The Europeans in Australia: Volume One: The Beginning (1) - Softcover

Atkinson, Alan

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1742234968 ISBN 13: 9781742234960

Publisher: NewSouth, 2016

Synopsis

The first of three volumes of the landmark, award-winning series The Europeans in Australia gives an account of early settlement by Britain. It tells of the political and intellectual origins of this extraordinary undertaking that began during the 1780s, a decade of extraordinary creativity and the climax of the European Enlightenment. Atkinson examines, as few historians have done before, the political and intellectual origins of this extraordinary undertaking.

About this title

About the Author

Alan Atkinson has a PhD from the Australian National University in Canberra, as well as a Masters degree from Trinity College, The University of Dublin. His books include Camden: Farm and Village Life in Early New South Wales and The Commonwealth of Speech.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

The Europeans in Australia

Volume One: the Beginning

By Alan Atkinson

University of New South Wales Press Ltd

Copyright © 2016 Alan Atkinson
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-1-74223-496-0

Contents

Introduction to three volumes, 
Foreword, 
ORIGINAL DIFFERENCES, 
1 Talk, 
2 Writing, 
3 Towards Botany Bay, 
4 Arthur Phillip and Robert Ross, 
5 Argument and Servitude, 
6 Discipline and Cheerfulness, 
CHANGING, 
7 Men and Women, 
8 Black and White, 
9 God and Humanity, 
PUTTING THEMSELVES, 
10 Boundaries, Homes and Money, 
11 Vicissitudes of Commonwealth, 
12 Varieties of Brotherhood, 
13 Sydney's Rebellion, 
14 The Ocean and the Little Fish, 
15 The Coming of the Macquaries, 
Afterword, 
Acknowledgments, 
Notes, 
Bibliography, 
Index, 

CHAPTER 1

Talk

I

On 19 January 1788 eleven sailing vessels, carrying a little more than a thousand Europeans for the purpose of settling the eastern half of Australia, drew near their destination. On this day the coast about Botany Bay was sighted. One of the officers of the intended garrison recalled the cheerfulness all about him, 'the spirits visible in every eye'. According to another:

The wind was now fair, the sky serene, though a little hazy, and the temperature of the air delightfully pleasant: joy sparkled in every countenance, and congratulations issued from every mouth. Ithaca itself was scarcely more longed for by Ulysses, than Botany Bay by the adventurers who had traversed so many thousand miles to take possession of it.

This is a kind and degree of happiness shared only by individuals who go from one world to found another. It embodied relief after a long voyage, but it was much more. It was also the pleasure of possession and creation, and as such it lingered for months, even for years, beyond the moment at which the invaders first set foot on Australian soil.

It was not a feeling which depended on any certain prospect of comfort, riches or liberty. Nor did it involve any thought that the current inhabitants of Australia would welcome conquest, though a few of the travellers had convinced themselves that in their future dealings with the Aborigines justice and humanity would prevail. There were poor men and women on the ships who had ideas of their own as to what might be in store, and some had hopes of making an easy life for themselves. But anyone who understood the mind of their Commodore and intended Governor, Captain Arthur Phillip – a mind to be explored in the pages which follow – must have known better.

Liberty was especially doubtful. It is true that in many parts of Europe and North America the last years of the eighteenth century were a time when liberty flourished and rights for men, if not for women, were enlarged as never before. Already for generations Britain and its colonies had been the home of liberty, but the current age promised, or threatened, to carry liberty to new extremes. Britons, and the English in particular, delighted in raising their voices in public, and what they understood to be a manly oratory – demand, protest, declamation, consent – was their meat and drink. Good government, they had long thought, should be full of the sweet to-and-fro of conversation. And the most important conversation, passing backwards and forwards down the generations, a conversation by which the nation as a whole was embroidered with liberty, was between those who had power and those who lacked it. This understanding was summed up in the word 'commonwealth'. All had voices. However, in New South Wales, a British settlement founded in an age of revolution, the future of such conversation was uncertain.

Talking and the freedom of speech were the essence of the English idea of liberty. As the seventeenth-century pamphleteer John Warr put it, 'the minds of men are the great wheels of things: thence come changes and alterations in the world; teeming freedom exerts and puts forth itself '. The rights attached to property were important too, especially landed property. Place, and the type of attachment to place which was defensible in law, refined the idea of being English and thereby underwrote the membership of commonwealth. But talking was pervasive, fluid, protean. Like smoke, it filled the spaces left for it. Like fire, it made its own spaces. It was perfectly consistent with a society of rank and degree, as long as all were sure of their status and of the rights attached to status, so that even violent demands could pose no fundamental danger to the whole. Propertied Englishmen raised their voices in order to send their representatives to parliament, and their representatives raised their voices in parliament (a word which means 'talking') in conversation with each other and the government. In theory all Englishmen, and up to a point Englishwomen, had a right to address the sovereign, officers of state, parliament and magistrates, and a right to expect a response. The duty to hear and the right to be heard both encompassed the right to say 'no'. In short, government from day to day was supposed to depend on the subjects' consent.

There was no necessary connection between commonwealth and democracy, whether democracy in the form advocated at the end of the eighteenth century or that which was to be practised in due course during the nineteenth. Commonwealth did not involve the whole population, listed without discrimination on electoral rolls, speaking on great issues, and in such a way as to deliver a single verdict. It did not involve the sovereignty of the people because neither the people nor anyone else controlled the final word. The idea of national sovereignty itself was not yet fully worked out. It was conversation about particular things, and the voices of individuals and groups were raised in particular ways. The people spoke with a babble of voices. The law courts, with their infinite arguments, summed up the English system best of all. They therefore occupied a sacred place within the common imagination:

What whispering is there [in the courts] ... What swearing is there: yea, what swaggering, what facing and out-facing? What shuffling, what shouldering, what Justling, what leering, what byting of Thumbs to beget quarrels, what holding uppe of fingers to remember drunken meetings, what braving with Feathers, what bearding with Mustachoes.

Swaggering, 'facing and out-facing', were perfected in the courts, by judges in full regalia as much as by witnesses and petty lawyers. But these habits carried through to other forums and arenas.

The people were no part of government. But they might speak to government, might face and out-face, at least according to popular doctrine. Trial by jury was highly prized as a classic method of giving power to common voices. The principle of 'no taxation without representation', on which the power of parliament depended, was equally precious. It meant that people with property could not be taxed by government without the consent of their elected representatives. The Act of Habeas Corpus, 1679, was another statement of principle central to the English and British constitution. It stopped imprisonment without trial. Through being tried the accused acquired a voice, a means of being heard against the Crown itself, a right which in fact grew more substantial within the courts during the eighteenth century, thanks to the increased activity of the lawyers.

The Act of Habeas Corpus also had something to say about the transportation of convicts. According to the Act, no English man or woman might 'be sent Prisoner' out of England except under two conditions. Either he or she 'shall by Contract in Writing agree' to go; or else, having been convicted of a felony and sentenced to death, he or she 'shall in open Court pray to be transported'. There was to be a question asked from the bench and an answer given from the dock. Throughout the eighteenth century, and even into the nineteenth, consent had a part to play in the business of convict transportation. However, in this case the voice of the criminal became increasingly ritualised and feeble. So much so that, fifteen years after settlement began in New South Wales, Jeremy Bentham argued that the transportation system was entirely at odds with this celebrated Act, and so with the constitution itself.

The British attitude to talking was linked with religion and with the obvious glories of Protestantism. The Protestant faith had no institution like the Catholic confessional, in which Christians opened their mouths merely in order to lay themselves open to the judgment of their priests. In Catholic countries this was the main link between the common man and woman and the system of power which meant most to them. In England, after the Reformation, the Church had no such dealings with the mass of the people. During the turmoil of the 1640s, indeed, talk came mainly from the other side, for 'the people in Christ's kingdom' claimed, as they put it, a right 'of consultation, of debating, counselling, prophesying, voting'; even 'swearing i' th' light, gloriously'. This was living conversation, quite distinct from scholarship and writing, which was understood to be the instrument of a mortifying power: 'The dead letter is not the Word, but Christ is the Word.'

In principle, voices were stilled only by proper ceremony. But the means were effective. Most punishments inflicted by the courts were physical ones, designed to incapacitate the criminal, temporarily and permanently, as a thinking, speaking being. The courts were a stage on which men and women of all kinds might raise their voices, but there were other, smaller arenas which punctuated the flow of language. The pillories, or stocks, which occupied a central place in most towns of any significance, were little platforms on which the victims of the law were forced to suffer in silence. This was not quite true of that more celebrated stage, the gallows, because individuals condemned to be hanged were usually allowed to make a speech to the assembled crowd, but their words must have served to underline the ensuing silence. Capital punishment was very common. In cases of treason it was accompanied by a preliminary maiming which drove home beyond doubt the residual power of the state.

Within the circle drawn by these ritual interruptions there flourished a perpetual conversation between the people and their secular governors, a continuous rearrangement of right and wrong across familiar boundaries. One side might often speak from the bench, in splendour and at length, and the other from the dock, briefly and in squalor, but both had their turn. The talking itself was shaped by a need for justification and redemption, in this life or the next. Taking the system as a whole, this added up to a longing, frequently unsatisfied but never lost, for equity.

Such habits and expectations were well established in civil life during the seventeenth century: by the revolutions against Charles I and James II; by legislation, especially Habeas Corpus and the Bill of Rights (1689); and by the courts administering the common law. They thus became part of a peculiar tradition, one which was closely tied to English Protestantism and the integrity of Britain's island boundaries. The great Dr Johnson spoke of 'the garrulosity of the people', especially when their rights were at issue. England, in the minds of Englishmen, was a citadel of liberty, a nation, in Milton's words, 'not slow and dull, but of a quick, ingenious, and piercing spirit, acute to invent, subtle and sinewy to discourse'. To its critics and enemies, it was a political Tower of Babel. Its great opponents were the two powers which dominated the European continent, the Catholic monarchies of France and Spain. Geography affirmed that Britain was a world to itself, and no part of any single-voiced empire, such as the Catholic states seemed (to Britons) to be.

Ideas about rights can be undermined in two ways. They can be submerged by new thinking, or they can be worn away by neglect and administrative routine. The eighteenth century – the Age of Enlightenment – was, above all, a period of invention. It was also a time when educated men and women in Britain talked less about the virtues of Protestantism, and became more interested in ideas which could be shared with the European mainland. Britain itself was a fertile field for novelty (the Scottish Enlightenment was especially remarkable), but the breaking down of old boundaries suggested to many a less self-sufficient culture, and a threat to ancient liberties. Every day, according to one old fashioned member of the House of Commons, '[they] patiently listen, not only to the schemes, but [to] the jargon of France'. Lord Sydney, who was to be the minister responsible for first sending convicts to New South Wales, was of the same disgruntled point of view.

The French Revolution of 1789 was to disrupt and complicate the progress of enlightenment. It hurried the evolution of new ideas about civil order and the relationship of government and people and in some minds, both revolutionary and counter-revolutionary, it sharpened an insistence that discipline should be met with silence. Precedents might be found in royal policy during the time of Charles I, but the new movement was more pervasive, more ambitious and more successful. 'The Poor', though central to public debate, found their voices, at least in principle, consigned to irrelevance. English tradition was curtailed as a result, but in some places the resulting tension led to profoundly new experiments in public order. One of those places was Australia, which was settled by Europeans during the period of the high Enlightenment. Methods of order in the new community were partly English, in the old sense, but there was much about them that was new and more broadly European. The First Fleet sailed from England two years before the outbreak of revolution in Europe, and for many years in this remote corner of the globe the eighteenth century stood still. For an entire generation, European order was worked out in Australia as if all the exquisite promises of the Enlightenment might still come true.

II

There was another reason why – although the sky near Botany Bay might be 'serene' and the air 'delightfully pleasant' – English liberty shone with uncertain prospects in New South Wales for some years after 1788. Australia's very remoteness made the demands of authority much more urgent than they might otherwise have been. English ideas about talking, and especially about consent, were to be found throughout the English (and later British) empire from its beginnings in the seventeenth century. But peculiar circumstances sometimes called for silence. In some out-of-the-way parts of the empire, survival seemed to depend on passive cooperation. For these the English devised an alternative type of order, called military government, a method going back to the time of Elizabeth I and to the first long-term military expeditions to the Netherlands and Ireland. It was found to be useful wherever English settlements were new and fragile or where they were in danger of attack. When Englishmen planned new settlements, they had to reconcile the right of consent with the need for survival. The problem was particularly obvious when the settlement was small and remote from any dependable source of protection and supply.

The earliest colonies of England's Atlantic empire and, much later, the first settlement in Australia, were all cases of this kind. The very first projects, such as Virginia, Bermuda and New South Wales, were uncertain and hazardous, and the resulting similarities among them were more important than the presence or absence of convicts. For the historian, they illuminate each other. In Virginia and in New South Wales the vast distance from anything familiar seems to have caused a kind of paralysis among many of the very first arrivals. In Virginia the people were 'no more sensible than beasts, [and] would rather starve in ideleness ... then [sic] feast in labour'. In New South Wales the transported men and women ceased for a while to be 'thinking beings'. Such a population needed something like military government. Later settlements, formed when the territories were better known, with neighbours near at hand and often with larger capital, required less of the military style.

The settlement in Virginia in 1607 and its off-shoot at Bermuda in 1612 were the first permanent English communities beyond Britain and Ireland. They were both the work of the Virginia Company of London, a joint-stock enterprise mainly concerned to make money for its shareholders. To begin with, the company was sole proprietor on the North American coast and on the island of Bermuda, an absentee employer and landlord with unrivalled authority on the spot. Most of the men and women who arrived in Virginia in 1607, like the first convicts in New South Wales, were not free agents in the new land. They were labouring people bound to serve the company for seven years, and even the freemen, so called, did not take up land of their own: 'our people', wrote their Governor in 1614, 'were fedde out of the common store and laboured jointly in the manuring of the ground, and planting corne'. The fruit of their labour belonged to the company.

(Continues...)

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Edition details

• Publisher: NewSouth
• Publication date: 2016
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1742234968
• ISBN 13: 9781742234960
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 2
• Number of pages: 608