The strange birth of colonial democracy: New South Wales, 1848-1884 9781597403016, 9780043271001

Table of contents :
Frontmatter
Illustrations (page vi)
Preface (page viii)
Introduction: democracy and its dangers (page 1)
I A British democracy (page 14)
1 Tricking the British (page 16)
2 Betrayed by the British (page 31)
3 Making Britain democratic (page 47)
4 Desperately loyal (page 59)
II Democracy and society (page 80)
5 Landlords and tenants (page 82)
6 The effects of gold (page 97)
7 Marks of distinction (page 105)
8 Bushmen and bushrangers (page 119)
III Fruits of democracy (page 132)
9 Attacking the rich (page 134)
10 Excluding the Chinese (page 157)
11 Disgust (page 173)
IV Democracy and authority (page 194)
12 The governing of diggers (page 196)
13 Police and bushrangers (page 217)
14 Local authority (page 243)
Epilogue: the unwanted (page 266)
Sources (page 274)
Notes (page 275)
Index (page 300)

Citation preview

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A vivid account of the arrival of democratic politics in the first Australian colony. Through portraits of people and events, the pivotal years of mid nineteenth century New South Wales are presented, and a picture of a society in ferment uncovered. Tenant farmers and urban workingmen, gold diggers and the outcast Chinese, upstart gentlemen and their greedy followers, come together in a new kind of politics which emerged to end the old order of convicts and pastoralists. From this turbulence, government as we know it takes shape: democratic but run as a highly centralised bureaucracy. Democratic manners take hold but not a democratic ideology. The

Strange Birth of Colonial Democracy is not just a study of the nineteenth century, for much of the world here described is still with us.

John Hirst teaches history at La Trobe University and was for six years the Editor of Historical Studies. He is the author of Convict Society and its Enemies and Adelaide and the Country. The father of two teenagers, his first book for children, DON’T, was published in 1988.

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dangers he presented. On the spot they drew up a petition asking that he be allowed to be heard in the House of Lords to speak against the government’s bill. His speech to them was printed as a pamphlet. As soon as he saw a newspaper account of the speech, Earl Grey instructed his office to collect the dirt on Lowe — had he not changed sides on important issues? — and to check the proceedings of the Legislative Council for the nominees’ role and the results

of the 1848 elections for ‘convict’ influence.'® The Colonial Office had already considered proposals to alter the

franchise. It had looked favourably on petitions from squatters asking for the vote. It had also received the petition from the Constitutional Association and it saw some merit even in their case, though for reasons which would have disturbed the Sydney demo-

crats. The Colonial Office staff considered that Sydney had too great a political influence and that more voters should be created in the country. So the part of the democrats’ petition which took their attention was the explanation that country rents and values were

much lower than Sydney’s. If they had taken any action on the petition, it would have been to lower the qualifications in the country and allow leaseholders as well as owners to qualify, and leave the Sydney qualifications as they were. The Colonial Office finally took no action because the new Australian bill they were drawing up gave the colonists the power to alter their own constitution.

But now, in the House of Lords, the colonial reformers were again vigorously contesting the government’s plan to leave the future constitution of the colony in the hands of the existing Legislative Council. The reformers failed to get Lowe a hearing before

26 A BRITISH DEMOCRACY their Lordships; they failed to replace the single Council with a twochamber parliament; but Lowe’s argument on the franchise could not be resisted. The bishop of Oxford, who had been at Lowe’s meeting, declared that the existing qualifications had to be lowered to prevent convicts and their descendants from acquiring absolute power—the convict influence, already exaggerated by Lowe, had now reached these proportions.'* The Tory Lord Lyttelton, a committed colonial reformer, formally moved that the existing qualifications be halved and the vote be given to leaseholders and squatters.

Earl Grey yielded, saying that he had always thought the franchise was too high.’” But in conceding the point he went much further

than he and his department had previously been prepared to go—the House of Lords lowered the franchise not only in the country but in Sydney as well. The new Sydney franchise was to be

what the democrats had asked for—the £10 householder. No doubt, as the democrats had reckoned, their Lordships did not consider they were acting rashly because £10 was the English qualification. The British ignorance of colonial affairs, which could always be relied on, and the chance of Lowe’s return had led to the establishment of virtual household suffrage in Sydney. The House of Lords, the enemy of British reform, had picked colonial democracy out of the gutter. — When the Australian Colonies Government Act reached Sydney the conservative legislative councillors—the great majority of the

house—were appalled at what had been done to the franchise. Charles Nicholson, the speaker of the house, despaired: why should the British government and parliament act as if their aim was ‘to republicanize and democratize’ the country? The answer he knew: they had been tricked by Robert Lowe, ‘a sort of psychological monster, all head and no heart... hollow, faithless, capricious...’. In planning the new university Nicholson had always been aware of the need to fight the democratic heresy; now he felt its hold on colonial society getting tighter and more and more he saw the university as a bastion of civilisation.*? The democrats were exultant

at the new franchise. Parkes in the Empire crowed over the conservatives’ embarrassment: they could not denounce the House of Lords as a democratic mob or the bishop of Oxford and Lord Lyttelton as republicans and Chartists.7!

But the resources of conservatism were not exhausted. The

Legislative Council had to rearrange electorates and the allocation

of members because under the new Act Port Phillip had been separated from New South Wales and votes given to the squatters beyond the counties. The conservatives arranged the new electorates to minimise the representation of Sydney and the other towns, where almost one-half of the population lived, and where the new, lower franchise had most effect. Four seats were given to Sydney,

TRICKING THE BRITISH 27 seven to the other towns, and 25 to the country. This arrangement was defended by an appeal to the principles of the 1832 Reform Act in Britain. The Reform Act had swept away electorates with small

or nonexistent population but had not adopted the principle of representation according to population alone. The property and great interests of the country had also been considered. Since the basis of New South Wales prosperity was its wool industry, the conservatives argued that the country must have the majority of the

seats. To allot seats solely according to population would be to ‘covertly lay the foundations of a species of republicanism’. The few liberals in the Council, knowing that a preponderance of country seats would entrench the conservatives, objected strongly to

the new electoral arrangements, but they had to argue on the

conservatives’ grounds. They accepted the authority of the Reform

Bill of 1832 and attempted to interpret it in a different way. Whatever else it had done, they claimed, it had given new seats to the towns; but in England, the conservatives responded, the towns were manufacturing centres, creators of wealth, unlike Sydney which was an entrepot for the pastoral industry. Population had been an important test, the liberals asserted, for it was the boroughs with the

smallest populations that had lost their seats; but look, said the conservatives, at the inequalities which remained: Bridgeworth with

a population of 1931 sent two members to the Commons; so did Tower Hamlets, in London’s East End, with a population of 419 730.

So the power of British precedent on a matter which New South Wales was free to determine for itself was fully displayed. The conservatives on this occasion had the best of the argument. While Britain adhered to the principles of the Reform Act, it would be difficult for New South Wales liberals to establish new principles for apportioning electorates. Elections for a new council based on the new electorates followed

immediately. Most of the interest centred upon the contest for Sydney where, thanks to the House of Lords, something close to household suffrage prevailed. It was one of the oddities and strengths of the old political order, which severely restricted the franchise and

popular influence, that the results in the electorate which had the largest number of voters were accorded a special significance. Contests for these seats were the nearest approach to a public opinion poll. Part of Wentworth’s authority as the leading member of the house derived from his being one of the members for Sydney,

the premier constituency. He offered himself again for one of the three city seats and boldly told the newly enfranchised that he did not think they should have the vote. He dared anyone to name an instance where universal franchise had not produced ‘anarchy, rapine, and bloodshed’. The violence and lynch law of the Californian

goldfields were but the last in a line of democratic excesses. Went-

28 A BRITISH DEMOCRACY worth only just managed to survive—he won the third seat. The second place went to a liberal, the merchant Lamb. The honour of being returned at the head of the poll fell to the Reverend John Dunmore Lang. On the platform Lang declared for universal suffrage

and answered Wentworth’s challenge to find a place where it had worked well—he named the older states in the United States and France after the Revolution of 1848.*° France would not support his

case for much longer; three months later the new democratic constitution was overturned by Louis Napoleon who set himself up

as emperor. On the platform Lang had also declared for the complete freedom and independence of the colony.** To have gone so far and still be returned at the head of the poll was a great boost to the democratic and republican cause and filled the conservatives with foreboding. But overall the new Electoral Act had produced the results its framers had intended. The overwhelming majority of

the new council was conservative. In May 1851 the democrats organised a Political Association whose chief aim was to campaign

ceased to exist. ,

against the inequities of the Electoral Act. By September it had Charles Nicholson was pleased at how well the Legislative Council

had handled the undermining of the conservative position by the House of Lords. Animated by a ‘proper anti-democratic feeling’,

eon |

a. 4 ‘That firebrand Lang’: scaring conservatives with a republican victory.

TRICKING THE BRITISH 29 the council had scotched the notion that representation should be based on mere numbers. ‘Fortunately the bulk of the property of the Colony is in the hands of men who have resolutely resisted the first inroads of popular aggression.’ But the danger from Britain was not over. The lowering of the franchise had been secured by a trick; the next assault on the conservatives’ position was quite deliberate.

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HE colonists wanted to throw off British control and govern

) themselves, but they nearly all assumed that the constitution of the new country must be modelled on that of the old. This gave the colonial conservatives a great advantage since a central principle of the British constitution was that popular power had to be limited. Until the early 1850s it had been assumed in Britain that colonies should as far as possible follow the mother country. Unfortunately for the New South Wales conservatives that assumption was cast aside just as the colony was drawing up its constitution. There had always been some difficulty in the constitutions of colonies following the British model. With two of the three orders there was no problem. A governor took the place of the monarch; an elected Assembly that of the House of Commons. The difficulty lay in the creation of upper houses to match the House of Lords. Since there was no hereditary aristocracy in the colonies, upper houses had been nominated by the governor. These legislative councils, as they were called, seldom gave satisfaction or worked well. Men nominated by a governor never acquired the prestige or the independence of Britain’s aristocracy. Because their societies were colonies the councils were called on to play a role which was unknown to the House of Lords: they were expected to support the governor when the assembly’s demands clashed with imperial interests. There was little prestige to be gained by legislative councillors in assisting the mother country to deny the mass of the colonists the power to govern themselves.

One response to these difficulties was to make colonial society more like England’s; if a hereditary aristocracy was required for a British constitution to work properly, then an aristocracy would

have to be established in the colonies. Proposals for this were mooted by some loyal American colonists in the eighteenth century

as the relationship between colonies and mother country deteriorated.! When new constitutions were granted to Canada in 1791 the British government was determined to avoid its mistakes in the thirteen colonies it had lost and planned to establish a peerage to compose the upper houses. In the event no peers were created and 32

BETRAYED BY THE BRITISH 33 the legislative councils remained merely houses of governors’ nominees. They did not give satisfaction, and from the 1830s the popularly elected assemblies were appealing to Britain to save them from the narrow, reactionary cliques which composed the councils

and thwarted their measures. The Canadians proposed that both houses be elected. To this the British government was not prepared to agree because two elected houses would give too much weight to the popular power and leave the governor, as the monarch’s representative, dangerously isolated. A clash between two elected bodies

and a British governor could only result in republicanism and separation.” Besides, to allow the Canadians an elected upper house had implications for British politics. The House of Lords itself was

under attack as a bastion of aristocratic privilege and a barrier to reform. To allow an elected upper house in Canada would give a handle to the British critics of the House of Lords. The principles of the British constitution had to be upheld everywhere. Because of New South Wales’ peculiar origins as a convict colony the British government had not established there the threefold order of governor, council and assembly. The governor at first ruled alone; then a Council was added, composed of men nominated

by the governor, and when the colony was thought ready to elect legislators, these were simply added to the Council, which was comprised of two-thirds elected members and one-third nominated. This arrangement had survived the attempt of the colonial reformers

to give the colony a regular constitution of two houses when the Australian Colonies Government Bill passed through the British parliament in 1850. But that measure had given the mixed Council the right to amend its own constitution. With Wentworth as its leading light, a committee of the Council drew up a new constitution providing for a two-chamber parliament in 1852. The committee was of one mind except on the vexed question of the upper house. Some committee members wanted an elected house, some a nominated, and others a combination of nomination and election. Wentworth allowed debate on the measure

to stand over for the public to comment. No interest was taken in the issue and the proposed new constitution lapsed. The Council resumed its constitutional deliberations in 1853 with more purpose because a change of government in Britain had brought a change in colonial policy. The Whig government of Lord John Russell had

been defeated. Earl Grey, who had revived transportation and denied Australians control over land policy, held office no more. His successor as secretary of state for colonies in the new Tory government was Sir John Pakington. Pakington knew much less about the colonies but was prepared to give the Australians what they wanted, control over land policy and all other local matters, and for good measure he ended transportation to Tasmania. The

34 A BRITISH DEMOCRACY Tory government, in which he was only one of many nonentities, survived for only ten months. The next government was a coalition of Whigs and liberal Tories and its colonial minister was the Duke

of Newcastle, a colonial reformer, who quickly confirmed Pakington’s offer to the Australian colonies. Both ministers made these concessions on condition that the Council adopt a new consti-

tution of two houses. Pakington wanted the upper house to be nominated; the Duke of Newcastle was happy to leave its form open for the colonists to decide. Wentworth was the dominating force on the Council’s committee which drew up a draft constitution. He persuaded them to solve the difficulties of creating an upper house by following the British form: a colonial House of Lords would be supplied by a colonial aristocracy. At first the local Lords—the Legislative Council— would be nominated by the governor for life, but they would be joined and gradually supplanted by men who had been granted hereditary titles by the crown. The lower house, the House of Assembly, was to be

constituted on the same principles as the elected portion of the existing mixed Council. Except for a minor adjustment in a conservative direction, the voting qualifications were to remain the same. Wentworth considered that as a result of the interference by the House of Lords they were already dangerously low. The electorates were to be allocated according to interests, and not popul-

ation, as the Council had determined in its 1851 Electoral Acct. There was a great imbalance against Sydney and the other towns.

Wentworth rightly foresaw that the composition of the upper house and the arrangement of electorates for the lower house would

be the parts of the scheme which would meet most objection. Accordingly he made them the most difficult to alter. To amend the

arrangement of electorates required a two-thirds majority in the Assembly. To change the composition of the Council required a two-thirds majority in both houses. With a constitution so framed and protected Wentworth assured the Council that he had shielded the colony against the dangers of democracy. As soon as Wentworth’s constitutional plan became known, democrats and liberals began to organise to oppose it.* Only a large-

scale protest outside the house could have any chance of success because in the house the liberals were in a tiny minority. The best chance for defeating the scheme was to persuade the Colonial Office

and the British parliament to refuse it their sanction because the mass of the people were opposed to it. As in the anti-transportation movement, the liberals dominated the agitation against the constitution. The specifically democratic cause of widening the franchise did not get a hearing. Democrats could cheerfully join with liberals in opposing Wentworth’s plan for

a hereditary aristocracy in the Council and the distribution of

BETRAYED BY THE BRITISH 35 electorates for the Assembly, even though they had different views on what form the constitution should take. The leading merchants

and professional men might well have been prepared to accept a nominated upper house, but they were not ready to accept the creation of a territorial aristocracy which would consign them to an inferior position, socially and politically. They would not have supported apportioning electorates according to population, for they had no more wish than Wentworth to increase the influence of the Sydney democrats and the rabble-rouser Lang, but they were outraged at Wentworth’s claim that Sydney strictly had no right to any representation in the Assembly since it was solely a service centre for the great pastoral interest. Liberals and democrats were united in seeing Wentworth’s constitution as an attempt by the pastoralists

to turn themselves into a ruling class and deny the rest of the population access to their lands. The protest movement had one immediate effect. Before debate on the constitution got under way in the Council it was known that the peerage part of the scheme was to be dropped. Peers in Botany

Bay had been laughed out of court. The legislative councillors would now, if Wentworth’s scheme were adopted, be nominated by

the governor for life. The liberals in the house and the protest movement outside maintained their opposition to this arrangement. Nominations smacked of special privilege and of reliance on sycophants who would oppose the people’s wishes in return for favours from Government House. The conservatives explained that under the new constitution the governor would not as hitherto act alone in making appointments; he would be advised by his ministers who would be responsible to the Assembly. This gave little comfort to the liberals because as far as they could see governments would be composed of conservatives and not of themselves. Nor were they persuaded by the conservative argument that a nominated upper

house allowed for the Assembly’s will to prevail when serious disagreements between the houses arose, since the Council could be

swamped by new appointments known to be favourable to the Assembly’s views. Wentworth used the ‘expansive’ principle of his

nominated upper house as further proof of the Britishness of his scheme. It was by the threat of the creation of new peers that the House of Lords had been persuaded to pass the Reform Bill in 1832.

Of course it was easy for Wentworth to speak of the vulnerability of his upper house because he had so organised the electorates of the lower house that liberal and democratic forces would be seriously handicapped in making any challenge to the existing order. Within a few years liberal governments in New South Wales got their way by

making new appointments to the Legislative Council and on one occasion by swamping it with the wholesale appointment of new

36 A BRITISH DEMOCRACY members. At this time liberals refused to see the advantages of a nominated upper house for a reforming government because they feared they would be excluded from government, and besides, they were opposed to the special privilege which nomination implied whoever did the nominating. Their schemes for elected upper houses

would ensure that a position in the Council did not depend on the favour of a nominating body but would be open to anyone properly qualified who could gain the support of the electors. Wentworth in introducing his scheme said he wanted a British not a Yankee constitution. His opponents accepted this aim. Their protest meetings were held under the Union Jack and they gave three resounding cheers for the British constitution, the flag and the queen. They set out to show that their alternative schemes were truer to the spirit of the British constitution than Wentworth’s. A nominated upper house, they declared, was a pitiful attempt to imitate the House of Lords. The peers were an ancient order widely

respected and independent of both the people’s house and the crown. The nominees would be none of these. The notion of a legislature being nominated was totally at odds with the spirit of the

British constitution. Only an elected upper house could gain the respect and independence which the Council would need if it were to fulfil its proper role of checking the lower house. But to Wentworth and his followers two elected chambers were equally at odds with the spirit of the British constitution. An elected upper house, even if the franchise were restricted, would give too much influence to popular power and lead inevitably to republicanism. They looked on the constitution not merely as a mechanism for government, but as a legitimator of the inequality which marked a British society and was essential for the maintenance of monarchical

institutions. Wealth, merit and intelligence should receive recognition and political weight, not through the rowdiness and indignity of popular election but as a matter of course. A society which accepted that men naturally fitted for the Legislative Council should be offered a place in it would be safe from democracy. In planning a constitution both sides were seeking to serve their

own cause, but both were confused as to how this might best be done in a way which did preserve the virtues of the British constitution which they sincerely revered. The Council’s committee on the constitution in 1852 had not been able to agree as between schemes of nomination and election. In 1853 it was clear that only Wentworth

was enthusiastic about the peerage scheme, though he had wide support among conservatives for nomination. On the other side, the

liberals could not agree on how to constitute an upper house if it were not to be nominated. To many, a simple direct election even with a restricted franchise seemed to ‘be giving, as Wentworth declared, too much weight to the ‘popular power’. The Constitution

BETRAYED BY THE BRITISH 37 Committee which had been set up to organise the protest at Wentworth’s scheme spent many meetings deliberating on an alternative. Finally they decided on an elected house, but with a limitation on candidates. The governor and the Assembly would each nominate candidates for the vacancies and the people would choose between them. In this way the two British orders which the colony

could reproduce—the Assembly for the Commons, the governor for the crown— would participate in creating the third order which

the colony could not supply in the British way.* Parkes and the democrats were opposed to this scheme and would have been happy

with a normal election for the Council with no restriction on candidates, but this was the price they paid for cooperation in the protest with Sydney’s men of wealth and standing. Schemes in which the two orders of Assembly and governor participated in the creation

of the upper house were propounded in several quarters.” They showed how well entrenched was the traditional thinking on the composition and operation of the British constitution. The British constitution is amended in the simplest way by ma-

jority votes in the Commons and Lords in the same way as an ordinary act is altered. Wentworth’s constitution required a twothirds majority before its most important provisions could be altered. Wentworth found precedents for unusual majorities in the American constitution, which was not very convincing in a man who insisted on the Britishness of his proposal, and in the Canadian constitution of 1840 which united French and British Canada. The opponents of the two-thirds clauses could argue with some force that on this issue they were more British than Wentworth was.

The contest to appear most British disgusted the democrats. Daniel Deniehy refused to join it in his great speeches at the protest | meetings. He made the most effective hit against the peerage scheme when he christened it a ‘bunyip aristocracy’ and delighted his audience with suggestions about the most apt titles and coats of arms for the Botany Bay peers. This was the usual attack on the peerage scheme, that there were not suitable colonial candidates for the honour, but it left open the question of whether proper peers did have the right to special political powers as they had in Britain. Most liberal speakers assumed that they did. Deniehy did not; he denounced the aristocracy as a conspiracy against the liberties of the

people. He refused to accept the usual account that the British constitution worked well because of the balance of the three orders, King, Lords, and Commons. The reason why the two houses got on so well together was that they represented the one order, the great

landed wealth of England. The landed aristocracy had its junior members in many seats in the House of Commons and determined who won many others.° From his rural isolation Charles Harpur sent to the Empire his

38 A BRITISH DEMOCRACY mockery of the peerage scheme which made clear his lack of respect

for the English original. How should the local peers be chosen? Should the test be as ‘drunk as a Lord’ or as ‘rich as a Lord’? The best guide he concluded was large noses and receding foreheads which were the signs of ‘intense sensualism, selfishness extreme and a brute obstinacy’. The British constitution was to him no more than a ‘congeries of feudal accidents’.’ The Empire also carried a series of articles from another Hunter

Valley democrat, John Robertson, a big roistering bushman, a protégé and friend of the Reverend J.D. Lang at whose school he

had been educated, and unlike the recluse Harpur a respected local leader. He began his contribution to the constitutional debate by denying that the British constitution was a fit model for the colony to follow. His ideal constitution had a republican simplicity: one house, manhood suffrage and electorates precisely equal in popul-

ation. He complained to Lang, who had been out of the colony when the constitutional struggle was taking place, that Wentworth’s opponents had allowed themselves to be mesmerised by the seven words ‘the glorious constitution of our father land’.® Though Parkes published Harpur and Robertson, his editorials in the Empire fol-

lowed the leaders of the protest movement and couched the case against Wentworth’s constitution chiefly in British terms.

The true democrats might not like this approach, but it brought results. Parkes and the liberals were successful in depicting an elected upper house as more British than a nominated one because in the early 1850s a number of leading British politicians, specialists in colonial affairs, declared that elected upper houses were more suitable for colonies than nominated ones. On the issue on which he staked so much Wentworth was undermined by the British. The new views in England were developed in response to the problems surrounding the legislative councils of Canada. The reforming and popular parties in Canada had long been opposed to

nominated councils, but as they gained the upper hand under responsible government in the late 1840s, they could begin to influence the nominations. This led Canadian conservatives to

consider that elected upper houses would be a more effective bar to popular excesses than nominated ones.” The point was not lost on politicians in Britain. Most of the colonial reformers, who had urged Earl Grey in 1850 to grant self-government to the Australian colonies with parliaments of two houses, favoured elected upper houses.

They insisted that nominees could never gain the prestige and independence of the British peers. Colonial societies were different from Britain and it was foolish to expect that they would develop an aristocratic order which in Britain had been the growth of centuries, still less that one could be created by constitutional arrangements.‘” Though he successfully opposed the colonial reformers’ plans for

BETRAYED BY THE BRITISH 39 Australia, Earl Grey accepted the point that nominated upper houses had failed. In drawing up a new constitution for South Africa in 1850, he provided for an upper house to be elected on a restricted franchise. This was a daring innovation, the first time that Britain in

making constitutional plans for its colonies had departed from a nominated upper house.'’ Sir John Pakington, the Tory who succeeded Grey, held to the ancient belief that if colonies were to be British and monarchical nominated upper houses were essential.! But after his short term, the responsibility for the colonies passed to the Duke of Newcastle, a colonial reformer, who made plain his support for elective upper houses. He held office at the time New South Wales was drawing up its constitution.’ The most notable and persuasive exponent of the new position was W.G. Gladstone, the rising star of the Commons, formerly a Tory, now a liberal Tory, and soon to be liberal leader. In the coalition government in which Newcastle was secretary of state for colonies, he was chancellor of the exchequer. In an 1852 debate on the New Zealand constitution he made a powerful plea for an elected upper house in opposition to Pakington’s scheme for a nominated one. He insisted that the British character of the colonies did not depend on a close imitation of British institutions. They were British in spirit, manners and habits, and trusting to this the British government should grant them self-government and not impose upon them constitutional forms which might suit England but were inappropriate there.'* So from Britain itself came the word that the threefold order of King, Lords and Commons was not essential for Britishness. The old country had declared that the new could be different. Gladstone even went so far as to say that in forming colonial constitutions the best guide was the constitution of

the United States. | These views were dynamite in the hands of Wentworth’s op-

ponents. More than anything they could say, they exploded his claim that a nominated house was essential if the British character of New South Wales was to be retained. The words of British statesmen on upper houses were constantly thrown at Wentworth and his followers in the Empire, at the protest meetings, and in the debates in the Legislative Council. How could the liberals be disloyal or republican when they wanted only what Grey, Newcastle

and Gladstone recommended? Parkes could effectively depict Wentworth in the Empire as a huge Goth, left behind by the progress of opinion.’ The conservatives felt their betrayal keenly. They were reduced to saying that Earl Grey, the Duke of Newcastle and Chancellor Gladstone knew nothing about the colonies and their requirements. They deeply resented the view that the colonies were to develop differently from Britain, and that there was no chance of an order

40) A BRITISH DEMOCRACY similar to the House of Lords emerging. The shepherd kings, the pastoralists, were naturally fitted for this role, said Wentworth. Behind the new English views on upper houses they saw the old disdain for colonies. It was the arrogance of the Lords which led

them to think that no other body of men could compare with themselves. Earl Grey and the Duke of Newcastle were willing to make perilous constitutional experiments on the colonies which they

would never think of applying to themselves. But what if the experiments fail? ‘The colony will, indeed, be in utter confusion,

but they will be coolly seated round their mahogany tables in Belgrave-square or some other equally fashionable locality, where, sipping their Chateau Margeaux, they may exclaim, “Ah! I now see

clearly that elective institutions will not answer in New South Wales”.’!© So the conservatives mocked those who should have been their patrons. Meanwhile the Constitution Committee was proclaiming in bold letters on its manifesto: “The British Government is on our side.’*’

The liberals could certainly expect to get a very favourable hearing in London where Wentworth’s constitution had to be approved, but they had not managed to mobilise a very large resistance in the colony. There had been two large and successful protest meetings in Sydney and some meetings in the country, petitions had

been sent in from Sydney and the country, but there was not a sustained or enthusiastic movement such as had met the attempt to revive transportation.

After a long debate the constitution passed the Council very comfortably. The only major concession that Wentworth made, apart from dropping the hereditary proposal, was to limit the appointments to the nominated Council in the first instance to five

years; only thereafter would they be made for life. This was designed more to please the Duke of Newcastle than his colonial critics.‘® Wentworth was fighting on two fronts to get approval for his measure, and he had more reason to fear the Colonial Office and the imperial parliament than his local opponents. Actually he claimed

that if it had not been for the ‘indiscreet and unsupported’ statements of British politicians in favour of elected upper houses, there would not have been a ‘democratic’ opposition to his measure in the

colony.” Wentworth’s prospects in England were made worse because his old opponent Robert Lowe was now writing editorials for the Times

on colonial affairs and had a seat in the House of Commons. He would do all he could to have the constitution rejected and to repeat his earlier coup when he persuaded the House of Lords to halve the franchise qualifications in the Australian colonies. To guide his measure past all these obstacles Wentworth himself went to London. He was accompanied by Deas Thomson, the colonial secretary, the

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leading official after the governor in the old form of government.

These two men had often been at odds when Wentworth was fighting for colonial self-government. Now they were united in an effort to prevent the British government and parliament throwing the colony into the hands of liberals and democrats. The constitution, passed in New South Wales in December 1853,

arrived too late to be considered and approved in the British parliamentary session of 1854. Parliament was busy with the Crimean

war, but not so busy that it could not find the time to pass a short act to amend the Canadian constitution. By an overwhelming vote the Canadian Assembly had requested the power to replace the nominated upper house by an elected one. The Duke of Newcastle, one of the advocates of elected upper houses, was happy to comply and he carried a bill through the parliament to give the Canadians what they sought. This bill also withdrew the requirement that electorates for the Canadian Assembly could be changed only by a two-thirds vote.“ These changes undermined Wentworth’s position still further. He had taken the Canadian constitution as his model for New South Wales and now it was to be changed in line with the view of his opponents. With the removal of the two-thirds provision, the only British precedent he could cite for his own special requirements for amendment had been taken from him.

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42 A BRITISH DEMOCRACY Colonial Office officials and a number of ministers devoted close attention to the New South Wales constitution and those submitted

by Victoria and South Australia.“ There were some in favour of sending the New South Wales constitution back for reconsideration

since there had been numerously signed petitions against it and because they believed that elected upper houses were superior to nominated. The dominating force in the deliberations was Lord John Russell, former Whig prime minister, now serving in the coalition government. He had an open mind on whether elected or nominated upper houses were superior, but was adamant that the only principle a British government could now act upon was to allow colonists to determine the matter themselves. Since the local legislature had considered the composition of the upper house carefully

— Russell was very impressed by the quality of the New South Wales debate — and had passed the constitution with overwhelming majorities, its decision should be respected. With another change of government early in 1855 Russell himself became secretary of state

for colonies, and took the final decisions on the constitution and guided it through parliament. One thing stood in the way of the colonists determining the composition of the upper house for themselves: Wentworth’s provision that a two-thirds vote in the upper and lower house was needed to change it. After his upper house had survived official and ministerial scrutiny, his whole scheme came apart because the government did not accept the amendment procedures of his constitution. Wentworth had not been very careful in framing his amendment procedures. The usual practice is to set out in one place how a constitution is to be amended. But Wentworth’s chief preoccupation

was to prevent his constitution from being amended, so at its two most vulnerable spots—the distribution of electorates and composition of the upper house—he had inserted after the clauses which

dealt with these matters the provisos that they could only be amended by two-thirds votes. He made no other provision for amendment; there was no clause dealing generally with the issue, nor any indication how matters other than electorates and the upper house could be altered. Wentworth appears to have believed that

other matters could be amended by simple majorities, but his constitution did not say so.” If the constitution had been simply an act of the local legislature, the power to amend it could have existed without it having to be stated (for any parliament can reverse an act of a preceding parliament), but this constitution was to be enshrined in a British act of parliament and so could only be amended locally in ways that had been explicitly provided for. When the constitution reached the Colonial Office the absence of a general power of amendment was noted. A provision to allow for

BETRAYED BY THE BRITISH 43 amendment by simple majorities was inserted but in such a way that by simple majorities the New South Wales parliament was able to amend all clauses in the constitution. The consequence was this: the parliament could pass an act by simple majorities repealing the twothirds clauses; once this was law it could then deal with electorates

and the upper house by simple majorities as well. The two-thirds clauses had become dead letters. Russell in his public statement said he assumed that the amend-

ment procedures inserted in London were what the Council had intended.*? Wentworth may have intended that on matters other than electorates and the upper house amendments should be by simple majorities, but he certainly did not intend that his two-thirds clauses should be so easily revoked. He wanted these to be made irremovable by being enshrined in a British act of parliament. Wentworth was busy lobbying ministers and the Colonial Office in favour of his measure and told them as much.”4 Russell ignored his submissions because he was determined that British governments and parliaments should not again become involved, as they had so long in the case of Canada, with the merits of a nominated versus an elected upper house. The colonists themselves should decide and they should have complete freedom to change their minds—as the Canadians had been granted the year before. Hence by sleight of hand he removed the two-thirds clause which was a bar to that freedom. In making the changes to the amendment procedures,

Russell also made it much easier for the Assembly to alter its electorates, a matter of more immediate consequence than the composition of the upper house. By setting out to make his constitution difficult to alter, Wentworth had brought disaster on himself. In the House of Commons Lowe mounted a fierce resistance to the New South Wales constitution arguing, as the liberals did in the colony, that it was designed to entrench the pastoralists politically so that the rest of the colonists would be denied access to the land the pastoralists monopolised. Russell had the numbers to defeat him

and he characterised his proposal for the British parliament to change the nominated into an elected upper house as a departure from the principles of colonial self-government.” The government’s willingness to allow colonists to reach their own decisions was made clear by its simultaneous approval of a nominated council for New South Wales and an elected council for Victoria. Russell might have had less trouble from Lowe if he had explained more clearly the full import of the new amendment procedures.”° Wentworth issued a pamphlet answering all Lowe’s criticisms and

pleading with the parliament to let New South Wales have a constitution on the ancient British lines. He knew that the new amendment procedures had been introduced because of doubts about the nominated upper house. He explained that the failure of

44 A BRITISH DEMOCRACY the nominated houses in Canada was no reason to expect the same

result in New South Wales. Canadians were generally poor, but Australia abounded with wealthy gentlemen who would grace a nominated upper house. The councils had fallen into bad odour in Canada when there were contentions between colony and mother country and the nominations had been made solely by the governor. In New South Wales the nominations would be made on the advice of ministers responsible to the Assembly. He could not understand why the loyalty of the New South Wales colonists to the institutions

of their fatherland should be met in Britain by a desire to force upon them ‘new and untried forms of democracy’, for such he saw

an elected upper house. His last, desperate shot was to warn the parliament that in forcing democracy on the colonies it might encourage the unsettled masses of Britain to demand the same measures at home.7’ Russell had declared that he did not want to prejudge the issue of

the best form of upper house, but he had certainly given a judgment on Wentworth’s constitution. The liberals in the colony were delighted and grateful that he had opened the way for its speedy amendment. At the first elections under the new constitution the conservatives asked for a fair trial for the constitution, but no one could now argue for the retention of the two-thirds clauses since the British minister had virtually invited the colony to get rid of them. The first government under the new order was conservative, but it announced that it would introduce a bill to withdraw the two-thirds clauses. The government proposed no further constitutional alterations, but to withdraw the two-thirds clauses was an acknowledgement that they were going to be made. Willy-nilly the conservatives had to help in the undoing of Wentworth’s constitution. When the liberal government of Charles Cowper came to power late in 1857 it could alter the constitution by simple majorities.

Conservatives looking for the causes of their defeat after the liberals had triumphed completely blamed Lord John Russell for altering the constitution, or the first conservative ministry for agree-

ing to withdraw the two-thirds clauses, or Wentworth for not returning to the colony to lead the conservatives in the new order.”®

These causes, effective in themselves, were all outcomes of the changed British view on the government of colonies. Russell was among the more moderate of Wentworth’s critics; other ministers would have disowned his constitution altogether. The first ministry, claiming to uphold the traditional values, could not stand in the way of what the British minister had encouraged. Wentworth knew his constitution was a last desperate throw which he realised he had lost

before the constitution came into effect. Had he returned to the colony he would have been presiding over its failure. He was by

BETRAYED BY THE BRITISH 45 then an old man. The battles for self-government which he had begun in his twenties had taken too long; before 1850 Britain would have accepted his constitution without question.

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HAT was this Britain to which colonists were loyal and

W which provided them with the model for their political

institutions? Certainly it was not a fixed entity. It could be seen and presented in different ways. It was changing rapidly. There could be many views about what it was becoming. Liberal reformers

in New South Wales owed their success in part to their ability to depict Britain as being on the verge of adopting the reforms which

they were advocating in the colony.

News from Britain was eagerly sought by the colonists. For

migrants it was news from home, and since Britain was the colony’s

controlling power and exemplar British news was in a very real sense local news. The newspapers competed fiercely to be the first on the streets with the latest British and foreign news. The Sydney Morning Herald and Parkes’ Empire kept whale boats patrolling the

ocean miles outside the heads so that they might meet incoming ships and carry the newspapers they brought quickly back to Sydney.’ The newspapers did not present merely digests or summaries of British news. They reprinted whole articles from the British newspapers— editorials, reports of parliamentary debates, speeches by major political figures outside parliament, the proceedings of reform meetings and church assemblies, significant letters to the editor. Readers of the colonial press were more directly exposed

to the issues and language of British politics than the reader of a modern newspaper whose regular supply of British news comes packaged for an Australian readership by ‘our special correspondent’.

The British news might have taken two or three months to reach the colony, but it was not regarded as stale. In the colony’s early days when shipping was very infrequent, a new ship might bring two or three months’ news and then there would be a long silence before

there was another instalment. But as shipping became more frequent, the intervals between the instalments of British news became

shorter and the amount brought by each ship became less. In the 1850s when a new ship arrived the papers would announce that our British news is advanced by two, five or seven days. With ships 48

MAKING BRITAIN DEMOCRATIC 49 arriving every week it became much easier to follow British events as they unfolded. We usually measure the improvement in commu-

nication between Britain and Australia by the shortening of the length of the voyage between them. But for the ease with which British news could be followed, the significant factor is the frequency

of the voyages. At a public meeting in 1853 one speaker unconsciously revealed how close colonists thought themselves to British events. He referred to a speech made by Lord John Russell ‘the other day’; of course Russell had spoken months before; it was the newspaper which carried the report of the speech which had arrived the other day.” Once the newspaper editor had scanned the newspapers and made up his first digest of British news, he then read more leisurely through them and marked those articles which he wanted his printers

to set for reproduction in his own paper. As we turn the pages of the Empire, we can watch Parkes at work on this task. He favours stories and articles on reform movements or the need for reform. The Britain which he presents to his readers is seething with a desire

to change. A reform movement had only to be commenced and

Parkes in his own editorials assumed that its aims would be accomplished before the year was out.

The British reform movements of the 1850s were much more

useful to the cause of reform in New South Wales than those of the 1840s had been. The Chartists had been an embarrassment to the

Sydney democrats. The Chartists were a militant working-class organisation demanding sweeping changes to the constitution. They had no significant middle-class support and the respectable press

depicted them as wild and dangerous men. To ask for a wider

franchise in New South Wales in the 1840s was to be denounced as a

Chartist, which was enough to be ruled out of court.While the Chartists were in the field, there was no prospect of the British parliament considering further measures of political reform. But after the humiliating defeat of the Chartists in 1848, and with the return of prosperity, the political world opened out and the prospects for reform improved. New organisations, largely middle-class,

were formed to support reform programmes much more moderate than the Chartists’. These were known as little charters and comprised household suffrage, triennial parliaments, redistribution of electorates, and the ballot. In 1852 the prime minister, Lord John Russell, introduced a bill to rearrange electorates and reduce the franchise qualifications.” Russell’s cabinet was not at all enthusiastic about the measure and

in a few days the government was defeated on another matter and the reform lapsed. However the introduction of the 1852 Reform Bill is a significant event in the history of New South Wales. In 1851 the Legislative Council had arranged its electorates according to the

50 A BRITISH DEMOCRACY principles of the 1832 Reform Act which recognised interests and property and not simply population in the allocation of electorates. Lord John Russell was one of the architects of the 1832 bill and in 1837 he had declared it was a final measure. Now he had shown he was prepared to take reform further. The chief prop of the New South Wales electoral system began to look distinctly shaky. The Empire reprinted Lord John Russell’s speech on introducing the 1852 Reform Bill and extensive commentaries on it from the British press. Parkes wished Lord John Russell had gone further; his bill was a paltry response to ‘the voracity exhibited by the Nation for Reform’. But he was quick to use the bill as a weapon in New South Wales politics: “We should take Lord John Russell’s Reform Bill as a text from which to preach to ourselves many an earnest sermon. . .”*

Lord John Russell continued to provide the Empire with good copy. In a major speech outside parliament he defended his reform proposal against the standard Tory arguments about the dangers of democracy. He said that previously he had thought that the mixed monarchical constitution placed severe limits on further reform, but he was now persuaded that more power could safely be given to the people or, as he termed it, the democracy because there was no sign that the people would use their power against the House of Lords or the monarchy. ‘At no time,’ he said, ‘in the history of this country have its people been more attached to the Monarchy, or more loyal and affectionate to their Sovereign.’ Russell was distancing himself from the traditional view that the extension of popular power would tend to republicanism; he saw that the safety of the monarchy might not depend on maintaining the balance of the traditional threefold order and the inequality of political rights.° Russell soon returned to office and in 1854 he introduced a reform bill which was more thoroughgoing than the 1852 attempt. Eighty-six small towns were to lose their members, who would be given to more populous areas. The franchise qualifications were also

to be lowered. Parkes welcomed the measure as a sign that the ‘most experienced statesmen of England’ were coming to accept that

population was the proper basis of representation. How could Wentworth, faced with ‘this sweeping proposal’, claim that his constitutional scheme was in harmony with the British constitution?° The government which sponsored this reform bill was a coalition

containing Whigs, the traditional reformers, and liberal Tories. Parkes was ecstatic over the new prospects which this development

seemed to promise. The old parties were breaking up and the reformers of both parties were uniting in what Parkes called a people’s party. Lord Aberdeen, the prime minister, had disavowed the old party labels and had ‘identified the whole people with the

Government, and made it appear that the Crown itself is the people’s own’. This was ‘so truly noble, so thoroughly humane, so

MAKING BRITAIN DEMOCRATIC 51 all but divine’. He predicted that a political and social revolution was near at hand.’ Assuming that a new reform bill had already passed, he declared that ‘the elective franchise is being gradually but systematically extended in England, where there can be little doubt that a few years will see nearly the entire population in possession of that boon’.® Parkes’ Britain was about to become a democracy. Parkes used the new developments in British politics to argue that democracy could be achieved in the colony without breaking the ties

with Britain or offending the colonists’ deep-felt loyalty to the mother country. He had to defend this position from critics on the left who assumed that a loyal colony could not be truly democratic and those on the right who argued that a democratic colony could not remain loyal. On the left, J.D. Lang called again in early 1854 for a democratic constitution and a concerted move for an Australian republic. He had just returned from his seventh visit to Britain. He had been a close observer of the changes in British policy towards the colonies which had led to the abandonment of transportation, the granting of self-government and a willingness to endorse elected upper houses in colonial constitutions. According to Lang the time was ripe for a declaration of independence because the British would not oppose it.” He had made the same claim about the likely British response in 1850 when he issued his first call for independence; this time it was better founded. After his 1850 lecture, Parkes had offered himself

to Lang as one of the fearless band who would struggle for an independent Australian republic.’ Now in the columns of the Empire Parkes registered his dissent. Lang was right in abstract principle: ‘An essentially popular and democratic government is no doubt the best for any country; but when the habits of a people are once formed, it is mere waste of energy to attempt to change them. Such a government as he proposes to establish here could only be

achieved by a revolution.’ But much could still be done: ‘The growth of popular power in Britain is transforming the mother country and is having an influence on the furthest extremities of the empire.’ That is, as Britain became more democratic, it would be easier to move the colonies in the same direction. Then a democratic

government would be achieved without breaking the tie with the empire. That was the possibility at which Parkes now aimed; he would not waste his time chasing phantoms.” Parkes put this strategy into effect later in the year during his successful campaign for a seat in the Legislative Council. He was contesting one of the Sydney seats which had been vacated by Wentworth, who was taking his constitution to London. It was

thought at first that Lang would contest the seat, but he had

committed himself to running for a vacancy at Moreton Bay, the focus of his latest migration schemes. Lang’s Sydney followers

52 A BRITISH DEMOCRACY transferred their support to Parkes, though with some misgivings since he had distanced himself from the radical wing of the reform movement.!* They had more misgivings after he won, for he spoke of the honour of taking the place of that ‘great man’ Wentworth— the popular enemy — and made it plain he was setting himself up as the great man of the future. Parkes’ opponent was Charles Kemp, a former proprietor of the Sydney Morning Herald, who campaigned in favour of Wentworth’s

constitution. Parkes was of course opposed to it and he reassured the radicals that he had not deserted his principles; he had worked all his life for the extension of political power among the people, ‘and if that constituted democracy, he acknowledged he was a democrat’.!> As the studied ambiguity of that declaration makes clear, ‘democrat’ was still a hot potato. Supporters of manhood suffrage used it defiantly or defensively, but seldom comfortably. Many liberals who had opposed Wentworth’s constitution balked at it; conservatives used it as a term of abuse. The Sydney Morning Herald described the contest between Parkes and Kemp as between the ‘democratic party’ and a man ‘loyal to his SOVEREIGN and true to the glorious constitution of Old England’.'* Against such charges of republicanism and disloyalty Parkes had a new weapon. On nomination day before a crowd of 3000 he declared that his

principles were not those of levellers or seditionists, but those avowed by the present government of Queen Victoria." Lord Aberdeen and his ministers would certainly have disavowed Parkes’ account of their principles. They had no great enthusiasm

for the reform bill which Russell had pressed on them. They persuaded him to abandon it after they declared war on Russia in

March 1854. The government which Parkes had hailed as the people’s own was ignominiously defeated in January 1855 in the House of Commons because of its poor conduct of the war. The soldiers in the Crimea had suffered most not from the Russians but from hunger, cold and lack of medical attention. In response to this disaster, a new reform movement quickly emerged with the aim of ridding the army and the civil service of aristocratic time-servers and bunglers and of opening both to men of merit. In the pages of the Empire, the ‘people’s’ government of Aberdeen now became the embodiment of aristocratic privilege and the doings of the new reform movement were lovingly chronicled. Columns were given over to its manifestoes, meetings, and the speeches of its leaders. The Empire’s own editorials highlighted the significance of the movement: ‘Each later instalment of English news brings us word

that the conviction of misrule resulting from the monopoly of political power by the privileged classes, is spreading and deepening.’ The leaders of the new movement may at first be rebuffed but they will soon be carried ‘by the strength of the universal popular

MAKING BRITAIN DEMOCRATIC 53 sentiment’ to the high places of power. Once again Parkes predicted that ‘a great and bloodless revolution’ was at hand.’° The aim of the

new movement to let ability wherever it was found, and not privilege, control the state had an obvious application to the New South Wales liberals’ attack on a nominated upper house. Parkes may appear as a simple-minded enthusiast in his response to these British political developments, but he knew what he was about. He realised that what a political movement can achieve does not depend merely on numbers and a cause but on society’s understandings of what is possible, legitimate and right. The mind of any one country will be affected in this by developments in others. On one occasion Parkes speculated on the repercussions if Russian serfdom were to be abolished: ‘a shock would aid to shatter the chains of every other thrall in the remotest kingdoms.’ “The nerves of the wide world of mankind,’ he continued, ‘like those of the human body, are complicated into one compact system and must everywhere, on strong occasions, reciprocate sensibilities.”"’’ For an Australian colony, Britain was the most important nerve centre and Parkes’ plan was to use the Empire to heighten the effect of the messages which flowed from it. A reforming Britain would legitimate reform in New South Wales.

Britain was in fact nowhere near as ready for reform as Parkes depicted it. The next reform to the political system was not achieved until 1867, and household suffrage, which Parkes confidently expec-

ted to be enacted in a year or so, was not granted until 1884. Manhood suffrage came in 1918, 60 years after its establishment in New South Wales. But Parkes’ predictions of imminent reform were effective in New South Wales politics because they could not simply be dismissed out of hand. The political world in Britain had changed from the hard times of the late 1830s and 1840s when the constitution

was being defended from the Chartist assault. To talk of further reform was no longer outrageous. Cabinet ministers publicly pondered what democracy might mean instead of denouncing it. The issue ceased to be whether there was to be further reform, but when. Parkes could unsettle the New South Wales conservatives by

warning them that the Britain they appealed to was about to disappear. He could encourage the reform party by telling them that all they were seeking was shortly to be granted in Britain itself. One of the successes of the reform party in New South Wales was to widen the definition of what was ‘liberal’. In the early 1850s the ‘liberal’ causes were self-government, anti-transportation, and the abolition of the squatters’ monopoly hold on the land. The colonial meaning of the term harmonised with the British one for in Britain liberalism was opposed to special privileges for any class or group

and to arbitrary powers. Liberals in both Britain and New South Wales were not democrats. But by the second half of the 1850s the

54 A BRITISH DEMOCRACY DESCRIPTIVE FLAGS.

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MAKING BRITAIN DEMOCRATIC 55 colonial liberals were moving rapidly leftwards. They espoused manhood suffrage, the ballot and equal electoral districts. As they did so, the more substantial merchants and professional men, who had been so important in giving the movement respectability, deserted to the conservatives. They were replaced by men of lower social standing and more radical views.'* Cowper, the impoverished

landowner, who had come to the fore in the anti-transportation movement, continued to lead them, a patrician captain over an increasingly disreputable crew. But still the liberals kept their name. The conservatives challenged their right to use it; they asserted that they themselves were liberals

in the common acceptance of the térm.’” They objected to their

Opposition to democratic reform being described as ‘illiberal’. Such disputes over the meaning of terms take us close to the process by which opinions change and new ideas gain legitimacy. ‘Democracy’,

which had commonly been regarded as dangerous, was gaining respectability under a ‘liberal’ banner. The conservatives were naturally enough incensed at this development and according to the established usage of ‘liberal’ they had reason to complain. The fact that the liberals could make their meaning of the term stick was a tribute to the success of Parkes’ efforts to keep New South Wales up to date with British reform. The meaning of ‘liberal’ was changing in

Britain too. There were now in Britain impeccable liberals committed to a wide extension of popular power; they were far from being a majority, but they were enough to sanction the colonial use of the term. Cowper had little enthusiasm for liberalism in its more radical form; he became the adept manager of the liberals rather than their inspiration. Parkes, in the Empire and the Assembly, did most to shape and defend the liberal programme. When the Assembly came to debate the bill for manhood suffrage, the ballot and the rearrangement of electorates he was the chief speaker on the liberal side.*? The two arguments he used to support the measure had been

his stock-in-trade in the Empire. The first asserted that colonial society was different from Britain and so the usual British arguments about the dangers of democracy did not apply. There were no

ancient classes or interests against which the people might make damaging attacks; in a new and expanding society there was opportunity for all and if all men were given political rights they would identify their own fortunes with those of the state and there would

be no likelihood of disorder.*! The danger would arise not from granting popular rights but from withholding them. Parkes also supported the claim that democracy was natural for a new country by pointing to the absence of an aristocracy in the colony and the

insignificance, by British standards, of the difference in social standing and circumstance between the colonists. This was the argument

56 A BRITISH DEMOCRACY which was used in Britain to support elected rather than nominated

upper houses for colonies and was appealed to by several other speakers in this debate. There was now official British endorsement for the view that colonial societies were distinctive and had different

constitutional requirements. In Britain this was not taken to mean that colonies should be democracies, but once the strict adherence to British forms was abandoned, it was easier for colonial democrats to dismiss the traditional arguments against democracy and harder

for colonial conservatives to maintain them. |

Parkes’ other argument, to which he gave more prominence, was that the bill was fully in accord with developments within Britain. In

the House of Commons as it stood the towns had a greater proportion of seats than in the New South Wales bill and it was now accepted on all sides that a wider franchise and the ballot were to be conceded very shortly. With his usual exaggeration Parkes declared that ‘all the great men’ in British politics were involved in this reform cause, forgetting the great men who had opposed it in the past and who still had severe doubts. The bill was, he said, ‘English in spirit’ and in no sense an ‘un-English measure’. He read from a speech of John Bright, the British reformer, on the need for changes to the franchise and the electorates, reminding the Assembly of the great weight which Bright carried in the British political world. Bright’s speech enabled Parkes to conclude that the colony, far from going too far towards democracy, was stopping short of what Britain would soon be doing. Other speakers appealed to British reform and reformers in a similar way. John Campbell, the least able of them, declared amid roars of laughter, ‘was it not a bill the people of England have been agitating for during the last 1500 years, in fact ever since he was a boy?’.” Imagine if the colonial reformers had been unable to appeal to British reform and reformers. Then Parkes would have needed to stress his first argument much more and to highlight the differences between the colony and the mother country. Colonial democracy would have been a declaration of independence and a rejection of British privilege and inequality. But democracy defended as British was tamed and quarantined; it was less likely to have a transforming effect on the way colonists thought of themselves or the mother country. Parkes was no doubt correct in claiming that the colonists’

loyalty was such that they were not ready to defy the mother country. Democracy had to be made British before it could be accepted. Parkes’ old democratic allies were also correct in sensing that such a democracy would give them much less than they had hoped for. Just as the measure establishing manhood suffrage, the ballot and new electorates passed the Assembly, Henry Parkes became bankrupt. The Empire ceased publication and Parkes had to resign his

MAKING BRITAIN DEMOCRATIC 57 seat. He was soon back in parliament, but his financial affairs remained precarious and two years later he wangled from the liberal government an appointment as a lecturer on the colony in Britain. During his British travels he was able to see at first hand how low

the fortunes of reform had sunk. At Birmingham, his home town, he lectured to an audience of 5000, chiefly working men, who raised no cheer when he told them that manhood suffrage and the ballot prevailed in the colony. And these were the men, Parkes lamented, who had waged civil war for the Charter twenty years ago.” John Bright, the reformer whom Parkes had used to ease democracy into New South Wales, was out of favour. He had actually lost his seat

because he had opposed the Crimean War. The Britain which Parkes had created— voracious for reform— was a phantom. The signs of reform, though not the substance, had been present in the

early fifties and now there were not even the signs. However, Parkes had worked wonders with the signs, and in a colonial society they become more important than substance. Colonists cannot share the complexity and variety of immediate experience in the mother country; the place which remains so important for them becomes a collection of images which they continuously recreate themselves. The conservatives held up one image —the glorious constitution of our fatherland— and Parkes eclipsed it with another.

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OCAL politics was not what excited the colonists most. They

L. celebrated with most abandon after they learnt of the fall of Sebastopol in 1855 which marked the end of the Crimean War; they were at their most generous in donating to the fund for the widows and orphans of soldiers who died in the Crimea; they followed no event so closely as the four-day cricket match against

the first English touring side in 1862; they were ecstatic at the visit of Prince Alfred, the queen’s son, in 1868. At these times the colonists were not merely revealing their attachment to Britain and things British; they were, to varying degrees, self-consciously demonstrating their loyalty to Britain in order to impress the British. Before 1850 the colonists had been pressing Britain to leave them alone so they could govern themselves; just as they achieved that aim their world became more dangerous and they began to fear that the mother country was leaving them too much to their own devices. In November 1853 an American ship arrived in Sydney Harbour

from New Caledonia with the news that those islands were now French. The ship had been chartered by the French to take back supplies to the new colony. There was widespread dismay in New South Wales that Britain had allowed its arch rival to obtain a base so close to the Australian colony. The recommendations from colonists and British officials in the region that New Caledonia should be claimed for Britain had been ignored by a ‘cowardly’ British government. In the colonists’ eyes, the French were clearly up to something. They now had Tahiti, the Marquesas, and New Caledonia; what would be next: Tonga or New Guinea?’ A base in New Caledonia would make it easy for the French to launch an attack on Australia in the event of war between France and Britain.

The colonists were not afraid of conquest, because the mighty British navy would ultimately ensure that the continent could not be held by a hostile power; what they feared were lightning raids on ports and shipping which were much more tempting targets since the gold rushes. Ships carrying gold to Britain could be captured and

Sydney held to ransom or plundered for the gold in its banks. Napoleon III, the French Emperor, did have the possibility of an 60

DESPERATELY LOYAL 61 attack on Australia in mind when he ordered the annexation of New Caledonia.” In his 1850 lectures Lang had said that an independent Australia would have no enemies. He brought the house down when he listed the possibilities—the Aborigines? the Japanese? African negroes? the Latin American republics? That joke would no longer work.

At the time New Caledonia was taken the old enemies, France and Britain, were supporting each other in resisting Russian expansionism. When in 1854 they went to war against Russia in the Crimea, the colonists were afraid that Russian ships might now raid their coasts. Leading colonists requested that the British naval presence on the Australian coast be maintained and strengthened, the Sydney Chamber of Commerce pointing out that it was British trade and British capital which would be in danger if the colony were left defenceless.* Keeping Britain interested in the colony’s defence was the new task of its public men. Britain did accept the obligation to maintain its power everywhere on the high seas, though that did not mean keeping a fleet in every

nervous colonial port. During the war the navy undertook only to keep one ship in Sydney Harbour and send reinforcements if they were needed. For land defence, the British government expected colonies to assume more of the burden themselves.” It paid for four companies of British troops in Sydney; two extra companies which the government had requested in 1851 on the outbreak of the gold rushes were paid for by the colony. All the troops received, at the colonists’ expense, extra pay to cover the high cost of living in Sydney. To aid the regulars in repulsing any Russian raiding party, the government enrolled a band of volunteers who trained in their spare time. To protect the harbour from hostile shipping it undertook an expensive program of fortification. Governor Denison, who arrived in 1855, was a military engineer and took charge of this work himself. He stopped work on the outer defences and strength-

ened the inner forts at Dawes Point and Bennelong Point and created a new fort at Pinchgut which from then on was known as Fort Denison. The forts were manned by British Artillery companies paid for by the colony. Only the radical democrats had doubts about the British cause in the Crimea and the colony’s own defence effort. Some radicals wanted Russia to be humiliated because it was the most tyrannical of European governments, a suppressor of liberal and national movements within and beyond its borders, but they were afraid Britain would conduct a limited war for its own interests rather than a crusade.° A poem of Harpur’s in the People’s Advocate described the war as just another tussle between kings and diplomats with which Australia should have nothing to do unless it wanted to be fouled by the ‘Old World’s dirt’.’ Radicals’ feeling about the war

62 A BRITISH DEMOCRACY became more mixed when they pondered its local political effects.

They saw it as strengthening the discredited system of rule by

governor and officials, to whom the colonists were paying

taxes for the new defence works, and diverting attention from the evils of Wentworth’s conservative constitution which was soon to be foisted upon them. (The constitution was actually delayed in London because the British government was preoccupied with the war.) They knew their history —a war scare was going to be used to snuff out dissent. The people, declared the People’s Advocate, had nothing worth preserving. No foreign rule could be worse than what the colonists now endured. Let the landlords and merchants defend Sydney rather than ask the working class to pay and suffer for it.® Despite their doubts, radicals could not help warming to the new volunteers. For the colony to possess its own military force was a step towards national identity and independence. They wished that

the volunteers had been called the National Guard, after the republican models of the United States and France.” Adelaide

Ironside, the radical artist, made the colours for the new force — the Union Jack combined with Australian wildflowers— and presented them at a parade in the Domain. She did not address the volunteers in the customary way as ‘gentlemen’ but with republican plainness

as ‘Soldiers and fellow countrymen’ and spoke of herself as a ‘daughter of Australia’. She began her short speech, the first

by a woman in the colony’s public life, with the announcement that she was about to leave for Europe to study the great models of art.

At first sight, this personal concern may seem out of place on a public occasion, but for Ironside her: preparation in Europe for a career as the artist of an independent Australia was an event as significant as the enrolment of an Australian volunteer force." The Rev. J.D. Lang carried the radical case against the Crimean war into a forum where it gained widespread publicity. At the outset

of the war a public meeting was called to express support for the allied cause. There were nearly 2000 people in the theatre and the rest of Sydney could read a full account of what was said in the next day’s papers.’ The whole range of the colony’s politics was repre-

sented among the speakers, conservative, liberal (patrician and popular) and radical. Sir Charles Nicholson, speaker of the Legislative Council and chancellor of the university, was in the chair. Lang was the only speaker who doubted the righteousness of the British cause: Britain could have fought Russia in 1848 to save an independent Hungary; now it was fighting to save the infidel Turkish sultan. He disturbed not a meeting, but a patriotic rally. His words

were drowned out with groans and hisses, the chairman had to intervene to gain him a hearing, and when he was at his most outrageous someone called for three cheers for the Queen which was ‘very generally responded to’. Whatever the rights and wrongs

DESPERATELY LOYAL 63 of the war, Lang urged the colonists to have nothing to do with it. Russia bordered the Pacific Ocean and France was on the colony’s doorstep, and if the colony remained a British satellite it would be drawn into endless conflicts with them. An independent Australia, on the other hand, would have no quarrel with them and would be left alone. This to the audience seemed nonsense; the more Lang highlighted the dangers from European powers in the Pacific the more they felt the need for protection from another great power —

Britain. Captain Innes interrupted Lang to point out how selfdefeating his argument was. Lang did truly believe that an independent, undefended Australia would be left alone. So much so that he predicted that the French Emperor would give New Caledonia to

an independent Australia since the only reason he held it was to harass Britain through Australia.'? Lang had formed his dream of a peaceful independent nation when the great powers were on the other side of the world. To insist that nothing was altered now they were not made him appear naive.

The plan for an independent Australia would have been more credible if it had included the building up of its own defences— but Lang opposed any measure for local defence. If Britain thought the

colony was worth having, it should defend it. He declared amid great uproar that he would not give a single sixpence to defend the colony under the present system of government. To do so would amount to an endorsement of Wentworth’s hated constitution. Before he would defend the colony, Britain had to amend the constitution to his liking.

The war had baffled Dr Lang. Here was the great patriot recommending that the colony do nothing for itself and rely wholly on Great Britain! He was denounced at the meeting and afterwards for advocating a cowardly policy. He was deserting Britain when the

going was tough and was not prepared to fight even to defend

his own. It was left to Sir Thomas Mitchell, the surveyor-general, who had fought under Wellington, to strike the heroic note. Old as he was, he offered to lead a raiding party against a Russian intruder. What use was it, he said, for Lang to be withholding support from Britain and arguing terms when the cannonballs might start to fly at any minute? Lang did not offend the meeting by saying that Britain had a duty to defend the colony. The colonists were very keen to impose that duty upon it. The meeting itself with its declarations of loyalty and support was designed to bring the colony under favourable notice and make it seem a possession worth keeping. The colonists were

Outraged because Lang would do nothing to assist the mother country. Their instinct was to support British arms as the instruments

of liberty, civilisation and true peace, and their first thought was how they might assist the empire in a time of trial. In assisting

64 A BRITISH DEMOCRACY the empire they would also be defending themselves. Most obviously they could help with local defence — the meeting resolved to support

a local defence force and expenditure on forts—but two speakers declared that if Britain was in real danger men from the colony would join the battle.'? At the meeting Parkes was the most effective speaker against Lang, not simply because he spoke well, but because, as everyone knew, he had previously been Lang’s supporter and was still an advocate of radical political change. Parkes could never accept that

the war was none of the colony’s business— ‘Are we then, to be told,’ he said, ‘that we are no longer Englishmen?’. That attachment was strong in Parkes as in nearly all English migrants, and the war rekindled it. But for Parkes Englishness was also a political tactic; he told the meeting that since as Englishmen they were claiming their political rights they could not desert England in the hour of danger. He destroyed Lang by identifying his approach as the ‘abominable doctrine that the adversity of the mother country was the colony’s opportunity’. Though no pawn of the governor, he was prepared to support him in taking measures for the colony’s defence.

He himself was ready to join Sir Thomas Mitchell in a boarding party. The prospect of danger and the opportunity for grand gestures

fired Parkes’ imagination. He made close inquiries about the best weapons for hand-to-hand fighting." This meeting was a turning point in the colony’s political history. Lang’s recipe for freedom and independence was totally discredited. Parkes’ public repudiation of Lang and his enthusiasm for Britain suddenly made democratic liberalism appear much less threatening in conservatives’ eyes. In Parkes’ hands at least democracy would not mean republicanism and a break with Britain. Parkes’ personal reputation soared, with even the Sydney Morning Herald praising him for his disowning of Lang.’

After six months of war the queen requested her subjects to provide for the widows and orphans of the soldiers who were dying

in the Crimean battlefields and hospitals. A second representative meeting of Sydney citizens enthusiastically formed a local branch of the Patriotic Fund. People were urged to give not simply as a charity but in recognition of the protection which British forces

were affording the colony—if the Russian navy had not been locked up in the Baltic and Black Sea by British ships, it would have

been raiding Australian ports and shipping. Since the organisers were looking for donations from every section of the community, they invited speakers who represented all nationalities (English, Scots, Irish and native-born), and all creeds (Protestant and Catholic). On this occasion there was not a discordant note.*© The Catholic Irish could not be expected to be enthusiastic for the Crimean War simply because it was an English cause. They sup-

DESPERATELY LOYAL 65 ported, or at least did not oppose, this and other imperial causes partly because they could see the advantages which the colony derived from the British connection and chiefly because their experience in a self-governing British colony was so very different from the Irish experience of British rule in Ireland.'? The New South Wales Irish did not live in enclaves, but scattered among the English and Scots. They enjoyed equal civil and political rights and though on average poorer than other national groups (because they came with fewer resources and skills), some had done well and a

few held prominent positions in public life. One of these, Roger Therry, a judge in the Supreme Court, was the keynote speaker at the Patriotic Fund meeting. The Catholic church was officially recognised and financed by the government on the same terms as the Anglican and Presbyterian. The Irish were generally well pleased with colonial life and wanted to be accepted. Without forgoing their Irish identity or forgetting Ireland’s wrongs, they were ready to conform to the prevailing British ethos, and Protestant

English and Scots in public life were on the whole prepared to find ways to incorporate them. There was a general determi-

nation to avoid the divisions and bitterness of the old world. The Patriotic Fund meeting with its carefully balanced panel of speakers

was typical of the colony’s public life at its best. Of course, old prejudices and antipathies survived. While Ireland was subject and Protestants and Catholics believed each other to be

fatally mistaken these would continue and would occasionally be exploited, but they were also the spur to leaders on both sides to maintain their efforts to limit and control them. Before the Patriotic Fund meeting a rumour circulated that Catholic widows and orphans were to get lower pensions than Protestant, begun no doubt by some Irish who were unhappy at Irish support for this imperial cause. Archdeacon McEncroe, who was the second Catholic speaker at the meeting, had no doubts about the cause—he gloried in all nationalities and creeds combining to defend ‘their queen, their God, their right’ — but he mentioned the rumour, hoped it was false and reported that the fund’s organisers had already promised that the colony’s contributions would be accompanied by an instruction

that there was to be no discrimination in the distribution. The governor, who was in the chair, promised that he would send the same message to the secretary of state for colonies.

The Patriotic Fund movement became colony-wide. Country towns followed Sydney’s example; a public meeting was called to launch the movement, a committee of worthies appointed to organ-

ise the collection and they themselves took a prominent part in canvassing door to door. Individuals and groups competed to give the largest contribution. Daniel Cooper, nephew and namesake of the ex-convict brewer, set a cracking pace at the first meeting by

66 A BRITISH DEMOCRACY donating £1000. Donations were sent from pubs, shops, schools, warehouses, government departments, crews of ships, members of trades unions and gold-diggers at various points and bars of the rivers. The collectors reached the furthest recesses of the colony. Months after the movement was launched in Sydney donations were

coming in from overseers and men on sheep and cattle stations.'® On the Lachlan Ben Hall, native-born son of Irish convict parents, gave £1 ($80 in today’s terms).’” The colony sent over £60 000 to Britain, a princely sum and a much bigger contribution than that of any other of the empire’s colonies. From the first the fund had been seen as not only an opportunity for helping the widows and orphans, but also the colony itself. The leaders of the movement wanted to outshine the new rival, Victoria, to bury the Botany Bay image of convict times, and above all to show loyalty to the mother country. Having collected the most, New South Wales had a reputation to live up to.*? When there were collections for the victims of the Indian Mutiny and Lancashire cotton workers unemployed because of the American Civil War, the colony again gave handsomely. On the basis of these donations the colony claimed itself to be the most loyal of colonies and its generosity to these causes was used quite shamelessly to claim Britain’s attention and protection.” Well before the end of the Crimean war, the volunteer force was in decline. Some left early, disappointed that they had not been elected officers or having no confidence in those who were. Once it became clear that there were no Russian raiders on the high seas more drifted away as there was little prospect of them having real work to do. It required some fortitude always to be a volunteer since there were constant jibes at the men who were merely playing at soldiers. There were no sanctions against those who failed to attend drills and parades. In 1856 the first parliament under responsible government took away from the volunteers the paltry sums which had been paid for a central office and instructors. A remnant struggled on without any official support.*? That left the British redcoats as the colony’s sole defenders on land. While they were in opposition in 1856 and 1857, the liberals complained of the money spent on them and urged that the volunteers should be encouraged as a cheaper force and one totally under the colonists’ control. When liberal governments came to power, however, they maintained the redcoats and did nothing to encourage the volunteers. For governments, using the redcoats was the easiest way to get a reliable defence force and a fairly cheap one since Britain still paid most of the cost. Volunteers did not have to be paid in peacetime, but in peacetime few men would want to enrol; in war the volunteers would have to be paid and at a higher rate than the British soldier and for service which would be much inferior since the volunteers could not match the training and discipline of the British regulars.

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n:

y h n e S V lars e

A new threat: the French Flag flying over New Caledonia.

e e e here was a wl espr p oc rt) Tn t 1 erred to kee ¢€Stl . Overnments Parkes was the gp he ?.

I W wid ad assumption that in no circumstanc

the colon produce soldiers as good as the British. h 860 h Britain demanded that the colony meet most of the cost ;

Ww ly leadi litician who fought against this

h he insisted that the British connection had to arrangement. Though he in ! | b intained because the colony could not protect itself against a

reatmocracy power, he still wante ’ Isatisne it snou €1accus , W ill ted to foster a strong local defence force.

him th olony was a nation in the ma Ing and aS a

iti citizens rms. He toming all its to .was

not

hei if to s and pay have the time to devote Men had : v V to drills an parades. £ isfied with the volunteers because they ere an exclusive force.

d During the Crimean war the voluntee rs

W unusual militia in whic » ° eqs confidence in uSstralian be been young men from gove.“"2S k 7wanted 2 n ad a who referred to themselves as gentlemen Parkes

iti r qualit

ilitia in which all would be required to serve. He had an

I l military ca acity —his militia wou

I force to the British regulars e men m

68 A BRITISH DEMOCRACY than those recruited in British towns and discipline maintained on very different principles. His model was the United States army which under Washington had fought so well to defend their homes and liberty. Parkes pressed his scheme on the Assembly late in 1859 when there was a renewed interest in defence because war between France and Britain seemed likely. He secured only ten votes, the majority of the house, which was overwhelmingly liberal, being content to rely on British regulars.*° They were not moved by Parkes’ warning that in war Britain might have to withdraw its regulars to fight elsewhere. They put their faith in British steadfastness, with the smart men saying that British interests were too extensive in the colony for it to desert them.7° And even if the regulars were withdrawn, the colony would not face disaster because the navy would be there to guard its coasts. There was no need to respond to Parkes’ democratic vision of a nation in arms. As the fear of war with France grew during 1860, new bands of volunteers formed without any prompting from the liberal government. Ministers were not sure that volunteers were needed; they did not want to be associated with the volunteers if they were a nine-day wonder or to pay for their training and organisation if they should be an enduring success. Despite the lack of enthusiasm at headquarters, the movement grew much more rapidly than during the Crimean war and finally the government was obliged to recognise and encourage it.” The volunteers had the spur and sanction of the volunteer movement in Britain which had formed in response to fears of French invasion; if the colony did not fear invasion, the French with a base in New Caledonia seemed a more menacing enemy than the Russians. The social composition of the volunteers was the same as before; young men from what the Sydney Morning Herald called the ‘respectable and educated classes’ .** The volunteer

artillery was quite aristocratic, having its origins in the Australian

Club and in meetings of gentlemen at the Metropolitan Hotel. Parkes tried to offset this by promoting a second artillery company which would take people from all classes, including men who could not afford to buy a uniform.’’ But as he well knew, only a scheme which covered costs and provided officially for time off for training could attract large numbers of working men. Saturday afternoon

when parades were held was still part of a working day.°? The volunteers, especially at officer level, remained a gentlemanly order and their rifle matches and parades occasions for the gathering of fashionable company.”! The reemergence of the volunteers took place just as the democratic movement reached its high point with the agitation to unlock the land. The Sydney Morning Herald took great comfort in the fact that though the superior and intelligent classes of society were being overridden and excluded by the democratic order, they could find a

DESPERATELY LOYAL 69 useful function in the volunteers.** The colony had not much need of its own defence forces, but what it had was not touched at all by a democratic ethos. The liberals entrusted defence to British soldiers and the volunteer offerings of the classes who were anti-liberal. During the 1859 French scare Lang revived his plan for separation

from Britain and neutrality in Britain’s wars. He gave even more offence this time because the proposal was made not at a public meeting but in the Legislative Assembly itself. As soon as Lang

gave notice of his motion it was challenged. T.A. Murray, a disenchanted liberal, the owner of Yarralumla, objected to the motion being accepted for discussion. A proposal for independence should not be allowed to stain the records of the house. He asked

the speaker to have the clerk read the oath of allegiance to the queen to which Lang had subscribed when he became a member. The oath was read and the speaker ruled that the motion did not violate it: Lang was not actually proposing separation; he wanted to petition the queen to grant it. The liberals were embarrassed by this motion coming from one of their followers, but supported Lang’s right to put it and have it discussed.** But it never was discussed. A few days later Lang withdrew it, saying he was well satisfied that it

had been allowed on to the house’s record. The honourable and gallant member Captain Russell would have liked to have denied him that satisfaction: he said the motion was so repugnant to the

feelings of all classes of Her Majesty’s subjects that it should be torn out of the records and swept from the floor of the house.** Loyalty was becoming extravagant and desperate.

That Australia would in the long term become independent was

commonly accepted in the colony. The belief in the country’s unlimited potential led naturally to this conclusion. When Australia was a great nation, a second United States, it would be able to look after itself and would part on good terms from the mother country. It was not taboo, as it later became, to discuss this outcome quite openly.*> Meanwhile, however, the colony needed Britain’s assistance. Lang’s motion was objectionable not because it mentioned the unmentionable but because shaped as a proposal for action now it might give Britain the idea that the colony was considering inde-

pendence. When Lang was denounced for disloyalty he coolly replied that several eminent British politicians were now proposing that colonies should become independent. This was all too true— and made Lang’s offence worse. Rock-solid loyalty was necessary to keep Britain up to the mark. The feeling in Britain against keeping the colonies grew strong in the 1860s. Cobden and Bright, the liberal leaders of the so-called Manchester school, were the colonies’ chief enemies at headquarters. They had led the successful campaign which made free trade with the whole world national policy in the 1840s and they argued

70 A BRITISH DEMOCRACY

o. & | Bopinhiateeeree ie NN A AVC vs | Be eS See * Pete ey hi Tie Oona Heise , Wine | pee ; a ae * fe bed \ 1: vt ane a Ee Be Spe Be: Mi i ou ae ©)

Service. |

The volunteer artillery in the uniform of the gentleman before they acquired that of the

that Britain’s prosperity did not depend on keeping possession of colonies: colonies would do the same business with Britain whether she owned them or not. Britain actually suffered from keeping the colonies because she was paying for their defence. Cobden and Bright did not openly advocate throwing the colonies over; that was left to one of their cohorts, Goldwin Smith, who was professor of history at Oxford.*° Historians now play down the influence of these anti-imperialists;

Britain went on acquiring new territories despite them and no responsible statesman except in moments of impatience or special difficulty really considered getting rid of the colonies.*’ The sec-

retary of state for colonies in Gladstone’s liberal government of 1868-74 came nearest to beginning the process of dismembering the empire when he instructed the governor-general of Canada quietly

to prepare the country for independence.*® But the government retreated from this position and in the 1870s the tide turned and imperial fervour took off. The colonists at the time, however, did not have the advantage of this perspective. They saw a movement led by Cobden and Bright, who had been victorious in other causes; they knew that the anti-empire case had been accepted in part because they were asked to pay more for British soldiers; they heard much enthusiasm from those who wanted to get rid of the colonies

and little from those who wished to keep them. They were afraid they were about to be deserted. The Times told the world that in England a professor of history even at Oxford was not a statesman, but in the colonies Goldwin Smith was hated and feared.*”

DESPERATELY LOYAL 71 The Australian colonies became more anxious for Britain to maintain its interest in them, but they had a special handicap in gaining the good opinion of a British audience: they were democracies. In the early 1860s anti-reform feeling in Britain was at its peak. The old parties of reform were in power, but they took their cue from Prime Minister Palmerston, who was resolutely opposed to any further widening of the franchise and change in the electorates.

There was no demand for this from the people, whom Palmerston kept happy by his aggressive foreign policy. The governing classes were delighted at the collapse of the United States into civil war, which finally disproved all that the radicals had said about that ideal form of government, and were supporters of the gentlemen planters of the southern Confederacy. Into this environment came news of the failings of Australian democracy — the lowest types were elected

to parliament, governments were unstable, inefficient and corrupt and sanctioned the wildest prejudices of the mob. This was the picture conveyed by the most influential newspaper in the world, the Times of London, which told the colonial office to stop agreeing weakly to everything the Australians did. Self-government in its view had been carried too far. It was the greatest mistake to have let these colonies adopt universal suffrage unless Britain had intended to do the same. The Australian experience was yet another warning of how disastrous that policy was; the Times referred to Australia as ‘this little theatre which our colonists have been good enough to get up for our instruction’.*” Right across the nation other newspapers reproduced the tales of Australia’s degradation from the Times. To Parkes’ chagrin, even the liberal Manchester Guardian joined in.*' Colonial conservatives who had suffered at the hands of democracy were delighted to see the colony depicted in this way. Indeed they were partly responsible for feeding these tales to the British press.“ They would not have suffered in vain if their experience could keep Britain from going the same way. For conservatives who remained in the colony, the connection to an undemocratic mother country became increasingly important. If the democrats did finally get out of hand, Britain could intervene; meanwhile the degradation which they felt in belonging to a crude democracy was offset by their citizenship of a great empire where the decencies were still upheld.*? Many of the conservatives, including the two premiers Donaldson and Parker, had taken refuge in Britain. There they could luxuriate in an anti-democratic climate; when they met together in London at Australian dinners to celebrate 26 January or to farewell a new governor they could speak their mind publicly about democracy in a way that was no longer possible in the colony.“ Conservatives in the colony and at home had not quite given up hope that the colony would renounce democracy and return to British ways.*° The British distaste for colonial democracy was the

72 A BRITISH DEMOCRACY last weapon they had to use. This could be made to operate quite directly: after a Times attack on Australia, the value of colonial securities fell on the London money market.*° The colonial liberals were furious at the treacherous behaviour of the conservatives. They had reduced them to a pitiful clique in the colony, only to see them find a receptive audience in London for their outrageous lies about liberal democracy. The difficulty the liberals faced was that they could not be indifferent to what the British thought of them. They could not say that an aristocratic ruling class was bound to have jaundiced views of a democracy. They needed Britain; and worse for their equanimity, they admired the country which was denouncing them. So they sought to correct the lies; to emphasise how orderly, British and loyal the colony was.*’

Such were the uncertainties and complications in the colony’s relationship with the mother country when the news reached it in 1867 that Prince Alfred, the queen’s second son, was to visit them.** He was 23 years old and had recently been made a captain in the navy.

He would come in his own ship the Galatea. The news itself was greatly comforting. Beyond and above the politicians and pamphleteers wrangling over the value of colonies was a sovereign who knew

and cared about the colonists and was sending her beloved son to tell them so.*? Prince Alfred was actually in disfavour with his mother, who found him ‘reserved, touchy, vague and wilful’; he came to see her seldom, stayed briefly and made everyone miserable. He was leading a wild life in society. The queen could find no excuse for him; he was not being led astray, he was choosing to go

astray. She hoped that the responsibility of the tour and the separation from London society would improve him. He was not at all pleased at this banishment.°” Only one public voice was less than enthusiastic about the visit. The Freeman’s Journal, run by Irish Catholics, though not endorsed by the church, described it as a pleasure cruise of a ‘young AngloGerman gentleman’, the son of a sovereign who had done nothing in particular to win the gratitude of Australians.°’ This was fairly mild in a paper which outraged loyal colonists by diatribes against

England as the oppressor of Ireland. Just at the time of Prince Alfred’s visit, the relationship between those two countries was in

one of its periodic crises. The Fenian brotherhood had attacked police and army posts in Ireland and then carried the battle into England as it attempted to rescue their members held in English jails. Three Fenians who killed a policeman in Manchester were caught and executed and were promptly canonised in Ireland as the

Manchester martyrs. English hatred of the Irish intensified as innocent citizens on English soil were killed and injured. These

DESPERATELY LOYAL 73 developments led to a souring of relations in the colony. Iwo members of the St Patrick’s Day regatta committee announced they

would not honour the toast to the queen at the regatta lunch. The host of the hotel where the committee met told them to leave as they had become political. The governor withdrew his patronage from the regatta.” In local politics, too, there was a new ground for Irish disaffection.

In 1866 Henry Parkes in his first ministerial post reshaped the education system to restrict aid to church schools and control them more closely. Catholic clergy began to organise themselves for the long battle to defend their schools. So far this issue had not touched many of the Catholic laity; the clergy had a lot of work to do before

all Catholics believed that education was important and that the national schools run by the state were sinful.-? The Freeman’s Journal, though, made Parkes’ tyranny on education as much a staple of its weekly offerings as Ireland’s wrongs. It did not, however, maintain its rudeness to the prince. By the time of his arrival it had succumbed to the general enthusiasm and, giving the prince his

proper title, declared that there was not a man of any creed or nationality who did not wish him a pleasant stay and a safe journey home.>*

Throughout the colonies, the loyal demonstrations for the prince

were exuberant and insistent. Every district wished to see him, every organisation and association wanted to present an address of welcome and loyalty, and everyone with a claim to social distinction

must meet him. The jockeying for his favour began before he arrived and, since a full itinerary had not been settled, continued when he was here. Even after plans were made they were disrupted

with scant regard for protocol. He could not travel through the country without a group of horsemen would descend on him, announce they were the councillors of the vicinity, and read their address of welcome and loyalty to his gracious mother. He was not always able to hide his boredom.”° The prince came to New South Wales after visiting South Australia, Victoria and Tasmania. As capital of the oldest and most loyal

colony, Sydney was determined to outdo their welcome.°? The whole steam fleet of the port went out beyond the heads to meet the

Galatea, and then escorted her into the harbour, with thousands watching at the heads and on every vantage point. Heavy rain rather marred the effect. Next day the prince made his official landing at

Circular Quay and progressed through the city to Government House. Since this was a great state occasion, the ministers of the crown showed that they knew what was proper—they met the prince dressed in court costume, brilliant blue tunic, gold lace, cocked hat and sword. When the governor ruled, he and his officials

appeared in court dress on great occasions, but this was the first

74 A BRITISH DEMOCRACY

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an Soems . “ a ne Rae a :a a7 ,8A-- ao O'Farrell, Prince Alfred’s assassin, under attack from ladies and gentlemen as he 1s placed on board a paddle steamer en route to Darlinghurst Jail. Very little of his gentleman’s dress remains on him.

time it was worn by ministers under responsible government.°’ They

excited ‘mirth and respect’ from the crowds. The prince wore normal street clothes and was somewhat overshadowed by his bulky

colonial courtiers. The largest crowds ever seen in the colony’s history gathered on this day. They were matched subsequently by those who attended the prince’s review of the volunteers, watched the fireworks, and thronged the streets to see the illuminations and tableaux on the city buildings. Thousands of visitors from the country were among them. And yet, as every report of these events stressed, there was no disorder. The city magistrate boasted that he had to hear only one case of drunkenness.*® Loyalty and orderliness: the colony was presenting itself to the world just as it wished. Henry O*Farrell, an Irishman from Victoria, shattered that image when he shot Prince Alfred at a.charity picnic beside the harbour at

Clontarf. Everyone remembered where they were and their first thoughts on hearing the news.°’ They knew they had been cast in that instant into a new epoch. Dreadful prospects opened before them. What would England think of them now? What would the queen think of them, she who had entrusted her son to their care? The reputation of the colony was already blighted by the deed, but if the prince should die...? The rage which swept through the colony was not on account of the damage O*Farrell had done to the prince (which turned out to be minor), but to themselves. The elite of Sydney, gentlemen and ladies, would have lynched O’Farrell on

the spot if the police and the bandsmen of the Galatea had not prevented it. When they at last managed to free him from the highly respectable mob and get him on a boat, his head was battered and bloody and not a stitch of clothing remained on the top half of his body. The man who grabbed O’Farrell and deflected his second shot

DESPERATELY LOYAL TS was mistaken for a time for the assassin and suffered almost as much. —

Probably O’Farrell was mad, though this view was not accepted by the jury at his trial or the government, for otherwise he could not have been hanged. Almost certainly he acted alone, but this is not what he told his captors. He declared that he was a Fenian who had been sent from Melbourne where a group of ten had drawn lots to

determine who would commit the deed. The government, with Parkes as colonial secretary in charge, mounted a massive operation

to search out the Fenian network in Australia. The publicdemanded that the government take decisive action to stamp out the conspiracy which had disgraced them. In parliament the opposition announced that party warfare would cease and it would give full support to the

government to take whatever measures were necessary. Six days after the attempted assassination the government introduced and

carried in one day the Treason Felony Act. This brought the colony’s law on treason into line with the mother country’s, but also

created new powers and offences. The government could forcibly

enter premises to search for papers and arms of those bent on treason. The premier, James Martin, told the house that the government already had evidence, which it could not reveal, that there was a local Fenian network. It became an offence, carrying imprisonment of up to two years, to speak or publish anything disrespectful

to Her Most Gracious Majesty. One disrespectful utterance was specifically named as an offence — an announcement that you would not honour a toast to the queen. There were some misgivings about

these measures which were partly allayed by their operation being

limited to two years, but only three men voted against them. Loyalty was now to be enforced by law. For a week Sydney people could think of nothing other than the

fate of the prince and what was so closely linked to it, their own.

The medical bulletins on the prince’s progress were the most important news; the morning papers carried the 3 am bulletin which

described how the prince had passed the night. The city was in a sort of mourning; activities were cancelled including all the St Patrick’s Day festivities; attendances at the theatres were thin. Whole families fell ill with grief and worry.” On the day after the attempt a mass indignation meeting of 20 000 people in Hyde Park reaffirmed its loyalty to the queen, denounced

the wretch O’Farrell and totally dissociated the colony from him — he was a mere visitor, no citizen of theirs—and generally set the colony right before the world so that it would not be exposed to

its ‘hatred and contempt’. These ritual acts were performed again and again as every suburb, country town and voluntary association called its own indignation meeting. A new flood of addresses carrying the resolutions from the meetings poured in on the prince at his

76 A BRITISH DEMOCRACY sick room at Government House. At these meetings some speakers

declared that the colony would not be blamed for the act of one individual, but others denied it— however unjust it was, the colony would be marked by this stain for years to come. At the indignation meeting of the native-born, Michael Fitzpatrick, the son of a convict and a Catholic, said that the colony’s reputation could be saved only by ‘systematic and sustained loyalty’.°’ This was the function of this meeting and all the others. The native-born reached new heights at

their meeting in fervour for the queen and the British connection and in execration of O’Farrell. Two speakers wanted his body fed to

the sharks so that it would not pollute their native soil. Before the

indignation meetings had run their course it was clear that the prince would recover. A new movement then began, to build a hospital by public subscription which would carry the prince’s name

and help to reestablish the colony’s reputation in the eyes of the queen and the British nation. During all the public heart-searching there had been a very studied effort not to blame the local Irish for O’Farrell’s crime. The

tactic had been to make O’Farrell as alien as possible in order to

salvage the colony’s reputation. At the indignation meetings, English, Scots, Irish, and native-born declared themselves and were declared to be united in loyalty and abhorrence of the deed. At the

first and largest indignation meeting clergymen had been banned from the platform lest they aroused any sectarian feeling. There were passionate calls for Australians to put behind them all oldworld antagonisms and divisions. The Catholics were looked to for a declaration of loyalty, and although the assumption that they were under a special obligation rankled, they obliged. Yet in the community at large, prejudice against the Irish Catholics was running wild. Irishmen were dismissed by Protestant employers; friendships between Catholic and Protestant were broken; the most

absurd rumours circulated about the involvement of the Catholic

church in the commission of the crime.® The one public body which fanned this prejudice instead of damping it down was Her Majesty’s colonial government. Parkes had found no firm evidence of Fenian activity, but he continued to pursue this phantom. A few drunks had

been arrested for disloyal statements, but had not been proceeded

against. On the day before he was hanged, O’Farrell wrote a confession declaring that his previous claims were false and that he

had acted alone. Parkes suppressed this, but O’Farrell had sent a second copy to his lawyer which was then passed to Parkes’ opponents. When its contents were revealed the Catholics were no longer in any doubt that Parkes was attempting to implicate them in the attack on the prince. As he smeared them with disloyalty they reminded the world of Parkes’ disloyal past as Chartist and republican.© Parkes, already riled by the Catholic attack on his education

DESPERATELY LOYAL 77 policy, launched into an anti-Catholic crusade. After five months the colonists learned what the British thought

of them. The response was entirely different from what they had expected. The colony’s chronic uncertainty about its standing because of its convict past and democratic present and its fear that Britain was looking to cast off the colonies had led it into a totally unnecessary display. No one reproached New South Wales for harbouring an assassin or thought any the less of the colony.” There had been Fenian outrages in Ireland, England, and Canada; the news was received as simply further evidence of Fenian wickedness and how widespread the conspiracy was. The reaffirmation of

loyalty from the colony was welcomed, particularly as it showed how self-defeating Fenianism was, but its excesses caused some amusement and in regard to the Treason Felony Act real dismay. The colony in its desperation to be loyal had enacted a totally unBritish measure. There was outrage in the colonial office over the Act—‘worthy of Henry VIII!’—and particularly at the provision regarding loyal toasts. The officials recommended that Britain disallow it, but the secretary of state asked merely that it be modified. The government which had insisted on the genuineness of the Fenian threat could not afford to retreat. The premier requested the act be allowed to stand, setting out the dangers which the colony faced—the Freeman’s Journal, disloyal talk, the refusal to drink toasts — and insisting that colonial ministers were the best judges of

what was necessary. The secretary of state relented, but made it clear that he still did not approve the clauses regarding disrespectful language and publication. The British press criticism of the Treason Felony Act was reported in the colony, which gave Parkes’ opponents a powerful weapon. He, who was a master at finding British precedent for all he did, had

now been condemned in Britain. He refused to back down and

declared he had the evidence to show there had been a conspiracy. There turned out to be no new or convincing evidence and this rash

claim nearly ruined him. He was saved because briefly he had managed to tie his own fate to that of Protestantism. But Catholics and Protestants were not so firmly divided in the community that this could be a lasting formula for political success; there were too many other allegiances, personal and local, which cut across this divide. Soon Parkes was mending his bridges with the Catholics.

They deeply resented their treatment during the panic after the attempt on the prince, but they were no less willing thereafter to show due loyalty, never fulsome, but adequate in normal times to save them from reproach.

The queen’s response to the assassination attempt was all the

colonists could have wished. She understood them, and in a special message said she not only appreciated their unbounded loyalty but

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Government House, the union jack, gentleman volunteers depicted in 1855. These remained the trappings of the democratic state.

also felt in a peculiar degree for the colony that the attempt should have been made there. The awful moment when the queen heard the news was not quite as the panic-stricken colonists had imagined.

She was shocked, of course, but before that had passed she had remembered the trouble her son caused and hoped God had spared him because he was now going to be good.°’ The prince’s visit brought Australia before the British public in a new light. There was genuine amazement in the press and among

politicians at the enthusiasm for the prince and the passionate loyalty to the home country. This display at last displaced the stock idea that colonists in demanding self-government and no interference in local affairs were on a path to complete independence. The surprise in Britain at the strength of loyalty to the throne arose in part because democracy was still associated with republicanism. How could those who had adopted equality in political rights pay such extravagant court to the son of a hereditary monarch? But in Australia the monarchy had taken on a role rather different from that in the United Kingdom. It was not so strongly associated with government; it had been lifted out of its aristocratic

setting and made a symbol of unity for colonists of different backgrounds, even for Catholics for whom the virtuous queen could

DESPERATELY LOYAL 79 be separated from the government and empire she headed; it was a human and reassuring link to home, to a great civilisation, and the

power which was needed to protect them. All this was perfectly compatible with democracy. During the prince’s tour the colonists had pressured him into serving the democracy by everyone insisting on the right to his attention.° In Britain, too, monarchy and democracy were ultimately to be reconciled. Britain took a decisive step in that direction just as the prince arrived in Australia when the second Reform Act was passed. This gave the vote to skilled workers in towns, still a far cry from

democracy, but the fact that it was granted by a conservative | government, boldly outbidding the liberals, the usual party of reform, signalled that there would be no resistance finally to democ- —

racy. The Australian exiles in Britain were bitterly disappointed, and for good reason, because a Britain which had adopted this measure could no longer be held up to rebuke Australia.” Australian democracy was safe from its last enemy. Nor could Britain be quite so superior about Australian democracy since it was the fate which now awaited her. A British democracy was ceasing to be a contradiction in terms. Democracy in New South Wales was established when those terms were contradictory, and though democracy was made compat-

ible with loyalty to monarchical and aristocratic Britain, it was limited and coloured by the connection. Since Britain became more,

not less important for the colony’s defence from the time of selfgovernment onwards, the colony still had to please its overlord. It had established a very different political order from Britain’s, but this distinctiveness was proclaimed much less than its loyalty and essential Britishness. The trappings of the new state still bore an old-world stamp: the British governor, British troops, gentlemen volunteers, and, when loyalty and the desire to please reached their height, ministers in court dress.

N some new countries where land was abundant, property[ holding became widespread as each pioneer settled on his own farm. Even where property-holding was retained as a qualification for voting, these societies willy-nilly became near democracies. This was not how land was distributed in New South Wales. The chief

rural pursuit was not farming but grazing, and this required large holdings and considerable capital to purchase stock. Even in agriculture, extensive tracts of the best land were held in large estates. The pastoralists and large landowners who controlled most of the colony's wealth were a tiny fraction of the colony’s population. Democracy was adopted in New South Wales as part of a campaign

to give people access to the land. It was not a recognition of widespread property-holding, but a means of securing it. In its distribution of land, New South Wales appeared not to be a new country where opportunity was open to all, but a reproduction of the old world. Hence the liberal and radical case against the British landed aristocracy could be transferred unaltered to the colony. Colonial liberals, like their British counterparts, wanted to stop land being reserved for a privileged caste and to open it to men of means;

colonial democrats, like the Chartists, saw the land as a resource to which all had a right no matter what their means. The squatters and large landowners realised their vulnerability and had ensured that the great preponderance of representation in the old Council and the new Assembly was given to the country. Our first task will be to discover why so many country seats refused to be conservative bastions and voted liberal.

Equality of opportunity was the liberals’ aim. This principle was affronted both by the squatters’ monopoly and the nomination, rather than the election, of the upper house. There is a common view that the liberals were also egalitarians in another sense, that as opponents of the conservative order in New South Wales they rejected all olaworld distinctions and titles. On this view democracy represented a proclamation of social equality. It did not. Liberals wanted economic success to be open to all, but they wanted success to have its proper social reward. A man has been ignored by gentlemen from great houses; the woman he marries has been snubbed by ladies in carriages. If they struggle hard to advance their means and their social standing, they want a world in which there are not only carriages and great houses but respect for their occupants. Through the clamour against monopoly and privilege, we must find those distinctions which democracy was not meant to threaten. The liberals gained strength by promising both to remove distinctions and to confer them. The one area which the liberals could not capture was the pastoral

interior. Ironically, it was here that the most ingrained of old-world social attitudes—the disdain for manual labour—first disappeared and the common working man acquired a new dignity. This was a development to which the liberals were not attuned; they were so

blinded by their opposition to the squatters that they thought the common people were most oppressed in the interior.

81

‘But you care very much about your Australia?’ ‘My Australia? Yes, I own about seven acres of it, all told. I suppose | care very much about that.’ D.H. Lawrence Kangaroo chap, 2

ee er) We ee 2 ce - | jos poe oe : o : : | “e = me | “e 1 ae ° : a. cee Ae

a —6hlt( The opponent was a radical doctor from the Berrima end of the district, who had the support of Henry Oxley, a large Berrima landholder. Oxley, the son of the

explorer and surveyor-general John Oxley, had, like James Macarthur, been born in the colony, and was as determined as Macarthur to control the affairs of his locality. He supported the radical doctor not chiefly on account of his views but because he was

from Berrima.’ The rivalry between different centres for govern-

ment works and services was a feature of the politics of this

electorate as all others and could divide landed gentlemen just as it did storekeepers and publicans. For the 1856 election, the first under responsible government, Henry Oxley wanted to ensure that the ‘misunderstanding’ of 1851 did not recur, and he was early in touch with Macarthur to plan who should stand.!° The task was easier now since West Camden had been given two members. Macarthur himself was to run again and he was promised general support from Berrima. Oxley declined to stand for the second seat and since no other ‘country gentleman’ was offering, Macarthur invited Thomas Barker, a Sydney businessman and pastoralist, to stand. Barker visited Camden village and received the support of the leading townspeople—=miller, storekeeper, publican and tanner — but was told that no one would listen to him unless it was known that he had Macarthur’s endorsement. He reassured them on that point. A public meeting was held and he

86 DEMOCRACY AND SOCIETY was adopted as a candidate. He went further south to Picton and was met there by Henry Oxley with the news that his brother John had decided to stand. Barker immediately decided to withdraw since

he had no wish to oppose a gentleman of the county. He turned back to Camden to stop the news of his acceptance meeting reaching

the Sydney press. The Camden townspeople were upset at being made to look foolish by the last-minute Oxley candidature. Macarthur and the other Camden gentlemen were worried about John Oxley’s soundness since he was an associate of Cowper, the liberal leader. Macarthur’s neighbour, George Macleay, with the votes of his 50 tenants to add to Macarthur’s 150, was tempted to push on with Barker’s candidature. But Barker definitely refused to reenter the contest. Henry Oxley assured Macarthur that his brother was sound: his address to the electors would oppose any hasty alteration to the constitution. On nomination day James Macarthur and John Oxley were elected unopposed. But in parliament John Oxley was not a firm supporter of the conservatives and very soon Macarthur had to tell Henry Oxley that he could no longer cooperate with him politically." At the next election Macarthur would oppose John Oxley’s reelection. He attempted to avoid a damaging contest by persuading John Oxley to retire, but when he refused, he endorsed the candidature of William Wild, a son of a Camden landed family. Macarthur and Wild, the

two Camden gentlemen, were returned and John Oxley from Berrima was defeated. Henry Oxley was furious, not at Macarthur’s own return, but that he should use his influence so consistently for Wild. He wrote to Macarthur: ‘that you have the power of returning whom you choose without reference to the feelings or wishes of any portion of the electors, can never again be denied.’'* Henry Oxley

had once denied it. When Macarthur’s influence in Camden had been criticised in 1856 Oxley had publicly defended him. He said that even over his own tenants Macarthur had no wish to exert undue influence and in fact he would scorn to have the support of anyone who would be forced to vote against his conscience.” Macarthur now took the same tack in defending himself against Oxley. He denied the charge of using his influence for Wild by defining influence to mean direct intimidation of the voters; he claimed that the support for Wild had been given freely and independently. But Oxley knew that Macarthur did not have to stoop to threats and standover tactics to get his way; his influence was more subtle than that. ‘You are surrounded by so many people anxious to do anything to further your wishes that you have only to say it would be pleasing to you to see Mr Wild or anyone else elected, to engage them actively canvassing for the favourite man and using your name without reservation. . .’'* If all agricultural electorates had been like West Camden, the

LANDLORDS AND TENANTS 87 liberals would have been left lamenting in the wilderness. To their own surprise they were able to win agricultural seats in other parts of the country. At the second election under responsible government in 1858, they won enough to form their first stable ministry. West Camden was in fact the only agricultural seat to remain solidly conservative. Elsewhere the liberals won some or all of the representation in the multi-member seats. Apart from West Camden, the only solidly conservative electorates were in the squatting districts of

the interior.

Why were the liberals able to gain support so rapidly in areas

which they had thought would be hostile territory? We have to find the reasons why the social order of landlord and tenant allowed for

conservative political dominance in West Camden, but not elsewhere. There were differences between West Camden and other settled districts, but everywhere tenants and landowners stood in a different relationship to each other from that in England. Even at Camden, finally, the Macarthurs were to lose control. Tenants were more independent of landlords than in England and it was not impossible to persuade tenants to vote against their landlord’s wishes.!> Tenancy was for many not a permanent state, but a makeshift short-term arrangement. Their aim was to make enough money to buy their own farm. Owners complained that tenants had no concern for the future productivity of the land that they worked; they exhausted the soil with overcropping or left it rotten with weeds and then moved on. In the hard times of the 1840s owners had difficulty in finding tenants. In the gold-boom time of the early 1850s the demand for farms to rent increased, but at the same time those already on the land could better realise their aim of moving onto land of their own. From the proceeds of the high prices for their produce, they could buy a farm from an existing

owner or direct from the crown. |

The man possessing nothing, who wanted to own his own farm, began by taking a clearing lease. On this he paid no rent at all for

the first few years; his obligation was to clear the land and on whatever he cleared he could plant his crop. The landlord would undertake to feed him and his family for the first year, or the local storekeeper would extend him credit. After the first years, he began

to pay rent which was gradually increased until all the land was brought into production. The farmer might then stay and rent the farm he had created or move on and rent elsewhere. The land might

already be impoverished by his cropping and the landlord would then have to sow it down to grass.'° The tenant farmers were a natural constituency for the liberals. The farmers’ aim was to own a farm and the chief plank in the liberals’ platform was to break down the squatters’ monopoly and make crown land more readily available to the people. From the

88 DEMOCRACY AND SOCIETY first election under responsible government the land issue was important in the country, whereas in Sydney the constitution took precedence. The land issue was a complex one and from the varying proposals it was difficult to decide which would best help the poor man. But from an anxious letter to James Macarthur from a country clergyman we learn what uncomplicated messages the liberal campaigners were passing on to the people. The clergyman called them

wild, insane, suicidal. No man was to own more than 5000 acres; every man was to buy and get as much as he liked at 5s. per acre provided he was a Jack and not a master."’ The alterations which the House of Lords made to the franchise in 1850 transformed the social composition of the country electorates. Previously in the countryside voters had to own property. Now property-owners might well think that the squatters paid too little for the privileges they enjoyed, but owners, even small owners, might be wary of proposals to offer huge areas of crown land at greatly reduced prices as a general fall in property values would affect the value of their own holding. Tenants by contrast had no

vested interests; the cheaper crown land became and the more readily access was granted to it, the better they were pleased. The liberals in their eyes could never be too radical on the land question. In the country electorates in 1856 approximately 30 per cent of the voters were tenants and another 20 per cent were householders renting in the small towns, a non-property-owning category enlarged by the House of Lords which reduced the qualification from £20 rent to £10. Thus only half the country electorate owned property. In the Lower Hunter Valley and in Camden the proportion of tenants and householders was even higher and owners constituted only 42 per cent of the electorate. ® There was an impermanency about landlords, just as there was with tenants. In the 1840s very few of them were economically

secure. The core of the large estates had been received as free grants from the crown, but these had been added to by purchase in the 1830s on borrowed money. In the hard times of the 1840s, with low prices and low rents, the landowners had difficulty in meeting

their obligations. Bankruptcies and failure were common.” The situation became so bad, even for an old and seemingly secure family like the Macarthurs, that Edward Macarthur (the brother who had settled in England) asked Gladstone whether he could sponsor a plan for the British government to offer special loans to prop up the landowners of New South Wales. He argued that the British parliament was responsible for the critical position of the landowners because it had set too high a price on colonial land and that if the educated, landed class was not supported, democracy would triumph. Gladstone was noncommittal in reply.”° The landowners who had paid high land prices resented the easy

LANDLORDS AND TENANTS 89 terms on which the squatters leased land in the interior. Many of the landowners themselves took up squatting runs— which helped them

to pay for their estates in the settled districts— but the bitterness against the ‘pure’ squatters who invested nothing in land and had no commitment to it remained." So the liberal programme of reducing squatters’ privileges was not something landowners would necessarily oppose, though they were opposed to the democratic reforms to which the liberals increasingly committed themselves. But what fuelled the liberal campaign for democratic reform was the squatters’ privileges and their evident determination to hold on to them. The landowners were caught: they might support the liberals’ land policy in its more modest forms but they deplored the means by which they

were looking to achieve it. One of the causes which James Macarthur gave for the defeat of the conservatives was the intransigence of the squatters. Their ‘selfish arrogance’ and ‘extreme violence’ inflamed the people and made a defence of conservatism by decent landowners like himself impossible.** The squatters might well have

complained that democracy would not have triumphed if the large landowners had not given some support to the anti-squatting cause. In the 1850s landowners were rescued by the gold boom. Returns

on rural produce soared and property values rose. By the end of 1854 James Macarthur expected that he would be able to pay off all his debts.2? But instead of consolidating and strengthening the social order of landlord and tenant, the new prosperity weakened it. Many

landowners sold their properties and returned to England; in the Hunter River Valley especially there was a veritable exodus.~* These men were first-generation migrants who did not have the commitment to the colony of a James Macarthur or a Henry Oxley who were native-born sons of pioneers. They had come to make their fortune and return home and when fortune finally smiled they left. They did not want to play the role of country gentlemen in the colony and they judged that there were few others who wished to do

so. They sold their estates not in one piece, but subdivided into small farms. By this process the social order which the liberals valued and which was more likely to support them— the small man independent on his own land— was being strengthened. The Lower Hunter Valley was a fertile region producing about one-third of the colony’s agricultural produce. At the first election

under responsible government in 1856 its two rural electorates returned five liberal members and only one conservative (and he was unsteady in his support). This was a very different society from the Macarthur country of West Camden. The farmland was close to substantial towns: Newcastle, Morpeth, and Maitland which was the colony’s second city. Morpeth, at the head of the navigation on the

Hunter River, and Maitland nearby served not only local landowners and farmers but the pastoralists higher up the valley and

90 DEMOCRACY AND SOCIETY across the ranges in the Liverpool Plains and New England. They were entrepots between Sydney and the interior. The Hunter River towns, which constituted separate urban electorates, were strongly liberal and they gave a lead to the surrounding countryside. The Maitland Mercury, the first newspaper established outside Sydney, was liberal and its founding proprietor Richard Jones was one of the successful candidates in the rural electorates in 1856. The regular and reliable coastal steamships which plied between Sydney and Morpeth brought the Hunter Valley within easy reach of Sydney (a journey to Maitland was much more easily accomplished than to Camden). This and its well-developed commercial centres explains why the Hunter Valley was the area where the Sydney liberals first established local networks prepared to act in concert with them.” Piddington, a Sydney bookseller and stalwart of the liberal move-

ment, was elected in 1856 for one of the Hunter Valley rural electorates.

The local large landowners, who were by no means all antiliberal, made some effort at joint action in the 1856 election, but these electorates were too large and diverse for them to control. Good candidates could be found and well launched without their aid. One of the new members in 1856 was William Arnold, a small

landowner recently enriched by the proceeds of gold-buying. He had taken a subsidiary part in previous elections. For the 1856 election he got the support of the Maitland Mercury and announced his own candidature before the local gentlemen had met to discuss candidates.7° The two large landholders who had held seats for the Lower Hunter electorates in the old Council lost them in 1856. In Illawarra, the other major area of tenant farming, the liberals had to work harder for their success. At the 1856 elections John Marks, a local farmer, won one of the two seats for the popular cause; the other was won by Henry Osborne, a large landholder and a conservative. Osborne was the big man of Illawarra, the largest landowner, with a numerous and loyal tenantry. His first tenants were convicts and others who had worked for him and he subsequently assisted them to bring out and settle members of their families on his land.*’ Even his enemies acknowledged that he was a good landlord and that many owed their prosperity to his assistance.

On nomination day he was always accompanied to the poll by a large crowd of horsemen, his tenants and supporters.*® He was a self-made man, not well educated, and with none of Macarthur’s sense of the obligation upon large landowners to act together, not only to ensure electoral success but the credibility of the conservative order. When tenants were first enfranchised he raised technical objections in the local court against the vote being given to the tenants of Alexander Berry whose huge estate straddled the Shoalhaven River, the southern boundary of the electorate. These two

LANDLORDS AND TENANTS 91 doughty pioneers had been enemies ever since Berry accused Osborne of stealing his stock.*”? Osborne’s objection that Berry’s

tenants did not have proper leases was upheld. Needless to say, once the leases were put in order, Berry’s influence was used against Osborne. Technical objections were also raised in 1851 against the leases held by Osborne’s tenants, but these were overruled by two magistrates, one his brother and the other a ‘near connection’.””

At the second election in 1858 the liberals made a concerted

attempt to remove Osborne. Marks, the sitting liberal, ran again in tandem with Owen, a Wollongong solicitor turned businessman. The Illawarra Mercury published in Wollongong kept up an antiOsborne barrage. Osborne was particularly vulnerable as the land issue assumed more prominence because he was a squatter in a large

way. In Illawarra he might be the benevolent landlord, but elsewhere he was depicted as keeping the people from their patrimony.**

The liberals’ advertising campaign, relying on the force of the big

lie, accused him of being a rack-renting landlord. With more plausibility, it argued that as an opponent of land reform he was denying his tenants the chance to secure freehold farms and ensuring

they would remain his ‘serfs’ forever. The advertisements also attacked Osborne’s determination to extend his family influence —

he had arranged for a number of relatives and connections to be made JPs— and for giving leases and hence the vote to two Chinese

on his estate: ‘ELECTORS AND BRITONS.—WILL YOU DISGRACE YOURSELVES BY VOTING FOR A MAN WHO HAS INSULTED YOU BY QUALIFYING HIS CHINAMEN FOR THE PURPOSE OF SECURING HIS RETURN?’” Faced with the prospect of two liberals winning the electorate, Alexander Berry decided that his old enemy had to be supported and he gave instructions for his influence to be used in Osborne’s behalf.*’ But it was late in the day for the two great landowners to be cooperating.

Osborne headed the poll only at one booth, the site of his own estate; everywhere else the liberals were triumphant. Two years later in 1860 the liberals finally took the conservative stronghold of West Camden. James Macarthur was away in England and his brother William reluctantly took over the management of the electorate in the conservative cause. The election was called by

the liberal government on the issue of its land bill: the radical proposal to allow the would-be farmer to select his land anywhere on the squatter’s run without giving notice or any prior survey being

made had been defeated in the Assembly by a combination of moderate liberals and conservatives. The government was now appealing to the people to uphold the principle of ‘free selection’. The term itself was a masterstroke; the land still had to be paid for (by instalments, at the high price of £1 per acre) but ‘free selection’,

by allowing a person to settle anywhere, seemed to promise the

92 DEMOCRACY AND SOCIETY instant fulfilment of the dream of independence on the land. Neither William Macarthur nor his associates among the Camden gentry thought they had any chance of returning two conservative candidates in the midst of the enthusiasm for a bill which promised ‘to give everyone everything’.** Free selection was even more alluring because the last two seasons’ crops had been wrecked by floods. The liberals told the farmer whose crops had been destroyed that if the

government were returned he could put his family and goods on a

dray and travel until he found land that suited him and settle down.*> Whether he would find good land within reach of a market

as he had at Camden was not explored. The local gentry were further handicapped because all adult males now had the vote and voting was in secret.

The two hapless conservative candidates were Henry Oxley of Berrima, who had worked sometimes with and sometimes against the Macarthurs, and J.H. Plunkett, the much-respected attorneygeneral under the old system of government, who was a Catholic and in different circumstances likely to appeal to the Irish tenantry

of Camden. He lived in Sydney and did not venture into the

electorate. The local leaders of the liberal cause were not tenants or smallholders but substantial property-holders of the second order,

men who would not be accepted by Macarthur and Oxley as gentlemen of their rank, not because their estates were smaller than theirs but because of their background or the way they had acquired their property.*° John Morrice, one of the liberal candidates, was of

this group. He was a self-made man, who owned land at Berrima and squatting stations in the interior. He was believed to have amassed a fortune in the gold rushes by selling picks and shovels.*’ The other liberal candidate was a gentleman of the Macarthurs’ order, but not a resident in Camden. From the Australian Club in Sydney John Douglas wrote to William Macarthur announcing his candidature and assuring him that in his campaign he would be nothing ‘other than courteous to you or respectful to the influence which you deservedly possess’. Douglas was a squatter who was jumping on the liberal bandwagon and sent, as the conservatives alleged, by Cowper himself to carry the liberal banner in Camden. He hinted to Macarthur that he did not really support the liberal land programme and asked for his forbearance. But he was ready to accept his opposition—‘I can take a licking with perfect good humour.’*? When James Macarthur heard the news that Morrice ~ and Douglas were the new members for Camden, he was not unduly upset; it could have been much worse. They shone in contrast to the general mass of the Assembly: ‘Douglas is a man of old family and educated as a gentleman. Morrice I have always heard to be a hard-

working quiet man— his great fault the love of money...” |

What was much harder to bear was the betrayal by the leading

LANDLORDS AND TENANTS 93 men of Camden village who in previous elections had dutifully signed requisitions to Macarthur to stand and supported him and whomever he sponsored. The village was a Macarthur creation. They laid it out and sold or leased the plots. The businessmen prospered on the trade which the Macarthurs and their tenants brought them. The course of their career from amassing wealth to the assertion of political independence from the local squire is a classic case of the ‘rise of the middle-class’. Henry Thompson, miller and storekeeper,

and John Lakeman, a retired publican, were the two leading opponents of the Macarthurs in the village in the 1860 election. Sometimes the Macarthurs thought Thompson’s prosperity threatened their own. He had extensive dealings with their tenants, buying their crops, selling their goods and advancing them credit. When the farmers got into difficulties, Thompson was remorseless in seeing that he got his money back so that the Macarthurs, to whom

rent was owed, were in danger of missing out.*? Thompson had taken over the lease of a number of farms whose owners had fallen into his clutches and was the Macarthurs’ largest tenant.**

John Lakeman had been the first licensee of the Camden Inn which had been built by the Macarthurs and leased to him on condition that he maintain a respectable house and stock Camden wines.*” Lakeman prospered; he bought the inn from the Macarthurs and in the early 1850s sold out and retired. In 1855 he was charged

with raping a servant girl. At the trial Macarthur was called as a witness and said what he could to help the accused.*° After Lakeman

was convicted Macarthur added his influence to the calls that the sentence of death be not carried out.** Lakeman’s sentence was commuted and he served only a short term, for by 1860 he was free and supporting the liberal cause in Camden by mounting personal attacks on his old landlords and patrons. He charged them with breaking faith with those who had bought land in Camden village by not laying out approach roads as they had expected.” James Macarthur in England heard from William and his friends about the humbling of the Macarthur influence and the triumph of the liberals in Camden. He was disposed to be lenient with all his opponents and detractors except Lakeman whom he considered an ‘ill-principled, ill-tempered brute, all but mad’. He told William not to have any further dealings with Lakeman, but he refused to follow William’s advice of punishing the townspeople generally by cancelling his plans to supply an organ for the Camden church.” Emily, James’ wife, was not so ready to forgive the Camden people’s ingratitude. She had always disliked Thompson, and as for future dealings with Lakeman, ‘it would be very little communication that I should permit on his part— nothing but a touch of the hat’.*” When

Lakeman next appeared at Camden House after William had received these views, he was told to write if he had anything

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The world the Macarthurs made: Camden village surrounded by farms let out to tenants.

LANDLORDS AND TENANTS 95 particular to say—‘he went off and wrote not.’*®

West Camden had been kept safe for the conservatives over several elections by the unusual circumstances of its being a small electorate with one dominant landlord who took care to cooperate with others in electoral matters, and by being undisturbed by a large town population or local newspaper, which could provide a base for the liberal cause. But Camden was not so far different that it could hold out forever. In 1860 the bonds which had held the electorate to the Macarthurs broke under the forces which had delivered other country electorates sooner into liberal hands. Even tiny Camden village provided a base for the defiance of the large estate which surrounded it. Supporting the liberal cause enabled men to escape from an inferior position in the social hierarchy, to assert independence from those to whom they had previously deferred socially and politically. The liberals’ land programme brought them widespread Support and finally made them irresistable. Land reform was popular in both city and country, but in the city the attraction was more in the upsetting of the squatters; in the country it spoke to those who

were or hoping to be farmers and who wanted to be more than tenants. Even the best of landlords could not withstand it.

pI hir, the first New South The diggi ; discovery | of ool Wales goldfield. After the

es . very the democrats hoped {c i l

> dem ts hoped for a massive invasion, e

ain outh Wales few hundred claims along a valley r mained more ty ical of the New Sou

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oe Rg ST iret. ¢ a ® ee ee oe es ee aks

BS SPUN ge ee acne Pea eeSat Bly osA} Le Ma iSR asFAS eeseeotOa Base “os ares 1g oie ae Ce “¢ Pere og Ba ae eae gs si oe alee Re rane ea) wey Be +orWs eeTOMY. a.aeg Meo etenee oO ee ae fey hes are Pa BO eg ot ED ee meee da pos AN Shee REE uaeoy eeSAB. : é : ewe, we oeee (Eott EA aE yrsoy Rec eseacaeee eat it Sy alt eeaed .a J‘ : ~~ i Oe a BtgEBek te BEN AA aoeSeer aieEe res re ae ibChae ca ATEO Re: React be* i2 bs BSS YBate ohi

ous Reseed Bae ee % ee mt og _§ ae a a Sa Ba Se as a a bet, “is ae ee N ayer dee Cae af eT Lee

oy Se West oo Pe ey i. Et oe eM +xe gSteaeMR 3. kA i *ee: ae ra Sy Aa ie 4Bie vg Ree WAR em: 5 1 pee ‘hata a at Me ledhe 2deweraoe TE: Ae. re me #!ee Soe Site. er 3eT aieaan ove keee 1wwe Cae: SexBN: =e itRita Baar ee am anf¥Poa an i

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x hy eet ce ee MERE cu, OAR gene ae Een a Aa + TFA

a.2 ‘3aisMRS eeot ‘gy. can PEt eeABEee SE eM samme aR leat ae, oa ca a ye Mine i ON ease Seae Ree A Te De ata Pe‘~EEMeee POEMEE LAN % i 2.Ba Ree EOE Bere ee TE pacePSpen ha EPEAT

Kee - ren wt . Ow paar Maes Bh ae we eet et eM adie PEON . bhprs Sek tae Sigh eeSn Bo“ee ages, bo>nea cs ‘ ; EON SaMM iet Coe . Ww ORT ae Sa RSS ‘f a .Saat ea a ae “ er ageSaeed ee not ae SyhiCie Bt cata : RaOE eae Bee etfee sca“pega ESIEE COaare Ee :Pa etSe te © aren * “‘a:Pan oh&ensrnaag nae =esonaes +TeaBeh aea Py

. ES eR in PPT OMSAC TT+OR MS pecrer ee Sol SLEoh gagAeerie Be an, oe baa Bagel BB et: ie neti, wy ae A ieme ee°tet Okt eAKESP oson.aMB esaCoP oS SBD 4 AA, whe Area a ea mn taeOe EAB AR iSg GN estgbeWe ye.voaaween oe Bates ae saan aeR A + ATU cee Me Pecor Sn eM SANG Vy WNA.-0seg Soatgoe ns |owe ah, Seay SR CR SE SOE CORA Co A ne , 7+ The democrats worked hard as members of the committees to elect Sydney liberals, and their parliamentary successes made wider organisations less necessary. Instead of having to

exert pressure on the political order from without, the liberals quickly found themselves the majority within the citadel. The oldtime democrats did found the Electoral Reform League but it was quickly taken over by the liberal politicians. It organised several successful public meetings in Sydney, but its attempt at a mass rally in Hyde Park and a banquet of members of parliament sympathetic to the cause were flops. Its difficulty was that manhood suffrage on

which it might have raised some fervour was already virtually established in Sydney. Its chief concern was with the more abstruse

question of the allocation of electorates according to population which was less likely to stir the masses and definitely unlikely to draw support outside Sydney. This was why few MPs attended its banquet.“ There was finally nothing heroic in the passage of manhood suffrage. No mass organisation worked for it or gained credit and authority by its adoption. No noble men and deeds were left to posterity to revere as the people exercised their democratic rights. What democratic tradition could be shaped when the chief actors in the story were the House of Lords, William Wentworth and gold-

rush inflation? :

Parkes, the former toyshop proprietor now dressed as a gentle-

man, chaired by working-men supporters after his election to the

Legislative Couneil in 1854. ws

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Social distinction is everywhere desired, and nowhere more than in democratic countries, where the passion for rising in the world is

e°°

stimulated by the possibility of it.

Sydney Morning Herald, 4 January 1860

There is no such thing as a democratic gentleman. Joseph Furphy Such is Life chap. 4

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‘Ca eae — San. ae eee” Se a 2) paeee e wee COs Oe CEQ SNAit?eos . Ra (ee, «yeee.arte BY say ge oe eg ee oye SOS S ee es oe, an , ee ar AS fone . ‘a wy be a -_ tion The squatters and selectors were left with no solution to their boundary problems except trickery, force and an endless round of impounding and lawsuits.*°

The blackmailing selectors, those phantoms of the conservative imagination, did not take long to materialise. Farmer J. J. Main and his wife came from Victoria late in 1862 to select land in New South Wales. Their attacks on the squatters began in a very direct fashion. On a Murray River station Main assaulted a squatter’s overseer who was remonstrating with him for grazing his sheep on the run without permission. For this he was fined £10 in the Echuca court. Proceeding into the Riverina, Main and his wife both took up selections. Mrs Main chose 40 acres in the middle of a fenced paddock. Her land, marked only with pegs at its corners, was in the path of the squatter’s cattle as they moved to their customary watering place. She seized seven of these beasts and her husband drove them to the pound. They collected £35 damages for their trespass, more than enough to cover the deposit on their selections. At this stage Mrs Main had no stock of her own on the selection. The only sign of her desire to settle and improve the country, apart from her corner pegs, was a tent. Later in 1863 Main charged the overseer whom he had assaulted with committing an unnatural offence with a sheep. The case broke down completely and the overseer was cleared without a stain on his character.”’ The Mains’ journey into New South Wales became general knowledge because the squatter who had been obliged to pay damages to Mrs Main appealed to the Moama court. On a technicality the court

ruled against Mrs Main and this judgment was upheld by the Supreme Court. In handing down his judgment the chief justice expressed grave doubts over whether selectors had, under the existing law, the right to impound stock. Not even the most ardent

champion of the selector could defend the Mains—the liberal Empire described Mrs Main as an extortioner—but there was general consternation at the suggestion that the selector could not defend his ground by impounding. If he could not, the squatter could arrange to eat off all his grass with impunity. Parliament

ATTACKING THE RICH 149 quickly affirmed that the selectors could impound.*® This meant that

selectors whose only aim was to annoy the squatter had the power to impound the squatter’s stock as Mrs Main had done. The aim of selectors like these — boss cockies they came to be called— was to do or threaten so much damage to the squatter that they would be paid to go away.”” All these difficulties of selection before survey had been foreseen

by its opponents. What few had seen was that selectors would attempt to become small-time pastoralists. All the talk of land reform had concerned the creation of farmers and the development

of agriculture. To use the land acts to become a pastoralist a selector had to take up more land than the law-makers had intended him to have. The maximum size of a selection was 320 acres, but

there was a loophole in the act. Any ‘person’ could become a selector, so a selector could take up selections in the name of all his children. A babe in arms was a person, and so the courts ruled when the matter was referred to them. A man with a large family could acquire say 2000 or 3000 acres and with that three times the area as a grazing lease, though in his case all the holding was for grazing. Selectors had to live on their selections for three years and improve them before they could pay the balance of the purchase money and become the owners. To meet the residence requirement a family of selectors would put up a small hut or tent on each of their selections and for one or two nights a month children would be taken to sleep on their selections. Or a junction house would be erected, straddling the boundary of the selections in which the family could always live together while having a resident on each of their claims. Before the freehold title could be acquired selectors had to swear that they had resided on their holding and improved it to a certain value. Whatever the facts of the case, the children so swore and then transferred the title of the land to their father. A pastoralist selector was much more threatening to the squatter than the farmer, as the land acts had envisaged him, with his crops and orchard on the selection and his plough horses and cow on his

grazing right. He took much more land and he was in the same business, running stock on the open range which could intermingle with the squatter’s. The most bitter selector-squatter conflicts occurred in the good pastoral country of the Riverina.*” The small-time pastoralists, like the blackmailers, threatened the squatters in the interior where the responsible supporters of selection before survey had assured them they would be safe until agriculture was possible there. Squatters amply fulfilled the prediction that they would be well armed, tenacious and effective defenders of their territory. They did this by transferring from leasehold into freehold the key sections of their run, chiefly those which contained water or controlled access

150 FRUITS OF DEMOCRACY

, \ \\\ \

; A 2 ae Leah cy

Fon hath ft I 4 Be: = \ : " sy \ ~ “ 4 af 7 na gyaeas PE ge WARLNARS VANS Weer oe

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A squatter’s lurk: a ‘residence’ erected on a dummied selection.

to it. Once they had secure hold over these the remaining land was of no use to anyone else. They also purchased lands immediately surrounding any selector who had established himself on the run to prevent him from applying for more land and obtaining his grazing right (which had to be adjacent to the selection). They acquired the title to these lands by legal and illegal means. The squatters, who were well-respected men and often magistrates, were as ready as

anyone else in the scramble for land to swear falsely and deal doubtfully and to benefit from others doing so.*! The squatter and his family members of all ages were ‘persons’

and hence could select land. So were his employees and their

children who were used as dummies to select land and when title was acquired transfer it to the squatter. Land on which improvements had been made could be bought outright at the minimum price of £1 per acre, and to take full advantage of this movable and false improvements were used to acquire several pieces of land in succession. Squatters bought up from the volunteers in the defence force the land orders which they were given as a reward for service. These could be held in reserve and then used to claim freehold to any piece of land on the run as the needs of the battle dictated. Squatters requested the Lands Department to declare key points of their run as water reserves on the grounds that if one person were to select them he would render large sections of country unusable by anyone else. So poorly equipped was the Lands Department that in

the early years of free selection it could make no independent assessment of what reserves were really required and took the squatter’s word on these matters.** Needless to say the squatter took a generous view of what reserves were required, for while they

ATTACKING THE RICH 151 held the surrounding land they would be the sole users of the water preserved by them. Finally, squatters requested that part of their land be put up for sale at auction and then they bid against all comers for it. This was the most open and straightforward method squatters had of obtain-

ing land and it had been provided for in Robertson’s Act. It had disadvantages for the squatter. It was slow because land had to be surveyed and then the sale had to be advertised, whereas a selection

by dummy could be made at any time and secured the following Thursday. It was expensive because at least the minimum price of £1

per acre had to be paid. By contrast, reserves cost the squatter nothing; buying in virtue of improvement cost £1 an acre but the squatter faced no competition; selection cost only 5s. per acre for the deposit and frequently nothing more because when after three years he (or his dummy) was eligible to pay the balance of 15s. per

acre, the selection was forfeited if the danger had passed. At

auction squatters did not bid against each other, but sometimes they had to buy off blackmailers who threatened to bid against them or to

free-select the land they were intending to buy, for until the land was actually under the hammer it was open to selection. Squatters would have preferred not to have been forced to buy their land. At

first they bought enough to protect themselves, but with good seasons and high prices in the 1870s they began buying at auction on a large scale to obtain complete protection from the selectors.*? As

selectors failed or wanted to move on, squatters bought up their lands, which is what some selectors had intended from the first. After twenty years’ operation of the land acts New South Wales remained basically a pastoral economy. Over most of the interior the conditions for agriculture were still not favourable. But though free selection had failed to transform the countryside, it had threatened squatters sufficiently to make them buy their holdings. Instead of large leaseholds, there were now large pastoral freeholds in the interior. This outcome was exactly contrary to what the selectionbefore-survey legislators had planned.“ Too much had been invested in selection before survey by both politicians and people for it to be readily abandoned. Minor amendments and adjustments could be suggested to the land acts, but the

test of all proposals was not whether their outcome would be satisfactory but whether they conformed to the principles of 1861, of

which the most important was the right of the selector to take any part of the squatter’s leasehold. After getting his fingers burnt over his fencing proposal in 1862, Robertson would allow no fundamental alteration to his act and was terrifying in defence of his handiwork.

He threatened anyone who attacked it with political annihilation. It was no ordinary measure, he said, but the will of the whole people.”

152 FRUITS OF DEMOCRACY Once squatters found that they could use the acts to their advantage, they too became broadly supporters of them.*° Champions of

selectors denounced them for their deviousness and greed and sought ways within the framework of the acts to help selectors and hinder squatters. This proved difficult to do, first because so long as the selector and his children were to have the utmost freedom to choose land without scrutiny or control, it was impossible to stop the squatter and his dummy from doing likewise. Second, squatters remained a significant group within the Assembly and after the antisquatting fervour of 1860-61 had subsided were able to combine effectively in defence of their own interests.*’ Finally, governments of all persuasions wanted revenue and if squatters, who were the largest land purchasers, were prevented from buying they would have been in serious difficulties. With such a conjunction of forces, the weapons of war which squatters and selectors had been given in 1861 were left unaltered and minor adjustments made to the rules of battle, with advantages and handicaps distributed evenhandedly to the warring parties. So in 1875 selection by children under sixteen was outlawed (which hindered the selectors chiefly) and dummying

was made a criminal offence (which was meant to handicap the squatters). Squatters were given protection from blackmailers in the purchase of land on which they were making improvements, but all improvements now had to be of a substantial nature.*° Despite the frauds and conflict which the acts produced, and their

failure to promote rapid development in agriculture (which grew more rapidly in the 1850s before the acts were passed), thousands of

people were able to use them to settle on the land. These success stories could not be gainsaid. The supporters of Robertson’s acts convinced themselves that only that measure and nothing less could have produced this result.*”? However, most of the successful settlement was in the coastal and middle regions and would have occurred if the Legislative Council amendments in 1861 had been accepted,

because the Council was prepared to allow free selection in these regions though not in the interior. A good deal of it took place in forest country which could have been offered to the people without threatening the squatters, who had no use for heavy forest. But all the alternatives to Robertson’s scheme vanished from memory and even when fundamental criticism of it became politically possible, the critic usually paid homage to the great man and declared that Robertson’s act was necessary in the 1850s though now it had unfortunate consequences. Support for a complete reconsideration of land policy grew from the late 1870s as squatters were using the auction provisions to buy on a massive scale. Previously there had been battle on the land; now it was a squatters’ victory march. The chances of the interior being peopled with independent small settlers were disappearing

ATTACKING THE RICH 153 rapidly. Governments were happy to have an overflowing treasury,

but those with any wit would see the danger of government becoming so reliant on the sale of capital assets. Organisations of selectors, which had met in annual conference in Sydney since 1877, began to doubt the wisdom of the measure to which they owed their existence. When first formed they had pursued their own sectional

interests as against the squatters’, but in 1882 they resolved that unrestricted selection before survey should cease. The land, or what remained leasehold, should be divided. One part should be allotted to selectors; on the other, squatters should have a long lease without threat of disturbance. On the day following the passage of this resolution a politician, a champion of the selectors, came to the conference to berate the delegates for what they had done. What sort of selectors’ conference was it, he asked, which advocated security for the squatters? He bludgeoned them into passing another resolution which asserted that they had meant no criticism of past practice. He failed to get them to rescind their earlier resolution.” The demagogue’s delusion that squatters had to be given no quarter if selectors were to be helped had had its day.

In the same year, 1882, Robertson as minister of lands in a coalition government with Henry Parkes, the other great survivor of the 1850s, introduced a bill to amend his original measure. As with earlier amendments it was a mere tinkering with details. For the first

time a rival leader in the Assembly made a bid for power by launching a full-scale attack on the 1861 acts. The man who sought to slay the giant was Alexander Stuart, a substantial Sydney business-

man. He was properly respectful to Robertson, whose continued popularity was one of the great obstacles to change, but he was unsparing on the disaster which he had created. Selectors and squatters had been needlessly set against each other; the country had been demoralised by foul deeds and false swearing; and all to no avail because the squatters had a firmer hold on the land than

ever before. He proposed that each squatting lease should be divided into two parts, the squatter to retain one on a longer lease without disturbance and the other part to be open to selectors. Of course some squatters had no leasehold left since it had all been converted into freehold, but in the western interior all land was still held by lease. On the resumed half of these western leaseholds the selector was to be allowed sufficient land to make him a small grazier, which was the only possible land use. Stuart also called for an immediate halt to the sale of land by auction, a courageous move since if the government ceased to collect funds from the squatters they would be obliged to impose new taxation or retrench.”’ Faced now with a fully worked alternative to his scheme, Robertson shrank into a pathetic figure defending his acts not so much because

they had settled the country but because they had made squatters

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‘a nSfotEeteaa Riga -, Roger &g However, the constant newspaper reports of diggers running off as the commissioner approached and the numerous stories from returning diggers about how they had ‘diddled the commissioner’ meant that Hardy was not allowed to rest on his laurels.*° In the press, in the Legislative Council, and in private representation,

the colonial secretary was being urged to tighten up the administration and collect more money from the diggers. The fiercest critics were in the Legislative Council. James Macarthur, who had opposed opening the diggings at all, chaired a select committee in 1852 which

damned the existing goldfields administration. His deputy was William Wentworth who considered diggers a public nuisance to be

tolerated only if they paid a handsome sum into the treasury. Wentworth alleged that only a tiny proportion of diggers paid licences; not more than one in four.”’ The colonial secretary knew

that that was not true. He had himself visited the goldfields and been impressed by Hardy’s achievements.*® He sought some improvement in the collection of licences and did his best to shield Hardy from the wilder criticisms.

The critics of the existing arrangements wanted to identify the diggers and keep them in one place. Before they left for the diggings they should be vetted by local magistrates and clergy; they must be grouped into parties with a leader and obliged to stay in them, the names of the party being recorded in placards outside their tents.

Those already at the diggings should be registered and grouped according to this plan. Parties would be allotted a claim by the commissioner which could not be subdivided; all claims would be registered and recorded on a chart and parties could not shift claims without the permission of the commissioner. These proposals were designed in the first place to make collection of the licence easy and

complete, but behind them lay a desire to reshape this rushing, atomistic society into something like a traditional form where men were known and bound to households, masters and landlords.

Hardy made short work of these proposals when they were referred to him by the colonial secretary. Diggers knew their own business best and would not welcome being ‘penned off like sheep’ into parties; they should be allowed to work with whom they liked, where they liked and to change their claim as soon as it seemed unprofitable — ‘persons change twenty times in a week’. To register all claims and transfers would be a huge pointless labour and as for a chart—on what scale would it have to be to record claims fifteen feet, wide? And imagine carrying it about and altering it in the open air. Hardy differed from his critics in two ways. He saw the diggers as

208 DEMOCRACY AND AUTHORITY pursuing a perfectly legitimate calling rather than being servants improperly absent from hired service, which is how Macarthur and Wentworth considered them. He had also cast off the fear which they still held that a gold rush would end in lawlessness. He knew he

could control these people. So confident was he that he took pleasure in exaggerating how disreputable the diggers were. To the suggestion that diggers should have references from clergymen and

magistrates he replied: ‘one half of the diggers wouldn’t know a clergyman if they saw him, and the other half wouldn’t know a magistrate if they could avoid it.’ If these references were insisted on from existing diggers, they would all have to leave! With Hardy’s answers before him, the colonial secretary did not proceed with any of these proposals.

The colonial secretary did have some sympathy with the most commonly made criticism of Hardy’s practice: that the commissioner should not go to the diggers to collect licences; they should come to

him. Collecting licences was a time-consuming business. Captain Erskine of HMS Havannah, another of the gentlemanly sightseers, accompanied Hardy while he issued licences on the Turon. They were on foot, dodging the mullock and holes and scrambling over

the rocks. The captain found the operation inconvenient and

tedious. A lot of time was wasted, as he saw it, in discussion with

the diggers. They offered gold in payment and this had to be weighed and then there might be some dispute about the purity of gold and hence its value. Much more efficient, said the captain, echoing all Hardy’s critics, if the commissioner issued licences at his tent. And he should not accept gold but only notes and coins, said another of the critics, the Bathurst inspector of police. Hardy refused to change his practice. He thought it would be an imposition to ask diggers to come considerable distances and lose time waiting for their licences. More importantly, if he received licences in his tent he would not learn as much about his patch. He needed to see the men where they were, to associate people with each other, and people with places.*° At the Turon, after Hardy had left it and perhaps under urging from the colonial secretary, the commissioners abandoned Hardy’s practice and required diggers to come to the camp for the licence. The diggers, now forced to wait

for hours in queues, were loud in their complaints and the old practice was resumed.*! The regular routine for the commissioners on all the fields was to spend the first days of every month moving through their whole district renewing licences.** Licences could also be obtained at the camp at any time and newcomers collected them there. It is puzzling at first to understand why Hardy’s critics, who were

traditionalists on social order, could not see the advantages of Hardy forming a close personal knowledge of his charges. Was he

THE GOVERNING OF DIGGERS 209 not acting the part of the paternal landlord visiting his tenants and

cottagers? No—he was a high official of the government and traditionalists expected government to be remote, and not a little forbidding, sufficient to keep the mob in awe. A ruler should not, as the Bathurst police inspector put it, ‘wait on’ his subjects and enter into conversation with them. Those assumptions about government were formed when the common people were propertyless and prone to riot. It was given to Hardy to be the first ruler of common people when they were living in hopes of making a fortune. The fact that diggers were all claim-holders explains in part why they were such firm supporters of law and order when all the other circumstances of the diggings seemed to promise the opposite. They were quick to nab thieves and take them up to the commissioner and were pleased at the commissioner throwing out bad characters.** Hardy’s success demonstrated that in such a society government no longer had to be remote and awesome. Late in 1852 the colonial secretary ceased to control policy on the

goldfields. The British government, responding to the incessant demands from the colony for full self-government, passed over control of the goldfields to the Legislative Council. The first thing the Council did with its new power was to sack Hardy, which it accomplished by abolishing his position of chief goldfields commis-

sioner. Hardy had been incensed by the criticism of his administration in the Council and when he was summoned to appear before the Council Select Committee on the Goldfields he made no effort to placate his opponents. He countered every suggestion from Wentworth that the diggers should be more closely controlled and taxed by drawing parallels with the squatters: if squatters could go anywhere, transfer their holdings as they liked, make fortunes while paying a fixed rent, why should not the diggers do the same? This was a red rag to the bull. The Select Committee reported that Hardy’s views rendered him unfit for his position and the Council agreed.“ On the recommendations of its Select Committee the Council passed an act for the better management of the goldfields. This provided that diggers who did not take out licences should be fined, and if they could not or would not pay the fine they were to be jailed. Hardy had wanted such a measure to give the commissioner more power than simply to order non-licensed persons to leave, but in its other provisions this act attempted to overturn his liberal administration of the fields. Everyone was to take out a licence — not only diggers but traders and those they employed and every resident on the field. The licence had to be carried at all times and be produced on demand. Foreigners were to be deterred by being required to pay twice as much for their licence since Wentworth believed that they were more likely to be democrats and socialists.

210 DEMOCRACY AND AUTHORITY Wentworth cross-examines Commissioner Hardy

Wentworth: I take it there can be no doubt that the Gold Field is the property of the public?

Hardy: Yes, the Gold Field is, but the Gold is not; that is, the Gold brought to the surface is brought there by man’s industry, and I cannot conceive that there is any justice in taxing one man more than another;—I cannot conceive that Gold Diggers should be taxed more than the rest of the

community, always supposing that they pay the expense which the Government is put to by their occupation of the Gold Field. The Gold is -- under ground, and there would remain but for the industry of these men; and their industry brings that to light in the same way that the fleece of the flock is brought to the market by the industry of the squatter. Wentworth: Would not that doctrine strike at the foundation of all Royalties or taxes upon this occupation?

Hardy: | have nothing to do with that. SELECT COMMITTEE ON GOLD FIELDS 1852, EVIDENCE P.7

Wentworth was even able to persuade the Council that anyone presumed to be a foreigner should be treated as one unless he could be proved otherwise. Because Wentworth’s Chinese labourers had

absconded to the fields he had taken a special interest in how thoroughly the commissioners checked on whether the diggers were improperly absent from hired service. During the Select Committee hearings he was able to confirm his suspicion that the commissioners treated this requirement as a dead letter. Accordingly, the Council now provided that proof of discharge had to be produced before a licence could be issued and if it was subsequently established that a digger was improperly absent he was to lose his claim. It was to be transferred to the person who had informed against him, a tactic to which Wentworth was increasingly drawn the more he heard of the solidarity of the diggers in the evasion of the licence.” The diggers were angry at the new law. They had been looking for a reduction in the licence fee and instead it had been maintained and was to be more stringently enforced. Wentworth was hanged and burnt in effigy on the fields.*° The fines and especially the terms

of imprisonment and hard labour imposed on the non-licensed seemed to have affronted the diggers more than the illegal smashing of cradles had done; they were being treated as criminals.*’ It did become more difficult to evade the licence. In the first months of the new regime nearly 50 per cent more licences were issued.*® Some of

these were taken by people who did not previously have to be

THE GOVERNING OF DIGGERS 211 licensed — chiefly the employees of tradesmen and publicans— but

clearly evasion by the diggers had been higher than Hardy had allowed, though much less than Wentworth had alleged.*? Soon after the new regulations were introduced, an exodus from

the fields began. This had more to do with the attraction of the richer Ovens field in Victoria, just south of the border, than the oppressiveness of the new regulations—=in Victoria, after all, there was the same licence fee more harshly administered than it ever was

in New South Wales. Nevertheless the sight of diggers leaving brought a new attitude to goldfields policy. The hardliners, no matter how disturbed they were by what the goldfields portended socially and politically, had benefited with everyone else from the great prosperity which they had brought. Suddenly the gold-diggers

constituted an economic interest which had to be protected and fostered, a significance which not even Wentworth could defy. Six months after they had been enforced, the Legislative Council repealed virtually all their harsh new measures. More importantly, they lowered the licence fee from 30s. to 10s. As Wentworth was at pains to point out, this was not in response to the misguided protests of the diggers, but because of changes to the fee in Victoria. Faced

with mass defiance at Bendigo, the Victorian government had announced that the 30s. fee would be abandoned, though the government was in such disarray that what would replace it was not clear. A 30s. fee could no longer be maintained in New South Wales and the Legislative Council hoped that by a wholesale reduction to 10s. they might undercut Victoria and lure diggers north.~” The harsh interlude in goldfields policy did not disturb the good relations between the commissioners and the diggers. At the Turon where tension was highest the commissioners made it plain that it

was not at their wish that the law had been altered.>* The harsh measures were administered leniently.°? For instance, the commissioners reported that it was impossible to exact the double fee from foreigners because they all claimed to be British subjects—the Chinese were all from Hong Kong, the French from Canada, the negroes from South Africa. This need not have been an obstacle had the commissioners followed the letter of the law, because Wentworth had placed the onus of proof on the foreigners.”° The commissioners enjoyed wide respect and became leading figures in community life. They chaired public meetings, acted as judges at race meetings (here as in claim disputes their impartiality

was valued by the diggers), and gave their support to worthy causes.°* They were very different from the remote and disdainful

rulers who were so commonly in charge of the Victorian fields. Hardy had set a very different style— and it should be recalled that he was the first commissioner on nearly all the major fields discovered in 1851—pbut the style would probably not have survived in

212 DEMOCRACY AND AUTHORITY Victorian conditions. The New South Wales fields remained small and dispersed. As the diggers moved to a new area, a new commissioner was appointed, the guiding rule being that there should be one commissioner to 1000 diggers.°° As fields declined commissioners were often left with considerably fewer charges. Diggers strung out along a river valley and its gullies with one commissioner

who knew the ground and the workers well was a very different situation from a concentration of thousands ruled by a great bevy of commissioners and police whose encampment was akin to a castle in hostile territory. In New South Wales the commissioners also ap-

pear to have been able to recruit a better-quality police force. Drunkenness was still a common failing, but Hardy insisted that it be followed by instant dismissal.>’ More importantly for the reputation of the police, the commissioners themselves remained responsible for both the issuing and checking of licences and the police

were not sent out on regular ‘digger hunts’.°° To celebrate the repeal of the harsh regulations, the Turon diggers played the gold police at cricket, an event difficult to imagine in Victoria.” Victoria continued to influence New South Wales gold policy.

After the miners’ revolt at the Eureka Stockade, the Victorian commissioners were disbanded and a democratic regime was inaugurated on the goldfields. Every six months the diggers on each field were to elect a court to control mining and their rulings were to be implemented by a mining warden. The monthly licence fee was

replaced by a miner’s right, to cost only 20s. for a year, and to maintain the gold revenue an export duty on gold was imposed. To tax the gold rather than the digger met the diggers’ complaint about the unfairness of the licence fee in that the unsuccessful had to pay

as much as the successful digger. Again the New South Wales government had to follow the Victorian government in lowering its charges on the digger and to the chagrin of the liberals the credit for abolishing the licence fee and introducing a miner’s right and the gold export duty fell to the conservative government of 1856. This

government was more cautious about following Victoria on the government of the goldfields. The commissioners were retained, though they could now call on two diggers to act as assessors in the

settling of disputes. If the diggers on any field requested it, an

elected local court could be established to draw up regulations for the working of the fields. As an alternative to the commissioners, the court could also settle disputes.’ Only two local courts were established— at Araluen and Adelong—and neither appears to have made use of its power to settle disputes. In 1861 the liberal government abolished this power and the courts were left as regulation-makers only. The commissioners everywhere were to settle disputes and generally oversee the management of the fields. Under this legislation three courts were established, at Kiandra, Lambing

THE GOVERNING OF DIGGERS 213

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a ee Rg A a ee ake RB ER re DarSen o x ¥ : Cae Bo

OE? SS amigo er... gt Unfraternal diggers: ‘That’s where the Commissioner put the peg and if I catch you there again I'll wring your nose off.’ ‘Will you old bloke. Just let’s see how you can do it.’

Flat, and Forbes. The courts established earlier at Araluen and Adelong lapsed.*! There was little enthusiasm for the local courts. Since the diggers

were highly mobile and most fields were small it was difficult for those who wanted courts to maintain sufficient interest to launch one, let alone sustain it.°* At the two large fields of the 1860s, Lambing Flat and Forbes, the commitment was stronger, many diggers here having come from Victoria where rule by commissioner

was a thing of the past. Pressure from these fields led to the government providing a salary for the court’s secretary, the lack of which had been an impediment to the founding and smooth function of courts.°* But at Lambing Flat the usual cause worked to under-

mine the court. By the time it was established, the diggers were rushing to Forbes. At the first election there was no contest, the nominations being just sufficient to fill the nine posts, and interest quickly declined.*” At Forbes the court had progressed no further than the adoption of an elaborate code of standing orders before the

whole system was abandoned in 1866. Nowhere did the courts establish a firm authority and attract wide respect. In some places they became laughing stocks. They paralysed themselves with bitter feuding and disputes over elections. The chairman at Kiandra and the secretary at Lambing Flat refused to recognise their dismissal from office and the courts were reduced to appealing to the government to get rid of them. The regulations which the courts drew up were often ambiguous, contradictory or beyond their powers.® If there are circumstances in which direct democracy can be an effective government, these were not they. Local courts were given such lukewarm support partly because the commissioners gave satisfaction. The promise which local courts held out was that the general regulations could be supplemented by rules specifically designed to meet local need and circumstance. The

214 DEMOCRACY AND AUTHORITY distinctiveness of each field was something miners insisted upon.”

The general regulations steadily became more elaborate as the commissioners’ practice was codified or new decisions given on difficult matters, but a large discretion was always left to commissioners. In practice they were able to make some adjustment to suit

local circumstances and they had no hesitation about ruling on matters even where there were no regulations.°’ This flexibility reduced the need for local courts. A ruling on a new matter was much easier to extract from a single commissioner than from nine

elected men. Government by commissioner in theory offended not only democratic, but liberal principles. In the press there were occasional jibes about military rule and showy uniforms, but such sentiments did not

take hold among the mass of diggers.°° They could not make progress because the New South Wales commissioners generally did not succumb to the vices which are supposed to afflict those entrus-

ted with great power. They were eager to serve those they ruled,

took pains to know their business and were impartial in their judgments. Liberal governments did not disturb the commissioner system which had been initiated under the autocratic rule of governor and colonial secretary. Among those to whom they entrusted these large powers was Charles Harpur, the poet of democracy. Harpur did the job well and he must have been pleased that the diggers were so satisfied with him that they took no interest in having a local court. Yet he was disappointed in the diggers. With other radicals, he had hoped to find strong bonds of cooperation and fellowship among men freed from the bondage of working for masters. His job in settling disputes taught him differently: the diggers were ‘so grasping, so unfraternal and dishonest’.®”

The disputes were not merely between parties; the parties or partnerships were themselves very unstable. Men seldom stayed together long. They quarrelled over where or how they would work and because some partners, regularly hung over or lazy, did not work. By contrast, the Americans and Chinese formed long-lasting associations and were more effective producers, the Americans through their technical skill and the Chinese through their pains-

taking methods. When parties broke up, they argued over the allocation of gold and payment of debts or dissension occurred because an objectionable partner would not leave and give up his rights. Settling these disputes within parties was yet another of the commissioners’ tasks.’? Commissioner Harpur, who had once argued that the sinfulness of man was no more than a conservative ploy, had to do it too.” The democratic innovation of the goldfields lay not in institutions or abiding associations, but in the free and easy personal relations between men who in the wider society would not have been equals.

THE GOVERNING OF DIGGERS 215 These were highly valued at the time and have been celebrated since in story and history. This is the democracy that Australians value; they would be puzzled at Harpur’s disappointments. The democracy of manners— people treating each other as social equals— developed slowly and was not fully established until our

own time. The experience on the goldfields and the granting of equal political rights assisted its growth, but, as we have seen, the liberals of the 1850s and 1860s who introduced democracy were still

pursuing marks of social distinction. Of course, from the earliest times, there were attacks on pretensions and exclusiveness, which have sometimes been taken to indicate that colonial society was inimical to formal recognition of social distinction, but as often as not the attackers were wanting to join the club, not destroy it. The attacks indicate that the system of social distinction was not stable, but it did not break down quickly. In the 1850s and beyond there was plenty of addressing superiors as ‘sir’ and touching of caps, which is why the goldfields were regarded as so novel.

Melbourne Punch delights in the bushrangers’ es humiliation of the New South Wales police. At =e this time Victoria did not have a bushranging ae

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Diggers at Lambing Flat offered to go in pursuit of the bushrangers, but the Cowper government declined their services. In June 1862, four months after the new police began operations, Frank Gardiner with seven or eight henchmen pulled off the greatest of the bushrangers’ robberies: at Eugowra Rocks they took £14 000

in gold and notes from the gold escort en route from Forbes to Sydney.** At today’s values their haul was $3 million. One police party picked up the trail of some of the robbers; they did not catch them but the robbers were forced to abandon the packhorse which carried a part of the gold. Later a small party led by Sir Frederick

Pottinger came by chance on three of the robbers on the road. Pottinger asked Gilbert for proof of ownership of his horse (the equivalent today of a request to see a driver’s licence). He pretended to look for his receipt and suddenly spurred his horse and was gone. The police seized the other two and found gold on them. But

this success was short-lived. Gilbert rode back to the Weddin

Mountains and organised a rescue operation. The police party was ambushed and Pottinger forced to give up his captives. Soon afterwards Pottinger suffered another humiliation. With eight men he surrounded the home of Mrs Brown, Gardiner’s mistress, on the

expectation that Gardiner would visit because Mr Brown was absent. Gardiner did come, but at point-blank range Pottinger’s gun misfired and Gardiner escaped. Pottinger then went into the house

POLICE AND BUSHRANGERS 225 and arrested for being an accomplice of Gardiner ‘Warrigal’ Walsh, aged seventeen, a half-brother to Mrs Brown. Pottinger never lived these failures down— after two close encounters he had taken no bushrangers and had managed to land in jail only a mere boy. He

was mocked not only as a blunderer but as a coward. When one member of parliament called him that, Pottinger challenged him to a duel. The member replied with an apology— and continued his attack on Pottinger in the house.” It was not an officer but a senior sergeant of police who made the breakthrough in the escort robbery case. He arrested a number of

men on suspicion and one of them, Charters, confessed to the crime. Charters secured immunity for himself by naming all those who had been involved. Of these, four could be found and they were put on trial at a special session of the Supreme Court in Sydney. The only substantial evidence against them was that of Charters who was not a completely credible witness. The jury could not agree on a verdict; they were put on trial again and three men were convicted and one acquitted. The offence with which they had been charged—robbery and wounding—still carried the death penalty. The leading townspeople of Bathurst had requested the government to hold a special session to try the robbers in Bathurst. They were disappointed with the decision to hold the session in Sydney for they feared that Sydney people were soft on bushranging crime. 6

Their response to bushranging certainly was different because they

were spectators of the drama rather than participators in it.

Sydney people could admire the bushrangers quite unreservedly because they were in no danger of being held up by them. They could also make monsters of them since they had no first-hand knowledge of the sort of men they were before they took to the road. The admiration was sidespread, displayed by people of all classes, and swelled into the kind of craze which only a city can nourish. Gardiner was the object of songs, engravings, jokes, and an exhibit in the Sydney waxworks. The detestation of the bushrangers in Sydney was made more intense by a concern for the colony’s standing in the eyes of the world. To outsiders the fact that a large part of the colony were commanded by bushrangers was a

sign that the convict element was still active in manufacturing criminals and sympathy for them. It was galling to respectable people to have the colony’s reputation, and their own, again called into question. Melbourne’s taunts and reproaches damaged their

pride; London’s had the potential as well to affect their bank balances because they would influence the colony’s credit rating. As

the haters of bushrangers found that even respectable people had joined the hero-worshippers, their condemnations became more desperate.

226 DEMOCRACY AND AUTHORITY

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4)Yi,\ MW ZEN Il |If{ SBSSN ASB | yf \ we | (AY: WTO L, ARES CRG flo a WC ey aA KS AsAt Si. t AyifSay a a Manns’ case was different from the rest: gold had been found on him and in court he had confessed to the crime. There could be no legal doubts about his conviction but the petitioners for mercy now changed their tack and asked why he alone, whose guilt was no greater than the rest, should suffer the extreme punishment. He was an appealing subject for sympathy— all that was claimed about the youth, good character and respectable connections of the robbers was true of him; to the Empire’s court reporter, who had watched him in the dock, he seemed ‘the beau ideal of the Australian stockman’.** The governor now was subject to intense pressure

to save him as well. More parliamentarians, and ones of solider reputation, joined the agitation. James Martin, conservative leader of the opposition, was given a large part of the Sydney Morning Herald to denounce the conviction as ‘irregular and illegal’ chiefly because, as he claimed, the jury had been wrongly directed on the evidence of approvers and to attack the government for being prepared to ignore these doubts because they wished to make an example. He conceded that Manns’ case was different, but argued © that there was so much sympathy for his fate that hanging him

228 DEMOCRACY AND AUTHORITY would be counterproductive. To Martin the whole episode was another instance of the colony’s ‘democratic irregularities and mistakes’. His own conduct was somewhat irregular. He was a leader of the bar and had defended the robbers at their first trial. Was it for him to carry the defence of his clients so far as to criticise the judges in the newspapers for their ignorance of law and to lead deputations to the governor for a reprieve?” With only a few days left, the campaigners to save Manns made a huge final effort. They set up tables at six points in the city to collect signatures on a one-sentence petition. They no longer bothered with argument; the signatures alone were to be the persuasive force. In two days 14 000 people signed, which the Empire claimed was the largest number of signatures ever collected in Australia. Among the signatories, it continued, were ten barristers and a large number of solicitors, clergymen, merchants and professional people. The petition was presented to the governor the day before the execution was due. It did not induce him to change his mind; nor did deputations of parliamentarians at 11 that night and at 7 the following morning.

The Empire announced: ‘Today a crime will be committed...a judicial murder.’*° When the sentence of death had first been passed the Empire, taking a proper responsible position, had supported the law taking its course; in the four weeks that followed it succumbed and then contributed to the popular agitation to save the robbers.>’ The hanging of Manns was horrible. The knot of the rope slipped

and he was left to a slow suffocation. In his agony he grasped the rope above his head in an attempt to lift himself out of the noose. After fifteen minutes he was still not dead. Four prisoners were then called to lift him up while the executioner adjusted the rope. Even then he did not die immediately. The government’s salutary example had produced universal revulsion.” During the trial of the escort-robbers and the agitation to save them the bushrangers’ robberies continued unabated. Gardiner appeared to have left the scene; the gangs were now led by Gilbert

or Ben Hall. The execution of Manns did not deter them. The continued failure of the police to check or catch the bushrangers was

a grave embarrassment for Cowper and for the first time since the free-selection triumph his government looked vulnerable. Most of the country press was hostile to the new police. In Sydney, the Sydney Morning Herald still defended them, but the Empire, the liberal paper, was fiercely critical of the semi-military despotism and ‘Frenchified centralization’.*? In the Assembly in July 1863 Cowper faced a motion for a return of the police to local control and in August Martin mounted a full-scale attack on the government’s failure to maintain law and order.*° Cowper survived both of these attacks, but directly and indirectly he conceded much—the police did not know their districts, too many Izish had been sent to the

POLICE AND BUSHRANGERS 229 bush, the police horses had been inferior, and relationships with the magistrates could have been better. Yet he would not contemplate a return to the old system; the new force must be improved and not

abandoned. The police were getting better—the bad were being weeded out and the good were undergoing quite heroic privations in

the bush. The inspector-general had been sent to Young to take direct control of operations. Some of his critics wanted to return the police to local control, others wanted the bushrangers to be pursued by men like themselves, native-born bushmen who should either be recruited into the police or enrolled as a special force of volunteers.

The opponents of the new police declared that they would never catch the bushrangers and amused the house by stories of their incompetence — giving due warning of their presence by clattering through the bush, getting lost, taking fright at an emu, arresting a notorious bushranger and finding it was his brother. No member of parliament would openly defend the bushrangers, but some did not hide their admiration of the bushrangers’ skills and these were reaffirmed in every listing of the police’s failures. Robertson, minister of lands, complained that members were encouraging crime.*!

Bushrangers, said another member, would read the debate on themselves and the police in the newspapers with great satisfaction. *”

Within his detailed defence of the police Cowper uttered a plaintive cry—if only the squatters would turn out as they used to the bushrangers would soon be caught. Actually landholders had not been quite as zealous as Cowper and others claimed: the old bushrangers too had intimidated squatters into neutrality and many bushrangers had to be caught by the mounted police. There were, however, notable cases still remembered where magistrates and settlers had been active and successful.** It was rather late in the day for Cowper to be looking for a revival of that activity. He had deliberately removed law and order from community control and entrusted it to a specialist organisation parading its self-sufficiency and efficiency. Such a transfer of responsibility is a perilous operation since those supplanted will be resentful and a new organisation can scarcely be smooth-running from the jump. The new body needs to produce results quickly—as the London police and Irish constabulary had been able to do. Cowper had a disaster on his hands. He had passed a central responsibility of government to a single body which was accumulating failures and fast losing all public respect. As the police became more desperate to catch the bushrangers,

they adopted more arbitrary methods and so further alienated themselves from the public. They took up people on suspicion of being involved in bushranging and kept them locked up by having

their cases regularly remanded. They were not careful how they searched the houses of alleged sympathisers. They arrested people

230 DEMOCRACY AND AUTHORITY who were in no way connected with bushranging. Such actions reduced support for them in the bushranging district. The whole colony was outraged at the burning of the houses of Ben Hall and O’Meally, the father of one of the bushrangers. The police had some warrant for the incendiarism in both cases, but the stories of innocent women and children left without a roof over their head did them immense damage. ‘In the contest between the police and the bushrangers as to which should commit the blackest atrocities,’ said

the Empire, ‘victory rests for the present on the banners of the blues.“* These heavy-handed operations lent credit to the claim which was made then, and many times since, that the police had driven men to bushranging.* Martin’s no-confidence motion on law and order had been debated

at length in August 1863. The following month the bushrangers adopted a new tactic—they made robbery a secondary consideration to a spectacular humiliation of the police.*° When they held up a mail coach near Carcoar they captured the policeman who was

riding some way ahead to protect it and stripped him of his arms and uniform. A few days later in the bush three policemen tamely surrendered to the bushrangers and they too were forced to give up uniforms and arms. The four bushrangers now decked themselves out as police and threw their victims into greater confusion. At one robbery a poor man touched his hat and called O’Meally ‘your

honour’.’” Twice the bushrangers took charge of the town of Canowindra with all its inhabitants for days. They held a party in the pub, paid for all the drinks, behaved with pertect propriety in front of the ladies, and had the company in fits of laughter with their tales of police blunders and cowardice. The lone policeman of the town was one of the captives and party-goers. Ben Hall mocked his powerlessness by making him master of ceremonies at the first party. On the second visit, Hall captured him in his police station, ordered him to array himself with his arms— gun, bayonet, revolver —and then he drove him in front of his horse down the street to the pub. There the bushrangers taunted him, took away his arms, and told him to enjoy himself at the party until further orders. The aim of sticking up a whole town was plainly to show how far their power reached and how little they feared the police. Gilbert told the party-goers that the police could be relied on not to arrive until there was no danger. To demonstrate the point the bushrangers had left word at their last robbery of their intentions regarding Canowindra. A warning was duly sent to Bathurst. A police party advanced to Canowindra painfully slowly and arrived after the bushrangers had left. A magistrate near Canowindra, learning of the hold-up, rode to Cowra to tell the police. The two policemen there refused to move saying that two men were insufficient. When the

POLICE AND BUSHRANGERS 231 Bathurst police party did finally arrive at Canowindra, the bushrangers returned to the outskirts of the town and sent a message offering to meet them in a set-piece battle so long as no more than six police came. They would allow the police one extra man to take the place of the first trooper who fell. The police said the river was too high for them to cross. The messenger offered to punt them across the river, but they still declined.*® The bushrangers’ most audacious deed, the crowning act of their

new campaign, was a raid into Bathurst. Canowindra was a tiny, straggling settlement; Bathurst was a provincial town and the headquarters of the western division of the police. The raid was shortlived because while they were robbing a jewellery shop the jeweller’s

daughter screamed and raised the alarm. The bushrangers rode rapidly out of the town but halted at a pub on the outskirts (where they took booty as well as refreshment) while the police went galloping off into the country. The town behind them was in consternation. Three days later they returned to the edge of Bathurst

and moving at a leisurely pace robbed stores and hotels on a road leading into the country. The police were alerted after the first robbery and led by their superintendent were soon on their trail. The bushrangers continued their robberies and were moving slowly, weighed down with their loot on a made road, but somehow the police by conferring, re-grouping, and taking due caution managed not to overtake them. The people of Bathurst now fully believed the police were what the bushrangers claimed, fools and cowards.*” These dramatic events made excellent copy. In the newspapers colonists could read detailed accounts of the raids on Canowindra and Bathurst, reproduced in full from the Bathurst papers, together with their strictures on the police. Only the Sydney Morning Herald

limited itself to brief reports explaining that it did not wish to minister to the vanity of the bushrangers by reporting their mockery and swagger, which it termed their ‘rough, insolent humours’. There was a style of reporting, it added, which was lessening the sense of the bushrangers’ atrocities.” Bell’s Life in Sydney, the racing and

scandal paper, was a notable offender. It ran a regular column under the heading ‘The Bushrangers Weekly Gazette’ which mixed straight news with comedy: Narrow Escape of the Police!!!

Last evening three bushrangers espied a large body of troopers, and immediately gave chase. The darkness of the evening favoured the escape of the

troopers, and baffled the bushrangers. | (This inverted a standard formula in police reports. )

232 DEMOCRACY AND AUTHORITY Marvellous Exploit of an Inspector Shot Something At Last!!!

Although the troopers have hitherto been singularly unsuccessful in shooting anything, an inspector has at length been fortunate enough to shoot — himself.

He has reversed the old saying of ‘putting his foot in it’, by putting it in his

foot.”

Even a straight reporting of events could now scarcely help reading like farce; the Herald’s policy was correct: only silence could save the reputation of the police and make the bushrangers into ordinary criminals.

_ Cowper was driven to distraction by the collapse of the police under the bushrangers’ onslaught. After the three policemen were captured and their uniforms and arms taken he telegraphed for an explanation to Superintendent Morissett—he who later led the ‘pursuit’ of the bushrangers on the road out of Bathurst. Morissett replied that the police could not have escaped capture unless they were prepared to sacrifice their lives. Policemen not willing to run that risk were not likely to be successful. Cowper with good reason was dissatisfied with Morissett. His patience with the whole force was at an end. He sent off a telegram to Inspector-General McLerie, who was in the field somewhere, threatening that if the police did not improve he would set them aside and constitute another force —‘TI have never suffered so much anxiety upon a public matter as upon this police question. To defend a force which is continually making so many blunders is impossible.’ From Wagga Wagga by telegram the inspector-general defended his men and warned the premier that to set aside the police would be disastrous for his government and the public. Cowper was not looking for this sort of reply. He sent off a second, more withering telegram: these desperate characters would never be taken ‘if drunkenness, or cowardice, or inefficiency in the police are to be glossed over or excused’; the inspector-general had been in the field for three months with 300 men and unlimited financial resources and still a gang of five men defied them. He told him that if he had not caught the bushrangers within one month other arrangements would be made.”

Two days later Cowper was under attack in the house over the bushranging crisis in the west. He made only a half-hearted defence of the police and then, at the end of the debate, he abandoned

them—nhe read to the house the telegrams he had sent to the inspector-general. The longstanding critics of the police were delighted that the premier had now admitted that the force he had created was a complete failure. Other members were appalled at the head of government disowning his police force while it was still in the field. Cowper was also criticised for offering the bushrangers a

POLICE AND BUSHRANGERS 233 gift —if they lay low for one month they would enjoy the triumph of

having destroyed the police force, unless the premier were to go back on his threat.°? Cowper belatedly saw the danger. When he was again under fire in the house following the raid on Bathurst, he tried to argue that he had not threatened a complete setting aside of the police. But Slippery Charlie could not claim this time that he had been misreported. Immediately another member read his telegram again to the house.“ Cowper led a charmed life. He was saved from this dilemma by another crisis. He had recently appointed a new treasurer who having examined the books declared that the government surplus was a mirage and that a substantial deficit would have to be met by new taxation. Cowper disputed the figures of his own treasurer — but this was too much for the house. The day after the debate on the Bathurst raid the government was defeated on its budget by one vote. Someone else would have to balance the books—and catch the bushrangers. Cowper has been let off lightly over the failure of his new police. It is commonly said that it was simply a misfortune for Cowper that there was a great outbreak of bushranging just as the new police system came into operation.°> Notice that this comment implicitly rejects the possibility that the bushrangers abandoned all restraint because they were so contemptuous of the new police. The view that the inefficiency of the police was responsible for the outbreak was put at the time, and of course rejected by Cowper and the inspector-general.°° They argued that Gardiner had taken to the road before the new police act was passed — which was true, though

it might still be claimed that the activities of Gardiner and his associates might not have grown to such a prodigious extent. But even if we accept that the bushrangers would have followed the Same course in their robberies and further, as the inspector-general claimed, that the old police would not have been able to cope with them either, we can still be certain that the bushrangers’ career and its consequences would have been very different without the new police.

It became one of the bushrangers’ primary aims to humiliate the police — and this quite simply could not have been done in the same way with the old police. You could evade them, but you could not strip them of their uniforms or rob their police stations— because

these did not exist. Nor could you continue to show up their inefficiency because they were not regarded as all-sufficient and it was accepted that in difficult cases they needed assistance. The new police were set up to be self-sufficient and when they could not cope

they remained in place, a target to be knocked over again and again. The unified hierarchical organisation which was to ensure efficiency now amplified failure—every blunder reflected on the

234 DEMOCRACY AND AUTHORITY

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equal in not having any responsibility for public order. This would have been the effect of the new system whether it was a success or a failure. By their failures with the bushrangers, the new police also

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POLICE AND BUSHRANGERS 241 who emerged from obscurity to command the local population and confound authority. Respectable people would not have been surprised to see the bushrangers admired by the lower orders; what dismayed them was that they were also heroes to people of their own kind. Those who refused to admire the bushrangers considered that all respectable people had to stand together in support of law _ and order. In the past that had been crucial; it was less important once law and order was the business of professionals. Only in the country towns did the old attitude survive. In the countryside, in Sydney, in parliament itself, the solidarity of the respectable had disappeared. The police could be left to do the job and be despised at the same time.

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thority, thewent whole thi tloose by itself, d ith any y, e thing Dy itseli, and easy,| without

bossing. No real authority—no superior classes—hardly even any e

boss.

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F we trace the history of local government in Australia through

[ & conclude institutions known to us—councils and shires—we will that it has been the weakest element in our governmental system. Councils and shires were formed long after central governments; even after their establishment in some districts large

areas of the colonies remained without them; and compared to Britain and the United States these local government institutions have exercised very limited powers. Such a survey would overlook the very strong local institutions which operated in pre-1860 New South Wales. They were not elected bodies, nor did they raise their own funds, but their powers were more extensive and their impact on the community much greater than that of any shire or council. They were the benches of magistrates, composed of the men appointed JPs, who were chiefly large landholders.’ Magistrates presided over what was known as a police district. As we have seen, the magistrates appointed and controlled their own police and this important function gave the name to the area of their jurisdiction. In 1860 there were about 60 police districts. As controllers of the police, the magistrates were involved in the detection and

arrest of offenders. In their court they then decided whether the offenders were guilty or in cases of serious crime whether they should face trial in a higher court. This dual role was clearly a threat

to the impartiality of justice and was one reason urged for the removal of police from the magistrates’ control and the creation of a single force ruled from Sydney.

The courthouse where the magistrates met once a week and

where their clerk kept regular office hours was the administrative

hub of the community. Its importance can still be seen in the buildings themselves, which are much more substantial than in other Australian states where local authority was never as important. The

police district over which the magistrates ruled was the locality whose boundaries were well known to the people. Police districts were adopted for central government record-keeping — the census, agricultural statistics, registration of births, marriages and deaths — and from 1858 for electorates. The counties into which the land had been surveyed remained units for land registration only. 244

LOCAL AUTHORITY 245 The trying of minor offences was then as now the routine task of the magistrates, but then the affairs of respectable citizens as well

came regularly into their jurisdiction. Everyone in the country owned stock and in the absence of fences accusations of theft and actions for trespass and damage were frequently before the magistrates’ court. The pound to which straying stock were taken was under the supervision of the bench who appointed the poundkeeper, fixed the charges he was to levy on owners, and heard complaints against him. All employers of labour had to turn to the magistrates if they wished to punish their labour force for breaking the terms of their agreement, and employees took their employers to court if they did not pay their wages. The selling of alcohol, the first and foremost business in every town, village and crossroads, was illegal without a licence from the magistrates. These licences to print money were issued annually after the magistrates had satisfied themselves as to the suitability of the publican and his premises. Much was at stake when publicans and their two guarantors for good behaviour crowded into courts all over the colony on the third Tuesday in April. People who could not support themselves turned or were brought to the magistrates’ court. Unmarried mothers sought maintenance for their child. The court would establish who the father was— consulting 1f necessary the features of the baby—and then assess how much he should pay to the mother and for how long. Deserted wives acquired maintenance orders on their husbands for the support of themselves and their children. The incapacitated, the infirm and lunatic were sent by order of the magistrates to Sydney where there were institutions to care for them.

The magistrates were responsible for the compilation of the electoral roll and so they made the final decision on who was entitled to vote. Collectors, appointed by the magistrates, visited every household and having made inquiries about the value of property held and rent paid listed all those qualified to vote. This provisional listing of names and qualifications was posted on the courthouse door. Then the magistrates held a ‘revision court’ where objections to the inclusion or exclusion of a name were heard and the list finally settled. The central government relied on the magistrates to be its eyes, ears and arm in their locality. The magistrates advised the postmaster-general who should be the local postmaster. They supervised the collection of the census and agricultural statistics. The government transmitted to them the funds that had been allocated for the improvement of roads and bridges. They then arranged for the work to be done by the smaller settlers who relied on picking up outside jobs of this sort to survive. Deficiencies in administration were drawn to the attention of the government by the magistrates and the

246 DEMOCRACY AND AUTHORITY government sought from them reports on matters which affected their areas. A circular letter to all benches was the way a department or a select committee collected information on a policy matter. The significance of the magistrates in the life of their communities should now be apparent. Directly or indirectly constables, collectors,

poundkeepers, postmasters, publicans and road contractors owed their position to them. They affected the livelihood of cattle-owners, employers, working people and the poor. Their decisions affected

more people more regularly than those of the government in Sydney, and since the government had no agents of its own in the country the magistrates represented the central government as well. The community’s affairs were controlled by men living in it. Magistrates who heard cases of stock trespass and poor workmanship were themselves stock-owners and employers of labour. They took an active part in elections for which they had drawn up the list of voters. This made it hard for them to be impartial and harder still to be seen to be so; because their decisions impinged so heavily on individuals and the community the rulings of the bench and its composition frequently became matters for bitter feuding.” The only governmental activity outside the magistrates’ purview was education. Until 1848 schools were run by the churches with the assistance of government subsidies. In that year the national school system was instituted which was designed to take children from all denominations and teach them the common elements of Christianity as well as the three Rs. The churches were to continue to receive subsidies for their schools; the new system was to save wasteful duplication of resources where there were insufficient children for each church to run a school. The supporters of national schools hoped that they would eventually supplant the church schools and so ensure that all children were educated together and not introduced to old-world religious feuding. National schools were supervised by a local committee which had to raise one-third of the cost of the building; the government paid the rest and the salary of the teacher. As leading men in the district, magistrates might be members of a national school committee, but the bench as such had no

jurisdiction over the school. To check on the teachers and the

committees the National School Board appointed its own inspectors

in the late 1850s. These were the first signs of a new mode of governing the country. Since local government was so strong in the 1850s, to hold power in Sydney was not to rule the country. Until the men who composed

the local benches were changed, the people lived under their old rulers. Cowper’s liberal government appointed new magistrates with

a free hand and had no qualms about installing its own supporters on the bench. It did not swamp the benches, but it did not consult the existing magistrates about new appointments and it appointed

LOCAL AUTHORITY 247 shopkeepers and other business people who had not previously been

thought suitable for the position.> Magistrates were meant to be independent men, preferably large holders of land, but at least not dependent for their income on day-to-day transactions with the public. Had these rules been maintained, most magistrates would have been conservatives. Many of the old magistrates were angry at Cowper’s appointments, but what could they do? The conservatives’ chances of regaining state power and hence the control of appointments were slight. Some swallowed their resentment and accepted

the new men. Others declined to sit with them and no longer

attended the bench. By refusing to acknowledge equality with the new men they hoped to preserve their social superiority and to rob the newcomers of the authority which their own presence had built for the bench. The danger of this tactic was their own affairs might come up for judgment before these upstarts.* The only other course was to take the offensive: to detail the inadequacies and unfitness of the new appointees. If the targets were chosen carefully, Cowper’s policy of appointing anyone to the bench might be discredited. The country gentlemen of Berrima, Mudgee and Goulburn adopted this tactic late in 1859 after Cowper had issued yet another list of new magistrates, this one containing 200 names, the longest yet. The aristocratic counteroffensive sparked off bitter conflicts. This was the hand-to-hand fighting of the liberal revolution. The men to whom objection was taken were prominent in their community. The gentry had on some public matters acted with them. Now they were to be humiliated in a last desperate attempt to keep them and all the others Cowper had in the wings from taking over. The new magistrate objected to at Berrima was Henry Badgery.” He was a landed proprietor, born in the colony of free but humble parents. While the sons of the gentry had been at school, he had been minding his father’s cattle. Even after he had established his estate at Vine Lodge, Berrima, he showed he was not a true country gentleman by joining the gold rush and opening a shop. Still he was

given the title Esquire, and by no less a personage than James Macarthur of Camden to whom Badgery gave his political allegiance.° There was intense rivalry between Camden and Berrima, which were joined in the one electorate. By giving his support to the

leading Camden gentleman, Badgery thumbed his nose at the Berrima gentry who would not accept him as an equal. It may have been through Macarthur’s influence that Governor FitzRoy made Badgery a magistrate in 1851, a position he did not hold for long. The appointment came as a great shock to Henry Oxley, the leading

magistrate at Berrima, who was determined that Badgery should never sit on the bench with him.’ He told the governor that Badgery had once been convicted in his court of selling liquor illegally. When

248 DEMOCRACY AND AUTHORITY the governor established that this was true, Badgery was asked to resign. As the liberal movement strengthened, Badgery’s options

widened. At the 1859 elections he confronted Oxley directly by opposing his candidature and supporting the Berrima liberal, John Morrice. Morrice did not win, but Cowper rewarded Badgery by making him a magistrate. At this the Berrima gentry tried to repeat their success of 1851—they refused to sit with Badgery and told Cowper he would learn the reasons why in the 1851 files. Nothing could be found in the files, but Oxley ensured that the world learned

of Badgery’s disgrace by giving an account of the affair to the Goulburn Herald. Badgery, taking a great risk, denied that he had been sacked in 1851; he explained that he had resigned merely because he was out of the district at the gold rushes. Oxley then published a letter from the governor in which he had been assured that Badgery had been asked to resign.® The battle continued in the court itself. The only magistrates in regular attendance were Badgery and the man he had supported at the 1859 election, Morrice. While the bench was entirely liberal, the gentry were represented in the person of the clerk, J. Liardet, who

was brother-in-law to Oxley. The magistrates, new to their job, needed the help of the clerk; he was reluctant to oblige. Morrice and Badgery complained that if they asked for a law book, he threw

it across the table at them. If they pondered it for too long he muttered ‘Any ploughboy could understand it’. Liardet boasted that he was going to destroy the ignorant usurpers whom he had to call ‘your worships’. As clerk he had been at the centre of the district’s

public business for years when Morrice and Badgery had to deal with the bench as supplicants. The clerk accused Badgery of having attempted to bribe him and Morrice of asking him to overlook official regulations. The magistrates meanwhile were complaining to the colonial secretary of their rude and unhelpful clerk. The government finally instituted an inquiry into all the allegations and counterallegations, except the charge that Badgery had once been convicted

of selling liquor illegally—by this omission, accidental or contrived, it ensured that the inquiry would deal with matters on which

the evidence was more doubtful. The inquiry, finding faults 6n both sides, recommended that Liardet be moved to another bench. _ The gentry got up a petition to save him, signed by their tenants, but Liardet destroyed himself by writing a scurrilous letter to one of the supporters of Morrice and Badgery. For this he was dismissed from the service. Morrice and Badgery with a new clerk ruled at

Berrima. At the free selection election in 1860 Morrice, with Badgery’s support, defeated Oxley and became a member of the Assembly.

At Mudgee the magistrates protested at Cowper’s appointments

by resigning en masse.” They took particular exception to the

LOCAL AUTHORITY 249 appointment to their bench of the town businessman M. H. Lyons who had before he prospered been employed by them as a constable. They described him as unqualified by personal character, position in society and antecedents (or background) for the honour. Lyons claimed that his background and connections were more than a match for theirs—his father was an Irish gentleman of ‘independent but not very large means’ and many near relatives were peers of the realm. He had come to the colony as a surveyor and had been a constable only briefly to tide him over a bad time. The district of Mudgee was a gentry stronghold under threat from a liberal town. The land around the town had been settled by sons of old New South Wales families who were related to each other by

blood and marriage. They constituted nearly the whole of the Mudgee bench which ruled both town and country. But the town was becoming more assertive. It sent liberal men to the Assembly, rejecting the gentry’s conservative candidates. The gentry were still involved in the management of some town institutions, but townspeople had developed new ones solely under their control and had recently rescued the hospital from aristocratic domination. Townspeople had petitioned for Lyons to be made a magistrate and were furious at the gentry’s treatment of him. They urged the government to accept the magistrate’s resignations. Mudgee’s liberal newspaper declared that ‘the bulk of the people feel relieved from all official connexion with the dominant class: they feel as a body raised in the social scale by the removal of an incubus’.’®

The government did not think that Lyons’ brief period as a constable was grounds for excluding him. Lyons sat on the bench and with one or two other townsmen magistrates managed to carry on the business without the service of the ten country magistrates. Mudgee’s conservative newspaper mocked Lyons’ grammar and accent and told him he should say ‘are the contents of that true?’ rather than ‘Is the contints of that thrue?’.!’ The gentry strengthened their high-principled objections to Lyons by sending off to the government a detailed list of his alleged shady dealings as constable and businessman, which Lyons was called on to explain. Pursued so

hard, Lyons turned on his attackers. He aimed his blow at the magistrates’ weakest point. W. R. Blackman, JP, did not come of an

| old family. He was now a landholder, but his parents had kept a pub

| at Mudgee. Lyons accused them in a letter to the government of being sly groggers and he described Mrs Blackman, who was still alive, as a drunkard. When this document became public, Mrs Blackman sued for slander. The charges were dropped on condition | that Lyons make an abject apology to be printed in the newspapers. On its appearance Lyons was dismissed from the bench and lost his

| position on the mechanics institute, the Benefit Society and the school committee. The hospital kept him on.’* To staff the local

250 DEMOCRACY AND AUTHORITY bench adequately the government reappointed one member from each of the old Mudgee families—a Lowe, a Bayly, a Cox and a Rouse. Magistrates at Goulburn followed Mudgee’s example to protest at

the appointment to their bench of W.R. Riley, the editor of the Goulburn Herald, a liberal paper. The bench was less united than at Mudgee — thirteen out of 27 magistrates resigned. Goulburn was an older and larger town and had more town magistrates, but with one

exception the resigning magistrates came from the country. The gentry were again in revolt. Like the Mudgee magistrates they objected to the new appointment because of his station in society and his background. These objections could have been made to two storekeepers appointed at the same time, but with Riley they could also point to a stain on his character— when he was seventeen he had been dismissed as a clerk at the jail for offering a bribe to his superior officer. When this failing was trumpeted abroad Riley’s first impulse was to resign from the bench. But when the town rallied so

strongly behind him, he stood firm, admitted the offence but pleaded that an upright life should outweigh a youthful peccadillo. The government considered the offence could not be overlooked and dismissed him. The resignation of the magistrates was accepted.

Of the three men attacked, two had fallen. This must not be counted a success, however, for only at Mudgee were the old magistrates back on the bench. Not only in the three districts but in the colony at large there was widespread indignation at the gentry’s attempt to make social position and background tests for membership of the bench. There was no public move to support them. The effect of the gentry’s rearguard action was to strengthen the determination that men who had sprung from the people should have the right to the highest positions." In the Assembly that view also predominated, though the conservative James Martin still proclaimed a more restrictive policy.” When Martin took office in 1863 he did what no one expected was

still possible—he drastically pruned the list of magistrates. His government’s declared aims were to exclude those unfit by education, means or character, people in active business (this was directed at shopkeepers) unless no one else was available, and those who rarely or never attended the bench. To break down the practice

of magistrates having their sons and brothers appointed to the bench, only one member from a family in the one locality was to be appointed. There were by now 1250 justices of the peace and Martin

reduced these to 628.1 A purge of these dimensions shook the

social foundations. After the first howls of rage came demonstrations

that the government had not been true to its own principles, and claims that it had been as much influenced by political allegiance as

LOCAL AUTHORITY 251 its predecessors. The gross inconsistencies, which even a cursory examination of the list reveals, suggests that this must have been so. Martin’s ministry was not purely conservative and many interests were being served in this purge, but in part it was an attempt to regain lost ground for the gentry, even though social position was not one of the proclaimed criteria. Magistrates at Goulburn who had

resigned were reinstated. Though one of the principles of the reorganisation was to retain on the bench only those who attended regularly, many men who had never attended kept their positions. Among these were those who had retired in disgust rather than sit with Cowper’s appointments. Some of the men they had objected to were removed, among them Henry Badgery of Berrima. However, it was no longer possible to uphold an exclusive policy. The furore over the exclusions was such that Martin had to reinstate 26 of the excluded. His tampering with the magistrates was partly responsible for his defeat in parliament shortly afterwards and at the election

which followed. Cowper returned to power and 98 more of the purged were reinstated within twelve months. Henry Badgery was one of them.*’ In their resignation statements the Mudgee and Goulburn gentry had claimed that their superior social position would be compromised if they were forced to accept the new appointments as equals.

In rejecting their protests, the townspeople were not so much denying that their social position was superior as insisting that differences in social position should not prevent men acting together

as equals in public life.'® In social life too the gentry were under similar pressure as people came to expect that they would meet each other as equals. Two women witnesses report on this process. In her reminiscences the poet Mary Gilmore tells of the tradespeople’s revolt at the Wagga Wagga racing club ball in the 1870s. The ball was the high point of the social calendar. At first it was purely a

squatters’ ball; later selectors and shopkeepers and their families were admitted but on tickets which restricted them to one-third of the hall. Between them and the squatters and their women a chalk line was marked on the floor. One year when the ‘silver tails’ had gone in to supper a daring couple stepped over the line and danced a whole waltz on the squatters’ floor. Next year to prevent this a rope was stretched across the hall. But after two years the tradespeople cut the rope and danced in among the squatters and their wives and daughters. Did they mix together happily ever after? No—the race ball ‘as a special social function’ declined to nothing; the squatters turned the masonic ball into the high point of the social calendar.!®? This was nevertheless a victory for democratic manners. Inequality was no longer publicly insisted on. People can be pressured into treating each other as equals, but they will still wish to associate with some people rather than others. A democracy

252 DEMOCRACY AND AUTHORITY of manners cannot prescribe where and how often people shall meet; it determines merely how they are to behave when they do.”°

People of different class and background may well meet each other less frequently than before. This was the lament of Rachel Henning in one of the delightful letters to her sister by which we know her. Over Easter in 1874 she was writing from a farm in Illawarra where she and her husband had recently settled. She was alone in the house. Both her servants were at a school feast and picnic in the hills—‘you are obliged to give your servants a great many holidays here to keep them at all’. The few gentlefolk of Wollongong did not join the people in their holiday amusements. Some of the people lived on small farms surrounding their own, but

she had not met any of the farmers’ wives. In England she had enjoyed calling on her poorer neighbours and talking with them. ‘Here if you did anything of the kind they would return your call and bring their children to tea.’*’ Since she would not accept this equality, she had to isolate herself. The gentry could still play a part in community life. Old families and large houses did not lose their appeal; they were valued more straightforwardly when they were no longer associated with claims for preeminence. But where the gentry were involved in community

institutions it was more likely to be as patrons than as directors.“ The gentry had one comfort: no one succeeded to the prominent place which they had held in local affairs when they composed the magisterial benches. Just as the liberals were securing their hold on the benches, the power they exercised began a long decline. The liberal government took from the magistrates the control of the police in 1862. This was an important loss of power in itself, but it also created a formidable rival to the magistrates as the arm of the central government. With the establishment of the police force the government for the first time had a salaried official in every town and district. The centralised police force had not been very successful against bushrangers, but it was an ideal instrument for increasing

the administrative reach and efficiency of the central government. As the government assumed new responsibilities the police were appointed to carry them out; in some matters throughout the whole colony, in others only in remote areas where they were the sole salaried officials. They enforced attendance at school, checked the cleanliness of dairies, supervised the storage of gunpowder and kept an eye on orphan and neglected children boarded out with private families. They were also given functions previously performed by the magistrates. The collectors of statistics and electoral lists had been appointed by magistrates and paid by the government. It was cheaper to give both jobs to the police. The printing of the electoral rolls which the magistrates had arranged locally was transferred to Sydney. The police assumed much of the responsibility for the

LOCAL AUTHORITY 253

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Telegraph lines, 1862: an ideal instrument for central administration.

incapacitated and the needy. They gave out rations to newly arrived

migrants, Aborigines and the infirm, and buried paupers. They, rather than the magistrates, became the collectors of information to assist the government in making policy decisions — they reported for example on the habits of the Chinese, the local larrikins, and how

many insane, infirm and destitute from other colonies had taken refuge in their district.” The police made great use of the telegraph for police business proper and for their wider administrative duties. The telegraph was cheap and easy to erect. The first line went up in 1858 and by 1862, when the new police was formed, the lines reached to the colony’s borders and every substantial town was connected. A new town joined the telegraph network long before its roads were made and decades before it heard the whistle of a steam engine. A minister wishing to learn something or get something done in a country town

no longer wrote to the bench of magistrates; he telegraphed the police.

254 DEMOCRACY AND AUTHORITY The police were the dogsbodies of central administration, performing tasks which did not warrant the appointment of specialised officials. Departments which had a regular need to supervise operations in the country appointed their own agents. By this process too magistrates were superseded or bypassed. The post office acquired travelling inspectors to check on the performance of mail contracts and the running of post offices. The Public Works Department appointed road engineers and superintendents, at first responsible for the construction of main roads and then for nearly all minor roads as well. By the 1880s there were over 40 stock inspectors, in regular contact with Sydney by telegraph, who were responsible for the control of stock disease and the supervision of stock movement. In this operation the magistrates’ court played a minor role: the clerk collected the levies on stockholders which paid for the inspectors. The magistrates were losing their position as administrators and being confined to judging, but there were changes too in their purely court business. As fences were built, the contentious issues of

impounding, trespass and stock theft were heard less frequently. Masters and servants legislation was not invoked so regularly because employees were not working under long-term contracts. A bad worker was simply fired, instead of being taken to court. There were thus fewer people drawn into the magistrate’s jurisdiction, but courts were still important enough for the absence of the magistrates

on court day to be a great inconvenience. It was a longstanding complaint against the unpaid magistrates that they were not regular in their attendance. Increasingly the government responded to these

complaints by appointing more salaried police magistrates (there were 22 of them in 1856 and 78 in 1886) and commissioned them to

serve not only the town where they were located, but three or four others in the district as well. As the police magistrates became more common, there was a growing unwillingness to see justice left solely in the hands of unpaid amateur magistrates with local connections — which increased the demand for more salaried men. That an unpaid magistrate seemed an anomaly or a danger shows how far the new order of government by salaried officials had been accepted — in the

1850s nearly all local administration and justice had been in the hands of amateurs. In so far as the government still used magistrates’ courts as administrative agents it was the salaried portion that it relied on—the police magistrates and the clerks.

The magistrates lost their last important administrative function because they became too interested in it. Before the annual licensing day it was usual for magistrates to be lobbied by publicans,™ but the lobbying took on a new dimension when the temperance campaign

set out to capture the local benches. Magistrates opposed to granting new licences and in favour of closing down less salubrious

LOCAL AUTHORITY 295 premises rallied in force and were met by magistrates equally determined to keep pubs open. In 1881 the government stopped | these unseemly clashes by removing the right of all magistrates to participate in licensing business. Special licensing courts were estab-

lished, composed of only three magistrates, and each was to be

presided over by a police magistrate.” Though magistrates had much less influence on community life, appointments to the commission were still anxiously sought. Prem-

iers made appointments with a free hand to reward faithful supporters in the electorate—in 1887 Parkes made 600 magistrates in one swoop. The pretence that these appointments were necessary to

staff the local courts was pretty much abandoned.” The position

was chiefly an honour, but the combined effects of the decline in the significance of the magistrates’ courts and the increase in the number of magistrates would be bound to reduce its value. JPs were on the way to becoming useful people for signing official documents. A magistrates’ bench stuffed with liberal appointments was scarcely a liberal institution. It was an appointed body and liberalism stood

for representative institutions. Liberal shopkeepers sitting on the bench next to gentlemen from country houses might have thought the revolution had reached an eminently satisfactory conclusion, but the liberal leadership of the 1850s had been committed to more than capture of state power and the use of its patronage; they wanted to establish elected local bodies throughout the colony. A government

based on the sovereignty of the people needed the support of a network of elected institutions to prevent it from being easily subverted from the centre and to train people in the civic virtues.” At the time of self-government in 1856 there was not one elected

local council in operation. A council had been established for Sydney in 1842 but after ten years’ operation it had so mismanaged the city’s affairs and disgusted its citizens that the Legislative Council abolished it in 1853. The council was elected on a wide franchise.

At the first election elite citizens were rejected in favour of small traders and shopkeepers. The elite retaliated by having nothing further to do with the council which thereafter remained in the hands of its social inferiors. Some of the councillors were disreputable and illiterate; some took the position merely for the opportunity of social advancement, and generally they were of poor quality. In their proceedings they were turbulent and abusive. They spent the rates on improvements near their own homes and on jobs for their supporters. In short, the council’s history prefigured that of the Legislative Assembly. The failure of the council was an embarrassment to the liberals, who believed in representative government | on a broad basis, but finally not even they could conscientiously defend it. After abolishing the council, the Legislative Council

256 DEMOCRACY AND AUTHORITY entrusted the city’s affairs to three commissioners. Their adminis-

tration was much more efficient, but as soon as there was some ground for complaint against them the liberals went on the offensive, denouncing arbitrary rule by commissioners and insisting on the return of representative institutions. They made the issue serve their wider purpose of projecting themselves as those most committed to free institutions and hence the most appropriate leaders of the colony under the new dispensation of self-government. The conservatives who formed the first government under the new order protected the commissioners themselves from the liberals’ vendetta but had no wish to keep the issue alive by supporting the city commission. They introduced the measure which reestablished the Sydney council.” The conservatives also favoured the introduction of a general system of representative local government. Their motives were Slightly different from those of the liberals. They were afraid of extra taxation being placed on the rich and saw this as more likely if the central government had to go on paying for all public works, major and minor, in every locality. Under a system of local government localities would have to pay for their own works, which would induce self-restraint and careful management. If all was controlled

from the centre, ministers would agree to works without close scrutiny in order to keep a majority in the house. When the second conservative government was subjected to just this sort of pressure it hurriedly brought forward a bill to provide for local government.

They were soon afterwards displaced from office and it was the liberals who in 1858 carried the Municipalities Act. Especially after they had taken office, the liberals could see the financial advantage

of transferring responsibilities to localities, but for them local government served also the grander purpose of widening and strengthening popular rule.” Though both sides of the house had a strong commitment to local government, the Municipalities Act was a very limited measure. Councils were to have few powers and were to be constituted only if the inhabitants requested it. What the speeches claimed as essential was in practice to be optional. In all the Australian colonies this was the procedure— and for a similar reason. In no colony was there direct taxation of either land or income, a happy state of affairs which governments were under strong pressure to maintain. The source of local government funds was rates, a tax on land, and so to have imposed local councils everywhere would have been to introduce a colony-wide land tax. Perhaps no special reason needs to be found for a dislike of taxation, but for this generation one of the chief evils of Britain from which they hoped to escape was heavy taxation and particularly local property rates.°° A New South Wales government had a special reason to proceed

LOCAL AUTHORITY 257 cautiously. In the 1840s the whole colony had been roused against attempts by the Colonial Office and Governor Gipps to introduce local councils. These schemes were seen as particularly sinister. At one stage the aim was to get the councils to pay from their rates half the cost of the police, which the colonists claimed was an imperial responsibility since imported convicts provided most police business. At another stage the aim was for local councils to elect the colony’s legislature since the Colonial Office was still reluctant to entrust too much power to the people at large. Far from being cornerstones of liberty, local councils then appeared as an instrument of tyranny. Of course a large part of the objection to councils arose simply from

the reluctance to pay rates in any circumstance and for any purpose.>! It would require some contortion to characterise the creation

of local councils by an elected government as an arbitrary and oppressive act. But New South Wales governments had no illusion that they could succeed where Governor Gipps and the Colonial Office had failed. The most the conservative government had been prepared to do was to declare that areas which did not form councils to construct local works would not be given central funds for them. The liberal government dropped even this threat from the measure which became law. Both conservative and liberal bills attempted to allay the fear of escalating local rates by setting a maximum rate level which councils could not exceed.

When the liberals spoke enthusiastically of local government establishing free institutions throughout the country, they thought of themselves as controlling them. The country towns were generally liberal and if they became the centres of councils which incorporated the countryside around them local government would be a means of

extending liberal influence, because the urban population would outnumber the rural. More particularly, councils centred on the towns would exercise sway over the conservative large landholders who through their positions on the bench had hitherto been the local governing class. The conservatives saw this danger and a worse

one: the estates of the large landholders would be taxed to build roads and footpaths in the towns. They argued that the Municipalities Bill should be limited to the towns and that there should be a separate measure to provide local government for rural areas. A liberal house rejected this proposal, but the Empire assured the conservatives they had no reason to fear: properly considered the interests of town and country were the same.~*

There was no rush to take advantage of the Municipalities Act. Over the next ten years seventeen corporations were formed by Sydney suburbs and twenty by country towns. Many country towns

decided they were better off without a corporation. To gather Opposition to incorporation was the easiest of political tasks: people were asked to declare that they did not want to pay rates. The three

258 DEMOCRACY AND AUTHORITY largest towns outside Sydney— Maitland, Bathurst and Parramatta —did not incorporate until several years after the passage of the

act. The movement to incorporate was met with organised opposition in all three places. The act provided that those wanting to

establish a corporation and those opposing it should send in petitions. Perfect democracy prevailed in the assessment of the petition. The town worthies might ask to be incorporated, but if there were more signatures on the opposition petition the town was told it could not have a corporation. If the town worthies wished to persist they had to initiate another petition. Maitland and Parramatta were incorporated at the second attempt, Bathurst on the third. There was much skulduggery in the collection of signatures to the petitions which the rival parties fully exposed in their submissions to the government.” Most of the country corporations were limited to the area of the town and none extended very far into the country. The few attempts made to incorporate large areas came unstuck. To threaten country landholders, especially large ones, with incorporation created a determined opposition to the project which had no difficulty in

collecting signatures in both town and country for a counterpetition. Had towns been united in the support of incorporation, they could have coerced the country into joining them, but acquiring

a majority for incorporation even in the town was a difficult business. At Mudgee, where conflict between liberal townspeople and conservative country gentry was intense, the gentry adopted a

different tack to keep their lands out of the proposed Mudgee council. They arranged to have them incorporated separately as the Cudgegong municipality. This was the largest and only purely rural council.»

The most determined attempt to levy toll on the surrounding countryside was made by the township of Nowra on the Shoalhaven River. The leading landowner in the district was Alexander Berry, a cantankerous old Scotsman with very reactionary views. Berry was the first settler in the district and for a long time lord of the whole. He had two establishments, Coolangatta and Numba, on opposite

sides of the river just inland from the heads. These were in all senses the focus of district life for his numerous employees and tenants: court, post office, churches and stores were located here. The ferry which linked the two establishments was the only river crossing and so Berry commanded the north-south road. On the

north side Berry owned all the land, but on the south he was gradually joined by other settlers with whom he invariably quarrelled. One of the landowners established a rival township, Terrara, on the river a little further inland. From these settlers magistrates were appointed who in Berry’s eyes exercised their authority to

damage his interests. He attempted to damage them with the

LOCAL AUTHORITY 259 colonial secretary by frank accounts of their failings: one lived with a black gin, a second had been horsewhipped by a mere overseer, a third had ‘piddled in his hat in the Pothouse’.*° The licensing of this —

pothouse was one of Berry’s complaints against the magistrates since it lured his men away from their work. This pub was the nucleus of what became the government town of Nowra, still further

inland and on high ground set back from the river. Nowra finally eclipsed both Berry’s establishments and the private township of Terrara, but only after a long battle to wrench government services from its rivals and reroute the roads and postal services. Its supremacy was assured after Terrara was swept away by floods in 1870

and by the positioning of the Shoalhaven bridge so as to give it the north-south traffic.

When the Municipalities Act was passed Nowra had a dozen houses and 63 people.*’ Nevertheless, it contemplated making itself

into the centre of a municipal district. The leading men in this movement were Michael Hyams the publican and his brother-in-law

Henry Moss, who had changed his name from Moses after he left prison where he had served five years for subornation to perjury.~° Hyams and Moss knew there would be opposition to their plan— an earlier effort by the local liberal MP to incorporate the whole of the

Shoalhaven Police District had met opposition from Berry and others. Nothing had finally been determined when the movements for incorporation in Shoalhaven were given new direction and force by the radical firebrand, J.D. Lang.

Lang visited the district to preach and boost the liberal cause. When Berry heard that he was to preach in the Presbyterian church at Numba he pressured the minister into refusing him the use of it. For this slight Lang exacted a terrible revenge. In two open letters to the press he denounced Berry as a monster monopolist who had

flogged his convicts to within an inch of their lives, treated his tenants as serfs and spent nothing on improving his land or community facilities. None of this was true, but falsehood on a grand scale was one of Lang’s ways with his enemies. Another was taking

God’s part in assigning punishment for them—soon, said Lang, Berry would be burning in hellfire for all his sins. Meanwhile an effective instrument of earthly punishment was at hand in the form of the Municipalities Act. By incorporating Berry’s thousands of acres the community could exact huge sums from him in rates for its

own purposes. All that stood in the way of such a scheme was the general reluctance to pay rates. This Lang could not understand. If smallholders were prepared to pay trifling sums, they would be rewarded with fortunes from the great. In his happy gift for the telling phrase, Lang described Berry’s estate as good surface diggings, which would go on yielding gold year after year. The same thing could be done to all large landholders. Properly applied, the

260 DEMOCRACY AND AUTHORITY Municipalities Act could effect a ‘social revolution’. Lang published his attacks in local papers at Kiama and Wollon-

gong and they were reprinted by the Sydney Evening Mail. Berry ensured that the whole colony heard of them by charging Lang with libel. Though Lang could not rouse support for republicanism, he was still immensely popular and able to present his battles, in which there was so much personal spleen, as patriotic struggles. The crowd believed all he said about Berry. A Sydney jury refused to convict him. Berry did manage to get damages from the two local papers, to which Lang responded by holding a public meeting to raise money

to pay them and repeating his attack on Berry in full. Berry proceeded against him for this new offence but again the jury would

not convict. During the course of these trials Lang was elected at the top of the poll as one of the members for West Sydney. Since Berry had done his best to extinguish Hyams’ public house and thwart Nowra’s growth, Hyams and Moss were only too ready to join a vendetta against him. The whole colony was now waiting for someone to take up Lang’s plan. With Lang and his influence behind them the men of Nowra went to work with a will. They were devilishly cunning in drawing up the area of the proposed municipality. To the south of the river it included Nowra and its immediate environs; north of the river it took in Berry’s lands, but only the pastoral sections where there were no tenants. This was to ensure that there would be no one on the north side who could protest at the incorporation. Overall the municipality was shaped like a figure eight with its boundaries ducking and diving in the most amazing

way. This proposal, which had nothing to do with defining a coherent area for local administration, which linked a village set well back from a river with paddocks on the other side, was called by its designers ‘Nowra and suburbs’.°? Cowper’s government could not afford to thwart Lang’s crusade and processed this proposal as if there were nothing unusual about

it.“° Berry organised a petition against it, but this was discounted because most of the signatories did not reside within the proposed municipal area. His own protests were ignored. The municipality was duly proclaimed under the name Shoalhaven council. Berry

thought the Terror had begun, with himself the first victim of democracy’s attack on property. He appealed to the Colonial Office for protection against the revolutionary government of New South Wales. Though the Colonial Office staff saw his case as a clear sign that large property-holders should sell up and leave the colony as soon as possible, they could not interfere. Berry felt that his British citizenship was now worthless.** When the rates notice arrived from the Shoalhaven council he refused to pay. The council seized some

of his stock whereupon Berry appealed to the Supreme Court to declare that the Shoalhaven council had not been properly cons-

LOCAL AUTHORITY 261 tituted. The court decided that the Municipalities Act in providing for the incorporation of a city, town, or rural district envisaged that one of these could form a corporation, but not two joined together. Since Shoalhaven council included a town and a rural district it was

illegal. Mayor Moss, supported by the Cowper government, appealed to the Privy Council against this decision but it was upheld. Shoalhaven council was no more. The making and unmaking of the Shoalhaven council had important consequences for local government generally. The Supreme

Court’s ruling on the illegality of linking urban and rural areas

together cast doubt on the authority of all councils which included rural areas however small. A few councils suspended operation; Goulburn council was declared illegal in the Supreme Court on the action of a rural ratepayer. The government attempted to pass a bill validating all existing councils, but the Legislative Council, in order to protect Berry, threw it out. Though the creation of Shoalhaven council had been a popular cause, endorsed by the liberal government, the scheme was so patently fraudulent and vindictive that it

eventually discredited any linking of town and country in local government. On all sides it was accepted that there should be separate provisions for the incorporation of towns and rural districts

—what the conservatives had unsucessfully requested in 1858.” Shoalhaven council itself contributed to the disillusionment by being singularly incompetent and faction-ridden. The Municipalities Act of 1867 removed the uncertainty which the Shoalhaven fiasco had created. All municipalities formed under the 1858 Act were validated—except Shoalhaven. The system of cre-

ating councils only at the request of the inhabitants was retained. Towns and rural districts were to be incorporated separately and

their boundaries were to be of regular form to avoid artificial

schemes of the Shoalhaven sort. The power of local government to damage large property was further weakened by the provision that votes for council elections would be allocated according to the value of property held, up to a maximum of four votes. The 1858 act had given the small ratepayer as much voting power as the large, which

in Lang’s eyes greatly added to its revolutionary potential. But parliament was now less radical and considered that large propertyholders had to be wooed into local government rather than coerced. This measure was carried through the parliament by that old democratic ideologue Henry Parkes.

New councils continued to be formed after 1867 but chiefly in Sydney suburbs and country towns. Most of the countryside remained without local government. Small landholders and large were united in the determination not to pay rates and had no inducement to make them change their minds. Towns might need lighting and

262 DEMOCRACY AND AUTHORITY water and footpaths, but country people required only roads and bridges which could be obtained direct from central government. For them central government was not a distant, indifferent power; as voters they demanded that their local member obtain finance for their roads and bridges, and members in turn made the meeting of these demands the cost of their support for ministries. Country people turned the central government into their local government. Central government was preferred to local councils because of its continuing ability to provide services without taxing people directly

for them. Its chief sources of revenue were import duties and

receipts from the sale and lease of crown lands.** The first is an indirect tax raised relatively painlessly and the second is not a tax at all. In times of economic recession receipts from both these sources fell, but parliament would do anything rather than move to direct taxation of land and income— it imposed stamp duties on business transactions, raised tariffs temporarily or went into debt.* The conservatives’ belief that democracy must lead to an attack on property was wildly astray. The absence of payment of members ensured that most members had some property, however small; the smaller the property the more desperate were its owners to avoid the burdens which would make it difficult to retain or augment. Had parliament not been able to raise money so easily and been forced to impose direct taxation, the issue of the relative responsibilities of central government and local councils would have assumed a differ-

ent aspect. Governments, like those in Britain and the United States, would have told localities that if they did not raise rates there would be no local services. If they were faced with the alternative of paying direct taxes to Sydney or to a local council, people may well have preferred the local council. An inkling of what might have been can be gained from the plans for local government drawn up by the first Martin ministry in 1864. This government held office during a recession and was committed

to correcting Cowper’s financial mismanagement. It proposed to establish ten provincial councils to be responsible for public works, police and education.*© Since the essence of the plan was that localities should pay for their services, it was not well received and soon abandoned. Governments muddled through the financial crisis without making fundamental alterations to taxation or to central government responsibilities. And then the good times returned. In the 1870s revenue from land sales soared and the stamp duties and extra import duties imposed in the mid-sixties were repealed. Since the colonists were committed to a policy of free trade, extra import duties were imposed with great reluctance. The land bonanza enabled them to return to their principles. It also allowed country residents to get roads and bridges without seeming to pay for them. In the early eighties the land revenue declined and the crisis over

LOCAL AUTHORITY 263 finance returned. As recession in the 1880s gave way to depression in the 1890s, there was to be no easy solution. One obvious measure

presented itself to governments: country districts should pay for their own roads and bridges. For two decades governments had as a perpetual item on their agenda the compulsory incorporation of country areas. Of course when governments were in financial difficulties their electors were too. The attempts to create local government bodies were denounced as placing new burdens on the people when they could least afford it. Country members who made their reputations by extracting roads and bridges from governments combined to thwart these proposals. To keep their position they had to save their constituents from the tyranny of being forced to have councils. It was not until 1906 that a government managed to establish shire councils throughout the country.*’ All that governments had established by the creation of the shires

was that throughout the state local bodies should pay for local public works. This was a minimal role for elected councils. The central government continued to take responsibility for services which in Britain and the United States were performed by local bodies. The most notable of these were police and education. Police had always been paid for by central government, even when they were administered by the magistrates. Had localities been taxed to

support the police it would have been much more difficult to centralise the force. Education was at first largely a local responsi-

bility. Its transfer to central control is a further indication of the attractiveness of a central government when it is rich. The local committees which ran the national schools had to pay

one-third of the cost of the schoolhouse and maintain it. Though these schools were to promote social harmony, the committee members and the parents quite often fell to feuding along religious and national lines. Committee members tended to lose interest in the school or to take too much interest in it and harass the teacher. Many of them were poorly educated themselves and not really qualified for their responsibilities. Inspectors and the central board were in two minds over the local committees: they needed them to establish and support the schools, especially against the opposition of the clergy, who had denominational schools to protect, but they were disturbed that the education of children should suffer because of local feuding, meddling and ignorance. They hoped that eventually there would be better-qualified local bodies to assume control. This was a common assumption: Martin’s plan for provincial councils

in 1864 made education one of their responsibilities; Parkes in introducing the Municipalities Bill of 1867 said he hoped councils would eventually run schools. But councils excluded themselves

from that role by their very spotty coverage of the country; and even if they had been universal they would not have wished to

264 DEMOCRACY AND AUTHORITY spend rates on education while the central government had funds to support it.

In the 1870s the government had more than enough revenue, which led administrators and politicians to abandon the reliance on local fund-raising and involvement in education. A more efficient and comprehensive system could be established if the government took full control. In 1875 the requirement that local people raise one-third of the cost of a new schoolhouse was dropped. Government would build schools wherever they were needed. The 1880 Education Act cut all aid to denominational schools and put national

schools and their teachers under the control of a government department.*®

- The colonists had again showed that they did not place much importance on local government. The liberals in the 1850s had considered local government very important, but their ideas were based on old-world experience and circumstances which in the colony lost their point. Local government did protect liberty when lords, king or dictator threatened it. Local bodies were vital for a town when central government was preoccupied with war, empire and foreign affairs and had no funds or machinery to attend to local improvements. But here the liberal state was under no threat and its chief business was improvement and development. Every district had its ambassador at headquarters in the form of the local member to get its share of an ample revenue. In a small society, with tiny

electorates of a few thousand voters, the state could not seem remote. Improved communications, especially the telegraph, meant

that Sydney was in truth less remote as an administrative centre. The colony appeared as a manageable unit, which explains why parliamentarians could unthinkingly cite the unification of the London police as a precedent for creating a police force which spread over hundreds of miles.” In the old world local control was being limited or supplanted as central government accepted wider responsibilities and improved its

techniques of control. To want every child to be educated and the educational budget to be well spent was not a colonial innovation. Nor were the feuding and ignorance of the local educational committees in New South Wales unique. What made the colony unusual was the ease by which central could supplant local authority. In the old world where there were well-established local institutions,

suspicion of central control or inadequate central funds, local contrariness and incompetence could not be completely overridden. By the 1880s the colony was administered in a totally different

way from what it had been when the liberals first took power in Sydney. The unpaid magistrates who had been an omnicompetent local authority had been superseded. The new elected local bodies exercised few powers and did not operate at all in wide sections of

LOCAL AUTHORITY 265 the country. Central government’s power had increased enormously; the range of operations for which it took direct responsibility

made this and other Australian governments unique. Policemen, teachers, stock inspectors, and road superintendents who served in the country were officials of departments controlled from Sydney. Rule by government official, first developed in the pastoral interior

in the person of the commissioner of crown lands, had been transferred to the goldfields in the 1850s and then gradually to the whole society. The advent of democracy, which was to have given

power into the people’s hands, far from arresting this trend had assisted its growth because the liberals could successfully attack the old ruling class in the country. In this environment, however, some democratic practices could

flourish better. The desire to treat all people as equals has to be checked when in the daily round people meet others who exercise power over them. When magistrates were rulers, you could not be matey with a magistrate. In self-governing communities, the inequalities of power are constantly displayed; but if power is exercised from a distance or by local officials whose authority comes from outside the community, then there are fewer barriers within the community between one person and another. The colonists now lived in a world more like the gold-diggers’ where all power was held by the commissioner and so they were better able to realise the diggers’ ideal of treating people of all classes and backgrounds as equals. Authority in this environment became more formal and impersonal. The British habit of obedience to authority was maintained, but authority was no longer embodied in leading local figures such as the magistrates or acknowledged by deference to a ruling class.

Australians gained their sense of freedom by making authority anonymous.

Epilogue Men were mining, farming, making roads, shouting politics. But all with that basic indifference which dare not acknowledge how indifferent it is, lest it should drop everything and lapse into a blank. But a basic

indifference, with a spurt of excitement over a horse-race and an occasional joy in a row.

D.H. Lawrence Kangaroo chap. 18

A 0s ‘9"][]e

| ae 7 a | 4 -_— {~~ Wee

F “— , i i. a ,; Daniel Deniehy by Adelaide Ironside: one republican idealist depicted by another.

266

AN is by nature a political animal,’ said Aristotle. By this

M he did not mean that we have an interest in politics or an aptitude for it, but that we reach our full stature in and through politics. Men can exist under barbarism or despotism, but

they are at their best when they associate together as citizens to govern themselves. Politics is not often thought of in these exalted terms in modern Australia, least of all in New South Wales. Its first democrats, however, were followers of the Greek ideal. They looked to democratic politics as a way of dignifying and invigorating all men and carrying the community to a higher form of civilisation. Politics would become central to the life of the people and the new regime

would attract the best talent to honour and serve it. With these expectations Daniel Deniehy prepared himself to be its orator and man of letters, Charles Harpur its poet, and Adelaide Ironside its artist. Democracy came, but it had no use for these three.! The first Assembly elected by manhood suffrage was asked to

allot a modest sum to support Ironside while she continued her studies in Rome. The motion was introduced by the Reverend J. D. Lang, her old mentor, and seconded by Deniehy, her close friend

who had also been a mentor, though only three years her senior. Lang told the Assembly that there was no question of Ironside’s ability —she had received high praise in Rome and her studio had been visited by the prince of Wales. When her studies were complete she could return to the colony and decorate the walls and ceiling of

the projected new parliament house with fresco paintings. The colony should follow the example of the United States which sup-

ported its promising artists and had the walls of its Congress decorated with the scenes of the great deeds of the War of Independence. The government opposed the motion and it was defeated on the voices without further debate. Ironside did not know beforehand of Lang’s move and was furious at him when she

learnt of it. But would she have been quite so annoyed had he succeeded? It was too early, she reassured herself, for the parliament of a young country to appreciate the importance of art, but when her fame was fully established in Europe, then the colony 267

268 EPILOGUE would see her worth—‘I do not call upon my country, Australia must in time call for me.’ Charles Nicholson, her conservative patron, warned her to expect nothing: the men who now filled the Assembly would think £500 too much to pay for all the art treasures in the Vatican and would not spend a sixpence on anything that was not practical.

Two years later Ironside won critical and popular acclaim in London when she exhibited four paintings in the International Exhibition, three in the Roman section and her masterpiece “The Marriage at Cana’ in the New South Wales section. There was encouraging talk that ‘The Marriage’ would be acquired for the colony either by an individual buyer or the government, and the artist thought the time for her return to her native land had come. But no buyer eventuated. She had put a high price on the painting, but was prepared to reduce it by a third if it were acquired for some public building in Sydney. Lang then made an unsuccessful attempt in Sydney to raise the purchase price by subscription. Since people said they would subscribe if they saw the painting and liked it, Lang urged her to send the painting out to the colony. But Ironside could not afford to send the painting unless a sale was guaranteed. Years passed before it was clear that the painting would not be bought. She finally decided that she, her mother and her best pictures should

go home once she was well enough to travel. She was dying of tuberculosis. Her last letter to Lang written on 10 January 1867 began: ‘This day eleven years ago we first entered Rome. | am writing to you wrapped up in flannels and blankets, with all the strength taken out of me at last by the cold of Europe, and longing to breathe again the warm air of my native land. God willing we

shall leave England for Sydney in the Spring, either in June or July...’ In April she died. Among the personal belongings which were returned to the colony was her small ink sketch of Deniehy, a dashing and romantic figure, which she had drawn in 1854, the year before she left the colony.

Deniehy was much loved in the early 1850s. He was young, charming and witty and so extraordinarily talented that he excited only admiration and joy; no one could be jealous of him. After his ‘bunyip aristocracy’ speech Harpur wrote a poem to celebrate him and his triumph: Little Dan Deniehy! Brilliant Dan Deniehy Dear is the light of thy spirit to me!

In his mid-twenties he was not only the great orator of popular . politics, he was also writing and lecturing on the literature, art and architecture of Europe as a master. His marvellous memory gave him an effortless range. As one admirer remembered, he could talk

THE UNWANTED 269 of the. paintings in the Louvre as if he had the catalogue in his pocket.

Deniehy’s disasters began when he became a member of the Assembly in 1857. He had little money and less money sense and his parliamentary work interfered with the law practice he had begun in

Goulburn. He could not hide his detestation of Cowper and what the popular movement had become under him, which meant he was hissed at public meetings in Sydney and denounced in the Empire. He turned against old allies who supported or went along with Cowper. They now became the objects of his biting wit. After three years in parliament he had destroyed himself as a political force. His

journal the Southern Cross, which was to have saved the popular movement from its leader, folded after eight months. In his early

thirties he knew that he was not going to realise his lifelong ambition of serving his country. The only struggles now were against his craving for alcohol and to find the means to support his beloved wife and children.

One of the hardest things to bear, as he sank into insignificance,

was.to see men of no education find their way so easily into the Assembly and positions of power.* He was savage and cruel about their ignorance because they demonstrated that the whole plan of his life had been wrong. He had devoted himself to his books, believing as he widened his knowledge that he was preparing himself to take a leading part in his country’s affairs. Now he found himself in a parliament and a democracy where learning was at a discount.

His last initiative in politics was a telling failure. He asked the

house to support the establishment of a free public library in Sydney. It was silly of the liberals, he said, to oppose the university

because it educated only a few and to do nothing to educate the many. Ambitious young men—future parliamentarians among them — had to be given the chance to cultivate their minds while they were making their money. The whole society needed a wellstocked library because it was so far removed from ‘the great centres of science, refinement and politics’. The government had no intention of spending money on a library, and ministers and their supporters, while not opposing the idea, found many reasons why it should not be implemented: there were insufficient funds, railways were a more pressing need, and a library in Sydney would give no benefit to the country. Facing defeat, Deniehy was scathing about

democrats who would not spend money to educate the men to whom they had given the vote and who thought public works were all that mattered. It had not always been thus with democracies, he said. In Athens the government had spent large sums on sculptures and temples and whatever would elevate the minds of the people. His parting shot was to insult the ministers—they owed so little to

2/0 EPILOGUE books that they could not see the point of letting others read them.°

When Deniehy gave up politics in 1860 he drank heavily and became very ill. He was saved temporarily by the offer of editing a Catholic paper in Melbourne. Here he still wrote well, sniping at liberals and tolerating conservatives because liberals were a greater

threat to Catholic schools. When the paper ceased publication in 1864 he returned to Sydney and was soon in a bad way. In these last

years he was a broken man, shuffling through the streets and avoiding company. In an effort to make a fresh start and escape the drink he went to Bathurst to begin a law practice. Before his wife and children joined him, he died after falling heavily in the street. He was 37 years old. ' Charles Harpur, gold commissioner on the southern fields, learnt the details of Deniehy’s death in a letter from a young admirer, the

poet Henry Kendall who had a government job in Sydney. ‘I am infinitely sad,’ he wrote in reply, ‘at what you tell about the last days

of poor Deniehy! Ah me! When I think of the time when I addressed the following song to him, how forlornly disappointed do I feel!’ Harpur then copied out his ‘Little Dan Deniehy’ verse for Kendall. The young poet would not have seen it before because despite Harpur’s efforts no collection of his poetry had appeared since 1853 when The Bushrangers, A Play in Five Acts and Other

Poems was published. It had been reviewed in the Empire by Deniehy who hailed the author as the first of ‘those Sons of the Morning who shall yet enlighten and dignify our home, building up as with the hands of angels the National Mind’. Harpur was now spending a lot of time copying and recopying his poetry for the definitive edition of his works in which no one was

interested. He contemplated various schemes to get the volume published — subsidising it himself, asking people to subscribe, finding an English publisher — but had to lay them all aside. Individual poems were still being accepted by the Sydney press, but it did not take much for him to fall out with editors who did not treat him or his poems with proper respect. He resolved to have nothing further to do with them and let posterity judge him on the collection he was perfecting in manuscript. Harpur had always been an awkward, moody and temperamental

character who even as a young man had railed against his fate of being a poet in a community which had no time for poetry. At least in his last years for the first time he had a secure income from his salary as gold commissioner. The job left him some time for poetry and he had also selected and developed a farm which he had made his home. Unfortunately for him the goldfields were in decline and governments wanting to save money decided that full-time commissioners could be dispensed with. When Parkes took office for the

first time early in 1866 Harpur wrote to him to renew an old

THE UNWANTED 271 friendship in the hope that Parkes would save his job. He sent him the latest revision of the sonnet he had addressed to Parkes when they were young men together dreaming of the Australian republic and Parkes had declared to Harpur that he loved him like a brother. Harpur told Parkes of all the good work he did as commissioner and reminded him of Burke’s saying ‘Whoever protects a man of genius

confers a favour upon the state’.* But Parkes could not protect him — all the remaining gold commissioners were sacked on 1 July 1866— and lest Harpur feel too righteous Parkes conveyed to him

the complaints he had received about some odd behaviour in the gold commissioner. Harpur vowed to publish a terrible indictment of Parkes and practised his denunciations on his young friend Kendall— ‘This fellow...who has not even two qualifications for the high office he now fills, lest the profoundest hypocrisy be one, and pre-eminency in failure another.’ The blow from which he did not recover was the death of his second son who accidentally shot himself while out hunting. Harpur buried him on the hill behind his house and arranged that he should be buried there with him. He composed his own epitaph: Here lies Charles Harpur, who at fifty years of age came to the conclusion, that he was living in a sham age, under a sham Government, and amongst sham friends, and that any World whatever must therefore be a better world than theirs. And having come to this conclusion, he did his dying and now lies here with one of his sons, in the hope of their meeting in some place better fitted to make them happy, and to keep them so, than this from which they have departed. And even if all that now remains of them is what remains below —it is still well: inasmuch as, in that case, they are safe from all malignity, whether proceeding from God or Devil, that would further afflict them.

Harpur lived for another year and so the old republican had to endure one further ‘sham’: ministers in the government, the same men who had sacked him, putting on court dress to welcome Prince

Alfred. He took time off from the copying to write a poem denouncing them. Democracy was what these idealists had longed for, but it came in a totally unexpected way. The political revolution had not required a mobilisation of the people. There had been no struggle to educate and elevate the masses and no moment of crisis when their attach-

ment to new institutions was intense and fixed forever as part of their identity. Too much came too easily. In Sydney, which was the only centre of democratic organisation, nearly all men acquired the vote because the House of Lords halved the voting qualifications and inflation then made them nominal. Manhood suffrage was

introduced not by democrats, but by liberals, late converts to democracy, whom Deniehy described as ‘the respectable mild soda water of Australian politics—neither wine nor spirit’. He thought

272 EPILOGUE only SIX of those who voted for manhood suffrage really believed in it. The democrats had expected that the new political regime would

be created during a great nationalist awakening when the people would throw over British rule and British notions and found a republican democracy. Their model was the United States. A long and bitter struggle for self-government would have encouraged a nationalist spirit and associated it with politics; but Britain conceded self-government fairly readily and in so far as it had to be struggled for, the local fighters were not democrats but the legislative councillors of the 1840s who were the conservatives of the 1850s. Republicanism was not needed in order to achieve control over local affairs and democracy too was established without a disowning of Britain.

After the defeat of Chartism in 1848, there emerged acceptable British spokesmen for democracy.

When nationalism developed later in the century it was not strongly associated with politics. Those who thought of themselves as British Australians were attached to the institutions and traditions of the empire rather than to local institutions, which were peopled with disreputable characters and were difficult to admire. To the more radical, independent nationalists the democratic state with its British trappings seemed un-Australian. There were already signs of this in the bushranging era when the popularly elected government was embarrassed by a proto-nationalistic feeling for the outlaws. The democrats considered that the political world should provide moral exemplars; here men of the highest virtue serving the common good would inspire and ennoble the community. They were looking for heroes and they got Cowper, a mere administrator who introduced democracy as if it were nothing out of the ordinary and

who acquired a reputation for deviousness but not virtue. His lieutenant Robertson, the land reformer, did play the hero’s part. He had the boldness and bluntness of an Australian bushman, stuck

to his policy of free selection and roused the people to make parliament adopt it. He had a devoted following throughout the colony. Unfortunately his land policy did not transform the countryside and worse, became associated with every form of sharp practice _ and corruption. He stayed in politics long enough to see his land act

repealed in 1884 and left the house two years later not as a statesman but as a disappointed faction leader heaping personal abuse on an opponent.® He did not live on as a hero of democracy and there was no one else. The democrats had looked to democracy to promote social equality and dignify the common man. They thought of this chiefly

in political terms: people would be equal as citizens with similar rights and similar opportunities to participate in the processes of government. But like nationalism, social equality developed largely

THE UNWANTED 273 apart from politics. It was not launched by people self-consciously

calling each other citizen, as they did in the French Revolution. Democratic manners were first fully practised on the goldfields

where the people had no say at all in government. Manhood suffrage signifies equality, and it played its part in breaking down social distinction, but the ‘gentlemen’ politicians who introduced it did not give it this message. Nor did the new democratic regime _ cultivate the active involvement of the people in government; local institutions had few responsibilities or were nonexistent; the predominant form of the state became a centralised bureaucracy. There was actually a right not to have local government—an Australian discovery in political philosophy. This is not to demean Australian egalitarianism; it is in a way more genuine because it owes nothing to politics. People calling each other citizen or comrade are not usually equal in power, as the victims of Citizen Robespierre and Comrade Stalin well knew. In one matter the people did express a fundamental commitment through politics. They wanted a society where success was open to all, and no barrier was more quickly broken than that which had reserved politics for the rich, the well-bred, and the well-educated. But as parliament lost its eminent men and gentlemanly manners it also ceased to enjoy wide respect. The colonists inverted the Greek ideal and made public life something to be ashamed of.

Sources Standard references The following works are essential for a study of the politics of this period. My

interpretation on a number of matters is different from theirs, but I have relied heavily on them. They are cited in the notes by short title. C.N. Connolly, Politics, Ideology and the New South Wales Legislative Council 1856-1872, PhD thesis, Australian National University, 1974 C.N. Connolly Biographical Register of the New South Wales Parliament 1856-1901 Canberra 1983 P. Loveday, The Development of Parliamentary Government in New South Wales, 1856-1870, PhD thesis, University of Sydney, 1962 P. Loveday and A.W. Martin Parliament Factions and Parties. The First Thirty Years of Responsible Government in New South Wales Melbourne 1966

A.W. Martin Henry Parkes, A Biography Melbourne 1980 A. Powell Patrician Democrat, The Political Life of Charles Cowper

1843-1870 Melbourne 1977 J. M. Ward James Macarthur, Colonial Conservative, 1789-1867 Sydney 1981

274

Notes

Abbreviations

CO Colonial Office

Col. Sec. Colonial secretary

ML Mitchell Library

NSWA = New South Wales Government Archives

S. Cmt. Select Committee

SMH Sydney Morning Herald V. & P. New South Wales Votes and Proceedings (Legislative Council to 1855; Legislative Assembly from 1856) Introduction: Democracy and its dangers

1 People’s Advocate 2, 9, 16, 23 Dec. 1848; Martin Parkes pp. 46-54 2 See below p. 100. 3 C. Pearl Brilliant Dan Deniehy Melbourne 1972; Deniehy to Ironside 25 May, 29 Oct. 1854, Ironside Family Papers ML MSS 2727/1 4 J. Normington-Rawling Charles Harpur An Australian Sydney 1962;

Harpur to Parkes 22 Aug. 1850, ML MSS 947 5 SMH 21 Dec. 1848, 1, 26, 29 Jan. 1849 6 People’s Advocate 6, 13 Jan. 1849 7 ibid. 16 Dec. 1848

8 A. Gilchrist (ed.) John Dunmore Lang Chiefly Autobiographical Melbourne 1951, vol. 1, p. 268, vol. 2, p. 459; D. W. A. Baker Days of Wrath. A Life of John Dunmore Lang Melbourne 1985 pp. 160-67, 283-87 9 J. Poulton Adelaide Ironside. The Pilgrim of Art Sydney 1987 10 People’s Advocate 10 Feb. 1849; Empire 28 Dec. 1850 11 E. Perkins (ed.) The Poetical Works of Charles Harpur Sydney 1984, pp. 9-10, 623; H. Parkes Murmurs of the Stream Sydney 1857, pp. 14, 39-42, 75, 77, 81; People’s Advocate 20 Aug. 1853 12 Parkes Murmurs pp. 21-23 13 People’s Advocate 16, 30 Dec. 1848, 20 Jan. 10, 24, 31 March 1849, 19 April 1851; Empire 5 Feb., 21 July 1853; Harpur to Parkes, 22 Aug. 1850,

ML MSS 947 14 People’s Advocate 2 Dec. 1848, 3 March 1849

15 J.D. Lang, Common Place Book, item 85, ML A2247 16 Normington-Rawling Harpur pp. 138-39; Maitland Mercury 5 July 1848

17 Parkes to Maria 27 Sept. 1847, ML A1044 18 People’s Advocate 9 Dec. 1848 (Hawksley, ‘Knowledge’), 23 Dec. 1848, 3

Feb. 1849; Empire 1 Aug. 1851; Perkins Harpur pp. 702-3, 712-13 19 Perkins Harpur pp. 356-57, 403-6, 541-42; Harpur ‘Duncan’s Plea for the New Constitution’. Ms. poems, newspaper articles, ML A92 pp. 205-7; People’s Advocate 8 March 1851. On moral improvement gener275

276 NOTES

ally see M. Roe Quest for Authority in Eastern Australia 1835-1851 Melbourne 1965, part III. 20 People’s Advocate 20 Jan., 10 Feb. 1849, 1, 8 March, 25 June, 5 Aug. 1851; Empire 28 Aug. 1851 21 Parkes Murmurs pp. 10-11, 77, 80, 102; H. Parkes Stolen Moments Sydney 1842, pp. 68-69; Perkins Harpur pp. 6-8, 96, 426, 433-34; Lang, Common Place Book, items 22, 33, 114; Baker Days of Wrath pp. 216-17

22 SMH 5 Oct. 1849 23 Nicholson to A. Cunninghame, 4 March 1849, 4 Jan. 1851 [1852], 29 Feb. 1852, ML A3180 24 J.M. Ward ‘Foundation of the University of Sydney’ Journal of Royal Australian Historical Society 37, 5, 1951, pp. 295-310; W.J. Gardner _ Colonial Cap and Gown Canterbury 1979 25 Australian 22 May 1838 26 Inaugural Addresses delivered on the opening of the University of Sydney ... sydney 1852

27 ‘Institutions of Ancient Greece’, Westminster Review, 10, April 1826, pp. 269-331 is a preliminary over-view 28 Nicholson to Cunninghame, 29 Feb. 1852 ML A3180 29 Lang, Common Place Book, items 224, 229a 30 Empire 3 June 1853, 1 Feb. 1854

Chapter 1 Tricking the British 1 People’s Advocate 27 Jan. 1849 2 T.H. Irving, The Development of Liberal Politics in N.S.W., 1843-1855, PhD thesis, University of Sydney, 1967, p. 309 3 People’s Advocate 13 Jan. 1849

4 R. Knight Illiberal Liberal: Robert Lowe in New South Wales, 1842-1850 Melbourne 1966

5 Lowe to Parkes, 20 Jan. 1849, ML A71 6 People’s Advocate 20 Jan. 1849 7 Martin to A. Mackay, 22 Jan. 1849, ML A63 8 People’s Advocate 27 Jan. 1849 9 Powell Patrician Democrat

10 D.W.A. Baker Days of Wrath: A Life of John Dunmore Lang Melbourne 1985, pp. 375-78; C. Pearl Brilliant Dan Deniehy Melbourne 1972, pp. 40-43 11 The Coming Event Sydney 1850 12 Martin Parkes pp. 62-63

13 Russell to Earl Grey, 29 June, 19 Dec. 1849, Earl Grey’s Journal, 23 Feb., 23 March 1850, Grey papers, University of Durham 14 Parliamentary Debates vol. 108, pp. 976-1020, vol. 109, pp. 1272-1343

15 People’s Advocate 27 Jan. 1849; Speech on the Australian Colonies Government Bill ... by Robert Lowe.London 1850 16 Colonial Papers, Australia 19, n.d. Grey Papers, University of Durham 17 Gipps to Stanley, 18 Jan. 1846, CO 201/365; Fitzroy to Grey, 27 Feb., 12 May, 29 June, 26 Dec. 1849, CO 201/411, 413, 414, 419 18 Parliamentary Debates vol. 111, p. 960

NOTES 277 19 Parliamentary Debates vol. 111, p. 1048 20 Nicholson to Cunninghame, 12 Feb. 1851, 29 Feb. 1852, ML A3180 21 Empire 11 Jan. 1851 22 Corrected Report of the Speeches of Hon. Edward Deas Thomson ... on the first and second reading of the Bill for the division of the colony into electoral districts Sydney 1851, p. 13. For the debate see also SMH, 12, 18 April 1851 23 Empire 16 Sept. 1851 24 People’s Advocate 23 Aug. 1851 25 Nicholson to A. Cunninghame, 29 Feb. 1852, ML A3180

Chapter 2 Betrayed by the British 1 B. Bailyn The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution Cambridge Mass. 1967, pp. 278-80 2 J.M. Ward Colonial Self-Government. The British Experience 1759-1856 London 1976, chap. 2

3 On constitutional debates see E.K. Silvester (ed.) New South Wales Constitution Bill. The speeches in the Legislative Council ... Sydney 1853; the speeches at the protest meetings Empire 5, 16 Aug., 7 Sept.

1853, and for further conservative views, G.W. Rusden to James Macarthur 30 June, 4 Dec. 1853, C. Nicholson to James Macarthur 21 April 1853, ML A2923; Edward Hamilton to Wentworth, 7 Sept. 1853, ML Aé63.

4 Empire 9, 17, 21, 26 Nov. 1853 5 Empire 29 Oct., 12 Nov. 1853; Constitution Bill, Petition from Windsor

and Richmond, Petition from Landed Proprietors, Householders and Colonists V. & P. 1853, vol. 2 6 Empire 9 Sept. 1853 7 Empire 6 Aug. 1853; Pieces in Prose by Charles Harpur, ML C376, p. 193

8 Empire 28 Nov., 5 Dec. 1853; Robertson to J.D. Lang, 26 Nov., 16 Dec. 1853, ML A2226

9 G.F.G. Stanley A Short History of the Canadian Constitution Toronto 1969, pp. 67-69 10 Parliamentary Debates vol. 109, pp. 1272-1343, vol. 110, pp. 554-618, vol. 111, pp. 514-15, 1030-47 11 Ward Self-Government p. 311 12 Parliamentary Debates vol. 121, p. 979, vol. 122, p. 49

13 ibid. vol. 122, pp. 1149-52 | 14 ibid. vol. 121, pp. 951-74 15 Empire 26 Aug. 1853

16 Silvester Constitution Bill pp. 130, 160, 162, 183, 204—5, 219, 223 17 Empire Supplement, 24 Aug. 1853

719-20 |

18 SMH 8 Dec. 1853; Empire, 8 Dec. 1853; S.F. Draper, Conservative Political Action and the Constitutional Debate in the N.S.W. Legislative

Council c. 1843-1854, PhD thesis, University of Sydney, 1970, pp.

19 SMH 22 Dec. 1853

20 17 & 18 Victoria, cap. CXVIII; Parliamentary Debates vol. 134, pp. 159-77, vol. 135, pp. 1319-41

278 NOTES 21 CO 881/1/VIT, VIII, IX, XIV, XVI, XVII; F. Rogers to Merivale, 6 Sept. 1854, CO 323/77; George Grey to Russell, 30 Oct. 1854, PRO 30/22/11E

22 SMH 14 Dec. 1853 23 Russell to Denison, 20 July 1855, Assent to the New Constitution Act of 1853 V. & P. 1855, vol. 1 24 Wentworth to Nicholson, 3 July 1855, ibid 25 Parliamentary Debates vol. 138, pp. 719-32, 1989-2005 26 He only informed the house of these as an afterthought, vol. 138, pp. 733-34 27 Mr Wentworth’s Reply to Mr Robert Lowe’s Speech ... London 1855, pp. 14-16 28 SMH 8 May 1861; C. Nicholson to James Macarthur, 18 Jan. 1861, ML

A2924; James Macarthur to C. Campbell, 2 Nov. 1861, ML A2920; Edward to James Macarthur 25 March 1866, ML A2916 A. Berry to Nicholson, 18 June 1862, Berry Papers vol. 17, ML MSS 315

Chapter 3 Making Britain democratic 1 E. Grainger Martin of Martin Place Sydney 1970, p 74; H. Parkes Fifty Years in the Making of Australian History London 1892, pp. 100-101 2 Empire 16 Aug. 1853

3 On this and subsequent reform efforts I rely on J. Prest Lord John

Russell London 1972. 4 Empire 26 May, 11 June 1852 5 ibid. 4 Feb., 24 March 1853 6 ibid. 17 March 1854 7 ibid. 21 March, 7, 11 May 1853 8 ibid. 1 June 1853

9 ibid. 27 Jan., 1 Feb. 1854 10 Martin Parkes pp. 62-63 11 Empire 1 Feb. 1854 12 ibid. 26, 27 April 1854 13 ibid. 28 April 1854 14 SMA 28 April 1854 15 Empire 2 May 1854 16 ibid. 30 July, 13, 17 Aug. 1855 17 ibid. 31 July 1855 18 C. Connolly “The Middling Class victory in New South Wales, 1853-62’ Historical Studies 19, 76, April 1981, pp. 377-79 19 Empire 4, 7 Feb. 1856; SMH 22 Jan., 22 Feb. 1858; Election for West Camden. Speeches of Henry Molesworth Oxley and James Macarthur, Esquires Sydney 1856, pp. 13-14 20 SMH 7, 8 May 1858 21 Empire 7 Jan., 25 April 1854 22 SMH 7 May 1858 23 H. Parkes, Australian Views of England London 1869, pp. 1-13 Chapter 4 Desperately loyal 1 J.M. Ward British Policy in the South Pacific Sydney 1948, chap. 14; SMH 2, 3 Nov. 1853; Empire 2 Nov. 1853; People’s Advocate 5 Nov. 1853

NOTES 279 2 T.B. Millar Australia in Peace and War Canberra 1978, p. 57 3 J.D. Lang The Coming Event Sydney 1850, p. 31 4 Independent Naval Command in the Australian Seas, Petition V. & P. 1854, vol. 1; SMH 28 Aug. 1855 5 G. Liik, External threats as a factor in Australian politics 1870-1900, PhD thesis, University of Sydney, 1971, pp. 15-40; Defence of Port Jackson, Assistance from British Navy V. & P. 1854, vol. 1 6 People’s Advocate 6 May, 24 June 1854; Empire 21, 31 March 1854, 17 March, 21 Aug. 1855; Goulburn Herald (Deniehy) 21 April 1855 7 People’s Advocate 2 Feb. 1856 8 ibid. 1, 15 April, 10 June, 29 July 1854; Goulburn Herald (Deniehy) 2 Sept. 1854

9 Empire 31 Aug. 1855; People’s Advocate 24 June 1854; SMH 24 Aug. 1855 (Parkes) 10 Empire 21 June 1855

| 11 ibid. 23 May 1854

| 12 J.D. Lang The Prospect for Australia in the event of a war with France Sydney 1858, p. 22 13 SMH 21 Feb. 1855 (Canon Walsh); Empire 21 Feb 1855 (Nicholson) 14 S. Cmt. on Volunteer and Yeomanry Corps Bill, Evidence, pp. 4—5, V. & P. 1854, vol. 1 15 SMH 23 May 1854; People’s Advocate 17 June 1854 16 SMH 21 Feb. 1855; Goulburn Herald 3 March 1855 17 I follow here P. O’Farrell The Irish in Australia Sydney 1986. 18 Lists of contributions were published regularly in the press, beginning 27 Feb. 1855. 19 Empire 24 May 1855

| 20 SMH 19, 27 March, 12 Sept. 1855; Empire 23 Feb., 7 March 1855

21 SMH 28 Aug. 1855 (Smith), 21 Dec. 1859 (Darvall), 2 April 1862, 14 March 1868 (Martin); Empire 19 Oct. 1863; Illustrated Sydney News 23 June 1855, R. Therry Reminiscences of a Thirty Years’ Residence in New South Wales and Victoria London 1863, pp. 399-400 22 D.M. MacCallum, Essays in early colonial’ defence in New South Wales

with particular reference to the volunteer movement, MA thesis, University of Sydney, 1961, chap. 5

23 SMH 10, 11 Dec. 1856, 7 Jan. 1857, 19 Nov. 1858, 21 Dec. 1859 (Forster) 24 S. Cmt. on Volunteers Act, Evidence pp. 33, 35, 38, V. & P. 1855, vol. 3; MacCallum, Colonial defence, pp. 74-75 25 SMH 21 Dec. 1859 26 See also SMH 16 Aug. 1855 (Martin, Campbell), 10 Dec. 1856 (Nichols),

: 19 Nov. 1858 (Smith)

! 27 MacCallum, Colonial defence, chap. 12; SMH 29 June 1861

| 28 SMH 21 Jan. 1861

29 MacCallum, Colonial defence, p. 286; Speech by Dr James C. Cox ... Australian Club, Sydney 1909, p. 15 30 SMH 18 March 1861 (Waterloo Co, composed of working men, absent) 31 SMH 13 May 1861; Empire 21 Oct. 1863, 19 Jan. 1867 32 SMH 18 Jan. 1861

| 33 SMH 24 Sept. 1859

| 34 ibid. 28 Sept. 1859; J.D. Lang How to Defend the Colony ... Sydney 1860

280 NOTES 35 SMH 21 Aug. 1855 (Weekes), 27 Sept. 1859; Empire 27 Sept. 1859; Bell’s Life, 21 Dec. 1867 (Young) 36 SMA 22 April 1862

37 A.G.L. Shaw (ed.) Great Britain and the Colonies London 1970, pp. 25, 28, 32-33

38 T.R. 1968,Resse p. 29 The History of the Royal Commonwealth Society London 39 SMH 22, 23 April 1862; Empire 15, 19 Oct. 1863; The Speech of the Hon. John O’Shanassy ... May 10th 1866 Melbourne 1866, pp. 14-15; G.F. Bowen Thirty Years of Colonial Government London 1889, vol. 1, p. 209; Lik, External threats, pp. 35-36 40 Times 18, 21 Oct. 1861, 27 June 1863; SMH 18 March 1865 41 H. Parkes Australian Views of England London 1869, p. 6 42 Times 17 Feb. 1862; SMH 21 Nov., 21 Dec. 1860 43 SMA 27 Sept. 1859, 29 March 1862 44 SMH 13 May 1861, 22 April 1862 45 Therry Reminiscences pp. 474-75, 485-86; SMH 5 April 1864, 18 March 1865

46 Times 17 Feb. 1862; Empire 21 Dec. 1861 47 Empire 4 Dec. 1860, 21, 22, 24 April, 15 May, 19 June 1862, 4, 23 Jan. 1868

48 Illustrated Sydney News 22 Feb. 1868 49 SMA 23, 28 Jan., 17 March 1868; Empire 16 March, 3 April 1868

50 R. Fulford (ed.) Your Dear Letter, Private Correspondence of Queen Victoria and the Crown Princess of Prussia London 1971, pp. 94, 106, 116, 120, 123, 192-93, 204 51 Freeman’s Journal 12 Oct. 1867 52 SMH 14 March 1868 53 Freeman’s Journal 20 July 1867, 8 Feb. 1868 54 ibid. 25 Jan. 1868

55 B. McKinlay The First Royal Tour 1867-68 Adelaide 1970; Times 14 Jan., 12 Feb. 1868 56 This account is taken from Martin Parkes pp. 232—44 and the Sydney

press. 57 Governor Young to CO 19 June 1865, CO 201/534

58 SMA 25 Jan. 1868 59 SMH 21 March 1868 and passim 60 Empire 28 March 1868 61 SMH 25 March 1868 62 Empire 2, 7, 25 April 1868; SMH 15 April 1868 63 SMH 24, 26 March 1868 64 Times 27, 28, 30 April, 18, 19 May 1868; Manchester Guardian 27 April 1868; Home News 22 May 1868; Guardian (London) 29 April 1868;

Empire 5, 8 Aug. 1868 | 65 Governor Belmore to CO 25 March 1868, CO 201/546, 12 Aug. 1868, CO 201/547

66 Martin Parkes pp. 243-50. 267-69 67 Duke of Buckingham to Sir F. Rogers, CO 201/546 ff. 259-65; Fulford Your Dear Letter p. 185 68 Home News 27 Jan. 1868; Times 27 June 1868; Empire 20 Jan. 1868

_NOTES 281 69 ‘Australia’ Fraser’s Magazine 77, May 1868, pp. 653-54

70 Parliamentary Debates 1866, vol. 182, col. 63; Nicholson to Berry 14 March, 23 June, 30 Oct. 1867, Berry Papers, vol. 17, ML MSS 315 Chapter 5 Landlords and tenants 1 D.N. Jeans An Historical Geography of New South Wales Sydney 1972,

| pp. 124-27; S. Cmt. on extension of elective franchise, Evidence passim, V. & P. 1844, vol. 2

2 Emigration and Transportation relatively considered London 1847, Appendix, pp. 34-35; Some Immigrants’ voluntary statements given to Caroline Chisholm in NSW, 1845-46, collected by Margaret Kiddle, Baillieu Library, University of Melbourne, part III, p. 36. 3 Immigrants’ voluntary statements, part III, p. 29 4 ibid. p. 40 5 S. Cmt. on extension of elective franchise, Report, V. & P. 1844, vol. 2 had recommended a £20 franchise to exclude smaller tenants 6 Election for West Camden: Speeches of Henry Molesworth Oxley and James Macarthur Esquires Sydney 1856, p. 11 7 People’s Advocate 23 Aug., 13 Sept. 1851 8 Empire 23 Sept. 1851 9 Henry Oxley, Diary, ML MSS 587, 28, 30 July, Sept. 1851 10 This account is based on the letters received by James Macarthur from

H.M. Oxley, Thomas Barker, J.M. Antill, George Macleay from October 1855 to March 1856, collected in the Macarthur Papers, ML A2923. The number of Macleay’s tenants is taken from ‘list of tenants and clearing leases’, Correspondence and Papers re Brownlow Hill, ML A5377-3. 11 James Macarthur to H. Oxley, 10 Oct, 1856, ML A2920 12 H. Oxley to James Macarthur, 26 Jan. 1858, ML A2920 13 Election for West Camden, pp. 11-12 14 Macarthur to Oxley 30 Jan. 1858, Oxley to Macarthur, 3 Feb. 1858, ML A2920

15 See Flood’s comments on declaration of South Cumberland poll, Empire 3 Feb. 1858. 16 S. Cmt. on extension of elective franchise, V. & P. 1844, vol. 2, and S. Cmt. on state of agriculture, V. & P. 1855, vol. 2; Maitland Mercury, 30

Dec. 1854, 29 Dec. 1857; SMH, 14 Nov. 1859; William to James

Macarthur 17 March 1861, ML A2934; Berry Estate letters, 6 March 1856, 13 Jan. 1858 Berry Papers, ML, items 35, 36 17 H. Sparke to James Macarthur, 23 Oct. 1856, ML A2923 18 Loveday, Parliamentary Government, p. 455 19 C. Nicholson spoke of the ‘entire ruin’ of nine-tenths of the old settlers, Nicholson to Cunninghame, 4 March 1849, ML A3180. 20 Edward to James and William Macarthur, 17 July 1849, ML A2915 21 M. Roe Quest for authority in eastern Australia 1835-1851 Melbourne 1965, pp. 67-69 22 James to William Macarthur, 26 March 1861, ML A2932 23 G. Norman to James Macarthur, 26 July 1854, ML A2923 24 Maitland Mercury 30 Dec. 1854, and see ibid. for property sale adver-

tisements, 7 Feb. 1855, 26 Dec. 1857, 2 Jan. 1858 and for ‘Persons

282 NOTES returning to England’ (5 April 1856). 2) Martin Parkes pp. 143, 148; Loveday, Parliamentary Government, pp. 101-2

26 W.M. Arnold to Captain David Browne, 5 March 1856, ML MSS 901; Maitland Mercury 16, 27 Feb., 26 March 1856 27 R. Therry Reminiscences of Thirty Years’ Residence in New South Wales and Victoria (1863) Sydney 1974, p. 415. Mr Henry Lee of Wollongong

guided me to information on Osborne. 28 Empire 19 Sept. 1851; Illawarra Mercury 21 Jan. 1858 29 Berry Estate letters 1851, pp. 114-23, and loose MS inside cover ‘Henry

Osborne’, Berry papers ML, items 35, 36 ,

30 SMH 14 Aug. 1851; Empire 30 Aug. 1851 31 Illawarra Mercury 7, 14 Jan. 1858 32 ibid. 28 Dec. 1857, 4, 14 Jan. 1858 33 Berry Estate letters, 8, 11 Jan. 1858, Berry Papers ML, items 35, 36 34 SMH 20 Dec. 1860; Letters to William Macarthur from J.M. Antill 24 Nov. 1860, J. Chisholm 5 Dec. 1860, James Martin 17 Dec. 1860, ML A2937 35 SMH 5 Dec. 1860

36 Among these were Henry Badgery, John Black, Henry Dunn, John Dunn, E. L. Moore. 37 Connolly Biographical Register p. 239 38 J. Douglas to William Macarthur, 21 Nov. 1860, ML A2937 39 James to William Macarthur, 26 March 1861, ML A2932 40 William to James Macarthur, 20 Sept. 1860, 19 Feb., 17 March 1861, 20 Jan. 1862, ML A2934 41 See list of tenants in back pocket of ML A4203. 42 Memo of agreement with James and William Macarthur 25 Oct. 1843, ML A4212; entry under Lakeman in rent book ML A4203 43 Empire 8 Aug. 1855 44 J. Hassall to James Macarthur, 20 Jan. 1861, ML A2924

45 James to William Macarthur, 26 March 1861, ML A2932

46 William to James Macarthur, 19 Feb. 1861, ML A2934; James to William Macarthur 26 March, 10 May 1861, ML A2932 47 Emily to William Macarthur, 19 March 1861, ML A4344 48 See pencilled note on John Black to William Macarthur n.d. [1861], ML A2937.

Chapter 6 The effects of gold 1 People’s Advocate 24, 28 May, 21 June, 27 Sept. 1851; Empire 1 Aug. 1851

2 B. Hodge Frontiers of Gold, The Goldfields Story 1851-1861 Book 2, Penshurst 1979, Part I; see also D.L. Carrington, The Gold Rushes of N.S.W. 1851-1874, a social history, MA thesis, Australian National University, n.d. 3 T.H. Irving, The Development of Liberal Politics in N.S.W. 1843-1855, PhD thesis, University of Sydney, 1967, chap. 11 4 Nicholson to Cunninghame, 12 Feb. 1851, ML A3180 5 Empire 16 Sept. 1851 6 T.H. Coghlan Labour and Industry in Australia London 1918, vol. 2,

NOTES 283 pp. 792-93; S. Cmt. on City Corporation V. & P. 1852, vol. 2, Evidence pp. 10, 12, 63 7 A.C. V. Melbourne Early Constitutional Development in Australia (1934) St Lucia 1963, p. 402

8 Electors in 1850 are taken from Electoral Rolls, V. & P. 1850, vol. 2 and in 1851 from Electoral Roll, V. & P. 1851, vol. 2. They have been compared with adult males recorded in the 1851 census. The 1856 figures on enrolment and population appear in Abstract of the Returns of the Population in the Electoral Districts on 1st March 1856, V. & P. 1857 vol. 1. Port Phillip has been excluded and what became Queensland

included. Electors could enrol in each electorate where they held property so the figures in the table are slightly inflated. Loveday, Parliamentary Government, Table VIII records the electors enrolled under each qualification in 1856. 9 N. Gash Politics in the Age of Peel London 1953, p. 89

10 A. Powell, The Political Career of Charles Cowper, 1843-1870, PhD thesis, La Trobe University 1974, pp. 239-240; Ward Macarthur pp. 227, 230, 239 and references there cited 11 Maitland Mercury 23 Jan. 1858 (Scott), 26 Jan. 1858 (Weekes), 18 Feb. 1858 (Arnold); Empire 26 Jan. 1858 (Rotton) 12 Powell, Charles Cowper, pp. 275-80 13 Empire 9 April 1853; Deniehy to Parkes, 10 Nov. 1855, ML A709 14 Powell, Charles Cowper, pp. 239-40; Empire 21 July, 11 Aug. 1857; SMA 21, 22 July, 11 Aug. 1857

Chapter 7 Marks of distinction 1 SMH 26, 30 Sept. 1851

2 H. Nicholson Good Behaviour London 1955; S. Raven The English Gentleman London 1961; S.R. Letwin ‘The Idea of a Gentleman’ Encounter 57, Nov. 1981, pp. 8-19; P. Mason The English Gentleman London 1982 3 Sydney Society in Crown Colony Days, reminiscences of Lady Forbes, typescript ML, p. 51 4 Donaldson to father, 5 Sept. 1839, ML A728 5 W.C. Foster Sir Thomas Livingston Mitchell and his world 1792-1855 Sydney 1985, chap. 1 6 Donaldson to father, 14 April 1839; to George 30 Nov. 1840, 22 Jan., 2

April, 7 May 1841, ML A728 : 7 For this tactic in the colony, see People’s Advocate 11 Jan., 27 Sept. 1851; E. Perkins (ed.) The Poetical Works of Charles Harpur Sydney 1984, pp. 378-79. 8 Empire 17 Sept. 1851 (Lamb) 9 Australian Club, Minute Book 1838-1845, ML MSS 1836/3 10 W.S. Jevons, Social Survey of Sydney, SMH 9 Nov. 1929; the relaxation

of standards for colonial gentlemen is evident in Burke’s Colonial Gentry, discussed in my ‘Egalitarianism’ Australian Cultural History 5, 1986, pp. 15-16. 11 M. Fletcher Costume in Australia 1788-1901 Melbourne 1984 passim 12 Police and Hackney Carriage Regulations, V. & P. 1859-60, vol. 2, pp. 13, 24

284 NOTES 13 G.L. Buxton The Riverina Melbourne 1967, p. 146; H.W. Haygarth Recollections of Bush Life in Australia London 1848, pp. 30, 90; T. Major Leaves from a Squatter’s Note Book London 1900, pp. 12, 15; G.C. Mundy Our Antipodes London 1852, vol. 3, pp. 20, 77, 123;

Annie M. Baxter A Lady in Australia Melbourne 1873, pp. 6, 47, 50, 53 14 Bathurst Free Press 9 July 1859 (Cummings) 15 J. Goodwin to J.D. Lang 7 July 1851 ML A2229; Berry to Nicholson 30 Aug. 1866, Berry Papers ML vol. 17, to Robinson 19 April 1862, vol. 5; Bell’s Life, 28 Sept., 5, 12, 19, 26 Oct., 23, 30 Nov. 1867 16 Maitland Mercury 20 Dec. 1859; Yass Courier 26 Nov. 1859 17 Mundy Antipodes vol. 1, p. 375 18 Government Gazette 20 May 1851, p. 822

19 W. Denison Varieties of Vice-Regal Life London 1870, vol. 1, pp. 43-44, 336; People’s Advocate 24 May 1851 20 Martin Parkes chaps. 1, 2 21 H. Parkes An Emigrant’s Home Letters Sydney 1896, p. 95 22 Parkes to Sarah 7 May 1854, ML A1044 23 James Macarthur to Parkes 5 April 1856, Parkes to Macarthur 7 April 1856, ML A2923. For Robert Lowe’s denial that he was editor of the Atlas see J. Normington-Rawling Charles Harpur, An Australian Sydney 1962, p. 100. 24 Martin Parkes pp. 109-110; People’s Advocate 20 May 1854 25 Martin Parkes pp. 122, 124

26 ibid. p. 126. 27 C. Pearl Brilliant Dan Deniehy Melbourne 1972, pp. 36, 92 28 ibid. pp. 31-32, chap. 5 29 E.A. Martin The Life and Speeches of Daniel Henry Deniehy Sydney 1884, p. 139. See also Southern Cross 3 March, 12 May 1860

30 G.L. Milne, Two Pioneers: a brief record of the lives of Sir William Milne of Adelaide and Henry Rotton Esq. of Bathurst, typescript ML MSS 593; SMH 6 April 1861 31 SMH 27 Aug. 1862, 1 July 1863 32 G. Serle The Golden Age Melbourne 1963, pp. 295-96, 303, 318 33 Maitland Mercury 5 April 1856; SMH 8, 13 Jan. 1858; Empire 15 Jan., 10 March 1856; D. W. A. Baker “The Origins of Robertson’s Land Acts’ Historical Studies 8, 3, May 1958. pp. 175-76

34 S. Cmt on the State of the Magistracy V. & P. 1858, vol. 2, Evidence pp. 3, 41-42, 67 35 See, e.g., P. A. Willmott to Margaret, 5 Oct. 1858, Willmott Family Papers, ML MSS 2619/1; Martin Parkes p. 29 36 S. Cmt. on State of Magistracy, V. & P. 1858, vol. 2, Evidence, pp. 79-85 37 Powell Patrician Democrat p. 132

38 SMH 20 Aug. 1862 ,

39 ibid. 10 April 1861, 19 Aug. 1863 40 ibid. 30 Sept. 1863 41 ibid. 29 Nov. 1859

42 Chapman’s case was referred to by several speakers during a long debate on Martin’s censure motion, SMH 19, 22, 28 Aug. 1863.

43 Illawarra Mercury 16 Aug. 1864 |

NOTES 285

44 Colonial Office, Honours; Minutes and Memoranda, 1858-1868, 1874-1882, 1883-1887, CO 448/1A, 1B, 2 45 Powell Patrician Democrat pp. 120, 152, 158

46 Martin Parkes p. 368 |

Chapter 8 Bushmen and bushrangers 1 D. Denholm, Some Aspects of Squatting in N.S.W. and Queensland,

1847-1864, PhD thesis, Australian National University 1972, pp. 55-59 , 2 A. Harris Settlers and Convicts (1847) Melbourne 1953, p. 112 3 G.G. Mundy Our Antipodes, or Residence and Rambles in the Australasian Colonies London 1852, vol. 1, p. 282; A. Marjoribanks Travels in New South Wales London 1847, pp. 261-62; S. H. Roberts The Squatting Age in Australia 1835-1847 (1935) Melbourne 1964, p: 281

4 Harpur to Parkes 26 Sept. 1847, 4, 15 March 1854, ML MSS 947 5 D.J. Shiel Ben Hall Bushranger Brisbane 1983, pp. 6-7, 14-16, 121-23; G.E. Boxhall History of the Australian Bushrangers Sydney 1935, p. 178

6 R. Ward The Australian Legend Melbourne 1958, chap. 4 | 7 H.W. Haygarth Recollections of Bush Life in Australia London 1848, pp.

17-19, 31. See also M. Roe Quest for Authority in Eastern Australia Melbourne 1965, chap. 3 8 Roberts Squatting Age pp. 284-91 9 Report on strength and efficiency of the Survey Dept, V. & P. 1854 vol. 2,

p. 3; Haygarth Bush Life pp. 91-93 10 R. Therry Reminiscences of Thirty Years’ Residence in N.S.W. and Victoria (1863) Sydney 1974, pp. 266-70; Trespasses on Sheep and Cattle

Runs, V. & P. (Leg. C) 1858, vol. 3

p. 3

11 C. Macalister Old Pioneering Days in the Sunny South (1907) Sydney 1977, pp. 321-22 12 9 Geo. IV No. 11, 1828; 4 Gul. IV No. 3, 1833; 19 Vic. No. 36, 1855

13 A. Harris describes such a system in The Emigrant Family (1849) Canberra 1967, p. 50, which was confirmed as an accurate portrayal in evidence to the S. Cmt. on Cattle Impounding Bill, V. & P. 1855, vol. 2,

14 SMH 18 Aug. 1866 15 S. Cmt. on Proposed Vote of Censure on the Attorney General V. & P. 1858-59, vol. 1, Evidence p. 27

16 Charge of Cattle Stealing—case of William Brotherton, V. & P. 1867-68, vol. 2; to remove this reluctance Act 17 Vic. No. 3, 1853 offered

a means of reimbursement to those who had bought stolen cattle. 17 The best account of cattle and horse stealing and bushranging is R. Boldrewood’s novel Robbery under Arms.

18 Report and evidence of S. Cmt. on Banking V. & P. 1850, vol. 2 19 Shiel Ben Hall p. 41 20 See, e.g. SMH 30 Sept. 1863 21 C. Fetherstonhaugh After Many Days Sydney 1918, pp. 102-3; E. Rolls A Million Wild Acres Melbourne 1981, p. 299 22 Harris Settlers and Convicts p. 141; Haygarth Bush Life p. 96; H. Parkes

Murmurs of the Stream Sydney 1857, pp. 29-33 23 Shiel Ben Hall pp. 64-65, 164-67; F. Howard The Moleskin Gentry Melbourne 1978, chap. 7

286 NOTES 24 Marjoribanks Travels pp. 158-59; Haygarth Bush Life pp. 36-37; Therry Reminiscences p. 125 25 C. White History of Australian Bushranging (1903) Melbourne 1970 vol. 2

pp. 29, 38 26 ibid. vol. 2, pp. 61-74, 86-90; Shiel Ben Hall pp. 156-59; see also Howard Moleskin Gentry pp. 83, 84, 87 27 G. A. Wilkes The Stockyard and the Croquet Lawn Sydney 1981, chap. 3

28 H. Lawson Short Stories and Sketches 1888-1922 (ed.) C. Roderick, Sydney 1972, p. 544 29 Fetherstonhaugh After Many Days p. 368 30 See Howard Moleskin Gentry passim 31 For ‘bushman’ applied to masters see Mundy Our Antipodes vol. 1, p. 283; Fetherstonhaugh After Many Days p. 171; S. Cmt. on Native Police

Force V. & P. 1856, vol. 1, Evidence p. 41. 32 M. Fletcher Costume in Australia 1788-1901 Melbourne 1984, pp. 64,

86-7, 96 ,

33 Haygarth Bush Life pp. 60-67, 97-101 34 See press reports on race meetings and Laws of Racing, a manuscript book in Scott Family Papers, ML MSS 38/11X. 35 Macalister Pioneering Days pp. 128-29, 131-37, 153-58; W. Bridge, Early Muswellbrook and Scone, ML MSS 898, pp. 71-82, 97-105, 137-65 36 J. Sidney A Voice from the far interior of Australia London 1847, p. 24; ‘Henry Kingsley Geoffrey Hamlyn quoted in Ward Legend p. 204; G. Buxton The Riverina, 1861-1891 Melbourne 1967, pp. 111-12 37 See J.B. Hirst Convict society and its enemies Sydney 1983, pp. 136-37, 143-44, 38 R. Walker ‘Bushranging in Fact and Legend’ Historical Studies 11, 42, April 1964, pp. 207-8; White Bushranging vol. 1, pp. 277, 289-90, vol. 2,

pp. 8-10, 17, 91; Shiel Ben Hall pp. 16-19, 68-69 39 Walker ‘Bushranging’ pp. 220-21; White Bushranging passim; Empire 2, 13 Oct. 1863 40 Walker ‘Bushranging’ p. 221; White Bushranging vol. 1 pp. 229, 298, vol.

2 pp. 52-53 41 See D. L. Carrington, The Gold Rushes of New South Wales 1851-1874, A Social History, MA thesis, Australian National University, n.d., pp.

77-78. }

Chapter 9 Attacking the rich

1 S. Cmt. on Land Law, V. & P. 1873-74, vol. 3, Evidence p. 10 2 Powell Patrician Democrat pp. 81-84 3 SMH 23 Oct., 18 Nov., 3, 10 Dec. 1857 4 ibid. 28 Nov., 8 Dec., 1857 5 ibid. 5, 6, 10, 11, 18, 25, 26, 27 Oct. 1860 6 On the successful operation of the agricultural reserves see G. A. Price, The Genesis of the Robertson Land Acts of 1861: a study of the evidence

in Liverpool Plains, MA thesis, University of New England, 1963. 7 The phrase was Forster’s SMH 17 Dec. 1860. 8 Martin and Loveday Parliament, Factions and Parties p. 32

NOTES 287 9 SMH 21 Dec. 1860; Nicholson to J. Macarthur 18 Jan. 1860, J. Chisholm to J. Macarthur 20 March 1861, J. Hassall to J. Macarthur 20 Jan. 1861, ML A2924; Therry to J. Macarthur 11 Jan., 24 May 1861 ML A2930; the

members referred to are Buchanan (for his drunkenness, Maitland

Mercury 11 Dec. 1860), Eckford, Caldwell, Stewart. 10 SMH 15, 29 Dec. 1860 11 Empire 29 Nov. 1860 12 SMH 19, 22 Dec. 1860 13 Yass Courier 15, 22 Dec. 1860, 2 Jan. 1861 14 Empire 27 Nov. 1860 (W.B. Allen), 4 Dec. 1860 (W. Love) 15 SMH 18 Oct., 17 Dec. 1860 16 SMH 21 Nov., 8, 12, 18 Dec. 1860 17 See Land and Life a single-page pamphlet, held in N.S.W. Pamphlets,

vol. 1, La Trobe Library; Petition of Right, V. & P. 1860. 18 Empire 26 Nov. 1860 (Shoalhaven correspondent) 19 Empire 28 Nov. 1860 (Duigan) 20 S. Cmt. on Condition of the Working Classes, V. & P. 1859-60, vol. 4, Evidence pp. 157, 160-61 21 Maitland Mercury 28 June, 29 July 1848 22 SMH 5 Oct. 1860 23 ibid. 14 Dec. 1860

24 ibid. 10 Oct. 1860 (A. Morris), 7, 15 Dec. 1860 25 Connolly, Legislative Council, chap. 2, pp. 128-37 26 ibid. pp. 162-79 27 SMH 26 Oct. 1860, 8 Aug. 1863 28 Connolly, Legislative Council, pp. 180-87; Young to CO, 19 April, 21 May, 23 Sept. 1861, CO 201/517, 518, 519

29 K.G. Allars ‘Sir William Westbrooke Burton’ Journal of Royal

Australian Historical Society 37, 5, 1951, pp. 291-94 30 SMH 11 May 1861 31 Empire 13 May 1861 32 Connolly, Legislative Council, pp. 187-202

33 G.L. Buxton The Riverina Melbourne 1967, pp. 156-57; Report of Inquiry into State of Public Lands V. & P. 1883, vol. 2, pp. 34, 114; Act 40 Vic. No. xiv, 1876 34 S. Cmt. on Land Law V. & P. 1873-74, vol. 3, Evidence, p. 82 35 SMH 5, 12, 13, 16 June 1862

36 For a good treatment of the conflict see A.J. Greenhalgh Time's subjects: the story of Goorangoola Roseville n.d., part II, chap. 2. 37 SMH 2, 4 May 1863; Riverina Herald 30 Sept., 28 Oct. 1863. For Main’s subsequent history see SMH 9 April 1864, 1 Dec. 1866. 38 Empire 22, 23 May 1863; SMH 2 June, 12 Aug. 1863 39 NSW Parliamentary Debates vol. 10, 1883-84, p. 334 40 Buxton Riverina pp. 163, 166-70, 259

41 S. Cmt. on Land Law, V. & P. 1873-74, vol. 3, Evidence pp. 20, 43; SMH 11 May 1875 (Forster) 13 May 1875 (Farnell), 18 May 1875 (Bennett); Report on Inquiry into the State of the Public Lands V. & P. 1883, vol. 2, p. 29 42 S. Cmt. on Land Law, V. & P. 1872, vol. 2, Evidence, p. 10 43 Report of Inquiry into the State of the Public Lands V. & P. 1883, vol. 2

288 NOTES pp. 14-15; Buxton Riverina pp. 253-56; N.G. Butlin Investment in Australian Economic Development 1861-1900 Cambridge 1964, pp. 89-92

44 D.N. Jeans An Historical Geography of New South Wales Sydney 1972, chaps. 13, 17 45 SMH 11 Oct. 1867, 21 May 1875; NSW Parliamentary Debates vol. 7, 1882, pp. 1159, 1163 46 SMH 17 Oct. 1867 (Suttor), 18 Oct. 1867 (De Salis)

47 A.W. Martin ‘Pastoralists in the Legislative Assembly of N.S.W., 1870-1890’ in A. Barnard (ed.) The Simple Fleece Melbourne 1962 48 Act 39 Vic. No. 13, 1875 49 SMH 7 May 1875 (Garrett), 11 May 1875 (Hoskins) NSW Parliamentary Debates vol. 7, 1882, pp. 1276-78 50 SMH 11, 12 Oct. 1882 51 NSW Parliamentary Debates vol. 7, 1882, pp. 1171-85 52 ibid. pp. 1162-64, 1170 53 See A. Bray, The Operation and Demise of the Robertson Land Acts, 1861-1884, BA thesis, Australian National University, 1984 54 Buxton Riverina pp. 154-56; Report of Inquiry into state of the Public Lands V. & P. 1883, vol. 2, pp. 15, 33; SMH 13 May 1875 (Robertson); NSW Parliamentary Debates vol. 7, 1882, p. 1184

Chapter 10 Excluding the Chinese 1 C.A. Price The Great White Walls are built Canberra 1974, chap. 3 2 SMH 9 March 1861 3 SMH 12 April 1858 4 S. Cmt. on Chinese Immigration Bill, V. & P. (Leg. C.) 1858, vol. 3 5 Empire 12 April 1858 (Williamson), SMH 21 May 1858 (Hay, Thornton)

6 See e.g. A.T. Yarwood Attitudes to Non-European Immigration Melbourne 1968, p. 34 (Martin); SMH 13 March 1861 (Robertson);

Price Great White Walls p. 83 (Parkes) 7 Chinese Immigration Bill, Arrivals of Chinese since 1 Jan. 1856 V. & P. (Leg. C.) 1858, vol. 3; at the 1861 census there were 12 986 Chinese and 114 994 Europeans over the age of twenty.

8 SMH 24 Oct. 1861 (Robertson) 7

9 SMH 21 May 1858 (Owen, Dickson), Empire 19 June 1858, (Owen,

Cowper) SMH 13 March 1861 (Gray) 10 SMH 22 July 1858 (A ‘Beckett), 29 July 1858 (Douglas)

11 Empire 12 April, 19 June 1858 (Robertson), SMH 9 March 1861 (Buchanan), Empire 22 July 1861 (Stewart) 12 SMH 25 June 1858 (Parkes), 9 March 1861 (Buchanan), Empire 1 Aug. 1861 (Windeyer), 9 July 1861, 3 Aug. 1861 13 SMH 1 Aug. 1861 (Windeyer), 26 Sept. 1861 (Harpur); Empire 10 April 1858

14 M.C. Hartwig ‘Aborigines and Racism: an historical perspective’ in F.S. Stevens (ed.) Racism: the Australian experience Sydney 1972, pp. 18-19

Council, pp. 227-28 |

15 SMH 22, 29 July, 30 Oct. 1858; 3 May 1861; Connolly, Legislative 16 SMH 22, 25 June, 30 July 1858; 9 Oct. 1860; 7, 13 March, 3, 19 July, 2 Aug. 1861

NOTES 289 17 C.N. Connolly ‘Miners’ rights: explaining the “Lambing Flat” Riots of 1860-61’ in A. Curthoys and A. Markus (eds.) Who are Our enemies?: racism and the Australian working class Sydney 1978 pp. 35-47 18 The account of events at Lambing Flat is taken from D. L. Carrington, The Gold Rushes of N.S.W. 1851-1874, MA thesis, Australian National University, n.d. pp. 146-77; P. A. Selth ‘The Burrangong (Lambing Flat) Riots, 1860-1861; a closer look’ Journal of the Royal Australian _ Historical Society 60, 1, March 1974, pp. 48-69. 19 SMH 14, 31 Jan. 1861 20 Selth ‘Burrangong Riots’ p. 66 note 31 21 ibid. p. 53

22 SMH 27 Feb. 1861 , 23 SMH 27 Feb. 1861 (Cowper, jun.) 13 March 1861 (Allen)

24 Empire 11, 15, 21 March 1861; 14 March 1861 (Hill) M.D. Sephen, Some Aspects of the Berry Papers, pp. 66-67, typescript ML A4092 25 SMH 12 March 1861 26 Powell Patrician Democrat p. 127 27 SMH 21 March 1861 28 SMH 13 March 1861 29 He gave a full defence later, SMH 25 Sept. 1861. 30 SMH 2 April 1861 31 SMH 25 April, 2 May 1861 32 SMH 27 Feb. 1861 33 SMH 3 May 1861 34 Selth ‘Burrangong Riots’ p. 57 35 SMH 9 April 1861 36 Carrington, The Gold Rushes, p. 158 37 Selth ‘Burrangong Riots’ p. 68, note 84 38 Empire 5 July 1861 39 Empire 3, 31 July, 2 Aug. 1861 40 Empire 30 Aug. 1861 41 SMH 27 July 1861 42 SMH 25 Sept. 1861 (Hay) 43 Empire 26, 27, 30 July 1861 44 Empire 6, 7 May 1861 45 Times 15 Nov. 1861 46 SMH 20 July 1861 47 Empire 1, 23, 31 Aug. 1861 48 SMH 3 Sept. 1861 49 SMH 20, 24, 25 Sept. 1861 50 SMH 17 Oct. 1861 (Butler) 51 SMH 25 Sept., 10 Oct. 1861 52 SMH 10, 17, 24 Oct. 1861 53 SMH 13 Sept. 1861 54 SMH 19 Sept., 24 Oct. 1861

Chapter 11 Disgust | 1 James to William Macarthur, 25 Feb., 10 May 1861, 24 Jan. 1862, ML A2932

2 For the use of the word see T. A. Murray (27 April 1859), Barker (11

290 NOTES April 1860), Nicholson (26 Sept. 1860) to James Macarthur, ML A2924; James to William Macarthur 16 Dec. 1856, 10 May 1861, ML A2932. 3 Powell Patrician Democrat pp. 66-73 4 SMH 6, 13 Dec. 1856 S Powell Patrician Democrat p. 68 6 SMH 28 Aug. 1863 7 SMH 15 Oct. 1861, 23 Dec. 1863, 27 Feb. 1868

8 A. Trollope Australia (eds) P.D. Edwards and R.B. Joyce, Brisbane 1968, p. 724 9 SMH 24 Dec. 1863 10 SMH 7, 10, 11, 12 Sept. 1861 11 SMA 25 Aug., 10 Sept. 1863, 1 Oct. 1867 12 SMH 16 March 1861 13 SMH 29 Aug. 1862 14 ML A2935, pp. 91-93 15 Therry to James Macarthur, 6 May 1861, ML A2930 16 Trollope Australia pp. 720-21 17 S. Cmt. on Present State of Colony V. & P., 1865-66, vol. 3, Evidence, p. 78 18 G.N. Hawker The Parliament of New South Wales 1856-1965 Sydney 1971, p. 79; P. Loveday ‘Patronage and Politics in NSW 1856-1870’ Public Administration xviii, 4, Dec. 1959, pp. 354-55 19 “The Song of Ninian Melville’ The Poetical Works of Henry Kendall (ed.) T.T. Reed, Adelaide 1966, p. 434 20 Maitland Mercury 1 Sept. 1859 21 SMA 16 Oct. 1861, 5 April 1871; NSW Parliamentary Debates vol. 9, 1883, pp. 1702-712 22 Loveday ‘Patronage’ pp. 354-55; Powell Patrician Democrat pp. 129-32 23 James to William Macarthur 4 Dec. 1855, ML A2932; William to James Macarthur 15 May 1861, ML A2934; Powell details the financial imperatives in Patrician Democrat pp. 107, 139, 141, 143, 150. 24 Loveday ‘Patronage’ 25 Loveday ‘Patronage’ p. 342 26 SMH 24 Sept. 1859 27 SMH 19 Aug. 1863, 27 Aug. 1863 (Piddington) 28 G.B Barton Poets and Prose Writers of New South Wales Sydney 1866, pp. 78-81 (Martin); SMH 21 Dec. 1860; Nicholson to Adelaide Ironside, 20 Dec. 1860, Ironside Family Papers, ML MSS 272/1 29 SMH 25 Aug. 1863 30 Ward Macarthur pp. 240-41 31 NSW Census 1856, Report, pp. xvi, xviii 32 Universal Education: A Lecture Sydney 1859; SMH 28, 30 Dec. 1859 33 SMH 5 Jan. 1860 34 Inaugural Addresses delivered on the opening of the University of Sydney

... by Hon Sir Charles Nicholson ... and The Rev. John Woolley Sydney 1852, pp. 7-8, 10-11 35 S. Cmt. on the Sydney University V. & P. 1859-60, vol. 4, Evidence, pp. 6, 33-36; University of Sydney Report V. & P. 1860; Nicholson to

T. Barker, 31 Oct. 1856, Nicholson Papers, University of Sydney Archives

NOTES 291 36 SMH 4 April 1864 37 S. Cmt. on the Sydney University, Report, Evidence, pp. 5, 9, 34-35, 131

38 James Macarthur to Martin, 31 July 1858 ML A2920 39 William to James Macarthur, 10 Feb. 1861, ML A2934 40 Nicholson to James Macarthur, 9 June 1859, ML A2924 41 William to James Macarthur, 10 Feb. 1861, M1 A2934 42 Nicholson to Windeyer, 22 Jan. 1866, 20 July 1875, Nicholson Papers, University of Sydney Archives 43 Nicholson to Adelaide Ironside, 20 Dec. 1860, Ironside Family Papers, ML MSS 272/1

44 What follows is based on the letters of Therry to James Macarthur, ML A2930, of James to William Macarthur, ML A2932, of Nicholson to Berry, Berry Papers, vol. 17, ML MSS 315 and D.S. Macmillan ‘The Australians in London, 1857-1880’ Journal of Royal Australian Historical Society 44, 3, 1959 45 Therry to James Macarthur, 16 March 1862, ML A2930; T. C. Harrington to James Macarthur, 7 April 1862, ML A2925; Nicholson and Therry to Ironside, Ironside Family Papers, ML MSS 272/1 46 James to William Macarthur 10 May 1861, ML A2932 47 Nicholson to Berry, 10 July 1865, 26 Feb. 1866, 18 Dec. 1868, 1 Aug.,

12 Dec. 1870; Nicholson to Barker 10 Sept. 1867, Nicholson Papers, University of Sydney Archives 48 SMH 23 Sept. 1867, 29 May 1863 49 Martin and Loveday Parliament, Faction and Parties p. v 50 Diary 1858-59, ML A1011, 3 Dec. 1858, back cover 51 Southern Cross 5, 19 Nov. 1859 §2 ibid. 31 Dec. 1859, 21 Jan. 1860

53 Reprinted in C. Pearl Brilliant Dan Deniehy Melbourne 1972, Appendix D 54 Martin Parkes p. 164 © 55 The Electoral Act and how to work it Sydney 1859, pp. 7, 11-13 56 Southern Cross 3 March 1860 57 ibid. 14, 21 Jan. 1860 58 ibid. 14 Jan. 1860 59 ibid. 3 March 1860 60 ibid. 12 Nov. 1859, quoted in Pearl Deniehy pp. 100-101 61 Southern Cross 10 March 1860 62 SMH 24 Sept. 1863 63 SMH 21 Dec. 1860 64 SMH 5 April 1864 65 See Martin and Loveday Parliament, Faction and Parties; Martin Parkes pp. 201-2, 213, 278-79 66 Ward Macarthur pp. 276-78 67 Political Presentments London 1878, see esp. pp. 83-88, 93-98

68 Martin and Loveday Parliament, Factions and Parties pp. 3-5; N.B. Nairn ‘The Political Mastery of Sir Henry Parkes Journal of Royal Australian Historical Society 53, 1, 1967, pp. 5, 10 69 See esp. reelection of Buchanan (SMH 7, 8 Oct. 1864) and Crick (SMH

13, 14 Nov., 8 Dec. 1890) ,

292 NOTES 70 Here I follow the SMH explanation: see 30 Aug. 1862, 5 April 1864. 71 SMH 3, 4,5, 10, 11 April 1861 72 Bulletin 20 Aug. 1887 73 Bulletin 14 Nov., 12 Dec. 1885, 5 June 1886 Chapter 12 The governing of diggers

1 Governor Fitzroy to Earl Grey, 31 May 1851, Appropriation of Gold Revenues V. & P. 1852, vol. 2, p. 3; SMH 8 Sept. 1852 (Thomson) 2 Macarthur to Thomson, 29 May, 11 June 1851, ML A2920 3 Bathurst Free Press 4 June 1851; SMH 26 June 1851

4 Appropriation of Gold Revenue V. & P. 1852, vol. 2, pp. 10, 17-18, 20-21; Wentworth to Inspector-General of Police, 21, 27 May 1851, NSWA 4/1146.1

3 Empire 29 May 1851; Bathurst Free Press 4, 7 June 1851; People’s Advocate 24 May 1851 6 Thomson to Macarthur, 30 May 1851, M1 A2920 7 Appropriation of Gold Revenue, V. & P. 1852, vol. 2, pp. 21-22; Police Magistrate, Bathurst to Col. Sec. 27 May 1851, NSWA 4/1146.1 8 SMA 16 June 1851 9 G.C. Mundy Our Antipodes London 1852, vol. 3, p. 345; SMH 26 June 1851

10 Papers Relative to Geological Surveys V. & P. 1851, 2nd session, vol. 2,

pp. 95-96

11 Bathurst Free Press 7 June 1851 12 Geological Surveys pp. 96-97 13 Geological Surveys p. 103; Bathurst Free Press 13, 17 Sept. 1851; SMH 29 Sept. 1851; Commissioner Hamilton to Hardy, 28 Nov. 1851, NSWA 5/3770A

14 Gold Commissioner, Sofala, letters sent 23 March 1853, NSWA 4/6264;

SMH 18 Aug. 1851; Government Gazette 2 Feb. 1853; SMH 2 Dec. 1851; Massie to Hardy, 1 Sept. 1852 NSWA 5/3770A; Mr Sub Com-

49

missioner Cooper, V. & P. 1864, vol. 4 15 SMH 20 June 1851

16 Bathurst Free Press 11 June 1851; Mundy Our Antipodes vol. 3, pp. 349-50

17 S. Cmt. on Mr. C.G. Gray’s Defalcations, V. & P. 1855, vol. 1, Evidence pp. 1-3 18 Hardy to Col. Sec. 20 June 1851 (NSWA 51/6205), 12 July 1851 (ML A1531.3) Col. Sec. to Hardy, 11, 18 July 1851, NSWA 4/3732 19 Col. Sec. to Hardy, 11 July, 4 Dec. 1851, 27 Jan. 1852 NSWA 4/3732; Empire 17 Oct. 1851 20 Geological Surveys, pp. 96, 97, 98, 99, 100, 101; Gold Revenue, pp. 41, 21 SMH 4 Oct. 1851; 16 May 1857 22 Col. Sec. to Hardy, 19 June 1851, NSWA 4/3732 23 Geological Surveys, p. 103 24 Gold Revenues, p. 39

25 Empire 3 Oct. 1851; Mundy Our Antipodes vol. 3, pp. 346-47; C. Rudston Read What I heard, saw, and did at the Australian Gold Fields London 1853, pp. 66-67

NOTES 293

26 SMH 10 Dec. 1851 27 Empire 3 Oct. 1851; Bathurst Free Press 6 Dec. 1851 28 See above pp. 29 Bingara Gold Field V. & P. 1852, vol. 2, p. 2; SMH 20 July 1861 30 S. Cmt. on Management of Gold Fields, V. & P. 1852, vol. 2, Evidence

p. 41; Mundy Our Antipodes vol. 3, pp. 343, 390-91; in Victoria see Read What I heard pp. 159, 160, 175. 31 Hardy to Thomson 31 Dec. 1851, ML A1531.3 32 E. Scott (ed.) Lord Robert Cecil’s Gold Fields Diary Melbourne 1935, p. 36 33 Mundy Our Antipodes vol. 3 pp. 390-91

34 S. Cmt on the Management of the Gold Fields V. & P. 1852, vol. 2, Evidence pp. 2-3, 28, 39-41, 47, 49, 50, 78, 95; Mundy Our Antipodes vol. 3, p. 338; SMH 2 July, 4 Oct. 1851; Bathurst Free Press 12 July 1851

35 S. Cmt. on Management of the Gold Fields V. & P. 1852, vol. 2, Evidence, p. 12; Hardy to Col. Sec., 7 Sept. 1852, NSWA 4/422 36 Bathurst Free Press 26 July, 4 Oct. 1851 37 SMH 2 Sept. 1852 38 Thomson to Fitzroy, 21 Aug. 1851, ML A1531.2 39 Macarthur to Thomson, 11 June 1851, ML A2920; Gold Revenues, p. 40; Col. Sec. to Hardy, 30 May 1851, NSWA 4/3732; Hardy to Col. Sec.

24 June 1851 (Geological Surveys, p. 102), 12 July 1851 (NSWA 51/6833) 21 Aug. 1852 (NSWA 4/422), 24 Nov. 1852 (52/9875 in NSWA Box 4/3180)

40 ibid.; J.E. Erskine A Short Account of the Late discoveries of gold in Australia (1851) Sydney 1957, p. 46; Mundy Our Antipodes vol. 3, pp. 391-92; Inspector-General of Police to Col. Sec. 17 June 1851 (NSWA 51/6013); SMH 29 Sept. 1851; S. Cmt. on Management of Gold Fields, Evidence, p. 21 41 SMH 10 Nov. 1851; Bathurst Free Press 22 Nov. 1851; Gold Commissioner, Sofala, letters sent 8 Sept. 1852, NSWA 4/6264 42 J.H. Gniffin’s Journal, ML B1321, records a commissioner’s movements and activities. 43 Bathurst Free Press 20, 27, Sept. 1851; Maitland Mercury 8 April 1856;

Read What I heard p. 30; N. Keft, The Peaceable Gold Diggers, BA thesis University of New England, 1969, pp. 11-12 44 S. Cmt. on Management of Gold Fields, Progress Report, third Report, Evidence, pp. 9-21; Hardy to Thomson, 30 Sept. 1853, ML A1531.3 45 Act 16 Vic. No. 43, 1852; SMH 22, 23 Dec. 1852 46 SMH 9 June 1853 47 SMH 19 Feb. 1853 48 C.M.H. Clark Select Documents in Australian History 1851-1900 Sydney 1955, p. 75 (compare Feb. and March 1853) 49 For the Turon protest, see above p. 99. 50 S. Cmt. on Gold Fields Management Bill V. & P. 1853, vol. 2, Report, Evidence, pp. 13, 23, 39; SMH 17 March, 9 June, 23 Sept. 1853; Act 17

Vic. No. 23, 1853; G. Serle The Golden Age Melbourne 1963, pp. 111-12

51 SMH 2, 11, 12 Feb. 1853 52 SMH 26 Feb. 1853, Empire, 19 Feb. 1853

294 NOTES 53 S. Cmt. on the Gold Fields Management Bill V. & P. 1853, vol. 2,

Evidence p. 8 54 B. Hodge Frontiers of Gold Penshurst 1979, pp. 57, 160-61; SMH 17 Nov. 1851 Braidwood Observer 18 Feb., 26 May 1860; Bell’s Life, 10 Oct. 1863

55 Serle Golden Age pp. 21, 95-97

56 SMH 4 Dec. 1851 (Thomson); Hardy to Col. Sec. 4, 11 Oct. 1852, NSWA 4/4221

57 Report from Commissioner Western Gold Fields V. & P. 1855, vol. 2, p. 3; McLean to Hardy, 12, 21 May 1852, NSWA 5/37/0A; Hardy to McLean, 18 May 1852, NSWA 4/421 58 Keft, The Peaceable Gold Diggers, pp. 46-47. A more systematic police

patrol system operated for a time at Ophir—Green to Thomson, 13 Oct. 1851, ML A1531.3; SMH 8 Oct. 1851 ~ 59 Hodge Frontiers of Gold p. 45 60 Act 20 Vic. No. 29, 1857; Empire 20, 29 Nov. 1856 61 Royal Commission on Gold Fields V. & P. 1871-72, vol. 2, Appendix D has a summary history of the local courts. 62 Alpine Pioneer 21 Sept., 9, 12 Oct. 1860 63 Braidwood Observer 22 Oct. 1862 64 Burrangong Courier 30 July, 23, 27, 30 Aug. 1862 65 Lands Department, Letters to Gold Commissioners, NSWA 2/1805, 1806 records government involvement with courts; Royal Commission on Gold Fields V. & P. 1871-72, vol. 2, Report pp. 17-18, Evidence, pp. 5, 48, 56-57, 61, 107; Empire 10, 17, 23, 25 Aug. 1866.

66 Royal Commission on Gold Fields, Report pp. 16-17 ,

67 Gold Commissioner Timbarra, letters sent, 23 July 1859, 10 June 1861, NSWA 4/7855; Gold Commissioner Sofala, letters sent 23 March 1853, NSWA 4/6264; Alpine Pioneer 27 Nov., 1860; Maitland Mercury 31 Aug. 1853

68 Bathurst Free Press 17 Sept. 1851; Empire 30 June, 12 July 1851, 6

March 1863; Burrangong Courier 25 Oct. 1862; SMH 24 June 1857; S. Cmt. on Management of Gold Fields, V. & P. 1852, vol. 2, Evidence p.

96. The diggers’ views of the commissioners, after they had been abolished as an economy measure, were collected by the Royal Commission on the Gold Fields, V. & P. 1871-72, vol. 2, Evidence passim; see also Tumut and Adelong Times 17, 24, 28 May 1866. 69 J. Normington Rawling Charles Harpur An Australian Sydney 1962, pp. 257, 266

70 S. Cmt. on the Gold Fields Management Bill V. & P. 1853, vol. 2, Evidence pp. 5, 41; Hodge Frontiers of Gold p. 179; Royal Com-

missioner on the Gold Fields V. & P. 1871-72, vol. 2, Evidence, p. 141; Gold Fields Regulations, V. & P. 1862 vol. 4, no. 24; SMH 8, 16, 23 May 1857; Adelong Creek Gold Field, V. & P. 1853, vol. 1; Maitland Mercury 8 April 1856 71 Braidwood Observer 12 May 1860

Chapter 13 Police and bushrangers

1 Empire 28 Nov. 1861; SMH 16 July 1863 2 Report from Nundle bench, Col. Sec. 4/561, NSWA

NOTES 295 3 J.B. Hirst Convict society and its enemies Sydney 1983, pp. 145—47 4 Police Establishment V. & P. 1850 vol. 1; S. Cmt. on Police V. & P. 1850, vol. 2 5S SMH 26, 27 Sept. 1850; Act 14 Vic. No. 38, 1850 6 SMH 2, 9 Sept., 1, 8, 16 Dec. 1852; S. Cmt. on Police Regulation Bill V. & P. 1852, vol. 1; Act 16 Vic. No. 33, 1852 7 SMH, Empire 29 Sept. 1853; Act 17 Vic. No. 30, 1853; Thomson to Fitzroy, 25 Aug. 1851, ML A1531.2 8 Police Recruiting Act, V. & P. 1855, vol. 1; Empire 28 Nov. 1867; R. Walker “The N.S.W. Police Force, 1862-1900’ Journal of Australian Studies 15, Nov. 1984, p. 30; R. Haldane The people’s force. A history of

the Victoria Police Melbourne 1986, pp. 82-87; Register of Police 1862-1904, NSWA 7/2613

9 SMH 12 Oct. 1859 10 Act 25 Vic. No. 16 1862; Rules for the Police Force of N.S.W. V. & P. 1862, vol. 2; Walker ‘N.S.W. Police Force’ p. 26 11 Empire 28 Nov. 1861 (Hoskins), SMH 16 July 1863 (Cowper) 12 The most recent report in favour of centralisation was Police Matters,

Board of Inquiry V. & P. 1856, vol. 1 13 SMH, Empire 28 Nov., 20 Dec. 1861 14 SMH 19 Aug. 1863. See above p. 180 15 Walker ‘NSW Police Force’ p. 27 16 Police: Report from Inspector-General, Mail and other robberies V. & P. 1862, vol. 2; SMH 30 Aug., 1 Sept. 1862 17 Police Rules 265-68, V. & P. 1862, vol. 2; Empire 28 Nov., 9 Dec. 1867

18 R. Ward The Australian Legend Melbourne 1958, p. 135 19 Mr Chatfield, Late Superintendent of Police V. & P. 1863-64, vol. 2 20 Martin Brennan, Police History of the Notorious Bushrangers of N.S.W. and Victoria, typescript ML A2030, pp. 4, 100-101; Police Regulation Act of 1862, p. 1,V. & P. 1872, vol. 1 21 F. Howard The Moleskin Gentry Melbourne 1978, p. 92; SMH 27 Aug. 1863 (Cummings), 4 July 1864; Police, Copies of letters and circulars sent, NSWA 7/6290 28 Sept. 1864, 16 Jan. 1865; Bell’s Life 14 Nov. 1863

21 May 1863 , 23 E.F. Penzig A Real Flash Cove—The Story of The Bushranger John

22 General Orders from Inspector-General, Murrurundi, NSWA 7/6169.3,

Gilbert Kenthurst 1983, pp. 17, 31 24 For this and other major bushranging episodes see C. White History of Australian Bushranging (1903), Melbourne 1970. 2) SMH 17 July 1863 (Harpur, Egan) 26 White Bushranging vol. 1, pp. 269-70 27 This assessment is based on the Sydney press during the trial of the escort robbers and the efforts to have their sentences commuted (Feb.— March 1863) and the trials of Frank Gardiner (April-July 1864). 28 Empire 13-20 March 1863 29 Empire 3 March 1863; Bell’s Life 7 March 1863 30 D.J. Shiel Ben Hall Bushranger St Lucia, 1983, p. 127 31 Empire 9 March 1863 32 Empire 10, 28 March, 1 April 1863; F. Clune Wild Colonial Boys (1948) Sydney 1982, p. 443

296 NOTES 33 Executive Council Minutes, 2 March 1863, NSWA 4/1542 34 Empire 27 Feb. 1863 35 SMH 24 March, 21 Aug. 1863 (Robertson) 36 Empire 23-27 March 1863 37. Empire 28 Feb. 1863 38 Empire 27 March 1863; SMH 27, 28 March 1863; Bell’s Life 28 March 1863

39 SMH 28 Aug. 1863; Empire 28 Sept., 27 Oct., 4 Nov. 1863, 9 July 1864 40 SMH 16, 17 July, 19-22, 26-28 Aug. 1863 41 SMH 21 Aug. 1863 42 SMH 27 Aug. 1863 (Egan) 43 SMH 1 Oct. 1863 (Shepherd, Dangar) 44 Shiel Ben Hall pp. 22, 128-33; Empire 28 Sept., 1 Oct. 1863; Bell’s Life - 11 July 1863; Yass Courier 23 Sept. 1863 45 Bell’s Life 1 Aug., 14 Nov. 1863 46 Empire 21 Oct. 1863; White Bushranging vol. 2, p. 28 47 Empire 2 Oct. 1863 48 Empire 6, 9, 20 Oct. 1863 49 White Bushranging vol. 2, chap 11 50 SMH 3 Oct. 1863 51 Bell’s Life 25 July, 1, 15 Aug. 1863 52 SMH 1 Oct. 1863 53 SMH 1, 2, Oct. 1863 54 SMH 7 Oct. 1863 55 Powell Patrician Democrat p. 135; Shiel Ben Hall p. 128; J. O’Sullivan Mounted Police in N.S.W. Adelaide 1979, p. 75 56 SMH 22 March 1865; Police Regulation Act of 1862, p. 3, V. & P. 1872, vol. 1 57 Walker ‘N.S.W. Police’ p. 30 58 Empire 12 March 1863 59 SMH 16 July 1863 60 SMH 1 Oct. 1863

61 Inspector-General of Police, copies of Letters and circulars sent, 22 March 1866, NSWA 7/6290 62 Yass Courier 10 Oct. 1863 63 Empire 29 Oct. 1863; Walker ‘NSW Police’ p. 33; SMH 19 Aug. 1863 64 Police Force of NSW: Rules V. & P. 1864, vol. 1

65 Walker ‘N.S.W. Police’ p. 27; Inspector-General of Police, Benches of Magistrates on workings of present system, NSWA 4/561 66 SMH 16 April 1864 67 SMH, Empire 21, 23 May, 8, 9 July 1864 68 SMH 12 July 1864 69 Martin Parkes pp. 284-91; White Bushranging vol. 1, chap. 8 70 Act 28 Vic. No. 2, 1865; SMH 17 March 1865 71 H. Parkes Speeches on various occasions Melbourne 1876, p. 182 72 SMH 22 Aug. 1863 (Driver); 23 July 1863 (Harpur) For the strongest native defences see SMH 12 June 1874 (Driver, Cooper). 73 SMH 26 Jan. 1861 74 SMH 20 Aug. 1863 (Amold), 1 Oct. 1863 (Lang), 7 Oct. 1863 (Darvall), 22 March 1865 (Cowper), 24 March 1865 (Arnold)

NOTES 297

75 J. O’Sullivan The Bloodiest Bushrangers Adelaide 1973

Chapter 14 Local authority 1 The general assessment of central and local administration made in this chapter draws on a number of sources: Acts of Parliament, the annual Estimates and debates on them, standard administrative procedures as revealed in the papers published in V. & P., the records of local benches and police stations. 2 H.J. Gibbney Eurobodulla. History of the Moruya District Sydney 1980, pp. 35-38, 59-61, details a long-running feud. Others appear regularly in V. & P. 3 SMH 19 Aug. 1863; and see above pp. 115-17

4 For the attendance of magistrates at the bench see V. & P. 1863-64, vol. 2; Return of Magistrates in various districts, NSWA 4/746.4; Magistrates Business at Courts, NSWA 4/760.1. 5 For this case generally see Col. Sec. 4/731 NSWA; Mr J. E. Liardet, V. & P. 1862, vol. 2 6 James Macarthur Reply to requisition to stand for West Camden 22 July 1851, ML A2923 7 H.M. Oxley Diary, 29 Oct. 1851, ML MSS 587 8 Goulburn Herald 2, 9, 16 Nov. 1859

9 For this case generally see Mr Myles Harte Lyons V. & P. 1860, 1861-62, vol. 1. 10 Mudgee Newspaper quoted in Goulburn Herald 9 Nov. 1859 11 Western Post 23, 30 March 1861 12 Western Post 4 May, 1 June, 6, 20 July 1861; Mudgee Liberal 24 Jan. 1862

13 Mr W.R. Riley V. & P. 1859-60, vol. 2; SMH 17 Dec. 1859; Goulburn Herald 30 Nov. 1859 14 Goulbourn Herald 26 Oct., 5 Nov. (quoting Mudgee Newspaper), 9, 19 Nov. 1859; Illawarra Mercury 1 Dec. 1859; Maitland Mercury 5 Nov., 20 Dec. 1859; Yass Courier 26 Nov. 1859

15 See above pp. 115-17 16 SMH 27, 28 July 1864

17 SMH 19 Oct.—3 Nov. 1864; reinstatements are reported in the Government Gazette. 18 See e.g., Maitland Mercury 5 Nov. 1859. 19 Old Days: Old Ways: a book of recollections Sydney 1934, pp. 38—40 20 Cf. A. de Tocqueville Democracy in America vol. 2., Book 3, chap. xiii. 21 The Letters of Rachel Henning (ed.) D. Adams, Sydney 1963, p. 266-67 22 G. Buxton The Riverina 1861-1891 Melbourne 1967, pp. 261-62; for Macarthur’s diminished role in Camden see J. Jarvis (ed.) The Story of

Camden Camden 1939, p. 11, Agricultural Society to Macarthur, 18 March 1867, ML A2920. 23 Police Correspondence with the country, NSWA 2/2384, 9 Jan. 1872, 27 Jan. 1877, 31 May 1879 24 R. Therry Reminiscences of a Thirty Years’ Residence in N.S.W. and

Victoria London 1863, pp. 67-68; S. Cmt. on Municipalities V. & P., 1873-74, vol. 5, Evidence, p. 29

25 NSW Parliamentary Debates 1881, pp. 1000-1005 |

298 NOTES

26 Government Gazette Supplement 9 Sept. 1887; NSW Parliamentary

Debates 1887, pp. 1818-31 :

27 Empire 4 Aug. 1853, 6 Sept. 1855, 11 Jan. 1856 28 F.A. Larcombe The Origin of Local Government in New South Wales

Sydney 1973, chaps. 4, 5, 6; M. Roe Quest for Authority in Eastern Australia Melbourne 1965, pp. 83-85; S. Cmt. City Corporation, V. & P. 1852, vol. 2; for radical and liberal assessment of councillors see People’s Advocate 8 Oct. 1853; Empire 1 Dec. 1852. 29 Larcombe Origin of Local Government pp. 251-62; SMH 30 Oct. 1857 30 See my ‘Keeping Colonial History colonial: the Hartz thesis revisited’ Historical Studies 21, 82, April 1984, pp. 85-104. 31 Larcombe Origin of Local Government chaps. 2, 8 32 Empire 28, 29 July 1858 33 Larcombe Origin of Local Government pp. 262-77

34 NSWA 4/734 (Port Macquarie, Mudgee), 4/735 (Penrith), 4/794 (Singleton, Mulibimbah)

35 For what follows see Larcombe Origin of Local Government pp. 277-96; D.W.A. Baker Days of Wrath: A Life of John Dunmore Lang Melbourne 1985, chap. 28; for Berry’s estate and its relationship with

other settlements see Berry Estate letters, as transcribed by M. McHatton, Berry Papers, ML. 36 Berry to D. Berry, 25 Sept. 1851, Berry Estate Letters 37 S. Cmt. on Shoalhaven Municipal Petition Journal of Legislative Council 1859-60, vol. 2, Evidence, pp. 4, 21 38 SMH 12 Sept. 1848 39 Nowra and Suburbs Journal of Legislative Council 1859-60, vol. 2 40 I infer this motive from Cowper’s unwillingness in other cases to support the linking of town and country, SMH 28 July 1858; his memo of 23 Sept. 1859 on the Mudgee file, NSWA 4/734. 41 Young to Colonial Office, 3 Oct. 1861, CO 201/519; M.D. Stephen, Some Aspects of the Berry papers, p. 61, ML A4092; ‘Parallel between

France in 1793 and Botany Bay in 1863’, Berry Papers, item 34 miscellaneous 42 SMH 3 July 1863, 4 Dec. 1866 43 F. A. Larcombe The Stabilization of Local Government in New South Wales 1858-1906 Sydney 1976, chap. 8

44 P.N. Lamb ‘Crown Land Policy and Government Finance in N.S.W. 1856-1900’ Australian Economic History Review 7, 1, March 1967 45 Powell Patrician Democrat pp. 138, 144-47 46 SMH 2 April, 20 Aug., 19 Oct. 1864; Empire 24 Aug. 1864 47 Larcombe Stabilization of Local Government chap. 12

48 M.J. Ely, The Development of a Centralised Educational Administration in N.S.W. 1848-1880, PhD thesis, University of Tasmania, 1973 49 See above p. 222.

Epilogue: the unwanted :

1 What follows is taken from C. Pearl Brilliant Dan Deniehy Melbourne 1972; S. Normington-Rawling Charles Harpur, An Australian Sydney

1962; J. Poulton Adelaide Ironside Sydney 1987. 2 See above pp. 188-9; and Victorian (Melbourne) 5, 26 July 1862; 5

NOTES 299 March 1864; Deniehy to Armstrong 27 Nov. 1860, ML MSS 869. 3 Empire 3 Oct. 1860 4 Harpur to Parkes 3, 17 Feb. 1866, ML MSS 947 5 E.A. Martin The Life and Speeches of Daniel Henry Deniehy Melbourne 1884, pp. 73, 186 6 Bulletin 5 June 1886

Index

Aberdeen, Lord, 50, 52 Campbell, David, 127, 128 Alfred, Prince, 60, 72-4, 75, 78 Campbell, John, 56

Arnold, William, 90 Canowindra hold-ups, 230-1 Australian Colonies Government Cape, William, 180

Act, 24, 25, 26, 33 cattle-stealing, 124-6

Australian League, 23 Chambers (crown prosecutor), 178

authority, 265 Chapman (magistrate), 116

Charters (bushranger), 130, 225,

Badgery, Henry, 247-8, 251 226 Barker, Thomas, 85-6 Chartists, 2—3, 5, 12, 49 Bathurst raid, 231 Chatfield, Superintendent, 223

Bayley, Lyttleton, 187 Chinese, conservative attitude to, Bayly (magistrate), 250 159-62, 210, 211; digger’s Bell’s Life in Sydney, 231 attitude to, 162—70; liberal

Berry, Alexander, 90-1, 258-61 attitude to, 159-61, 165; popular

Black, Inspector, 226 view of, 158; restrictions on, Blackman, Mrs, 249 158-9, 171, 218 Blackman, W.R., 249 Chisholm, Caroline, 83-4 Bow (bushranger), 227 civil service, 177—80, 187 Bright, John, 56, 57, 69-70 Clarke brothers, 239

Britain, anti-imperialists, 69-70; Cloete, Peter, 164, 165, 166 anti-reform feeling, 71; colonial Clune, Frank, 227 policy, 23-6, 38—40; constitution Cobden, Richard, 69-70 of, 12-13; loyalty to, 60, 63-9, commissioners, goldfields, 198-203,

72-9; reform in, 49-51, 52-3, 56, 204-6, 211, 213-14 57; ties with, 48-9, 50-2, 61, conservatives, 2, 9-13; see also

66-8 Martin, James; Wentworth,

Brown, Mrs, 224-5 William; individual subjects

Buchanan, David, 176 constables, 218-19, 222, 239;

Bulletin, 193 special, 198-9, 202-3, 204, 224 Burke (bushranger), 127 constitution, amendment

Burton, Sir William, 145-6 procedures, 34, 37, 42—4; British

bushmen, 128-30, 131 attitudes to, 38—40, 41-5; British bushrangers, as symbol, 235; model, 32—3, 36, 38; effects of background of, 130-1; local Canada’s system, 38, 41, 43-4; support for, 121-2, 127, 224; passed, 40-1; Wentworth’s, 34-6,

police and, 219, 222-5, 226-7, 63

229-35, 237, 239; squatters and, Constitutional Association,

127-8; Sydney and, 225-6, (radical), 2, 3, 17-20, 21, 23, 25;

227-8, 238-9, 241 (conservative), 177, 189 Constitution Committee, 36-7, 40 Camden, 83-7, 91-5 , Cooper, Daniel, 65 300

INDEX 301 councils, local, conservatives’ social status, 112—13

attitude to, 256-7; liberal attitude | Denison, Sir William, 61 to, 255-6, 257, 264; resistance to, | Derby, Lord, 117

257-8; rural, 258, 261-2, 263; diggers, and Chinese, 162-71;

Sydney, 255; threat to control of, 197-215, 221; landowners, 258, 261 democratic, 203-4, 214-15;

country areas, liberal support in, 87, foreign, 209-10, 211; protests of,

89-92, 95 98-9; uphold law, 209, 224

courts, goldfield, 212-14 doctors, status of, 109 Cowper, Charles: anti- Donaldson, Stuart, 71, 106-7, 108,

transportation, 21; and 115

bushranging, 227, 228, 232-3, Douglas, John, 92 238; and Chinese, 158, 165-6, duelling, 106, 225 168, 169, 170, 218; and

democrats, 186-7, 269; financial education, 73, 188, 190;

mismanagement, 190, 262; conservative support, 9-11, knighthood, 117; and land 181-4, 190; control of, 246, policies, 136, 137-8, 144, 146-7, 263-4; democrats and, 8-9; 218; and Legislative Council, 144, liberal policy, 187; radicals’ 146-7; liberal leader, 44, 55; and support, 182; university, 9-11,

magistrates, 115-17, 246-8; and 182-4

manhood suffrage, 218, 272; and = Education Act (1880), 264 parliamentary behaviour, 175, ~ _ elections, (1858), 138, 158, 175;

176; patronage, 177-9, 180, 181, (1859), 138, 178; (1860), 114, 186, 189, 222; and police force, 139-43, 174, 178, 189, 221

218, 220-3, 228-9, 232-3, Electoral Act (1851), 28, 34

235-6; social standing, 178-9 Electoral Reform League, 102, 103

Cox (magistrate), 250 electoral rolls, 245

Crimean War, 41, 57, 60, 61-2, electorates, country, 87, 88;

64-5, 67, 68 established 1851, 26-7, 34,

Curry, Paddy, 84 49-50, 84; reform of, 102, 138 Empire, and Britain, 48-9, 50-1,

Darvall (solicitor-general), 175 52-3; ceases publication, 56, 186;

defence, 61, 63, 66-9 on Chinese, 165, 167, 168;

democracy, Athenian, 11-13; founded, 22, 111; on franchise, British, 79; failings of, 71-2; 26; on liberal programme, 55, republican, 272; see also equality 186; on Manns’ case, 227, 228; on democrats, 2—9; aims of, 271-2; and native-born, 235; and Parkes

education, 8—9; and franchise, opponents, 112, 269; on police, 17-20; gold and, 98; and liberals, 228, 230; on republic, 51; on 101-2, 103; as poets, 6-7,209; _— upper house, 37-8, 39, 146 and republicanism, 4-6; and equality, social, 215, 251-2, 265,

transportation, 21, 22; and 272-3

working men, 7-9 Erskine, Captain, 208

Deniehy, Daniel, 268, 270; exiles, conservative, 184—5 democrat, 3, 6, 37, 188-9, 267;

joins conservatives, 189; and faction system, 190, 191 liberals, 187, 189, 271; member Fairfax, John, 175 Legislative Assembly, 269-70; on Felons Apprehension Act, 238 parliament, 186, 187-8; poet, 7; Fenians, 75, 76, 77

302 INDEX

Fitzpatrick, Michael, 76 Hoskins (MP), 221

FitzRoy, Sir Charles, 21-2, 247-8 Hunter River Valley electorate,

Forster, William: democrat, 186, 89-90

187-8, 189; and factions, 190, Hyams, Michael, 259, 260 191; poet, 192; and police, 236,

238; squatter, 140-1 Icely, Thomas, 198

franchise, widening of, 17-20, Illawarra electorate, 90-1

24-6, 27-9, 88, 99, 100-2 Illawarra Mercury, 91 Freeman’s Journal, 72, 73,77 Innes, Captain, 63 French, fears of, 60-1, 63, 68 Insh Catholics, 22—3, 64-5, 72-3,

: 76

Gardiner, Frank, 121, 122, 126,130, Ironside, Adelaide, 6, 7, 62, 185,

224-5, 228, 233, 237-8 267-8

gentlemen, definition of, 106-17 -

Gilbert, John, 130, 224, 228, 230, Jenkins, R. L., 181-2

238 Jones, Richard, 90

Gilmore, Mary, 251 justices of the peace, 115-17; see

Gipps, Sir George, 257 also magistrates Gladstone, W.G., 39, 88

goldfields, Chinese on, 162-70; Keightley, Henry, 127-8

control on, 197-203, 221; Kemp, Charles, 52, 112 foreigners on, 209-10, 211; Kendall, Henry, 270, 271 protests on, 98—9; social

distinctions on, 203-6, 214-15; labourers, absconded, 210

Victorian, 206, 211-12 Lakeman, John, 93

goldmining, move to ban, 197 Lamb (merchant), 28 © Goldwin Smith, Professor, 70 Lambing Flat, 162—70, 204, 212,

Goulburn Herald, 248, 250 213, 221, 222

government, central, 264-5 Land Act (1861), 91-2, 94, 144,

Government House, 109-10 152-5; (1884), 154

Grey, Earl, 20, 23-4, 25, 33, 38-9, Land League, 137, 138

40, 117 landowners, and goldmining, 197;

Grote, George, 12 political power of, 84-94

land policies, 88, 152; British, 24,

Hall, Ben, 66, 121, 122, 126, 127—8, 33; liberal, 136—43; see also

130, 228, 230, 238 selection, free

Hardy, J. R., 198-203, 204, 205, land tax, 256, 258-62

206-10, 211, 212 Lang, John Dunmore, attitude to

Harpur, Charles, on Crimean War, democracy, 7, 11; and British 61-2; death, 271; democrat, 3, 6, decadence, 21—2; and Catholics, 7, 8; and Deniehy, 268, 270; gold 22-3; and Crimean War, 62-4;

commissioner, 179, 214-15, and Ironside, 267, 268; and local 270-1; poet, 7, 8, 9, 267, 270; councils, 259-60; and Parkes, squatter, 121; and upper house 111, 112; parliamentarian, 28, 51;

debate, 37-8 republican, 5, 22-3, 28, 51, 61, Hawkesley, Edward, 3-4, 179 63, 69 Hay (MP), 147 Lawson, Henry, 128

Henning, Rachel, 252 Legislative Assembly, composition honours, imperial, 117 of, 175-7; factions in, 190, 191; horse racing, 129-30, 211 payment of members, 114, 178;

INDEX 303 and support for Ironside, 267-8 Main, J.J., 148 Legislative Council (pre-1856), Main, Mrs, 148, 149 composition of, 2, 9, 24, 27-9; Maitland Mercury, 90 and constitution, 25, 33; and Manchester Guardian, 71 electorates, franchise for, manhood 2, 17, 27-8;26-7; and goldfields, 207, 113-14,suffrage, 138, 181,1, 101, 102, 209-10, 211; and police, 219-20; | Manning, Sir William, 182

status of members, 110; and Manns (bushranger), 130, 227-8

university, 9-10, 182; see also Marks, yon, oe : upper house Martin, Allan,

Legislative Council (post-1856), Martin, James, and Fenian network, composition of, 34-7, 143, 144, 75; and franchise, 19; and free 146; five-year term, 144—5; and selection, 139-40; and local Chinese, 158-61, 170; and land government, 262, 263; and

law, 144-7 magistrates, 116, 250; and Manns Liardet, J., 248 case, 227-8; and police, 230; liberals, 21, 53-5; see also Cowper, premier, 190, 236, 238

Charles; individual subjects Mayne, William, 220

licences (goldmining), 198—9, Miners’ Protection League, 164, 165

206-7, 208, 210 Mitchell, Sir Thomas, 63, 64, 106—7 Loveday, Peter, 191 Morissett, Superintendent, 232

43 Moss, Henry, ; ;

Lowe, Robert, 18, 19-20, 24-6, 40, reales yo 2” oO 61 Lowe (magistrate), 250 MPs, see parliament, members

Lucas, John, 158, 169 Mundy, Captain, 205 Lyons, M.H., 249 Municipalities Act (1858), 256, 257, 259, 261; (1867), 261, 263 Macarthur, Edward, 88 Murray, T. A., 69 Macarthur, Emily, 93

Macarthur, James, and education, ; ;

181; goldmining, 197, 207, 208: Raton sm 23° 4 6g

landowner, 83—4, 88, 89, 174, Newcastle, Duke of, 34, 39, 40, 41 177, 185; member Legislative Nichols, Robert, 19, 20

Council, 190-1; political Nicholson, Sir Charles, art patron,

influence, 85 , 86, 91, 92—3, 247 268; and Crimean War, 62; and

Macarthur, William, 83-4, 91-2, franchise, 26, 28, 99: leaves

93, 174 colony, 184, 185; and university,

McEncroe, Archdeacon, 65 10, 11, 181, 182-4

ecient boone, net ge Norton, Inspector, 226-7 McLerie, John, 169, 221. 232. Nowra, incorporation of, 258-61 235-6 magistrates, and centralised police, O’Farrell Henry, 74—6 220, 221, 236—7; conservative officers, status of, 109

attitude, 116-17; liberals’ O’Meally (bushranger), 127, 130, appointees, 115, 246—S0, 251; 230

numbers reduced, 250; Osborne, Henry, 90-1

responsibilities of, 218-19, Owen (solicitor), 91

244—6, 254-5; significance of, Oxley, Henry, 85, 86, 92, 247-8 255; social position of, 115, 251-2 Oxley, John, 85, 86

304 INDEX Pakington, Sir John, 33-4, 39 Pottinger, Sir Frederick, 223, 224-5 Palmerston, Lord, 71

Parker, H. W., 71 religion, state-aid to, 5-6

Parkes, Henry, 3, 6-7, 110-12, 153; republicanism, 4-6, 69, 272; Lang and Britain, 49, S0—3, 55-7, 64; and, 22—3, 51; Parkes and, 51, 52,

Catholic attack on, 76-7; and 64

Cowper, 186, 189-90; and Riley, W.R., 250 Crimean War, 121; and defence, Robertson, John and bushranging, 67-8; and democracy, 3, 5, 7, 23, 229; and Chinese, 164, 165; and 188-90; and education, 190; and constitution, 38; and free factions, 190; and Fenian activity, selection, 136-55 passim, 174,

75, 76; financial problems, 56, 272

189; founds Empire, 22; and Rouse (magistrate), 250

. franchise, 20, 26; and free Russell, Captain, 69

selection, 189; and Harpur, 271; Russell, Lord John, 23, 33, 42—S,

knighthood, 117; and Legislative 49-50, 52, 101, 117 Council, 51-2, 112; and liberals, Russian threat, 61, 63, 66 55-6; local councils, 261, 263; on

quality of parliament, 186, 187-8; selection, free, 91-2, 135-6,

and transportation, 22; and upper 139-43, 147-55

house, 37, 38, 39 selectors, pastoralist, 149

parliament, conservative views of, self-government, 9-10, 23-6 174, 176-7, 185; liberal tactics, shire councils, 263

174-5 Shoalhaven council, 260-1

parliament, members, behaviour of, | Southern Cross, 187, 188, 269 175-6; civil service jobs, 177-9; squatters, attitudes to, 89, 120, 121;

disrespect for, 192-3; quality of, effects of gold on, 99; houses of, 185—6, 187—8; 191-3; status of, 128; and lawlessness, 121-2,

110, 112, 114-15, 176-7 123-8; and liberals, 21, 120, 121,

Patriotic Fund movement, 64-6 131; privileges, 120-1; and

patronage, role of, 177-81; selection, 135-6, 140, 147-52; conservatives and, 180-1; voting rights of, 25

186, 189, 222 238 peerage, proposed, 34-5, 37-8, Stewart, Robert, 188

Cowper’s use of, 177-9, 180, 181, | Stephen, Sir Alfred, 181, 182, 192,

110, 112 Stuart, Alexander, 153-4

People’s Advocate, 3, 6,7, 20, 22, Sydney Evening Mail, 260

61-2, 85, 111, 198 Sydney Morning Herald, on Britain,

Plunkett, J.H., 92 48, 64; on bushrangers, 227, 231;

police, administrative duties, 252-4; on Chinese, 161, 163-4, 166, 167,

British, 220, 221; and 171; conservativeness, 4, 22, 52; bushranging, 222-5, 226-7, on defence, 68; on land policies,

229-35, 237, 239; composition of, 137, 141; on magistrates, 116; on 220, 222, 235, 236; districts, 244; MPs, 175, 176, 192; on police,

hostility to, 228-30, 239; 228; on university, 183 inefficiency of, 223, 232-5; Irish,

219, 220, 221, 235; magistrates, taxation, 174, 256-7, 262—4 254; officers, 222, 223, 225, 236; telegraph, 253, 264

see also constables tenant farmers, 83-95

Political Association, 28 Therry, Roger, 65, 177

INDEX 305 Thompson, Henry, 93 Walsh, ‘Warrigal’, 225 Thomson, Edward Deas, 40-1, 144, | Ward, Russel, 130

197-8, 207-8, 219-20 Wentworth, William, constitution, Throsby (landowner), 85 33-45, 50; on franchise, 18-19,

Times, 70, 71, 72 27-8, 100, 101; on goldfields,

transportation (convicts), 20-1, 22, 207, 208, 209-10, 211; peerage

33 scheme, 34-5, 37-8, 110, 112;

Treason Felony Act, 75, 77 president Legislative Council,

Trollope, Anthony, 177 146, 168, 170; and university,

troops, British, 61, 66-8 9-10 West, J., 161-2 |

University of Sydney, 9-11, 182-4 West Camden electorate, 85-7,

upper house, problem of, 32-9, 91-4

143-4; see also Legislative Wild, William, 86 : Council Wilkes, G. A., 128 Windeyer, William, 184

Victoria, Queen, 5, 23, 72, 77-8 Woolley, Professor, 184 volunteers, 61, 62, 66-9, 168-9 workers, pastoral, 122, 125, 128, vote, qualifications for, in 1848, 2; 131 gold rush and, 99-102, 131, 162;

rent, 17-18, 26; squatters, 25, 88; Young, Sir John, 144-6 tenants, 84, 88

Zouch, Inspector, 163-4, 165 Walsh, John, 121-2, 127

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