Australian History For Dummies. Alex McDermott

In 1815, the Duke of Wellington combined his British forces with Prussian and other forces at the Battle of Waterloo to defeat Napoleon’s French Army and end, finally, the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars. These had been raging, on and off (with more on than off), for some 25 years. Just as an outbreak of peace in the early 1780s led to a rapid rise in crime from returned soldiers and sailors in Britain (refer to Chapter 3) so here, too, the defeat of Napoleon meant 400,000 soldiers found themselves demobbed (stood down from their jobs). They returned to a Britain of stagnant economic growth, with few jobs on offer. A dramatic spike in the number of convictions and transportations ensued, as ex-soldiers took to crime.

      

Macquarie found himself dealing with three or four times the annual number of convicts that previous administrators had received, while simultaneously being dealt an almost biblical set of ecological catastrophes: Droughts, floods and caterpillars destroyed much of the harvests after 1816. He had little choice but to put most convicts back on the public store (for work on public projects) and re-establish large-scale government farms and projects to soak up the surplus convict labour. The increased expenses charged back to Britain reduced Macquarie’s standing with the Colonial Office even further.

      

Male convicts under government charge tripled between 1817 and 1819, while those in the private sector halved between 1818 and 1820.

      Britain starts paying attention again (unfortunately!)

The end of the Napoleonic War meant Britain start paying attention to the penal colony again but, curiously, this wasn’t really a good thing. Scrutiny of the far-off colony of NSW started to increase — and for Macquarie, and most of the convicts and ex-convicts in NSW and Van Diemen’s Land, this scrutiny didn’t bode well.

      

The extended period of neglect previous to 1815 had proved to be largely benign for most colonial inhabitants. In this initial period, no-one insisted that NSW was meant to function as a place of punishment — it was just a place to get sent off to. Once here, governors were mainly concerned with keeping costs down and were quite happy to give convicts conditional freedom if they could pay their way or had a decent trade that was in demand.

      With the end of the wars and the beginning of a long period of peace, Britain began to experience increased economic depression and social turmoil. Increased crime led many to begin asking questions about the current system of crime prevention and punishment. They weren’t greatly impressed by the answers.

      Bringing back terror

      The strange thing about NSW was that it was begun as a place of punishment, yet for many convicts who arrived in the period up to and including Macquarie’s rule, it had proved to be a place of freedom and opportunity. Macquarie’s idea of a society of second chances (building on the reality he’d found on his arrival and undoubtedly popular in a colony chiefly made up of convicts and ex-convicts) cut less mustard in Britain, where the late 1810s saw greater scrutiny and debate about the nature of life in NSW.

      In the House of Commons, a parliamentarian denounced the rule of Macquarie for being both expensive and chronically slack. The story of D’Arcy Wentworth, last seen leaving England after being caught as a highwayman and now the Chief of Police in Sydney, was repeated with anger.

      

Originally, the general impressions most people in Britain had of NSW and Van Diemen’s Land were vague, hazy ones based on the idea of a Botany Bay hellhole. NSW and, later, Van Diemen’s Land, were assumed to be places of hard labour, little food ‘and constant Superintendence’. This made the place ‘an object of peculiar Apprehension’. Now, however, the real stories were getting back — about thieves, pickpockets and highwaymen being freed on arrival and going on to achieve wealth and respectability unlike anything they’d had before.

      Earl Bathurst, running the Colonial Office, decided to send out Commissioner John Thomas Bigge, ex-chief justice of Trinidad, to conduct an inquiry into what was really happening in NSW. Bathurst’s instructions outlined the problem as he saw it.

Transportation, the second worst punishment aside from execution, was now being explicitly requested by those convicted of even minor crimes. And transportation only worked as a deterrent, clearly, if people didn’t want to be sent. Something had to be done to make transportation once again ‘an Object of Real Terror to all Classes of the Community’. Bigge’s job was to work out what, and how. Bathurst warned him to avoid letting any ‘ill considered Compassion for Convicts’ lessen transportations main purpose: The all-important ‘Salutary Terror’ that would keep potential British crims in check.

Big Country? Big Ambitions? Bigge the Inspector? Big Problem!

      Commissioner Bigge arrived in Australia in 1819 with a remit to find out all that was necessary to change NSW back into an object of ‘Salutary Terror’ for would-be crims in Britain. As such, Bigge was always going to clash with Macquarie, who had long decided that the purpose of NSW was not as a stern deterrent against crime in Britain but as an opportunity for convicted felons to start again, in a new land with a clean slate.

      The first flashpoint between Bigge and Macquarie took place over Macquarie’s promotion of ex-convict William Redfern to magistrate. Macquarie had appointed ex-convicts in previous years, but in those years no other candidates were available for the post. This time, however, other choices were possible, but Macquarie ignored them to give the appointment to a man who many considered to be an old Macquarie favourite.

      This, thought Bigge, was insupportable and he gave Macquarie an ominous warning: Giving Redfern the job was a move that the British Government would ‘regard as a defiance of their Authority and Commands’. And Governors who defy His Majesty’s Authority and Commands tended not to last long in their careers.

Macquarie’s response was to make a spirited defence not simply of the Redfern appointment (where he probably thought he was on shaky ground anyway), but of his entire policy. He put it to Bigge that when he first arrived in NSW he’d, naturally, had no plans or desires to start raising convicts in society. The only thing he expected to do with convicts was control them. To his surprise, however, ‘a short experience showed me … that some of the most meritorious men … who were the most capable and the most willing to exert themselves in the public service, were men who had been convicts!’ And so, he argued, he’d developed a plan to encourage men and women according to merit (and material success) rather than past criminal conviction. The future of the colony, Macquarie told Bigge, was convicts and their children. He then went further, asking Bigge to ‘avert the blow you appear to be too much inclined to inflict … and let the Souls now in being as well as millions yet unborn, bless the day on which you landed on their shores, and gave them … what you so much admire … Freedom!’

      A little verbose maybe, but Macquarie got his point across. More basically: This country belongs to them; don’t take it away. But more than that it was a plea to a man who had more power than any other to shape the future trajectory of the colony to not condemn the social edifice he’d been creating.

      

Bigge’s response was as measured and terse as Macquarie’s plea was flowery and sentimental. He pointed out he represented not only the ‘respectable’ opinion in the colony, but also that of the British Government. Bigge said that he was willing to try to ‘subdue the objections which must arise in the breast of every man’ whenever they were forced