Eureka to the Diggers

by Thomas Keneally

  Bungaleenee’s children, Harry and Tommy, were educated at the Baptist School for Aborigines at Merri Creek near Melbourne, and then were sent to Coburg National School and its hard-fisted teacher Mr Hinkins. Tommy died at the age of eleven in 1856. Harry was praised for his intellect but tended towards truancy, and at one stage attacked Hinkins with an iron bar. Nevertheless, the teacher was determined to transform him, and by the early 1860s places were sought for him at Scotch College and Melbourne Grammar, but he was not accepted by either. He became a messenger in the Department of Lands and was then implicated by white youths in an attack on a young girl, and sent to the training ship SS Virginia, the equivalent of a juvenile detention centre. He was part of the crew when it searched for Burke and Wills in the Gulf of Carpentaria, and by then he had settled to the discipline of being a sailor, and seemed to enjoy it.

  At the age of eighteen, Harry was back working as a map tracer at the Department of Mines, where he showed gifts for literacy, a good copyplate hand and competent drawing. He had entered a phase in which he wished to a demented degree to be saved from his own blackness, and had told his fellow sailors on Virginia that his parents were white. While washing his hands one day, he said to his old mentor and punisher Hinkins, ‘I think they are getting a little whiter—are they not, father?’ When someone suggested that he might like to marry a well-educated Aboriginal girl from New South Wales, he was outraged. ‘A black girl indeed! It’s like their impudence to speak to me about a black girl as a partner for life.’ While still eighteen, he asked Hinkins to sponsor him for membership of the Society of Oddfellows. The Oddfellows had derived their curious name from the fact that they accepted men from a number of trades, not simply one. Their self-help organisation stressed temperance, and their lodges had been erected all over Britain and in the colonies, where most towns of any size had an Oddfellows hall. The regalia involved in their ceremonies was somewhat like that of the Freemasons. Into this society, the son of Bungaleenee was duly inducted.

  In front of a crowded lodge in Melbourne, he declared, ‘Though I am the first of my race to receive this high honour, I sincerely hope I shall not be the last.’ Having achieved one of the marks of the white fellow, membership of a lodge, he died before he could achieve others. A month after his induction, he perished of gastric fever. By the time of his death the Kurnai, his people, were being rounded up into a mission named Ramahyuck, outside the Gippsland town of Sale, run by the Moravian Methodists. From south-east Queensland to South Australia some 4000 squatters and their 20 million sheep occupied an extraordinary swathe of land, massive by European standards, of almost a billion acres (400 million hectares, or 4 million square kilometres). It was not that native land had been taken over which concerned most liberal-minded people, but that it had not yet been unlocked. And when it was unlocked, it would not be unlocked for the Kurnai at Ramahyuck.

  POLITICS AND BANKRUPTCY

  By 1860 Henry Parkes, the ivory-turner immigrant from Birmingham who had espoused republican politics and promoted them in his liberal newspaper The Empire, was concerned with matters other than the principles implying white supremacy. An activist whose eloquence had helped put a final end to the transportation of prisoners to eastern Australia, he was a politically adept member for East Sydney in the Legislative Assembly of New South Wales at a time when the seats were large but were able to return a number of candidates, following the English pattern. He embarked upon becoming a consummate politician, but remained a bad businessman, a writer of poor verse, and a fancier of women.

  He had already met the other great colonial politician, Charles Gavan Duffy, when Duffy first arrived from Ireland, ultimately to settle in Melbourne, and had seen at once that he was a man of similar skills. ‘I do not profess to enter into the spirit of Mr Duffy’s public life in his native country, I yet know this of Irish history and Irish wrongs, that had I been myself an Irishman, with Mr Duffy’s temperament and his principles, I believe I should have been a rebel like him.’ Like Duffy, he was already a convinced Federationist. ‘The time is coming,’ he said in the early 1860s, ‘when we must all be Australians.’

  Governments of the time were unstable entities. When in New South Wales the first true ministry, led by the Sydney merchant, landowner and self-proclaimed liberal conservative Stuart Donaldson, lasted only two months, Parkes, one of his radical democratic opponents, claimed Donaldson resigned ‘in a fit of petulance’ over not being permitted to appoint judges to the Legislative Council, the colonial Upper House. The short life of Donaldson’s government was merely an omen of short-lived administrations to come throughout the early decades of self-rule.

  Always over Henry Parkes, as he participated in these unstable arrangements, there was the shadow of debt. William Bede Dalley would declare of the middle-aged Henry Parkes in 1872, ‘If he lives long, he will rule over a nation, not of admirers and friends, but of creditors.’ Said another contemporary, ‘The very ring of his voice has a promissory note in it.’ A prodigious liability of £50 000 had been built up by The Empire, and Parkes had been forced by it to quit politics in 1856. In the same year he published his second volume of poems, Murmurs of the Stream. This book was ‘dedicated to the 3057 electors of Sydney who returned the author to the Legislative Assembly, March 13th, 1856’.

  His verses were undistinguished but had an idealistic ring:

  Poor land! Of what avail for thee

  Thy summer wiles and skies resplendent,

  If all this light still lifeless be,

  And man grow here a thing dependent.

  As Sir Charles Wentworth Dilke, an English politician who travelled extensively in Australia, said of Parkes, ‘His debts, his poetry, are powerless to sink him.’

  The extolling of the ‘liberty’ side of the British tradition, that almost theological belief that emerged from Thomas Paine’s work and would be a founding principle of the civil life of the United States, was very strong in Parkes too. But small issues of business woe dragged him down from transcendence of Australian vision. He wrote of, ‘Disappointment’s pain and trust deceived, and efforts foiled.’ His heart bled under ‘misery’s fang’. But Australia, he said in a poem to his son, ‘the little southerner’, ‘shall startle the world from its pomp of old sins’.

  In a letter he wrote in March 1857 to his friend Jacob Levi Montefiore, a nineteenth-century entrepreneur in that colonial mode that stretched from insurance to manufacturing to pastoral interests, and a forgiving creditor of Parkes, he related that Sir Daniel Cooper, another of his creditors, had told him to his face that he would rather crush The Empire than suffer personal annoyance from his connection with it. ‘In ordinary cases this might be borne—if the ends in view were only the accumulation of money.’ But Parkes believed that ‘to infuse fire and vigour into the political life of the country’, he needed to be free of money worries.

  Wisely or not, he re-entered Parliament for the North Riding of the County of Cumberland in 1858, and declared his support for Charles Cowper’s Electoral Law Amendment Bill, introduced to the Legislative Assembly in May 1858, proposing representation on the basis of equal population per seat, manhood suffrage and vote by ballot. The Lancashire-born Cowper was a strange—some would say wonderful—combination of progressive businessman and radical. According to the conservative John Hay, the bill was likely to lead to mob chaos. ‘It left the good old English path . . . and was an indication that the Government of the country was on a downward course towards democracy and the tyranny of an unthinking majority.’

  Supporting such reforms, Parkes still had to resign when Sir Daniel Cooper struck again, demanding repayment of £11 000 with which Parkes had bought The Empire’s premises. The matter went before the Supreme Court, and possession of the property was taken and The Empire was advertised for sale. A meeting of creditors was held. Embarrassingly, there were wages owing to staff. Parkes faced insolvency. There were attempts by P
arkes’ political supporters to take up the mortgage. The paper closed down, leaving his house in Ryde threatened and forcing him ‘to begin life afresh with a wife and five children to support, a name in a commercial sense ruined and a doubt of the practical character of my mind’. But through help from friends, he had at least avoided bankruptcy. But he had to surrender his estate, the liabilities being estimated at £50 000 and the assets at £48 000.

  Though completely exonerated by the judge, Parkes had given his opponents a stick to beat him with. When he appeared before the electors of South Sydney at the general election of 1859 he was ‘vilified, oppressed, penniless’, but by the time the 1860s dawned he was the member for East Sydney, and economically but not politically humbled. He was still considered a radical, since he told the House that the parliament of a new country ‘has no graver duty to perform than guarding against the accumulation of special enactments which . . . are often at variance with the maxims of common law’. The common law favoured the rights and freedoms of citizens, not those of special interests or large landholders.

  The issues which were to make him unpopular with Catholics were already arising—state-aided religious schools were adverse to his belief that all religious bodies in the colony should work on a voluntary and self-supporting principle. Catholic priests denounced his secularism, and to some extent what they saw as his sectarianism, from the pulpit. He was already worried about the scale of Irish immigration. He complained that in the period 1860–69, 15 000 out of 20 000 assisted immigrants were Irish, and he saw the Irish Catholics as representing one solid priest-ridden political force alien to British progress. This assumption would in time make him behave obsessively towards the Irish, as when he opposed an assisted-immigration bill in 1869 because he ‘had no desire that his adopted country, the birth place of his children, should be converted into a province of the Pope of Rome’. Such talk made him a darling of the Orange Lodges, however, lodges inherited from Ulster whose mandate was to counter ‘Romish’ influence. Conflicts between ‘Green’ Irishmen and ‘Orange’ Irishmen were bitter.

  It was true that the Irish clergy sought to corral their flocks from other influences, so that the ‘One, True Faith’ remained unpolluted. There was also a tendency within Catholic schools to emphasise Irish history and to distinguish Australianness from Britishness. Mainstream prejudice against them cemented their Irish Catholics’ attachment to each other in any case. That aside, they were like everyone else trying to make their way in the suburbs, generally the industrialising ones, or often in the shabbier reaches of the bush. Unlike in Boston or New York they did not live in ghettoes, and their allegiance to Australia was unquestioning. In any case, the factory conditions in the cities and drought and low prices imposed a common Australian experience on everyone, without sectarian favour, though there were companies, such as Frederick Cato’s, the wholesale grocers, which would not employ Catholics. During the 1860s, signs reading No Irish Need Apply were placed at the doors of many businesses and factories. (Ulster Protestants were exempt from this exclusion.) In response, Irish Catholics began to organise through the Hibernian Association and the Knights of the Southern Cross to take workplaces over for their own kind. Catholic children in Melbourne schools in the 1890s would be told that members of the Holy, Catholic and Apostolic Church had ‘taken over’ the city’s tramways, and so they could always get a job there.

  Early in 1861, under the sting of want, Parkes accepted an invitation by Cowper to tour Britain with W.B. Dalley as an official government lecturer on immigration at a salary of £1000. His objective, he said when he was leaving, was to attract rich men as well as poor men to Australia. Some believed that he was offered this job, and its accompanying welcome salary, as a means for his enemies to get him out of Parliament. Cowper knew Parkes needed the money and, as William Lyne said, thus ‘in the course of a few days, one of the most prominent and consistent of the radical party . . . was removed from the arena’. When he sailed in May Parkes left behind his wife Clarinda and his children impoverished on their rented farm at Werrington.

  Dalley and Parkes opened offices in London, and described their official position—New South Wales Government Immigration Agents. They had letters of introduction to Mr Gladstone, Lord Brougham and the Duke of Newcastle. In dispatches home, they said that they were having problems because of ‘the indisposition of the wealthy classes to immigration’. Manufacturing was booming and the larger employers of labour were for the present in need of workers, and did not want to see a haemorrhaging of people to any of the new world countries. The ‘humbler walks of life’ were more interested in emigration but were put off by the New South Wales plan. Each emigrant, unless able to pay the whole of his passage money, was required by law to lodge the partial payment with the Colonial Treasury in Sydney, and this was a rigmarole for ordinary people not used to dealing with banks. (Queensland, Victoria and South Australia offered more attractive and less bureaucratic terms.) It was difficult to arrange ships until a certain number of passengers were guaranteed, so that many emigrants, like Parkes himself and Clarinda in 1838–39, had to wait around in London or Liverpool, Glasgow or Cork until the required number of emigrants were signed up.

  Though touring for money in an era before the payment of members, Parkes lost none of his sense of destiny, and during the progress of his journey he was able to meet and converse with such literary stars as Thomas Carlyle, renowned writer of The History of the French Revolution and the wit who called economics ‘the dismal science’, and Richard Cobden, advocate of peace and free trade. Going to Birmingham, the city of his birth, to lecture—travelling first class in contrast to the third-class unglazed carriage in which he and Clarinda had made their initial journey to London twenty-two years before—he took the opportunity to come to a business agreement with a fancy goods exporting business. He hoped (in vain) that this might guarantee his family’s affluence for the rest of their lives.

  Back in Sydney, he was delayed in his return to politics but there was no thwarting him permanently. In January 1864 he returned to the House at a by-election for the seat of Kiama, which he would hold until 1870. He was helped not only by his repute but by the fact that Kiama was the headquarters of the anti-Catholic Orange Lodge. He opposed both the Martin and Cowper ministries and built his own free trade radical faction.

  In 1865 Cowper tried without success to buy the ever cash-strapped Parkes off with an offer of the post of Inspector of Prisons, and when Parkes rebuffed that he offered him a ministry portfolio. But when Cowper lost the confidence of the House in early 1866 and the more conservative Cork-born James Martin was commissioned to form a ministry, he valued Parkes’ alliance and made him his colonial secretary. The alliance between Martin and Parkes was characteristic of nineteenth-century politics. Though raised Catholic, Martin—a liberal conservative with a passion like Parkes’ for state education—was agnostic enough to be attacked from the pulpit of St Mary’s Cathedral by Archbishop John Polding. Martin and Parkes collaborated to have the bushrangers of the time hunted down and, when successful, wanted some of their death sentences commuted.

  Parkes’ portfolio of Colonial Secretary made him responsible not only for internal New South Wales administration but also for liaising with the Colonial Office in Whitehall. Of Parkes as a minister, the Sydney Morning Herald would declare that, ‘No man among us knows better where to find the heart of the dark-browed and the rough-handed’—that is, of what would come to be called the proletariat. As for his passion for state schooling, Parkes declared, ‘My motto has always been, fewer gaols and fewer policemen, more schools and more schoolmasters.’

  Parkes was now equipped with the gifts—being visionary, ambiguous and cunning—to take him to his coming eminence.

  PLORN TRIES TO DO A MAGWITCH

  The story of Plorn Dickens in Australia would be characteristic of that of a number of genteel young Britons, in a class of more elevated self-tran
sportees. His elder brother, Alfred, had left Conoble for a new job as manager of Corona, a station in the barren Barrier Hills north of the site of what would be Broken Hill, and when in December 1868 young Plorn arrived, just sixteen, Mr Rusden organised a job for him at Eli Elwah, a large sheep station near Hay in New South Wales. Ten days after Plorn left for Eli Elwah, he turned up again in Melbourne, declaring that the resident owner was not a gentleman. Whatever had happened, Rusden wrote to Dickens that Plorn was lacking in resolution. Now it began to occur to Dickens that it might have been a mistake to commit Edward to such a wild and demanding colonial life. Dickens, having suffered a stroke, or a series of small ones, wrote to Rusden in early 1869 both warning his Australian friend not to believe the dire news about his health, and also declaring Edward to be ‘a queer wayward fellow with an unformed character . . . I still hope he may take to colonial life. I know that it is an experiment which may not succeed, and I know perfectly well that if it should not succeed, the cause of the failure will be in himself alone.’ One wonders how many young men of a nature like Plorn’s, dispatched to Australia, felt the same alienation and bewilderment when a kindly person in Sydney or Melbourne found them a position in some remote place full of rough-handed, harsh-souled men.

  Plorn’s new post was even more remote. Momba Station, 80 kilometres north-west of Wilcannia on the Darling, was in country marked by stony hills and lagoons and waterholes. Nearly 2 million acres, Momba carried 353 cattle and 75 000 sheep. Rainfall was meant to be 25 centimetres annually but did not always oblige. The other Australian reality was that millions of rabbits infested the pasture. The rabbit had taken only a few short decades to colonise the remotest Australian pasture land.