Dreamers and Schemers: A Political History of Australia

By Frank Bongiorno

A landmark book - the first full political history of Australia

In this compelling and comprehensive work, renowned historian Frank Bongiorno presents a social and cultural history of Australia's political life, from pre-settlement Indigenous systems to the present day.

Depicting a wonderful parade of dreamers and schemers, Bongiorno surveys moments of political renewal and sheds fresh light on our democratic life. From local pubs and meeting halls to the parliament and cabinet; from pamphleteers and stump orators to party agents and operatives -- this enthralling account looks at the political insiders in the halls of power, as well as the agitators and outsiders who sought to shape the nation from the margins.

A work of political history like no other, Dreamers and Schemers will transform the way you look at Australian politics.

'With acuity and grace, Bongiorno divines the soul of the nation … All told with a cheeky eye for detail and nose for skullduggery by a historian in full archival, narrative and rhetorical flight. A landmark work' --Clare Wright

'Bongiorno is one of our premier historians and this is his masterwork. An original take on our politics and people, written with an open mind and warm Australian heart.' --George Megalogenis

'Penetrating and vividly written, this a political history that broadens our understanding of politics; one that offers genuinely fresh insights and resists tidy generalisations. From First Nations politics to the democracy sausage, Dreamers and Schemers never disappoints. It will stand as one of the most essential works in Australian history for decades to come.' --Mark McKenna

Shortlisted for the Australian History Prize in the NSW Premier's History Awards

• Language: English
• Publisher: Black Inc. Books
• Release date: Nov 1, 2022
• ISBN: 9781743822722

Frank Bongiorno

Frank Bongiorno is professor of history at the Australian National University and author of the award-winning The Sex Lives of Australians. He has written for the Monthly, the Australian and Inside Story.

Book preview

PRAISE FOR DREAMERS AND SCHEMERS

‘Penetrating and vividly written, this a political history that broadens our understanding of politics; one that offers genuinely fresh insights and resists tidy generalisations. From First Nations politics to the democracy sausage, Dreamers and Schemers never disappoints. It will stand as one of the most essential works of Australian history for decades to come.’ Mark McKenna

‘With acuity and grace, Frank Bongiorno divines the soul of the nation, not on distant battlefields or down glimmering mineshafts, but in the cut and thrust of everlasting political contestation. A masterful, sweeping account of the ideas, aspirations and imagination that have fired Australians’ relationship to power and its sometimes fair, often sordid distribution. All told with a cheeky eye for detail and nose for skullduggery by a historian in full archival, narrative and rhetorical flight. A landmark work of Australian political history destined to be savoured by teachers, students and lovers of history alike.’ Clare Wright

‘Bongiorno is one of our premier historians and this is his masterwork. An original take on our politics and people, written with an open mind and warm Australian heart.’ George Megalogenis

‘A perceptive, lucid and wry history of Australian politics. With his characteristic eye for humane detail, Bongiorno reveals what we, the Australian people, have demanded from those who represent us, and the ways that politicians and activists have responded. This rich, sweeping history is an essential primer for all Australians, especially the dreamers and schemers who seek to lead us today.’ Michelle Arrow

‘Bongiorno’s carefully distilled and astutely crafted Dreamers and Schemers brings a singular clarity to our political journey as a nation. He writes the Australian story like no other, with a sharp and sensitive intellect that allows multiple voices and perspectives to speak. Essential reading for anyone wanting to tread the past of Australia’s formation and to peer into the future for a glimpse of what might be next.’ Miriam Corowa

Also by Frank Bongiorno

The People’s Party: Victorian Labor and the Radical Tradition, 1875–1914

A Little History of the Australian Labor Party (with Nick Dyrenfurth)

The Sex Lives of Australians: A History

The Eighties: The Decade That Transformed Australia

Black Inc. acknowledges the Australian Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples as the first inhabitants of the nation and the traditional custodians of the lands on which we work. We pay respects to their elders past and present.

Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people are advised that this book contains images and names of people who have passed away.

Published by La Trobe University Press in conjunction with Black Inc.

22–24 Northumberland Street

Collingwood VIC 3066, Australia

[e-mail]

www.blackincbooks.com

www.latrobeuniversitypress.com.au

La Trobe University plays an integral role in Australia’s public intellectual life, and is recognised globally for its research excellence and commitment to ideas and debate. La Trobe University Press publishes books of high intellectual quality, aimed at general readers. Titles range across the humanities and sciences, and are written by distinguished and innovative scholars. La Trobe University Press books are produced in conjunction with Black Inc., an independent Australian publishing house. The members of the LTUP Editorial Board are Vice-Chancellor’s Fellows Emeritus Professor Robert Manne and Dr Elizabeth Finkel, and Morry Schwartz and Chris Feik of Black Inc.

Copyright © Frank Bongiorno 2022

Frank Bongiorno asserts his right to be known as the author of this work.

ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form by any means electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise without the prior consent of the publishers.

9781760640095 (paperback)

9781743822722 (ebook)

Cover design by Tristan Main

Text design and typesetting by Marilyn de Castro

Cover illustrations: ‘Sketch of kangaroo and emu for draft Coat of Arms’:

National Archives of Australia; wattle illustration: Anna Szonn/Shutterstock

In memory of Stuart Macintyre (1947–2021)

For a’ that, an’ a’ that,

It’s comin yet for a’ that,

That Man to Man the warld o’er

Shall brothers be for a’ that.

Robert Burns

CONTENTS

Introduction

1.Autocracy, Community and Democracy: From Earliest Times to 1855

2.Making Democracy Work: 1856–90

3.A New Australia: 1891–1913

4.Loyalty and Interest: 1914–39

5.War and Peace: 1939–49

6.The Good Times: 1949–66

7.Revolt, Reason and Reaction: 1966–82

8.Australia Remade? 1983–99

9.‘The Glimmer of Twilight’: 2000–19

Conclusion: In the Age of COVID-19

Picture Section

Acknowledgements

Endnotes

Credits

Index

INTRODUCTION

The memorial service for Gough Whitlam, who died on 21 October 2014, was a grand event in a nation that likes to imagine itself as more relaxed than most in its civic rituals. Two thousand people packed the Sydney Town Hall, a mixture of dignitaries – including the then Liberal Party prime minister, Tony Abbott, and six former prime ministers – and fortunate members of the public who gained their tickets in a hotly contested ballot. There were twenty Gurindji people from the Northern Territory among the mourners, a reminder of that moment in 1975 when Whitlam had ceremonially poured soil into the hands of Gurindji elder Vincent Lingiari. Paul Kelly and Kev Carmody performed ‘From Little Things, Big Things Grow’, a song about the struggles of Lingiari and his people.¹

Mourners had begun queuing outside three hours before it began; many more watched the service on a screen set up outside the building.² The media reported booing when Tony Abbott and John Howard appeared on the screen; some cheered their favourite Labor prime ministers – Paul Keating, Julia Gillard and Bob Hawke; others were more muted in their response to Kevin Rudd; and, what would have seemed bizarre a few decades before, the crowd politely received Whitlam’s nemesis from the Dismissal, Malcolm Fraser.³

Whitlam’s death had been long anticipated, for he was ninety-eight. The obituaries and tributes were prepared; the rolling or not-so-rolling phrases honed, polished and ready to go – ‘one of the principal authors of contemporary Australia’, intoned Paul Kelly (the journalist, now, not the musician); ‘a giant among men who changed Australia forever’, said another veteran of the fourth estate, Ross Gittins.⁴

And yet Whitlam’s death, like his government, was of its time. In the 1980s and 1990s, the Labor governments of Bob Hawke and Paul Keating – and those in the commentariat who cheered the party’s rightward turn – often appeared not to be able to get far away enough from the Whitlam legacy for their own comfort. Now, they seemed willing to embrace it at last. Media and public responses to Whitlam’s death expressed the disillusionment of the present as much as the dreams – both realised and shattered – of a distant past. His passing became an opportunity for reflecting on what had gone wrong in Australian politics. In an age of scepticism, one of declining political trust, there was a recognition here that government mattered, a yearning for a politics that was once again bold, idealistic and grand.

In the most praised eulogy of the service, Indigenous leader Noel Pearson described ‘this old man’ – he repeated the phrase often – as ‘the textbook case of reform trumping management’. ‘And what did the Romans ever do for us anyway?’ Pearson asked, taking up a theme made famous in Monty Python’s brilliant 1979 religious satire, Life of Brian. This ‘Roman’, he explained of Whitlam, in cadences that for some recalled Martin Luther King Jr, had done much: Pearson proceeded to list the government’s many achievements to the applause of the audience.⁵ Film star Cate Blanchett spoke in praise of free tertiary education.⁶ Everyone seemed to have a story, everyone could find something that they thought mattered above all else. Bob Carr, the Right-wing Labor premier of New South Wales, liked that Whitlam had taken on and defeated the Left.⁷ Kelly thought that Whitlam’s government had shown that all prime ministers had to ‘operate as successful reformers’.⁸ Greg Barns, a Liberal Party dissident and Tasmanian lawyer, possibly squinting a little too hard, found a ‘classic economic and social liberal’ in the mould of Paul Keating and John Hewson.⁹

But what was most telling was the way ordinary people – those interviewed by journalists outside the Town Hall, or who wrote letters to newspapers – wove the story of the Whitlam government into their own lives. Many declared that it was only Gough who had provided them with the opportunity to attend university. It is hard not to wonder whether these people were conflating the expansion of tertiary education, which had been going on for some years, with the abolition of fees, but political myth has a power of its own, and it was in full flight. One woman who was a migrant teenager when Whitlam came to power thought that there was more racism and prejudice in the old Australia before 1972 than afterwards, once Whitlam had ushered in the new one.¹⁰ For such people, the political was personal, and vice versa. Whitlam, they said, had changed their lives while changing the nation.

Amid the praise for Whitlam there was implied criticism for the politicians of the present. Where Whitlam’s star had burned briefly and brightly, theirs – it seemed – barely flickered. The service ‘was much more than a nostalgic celebration of an extraordinary life’, The Age’s Michael Gordon judged. ‘It was also an invocation to today’s crop of politicians to think big and be brave.’¹¹ ‘The reductive, lowest-denominator politics of fear and smear that we are served day after day is a world away from the inspiration and meaningful program Whitlam presented’, declared Dennis Atkins of the Brisbane Courier-Mail.¹² Ian Marsh, a political scientist, pointed to the way Whitlam’s achievements were built on a functioning party system that stands in stark contrast to the hollowed-out parties, sound bites, 24-hour news cycle and ‘manufactured black-and-white choices’ of modern election campaigns.¹³

In the never-ending culture wars that raged in the op-ed pages of Australia’s declining press, the angry, cynical and embittered were as forthright as ever. Right-wing pundit Andrew Bolt attacked the ABC for its ‘lavish and loving coverage of the memorial service’.¹⁴ It ‘resembled the state-ordered mourning for a socialist dictator’.¹⁵ That was, of course, a wilful misreading of the occasion, but it is true that Australians have not usually found their heroes – socialist or otherwise – among politicians, nor their legends in political history.¹⁶ They have preferred Ned Kelly to Henry Parkes, Gallipoli to Federation, John Monash to Alfred Deakin, Betty Cuthbert to Vida Goldstein. And some have long argued that Australians regard their politics in an instrumental or utilitarian way: the role of government, and of the political process, was to provide people with the goods and services that they could use to live satisfactory or fulfilling lives, depending on the scale of their ambition.¹⁷

The story I tell in the pages to come is a richer one than this: a politics of ideals, visions and dreams as well as of roads, bridges and electric wires. Of dreamers and schemers. I have tried to explain what Australians have expected of their political system, how effective it has been in meeting those expectations, and the kinds of activity in which they have engaged to make it live up to their hopes and aspirations. It is a history of ideas and institutions, and of leaders and followers. I tell the stories of many of the insiders who have moved easily in a world of power, but not, I hope, at the expense of the experiences of outsiders who have tried to make politics work for them from the margins. The book is based on the conviction that while all of us – including historians – can choose to behave as if political affairs matter little to how our society functions, politics in the end has the habit of seeking us out, of becoming entangled in lives that we imagine as purely private and disconnected from its demands. White Australians, and especially the well-off, have mainly had the luxury of stable political institutions, reasonably responsive to their demands and adaptive to changing circumstances. But Indigenous people, whose political structures had to face the onslaught of white invasion, and migrants who have come from places where politics made life impossible or hardly bearable, have had fewer reasons to take for granted a peaceful political life. The experiences of all of them figure here, for their aspirations have helped shape a distinctive political culture.

The book begins in deep time, among Indigenous people who lived on this continent for millennia, and ends in the age of COVID-19, the latest of the many external shocks to affect Australia’s political system. The careful reader will notice that I tell the story of a politics that has adapted to such challenges. But it has not done so through some automatic mechanism, nor in a way that benefits everyone equally. The durability of the political system has relied on people capable of making it work, and that has demanded ingenuity, ambition and – when politics has been at its best – imagination and creativity. In a settler society, moreover, political systems are fundamentally about establishing and then maintaining control over resources – especially land – that underwrite the economic and social life of the dominant group.

The story I tell here is predominantly about a white settler society. Unlike the political histories produced by earlier generations of historians, this one begins with a discussion of some political structures and practices of Aboriginal societies. But this is a complex subject that demands detailed study in its own right and it is a story that, as a settler Australian, I am poorly qualified to tell. Nonetheless, Indigenous society had a politics, and the First Nations peoples who survived the onslaught of British colonisation often adapted skilfully to the challenges and opportunities posed by a new political order they had been allowed no hand in shaping. Their sovereignty was denied, their modes of government denigrated as primitive if they were recognised at all, and their laws dismissed as barbaric. Even today, we seem a long way from evolving a politics in which we can begin to see what it might be like to give adequate recognition to the sovereignties and stories of First Nations people.

Even what we conventionally call democratic politics is a story of domination, contest and spectacle that often seems detached from the lives of those we think of as ‘ordinary people’.¹⁸ In democracies, we are told that the people are boss. In reality, even those of us with a vote are left as bystanders – spectators of ‘a game of winners and losers played out among larger-than-life individuals’.¹⁹ And some of us are expected to be content with a place at the back of the grandstand, with little hope of our voices carrying to other spectators let alone those heroic figures competing in the arena.

This book tells the story of these shortcomings and disappointments. But it also tries to capture the promise and possibility that Australians have seen in political life over the course of their history.

AUTOCRACY, COMMUNITY AND DEMOCRACY: FROM EARLIEST TIMES TO 1855

First Nations

The people who would come to be known as Aboriginal Australians arrived from lands in the north possibly as long ago as 65,000 years. The continent to which they came, Sahul, was much larger than mainland Australia today. Land that is currently under the sea was then above it, and there were ‘bridges’ to what are now New Guinea and Tasmania. The waters began rising some 18,000 years ago – one of the many changes to which these people would need to adapt during their long habitation of the continent.¹ By the time Europeans arrived, they had formed trading networks, made increasingly refined stone tools and developed a complex social organisation and belief system, which had at its heart the Dreaming. The Dreaming stories, which were populated by creator beings understood as a continuing presence in the world, explained the relationship of Aboriginal people to their Country, one another and the cosmos.

Did these people have political lives before the arrival of the British? Much of what we know comes from observations by settlers, who were often unimpressed with what they found. Europeans accustomed to a structured, institutionalised and hierarchical political order looked for legible political organisation among Aboriginal people, often struggling to find it. Yet repeatedly, European observers described through a glass darkly Aboriginal political arrangements of apparent sophistication, before going on to deny that those same people had a proper system of government.² They were, wrote one American anthropologist in the 1950s, ‘a people without sovereignty … a people without politics’.³ Such a claim to absence begged many questions. How could Aboriginal people, without politics, build traps for catching fish, such as that at Brewarrina, or weirs for trapping eels – each an enterprise involving formidable planning, materials and labour? How did they organise ceremonies that might include several hundred participants, such as the gatherings of far-flung people to eat eel in south-western Victoria, or in the Bogong Mountains near present-day Canberra to collect moths, perform ceremonies, arrange marriages and exchange goods?⁴ How did they decide when to fight, and when to make peace?

Scholars of Aboriginal society have for some time now found this story of absence an implausible one.⁵ It is based on a particular understanding of the relationship of societies and economies to government and politics. Theorists have tended to assume that when the activities of a group achieve a certain level of complexity, an entity emerges that we might call a state, which brings with it a principle of sovereignty and, eventually, the practice of politics. David Graeber and David Wengrow have argued that this chronology is too simple: states do not have common origins or lines of development. We have given the term ‘state’ to past societies in quite diverse times and places when they contained features we associate with states of our own times: a claim to a monopoly over the use of force is one; a bureaucracy with the capacity to manage large amounts of complex information is another. But there are many societies that have existed without these elements of centralised government.⁶

Aboriginal society is arguably one such example. It was made up of many nations, each with its own language and law. Aboriginal people had politics, but they did not have a state in the sense that the term is usually understood. Aboriginal people did not use writing, and they lacked bureaucracy of the kind that British settlers associated with states. But their stories and songlines, recorded in rock art and oral tradition, explained the cosmos, their being and their laws. Grappling with how Aboriginal people governed themselves, the explorer George Grey found ‘mere oral traditions’ that were handed down the generations without the aid of ‘fixed records’ and yet were ‘fixed in the minds of the people as sacred and unalterable’. These ‘traditional laws and customs’ were ‘by them considered as valid and binding as our laws are by us’. But for Grey, the nature of these laws and institutions was a mark of Aboriginal ‘barbarism’ because they allowed no course for their alteration or overthrow, and they were designed mainly to allow the strong to oppress the weak.⁷

Aboriginal societies, then, might not have been states, but they did clearly have law that was, in some manner, made, applied and enforced. By any reasonable definition, they also had politics. For the British theorist Bernard Crick, politics is ‘the activity by which differing interests within a given unit of rule are conciliated by giving them a share of power in proportion to their importance to the welfare and survival of the whole community’. It involves conciliation and compromise, ‘a way of ruling in divided societies without undue violence’.⁸ Among the Ngarrindjeri of South Australia, each clan was autonomous and governed by a council of ‘experienced elderly men’, known as the ‘tendi’. It was led by a man, the ‘rupulle’, chosen ‘for his ready speech, temper, and capacity for authority’ – that is, the office was not hereditary. George Taplin, a missionary to the Ngarrindjeri, described a scene that might have been of a rambunctious colonial parliament of the same era, although he seemed not quite to see it in that light:

I cannot give the natives credit for much order in their method of conducting business. There was a tremendous amount of talk. Sometimes one would speak, then half-a-dozen would all speak together in an excited and vociferous manner, then some friend would interject an exclamation … I afterwards heard that the tendi broke up without any decision being arrived at.⁹

The explorer Edward John Eyre, probably discussing the Moorundie people in the same colony, remarked on the absence of ‘any form of government’ and the lack of ‘chiefs’, yet recognised that there were ‘always some men who take the lead, and whose opinions and wishes have great weight with the others’. Older men, he saw, carried authority, having knowledge and power unavailable to others, although Eyre thought those who were ‘still in full vigour of body and mind’, rather than the very oldest, were the most powerful. Such men, sitting ‘apart from the others’, would deliberate on weighty matters at an assembly where it was not uncommon for ‘some discontented individual’ to ‘loudly and violently harangue the whole tribe’ for hours on end on some matter, only ceasing once he had worn himself out. Leading members would offer ‘admonition or advice’, but there was ‘rarely any thing amounting to an order or command; the subject is explained, reasons are given for what is advanced, and the result of an opposite course to that suggested, fully pointed out; after this the various members are left to form their own judgments, and to act as they think proper’.¹⁰

Herbert Basedow, the South Australian polymath, similarly wrote of the Aboriginal people he had encountered during his outback travels in the early twentieth century that their affairs were ‘under the jurisdiction of a small council of old men who have their discussion in secret conclave, away from the main camp’. Seniority and distinction determined admission, but ‘the strongest personality’ controlled its deliberations ‘much as a Prime Minister rules over his cabinet’. Once this body had freely debated a matter and made a decision, it was placed before a wider assembly of all of the adult men. They could ask questions, but dissent would be ruled out of order. Within these arrangements, younger men were expected to defer to their elders, but there was also a place for character, skill and talent. A man gifted in declamation might hold forth to ‘an enthusiastic and, at times, spell-bound audience’. A man of exceptional accomplishment in hunting or warfare would attract his own form of prestige. A joker would keep people in hysterical laughter. In all of these activities, surely, were spaces for politics.¹¹

Depending on local circumstances, Aboriginal people tended to live in groups of about twenty-five to a hundred people, which emerged out of links of kinship and complex rules of intermarriage. Members belonged to Country according to birth and kin, but new alliances occurred within and between clans as groups divided and control of lands shifted. Such processes involved the bargaining, exchange, debate, competition and confrontation that are everywhere the elements of a recognisable political life. Shrewdness and eloquence mattered in the exercise of power. Senior men with these skills, especially when combined with control of land, magic, wives and warriors, could emerge at a regional level, where they might become ‘big men’.¹²

One school of archaeological research has suggested that the development of more efficient food production about 5000 years ago contributed to the formation of new and larger political units. Having more abundant food facilitated more elaborate ceremonial activity and schemes of esoteric knowledge, helping to build relations between clans into wider kinship networks. Longer and more lavish ceremonies, the staging of mass hunts and enhanced access to wives possibly increased the status and power of male elders. In south-western Victoria, each autumn brought together as many as 1000 Aboriginal people in seasonal villages to enjoy the eels caught in traps and weirs, and it was an occasion ‘for holding their great social and political meetings’. More intense interaction of this kind promoted usually peaceful relations between men in ceremonial, hunting and even sporting contests, thereby producing a phenomenon – heroic competition between individuals – that has been identified as a foundation of political life. Competition in south-western Victoria, for instance, would occasionally manifest in bloodshed, but more often in football or wrestling.¹³

The law governed who could and could not marry. Polygyny was common – the practice of a man marrying several wives – but men in resource-rich regions seem to have had more wives than those in more arid places. The practice was a foundation of male authority, providing senior men with sexual prerogatives, a kinship network, access to the Country of a wife’s family, children to be promised in marriage and control over warriors. Senior men also dominated most matters relating to ancestral law and religious ceremony – which was equally a source of their authority – but there were spheres in which women had autonomy and power. Men’s and women’s roles were understood as distinctive and complementary: together, they had responsibility for maintaining the Law in accordance with the Dreaming.¹⁴ Men, however, controlled male initiation, meaning that they regulated the transmission of authority across the generations and could enforce the deference of younger men – a pressure point in any social and political order. Senior men’s views on almost all matters counted for a great deal more than anyone else’s. Still, there were ways of achieving and exercising power through aptitude and circumstance. Recognised magical ability could give a man power among a wide circle.¹⁵

Autocracy

The sovereignty claimed by British people over the eastern portion of New Holland in 1788 was also a kind of magic, in which the reading of a proclamation and the planting of a flag changed the status of a place forever. The people who claimed to be able to perform this sorcery came from a society with a single chief at its apex. In distant Britain, the great landowners had limited the power of the sovereign in favour of parliament, but even in 1788 few people had a say in who governed them; a smaller proportion, in fact, than in any Aboriginal community. Perhaps one in ten men – and no women – had sufficient property to qualify to vote for the House of Commons. The House of Lords, still powerful, was mainly the preserve of aristocratic men with titles, usually inherited, and of the bishops and archbishops of the Church of England.

The government ruled over a diminished empire. In the 1780s Britain had lost much of its territory in North America, but it continued to practise slavery in some of the colonies it had retained and some British entrepreneurs still traded in human flesh. Australia would be founded on the unfree labour of convicts, and some colonial antipodean fortunes would rest on wealth earned from Caribbean slavery. Parliamentary authority and the rule of law protected the advantages of the wealthy elite, but they were also a buffer against the exercise of arbitrary power against humbler folk. The king himself was subject to the law rather than above it, and he could not impose taxes without parliament’s approval. ‘Free-born Britons’ had certain rights under what they called ‘the Ancient Constitution’, such as to trial by jury and to petition the sovereign, and they could not be arbitrarily imprisoned or punished. When New South Wales was established in 1788 as that most peculiar of settlements, a penal colony, even the lowliest convict would have believed these birthrights could not simply be ignored in an English land. While such claims were sometimes deemed ‘absurd’ by the authorities when applied to prisoners, they motivated convict resistance to arbitrary punishment or cruel treatment. There was quibbling by the occasional judge, but it was widely recognised that a corollary of allowing people to accumulate property was giving them access to the courts. Convicts also brought with them a belief in the right to a basic level of material provision at the government’s expense, and the right not to have to perform excessive labour. The government store or commissariat was to act as the guarantee that no one should starve, and it was the governor’s responsibility to ensure that it was administered fairly. In many ways, the foundations of what would later be colloquially called the ‘fair go’ system or, more technically, social democracy, were laid in the very earliest years of settlement.¹⁶

Aboriginal people, who probably numbered about 750,000 in 1788, would have an ambiguous status in this new order. Unlike in most other British colonies, no treaties would be signed with them. Relations with the British authorities took on the character of diplomacy, politics and warfare. Violent conflict between settlers and the Dharug people in the Sydney district and along the Hawkesbury River from the 1790s led to the formation of settler militias, assisted by Aboriginal guides, which prosecuted punitive expeditions. In April 1805, at a time of considerable tension, the Reverend Samuel Marsden learned from three Dharug women that their people ‘wished a conference with him, with a view of opening the way to a reconciliation’. A delegation of three men waited on him at Parramatta soon afterwards; Marsden told them that reconciliation could only be achieved if the Aboriginal men responsible for recent attacks surrendered, and that none of them would otherwise be permitted on the grounds of any settler. The following day, about twenty Aboriginal men, from a much larger number assembled in the area, negotiated with Marsden, who demanded ‘the names of the principal murderers’ as well as cooperation in apprehending them. Two Aboriginal guides agreed to join a military expedition, but it is likely that one of them was one of the accused murderers they were supposedly pursuing.¹⁷ In these ways, an asymmetrical politics emerged between the settlers and the Dharug people of the Sydney area, one in which Aboriginal people sought to find a place for themselves. While such relations could seem something like a politics among nations, by the 1830s Aboriginal people would more commonly be considered British subjects who, at least in theory, had the same rights and obligations as the colonisers. This status, however, emerged ‘slowly and hesitantly’.¹⁸ Legal historians have drawn attention to how early colonial settlement assumed the existence of multiple sovereignties. The authorities imagined that Aboriginal law still held force among Aboriginal people, expressing a surviving sovereignty that co-existed with the British version. But as settlement expanded inland, there was a trend towards a more recognisably modern form of territorial sovereignty, a claim to exclusive rule over land and people. Still, Aboriginal people’s legal rights were to remain limited not least because they could not swear a Christian oath in court.¹⁹

The political structure of the colony formed in the wake of the arrival of the First Fleet’s eleven ships was autocratic, an ‘imperial despotism in miniature’. The governor – the first was naval officer Arthur Phillip – was at the top of this order. He was ideally to be a father-like figure, and he would have local counterparts in the male head of each household, supporting him through their wise and self-restrained rule. That was, in any event, the ideal. It was a small, ramshackle settlement that would remain so for many years, at first inevitably primitive by the standards of urban society in Europe and North America. But it was thoroughly modern in an important respect. As a penal colony in which responsibility for the survival of the inhabitants rested with government, Australia became ‘one of the most thoroughly documented and closely observed societies in the world’. The leading historian of political ideas in Australia has suggested that the legacy of this may well have been the ‘ready acceptance of rules, documentation and surveillance’, a habit of practical obedience and ‘talent for bureaucracy’ that contradicts Australians’ image of themselves as anti-authoritarian and socially informal, traits which they have sometimes attributed to their convict origins.²⁰ From the outset, too, the authorities expected specific material and diplomatic advantages to come from the settlement, possibly foreshadowing something of the utilitarian cast of the country’s political culture. The convicts and their gaolers were to extend British dominion in the Pacific, laying the basis for agriculture and commerce, and providing supplies of timber, flax and hemp for the Royal Navy. Marriages among the convicts received warm encouragement from the earliest days. The children of them would be born free: already, the seeds of a different kind of colonial order were being planted.²¹

The British settled New South Wales in an era when elites were more than usually fearful of the masses. The ruling class had no interest in widening participation in government. The North American colonies had enjoyed assemblies and yet thirteen of them had rebelled. From 1789 the revolutionary ardour spread to France; in January 1793 the French king, Louis XVI, went to the guillotine, his queen soon suffering the same fate. Fear permeated the British ruling class as France experienced its reign of terror, driving the suppression of popular radicalism. Several ‘friends of liberty’ would find their way to the colonies as unwilling immigrants, although most convicts were ordinary workers caught stealing rather than political protestors punished for pursuing a cause, noble or otherwise.²²

News of the dramatic events in Europe eventually reached New South Wales – the Second Fleet in 1790 brought with it a tale of revolution in France – and the ideas that inspired the revolutionaries gained some currency in the tiny British settlement at Sydney. Five of six ‘Scottish martyrs’, Jacobins in sympathy with the French Revolution, arrived in Sydney as convicts. The best known of them, Maurice Margarot, claimed to have been in Paris at the time of the storming of the Bastille in 1789 and was soon after a member of the famous London Corresponding Society, sometimes considered the first English working-class political organisation. The authorities regarded Margarot’s home in Sydney as a hothouse of sedition, although he might also have been a double agent.²³ Revolutionary ideas extended beyond such gentlemanly political prisoners, whom authorities spared the harsh punishments and labour obligations of ordinary convicts. John Boston was another ‘friend of liberty’, a companion and business partner of the Scottish martyr Thomas Palmer. Boston was involved in a violent brawl with members of the New South Wales Corps after a soldier – a ‘damned Rascal’, said Boston – shot his pregnant sow in October 1795. He successfully sued the murderers of his fine pig. Thomas Paine’s Rights of Man, the book that more than any other inspired the revolutionary ardour of the era, was being read by officers in New South Wales and his notoriety hung over the early history of the colony. In 1806 a lifer named Joseph Smallsalts was punished with 100 lashes and labour in the Newcastle coalmines for having declared ‘he would be worse than Tom Paine, if thwarted’; as a further humiliation, he was forced to wear a label on his back with the words ‘Tom Paine’ in large letters.²⁴

It was the arrival of convicts following the uprising of the United Irishmen in 1798 that brought a more intense fear. There were several conspiracies uncovered by the authorities between 1800 and 1803, and one shipboard mutiny that resulted in the killing of fourteen convicts. Then, in the darkness of the night of Sunday, 4 March 1804, about 200 convicts working at Castle Hill near Sydney overpowered the convict constables guarding them – most of whom joined them in the uprising – and raided local farms for arms, comrades and spirits. The rebellion appears to have been a largely Irish affair. Indeed, it has been plausibly argued that it was an uprising of the United Irishmen abroad, inspired by the potent combination of the renewal of Britain’s war with Napoleonic France (March 1803) and a failed uprising in Dublin staged by Robert Emmet (July 1803). News of each arrived in the colony in late 1803 and early 1804 respectively, probably giving encouragement to Irish prisoners dissatisfied with their life of exile and inflamed by revolutionary ideals. There was almost certainly a longing for escape at the heart of the rebellion: the rebels embraced a modified version of the Irish revolutionary slogan ‘Death or Liberty’, to which they added ‘and a ship to take us home’.

The governor, Philip Gidley King, responded by declaring martial law and sending in his forces – both soldiers and settlers were engaged – to suppress the uprising. That was not hard. When two ringleaders – both ex-soldiers – came forward to negotiate a truce, Major George Johnston and one of his troopers each produced a pistol, which they put against the heads of the two men. Johnston, a handsome, popular and capable officer who had been sent home for illegal trading in spirits a few years before, then ordered his troops to open fire on the rebels. Officers had to restrain their men from a general bloodbath, but still some 17–22 convicts lost their lives at a place that became known as Vinegar Hill, recalling the Irish uprising of 1798. For several days, convicts wandered the countryside as settlers fled before them in fear. Some rebels would be hanged, while others had their backs reduced to a pulp by the lash. Twenty would eventually be either executed or flogged.²⁵

Castle Hill was an exceptional use of the governor’s wide powers. More routinely, he appointed justices of the peace, pardoned convicts, granted land, allocated labour, considered applications for convict marriages and regulated trade. Or, rather, he sought to regulate trade: during the interregnum between Phillip’s departure in 1792 and John Hunter’s arrival almost three years later, the officers in charge had managed to establish a lucrative trading monopoly that would remain unbroken until the end of the 1790s. The officers were the only group in the colony capable of challenging the governor politically, and they would increasingly do so. Nevertheless, the power of governors arose in part from their isolation. They were ultimately answerable to the Colonial Office and expected to act in conformity with English law, allowing for necessary local adaptations. Yet if a governor referred a matter to London, it would likely be about two years before any answer was forthcoming. In the meantime, the governor had considerable autonomy if he could uphold his local authority.²⁶

The challenges were there, almost from the beginning. In the absence of an assembly, free press or popular politics, resistance to the governor’s authority depended on other means and opportunities. In a small, intimate community, the social snub could be readily deployed. In 1801 Captain John Macarthur, in dispute with Governor King, promoted a boycott of Government House among the officers. When King, to test the waters, sent out an invitation to civil and military officers for a function, excluding only Macarthur, he received acceptances from all but four, ‘who were so uncivil as not to send me any answer until I sent for it … when they all refused. I could no longer be in doubt who were and who were not the adherents of Capt’n McArthur’.²⁷ A governor’s opponents could also anonymously circulate printed libels in the form of ribald verse, or ‘pipes’, as they were called. King was the target of several in 1803 during his feud with the officers. An ‘Epitaph’ found him:

Dejected, here forlorn, by all despised –

Of every human turpitude possest –

He sinks beneath those sins, to none disguised,

A wretch to whom all pity is bereft.

It ended with King in league with Satan, before meeting his fate in ‘the hottest flames’. Another accused this ‘wicked, oppressive, notorious man’ of a scheme ‘To make all subservient, humble, and poor, / To take women and children, all off from the store’, before going on to describe various acts of gross and grasping corruption.²⁸

The courtroom, too, emerged as a favoured site for prosecuting factional struggles. King court-martialled three men he held responsible for the pipes. In a calculated affront, Major Johnston, as acting officer in command of the Corps, halted the proceedings and ordered the arrest of the presiding officer, surgeon John Harris, whom he accused of having divulged to outsiders the voting on the court martial, which was supposed to be confidential. The ‘assassins’ whom King thought responsible for the verses thereby escaped punishment.²⁹ A court martial, criminal trial or civil hearing could in this manner become the occasion for the pursuit of a feud and the staging of a contest. Military officers dominated all of them, which meant that the governor needed to brace himself for ‘mortification’, as King put it when he became their victim. Officers could easily stage a trial of strength with a governor they wanted to reduce. A powerful, skilled and determined litigant or accused might use the court as a most convenient political arena.³⁰

Macarthur, a turbulent former officer and the colony’s richest man, used a series of cases between 1806 and 1808 in just this way to pursue his quarrels with Governor William Bligh. On 25 January 1808 Macarthur was on trial for sedition after defying a summons in connection with the importation of a still for making spirits, as well as the escape of a convict on a schooner of which he was part-owner. When the proceedings degenerated into disorder, with soldiers in the gallery cheering on their hero, Bligh had Macarthur arrested the next morning. Rumours soon began circulating that the governor intended having the officers responsible for hearing the case the day before charged with treason. The stakes were high – the offence carried the death penalty – and the soldiers and their officers closed ranks. At four p.m., Johnston – at home, recuperating from a gig accident – received a letter from Bligh describing the officers’ actions as ‘treasonable’, confirming his worst fears of the governor’s intentions. Johnston then conferred at the barracks with various military and civil confrères, Macarthur among them, and agreed to remove Bligh from office. The officers led their men to Government House and found Bligh in an isolated room after a long search. Bligh’s enemies would spread the rumour that he was discovered hiding under a bed, a falsehood, but this image of an undignified arrest would be circulated for years ahead to present the governor as a coward. Bligh was placed under house arrest.³¹

Governors, as a rule, took the side of ex-convicts and small settlers against wealthy officers, merchants and landowners. Herbert Vere Evatt, in his classic study of Bligh’s overthrow, Rum Rebellion (1938), saw the coup on 26 January 1808 in precisely this light: Bligh was overthrown because he had taken the side of the common people against the monopolist traders of the New South Wales Corps. The trade in spirits, and Bligh’s effort to suppress it, were supposedly at the root of the rebellion.³² But this is all too simple. It is true that several of the governor’s decisions in favour of ordinary settlers had eaten into the merchants’ profits. On a personal level, too, Bligh had form. He was overthrown in the famous Bounty mutiny and, especially in his forthright manner of speech, had a knack for conforming to other men’s image of how a despot should behave. Johnston, in defending himself at his court martial, reminded of ‘the beastly language’ in which Bligh uttered his threats, ‘language so bad as to make even the dragoon who rode with him solicit another service’. This testimony was obviously self-serving, but it was hardly the first time this had been said of Bligh. In a settlement such as Sydney, where men were inclined to stand on their honour, some found Bligh’s behaviour no less provocative than Fletcher Christian and his comrades had back in 1789.³³

Merchants and landowners undoubtedly saw Bligh as a threat to their commerce and property, but there was more to this conflict than money. Macarthur and the officers were also influenced by Whiggish ideas of freedom that were understood to have justified the overthrow of James II in the Glorious Revolution of 1688, and which had also seen governors deposed in the North American colonies. The Sydney rebels had at their disposal a vocabulary to describe and condemn the arbitrary rule of a tyrant. Bligh had high-handedly proposed to demolish buildings that had been built on government land, a plan from which officers stood to lose materially. But they saw in such an arbitrary threat to property rights an offence that went to the heart of their understanding of the distinction between freedom and tyranny.³⁴

Macarthur was widely and correctly understood as ringleader in the affair, Johnston as ‘Jack Bodice’s tool’ – a reference to Macarthur’s supposed early career as a staymaker’s apprentice. But it was Johnston who would be court-martialled in London.³⁵ He was fortunate: as the leader of the mutiny, he could have paid for his conspicuous role in the rebellion with his life, like several of the Castle Hill rebels he had dealt with in 1804. But the authorities seem to have accepted that Macarthur was behind it all, while Johnston had acted out of a conviction that there was a danger of civil strife if he had not deposed Bligh. It is hard to know whether such supposed fears were sincerely held. In April 1808 Johnston had rather implausibly explained that he acted ‘to prevent an insurrection of the inhabitants’ and to secure Bligh and his advisers ‘from being massacred by the incensed multitude’. Later, he testified that if the six officers had been arrested, ‘the military would have joined in insurrection with the people’. Johnston was raising the dreaded spectre of popular revolution at a time of counter-revolution, when the authorities were likely to be receptive to such a message. Certainly, the anger within the army was real enough, but the existence of any wider popular revulsion of a tyrant seems to have been a figment of Johnston’s imagination, as well as a highly convenient one.³⁶

Johnston would eventually be cashiered – discharged dishonourably – and allowed to return to New South Wales as a farmer. Macarthur was in London for the court martial but the government’s legal advice was that, as a civilian, he could only be tried in New South Wales. So, he remained in England for a decade while his wife, Elizabeth, revived his faltering colonial business. Bligh remained under house arrest for a year, refusing to return to England. Eventually relenting and placed on a ship to go home, he double-crossed his captors by ordering the captain to take him to Hobart Town, where he proceeded to make a nuisance of himself with David Collins, the lieutenant-governor of that settlement, who was otherwise preoccupied with his pregnant teenage convict lover. Bligh returned to Sydney in January 1810 after Lachlan Macquarie’s arrival as the new governor, to make a nuisance of himself there as well, before sailing for England in May to seek vindication.

Johnston initially led the rebel administration, appointing as the colony’s secretary Macarthur, who became the de facto ruler of what was in effect a military dictatorship. Macarthur and the officers probably used the opportunity to advance their commercial interests, and they convened courts to pardon their friends and punish their enemies. Johnston soon gave way to Joseph Foveaux, the highest-ranking officer, who had been on leave in England. Foveaux sidelined Macarthur, whose power had become too great even for the rebel regime’s supporters; Macarthur characteristically responded by challenging him to a duel, which – like most duels in early colonial Australia – happily ended with both men walking away unharmed.³⁷ When William Paterson, who was the lieutenant-governor, returned to Sydney from a settlement he had founded at Port Dalrymple in northern Van Diemen’s Land, he assumed the leadership. Or, rather, he was its nominal leader: drunk, ill and incapable, Paterson stayed at Government House in Parramatta while handing over a vast portion of the public estate to his fellow officers in land grants.

When Macquarie arrived in the colony in late December 1809 with his wife, his own regiment and a legally qualified deputy judge advocate, Ellis Bent, he had the task of untangling this mess. The British government was determined that, whatever the respective faults and merits of Bligh and his enemies, order and regularity must be restored. It had accordingly selected a man partial to order and regularity and clothed him in the same autocratic powers that all of his predecessors had possessed. A Scot born of humble tenant farmers on the islet of Ulva in the Inner Hebrides, Macquarie made it his business to improve public morality and religious observance. He also wanted to restore harmony. Among his earliest decisions was the cancellation of all land grants and official appointments made by the rebel regime, but he also indemnified those who had served under the officers’ rule and relied on Foveaux, a member of that regime, for advice. His policy towards the convicts was to permit them, once they had served their sentences, to participate fully in the civil and social life of the colony. ‘Emancipation’, he told the secretary of state for colonies, Lord Castlereagh, ‘when United with Rectitude and long-tried good Conduct, should lead a Man back to that Rank in Society which he had forfeited, and do away, in so far as the Case will admit, All Retrospect of former bad Conduct’.³⁸ It was a kindly and generous policy, as well as a wise one that allowed him to draw on the talents of those concerned. But it was destined to arouse deep resentment in those who thought one fall was a fall for life.

Macquarie applied another policy that would also, in time, lead to the enmity of the powerful and wealthy: convict labour would be used to erect public buildings worthy of a rising colony of a great empire. He employed an emancipist architect, Francis Greenway, to design many of them, and an emancipist poet, Michael Massey Robinson, to write odes in praise of a fortunate colony, a benevolent monarch and a wise governor. D’Arcy Wentworth, the colony’s principal surgeon and largest landowner, gained the contract to build a hospital, a deal that controversially included a lucrative licence to import spirits. Wentworth was not himself a convict but he was a former thief, whose powerful family connections had given him the option of exile to Botany Bay as an alternative to conviction for highway robbery. His native-born son William, the product of D’Arcy’s shipboard liaison with a convict woman, had with two companions crossed the Blue Mountains in 1813. William Cox’s road, built shortly afterwards by convict labour, might have been a ramshackle affair, but it signified a colony beginning to look inland for settlement and commerce, instead of predominantly out to oceanic horizons.³⁹

Macquarie has been celebrated as the Aboriginal people’s friend and protector, establishing the Native Institution at Parramatta for the education of their children, creating for them a village and a farm, and feasting with them each December on roast beef, potatoes and plum pudding. But on this score, his reputation has had rough handling in more recent years.⁴⁰ Macquarie’s orders were behind the Appin massacre in 1816: troopers, if they happened to kill Aboriginal men, should hang them up ‘on Trees in Conspicuous Situations, to Strike the Survivors with the greater terror’.⁴¹ Unlike all previous governors, he was an army rather than a navy man, and brought decades of experience in North America and India to the role of military commander. In this as in other matters, Macquarie was on a ruthless quest for order and was increasingly irascible. His role as commander of an occupying power in all but name included overcoming an often-successful Aboriginal resistance to colonisation, which he accomplished with a mixture of violence, conciliation and diplomacy. The latter found its most conspicuous expression in the annual feast at Parramatta, also an occasion for the mingling of Aboriginal groups in an adaptation of their traditional assemblies and feasts.⁴²

Often considered the last of the classically autocratic governors, Macquarie had wide powers over virtually every aspect of colonial life. His rule as a colonial version of a Scottish laird writ large was nonetheless restrained by having to negotiate other centres of power in the colony. He admitted convicts to civil life, even to Government House. Yet, while Macquarie might invite emancipists – former convicts – to break bread with him, he could not force free settlers to admit former felons to their own tables. The degeneration of his relations with the colony’s exclusive faction led 40 of 155 invited guests to decline to attend Government House in January 1817 to celebrate Queen Charlotte’s birthday. The highly personalised nature of factionalism in New South Wales incidentally ensured a place for women in its political life, for the use of the social snub necessarily required their participation.⁴³ The divisions between exclusives and emancipists remained, and indeed intensified, as Macquarie sponsored the careers and fortunes of the most able and successful former convicts as well as favourites who associated with them, such as D’Arcy Wentworth. These policies attracted growing disapprobation from those who regarded themselves as the colony’s gentlemen. For instance, after a court was established for civil cases in 1814, Macquarie wrote to the new judge, Jeffery Bent, brother of Ellis, supporting emancipist petitioners and requesting that the recent practice of allowing them to practise as attorneys be continued. Bent, however, objected to this interference with the administration of justice. The issue of former convicts’ civil status would arise more drastically in 1817 when the court, now under Bent’s successor, Barron Field, ruled that the legal disabilities of a former convict were not removed by a governor’s pardon alone. This decision had the potential to hamper property-owning emancipists in particular and led to their petitioning of the British government for a resolution.⁴⁴

Influenced especially by the criticisms from Jeremy Bentham, the penal and constitutional reformer, there had for many years been suspicion that the orders issued by governors were illegal, since they relied on the royal prerogative rather than parliamentary authority. The brothers Bent brought weighty legal expertise to the colony, and both professed alarm at the extent of executive power. Jeffery eventually provoked a confrontation with Macquarie when he refused to pay a road toll, an impost he considered illegal. Even allowing for the unusual nature of the colony, it seemed contrary to English practice that laws could be imposed and taxes levied without parliamentary consent. But for years, despite criticisms within the colony and in London, the Colonial Office continued to brazen it out, with Lord Bathurst loyally upholding the governor’s authority when it came under challenge while hauling him over the coals from time to time as he exceeded it. Macquarie arranged to have the Bents replaced – and Ellis died in 1815 – but the issues they had raised remained unresolved. In 1819 Westminster passed legislation indemnifying Macquarie against legal action – a temporary solution that would have to do until the colony had its own constitution.⁴⁵

As had happened with his three predecessors, Macquarie’s enemies plotted to get rid of him. The criticisms were numerous. He had leaned too far in favour of emancipists and their friends. He had been extravagant in public expenditure. He had wielded unchecked power and exceeded his formal authority. He had dispensed summary punishment. He had used too much convict labour and starved private employers of their services. To investigate and report, the British government appointed John Thomas Bigge, a former chief justice of Trinidad. Bigge would spend seventeen months gathering evidence and preparing several long reports, covering a wide range of matters. Bigge’s detractors, including the governor himself, thought him too willing to listen to the governor’s enemies. While his judgement of Macquarie was ungenerous and animated by Bigge’s own social prejudices, his reports were thorough and authoritative. Bigge envisaged that punishment and profit should be more closely aligned in assigning convicts to private settlers. Yet, while he wanted to redirect convict labour from public to private use, he also recommended that autocratic rule continue. Bigge could find no role for a Council; rather, he suggested a system that would have the governor consulting with magistrates on proposed orders and proclamations. A convict colony should not have politics; any representative legislature – even if it were given a stiff property qualification – would be dominated by emancipists. Macquarie, who had sung their praises and championed their rights, departed a broken and defeated man. He left behind him a more tranquil and prosperous colony than he had inherited from the officers who had deposed Bligh, yet one divided by faction more than ever.⁴⁶

When the British parliament passed the New South Wales Act in 1823, its provisions implemented some of Bigge’s recommendations and dealt with problems identified in previous arrangements. It provided for an independent Supreme Court for each of New South Wales and Van Diemen’s Land, with juries in criminal trials to be made up of members of the armed forces, and some limited scope for ordinary juries in civil cases. The chief justice would have a critical, independent power: he would need to certify that any law was not repugnant to laws of England, insofar as the circumstances of the colony admitted. A provision for a Legislative Council, which had not been among Bigge’s recommendations, appeared in the bill as an afterthought. It evolved from objections by the future chief justice Francis Forbes to a proposal allowing the governor to make laws on virtually any matter, subject only to the agreement of six magistrates.⁴⁷

The Legislative Council of 1823 should not be confused with a representative legislature, let alone a democratic one. Only the governor could initiate legislation. Its five to seven members were to be appointed, not elected. Until 1838 it met in secret and its members had to take an oath not to divulge its deliberations. When the Council passed its first law, which extended the indemnity enjoyed by the governor to his advisers and agents over the levying of taxes, the Act was not published to avoid potentially inconvenient publicity. There was to be no role for public opinion under the new arrangements; not in theory, anyway, but Forbes felt that when nominees were being considered ‘regard should be had to the influence possessed by the members over the minds of the people’. In practice, the colony was about to experience its first burst of popular politics.⁴⁸

The Coming of Popular Politics

The petitioning undertaken by emancipists in 1819 and especially in 1821 – the latter involving former convicts alone – indicated the existence of grievance, a sense of collective identity and a willingness to seek constitutional remedy. While the matters they pursued were formally about the standing of emancipists within the legal system, at the core of their claims was a more fundamental concern: recognition of their equal worth in a society where many still refused to associate with them. The young William Wentworth, bearing his own sense of grievance, saw an opportunity in this to ride to political influence.⁴⁹

He was not a convict himself, but his mother was and his father nearly was. As a young man, he could see that the great and good did not treat his family as equals, despite their aristocratic connections. John Macarthur had refused to give him the hand of his daughter Elizabeth in marriage, in terms that made plain his view of Wentworth’s inferior status. Wentworth also, while studying in England, became aware of the chequered past of his father, D’Arcy. The