Australians

by Thomas Keneally

  The jury took only half an hour to bring down a verdict of Not Guilty. It was a great relief to Hayes’s wife, Anastasia, who was worried publicly about why Tim had shown so little manhood as to get arrested in the first place. She had also complained to the police that the stockade had been attacked on Sunday rather than Saturday, ‘when the men were ready for you’. Thousands assembled outside the courthouse talked of storming it to release Hayes were he found guilty. Now, freed, he was carried through the streets shoulder high by a cheering crowd.

  Carboni had been under arrest four months by now, and his turn came on 21 March 1855. Attorney-General Stawell brought forth eight witnesses—four of the 40th Regiment and four constables, and it was not too late at all, if he could get this Italian, for honour and authority to be restored.

  In prison until then, said Carboni, his daily routine had begun with a dish of hominy ‘now and then fattened with grubs’, then a lunch of scalding water with half a dozen grains of rice, a morsel of dried bullock flesh, and a bit of bread eternally sour. That was ‘the cause of my suffering so much of dysentery’. A couple of ‘black murphies’—potatoes—completed the daily diet with a similar dish of hominy as in the morning, ‘with the privilege of having now and then a bushranger or a horse-stealer for my mess-mate, and often I enjoyed the company of the famous robbers of the Victoria Bank’.

  John Manning and Michael Tuohy, both Irishmen, while awaiting trial would ask Carboni to entertain them with a favourite piece of Italian opera. Occasionally a kindly guard would drop a stick of tobacco through the wall. ‘We decreed and proclaimed that even in Hell there must be some good devils.’

  At the beginning of 1855 Carboni had received a copy of the indictment against him, and declared it ‘the coarsest fustian ever spun by Toorak Spiders’. In court, however, he rather liked Judge Barry, whom he said could manage his temper even among the vexations of the law.

  A crown witness named George Webster declared that Carboni had made a speech on Bakery Hill to the effect that he’d come 16 000 miles to escape tyranny and that the diggers should put down the tyrants of the Camp. The prisoner tore up his licence and threw it towards a fire, added Webster. Mr Ireland for the defence, however, was able to hand the witness an intact gold licence covering the period when the licence was allegedly burned. One soldier declared that Carboni was armed with a pike in the stockade. Another stated that he saw Carboni and two other men chasing the first private. A third soldier said he was at the stockade and saw Carboni, and so did a number of troopers and a non-commissioned officer.

  Mr Ireland warned the jury of the horrid reality of the punishment for high treason—hanging, drawing and quartering. ‘Never mind the stench,’ wrote Carboni later, recalling Ireland’s words, ‘each piece of the treacherous flesh must remain stuck up at the top of each gate of the town, there to dry in spite of occasional pecking from crows and vultures.’

  The jury retired at nine o’clock at night to consider the evidence. ‘To remain in the felon’s dock while your jury consult on your fate is a sensation very peculiar in its kind.’ At twenty minutes past nine, the jury came back. The verdict was Not Guilty. ‘The people inside telegraphed the good news to the crowd outside and “Hurrah!” rent the air in the old British style. I was soon at the portal of the Supreme Court, a free man. I thought the people would have smothered me in their demonstrations of joy.’

  Asked to speak, he used some notes he had scribbled in pencil in his cell, number 33: ‘Lord God of Israel, Our Father in Heaven! We acknowledge our transgressions since we came into this our adopted land. Intemperance, greediness and the pampering of many bad passions have provoked Thee against us; yet, oh Lord our God, if in Thy justice, Thou are called upon to chastise us, in Thy mercy save this land of Victoria from the curse of the “spy system”.’

  To this, Tim Hayes shouted, ‘Amen!’

  The trials had become a farce now, but Hotham continued with them. The last prisoners were tried in a group of six, and acquitted. The governor was shaken in health and confidence. The Secretary for the Colonies, John Russell, wrote to him and told him that even if he had acted upon good advice to the best of his judgment, it had been inexpedient to charge the diggers with high treason. One of the acquitted, John Manning, spoke of the deliberately non-Irish juries that sat at the trials: ‘The future history of Australia will remember them with honour, and posterity will exalt with a laudable pride that, in even the darkest and gloomiest moments of their history, their ancestors had been found to the very last moment, true to their post.’

  When the report of the Commission on the Goldfields, authorised by Hotham in December, was tabled, it condemned ‘the resort to arms’. Peter Lalor, still technically at large, wrote to the Age asking why nothing had been done to fix affairs ‘before this bloody tragedy took place’. ‘Is it to prove to us that a British government can never bring forth a measure of reform without having first prepared a font of human blood in which to baptise that offspring of their generous love? . . . Or is it to convince the world that where a large standing army exists, the Demon of Despotism will have frequently offered at his shrine the mangled bodies of murdered men.’

  The Age wrote of Hotham that he had ‘brought the good faith in the government into disrepute by systematic breach of contract . . . and a disgraceful system of espionage’.

  Lalor, having survived his amputation, found that his friends had raised enough money for him to buy a portion of land near Ballarat. Even while the reward still existed for his apprehension he was moving around freely and had even bid publicly for his land.

  It was an exhilarating time for Australian patriots. On 15 June 1855 the Gold Fields Act had been passed. It provided that local courts would undertake the majority of the work formerly done by the gold commissioners. The Act gave the diggers the right to elect members of the court, and its powers were wide, covering the regulation of conditions on the fields. On 14 July 1855, Raffaello Carboni was elected to the Ballarat Local Court and took his place with eight others. He was embittered by the loss of his money and personal belongings during his imprisonment, but he was delighted with his new position. In November 1855 he stood unopposed to represent Ballarat in the Legislative Council, and was again elected when a new Constitution came into force in 1856. By 1857 he denied he had ever been a Chartist, a republican or a Communist, but ‘if democracy means opposition to a tyrannical people or a tyrannical government, then I have ever been, I still am, and will ever remain a Democrat’. He stayed in Australia until his book, detailing the Eureka battle and events leading up to it, was launched at the end of 1855, and then returned to Italy and to a place in Garibaldi’s unification struggle.

  John Basson Humffray was the other representative elected under the new Constitution from Ballarat. He founded a new group, the Victorian Reform League, but it did little since most of what it sought was achieved when Hotham despairingly implemented the recommendations of the Gold Fields Commission of Enquiry.

  In November 1855, Hotham was induced to forward his resignation to the Colonial Office. When it was later moved in the Legislative Council that a sum of £1000 be expended on a monument to his memory, Lalor, elected that very month to the Assembly, rose and said he did not want to cast a slur on the dead (for Sir Charles by then had died), but that Sir Charles had a sufficient monument in the graves of those slain at Ballarat. Less than a year later Peter Lalor said he was ‘free to confess that it was a rash act’ he had taken part in at Eureka.

  For Australia now seemed to the vast majority of its people—other than indigenes—a forum where crises could be resolved by constitutional and moral means. What would become an endemic cynicism about politics and the venality and jobbery of individual politicians had not yet possessed the souls of citizens. Peter Lalor would in 1856 be elected to serve in the Victorian Legislative Assembly, all property qualifications for being a voter having been removed in 1857 in that state. Backed by wealthier Irish and other well-off progressives in
the Goulburn area, Daniel Deniehy, an oratorical catherine-wheel fuelled and hollowed by alcohol, would serve in the more limited Legislative Assembly in New South Wales before 1858, when the franchise was still restricted to payers of £10 rent or owners of property worth £100, and after, when property qualifications was abolished and the old Chartist option of the secret ballot was instituted. (It had after all been a year earlier in Victoria.) Following the arrival of the last convict ship in 1853, the former Van Diemen’s Land, now naming itself Tasmania in an attempt to turn a new page or more accurately to rip out an old one, the political prisoner and Irish nobleman, William Smith O’Brien, wrote that had the bicameral institutions introduced there been in operation in Ireland they would have made peace and quashed rebellion.

  As soon as the enormous colony based on Moreton Bay and containing a population of 25 000 received its independence in 1859 under the name Queensland, elective government came into being, though the electoral districts were drawn in such a way as to give a pastoral vote much more value than a city one. South Australia, influenced constitutionally by its neighbour Victoria, held its first elections in 1857, whereas Western Australia, with its small population and commercial tenuousness, would be governed by viceroy and Legislative Council until the first elections for an assembly in 1890.

  To keep a lid on radicalism, there existed in the new states Legislative Councils full of government appointees in the case of New South Wales, and in the more advanced politics of Victoria, elected on the basis that candidates owned property worth £50. The Legislative Councils were meant to thwart radical legislation.

  Henry Parkes, never a brilliant businessman, had temporarily left the Legislative Assembly in New South Wales in an attempt to save his newspaper the Empire. He had earlier abandoned his attempts to make a living through his shops. But to him the new Legislative Assembly, which he soon re-entered and in which he was a robust liberal, provided a career, though one in which he was always hard-up. As for others, on one hand was the Reverend JD Lang, still turbulent, fighting off a libel charge brought by the South Coast landowner Alexander Berry, and regretting that his republican, federal vision had not emerged in the new constitutional arrangements. And on the other the aging and unappeasable William Charles Wentworth.

  He and his family were in a self-imposed exile in Britain, where Wentworth mourned the waning of hope and the death of his teenage daughter Belle. Despite his role in creating the New South Wales constitution, he saw the finished item as ‘a scandal to the British race and character’. Not only did he believe that the non-hereditary Legislative Councils would permit ‘the folly of Democracy’ to destroy the sylvan glories of the New South Wales he had written about in his youth, but his own proposal for a General Association of the Australian Colonies, a harbinger of an ultimate federal assembly, had been ignored. The universal franchise and a lack of an hereditary upper house seemed drastically radical to him and certainly likely to reduce the power of pastoralists. They would not do so to the extent he feared, given the influence of that group in the Legislative Councils of the various colonies and the squatters’ capacity to adapt.

  So that was Australia now, at the end of the 1850s, a country where most demands seemed to many people, including outside commentators, the Lalors of the earth, the Smith O’Briens, and the city progressives—to have been met; and where the penal past had been transmuted into a diverse future, in which Australians would bravely attempt to live down the origins of their society.

  TIMELINE TO 1860

  45 million BP circa The landmass (Sahul) that was to form Australia began to break from Gondwana, the great southern super-continent.

  60 000 BP circa First Homo sapiens arrived on the continent.

  35 000–30 000 BP circa Oldest known Aboriginal tools found. Jinmium stone tools from the Northern Territory were dated at 130 000 BP, although this finding is yet to be widely accepted.

  1600s–1800s circa Makassan trepang (sea cucumber) divers reached the northern coastline and encountered Australian Aborigines.

  1606 March Willem Jansz and crew of the Dutch ship Duyfken explored the western coast of what is now Cape York Peninsula and possibly encountered Australian Aborigines.

  1606 July–October Luis de Torres sailed the southern coast of New Guinea, through the strait that now bears his name.

  1616 October Dutch commander Dirk Hartog landed on an island on the western coast (now Shark Bay) and left behind a commemorative plate.

  1629 June The Dutch East Indiaman Batavia was wrecked on a reef off the western coast. The commander, Francois Pelsaert, made Batavia in a ship’s boat and returned to retrieve survivors. Two were left on the western coast.

  1642 August Governor-General of the Dutch East Indies, Anthony van Diemen, sent Abel Tasman to explore south of the known land.

  1642 November–December Tasman annexed part of a southerly island (now Tasmania) for Holland, calling it Van Diemen’s Land.

  1688 January English privateer William Dampier of the Cygnet anchored on the north-west coast. He undertook further exploration in the region in 1699.

  1718 A system for the transportation of convicts from Britain to another country was established with the Transportation Act.

  1760s A series of Enclosure Acts transformed the British landscape, driving small farmers and agricultural workers into the cities. Widespread unemployment and social dislocation resulted.

  1768 August Lieutenant James Cook of the Endeavour embarked from Plymouth to observe and record in Tahiti the transit of Venus across the face of the sun.

  1768 During his around the world voyage, French explorer Louis Antoine de Bougainville sighted the Great Barrier Reef.

  1769 June The observation of Venus completed, Cook then opened sealed orders that instructed him to search for the Great South Land.

  1770 April Lieutenant Zachary Hicks sighted land, near the southeastern tip of the Australian mainland. Later that month, Cook and others landed at Botany Bay.

  1770 August Cook hoisted English colours and in the name of His Majesty King George III took possession of the whole eastern coast, giving it the name New South Wales.

  1782 Britain was defeated in the American War of Independence. The transportation of British convicts to America soon ceased.

  1783 Hulks were introduced on the Thames as a means of alleviating overcrowding in British gaols. They remained in use until 1853.

  1786 August Minister for the Home Office, Lord Sydney, proposed the establishment of a convict settlement at Botany Bay. The Heads of a Plan was adopted later in 1786.

  1788–92 Captain Arthur Phillip, Governor-in-Chief, New South Wales.

  1788 January The First Fleet reached Botany Bay. Captain Arthur Phillip welcomed Count de la Perouse and two French vessels on their coincidental arrival in Botany Bay. In March the French ships departed to pursue Pacific explorations and were never seen again.

  1788 February The formal proclamation of the colony took place in Sydney Cove. Phillip was appointed Governor. Lieutenant Philip Gidley King sailed in the Supply for Norfolk Island, where a penal station was to be established under his command.

  1789 April An outbreak of smallpox was identified and soon constituted an epidemic among local indigenous communities.

  1789 November Governor Phillip gave land at Rose Hill (near Parramatta) to James Ruse, an industrious former convict. In 1791, he drew his final rations from the government store. He is regarded as Australia’s first independent farmer and settler.

  1789 November Two Aborigines, Bennelong and Colby, were captured. Colby soon escaped but Bennelong remained at Government House for several months. In 1792 Bennelong accompanied Phillip to England, where he met George III. Bennelong returned to Australia in 1795.

  1790 June The Second Fleet arrived, bringing more convicts and desperately needed supplies.

  1790 September Governor Phillip was seriously wounded by a spear in an encounter with Aborigines at Manly Cove.

  1791 March
William and Mary Bryant, with their children and fellow convicts, escaped from Port Jackson and sailed to Timor in an open boat.

  1791 July–October The Third Fleet arrived in Sydney.

  1791 October Whaling from Sydney commenced using returning convict transports. By the late 1790s English, American and French whalers were also hunting in the region.

  1791 November Twenty-one Irish convicts escaped and attempted to travel overland to China. A number soon died and the remainder were later recaptured.

  1792–94 Major Francis Grose, administered the colony.

  1793 January The first free immigrants arrived from England and took up land, in a district they named Liberty Plains (now Homebush), in February.

  1793 June Reverend Richard Johnson commenced construction of the colony’s first church. The first service was held in August.

  1794–95 Captain William Paterson, administered the colony.

  1795–1800 Captain John Hunter, Governor, New South Wales and its dependencies.

  1795 May Open warfare broke out between settlers and Aborigines on the Hawkesbury. Paterson retaliated by sending a party of the NSW Corps and Aboriginal lives were lost. Violent encounters between Aboriginal and convict settlers would continue throughout the early years of the colony.

  1796 January Escaped convicts banded together to plunder settlers’ farms. They were Australia’s first bushrangers.