Australians: Origins to Eureka: 1

by Thomas Keneally

  Unlike Western Australia, however, with all its problems, South Australia was to be subjected, beneficially, said Wakefield, to divided authority. The Colonial Office would appoint a governor who was to be responsible for affairs of state other than land sales and immigration. Land sales and immigration were to be under the control of a board of commissioners, set up in 1835 with Robert Torrens as chairman and Roland Hill, the later inventor of the penny post, as secretary. The board was to preside over the sale of all land alienated from the Crown at a price of at least 12 shillings an acre, much less than Wakefield’s ideal ‘sufficient price’. The money from sales was to be used to foster immigration by poor labourers. The allotted area for sale comprised 802 511 square kilometres. All this huge area was designated, without thought for the Aboriginal inhabitants, as ‘wasteland of the Crown’.

  The colony had to be self-supporting. The commissioners were authorised to raise £200 000 to finance the first settlement and the foundation of government, and £50 000 against the sale of land to begin the immigration program. At this stage land was selling for 5 shillings an acre in New South Wales. The board advertised its prospectus and attracted attention in the press. Settlers bought into the enterprise sight unseen; sight merely described in most flattering language.

  After demand dried up they dropped the price of all land to 12 shillings an acre. Finally Angas saved the speculation from total collapse by forming the South Australian (Land) Company as a philanthropic and business venture to buy out the balance of the land, and by December 1835 sufficient land had been sold to initiate the colony and a £20 000 guarantee was lodged by the board with the Treasury.

  Behind this lucre lay the hope of a new society free from political patronage and the evils of a privileged church. So it was a perfect place for Robert Gouger, one of Wakefield’s collaborators, a former inmate of debtor’s prison, a dissenter in religion and a radical in politics. Gouger had submitted plans for the disposition of land and provision of worthy labourers to the Colonial Office and became secretary of the South Australian (Land) Company. The company dissolved itself in 1833 and Gouger dominated a new South Australian Association with the classicist parliamentarian George Grote.

  John Hindmarsh, a naval captain, was appointed governor—as in most cases the Colonial Office could think of nothing better than to subject the Australians to military officers, which in some cases, Bourke and Gipps of New South Wales for example, had worked remarkably well. A reputable 25-year-old solicitor named James Hurtle Fisher would give up his London legal office to become the resident commissioner. The colony would achieve self-government when its population reached 50 000. Meanwhile, a nominee council would assist the governor.

  All was set for a colony whose society would be not only superior to New South Wales’s but superior to Britain’s itself.

  RE-ESTABLISHING PORT PHILLIP

  Port Phillip in the south-east of the Australian mainland first gained its settlers from Van Diemen’s Land, that lovely and august island whose mountains, east and west, hemmed settlement to its central valley running from Hobart to the coast north of Launceston. For several years before the occupation of Port Phillip, most Van Diemen’s Land settlers who had any capital at all were interested in the coast to their north across Bass Strait. Whalers and sealers had already built huts at Port Fairy and Portland, in today’s western Victoria. The Hentys, an English family, had pioneered more permanent settlement there. Their leader was Thomas, a gentleman sheep farmer from Sussex who sold up his property at the age of fifty-four to set sail for Australia, bringing with him his flocks and seven of his well-educated sons. (Another son would ultimately deliver Henty’s wife and his sturdy daughter, Jane, to Launceston.) The Hentys were amongst the unlucky immigrants who arrived in Van Diemen’s Land on their chartered ship just after free grants of land had ceased in 1831. One son, James Henty, tried Western Australia, but considered the land granted to the family there too poor to be worth working. In their own vessel, the Hentys began investigating the coast of the mainland. After three reconnaissances, in November 1834 another son, Edward, was ‘much pleased’ with Portland Bay, far to the west of Port Phillip, with its ‘extraordinary vegetation and good climate’. Inland he found plenty of good grass. The Hentys began farming there in earnest; they had no other options, and they hoped the land they had occupied would in time be confirmed as theirs. Whalers stole their beef, but then they got involved in whaling as well. They were a family-based, uncondoned version of the South Australian (Land) Company. Their area would later be visited by the surveyor and explorer Major Thomas Mitchell, who would be astounded to find them there and who would name the region Australia Felix. Later it would be more commonly named the Western Districts and the Hentys would become mythic for their impertinent land grab. But when their father died in Launceston in 1839, the tenure of the Hentys was still insecure.

  Meanwhile the Port Phillip Association had been formed to settle the desirable bay of that name. In 1827 the lawyer Joseph Gellibrand and the bushman John Batman, a Sydney-born Currency lad and son of a saltpetre thief, applied for a land grant there but were thwarted. There was further collaboration with Charles Swanston, manager of the Derwent Bank in Hobart, a very energetic person in all this, JH Wedge, the Van Diemen’s Land government surveyor; James Simpson, Commissioner of the Caveat Board; two Scottish brothers, William and Duncan Robertson, who backed Batman financially; and a George Mercer of Edinburgh. Accompanied by an Irishman, three English servants and seven Sydney Aboriginals to act as intermediaries for the Port Phillip tribe, Batman was to find a place suitable for settlement. It was on this visit to Port Phillip that he made a treaty by which the Doutta Galla tribe ‘sold’ about a million acres (405 000 hectares) of land to the Association in exchange for small quantities of trade goods.

  Batman now sold his land in Van Diemen’s Land and suddenly had £10 000 to invest on the mainland. He was impatient, as if he knew his time was short. He had lived what many called ‘an abandoned life’ and was probably already suffering from the nasal form of syphilis which would cause his wife, Eliza Callaghan, to spurn him, and which would kill him in four years time. He was in a mood to make final arrangements. Both Batman for the Port Phillip Association and the Hentys pushed ahead in blithe hope that their requests for land grants would be recognised. They were both in direct negotiation with the Colonial Office when the initial settlements were made, doing their best to force it into assuming responsibility for them and extending legitimacy of possession and protection to them.

  In Sydney, Governor Bourke was worried because he knew ‘much evil’ must follow without proper controls in the new southern settlement. Unlike some at the Colonial Office in Whitehall, he thought it would be best to impose reasonable conditions on Mr Batman and his associates, to consider the total capital expended by them, and to recognise the occupation of Port Phillip. Meanwhile Governor Arthur of Van Diemen’s Land, worked on by the bank manager and Association member, Swanston, gave them as much discreet support as he could. Arthur hoped that the Port Phillip settlement might come under his purview, but in a proclamation of August 1835 Bourke made it apparent that it came under his, and he warned off all trespassers and declared any treaty made with the natives illegal.

  Without legal force to their settlement, the Association played on Arthur’s humanitarianism by stressing their desire to Christianise and civilise the Aboriginals. ‘This is all Stuff,’ wrote Arthur frankly to Bourke, ‘and it is better for all parties to be sincere, and plainly state that the occupation of a good run for sheep has been the primary consideration—if not the only one.’

  James Henty, Thomas Henty’s able eldest son, back in London, besieged the Colonial Office for acknowledgment of the Portland Bay settlement. In the meantime the Port Phillip scheme had created a great frenzy of enthusiasm amongst the young and the discontented in Van Diemen’s Land. In May 1836 Governor Bourke ordered a representative to proceed from the Goulburn district to report on the n
ew settlement. The man declared ‘the Port Phillip residents appear to be treating the blacks with great kindness and are endeavouring to instil habits of industry into them,’ foreshadowing that the land would need to be fought for. Yet there had been spearings, he admitted.

  The convict population of Van Diemen’s Land had been a mere 568 in 1817, but by the early 1830s the numbers were in the thousands, and it was these men and women, assigned to Vandemonian masters who moved to the Port Phillip area, who created the labour for the expansion of the pastoral industry into the Western Districts, Australia Felix. The life for both squatter and servant was barbarous: often torpid, occasionally interspersed with brutality. Yet the pastoralists were not like the bounty settlers—they had capital and they meant to go home and live in comfort when they had earned their fortunes. Many of them got caught, nonetheless, by the scale of their hunger for wealth or by other attachments.

  So many personable young men now departed Van Diemen’s Land that it caused one young lady of Hobart, Jane Williams, to call the new country ‘that dreadful Port Phillip’. The young Vandemonians were responsible for more than 300 000 sheep grazing in Port Phillip in 1837. By 1839 intending settlers from Van Diemen’s Land formed more than half of total arrivals, even though emigrant ships had begun to arrive directly from Britain.

  Under pressure of the spearing to death of the squatter Charles Franks, and one of his partner’s convict shepherds, Governor Bourke appointed Captain William Lonsdale to Port Phillip as police magistrate. A Customs Officer and tide waiter were also appointed, given the constant intercourse with Launceston. To further formalise matters, the Port Phillip Association’s representatives were summoned to Sydney ‘to arrange the terms on which the Association will be permitted to retain some small part of the land they have taken possession of ’. The expenses of the new establishment were to be ‘defrayed from the revenues of the Crown lands’. While the members of the Association were not given land, they were to be allowed a remission of £7000 on any land they bought at auction.

  From their lush corner of the greater Port Phillip region, the Hentys, too, continued to wage a paper war with the Colonial Office and the Sydney government until they won title to their land in 1849. Major Mitchell’s account of Australia Felix had already attracted a great number prepared to invest and settle in the district. The flow from Van Diemen’s Land to Australia Felix—as well as to Port Phillip itself—was on.

  Meanwhile, one early arrival in the Association’s settlement found a town of three or four wattle and daub huts, a few turf huts and about twelve or fifteen tents, some of these being only tarpaulins put across a pitch-pole, supported at each end by a forked stick stuck in the ground. This is how Magistrate Lonsdale found the settlement too, when he arrived to be its magistrate. Yet by then the population of the whole district ‘exceeded 5000 souls . . . and more than 100 000 sheep’. Bourke named the village Melbourne to honour the prime minister of Great Britain and directed that a town be properly laid out. Land was to be put up for sale at both Melbourne and its port, named Williamstown. He travelled to Geelong and visited the stations of Thomas Manifold and Philip Russell, youngish, vigorous men from Van Diemen’s Land, and could not entirely dislike them for taking their chances.

  The settlers at Geelong, a new port servicing Australia Felix, asked for protection and from Sydney Bourke dispatched Captain Foster Fyans as a police magistrate. He also saw that it was necessary that appointed or elected members from Port Phillip attend the legislature at Sydney, even though the natural commercial partnership would be with Launceston or Van Diemen’s Land in general. A judge of the Supreme Court of New South Wales would hold Assizes twice a year at Port Phillip. Then there was the matter of land tenure to consider.

  Bourke had ordered one hundred town allotments be surveyed for Melbourne, and similarly a few at Williamstown. Otherwise the unsurveyed reaches of the new pastoral region spread away without apparent limit, and those who took it were to pay the usual not very onerous licence fees.

  The Crown Lands Commissioners should exercise their wit to prevent crises between blacks and whites, Bourke decided. There were hopes that the natives could be persuaded to settle in villages and make themselves useful under the generous aegis of the chief protector, George Augustus Robinson, who had struggled to protect the Van Diemen’s Land Aboriginals. In that vast country, Bourke could not prevent the occupation and exploitation of land by squatters. He sought, however, to ameliorate the effect upon the native inhabitants.

  The first Sydney-side overlanders (that is, from the Sydney side of the Murray River and the Australian Alps, were Joseph Hawdon from near Batemans Bay, and his assistant, John Gardiner, an Irishman who had lost his tenancy in County Meath and was hungry for success in Australia. With convict and ticket-of-leave stockmen, they drove cattle from the Murrumbidgee to Melbourne in December 1836 and sold them at £10 per beast. Other journeyers from the Sydney side could follow the deep ruts which had been left by Major Mitchell’s boat-carriage. By June and July 1837 there were numerous overlanders following this same route and by 1840 it was said that there were 20 000 cattle between Yass and Melbourne, moving slowly southwards. Some of these parties went through to South Australia, the hospitable Hentys providing them with accommodation at Portland, whereas others sent their stock to Adelaide by ship. Meanwhile, Joseph Hawdon, from the Cowpastures near Sydney, took two months from the Murrumbidgee to Melbourne but others were not so fortunate—some found their assigned men unmanageable as soon as they were beyond the reach of a magistrate’s court; others had to treat their flocks as best they could when scab and catarrh broke out in them. One typical overlanding party composed of thirty men, an overseer and two natives. There were 5000 sheep, 600 horned cattle, twenty horses, two pigs and forty working bullocks besides a variety of dogs. ‘Our provisions and baggage are carried by four bullock drays and two horse carts. The sheep are enclosed every night in strong nets which are fastened at top and bottom to stakes driven into the ground and are watched all night by one of the men. The cattle are watched all night by two men who walk around them until they lie down, and come to them again just before dawn of day, when they rise to feed.’

  At night horses and working bullocks were hobbled and three tents were put up—one for the overlander and his overseer, another for the shepherds and a third for the six men who drove and watched the cattle. The rest of the men slept under the drays. The provisions were flour, beef, tea, sugar and tobacco.

  Governor Gipps, who succeeded Richard Bourke, would remark on the quality of the overlanders: ‘Young men of good families and connections in England, officers of the Army and Navy, graduates of Oxford and Cambridge, are . . . in no small number amongst them.’ All of them were convinced of their future fortunes. After the overlanders came the first fresh arrivals from overseas, eager young men who had read the treatises on sheep and cattle in The Library of Useful Knowledge, in Major Mitchell’s Travels in Australia and in Mr Waugh’s Three Years’ Experience. Many of them were from the lowlands and border area of Scotland, because the fares to Australia for a gentleman were cheaper than those from London by a differential as great as £50 for cabin passage and £20 for steerage.

  Neil Black, a partner of Neil Black and Company of Liverpool, was the son of a Scots farmer from Argyllshire and had a little capital of his own. Taking his chances in Australia, he much preferred Melbourne to Sydney, finding it to be more of ‘a Scots settlement’, though its streets were hazed with dust, and an open sewer crossed the main thoroughfare. He would buy a run named Strathdowney. The names of locations in Skye, the Hebrides and the Highlands would compete with local Aboriginal names to be given to pastoral runs throughout the Western District.

  Between 1839 and 1840 the population of the entire Port Phillip region nearly doubled to 10 291 because of arrivals from overseas, including assisted immigrants. Squatters such as Neil Black were able to sponsor immigrants under bounty schemes. By the middle 1840s when Port Phillip was
divided into five regions, there was scattered settlement in each of them. But there were only forty-four runs in Gippsland compared with seven times that number in the rich Western District.

  The men from overseas by now outnumbered the Vandemonians in the total population, but immigration from Van Diemen’s Land continued. Those with capital always brought with them ex-convicts to swell the numbers of the labouring population. By 1841 newcomers had to buy stations, and it was already hard to find suitable new runs. The government had been defied in the initial making of the settlement and it remained, as Sir James Stephen, British Undersecretary for the Colonies, said a ‘systematic violation of the law’ which was ‘countenanced and supported by the society to which they [the squatters] belong’. Stephen was aware of the fact that the founding minor crimes of Australian penal society were nothing compared with the audacity of the squatters. When it came to varieties of crime, the squatters’ was the most spacious. Though these men violated the law on a huge scale, they did not see it in those terms, and operated from the mandates—biblical, ideological and personal—which had most validity for them.

  Melbourne, Geelong and Portland had become depots and meeting places for squatters from up country and whalers from the sea. Here was society created by white men almost exclusive of women, and concerned almost wholly with work. Portland remained a whaling town and throughout the winter every inhabitant was alert for a whale blow, and when the alarm was given there was a scramble to take to the boats. At night the whalers roystered and fought in the streets and scandalised the inhabitants. In the small white-walled encampment of Port Fairy, the whalers and squatters caroused in the Merrijig Inn.