Australian History For Dummies. Alex McDermott

Australian History For Dummies

Australian History For Dummies - Alex McDermott

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order, only to find themselves largely ignored by the convicts, and by the common soldiers and the officer Corps as well.

      

Early NSW was anything but pious. Neither the convicts, nor the common soldiery, nor many of the officers, military or civil, set any real store on forswearing their preferred pursuits — swearing, gambling, drinking and fornicating. In this they were broadly reflective of the habits and pursuits of the bulk of Georgian England, but in NSW the established authorities and arbiters of proper morality held far less sway.

The Evangelicals were just launching their great moral revival at this time in late Georgian Britain; its chief exponent, William Wilberforce, experienced his ‘conversion’ at about the same time as the First Fleet was sailing. The Evangelists’ deep sense was that England had ‘fallen’ from the state of religious zeal of the previous century, and been seduced and corrupted by the luxuries and excesses that modern life offered. They wanted to ‘reclaim’ modern Britain from the various excesses and debaucheries that the 18th century had become famous for. The Evangelicals had some really positive social reform to their credit — most notably, the abolition of slavery in Britain — but they had their work cut out for them in the new colony of NSW.

      Under the tutelage, direct and indirect, of Wilberforce, who was a friend of Prime Minister William Pitt and Sir Joseph Banks (a lot more about Banks in Chapter 3), clergymen of Evangelical bent were sent out to the new settlement.

      Once in NSW, Reverend Johnson railed against the laxness of the Corps when it came to enforcing piety, and for allowing convicts to throw ‘aside all regard or reverence for the Sabbath Day, and to render all public solemn worship utterly contemptible’. Convicts were paid to work on Sundays. Other convicts were left to pretty much do whatever they wanted.

      

While Johnson was conducting services, he claimed the bulk of convicts ‘were either asleep in their hammocks or sitting in their huts, or otherwise gone out to work for officers or other individuals’. Just as bad, ‘spiritous liquor was the most general article and mode of payment for such extra labour, and hence in the evening the whole camp has been nothing else, often, but a scene of intoxication, riots, disturbances, etc’. Evangelical missionaries escaping from threatened violence in Tahiti in 1799, according to Johnson, found in the colony of NSW ‘Adultery, Fornication, Theft, Drunkenness, Extortion, Violence and Uncleanness of every kind’.

      

These expressions of horror and outrage were generally applied by Evangelicals to the various ‘unclaimed’ parts of England itself — whether it was the ‘debased’ aristocrats or the ‘lower orders’ then chiefly congregating in London. Yes, the people in NSW liked to whore, gamble, swear and drink, often to excess — but that didn’t mark them out as particularly different from a lot of people in the Georgian era.

      Yet on his arrival in the settlement, Hunter — himself a deeply religious Christian and sympathetic to the Evangelicals — raved about the place. Having been in NSW with Governor Phillip at the beginning of white settlement, he was staggered that so much progress had been made in so little time.

      

Hunter wrote to the Duke of Portland in London describing the ‘very great success’ that individual farmers had had in growing grain and breeding livestock. True, Hunter conceded a little reluctantly, it was self-interest rather than the public good that motivated everyone. Yet ‘it certainly succeeds better with them than in the hands of Government’. And he also approved of the rum incentive payments — initially, at least. ‘Much work will be done by labourers, artificers and others for a small reward in this article, and (without any injury to health) which money could not purchase.’

      But Hunter was pretty lazy when it came to governing this newly productive colony. During his time as governor, Hunter failed to

       Manage the emerging trade and import market in the new colony

       Ensure the newly established government store was restocked after initial supplies sold out

       Control the distribution of land according to a well thought out plan — or any plan

      However, Hunter’s lack of attention to detail actually had some positive effects for the colony.

      Ending the trading monopoly game

      When the administration of the new colony was in the hands of the NSW Corps, the officers in the Corps set up trading monopolies over all imported goods. On his arrival, Hunter made no attempt to control or manage the emerging trade, and issued no rulings on whether the monopolies should be broken or maintained.

      However, failing to control trade actually had the positive effect of allowing the market to open up. The monopoly was broken not by a governor, nor an order issued from London, but by convicts and common soldiers made good — convicts and soldiers put in place, moreover, by the officers themselves.

Because the officers prized so highly their status as ‘gentlemen’, they couldn’t be seen to be involved in trade, so they put their underlings and go-betweens in the cockpit. Convict servants and soldier privates didn’t take long to corner the market for themselves, quickly proving they were more than savvy enough to strike their own deals with ships’ captains once they’d built up enough capital to do so. They and newly arrived entrepreneurs from British India undercut the officers — who were furious, but couldn’t do much about it. (They’d started falling out among themselves by this stage, anyway.) The NSW Corps officers started getting out of the trading game, including the grog trade, and concentrated instead on developing their landed holdings.

      The rum monopoly was over. Yet no-one had told the powerful men in England that.

      A government store with empty shelves

      Skyrocketing inflation caused by the officers’ monopoly on imported goods (refer to preceding section) could have been mediated when Hunter established a government store, which provided farmers and others with reasonable prices for essential items ordered in from Britain, such as clothes, spirits, tea, tobacco and sugar.

      But once the store ran out of its initial supplies, Hunter neglected to re-stock. Being unable to foresee that you’d need to order regular consignments of merchandise that were being widely used by the mass of the rural population is a telling failure.

      Handing out land higgledy-piggledy

      Phillip, who didn’t think much of convicts as settlers, had fairly strictly separated the areas where convicts, ex-convicts and free settlers would be given land to settle, and Grose

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