And action they found, due to a woeful lack of foresight in setting up the convict outpost. The problem, as SJ Butlin so succinctly put it, was that the equipment of the First Fleet did not include money. Nobody thought to fold a bit of cash in amongst the thousands of tonnes of gear crammed into those groaning wooden tubs. Or, as Phillip himself wrote, ‘this country has no treasury’. He had been given authority to buy livestock and supplies en route, with bills drawn on the British Treasury, but these were gross and unwieldy implements for dealing with smaller transactions. The architects of the settlement had not considered what would happen when it evolved into something other than a prison farm with a small, strictly controlled command economy. Money wasn’t needed in prison, went the reasoning, therefore it had no place in Sydney.
In reality, of course, prisons are thriving Petri dishes of economic activity, with all manner of goods and services bartered between inmates and captors. Tea, tobacco, dry socks and blowjobs all had value in convict Sydney and could be traded for something as coarse as a mug of home-brewed rotgut or as refined as a love letter. The multiskilled felon, Thomas Barrett, who minted those near perfect replica coins out of melted-down belt buckles and pewter spoons during the fleet’s stopover in Rio, knew more about the human condition than the high ministers who consigned him to exile. He understood that people have needs and desires, which they will pay to have satisfied, no matter how far from home they are or how low they have fallen. Trade is inevitable. But Phillip was not equipped for it and so substitutes for a local currency had to be found.
Some small sums were dug out of the pockets of convicts and marines – forgotten pennies and shillings, the sort of low-grade travel shrapnel anyone who’s been overseas would be familiar with. Butlin also argues that a few of the craftier transportees probably managed to smuggle some of their ill-gotten booty into the settlement. Traders, explorers and military expeditions also called into the harbour from time to time, leaving deposits of coinage and small banknotes. So much global small change had accumulated by 1800 that Governor King was moved to assign purely local values to the town’s stockpile of guineas, gold mohurs, ducats, pagodas, rupees, Spanish dollars and Dutch guilders. Large batches of foreign geld tended to leak out of the colony quickly, however, spent on supplies purchased from visiting ships. Four and a half thousand Spanish dollars, sent to Sydney after Phillip complained to London of his cash shortage in November 1788, were soon dissipated. As colourful and varied as the colony’s supply of early coinage was, it remained hopelessly inadequate, forcing the settlers to rely on more primitive, makeshift arrangements.
The first of these – promissory notes – were a simple, if occasionally problematic alternative. Lacking banknotes, convicts, soldiers and free settlers merely shrugged and wrote their own. These notes, which were nothing more than promises to pay for a product or service, passed from hand to hand as often as a modern banknote. They were transferable, negotiable IOUs, written by everyone from the meanest lag to the governors themselves, for debts of three pence up to hundreds of pounds. But in a society of forgers, con men and thieves of course, they often changed hands at a heavy discount. Written on any scrap of paper, often torn, smudged and glued back together, they were a highly dubious system of exchange, because anyone with a quill could literally print their own money. Some printed their notes in very fine ink on very flimsy paper, hoping never to have to make good on their promise. Many were forged over the names of the colony’s leading lights. In 1799 Chapman Morris was sentenced to death for erasing a letter from James Williamson and writing in a promise to pay £23 above the signature. Butlin writes that the ready acceptance of torn notes, pasted back together, led a number of rogues to rip up notes from the same person and tack them together to create bills of greater value than those originally issued. ‘Even when individuals had printed forms stamped with their initials to ensure forgery of at least no other name, notes with these initials cut away were accepted in spite of the note itself advertising forgery.’ Vexed by the number of worthless, grubby, fading notes which constantly reeled through the nano-economy of early Sydney, Governor King repeatedly tried and failed to remove them from circulation. But even the courts ignored his orders to pay the private notes no heed, and they were still circulating when Macquarie sailed for England nearly twenty years later.
Many of the notes promised to pay a certain amount of money, but just as many promised to pay in wheat or other goods, indicating another important form of exchange in this rickety, jury-rigged marketplace – barter. And foremost amongst the many items which might be bartered was rum, a catch-all name which meant any sort of spirituous liquor, from fine French brandies to mouldy bladders of toxic moonshine. Rum’s narcotic embrace offered the surest escape from the burdens of a life lived so hard that tea and sugar were considered a luxurious indulgence, and it remained a preferred method of payment to labourers for up to forty years. It was not the only method of payment of course. Sometimes, if only rarely, money itself was used. More often employers combined several modes of remuneration, with tea, sugar, wheat, meat, clothing and rum all being common. When Captain Anthony Fenn Kemp was paymaster of the New South Wales Corps, he refused to pay his men in cash, setting up a store in town and fobbing them off with whatever useless crud he had managed to lay in since last payday. If some insolent private demurred, perhaps not understanding the advantages of being paid a month’s wages in the form of a grossly overpriced coil of rope or some old hessian sacks, the good captain would scream abuse at him until he saw the error of his ways. In one recorded instance he turned on one upstart in a furious rage, yelling that he was ‘a damned saucy, mutinous rogue’ and threatening ‘to have him flogged for his impertinence. Against this bullying the soldier had no redress; he was forced to take his pay and dispose of the goods as best he could.’ Most workers were only too happy to take their wages in kind, however, creating a serious problem for the governors, a business opportunity for the officers, and a fault line in the power structure of the town which would crack wide open in 1808.
Every governor from Phillip to Macquarie railed against the rum trade and its attendant evils, and all failed to suppress it. When Phillip sailed from Sydney for the last time he made a gift of two ewes belonging to the Crown to every settler, on the condition that they be retained and used to increase the colony’s flock. No sooner was he out of the heads than his former subjects were rushing to trade in their windfall for grog. Every settler, bar one, was said to have sold their ewes ‘at five gallons of spirit a head’ to the officers of the corps. Governor Hunter, whose complaints about the spirit trade and widespread drunkenness were as impotent as they were frequent, nonetheless recognised the value of a tipple in motivating an otherwise dozy workforce. Much work which cold hard cash itself could not purchase would be done by labourers for a small tot of rum, he advised London. Behind the success of so many officers’ farms lay a large body of convicts or emancipists who worked in their spare time simply to procure such delicacies as tea, sugar or rum, and Hunter believed that the public accounts would benefit greatly and more satisfaction be ‘given to the workmen were we in possession of those little luxuries so much sought after’.
The unfortunate episode with Phillip’s ewes however, shows that the central role of rum in the economy worked to benefit some more than others. In British Imperialism and Australia, Brian Fitzpatrick describes the system of paying farmers and labourers in grog as being ‘highly profitable to perhaps one in two hundred of the colonial population and oppressive or ruinous to the one hundred and ninety-nine’. In June 1796 Hunter, who had tried to regulate the spirit trade, found it necessary to alter his previous order licensing a small number of operators to run retail liquor stores, proclaiming that far from solving the problem he found ‘nothing but drunkenness and idleness among every part of the settlement’. He banned the payment of spirits for grain and reinforced his ban on unlicensed grog merchants.
The practice of purchasing the crops of
settlers for spirits has too long prevailed in this settlement. It is high time that a trade so pernicious to individuals and so ruinous to the prosperity of his Majesty’s colony should be put an end to. It is not possible that a farmer who shall be idle enough to throw away his labour for twelve months for the gratification of a few gallons of a poisonous spirit, and by which he is to be deprived of his senses for several days, can ever expect to thrive or enjoy those comforts which are only to be procured by sobriety and industry.
Governor Bligh, who cared little for alcohol himself, was in no doubt about its evils.
A sawyer will cut one hundred timber for a bottle of spirits – value two shillings and sixpence – which he drinks in a few hours; when for the same labour he would charge two bushels of wheat, which would furnish Bread for him for two months.
As was the case when Government House tried to regulate the physical growth of the city, proclamations and orders designed to suppress the growth in spirit trading failed in large part because the people charged with enforcing the rules – the officer class – were the same ones who profited from undermining them. Bligh for one was quick to sort out the villains and victims of the trade.
The farmers are involved in Debt, and either ruined by the high price of Spirits, or the high price of Labour, while the unprincipled holder of spirits gets his work done at a cheap rate and amasses considerable property.
In a sense the conflict was inevitable. Marooned on the far side of the planet, with no way of knowing whether London had remembered to send out desperately needed supplies – and, if it had, whether those vessels had survived the hazardous voyage – the colony was forced to turn to private initiative to survive. If the state was unable to guarantee the delivery of supplies, individuals would have to take its place. Those individuals, as Butlin points out, would have to be free, with access to capital, worthy of credit and with some education and organising ability. They would need to combine to defeat the monopoly of ships’ captains who called into the starving settlement to dangle tantalising cargoes of food and drink before famished customers. There was only one group who fulfilled all of these requirements – the officers of the corps. They had access to reserves of foreign exchange through bills drawn on the Treasury in London for their salaries. They controlled the court system. Under Grose they effectively administered land grants and the supply of labour. And of course not to be forgotten, in the background, marching and drilling and raising clouds of red dust on the parade ground which looked down over the town, were the hundreds of well-armed men they commanded.
The solidarity of the corps in the face of outside challenges should not be underestimated. They sent a clear message to everyone that crossing one member of the corps meant crossing all of them. In their willingness to stand by their rough-headed troops and see off all comers the gentlemen of the New South Wales Corps at times resembled nothing so much as a latter-day chapter of drunken Hell’s Angels. In the first week of February 1796, for instance, the civilian populace of the town were given reason to fear for their lives and property after a master carpenter named John Baughan had a set-to with the military. Baughan and some private were nursing a feud from having previously worked together. Whilst he was supposed to be guarding a storehouse, the soldier, who knew Baughan to be working in a building nearby, lay down his rifle and wandered over to chat with a friend standing outside. The subject was Baughan, the conversation was loud and the language would have made an old sailor blush. Baughan, too smart to be drawn into an open confrontation, crept out the back of the house, saw the soldier without his weapon and quietly snuck away to retrieve it himself. He carried the musket off to the sergeant of the guard who had no choice but to put the private on report.
The next morning, 5 February, Baughan and his wife were roused by a drunken mob apparently consisting of every member of the corps who was not then on duty. They broke open the gate to the Baughans’ residence, a neat little house the couple had worked hard to furnish in some style and comfort. They smashed the windows, entered the dwelling and took to the corner posts with an axe. They broke Baughan’s bed, tore the bedding and smashed chairs, window frames, drawers, chests and in short, according to Governor Hunter’s report, ‘demolished everything within his possession’.
Baughan had tried to defend his home, having had a few minutes warning of the mob’s approach. He’d armed himself with a gun and threatened to use it on the uniformed rabble who gathered at his front gate. That held them back for a short time but they had the numbers, surrounding his property and trampling the fence on the far side, which he could not defend. A number of soldiers rushed up behind the terrified carpenter, tackled him and wrestled him to the ground, grinding his face into the dust and placing an axe on his neck, swearing that if he so much as stirred they’d chop off his head. Keeping him subdued like this, wrote Hunter, they completed the ruin of his property, ‘to the very great terror of the man’s wife, after which they went off cheering’, and marched in a body across the parade ground in front their commanding officer’s house.
Hunter was under no illusions about the seriousness of the incident. He wrote to Captain Paterson of the corps complaining that the conduct of some of its members had been, in his opinion, ‘the most violent and outrageous that was ever heard of by any British regiment whatever’. He warned that he would regard any further aggravation as open rebellion, for which the ringleaders would answer, ‘most probably with their lives’. He had no idea of how prophetic his words were when he told Paterson that
they must not – they shall not – dictate laws and rules for the government of this settlement; they were sent here by his Majesty to support the civil power in the execution of its functions, but they seemed disposed to take all law into their own hands, and to direct it in whatever way best may suit their own views.
John Macarthur, who would later pull corps commander George Johnston’s strings during the Rum Rebellion, was then a captain in charge of the company from which the rioters were drawn. He wrote to Hunter seeking to have the charges against his men dropped, after they had expressed ‘their contrition’ and ‘sincere concern’. They promised not to act up again, said Macarthur, and to cover the Baughans against any loss they may have suffered. Hunter backed down and the men were admonished by their commanders. However, the severity of that jolly good talking-to was called into question by Macarthur’s threats to Dr William Balmain over the matter.
Balmain, a civilian magistrate, had made his way to Baughan’s wrecked house to interview him about the attack. Baughan and his wife were so fearful of an another reprisal raid, however, that they refused to cooperate. Balmain played the heavy, threatening to charge them for obstructing his investigation, but they wouldn’t be moved. Mrs Baughan in particular was convinced the soldiers would murder her husband at the slightest provocation. Word of Balmain’s investigation soon made it up the hill to the barracks and the surgeon found himself in receipt of a letter from Macarthur demanding details of his inquiry. Messengers hurried back and forth across the village with a series of increasingly angry notes as the entire officer corps protested their indignation at the magistrate’s ‘shamefully malevolent interference’ in their affairs. Balmain, who knew only too well that Macarthur lay behind all this, challenged him to a duel, calling him a ‘base rascal and an atrocious liar and villain’.
In reply Balmain received a lesson in solidarity from Macarthur’s brother officers. They wrote collectively, rejecting his claim that his quarrel was only with Macarthur. The abuse previously heaped on him was in fact the opinion of the whole corps. They regarded his conduct with the ‘highest degree of contempt and indignation’. And if he had a problem with that and wanted satisfaction, he had only to ask and the corps would appoint ‘an officer for that purpose, and if he should fail in giving Mr Balmain the satisfaction required, another and another will be fixed until there is not one left to explain’. They assured the surgeon that this was no empty threat, that they were all ‘earnest f
or an opportunity of punishing’ him. Balmain, for his part, very wisely chose not to fight a rolling series of pistol duels with every officer of the regiment.
This dispute was not just a lot of pompous boofheads standing on a ridiculous code of personal honour. It was a forewarning of the deep rift developing between the town’s two most important power centres: the civil administration centred on Government House, and the military–commercial complex nominally centred on the officers’ barracks but essentially directed by one man, Macarthur. He was not the only officer to engage in trade and farming of course. The strength of the officers came from their acting in concert. But none acted with more audacity or ruthlessness than John Macarthur. He had organised one of the combine’s first trading forays in October of 1792, when the officers chartered the Britannia to buy supplies at the Cape. As inspector of public works in 1799, he virtually ran the colony on behalf of the military. But he was only able to play that role because the acting governor, Francis Grose, had largely abandoned his post and its powers.
Grose was not what you would call a dynamic sort of guy. No sooner had he settled his wounded butt into Phillip’s chair than he was disposing of as many of his responsibilities as good manners would allow. He devolved responsibility for Parramatta to Captain Foveaux, the corpulent, asthmatic military commander of that expanding satellite town. Similar arrangements took effect in Sydney. Civilian control of the colony evaporated with the quick removal from office of the magistrates and their replacement by army officers. For the first time in the history of the colony, rations for the military were increased above those of the convicts. Grose had little taste for discomfort, according to Judge Advocate Collins, and he certainly had no intention of following Phillip’s example of vigorous personal leadership. He retired to his predecessor’s farm where, he wrote, ‘I live in as good a home as I desire … [with] a sufficiency of everything for my family. The climate, though very hot, is not unwholesome; we have plenty of fish, and there is good shooting.’ It was, all things considered, a spiffing way for a chap to see out his autumn years.
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