52. Port Macquarie Bench Book, June 13, 1836, NSWA 4/5639, cit. in Alan Atkinson, “Four Patterns of Convict Protest.”
53. Atkinson, ibid.
54. George Taylor, letter, CSO 1/624/14148, TSA, Hobart.
55. Deposition of James Davis, Dec. 10, 1829, HRA xv:306–7. Thomas Argent: HRA XV. 305.
56. CSO 1/568/12796, TSA, Hobart.
57. Sydney Gazette, Aug. 18, 1825.
58. Darling to Murray, Feb. 16, 1829, HRA xiv:646.
59. Gipps to Glenelg, Oct. 8, 1838, HRA xix:604.
60. Cook EL, pp. 33–34.
61. Sydney Gazette, Feb. 1, 1826.
62. George Loveless et al., A Narrative of the Sufferings of … Four of the Dorchester Labourers, p. 16.
63. Hirst, Convict Society, p. 109.
64. Goodwin to Lang, Sept. 21, 1850, A2226, Lang Papers, vol. 6, pp. 492–95, ML, Sydney.
65. James Brine, in G. Loveless et al., A Narrative, pp. 11–12.
66. Edward J. Eyre, “Autobiography,” Ms., p. 45.
67. Alexander Berry, Reminiscences, cit. in ADB, vol. 1, p. 95.
68. Berry to Wollstonecraft, June 7, 1823, and Oct. 13, 1825, cit. in Shaw CC, p. 222 from Berry Papers, xi/xii, ML, Sydney.
69. James Macarthur to SC 1837–38 (11), Minutes, p. 164. James Atkinson, An Account of the State of Agriculture and Grazing in New South Wales, pp. 112–16. T. P. Besnard, A Voice from the Bush in Australia: Shewing its Present State, Advantages, and Capabilities (1839), pp. 20–21, cit. in Crowley, Doc Hist., pp. 478–79.
70. Eyre, “Autobiography,” Ms., p. 46.
71. Parents to Holden, DDX 140/17:14, LRO, wife to Holden, DDX 140/17 16, LRO.
72. Bigge NSW, p. 76.
73. Bourke to Goderich, Apr. 30, 1832, HRA xvi:625.
74. Bigge NSW, pp. 76–77.
75. William Vincent, letter to his mother, Aug. 17, 1829, in SC 1837–38 (11), Appendix, p. 354.
76. Peter Withers, letter to his brother, TSA, Hobart
77. Withers, ibid.; Richard Dillingham, The Dillingham Convict Letters, ed. H. W. Foster (Melbourne, 1970), pp. 21–23 [Sept.-Nov. 1838].
78. Petition of Thomas Jones, Apr. 8, 1830, PC 1/78, PRO.
79. Bigge NSW, p 103.
80. Richard Whately, “Transportation,” in Miscellaneous Lectures and Reviews, pp. 258–59, cit. Clark, ed., Select Documents in Australian History, 1788–1850, p. 151
81. [O.P.Q.] in New South Wales Magazine, vol. 1 (August 1833), pp. 16–17.
82. Eyre, “Autobiography,” Ms., pp. 46–47.
83. John Standfield, in G. Loveless et al., A Narrative, pp. 5–6.
84. Shaw CC, p. 226, quoting Anne McKay, p. 355. Eyre, “Autobiography,” Ms., p. 47.
CHAPTER TEN Gentlemen of New South Wales
1. Peter Cunningham, Two Years in New South Wales, vol. 1, pp. 44–45.
2. “A Settler,” SMH, Jan 16, 1839, cit. in John B. Hirst, Convict Society and Its Enemies, p. 207.
3. Louisa Anne Meredith, Notes and Sketches of New South Wales, pp. 52–53.
4. Arthur Bowes Smyth and Ralph Clark, Journals, Feb. 7, 1788.
5. On John Macarthur, see ADB entry (vol. 2, pp. 153–59); Macarthur Papers, ML, Sydney; M. H. Ellis, John Macarthur, and S. Macarthur-Onslow, ed., Some Early Records of the Macarthurs of Camden.
6. Macarthur’s attempts to broaden his business interests beyond the pastoral were almost uniformly unsuccessful, so much so that by 1812 his unwise investments in Pacific trade had all but cancelled his profits from wool. He was the worst of company men. No one could work with him and expect to be treated as an equal partner. He boasted that he had “never yet failed in ruining a man who had become obnoxious to him.” His grand disaster was a chartered company set up to corner the production of wool in Australia. Macarthur had dreamt of such a monopoly since at least 1804, but not until twenty years later did he bring it into existence with the all-important backing of the British Government: the Australian Agricultural Company, endowed with a million acres of land near Port Stephens, north of Sydney, and capitalized by private subscription at £1 million. No corporation of this size had ever been set up in the Pacific, and despite its early success Macarthur wrecked it within four years. By 1828 his meddling had become so intrusive that the AAC’s shares sank from their original £100 to £8.
7. Macarthur’s timing: S. Cottrell to E. Cooke, July 14, 1804. Lord Camden’s land grant to Macarthur: David Collins, An Account of the English Colony in New South Wales, vol. 1, pp. 437–38.
8. On sheep-breeding in early colonial Australia, see Eric Rolls, A Million Wild Acres, pp. 23–27.
9. James Mudie, The Felonry of New South Wales, pp. 12–13.
10. James Macarthur to John Macarthur, Sr., June 24, and July 11, 1820, cit. in John M. Ward, James Macarthur, Colonial Conservative, p. 45.
11. On the southern “fisheries” of whales and seals, see Alan Moorehead, The Fatal Impact, pp. 195–204.
12. Unsigned memo on Bass Strait sealing to Lieut-Gov. Arthur, May 29, 1826, on microfilm reel 600, NSWA, Sydney.
13. The numbers of native women kidnapped in this way cannot be accurately assessed, but the traffic had two chief results. First, it stamped the aboriginal tribes with an ineradicable hatred of whites and depleted their birthrate. Second, and paradoxically enough, it ensured the survival of the Tasmanian Aborigines. After their extermination on the main island of Tasmania, a small group of aboriginal descendants continued to exist on Cape Barren Island in Bass Strait. (See Chapter 11.) For an account of the sealers’ incursions, see Anne McMahon, “Tasmanian Aboriginal Women as Slaves”; on the Cape Barren Islanders, see Lyndall Ryan, The Aboriginal Tasmanians.
14. On Campbell’s defiance of the East India Company’s embargo on oil and sealskin from Australia, see Alan Frost, Convicts and Empire, p. 193ff.
15. J. Arnold, letter to his brother, Feb. 25, 1810, A1849, ML, Sydney, cit. in Crowley, Doc. Hist., vol. 1, p. 171.
16. London Times, July 14, 1838. On Terry, see ADB entry (vol. 2, pp. 508–9); P. E. Leroy, “Samuel Terry” in JRAHS, vol. 47 (1961). On the rumors against Terry, see Bigge NSW, p. 141: Terry was alleged to keep ready-written powers of attorney in his public house, which fuddled ex-convicts would sign when drunk. “By these means, and by an active use of the common arts of over-reaching, Samuel Terry has been able to accumulate a considerable capital, and a quantity of land … inferior only to that which is held by Mr. D’Arcy Wentworth.” The allegations that he fleeced other ex-convicts began with the Rev. Samuel Marsden. At his death, the “Botany Bay Rothschild” (who was, in fact, a Gentile) left his widow with £10,000 a year, an estate of £250,000, and vast land holdings that included the whole of Martin Place, the hub of modern Sydney.
17. On Crossley, see ADB entry (vol. 1, p. 262). Crossley was charged with posthumously altering the will of a clergyman, on the man’s very deathbed, in favor of one of his own friends. He is said to have pleaded that there was, in fact, “life” in the Reverend’s body at the moment the will was doctored. He had made sure of this by popping a live fly in his client’s mouth, pushing it shut, and then placing in the dead hand a pen with which the signature was written. The court surprisingly acquitted him, but before long he was on his way to Botany Bay for seven years, for perjury in another malpractice case.
18. Although Bent’s sole motive was bigotry, he attempted to give his decision a legal veneer by basing his refusal to hear convict attorneys on the statute 12, Geo. I, c. 29.
19. On Redfern, see HRA 1:6–10, E. Ford, The Life and Work of William Redfern; and E. Ford, “Medical Practice in Early Sydney,” MJA, July 9, 1955.
20. Barron Field, “On Reading the Controversy between Mr. Byron and Mr. Bowles,” in Brian Elliott and Adrian Mitchell, eds., Bards in the Wilderness: Australian Colonial Poetry to 1920, p. 18.
21. On Lewin, see Bernard Smith, European Vision and the South Pacific, pp. 158–62. A relatively large number of convict artists were transported for the crime
closest to their profession, forgery. The colony also had its free amateurs. naval draftsmen like the unidentified “Port Jackson Painter,” who came with the First Fleet, and George Raper; and army officers who dabbled in painting, like Capt. James Wallis of the 46th Regiment.
22. John Grant, “Verses Written to Lewin, the Entomologist,” 1805, in Grant Papers, Ms. 737, NLA, Canberra.
23. On Lycett and the beguiling modifications of Australian landscape in his “Views,” see Smith, European Vision, pp. 179–81.
24. On Thomas Griffiths Wainewright, see J. Curling, Janus Weathercock (London, 1838); and R. Crossland, Wainewright in Tasmania (Melbourne, 1954). A sickly but eager esthete and something of a Georgian dandy, Wainewright was both painter and art critic, writing for the London Magazine in the 1820s under the pseudonyms of Egomet Bonmot and Janus Weathercock. He exhibited paintings strongly indebted to Henry Fuseli at the Royal Academy from 1826 onward. Wainewright lived beyond his means, and his fall from grace into the Antipodes began when he forged powers of attorney in order to get his hands on a capital sum of £5,250 left him by his grandfather and transferred, in trust, to his wife. Thirteen years later he was arrested and tried for (as he saw it) taking his own money. The governor of Newgate Prison persuaded him to plead guilty in return for a light sentence. Instead, to Wainewright’s horror, he was transported for life.
The unhappy artist arrived in Hobart at the end of 1837 and was put in a chain gang on the roads. His health collapsed and he was transferred to ward work in the Hobart hospital. In return for small and condescendingly given favors from the eminent of Hobart, he did watercolor portraits; some forty of these survive. A heartrending plea for a ticket-of-leave, written to the lieutenant-governor, Sir John Eardley Eardley-Wilmot, in April 1844, is preserved (Aw. 15, ML, Sydney). Wainewright calls Van Diemen’s Land “a moral sepulchre.” “Deign, your Excellency to figure to yourself my actual condition during 7 years, without friends, good-name (the breath of Life) or Art—(the fuel to it with me). Tormented at once by Memory, & Ideas struggling for outward form & realization, barred up from increase of knowledge, & deprived of the exercise of profitable or even decorous speech. Take pity, Your Excellency!” He reminds Eardley-Wilmot (who had probably not heard of any of them) that he, Wainewright, has been praised by “Flaxman, Coleridge, Chas. Lamb … & the God of his worship, Fuseli.” All to no avail; his ticket-of-leave was not granted until the end of 1846, less than a year before his death.
25. For an example of these “pipes,” see Anon., “Alas; poor Botany Bay,” in Elliott and Mitchell, eds., Bards in the Wilderness, p 8.
26. J. M. Freeland, Architecture in Australia, p. 39. On Greenway, see ADB entry (vol. 1, pp. 470–72); M. H. Ellis, Francis Greenway; and Morton Herman, Early Australian Architects and their Work.
27. Meredith, Notes and Sketches, pp. 50–51.
28. Ibid., p. 39.
29. Letters of G.T.W.B. Boyes, May 6, 1824, Royal Society of Tasmania, UTL, Hobart.
30. Meredith, Notes and Sketches, pp. 49–50.
31. Ibid., pp. 58–59, 75.
32. Hirst, Convict Society, pp. 118–19.
33. Gipps to Glenelg, Mar. 29, 1839. HRA xx:74.
34. Mellish, A Convict’s Recollections, p. 52.
35. Ullathorne to SC 1837–38 (11), Minutes, p. 22. Domestic horror-stories: Meredith, Notes and Sketches, p. 128. Christmas was especially trying, she reported “The prevailing vice of drunkenness among the lower orders is perhaps more resolutely practised at this season than any other. I have heard of a Christmas-day party being assembled, and awaiting the announcement of dinner as long as patience would endure, then ringing the bell, but without reply; and on the hostess proceeding to the kitchen, finding every servant either gone out or rendered incapable of moving, the intended feast being meanwhile burned to ashes. Nor is this by any means a rare occurrence.”
36. John Russell to SC 1837–38 (11), Minutes, p 56.
37. Gipps to Glenelg, Mar. 29, 1839, HRA xx:74.
38. Russell to SC 1837–38 (11), Minutes, pp. 58–59.
39. John Goodwin to J. D. Lang, 1850, Lang Papers, vol. 6, A2226, ML, Sydney.
40. Maconochie to SC 1837–38 (11), Report, p. xxxiii; Ullathorne to SC 1837–38 (11), Minutes, p. 23.
41. Russell to SC 1837–38 (ii), Minutes, p. 56.
42. Darling to Goderich, Oct. 2, 1837, HRA xiii: 673.
43. J. F. Mortlock, Experiences of a Convict Transported for Twenty-one Years, p. 92
44. On John Grant, see ADB entry (vol. 1, pp. 469–70); W. S. Hill-Reid, John Grant’s Journey; Grant Papers (journal and letters), NLA, Canberra. Grant’s description of his efforts to extract a ticket-of-leave from Governor King is in a letter to his mother and sister, Jan. 1, 1805, Ms. 737/22, NLA, Canberra.
45. Mortlock, Experiences of a Convict, pp. 84–85. The former MP was William Smith O’Brien (1803–1864), member for Ennis (1828–31) and Limerick (1835–49), one of the leaders of the Young Ireland movement who, with his compatriot John Mitchel and several others, was convicted of high treason in 1848 and transported for life to Van Diemen’s Land.
46. Woomera [pseud.], The Life of an Ex-Convict, p. 13. On official harassment of Specials who professed atheism, see James Bushelle, “Memoir.” Bushelle, the son of an Irish merchant in Limerick, was transported for stealing diamonds. He served a term in the penal station at Port Macquarie, returned to Sydney, became choir-leader in St. Mary’s Cathedral and instructor to the military bands; he presented these signs of respectability to Governor Bourke, hoping for an early ticket-of-leave. Alas, “Governor Bourke would not grant [me] that indulgence; haying referred to [my] character on the books, and found the charge of ATHEISM affixed to [my] name.” Instead, he went back to Port Macquarie for another year, bitterly lamenting the day he had succumbed to the French accomplice in crime who “in the polite and fascinating language of France and Italy … infused into my unsuspecting mind, that ffrench Philosophy best known in England as ffrench Principles, meaning those poisonous seeds disseminated by Voltaire and his school, founded upon Satire and Irony upon Religion and Government.”
47. The first view was set forth by Russel Ward in The Australian Legend: “All we know about the convicts shows that egalitarian class solidarity was the one human trait which usually remained to all but the most brutalized.” It was attacked by Humphrey McQueen (A New Britannia, pp. 126–27) on the grounds that the convicts could not have felt class loyalty because they did not form a class “For its first fifty years at least, Australia did not have a class structure, but only a deformed stratification.… The convicts lacked, through no fault of their own, any feeling of class-consciousness.” This late Marxist boilerplate ignores the primary social fact of colonial society, which was that convicts were treated, oppressed, and made to see themselves as a class separate from and inferior to all free settlers. They were usually called “a class” in official communications. That their behavior did not conform to Utopian stereotypes of class unity—that, like their social superiors, they competed for property and status—in no way altered their sense of separateness as a group, or their ability to stick together. In McQueen’s schematic view of history, even the convicts’ dislike of guard, trap, informer and beak was “essentially bourgeois in origin and content,” reflecting only the hegemony of false individualism. No doubt if they had loved their Gulag, such writers would laud them as pioneer Stalinists.
48. Rev. John Morison, Australia As It Is, London, 1864, p. 223.
49. Hunter to SC 1812, Appendix 1, Minutes, p. 23.
50. Samuel Marsden, “A Few Observations on the Toleration of the Catholic Religion in N. South Wales.”
51. Ward, Australian Legend, pp. 29–30.
52. Mellish, Recollections, pp. 63–65.
53. Alexander Harris, Settlers and Convicts, p. 326.
54. Ibid., p. 126.
55. Bligh to SC 1812, Appendix 1, Minutes, p. 46. Bigge NSW, p. 102. Bourke to Goderich, Apr. 30, 1832, HRA xvi:625.
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56. Sydney Smith, Edinburgh Review, July 1819.
57. For a discussion of the complexities of origin in colonial society in the 1820s, and the inadequacy of the “children of the convicts” stereotype, see Portia Robinson, The Hatch and Brood of Time.
58. “Crime descends”: Judge Alfred Stephen to James Macarthur, ca. 1857, cit. in Michael Sturma, Vice in a Vicious Society, p. 2 On the respectable reaction against convictism, see Sturma, p. 8 “Ultimately the community’s reaction to its convict origins proved of more lasting and profound significance than convictism itself.”
59. Sir William W. Burton, “State of Society and State of Crime in New South Wales …,” Colonial Magazine, vol. 1, p. 425.
60. Burton, ibid., vol. 2, pp. 51–53. Burton’s general figures for crime, gathered from trials before other judges as well, show the same pattern. Translated into percentages of defendants in three sample years, they become:
61. Bigge NSW, p. 105.
62. Robinson, Hatch and Brood of Time, p. 12.
63. “None but slaves do work”: Cunningham, New South Wales, vol. 2, pp. 48–49. Aversion to the sea and maritime labor: Robinson, Hatch and Brood of Time, p. 237ff. Bigge, it seems, was wrong in reporting (Bigge NSW, pp. 81–82) that “many of the native youths have evinced a strong disposition for a sea-faring life, and are excellent sailors … [T]hat class of the population will afford abundant and excellent materials for the supply of any department in the commercial or naval service.”
64. “Fair hair and blue eyes”. Cunningham, New South Wales, vol. 2, p. 53. Other references to Currency traits also are from Cunningham, passim.
65. G.T.W.B. Boyes to Mary Boyes, Oct. 23 and 27, 1831, in Boyes Letters, UTL, Hobart
66. “Supercilious intolerance”. Harris, Settlers and Convicts, pp. 295–96. “Sterling madonnas”: Cunningham, New South Wales, vol. 2, p. 53.
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