The mob which did for Finney was one of many which roamed at will through the town on election day, forming, splitting, clashing and merging like frenzied amoeba of political violence. Most of the fury seems to have been directed at the supporters of William Wentworth, the eventual victor. Although a fiery liberal in his younger days, Wentworth increasingly found himself snuggled up with the champions of landed wealth. He was a fascinating character, the product of a bit of raunchy business below decks between the disgraced surgeon D’Arcy Wentworth, one of the builders of the Rum Hospital, and convicted clothes thief Catherine Crowley. D’Arcy made a pile in the colony, where he worked as a merchant, surgeon and police chief, despite allegations that he had ridden as a highwayman in the old country and been forced to Sydney by the subsequent scandal. His wealth purchased a classical education for his son and fuelled William’s acute desire to be accepted into Sydney finest salons and drawing rooms, a desire which foundered on the town’s rigid segregation of former convicts and the freeborn pastoral elite. William never forgave those ignorant snobs, seizing at any chance to avenge the insults they heaped upon his parents. Arrogant, obstinate, mischievous and contemptible, the pastoralists – with their wagons circled tightly around their mad leader John Macarthur – often winced under the lash of Wentworth’s caustic rhetoric.
The pastoral elite, of course, were themselves mostly one generation removed from embarrassment and owed their high station to land stolen from the black natives and worked by white slaves or the poorest indentured migrants. What they lacked in breeding, however, they more than made up for in self-delusion and hypocrisy. An aristocratic junta, Wentworth called them, ‘who monopolised all situations of power, dignity and emolument’. When the enlightened Macquarie broke their oligarchy and promoted the interests of the emancipated convicts, he ‘instantly drew on himself their unrelenting and systematic hostility’. But, as Wentworth explained, with Macquarie initially enjoying the support of London, the wily curs in Sydney eased their public protest against his liberal policy ‘although it was still as repugnant as ever to their feelings’. Instead they shifted ground and, while praising the soundness of the principle, leapt on every chance to condemn its application.
Accordingly, every emancipist who was fortunate enough to become the object of the Governor’s countenance and protection, was instantly beset by this pack in full cry. Not content with hunting up and giving false colour to every little blemish, which they could discover in the individual’s history, they scrupled not to circulate as facts every species of calumny to which an unbridled and vituperate ingenuity could give birth.
D’Arcy had suffered at the hands of this ‘vituperate ingenuity’, when JT Bigge, whose commission of inquiry put a bullet into Macquarie’s administration, repeated the slander that Wentworth the elder had been packed off to Sydney in chains rather than as a free man (even if under a dark cloud). In reply, Wentworth Jnr savaged Bigge the ‘booby Commissioner’, challenged anyone repeating the lie to back their words up with a duelling pistol and set out to destroy the power and privileges of those high-born dogs who had cocked their mangy legs on his beloved father’s name. Ironically, while his unrelenting assault on ruling-class interests laid the foundations of Australian democracy, he grew to mistrust and oppose that democracy as his own fortune and power waxed fat. The legacy of his opposition, and of the hostility of the pastoral lobby to those rude popular forces which reached their highest pitch in the metropolis of Sydney, was 150 years of laissez-faire chaos within the cauldron of the city.
Legal study in England prepared Wentworth for his assault on the citadels of power in Sydney, but the polish of elite schooling could not disguise the roughness of his personality. A shambling, raw-boned man, a commanding orator, he inherited his old man’s good looks and powerful physique. He presents in a later-life portrait which now hangs in Parliament as a barrel-chested elder statesman, a sad-eyed prophet with a mass of white leonine hair and a truly Roman sense of his own importance. The artist was kind, or perhaps Wentworth’s wife scolded him into dressing properly for the sitting, which shows him in a dark, natty-looking jacket and a handsome if slightly excessive bow tie. His daily appearance was more eccentric, especially for one so wealthy. Shabby old corduroys and an unfortunate, ill-fitting morning coat were his preferred ensemble in Parliament. A generous entry in the Australian Dictionary of Biography describes him as a ‘Gulliver in Lilliput’, Elizabethan in spirit, ‘splendid and defiant’. A deep sense of history, an enduring faith in the classical values and a love of Burke’s splendid oratory, with its ‘evocation of the greatness of Augustan Rome and England’ were his guiding intellectual lights. But his passions were more Byronic and violent and warred within him his whole life. Manning Clark, who seems to have been unable to forgive him for abandoning the lower classes, wrote that ‘it was as though the gods had planted in him great talents and fatal flaws for their sport’. Clark opened up on him with both barrels in the second volume of his history, describing the first member for Sydney as being possessed of a ‘rancour and malevolence in his heart towards all who stood in his way’. Honourable members of the British Parliament, learned judges and that other mighty ego-maniac John Macarthur all felt the hot blast of his wild temper when they dared slight him or his family name. Macarthur made himself a target when, having agreed to allow young Wentworth the honour of his daughter’s hand, he withdrew the offer. ‘I will pay him off in his own coin,’ growled a wounded, incensed William to his father.
Manning Clark thought the slovenly and disrespectful younger Wentworth had largely squandered his great gifts in vulgar vendettas by the time he took his seat in the Legislative Council.
His air of faded grandeur seemed to have had its root in no common soul. At times he looked like a tamed tiger about to sidle from one end of his cage to the other for a chance to claw those who teased or enraged him. On such occasions his face became quite florid and was marked by a look of wildness which often comes over the face of a man for whom destroying enemies is the great sport of life.
Wentworth could have sat in the Council many years before but had refused to be appointed to the position, arguing that the early, unelected form of the Council was a ‘wretched mongrel substitute’ for an elected assembly. He called it an ‘anomalous and unnatural creation’, before setting out to obtain its destruction. His early adult life was devoted to curtailing the autocratic powers of Government House, and his public career was marked by decades of bruising and sometimes savage confrontation with a succession of governors as he sought to claw away the armoured authority of that office. His feud with Ralph Darling, governor from 1825–31, was an epic confrontation unrivalled since the clash of Bligh and Macarthur twenty years before.
During the reign of Darling’s predecessor, Governor Brisbane, Wentworth and his partner Dr Robert Wardell had grasped the nettle of press censorship and set up a newspaper, without reference or deference to Government House. Sydney had never known a free press where those violent shifts and fault lines of opinion which constantly cleaved its small, incestuous society could find expression, and the Colonial Office in London was none too keen on the idea. Brisbane, however, was all for the experiment and thus audacity triumphed, much to the chagrin of Darling, the cold, hard-hearted militarist who quickly crossed swords with Wentworth and Wardell and the crop of rambunctious newspapers which sprang up in the space they cleared. Darling, who had wondered back in London ‘whether he would have the power to silence’ this ‘vulgar ill-bred’ demagogue, discovered that he did not. When Wentworth and his fellow editors attacked the Governor, stirring up trouble and agitating for trial by jury and an elected assembly, Darling attempted to destroy them by imposing a tax on the papers and empowering the courts to banish any recalcitrant press men from the colony. He went after Wardell and Wentworth’s publication, the Australian, for seditious libel, but his hapless, ill-prepared legal counsel were demolished in court by the ‘effrontery and talent’ of the defendants.
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It was an exemplary victory. Macquarie would have banged them away in irons. Bligh, at a guess, would have hung them by their thumbs and screamed incomprehensibly at them. For Darling, whose whole career was a testament to unswerving military obedience, the challenge to his authority was anathema. But there was little he could do. It was a long time since Government House had been the seat of all power in Sydney. Even though the weak, faux liberal institution of the unelected Legislative Council was more a symbolic curb on Darling’s will, it was a potent sign of the accelerating drift of power away from his office. As JJ Auchmuty puts it, since neither a ship nor a prison makes any pretence at democracy, the personalities of the governors were of dominating importance for the first fifty years of the colony’s existence. For all their problems and the constant, niggling challenges to their rule, the governors’ decisions determined how the inhabitants of Sydney would live their lives. When Ralph Darling was sent packing in 1831 that was no longer the case. Wentworth celebrated his recall to London with an awesomely debauched open house at his Vaucluse property. Over 4000 Sydneysiders trekked out along the rough path of the South Head road to launch themselves on a mountain of free food and grog. Gin, beer and thousands of loaves of bread were laid on while a whole bullock and twelve sheep were slowly roasted, rotating over the coals on an enormous spit. The party kicked on until dawn the next day, cementing Wentworth’s place in the hearts of the common folk.
The Wentworth of 1843, however, while still a firebrand, was not the much-loved people’s tribune of his youth. His increasing wealth had fostered a commonality of interest with the same freeborn gentry he had made a career of tormenting. And his contest with Captain O’Connell, a favourite of the Catholic working class, inflamed sectarian feeling amongst those very same starving, unemployed artisans who were denied a chance to vent their frustrations by the restrictive nature of early voting laws. Only wealthy white adult males were entitled to vote in 1843, excluding two-thirds of the colony’s men and all the women from any say in the first parliament. Desperation denied one form of expression will usually find another and the murder of Finney was but one outburst of political fury that week. The wonder is that the authorities, who had long harboured fears of mob uprising amongst the poor – and specifically the Irish poor – didn’t foresee the trouble and prepare.
The nomination ceremony for the city electorates, held on Tuesday 13 June, had spun out of control when a crowd of seven or eight thousand (more than double the number of eligible voters) had swarmed into Macquarie Place where the hustings had been erected. The huge, raucous crowd, which seems to have included most of the town’s adult population, jammed the nearby streets, causing terrible confusion. They spilled over the balconies and out of the windows of surrounding buildings and blocked all access to the platform where the candidates were to be nominated. In the days before traffic, machinery and high-rise buildings, the roar of the masses must have reached to the outskirts of town. In the immediate vicinity the noise was so great as to drown out all else, especially as fist fights and vicious brawls erupted within sections of the crowd, transmitting their violent energy through the close-packed unwashed hordes.
Unaware of the scenes which awaited them, William Wills, the Lord Mayor’s secretary, who had exhausted himself preparing for this day, recorded his weary pleasure at seeing the official procession to Macquarie Place, where his boss was supposedly in charge of proceedings. ‘The mayor was in his carriage drawn by four beautiful greys,’ he wrote in his journal, ‘accompanied by two of the aldermen, the Town Clerk and his secretary – the turnout altogether would not have disgraced the Lord Mayor of London.’ The scene at the hustings, unfortunately, was a disgrace to Sydney. Hundreds of supporters of each candidate had marched on the scene with bands playing and flags flying. Wills had thought to control access to the small wooden hustings platform by issuing tickets to the candidates and a few supporters; but, spying each other across the sea of top hats, cloth caps, suit jackets and workmen’s bibs, the contenders charged the steps instead. The loud, constant rumble cycled up into a thunderous roar as they met and fought for possession of the platform. Newspaper reports of the wild melee vary according to the sympathies and biases of the proprietors, but it seems O’Connell’s men gained the ascendancy and repelled the attacks of Wentworth’s crew with all the savage, bloodthirsty glee of any well-entrenched defenders seeing off a disorganised, inflamed rabble. Wentworth’s running mate Dr Bland was nearly choked to death by one assailant and thrown bodily from the decking into the nineteenth century mosh pit. About two to three hundred brawlers were engaged at one time, with random bursts of ugliness flaring elsewhere in the huge assembly, especially around the omnibus where brewing baron Robert Cooper’s low-rent supporters fell on any opposition with muddied hobnailed boots while Cooper harangued them from above.
Cooper, whom Wills described as ‘a huge tall man of most repulsive visage and dress’, provided the campaign with both comic relief and a frisson of Victorian horror. He was transported for receiving stolen goods and Wills described him as ‘a most illiterate fellow [who] has not two ideas beyond distilling gin, at which he is so successful as to be one of the richest men in NSW’. Cooper drew his support from the lowest reaches of the city, from the poorest workers and the hardest drinking, most unruly criminals. When his legions marched they did so behind loaves of bread spitted on pikes to demonstrate their champion’s concern for the everyday struggles of the underfed. To the city’s burghers and merchants, those soggy loaves must have looked uncomfortably like the severed heads of the French aristos during the republican uprising of the previous century. However, while the underfed could march and parade to their hearts’ content, they could not vote. The softening of their woes would have to rely on the tender mercies of the propertied few, represented by Wentworth and Bland, and as these fine chaps were apparently in favour of importing Asian protoslaves to drive down the price of labour, it’s perhaps not surprising the lower orders jacked up when, at about one in the afternoon on polling day, it became obvious that neither Cooper nor their other favourite, the dashing populist officer O’Connell, were likely to get a guernsey in the first elective assembly.
The worst trouble broke out, as might be expected, in the slum district of the Rocks. Polling booths had been erected there, high above the harbour, on the boggy, windswept crest on which the colony’s flag staff stood. Kent Street runs at the foot of this hill, past the Lord Nelson Hotel, now one of the oldest pubs in Sydney, then one of the biggest buildings at Millers Point. A clutch of cottages, a windmill, some shipbuilding yards, wharves and a couple of more substantial terraces complete the picture in JS Prout’s 1843 sketch of the area. Voters making the hard climb up the hill passed long-horned goats grazing amongst massive sandstone boulders. The whole area had been ‘a waste howling wilderness’ until recently. As the count progressed a large, ill-tempered group who had gathered on the heights turned nasty. Sneers and threatening stares directed at opposing campaign workers turned into snarls and insults, which quickly escalated into an uglier, two-fisted debate. The mob, who were allegedly fired up with lashings of Robert Cooper’s gin, turned on Wentworth and Bland’s supporters. They attacked the booths and workers, demolishing everything and scattering the terrified staffers. John Jones, a ship owner and Council alderman, was besieged, his sister screaming, ‘Murder! Murder!’ as someone (reports vary as to whom) ran down the steep, slippery banks of the hill to Jones’s own wharf to alert a band of whalers and seamen to their boss’s distress. They armed themselves with whale lances, blubber spades, axes and harpoons before charging up the slopes to do battle. Jones meanwhile had run through one of the attackers, John Holohan, with a spring blade concealed in a walking stick, jabbing the man in the elbow and driving the spike home till it emerged from his upper arm. Holohan later claimed he had been standing quietly with his hands in his pockets when the agitated ship owner had knifed him. Jones in reply said that Holohan had come at him with a club. The
whole convulsive, hysterical circus was smashed by a charge of the mounted police who thundered into the riot and let fly on all sides. No sooner had they broken up this mob when the heavily armed whalers from Jones’s ships arrived and the police had to wheel around and sail into them as well. Again, reports of the panic differ according to the prejudices of the journal or paper reporting the scene, but they all agree that around about this point, Jones himself fled the area, either to escape his attackers or the police. Either way, he legged it successfully, flying down the slopes and leaping into a small boat which carried him to safety on the other side of the harbour.
The angry, frustrated mob streamed down the slopes of Flag Staff Hill and dispersed through the muddy streets of the town, quickly meeting up with other friends and allies in a rolling series of riots which surged around the city all day, killing David Finney and laying waste to dozens of houses and buildings whose owners had the audacity to display the colours of Wentworth’s victorious ticket. One reporter suggested that ‘a delusion had got into the heads of some Irishmen’ that rioting on election day was not a punishable offence, possibly because their preferred candidate was the son of the colony’s military commander, Sir Maurice O’Connell. Chances are, though, things would have got out of hand even without this piece of muddle-headed sophistry. Politics involves a lot of symbolic action in democracies, even unformed neophyte democracies. The ballot on which so many rest their hopes is as much a device for channelling and defusing the wild spirits of a population as it is a means of apportioning power. Locked out of the process at a time when the hard earned comforts and certainties of their lives were under violent assault from the depression, it’s not surprising the proles and the untermenschen reacted so aggressively.
Leviathan Page 29