When Governor Gipps was running through the long list of people who had complained about Judge Willis, he mentioned that eighteen magistrates had come forward with complaints about Willis’ behaviour.   How did people get to be magistrates in Port Phillip in the early 1840s?

A bit of back-tracking first.  The role of ‘magistrate’ has a long history. In England they have been a feature, in one guise or another, of the justice system for the past six centuries.  Traditionally the gentry families of the countryside, almost as a matter of course,  appropriated the role as their right within the village system of deference and moral responsibility that underpinned English rural life.  The magistrate, who usually held unreported hearings in his own house, had wide latitude over many areas of life; magistrates knew the villagers  (their families, their entitlements and their histories)  and were known themselves known (their families, their entitlements and their histories)  by the village inhabitants.

In the early years of penal settlement in New South Wales and Van Diemens Land, there were very few free settlers and at first nearly all magistrates held other positions.  As more free settlers arrived and took up large land grants, they were called upon to police the work and leisure of the convicts who worked on their properties.  Have no illusions about this: the colony depended on the forced labour of convicts, and the efficiency of this dispersed, in effect privatized, system depended on the surveillance, assiduousness and authority of the magistrates.

The Colonial Office back in London appointed the main office-bearers for Colonial positions,  shifting, juggling and negotiating individual careers as part of a huge chess-game, with influential spectators on the side making their ’suggestions’, pulling their strings and calling on and bestowing favours in the swirl of patronage and reciprocity.   The appointment of magistrates was, however, one of the positions in the gift of the local Governor in the colony- and he used it.  And eager aspirants knew that and approached him too, with their letters of introduction and recommendation from patrons both at home and those who had preceded them to the colony.

The early magistrates in Port Phillip were appointed from Sydney, both paid and unpaid.  There was a sniffiness about paid (or stipendiary) magistrates, and certainly the London-based Colonial Office preferred honorary magistrates who did not need to be paid.  But from about 1822-42 the courts had increasing oversight over magistrates’ activities and the issue of conflict-of-interest became more pressing.  For, unlike in England, the landed proprietors of New South Wales were not a leisured class: they were entrepreneurial men on the make themselves, who were anxious for quick returns on their capital, which in turn depended on convict productivity.   The rapid extension of settlement necessitated the appointment of paid magistrates in charge of an organized, generally ex-convict, police force.   On the anxious fringe of frontier settlement, there was increasing demand for police magistrates which was on  one level resisted by the local government on grounds of cost, but acceded to as a ‘temporary’ measure because it meant that personnel could be shifted to meet population movements and changing needs, unlike honorary magistrates who were appointed because they were already established in a particular locality.

Patronage power tended to be diluted the further one travelled from the metropole.  The Colonial Office could, and did, ask that particular men be appointed magistrates-  F. B. St John, the Police Magistrate in Port Phillip was one such Colonial Office request.  But generally, the magistracy was one area of patronage, interwoven as it was with local status and visibility, that the Colonial Office was prepared to devolve to the Governors.  Once La Trobe arrived in Port Phillip, Gipps shared aspects of this patronage with La Trobe.  He always consulted La Trobe before ratifying appointments and he entertained suggestions from La Trobe’s end.  But the actual gift of  the magistracy rested with him.

Gipps’ practice was to avoid making magistrates among practising doctors and from the clergy (unlike earlier times- the Rev Samuel Marsden was commonly known as a whipping parson). He insisted that magistrates must have been in the colony for one year, and must be at least 24 years of age.  Gipps relied on La Trobe’s opinion and asked him to vet the appointments amongst others in the locality- for instance, before appointing Stephen and Edward Henty to the position of magistrate in Portland, La Trobe consciously sought out people who thought they should not be appointed- to no avail.  Gipps advised La Trobe to broach the topic with nominees beforehand: “I hope you always obtain a man’s consent to act before you recommend him as it is very necessary to do so.”  Gipps suggested that La Trobe make the recommendation directly to him (Gipps) or to his Private Secretary as “a man might not want his qualifications for the Magistracy discussed in public office” (Gipps to La Trobe 1 March 1840, Shaw Gipps-La Trobe Correspondence p.17)

By the early 1840s the magistracy was no longer seen primarily as a penal surveillance mechanism, but had been overlaid with other municipal, moral, licensing and public order issues.  The honorary and police magistrates were responsible for the “regulation and control of a community” including the administration of regulations over buildings, fire prevention, roads, cleanliness etc.   as well as petty crime and public safety.  When the Melbourne Town Corporation was created in 1842, a separate division of magistrates was created from among the town councillors.

One thing that you did not need was legal training.  In the 1830’s Plunkett published his book which came to be known as “Plunkett’s Australian Magistrate” and the mainstay of legal advice for magistrates and the first Australian practice book of its kind.  As the 1840s went on, there were increased bureaucratic demands made of magistrates in terms of documentation and official oversight.

Paul de Serville  in Port Phillip Gentlemen lists the magistrates appointed in 1841.  Several held other government positions e.g. Edwards,, Le Souef, Parker, Robinson  and Sievwright were all magistrates by virtue of their positions as Aboriginal Protectors;  Airey, Fyans and Powlett were also Commissioners of Crown Lands.  Lieutenant Russell as Commander of the Mounted Police was a magistrate; as was  James Simpson as Police Magistrate until replaced by the Colonial Office’s suggestion of F. B. St John.  Alongside these were the honorary magistrates recognized for their importance in the community.  As part of the gentlemanly identity that they all projected and drew upon, all magistrates were involved in myriad civic and business activities.

As might be expected given Willis’ temperament, he clashed with several of the magistrates under his purview.  He strongly embraced the educational aspects of his role as Supreme Court judge, insisting that the magistrates attend court to familiarize themselves more fully with the law.  He was critical of magistrates who were involved in speculation – or at least, those who got caught out in the financial distress of the early ‘4os, and clashed with Simpson, Farquhar Mc Crae, Lonsdale and Brewster.  He was often critical of the Aboriginal Protectors, especially Sievwright who was by this time under a cloud over other improprieties as well.  In one of the frequently-retold vignettes from Judge Willis’ courtroom, he clashed on several occasions with J. B. Were, most famously when he without warning ordered Were, attending court as a magistrate,  to take the witness stand to testify.  When Were protested that he could not remember certain details, Willis awarded him one-two-three-six months in jail for contempt of court.  Needless to say, J. B. Were was one of the 18 who protested Willis’ behaviour.  But not all magistrates opposed him.  Willis looked favourably on Robert Martin, William Verner and J. D. Lyon Campbell- all of whom happened to live nearby to Willis in Heidelberg- and they gave him their unstinting support.   The split in support or opposition to the Judge amongst the magistrates mirrored the division in public opinion more generally.

that newspapers are increasingly being used as an outlet for the activities of lobbying firms.  It’s just “he said/she said” being mouthed by ventriloquist politicians, ’spokesmen’ and ‘independent’ commentators.

The Age yesterday had a register of the climate-change lobbying companies- easily found yesterday;  I couldn’t find it on the site today- I had to find it through the Centre for Public Integrity which then had a link to it through the Sydney Morning Herald.   The PDF file showing the large companies, the lobbying companies who contract to them, and the lobbyists and their policitical connections can be found at

http://www.smh.com.au/pdf/climatechange_lobbyingregister.pdf

The advisers and staffers, on both sides,  are coming out to play.  And we’ll uroll our newspapers in the morning and think that we’re reading “news”.

Meanwhile, Rupert and Little Johnny are whipping themselves up into a frenzy.  A plague on all their houses.

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.

2000, 271 p

Ruth Cracknell was a much-loved Australian actor- sharp, eloquent, funny, rather patrician in an ‘older woman’ sort of way. Although, of course, her character Maggie Beare in ‘Mother and Son’ (where she plays the devious elderly mother whose hapless adult son returns to live with her)  was none of these things!

I had to keep flicking to her picture at the back of the book to remind me that she was the author, because her celebrity is almost inconsequential to this story.   It’s not so much Ruth Cracknell here, but Mrs. Ruth Phillips, mourning the death of her husband Eric.  It’s as woman and widow, mother and grandmother that we meet her, not as a ’star’.

This is a beautifully constructed memoir.  The preface starts with Eric’s funeral, with  parts are written in italicized third person, as if she is watching herself going through the ritual.  She then moves back in time to their arrival in Venice for a holiday together and the pace of the narrative moves to a slow sort of travelogue, overshadowed by the certain knowledge that death  is hovering over them like an unseen, malevolent force.  This sense of foreboding permeates the book, even when Eric is finally well enough to fly home to Melbourne where cancer is diagnosed.  The title is well chosen: I kept thinking of Mann’s ‘Death in Venice’, but Eric does not die there. He recovers sufficiently to be medi-evacuated back to Australia, has two precious trips back to the family home for Sunday lunch, and some weeks later dies of the cancer, not the bleeding that initially threatened his life.  And so, by the end of the book, we return to the funeral and we, too, grieve.

While waiting in Venice for him to recover sufficiently for the trip home, the tourists leave as the summer season ends, the deeper water laps at the floor of her ground floor flat, and Ruth becomes aware of the sheer inconvenience of living (as distinct from visiting) Venice.  That holiday, so eagerly anticipated, so richly enjoyed for the first few days becomes instead a stark, lonely, bewildering exile.

This is, instead, a journey from Venice, not to it, and in the weeks they have together, they fall in love again- a different sort of love, suffused with the knowledge that it is all they have left.  They truly do live “in the moment”: the sharing of a blood orange is a sensuous joy, and she sees and loves anew the stripped down, solid core of the man she has been married to for over 40 years.

It was interesting to read this book after recently finishing Caroline Jones’ book about her father’s death.  This is a much more grounded, sane and adult book, and one that gives much more comfort.  It is beautifully written and constructed, and it shares the poise, groundedness and authenticity of its author.

2009, 342p.

Rich and Sandy are 40-something leftovers from the 1980s, still stuck in the victory of the Franklin River blockade that they look back to as the high point of their lives.  They met on the campaign and shifted to a small hippy country town together but their relationship broke up while their daughter Sophie was very young.  Sandy immersed herself in the companionship of her earth-mother friends, while Rich headed off around the world as a photojournalist.  Neither has moved on at all from their dreams of the early eighties: Sandy’s dreamcatchers and pottery are now tatty, dated and twee, while Rich’s career in photojournalism finds him washed up in the dead-end of editing  infotainment  segments for morning television.  The story opens as Rich re-establishes contact with his moody, anorexic, goth 15 year old daughter Sophie, and suggests a bushwalk to Cradle Mountain as a new start to their relationship.

Sandy is reluctant to let him back in to their lives; Sophie is curious and at first attracted by his footloose approach to life, especially compared with Sandy’s smothering neediness and flakiness.  But Rich, in his own way, is just as stuck in the 1980s as Sandy is,  just as blind to Sophie’s anorexia and just as flawed as a parent, whatever his initial attractiveness.  When he encourages Sophie to go for a walk off the tourist trail, they get lost and Sophie loses her illusions about him.

These are very human characters, and Kennedy teeters of the verge of parody, especially with Sandy.  She hones in on Sandy’s ineffectual, rather vacuous new-age, earthmother persona and Rich’s self-deception, cynicism and lack of commitment.  Sophie is a sullen, sneering adolescent, cocooned in her technology and affected world-weariness.  But there’s a recognizability about them all too, and an element of send-up that lacks the venom of  Christos Tsiolkas’ The Slap, to which this book has been compared.

This gently-skewering parody is acutely done, but after a while it didn’t seem to be going anywhere. But the second half of the book picks up pace and it becomes a real page-turner: I was literally sitting up in bed, wanting to finish it but despairing at how late it was becoming as I kept reading.

There are some fantastic interviews with the author: one on the Radio National Book Show and another at The Ember, and good blog posts by Lisa at ANZLitlovers and Kerryn Goldsworthy at Australian Literature Diary.  I must admit that, particularly after reading the interviews, I found nuances and depths in the book that I hadn’t picked up on at first reading.   I’m not sure why this is- I was aware of the references and paradoxes in the book, but almost needed to listen (or read) someone talking it over for them to coalesce for me.  I’m not sure whether this reflects a weakness in the book, or in me as a reader, or whether this is the sort of book that is best shared with others and talked about as much as read.

This is a good book.  I wonder if its references to MySpace and ipods will date it, but the observations of character and the wonderful descriptions of landscape will sustain it even when Sophie is just as dated and twee with her early-21st century technology as Sandy and Rich are with their 1980s idealism.

One of the most high-profile criminal cases of 1842 was that of the Plenty Valley bushrangers who were hanged on Judge Willis’ instructions in 1842.

The four Plenty Valley bushrangers embarked on a five-day spree on 26^th April 1842 that entailed eighteen robberies and eventuated in a shootout where one of bushrangers was killed and the leader of the captors, Henry Fowler, was injured through a gunshot wound.[1] After robberies on 26th-28th April around the Oakleigh/Mulgrave area, they turned northwards towards the Plenty Valley.

Click here to see a map of their exploits in the Plenty Valley

In her study of convict bushrangers, Jennifer McKinnon draws a distinction between “footpads” the often- unarmed bandits in small groups staying close to the main centres of population, and “banditti” in large armed and mounted gangs who operated in the interior.[2] She cautions, however, that the distinction between “footpads” and “banditti” is not a hard and fast one. Certainly the Plenty Valley bushrangers combine elements of both: they ranged around familiar, relatively settled territory in what are now fringe suburbs within riding distance of central Melbourne, where they had been employed previously. But they operated on horseback, at first in pairs, but later in a larger group of four, and possibly five, armed men.

To a certain extent they fit the archetype of social bandits and draw on a time-worn trope of

…the bold Robin Hood of their morning songs, and … the unfortunate victim of legal oppression, the captured of the chase….His reckless daring would be the noblest chivalry; and the jovial freedom of his manners, the frankest generosity.  His immoral jests would be treasured for posterity, and the éclat of his life and death would stimulate the worthy ambition of sympathizing souls.[3]

Graham Seal, likewise, identifies Robin Hood as the beginning of a coherent and continuous tradition of British outlaw heroes portrayed as

“friends of the poor, usually driven to outlawry by some injustice.  They are however, brave, courteous to women, and use violence only when it is unavoidable or in justified revenge.  Generally, they die bravely and usually through treachery.”[4]

Thus, we see the Plenty Valley bushrangers avidly pocketing the £63 they stole from Capt Gwatkin from the trading vessel Scout in a hold-up on the road to Dandenong, while giving 5 shillings of the Captain’s money to fellow-victim Frederick Pitman so that he can pay for his bed at the Travellers Rest Inn at nearby No-Good-Damper.[5] Paula Byrne’s study notes the extravagant dress often adopted by bushrangers, and here we see one of the Plenty Valley bushrangers resplendent in the scarlet-lined Austrian Hussars costume stolen from an earlier victim, complete with dangling sword, in a subversive and swaggering challenge to uniformed authority.[6] Food, too, was important: Byrne comments that settlers often recalled the exact food taken or consumed by bushrangers.[7] Hence we have the goose killed and thrown to Capt. Harrison’s cook with instructions to have it ready for their dinner the next day, and the roast ducks and herrings appropriated for their own breakfast when the bushrangers burst in on five men at Campbell Hunter’s station, the site of the final shoot-out.  We have the bravado of bushranger Jepps, nonchalantly standing outside the door of the hut, lighting his pipe with bank notes and, as Constable Vinge recalled later, challenging his captors:

After considering for a time he opened his arms and walked towards us, and then stood still for a while and said, ‘Gentlemen, I have robbed most of you that I see, but I want to get away!’  I answered ‘No; you will not get away’.  He then said ‘Gentlemen, rather than be taken to Melbourne and made a public show of on the gallows, shoot me’. I walked up and handcuffed him.[8]

Although there may not have been outright support from settler sympathizers, there does seem to be a degree of ambivalence amongst some of their victims.  An early victim, James Bruce Donaldson, may have been robbed by them one or two days previously, but did not report the crime.[9] The bushrangers took another settler, George Rider, hostage and ordered him to guide them to the next victim’s house where he interceded with the two women present, shared a champagne with the bushrangers, and was released with his watch.  Rider returned home with no attempt to alert the authorities, and returned the next day to act as intermediary between the besieged bushrangers and their captors.[10] He later handed in a sum of money for the prisoners’ defence, but Willis disallowed the use of the proceeds of crime for this purpose.[11]

However, the Plenty Valley bushrangers differ from the convict bushrangers in several important ways. Chronologically they fell between the convict bolter period of the 1820s and 1830s and the “golden age” of bushrangers in the 1860s.  During this hiatus, there was a marked decline in social prestige for bushrangers. With the abolition of assignment in the early 1840s, they lost their raison d’etre as social bandits, and they had not yet taken on the mantle of exemplars of the social struggle over land of the 1860s.[12]

Moreover, and importantly, the Plenty Valley bushrangers were not perceived to be convict bushrangers at the time. Their leader, 27-year old John Williams was a Catholic bounty migrant, thought to be Irish but actually born in England.  Martin Fogarty was also described as an Irish bounty migrant.  Charles Ellis, aged 18 was English and appeared to have arrived as a free immigrant, and Daniel Jepps was a 27 year old American whaler, said to have “had the air of having once moved in a different sphere”.[13] Although Ellis was later described as “an old lag from Van Diemen’s Land” and Fogarty was said to have been forced to leave Ireland after turning Queens Evidence in a number of murder cases, the public perception, at least prior to the trial, was that they were not ex-convicts.[14] Hence Willis’ address to the jury focused on the need for attention to be paid during the selection process to the character of incoming immigrants- a variation on his more common warnings about the degradation of society occasioned by convict gangs employed on public works and expirees from Van Diemens Land.[15] In the mirror that Willis held up to the community in his courtroom addresses, Port Phillip was not a penal colony.  Indeed Willis prefaced his Latin-laden address to the jury hearing the Plenty Valley bushrangers’ trial by noting that it seems

“as if the contamina [sic] of similar enormities in the penal colonies had extended its baneful pestilence to this district- a district colonized by free emigrants, not peopled by convicts, and therefore reasonably expected to be the less polluted.”[16]

In a settlement that distinguished itself from the older penal colonies, this first incidence of bushranger activity elicited a strong public response.  No fewer than three police groups, headed by ex-Chief Constable ‘Tulip’ Wright; Crown Land Commissioner Powlett and Constable Vinge, and two groups of civilians converged on Lowland Flats for the final confrontation.  One of these volunteer groups was a contingent of five men from the Melbourne Club who were feted as “the gay and gallant ‘Five’, the heroes of the time, whose bravery was theme on every tongue” [17] Their earlier indiscretions of dueling, insolvency and altercations at the horse races were forgiven as the gentlemen of Melbourne drank their health at a public dinner and the Masonic Lodges awarded three of them with gold medallions.  The formation of a Yeomanry Corps amongst the “gentleman residents” of the District for the protection of the community was proposed by Police Magistrate F. B. St John, and the Plenty Valley settlers offered to form a volunteer corps among themselves- an offer endorsed by the “resident ladies” of Plenty Valley in a rare petition with only female signatures.[18] In the immediate aftermath of the capture, rumours circulated that other fugitives from the Goulburn River had conspired to meet with the Plenty Valley bushrangers on the Maribyrnong River where they would wait in hiding until an opportunity arose to steal a vessel to make their escape.[19] There was heightened agitation for surveillance of the sawyers and timber cutters along the rivers as anxiety rose about the need for social control of “skulkers of various descriptions” and expired convicts from the penal colonies, especially Van Diemens Land, flooding into the Port Phillip district.[20]

So, what happened when the captured bushrangers encountered Judge Willis in the courtroom?? Ah- for that you’ll have to wait for the completed thesis (from which this was cut- as if you can’t tell!) and the supporting documentary and soap opera.  Suffice to say, the three surviving bushrangers were hanged on 28th June 1842- three of the six executions carried out during 1842 under Willis’ sentencing.

[2] Jennifer A McKinnon, Convict Bushrangers in NSW 1824-1834, La Trobe University, 1979,  61-62.

[3] James Bonwick, The Bushrangers: illustrating the early days of Van Diemen’s Land (1856), Hobart, Fullers Bookshop, 1967, p. 89.

[4] Graham Seal, Ned Kelly in Popular Tradition, Melbourne, Hyland House, 1980, p. 31.

[5] Mann, The Plenty Bushrangers of 1842: the first Europeans hanged in Victoria, p. 5.

[6] Paula J Byrne, Criminal Law and Colonial Subject: New South Wales 1810-1830, Cambridge (Eng), Melbourne, Cambridge University Press, 1993, p. 134.; Mann, The Plenty Bushrangers of 1842: the first Europeans hanged in Victoria, p. 15.

[7] Byrne, Criminal Law and Colonial Subject: New South Wales 1810-1830, p. 135.

[8] Constable George Vinge ‘Bushrangers in the Olden Times’ The Argus, Friday 6^th August 1880.

[9] Mann, The Plenty Bushrangers of 1842: the first Europeans hanged in Victoria, p. 12.

[10] Ibid., p. 25.

[11] Port Phillip Patriot 12 May 1842.

[12] Michael Sturma, Vice in a Vicious Society: Crime and Convicts St Lucia Qld, University of Queensland Press, 1983, p. 101.

[13] Mann, The Plenty Bushrangers of 1842: the first Europeans hanged in Victoria, pp. 2-3.; Port Phillip Herald 20 May 1842.

[14] On Ellis as expired convict see Macfarlane, 1842 The Public Executions at Melbourne, p. 28. and Fogarty as exile Port Phillip Herald 20 May 1842.

[15] Port Phillip Herald 13 May 1842.  For his more-frequent commentary on the dangers of convicts and ex-convicts see Port Phillip Herald 28 May 1841; 17 August 1841; 14 January 1842.

[16] Port Phillip Herald 13 May 1842

[17] Finn, The chronicles of early Melbourne, 1835 to 1852 : historical, anecdotal and personal / by “Garryowen”, p. 408.

[18] St.John to La Trobe 30 April 1842, PROV 19, Unit 33, 42/1366; Campbell Hunter and men of the Plenty to La Trobe, 5 May 1842 PROV 16 Unit 3 42/592;  Ann Bear and ladies of the Plenty to La Trobe 5 May 1842 PROV 16 Unit 3 42/593.

[19] Mann, The Plenty Bushrangers of 1842: the first Europeans hanged in Victoria, pp. 29-30.

[20] La Trobe to E. D. Thomson 4 May 1842 PROV 16 Unit 12 42/571   This was not an unjustified fear.  Sturma notes that of 5000 convicts freed by servitude or holding conditional pardons recorded leaving Van Diemens Land between 1847 and 1849, over 3,800 departed for Port Phillip compared with less than 250 for Sydney.  Cited in Sturma, Vice in a Vicious Society: Crime and Convicts p. 54.

1998,  307p

If you ask a Melbournian about William Hobson, most of us would mutter something about Hobson’s Bay or the Hobson’s Bay City Council.  I hadn’t really thought about who ‘Hobson’ was: I assumed that he was an old sea-dog living down somewhere around Williamstown, and when I thought hard about it, I wasn’t even really sure if I knew where Hobson’s Bay was.  “Somewhere in Port Phillip Bay” I would airily gesture- thereby setting my Uncle Peter’s teeth on edge over the tautological use of  Port and Phillip and Bay in the same phrase.  (“It’s Port Phillip, Janine, – the Port named after Governor Phillip; not Port Phillip Bay”)

Speaking of which, Governor Arthur Phillip was born on this day 1738.

Back to Hobson’s Bay.  It is the bay immediately at the mouth of the Yarra River, with Williamstown on its west shore and Port Melbourne and Middle Park round to the east.  And Hobson, for whom it is named, was not a long-term Melbourne resident but instead spent a three-month stint between September and December 1836 surveying and charting the coastline of Port Phillip, returning to Sydney before a second brief trip accompanying Governor Bourke for an official visit and exploratory expedition in March 1837.  Hobson  was impressed with Port Phillip and was already dreaming of the fortune that could be made there.  In his letters to his wife he expressed hopes of perhaps being appointed Governor there in the future.  That didn’t happen.  Instead, he was sent off to New Zealand to investigate conflict there and on the basis of the report he submitted to the Colonial Office, he was appointed Consul to New Zealand in August 1839.  There seems to have been some slippage in the terminology of Consul/Lieutenant Governor/ Governor that probably signalled much about precedence and status at the time, but which is less significant to us now.  After meeting with the recently-appointed Governor Gipps in Sydney in December 1839, he sailed off to New Zealand arriving 29th January 1840 and was not to leave the country again before his death in 1842.  He didn’t muck around when he arrived: the first copy of the  Treaty of Waitangi was signed  on 6th February, just over a week after his arrival.

Which is, of course, where my interest comes in.  On the flight over to New Zealand, I read a review of Paul Moon’s latest book The Edges of Empire: New Zealand in the mid-Nineteenth Century.  I hadn’t heard of Paul Moon- not that that necessarily means anything- but I had heard of Cynthia Orange and other historians who have written about the Treaty of Waitangi.  From his Wikipedia entry, he seems to be a prolific and at times controversial historian from Auckland University of Technology- perhaps an unusual location for an academic historian?

Certainly in his preface he distances himself from other historians, their methodology and their debates.

In preparing this biography, I have cautiously avoided trying to make the subject conform to a particular theme or line of argument, and any themes that do arise tend to be incidental…Consequently, many of the episodes in this work have been retraced in the way that they unfolded for Hobson at the time, rather than with the didactic and ’superior’ sort of hindsight that necessarily distorts as it attempts to simplify and clarify. (p12)

This rather sanctimonious approach does not serve him well.  In his eschewal of historiography and debate, he relies heavily on fairly lengthy slabs of official correspondence and primary sources predominantly from the New Zealand end.  The Colonial Office is depicted as a lumbering, compromised body ‘over there’- a simplistic approach which overlooks the contested nature of lobbying politics and the machinations of individuals and factions.  These political currents are well described by Adams in Fatal Necessity and more recently in Zoe Laidlaw’s analysis of the Aborigines Select Committee, the lobby group that lay behind much of the Colonial Office approach to indigenous affairs right across the empire.   Moon does, despite his protestations, engage with historical debates, most particularly over the Treaty of Waitangi, but does not extend what I conceive to be the courtesy of naming the historians or their arguments-  instead prefacing his own sallies with “It has been suggested that…“  It’s also striking how few recent references he cites in his bibliography: there is a heavy reliance on works from the early 20th century or the 1960s.  He critiques Paul Scholefield’s ‘hagiographical’ and ‘apologetic’ (p. 12) treatment of Hobson in 1934, but doesn’t take up any of his points in detail beyond this blanket condemnation.

It was this prickliness towards other historians that made me rather distrustful of his own history-writing.  I found myself reading it with a bookmark firmly inserted at the end of each chapter to check his sources, with frequent reference to the bibliography at the back to double-check the date of the reference: an unwieldy and inappropriate format in a history book.  While I was reading it, I found myself frustrated by the elision of primary and secondary sources, but on flipping through to write this review I couldn’t locate the examples that so annoyed me at the time (which does make me wonder about my own reader-response, and what prompted it, at the time).

By concentrating on the time 1840 to 1842, Moon does not pick up on the significance of Hobson’s naval background, a theme explored so well in Greg Dening’s Mr Bligh’s Bad Language and in Jane Samson’s Imperial Benevolence: Making British Authority in the Pacific.   He also skips over the significance of the patronage of Lord Auckland, after whom Hobson named the town he chose as capital city.

However, his approach does shed light on the contest  between the missionaries and the Wakefieldian-influenced land settlement company New Zealand Company, both of which vied for Hobson’s attention and decried his limitations to their patrons back in England.  Add to this the corrosive influence of self-serving and canny civil servants,  plucked from obscurity in Sydney on  Hobson’s way to New Zealand, who were just as avaricious as any land entrepreneurs in London or in Port Nicholson, the rival North Island city settled by the New Zealand Company.  Then, if that’s not enough, overlay this with Hobson’s own evident ill-health, evident even to me 160 years later,  looking at the shaky and at times child-like signature of Hobson’s name on different versions of the Treaty of Waitangi.

References

Peter Adams Fatal Necessity: British Intervention in New Zealand.1977

Greg Dening Mr Bligh’s Bad Language, 1994

Zoe Laidlaw ‘Integrating metropolitian, colonial and imperial histories- the Aborigines Select Committee of 1835-7′ in Tracey Banivanua Mar and Julie Evans Writing Colonial Histories: Comparative Perspectives, University of Melbourne 2002.

Cynthia Orange The Treaty of Waitangi, 1987.

Jane Samson Imperial benevolence: making British Authority in the Pacific 1998.

Paul Scholefield Captain William Hobson: First Governor of New Zealand 1934.

…if the American private security firm Blackwater changed its name to “Xe” so that people would stop talking about it because no-one could pronounce the name?

When this was distributed as the next month’s read for my CAE bookgroup (a.k.a. “The Ladies Who Say Oooooh”) my heart sank.  “I’ve read this”, I thought.  But as I read further into it, I realised that it was not a clone of  Amy Tan 3-female-generation saga, as I expected it to be.  I had not, in fact, read it and now that I’ve finished I wish I hadn’t anyway.

This is a grubby, self-serving, vindictive book.  The author has left her (now deceased) parents’ names unaltered, along with that of her husband.  She did, however, change the names of her siblings.  I think that the issue of changing or not changing names in an autobiography really highlights the sore spots and anxieties in an author’s telling of their story.

The book is one long howl of wounded dignity and pain.  The author’s mother died after giving birth to her, and her father remarried a young, beautiful French-Chinese woman that the family called ‘Niang’, an alternative form of “mother”. The besotted father is putty in her hands, and betrays his allegiances to the children of his first wife- although admittedly, the relationship between a widowed father and the child whose birth precipitated the mother’s death must always be a fraught one.

This is a toxic family.  Niang certainly does appear a cold, manipulating, scheming woman who sows jealousy and dissesion amongst her children and their half-siblings.  They are all- parents and children- dominated by the love of money, ruthless in their determination to get ahead; remorseless in their own quest for parental approval.  The author, as narrator, portrays herself always as the innocent victim of others’ perfidy- a rather self-serving and perhaps not always accurate assessment.  There is no loyalty to family, and certainly no loyalty to country among the immediate family- they collect and discard nationalities at will in their thrust to get ahead.

Why did she write this book?  One can only think that it is her revenge, served cold and in print.  And wait- there’s more!  Not only did she write this book, but she rehashed her revenge  in her second book Chinese Cinderella which from its description, sounds like the same book fictionalized.

I feel complicit in her vindictiveness by even having read this book.

…that the clutch bag, which is supposed to be all the rage for Fashions on the Field is another way of ensuring that women remain decorative and useless.  As if the hobbling high heels are not enough, now we have to shuffle along,  clutch bag in hand or wedged tightly under the arm.   How is one to hold a drink, hold on to one’s hat, nibble on a canape etc. with just one hand?  Not really my problem and not high on the world’s priorities but frustrating and demeaning nonetheless