Power abhors a vacuum, however, and others rushed in to assume the prerogatives of his office, if not the trappings. Left to their own devices, says Ross Fitzgerald, the military began to arrange colonial affairs to their own benefit. Grose decided that private farms, especially the large holdings of the officers, would be the colony’s salvation, granting to his fellow officers thousands of acres and convicts to work them. The man in charge of this process was Macarthur, whom Grose increasingly relied on as an advisor and administrator. Appointed inspector of public works for the Parramatta and Toongabbie areas, Macarthur, whom Grose called ‘the old head on young shoulders’, was virtually handed the keys to the colony. He was also the regimental paymaster between 1792 and 1799, an appointment which doubled his own salary and placed him in control of the funds which financed the officers’ mercantile ventures.
In Macarthur we find a nemesis for Bligh’s Greek tragedy. The sources of power are many: economic, military, religious, social and political institutions are all imbued with their own forms of authority. The activation of such power, however, requires an act of human will. Grose arrived in Sydney with almost unlimited power on paper, but he seemed happy to disperse his authority, first ceding it to men like Foveaux and Macarthur, then watching it leach away as they applied it to their own ends. Other governors, Hunter, King and Bligh foremost amongst them, struggled to retain their authority in the face of daily challenges from competing power centres. In John Macarthur greed, treachery, cunning and a monomaniacal gift for self-promotion combined with undeniable business acumen, a razor-sharp mind, and dreams of glory way above his station, to forge the strength of will needed to build an empire from nothing and lay waste to its challengers. He was also fortunate in having married well. His wife Elizabeth was an astute farmer and businesswoman and arguably contributed more to the establishment of Australia’s pastoral industry than her troublemaking partner. Indeed, had Elizabeth’s wise head been on John’s shoulders, the family fortune would probably have been many times greater and the Macarthur name would never have been inextricably linked with infamy and rebellion. Her dial should have been on the old two-dollar note instead of her scheming husband’s.
Almost every governor who encountered Macarthur had trouble with him. Reprimanded by Phillip, he withdrew from all social contact with Government House, this while still a mere lieutenant. Grose, who gave him as much land and autonomy as he could deal with, had an easier time of it. But Hunter, the next naval officer to try to rule the colony, quickly fell out with the now Captain Macarthur after attempting to reverse some of the policies by which Grose had entrenched the military autocracy. Macarthur then ‘sent serious criticisms of Hunter’s administration directly to the secretary of state and military commander in chief’, precipitating Hunter’s recall to England. Hunter’s official caution that ‘scarcely anything short of the full power of the Governor would be considered’ by Macarthur as sufficient was echoed by the next governor he tormented, King. Governor King sent the ‘perturbator’ back to London for a court martial after Macarthur had shot his own commanding officer in a very dodgy duel, King writing: ‘Experience has convinced every man in this colony that there are no resources which art, cunning, impudence and a pair of basilisk eyes can afford that he does not put in practice to obtain any point he undertakes …’ and ‘that if Captain Macarthur returns here in any official character it should be that of Governor, as one half of the colony already belongs to him, and it will not be long before he gets the other half’.
Relentless pressure, confrontation, subterfuge and violence were all well within Macarthur’s tactical range. Besides the duel with his commander which led to his initial exile from Australia, he also drew his pistol on the master of the convict transport which carried him to Sydney, shooting a hole in his greatcoat on the Old Gun Wharf at Plymouth Dock. He would boast later to Governor Ralph Darling that he had ‘never yet failed in ruining a man who had become obnoxious to him’; and his long-running feud with Judge-Advocate Richard Atkins, himself a rogue of the first order, stands as a near-perfect example of how to wage a savage campaign of personal vituperation. Atkins, a ‘tall, fine-looking, over-rosy and middle-aged gentleman, prepossessing in appearance, engaging and easy in manner’ vied with Bligh for the honour of being Macarthur’s most hated adversary, although this didn’t redeem him much in the judgmental governor’s eyes. In 1807 Bligh described Atkins to the Home Office as ‘the ridicule of the community’. He said that Atkins had passed sentences of death ‘in moments of intoxication’.
His determination is weak, his opinion floating and infirm; his knowledge of the law insignificant and subservient to private inclination and confidential cases of the crown, where due secrecy is required, he is not to be trusted with.
To Atkins, the high born legal officer who was finally humiliated during the rebellion, must go the honour of one of the most withering attacks on Macarthur’s character after the latter, a mere draper’s son, charged him with a catalogue of crimes in an early feud:
What must your sense of shame be when you, a Goliah [sic] of honour and veracity, should resort to a subtifuge at which the meanest convict might blush, by skulking from substantial meaning and screening yourself by a jingle of words from the manly perseverance which should mark the character of a man professing as you do. The quibble between charges and assertions is of too flimsy a texture to require a comment. It is only worthy of a dastardly coward like yourself. Your original meanness and despicable littleness pervades your every action. It shows the cloven foot. Return to your original nothing; we know what you have been, and what you now are; and believe me an honest and industrious staymaker is a more honourable and more useful member of society than such a man as I hold you to be. Let me ask who has been the incendiary – who has been the promoter of all the feuds and animosities between individuals in this colony? You sir. You are likewise the man who has had the audacity to accuse me with having acted officially and individually with injustice, oppression and peculation [embezzlement] – nay even highway robbery. You, who four years ago, was only a lieutenant, pennyless but by his pay, and now is reputed worth £8,000. Let this colony hear witness where lies the strongest presumption, you or me being the oppressor, peculator or robber. On this subject, viper, you bite a file; the day of retribution will come, and believe me it is not far off …
Atkins was wrong as it turned out. The day of retribution was a long way off for Macarthur, who returned from his banishment to London in triumph, having convinced the authorities that far from being punished for shooting up a superior officer, he should instead be given five thousand acres of prime grazing land and thirty convicts to work it so that he might establish a colonial wool industry.
While he deftly turned to his own advantage an episode which would have ended in ruin for anyone else, Macarthur’s enforced absence between November 1801 and June 1805 coincided with a further atomisation of Sydney’s power structure which he could not control or even respond to. Although a succession of governors had been unable to check the rising commercial influence of the officers’ cartel, a couple of former convicts and one free settler proved themselves more than capable.
Margaret Stevens has observed that, apart from Macarthur, the officers’ business activities remained ‘rudimentary and unenterprising, based mainly on the permanent demand for spirits. They made no attempt to anticipate a more sophisticated demand, or to carry the risk this would entail.’ Others were not so lethargic. It was considered more than a little déclassé for the officers to openly engage in trade, being gentlemen and all, so they had to retain the services of frontmen or women. Some of these cutouts, such as the convicted thieves Simeon Lord and Henry Kable, took to commerce with infinitely more zest and guile than their uniformed masters. Lord, who acted as a retail agent for Lieutenant Thomas Rowley, used his experience to set up as an auctioneer and wholesaler after 1800, providing visiting ships with an alternative outlet to the officers’ syndicate which had long ski
mmed the cream off the high prices of imported goods. About the same time Kable, who had kept shop for a number of officers, went into business with James Underwood, a boat builder who had arrived on the Admiral Barrington in 1791. Kable and Underwood launched themselves into the sealing industry, using vessels built in Underwood’s yard on the Tank Stream, and by 1804 they were employing sixty men and gathering up to thirty thousand skins a year from Tasmania.
The most important economic development of that period, however, was the arrival of a free man, a merchant and trader by the name of Robert Campbell, the same Campbell who rushed from Government House on the night of the rebellion, responding to the screams of Bligh’s daughter Mary as she attempted to block the charge of the main guard. Campbell was an honest Scotsman, fair-minded, brave and charitable. He was the youngest surviving son of the laird of Ashfield and at the age of twenty-seven took sail for India to join his brother in the family’s colonial business. He passed through Sydney in 1798, scouting for opportunities, and returned with a speculative cargo in February 1800. Campbell must have been a far-sighted man to see the commercial promise of a poor, remote village surrounded by dry, dull-looking forest and serviced by one rickety wooden wharf. The month he arrived to establish a new branch of his company, the total white population of Australia was less than 5000 and Sydney’s share of that but a fraction. The people who made up this potential market were a deeply unimpressive crew, many of them near permanently drunk on the 50 000 gallons of hard liquor which had arrived in just the previous four months. Campbell had chosen to hazard the family silver on a prison town which could not afford to build a new jail. As the summer southerlies pushed his ship up the side of the continent, Governor Hunter worried about the lax arrangement for storing the colony’s gunpowder, given all of the Irish troublemakers who had been arriving recently. The Reverend Marsden was grumbling to the Duke of Portland that ‘Satan’s Kingdom seems to be so fully established and his power and influence so universal among us that nothing but an uncommon display of Almighty power can shake his throne’.
The less than impressive state of Campbell’s local market was mirrored in the chaotic regulatory structure within which he would have to operate. The legal system of the hybrid prison society was arbitrary, untrustworthy and run by some truly underwhelming judicial minds. For instance, as Campbell prepared to sell his cargo from the Hunter, Joseph Holt, a recently arrived Irish rebel, tried to sue Captain Salkeld of the Minerva for sixty guineas which had been paid for the passage of Holt’s son. Instead of allowing the boy to stay with his parents, Salkeld had insisted on quartering him with the sailors and had then made him work through the voyage. Holt sued for a refund of the fare and for the wages his son should have been paid. However, having been warned about the town’s judge, Richard Dore, Holt kept watch late one night and spied Dore receiving a bribe of ‘a ferkin of butter, a cheese and five gallons of spirits’ from Salkeld. Unsurprisingly, the judge trashed Holt’s case, saying he and his family were just convicts. Holt, who had not actually come to Sydney as a convict, protested and the judge ordered him to shut up. Holt tried again and Dore had him thrown out of court, saying his conduct was a perversion of justice and if he said another word he’d be committed to jail. In explanation of Dore’s behaviour (assuming the free cheese wasn’t to blame), he’d probably drunk more than his fair share of those 50 000 gallons of rum which were sloshing around town and he was in the middle of slowly and painfully carking it. At any rate, this was not the sort of predictable, rule-based environment in which your average businessman prefers to operate.
Campbell had entered an economy which had no money and no certainty, where the courts, such as they were, had been thoroughly contaminated and abused by the town’s contending power players. The workforce, drawn largely from Britain’s urban centres, was demoralised and unsuited to agrarian pursuits. A military cartel controlled much of the primitive trade and financial markets. And tens of thousands of nautical miles, haunted by privateers and hostile foreign warships, lay between Campbell’s Sydney outpost, the family’s Indian operations and their metropolitan headquarters back in the UK. In the face of all this, Campbell prospered. The wharf and warehouses he raised were the finest in the harbour and by 1804 held £50 000 worth of merchandise, which was ‘worth more than all the paymaster’s bills drawn during the seven or eight years of the officers monopoly’. Campbell amassed this fortune through the revolutionary practice of paying a fair price to his suppliers and taking only a small margin from his customers. He offered credit at generous rates and took payment in grain. It was a complete departure from the methods adopted by his competitors in the corps who gouged margins of up to 1200 per cent from their captive market, and Campbell proved very popular with both the small settlers and the governors. Two hundred farmers signed a memorial for him in 1804 which stated, ‘But for you, we had still been a prey to the mercenary unsparing hand of avarice and extortion.’ He was too powerful for his competitors to destroy, although he was probably lucky that Macarthur had been banished from Sydney for the first years of his company’s life. Nobody else had Macarthur’s malign genius for destruction and by the time he returned, Campbell’s empire had expanded beyond his reach and had, with the help of men like Lord, Kable and Underwood, undermined the hegemony of the corps. Fitzgerald and Hearn summarise the shift neatly:
By 1801 fundamental changes were moving the colony’s economic structure away from the arbitrary regulation and simplicity of the prison camp. Yet the colony’s government still firmly reflected the interests of the gaolers, and the governor retained widespread powers over gaoled and free alike. At times, when the governor had been inclined to relieve himself of his responsibilities, the military had been ready to accumulate that power to itself.
And the officers, notwithstanding the rise of Campbell and Company, were not quite finished yet.
One early meeting between Bligh and Macarthur was a scorcher. The most detailed description comes from Macarthur’s testimony at George Johnston’s court martial, although we should probably recalibrate this version in light of Macarthur’s well-known penchant for lying his arse off. He portrayed himself as something of an innocent little lamb wandering into the mad governor’s slaughtering pen; but if you ignore the self-portrait of a delicate petal, bruised by the violence of Bligh’s temper, and instead imagine two ferocious egomaniacs turning purple with rage and gobbing poison phlegm into each other’s eyes, chances are you’d be right on the money.
Macarthur had approached Bligh about the extravagant promises of land and servants he had been given in London. King had managed to fudge the issue long enough for it to become his successor’s problem. About a month after Bligh had taken control of the government, Macarthur rode out to the Governor’s residence at Parramatta to front him on the issue. He found Bligh walking in the gardens alone and, seizing the chance, smarmed up to ask whether Bligh ‘had been informed of the wishes of the Government’ respecting Macarthur’s affairs. He was particularly anxious that Bligh understand the advantages which would accrue to the colony from Macarthur’s own ascent to the ranks of the grotesquely rich. The impression created by Macarthur at this point is of a hand-wringing Uriah Heep, desperately trying not to upset the infamous Bounty Bligh’s volcanic temper. Upset it he did, however, Bligh exploding in his face, ‘What have I to do with your sheep sir? What have I to do with your cattle? Are you to have such flocks of sheep and such herds of cattle as no man ever heard of before? No Sir!’ Macarthur then told the court martial:
‘I endeavoured to appease him, by stating that I had understood the Government at home had particularly recommended me to his notice. He replied, “I have heard of your concerns sir; you have got five thousand acres of land in the finest situation in the country; but, by God, you shan’t keep it!” I told him that as I had received this land at the recommendation of the Privy Council and by order of the Secretary of State, I presumed that my right to it was indisputable. “Damn the Privy Council! An
d damn the Secretary of State too!” he says.’
Later in the day, with Macarthur still tugging at the Governor’s elbow, seeking his indulgence, Bligh burst into another rage, again damning the Secretary of State and screaming violently, ‘He commands at home. I command here’. In the meantime Bligh had upbraided poor old ex-Governor King who was lingering a short while in the colony, abusing his long-suffering, emotionally fractured predecessor so vehemently for indulging Macarthur that he actually burst into tears. In William Bligh, it seemed, Macarthur’s unyielding Olympian will had finally met its match. Bligh had arrived in the colony unsure of the extent of his powers but with no doubts about the mission he had been assigned. He was to bend Macarthur and his ilk to the imperial will, and if they would not bend, he was to break them.
The wild energy generated by the clash of these two men and the interests they represented was constrained and intensified by the cramped political structures in which they were forced to make war. Twenty years of ill-considered policies and neglect had created a polity every bit as primitive, crude and harsh as the physical environment in which their battle unfolded. Civil society in convict-era Sydney was to London’s political mores and practices as the rough, meandering huts of Soldiers’ Row were to the Houses of Parliament. In conception, the governor stood as a facsimile of the king before the Civil War. He was almost an absolute monarch, with the power of life and death over his subjects. Rivalry, folly and indolence, however, soon drained authority from the governor’s office, and when Bligh was approached to take the position in 1805 he confessed to his patron Sir Joseph Banks that he had no idea of the limits to his power in the colony. Soon after arriving he seems to have decided there were none, other than the desire of Macarthur and his allies to thwart him. Richard Atkins told Johnston’s court martial that Bligh had once fumed at him, ‘The law sir! Damn the law. My will is the law, and woe unto the man who dares disobey it’.
Leviathan Page 26