Australians: Origins to Eureka: 1

by Thomas Keneally

  Still the coolie faction fought on. Robert Campbell, grandson of Sydney’s early merchant of the same name; Robert Towns, the Geordie sea captain and merchant; and WC Wentworth (also Towns’s brother-in-law) commissioned a Calcutta firm to obtain one hundred ‘menial servants’ in 1845. But even the Herald disapproved of this display of back-doorism.

  Robert Towns would always be interested in cheap labour from Asia and the Pacific islands. He had arrived in Sydney in 1827 as captain of his own ship, and six years later married Sophia Wentworth, William’s seventeen-year-old half-sister who had arrived back from England that year in Towns’s ship The Brothers. Towns’s relationship with his Indian coolies was not smooth. He was a famously tough employer, who took his virtues from Quakerism and the Old Testament. All the coolies working at his depot at Miller’s Point went on strike, and spent two days at the police office in Sydney complaining to the magistrates. The complaints were—as usual—to do with irregularity of pay and inappropriate food; meat and flour were being handed out instead of the rice and dholl their contracts had specified. The coolies declared that they were Brahmins, and meat would make them ritually unclean. They won their case in the end, but for several days beforehand were left begging in the streets.

  The meat problem resurfaced in April 1849, when six of Wentworth’s coolie servants were charged with absconding. The verdict imposed by the magistrates was that though the agreement remained, the coolies had to spend a week in prison, court costs were to be deducted from their wages, and, presumably, if they wanted to avoid hunger, they had to eat meat.

  The Australian pointed its finger at all these problems. The coolie was more expensive than the Irish, it said, being a ‘poor slender half-built man, made out of rice and dholl’. Between the Indians’ failure to be ‘meek and mild Hindus’, and the lack of enthusiastic support from government, things were not flourishing for the coolie faction. Friell said that his coolies at Tent Hill were indolent and that they had cynically accepted their passage to Australia, never intending to give good service.

  Soon there was discussion about Chinese labourers, with employers speculating whether they would prove to be less unruly.

  TRADING IN TEA

  Singapore, once it was established as a British free trade port in 1819, had begun to attract a lot of trade from Makassar, and inspired the creation of a similar northern Australian port that could attract Makassan ships and become the basis of trade with the Celebes (now Sulawesi), the Moluccas and China. Three attempts were made to create such an outpost on the far northern coast of the continent: Fort Dundas on Melville Island, for five fraught years from 1824 to 1829; Fort Wellington at Raffles Bay on the Coburg Peninsula, east of present-day Darwin from 1827 to 1829; and tragic Victoria at Port Essington, also on the Coburg Peninsula, from 1838 to 1849, where the remains of British soldiers, their wives and children lie amongst the termite mounds and spinifex to mark an unwise effulgence of British planning. For all these places were unsuccessful in attracting the Makassan fleets for trade, and all of them were fever and malaria ports.

  Port Essington, and its township Victoria, east of present-day Darwin, seemed particularly accursed, and unsuited for its hopes of being the new Singapore. Even in the year of its founding, 1839, twelve people were killed by a cyclone. There was not commercial gain at any time. No ships came for trade and supplies. No settlers came to join the garrison, convicts and the Italian priest Father Angelo Confalonieri, stranded there by shipwreck, and its chief annalist. Traces of the graves of soldiers’ wives, children, and other victims of malaria and unspecified fever can still be found there amongst the Coburg Peninsula’s termite hills and scrub. The hated town and its always termite-infested buildings, when abandoned in 1849, were destroyed by the navy’s cannon-fire.

  Even so, all the early traders of Sydney, emancipist and free, had contact with the British trading houses in Asia. The young Scot Robert Campbell, son of the laird of Ashfield near Greenock, Scotland, and trading from warehouses at Dawes Point, Sydney Cove, had his brother in Calcutta, and John and Gregory Blaxland were related by marriage to Hogue, Davidson and Company of Calcutta. Walter Davidson was a young man who had drawn on John Macarthur’s advice when the shipwrecked Macarthur and his children fetched up in the Celebes on their way to England, and had done him services which had led to Macarthur’s being rewarded with British impunity and Australian land. He came to Sydney with John Macarthur in 1805 and, on instructions to Governor King from the British government, had been granted 2000 acres (810 hectares) next door to the Macarthur estate in Camden. He formed a trading partnership with Macarthur and took a ship to Macau with a mixed cargo, mostly sandalwood from Fiji, for the Chinese market. This was in defiance of the East India Company’s trade monopoly, which as early as 1806 Governor King had tried to break, pleading that the new colony ought to have access to the China trade, to export sealskins, trepang, sandalwood and other colonial produce. The British East India Company had resisted the idea, and King was forced to forbid the locals to trade with China. Yet monopoly rights were steadily eroded. Whaling and sealing companies made special arrangements with the East India Company to enable them to operate in the South Seas from 1798. By 1813, the Company had lost practically the whole of its monopoly rights except for the China trade and trade in tea.

  China tea, sweetened by sugar, had become an early solace of exiles, received from a master by a convict as a reward, or as inducement to good work, something which could be withheld for bad behaviour. Seated at a fire, a man or woman could let the warm fragrance caress their faces and dream of a world unmarred or a homeland restored. The colonial appetite for tea was even more intense than that of Britons.

  The tea would not be drunk with milk, as later became the Australian habit. It was green tea, and drunk with sugar derived first from the Philippines, and later from Mauritius, when it came under British rule. This thirst for tea and sugar in New South Wales had been an engine in the development of Australia’s earliest international trade, because the trade in tea made the Australian merchant houses look for something other than cash with which to pay for it—goods such as sandalwood, trepang, sealskin and tortoise shell. Many of these early houses were run by emancipists—Henry Kable of the First Fleet; Simeon Lord; James Underwood, Kable’s partner; that entrepreneurial powerhouse Solomon Levey; and later, the Kable and Underwood apprentice James Kelly.

  Cargoes of sandalwood and trepang would be landed in Sydney from the islands in ships owned by wealthy emancipists such as Kable, Underwood, Lord and Levey for re-shipping—in a complicated system using neutral vessels to circumvent the East India Company’s monopoly—to China. By 1834, even the China monopoly was abolished.

  Meanwhile, Walter Davidson had stayed on in Macau, setting up a base there. He was soon the man to go to in the Portuguese colony so close to China, and much of the tea with which the colonists were comforted and Aborigines bribed with came through him.

  He had been in Sydney enough to be involved with Macarthur in the imbroglio over Governor Bligh, but left Australia permanently after the rebellion and, despite the Portuguese trying to evict him, remained in Macau until 1822, trading all that time with Australia. The problems of doing business over these enormous areas were softened by reliance on family ties, school friendships, Freemasonry and relationships like that between Macarthur and Davidson.

  With the ending of the East India Company monopoly in 1834, trading with China opened up a little, but a crisis developed between the British and the Chinese over opium imports as payment for tea, and Guangdong, the centre of the tea trade, was blockaded by the British. The bold Geordie Robert Towns, now New South Wales magistrate, merchant and landowner, considered himself a free agent and tried to break the blockade, sailing his ship, the Royal Saxon, past the point of demarcation known as the Bogue. He was unsuccessful, and much chastised by the British for his attempt.

  Ultimately, as China was humiliated in the Opium Wars and forced to make further tradin
g concessions, Walter Davidson moved his base to Hong Kong and put tea warehouses in various Chinese ports. The ships to collect the tea would arrive in the Pearl River after the north-east monsoon in October and leave for Australia before the south-west monsoon began in March. They would time their return to Australia to avoid cyclones in the Coral Sea and would arrive off Sydney about May. But gradually Australia’s trade with China in tea transferred itself to India—it was in British interests that it should do so, and there was a shift from green to black teas, associated with the growth of dairying and the availability of fresh milk. The end of convict transportation in the 1840s also brought an end to the masters’ demands for cheap teas for their convicts to drink.

  Australia’s exports to China continued, but now suited the tastes of the large European enclaves in Chinese ports where there were foreign concessions and thus large European populations. Australian merchants shipped butter and cheese, racehorses for the Shanghai and Hong Kong jockey clubs and, increasingly, coal supplies for European steamships. Chinese imports included opium which was often smuggled into Australia because, though not illegal, it was heavily taxed. But as in the earliest penal times, there remained a triangle of trade involving China, Australia and Britain.

  WHAT ABOUT CHINESE?

  In the early years of the colony there had been a scattered arrival of a number of skilled Chinese tradespeople—carpenters, furniture-makers and cooks, some brought in by wealthy landowners. In 1829 the Macarthurs at Elizabeth Farm employed a Chinese cook and a Chinese gardener, but even earlier in the decade the newly arrived young Presbyterian minister John Dunmore Lang employed two Chinese men, Guong and Tchiou, primarily to make household furniture, but also so that he could explore whether there was a relationship between the spoken languages of China—in their case probably a Cantonese dialect—and those of Polynesia. Guong and Tchiou probably arrived in Sydney on the Calder in 1822 and were allowed to land by the Colonial Secretary, who had already that year allowed ten Chinese labourers to be brought in on the Westmoreland. Chinese carpenters ordered from brokers in southern Chinese ports arrived in Melbourne in 1836 and in 1842 at Port Adelaide, and the great enthusiast Lang proposed that a Chinese tea plantation be started at Port Macquarie.

  In the 1840s the Peacock Inn in North Parramatta was owned by a Cantonese man known as John Shying, who had been born Mak Sai Ying in Guangdong in 1796 and had come to New South Wales as a free settler in 1818. He married an Australian woman, Sarah Thompson, and after Sarah’s death, another Australian, Bridget Gillorley. A complaint made about girls of Irish background—as Bridget was—was that they were likely to marry Chinamen, the supposed lowness of one calling to the lowness of the other. Shying returned to China in 1832 where he stayed for five years pursuing business and family matters, but came back to Sydney in 1837.

  Low Kong Men, a British subject born in Penang, the son of a Cantonese merchant, came to Melbourne in 1843 in his own vessel. He spoke English and French as well as Cantonese. Within a year he had established in Bourke Street the Kong Men Company, importers of tea and other delicacies. He owned a fleet of six ships, some of which were engaged in collecting trepang from Torres Strait. By 1850 he was so well established in Melbourne that he organised Chinese clubs, settled disputes between Chinamen and tried to mediate in their relations with the Crown.

  During the First Opium War (1840-42), when the Chinese resisted British attempts to use Indian opium to pay for increasing imports of China tea, Australian pastoralists, disenchanted with the Indian coolie experiment, discussed the desirability of importing Chinese coolies as cheap labourers, but they were unable to do so until the war was over. Then, in 1847, amendments to the Colonial Master and Servants Act made it attractive to import Chinese labourers into Australia. The first shipload of indentured labourers arrived in Sydney in October 1848 from Amoy (Xiamin), organised through the agency of J Tait, a British merchant house in that port. There, in a depot on the agency grounds, the labourer, recruited by Chinese middlemen, signed a Chinese-language contract concerning pay and rations, and undertook a five-year exile to some as yet unknown station in the remote Australian bush. On arrival in Sydney, the labourer would sign an English-language contract not always identical to the one he had signed in the Amoy depot.

  The arrival of Chinese coolie labour was immediately unpopular among Australian workers, the same people who had been involved in the abolition of convict transportation. Australia would receive between 1847 and 1853 approximately 3500 Chinese indentured labourers. They represented in their very persons a challenge to the home government and to the European settlers’ concerns over wages and race. These latter sentiments would ultimately win; the importation of Chinese labour would represent the peak of the large pastoralists’ economic and political power.

  Benjamin Boyd, an exceptional entrepreneur who had been involved in the founding of the Royal Bank of Australia in London, used its finances to move a number of his ships and himself to New South Wales. By 1844, after only two years in the colony, he and the bank controlled 2.5 million acres (just over 1 million hectares) on the coast, in the Monaro and the Riverina. He added a new twist to the indentured labour issue by bringing in Pacific Islanders, generally Melanesians, to work in his whaleboat crews and on his sheep stations. In 1847, for example, ships of his brought to Australia 185 men and seven women from small Melanesian islands such as Ouvéa and Lifou in the Loyalty group, from Tana and Aneityum in the New Hebrides (now Vanuatu) and even from a Polynesian island beyond Vanuatu. The men were to work as shepherds, labourers or seamen for five years at £1 6 shillings a year with food, clothing and bedding supplied. White shepherds at this time were earning £25 a year, so Boyd seemed to do very well out of his Islanders.

  Scrupulous people accused Boyd of virtually kidnapping the natives to bring them to Australia, but an enquiry by the Attorney-General of New South Wales dismissed the accusations. The Legislative Council’s Committee on Immigration of 1847 reported unfavourably that the ‘boundless regions of the Australian continent capable of containing millions of our fellow subjects may thus be occupied by a semi-barbarous or even savage race’.

  Some of Boyd’s Islanders who were assigned to his mountainous stations in the Monaro suffered severely from the winter cold, and others could not get accustomed to the great stretches of plateau and Riverina plains, and returned to Twofold Bay—Boyd’s base on the New South Wales south coast—begging him to transport them home. By the end of 1847, only sixty of his original Islanders remained with him.

  In 1851 that other thrusting entrepreneur Robert Towns owned thirteen ships that were involved in the Pacific trade. He imported eight shiploads of Chinese labourers in the early years of the 1850s. When his Arabia arrived from Amoy on 22 December 1851, it was found that ten out of 189 Chinese coolies had died aboard. The captain, Chilcott, had been in the habit of tying quarrelsome Chinese to the rigging and flogging them, and had even resorted to throwing hot tea over them. Towns noted, ‘You have the services of these men for five years at a rate not exceeding one-quarter you are obliged to pay for your own countryman.’

  For a ship named the General Palmer another broker signed up 332 labourers on five-year contracts. This journey was a disaster—by the time the ship dropped anchor in Sydney, 63 Chinese and one crew member were dead of dysentery. The enquiry showed that although General Palmer was a good ship there had been no place to separate the sick from the healthy. The men had no changes of clothing, nor any blankets, and the only water closets provided were chains flung over the stern on which the sick men had to balance themselves. Some of the men, weakened by dysentery, had simply fallen off the chains and drowned.

  In the infamous case of St Paul, a French ship bound from Hong Kong to Australia in 1858 with 327 Chinese labourers aboard, only one man, Ah Fung, made it to Sydney. The ship had been wrecked on Russell Island off New Guinea. According to Ah Fung, reliably so or not, some of the European crew escaped by small boat to the north coast of Austr
alia while the Chinese left on the island were progressively killed and eaten by the local natives.

  The squatters in the northern sections of New South Wales, that is, in future Queensland, were the biggest users of indentured labourers from China. Many Chinese indentured labourers were employed also to clear land around the farms and townships of Narrandera, Hay and Deniliquin in south-west New South Wales. They were a mobile workforce who, hired out, would set up their own camp, work and move on. Time off was usually spent in the Chinese quarter of the nearest big town.

  There were at this time similarities between the pressures on the individual Chinese male and those on the Irish and the Scottish Highlanders. They were likely to have joined local gangs and secret societies to create a network of support for themselves in a landscape where their hold on land was shaky. They may have come from a background of clan warfare, common in Guangdong, where mercenaries were often hired by both sides. Some of those who ultimately came to Australia may have served as mercenaries or members of militias, or rebels during the Taiping uprising of the 1850s. If a man wanted to escape Guangdong for any reason, the estuary of the Pearl River was crowded—since the Treaty of Nanking—with the masts of foreign vessels.

  Ching Dynasty law allowed more than one marriage, and the chief purpose of marriage was not the fulfilment of the married couple but the production of male heirs for the perpetuation of the ancestors’ line, and the recruitment of an extra woman to help in the house and farm. If a man was married before he migrated, it was accepted he would not take his wife with him. He would come back to his home village once he had made his pile. While he was away, if he did well he was permitted to take a second wife and maintain two households. If he was single when he migrated, he would return home, after saving enough money, to marry, stay for a few months, and then return to the place of migration without his wife. Thereafter, he would visit his home village as often as he could afford.