehall enunciated the principle that Australia should be a land ‘where the English race shall be spread from sea to sea unmixed with any lower caste. As we now regret the folly of our ancestors in colonising North America from Africa, so should our posterity have to censure us if we should colonise Australia from India.’

  The issue rolled on through the 1840s, especially after the formation of a Coolie Association by Australian landowners. They drew up a memorial in favour of more coolie importation but the governor, receiving it for transmission to England, asked them, ‘Gentlemen, are you sure that the great body of the colonists is with you?’ Indeed, in the electoral campaign for city representatives to the Legislative Council in 1843, there was a ‘No Coolie’ ticket.

  WC Wentworth and Captain Maurice O’Connell, both committee members of the Coolie Association, tried to depict themselves as ‘the working men’s friend’. For if the colony collapsed econom
ically, they said, it was the workers who would suffer. On the other side, Henry Parkes’s friend, the literary Scot William Duncan, was removed from his position as editor of the Chronicle by the Catholic vicar-general for being too anti-coolie, and thus too political.

  With the income-based franchise for voting for the Legislative Council set high, Wentworth was able to beat the anti-coolie ticket massively. Soon after the elections, however, a broadside announced, ‘Operatives of Sydney arise! Your interests are at stake30 Attend at the Race Course on Monday next, January 16th [1843], to defeat the objects of the Coolie men.’ William Hustler and Robert Cooper, emancipist merchant, the chief anti-coolie organisers and candidates for the Legislative Council, argued that if workers were needed there were ‘hundreds and thousands of their starving brethren in England’ who were to be preferred to ‘black slave labour’. Henry Macdermott, an advocate for white labour, opposed coolie labour because of the ‘vices peculiar to the natives of India’, which went unspecified but were wildly guessed at.

  An anti-coolie petition signed by 1421 artisans and small businessmen was forwarded, with Governor Gipps’s opinion in its support, to Queen Victoria. The British Colonial Secretary Lord Stanley told Gipps that he should acquaint the labouring classes of New South Wales that the Queen had read their petition, and that Her Majesty’s government had no plans to permit the immigration of coolies into New South Wales. The British government did not wish to create a new colonial underclass in New South Wales, and neither did what were generally condemned as ‘the democratic classes’ in the colony. The only exception allowed to the ban was the employment of Indian sailors and menial servants, and in October 1844 a number of such ‘servants’ arrived to work under the aegis of a man named Friell on his property at Tent Hill, north of Glen Innes. A year later they walked away, complaining to the magistrates of Glen Innes about their clothing, rations and wages.