Australian History For Dummies - Alex McDermott

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in the Colonial Office would be fine with that.

Bligh arrived in the colony in 1806 with a very set idea of the sort of place NSW should be. The original vague idea of convicts becoming a self-sufficient rural peasantry had stuck fast in his mind. The problem, however, was that it had never been like that, and it was never going to be like that. By trying to force NSW to revert to a kind of pre-modern self-subsistence economy and society, rather than assist it in its continued adjustment to the mercantile and commercial realities it was part of in the early 19th century, Bligh was trying to force back the tide. The place was not, and never had been, what these original government orders had told it to be. The place, as one historian put it, was ‘born modern’.

      Bligh was not the sort of individual to be disconcerted when reality didn’t conform to what he insisted it ought to be. To his grim satisfaction, he found no shortage of felons and ex-felons on the make, with men and women (both free and unfree) involved in ‘dubious’ enterprises such as trading and buying and selling. So Bligh got to work.

      One of main problems Bligh focused on was the favourite form of incentive payment and extra wage: Rum. He attacked the distillation and rum retailing industry, which the officers had already left and was by this time dominated by soldiers and ex-convicts. The inhabitants of Sydney, who at this point made up more than half of NSW’s total population, were livid; the main populace, made up of convicts, ex-convicts and soldiers, particularly so.

      Not content, Bligh then went further. He declared that some who had leases and property rights in the township would have to be evicted to fit in with his new town plans. At the same time, Bligh made it clear that he despised the NSW Corps soldiers, claiming they were no better than the convicts and, because many of them were ex-convicts themselves, couldn’t be trusted. Then he finished it nicely by calling them ‘wretches’, ‘tremendous buggers’ and ‘villains’.

      Removing rum as payment

      Bligh began by outlawing the use of both rum and promissory notes as mediums of exchange. Rum was still the usual form of payment for many workers and traders. Promissory notes were IOUs that passed from one hand to another and could be traded in and redeemed by the individuals who had first released them.

      

Both rum payments and notes of exchange had sprung up because Britain had failed to provide the colony with any form of currency in the first place. (After all, why should convicts living as happy self-supporting peasants need something so complicated as money?) These became the common mode of making exchanges and payments throughout the colony.

      Quashing all dissension and threatening eviction

      When three ex-convict entrepreneurs (Lord, Kable and James Underwood) sent Bligh a (relatively mild) protest letter, he jailed them. Bligh declared the letter insulting.

      Then Bligh started threatening Sydney residents with eviction, because he wished to do with the town layout what he was trying to do with the economy — push it back to Phillip’s period. Bligh didn’t like the colonial mess he was being confronted with, and he certainly didn’t like the sprawling, mercantile shanty metropolis of Sydney that had just grown up without, as he put it, ‘any particular design’.

      

The mess that was Sydney was actually the source of the colony’s greatest strength. No strictly military area of the settlement, no ex-convicts ghetto and no free settlers area existed, and only one convict jail to restrict convicts to was established. On the land and in the town, convicts lived with settlers, both free and emancipated.

      Bligh launched a campaign against colonial disorder. He had ‘plans which I had formed for the improvement of the town’, and put the fear in people badly by telling them colonial leases may have no legal meaning.

      

In trying to implement his reforms, Bligh wasn’t helped by his own language and demeanour. He reacted badly to being questioned or disagreed with. When someone brought up the laws of England, he exploded: ‘Damn your laws of England! Don’t talk to me of your laws of England: I will make laws for this colony, and every wretch of you … shall be governed by them; or there [pointing to the jail] is your habitation!’

      Bligh’s end

      It’s hard to find a historian who doesn’t take sides on Bligh, on whether he was either:

       A noble but misunderstood, valiant governor trying his best to get rid of that pernicious officer trade cartel, and help out the little guy

       A serial buffoon given to violent threats and outbursts who managed the almost impossible — uniting all the warring factions and overcoming the seething animosities that Sydney was riven with, by bringing everyone (soldiers, ex-cons, officers, traders, house owners and renters) together against him

      Either way, it’s impossible to ignore the one really big event of his tenure, and the only violent overthrow of established government in Australia’s history — known (since the 1850s) as the Rum Rebellion.

      Soldiers and common populace join forces

      The 20th anniversary of NSW’s first settlement (26 January 1808) saw the majority of the population uniting as one — to arrest their own governor! At the desperate urging of ex-officer John Macarthur (who had just escaped from being jailed by Bligh), Major George Johnston led his detachment of the NSW Corps to Government House where Bligh lived. After a few hours of searching and ransacking the house high and low, the marines found and arrested Bligh.

      That night bonfires were lit, people got drunk and it was difficult to find anyone in Sydney who didn’t think that the arrest of the blustering, unpredictable governor was a very good idea indeed. And if they didn’t like the idea, they (understandably) stayed fairly quiet.

      Most historians will tell you that the arrest of Bligh by the NSW Corps was all about the big players — bold, bad Bligh versus Macarthur. And so on. Some have described Johnston as a ‘puppet’ of Macarthur who did his bidding in arresting Bligh.

      But the real cause of the Rum Rebellion is to be found in the fact that the ordinary soldiers and common people of Sydney had become utterly meshed with each other, to the extent that the soldiers couldn’t be relied upon to do the Governor’s bidding. In a functional sense they formed a common interest.

      If Johnston was a puppet it wasn’t of Macarthur, but of the common soldiers and ordinary populace.

      

The soldiers who deposed Bligh were in day-to-day life practically indistinguishable from the ex-convicts in both social and economic background. Most of them had been in NSW since the early 1790s. They had married or entered into de facto relationships with convict women, had children, set up businesses and established farms. The NSW Corps had ‘gone native’ in the 18 years or so since its first formation and arrival. The Corps was no longer a reliable arm of the Crown and could no longer be trusted to impose the British Government’s will on the local population.

Major George Johnston, at his trial for mutiny in England three years later, explained how the NSW Corps was inextricably involved with the people

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