Australians: Origins to Eureka: 1

by Thomas Keneally

  REINVENTING SCOTLAND

  Alistair MacDonnell, sixteenth laird of Glengarry, a Skye landowner and still a man in his prime, was receiving £60 000 income a year from an estate which cost him £80 000 to run. His father had been the prototype for the heroic laird Fergus McIvor in Sir Walter Scott’s literary sensation of 1810, Waverley. The Glengarrys were the clan that had given their name to the Scottish cap worn (to this day) by Highland regiments. Now the glory was hollow, and Alistair MacDonnell decided all this talk about recreating Caledonia in Australia was the answer. A visitor to Glengarry about the time MacDonnell was to leave for Australia saw tenants beside ‘the great man’s gate’ in mud hovels he believed Eskimos would be appalled to reside in.

  MacDonnell set sail in 1842 with his family, his servants, some prefabricated timber houses and his piper, all with the intention of making Caledonia anew in Australia. He was bound for Gippsland, a grazing region east of Port Phillip, for whose discovery the Polish adventurer Paul Strzelecki took credit, attaching the name of the governor to it, but which in fact had earlier been reconnoitred by a young Skye emigrant named Angus McMillan. It seemed from 1840 on to be a Scots preserve, where squatting leases were taken by Skye men who generally employed other Skye men as drovers.

  By the regulations then in force in New South Wales (of which the lands encompassed by present-day Victoria were then part), MacDonnell was entitled for a fee of £10 per annum to hold an area of 20 square miles (51.8 km2), on which he might place five hundred head of cattle or four thousand sheep. He chose a site for his head station and residence on the banks of a Gippsland river, the Tarra. Now, if he succeeded, old Scotland, communal and cohesive Scotland, could be reborn in Gippsland in Australia.

  His clansmen built a house for him, huts for themselves, and stockyards, and he bought five hundred dairy cattle for £10 each, and the business of dairy farming commenced in the land of the Kurnai, the Aboriginal tribe of the region. Young Scots bailed up the cows each morning and put on the leg ropes, and sat on the stockyard fence as the milkmaids moved in to draw the milk. But all the milk and butter was consumed on the station, and only a little inferior cheese could be made. The MacDonnell farm, however, was popular with young Scottish drovers, and one visitor was the youth Donald Macalister, who came to make arrangements for the shipping of some cattle and sheep. He, his drovers and shepherds had a pleasant time at MacDonnell’s with songs and whisky and a piper playing, and the men and milkmaids dancing. But there was much in Australia which mocked the conventional idyll. On the road to MacDonnell’s one day, Donald Macalister was distracted by one native while another rushed him from behind and threw a spear through his neck. His riderless horse arrived at MacDonnell’s, and his body was found stripped of everything but trousers and boots. His upper body had been mutilated. It was a payback killing.

  Lachlan Macalister, his uncle, was a former army captain and officer in the Border Police and was not going to let this murder go strenuously unchastised. As an ironic Gippsland court clerk, George Dunderdale, wrote, ‘It was, of course, impossible to identify any black fellow concerned in the outrage, and therefore atonement must be made by the tribe.’ The Kurnai were found encamped near a waterhole at Gammon Creek. ‘Those who were shot were thrown into it, to the number, it was said, of about 60, men, women, and children; but this was probably exaggeration . . . the gun used by old Macalister was a double-barrelled Purdy, a beautiful and reliable weapon, which in its time had done great execution.’

  It seems that Macalister’s posse of Gippsland Scots was unabashed about the casualty rate. But even the gunning down of indigenes could not guarantee Scotland-in-Australia.

  For the dairy business at MacDonnell’s farm ran at a continual loss. In the end, he could not keep the recreated tribal situation afloat. He sold his cows cheaply to dealers from Sydney, and intended to return to Scotland. On the eve of his departure for Sydney by schooner, a farewell dinner was given by the Highlanders at the Old Port near Port Albert on the lagoon system of the Gippsland coast. All wished the young chief well, and his going depressed them. It showed there was something about the pastoral realities of Gippsland that fought against their desire for clanship. ‘The family tree of Clanranald the Dauntless had refused to take root in a strange land,’ observed Dunderdale.

  CHARLES DARWIN’S NEW SOUTH WALES

  Towards the end of his service as naturalist on HMS Beagle, young Charles Darwin, whose research would rock the foundations of the world, decided from his visit to Sydney that there were many serious drawbacks to domestic life in the colony, ‘the chief of which, perhaps, is being surrounded by convict servants. How thoroughly odious to every feeling, to be waited on by a man who the day before, perhaps, was flogged, from your representation, for some trifling misdemeanour.’ The female servants were the worst, he thought, for they taught the children of the house the vilest expressions if not the vilest ideas.

  There was sometimes a strong bond, as much as Darwin disapproved of it, between the child and the convict servant, since the servants tended not to ‘peach’ on children to their parents. One thinks of the bond between the Wentworth children and D’Arcy’s housekeeper-lover, Maria Ainslie. But Darwin was right that there was an extra layer of class difficulty between servants and masters in New South Wales—the inferiors being in this case not just members of the lower classes but convicted criminals. Similarly, he could not but be worried that settlers’ sons in the age group sixteen to twenty would often be sent off to take charge of distant farming stations, and that these young men were doomed to associate entirely with convict stockmen.

  He also noticed the tension between the edgy and often clever children of the rich emancipists and the free settlers, and indeed the colonial snobbery of up-jumped Currency folk towards honest immigrants. It was the rich emancipists, not the immigrants, who believed they were the measure of society, though the ‘Ultras’ like the Macarthurs, who saw themselves as inhabiting the mountain-top of society, gave them a run for that title. The surgeon Peter Cunningham wrote, ‘The pride and dignified hauteur of some of our ultra aristocracy far eclipse those of the nobility in England.’

  In walking about the town, Darwin was impressed by the contrast with his experiences of South America. ‘Here, in a less promising country, scores of years have done many times more than an equal number of centuries have effected in South America.’ His impulse was to congratulate himself for being an Englishman. But there was a misgiving: he was not sure how profound the reformation of the former convicts was. Darwin thought that as a genuine system of reform, New South Wales had failed.‘But as a means of making men outwardly honest—of converting vagabonds most useless in one hemisphere into active citizens of another, and thus giving birth to a new and splendid country—a grand centre of civilisation—it has succeeded to a degree, perhaps unparalleled in history.’

  Travelling to Bathurst he liked the state of the macadamised roads, but was shocked by the dimension of savagery apparent in the iron gangs under the charge of sentries with loaded arms. This oddity was matched by that of the flora: ‘The trees nearly all belonged to one family, and mostly had their leaves placed in the vertical, instead of as in Europe, in the nearly horizontal position: the foliage is scanty, and of a peculiar pale green tint, without any gloss.’

  Altogether, he decided, nothing but the sharpest necessity would cause him to emigrate. Meeting a party of natives, the touring party from the Beagle was able to give the leading Aboriginal a shilling if his men would perform spear-throwing for the amusement of the travellers. A cap was placed thirty metres away and the throwers transfixed it with spears launched from throwing sticks at great speed and force. Even so, Darwin felt that this was a race in decline, a people of value reduced now to sideshow performers. He acknowledged that wherever Europeans trod, death struck the indigenes. ‘The varieties of man seem to act on each other in the same way as different species of animals—the stronger always extirpating the weaker.’ He did not, however
, make this observation as men convinced of European supremacy would, though he has often been accused of just such a supposition. He was speaking not of racial superiority but of infection and the gun. However, long after he had died, his ideas would influence the relationship between black and white in Australia.

  CHAPTER 17

  ‘ALL FREEDOM AND SENTIMENT’

  The press in New South Wales began as the press, a single unit, a wooden and iron press Phillip had brought with him and which sat for more than a decade in a shed behind Government House. Here a convict occasionally ran off a government notice or edict. But the man who would turn it to the function of a newspaper did not arrive in the colony until towards the end of 1800. George Howe, transported for robbing a mercer’s shop, had been born in St Kitts in the West Indies and had then worked in printing in London. Soon after he arrived in Sydney, Howe became the government printer and in 1802 printed New South Wales General Standing Orders, claimed to be the first book produced in Australia. Howe was not without a journalist’s skill and persuasiveness, and Governor King authorised the founding of the Sydney Gazette as a weekly newspaper, printed in the same shed as the decrees had been, in 1803. The paper was carried on at the risk of Howe who, though he had been pardoned in 1806, did not receive a salary as government printer till 1811. Even then it was only £60, and when subscribers to the Gazette fell behind in their payments, he frequently became desperate. He had five young children to feed, the offspring of his alliance with a convict woman, Elizabeth Easton. He was driven to try to keep a school, and to trade in sandalwood from New Zealand, and by 1817 he was one of the original subscribers when the Bank of New South Wales was founded by emancipists and some exclusives. He died in 1821.

  It was his eldest son, Robert, who maintained the Gazette, started The Australian Magazine and published the currency lad Charles Tompson’s book of verse.

  Robert Howe’s paper was suspected of being a tool of government, yet was often liberal and certainly not timid. Howe was horsewhipped by D’Arcy Wentworth’s great friend William Redfern in the street one day, and another disgruntled reader assaulted him with a bayonet and wounded him. Yet his newspaper was not emancipist enough nor national enough for the young returned-home William Wentworth.

  On 14 October 1824 Wentworth and his fellow lawyer and drinking companion Robert Wardell launched a weekly newspaper, the Australian. They were influenced in part by the fact that the first Legislative Assembly of New South Wales, to which John Macarthur and his nephew Hannibal Macarthur had been appointed, did not contain a single spokesman for the nativist or emancipist side, a role which Wentworth himself had hoped to fulfil. Wentworth and Wardell were also appalled that when on 24 October 1824 lists of those deemed eligible to serve as jurors were fixed to the doors of Sydney’s churches, no one who had come to the colony as a prisoner was on them. Wentworth used the courthouse and his paper to challenge this decision. Full of combativeness, when he was elected a director of the Bank of New South Wales, ill feeling between the exclusives and emancipists on the board grew intense, and so the exclusives resigned to found their own institution, the Bank of Australia, in 1826.

  Wardell looked after the day-to-day running of the newspaper and wrote most of the copy. Wentworth wrote some editorials and paid more than £4000 in 1824-25 as his share of the capital and running costs. Wardell and Wentworth’s editorial brio made Governor Brisbane give up any attempts to censor the milder Gazette. Barron Field, the colony’s new Supreme Court judge, said of the Australian that it was the equivalent of producing a radical newspaper in Newgate.

  On 26 January 1825 occurred a great dinner hosted by Wardell and Wentworth at which the thirty-seventh anniversary of the colony was toasted. They drank to a House of Assembly, freedom of the press, trial by jury and to the Currency lasses. The ex-convict poet Michael Massey Robinson called on them to drink to, ‘The land, boys, we live in’. About the same time copies of the third edition of Wentworth’s book reached New South Wales and the emancipists hailed its author as their spokesman.

  William Wentworth’s interest in Currency and emancipists must have been redoubled by his association with a young plaintiff named Sarah Cox, a twenty-year-old daughter of two convicts, in a breach of promise suit in the Supreme Court against a sea captain who traded between Sydney and Van Diemen’s Land. By the time the jury awarded her £100 damages plus costs, she was two months pregnant with Wentworth’s child. He had repeated the pattern of his father in finding his partner amongst the despised. Miss Cox had grown up in a modest home at Sydney Cove next door to her father’s ship and anchor smithing workshop.

  In 1825 at an estate Wentworth rented near Petersham, his and Sarah’s daughter, Thomasine (or Timmy), was born out of wedlock. Wentworth would buy Petersham from Captain Piper and stay with Sarah on weekends and spend the rest of the week in Sydney. Sarah was a serene, practical woman, black-haired, with a high forehead and searching eyes. Though her father’s business was successful in Sydney, he had left a destitute wife, Margaret, and their three sons and infant daughter in Shropshire surviving on poor relief. Sarah’s mother was Frances Morton, transported for life on a charge of stealing.

  Governor Brisbane was summoned home in 1825 after trying to leave the day-to-day running of the penal and colonial engine to his New South Wales Colonial Secretary, Frederick Goulburn, whose brother had been undersecretary in the Colonial Office from 1812-21, and the results were seen as not effective. Brisbane had given six days and nights of the week to his astronomical observations at Parramatta, and to writing papers on astronomical matters, in order to gain what he most desired—a doctorate from the University of Edinburgh.

  The new governor, Ralph Darling, decided to take on the scurrilous press. He wanted to enact a statute that would allow him to bring editors to court on charges of seditious libel. And he wanted to drive the papers out of business by imposing a fourpence stamp duty on each copy sold. Even Robert Howe of the Gazette, a man with such a debt to government, wrote material that mocked his intentions. Darling had recruited the sort of bodyguards who escorted judges and conveyed prisoners to Assizes in Britain. ‘The new javelin men,’ wrote Howe, ‘intended for the purpose of conducting prisoners to and from the Criminal Court and to do duty generally over the gaol, are now equipped, and make a most formidable appearance. The uniform is a blue coat, with a yellow binding on the edges, and grey trousers: with a terrific long spear . . . Really we shall begin to think ourselves in old England yet.’

  Darling’s efforts to control the press were also opposed in New South Wales by Chief Justice Forbes and in London by James Stephen, the legal counsel to the Colonial Office.

  One of the deciding issues for both the press and the governor was the case of two privates of the 57th Regiment, Joseph Sudds and Patrick Thompson, who deliberately committed theft in a Sydney shop so that they could change their condition to that of convicts. Darling changed the sentence of seven years transportation to one of the outer penal stations to seven years hard labour, and put them in prison laden with irons and with spiked iron circlets around their necks which made it impossible for them to recline. Though he did then anxiously seek the advice of his judges on the propriety of his changing the sentence, Sudds died. Here, said Wentworth, was tyranny red-handed. The day Sudds died, the Australian and a newer paper, the Monitor, savaged Darling.

  In a joint opinion Sir Francis Forbes, a liberal-minded man who had previously been Chief Justice of Newfoundland, and his friend Justice Steven ruled against the governor, saying that Darling had in effect set aside the court’s sentence and imposed a new, illegal, sentence by executive fiat. The governor, like all other citizens, was subject to the rule of law, it was decided. His sentence should be overturned, declared the court.

  The Monitor, the newest paper in the colony, had been founded in 1826 by a former lay preacher and social worker named Edward Smith Hall. Hall’s editorial position was based on sincerely held ideological conviction, and there was thus
a sense in which he was more dangerous than Wentworth. Colonel Henry Dumaresq, clerk of the Legislative Council, aide to Darling and also the governor’s brother-in-law, complained in a report to the Colonial Office that assigned servants went up to five miles (8 kilometres) to read the Monitor in the evenings, and soldiers as well as convicts were constantly seen reading the paper. Thus, argued Dumaresq, a dangerous sense of unity amongst the prisoners and soldiers was building and disaffection to the Crown was being created. The security of the colony depended on stopping such a thing.

  Dumaresq also felt under threat from other organs of the press. When Robert Wardell wrote an article in the Australian critical of him, Dumaresq challenged him to a duel. They met in a field at Homebush, and each fired three shots at the other, all of which missed. Wardell’s second was William Wentworth, who persuaded him to apologise. Honour had been satisfied, and the parties all rode fraternally back to Sydney for breakfast. But the duel was in itself an attempt to control the press. Now that the terror of a bullet had failed, Darling proposed legislation which would establish a licence system for newspapers, provide for its forfeiture upon conviction for any blasphemous or seditious libel, and confer on the governor an unconfined discretion to revoke the licence. A second proposed bill would impose a stamp duty on newspaper sales.

  Under the New South Wales Act all legislation required a certificate from the Chief Justice to the effect that the legislation proposed was not repugnant to and was consistent with the laws of England. Darling, with the assent of his Legislative Council, enacted the new provisions concerning stamp duty and criminal sedition even though Chief Justice Forbes had warned him he might not be able to provide the requisite certificate.