West B.A., Murphy F.T. A Brief History of Australia
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A BRIEF HISTORY OF AUSTRALIA
50
the governor who had been sent to repair the damage caused by the
Rum Rebellion against Bligh. Macquarie was a complex character, who,
on the one hand, believed in the superiority of British and Protestant
institutions (Clark 1995, 36). On the other hand, Macquarie gave
eLizabeth veaLe MaCarthur
e
lizabeth Veale and John Macarthur married in 1788 and quickly
had their first son, Edward. Just one year into their marriage,
John was sent to Port Jackson as part of the New South Wales
Corps and his family accompanied him, arriving in June 1790. Life
was difficult for Elizabeth after the family’s arrival at Port Jackson.
Her second son, James, died in infancy and establishing a home
suitable for a family with an educated and comfortable background
initially proved difficult in the new colony. Nevertheless, less than
four years after their arrival on Australian soil their small farm at
Parramatta was doing very well. Their sons, Edward, William, and
James, who had been named after his dead brother, all received a
primary education in the colony and then further education back in
England, while their daughters, Elizabeth, Mary, and Emmeline, all
remained in New South Wales and married into the highest level
of colonial society.
Through her busy child-rearing years and the eight years during
which her husband, John, was exiled in England, Elizabeth continued
to be an important presence in the colony. Her home was con-
sidered the most refined and stable of all those established in the
early colonial years thanks to her kindness to servants and valuing
of education. The family’s businesses also thrived under her watch-
ful eye.
Although Elizabeth’s family was very successful, her latter years
were not always happy ones. Not long after her husband returned
from exile in 1817, he began to spend more and more time away from
his family. He suffered from what was called melancholia, probably a
form of depression, and experienced bouts of rage when he believed
Elizabeth had been unfaithful to him. Despite his moods, Elizabeth
remained loyal to her husband and fought to keep the family together
until his death in 1834. For the remaining 16 years of her life, she con-
tinued to write letters to her friends and relations in England and to
enjoy watching her children’s successes, particularly those of William
and James, both of whom followed in their parents’ footsteps and
took up sheepherding.
51
EUROPEAN EXPLORATION AND EARLY SETTLEMENT
orders to cease the “molestation” of the country’s Aboriginal people
and advocated granting land and power to deserving former convicts.
For his latter, pro-emancipist views, as well as his sobriety and evan-
gelical religion, Macquarie continually struggled against the power of
the colony’s wealthy civilians and military leaders, who were absolutely
opposed to granting rights and privileges to former convicts. He also
eliminated the use of rum as the primary currency in the colony, greatly
benefiting the majority but angering those who controlled the trade in
that beverage.
During his 11 years in office Macquarie saw the colony expand and
develop economically: Its population rose from 11,590 to 38,778, a 20-
fold increase; Sydney developed into a proper city; and the continent’s
interior was further explored (Clarke 2003, 71). But for all the good
Macquarie did, for which he is often known today as “the father of
Australia,” he was dismissed in disgrace in 1821. He had angered the
wealthy by promoting the economic power of emancipated convicts.
He had frustrated the British colonial office by his inability to cut back
expenditures, in part caused by the influx of 19,000 new convicts
between 1814 and 1821; another factor in the cost of running the colony
in these years was a string of bad luck with weather, flooding, and cat-
erpillars. To keep people busy and the economy working, Macquarie
responded by creating public works projects. Dozens of new towns,
hundreds of buildings, and more than 300 miles (480 km) of roads to
connect all of these new structures to each other and to the capital in
Sydney were built by out-of-work convicts. A report written by John
Thomas Bigge outlined Macquarie’s activities from the point of view
of the disgruntled wealthy elite, who wanted Macquarie replaced. This
was done in late 1821, when Sir Thomas Brisbane arrived in the colony
as the sixth governor of New South Wales. Macquarie sailed to London
in February 1822 and died just two and a half years later, dejected that
his efforts to raise the poor and emancipated convicts in the colony had
been thwarted.
After Macquarie’s departure, the class structure of New South Wales
was no longer that of a penitentiary but of a full-fledged colony. In 1823
the British Parliament signed the papers granting New South Wales full
colonial status, and Van Diemen’s Land was legally separated from the
mainland colony (Clark 1995, 52). Governors Brisbane and Darling,
who between them led the New South Wales colony through 1831,
were ordered to roll back the policies of previous governors with regard
to rewarding freed convicts with land and laborers. Instead, land grants
were made available only to those with at least £250 available to them
A BRIEF HISTORY OF AUSTRALIA
52
for improvements and investment. This meant that native-born white
Australians and freed convicts were usually excluded, while free immi-
grants began to swell the numbers of the local elite.
This is not to say, however, that the emancipists, former convicts, and
native-born white Australians accepted the concept of their inferiority
to the “exclusives,” the term for those wealthy few who had entered the
colony as free migrants. Many still believed that the land of Australia
belonged to them as its natural inheritors and that they deserved a “fair
go” because of their race (Clarke 2003, 81); Aboriginal Australians and
other nonwhites were not seen to be deserving of this privilege. Their
voice became public in 1824, when William Charles Wentworth, who
had been born en route to Australia in 1790, and Dr. Robert Wardell
began publishing their emancipist newspaper, the Australian. In many
ways, these two created the white Australian identity; before 1824 the
term Australian had been used to refer only to Aboriginal people. By
1830, thanks to Wentworth and Wardell, it was used predominantly to
refer to native-born whites.
In the same period, when battles of words between emancipists and
exclusives dominated New South Wales politics, in Van Diemen’s Land
Governor George Arthur was fighting a war of attrition against the
Indigenous population. The Black War against Aboriginal Tasmanians,
which began about 1825, included a period of martial law after 1828,
during which it was legal to shoot any Aboriginal person seen in or
around white settlements. In 1830 this policy was expanded with the
creation of the Black Line. This entailed arming every white man in the
colony, including convicts, about 2,200 people in total; lining them up
across northern Tasmania; and attempting to push the Aboriginal peo-
ple south, where they would be isolated in controllable locations. This
effort failed when only two people were captured, but between 1830
and 1834 the island’s remaining Aboriginal population was rounded
up on Arthur’s orders and removed to Flinders Island (Macintyre 2004,
65); the few survivors returned to a small reservation in southern Van
Diemen’s Land in 1847.
The last inhabitant of this reserve, Trugannini, died in 1876, giving
rise to the myth that the Tasmanian people died out entirely. Far from
their dying out, the 2001 Australian census found that nearly 16,000
people identify themselves as Aboriginal Tasmanian. Many of these
are the descendants of Aboriginal Tasmanian women who fled from
Arthur’s soldiers and other efforts to round them up and European
sealers who lived on Tasmania’s many offshore islands (Perkins 2008,
episode 2). While their Aboriginal languages have all but disappeared,
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EUROPEAN EXPLORATION AND EARLY SETTLEMENT
many other aspects of their societies and culture survive to the pres-
ent day.
The other important event in this period was the founding in 1829
of Australia’s first free colony at Swan River, contemporary Perth, in
Western Australia. The motivation behind this settlement, as was the
case on the east coast, was preventing the French from settling in the
region. Likewise, the Swan River colony awarded large grants of land
to those who claimed to have the capital to work it. The major differ-
ence between the colonies was the fact that Swan River took no con-
victs; however, this does not mean that it was worked by free laborers.
Instead of convicts, the new colony was worked by indentured laborers
imported from Britain, whose time and effort were as controlled by legal
contracts as those of convicts.
The Last Colonial Push, 1831–1850
Unlike the British settlements at Port Jackson, Swan River, and Van
Diemen’s Land, which had been motivated at least in part by a desire
to prevent the French from colonizing Australia, the new colonies of
Victoria and South Australia were entirely domestically driven. Victoria,
or Port Phillip as it was called at the time, was eventually carved out of
the larger New South Wales colony after colonial officials were pushed
by the actions of a few investors from Van Diemen’s Land.
John Batman arrived at Port Phillip in 1835 as the representative of
the Port Phillip Bay Association, which hoped to settle the mainland
region just across Bass Strait from Van Diemen’s Land. The associa-
tion expected to import thousands of cattle to the relatively lush lands
of Port Phillip, which had been explored in 1824 by Hamilton Hume
when he walked the 560 miles (900 km) from Port Jackson to Port
Phillip. Batman provides the only known example of land negotiations
and a treaty between colonizers and Aboriginal people in Australia. He
purchased about 100,000 acres of land around Port Phillip at the cost
of “20 pairs of blankets, 30 knives, 12 tomahawks, 10 looking glasses,
12 pairs of scissors, 50 handkerchiefs, 12 red shirts, 4 flannel jackets,
4 suits, and 50 pounds of flour” (Clark 1995, 85). With this bargain of
a purchase, Batman created panic in the minds of colonial officials in
Sydney and London alike; the transaction was seen to throw all previ-
ous British land acquisitions into doubt and thus could not be consid-
ered legal by the New South Wales governor or the London offices.
Nonetheless, in 1836, just one year after Batman’s claims along the
Yarra River were rejected by these officials, settlers began to move into
A BRIEF HISTORY OF AUSTRALIA
54
the new region, forcing the colonial office to recognize the new colony
under Superintendent William Lonsdale. The main city was laid out
in 1839 by Robert Hoddle and named Melbourne, after Britain’s prime
minister at the time, Viscount Melbourne. Until 1850 the region was
subordinate to the colonial headquarters in Sydney, but in that year
Charles LaTrobe, who had been superintendent since 1839, became
the first lieutenant governor of the new colony of Victoria (Clarke
2003, 107–108).
While Port Phillip, as part of New South Wales, accepted convict
labor until 1840, South Australia was formed as Australia’s only con-
vict-free colony in 1836. Rather than settling the new land through
land grants and convict labor, in South Australia land was to be sold
at artificially established prices, high enough to prevent the poor and
freed convicts from buying it. The proceeds from these sales would
then be used to fund the transportation of willing laborers to work
the new territories (Clarke 2002, 38–39). This project was jointly
enacted by the British government and a joint-stock company, the
South Australian Company (SAC), which controlled the sale of land
and the funds raised.
From the beginning, this was an awkward marriage of two very dif-
ferent systems with two very different personalities at their head. John
Hindmarsh, the first governor appointed from London, and James
Hurtle Fisher, the first commissioner appointed by the SAC, fought
incessantly (Clarke 2002, 47). At the same time, the vast majority of
the land that was sold off to investors continued to sit unused, valuable
only as a commodity to be bought and sold on the free market. In the
first four years of existence, South Australia produced only 443 acres
(180 ha) of productive farmland and laborers sat idle, living off supplies
provided by the colony’s sponsors in Britain (Clarke 2002, 47).
Fortunately, after this difficult start, conditions improved in South
Australia under George Gawler, who replaced both Hindmarsh and
Fisher in 1838. Rather than relying on a market-driven land policy,
Gawler invested heavily in infrastructure for the colony, using both
government and corporate funds to pay some of the 10,400 new labor-
ers who arrived between 1838 and 1840 to build the city of Adelaide,
among other projects. In the process he overspent his meager £12,000
budget by more than a quarter of a million pounds and was recalled in
1841 to London, where he found his reputation in tatters (Hetherington
1966). Nonetheless, Gawler had saved the colony from ruin and even
set the stage for colonial prosperity. Cattle, sheep, gardening, and wine
became the lifeblood of the new colony with a population that dif-
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EUROPEAN EXPLORATION AND EARLY SETTLEMENT
fered significantly from that of the other Australian colonies. Lacking
an image of the degenerate convict, South Australia presented a more
civilized front to the world, with its combination of free English settlers
and German Lutherans, who had been driven from their homeland by
religious persecution (Welsh 2004, 145).
In conjunction with the creation of new settlements, there was also at
this time a push inland as white settlements grew and expanded along
the coast. In the 1830s Edward Eyre, who had arrived from England in
1833, started moving sheep overland across vast distances. After several
overland trips to Adelaide and one mostly by sea to the Swan River in
the west, Eyre set off in 1840 on the journey that made him famous.
On June 18 Eyre, six other white men, two Aboriginal men, 13 horses,
40 sheep, and provisions for the group for three months departed from
Adelaide in search of grazing pastures, water, and other resources for
the benefit of pastoral Australia. Central Australia, however, contained
no territory suitable for a pastoral paradise, and Eyre struggled almost
from the very beginning. Pushing northward he was stopped by such
barriers as Mount Hopeless and Lake Torrens, a tributary of Lake Eyre.
Thwarted in his northward exploration, Eyre sent much of his party
home and with just one white companion, a trusted Aboriginal com-
panion named Wylie, and two other Aboriginal scouts turned his sights
to the west, where his luck was not much better. The scouts murdered
Eyre’s white companion and stole most of the group’s provisions, leav-
ing Eyre and Wylie to push westward alone. They made it to the coast
near contemporary Esperance, Western Australia, where a French ship
welcomed them aboard and replenished their stores, and finally to
Albany, Western Australia. Although he had relatively little to show
for his inland exploration, Eyre was awarded the founder’s gold medal
of the Royal Geographic Society in 1847. He later served as one of the
government’s most knowledgeable protectors of Aboriginal people from
1841 to 1844 (Dutton 1966).
Following in Eyre’s footsteps, his acquaintance Charles Sturt (the
two had met in 1837) also longed to be the first explorer to discover the
vast inland sea that most people still believed existed in the center of
the continent. Sturt had spent his early years in Australia exploring in
the north, charting its rivers inland and even “discovering” and “nam-
ing” the Darling and Murray Rivers. These, in fact, were to be his most
celebrated accomplishments for his 1844 expedition, which began by
following the course of the Murray-Darling northward, led him into the
Simpson Desert, where he finally had to acknowledge that his quest for
an inland sea was doomed to failure (Gibbney 1967).
A BRIEF HISTORY OF AUSTRALIA
56
In addition to the creation of new settlements and the exploration
of new territory, another important trend between 1831 and 1850 was
the influx of free laborers who migrated to Australia, both with and
without assistance from the British government. In part this infusion of
free individuals and families came about with the cessation of transpor-
tation to New South Wales in 1840. In the early years of the 19th cen-
tury, the British had created an image of Botany Bay and all of Britain’s
settlements in Australia as “hell upon earth” (White 1981, 16) in order
to deter potential criminals from their crimes. As a result of the propa-
ganda, criminals sentenced to transportation often cried at the thought
of exile, while members of British polite society feared even acciden-
tally rubbing shoulders with those who had worked as jailers and other
officials in the colony (White 1981, 16–20). Stories of rampant drunk-
enness, debauchery, sodomy, and even cannibalism among convicts and
soldiers alike circulated throughout Britain as cheap novels created for
commercial success became the source of ethnographic “facts” about
the colony. Although this image outlasted the actual policy of trans-
portation, with its elimination the possibility of great wealth began to
outstrip the myth of hell on earth and greater numbers of free investors
and laborers began arriving. Migration started to expand in this decade
and exploded in the next, as a result not only of the diminishment of
Botany Bay’s negative image but of the discovery of gold.
Conclusion
Between 1606 and 1850 Australia went from being a legend among
European seafarers to one of the most prosperous regions of the British
Empire. The colony’s rocky start, when food shortages, Aboriginal
resistance, and unfamiliar ecology made even survival difficult, was
overcome, and, with the help of sheep and cattle, prosperity began to
be the norm rather than the exception. There were difficult moments
along the way, even after the vast grazing lands beyond Sydney’s Blue
Mountains were opened. For example, the depression of 1840 pro-
duced a sharp decrease in the value of land and stock. But even with
this downturn, 1840 is often cited as a key year in the development of
the Australian financial system: The colony’s non-Aboriginal economy
outpaced the Aboriginal one in terms of gross domestic product (GDP)
for the first time, and market economy principles surpassed those of
colonial dependency (Butlin 1994). According to Butlin, by 1848 the
combined Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal GDP had finally surpassed
the Aboriginal GDP of 1788, and wealth in wool, cattle, and other pri-
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EUROPEAN EXPLORATION AND EARLY SETTLEMENT
mary industries had established a firm base for the burgeoning urban
economy. By 1850 Australia was host to more than 500 industrial
companies, about half of which operated in the new cities of Sydney
and Melbourne; the other half were flour mills that by necessity were
located closer to the source of their raw material (Molony 2005, 119).
Together the extraction of resources and their processing provided a
firm economic base upon which was built a wealthy provincial society
after the discovery of gold in New South Wales and Victoria just one
year into the second half of the 19th century.
58
4
goLd rush and
governMents
(1851–1890)
f
rom the earliest days of the 19th century, small amounts of gold
had been found throughout the New South Wales colony. Convict
builders of the Great Western Road, which stretched over the Blue
Mountains and Bathurst Plains, found small flakes of gold as early as
1815, while similar finds occurred in other areas of New South Wales in
the 1820s and 1830s (Johnson 2007, 24). While the new colony could
certainly have used the revenue from this valuable mineral, most colo-
nial leaders sought to keep the news under wraps. The administrators’
problem was that New South Wales was a penal colony at this time, and
thus its image was supposed to be one of deprivation in order to deter
potential criminals in Britain from committing crimes. News of easily
obtainable wealth in the colony would not have served the jailers well,
and thus it was suppressed for many decades.
Gold in New South Wales
By midcentury, however, with the initial cessation of punitive trans-
portation to New South Wales in 1840 and fear of population decline
in response to the California gold rush of 1849, gold took center stage
in Australia, with the bureaucrats’ blessings. The first person to hit
pay dirt was Edward Hargraves, an English-born Australian who had
traveled to California to try his hand at prospecting in 1849–50. While
there he recognized that California’s goldfields resembled the terrain of
New South Wales. In January 1851 Hargraves returned to Sydney and
set off with John Lister to find gold. Their first good luck was at Lewis
Ponds Creek, where they found five specks of the precious metal; they
were soon joined by William, James, and Henry Tom, and their finds at
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GOLD RUSH AND GOVERNMENTS
Summerhill Creek near Bathurst encouraged Hargraves to publicize the
news far and wide.
Rather than obtaining gold wealth itself, Hargraves’s motive seems to
have been a desire to claim the £10,000 governmental reward for hav-
ing found gold in the colony. In subsequent years, while Hargraves was