by Jan Morris
No bar sinister leaves a smutch on
The ermine pure of their escutcheon!
Belgravion swells, whose manners show
They once bad bloomed in Rotten Row!
And now, transplanted here, to pass
For an Australian upper-class!
There was a lot of money about in Sydney. Our visitor might well find himself received by an ex-convict footman, waited upon by an ex-convict butler, lit by gas-light, fed upon excellent roast beef, oysters, warm wine and melted butter, entertained by over-jewelled young beauties, and driven home to his lodgings in a crested carriage by a liveried coachman.
But if he dismissed his driver at the door, and took a turn before bed to work the claret off, he would find another Sydney down the road. After that first euphoric surprise, everybody was struck by the contrasts of this strange town. ‘My first feeling,’ reported Charles Darwin in 1836, landing fresh from Galápagos, ‘was to congratulate myself that I was born an Englishman: but upon seeing more of the town afterwards … my admiration fell a little.’ It was hardly surprising. Most of the Sydneysiders were very rough people indeed, criminals, convict families, or men of that wandering raffish kind who found their way in those days to all the seaports of the colonial world, deserters, fugitives, off-season whalers or sealers, to pick up a living along the waterfront, or linger rootless in the slums. The proletariat of any port was tough enough then, and the proletariat of Sydney was perhaps the toughest of all.
Between the posh streets of the little town, tucked away behind the mansions and the public offices, were Sydney’s notorious slums. Here lived the flotsam of the old penal settlement, in shacks and tenements dropping away through the hilly district called the Rocks to the sleazy quarters around the quays, where the haphazard huts built by the convicts long before were now doss-houses and bordels. Goats wandered at large among these back streets of Sydney, and the drains ran uncontrolled from the front door of one hovel to the back door of the one below. This was a Sydney sprung direct from the hulks and prisons of Britain—‘sent and transported’, as the judicial formula ran, ‘to some Place beyond the Seas’. Its inhabitants were bred to the lash, the chain-gang, the stocks and the punishment cell—in the mid-1830s some 6,000 floggings were inflicted in New South Wales every year, mostly for petty misdemeanours. If they were brutal or dissolute when they left England, they were far worse now: one local judge observed that sometimes the entire business of New South Wales seemed to be the commission of crime, ‘as if the whole colony are continuously in motion towards the several Courts of Justice’. Aborigines wandered drunken and dispossessed along the waterfront of Sydney, and some of the most terrible people alive brooded in the Rocks or waited in the alleys after dark.
In the great cities of England, the presence of such a ghastly underworld could go almost unnoticed to the stranger: in this small town it could not be escaped for long. In the centre of the lovely harbour, in full view of the botanical gardens, the old convict punishment centre of Fort Denison—‘Pinchgut Island’—stood as an inescapable grey reminder, on the sunniest day, at the blithest picnic, of Sydney’s harsh raison d’être. Some of the richest citizens of the town were emancipated convicts themselves, and for years the two chief political factions were the Patriotic Association, the mouthpiece of the emancipists, and the Exclusionists, the ‘Pure Merinos’, who thought all transported persons should be excluded from the franchise. A young Briton arriving in Sydney in the 1840s found that half the influential citizens to whom he carried letters of introduction would have nothing to do with the other half—‘if you visit one’, the bank manager warned him, ‘you cannot visit the other’. Probably the richest woman in the place was Mrs Mary Reibey, who had been transported to Sydney aged 13 for stealing a horse in Staffordshire, had married a ship’s officer, and so prospered in her widowhood as an independent merchant that she now owned several houses in Sydney, several farms and a couple of ships.1
A tradition of brutality and corruption inevitably tainted Sydney. Even those Sydneysiders who claimed descent from Army officers, settled in Australia at the end of their service, were sometimes the grandchildren of crime—many officers had made themselves fortunes by the illegal sale of rum and use of convict labour. Life was cheap, sensibilities were numb. We read of the popular Rat Pit in Pitt Street, where all sorts of animals were pitted against each other in gory combat, and of dogs and goats mercilessly baited in the streets. A visitor in 1838, watching a fight between bulldogs in a tavern on Brickfield Hill, saw one dog-owner chop the two back legs off his animal just to demonstrate its fighting spirit, and Sydney butchers habitually skinned or plucked poultry while the creatures were still alive—easier to do, they used to say in the market, while the carcass was limp.
In this mixed ambiance, cruelty in idyll, luxury beside squalor, Sydney was growing up and throwing off its penal past. In some ways it was already like a new industrial town of the English Midlands, only more intense. Its setting was far more beautiful, its public buildings were more handsome, and its sense of opportunism was fiercer than anything in Birmingham or Stoke; the ostentation of its nouveaux-riches was even more preposterous, and from top to bottom of its society ran that flaw of ruthless crudity. In an age of developing materialism it was a city that could hardly fail, and when in a few years gold was discovered in New South Wales, Sydney was transformed in a flash from town to metropolis, and built itself a handsome Royal Exchange, and a University.
The citizens of this settlement were already chafing under colonial control They might admire the urbanity of the men sent from London to supervise their affairs, but they certainly did not feel themselves inferior, or incapable of self-government. As the Centennial Magazine remarked of Governor Sir Charles Fitzroy, second son of the third Duke of Grafton, who was sent out specifically to cope with constitutional demands, ‘Fitzroy was about as fitting a man, in every respect, as could have been picked out of the entire English nation to be sent abroad to misgovern a colony, and to corrupt its morals by his evil example. A vulgar voluptuary and systematic Sybarite, prurient, unprincipled, utterly destitute of intellectual force, he could neither govern the colony, nor his household, nor himself. He lived only for the gratification of his own base passions’.1
4
Not every settlement was so outspoken, or so coarse-grained. A very different kind of society was established towards the end of the 1840s on the south island of New Zealand, near the spot where the Waimakariri River enters the Pacific. This was the principle demonstration of the theories of Edward Gibbon Wakefield, the most remarkable of the Colonial Reformers. The son of an intellectual father, Wakefield was a true original, a political theorist of brilliance, a character of disastrous impetuosity. He looked, according to contemporary portraits, rather puzzled or blotched by life, but he was really a man of violent resolution. He ran away with an heiress when he was 20, and at 26 went to prison for falsely inducing an immensely rich schoolgirl to marry him at Gretna Green—he needed her money, it was said, to get into Parliament.
In later life he devoted all his gifts and energies to the cause of overseas settlement, which he presented to the public in altogether new ways. For him emigration from Britain was not a passive expedient, but an active enterprise. He believed in systematic voluntary colonization, not only to reduce the pressure of population in England, but also to create healthy, well-balanced, loyal new societies in the colonies. This should be accomplished, he thought, by striking a proper balance between capital, labour and land. If land in a new colony was too cheap there was no labour, and no capital investment to develop the country, but if land prices were kept reasonably high then a complete society could be transferred from the Mother Country to any distant dependency. The money received for the land itself would be used to finance the migration, so that the whole process, called in the language of imperial economics ‘the Doctrine of Sufficient Price’, would be self-financing and self-perpetuating.
Wakefield planned
no Sydneys. He wanted close-knit, compact settlements of respectable citizens, mostly of the middle-classes—no extravagant younger sons, no emancipated forgers, no footloose ruffians or discharged libidinous seamen. On soil that was British but mostly virgin new social experiments could be undertaken—each colony would be ‘an immense nursery, to see what may be done for society’. Emigrant groups would include not only farmers, industrialists and labourers, but professional men of all sorts too, singers and milliners, printers and chemists—‘and at least one good Political Economist at each settlement’.
A hopeful field for such experiments was New Zealand, the most distant of all the possessions of the Crown, which had been acquired in 1840 specifically to keep it decent. Since Captain Cook had circumnavigated the islands in 1769, New Zealand had been plagued by European adventurers of all sorts. Its able and cannibalistic indigenes, the Maoris, had been corrupted with rum and gunpowder, so that the tribemen frequently slaughtered one another, and ate Europeans by the score, and on many parts of the coast doubtful white settlements were lodged—deserters, whalers, escaped convicts, speculators, sheepherders, a sprinkling of missionaries and a few pakeha Maoris—Europeans who lived Maori style, body tattoos and all. Darwin, in 1835, thought the white New Zelanders ‘the very refuse of society’, and five years later the British Government stepped in to stop the rot (and incidentally to forestall the French). They acquired sovereignty over the whole country by a formal treaty with a number of Maori chiefs—being determined to prevent, they said, that ‘process of war and spoliation, under which uncivilized Tribes have invariably disappeared as often as they have been brought into the immediate vicinity of Emigrants from the Nations of Christendom’. The Treaty of Waitangi guaranteed the Maori chiefs, in the name of Te Kuini Wikitoria, ‘full, exclusive and undisputed possession of their lands and estates’, and though this assurance was soon whittled away, still the original British intentions towards New Zealand were generally benevolent.1
So it was that in 1843 the colony of Canterbury was conceived. It was one of several Wakefieldian settlements founded in New Zealand, and was one of two that were deliberately denominational, like the earlier Utopias of the United States. The Otago colony was Church of Scotland, and Dunedin, its capital, was to remain Scottish to its core for ever. The Canterbury settlement was Anglican—High Anglican at that, for the Oxford Movement was reaching its tapestried apogee in England, and the Canterbury Association, founded to promote the colony, was richly Tractarian. Wakefield himself had no religion, but he was prepared to use any instrument to achieve his ends—he approached the Chief Rabbi once.
His lieutenant in the Canterbury Association, John Godley, was an Anglo-Irish Anglican Tory, Harrow and Oxford, and between them they attracted to the Association’s support a wide circle of High Church bigwigs. Many of them were, like Godley, graduates of Christ Church, Oxford, and therefore bishops. Two were archbishops. There were several peers and fifteen members of Parliament. Behind this formidable facade Wakefield himself, denied a public role because of his early indiscretions, industriously and powerfully laboured, consulted at every stage, visited at his Reigate cottage by successions of MPs, and even invited to nominate a bishop for the new settlement. The Times was attracted to the cause by all this consequence, and in 1849 the Association was given a royal charter. The Canterbury Pilgrims, as they romantically called themselves, primed by a course of lectures on New Zealand, and confirmed in their resolve by an immensely grand farewell dinner, sailed for the Antipodes literally with the blessing of the Establishment, for their leaders had visited Canterbury specifically to receive it.
Four ships sailed, direct from London, carrying 775 well-behaved pioneers. They were separated of course into cabin, intermediate and steerage classes, and the richer emigrants, like Mr and Mrs James Fitzgerald, who sailed in the Charlotte Jane (730 tons), paid £42 for a stateroom in the stern, half the width of the ship, for which they provided their own purpose-made furniture. The first party disembarked upon the uninhabited shore of what is now called Lyttleton Harbour—a dramatic meandering fjord, overlooked by the high bluffs of the Banks peninsula, with the snow-peaks of the Alps shining celestially in the distance. They were met by His Excellency the Governor and his lordship the Bishop of New Zealand, the one an inclination of ostrich plumes, the other an agitation of surplices, and when they had laboured up the steep track to the ridge above the harbour, they looked down in wonder upon the site of their chief settlement on the other side—a swampy treeless place beside the sea, harmless but unstimulating, where advance parties of surveyors and engineers were already at work with teams of Maori labourers.
They had brought with them an organ, a church bell, some prefabricated houses, a printing press and a reference library of 2,000 volumes given them by Christ Church, Oxford. Though the exclusively Anglican membership of the colony was already regrettably diluted, still they soon had a thriving Church of England settlement upon that flaccid shore. Its leaders hoped that it would be ‘a centre from which arts and morals should be spread throughout the southern world’, and they proposed that in the very heart of it there should stand a High Anglican centre of faith and education, part college, part cathedral, to be paid for in the Wakefieldian spirit largely out of land safes. Since the model for this institution was to be Godley’s own alma mater, and since so many of the wealthier settlers had been educated there too, they accordingly called the capital of their new colony Christchurch.
There were few Maoris in that part of New Zealand, so the Pilgrims wrote on a clean slate. They constituted from the start, as Wakefield wished, a working cross-section of the English community—‘a complete slice of England’, so The Times said, ‘cut from top to bottom’. The original intention to supply a nobleman and a bishop as spiritual and temporal heads of the colony unfortunately languished when no nobleman could be persuaded to emigrate and the bishop changed his mind after a month in the settlement: but they made a start with the church, the school and the library, they painfully worked out details of land tenure, grazing rights, Church endowments and squatting privileges, and they presently settled into a reasonably ordered and prosperous routine. It was all very English. Transplanted oaks and plane trees flourished, and in their branches chirped and procreated the skylarks, blackbirds, sparrows, greenfinches, yellow-hammers, magpies, plovers and starlings misguidedly brought from home.
It was not, however, much like the society Wakefield had envisaged. Few of his theories worked in New Zealand. Educated men would not go there, capitalists would not risk their capital there, poor men could neither buy land nor find jobs. Human nature betrayed the Doctrine of Sufficient Price. Wakefield had described the Canterbury pioneers as ‘not merely a nice, but a choice society of English people’: but not all of them were nice in the long run, rascals arrived among the regular communicants, and many of the more fastidious Pilgrims (who called themselves ‘colonists’, as against the steerage class ‘emigrants’) soon returned disillusioned to England.
The Canterbury plain was essentially grazing country, fine for sheep-farming, unprofitable for arable: but half the settlers had no capital to buy sheep, so they let grazing rights to less respectable kinds of New Zealander, or hired Australian stock-men whose devotion to the Thirty-Nine Articles was uncertain. Many more turned to sheep-farming themselves, and moved to the great sheep-runs beyond the settlement, where they soon lost any pretensions to gentility, and lived like wild free peasants, grazing their animals over the wide hummocky plains, and through the damp valleys of the foothills.
Even Christchurch itself began to lose some of its decorum, and showed signs of the rough colonialism Wakefield so despised. He had always hated the idea of ‘New People’, claiming an equality that was ‘against nature and truth—an equality which, to keep the balance always even, rewards the mean rather than the great, and gives more honour to the vile than to the noble….’ Yet a New People the Canterbury Pilgrims presently became, not so New as the Sydneysiders i
ndeed, but still a long way from the discreet hierarchy that the peers and prelates of the Association had foreseen. The simpler settlers, wrote an observer in 1853, soon became ‘mightily republican’—distinctly insolent, too, so a French visitor thought. They seemed to change almost as soon as they set foot in the Antipodes, straighter of posture, better of dress, plumper of figure, and no longer feeling it necessary, it appears, to refer to gentlemen as ‘Mr’ or touch their hats to ladies. As a cheerful Scot wrote of the process:
When to New Zealand first I came,
Poor and duddy, poor and duddy,
When to New Zealand first I came,
It was a happy day, sirs.
At my dour cheek there’s bread and cheese,
I work or no’, just as I please,
I’m fairly settled at my ease,
And that’s the way o’t noo, sirs.
The truth was that settlement colonies were essentially for poor men. Educated people would find nothing in a place like New Zealand, except escape from personal troubles at home, and the ideals of the Colonial Reformers mostly faded in time. ‘No person who has ever enjoyed a life in England would, I think, profess to prefer a colonial life’, wrote E. B. Fitton in 1856, and for ever afterwards most educated Englishmen found New Zealand, though kind and beautiful, fundamentally a bore. Still, though Christchurch grew more egalitarian and less Tractarian over the years, it remained by colonial standards always a conservative city: its Cathedral arose as ordained among the plane trees, its Christchurch Club became alarmingly exclusive, and there were always citizens to recall, referring to rectory watercolours upon the drawing-room wall, or indecipherable sepias of tennis-parties in family albums, that their forebears were those Mr Wakefield really had in mind, when he spoke of choiceness.1