‘The Commandant’ by Jessica Anderson

This book has been recently re-released as part of Sydney University Press’ Australian Classics Library.   The original was published in 1975 and there are still copies of the original imprint around: mine has a particularly lurid cover that would deter any casual browser.

The penal colonies at Sydney and Van Diemen’s Land have long attracted novelists- Thomas Keneally has been writing about them for decades and Kate Grenville has been lured by them more recently.  But there were other penal outposts in the Australian colonies as well: Norfolk Island, Moreton Bay in Queensland, Western Australia after 1850 and even Port Phillip, while not a penal colony as such, had convict gangs engaged on public works and the Pentonvillians in the second half of the 1840s.

“The Commandant” is set in Moreton Bay under the command of Patrick Logan.   The setting of the book is fairly accurate:  Logan did exist; his wife was called Lettie; he did come to a sticky and inconclusive end.  But the main character of the book, Frances O’Beirne, is Jessica Anderson’s invention entirely and here Anderson can let her imagination take flight.  This is a penal colony described from the domestic perspective, with the convicts not as “the men out there” but as shadowy but ever-present domestic servants.  Here we can see the blurring of the lines that John Hirst writes so well about in Convict Society and its Enemies with assigned convicts occupying that here-but-not-here space of the English domestic servant whose intimate presence gave them such an ambiguous status.

This is a very ‘interior’ novel in that much of it takes place inside, and much of the text is turned over to dialogue.  It is almost Austenesque in this regard, and I found it a little noisy and claustrophobic.  For me, the novel really opened up once it got outside into the Australian landscape- until this point it could have been set anywhere.

Frances O’Beirne is a recent arrival in the colonies and after a short time in Sydney, she travels up to join her sister Lettie who is married to Capt Logan. While in Sydney she comes into contact with the daughters of Edward Smith Hall, the editor of the Monitor and the (real life) opponent of Governor Darling.  She absorbs the ‘radical’ views circulating in Sydney, and is wary of her brother-in-law Logan, who is about to fight a libel case against the Sydney newspapers over reports of his excessive cruelty.  She is uneasy about the convict presence, and appalled by her brother-in-law’s discipline.

In an interview about the writing of The Commandant in “Making Stories” by Kate Grenville and Sue Woolfe (generous extracts available here), Anderson talks in an interview about the character of Frances

INT: Did you consciously seek a character to, as you say, ‘identify with’ or did the character come to you?

JA: Well I came to myself.  But I had to have someone who could see and comment on the action. But not just one person, and not just one point of view.  So I had Frances, Louisa and Letty.  Particularly Frances, although the other points of view are both well within my own range.  My daughter said it was quite easy to see who I was. But she saw me as Louisa.

…

INT: Is Frances really, in fact, a twentieth century character?

JA: There were people like Frances, radicals and reformers , in Sydney. There was nobody like her at Moreton Bay.  But I couldn’t have done it without her.  I needed an opponent for Logan.

Despite Anderson’s protestations, I’m not really sure that Frances isn’t a 20th century character. I don’t think that Anderson caught the religious aspects of a humanitarian anti-transporation stance, complete with its racism, class bias and cast iron certainties. Instead Frances’ opposition to the penal system is a bit too secular and Amnesty International.

Anderson’s real stroke of brilliance is in explaining Logan’s death- which, again, is historic fact. But her explanation which runs against the popular story about how he died is, unfortunately,  plausible and we can see with 20th century eyes what the implications of such an explanation could/did set in train.

I enjoyed this book and I’m glad that it has a second outing.  I think that it stacks up well against Keneally’s convict works like The Playmaker and Bring Larks and Heroes and Grenville’s The Secret River and The Lieutenant (which I haven’t read yet).  It isn’t as imaginatively extravagant as Flanagan’s brilliant Gould’s Book of Fish, but her twist on the narrative and history is inventive and deserves to be better known.

‘The Colony’ by Grace Karskens

2009, 549p plus notes

This is an absolutely beautiful book.

Physically, it is a thing of beauty.  It is hard cover, brimming with photographs and drawings (some glossy museum pictures juxtaposed with current photographs that the author has taken herself), with thick, luxuriant white pages.   And beautiful it should be, I suppose, supported as it is by the City of Sydney, the Australia Council, the Australian Academy of Humanities and the State Library of NSW.  In fact at first I thought it was a coffee table book to accompany a series (there was an SBS series of that name) but it’s not.  It’s a history (with the humility to designate itself a history rather than the history) fair and square, without apologies.

Karskens nails her colours to the mast: she is writing as an historian, and participating in a historical conversation with other historians:

This book has its roots deep in a great mountain of existing research, thinking and histories.  Historians work collectively, within a wider community of scholars.  So history writing is less an individualist pursuit than a collective quest, and an ongoing process.  This is one reason references are so important: they rightly acknowledge the work of past scholars, as well as guiding future readers and scholars into the literature.  In the notes and bibliography of this book you will find, besides original manuscripts and archival records, maps and pictures, an extraordinary and diverse body of scholarship about early Sydney, works mainly by historians, but also archaeologists, economists, anthropologists, art and architectual historians, ecologists, geologists, museuologists, geographers, biographers and local and community historians.  (p. xii)

She is true to her word.  There’s a heavy debt to Inga Clendinnen here, not only in content but in writing style, and likewise to Alan Atkinson- two historians I deeply admire whose writing turns an event around and looks at it from different angles, giving us the gift of coming to the familiar with new eyes.   There’s also a connection with James Boyce whose recent book Van Diemen’s Land is almost a pigeon-pair with this book in its re-visioning of the penal colony as a new environment with new opportunities.  Unlike Robert Hughes’ The Fatal Shore, this book joins other histories- John Hirst’s work springs to mind-  written with  a determination to look beyond Hughes’ gulag and horror: it looks to the agency, optimismism and opportunism of ordinary people in a new environment instead of just the dregs of the old world.

The history itself is a thing of beauty too.  It breaks free of many straitjackets: more than perhaps any other history of Australia that I have read it interweaves Aboriginal history, archaeology, women and environmental history throughout the book.  Not content with the almost obligatory “before” chapter dealing and then dispensing with “the aborigines”, she asserts that Sydney remained an Eora town- that Eora people continued to live within Sydney on their own terms, with their own geography and in resistance to christianizing impulses, into the 1830s and 40s. Indeed, they have never left.

The environmental theme carries throughout the book as well.  She starts in deep time and emphasizes the connection between landscape and food supply not just along the coastal regions, but inland along the rivers and ravines.  Unlike other histories which are drawn to the inland and the importance of crossing mountains and going towards the centre, she turns back towards the sea, just as the early Sydney people did.  She reminds us that Sydney had three beginnings: the abandoned Botany Bay settlement;  Port Jackson (truly a ‘port’ city where early convicts settled into the Rocks with their own raucous, uninhibited subculture), and then the third, more ordered attempt to start again in Parramatta by imposing conformity onto the layout.  She reminds us that once settlers spilled onto the Cumberland Plain, confronted by different tribes, the same battles had to be fought anew with new opponents.   The Europeans of early Sydney were not the industrialized huddled-masses; they were pre-modern people bringing with them the patterns of village tradition and the pre-industrial paradox of deference combined with the English moral economy.  At the same time, though, they were a consumer society, tied into the broader imperial economy by virtue of the port which serviced and was served by British trade routes and markets.

In Karsken’s book Macquarie is not the benign “Father of Australia”.  Instead she depicts both Lachlan and Elizabeth Macquarie as landscape artists, imposing their improving architectural vision onto Sydney, obliterating the emergent, spontaenous eruption of the workers’  lifestyle and culture by appropriating public space for the ‘respectable’ in mimicry of  a modern European urban landscape.

Nor, despite her obvious respect,  does she let Clendinnen’s romantic vision of dancing strangers blind us to the violence that was the first response and default position;  unlike Clendinnen she is not so enamoured of Watkin Tench that she sees his expedition under Phillip’s orders as a face-saving farce.

In her review of the book  Cassandra Pybus she chided Karskens for following the well-worn and well-mined biographies of  governors, scribbling military officers, Macquarie, Ruse and a few high-profile convicts.  I’m not sure that this is fair: the book is studded with small stories that move into the spotlight then fall back to the wings- not grand narratives to be sure, but small solo items that illuminate and make larger arguments human before moving on.  There is the grand design of official planning and policy, but she emphasizes that there was a complementary,unofficial, spontaneous counter-reality that emerged from the myriad small stories and small lives of ordinary people.

Some quibbles?  Karskens had succeeded so admirably in integrating an aboriginal worldview and interaction throughout the book, but two lengthy chapters at the close of the book focus on black/white relations in the Cumberland region.  Given that she was already handling this so naturally and unselfconsciously these two chapters deflected the book into another direction.  They are both long chapters.  Up to this point, there had been such elegance in the writing, at both structural and sentence level, but the conclusion of the book is  weighted unevenly and the work as a whole loses its symmetry.

The book is richly illustrated, so much so that I was surprised to find colour plates half-way through.  I had assumed that it was black and white only, and there was no reference in the text (e.g. Plate 3) to prompt the reader to search for them.  I felt almost cheated to find them later.  Likewise, maps would have reinforced her argument about the importance of waterways and coast and the pattern of the spread of settlement.

Ah, but these are just quibbles.  This is an insightful, intelligent, deeply human history with immaculate scholarship.   In his review published in The Monthly, Alan Atkinson wrote that the book  “propels Karskens straight to the first rank of Australian historians”- high praise indeed.  It’s certainly had me engrossed for about the last three weeks (hence the paucity of other book reviews recently), and you know- I think I’ll read it again one day.

‘Fatal Necessity: British Intervention in New Zealand 1830-1847′ by Peter Adams

When considering early Australian and New Zealand history, you have to keep your bifocals on. Isolated ‘down here’,  ten thousand miles from ‘home’, with at the least a six month round trip for any official communication,  it’s possible to view events and people through a local lens with a type of nonchalance about pronouncements and edicts that arrived from the other side of the world.   But taking a broader view, the network of relationships and communications between the colonies themselves and the Colonial Office formed another type of reality- not as immediate perhaps, but imbued with the finality of ultimate veto.  But both local and distant views have the illusion of solidity: neither is as straightforward as it appears.

The “Fatal Necessity” described in Peter Adams’ book refers to the mission creep that accompanied the creation and signing of the Treaty of Waitangi in New Zealand in February 1840.   The Colonial Office developed the treaty from a theoretical duty springing from the legal bond between subject and state, in order to control and protect British subjects who had chosen to go to New Zealand.  A second imperative was the increased humanitarian concern for the aboriginal people already there.   A third imperative, more urgent from the Antipodean perspective than that of the Colonial Office, was to prevent Maoris selling their land to strangers- particularly the French who were perceived to have designs on New Zealand.  The Colonial Office originally planned to gain sovereignty over only parts of New Zealand, but when the New Zealand Company despatched large numbers of settlers under systematic colonization, the Colonial Office realized that the whole colony had to be annexed.

This book shifts between the motivations and actions of individual men at the local, antipodean level- Gipps, Busby and Hobson- and the political manoeuvering of pressure groups and politicians to influence Colonial Office policy in London.  In particular Adams concentrates on the Church Missionary Society and its president Dandeson Coates, and the New Zealand Association- later the New Zealand Land Company- a group of investors influenced by Wakefieldian ideas of systematic colonization.   Diametrically opposed in their objectives, these two pressure groups circled around the main political and bureaucratic figures in colonial affairs, conducting meetings, petitioning and lobbying all as part of the game of politics and patronage.

Ten thousand miles away, Gipps, Hobson, Busby and Wentworth may have thought that they were key players and that their actions and submissions were influential, but this was a delusion. More important was the political make-up of British parliament and the always-present imperative to retain power.  Hence we see the clash of the Lords – Lord Howick, Lord Durham, Lord Melbourne, Lord Glenelg – doing deals, appeasing, jockeying and saving face as part of another dance of politics far removed from the lawn of the Resident’s House overlooking a quiet bay on the other side of the world.

‘Sex and Suffering’ by Janet McCalman

1998, 368p

I’d already worked out what I was going to say in reviewing this book.

I am not keen on institutional histories.  I dislike their celebratory nature and the way that their authors obviously feel compelled to doff their hats and gush over the institutional big-wigs and stalwarts.  You can often sense the shadowy presence of the steering committee in the back-ground and that a publicist and risk-management expert are hovering in the wings.

However, I was drawn to read this history of the Royal Women’s Hospital after hearing a Radio National Hindsight program on it, available for download here.  Janet McCalman, from the University of Melbourne ( I see that she, at least still works there, given the University’s decimation of its Arts faculty) wrote Struggletown: Public and Private Life in Richmond 1900-1965 - a history of the working-class suburb of Richmond,  and Journeyings: The Biography of a Middle Class Generation 1920-1990, which followed the No 69 tram through the middle-class suburbs of Melbourne.  She’s obviously drawn to writing larger social histories by focussing her lens on a small patch of inquiry.

And so Sex and Suffering: Women’s Health and a Women’s Hospital carries on an approach that she obviously feels comfortable with.  As the title might suggest, this is not just a history of an institution: instead it deals with sex and the experience of being woman, health and institutions.

The experience of childbirth is intimately woven into the hidden parts of private lives and soon overlaid by the other experiences and achievements of a growing person.   It is common to us all, and for a short period of time is overwhelming in its effect on the mother at her exposed, most basic core and on the people closest to her.   So it was fascinating to consider the act childbirth- that most intimate and personal of events- as part of a social phenomenon that can be handled at the structural level in so many ways.

The book itself follows a chronological approach, with seven sections covering roughly 20-30 year periods.  The emphasis varies in the sections, from the clinical (particularly in the sections discussing sepsis and antisepsis) to the social and structural (where the judgments of upper-middleclass doctors and the Board of Management were trained onto the predomiantly working-class and migrant clientele).   Throughout most of the book, she draws on the case notes of individual women- helpfully supplemented with a glossary of medical terms in the margin- to make real her discussion of anaesthesia and surgery and its effect on horrendous labour situations, the horror of clostridium welchii which could kill a woman in hours, and the changes in attitudes towards labouring women and their partners.  Ye Gods- some women had enormous babies- particularly in the post-Gold Rush period when women who had suffered malformations of the pelvis through malnutrition themselves as children, especially in Ireland,  gave birth to large babies when their own diets had become carbohydrate-heavy in a new country.  There’s something stark in reading the case notes reproduced at the end of the book that chart the death over a number of days of a woman, knowing that there are mothers and fathers, husbands and other children who have been left bereft.

I know that when I was in labour with my children, I was very conscious that I was part of a chain of labouring women in my family and thought -even then!- about how absolutely dreadful it would be to die in childbirth. Hormonally, physically and from an evolutionary sense, every sinew of your being in focussed on giving birth to that child then and there, even if it is your twelfth or illegitimate.  I felt as if I was surrounded by generations of women who had given birth before, and that I was stripped down to my essential female-ness.  In reading this book I was made conscious of the effects of bad births- those fistulas you now only know of in Third World countries,  the lifelong invalidism that followed some births, and the amount of pain that lingered on year after year.  It made the knowledge of my maternal grandmother’s seven births and several miscarriages, and my paternal grandfather’s first wife’s death in childbirth, more meaningful.

There are wonderful photographs and diagrams in this book.  The photographs of Melbourne in the early chapters from both the La Trobe Picture collection and the Royal Women’s Hospital Archives are clear and showed perspectives of my city that I hadn’t seen before.  The internal photographs of the hospital, again from the hospital archives,  while deliberately posed, speak volumes about hospital discipline and nurses’ roles.

A second thread that runs through the book is a commentary on class and gender in Melbourne. The more feminist, women-centred  Queen Victoria hospital stands as a counter-point to the more traditional, male-dominated Royal Women’s Hospital, and the class perspectives of the charity-oriented upper-middle class female board members run through the attitudes towards sexually-transmitted disease, abortion and adoption that the hospital had to deal with.

Well, this is what I was going to say until I got to the last part of the book.  The last section, unfortunately, descended into that boosterism and oily fulsomeness of the standard institutional history.  Probably for privacy reasons, the case histories dropped out of the narrative.  Although they were replaced by oral history reminiscenes of experiences in the Women’s, they lacked the immediacy and contingency of those earlier case notes.   Judgments about individuals who are alive and likely to read this book need to be tempered, and as a still-operating (though re-located) hospital , there is the equivalent, I guess, of the doctor’s  “do no harm” in writing about the institutional culture.  The management-speak of the final pages reflects the funding and political milieu in which institutions now exist, but I also suspect that it has been carefully vetted by the current hospital administration as well.

So, if you read this book- and I exhort you so to do- you might want to stop after Section VI in 1970.  To that point, it’s fascinating.

The Foundational Orgy

Some time ago, I rather flippantly (and crassly?) suggested that the 6th February- the night of drunken revellry on the Sydney Cove beaches- might be a more appropriate celebration of Australia Day than 26th January. You know the story- Robert Hughes has the couples rutting between the rocks; Tim Flannery started his The Birth of Sydney with it; Tom Keneally fictionalized it; and the tele-doco The Floating Brothel based on Sian Rees’ book of the same name re-enacts it.  Now I find that perhaps this “foundational orgy” never occurred.

Grace Karskens in her beautifully written and presented book The Colony: a history of early Sydney pins the origin of the “foundational orgy” on Manning Clark’s Short History of Australia, but Manning Clark himself backtracked on the story when he re-read the original sources.  Too late- the story (and let’s face it- it IS a striking one) was off and running.

There is no real evidence that the orgy ever occured. Surgeon Arthur Bowes Smith wrote that “the men convicts got to them soon after they landed” and that it was “beyond my abilties to give a just description of the scene of debauchery and riot that ensued during the night.”  Perhaps because that’s because he wasn’t there- he was on the Lady Penrhyn moored out in the harbour.  The sailors on his own ship were issued with rum rations, but the convicts were not.

Ralph Clark described the women’s tents of  “Seens of Whordom” but he called all convict women “whores”.  He describes the punishments meted out to male convicts and sailors alike who tried to have sex with the women, but not on or around 6th February.  He mentions the thunderstorm, but nothing else.  Neither does anyone else- in fact, Watkin Tench mentioned that “nothing of a very atrocious manner appeared” during February.

So, Karskens asks, does it matter?  Are we going to let the facts get in the way of a good story?  It does matter, she claims, because told as a story of  “loose  whores and randy drunken men”  it validates, and even celebrates certain types of male behaviour.  Even more than this,  Hughes et al claim this “scene” as the foundation of Australia’s sexual history- a sensationalist view that obscures the real legend- the fruitfulness and growth of relationships between men and women in those early years.

I am duly chastened.

References:

Grace Karskens The colony: a history of Early Sydney pp.313-315

Mr Robinson reports

I’ve been reading the Port Phillip journals of George Augustus Robinson.  Note that these are the Port Phillip ones, not those that he wrote in Van Diemen’s Land which were edited by N.J.B.  Plomley.  Actually,  Plomley’s work has had a bit of renaissance lately, with the republishing of his Friendly Mission and the release of Reading Robinson,  a set of essays by various authors which extends Robinson’s work into a broader imperial context.   I have this book of essays on hold, and shall report anon.

Robinson himself seems to be undergoing a reconsideration.  Until recently, his main biography has been Black Robinson by Vivienne Rae-Ellis, a vehement portrayal that depicts him as an incompetent and dishonourable liar and cheat.   Rae-Ellis’ book had a troubled publication history and  received much critical comment on its publication (Pybus, 2003).   Keith Windschuttle in his Fabrication of Aboriginal History interprets this as an attack on Rae-Ellis for her negative depiction of Robinson, who has been treated more benignly by Henry Reynolds, Lyndall Ryan and other historians that he himself attacked for their depiction of Aboriginal history.  Perhaps it’s a matter of “the enemy of my enemy is my friend” because Windschuttle certainly did not extend the same level of scrutiny to Rae-Ellis as he did to Reynolds and Ryan.

Robinson’s Tasmanian journals have received most of the attention, but the ones I’ve been reading are his Port Phillip journals, written after he had spent several years on the blighted Flinders Island with his dwindling band of natives.   He took with him to Port Phillip  several Aborigines from Flinders Island, including Truganini, Wooredy, and Matilda/Mathinna  (from Richard Flanagan’s Wanting).   He arrived in Melbourne in February 1839, prior to La Trobe.  His instructions were vague.  Glenelg at the Colonial Office in London sent a copy of the report of the 1837  parliamentary  Select Committee  to Gipps, with recommendations to protect, educate, provide religious education for and ‘civilize’ the aborigines.   Glenelg told Gipps to fill in the details, but Gipps was loathe to do so.  He argued that Robinson had been appointed Chief Protector on the strength of his “acquired experience superior to that which is possessed by any other individual in the Colony”, and he was left largely to define the role himself.  It seems that La Trobe was keen for Robinson to move around the District: he sent him on his trips to the Western District and was reluctant to appoint Robinson as a town magistrate lest it “seem to form the idea that his Duties lie in Melbourne instead of in the Bush” (Gipps to La Trobe 11 Feb 1843).  But his role did, indeed, involve both administration in Melbourne- in fact, he was appointed an office in Willis’  “old” Supreme Court building once the “new” courthouse was opened- and field work both supervising the Assistant Protectors and recording the language, names and habits of Aborigines throughout the District both as a form of ethnographic study and census.

This dual focus of  acting both as administrator and protector is reflected in his journals.  Inga Clendinnen tells us in her memoir Tiger’s Eye that she  drew on Robinson’s diary of his Western District  journey between 20 March and 15 August 1841 as her first step back into the academic waters after a long period of illness.  Her essay ‘Reading Mr Robinson’ focusses on Robinson’s  journey, but the George Augustus Robinson we see in the saddle, riding from tribe to tribe and outstation to outstation is not the same fussy, petty man that we see around the streets of Melbourne.  His role was not just to observe and count: he was also a minor bureaucrat puffed up with self-importance but ultimately impotent and compromised when the pointy end of the law intersected with the humanitarian aspects of his task.

Clendinnen admits “I have become very fond of Mr Robinson”.  I’m not quite as fulsome.  The ‘town’ Mr Robinson is rather wearing; in management-speak he is unable  ‘upwardly manage’ his relationship with his superiors (if indeed, he even perceives them as such), and he undermines and backstabs the assistant protectors under his supervision- although admittedly some of them were a rum lot too.  His attitude towards the Aborigines he brought over with him from Flinders Island is puzzling: he distances himself emotionally from the execution of  “Bob” and “Jack” for murder in January 1842, fulminating about process but oblivious to the tragedy; he goes into organiser-mode for the return of the women to Flinders Island without expressing any regret. The death of Peter Brune, who did not return to Flinders Island but remained with him as his native right-hand man, is brusque and matter-of-fact.

He doesn’t really seem to “get” Aboriginal communication, despite his compiling of long lists of words.  The whole idea of bringing the Van Diemen’s land natives over to smooth his path with the mainlain Aborigines highlights his lack of awareness of the distinctiveness of the Tasmanian tribes.   His interaction is often completely utilitarian on his own terms: he is dismissive of the context of communication wanting only the content:

When the natives appear I brake through all Aboriginal ceremony [sic] (which to observe would be a waste of time) and go forth and meet them  (10 May 1841)

There are several occasions of riding into a location incognito, and pumping people for information about “Robinson”- a curious way of gaining feedback, if that’s what he was doing.

Although, having said all this, there are times when the humanitarian breaks through, and I think that this side of him is what Clendinnen is responding to.  He is genuinely filled with admiration when he sees the construction of eel-traps, and acknowledges the ingenuity, strength and dedication of the men who created them, quite irrespective of race.  He is sceptical of the numbers of deaths reported by the settlers; he decries the preference for emancipated convicts as workers who, unlike new emigrants were not frightened of the natives.  He hears, and understands, the aboriginal claims on the land:

I should remark that, when Tung.bor.roong spoke of Borembeep and other localities of his own nativity he always added ‘that’s my country belonging to me!! That’s my country belonging to me!!” This language language is [plain] but not the less forcible on that account.  Some people have observed, in reference to the natives occupying their country, what could they do with it?  The answer is plain- they could live upon it and enjoy the pleasures of the chase as do the rich of our own nation (17 July 1841)

He is dismissive of the stories of cannibalism relayed to him by the settlers- “Fudge!”. And when he comes across a settler who freely admits murdering five natives,  he is chilled and repulsed by the man.  He is determined not to partake of the lonely man’s desperate hospitality:

Francis pressed me to sleep in his hut and it was evident the bed had been prepared, clean sheets and pillow case.  He entreated and said he would play me a tune on the fiddle and I was to make myself at home, &c.  I however had made up my mind to sleep in the van and got away.  I could not sleep in the place; I was disgusted and my heart sickened when I thought of the awful sacrifice of life done by this individual.  He acknowledged to five, the natives say seven.  (30 July 1841)

On leaving the man as quickly as he can, he passes a skull planted nearby- shades of Kurtz.  Robinson knows the message it is sending- and no doubt the local tribes do too

I cannot conceive why this skull was permitted to remain exposed in such a situation; it is doubtless best known to Francis. (30 July 1841)

With my almost endless ability to be diverted from actually writing my thesis (as distinct from wool-gathering about it), I’m looking forward to reading the new Robinson essays.  I’ve also borrowed a book of Sievwright, the assistant protector who was the cause of much scandal and criticism from all sides.  More on him anon too.

References:

Ian D. Clark  The Journals of George Augustus Robinson, Chief Protector, Port Phillip Aboriginal Protectorate, Volume Two: 1 October 1840-31 August 1841 Melbourne, Heritage Matters, 1998.

Ian D. Clark (Ed) The Journals of George Augustus Robinson, Chief Protector, Port Phillip Aboriginal Protectorate, Volume Three: 1 September 1841- 31 December 1843Melbourne, Heritage Matters, 1998

Inga Clendinnen Tigers Eye 2001 (includes the essay ‘Reading Mr Robinson’)

Anna Johnston and Mitchell Rolls (eds). Reading Robinson 2008

N.J.B. Plomley Friendly Mission 1966

Cassandra Pybus ‘Robinson and Robertson’   in R. Manne (ed) Whitewash: On Keith Windschuttle’s Fabrication of Aboriginal History, Black Inc, 2203

Vivienne Rae-Ellis Black Robinson: Protector of Aborigines 1988

A.G. L. Shaw  A History of the Port Phillip District: Victoria before Separation 1996

A.G.L. Shaw Gipps-La Trobe Correspondence

Keith Windshuttle  The Fabrication of Aboriginal History, 2002

‘Colonial Improver: Edward Deas Thomson’ by S. G. Foster

Once you’ve got some little way into your research, it’s quite amusing to look back at the things that puzzled or amazed you right at the beginning.  For me, it was coming across so many letters addressed to ‘E. Deas Thomson’.  Who WAS this man, I wondered, who seemed to write with such authority on so many topics- and why had I never heard of him?

Edward Deas Thomson was originally appointed clerk to the Legislative and Executive Councils under Governor Darling in 1829, then went on to serve as  Colonial Secretary for Governors  Bourke, Gipps, Fitzroy and Denison between 1837-1856.   The term ‘Colonial Secretary’ is a little confusing, as it was used both  for the Secretary of State for War and the Colonies in London (e.g. Marquess of Normanby,  Lord John Russell, Lord Stanley during Judge Willis’ time in NSW) as well as for the chief adviser and second administrator to the Governor here in the colonies.  In my focus on the empire-wide peregrinations of colonial civil servants and judges as they crisscrossed between Upper and Lower Canada, Newfoundland, Cape Colony, the West Indies, New Zealand, Australia, Sierra Leone etc., I have tended to forget that their mobility was supported by an ongoing administrative structure that remained more or less stable, despite the comings and goings of Governors.   This was the case with E. Deas Thomson who served under four governors, of varying political stances and administrative habits.

E. Deas Thomson was born in Edinburgh in 1800 to a family with naval and merchant connections.  His father was  the sometime accountant-general of the Navy, and family drew heavily on the patronage of Sir Charles Middleton (Baron Barham) , First Lord of the Admiralty, and his family after Sir Charles’ death.    His mother was from South Carolina, where Thomson’s father had worked as a plantation agent for his uncle.  After marriage, the couple moved back to Scotland but Deas Thomson’s mother seems to have not settled well and returned alone to South Carolina after suffering a period of paranoia, leaving the 5 year old Edward with his father.  Edward was educated at Harrow, then spent two years in France,  returning to London for a period before travelling to America, then Canada after attending  to business arising from his mother’s death in 1826-7.  The French and American connections, though not necessarily out of the ordinary, do suggest a broader experience than many other civil servants may have been exposed to.

Through his contacts with Sir Charles Middleton’s family, he appealed to Huskisson, then Secretary of State for War and the Colonies for a position in the colonial civil service.  At first he was offered the position of registrar of the Orphan Chambers in Demarara, then a second offer of Clerk of the Council of New South Wales, which he accepted, despite the lower salary, on account of the healthier climate.  This consciousness of the tropical climate, and its deleterious effects, is an ongoing theme in the English imagination of Empire.

He came to his position as Clerk of the Councils via a circuitous route.  The previous incumbent, Henry Grattan Douglass had been removed from the position, and Darling tried to replace him with his own brother-in-law Henry Durmaresq. However the appointment was vetoed by the Colonial Office after complaints of nepotism and Darling was warned against the appointment to public office of  ‘any relative or near connection’.  The position was then open for Thomson’s appointment.

Thomson was not particularly impressed with the drought-striken New South Wales during his first year in 1829, but his perceptions improved as the drought lifted and his friendship with Governor Darling developed.     He maintained a good relationship with Darling’s replacement, Richard Bourke ,and dined frequently with him, despite differences in political stance.  He married Bourke’s daughter Anna, which then placed him in a similar position to his predecessor Dumaresque when Bourke recommended Thomson (his son-in-law) as a replacement Colonial Secretary in place of Alexander Macleay- an erstwhile friend whose nephew ended up marrying Thomson’s own daughter in 1857- ah, the tangled intermarriages amongst colonial ‘gentry’ family!

Despite Bourke’s qualms about nepotism, the appointment went ahead, and as it was, Thomson remained Colonial Secretary for twenty years, long outlasting his father-in-law’s stay in New South Wales.   As such, he acted as confidant, advisor and spokesmen for the succession of governors.  His role changed after the 1842 Constitution introduced a partially-elected Legislative Council, and again with 1856 responsible government when, relucant to engage with electoral politics, he became a life appointee of the Legislative Council where he came to be aligned with the conservative element.

My own awareness of E. Deas Thomson, however, arises from his position as medium between Governor Gipps (the governor in charge during Judge Willis’ time in Port Phillip) and official and individuals in the community at large.   The protocols of communication were an important means of control:  individuals and government officials were instructed to direct all communication with the governor through his Colonial Secretary, and all communication with the Secretary of State in the Colonial Office in London also had to be channelled through Governor Gipps in Sydney (and hence, his Colonial Secretary E. Deas Thomson).   Certainly individuals could, and did, circumvent this process by writing directly to the undersecretary at the Colonial Office , but by Judge Willis’ time this practice, overtly encouraged by Undersecretary Robert Hay in the mid 1820s, had been regularized by the new undersecretary  Sir James Stephen.   Likewise,  there was an off-record back channel of communication within the colonies as well:  Gipps wrote personally to Superintendant La Trobe, and Thomson himself maintained long-standing communications with Denison in Van Diemen’s Land who was later to become Governor of New South Wales.   Indeed,  Thomson became increasingly critical of Governor Gipps’ carelessness in communications with local politicians,  and his inability to recognize when to speak and when to remain silent.  At the same time, leading members of the community recognized that it was better to sound out Thomson before approaching the Governor directly. (Foster, p. 62).

E. Deas Thomson himself has been cast as ‘conservative’ in his politics, particularly when he became a political actor in his own right after representative and then responsible government was granted to the colonies.  Certainly he came to be  seen to represent the interests of the squatters,  and expressed wariness and distaste for universal suffrage and wanted the constitutional backstop of a conservative upper chamber on a restricted franchise.  However, other aspects of his politics are less clear-cut.  He was a lifelong Free Trader, right from his time back in Scotland where he attended lectures by J. R. McCulloch.   He supported the idea of ‘improvement’- a theme picked up on in Foster’s title to his book- through schooling, universities, postal communications, railways, and his involvement in a range of benevolent societies and educational instutions including the Australian Museum and Sydney University.

The lives of E. Deas Thomson’s surviving children illustrate major themes in Thomson’s own life.  His eldest son suffered an ‘unstated ailment’ and could not hold down a job and drew on large sums of his father’s money- shades, perhaps, of Thomson’s mother’s ‘instability’; or maybe just colonial waywardness??? A second son became heavily involved in the Church of England and the temperance movement- the ultimate ‘improvement’ activity.  His three daughters’ marriages are a microcosm of empire: one married a nephew of Thomson’s own predecessor as Colonial Secretary, Alexander Macley; another married a member of the Indian civil service, and the other married a naval officer.

Thomson’s own early career demonstrates once again the importance of patronage in embarking on a colonial role.   Patronage seemed to make the world go round, but it’s easy to overlook its infantalizaing aspects.  Thomson’s own father, dismissed from his position as accountant-general in the Navy by the incoming Whig Government, turned his attention to a rich widow.  To his son he wrote:

The party I have had in view and still have, if it can be accomplished is a Mrs C a person about 50, being neither (of course) young nor handsome but with more good temper than falls to the lot of most people in life- She is the widow of an army surgeon who has been dead about 7 years- Her father left her about 15,000 pounds which has not been decreased but rather added to… Lord and Lady [B]arham approve the Match  & have visited & paid the necessary attention (quoted Foster p. 36)

Shades of Lady Catherine de Bourgh in Pride and Prejudice??  I suspect, but am not certain, that by now the Barham influence rested with 1st Earl of Gainsborough- or perhaps Lord and Lady Barham are a different branch of the family?  Ah, it’s hard to shake my 21st century perception that there’s something rather demeaning in all this deferral.

Foster paints a picture in this biography of a public servant who was not just a cipher for the Governor but who had influence in his own right.  He was in the mould of 19th century gentlemen improvers: he was concerned to ‘maintain balance’ between the forces in society, and he embraced technology, communications and education as a way of improving society.  His efficiency as public servant and administrator in many ways blunted the calls for responsible government: had the position of Colonial Secretary been filled by someone less capable, there would possibly have been more political agitation for constitutional change, much earlier.

References:

S. G. Foster Colonial Improver: Edward Deas Thomson, Carlton Vic. Melbourne University Press, 1978

‘Quest for Authority in Eastern Australia 1835-51′ by Michael Roe

In his long epilogue to War and Peace, Tolstoy mused about the role of ideas in history.  He didn’t think much of  it: according to him,  it was “altogether impossible to agree that intellectual activity has controlled the actions of mankind”.  Michael Roe’s Authority in Eastern Australia 1835-51 , however, is just such a history of ideas.

In particular, Roe poses the question: as the penal nature of the Australian colonies subsided, what new form of power was to take its place?  Was it to be the charisma of an individual or a small group of men?  Virtuosity on the part of government? Or the dominance of a set of ideas? He plumps for the final one: the set of ideas he dubs ‘moral enlightenment’ which, he argues, provided an alternative vision of society to the one  presaged by the dominance of conservative forces in the early 1800s.  The  Church of England and the transplanted (albeit rather second-rate) landed gentry had been dealt with generously in the carve-up of land and authority in the penal years, and they could have shaped Australia into an antipodean replica of a paternalistic, authoritarian, static society.  But they did not succeed, and this book explores that failure.

Roe argues that the conservative forces of the Episcopal Church and the landed gentry were challenged by four main factors.  First was the squatting movement which eschewed the landed gentry’s emphasis on property ownership and paternalist responsibility for a more pragmatic use of the land without emotional attachment and without actually paying for it. The squatters vociferously resisted any form of authority which attempted to constrain them, and once attaining political power in the 1850s, became a staunchly conservative force in protecting their gains.   Second was the phenomenon of radical politics, part of the mental freight of free immigrants especially in the 1840s.  They brought with them a strong antipathy to taxation without representation, and by the late 1840s a distinct working-class political movement had emerged, eclipsing the earlier linking of  native-born ‘Australianism’ and the emancipist cause.  The third and fourth factors are different manifestations of religious expression: the Roman Catholic Church and Protestantism.   The Catholic Church, although not necessarily ‘liberal’ in its politics drew on a strong Irish tradition of resisting Anglican supremacy, and identified more with “have not” policies that championing the small man.  Protestantism, on the other hand, was more fractured than Catholicism, but shared its insistence on equal standing before the law.  It also injected an element of self-will and challenge to hierarchical authority.

These factors did not cause, but did support the intellectual and emotional attractiveness of the philosophy he calls (after the poet Charles Harpur) “moral enlightenment”.  This grew out of eighteenth-century thought, combining  Romantic, Protestant and liberal attitudes.  It drew on the utilitarian tenets of individualism,  rationality and progress, suffused with the Romantic ideals of a simple and optimist view of humanity and perfectability.

In Australian society it was manifested through the emphasis on generalized learning (Mechanics Institutes, debating societies etc),  a popular but not deep interest in science and technology, belief in progress, temperance,  voluntaryism and self-help.  To be sure, it was a transplanted derivative philosophy, common across the European and especially English-speaking world.  But it lent itself easily to the concept of a new start in a new country, where the absence of tradition was a boon rather than a handicap.

I was nudged into reading this book which I’d had on my to-be-read list for some time, by a friend’s negative response to it.  Where were the people? she asked- and certainly, there is a dizzying array of small-time largely forgotten colonial political activists, named but then passed over without a coherent narrative being drawn out of their individual contributions.  This name-dropping tendency seemed less obvious in the final part of the book, perhaps because his research on transcendentalism and temperance was deeper and more original, and there was less need to tip his hat to the men and times of  colonial politics that he assumed would be familiar to his readers.

I was looking for an exposition of Conservative colonial politics and the challenge to it in 1840s NSW society- and in that, I am satisfied.  I was hoping for a template to fit Judge Willis’ own political stance into, and in that I was frustrated.  That, however, reflects the man.  I also found myself wanting to go one step further back- “But where did moral enlightenment come from?”. It was, as Roe, admits a transplanted species, and I find myself wondering if this contest of ideas was played out across many colonial societies of the 19th century, or whether it was a particularly Australian challenge.

References:

Michael Roe Quest for Authority in Eastern Australia 1835-1851, Melbourne, Melbourne University Press, 1965.

‘Lawless Harvests’ by Alex Castles

2003, 209 p.

As a primary school child in the 1960s, there were certain stationery items that your parents had to buy for you each year.  They always had to buy two HB pencils and a red-lead pencil that would kill you if you sucked the end of it (surely not?).  There was the 12-pack of Cumberland pencils that always looked insipid and cheap against the 24-pack Derwent pencils that the luckier kids had, with that brilliant aqua and lush bright green that even now gives me pleasure.   There was the pack of Greyhound Dry Pastels that went unopened all year until they crumbled to dust in your desk.  And then there was the plastic stencil map of Australia, with the states marked out with a thin line except for Victoria, where the boundary with NSW seemed to inexplicably dribble out into a series of dots on the right hand side.

It must have been a source of much chagrin for school children on the Apple Isle (Tasmania) to realize that their own state was left off the map.  No doubt having the little island dangling below Victoria added a level of complexity and expense to the manufacturing task that was not worth the effort.  And so, if you remembered Tasmania at all, you had to hand-draw it, down below Victoria somewhere.

Yet when looking at Port Phillip in the 1840s, one is struck by the dominance of Van Diemens Land on the new settlement.  George Town at the mouth of the Tamar River was much closer to Port Phillip than Sydney, 600 miles away.  Trade was frequent between Hobart, George Town and Port Phillip, and it was largely the scarcity of  available land after a heavy bout of land-grant activity in the late 1820s/early 1830s that drew men’s eyes northwards across Bass Strait.  Just as men and stock meandered down from the settled districts of New South Wales, so too did ship after ship from Van Diemens Land disgorge sheep that moved into farms throughout the Port Phillip district.

New South Wales dominates our awareness of early colonial Australia, but Van Diemens Land runs alongside it as a parallel but separate colonial entity.  Although the NSW Governor was officially Governor-in-Chief,  from 1825 onwards he played no active role in the administration of Van Diemens Land. The Van Diemens Land Lieutenant-Governor styled himself “His Excellency” (suggesting that there was no immediate superior) rather than the “His Honor” title that he had used up until this date, and the Tasmanian Supreme Court, officially proclaimed on 31 March 1824 was a separate entity in its own right rather than an arm of the Supreme Court of New South Wales as Judge Willis’ Port Phillip court was.

Alex Castle’s book, published posthumously in 2003 tells the story of the Van Diemens Land legal system.   The book had its genesis in a plan by the Law Society of Tasmania in 1985 to commission a history of the legal profession in Tasmania.  Professor Alex Castles from Adelaide University offered to write it, with a view to publication during the Law Society’s centenary year in 1988.  But only 3 chapters were written at that stage, and focus shifted to the 28th Australian Legal Convention to be held in September 1993.  By May of that year, twelve chapters had been completed and the final chapter was in draft form.  However it was never editted sufficiently for publication and the manuscript remained unpublished in a filing cabinet.  In 2003, after the death of Professor Alex Castles, the Law Society remembered the part-completed manuscript, and engaged its librarian to retrieve the text, and Dr Stefan Petrow to edit it, write an introduction and epilogue and compile a bibliography, as the text itself does not have footnotes.

In his introduction, Stefan Petrow discusses this book in relation to Castles’ other work, particularly his pioneering textbook 1971  ‘Introduction to Legal History’.  In this textbook, Castles concentrated on the English influences on the Australian legal System but Petrow detects  a movement in Castles’ work in later years that acknowledged local variation, particularly in frontier legal environments.  I wonder if Castles had written the introduction himself,  how he would have addressed himself to this question.

This book traces through the earliest legal steps in Van Diemens Land, which are hard to recover because the papers were burnt on the evening of  Lieutenant Governor Collins’ death- possibly to obscure legal decisions made during his time of office.   Collins’ successor Davey was completely out of his depth, and it was William Sorell, the next Lieutenant- Governor who reordered local affairs.  But the main focus of the book is on Lieutenant George Arthur and his devolution of power to himself, with the acquiescence of his fellow-Tory Supreme Court judge Pedder.   Castles credits Sir John Franklin (yes,  the villain of Richard Flanagan’s Wanting) with introducing the legal changes resisted for so many years by Arthur.  He traces through the amoval of the puisne judge Algernon Montagu and the attempted amoval of Pedder by Franklin’s successor Denison over the taxation-like nature of the Dog Act-  the same process of amoval (but for different reasons) which finished off Judge Willis’ career.

One thing that I very much appreciated in this book was the way that each chapter started anew with a little vignette or anecdote that piqued the reader’s interest anew.  He finished each chapter a similar way too, often returning to the episode with which he opened the chapter.  In between things got a little turgid, with a very ‘top-down’ perspective running throughout, but the openings and closings of each chapter remedied this.  I’m not sure that Castles himself would have finished the book with the what-happened-next epilogue that Petrow wrote-  the book suffers from the lack of a strong, argumentative final chapter.  However, it would have been beyond the ethical and editorial demands on Petrow to have written anything beyond what he has done.

‘Turning Points in Australian History’ ed. Martin Crotty and David Andrew Roberts

2009, 254 p plus notes.

I would have loved to have been a fly on the wall for some of the concept discussions for this book, published by the University of New South Wales press.   It takes a similar format to a preceding volume by the same editors which looked at Great Mistakes of Australian history. I find myself wondering whether the editors themselves pitched the idea, or whether it sprang from the marketing initiative of UNSW Press.  For there is certainly an ambivalence about the whole endeavour as even the back cover  blurb indicates:

This exciting and stimulating book examines turning points and crucial moments in Australian history.  Rather than arguing that there have been forks on a pre-determined road, the book challenges us to think about other paths or better paths that might have led to different outcomes.  It shows that a decisive event often only becomes so only in retrospect and that what seemed like a major turning point at the time often had no real impact at all.

I’m not sure that the book is as ‘if only’ or ‘what if’ as this suggests.  Instead, its chapters are structured as fairly straight narratives on a particular event with, except for two chapters, a specific month and year attached.

1. 14000 BP. On Being Alone: The isolation of the Tasmanians by Iain Davidson and David Andrew Roberts

2. 26th January 1788: The Arrival of the First Fleet and the ‘Foundation of Australia’ by David Andrew Roberts

3. 19 June 1822: Creating ‘an Object of Real Terror’: The tabling of the first Bigge Report by Raymond Evans

4. 15 July 1851: Hargreaves Discovers Gold at Ophir: Australia’s ‘golden age’ by Keir Reeves

5. 16 August 1890: The Martime Strike Begins: On upotia and ‘class war’ by Melissa Bellanta

6. 1 January 1901: Australia Federates, Australia Celebrates by Erin Ihde

7. 25 April 1915: Australian Troops Land at Gallipoli: Trial, trauma and the ‘birth of the nation’ by Martin Crotty

8. 10 June 1931: The Premiers’ Plan and the Great Depression: High politics and everyday life in an economic crisis by Erik Eklund

9. 27th December 1941: Prime Minister Curtin’s New Year Message: Australia ‘looks to America’ by David Day

10. 16 September 1956: ‘It’s here, at last!’ The introduction of television in Australia by Michelle Arrow

11. January 1961: The Release of the Pill: Contraceptive technology and the ’sexual revolution’ by Frank Bongiorno

12. 27 May 1967: The 1967 Referendum: An uncertain consensus by Russell McGregor

13. 1970: When it Changed: The beginnings of women’s liberation in Australia by Susan Magarey

14. 26 January 1981 The Opening of the Australian Institute of Sport: The Government takes control of the national pastime by Brett Hutchins

15. I July 1983 Saving the Franklin River: The environment takes centre stage by Melissa Harper

16. 14 May 1986 Paul Keating’s ‘Banana Statement’ and the End of the ‘Golden Age’ by Ray Broomhill.

17. 26 August -11 September 2001: From Tampa to 9/11: Seventeen days that changed Australia by Robert Manne.

There’s some very familiar names amongst the historians here- they have been chosen well.  But in several of the chapters you sense a real ambivalence with the whole project.  The concept being written about often spills out of a chronological strait-jacket, and the selection of an arbitrary date obviously leaves several of the authors feeling quite uncomfortable.  More than one author questions whether it’s really a turning point at all, or whether the concept of a turning point is even valid or useful.   The editors themselves raise this question in the introduction, and in this radio segment about the book.

The chapters are fairly uniform in length, and while not formulaic, tend to follow a pattern of ‘what happened’ then some analysis of the aptness of the designation ‘turning point’ for the event in question.  With the exception perhaps, of Susan Magarey’s chapter, you don’t really get a sense of the distinctive writing style or methodology of the authors’ other work.  The frequent use of inverted commas in many of the chapter titles reflects the rebuttal of popularly-received myths, images and understandings of the events described.

The particular selection of ‘turning points’ (or not) tells us just as much about 2009 as it does about the events under consideration.  I wonder if a similar book, written 50 years hence will feature the same events- I suspect not.  Many of the chapters discuss parallels between current events and the ‘turning point’, which of course adds to its appeal today and its quaintness tomorrow.

I find myself wondering who the intended audience is for this book- well, me for a start, I suppose.  The tenor of the book seems to have been written simultaneously to feed on, and yet resist, the ‘just stick to what happened’ continuous narrative genre that has become associated with John Howard’s attempt to rewrite the history curriculum for schools.  I enjoyed it in small grabs, a chapter here and a chapter there, much as I might read essays in a magazine.  I learnt things I didn’t know; I found myself curling a sceptical lip over the inclusion of some events at times (for example, on the Australian Institute of Sport chapter which, while making an interesting link with the Cold War, didn’t make a very convincing case for its inclusion as a ‘turning point’. ) It’s a bit like eavesdropping on an interesting conversation with informed, thinking people who have considered a phenomenon more deeply than you have, and are able to place an issue into a broader historical context.   The research is sound; the arguments are well-put but it is a book of its time, so read it now, while it’s still fresh!