Australians: Origins to Eureka: 1

by Thomas Keneally

  CHAPTER 31

  THE REPUBLICAN PUSH

  In 1847, Earl Grey, the Colonial Secretary, and James Stephen, his Undersecretary, had a plan for a new Constitution for New South Wales. Its benefits or disadvantages would wash along the Australian continent to the new and junior colonies of Victoria, South Australia, Western Australia and Queensland. It was a re-working of a constitution prepared that year for New Zealand. The plan envisaged a federation of the Australian colonies. District councils, instituted in 1842, were to remain, also the colonial legislatures, then a federal authority would be placed over all.

  However, there were still very few federalists in Australia in the 1850s. Governor FitzRoy of New South Wales was one, though he kept quiet about it. JD Lang, who abominated the governor, was another. Throughout the early 1850s FitzRoy and his two sons—Captain Augustus FitzRoy, his aide-de-camp who would later be killed in the Crimean War, and George FitzRoy, his private secretary—acquired a reputation as notorious lechers. Dr Lang denounced ‘the flagitious immorality’ of the three of them, all the more shocking given that the sainted late Lady FitzRoy had been killed in a coach accident for which FitzRoy’s ego and recklessness were to blame. Lang wrote: ‘Sir Charles FitzRoy was engaged in one of his Vice-Regal progresses in New South Wales when he reached the inland town of Berrima . . . and took up his abode at the hostelry of an innkeeper of the name of See, formerly, I believe, the [boxing] champion of New South Wales.’ See’s daughter was ‘by no means destitute of personal attractions’. Miss See became pregnant and paternity was laid at the door of Governor FitzRoy. Lang believed that by sending reports on ‘the FitzRoy brothel’ to the new Colonial Secretary the Duke of Newcastle, he had helped get rid of the FitzRoys. When Governor FitzRoy ultimately left New South Wales in 1855, an address of farewell was prepared in the Legislative Council, to which Lang tried to add his own clause: ‘That the moral influence which has emanated from Government House during His Excellency’s term of office has been deleterious and baneful in the highest degree to the best interests of the community.’

  Lang’s was the resonating voice of republican federalism. As early as 1843, in the New South Wales Legislative Council, he had stated, ‘It is impossible for this House to regard His Excellency [at that time, Gipps] in any other light than as an agent of a despotic authority which has usurped the rights and trampled on the privileges of the people.’ Lang’s visit to America in 1840 had enlarged his republicanism and he had produced a book-length tract while at sea entitled Freedom and Independence for the Golden Lands of Australia, in which he divided the settled areas of the Australian continent into states named for heroes such as Cook and Flinders. Earl Grey’s plan helped, said Lang, in as far as it paved the way for ‘the President of the United States of Australia’. But it was a plan imposed from above, with the franchise rights of voters not yet defined, and Lang wanted to provoke a plan which flowed from the people. His Australian League was formed to establish ‘one great Australian nation’. Federalism had its first domestic champion in this rambunctious Presbyterian minister.

  Other republican sympathisers included notable Currency children grown to early manhood. Daniel Deniehy was a prodigiously gifted young man of fifteen by the time he travelled to Ireland and Europe with his former convict parents. His father, Henry, had been transported and had arrived in New South Wales in 1820 serving a seven-year sentence for vagrancy, a common enough way of offloading some of the Irish poor. Mary McCarthy, his mother, had also served a seven-year sentence. The boy was born in 1828. The father began his free life as a labourer, moved into business as a produce merchant and then became a general merchant. Young Deniehy went to school at the Sydney Academy, which later became Sydney Grammar, and in later years remembered the sleepy schoolroom in Phillip Street ‘with small old-fashioned windows encased with great vines and honeysuckles’. The Sydney he grew up in was still a wild town, characterised by garbage heaps and open sewage drains. Short of water, plenteous in grog, its population did not generally bathe, so that when the garrison corps paraded in the humid Sydney summer near Hyde Park, the passer-by could smell them.

  Deniehy’s visit to his parents’ homeland, Ireland, a place of seasonal misery and close to perpetual unrest, sharpened his republican instincts, while the Continent rounded out his education as a colonial of sensibility. His sense of fashion was not impaired by his travels either. The Deniehys left Cork by the immigrant ship Elizabeth in January 1844 to return to Sydney. The town had trebled in size since Deniehy’s youth to a population of 36 000, and the old struggle between the emancipists and the exclusives—the pure merinos as they thought of themselves—was in full play, as was the Currency-Sterling divide. In monetary terms, currency was of less value than sterling, and thus ‘Currency’ were implicitly themselves of questionable value. But young men like Deniehy accepted the term as a badge of honour.

  The three big political issues of Deniehy’s late adolescence were the question of self-government, the prevention of the renewal of transportation, and the making available to ordinary settlers of land from the vast estates held—some would say locked up—by the squatters. The Pastoral Association had been formed to protect the privilege of the squatters, and their ability to control numbers in the Legislative Council was helped by their votes being worth so much more than those of city merchants. The property qualification to vote was high as well. The Currency poet Charles Harpur wrote scathingly of the statesman of the pastoral interest, William Charles Wentworth,

  Now behold him in his native hue,

  The bullying, bellowing champion of the few!

  Patriot!—he who has no sense nor heed

  Of public ends beyond his own mere need.

  Dan Deniehy of New South Wales, a mere articled clerk, also took up his pen to mock the squatters out of their claims, and to apply to their sons the nickname ‘Geebungs’, after a form of native shrub. Deniehy, who would soon be mounting platforms for the cause, considered the pastoralists a lumpen commercial crowd who would rather put a bullock driver into parliament, as long as he owned property, than ‘an impoverished Fox or an O’Connell living on his rents’. The Geebungs did not want to mix with other Currency, at least as Deniehy depicted them, but could never become fully British.

  Deniehy was characteristically hard upon a Geebung named James Martin from County Cork, who was emphatic that neither of his parents had been convicts. Yet despite his early opinions Martin would come to believe that the old world’s customs had to give way to a new world of talent, and he would become ultimately premier of New South Wales and later its chief justice. Martin, because of his Catholic working-class Irish origins, could never quite belong to the true merinos. But his patriotism, like that of Wentworth, who despised him, and like that of another coming colonial politician, Bede Dalley, was a patriotism dedicated to Australia under the British Constitution rather than a specifically Australian one.

  The man for whom Deniehy worked as an articled clerk was a literary patron of great generosity of spirit, Nichol Drysdale Stenhouse, a partner in the legal firm of Stenhouse and Hardy in Elizabeth Street, Sydney. Stenhouse was the perfect employer for Deniehy. As a young solicitor he had helped the famous— but cash-strapped—writer Thomas De Quincey, author of the notorious Confessions of an English Opium Eater. He had considered it a privilege to protect De Quincey during the years he was hiding from his creditors in Edinburgh.

  In Deniehy, Stenhouse was about to acquire another literary cause, of the kind that he had lost when lack of legal opportunity in Edinburgh had forced him to become a steerage immigrant to Australia. Since arriving in his new homeland, Stenhouse had gathered a library of four thousand volumes, and a circle of literary friends, including Charles Harpur, to whom he sent books by post to soothe Harpur’s solitude in Maitland. Now his clerk Deniehy began to publish fiction in the Colonial Literary Journal, and a critical piece,‘The Rise and Progress of the Drama in Australia’.

  In his fiction Deniehy wrote
of young love in an entirely Australian environment: a young couple meet on the Royal Mail coach running from Nash’s Hotel in Parramatta to Sydney. ‘We talked of Parramatta and its people—the banks of the river—steamers and stages—poetry—Lord Byron and peach pies— love and sorrow—cookery and curl papers—Governor Bourke and the last King Bungaree etc.’ ‘Sweet’ St James swung into view as they passed the gothic portal which adorned the junction of Parramatta Road and South George Street. But as the hero of the story pursues Betsey, he becomes scared of matrimony, and this would characterise Deniehy’s own attitudes.

  In The Legend of Newtown the hero again reflects Deniehy’s sentiments. He is ‘the son of the soil, generous, ardent . . . his enthusiasm made him proud of the land of his birth, jealous and sensitive of the slights too often thrown on her, and the vapid sneers which expatriated witlings find so much gratification in showering on the land that supports them, and gives them their daily bread’. The heroine in this piece is Australian too. Her features ‘were exquisitely fair and regular, and her figure possessed all that sylph-like grace and fragile delicacy of the Australian female form’.

  And in his verse, Deniehy projected an Australian idyll for him and his kind:

  A cottage shall be mine, with porch,

  Enwreath’d with ivy green,

  And bright some flowers with dew-fill’d bells

  ’Mid brown old wattles seen.

  Stenhouse’s residence and library at Balmain had become a regular meeting place for Sydney radicals, and through Stenhouse Deniehy, the literary patriot, was introduced to the explorer Ludwig Leichhardt, whose heroic if not always practical character made an impression on the young man’s imagination. Here was a sort of rebel, a man who did not want to serve Prussian militarists by fulfilling his state duty of conscription, but instead sought the interior of a newer, freer, less constricted place.

  The other great radical venue of the time was Henry Parkes’s ‘toyshop’ back room. There Deniehy met David Blair, a journalist on Parkes’s Empire, to which Deniehy also contributed. ‘He was clad in the style of a finished man of fashion—in fact, a perfect little dandy,’ Blair wrote of Deniehy. Blair thought that some of Deniehy’s writing was so good that it took the breath away—it was like meeting an ancient Roman emperor walking in broad daylight in George Street.

  Deniehy’s friendship with the poet Charles Harpur also began in Parkes’s parlour. Like Deniehy, Harpur was the son of convicts from County Cork. Harpur had just given up schoolteaching in the country and was in Sydney for a brief visit. Along with an Irish schoolteacher named John Armstrong from Tullamore, Harpur and Deniehy decided to take over the Mechanics School of Arts, the intellectual centre in Sydney prior to the foundation of the University of Sydney in 1852. Harpur dubbed it the ‘school of charlatans’, and the three put together a ticket to take over the committee. The new program, once that had been achieved, involved a series of lectures by Deniehy. In his lecture on modern English poetry, he praised his friend Harpur, calling him ‘the earliest of those Sons of the Morning who shall yet enlighten and dignify our home, building up as with the hands of angels the national mind’.

  Henry Kendall was another Currency visitor to Henry Parkes’s back room. Born in Ulladulla on the New South Wales south coast in 1839, he had sailed on a whaler at the age of sixteen and returned to Australia in March 1857 to settle in Sydney’s Newtown. Kendall, too, would pursue the Australian voice, and was encouraged by another literary solicitor, JL Michael, who made Kendall a clerk at Grafton, in the beautiful Clarence Valley of northern New South Wales. He agreed with the ultimatum which Harpur had laid down for himself:

  Be then the Bard of thy country . . .

  ’Tis the cradle of liberty!—Think and decide.

  Australianisms appeared in Kendall’s poetry—he called the dingo the warragul, a common coastal usage at the time. The kookaburra he called ‘the settlers’ clock’. He was particularly annoyed by the non-Currency belief that Australian birds had no song. The magpie certainly did, and the bellbird, and with colonial pride he pushed them in his writing. He possessed a sense of care for nature—he complained that the loss of many native species of birds was due to the extinction of Aboriginal hunters in many areas, which had led to a glut in the population of the huge lizard named the goanna, an eating delicacy which the Aboriginals had kept in check.

  He yearned as only a colonial can for the power to combine the Australian landscape he devoted himself to with poetic sensibility. He wanted an Australian muse to possess him.

  A lyre-bird lit in a shimmering space,

  It dazzled my eyes and I turned from the place,

  And wept in the dark for a glorious face

  And a hand with the harp of Australia.

  In 1851, young Dan Deniehy was admitted as an attorney to the Supreme Court of New South Wales. He took what work he could and kept writing, and within the year married Adelaide Elizabeth Hoalls, a young woman visiting Sydney as part of a world trip with her mother. She met Deniehy at the house of the Chief Justice, Sir Alfred Stephen. Miss Hoall’s father held Deniehy in absolute detestation ‘as having clandestinely won the affections of a young innocent girl [his daughter] in a strange land’.

  At a public meeting in the School of Arts on 16 April 1850, Lang uttered a plaint which would echo and be repeated down generations. ‘You have hitherto, even in the estimation of Great Britain herself, been the tail of the world, and every brainless creature of blighted prospects and broken fortunes from England . . . has been systematically placed above you even in this the land of your birth. Why, it is the rule of the service under the present regime that no native of the colony, however able, talented and meritorious he may have proved himself, can be appointed by the governor to any office under government with a salary of above £100 a year.’

  Lang was a strange creature in many ways—a papism-hating Presbyterian who found his friends amongst the papists like Deniehy. He never doubted that Australians would become a great and glorious people, even though he was not native-born, and even though he had personally intervened to recruit immigrants to prevent the population being excessively Irish or containing too great a proportion of ex-convicts.

  To Deniehy as to everyone else, Lang was an enigmatic friend. Deniehy was so fond of Lang’s republican and other political impulses, including the dream of a federal Australia, that the man’s anti-Irish-ness seemed a small blemish in the patriot whole. Deniehy himself would, after all, speaking out against Archbishop John Polding’s appointment of a particular man to a school board, incur temporary excommunication and abuse from some of his fellow-Irish. So he knew the limitations of his sect and his tribe both.

  HOUSE OF COLONIAL LORDS

  In 1853 a Select Committee of the New South Wales Legislative Assembly applied itself to the task, as first devised by Earl Grey, of drawing up a new Constitution with a bi-cameral system. The committee was chaired by William Charles Wentworth, who, along with James Macarthur, son of the great Perturbator, and Edward Deas Thomson, envisaged a Constitution which would ensure the control of parliament by the pastoral faction.

  James Macarthur saw himself as a fine aristocrat. By 1832 his famous father John Macarthur had been consumed by his demons and declared a lunatic, living under his wife Elizabeth’s care. She and his household had been his chief supporters and comforts, but now amidst other rantings he accused her of sexual and commercial infidelities. He had died in unrelieved torment at Camden Park in 1834. His son’s original ambitions were similar to those of his famous father—he hoped to continue to establish the Macarthurs’ freehold lands within the Limits of Location in the manner of the great British, land-accumulating noble families. At first he thought squatting unworthy of a great family, but his brother William and his older, English-born cousin Hannibal drew him into the practice from the late 1830s onwards. He was a four-square conservative, and his caution helped the family survive the depression of the early 1840s, in which Hannibal lost a gr
eat deal. But he so despaired of the potential impact of the gold discovery in Australia that he thought of giving up the land of his childhood and living in England. Over time he became the friend or at least ally of that more opportunistic conservative William Charles Wentworth, and between them they knew they must produce a Constitution which best served the pastoral ascendancy.

  The committee’s report provided for a lower house elected by votes of unequal value and without secret ballot, favouring rural interests, and a nominated upper house based on the House of Lords. The idea of a lower house controlled by the men of the great pastures outraged the leading merchants, and the concept of a ‘lordly’ upper house appalled democrats. A People’s Constitution Committee was formed to protest against the proposed upper house and Deniehy was its youngest member. It held a mass meeting at the Royal Victoria Theatre, filled to overflowing, where many speakers, including Deniehy, made their protests. Deniehy rose, small and stooped, and was at first called on to speak up. He certainly did speak up, to make one of the most famous speeches in colonial history. He said that Mr Wentworth’s having repented of the ‘democratic escapades’ of his youth had led now to high Tory sins sufficient to cancel out a century of former service. Loud cheers began, and mounted. Deniehy denounced ‘those harlequin aristocrats—these Botany Bay magnificos—these Australian mandarins’. He imagined that James Macarthur would style himself the Earl of Camden and his coat of arms would be a green field with the rum keg of the New South Wales order of chivalry. ‘They cannot aspire to the miserable and effete dignity of the worn-out grandees of continental Europe.’ As the common water mole is in Australia transformed to the duck-billed platypus, ‘in some distant emulation of this degeneracy, I suppose we are to be favoured with a bunyip aristocracy’.