A New Life in our History: the settlement of Australia and New Zealand: volume I The Fatal Shore ? (1780s to 1830s)

By Justin Cahill

A New Life in our History offers a fresh view of Australian and New Zealand history. It tells, for the first time, the epic story of their settlement from the perspective of ordinary people.

Beginning with the arrest of Solomon Bockerah and his transportation to Sydney on the notorious Second Fleet, it follows the spectacular rise and fall of the emancipist Sydney merchant John Laurie, the arrival of the Lang family on the ‘First Four Ships’ to Canterbury, the Nicholson family’s survival of the infamous Highland Clearances and the establishment of the Croydon Bush village settlement in rural Southland.

It also tells how their descendants answered the call of King and Country, following the men who served at Gallipoli and along the Western Front during World War I and those who served during the Battle of Britain and Italian campaign during World War II.

Over twenty years in the making, A New Life in our History is an unprecedented attempt to show how ordinary people make history happen.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Justin Cahill
• Release date: Apr 1, 2014
• ISBN: 9781311402103

Justin Cahill

Welcome to my Smashwords profile.I am a New Zealand-born writer, based in Sydney. My main interests are nature and history.My thesis was on the negotiations between the British and Chinese governments over the return of Hong Kong to China in 1997. It was used as a source in Dr John Wong’s Deadly Dreams: Opium, Imperialism and the Arrow War (1856-1860) in China, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1998, the standard work on that conflict.I wrote a column on the natural history of the Wolli Creek Valley for the Earlwood News (sadly, now defunct) between 1992 and 1998.My short biography of the leading Australian ornithologist, Alfred North (1855-1917), was published in 1998.I write regular reviews on books about history for my blog,’ Justin Cahill Reviews’ and Booktopia. I’m also a regular contributor to the Sydney Morning Herald's 'Heckler' column.My current projects include completing the first history of European settlement in Australia and New Zealand told from the perspective of ordinary people and a study of the extinction of Sydney’s native birds.After much thought, I decided to make my work available on Smashwords. Australia and New Zealand both have reasonably healthy print publishing industries. But, like it or not, the future lies with digital publishing.So I’m grateful to Mark Coker for having the vision to establish Smashwords and for the opportunity to distribute my work on it.

Book preview

A NEW LIFE IN OUR HISTORY

THE SETTLEMENT OF AUSTRALIA AND NEW ZEALAND

I

THE FATAL SHORE ?

(1780s to 1830s)

Justin Cahill

Smashwords Edition

Copyright 2014 Justin Cahill

Smashwords Edition, License Notes

This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy.

Please direct all inquiries to Justin Cahill at

PO Box 108, Lindfield, 2070

New South Wales, Australia

or e-mail to [e-mail]

To the memory of my grandparents,

Doris and Valentine Biggar.

"I have written my work … as a possession for all time."

- Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian War. I.22.4.

"Scottie: Midge, who do you know that’s an authority

on San Francisco history ? …

Midge: Professor Saunders, over in Berkeley.

Scottie: Not that kind of history. The small stuff ! About

people you never heard of !"

- Alec Coppel and Samuel Taylor, Vertigo, 1957.

CONTENTS

Introduction

Introduction to the revised edition

Names and documents

1. Coming into focus

2. Solomon Bockerah

3. The long revolution

4. The convict colony

5. Richard Atkins Esq.

6. Rise and fall of the House of Laurie

7. The Fame and the Glory

8. Forgery, seduction and a new beginning

oOo

INTRODUCTION

"Let there be no mistake …the most numerous and most forgotten

class of our nation deserves a new life in our history".

-Augustan Thierry, Letters on the History of France, 1820.

This is a short history of the settlement of Australia and New Zealand, told from the perspective of ordinary people. This makes it different from previous histories of these countries. They are generally told from the point of view of government, commercial and religious interests. So the views we read about are usually those of governors and prime ministers, the clergy, wealthy merchants or, in Australia, celebrity criminals. Ordinary people living their day-to-day lives are generally absent. When they are mentioned, their treatment is usually cursory. They are passed over with bland generalisations or lumped together and reduced to a broad series of social or economic trends. At best, they are described as ‘public opinion’. At worst, they are ‘the mob’ or ‘the rabble.’

This omission is difficult to understand, especially in Australia or New Zealand. Both countries resulted from unprecedented social experiments that involved hundreds of thousands of individuals from all walks of life. But while there are many books on the transportation of convicts to Botany Bay and the efforts to re-create English society in New Zealand, ordinary people are rarely included in the history they helped to make.

Who are these ‘ordinary people’? Thierry, the French historian, described them as "…the most numerous and most forgotten class of our nation". But to me, they are simply those who have not yet featured in our national history. As that is the majority of people, they share very few characteristics. They do not belong to any particular cultural, social, sexual or economic group. There is a good case for telling national history from their perspective. As Edward Thompson noted in his influential work Making of the English Working Class, they contributed "…by conscious efforts, to the making of history". Even though they were often affected by events beyond their control, we can still recognise them as individuals and appreciate their contributions to national development. Previous histories of Australia and New Zealand have rarely done this.

Why this has happened is difficult to explain. There is no shortage of material. Volumes of letters, diaries, court records, newspaper articles and photographs have been preserved in archives, libraries and museums throughout Australia and New Zealand and posted on the internet or both. Some historians have used these sources to provide an insight into the lives of convicts, traders or early settlers. But their works focus on small groups involved in particular events or cover a short period of time.

This book follows the experiences of eight families during the settlement or, depending on your view, occupation of Australia and New Zealand from the 1790s to the 1940s. These ordinary people provide an example of the new cast of characters that should feature in our national history. Solomon Bockerah was transported to New South Wales on one of the ships of the Second Fleet. Ann Bockerah and Sarah, her daughter, lived with Richard Atkins, the Colony’s scandal-plagued Deputy Judge Advocate. John Laurie, Sarah Bockerah’s husband, was transported to Sydney for larceny. He made and lost a fortune in the rum trade and became a pawn in a Tasmanian constitutional crisis before being transported a second time to Moreton Bay, near Brisbane.

The Lauries hoped to recover their fortunes in New Zealand. They arrived at Kawhia in the North Island shortly before the country was annexed by Britain. While there they traded with and married into the Ngāti Mahuta of the Waikato. Others soon joined them. The Langs were encouraged by Edward Gibbon Wakefield’s vision of re-creating rural England on the Canterbury Plains. The Nicholsons, after surviving the Highland Clearances, the Georgiana mutiny and the Victorian goldfields, moved to Southland.

Many were caught up in a kaleidoscope of local and international events. The Lauries left Kawhia to avoid the civil wars that ravaged to North Island. The Edwards family followed the Otago gold rush. Mary Lang struggled against the local prohibition movement to keep the licence to her Invercargill pub. Their descendants gradually converged at Croydon Bush, a remote and beautiful farming district near the southern end of the South Island. From there, George Biggar guided the New Zealand government’s geological survey over the rugged country around Dusky Bay and Preservation Inlet in the south-west of the South Island. Others left to fight for Empire in South Africa, Gallipoli and the muddy, blood-soaked trenches along the Western Front.

While this book focuses on ordinary people it does not leave out the usual, more famous subjects of national history. Omitting figures like Lachlan Macquarie, John Macarthur or Sir George Grey would distort reality and remove familiar reference points. Plus many of the ordinary people who make up the main characters of this book interacted with them. I simply take a broader view of who should be included in national history and attempt to present it from a different perspective.

While this is an attempt to give ordinary people a new life in our history, it is not a Marxist ‘people’s history’ along the lines of Howard Zinn’s A People’s History Of The United States. Marx had some profound insights into social and economic history and I am happy to acknowledge my intellectual debts - it could be said a history of ordinary people is Marxist project. But those looking for a work that puts theory before fact will be disappointed. Nor is this a social history or a survey of how ordinary people lived in the past. It is not an account of what they ate and drank, what their homes were like, the occupations they followed, their amusements or sexual habits.

Instead I try to show how the experiences of some ordinary people give us an insight into one of the wider issues in our national history - whether Australia and New Zealand met their original purposes. There were very different visions for their future. The British government established New South Wales as a penal colony, the ‘Fatal Shore’ where criminals would be exiled and punished. By contrast, in New Zealand colonial reformers hoped to create a social paradise free from the unemployment and poverty of nineteenth century Britain. But did Australia and New Zealand live up to these expectations ? Was Australia really the ‘Fatal Shore’ ? Was New Zealand ‘Paradise Found’ ? The lives of a small number of people cannot provide conclusive answers to such broad questions. But their experiences provide specific examples of ordinary people who, willingly or otherwise, participated in forming these new societies. It is from these individual stories that the true scope of our national history emerges.

Roseville

2007

oOo

INTRODUCTION TO THE REVISED EDITION

This is a revised edition of my history of early Australia and New Zealand told from the perspective of ordinary people. Revised editions are awkward creatures. They provide an opportunity to correct errors, add new material and revise the text. But new details can disturb a carefully structured original and, frankly, there should be a limit to how often someone can re-cast his thoughts. It is not for nothing that Roy Porter warns of "the fate of the unfortunate person who pulled on a loose thread on a pullover and quickly ended up with nothing but a heap of used wool."

While I have tried to avoid significant unravelling of either the book or myself, there was no escape from revising A New Life. The original edition was privately published in 2007 and is out of print. Since then I have found, been given or stumbled on a significant amount of new material. It includes papers collected by the Fiordland historians, Alexander and Neil Begg, about George Biggar and the letters sent home by his sons from Gallipoli and the Western front during World War I. The digitisation of New Zealand and early New South Wales newspapers, posted on the Papers Past and National Library of Australia’s websites, has provided an extraordinary amount of new information. New documentaries and sound recordings, made or held overseas, are now freely available on youtube. I also decided to extend the book up to the end of World War II. So it now includes the experiences of Irving ("Bunny’) Smith, who was a pilot in the Battle of Britain and the famous Amiens raid, and my great-uncle, Lewis Nicholson, who served in the New Zealand Forces during the Italian campaign.

On reflection, I was hard on a number of figures in the first edition, particularly John Macarthur, Ralph Darling and Wiremu Te Wheoro, the Māori statesman. It is easy to write a damning portrait of someone with whom you are out of sympathy. But everyone has their share of virtues and flaws, which may or may not be adequately documented by surviving records. Their motives and interests were occasionally ambiguous and liable to change. Those writing about them were often prone to exaggerate, jump to conclusions and rush to judgment to make a point. Historical figures deserve to be met on their own terms without a layer of anachronistic judgment - particularly where they faced unprecedented circumstances. The challenge is to present this mosaic of qualities, interests and contingencies as accurately as possible.

I have also come to hold a broader view of what European settlement in Australia and New Zealand represent. In the first edition, I suggested they were attempts to reconstruct elsewhere the dying world of pre-industrial England. I see them now in less prescriptive terms. They demonstrate how England used old methods to solve recurring problems. In other words, they are examples of how it used transportation and colonisation to relieve its growing population and unemployment - problems that were growing at an unprecedented rate by the time the First Fleet sailed for Botany Bay. While I still believe they were important experiments based on particular social and economic ideals, those ideals did not necessarily dictate their ultimate development. The on-going destruction of the natural environment, the alienation of the Aborigines and the Māori, the existence of poverty and increasing social inequality show the Australian and New Zealand experiments are far from complete. We remain a work in progress.

I have detailed the many fresh debts of gratitude incurred while revising A New Life below. The work was originally dedicated to my grandparents on their 65th wedding anniversary. Sadly they both passed away in 2007. Several others who generously assisted me over the years have also died. They include my grandmother’s sister, Annie Dickey, her cousin Marjorie Copeland, my grandfather’s cousins Isabel Smith, Belle Ross and Marianne Harris, my mother’s cousin, Margaret von Sprang and Stewart Stockdale (‘Dale’) Smith, who collected valuable material on the Laurie and Perry families. Robert Hughes, the Australian writer whose The Fatal Shore sparked my interest in our convict past, passed away in New York in 2012.

The support of Katherine Caruana, now my wife, has been constant – in some ways this has become her book too. As the generation that lived through World War II passes on, a new one has appeared. I write this with one eye on our children, Eleanor and Thomas, and their cousins. Our short, but dramatic history - with all its triumphs, tragedies and lessons - is theirs to continue.

Finally, to James Belich, the New Zealand historian who observed the early advocates of colonisation wanted …decent working people…willing to serve substantial apprenticeship as labourers and servants… but suggested that what they received …is an area where the myths are stronger than the published evidence, I simply wish to say hello.

Lindfield

2014

oOo

NAMES AND DOCUMENTS

As parents often named their children after themselves, many of the people in this book had the same first name and surname. To avoid confusion over which woman is being referred to, I have included her maiden name in parentheses where she is mentioned after her marriage. So Annie Laurie is, for example, referred to as Annie Edwards (Laurie) after her marriage to William Edwards. But I have only done this where it is not obvious from the context who I am referring to.

To avoid confusion over which man is referred to, I have given them numbers. But again I have only done this where it is not obvious from the context which man I am referring to. There are exceptions. John and Sarah Laurie’s son John was known as ‘John Laurie Junior’. So I have referred to John Laurie, his father, as John Laurie Senior to distinguish father and son.

Further, some men were known by a nickname. For example, William Biggar was usually called ‘Bill’, Stanley Herbert Perry was known as ‘Stan’ and Richard Lang was known as ‘Dick’. To avoid anachronism, I have generally used their nickname, except where it is not obvious from the context who I am referring to.

As there has been some variation in the spelling of Māori words over time, I have generally adopted the spelling given in the Te Aka Māori-English, English-Māori Dictionary and Index, except for names, where I have relied on the Dictionary of New Zealand Biography and places, where I have used the spelling adopted by Land Information New Zealand.

When quoting from contemporary newspaper articles or documents, such as family letters, I have retained their original spellings and forms rather than modernise them to retain the integrity of the text. They include, for example, the use of ‘f’ for ‘s’ in eighteenth century documents. But I have given the modern equivalent in parentheses after a particular word where it is not clear from the context who or what is referred to. I have also broken up long paragraphs to make the text easier to read.

oOo

1. Coming into focus

"Revolutions are not made by fate but by men ... the great revolutions in the eighteenth century were made by many lesser men banded together." Jacob Bronowski, The Ascent of Man, 1973.

i

The people who feature in this book first appear in the historical record in the late eighteenth century. During their lives, a long-established world was giving way to something new. They knew it was happening and, eventually, gave it a name - the Enlightenment. It, in turn, was a continuation of two earlier periods, the Renaissance and Reformation. During these times, Western Europe’s philosophers and scientists pushed aside the medieval beliefs and structures they had inherited and looked for rational explanations for all things. "Dare to know" Immanuel Kant challenged - and many did. Nothing was immune from scrutiny. The entire social order - governments, aristocracies, the Church - all came under challenge.

Gradually, the old order gave way to new forms based on reason, liberty and nationalism. In 1588 the Dutch, having thrown out their Spanish rulers, established a republic. After two civil wars, the English abolished the monarchy and executed their king in 1649. On 2 July 1776, the representatives of England’s colonies on the east coast of North America declared it "self-evident" that all men are created equal. Twelve years later, they gathered in Philadelphia to draw up the first modern democratic constitution. Soon afterwards the French established a republic, then deposed and guillotined their king. These changes were not necessarily permanent or consistent. Many parts of Europe were slow to respond the new ideas - some even had a change of heart. The English restored their monarchy in 1660. So did the French - twice. But these times mark the emergence of the society we have today.

There were also significant changes to social and economic life. The agricultural system that had dominated European communities since medieval times was slowly eclipsed by the growth of modern capitalism. This transformed the relationships between people and how they made a living. Ultimately, there would be a new focus on the individual. Ordinary people were no longer anonymous subjects bound to local magnates or the Church. Now, they were citizens.

ii

For us, over two hundred years later, there is much that was strange and much that was familiar. Men wore horsehair wigs, as barristers in some countries still do now. Mozart wrote masterpieces we listen to today. On 1 January 1788 in London John Walter re-launched his newspaper, the Daily Universal Register, as The Times. It is still in print today. By contrast, Germany did not exist. The Pope governed large parts of what is now Italy. The Ottomans ruled over Turkey, stretches of Eastern Europe and parts of Northern Africa, including Greece and Egypt. China and Japan had closed themselves to the world. What became Australia and New Zealand were barely known. Britain was ruled by King George III, often known as ‘Mad King George’. It was a global power, much as the United States is today. London, its capital, was Western Europe’s largest, richest city and a centre of international trade. It is there we first meet the subjects of this book.

2. Solomon Bockerah

i

By 1788, London was home to about a million people. They included many refugees, such as Jews and French Protestants who had fled poverty or persecution. Among them was Solomon Bockerah.

Solomon’s family had almost certainly fled to London to escape the pogroms that regularly swept Europe. He probably lived in the Jewish quarter around Aldgate and Houndsditch and was doubtlessly quite poor. Apart from these vague speculations, little is known about his past. It appears Solomon was a professional criminal. He belonged to a gang of petty crooks, including Isaac Bell, Robert Hobbs and Abraham Abrahams. During the evening of Saturday 1 November 1788 they went out searching for easy victims - stragglers lost in Algate’s maze of narrow, winding streets and lanes. They went along Bishop Gate Street, Cheapside and Grace Church Street "…till near Eight o’Clock but met with no Succefs".