2

Empire, convicts and currency

c. 1771–1820

In his thirties, James Cook had played a notable part in securing the empire of the world,
particularly of North America and India, to Britain in her Seven Years’ War with France (1756-63).
When he was killed in 1779, in what his European contemporaries called the Sandwich Islands,
Britain was in the midst of another and less successful war with France. When it had ended in 1783,
Britain had won Canada from the French but lost her own settlements in North America. The thirteen
colonies on the Atlantic seaboard from New England to Georgia had federated to form a new nation,
the United States of America. The Peace of Versailles left British statesmen with one major problem
– how to preserve what was left of the Empire, principally India – and one minor one – what to do
with her surplus criminals now that the North American colonies would no longer take them. William
Pitt, who first became prime minister in December 1783, saw his first task as the “uniting and
connecting” of a “shattered” empire.l

His father, William Pitt the elder, Earl of Chatham, had done much to create the empire when he
inspired the country and the government during the Seven Years’ War. His great-grandfather had
founded the family’s fame and fortune during the years when he governed Madras for the British East
India Company – in an age when corruption was universal and, under the name of “mercantilism”, even
those with the cleanest hands innocently proclaimed that colonies should exist for the benefit of
the merchants of the mother country. With such a background it is not surprising that the younger
Pitt saw the fostering of British rule in India and the East as the principal part of his task. To
it he brought those unmatched abilities which had made him prime minister at the age of 24 only two
years after he entered parliament. At a time when many English gentlemen drank port every night
until stupefaction set in, it was said that Pitt was seen drunk in the House of Commons only once –
and then he had the sang-froid to retire behind the speaker’s chair to vomit. The least talented
person in the government was probably Thomas Townshend, Viscount Sydney, Secretary of State. To him
fell the less important but more pressing task of finding a place suitable for the reception of
Britain’s felons.2

The matter was urgent because, as it seemed to contemporaries, crime and criminals had been
multiplying at an alarming rate. Throughout the eighteenth century the “agricultural revolution”
transformed the face of the English countryside. More and more enclosure acts were passed through
parliament by and for the landed gentry and their friends – for large “capitalist”, farms, run on
scientific lines, produced much more food for sale, and profit for their owners, than the
traditional kind of land use. As the change proceeded, thousands of small tenant farmers, poor
labourers and their families with ancient traditional rights to some forms of land use found
themselves expropriated. Most of them moved to the growing industrial towns, as did Henry Parkes’
family to Birmingham in the early years of the nineteenth century,3 but much was lost even by those
who found work in the new factories driven by water or steam power. They left, perforce, a settled
life in a village community made secure by friendship and traditionally sanctioned relationships
involving mutual obligations with squire and parson. They became, often, “hands” in an impersonal
factory, living among strangers in jerry-built terrace houses, working for inhumanly long hours at
low wages and bereft of all sense of belonging or personal worth – and these were the lucky ones.
Those who could not find work often had to steal or starve.4

Citizens with property worth stealing naturally worried mightily about the increasing criminality
of those to whom they referred as “the lower orders”. But their ideas for stemming the flood of
larceny, mayhem and murder were limited. The British governing classes, those whom G .A. Wood
called “the men who plundered their country in habitual political robbery”,5 thought only of
terrifying potential malefactors by hanging more and more of the few who were caught. Thus in the
century between 1688, when Dampier’s pirates were careening the Cygnet on a New Holland beach, and
1788 when the First Fleet landed the first white Australians in Sydney Cove, the number of capital
crimes in the English statute books rose from about fifty to two hundred. For instance, by the end
of the eighteenth century hanging crimes included picking pockets of goods worth more than one
shilling, shoplifting of goods worth more than five shillings, and cutting down trees in an avenue
or garden.6

Alas for the property-holders, neither the preachings of the clergy nor fear of the scaffold
deterred many poor people from following the paths of wickedness in which they had been trained by
desperate or demoralised parents. This was partly because police forces were so ineffecient that
wrong-doers had an excellent chance of escaping scot free, and partly because the very severity of
the laws defeated their purpose. When the penalty for stealing goods of or above the value of a
shilling was death, juries often found the value to be less – despite the most cogent evidence to
the contrary. Even magistrates and judges frequently sentenced to transportation people who should
legally have been “turned off” by the hangman. But these temperings of justice with mercy merely
exacerbated the problem of what was to be done with the hordes of criminals unlucky enough to be
caught.

Until 1776 most of them had been shipped to the American colonies, where their services, for the
term of their sentences, were sold to planters and other employers by the contractors who took them
off the hands of the British government. In that year Adam Smith published his classic statement of
capitalist economics, The Wealth of Nations, and the American colonists, some of whom in time were
to become the world’s most ardent capitalists, published their Declaration of Independence,
proclaiming “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” to be the inalienable rights of all. Few
at that time troubled their heads much about the rights of women, but the founding fathers of the
United States of America did think it beneath the dignity of the new nation to continue receiving
British gaolbirds. Illogically, or perhaps logically, they made up for the deficiency of cheap
labour by buying more Negro slaves, many of whom were brought from West Africa in British ships.
There were not enough gaols in the British Isles to hold those sentenced to transportation and so,
as a temporary expedient, the government confined them in old hulks, generally moored in naval
ports where the prisoners’ labour could be used in building docks and other harbour facilities.
Meanwhile successive Secretaries of State for Home Affairs sought suitable places of exile.

In 1782 a few hundred felons were drafted into the army and sent to Cape Coast Castle on the West
African “Slave Coast”, but those who survived the fever deserted and fought with a nearby Dutch
force against their British masters. Later in the year Gambia was suggested for the first time as a
receptacle for the ungrateful wretches. In the following year Cook’s old shipmate, James Mario
Matra, first pressed on the government the surpassing advantages of Botany Bay. He felt that this
place would make an ideal prison for the convicts, offered many commercial and strategic advantages
and, in addition, would make a splendid home for thousands of dispossessed United Empire loyalists
– people who, like Matra himself, had declared for the mother country when the American colonies
rebelled. The government was not much impressed, nor was Viscount Sydney when he returned to the
Secretary of State’s desk in December 1783.

During the next three years Matra, the “loyal” New Yorker, and Banks, his patron, were only two of
the multitude of people who lobbied the government with conflicting ideas for the transportation of
convicts. Among the places considered more or less seriously were the Canadian maritime provinces,
British Honduras, the island of St Thomas in the Gulf of Guinea, New Zealand, New Caledonia,
Norfolk Island, points on the coast of Madagascar, Lemain (an island about 700 kilometres up the
Gambia River in West Africa), Das Voltas Bay and several other points on the African coastline, and
the islands of Tristan da Cunha, Diego Garcia and the Andamans. The claims of Botany Bay were
agitated more often than those of any other place because Cook had sung the praises of phormium
tenax, a flax plant, and of splendid-looking straight pine trees, both of which flourished on
Norfolk Island.7

In the eighteenth century, naval power and world dominion depended on ample and assured supplies of
timber for ship-building and flax for sails and cordage, just as later navies depended successively
on coal and oil; but England drew uncertain supplies of these strategic commodities from Russia and
other Baltic areas and, worse from Pitt’s point of view, all British ships in the Indian Ocean
depended completely on these Baltic supplies shipped to the east with vast difficulty and at great
expense. Alan Frost has shown that from 1784 onwards decisions about Home and Colonial Affairs were
not made by Sydney, but by the prime minister, Pitt.8 As we have seen, he was deeply concerned with
the security of the Indian trade, after the loss of North-America the greatest source of imperial
wealth and of his own family’s fortune. Perhaps a settlement on the east coast of New Holland,
close to the supposed naval supplies of Norfolk Island, would buttress Britain’s strategic position
throughout the Indian and Pacific Ocean areas, forestall the French, secure to the Honourable East
India Company the lion’s share of the “Eastern” trade, and at the same time furnish a suitably
remote dumping-ground for the denizens of the hulks whose presence at home had embarrassed
successive governments for so long. Besides, empty convict transport ships might bring home cargoes
of China tea to quench the latest British thirst.

At last in 1787 the King’s speech to parliament announced that a plan had been formed “for
transporting a number of convicts in order to remove the inconvenience which arose from the crowded
state of the gaols in different parts of the kingdom”.9 A new empire and a new receptacle for
unwanted criminals was to replace the lost American colonies. It was symbolic that the first human
being to be hanged at “Botany Bay”, Thomas Barrett, was transported for the crime of having
returned to England before the end of the fourteen years for which he had been exiled to America
for stealing a watch.10

In May of the same year, the First Fleet of eleven store-ships and transports set sail for Botany
Bay. Most of its complement of something more than a thousand felons and their gaolers disembarked
in the virgin bush at Sydney Cove eight months later, on 26 January 1788. It had been – for the
period – a slow but more than usually healthy voyage.

The first governor and commander-in-chief was Arthur Phillip, a sensible and, by contemporary
standards, unusually humane naval captain. A typical man of the Age of Reason, he gave formal
assent to the doctrines of the Church of England, which body he regarded as a useful buttress of
state power rather than as one concerned with supernatural revelations or the calling of sinners to
repentance. He probably owed his appointment to his friendship with George Rose, Secretary to the
Treasury, or with Sir Evan Nepean, Under-Secretary to the Home Office, both of whom were friends
and confidants of Pitt himself. All three knew of Phillip’s abilities, for they had despatched him
on a secret and successful mission to France in 1784 to spy on war preparations in Toulon and other
ports.11 Doubtless Phillip knew too that the government saw the new settlement as a “strategic
outlier” to imperial interests in Asia as well as a conveniently remote convict depot. This would
account for his being almost the only person in the First Fleet who foresaw the time when the
miserable little gaol might become a prosperous and civilised country, but the immediate struggle
for survival taxed his strength to the limit.

His human cargo had been dumped on the shore where Sydney now stands. About three-quarters of them
were convicts, men, women, and children; many were aged or infirm, and nearly all unwilling to
work. The remainder were mainly Marine Corps officers and men, sent out as a guard; but from the
moment of landing, the officers manifested a keen appreciation of their station in life. They
refused to compromise what they regarded as their dignity by supervising the work of felons, except
in the case of those who had been assigned to them personally as servants. Thus the best-behaved –
or most sycophantic – convicts had to be made constables and placed in other positions of some
responsibility. Most of the colonists were criminals from the slums of London and other great
cities. There was hardly a gardener or farmer among them. Seeds refused to sprout in the alien
soil, and for the first two years the colony was threatened with famine. With something of Cook’s
nobility, Phillip placed his private stock of food in the communal store and decreed the same scale
of rations for bond and free. The “starving time” had passed by the time he sailed for England in
December 1792, and the day when the colony would be self-supporting seemed not quite as far off as
before. There was one convict in the First Fleet, who had been bred to farming, James Ruse. Phillip
gave him every encouragement and in April 1791 title to the first 40 acres (16 hectares) of land
ever granted by the British Crown on the Australian continent. By that time Ruse had succeeded in
producing enough to keep himself and his family.12

Only about one convict in every four in the First Fleet was female. This gross imbalance between
the sexes generally increased throughout the whole period of transportation. When the last “exile”
landed in Western Australia in 1868, about 162 000 had been transported, of whom about 25 000, or
one in every six or seven, were women.13 The scarcity of women in the early days disfigured
Australian life for long afterwards, creating a much cruder, male-dominated, “frontier” society
than developed in most other colonies where Europeans settled in the nineteenth century.
Surprisingly, the reasonable men in the British government, who drafted Phillip’s commissions,
recognised the danger and sought to provide against it. Phillip was to order the commanders of any
ship visiting islands in the south seas “to take on board any of the women who may be disposed to
accompany them to Sydney”, providing that no deception or compulsion was employed.14 Possibly
because he feared that the Polynesian women would in fact be brutally kidnapped if the scheme were
put into effect, the man of the enlightenment ignored the proposal. No women were present when the
officers and marines hoisted the Union Jack and “christened” Sydney Town about noon on 26 January
1788, at the spot in the bush where the obelisk now stands in Macquarie Place. When the female
convicts landed on a Sunday eleven days later, most un-Sabbath-like scenes ensued. As darkness
fell, men and women, convicts and marines joined in an orgy of rum and fornication. A tropical
storm poured down on the revellers, seemingly lashing them on to fulfil the Biblical command to
Noah and his sons to be fruitful, to multiply and to replenish the earth.15

Contemporary observers, whether male or female, agreed that the women convicts were even more
profligate, vicious and irredeemable than the men, but recent research shows that all have been
tarred with the sins of a minority.16 At least one woman in every five was a prostitute at the time
of her arrest.17 In the early years of the system, most others were forced into prostitution on the
transport ships, where they lived promiscuously with the sailors or took a protector from among
them. Those whose “innocence” survived until their arrival at Port Jackson or Hobart Town were
almost always forced into prostitution in the new country, if only because prisoners had to find
their own board and lodging. Only the luckier or more attractive women were able to cohabit with
only one man, at least for a time. As late as 1811, as soon as female convicts disembarked,
officers, non-commissioned officers, privates and free settlers took it in turns to have women
assigned to them “not only as servants but as avowed objects of intercourse, which is without even
the plea of the slightest previous attachment as an excuse, rendering the whole colony little less
than an extensive brothel”.18

Up until about the same date, women were sometimes flogged for real or imagined misbehaviour, but
this rarely or never happened later on. After about 1820, recalcitrant or spirited female prisoners
were punished only by having their heads shaved, by serving a sentence on the treadmill, by
solitary confinement or by imprisonment at the Female Factory at Parramatta or at The Cascades
outside Hobart Town.19 To these places were sometimes sent also those female prisoners unlucky (or
lucky) enough not to have been assigned to a settler. Hardened old harridans and at least
relatively innocent new arrivals were all put to work weaving rough cloth for “Government”. Yet the
life of a Factory woman was not one of unrelieved hard labour and boredom. Because of the scarcity
of white women, and because the authorities believed that embracing holy matrimony improved the
character of both spouses, a sort of marriage bureau was conducted at Parramatta every Monday
morning. The best behaved women were paraded by the matron. Dressed in whatever finery they could
muster, they conversed with free but unmarried men in search of a helpmeet. Any couple who fancied
each other was then given a special licence and married, often by Reverend Samuel Marsden. The
bridegroom was usually an emancipist farmer or “dungaree settler” like the bush-ranger Ben Hall’s
father, who was married “out of the Factory” in this way. James F. O’Connell gives a vivid account,
that at least rings true, of one such wedding. The happy couple sets out on their long journey to
the farm in a bullock-dray in which the “stringy-bark” settler has “previously deposited something
hardly less beloved ... than his wife – a five-gallon keg of Cooper’s gin”. After the wedding party
has disposed of tea, mutton and damper served on dishes made of “rounds of logs, sawed off thin”,
the keg is broached, pipes and tobacco produced, and

an edifying conversation commences between the new wife and her female visitors – an exchange of
experiences, in which each details how cruelly she was “lagged” on suspicion; all innocent as the
fifteenth generation yet to be born, of the crime for which the magistrates had the tyranny to
convict her; the dirty vagabonds of witnesses cruelly swearing her life away.20

Yet despite the profligacy and drunkenness forced on them by a crude and massively male-dominated
society the majority of women convicts did improve vastly in morals, if not necessarily in manners.
The most cogent proof of this is that they bore and brought up the first two generations of
native-born, white Australians, people whom even the sternest moralists proclaimed to be ethically
superior in every way to their parents and, more often than not, to the generality of free
immigrants.21

Phillip’s instructions also enjoined him to “open an intercourse with the natives, and to
conciliate their affections, enjoying all our subjects to live in amity and kindness with
them”.22 No one could have tried harder to carry out this order. On 15 May 1788 in his first
despatch to his master, Lord Sydney, Phillip wrote “it was my determination from my first landing
that nothing less than the most absolute necesity should ever make me fire upon them”.23 Two years
later he was still better than his word. On 7 September 1790 at Manly Cove, displaying, as a later
generation of Australians might say, “more guts than Ned Kelly”, but not more than Cook had shown
at his death, the unarmed governor of New South Wales walked along the beach holding out both hands
in a gesture of peace towards an armed Aborigine. For answer the black man hurled his spear so
forcefully that the barbed point transfixed Phillip’s right shoulder. The butt-end of the 3
metre-long spear kept striking the ground as this gentleman of the age of enlightenment returned
painfully to his boat. No serious efforts were made to punish the offender.24

The captain-general could not, however, control the passions of his white subjects as he could his
own. From the very first day of contact many convicts and marines stole from the Aborigines their
fishing and hunting tackle, their women and sometimes their lives, just as the British government,
in the person of Arthur Phillip, had already stolen their land. The first-comers fought back as
well as they could. In the first three years up to December 1790 they had killed or wounded
seventeen whites. When Phillip’s gamekeeper, M’Entire, was killed in that month, the governor’s
stock of calm reason came to an end. He despatched two punitive expeditions with orders to bring
back in bags the severed heads of six Aborigines from what was thought to be the offending tribe.
Both expeditions failed even to make contact with the Aboriginal enemy,25 but from that time
onwards no one set in authority over white Australians made such efforts as Phillip had done to see
that they lived “in amity and kindness” with black ones, and few indeed tried so hard to understand
them.

The abyss of incomprehension which separated the two races was graphically illustrated in May 1791.
Phillip decided to make an example of a convict caught in the act of stealing fishing tackle from
Dar-in-ga, the wife of Colbee. The man was severely flogged in the presence of many Aborigines who
had been made to understand the reason for his punishment, but “there was not one of them that did
not testify strong abhorrence of the punishment, and equal sympathy with the
sufferer”.26 Aborigines never could understand people who, in cold blood, deliberately inflicted
pain on a fellow human being. Unlike nearly all other people on the earth, they never engaged in
any form of cold-blooded torture. As the eyewitness, Tench, put it, the fiasco showed that the
Aborigines were “not of a sanguinary and implacable temper. Quick indeed of resentment, but not
unforgiving of injury.”27 Their humane and conciliatory temper, like their social organisation and
the inferiority of their weapons, remained a fatal weakness in their efforts to resist the
implacable and bloodthirsty European invaders.” The temper of North American Indians, for instance,
was very different and their resistance to white conquest correspondingly more sustained and
somewhat more successful.

Thus with relatively slight pressure toward closing their ranks against the black natives, white
Australian pioneers had ample scope for falling out with each other. The historian may doubt
whether there was any more quarrelsome society in the world than that of early New South Wales,
though even at this period quarrels were usually fought out in law courts, drawing rooms and grog
shops with words and fists rather than with more lethal weapons. Naturally, indeed inevitably, the
traditionally hallowed class distinctions of England tended to be reproduced in the Antipodes. In
some ways, conditions even accentuated them. For many years after the first white settlement – up
until at least 1840 – the vast majority of working people were convicts, or ex-convicts, or people
who associated familiarly with these groups and their children. Thus a visiting ship’s captain
wrote in 1805:

The circumstances under which the colony was settled, and the very purpose of the settlement, has
had a very visible effect upon the general manners, or what may be called the national character,
of Botany Bay. The free settlers are not without something of the contagion ... From upwards of a
hundred families who have been sent out from England, there are not above eight or ten between whom
and the convicts the smallest degree of discrimination could be drawn.28

Under these conditions it was not surprising that the colonial “gentry”, at first nearly all naval
or military or civilian government officers, should have drawn their spiritual skirts closely about
them in an effort to fix between themselves and the “felonry” an even greater gulf than existed
between the gentry and the “lower orders” in contemporary Britain.29 The two parties early came to
be known as “exclusionists” and “emancipists”, the former because they sought to exclude from
polite society ex-convicts and all other low fellows, the latter because they were emancipated
prisoners or friends, associates or descendants of such people. John Hood hardly exaggerated when
he wrote as late as 1843: “Caste in Hindostan is not more rigidly regarded than it is in Australia:
the bond and free, emancipist and exclusionist, seldom associate together familiarly.”30

This deep and bitter class feeling was sharpened too by the fact that there were relatively few
middle-class people to serve as any kind of bridge between the masses, tainted with the stigma of
felonry, and those who considered themselves the colonial gentry. As late as 1841 the New South
Wales census listed 4477 squatters (large-scale graziers), merchant-importers, bankers, and
professional men, and 50 158 craftsmen, labourers, servants and so on. Between these upper and
lower millstones there were only 1774 shopkeepers and other retail dealers. In the foundation years
the absence of any middle order of people was, as we have seen, even more marked. As David Collins,
the colony’s first judge-advocate, noted:

It was to have been wished, that a watch ... had been formed of free people ... But there was not
any choice. The military had their line of duty marked out for them, and between them and the
convict there was no description of people from whom overseers or watchmen could be provided.31

Yet, despite these factors, the gulf between the two classes was never as unbridgeable as those who
came to be ironically termed “pure merinos” (rigid exclusionists) wished to make it.32 From the
beginning there were other, and even more powerful, levelling influences at work. First, the very
intensity of the exclusionists’ emphasis on their gentility betrayed the precariousness of their
position. The British class structure could not in the nature of things survive, without
modification, transplantation to an antipodean wilderness – especially with its vital middle
component missing. If the colonial working people were heavily tainted by convictism, so were their
self-appointed betters by the part they played in “the system”. As the celebrated naturalist,
Charles Darwin, who visited Sydney in 1836, put it:

How thoroughly odious to every feeling, to be waited on by a man who the day before, perhaps, was
flogged from your representation, for some trifling misdemeanour. The female servants are of course
much worse; hence children learn the vilest expressions, and it is fortunate if not equally vile
ideas.33

Moreover, though a few of the squatters and other “pure merinos”, especially after about 1820, came
from families recognised in Britain as gentry, the great majority of the exclusionists did not. For
the most part, members of the colonial upper class came from the middle or lower middle class in
England. Often they were distinguished from the generality of colonists, only by their greater
wealth – and their greater taste for vulgar display. As the well-bred Hood lamented in 1843:

If the truth must be told, the fortunes of many of the exclusionists themselves were not acquired
by the purest means; close contracts, the gin or rum-shop, embarrassments wilfully created by
insidious loans and ejectments, and other crooked paths, were used equally by both parties, bond
and free.

Or as the radical Presbyterian parson. Reverend Dr John Dunmore Lang, put it: “Very strange tales
are told of gentlemen of New South Wales.”

Worse, from the point of view of the traditionalists, was the extreme fluidity of colonial society.
Many emancipists like Simeon Lord and Samuel Terry, the “Botany Bay millionaire” who once owned the
land on which Sydney’s general post office now stands, rapidly became rich, and if they themselves
were never quite accepted in polite society, their offspring often were. “Their children are sent
to the colleges of England,” wrote Hood, “and their daughters’ fortunes get them husbands from
among the free.”

The truth was that the convict system tended to corrupt the manners, if not always the morals, of
both the prisoners and their gaolers. Technically the settler acquired a property in the services
of the convict, not in his or her person; but in practice, as we have seen, free persons selected
female convicts, more or less openly, as mistresses. There were of course honourable and honoured
exceptions, men like Governor Phillip and the much-loved Governor Lachlan Macquarie who ruled from
1810 to 1821, but Governor Philip Gidley King (1800-06) had two sons by convict mistresses, one
named Norfolk and one Sydney, presumably in honour of their respective birthplaces. David Collins,
deputy judge-advocate of New South Wales under Phillip, had two children by Anne Yeates in Sydney
and two more by Margaret Eddington when he was Lieutenant-Governor of Van Diemen’s Land, where his
successor, “Mad Tom Davey”, in his official capacity attended divine service with a convict
paramour on his arm. True, Davey was dismissed, but when viceroys conducted themselves thus, what
was to be expected of the felonry? In fact, at least up to the end of Macquarie’s reign, the great
majority of all the children born in the colony were illegitimate, being quaintly if prophetically
termed in official documents “national children”. About nine-tenths were the offspring of convicts
or ex-convicts on at least one side of the (often temporary) parental union.34

The general debauchery was both sustained and aggravated by the oceanic tide of Bengal rum which
was for many years the principal commodity imported. It was an age of prodigious drinking in which
London gin-shops advertised that customers could get drunk for a penny and dead drunk for twopence,
but the specially selected colonists at Sydney and Hobart Town outdrank all others. The New South
Wales Corps, recruited for the peculiar service of keeping order at “Botany Bay”, replaced the
Marine detachment on Phillip’s departure in 1792. It proved a thorn in the flesh of successive
governors from 1795 until its departure in 1810, earning in popular usage the sobriquet of the “Rum
Corps”. During its existence, and for most of the following decade, coinage was in such chronically
short supply that rum, often used as a generic term for spirits, became the commonest medium of
incentive payments to convicts and the commonest article of barter, so common that some historians
have held that it functioned as the de facto currency of the colony during this period. The
traditional words of “The Convicts’ Rum Song” give a romanticised, or heroic, picture of the place
rum occupied in the community and hint at the reasons for its importance.

Cut yer name across me backbone,

Stretch me skin across a drum,

Iron me up to Pinchgut Island

From today till Kingdom-come!

I will eat yer Norfolk dumpling

Like a juicy Spanish plum,

Even dance the Newgate Hornpipe

If ye’ll only gimme RUM!

“Pinchgut Island”, originally little more than a barren rock in Sydney Harbour, served as a place
of solitary confinement, and occasionally of execution, for particularly refractory convicts in the
early days. Later officially renamed Fort Denison, the older term has persisted in popular usage. A
“Norfolk dumpling” symbolised prison conditions at Norfolk Island, after 1825 the most appalling of
all penal settlements for twice-convicted felons. The “Newgate hornpipe” meant, of course, the
“dance” of death on the gallows. Nevertheless, legend has exaggerated the quantity, though not the
quality, of brutality inflicted on the “government men” under the convict system. Probably fewer
than 15 per cent of all those transported ever saw the inside of such penal hells as Norfolk
Island, and probably fewer than half were ever flogged at all. Soldiers in the army, equally
subject to the lash, very often committed crimes in Australia because they were convinced that they
would be better off as convicts. There were many humane and reasonable men like D’Arcy Wentworth
among employers, as well as some sadists. Alexander Harris, one of the most judicious reporters of
early Australian life, has left two accounts which together show vividly the worst and the best
sides of “the system”. The first is an eyewitness account of a flogging, the second a convict’s own
tale of the brighter side of the picture:

I saw a man walk across the yard with the blood that had run from his lacerated flesh squashing out
of his shoes at every step he took. A dog was licking the blood off the triangles, and the ants
were carrying away great pieces of human flesh that the lash had scattered about the ground. The
scourger’s foot had worn a deep hole in the ground by the violence with which he whirled himself
round on it to strike the quivering and wealed back, out of which stuck the sinews, white, ragged
and swollen. The infliction was a hundred lashes, at about half-minute time, so as to extend the
punishment through nearly an hour ... They had a pair of scourgers, who gave one another spell and
spell about; and they were bespattered with blood like a couple of butchers. I tell you this on the
authority of my own eyes. It brought my heart into my mouth.35

The narrator of the following story was a convict who had absconded from the penal settlement at
Coal River, later Newcastle. He was captured and brought before the bench for sentence:

Then was my turn; but old Dr Wentworth was on the bench, and you know I had been sent to him for
six weeks in harvest directly after I came into the country ... So, all of a sudden, just as I
thought I was going to get my dowry,  up jumps the old doctor, stamping as if he was mad, and
shaking his fist at me ... “Gentlemen,” says he, “this is one of the most polished scamps in the
Colony. I know him well. Two hundred lashes! Pooh, pooh! He’d forget about it by tomorrow morning.
I fancy I’d better have him down to my Homebush farm and see what I can do with him.”  ... So it
was agreed on, for none of the other magistrates dared say No when D’Arcy Wentworth said Yes ... So
there I was by that night at sundown eating and drinking the best there was in the huts at
Homebush; and you heard tell how all the doctor’s men live. There I stayed till I got free; and
then hired to him. Never got one lash the whole five years I was with him.36

The prevalence of rum, like the foundation of Australia itself, also owes something to America.
When Phillip, worn out and ill, left for England, no new governor had been appointed. Major Francis
Grose, commandant of the New South Wales Corps, became lieutenant-governor. Soon after his
assumption of power, the Yankee ship Hope sailed through Sydney Heads with a much-needed cargo of
general provisions and 7500 gallons (more than 28 000 litres) of rum. Her skipper, Benjamin Page,
swore he would not sell his mixed cargo unless every barrel of rum was also purchased. Supplies of
all kinds were still desperately short and Page, like other trading skippers, demanded absurdly
inflated prices for his goods. In the face of such extortionate demands, the officers of the Corps
and their friends decided to form a counter-monopoly of their own. Under the nominal command of
Grose, but largely inspired by a forceful young lieutenant called John Macarthur, they combined to
purchase, without competition, the whole cargo of the Hope – and of most other ships which came to
the colony for years afterwards. Soon the soldiers of the Corps found that their wages were being
paid partly or wholly in rum or other trade goods, all of which were valued by the officers’ junta
at absurdly high rates. In this way poor settlers, mostly emancipated or time-expired convicts, and
even those still serving their sentences, were also exploited by the monopolists; for it had early
been discovered that as an incentive to efficient work, the scourger’s cat-o’-nine-tails, no matter
how furiously and continually plied, was insufficient. The convicts were therefore allowed to seek
private employment in the late afternoons after their “government work” for the day had been done.
When Phillip left, the officers of the Corps lost little time in extending this privilege,
especially by withdrawing many more convicts altogether from government work and assigning them to
themselves and their friends. The officers also began the practice, continued by later governors,
of granting large tracts of land to each other. These changes, however discreditable to the
officers concerned, did lead to much more efficient farming. The amount of wheat in circulation
increased almost as much as the amount of rum. The colony rapidly became self-sufficient in basic
foods and the “starving time” a memory.37

Three more naval governors, John Hunter, Philip King and William Bligh, tried without avail to
break the rum traffic and to mitigate the social and economic evils which it nourished. Instead
their own careers were blighted by the entrenched influence of the rum traffickers. Bligh, who
governed from 1806 until 1808, was actually deposed in a coup d’etatcarried out by the “Rum Corps”
– the very body whose prime function it was to uphold his authority. Fifteen months after the First
Fleet reached Sydney Cove in January 1788, Bligh’s crew had mutinied in HMS  Bounty near Tahiti.
The story is well known and has caused posterity to think of Bligh as a blustering and brutal
bully. True, but the record shows he was a good deal more than that. How else could he have brought
safely to Timor, a distance nearly 9000 kilometres, the open boat in which he was set adrift,
overloaded as it was with eighteen men and boys who refused to join the mutineers? As governor of
New South Wales, Bligh’s determined efforts to curb the power of the rum traders rapidly made him
very popular with the “little men” of the community, particularly with the struggling emancipist
farmers of the Hawkesbury River district some 40 kilometres northwest of Sydney. They made him
equally unpopular with the officers of the Corps and the exclusionists, people who were not used to
being sworn at in the “tarpaulin’s” language Bligh favoured.

Of these, the most influential was John Macarthur. Legend held that he came of an old Jacobite
family and had the ear of powerful friends in England. With his wife and infant son, he arrived in
1790 as a lieutenant of the New South Wales Corps. Though he never became a senior officer, the
strength of his character was such that, almost from the beginning, he dominated those who
considered themselves gentlemen and, more narrowly, the junta of military and civilian officers
which led the rum monopoly. Yet he enriched Australia as well as himself by his obsessive pursuit
of wealth, and his dubious claim to have founded the wool industry has been accepted by most
historians.38 Gentle and virtuous in his family life, his overweening pride drove him to quarrel
violently with any man who crossed his designs. His critics maddened him with the taunt of “Jack
Boddice”, implying that his father, a Devon draper, had specialised in selling male corsets to his
military customers. One of his many enemies called him “as sharp as a razor and as rapacious as a
shark”, and Governors Hunter, King and Bligh all denounced him in scarcely less baleful terms as,
among other things, “the grand perturbator”. Towards the end of his life his turbulent passions
ended in madness. At the time of the “Rum Rebellion” he had been thrown into gaol by the courts,
formally for a minor breach of the law but in fact more for his obstinate and successful defence of
the rum traders’ interests. From prison he engineered the junta’s bloodless coup, which was
actually carried out by Major George Johnston, commander of the Corps and lieutenant-governor of
the colony.

In the hot evening of the twentieth anniversary of the first landing, 26 January 1808, with band
playing and colours flying, the “Rum Corps” carried out what some cynics have termed its only
martial action. Inspired by rum thoughtfully provided by Mr Macarthur, the soldiers lurched across
the bridge which spanned the Tank Stream near the present intersection of Pitt and Bridge Streets.
To the tune of “The British Grenadiers” they staggered up the hill to Government House where the
New South Wales Corps soldiers on guard promptly joined their fellow rebels. No one offered to
defend the King’s representative except his daughter, Mrs Mary Putland, who invited the drunken
troops to stab her to the heart but to respect the life of her father. Major Johnston then
“arrested” Bligh, whom it was his first duty to protect against all the King’s enemies. A
contemporary print shows him being dragged from his hiding place under a bed; but in view of his
naval record it seems likely that this was a piece of rebel propaganda.39 Macarthur’s part in these
treasonable proceedings may be divined from a hasty note he sent to his wife:

My Dearest Love,

I have been deeply engaged all this day in contending for the liberties of the unhappy colony, and
I’m happy to say I have succeeded beyond what I expected. I am too much exhausted to attempt giving
you particulars: therefore I must refer you to Edward [their son] who knows enough to give you a
general idea of what has been done. The tyrant is now, no doubt, gnashing his teeth with vexation
at his overthrow. May he often have cause to do the like.

Johnston and the junta took over the government, continued to import rum, and proceeded to grant
more land to themselves and their friends. After some years Johnston was cashiered by a London
court-martial. Macarthur was not allowed to return to Australia for some time, but his wife
Elizabeth capably looked after his colonial interests during his absence.

Those who hold that the New South Wales Corps’ treasonable deposition of Bligh constituted the only
warlike deed in its inglorious history do it a little less than justice. Four years earlier it had
carried out a slightly less discreditable action. In 1798 the most recent Irish revolt against
their British overlords had been bloodily suppressed at the “Battle” of Vinegar Hill. Shiploads of
the defeated rebels were transported to New South Wales where, despite the fact that their lives
had been spared, they obstinately continued to hate their masters. Governor King, a devout loyalist
and supporter of the Protestant establishment, inquired into rumoured Irish plots to take Sydney in
1800 and 1802. Then in March 1804 the rumours became real. One of the transported rebels, William
Johnston, armed a band of convicts, mostly Irish, with stolen muskets and improvised pikes and
swords. They marched from Castle Hill towards Windsor, calling on all convicts to join their
crusade against the establishment. Informed by an Irish traitor, one Keogh, King ordered Major
George Johnston and a detachment of the New South Wales Corps in pursuit. The soldiers overtook the
rebels at Vinegar Hill, now known as Rouse Hill, about 7 kilometres short of Windsor. They answered
Johnston’s demand for their surrender with a defiant shout of “Death or Liberty”. Johnston then
asked their leaders to come forward to parley with him under an implied promise of safe-conduct.
William Johnston and his fellow rebel, Phillip Cunningham, were simple-minded enough to trust the
word of a British officer, even one enrolled in the notorious “Rum Corps”. After some discussion,
George Johnston clapped his pistol at Cunningham’s head while an attendant trooper pointed his at
William Johnston’s. Defeated by what the gentlemen of the Corps doubtless considered a brilliant
stratagem, the leaderless and ill-armed convicts ran away. Nine were butchered before they reached
Windsor and Cunningham was hanged out of hand there on the staircase of the public store. In the
following week those considered to be the ringleaders were punished according to the heinousness of
their offences. Three were publicly hanged at Parramatta, three at Castle Hill and two at Sydney.
Thirty-five were sent to the penal station at Coal River, renamed Newcastle.40

The Reverend Samuel Marsden, ever zealous in his support of the Protestant ascendancy, busied
himself in extracting incriminating evidence from witnesses, as he had done after the earlier
rumoured revolt of 1800. On that occasion, in his capacity as a magistrate, he had not scrupled to
break the laws of God and man by ordering floggings to extort confessions from vaguely suspected
persons. In 1804 two such were named Fitzgerald and Galvin, transported for their part in the
rebellion of 1798. Their flagellation was described by Joseph Holt, another suspected plotter who,
since he was a Protestant and a gentleman, was punished only by being forced to watch the torture
of his countrymen. “There was two floggers,” wrote Holt,

Richard Rice and John Jonson, the Hangman from Sidney. Rice was a left handed man and Jonson was
Right handed so they stood at each side and I never saw two trashers in a barn moove their stroakes
more handeyer than those two man killers did ... as it happened I was to leew’rd of the floggers
and I protest, tho’ I was two perches from them, the flesh and skin blew in my face as they shooke
off of the cats.

Next was tyed up paddy galvin, a young boy about twenty years of age. He was ordered to get three
hundred lashes. He got one hundred on the back and you cud see his back bone between his shoulder
blades, then the Doctor order him to get another hunder on his bottom. He got it and then his
huckles was in such a jelly the Doctor order him to be flog on the Calves of his legs. He got one
hunder there and as much as a whimper he never gave. They asked him if he would tell where the
pikes was hid, he said he did not now, and if he did he would not tell. “You may as well hang me
Now,” he says, “for you will never get any musick from me.” So they put him in the Cart and sent
him to the Hospita1.41

Australians generally and Irish-Australians in particular remembered the sort of thing that was
done to Paddy Galvin and to thousands like him. Folk memory often preserved too the tradition of
Galvin’s iron will in the face of hopeless odds. “I’ll fight but not surrender,” said the
anonymous, but clearly Irish-Australian, Wild Colonial Boy many years later. Later still, at the
time of what contemporaries called the Great War, most Irish-Australians, though very willing to
fight for Australia, still hated England, their hereditary enemy, sufficiently to vote “No” in the
campaigns for conscription for overseas service.

The “Rum Rebellion” at least prompted His Majesty’s ministers, preoccupied with the Napoleonic
wars, to give an unwonted modicum of thought to affairs in New South Wales. The system by which
naval governors had to depend for their authority on the goodwill of a military force, which
distance made semi-autonomous in practice, was abandoned. On New Year’s Day 1810 Lieutenant-Colonel
Lachlan Macquarie, at the head of his own regiment of 73rd Highlanders, assumed office as governor.
For the next twelve years he ruled New South Wales and its dependencies in much the same absolute
but paternalistic spirit as some of his ancestors had ruled their Highland clans. Like previous
governors, he regarded the Church of England as a body of men whose prime function was to preach
obedience to the secular power of the state. He made the leading clergyman in the colony, Reverend
Samuel Marsden, a magistrate of whom the convicts said “The Lord have mercy on you, for his
reverence has none” and whom Commissioner Bigge found to have ordered floggings far more freely
than any of the lay magistrates in the colony.42 The Church of England in Australia at this time
seems to have regarded itself as a kind of moral police officer in the service of government, so
much so that many church foundation stones, like those of St Matthew’s at Windsor and St James’ in
Sydney, bear no cross or other Christian symbol but simply a crown, the date and the sufficiently
significant inscription, “L. Macquarie Esq., Governor”.

During his regime (1810-21), the power of the rum monopolists was broken, not so much because of
the loyalty of his regiment or even his own prodigious efforts, as because the rising native-born
generation, an increasing trickle of free immigrants and growing export trade in whale oil and
sealskins rendered a nearly closed monopolistic system no longer economically viable. He closed
scores of licensed taverns while sly-grog shops multiplied, for if the monopoly of rum was ended,
the rate of its consumption hardly lessened. He gave to the central Sydney area the basic street
plan it has today. He ordered the erection of many fine buildings. Among those still standing are
St James’ Church in King Street, the adjoining Hyde Park convict barracks and the graceful Georgian
building long known as the “Rum Hospital”. Only two parts of the last still stand. One serves as
the Parliament House of the state of New South Wales. Its name derived from the fact that, in his
efforts to stamp out the rum trade, Macquarie at one stage thought to control it by granting to
three contractors (not including Macarthur!) an official three years’ monopoly of the import of
spirits. In return they built the hospital. History will never know how much more rum was smuggled
into the colony or illicitly distilled there.

Macquarie’s chief architect was an emancipist who had been transported for forgery, Francis
Greenway, whom later generations have agreed to honour as an artist in brick and stone. The new
governor consistently encouraged merit wherever he found it, even inviting deserving emancipists to
dine at his table. One of Macquarie’s ex-convict friends was William Redfern, a 23-year-old
surgeon’s mate in the Royal Navy when he was transported in 1797. When the crew of his ship
mutinied, he was overheard by a fellow officer to advise them to “be more united among themselves”,
and thus he became a mutineer and a felon.43 Not all of Macquarie’s emancipist friends were such
fine people as Redfern, but a vice-regal invitation to dine with any emancipist was more than most
exclusionists could stomach. So two of them, Archibald McNaughton and Phillip Connor, lieutenants
in Macquarie’s own regiment, pointedly left his table one night early in 1813. A few weeks later in
the dusk of a fine June evening, “flown with insolence and wine”, and dressed in merry
parti-coloured costumes, the two officers took a turn in the lower end of Pitt Street near the
waters of Sydney Cove. There they met a young needlewoman, Elizabeth Winch, also taking the air
with her lover, “John Brown the Painter”. Apparently every emancipist girl knew what to do when
confronted with military gentlemen. Elizabeth turned at once and ran for cover to the house of her
employer, Mrs Ann Holness, with whom she lived at number 17 a few metres along the road.

Lieutenant Connor gave chase. To protect his sweetheart, Brown ran between them and was beaten
about the head by Connor, who then walked some little distance away up the street. McNaughton
continued to argue with Brown outside the locked door of number 17, behind which Mrs Hotness and
her boarder waited anxiously. When Connor returned to support McNaughton, Elizabeth bravely stepped
out into the street, but only for long enough to persuade Brown to come back inside the house with
her. The gentlemen then began to batter their way inside while the occupants pushed against the
door to keep them out. Alerted by the din, Mr William Hotness returned from a neighbour’s house,
which he had been visiting. When he asked what the drunken assailants wanted, they answered that
they would have the two women, Ann Hotness and Elizabeth Winch, and that they would “do so and so
to them and you too ... making use of a very indecent expression.”

At this the emancipated tradesman, described by several witnesses as “a remarkably quiet man”,
replied, “I’ll do so to you”, as he put his hand on Connor’s chest and pushed him away from the
door. Both gentlemen then battered Holness to death with sticks, fists, their boots and palings
torn from a nearby fence.

Those whom Macquarie officially named the murderers were tried by a court presided over by Ellis
Bent, the judge-advocate, and comprising five mess-mates of the accused and two other officers from
the Royal Volunteer Corps. The luckless Holness’s body was examined by four medical gentlemen
including D’Arcy Wentworth. They all swore to the opinion that death had been caused by “an
effusion of blood in the lungs”, but said that they could find on the corpse no external marks of
violence sufficiently severe to have caused it. The fatal effusion, they thought, was much more
likely to have been caused by the very violence of the dead man’s passionate anger than by any
slight violence inflicted by those who had sought to rape his spouse. So the honourable military
court was able to find Connor and McNaughton not guilty of murder but “guilty of Feloniously
killing and slaying the said William Holness” and to impose on each the farcical penalty of one
shilling’s fine and six months in Parramatta Gaol.44

Small wonder that the new viceroy came to the considered conclusion that the emancipists, with all
their sins upon their heads, had done more for the prosperity and good order of the country than
those who considered themselves their betters. During the last two years of his term, the British
government sent out an able lawyer, J.T. Bigge, to report on the colony and on Macquarie’s
administration of it. The old viceroy’s view of the factions in New South Wales was made clear in a
letter he wrote to Commissioner Bigge during 1819. Here is an extract with emphatically muddled
syntax and indignantly explosive capitals, just as it sputtered from his quill.

You already know that Nine-tenths of the population of this Colony are or have been Convicts, or
the Children of Convicts. You have Yet perhaps to learn that these are the people who have Quietly
submitted to the Laws and Regulations of the Colony, altho’ informed by the Free Settlers and some
of the Officers of Government that they were illegal: these are the Men who have tilled the Ground,
who have built Houses and Ships, who have made wonderful Efforts, Considering the Disadvantages
under which they have Acted, in Agriculture, in Maritime Speculations, and in Manufacturers; these
are the Men who, placed in the balance as Character, both Moral and political (at least since their
Arrival here) in the opposite Scale to those Free Settlers (who Struggle for their Depression) whom
you will find to preponderate.45

We have seen that bitter class feelings existed in Australia before Macquarie’s time. Perhaps his
emancipist policy did something to accentuate them. It certainly did in the opinion of leading
exclusionist spokesmen like Macarthur , who successfu1Iy obtained the ear of Bigge and decisively
influenced the tenor of his official report. More than ever the emancipists and their children felt
that Australia, as it was beginning to be called, was their country, founded for them and their
descendants. Yet Macquarie’s period had also instituted profound changes that were to strengthen
the influence of the free immigrants even more in the long run.

When he sailed for Britain, New South Wales was no longer primarily a prison farm measuring some 60
kilometres from east to west and from north to south – extensive by British standards, it is true,
but still hemmed in between the Blue Mountains and the Pacific. In 1813 a way across the range had
been found by a party which included young W.C. Wentworth, son of the old doctor, and one of the
first and most illustrious native white Australians. Six years later he wrote, of the western
plains stretching away beyond the Great Divide, that they were “admirably suited for the pasture of
sheep, the wool of which will without doubt eventually become the principal export of this colony,
and may be conveyed across the mountains at an inconsiderable expense”.46 Not everyone at the time
shared Wentworth’s vision. Nevertheless, almost limitless pastures for the expansion of the wool
industry stood waiting. The Bank of New South Wales, which flaunted its contempt for tradition in
1982 by renaming itself Westpac, was founded in 1817, mainly by some successfu1 emancipists, with
the governor’s encouragement. Cedar- cutting in the coastal brushes had joined whaling and sealing
to furnish profitable export commodities. Wholesale importers and traders were firmly established
in Sydney and Hobart, and retail trading had begun. Few people still depended directly on the
communal government store, as all had done in the foundation years and most still did on
Macquarie’s arrival. Bigge’s Report to the home government urged that extensive parcels of land,
principally for stock raising, should be granted to respectable free immigrants in proportion to
the amount of capital they brought with them to invest. With cheap assigned convict labour, the
profits to be made in pastoralism were very tempting, and an increasing stream of well-to-do free
immigrants arrived to take advantage of the new arrangements.

Yet the harvest lay for the most part in the future. Only the seeds had been planted during
Macquarie’s regime, some of them unwittingly. In any case, the old chieftain received little
official credit for his exertions. Bigge’s Report condemned his emancipist policy and his
“extravagant” building program – unjustly as it has seemed to posterity. At the same time, the
report recognised economic reality by advocating the development of a large-scale wool industry for
the future, thereby at least tacitly condemning the effort of past governors to carry out
government policy; for, insofar as the Home authorities can be divined to have had an economic
policy for the colony, it had been to encourage the development of a large class of (mainly
emancipist) small-holding agriculturalists. Macquarie was given an affectionate farewell by
thousands of his subjects.47 When he sailed for the last time out of Sydney Harbour in the Surry on
15 February 1822, New South Wales was considerably more prosperous, and somewhat less turbulent and
wicked, than it had been on his arrival.

It was also much more extensive. In pursuance of his instructions, and of the elusive flax plant,
Phillip had despatched Philip Gidley King to settle Norfolk Island within a few weeks of the First
Fleet’s arrival in Sydney. By 1799 a young naval surgeon, George Bass, had explored the coastline
south of Sydney in some detail, discovered Western Port and circumnavigated Van Diemen’s Land,
examining en route the estuaries of the Tamar and the Derwent. In 1803 he disappeared after leaving
Sydney on a trading voyage to South America, but his name lived on in Bass Strait.

He had been accompanied on several of his exploratory voyages by another young naval officer,
Matthew Flinders, who proved to be second only to Cook as a navigator and hydrographer. Promoted
commander in 1801, he left England in HMS Investigator to explore the still unknown coast between
Nuyts’ Land at the head of the Great Australian Bight and what is now known as the Victorian coast.
He thus became the first European to see most of the shoreline of South Australia, which he charted
accurately. At Encounter Bay opposite Kangaroo Island, on 8 April 1802, he met Captain Nicholas
Baudin of the French Navy, who had been following the coast westwards. A month later he dropped
anchor in Port Jackson and had the leaky and rotten Investigator overhauled. In July he sailed
again on what was to be his greatest achievement, the first circumnavigation of Australia since
Tasman’s. Unlike the Dutchman, he mapped the coast in detail as he proceeded northward. On the Gulf
of Carpentaria’s shores he was puzzled by numerous indications of recent visits by Asian ships.
Finally, at an anchorage off the northeastern corner of Arnhem Land, which he named Malay Road, the
Investigator fell in with six Malay proas engaged in fishing for trepang. As the ship’s cook was a
Malay, Flinders was able to talk easily with Pobassoo, the Malay commander and his captains, who
told him there were sixty vessels altogether in their fleet. Being Muslims, they exhibited disgust
at the sight of pigs but, said Flinders, “had no objection to port wine”.48

When the Investigator returned to Port Jackson in June 1803, relations with France were by no means
as cordial as had been his meeting with Baudin in Encounter Bay. Governor King had been alarmed by
Baudin’s visit to Sydney over a year before and had urged the British government to forestall
French designs by planting settlements in the Bass Strait area. He sent a party under Lieutenant
John Bowen to settle at Risdon Cove in the Derwent estuary while the erstwhile judge-advocate of
New South Wales, Colonel David Collins, sailed from England in charge of 450 marines and convicts
to plant the flag in the Port Phillip area. Collins was dismayed by the lack of wood and water on
the inner shore of the peninsula near the present site of Sorrento. After only about three months
he took his party to the Derwent, where they joined Bowen’s smaller band to found Hobart in 1804.
In the same year King sent Lieutenant-Colonel Paterson of the New South Wales Corps with
seventy-five convicts to found another outpost at Launceston on the Tamar estuary.

Thus began the settlement of Europeans in Van Diemen’s Land and the extermination of the original
settlers, a process virtually completed within the Biblical span of one man’s lifetime, three score
years and ten. Most of the four or five thousand Tasmanians were killed in the first twenty years
of contact with tile whites – by the time that the island was made into a separate colony in 1825,
administered directly from Britain and no longer responsible to the governor of New South Wales.
Many were murdered by white soldiers or police or respectable settlers, but probably many more by
assigned convict servants or absconders who had become bushrangers. Many too, especially women,
aided in the establishment of white Australia’s first major industry – whaling and sealing.

Known to contemporaries as “the fisheries”, this industry provided the first “staple” export
commodity which flax and ship’s timbers failed to furnish. Up until about 1834, whale and seal oil,
whale bone and seal skins made up easily the most lucrative part of colonial exports. Only then
were “the fisheries” overtaken by wool. American and British whale ships frequently visited Sydney
and Hobart Town, especially after the East India Company’s monopoly came to an end in 1813, but the
industry was largely in the hands of emancipists and native-born people. In Sydney the most
prominent firm engaged in “the fisheries” in the 1800s was that of Kable and Underwood, two
ex-convicts who had come out with the First Fleet. One of Kable’s native-born sons, “Young Kable”,
became the leading bare-knuckle prize-fighter in the 1820s. People of this sort, for the most part,
built the ships of eucalypt hardwoods and provided the finance and the crews. They also kidnapped
hundreds of Tasmanian and mainland Aboriginal women to be exploited both as expert seal-hunters and
sexual slaves. As James Kelly, a sealing captain of Hobart Town, put it in 1816, “the custom of the
sealers in the Straits was that every man should have from two to five of these native women for
their own use and benefit, and to select any of them they thought proper to cohabit with as their
wives”.49 On one sealing trip in 1816, Kelly circumnavigated Van Diemen’s Land in a clockwise
direction for the first time. He made great use of female Aboriginal seal-hunters and boasted of
the great profit he made on the trip. A surviving portrait shows what later generations of
Australians would have called a “flash”, bumptious, “two-bob lair” or larrikin. Born in 1791, this
“Currency” lad was the son of an Irish convict woman.50

Ships often landed parties of men at lonely spots on the south coast, or on islands in Bass Strait,
or even far out in the ocean, to collect seals. These people were often left alone for months or
years at a time and sometimes, if their “mother ship” was wrecked, until they died. Usually they
brutally ill-used Aboriginal women whom they had kidnapped. In South Australia a legend still tells
of a beautiful young Aboriginal woman who was snatched away from her child on the mainland and
taken to the permanent camp of sealers established on Kangaroo Island from 1804 onwards. She eluded
her captors and swam back across Backstairs Passage through 14 kilometres of shark-infested waters
to her child and her tribe. Though told with many fanciful embellishments, the story is true down
to the unusual comeliness of its heroine.51 Such things certainly happened hundreds of times. By
the end of Macquarie’s reign in 1822, most of the southern Australian coasts and islands and even
places as far afield as Macquarie Island, halfway to the Antarctic continent, had been visited or
lived on by these brutal off-scourings of the convict system, and the population of Aborigines and
seals had been reduced by about half. Aborigines living near Sydney had been dispersed and
debauched. A contemporary engraving by an American artist, Augustus Earle, shows their state more
graphically than volumes of print could do.

Whaling and sealing were the main, but not the only, maritime occupations of early Australians.
Until pastoralism surged ahead in the late 1830s, the prevailing odour in white Australia was one
of rum and tar, not greasy wool and gum trees. As Alan Frost has shown, the decision to occupy
“Botany Bay” in the first place was taken primarily in answer to “a naval question”. The first four
governors were naval officers. The first settlements at Sydney, Norfolk Island, Hobart, Launceston,
Newcastle, Moreton Bay and the rest were virtually island-ports, which communicated with each other
and with the rest of the world only by sea. Rum – “Nelson’s blood”, the preferred drink of British
seamen – lubricated the colonial economy, the social intercourse and the dreams and nightmares of
the colonists alike. People looked outward to the ocean for inspiration and profit, not inward to
the unknown, dry interior of the continent. By the 1830s there were few islands in the Pacific
which had not felt the influence, good and bad, of Australian ships and Australian men, most of
them convict bolters or Currency people. As early as 1809 King Kamehameha of Hawaii, for instance,
employed a convict “bolter”, William Stevenson, and seven of his mates as official distillers of
rum to the court. To later Australians it may seem ironic that they built their still at Pearl Bay,
now known as Pearl Harbor. These men already spoke English with an Australian “accent”, as do
Fijians and both Maoris and Pakehas in New Zealand to this day.

A Scottish sailor reported the following conversation with “Long William”:

“Sir,” he said, “me ‘ouse is on a bit of a rise and from me front [veranda] you can see all over
your land, and if any of those bloody Indians are loafing on the job you can tell it without
stirring a step, and loaf the buggers will, if you let’ em. I’ve got two of them tending me still,
this minute, and iffen I don’t look out they’ll let the fire out in a jiffy. God strike me pink if
they won’t, and the mash all spoiled to hell an’ gone. You’ll find it pays Mr Campbell, to keep an
eye cocked and make’ em watch their paces, the easy-going bastids, if you’ II pardon me langwidge,
sir.”

Here was indeed a language which was new to me though not for its oaths. It was like Cockney such
as I had heard about the docks in London, but Cockney with a different flavour and with queer turns
of speech that those who lived in New Holland or Australia soon acquired.52

After whale and seal products the most important commodity in Pacific commerce was timber. The
beautiful red cedar wood, which once grew prolifically in the rainforests of coastal New South
Wales, was felled and floated down the coastal rivers by old hands and their Currency offspring.
From the rivermouths it was taken away in Australian ships more often than not, to Sydney, Hobart
and London or other overseas ports.53 The same colonial ships developed a lucrative trade in
sandalwood, carried from Melanesian and Polynesian islands to Chinese and Southeast Asian ports,
where it was made into magnificent furniture for the affluent and in cense for the religious.
Emancipist and Currency merchants shared too in the business which British leaders from Cook to
Pitt had hoped would provide the staple commodity for export from New South Wales – timber for
shipbuilding. Most of this, especially wood for masts and spars, came from New Zealand. This meant
that it was a dangerous trade, for to the everyday risk of shipwreck was added the chance of being
killed, cooked and eaten by Maori or Melanesian warriors who were by no means as backward in the
art of warfare as their Aboriginal counterparts. In 1809, for example, the ship Boyd sailed for New
Zealand to pick up a cargo of spars for London. Among the passengers was Ann Glassop, convict
mistress of William Broughton, Deputy Commissary of New South Wales and a magistrate, who had
arrived in the First Fleet as a servant to Surgeon White. Ann Glassop was taking her 2-year-old
daughter, Elizabeth Isabella Broughton, to England, apparently to visit some of her other children
by Broughton who were being educated there. The Boyd anchored in the Bay of Islands,54 that early
New Zealand rendezvous of tough Maoris and scoundrelly whites, but was lured away by the promise of
spars some 50 kilometres to Whangaroa. In New Zealand, as like as not, massacres were carried out
by the first-comers, not the invaders. All the crew and passengers of the Boyd were killed and
eaten except for a Mrs Morley and her infant, a boy named Thomas Davis and 2-year-old Betsy
Broughton. A few months later the survivors were rescued by Alexander Berry, also seeking a cargo
of spars, and put ashore in Lima, Peru, where the infant Betsy was looked after for eleven months
by a certain Don Gaspar de Rico. She was brought back to her father in Sydney by a passing British
ship and lived to marry the nephew and heir of Charles Throsby, the early explorer of the Illawarra
and Goulburn districts, Charles Throsby Jnr. By him she had seventeen children, some of whom became
the ancestors of many prominent Australians.55 Betsy Broughton’s most illustrious descendant was
the commanding officer of the first AIF, Major-General Sir W.T. Bridges who, before he was killed
at Gallipoli, ensured that Australian troops would retain their own identity throughout the Great
War and not be distributed among British units as they had been in the Boer War fifteen years
earlier.

By the end of Macquarie’s governorship, white Australian traders had been seen and white Australian
voices heard all over the Pacific. On the mainland the mountains had been crossed, as we have seen,
and sparse pastoral occupation of the interior had just begun to spread out from Bathurst. To the
south, settlement had spread through the Illawarra district and inland to the neighbourhood of the
present site of Moss Vale and the Cockbundoon Range. To the north, Governor King had begun the
first permanent white settlement at Newcastle as a place of secondary punishment for the rebellious
Irish convicts defeated at the “Battle” of Vinegar Hill in 1804. The Hunter Valley and the
Illawarra district had been settled, if sparsely, by cedar-getters, coalminers and others.

Much has been written in this chapter of the depravity of early Australian society. It would be
misleading to end it without mentioning moral changes for the better which were already becoming
visible before Macquarie’s departure. Gov ernor Hunter wrote in 1798:

A more wicked, abandoned, and irreligious set of people have never been brought together in any
part of the world ... order and morality is not the wish of the inhabitants; it interferes with the
private views and pursuits of individuals of various descriptions.56

The “national children” of the official documents were known popularly as “Currency lads and
lasses,” originally because, like the makeshift local currency of the early days – Spanish or
“Holey” dollars with “dumps” punched out of their centres, traders’ tokens, notes-of-hand and so
forth – they were a local product not imported from Britain, as were free immigrants, convicts and
a trickle of sterling coinage.57 Some of these Currency children could hardly have known who their
parents were. Perhaps they were better off than those who did since, in the eyes of respectable
contemporaries, most of their fathers were drunken and demoralised habitual criminals, and most of
their mothers equally drunken and demoralised prostitutes. Small wonder that godly people like
Reverend Samuel Marsden feared the worst for the thousands of “national children” growing up in
these conditions. For the first twenty-five years or so of Australia’s history, observers were
almost unanimous in expecting that the native-born would reproduce the manners and morals
attributed to their progenitors. Yet no such thing happened.

Commissioner Bigge, we have seen, was by no means predisposed to view the convict and emancipist
classes favourably. Yet in his Report on Agriculture and Trade, issued in 1823, the classic
statement on the transformation of their children occurs:

The class of inhabitants that have been born in the colony affords a remarkable exception to the
moral and physical character of their parents: they are generally tall in person, and slender in
their limbs, of fair complexion and small features. They are capable of undergoing more fatigue,
and are less exhausted by labour than native Europeans; they are active in their habits but
remarkably awkward in their movements. In their tempers they are quick and irascible, but not
vindictive; and I only repeat the testimony of persons who have had many opportunities of observing
them, that they neither inherit the vices nor feelings of their parents.58

There is not the slightest doubt that such a reform did take place. Contemporary evidence is
practically unanimous. For instance, Peter Cunningham, a hard-headed Scots surgeon, wrote in 1827
of “the open and manly simplicity of character displayed by this part of our population ... [which]
... was little tainted by the vices so prominent among their parents ... Drunkenness is almost
unknown to them, and honesty proverbial.”59 And in 1834 even the dour Reverend Lang, whose talent
for nosing out human wickedness was possibly unrivalled in the whole continent, wrote:

I am happy, indeed, to be able to state, as the result of ten years’ extensive observation in the
colony, that drunkenness is by no means a vice to which the colonial youth of either sex are at all
addicted. Reared in the very midst of scenes of drunkenness of the most revolting description and
of daily occurrence, they are almost uniformly temperate: for if there are exceptions, as I do
acknowledge there are a few, the wonder, I had almost said the miracle, is that they have not been
tenfold more numerous.60

The most convincing evidence is probably that of Sir William Burton, a justice of the New South
Wales Supreme Court from 1833 until 1844. He was so impressed by the law-abiding nature of the
Currency people that he inquired closely into the criminal statistics of the time.61 From his data
it has been shown that the first generation of white natives, as they were called at the time,
were, at least in a statistical legal sense, more virtuous than any other class in the community
including that of the free immigrants. Over the five-year period 1833-37, for instance, the average
number of persons tried annually before Burton, per thousand of each of the four classes of people
in the colony, was as follows: Convict, 3.4; Emancipist, 3.2; Free immigrant, 1.3; Currency, 1.0.
Further, none of the crimes committed by Currency people in this period, Burton maintained, was of
an atrocious kind punishable by death; and nearly half (thirteen out of thirty) were for
stock-stealing, generally known as “cattle-duffing” – an activity not held to be criminal at all by
popular Australian opinion until almost the present century. Robert D. Barton, uncle of “Banjo”
Paterson and a respectable squatter, as an old man in 1917 could still write, without conscious
humour:

The young Australians were, I think, strictly honest as regards money or valuables; you could leave
your hut or house with everything open for days, perhaps weeks, and when you returned you would
miss nothing, except, perhaps, that someone had made a pot of tea or got a feed, which, of course,
they were all entitled to, and never refused. But, from my earliest recollections, the branding of
other people’s calves was not looked upon as a crime.  ... and the killing of cattle for meat on
the place was almost invariably done at someone else’s expense. However, that condition of things
gradually changed, but a great many men never realised the change ... but continued their
depredations, which were then called cattle-stealing.62

How did these Currency men and women rise above the influence of their surroundings? Not by a
miracle, as the Reverend Lang was tempted to suppose. The main reason seems to have been that most
emancipist parents, though they commonly cohabited without clerical licence or divine blessing,
were in other ways reformed and normally decent people, like Ann Glassop, who provided good homes
for their offspring. They were not nearly as immoral as they were painted by respectable
middle-class observers.63 Secondly, compared with those in Great Britain at the time, Australian
conditions offered a very good living to anyone able and willing to work. There was an almost
continuous labour shortage, especially in the bush, partly because in a seemingly limitless
wilderness inhabited by very few people the sheer quantity of urgently necessary work also seemed
to be limitless, and partly because so much of the labour force was highly inefficient. We have
already seen how convicts had to be bribed with incentive payments to improve upon the
“government-stroke” which was their preferred, go-slow method of working. Yet most employers found
convict labour much more efficient than that of most free immigrants, who were unaccustomed to
Australian conditions. Under these conditions, free and experienced labour was at such a premium
that even children could command good wages – and did. It seems incredible, but contemporary
documents abound with evidence of 10- to 15-year-old boys carrying out responsible and sometimes
lonely jobs. Thirteen- and 14-year-olds commonly drove bullock-teams on long cross-country
journeys; young Albert Wright for many years managed a remote western sheep-station, alone except
for one half-mad shepherd. Thus colonial conditions provided the economic opportunity for young
people to become precociously self-reliant. The environment was such as to enable and promote the
reaction of Currency children away from overtly depraved convict-emancipist characteristics. Thus
Bigge’s Report on the State of the Colony (1822) noted that young Currency men were unwilling to
marry convict women, owing “chiefly to a sense of pride in the native-born youths, approaching to
contempt for the vices and depravity of the convicts even when manifested in the persons of their
own parents”.64

There were, of course, other convict-emancipist attitudes, not necessarily vicious in themselves –
such as group loyalty, or hatred of informers and of affected manners – which the rising generation
of young Australians saw no reason to reject. Historians have too long been mesmerised by the
horrors of the convict system and the depravity of many of its victims, forgetting the Gospel
statement that a person is never defiled by what is done to him or her, but only by the person’s
own deeds. In this perspective, early Australian history surely gives much cause for pride and
little for shame. From the most unpromising possible material there developed in a few short years
the self-reliant progenitors of a free and generous people – generous, that is, to all save
foreigners and the black people from whom they were taking the country. By 1821 New South Wales had
begun to be something much more than the miserable slave farm which had been founded thirty-three
years earlier. Not only was a vigorous and self-respecting generation of native-born people growing
up, but a new class of respectable free immigrants, not mainly dependent upon the colonial civil or
military establishments, had begun to make its appearance.