Londoners arrive to buy tickets to see Augustus Earle’s panorama of Sydney, which opened in 1829. The ticket seller offers Hell as an alternative, and the daughter of the family calls the panorama she is about to see a picture of ‘the Naughty Place’. In the meantime, a pickpocket attempts to guarantee his own transportation. Like most jokes, this one demonstrated entrenched attitudes. (‘New panorama, a startling interrogation’, published by T McLean, 1829 April 1, etching. National Library of Australia, nla.pic-an6589613)
The head of Yagan, an elder of the Swan River region. There was a fashion for the study of ‘native’ or ‘savage’ heads in nineteenth century Europe, so that Aboriginal remains were often sent off for supposed scientific study on matters of race and the gradations of Homo sapiens. (‘Portrait of Yagan, chief of the Swan River’, Geo. Cruickshank delt., R. Havell sculpt, print, pub 1834. National Library of Australia, nla.pic-an7404365)
Left: The young Quaker, Louisa Clifton, who lived under canvas in the failed settlement of Australind, yet who kept a journal whose delicacy and wit is worthy of a drawing room in London. (Watercolour of Louisa Clifton, ca 1839. Courtesy State Library of Western Australia, The Battye Library BA 1073) Right: Practical Major Mitchell who found Australia Felix and was loved for it. (‘Sir Thomas Livingstone Mitchell’, ca 1850s by William Hetzer, calotype. Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales a143002)
The Thunguddi of the Macleay in about 1842, as seen by the young surveyor Clement Hodgkinson before the major impact of grazing and cedar-cutting. The robustness of the men is a testimony to the traditional life Hodgkinson is unwittingly bringing to an end with his plumb line and theodolite. (‘Dance of defiance of the Yarra-bandini tribe’, 1842? By Clement Hodgkinson, drawing. National Library of Australia, nla.pic-an6617620)
53. Paradise on the Bellinger River? Hodgkinson seems to imply as much in this drawing of about 1843. (‘Natives spearing fish in the Bellengen River’, 1843? By Clement Hodgkinson, drawing. National Library of Australia, nla.pic-an6617600)
The penal system bred out stations, some for punishment of secondary crimes (crimes committed after transportation). Tragic James Tucker, convict novelist and playwright, was sent to Port Macquarie when his ticket-of-leave was cancelled for being drunk in Parramatta. (‘Port Macquarie’, ca 1840 by Joseph Backler, oil painting. Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales ML 356)
While images of flogging have become Australian clichés, it is true that the remote convict settlement at Moreton Bay was renowned for routine flagellation, even under the genial Foster Fyans. (‘Flogging a convict at Moreton Bay’, unknown artist, etching from ‘From the Fell Tyrant or the Suffering Convict’ by William Ross, 1836. Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales ML365/R)
Captain Fraser of the wrecked Stirling Castle is impaled by natives on Great Sandy Island in 1836. The idea that Eliza Fraser, his young wife, here naked, was now at the mercy of ‘savages’ titillated the popular imagination and made the ultimately rescued Eliza a British celebrity. (‘Murder of Captain Fraser’ from ‘Shipwreck of the Stirling Castle…’ by James Curtis, 1838. National Library of Australia)
The drover (possibly an assigned convict) meets the natives somewhere in Australia around 1840. (Detail from ‘Cattlemen and natives by gum trees’, ca 184- by ST Gill, watercolour. National Library of Australia, nla.pic-an2376895)
Twice an abductor of young women, Edward Gibbon Wakefield devised, in prison and after release, a scheme for the systematic colonisation of ‘waste land’ in Australia, a continent he would never trouble with a visit. (‘Edward Gibbon Wakefield Esqr.’ by Benjamin Holl, engraving, published 1826. National Library of Australia, nla.pic-an9928451)
Well-ordered Adelaide ‘animated and bustling’, gracefully surveyed and designed by Colonel Light, as Wakefield would have been gratified to behold it. Yet few of its inhabitants did not carry in their heart some disappointment—or at least the acute memory of trial and disappointment —from encountering the limitations of Wakefield’s theories. (‘Adelaide, Hindley Street from the corner of King William Street, looking west’, ca 1846. Courtesy of the State Library of South Australia, SLSA:B15276/41)
Under his new land provisions, Governor Gipps squeezes the squatters in a wool press in this cartoon of 1845. No one else in Australia or the Empire though squatters were being harshly treated; indeed, many people considered they had got away with a great acquisition or near-theft of land. (‘Ways and Means for 1845, or taking it out of the Squatters’, 1845, Raphael Clint & Edward Barlow publishers, lithograph. Dixson Library, State Library of New South Wales DL PXX 66/8)
The contrary view—Gipps’s squeezing of this ‘Monarch of more than all he surveys’ seems to have had little influence on his survival. (‘Squatter of NS Wales Monarch of more than all he surveys’, 1863 by ST Gill & Dr JT Doyle, drawings. Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales PXA 1983, f. 41)
Tutor, mountaineer, composer, and friend of Washington Irving’s on the American frontier, as Superintendant and then Lieutenant Governor of Port Phillip, the cultivated La Trobe was faced with challenges from querulous squatters and the restiveness of gold-seekers. (‘Charles Joseph La Trobe’, 1855 by Sir Francis Grant, oil on canvas. Pictures Collection, State Library of Victoria mp003623)
Collins Street, 1839, a target for overland drovers from New South Wales and a centre for the Scots arriving from land-cramped Van Diemen’s Land. As is common in such vistas, the natives, in this case the Yarra group, watch from the edges. (‘Collins Street, town of Melbourne, New South Wales’, 1839 by William Knight, watercolour. National Library of Australia, nla. pic-an5695310)
John Buckley had lived with the Port Phillip natives since 1804. Such men, generally convicts, were not as rare as earlier commentators declared. Here Buckley is greeted by the first Melbournians. (‘The first settlers discover Buckley’, 1861 by Frederick William Woodhouse, oil on canvas. Pictures Collection, State Library of Victoria mp010578)
The Yarra tribe in European clothing, posed for a journey inland. (‘The Yarra Tribe starting for the Acheron’, 1862 by Carl Walter, photograph. Pictures Collection, State Library of Victoria b19553)
The design on one side of a handkerchief manufactured in quantity for distribution around Gippsland in the hope that one of them would be discovered by the mythical missing white woman of the region. The design showed a young woman telling a man of the missing person. The reverse was printed with advice in English and Scottish Gaelic, advising her that there were fourteen armed men searching for her and urging her to ‘rush to them when you see them near you. Be particularly on the look out every dawn of morning’. La Trobe and others ultimately concluded the lost white woman did not exist. (‘White woman of Gippsland’ handkerchief. Pictures Collection, State Library of Victoria is000684 and is000683, digital enhancement courtesy of the Public Record Office of Victoria)
Black mounted troopers escort a prisoner from Ballarat to Melbourne in 1851. Up to 1854, there was considerable use of Aboriginal police on the goldfields under their commander Henry Dana. (‘Black troopers escorting prisoner from Ballarat to Melbourne’, 1851 by William Strutt, pencil and watercolour in ‘Victoria the Golden; scenes, sketches and jottings from nature, 1850-1862’. Reproduced with permission of Parliamentary Library, Parliament of Victoria)
Miners thronged to the Chinaman John Alloo’s (Chin Thum Lok’s) restaurant in Ballarat. (‘John Alloo’s Chinese Restaurant, main road Ballarat’, 1855 by ST Gill, lithograph. National Library of Australia, nla-pic.an6016195)
A highly staged photograph of miners taken about 1858. It is delightful for the glimpse of genuine diggers it gives us. (‘Group of diggers’, ca 1858 by Richard Daintree and Antoine Fauchery, photograph. Pictures Collection, State Library of Victoria b22463)
The rush of gold-seeking newcomers created a canvas town south of Melbourne and the Yarra River, depicted here as extraordinarily orderly and well laid-out. (‘Canvas Town, between Princess Bridge and S
outh Melbourne in 1850s’ by De Cruchy & Leigh, lithograph. Pictures Collection, State Library of Victoria b28555)
From drawing-rooms to the very doors of the court, the acquittal of the Ballarat rebels was greeted with great civic enthusiasm. (‘Acquittal of the Ballarat Rioters in 1855’, The Illustrated Australasian News, June 25 1887. Newspapers Collection, State Library of Victoria mp005883)
The accused standing trial for their part in the Eureka uprising. Timothy Hayes is on the extreme left, Raffaelo Carboni third from the left, and his friend the African American John Joseph sixth from the right. (‘Rebels in the Dock’, The Age, March 10 1855, p. 6. Newspapers Collection, State Library of Victoria)
Anastasia Hayes, schoolteacher, one of the seamstresses of the Eureka flag, spirited Irishwoman. After the uprising, she helped Dr Doyle during the amputation of Lalor’s arm. Her husband abandoned her after his acquittal, and went to South America. (Public Record Office of Victoria, PROV 12970/P0001, Hayes Family Photographs, Unit 1: Anastasia Hayes)
This painting is entitled ‘Eureka Slaughter’. The attack on the stockade occurred on a Sunday when fewer men were manning the palisades. The soldiers were from the 40th and 12th Regiments and were fortunate not to be fighting the Russians in the Crimea. (‘Eureka Slaughter’, 1854 by Charles A Doudiet, watercolour, pen and ink on paper, 16.3x23.9cm. Collection: Art Gallery of Ballarat, purchased by the Ballarat Fine Art Gallery with the assistance of many donors, 1996)
CHAPTER 18
NEW HOLLAND
The western side of what Flinders’s navigation in 1802-03 had proved to be a continent was still known as New Holland. It was more than two and a half million square kilometres of arid and semi-arid earth, some of the oldest on the planet. Its spacious and well-wooded south-west was considered promising by the few who had seen it. Yet for more than twenty years after Flinders’s great circumnavigation it had not generated in any British cabinet or in any colonial governor an urgency to occupy and consecrate it to the Crown.
In 1822 as a result of lobbying by the London representatives of Macarthur and other pastoralists, the British government reduced the import duty on Australian wool, and it was then that the Australian Agricultural Company, set up by royal charter in London, was granted 405 000 hectares of land north of Newcastle on the continent’s east coast to raise sheep and sow crops.
This phenomenon impressed a naval officer named James Stirling. Stirling had begun his naval life at the age of twelve, but unlike Arthur Phillip he had a powerful patron, his uncle, Rear Admiral Charles Stirling. By the age of twenty-one, he was commanding naval sloops attacking American shipping and forts on the Mississippi delta, and he was able to avoid going back on half-pay until 1818. He was resolute and rancour had not yet marked his nature.
He was prodigiously fortunate in 1823 to marry, on her sixteenth birthday, a jovial young woman, Ellen Mangles, whose father was a director of the British East India Company and head of the family’s own shipping line. In the 1820s there was a great deal of French naval activity in the Pacific, and Governor Darling was ordered to create a number of outposts on the Australian continent. Captain Stirling was given the command of HMS Success and was to sail to Sydney with a cargo of money and then voyage to the far tropic north to collect convicts and garrison from Melville Island, where a settlement had recently been established. Darling had already sent a garrison to King George Sound in present-day Western Australia. On his arrival in Sydney, Stirling argued that the monsoons would prevent him getting to Melville Island for some months, and that he would be better employed for the moment looking at the west coast of Australia, particularly at a river in the south-west discovered by one of the Dutch captains and named the Swan.
Darling liked the idea, but the Colonial Office did not. In Stirling’s words, it sniffed out his interest in the site as a settlement, and ‘trembled at the thought of the expenditure involved’. Nonetheless he made a reconnaissance to the Swan with a botanist from Sydney named Charles Frazer and they were both very impressed with the country. Stirling then took off for the Melville Island garrison, and thence returned to his duty on the East Indies station. It was when he was sent home sick with a stomach ailment that he was able to talk to his father-in-law about the fine country around the Swan. Helped by the Mangles family he assembled a syndicate, and relentlessly harried the officials at the Colonial Office to give the group government approval and grants of land. Stirling had no one idea on how settlement should proceed—he had many. He thought of founding an association such as had been used to settle Georgia and Pennsylvania, but influenced by events in eastern Australia, also wondered about floating a syndicate like the Australian Agricultural Company.
Stirling had further luck in that in May 1828 Sir George Murray, an aging Scottish general and friend of the Stirling family, became Colonial Secretary. Stirling had by then placed articles on the proposed colony in English newspapers and popular magazines. One of Stirling’s advocates, the merchant HC Sempill, compiled on the basis of the captain’s description a most attractive description of a country he had never seen. The Swan River, according to Sempill, had one of the finest climates in the universe and was suited for the production of cotton, silk, tallow, provisions, linseed, hemp, flax, corn and vines. The county was of an open and undulating character with excellent soil; it was beautifully, but not too much, wooded, well adapted for wool growing and the raising of stock, and the coast and river teemed with fish.
Sempill also pointed out the proximity of the Swan River to the Cape of Good Hope, Mauritius, the Indian sub-continent, Batavia and New South Wales. He foretold low prices for provisions. A commissioner would sail in the first immigrant ship, escorting the immigrants to their destination with the sole purpose of assisting their settlement. ‘Engagements with young, stout and healthy labourers and mechanics of good character are in the course of arrangements.’ The immigrant, Sempill promised, would not have to wage hopeless and ruinous war with interminable forests and impenetrable jungle, ‘as he will find extensive plains ready for the plough share’. He would not be ‘obliged to mingle with, and employ those bearing the brand of crime and punishment; and as no convict of any description of prisoner will be admitted into the colony, those who established property and families will feel that their names and fortunes cannot be mixed hereafter with any dubious ideas as to their origin. Land so situated, without tithes, taxes or rent, under the special care and protection of His Majesty’s Government, and where the British laws will be rigidly and uprightly administered, cannot fail being worth the attention of every industrious and discerning Briton.’
Sempill circumvented the decision by government not to pay the wages of labourers by promising to put interested and worthy labourers into contact with settlers of capital who would require their services. Another whom Stirling enlisted to his cause was Thomas Peel, a young gentleman of independent fortune related to the Home Secretary. Peel had thought of settling in New South Wales and investing his money there, but in 1828 was attracted by the more savoury reports of Swan River. The syndicate of financiers he joined offered to take ten thousand settlers with appropriate stock and stores to the new colony within four years and place them each on 200 acres (81 hectares) of land, in return for which the syndicate wished to receive four million acres (1 620 000 hectares) of land itself.
The Colonial Office was under pressure from Captain Stirling and the syndicate either to grant them the right to develop the place under a proprietary charter or to proclaim it a new Crown colony of which Stirling would be governor. The appointment of Sir George Murray, old general, famed lover and friend of the Stirling family in the Colonial Office in May 1828 and of another Stirling friend, Horace Twiss, as Undersecretary, meant that the Colonial Office was sympathetic, yet did not wish either to grant a charter or to incur expenses.
Stirling somehow persuaded Murray that the colony could be founded and flourish without government expense. But the Colonial Office beat the reward the syndicate of in
vestors was seeking down from four million to one million acres. Members of the syndicate dropped out, except for Thomas Peel. While he hesitated, a former convict from New South Wales, Solomon Levey, offered to enter with him into a ten-year partnership in the Western Australian endeavour. Levey was to finance the exploitation of the proposed one million acres; Peel was to be its resident salaried manager.
Levey was one of the emancipist merchants who had risen in the time of Macquarie. He had been transported for seven years as an accessory to the theft of 90 pounds (41 kilos) of tea and a wooden chest. He began his business career in Sydney soon after arriving, and was dealing in real estate and supplying the government store with various goods while still under sentence. On 8 February 1819 he received an absolute pardon. He became pervasively successful in business in the Pacific. His ships visited the islands of Bass Strait and the Southern Ocean for sealskins. In the 1820s he had a base in Tahiti from which he imported island products; he owned a rope factory; he had grazing properties and land grants within the Twenty Counties. He became a proprietor of the Bank of New South Wales, advocating low interest rates and associations between the bank and English banking firms. In 1824 he added his name to the petition that Redfern and Eager took to London asking that the emancipists be allowed to do jury duty.