Nor were the punches coming solely from one direction. Early in the day a rambling crew of Wentworth’s supporters were only too happy to rub up hard against anybody they found wearing the green ribbons of their enemy. Isolated fist fights and head kickings flared all over the central city area as agents of the two groups met. Hyde Park, then a vast expanse of open ground known as the Race Course, was the scene of a massive brawl which saw the end of any effective presence by the Wentworth contingent. ‘After this,’ reported the Australasian Chronicle, ‘the partisans of O’Connell and Cooper mustered in such strength that their opponents were unable to keep the field.’ They then turned on the nearby homes of Wentworth supporters such as Sam Lyons, the auctioneer. Ripping palings from fences and wrenching stones from the ground, the rabble launched a fusillade of improvised missiles at the auctioneer’s handsome villa, smashing up to 100 plate-glass windows. They attacked Dr Whittle as he rode his carriage down Pitt Street; devastated the Australian Hotel in Lower George Street; and fought their way into the house of Isaac Moss, driving his wife and children from their bedrooms. Here and there leaders on horseback charged ahead to keep an eye out for the mounted police. The inflamed mob howled and made for the polling booths at the Race Course, destroying Wentworth and Bland’s little camp as they had done on Flag Staff Hill. At this point, according to the Herald’s man, the mounted police arrived and were joined by Captain Innes who asked their sergeant to help him capture the ringleader. Putting their spurs to the flanks they charged, but one of the rioters swung at Innes’s horse with a club, catching it with a heavy blow to the jaw at which the animal reared up and took off. Before Innes could regain control, he had run down a woman wearing a green ribbon, further enraging the mob. The captain steadied his horse and returned to the unconscious woman, crying out for someone to get her a doctor. But he was soon surrounded by angry men, all bearing clubs and sticks, yelling that they would kill him. He managed to break through the press and crush, galloping off to the protection of the mounted police and asking them to join him in a charge to disperse the crowd. Volleys of rocks and fence palings followed him and the sergeant begged him to flee, fearing the mob would finish him off. Innes demurred as the rioters charged the police, turning his mount and making for the edge of the park as more stones and clubs sailed through the air, thudding into his back and his horse. He put the charger to the fence rails and cleared them in one regal bound, ‘wooden leg and all’. As night fell, it was feared the depredations would worsen and hundreds of troops from the 80th Regiment marched down from the barracks. Retracing some of the Rum Corps’ steps, they fanned out through the town to secure the peace. However, while armed troops, bad weather and alcoholic stupor helped return a semblance of order to the streets of Sydney, the creation of an elected government was to bring chaos.
It may be important that Sydney was, in effect, a tabula rasa. Unlike the cities of the Old World, no slow sedimentation of history lay beneath its streets. It had no long-established power structure. It was what JW McCarty would call a commercial city, a pure product of capitalism’s global expansion in the nineteenth century. Old World centres founded in Roman or mediaeval times grew organically, their modern forms still influenced by a patchwork of buildings and streets, canals and bridges, and political, economic, military and religious institutions established hundreds or even thousands of years in the past. In contrast, the cities of the New World sprang into being, often at a single, identifiable moment in time, to find themselves according to McCarty ‘fully exposed to the levelling effects of the expanding world capitalist economy’. Sydney shares in this a common heritage with the metropolitan centres of other recently settled areas in America, Canada and New Zealand. No gradual, millennium-long transfer of power from rural hinterland to urban core marked their evolution. Nor did industrialisation prompt their emergence on the world scene, as it had in Manchester with its cotton mills, or Pittsburgh with its steel foundries. Rather, the fantastic growth of the commercial city was fuelled by economic globalisation, hundreds of years before the term’s currently fashionable incarnation. Sydney has always been a global city, subject to the ebb and flow of the world’s capital, even when it was little more than a semirural village and a couple of rickety wooden wharves.
It was those wharves that were important. They were the point at which the city’s inhabitants touched the vast, roaring river of world trade and were either dragged under and drowned or came away clutching ingots of silver snatched from the current. Manufacturing, in contrast, was not important in the early days of the commercial city. It followed rather than inspired urbanisation. In 1843 Sydney’s factories were still an inconsequential part of its economy. Isolation made it necessary to produce locally simple goods like shoes and hats, and industry, such as it was, first arose to meet these needs, only diversifying with the growth of the rural sector. Milling, brewing, glass and pottery making, spinning and boatbuilding all played early roles but no matter how large or sophisticated the town’s factories became, the primary role of the city was as a base ‘for the opening up of new lands’; an assessment which was passionately embraced by the colony’s leading citizens, that aristocratic junta of wool-growing princes which Wentworth alternately attacked, envied or defended, depending on his own situation at the time. They believed Sydney existed simply to provide the means of moving their wool into the overseas market as cheaply and efficiently as possible, and they had the money and power to ensure this vision was not challenged.
All through the last century and up until the Second World War, the rich of Sydney and indeed of all New South Wales, were drawn overwhelmingly from the ranks of these pastoralists and, to a lesser extent, from the merchants who serviced them. Bill Rubinstein, writing in the Australian Economic History Review, undertook the substantial task of ranking the State’s top fifty wealth holders in each five-year period between 1817 and 1939. Graziers and landowners topped the survey at every stage, followed by their commercial brethren in exporting, warehousing and somewhat less often in retailing. It was only in the 1920s and 1930s, with the rise of large-scale manufacturing and mass consumer society, that other sources of significant wealth really established themselves. Before then agriculture had no rivals as the big rock candy mountain of the antipodes. That’s not really surprising. What is surprising in Rubinstein’s analysis was how poor the rich were. Perhaps the single most important statement which can be made about the very wealthy in Australia, he wrote, was their very low level of wealth, at least comparatively speaking.
By 1845 New York was home to 113 millionaires. By 1892, while Australia was belly-crawling through another of its culture-defining economic catastrophes, over 4000 American millionaires were sitting on their treasure chests, cackling with avaricious glee. However, in the entire period between 1788 and 1939 Rubinstein could find only eight bona-fide millionaire estates in New South Wales, two of which were probated largely in England. Until the gold rush and the long boom of the late nineteenth century, any man who could lay his paws on £10 000 would rank amongst the wealthiest on the continent. John Macarthur, for instance, left an estate of only £40 000. This in a country with one of the highest per capita levels of income in the world.
Rubinstein posits a couple of obvious explanations such as the minuscule size of the local market, limited local capital, state-owned railways and intercolonial trade barriers. A more intriguing possibility, however, lies in cultural factors. Many of the wealthy came from the ‘shabby genteel’ class of England and Scotland, who were not big risk takers but rather innate conservatives, a group Wakefield disparaged as being of the twentieth rank in society. They came in the 1820s, as had the men of the Rum Corps, seeking opportunities denied them at home. James Henty, one of the more substantial early migrants, set forth the rationale in a letter to his brothers.
What can we do in England with £10,000 amongst all of us … brought up as we all have been unless we chose to descend many steps in the scale of Society and which our feeling
s could ill stand, having at the same time an opportunity of doing as well and perhaps considerably better in New South Wales, under British Dominion and a fine climate … How many thousands are there who go to India for twenty years certain of a pestilential climate under a burning sun and for what? Why, to secure themselves (if they live) £400 or £500 a year for the remainder of their lives in England. At the expiration of ten years in New South Wales I shall be much disappointed if we individually are not worth double that sum … and immediately we get there we shall be placed in the First Rank in Society, a circumstance which must not be overlooked as it will tend most materially to our comfort and future advantage?
The free settlers of means in the 1820s and 1830s were practical and robust but not necessarily gifted or innovative. They tended to ferret out a niche and settle into it, seeking as much indulgence and help from the government as they could. The conservatism of these leading figures is difficult to comprehend across the arc of 200 years. It was a conservatism not so much monolithic as simply ubiquitous. There were many divisions within their closed little world but the fracture lines ran over shared ground, part of which was ‘a loathing of taxation too absolute for the twentieth century mind readily to comprehend’, and of course an intense fear of the mob rule of democracy. What state would you be in, asked Governor Denison, were you to throw political power into the hands of such an ignorant and vicious population as existed in New South Wales?
The image which entranced the colonial elite was of the landed gentry of England, whose style of life they sought to impose on New South Wales, in spite of the drastic dissimilarity between English and Australian rural conditions, and to the great detriment of those who lived as blue and white collar workers in the rapidly growing metropolis on Sydney Harbour. The dozen or so noble villas which appeared atop the ridge at Woolloomooloo in the 1830s were material expression of the new elite’s affinity for old-money expressions of style and dominance; the titles, the veneration of landed estates, the hierarchical attitudes, the myth of gracious living, as GC Bolton put it. So powerful was this vision of arcadian splendour to the tatty yeomen who chased it that any change was perceived as a threat. On New Year’s Day in 1850 for instance, the Herald reflected smugly on the steady progress for which the town and colony could thank the settled and somnolent pastoral industry. Not for New South Wales the explosion of California’s gold rush. When the precious metal was subsequently discovered the paper was aghast. The colony was about to be ‘cursed with a gold-digging mania’. James Macarthur, John’s son, an otherwise considerate and intelligent conservative, was so freaked out by the menace of gold that he wrote to the Colonial Secretary urging ‘the government [to] temporarily prohibit all mining’ and halt ‘the deranging & upsetting of our social system to its very foundation’.
This social system would have warmed the heart of his crazy old man. James’s brother Edward once explained the naked workings of this ‘social pyramid’ as being determined by ‘an all pervading law – they who possess Capital will be always proportionately few in relation to the numbers to be employed’. Any undue departure from this happy circumstance – happy for James and Edward that is – could only be destructive. ‘The Capital and substance of the Community will be squandered and the elements of its prosperity dissipated.’ The proper role of those drunken, rioting, unemployed Irishmen who tore up the town on election day was not to sit around in their grimy hovels waiting for an improvement in the building industry. Their role was to chase sheep around the Macarthurs’ paddocks, to harness themselves to a plough, to fell trees or engage in some other worthy rustic pursuit. They were to think of themselves as the solid foundation on which a kind of wonderful plantation economy would erect a civilized superstructure. They weren’t to aspire to anything more than this. It would be ‘destructive’. And they were certainly never, ever to contemplate taking power themselves. The very idea was an affront to the natural order.
James developed this line of thinking with reference to rival owners of capital – and competing centres of power – when he published an extended treatise on the constitution of the colony in London in 1837. His book argued that in a convict colony mere riches did not necessarily qualify the wealth holder to sit amongst the first rank of society and guide its development. Convict inn-keepers might have as much money as a respectable landholder, perhaps more, but that did not make them better or even equal men. A sense of honour and virtue was lacking. Unfortunately some of these disreputable characters and their bastard offspring were beginning to think ‘that the colony was theirs by right, and that the emigrant settlers were interlopers upon the soil’. These presumptuous chaps needed to be excluded from power. The destiny of the colony had to be left in the capable hands of the gentry, those two or three hundred families whose great estates marched ‘south and west from the capital’ and were centred around Camden, Campbelltown, Goulburn and Bathurst and in the river valleys of the Macquarie and the Hunter.
Michael Roe characterises the men who headed these families as the lords of Australia. Distinguished lineages were uncommon, but many had gleaned some idea of leadership in the army or navy. Their elegant mansions were filled with fine crystal and china. The walls were adorned with original oil paintings of British heroes like the Duke of Wellington, the first Earl Grey and Sir Walter Scott. London’s merchants provided French-polished mahogany dining chairs, rolls of the finest quality Brussels carpet and ‘rich crimson silk and worsted bell ropes with tassels and rosettes’. They rode together in hunt clubs; masters, servants and twenty hounds tearing through the fields of Pennant Hills. They dined and played billiards at the Australian Club, where ‘election was by ballot, and one black ball in ten would exclude a candidate’. They read the latest English journals at the Australian Library, which was just as exclusive. They built churches and chapels for the Anglican cause and established private schools where their sons might not be trained simply in Latin and mathematics but also in leadership and ‘that gentlemanly tone and bearing which are difficult of acquirement in a Colony so peculiarly situated as this’.
The tone of their lives, the style with which they comported themselves, was almost as important to the nouveau riche as the practical business of amassing and protecting their fortunes and influence, not surprising given the sort of low-rent villains like Robert Cooper who shared or even exceeded the landed barons’ wealth, if not their sense of decorum and pretensions to breeding. In a new, wide-open society where everything was up for grabs, these members of the bourgeosie cast around for ways to express their superiority over the less worthy and settled on the concept of respectability. Cooper and even Wentworth might be commercially successful, but one was thought a pirate and the other the son of a damn’d whore and a highwayman. The great mass of the populace, it goes without saying, were not even worthy of the consideration given to these parvenu. In reply Wentworth, who could be a real trouserman and party animal when the mood took him, mocked society’s obsession with respectability in his book of 1824. ‘Scandal appears to be the favourite amusement to which idlers resort to kill time and prevent ennui,’ he wrote ‘and, consequently, the same families are eternally changing from friendship to hostility, and from hostility back to friendship again.’
Nonetheless, those who took it seriously took it very seriously indeed. During the 1830s the Herald could work itself into an apoplectic spasm at the prospect of former convicts throwing back gin slings and cucumber sandwiches at Governor Bourke’s garden soirees. Government House was the focal point of society with Lady Denison recording that ‘Being, or not being, admitted here is, in this place, considered as the great criterion of a person’s social position.’ Good breeding and high station guaranteed access, indeed demanded it. Colonel Mundy, deputy commander of the forces under Sir Maurice O’Connell, had hardly unpacked his bags on arriving in Sydney before awaking to discover ‘a mound of visiting cards, interlaid with numerous invitations to dinners and evening parties’. For others, gaining that e
ntry was more problematic, as the merchant GF Davidson discovered.
To obtain admission to good society in Sydney when my family first arrived there was no easy matter. Not that there was any lack of it in the place, but the residents were, very properly, shy of strangers, unless provided with testimonials as to their respectability.
The testimonial, a letter of introduction, could be a passport to the city’s self-serving oligarchy, but naturally one had to be very careful from whom one sought testimonials, as a correspondent for Charles Dickens’s journal, Household Words, discovered.
Every man who emigrates has a large packet of letters of introduction … I had about thirty … Selecting one addressed to the manager of a joint-stock bank, I set out with the rest in my pocket. The gentleman received me graciously, read my letter deliberately, asked me every conceivable question about my birth, parentage, education, expectations, relatives, pursuits and intentions, amount of capital in hand and in prospects, and ended by observing that no doubt I should find something to suit me; in the mean time, the best thing I could do was to lay out my money in shares in his bank; luckily, I did not take his advice. Having answered all his questions, I put my packet of letters into his hands and inquired their value.
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