Australians: Origins to Eureka: 1

by Thomas Keneally

  The Patriotes were all excited to hear from Father Brady that Bishop Polding had mentioned their case to government while he was in England, and that they might receive their tickets-of-leave as early as February 1842. In the meantime Emmanuel Neich, the innkeeper, had decided to take a Patriote himself and applied for Maurice Lepailleur. In fact, Lepailleur was assigned to Hamilton C Sempill, a Darlinghurst magistrate close to Governor Gipps, and was happy to escape the barracks; it was one step closer to his wife, ‘dear Domitile’. He began working as a painter and labourer.

  News of the Canadians’ impending tickets-of-leave indeed came through in February, and by the month’s end every Patriote had left Longbottom. There was a celebratory dinner at the Jew’s Harp Inn on Brickfield Hill, which belonged to a French immigrant, Jean Meillon. Here a number of the Patriotes lived after receiving their tickets-of-leave and while looking for work. Lepailleur scrubbed floors and acted as a handyman there. In March, John Ireland, who owned the Plough Inn on Parramatta Road, gave him employment. Lepailleur painted coaches and houses and lettered post office carts on behalf of his master, since the Plough Inn was a changing place for coaches. He worked also for Alexander MacDonald who had supplied the Canadians, while they were at Longbottom, with peaches and watermelons to supplement their diet, and helped to build a house and family tombs for him in St Anne’s cemetery at Kissing Point across the Parramatta River. He also worked for his old friend Emmanuel Neich at the Bath Arms. He even worked for a time for William Charles Wentworth at Vaucluse.

  The stonemasons amongst the Patriotes worked on the foundations of the new Paddington Army Barracks. Bourdon, the former overseer, found his work manufacturing lathes from tree branches exhausting. Another Patriote, Rochon, bought two blocks in Kent Street, borrowing money from the small Canadian community, and brought in Patriote tradesmen, including Lepailleur, to work on them. Whatever their grievances, the Canadians tended to support each other. Dr Newcombe for example, a 77-year-old Patriote, lived with another Canadian in the Longbottom area.

  The freed Canadians were impressed as other visitors were, by the amount of drinking in the colony, particularly Lepailleur. Mrs Stone, the wife of one of his employers, was a pretty woman but she drank as much as a man, and was rapidly becoming deranged and dishevelled. Hippolite Lactôt found ‘Intemperance was de rigueur; sobriety the exception, amongst women as it was for men.’ Once a woman convict, intoxicated and just released from the Female Factory, stood in the middle of Parramatta Road screaming drunken curses outside the house of another ex-convict woman. When a Patriote sent a police guard to protect her, she turned her back, ‘lifted up her clothes and showed . . . her bum, saying that she had a “black hole” and slapping her belly like the wretch she was’. The Canadians were utterly unaccustomed to such drunkenness and displays of crudeness in women.

  The community’s sexual mores also fascinated the Patriotes, shaken by the experience of prisoner celibacy as they were. Jean-Baptiste Trudel and Désiré Bourbonnais went to help a woman who was being beaten by her Portuguese husband, and Bourbonnais was reported to the police for doing so. The Portuguese man paid the police off to prevent prosecution. And Lepailleur wrote once of a woman and her husband, the wood warden of Concord: ‘She was drunk and he punched her and beat her with a whip. It was her New Year’s present . . . we hear more women crying in the night here than birds singing in the woods during the day. I think every husband beats his wife.’ When working at Ireland’s hotel, Lepailleur was shocked to hear men boast of having committed gang rapes. And yet he, the alien ingrate rebel, was supposedly the lowest of the low in this society.

  When Bishop Polding returned from England, the Canadians were told that they should present themselves the following Sunday at St Mary’s. They did so in their best suits, expecting expansive news. Polding told them only that British Colonial Secretary Lord Stanley was favourably disposed towards them and that they should have patience. The bishop had not invited them into the presbytery, and said a few words to them on the church steps. They went away complaining, in the spirit of the Irish, that though a priest he was, after all, an Englishman.

  The Canadians were increasingly tempted by local women—Joseph Du-mouchelle ran away with Mrs Charles Nicholls, a woman from Concord. Tracked down, he was found to have some minor possessions of Nicholls’s in his keeping. He was arrested and sent to the Hyde Park Barracks, to serve a six-month sentence for theft, even though Mrs Nicholls praised his ardour by comparison to her husband’s. At the barracks, despite his brother’s death at the hospital, he worked his way into it, pretending illness.

  While walking in the Domain, Louis Bourdon, the officious overseer, was offered escape by officers of a French whaling ship which was in port. The officers downplayed the danger, even though the captain or owner of the ship was subject to its being impounded if an escaped convict were found aboard. Bourdon realised that escape would still mean exile from Lower Canada, and capture would mean his being sent to Norfolk Island. Just the same, he determined to try. He went on board, leaving sundry debts behind, and made his way to New York and ultimately, after pardons came through, to his home village.

  In Canada, L’Association de la Déliverance had been working for some years to promote a pardon for the Patriotes and to support ‘their families, their property, their honour, their liberty, their life’. A fund was raised to restart them in life, once pardoned or released. All the Patriotes were indeed pardoned by the British government by March 1844, and were repatriated by January 1845. Lepailleur was reunited with his ‘chère Domitile’. One Patriote, Joseph Marceau, stayed on in New South Wales and farmed in the Dapto region, south of Sydney, having married a nineteen-year-old Englishwoman.

  In the meantime, Sir John Franklin in Hobart had told the North Americans transported there that their circumstances were without precedent, and that they must not hold conversation with the other prisoners, as ‘they were a desperate and hardened class’.

  The Americans and non-Québécois Canadians were put to work on the roads and quickly noticed that the overseers and clerks took the choicest mutton and left the scrag ends to the convicts. There was no sugar, tea, coffee or tobacco. Macadamising the roads meant ‘levelling down hills and levelling up valleys, breaking stones and drawing them in hand carts to where they were wanted’. It was desperately tough physical labour. Four Patriotes bolted after months on the gang, but were recaptured and sent to Port Arthur for the remainder of their time. One party was sent to work on a new gaol in Hobart. They would frequently go out at night by climbing through the chimney of their hut, though its door was locked, and jumping to the earth and going away to steal potatoes, which they would bring back and drop down the chimney to their associates. Those discovered in these outings were flogged and given three months hard labour in irons or were sent to the coal mines on the Tasman Peninsula. Ultimately, in February 1842, the Americans were allowed to take their tickets and settle in one of six specified districts.

  The rebel, Snow, worked on the property of a member of the Legislative Council, taking in the harvest. In October 1842 he got the news that he had received a pardon along with twenty-eight others. They returned home on an American vessel, the Steiglitz, a whaler from Sag Harbor, New York. None of them were tempted to stay. ‘We had thought of the moral influence exerted upon the minds of children of the free population by being associated with and surrounded by so many of the most vicious human beings the world ever saw; we had in countless instances seen total depravity personified’, he later declared of the island colony.

  THE RELIGIOUS DIVIDE

  As shown by the suspicion attending the arrival of the Patriotes in Sydney, Protestant-Catholic tension was evident even in the early years of Australia. But the Catholics were also fighting their own internal battles. The fledgling Catholic Church in the colony was divided roughly along an English-Irish axis, even though in Sydney the English Benedictine bishop and lover of cricket, John Bede Polding, got on well with t
he apostle to the Irish convicts, the affable reformed alcoholic Father John McEncroe. But McEncroe was too much a political radical for the tastes of most of the English Benedictines, even though his politics reflected those of his congregation, bond and free. And in Hobart, the Irish Father John Joseph Therry fought the English-born Bishop Willson over control of church property for fourteen years. In August 1849, a letter signed ‘An Irishman’ appeared in the Hobart press sneering at ‘Bishop Willson and his anti-Irish clergy’. It claimed that birds of passage like them did not deserve a cathedral built with Irish money. The Irish Exile, a flamboyant journal run by a charming and tragic alcoholic revolutionary named Patrick O’Donohoe, supported Therry, depicting Willson as ‘upholding British supremacy under the veil of Catholicity’. Indeed, near the end of his career, Willson would argue that an Irishman should succeed him, chiefly because an Englishman could not hope to control the Hobart diocese.

  The English Benedictines (Willson was not one) tended towards conservatism, but in Van Diemen’s Land, as in New South Wales, Catholics of Irish background associated with the local ‘Australian’ faction whose objectives included resistance to transportation, a free market for free labour, self-government and the vote. Father Therry, for example, made clear that his opposition to transportation was as great as his opposition to stigmatising former convicts, so plentiful in his congregation, with criminality.

  Under Irish pressure, the Catholic Church supported the multi-establishment of churches, tolerance and social harmony, whereas the Anglican Bishop Broughton protested against the Catholic Bede Polding’s recognition as a prelate at an 1839 Government House levee. Bishop Nixon, the Anglican bishop of Van Diemen’s Land, similarly objected to Robert Willson adopting the title of ‘Catholic Bishop’ in 1842. The leading liberal Catholics of the day admired separation of church and state, not only because of progressive opinion but also because it was the best condition under which they—essentially a non-Establishment church—could operate. The Scots Catholic intellectual and journalist William Duncan suggested to Dr Lang, the Presbyterian leader, that the Catholics and Presbyterians unite to support this principle, which was reflected in Governor Bourke’s New South Wales Church Act. But Lang did not like the Church Act for its capacity to spread papism. By contrast, Catholics like Caroline Chisholm, a familiar sight in the 1840s riding her grey horse, Captain, and leading columns of young female immigrants into the bush, where in distant towns she had set out employment offices for them, made sure it was a committee composed of clergy and laity of all denominations that supervised her emigrants’ home in Britain and her depot and outlying offices in Australia.

  The Vatican, however, was suspicious of the new nationalisms and secular democratic pieties, and there was always a sensitivity in the Catholic Church about new ideas. With this anti-intellectual streak came mainstream Catholic suspicion of the secular schools Governor Bourke had legislated for. So a priest like McEncroe, much loved in the houses of the native Irish and by the members of work gangs, grew to be the enemy of a multi-denominationalist like William Duncan. Yet McEncroe was a social liberal too, an enemy of the concept that something as precious as the human soul should be left at the mercy of laissez faire economics of the kind that were keeping the Irish at home poor and would visit the huge calamity of the Famine upon them. He wanted the New South Wales government to establish a state bank to issue credit and discount small bills, and relieve the poor with loans. McEncroe was also a supporter of the anti-transportation movement, and he was anti-squatter in Australia as he had been anti-landlord in Ireland, and belittled the Pastoral Association and its pretensions. In men like McEncroe his friends could meet an increasingly common Irish Catholic phenomenon—the man who was strict on dogma and unyielding on religious observance, but radical in political thought. Indeed, the Presbyterian JD Lang later described him as Australia’s first republican.

  Another problem, both within the Catholic Church and between religions, was the tendency to use Irish nationalist emblems at Church events. The Attorney-General, John Plunkett and the lawyer Roger Therry—both Irish— shared Duncan’s view that this simply created anti-Catholic bile and bigotry, most vehemently expressed by local members of the Orange Lodge, the Irish loyalist society founded in the 1790s to protect the state against the inroads of papism. The local Orange newspaper, the Sentinel, railed frequently against the ‘papal democratic mob’, and found support in the Melbourne Argus. Their major charge against Catholics was that they planned domination of the judicial system from the Supreme Court down to the constabulary. Even the Presbyterian Lang gave the Orangemen ammunition by saying of Caroline Chisholm’s female migration schemes that they were ‘extending the Romanism of the colony through the vile, Jesuitical, diabolical system of “mixed marriages’’ ’. Ribbonism was active in Sydney, declared the Sentinel, and you could see it demonstrated on St Patrick’s Day and on Boyne Day, the day decent Protestants marched to celebrate their deliverance from the priest-ridden horrors of papism.

  The week around Boyne Day 1846, Melbourne suffered the tensions of civil war. In the midst of potential mayhem, the Sentinel declared that it opposed general cemeteries where Catholic bones presumed to seek burial with those of the children of God. Fortunately, sectarian activity confined itself to mutual insult and fist-fights, but the antagonisms had been set in place and would last for more than a hundred years.

  Meanwhile, the brilliant William Duncan’s Scottish blend of urbanity, learning and liberalism, disseminated in his paper, the Weekly Register, was not what Irish Catholics wanted to read. They took to a more tribal paper, The Freeman’s Journal. When Duncan’s paper went out of publication, he took a job as a customs officer in Brisbane, where he would work the rest of his career.

  The Irish enmity to the English Benedictines came to its head in the reaction to Father Gregory, a shy Benedictine monk who became vicar-general of the Sydney diocese. As is a common Irish reaction, his English austerity was mistaken for contempt. It was believed that he too quickly showed alarm or, some would say, dislike for the raggedness and ignorance of much of his Irish congregation. To them, his liking for the company of the higher officials and councillors of the colony seemed a betrayal, and being born in Cheltenham, unlike many of his flock he did not want to see Catholicism captured by Irish nationalists or turned into an instrument of cultural vengeance against Protestants. In the period in which he ran the diocese—1846-48—the Christian Brothers found him so authoritarian, supercilious and negligent of their feelings and needs that they returned to Ireland. A section of the Irish Sisters of Charity went to Van Diemen’s Land rather than submit to his intrusion in the running of their affairs, including their fund-raising for Catholic schools and a hospital. As discontented colonials used to complain to Whitehall of governors, discontented Irish denounced Gregory to Rome. Nonetheless, his report to Rome on the new Constitution for New South Wales which was being proposed in the early 1850s shows that he saw common cause with the Irish. ‘The Bill recently granted by the Imperial Parliament for a new arrangement of the Legislature in the Colony, will also, it is probable, be serviceable to the cause of Catholicism, inasmuch as by the extension of the voting franchise, the influence of the labouring and trading classes will be rendered more able to cope with that of the wealthy landowners and capitalists who are almost exclusively Protestants.’ Ultimately, an Act of 1851 removed all religious discrimination in New South Wales. Anglicans, Catholics, Presbyterians, Jews, Methodists and Wesleyans were legally equal before the state and the law. In practice, there were still battles to be fought.

  CHAPTER 26

  DEMOCRACY

  By 1848, Henry Parkes, former labourer, brass-finisher and customs officer had earned enough to turn shopkeeper, selling a miscellany of items from his premises in Hunter Street, and had founded and led an Artisans’ Committee which secured the election of the lawyer Robert Lowe, the first populist candidate, to the New South Wales Legislative Council. One of Lowe’s poli
cies was to reduce the reserve price of land to 5 shillings an acre, leaving squatters in possession until bona fide settlers purchased the land. It was a form of unlocking the land which would ultimately become popular many years later.

  There was inevitable conflict between the old gentry who had bought or been granted their land and the squattocracy who had acquired it cheaply. ‘Between the counties and the districts,’ wrote Benjamin Boyd, himself a squatter, ‘there always has been, and will be, bitterness of feeling and dissension. The old settlers cannot forgive the squatters their long leases; the squatters cannot forgive the old settlers their free grants of land.’ But of the gentry who did not become squatters, only a few survived the economic rigours of the 1840s.

  Squatting nonetheless was contrary to the idea of a ‘merrie Australia’, an Australia of villages. Indeed free men did not like to work on remote stations. Ex-convict overseers allegedly found pleasure in tormenting them for their enviable condition. Fear of Aboriginal spearing acted as a disincentive too. The work was monotonous. Payment was by orders drawn in Sydney that the workers had to go and collect. They might find on arrival that their employer’s credit was not worth anything. The free working class therefore failed to meet the woolgrowers’ need for labour.

  So the squatters were the chief voice favouring renewal of transportation, and it was one of the motives behind the establishment of the Moreton Bay Separation Movement, pushing for an independent colony in what is now Southern Queensland. But by common consent the ideal immigrant was a young married Briton; he, his wife and his children promised the best hope of a community sound in moral health and amenable to high ideals. The clash between men who wanted a continuing supply of cheap convict labour and those who wished for reputable artisans was very deep.