However, the personal impact of this event on Balcombe’s health and the future wellbeing of his family was enormous.
CHAPTER 35
‘TERRIBLE HOLLOW’
Not even ruins remain of what was once the Balcombes’ farmhouse ‘The Briars’ at Bungonia, but the homestead of their neighbours, the Reid family of Inverary Park, still stands. It is a handsome old bungalow with a chimney at each end of its deep roof and a long, wide front verandah. The house is surrounded by ancient trees and set back from the road at the end of a long straight drive.
The countryside around it and the old Briars property is gentle, wooded and undulating. But less than two kilometres away there is a yawning cleft in the earth’s crust: Bungonia Gorge, the deepest canyon in the whole continent of Australia. One comes upon it suddenly after walking through sclerophyll forest, and in the past it would have been abrupt and alarming. Today the approach is signposted and the lookout fenced, as part of a national park. The canyon is only 76 metres wide but the view down is of a terrifying sheer drop of 300 metres to the Shoalhaven River far below. Experienced bushmen know where to find tracks down into the gorge and there are said to be many caves in the cliffs.
As early as 1798, Governor Hunter sent an ex-convict, John Wilson, to explore the area and discover where escaped convicts, heading south-west, found seclusion. Wilson did not succeed.1 Bungonia Gorge may have been one lair from which bushrangers emerged to pillage local farms and stores and return with their plunder. In his 1888 novel Robbery Under Arms, the Victorian author Rolf Boldrewood called such a bushranger hideout ‘Terrible Hollow’.
Balcombe’s final years as colonial treasurer have a visual metaphor in his own farmland at Bungonia—fertile, prosperous and green, then descending abruptly into a sudden abyss.
Balcombe had partially recovered from the Treasury scandal. His arguments that the same procedure of discounting bills had been practised before and that he had deposited government revenue in the bank because there was no secure place for it other than the box under his bed appeared to have been accepted by his superiors, if not approved. After a further enquiry, more efficient practices were set up for the Treasury. Some very large padlocked boxes, too heavy for any burglar to carry off, were requisitioned. Balcombe had escaped with a warning, although his probity and competence would long remain in question.
However, he must have felt badly about his friend John Piper, the colony’s former ‘favourite son’, now somewhat neglected by old acquaintances and only occasionally mentioned. He had sold all his remaining assets and retired to a small farm near Bathurst. On the one hand Piper’s practice of discounting bills may have led Balcombe astray, on the other, Balcombe was responsible for the receipt of revenues collected by Piper, and should have been more thorough in checking his friend’s accounts. That had been the trouble: he and Piper were too similar in their enjoyment of exuberant revelries and in their casual attitude to reaping a few perquisites from their merchant friends. Piper had been a particular hero of Betsy’s, and Sydney gossips thought he had been rather too fond of her.
During the horror month of May 1826 for Balcombe with the governor and the Treasury crisis—he received a message from his friend and Bungonia neighbour Dr David Reid, who had been appointed magistrate for the area. There were ‘troubles’ with the Aboriginal people of the district. Two stock-keepers, assigned convicts, had been murdered. Other convict workers and farm labourers had formed a party planning revenge on ‘the blacks’. In defence against them, ‘an assembly of upwards of a thousand natives’ had gathered ‘within four miles’ of Inverary Park. Reid sent an official account of the developments to the governor, through the colonial secretary in Sydney. It must have been Reid who gave an explanation for the fury of the local Aboriginal people which had ended in the killing of the two white men: ‘Stock keepers had been stealing the natives’ women, committing violence against them.’2
Governor Darling ordered that ‘preventive measures’ be taken to avoid what would inevitably be multiple deaths on both sides. A force of thirty men, led by a captain and a subaltern, was despatched to Bungonia. They were instructed to ‘try to protect natives from injury and insult’ and attempt ‘to conciliate’. The officers were asked to ‘endeavour to communicate with Chiefs of tribes and assure them of the Government’s good intentions’.3 The swift action taken by Darling on that occasion avoided further bloodshed on both sides.
On 1 July 1826, the beginning of the new financial year, the Australia Bank opened its doors for business, setting up in direct competition to the Bank of New South Wales. It was backed by some of the wealthiest and most prestigious people in the colony, who preferred not to rub shoulders with former convicts when they made their deposits and withdrawals.4
Balcombe, with all his stock and land commitments, found it difficult on his reduced salary to pay the steep rent of the O’Connell Street house. As two rooms were used for the Treasury offices, he put in a request to Darling for an allowance for them. Instead of making his own decision, as Governor Brisbane surely would have done, the inflexible Darling sent the request in a despatch to Bathurst. That meant a seven or eight months’ wait for a reply.5 It must have given Balcombe an unpleasant reminder of that other military governor who played everything by the book and followed his lordship’s instructions with overanxious zealotry.
Reminders of Bonaparte and St Helena continued to appear in the local newspapers. The Gazette had a story about Kleber, a tall French officer brought before General Bonaparte in Egypt for insubordination. He looked truculently down at the general from his commanding height. ‘“Which of us,” said Bonaparte, “is above the other here? You are higher than I am only by a head—one act of disobedience more, and that difference will disappear.” Kleber obeyed.’6 The Australian reported that an old soldier now resided near Napoleon’s grave with its weeping willows ‘in consequence of some French officers who had been there, having taken off several branches from the willows as a memento of their former sovereign’.7
Betsy must often have thought of those days on St Helena, when she had delighted in provoking the former great conqueror and nothing she did seemed to annoy him too much; when she had been a happy careless flirt, admired by so many officers. They would have seemed in memory such golden halcyon days.
Darling was very much distracted in November 1826 and for long afterwards by an episode which became notorious as the ‘Sudds and Thompson affair’. Many military officers and soldiers were resentful of wealthy ex-convicts who seemed to gain many privileges from the government. Two soldiers, Joseph Sudds and Patrick Thompson, were frustrated under their strict military regime. In contrast, they felt, assigned convicts were given easy jobs, such as stock-keepers, carriage drivers or shop assistants, while those who had served their terms or gained tickets of leave had received land grants and set themselves up as small farmers. The two soldiers decided to join them. In front of witnesses, they stole a bundle of calico from a Sydney shop, in the confident belief that they would be dismissed from their regiment, serve a short gaol term and then be free to set up as civilians themselves.
But this small crime turned out very badly for them. It also occupied a great deal of time for Darling. The case of Sudds and Thompson was a key factor in abbreviating his career in New South Wales.
The men were stripped of their uniforms and drummed out of the regiment to ‘The Rogue’s March’. They were convicted by a Court of Quarter Sessions of theft and sentenced to seven years in a penal settlement such as Norfolk Island or Moreton Bay. At the time of his sentencing, Sudds pleaded that he was ill, but that was dismissed as a ruse. Darling ‘commuted’ their sentences to work in a road gang, to make a spectacle of their punishment. They were shackled in a particularly punitive, heavy set of irons, intended only for the most desperate of convicts, with spiked iron collars around their necks—personally designed by Darling—attached by short chains to their ankle fetters. This prevented them from standing upright. If th
ey attempted to lie down, the spiked collars stabbed their necks. Five days into the sentence, on 27 November, Sudds died.
The press exploded. Wardell, in the Australian, questioned the legal validity of the proceedings. Wentworth lashed out at the governor, accusing him of torture and murder. Edward Smith Hall for the Monitor produced a pamphlet, widely distributed, with a sketch of Sudds in his shackles, dying in agony, watched by a helpless Thompson.8
Governor Darling was portrayed as a repressive military despot, suitable to run a penitentiary but not an enterprising civilian colony. Hall made a direct comparison for punitive measures between Darling and a certain other governor: ‘there are two ways of fulfilling painful instructions. When Sir Hudson Lowe received very imperious orders respecting the safe custody of Napoleon, the world will never believe that such men as Bathurst and Liverpool intended Sir Hudson to put them in force in the manner in which he did.’9
Chief Justice Forbes advised Darling that his severe punishment of the two soldiers was ‘contrary to law’ and had been conducted at the ‘sole fiat of the Governor’.10 Amelia Forbes recalled ‘the cruel punishment of Sudds and Thompson’ in her memoirs and said—as she may have told her friends the Balcombes—that she ‘could never feel comfortable in General Darling’s presence again’.11
In late November, farmers in New South Wales experienced a ‘long dry spell’. They waited for the rains to come, and most were sure that they would. They had stocked their land and planted crops as if the green years would go on for ever, with no understanding that drought was a cyclical pattern in Australia. Many small settlers were bound to the Bank of New South Wales by debt, having borrowed to fence and stock their land and build dams and farmhouses, planning to repay when their crops yielded and their sheep were shorn. Balcombe was one of the optimistic ones: wherever he had lived—Rottingdean at the edge of the Sussex Downs, monsoonal India, St Helena, Devon and Saint-Omer—he had always been able to count on the heavens opening and drenching the earth. It was a preordained blessing to mankind and to animals and plants. But this country was different. The life-bringing rain did not arrive. It did not come for months. He never dreamed it would be years. Three years. The old Australian hands knew about it. Drought.
By early 1827, Balcombe had enormous worries pressing down on him. He had overextended himself financially by purchasing the additional 4000 acres at Molonglo. Although he had paid only a 10 per cent deposit on the dry and scratchy land, he had to pay interest on the loan; he had also been required to fence the land, and had bought a large number of sheep and cattle to stock it and incurred costs for their transport. If no rains came and the markets for his wool and grain continued to worsen, his heavy investment in his farming properties could end in ruin.
For the present he was managing. His sheep, heavy in wool from the previous good season, were shorn, producing seven bales to send to the London market.12 But he had another setback when Darling informed him that a despatch had arrived from Bathurst in response to his enquiry of seven months earlier. His lordship refused any additional allowance for Balcombe’s house rent, even though the Treasury was based at his home.13
Balcombe’s recurrent gout returned. He had to drop some of his commitments and relinquished his position as magistrate, deciding that he had stretched himself too far, although he would later be persuaded to resume the role.14
The long drought continued. The grasses dried up, and their roots were eaten out by the sheep and cattle. Yarralaw Creek on the Bungonia property receded from its banks to a thin trickle. Trying to reach the water, cattle became bogged in the mud and died. The circling crows flew down to feast.
Alexander, the Balcombes’ youngest son, was now out in the world, with employment as a clerk in the government Commissariat—where a report later judged him to be ‘negligent’. The eldest, William, with assigned convict workers, was managing his father’s Molonglo land and ‘The Briars’ at Bungonia. Thomas was still working at Port Stephens with the Australian Agricultural Company—possibly thanks to the Macarthur connection.
Elizabeth Macarthur was staying in town with her married daughter. She wrote to her son Edward in London: ‘We have just had a visit from Mrs Abell. She generally comes in about once a week and chats with us. I told her I was writing to you. She desired to be remembered. Her father has been confined by gout to the house for some weeks.’ Betsy told Elizabeth she had been to some parties and found them ‘a strange mixture of finery, ostentation and vulgarity’.15
Captain Piper had recovered his spirits and occasionally returned to the social scene in Sydney, just as the Balcombes and their daughter Betsy seemed to be withdrawing from it. A Captain Chestakoff wrote to Piper saying he was forming a party including Sir John Jamison, Mr Mackaness, Mr Stirling, Mr Bannister and Miss Bannister and Captain Mitchell, but he was ‘kind of thunderstruck by the refusal of Mrs Abelles [sic]’.16
In July, the new attorney-general, Alexander Macduff Baxter, arrived. A Scottish barrister from Perthshire, aged 29, he had married after his appointment and brought his new wife, Maria del Rosaria Anna Uthair, an attractive Spanish heiress. From the beginning, Baxter set out to ‘cut a great dash’ in colonial society, taking over Apsley House, one of Sydney’s few splendid mansions, and furnishing it in lavish style. But Darling had his doubts about him. Within two months he reported to the Colonial Office that ‘“Dandy” Baxter appeared to have little legal experience and was helpless in court against Robert Wardell and William Charles Wentworth’.17
The trial of the convict Thomas Sweetman was held in the Criminal Court on 10 August. He was charged with breaking and entering the dwelling of William Balcombe, and of larceny, of stealing two hats that were the property ‘of the said William Balcombe’. Various witnesses were called: a neighbour who lived opposite witnessed the burglary, raised the alarm and with the assistance of others prevented the prisoner’s escape. Thomas Balcombe was called as a witness. He had been residing with his father that Saturday evening, was alarmed by a noise and found a stranger in the hall who made off with two hats. The prisoner pleaded intoxication ‘in excuse for his being found in the way described’ but denied the charge of robbery. The judge summed up the evidence for the burglary then delivered the verdict: ‘guilty. Remanded for sentence.’18
The fact that the convict Sweetman had got past the sentry, and may have planned to steal Treasury funds, not just two hats, gives some vindication to Balcombe’s claim that he had deposited funds in the Bank, fearing the house was insecure.
Three weeks later, the chief justice and the assistant judge took their seats in the court. The prisoners, including Sweetman, ‘who had been previously tried, convicted and remanded to gaol, were brought up for sentence’. Judgement of death was recorded against all of them.19 It was usually mandatory for reoffending convicts. Amelia Forbes noted in her memoirs that it gave the chief justice much anguish to deliver death sentences for relatively minor crimes.
In September, Attorney-General Baxter hosted a ball and supper at his grand new home in York Street. The Governor and Mrs Darling did not attend, but otherwise all the usual suspects were there, including Mrs Balcombe and Mrs Abell. ‘The entire of the party did not retire till an early hour on Saturday morning.’20 William Balcombe may not have been well enough to be present, but that evening Betsy made a new friend, Baxter’s attractive Spanish wife. Before long they were visiting each other and walking in the Botanical Gardens together.
Balcombe had been ill for some time with gout, and probably depression occasioned by the distressing state of his landholdings and financial affairs. But he managed to go to the annual Turf Club dinner on 9 November at Cummings Hotel. It was a strictly all-male affair. About forty members sat down, with William Charles Wentworth acting as chairman and Sheriff John Mackaness as vice-chairman. The band of the 57th Regiment was there to entertain. Darling, officially the club patron, was invited but declined, instead spending the weekend at Government House in Parramatta. As the wine flowed,
the evening became boisterous. Wentworth proposed a toast to their first patron, Sir Thomas Brisbane, extolling his virtues as a ‘political friend’. A perfunctory toast was made to Governor Darling as the band played ‘Over the Hills and Far Away’. An article in the Monitor stated that the tune expressed ‘the feelings of the company and the colony’.21
On reading the Monitor, Darling withdrew his patronage from the club. He sent a stiffly phrased letter to Sheriff Mackaness, informing him that he was sending a copy of it to Lord Viscount Goderich, the British prime minister (Liverpool had resigned in April). He said he knew that Mackaness had not just presided at the ‘most calumnious and indecent’ event, but ‘you had given your countenance to the proceedings’. Given his ‘association and intercourse with certain factious Individuals, who in the most open and wanton manner have endeavoured to degrade the Government in the eyes of the Public, and to create discord between it and the People’, Darling would not be reappointing him sheriff at the close of the current year. Mackaness wrote a humble reply, claiming that in no way had he ‘endeavoured to degrade the Government in the eyes of the public or to create discord’. But it did no good. His job was finished.22
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