# A colonial autocracy, New South Wales under Governor Macquarie, 1810-1821/Chapter 1

CHAPTER I.
INTRODUCTION: THE LAND AND THE PEOPLE.
Authorities.—Historical Records of New South Wales (especially Volume VII.). Report on Transportation, P.P., 1812, II. Report on Gaols, P.P., 1819, VII. Bigg's Reports, P.P., 1822 and 1823, Vols. XX and X. Report of Trial of Lieut.-Colonel Johnston. Eden's History of New Holland. Memoir of Samuel Marsden.
When Colonel Macquarie landed at Sydney at the close of 1809 the population of the settlement he was to govern was already over 10,000. In the twenty-two years which had passed since the foundation of the Colony of New South Wales in 1788, the numbers had increased at a rate of nearly 500 a year—an increase in population then without parallel in the course of modern colonisation. The cause was not far to seek; what would under a system of voluntary emigration have been remarkable, was but the natural result of forced emigration, of the system of "Colonising-Transportation" of which New South Wales was the first example. The custom of sending convicted criminals to the plantations was indeed an old one, and one not peculiar to England, but the system put into practice in 1788 differed in important features from any which had been practised before.
The final triumph of the North American Colonies in 1783, by closing that channel, had left a fast increasing number of prisoners on the hands of the Government. The previous course had been to send a large proportion of the convicts to serve as bond-servants to colonial planters and farmers. Once they were consigned to the masters of the merchant vessels who offered for this service, the direct responsibility of the Government was at an end, and the convicted criminal served out his sentence under a form of mild restraint. Indeed the mildness of the punishment was condemned in the House of Commons ​so late as 1776 by Mr. William Eden, who a few years afterwards suggested hard labour at home or slavery in Mohammedan lands in exchange for Christian captives as more efficacious punishments.
Again, the bond-servants formed a minority and an unimportant minority of the whole colonial population.
When this system was interrupted by the revolt of the Colonies in 1776, and brought altogether to an end by the peace of 1782, the Government decided to recommence the transportation of convicts, apparently unconscious of the extent to which they were creating a new policy. Under the new scheme not only were the majority of the colonists convicts, but they were almost entirely, for the first few years wholly, under the direct control of the Government. By an Act of 1783, the King in Council was empowered to declare any territory in the foreign possessions of Great Britain to be a place to which convicts might be transported. At the same time an expedition examined the West Coast of Africa in the search for territory, but reported that it was too unhealthy even for the social outcast. Yet to find some suitable country for the purpose became daily more urgent. With the growing humanity of the times the commutation of the death penalty grew increasingly frequent. England offered no places of confinement for the men whose sentences were thus commuted save the pestilent, over-crowded prisons or equally horrible river hulks.
Meanwhile the immediate settlement of New Holland was being pressed upon the Government. The opportunity of achieving both objects was too good to be lost, and in 1784 the scheme received the serious attention of Lord Sydney, the Secretary of State for Home Affairs. In 1786 a further step was taken, and Orders in Council issued which declared the East Coast of New Holland to be a place within the meaning ​of the Act of 1783. In the following year the project was put into execution and a small fleet dispatched under the command of Captain Arthur Phillip of the King's Navy, who was to establish the settlement and be its first Governor. His command consisted of 1,100 all told, including a military garrison, 500 male and 250 female convicts and a sprinkling of free emigrants. In January, 1788, he landed his people at Port Jackson, and founded on its shores the town of Sydney.
The expedition created scarcely a ripple of excitement in England, full of interest though it was to a few students of criminal law. One of these, William Eden (afterwards the first Lord Auckland), wrote a History of New Holland, in the preface to which he discussed the new experiment. The suggestions made by him in 1776 in the speech referred to above had apparently fallen on barren ground, and he took it as an accepted fact that so far no means of keeping convicts at home had answered "the end of their exemplary correction," and that some way must be found of "exonerating this country of its obnoxious members". New Holland seemed a suitable location, and the annexation of that island was on other counts desirable. He spoke with careful vagueness of the considerable changes which had taken place since England first turned over troublesome subjects "to the use and benefit of its infant colonies"—changes "in the interests and political situation of many leading states of Europe". Whatever the actual facts here alluded to, it seems at least worthy of note that two days after Phillip landed at Port Jackson a French fleet was sighted in the offing, and that for the next forty years each impulse towards extended exploration and settlement in Australia, which was fostered by Government, was almost without exception coincident with a similar enterprise rumoured or in course of execution by France.
However desirable such a settlement might be, Eden considered that to invite "the industrious and respectable artisan ​to exchange his own happy soil for the possession of territory, however extensive, in a part of the world so little known" would have been justly censurable. For such a purpose there remained criminals who, having forfeited their lives or liberties to justice, "have become a forlorn hope, and have always been adjudged a fair subject of hazardous experiments; … if the dangers of a foreign climate or the improbability of returning to this country be considered as nearly equivalent to death, the devoted convict naturally reflects that his crimes have drawn on this punishment, and that offended justice in consigning him to the inhospitable shore of New Holland does not mean thereby to seat him for his life on a bed of roses."
There was, however, a difficulty in the likelihood that the punishment would not prove a heavy one, and would thus encourage the commission of offences (a condition said to have been realised thirty years later) or might prove a fatal argument for the multiplication of capital penalties. On the whole the prospects of the new settlement were hopeful, the future home of the convicts was likely to be better than they expected or deserved, and "such of those unhappy people as testify an amendment in their morals, or an inclination to embrace the profession of honest industry, will probably not be shut out from enjoying in some measure even the comforts of life".
Of the Colony as an instrument of commerce, and ultimately of profit to the mother country, he had high expectations, and he pushed aside the less optimistic views of colonisation to which the loss of America had given point. He argued that the errors and prejudices of past ages could not be fairly advanced "against the success of similar measures, when undertaken at this period with the assistance of superior lights".
It is melancholy to reflect that the decree of the "superior lights" was the foundation of a penal settlement under military government. Having founded it, so lacking in forethought and energy were these high powers that delay in sending ​store-ships kept the little colony, cast out like a band of shipwrecked mariners on this uttermost island, for more than two years on the verge of starvation. With a population of criminals and soldiers whose character was little better, people in whom greed was a dominant sentiment and self-restraint non-existent, Phillip weathered through four years of Governorship beset on all sides by difficulties of almost incredible magnitude. The community was as much alone as a ship in mid-ocean until the hitherto uncultivated soil yielded crops, and the few head of cattle increased. There were no means of getting away. The merchant vessels which had formed the bulk of Phillip's fleet had returned, and the crazy old Sirius, the King's ship under his command, had been lost soon after. While the Government at home delayed in sending store-ships, they added to Phillip's difficulties by sending more convicts. However, by 1792, when Phillip, broken in health and spirits, returned to England, brighter prospects were dawning and the immediate danger of famine had been put to rest by more liberal supplies from home. Phillip never returned to New South Wales, for shortly after his arrival in England he succumbed to an illness from which he had long suffered. Three naval governors followed him, Hunter, King and Bligh. The last was deposed and arrested by the colonists at the beginning of 1808, and it was as his successor that Lachlan Macquarie, the first soldier to hold the command, took the oaths of office on New Year's Day, 1810.
The work of free settlement had made little progress. The stream of emigration from England to all parts of the world flowed very slowly, and no definite efforts were made to divert it towards New South Wales. Phillip's eager prophecy that, given fifty farmers, future prosperity would be assured, may have received theoretic approval, but was disregarded in practice. Nor was any enthusiasm felt for the new system of "colonising transportation". In 1798 a Select Committee on Finance declared that New South Wales was "already fully supplied with convicts" and advocated the establishment of home penitentiaries. In 1803 Lord Hobart, Secretary of State for War ​and the Colonies, said: "If you continually send thieves to one place, it must in time be super-saturated. Sydney is now, I think, completely saturated. We must let it rest and purify for a few years and it will again be in a condition to receive."
Mr. Wyndham, who held the same office in the shortlived ministry of 1806, thought it well to encourage free emigration as a counter-irritant, so to say, to the convict population."
Little was done to improve affairs in these directions. Certainly during Lord Hobart's term of office, after an unsuccessful attempt to form a penal colony at Port Phillip, two settlements were established at Hobart Town and Port Dalrymple in Van Diemen's Land. Nevertheless the vast majority of the convicts were still shipped to New South Wales, and when in 1811 the population of Van Diemen's Land had reached 1,300, not a fifth part were prisoners. In the older Colony the proportion was more than one-half.
In the first seven years of settlement, from 1788 to 1795, 5,765 men and women were transported to New South Wales, and of these 3,377 either died or returned to England at the expiration of their sentences. But 1,633 men and 755 women remained in the Colony in 1795 who had either served their time, been pardoned or emancipated, or were still prisoners. In the next fifteen years, that is until the beginning of 1810, 6,525 convicts were despatched to Sydney. There is no reason to believe that the proportion of those who died or returned had greatly changed, for as the inducements to settle in the Colony increased so also with growing prosperity did the means of leaving it. Taking, therefore, the percentage of those who remained in the preceding seven years, there would in 1810 be 3,232 men and 1,905 women who had arrived as convicts.
As in the whole population of 10,452 there were 2,654 children, not more than 2,346 men and 315 women in the settlement had not been transported. Of the men the military ​garrison accounted for 1,416 and the civil staff for 30. Many of the women were the wives of the soldiers and men on the civil staff. Certainly not more than 900 men and 300 women belonged to the class of free settlers. Some of these, it is impossible to say how many, were the first of the Australian-born, the offspring of the earliest settlers and convicts, then just reaching the borders of adult life. There cannot under any circumstances have been in 1810 more than 600 or 700 voluntary adventurers.
It was only natural that, at a time when in all countries the boundaries of class were well-marked, the ranks of a population so strangely recruited as that of New South Wales should be crossed and recrossed by lines of social distinctions. The broadest division was that between convict and free, which marked a man from the moment at which he first set foot in the territory. No matter what position he afterwards attained, whether he rose from prisoner to landed proprietor or fell from freedom to the ranks of the colonial gaol-gang, the important thing was not what he had come to be but how he had come to be there. Among the convicts themselves new divisions came into existence—the chief of them that between the men who were and the men who were no longer prisoners. From the vocabulary of slavery this class gained its name, and a body of freed but not freemen was formed within the convict ranks. The distinction between "freed" and "free" cut deep into the social, economic and judicial structure of the Colony. By completing his sentence or by means of a free pardon or a conditional pardon or "emancipation," which gave him freedom so long as he remained within the colonial boundaries, a prisoner might join the ranks of the freed, but the taint of servitude kept him from the full rights of citizenship. It was, however, only as the Colony began under Macquarie to emerge from infancy, ​and gradually cast aside the chains of military government, that the full force of these restrictions came to be felt.
There was a second twofold division of an economic rather than social nature crossing that of convicts and free, the division, namely, between those who received rations from the Government stores and those who did not—between the "victualled" and the "not-victualled". To those who were "on the store," a ration of meat and grain varying with the harvests and the frequency of home supplies, was served out each week, and in 1811 Government provided 4,227 full rations. As these included the half rations for women and quarter rations for children, the total number of persons for whose food-supply the Government was responsible was considerably over 4,000. The "victualled" included the civil department, the military and police forces with their families, 1,347 convicts in Government employ, 80 land proprietors, the families of 40 of them and 90 of their convict servants. Rations constituted a great part of the remuneration of the small employees of Government, and in the lower ranks of the police force food and clothing formed the only wages. For the farmers the supply of rations was part of the system of land grants and "indulgences" to free and convict settlers.
The establishment of these Government stores issuing rations to about half the population influenced strongly the agricultural development of the Colony. Government not only granted land and assigned convict servants, but was also the chief purchaser of the produce of farmer and grazier, and the Government price ruled the market. Socially the stores in Sydney and in the townships were the chief rallying points for settlers and traders, who would come thither and loiter about, discussing the prospects of rain, and the laziness of convict servants, the findings of the Criminal Court and the struggle against Napoleon, the depredations of the natives on their peach trees, and the eternal glories of George III. and the ​British flag. Indeed the popularity of these informal "clubrooms" was such that Macquarie found it necessary, in the interests of public business, to issue an order on the subject wherein he expressed "a hope, after this Notice of the inconvenience arising from such habit, that persons not having actual business at the said stores and granaries, will desist from lounging there in future."
When Macquarie came to the Colony there were only three populated districts, Sydney, Paramatta and the Hawkesbury. The first had a disproportionate share of the people; for with an acreage of 24,301, it had a population of 6,156—more than half of the whole. The area of Paramatta was nearly double that of Sydney, but the population was only 1,807—and at the Hawkesbury River settlement there were 2,389 inhabitants occupying 28,704 acres.
The difference in kind between town and country populations was not so great as that in quantity. While the merchants and traders, who were usually landholders as well, belonged almost entirely to Sydney, in other respects the description of the people of one district serves equally well for that of all. Thus the classification given by Alexander Riley, a merchant of New South Wales, of the society of Sydney is not only an accurate account of that district, but well describes the whole settlement.
In his first class, Riley placed the officers, civil and military, and gentlemen. To say that such and such men were gentlemen was easy enough—to assign reasons for saying so was more complex. Riley did not attempt to do it. Yet in so small a community, and one which from its isolated position was peculiarly self-centred, such distinctions counted for much in the amenities of colonial life. Broadly speaking, profession or birth formed the usual standard. But a merchant came within the charmed circle, and so might a retail trader if his ​wealth were great and his "address" conciliatory. In so small a population the claims of each individual could be tested, and occasionally—rigid as was the general rule—reason and humanity triumphed over the levelling of the criminal law, and an ex-convict returned to his previous rank in society. The great test of a man's position and pretensions were the hosts with whom he dined. Save during Bligh's rule, to dine at Government House was a mark of gentility, while to dine at the regimental mess was even more decisive. A great number of the "gentlemen-settlers" were retired army and navy officers who applied with zeal the peculiar caste rules of the services. For the most part they were simple, commonplace men, physically courageous and intellectually vapid, men guided by a strange jumble of uncomprehended motives—blind loyalty to the King, their regiment or ship—blind acceptance of the Church of England—mingled with love of liquor, greed of gain and indifference to the usual tenets of morality. Few were men of striking ability or forceful character, for the colonial garrisons, which formed a back-water of the Service and the retired list, had little to show in those times of war in the way of brains or energy. All that was best was seeking promotion or glory on the field of battle.
The merchants were on the whole made of better stuff, for their business called for more intelligence and enterprise than the farming and grazing which usually occupied the gentleman-settler.
Riley's next division consisted of the traders and settlers who had come to the Colony as free men. This included shopkeepers and tradesmen, and those who in England would have been tenant-farmers, together with schoolmasters and Methodist missionaries. The farmers amongst them were to be found chiefly on the small rich allotments along the banks of the Hawkesbury. Their intercourse with the traders and settlers ​who had been convicts and who formed Riley's third class was comparatively free, and marriage between them and the children of freedmen or prisoners was frequent and generally approved. Indeed such connections were far more encouraged and less a matter for reproach in early years than at a later date.
The lowest rung of the social ladder was made up of convicts still under sentence and "free labourers". This was, of course, a social and in no sense a legal equality. The development of a class of "poor whites" was an inevitable consequence of the existence of servile labour. The free man fell from the social and economic point of view when he became a competitor of the bond-servant whose labour was compulsory although paid for by food, clothes and a yearly wage. The normal condition of a free man in a country where land might be had for next to nothing and cultivated with scarcely any capital was that of proprietor not labourer, and when Riley placed the latter beside the convicts, he described with perfect accuracy such a man's status in the Colony.
Probably no more extravagant and careless system of land distribution has ever been adopted in a British colony than that of the first fifteen years of Australian settlement, for already, at the beginning of 18ii, 117,269 acres had been alienated. The administrators of the new Continent had two objects before them—one, to rid England once for all of her delinquent population—the other, to make the Colony self-supporting. In the beginning it was not thought necessary to do more than establish the convicts on the land at the expiration of their terms of servitude. Phillip's instructions were quite explicit. Emancipists were to receive grants of 30 acres if single, 50 acres if married, with 10 more for each child. The grants were to be free of all fees and taxes for ten years, after which a quit-rent, fixed at sixpence for every 30 acres, was to be charged. In addition to these advantages, Government undertook to provide the ex-convict and his family with rations for twelve months, to give the necessary tools and seed ​grain, and to allow him stock on easy terms. By Macquarie's time the period within which the settler remained "on the store," which had been left to the Governor's discretion in Hunter's instructions in 1794, had been generally accepted as eighteen months.
One reservation and one restriction were imposed. The Government reserved for itself timber suitable for naval purposes on all land granted by the Crown, and made the grants to ex-convicts conditional on residence by the grantee. But to give or to withhold lay wholly in the Governor's discretion. The ostensible claim to a grant was good behaviour during servitude, but the standard of conduct might well vary as men of different character succeeded one another in the seat of patronage. Though these convict farmers were intended to form the motive power of agricultural progress, Phillip was directed in his instructions to report on the best means of settling military and other subjects on the land. Finding convict labour of a low standard, and convict settlers lacking in energy, Phillip strongly recommended the emigration of trained agriculturists. The Secretary of State disregarded this advice and began by authorising him to make grants to the non-commissioned officers and men of the garrison and later to the officers and civil staff. Finally the Governor was permitted to make grants to any free settler. The instructions laid down for Governor Hunter in 1794 were still in force in 1810. Any person applying for a grant might receive from the Governor land not more than a hundred acres above the amount granted to an emancipist and with similar freedom from taxes for ten years. After that a quit-rent of one shilling for each fifty acres was to be paid. Under special circumstances, a full account of which had to be transmitted to the Secretary of State, grants of larger area might be made to free settlers or emancipists. The former had to pay registration and surveying fees ​in all cases before receiving their land. A free settler had, however, the right to receive convict servants if the Governor could spare them from the public services, and if he undertook to feed and clothe them satisfactorily. Although nothing was said in the Governor's Instructions about victualling these settlers, they were usually placed on the store for the same time as the emancipists. This was one of the indulgences held forth to encourage emigration and settlement. While the giving of the grant, the extent of the indulgences, the number of servants, the situation, extent and quality of the land (apart from the general proviso that good and bad was to be equally distributed) depended, in the absence of special orders from the Secretary of State, wholly upon the will of the Governor, the settler had on his side unfettered power to deal with his land in whatever way he pleased. He might or might not reside there, he might or might not clear or cultivate it, and finally he could sell it on the very day he took possession. The only restraint upon him was his expectation of favours to come, and his knowledge of each Governor's principles and prejudices.
These instructions suggest a multiplication of small holdings of thirty to two hundred acres each and that such was the intention of the Government is borne out by the clauses regulating the reservation of land for the Crown and public services. The "planters" were to be settled in townships in order that as near neighbours they might better help and defend themselves and each other, and in each township was to be established a town in which special areas would be reserved for definite public purposes. Further, between every 10,000 acres granted to settlers, the Governor was to set aside 500 acres for the Crown which might be leased for any term up to fourteen years. With the progress of the settlement the Crown would thus retain between every cluster of farms a tract of land of which the value would steadily increase. But the irregularity resulting from special grants of large areas, and the dangers and inconveniences in a new country of leaving broad belts of uncleared land between ​the cultivated sections, made the regulation unpopular with surveyors and Governors, and it was almost totally disregarded.
The whole of the town of Sydney had been proclaimed by Phillip a Government reserve and thus brought under leasehold regulations. Governor King had further restricted the leases of town lots to a period of five years. This short time of certain occupation (for renewal was always problematical and there was no compensation for improvements) undoubtedly discouraged substantial building enterprises. In Sydney the houses were for the most part built of wood, with light flat roofs, varied occasionally by a stone building of similar shape and equally devoid of decoration. The town had rather the appearance of a cluster of sheds, and doubtless inspired by contrast in Macquarie that dream of architectural beauty which brought him later into much trouble and difficulty.
Notwithstanding the intentions of the Government there was in 1810 anything rather than a regime of peasant holdings. In the General Muster only 808 persons were returned as proprietors though 95,937 acres were given as "settled," and the stock, exclusive of Government herds, which amounted to a few thousand head, was estimated at 49,587 head. For a few years the practice of giving extensive grants to civil and military officers had been pursued, and in many cases these had been joined into single estates by private sale. Several members of the New South Wales corps had retired from the army before 1810 in order to devote themselves to their farms, and some who went with the regiment to England in that year returned to the Colony to live on the estates they had previously purchased or been granted. Occasionally also the Secretary of State had sent "gentlemen-settlers" to New South Wales with promises ​of grants of three, four or five thousand acres in chosen localities. These great estates lay chiefly in the Sydney and Paramatta districts. In these, 66,938 acres were occupied, of which 56,939 were given over to pasture and less than a tenth to crops. At the Hawkesbury more than a third of the area occupied was under crop or lying fallow, and only 18,000 acres were used for pasture. In this district small holdings were the general rule.
As early as 1805 Governor King spoke of the scarcity and "exorbitant" cost of labour. He attributed it to the common practice pursued by the colonists of obtaining larger grants than they could afford to cultivate themselves and then letting out the surplus. It was a bad system, and was one cause of the growing jealousy felt by Government against large estates. It created a wholly unnecessary class of middlemen, and by increasing the amount of land on the market weakened one of the incentives to good conduct for the convict, making it less important for him to earn his grant during the period of servitude. The need for labour, however, was not likely to be great so long as pastoral farming held first place, for climate and natural grasses favoured even careless breeding. While a few men of enterprise and foresight were occupied in improving fleeces with a view to exporting wool, both sheep and cattle brought large profits to those who bred for slaughter only. But the amount of stock in the Colony was not yet sufficient to guarantee a constant supply and salted meat was still sent from England. To check wasteful destruction of cattle and also cattle-stealing, Government officials supervised all slaughtering and received a fee for so doing.
There was, indeed, no freedom of trade, internal or external. The two staple products, meat and wheat, found their chief market with the Government, and were bought at a set price approved by the Governor. Following the English custom, the retail bakers sold their loaves at a cost fixed each week by the Sydney bench of magistrates, who based their decision on the price of corn in the market. The bakers were also ordered by the same authorities to make their bread of a certain fineness, or in times of scarcity of a certain coarseness of grain.
​These restrictions were as nothing in comparison with those on the import trade, by which alone the colonists could be provided with manufactured goods, whether necessaries or luxuries. In the first place the Charter of the East India Company made it necessary for the Home Government to prohibit commercial relations with India, China or any "known South Sea island" without the express permission of the Governor. The coasting trade, however, from Newcastle in the north to the Derwent at the south of Van Diemen's Land was in the hands of the New South Wales Government and the colonists. A clause in the Governor's instructions directed him not to allow the building of ships in the Colony for the China or East India trade, but it is doubtful whether the clause was ever enforced. Governor Bligh introduced a very troublesome regulation in the interests of Sydney as the headquarters of the whole settlement which Macquarie allowed to remain in force. In accordance with this all ships bound for Van Diemen's Land from other than colonial ports had to put in first at Port Jackson in New South Wales. It was supposed that as Van Diemen's Land was on the direct route from India and the Cape, the port of Sydney would without this regulation be subordinated to that of Hobart.
The port dues and customs were general and heavy. All imports save those from Great Britain paid a uniform ad valorem duty of 5 per cent., and duties were laid on colonial timber and coal brought to Sydney from other parts of the Colony. The products of the South Seas, sandalwood, pearl-shells and bêche-le-mer paid from £2 10s. to £5 per ton, and there was no drawback allowed on re-exportation.
When the naval officer who collected the duties had passed the cargo, the goods became subject to a curious regulation. In the earliest times the Government had been the only importer, and a system of investments in goods on behalf of ​the Government to be bartered for corn and meat had been commenced. The growth of private trading enterprises had made this no longer necessary, and on Macquarie's assumption of office it was brought to an end. For some time before that, however, the bulk of the trade had been in the hands of a few merchants who were able to charge exorbitant scarcity prices. To prevent such exploitation of the people's needs the Government placed a maximum price on imported goods, allowing in general 50 per cent. profit. In the dearth of competition the maximum price became the sole price of the merchant, though the retailer might still further heighten it.
The trading population in these early years was indeed a strange one. Officers both civil and military were concerned in every kind of enterprise. Division of employment was almost unknown. A man might be captain or commissariat officer in the army as well as sheep-breeder, farmer, butcher, merchant and ship-builder; and with scarcely one exception he was a rum-dealer as well. The subject of spirituous liquors, their importation, distillation, distribution and consumption, fills many pages of the history of New South Wales. It must be remembered that it was in England also an age of intemperance, and that the population of the settlement was recruited from the two classes most prone to drinking, the soldiery and the criminals. Amongst the rank and file as in the mess-room, a soldier was not long in learning to drink—just as a man who was a criminal, so to say, by accident, had little hope of escaping the vice in the prisons of England. The rest of the population, unprovided younger sons, failures and adventurers, were not men who would turn with horror from the excesses and immorality induced by reckless drinking. It is true that there were honourable exceptions, poor and rich, ​and that there were some notably peaceful and happy homesteads—but it is unluckily true that in 1810 they were still exceptional.
Those in authority laid down the simple rule—never possible in practice—that the convicts were not to be supplied with liquor, and also sought to regulate the quantity to be imported. Yearly the growth of population made this task more difficult. Under the instructions drawn up for Admiral Hunter in 1794, it became necessary to produce the express permission of the Governor in writing before landing any spirits. Under regulations drawn up in the Colony this spirit, having paid a heavy duty, might be sold by the importers to officers and others in certain quantities decided upon by the Governor. It was, however, quite within the Governor's discretion to decide at any time that the settlement was already sufficiently supplied, and King, who followed Hunter in 1800, turned away more than one cargo of spirits and became extremely unpopular on that account. Officers of all ranks and the merchants threw themselves into the business of monopolising the spirit trade and raising the price for retailer and consumer. The convicts and emancipists, unable to obtain a regular supply, became more and more eager for the liquor. They were there, unwilling immigrants, deprived of liberty, living under better but less exciting conditions than in the hovels and slums of London; the pickpockets had no pockets to pick, the forgers and coiners no bank notes or coins to counterfeit. Those who had not been habitual criminals had endured a long schooling in degradation by constant companionship with their fellows—first while waiting for trial, then in prisons or river hulks, and finally packed close together for a six months' voyage. For these the separation from homes and families and fatherland was harder to bear. They had a chance to make a fresh start in New South Wales, but they had also the continual bitterness of self-reproach. Under these circumstances nearly all the prisoners drank, and drank wildly, a few perhaps seeking indifference—the majority to gratify a physical craving.
When spirit could be bought the poorest were willing to sell all they had to get it. The limits on importation caused a multiplication of illicit stills. The home authorities refused to ​legalise colonial distillation, and the eagerness for drink was such that the Government could not prevent its illicit distillation. But far worse than this was the system of the "rum-currency," by which labour, land and produce were bartered for spirit. It was a currency of great elasticity, affected by the personal equation and still more by the length of time between cargoes and the quantity landed. No method could have been more effective in the oppression and spoliation of the weak, poor and ignorant. Yet it became the general custom with all classes, and though King and Bligh both forbade payment by rum, Macquarie had still to face the difficulty in 1810 and found it impossible to bring it to an end. The quantity of coin was next to nothing, the paper currency depreciated and the debtor as anxious as the creditor to be paid in liquor, while the small settler would exchange house, land and stock for a few days' orgie.
The state of drunkenness had its most serious side in the pauperism and misery into which the poorer classes were led, and the impulse it gave to evil ways of gaining wealth in the rest of the community. Immorality as well as drunkenness was rife. Marriages between the convicts were infrequent before 1810, but cohabitation was customary. The female convicts lived not only with prisoners but with men of all classes. Few of the women transported were of good character, and there were fewer still who could retain their decency in companionship with the wretched dregs of humanity who formed the majority, and in face of the terrible practices indulged in on the female transport vessels. After the long voyage out the women were assigned as servants to the settlers and officers of the Government. There were no regulations as to these assignments, and abuses whereby the servant became the mistress were general. So common were these and similar practices that when the New South Wales Corps left the Colony in 1810 Macquarie granted pardons to many female convicts in order ​that the men and non-commissioned officers might marry and take with them the women who had been their companions and were the mothers of their children.
The women who were not thus assigned remained in Government employment, working in a woollen factory at Paramatta. But even these found homes with the male convicts in the town, many leading lives as shameful as those they had left behind them in the dens of London.
Yet in spite of this promiscuous breeding, in spite of the prevalence of the bar-sinister, the children of these unions were of strong physique, lacked neither mental nor moral force, and sought to live soberly and decently. The family affections, too, were strong, and child murder or even neglect practically unknown. That women tried to preserve their innocent but illegitimate babies was natural enough in a country where to be a mistress and not a wife was the more usual condition.
The established forms and conventions of civilisation were difficult to establish in a little penal settlement cut off by the seas from the whole world. The ordinary decencies and comforts of life were dispensed with as carelessly as the marriage laws. Macquarie was disgusted with the rough-built houses and the badly clothed, uneducated children of even prosperous settlers. Mud and paling huts or two-roomed houses with a lean-to or skilling at the back were the ordinary country dwellings. But the climate exacted little in the way of shelter and clothing and, save in time of flood or famine, convict and settler alike lived better than they had been accustomed to do in England. Only here and there, however, had families established themselves in the country as in a permanent home. For the majority of the "gentleman-settlers" it was a place to make money in, money which was to be spent in re-establishing themselves in the old country, and which might be easily made in the liquor traffic. In the twelve years which followed Macquarie's arrival, no change was more remarkable than in this feeling that New South Wales was only the scene of a temporary exile.
Rough and plain as was the life of the settler, at least the fear of fierce native raids which pressed upon the American pioneer was absent. The aborigines took quietly the establishment of the white folk upon one of their hunting grounds. ​Phillip indeed did his best to conciliate them; and though, until Macquarie came, his successors showed little interest in their condition, peaceful relations were customary. In law the native could claim equal protection with the white man, but this equality was difficult to enforce even in the Courts. Amongst the out-lying population, when a black man stole the corn or fruit of a settler, it was often impossible to prevent the injured party from wreaking summary vengeance upon a whole tribe, and that brought in its turn indiscriminate reprisals. The Governors attempted, with varying success, to put an end to all private punitive expeditions, and to secure that black and white should both be brought to justice. The worst offenders against the natives were the escaped convicts who sometimes led precarious lives in the forests. On the whole the blacks suffered little. Missionary efforts were made to teach them Christianity, husbandry and the advantage of clothes and regular food. They learnt very little, and though some of them hung about the settlement, the greater number continued to wander through the forests where each tribe kept within its roughly marked boundaries, and where, save for occasional depredations on lonely farms, they interfered little with the colonists.
Such were the people and such their ways of living when Macquarie started on his difficult task of restoring peace and establishing good government after the long distractions which had led up to and followed the deposition of his predecessor, Captain William Bligh.
* ↑ Afterwards the first Lord Auckland.
* ↑ See History of New Holland, by William Eden, 1787, p. xxx. Discourse on Banishment.
* ↑ 24 Geo. III. cap. 56.
* ↑ i.e., Australia. New Holland was the earlier name for the Colony. In Flinders' Charts, published in 1814, the name Australia was used, and Macquarie in D., 4th April, 1817, hoped that the name would be adopted. One of the earliest names given by the voyagers of the seventeenth century was Terra Australis.
* ↑ See H.R., I., Pt. II., Memorial of Matra to Lord Sydney, 23rd August, 1783.
* ↑ Named after Lord Sydney.
* ↑ The book was published in 1787. It gives an account of discovery and explorations from 1616 to 1787. Eden was an intimate friend of the younger Pitt, and probably expressed the views of the Government in regard to the new settlement.
* ↑ History of New Holland, Preface, p. v.
* ↑ Ibid., p. vii.
* ↑ History of New Holland, Preface, pp. v-vi.
* ↑ See H. G. Bennet in House of Commons. Hansard, vol. 39, p. 478, 18th February, 1819.
* ↑ Ibid., p. vi.
* ↑ Ibid., p. ix.
* ↑ See Report of Select Committee on Finance, P.P. 1798.
* ↑ See H.R., V., Appendix, p. 835. Quoted in letter of Banks to King, 8th April, 1803.
* ↑ R.O., Wyndham to Bathurst, 1806.
* ↑ Every year a "General Muster" was held and a fairly complete Domesday compiled of the inhabitants, cattle and crops throughout the Colony. That made in 1810 has been lost, and the basis of the calculations which follow is the record for 1811.
* ↑ Probably 300 would be an outside limit.
* ↑ The estimate of the male convict population is probably too low. This should very possibly be larger and the free element smaller, for in 1820 the free settlers (excluding the Australian-born) were reckoned at as low a figure as 794. See Chapter V.
* ↑ The social, and to some extent the legal, consequences of imprisonment in a colonial gaol differed according to the nature of the crime, and also according to whether the offence was a crime by English or by Governor-made law only.
* ↑ In 1810 there were fewer rations served out, but it is impossible to find the exact increase.
* ↑ In a few cases the families were not "on the store".
* ↑ See later in this Chapter.
* ↑ In 1810 Government purchased three-fifths of the wheat grown in the colony. C. on T.
* ↑ S.G., 7th August, 1813. Government Public Notice and Order.
* ↑ Far north of Sydney a small settlement had been established to work the coal mines at Newcastle at the mouth of the Hunter River. There seventy "incorrigible" convicts worked under guard of a garrison of thirty. The labour was more severe and the comfort less than in the southern settlements, and Newcastle (called also "Coal River") was used as a place to which the New South Wales Courts might order the transportation of prisoners.
* ↑ 42,627 acres.
* ↑ Evidence before C. on G., 1819.
* ↑ Three examples may be given in which men who had been transported associated freely with the gentlemen settlers and Government officials, Ensign. Barrallier, who had been transported for killing his opponent in a duel, the Rev. H. C. Fulton, for supposed complicity in the Irish Rebellion, and Sir H. B. Hayes, ex-Sheriff of Cork, for the abduction of a young girl.
* ↑ There were, however, probably few merchants who did not farm some land, and few settlers who were not interested in some trading project.
* ↑ See Instructions, H.R., I., Pt. II., p. 85, pars. 9, 10.
* ↑ i.e. Men who had been convicts. This was a usual term in New South Wales.
* ↑ The amount of the quit-rent was left blank in Phillip's instructions, but was settled soon after at the above rate.
* ↑ Colonial term for receiving rations from Government.
* ↑ See H.R., VII., p. 133, etc., par. 9. Instructions to Macquarie, 9th May, 1809.
* ↑ See above, p. 5.
* ↑ See Instructions to Macquarie, par. 12.
* ↑ Ibid., par. 13.
* ↑ See Instructions to Macquarie, par. 14.
* ↑ Ibid., par. 16.
* ↑ Ibid., pars. 17, 18, 19, 20.
* ↑ e.g. Fortifications, churches, markets, etc.
* ↑ R.O., MS., Macquarie to Bathurst, D. 18, 4th April, 1817, in reply to D. 3rd, December, 1815. See also Chapter V.
* ↑ Crown reserves could be leased as the Governors thought fit. See Instructions above.
* ↑ He once contravened his own regulation by the simple if illegal method of incorporating in a five years' lease the promise of regular renewal up to twenty-two years. See D. 18, above.
* ↑ See especially Bigge's Report, I.
* ↑ Information on this subject is very scanty, and it is only by indirect evidence that the relative conditions of each district can be even approximately estimated.
* ↑ H.R., VI., p. 39, King to Earl Camden, 15th March, 1805.
* ↑ Macquarie's Instructions. The permission of the Governor of Bengal also appears to have been necessary. See Chapter V.
* ↑ Bigge speaks of a colonial vessel of less than 350 tons register trading to Cape Colony and to Batavia. Report III.
* ↑ When the restriction was removed in 1812 it was not found that Sydney suffered at all.
* ↑ For fuller treatment of this subject see Chapter V.
* ↑ The Government official in charge of the port.
* ↑ See Letter of Instructions to Macquarie, 14th May, 1809. H.R., VII., p. 143.
* ↑ There are no complaints to be discovered of the merchants against the fixing of the maximum price. This certainly suggests that the regulation was not strictly enforced.
* ↑ Marsden (Rev. S.) in An Answer to Certain Calumnies in the Late Governor Macquarie's Pamphlet, etc., published in 1826, pp. 8-10, explains that it was necessary in early times to give grants of land to officers of the Government in order to ensure enough corn being grown in the settlement to feed the people. This was undoubtedly the case before 1800.
* ↑ Cf. "Gin-currency" of West Africa.
* ↑ See Chapter IV. and also Proceedings of a General Court Martial for the trial of Lieut.-Col. Johnston on a charge of mutiny exhibited against him by the Crown and for deposing W. Bligh, etc., London, 1811, p. 246.
* ↑ See also Chapter VIII.
* ↑ See Letter of Instructions to Macquarie, 14th May, 1809. H.R., VII. p. 143.
* ↑ See notes of a conversation with Rev. S. Marsden in a volume of Essays Geographical, Commercial and Philosophical, published anonymously in 1812. Royal Colonial Institute.