by Iain Gately
Hunter had a particular bête noir among the officers of the rum regiment, Captain John Macarthur, who had been given command of the settlement at Parramatta and who had abused his position of trust comprehensively—buying land, assigning himself convicts to clear and farm it, and paying them with spirits at a 500 percent markup. By the turn of the nineteenth century Macarthur was a wealthy man. He was also a brilliant politician, and as his power grew in New South Wales, he set about undermining that of the governor via a stream of letters to his increasing range of commercial contacts in the City of London. His success can be gauged by Hunter’s short tenure—he retired in 1800, an embittered man, and was replaced by Philip King, who had no more success bringing the Rum Regiment to heel than his predecessor.
King began determined to assert his authority and sent Macarthur to Britain to be court-martialed. Unfortunately for King, Macarthur turned out to have the greater influence in the metropolis. He was acquitted and returned to Sydney in 1805 in his own ship, the Argos, which bore a golden fleece as its figurehead. Not only had Macarthur been exonerated by the court, but he had also received a land grant of five thousand acres on which to graze the prize merino stud rams he had bought while on trial. The potential of Australia for sheep had aroused more interest among the great and the good in London than any other news from New South Wales. The need for wool was dire in Britain, which was locked in war with Napoleonic France and had lost access to its traditional suppliers in continental Europe. The fact that much of the evidence against Macarthur, including Governor King’s report, had been stolen en route between Australia and Britain was overlooked, in favor of the possibility that he might be the man to turn the new colony into a giant “sheep walk.”
As well as rewarding Macarthur for his faith in sheep, London decided to remove Governor King, who clearly did not have the measure of his colonists, and to replace him with one of its best sea captains. The man they chose had sailed with Captain Cook, had received the personal thanks of Admiral Nelson for his gallantry during the battle of Copenhagen; had performed one of the greatest feats of navigation of the age, in piloting an open boat 3,618 miles across the open Pacific, and had successfully transported breadfruit from Tahiti to the Caribbean, where it now served as a cheap staple for slaves. Captain William Bligh was fifty-two when he landed in Sydney to take control of New South Wales. He was armed with instructions to clean up the colony, for the complaints of two embittered ex-governors had carried some weight in Whitehall, and while the British were happy to encourage sheep walks, they were also genuinely concerned that their penal colony was full of vice. High on the list of vices to be eradicated was drunkenness. Clause eight of his instructions required Bligh to ensure that no spirits were landed in the colony without his consent.
Once he had had time to form an impression of New South Wales, Bligh wrote to London, setting out the situation as he had found it and his policy for improving the place. He felt that drink was the key issue—the mother of all vices. Booze was the unofficial currency, and its use “as an article of barter had added to its pernicious effects . . . beyond all conception.” Prices and wages in the colony had become hopelessly skewed because of alcohol: “A sawyer will cut one hundred feet of timber for a bottle of spirits, value 2/6d., which he drinks in a few hours; when for the same labor he would charge two bushels of wheat which would furnish bread for him for two months: hence those who have got no liquor28 to pay their laborers with, are ruined by paying more than they can profitably afford for any kind of labor . . . while those who have liquor gain an immense advantage.”
In addition to the evidence of his eyes, Bligh had been presented on arrival with a report on the moral welfare of the colony, prepared by its chaplain, the Reverend Samuel Marsden. Marsden had little good to report of his flock, whom he characterized as depraved and libidinous inebriates. He drew particular attention to the plight of the children born in New South Wales. According to his statistics, the population consisted of 7,000 inhabitants, of whom 395 were married women and 1,035 were concubines. Of a total of 1,832 native-born children, 1,025 were illegitimate. Moreover, there was little available in the way of schooling, and the offspring of convicts tended to reveal their bad blood at an early age. Indeed, intoxicated children had become a feature of Sydney’s mud streets.
Bligh developed a five-point plan to revive the penal spirit in New South Wales and to rescue its free settlers from themselves. The extermination of all clandestine trade in alcohol was his first priority. He made rapid progress, and by October 1807 he felt able to report to London that the barter of rum had been abolished and that sterling had been reestablished as the currency of the colony. In a private letter home he confided that “this sink of iniquity Sydney, is improving in its manners and its concerns.” However, a blow struck at rum was not one that the regiment that bore its name was ready to take without retaliation. According to Macarthur, the colony had “become a perfect hell” and the Rum Regiment was “galloping into a state of warfare with the governor.” He and his associates decided to engage Bligh where they knew him to be most vulnerable—in the law courts. Bligh was nervous of courts. Sixteen years before he had been subjected to a level of official scrutiny, and public fascination, that few men of his time had had to face. The notorious mutiny that had occurred on HMS Bounty when she was under his command had been examined by the Admiralty, sensationalized in the press, and commemorated in poetry, and while Bligh had been exonerated, the stigma of having been on trial in the first place remained.
Testing the authority of Bligh in court not only served the useful purpose of awakening bad memories in the man, it also placed him in a forum where he could not win. The new judge advocate, Richard Atkins, had long been corrupted by the Rum Regiment. By all accounts he was a very public drunk, who committed some spectacular injustices while performing his official duties. He is reported to have sentenced people to death while himself so intoxicated that he could not stand up unaided, and was often too drunk to be able to speak. Bligh considered Atkins to be a “disgrace to human jurisprudence” and had written several letters to Britain requesting a replacement.
The challenge was thrown down to Bligh in October 1807, when Macarthur launched a lawsuit against Robert Campbell, an officer appointed by Bligh to control imports. Macarthur claimed Campbell had illegally seized two copper spirits stills that he was trying to ship into New South Wales. Moreover, not only had Campbell the temerity to detain the stills, but when Macarthur had arranged for the extraction of their boilers from government guard, claiming that they had been packed with medicines, for which he had an urgent need, Campbell had insisted that they be returned. On the face of it the case was absurd: Bligh, as governor, had prohibited the importation of stills, period; and his subordinate had been doing no more than his duty.
The court found, by a majority, the casting vote being delivered by Atkins, in favor of Macarthur. In retrospect, the Rum Regiment and its allies were providing a wonderfully clear message to Bligh—that the courts were utterly corrupt. Another legal challenge to his authority, once again an especially flagrant contravention of the law, was mounted in December 1807. A ship owned by Macarthur had been arrested for exporting a runaway convict. This was an offense of the utmost seriousness—the penal colony was intended to be secure, and shipowners were required to post bonds with the government, which were confiscated if it was proven that they had assisted a convict to escape Australia. Macarthur petitioned to have his bond returned and refused to attend court when requested. He was arrested and charged with sedition.
Events thereafter moved quickly. On January 24, 1808, the New South Wales Corps held a regimental dinner. Its purpose was to rally the troops so that “when heated by wine” they would be encouraged to make “a unanimous resolution of possessing themselves of the administration of the country,” i.e., to stage a coup. Thirty-six hours later, on the twentieth anniversary of the foundation of the colony, The New South Wales Corps took part in its only m
ilitary engagement. While success was complete, the action was hardly glorious—it consisted of the arrest of Bligh in Government House at bayonet point, followed by a celebratory debauch lasting throughout the night. Free drink was handed out to the victorious soldiers, effigies of Bligh were burned in the streets, sheep were roasted, “and those scenes of riot, tumult, and insubordination that are ever incident to the subversion of legitimate government and authority ensued. Macarthur, the hero of the day, paraded the streets, in the most publick parts of which he was always conspicuous.”
Bold as they were, the members of the Rum Regiment and their associates did not follow the example of the American colonists and declare independence. They were and knew themselves to be a very privileged minority, who had prospered by exploiting the colonial system and their distance from its center. A free land of equal rights was not at all to their tastes. Once they had Bligh under lock and key they set about justifying their rebellion. Major George Johnston of the rum corps, Bligh’s designated successor in the event of his death or absence, was installed as governor. A petition was prepared setting out the reasons for deposing Bligh. It claimed he had been a despot to rival Attila and reveled in commanding the infliction of corporal punishment. As soon as the rebels had knocked their apologia into shape, Macarthur volunteered to take it to Great Britain and to serve there as a delegate of the leading colonists. He was going anyway—the charge of sedition had already been posted, and the best way to demonstrate innocence was to be present to answer it. Meanwhile, all the old abuses were revived. The Rum Regiment resumed its monopoly on imported spirits, to the distress of the free settlers: “They obtain Spirits to what Amount they please, which they sell from five Hundred to a Thousand Per cent for Grain to the unthinking Settlers who have been deprived of procuring a single Drop by any other Channel, since the unfortunate day of the unjust Arrest of His Excellency Governor Bligh.”
Such was the time taken for news to travel between New South Wales and London that the second reign of the Rum Regiment endured for nearly two years. Aware that they would have to answer for their actions, they took care to maintain protocol and the semblance of order. In the middle of 1808, Johnston gave way as governor to Joseph Foveaux, technically his superior, who had been away establishing a rule of terror in Norfolk Island at the time of the putsch. Foveaux marked his command by distributing cattle from the government herds among his friends and composing slanderous letters about Bligh to send to Britain. In 1809 Foveaux passed on the command of the colony to another rum corps officer, William Paterson, who was inebriated “the greatest part of his time; so that, from imbecility when sober and stupidity when drunk,” he was “a very convenient tool in the hands of Macarthur, or of Foveaux.” Under the care of this debauched creature, the colony became a parody of the well-disciplined penal settlement that it was supposed to be. A sketch of prevailing conditions and attitudes appears in a letter of Sir Henry Brown Hayes, an Irish baronet transported for abducting an heiress, who led a comfortable exile on the Vaucluse Estate.29 According to Sir Henry, “forty thousand gallons of spirits . . . were given away to the civil and military officers since Bligh had been deposed, and not anything to the peaceable, industrious individual. . . . Paterson gets drunk at Government House at Parramatta, and Foveaux is left at Sydney to do as he likes, and he gives pardons, grants, and leases to the whores and greatest thieves. . . . Oh, it has been charming times! . . . Hang half this worthy set and it would be justice, for they have been the greatest robbers.”
The idyll that the drink monopoly had generated for the monopolists could not persist. News that Bligh had been deposed had reached London, had been pondered over, and action had been taken. To have one mutiny could be construed as an accident, but two was a record. A new governor, Lachlan Macquarie, accompanied by a pair of British warships, was sent to replace Bligh and restore order. He arrived in December 1809, by which time both Bligh and Macarthur, the principal actors in the drama, had left the stage, Bligh on a naval vessel to Tasmania, where he plotted a countercoup, and Macarthur to London, to explain himself in court.
The new governor was quick to make his mark. The liquor trade was brought under his control and a fair market created. Sunday closing was introduced for taverns to ensure settlers gave their livers a rest on the Sabbath. A number of the ringleaders of the rum mutiny were prosecuted. Instead of working the estates of the officers of the Rum Regiment, convicts were assigned to the deserving smaller settlers, and to serve Macquarie’s mania for monumental architecture. During his tenure, Sydney received its earliest public buildings, the first of which was the so-called Rum Hospital. Built in the Georgian style, with Indian touches, it was financed by the grant of a temporary spirits monopoly to its contractors, who were given the exclusive right to sell forty-five thousand gallons of liquor and to receive the proceeds tax free as reward for their labor. Once their funds had been raised, the market set the price for alcohol, and the same bottle of spirits that had sold for twenty shillings in 1808 cost two shillings by the end of Macquarie’s tenure in 1821. Once the anxiety over supply had been removed, drinking habits changed. Indeed excessive drinking came to be associated with bad times past—a part of their history ex-convicts wanted to forget. The increased size of the colony was a further stimulus to moderation. Settlers had spread more than a hundred miles from Sydney, over the Blue Mountains and into the virgin bush. It was not possible to visit a tavern every morning in such remote places, nor was it practical to carry kegs of porter on horseback to outlying stations. Their residents learned to ration themselves to a glass or so of rum a day.
The rising generation in Sydney and Parramatta drank beer. Australian brewing had progressed from maize and love-apples to barley malt and hops. Hops first had been cultivated in the colony by James Squire, an emancipated convict, in 1805, and he had been rewarded for his efforts with the gift of a cow from Governor King. The following year he opened a brewery and the Malt Shovel Tavern at Kissing Point on the Parramatta River. His pioneering efforts with Australian beer were recorded on his tombstone, and its effects on the drinker inscribed on another nearby, in an early testament to the black humor that has since become a characteristic of Australians:
YE WHO WISH TO LIE HERE DRINK SQUIRE’S BEER
By the 1820s New South Wales was also producing wine. The prime mover was no less than the “great perturbator” John Macarthur, who returned to his sixty-thousand-acre estate from his long exile in London in 1816. Prior to leaving Europe, Macarthur made a trip to France, where he inspected vineyards and collected vines; on the journey back to Australia he had also picked up more vines in Madeira and Cape Town. Although no record of the quality of the wines he produced exists, he built a substantial winery whose ruins still grace the grounds of his palatial home. Wine was also produced by Gregory Blaxland, a settler famous for discovering a route through the Blue Mountains, which hitherto had acted as a barrier to expansion inland. His product—a red wine fortified with brandy—was of sufficient merit to be exported to London, where it was awarded silver (1822) and gold (1828) medals by the Royal Society of Art.
The spirit of intoxication, however, had remained in the land. Exorcised by the Christian immigrants, it now possessed the remnants of the aboriginal tribes of New South Wales. Ab initio, contact between the colonists and aboriginals had been characterized by distrust and violence. Unlike natives on other continents, the aboriginals had displayed little curiosity about Europeans. They did not want to sell their possessions or their women for mirrors or beads. Their first words to the first fleet were “Warra, warra”—“go away.” When they were offered alcoholic drinks to taste they spat them out. Their indifference to booze was confirmed when the colonists decided to kidnap some aboriginals, in the hope that these might be tamed to their ways and so as act as ambassadors between the settlers and the tribes.
Accordingly, in 1790, Governor Phillip sent a party of marines to capture some natives. A group of aboriginals was ambushed on a beach
and the marines managed to secure one of them. Their hostage was taken to Sydney, washed, shaved, shown a print of Her Royal Highness, the Duchess of Cumberland, and named Manly. He attended dinner at government house on New Year’s Eve, where he was taught how to use a napkin. His appetite was observed with the keenest attention. He ate “heartily” of fish and pork, tried to throw his plate out the window when he had finished, but steered clear of the wine. This dislike persisted, even when he trusted his captors enough to reveal to them his name—Arabanoo—and to accustom himself to a British diet: “Bread he began to relish; and tea he drank with avidity: [But] strong liquors he would never taste, turning from them with disgust and abhorrence.”
But Arabanoo kept trying to run away. He burst into tears when he was allowed to see his friends from a distance and, unless distracted by the settlers’ children, whom he loved, usually was melancholy. A year later he died of smallpox. The colonists replaced him shortly afterward with a pair of orphans, whose parents had perished in the same epidemic. However, these infants did not suit their purpose of acting as a bridge between themselves and the aboriginals, and it was resolved to try and catch some more. Lieutenant Bradley was entrusted with this diplomatic mission “and completely succeeded in trepanning and carrying off, without opposition, two fine young men, who were safely landed among us at Sydney.” These were Bennelong and Colbee. Colbee ran away within a week, but Bennelong seemed determined to look on the bright side of captivity: “Though haughty, [he] knew how to temporize. He quickly threw off all reserve; and pretended, nay, at particular moments, perhaps felt satisfaction in his new state. Unlike poor Arabanoo, he became at once fond of our viands, and would drink the strongest liquors, not simply without reluctance, but with eager marks of delight and enjoyment. He was the only native we ever knew who immediately shewed a fondness for spirits: Colbee would not at first touch them.”