Empire: The Rise and Demise of the British World Order and the Lessons for Global Power (20 page)

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Authors: Niall Ferguson

BOOK: Empire: The Rise and Demise of the British World Order and the Lessons for Global Power
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To begin with, it is true, the convicts were only a little better off than slaves, forced to work for the government or ‘assigned’ to the growing number of private landowners (among them the officers of the New South Wales Regiment). But once they got their ‘tickets of leave’ at the end of their stretches, prisoners were free to sell their labour to the highest bidder. Even before then, they were given afternoons off to cultivate their own allotments. As early as 1791, two ex-convicts, Richard Phillimore and James Ruse, were growing enough wheat and maize on their own plots of land in respectively Norfolk Island and Paramatta, to take themselves ‘off the store’. In effect, those who survived transportation and served their sentences were given the chance to start a new life – even if it was a new life on Mars.
Yet without inspired leadership, Australia might never have been much more than a vast Devil’s Island. In its transformation from dumping ground into reformatory a crucial role was played by the colony’s governor between 1809 and 1821, Lachlan Macquarie. A Hebridean-born career army officer who had risen to command a regiment in India, Macquarie was every bit as much of a despot as his naval predecessors. When there was talk of appointing a council to assist him he replied: ‘I entertain a fond hope that such an institution will never be extended to this colony’. But, unlike them, Macquarie was an
enlightened
despot. To him, New South Wales was not just a land of punishment, but also a land of redemption. Under his benign rule, he believed, convicts could be transformed into citizens:
The prospect of earning their freedom is the greatest Inducement that Can be held out to the Reformation of the Manners of the Inhabitants ... [W]hen United with Rectitude and long tried Good Conduct, [it] should lead a man back to that Rank in Society which he had forfeited and do away, as far as the Case will admit, with All Retrospect of former Bad Conduct.
 
Macquarie took steps to improve conditions on the ships bringing convicts to Australia, drastically reducing the death rate from 1 in 31 to 1 in 122 by following the advice of William Redfern, a transported surgeon who became the governor’s family doctor. He softened the colony’s system of criminal justice, even allowing convicts with legal experience to represent accused men at trials. But Macquarie’s most visible and enduring contribution was to turn Sydney into a model colonial city. Even as
laissez-faire
economics began to set the tone back in London, Macquarie became an unabashed planner. Central to his urban vision were the huge Hyde Park Barracks, the biggest such building in the overseas empire at that time. With their austere symmetrical lines – the work of Francis Howard Greenway, a Gloucestershire architect and transported forger – the Barracks look like the prototype for Jeremy Bentham’s Utilitarian ‘panopticon’. Six hundred criminals, with artisan skills, slept there in rows of hammocks, a hundred to a room, easily kept under surveillance through spy-holes. But this was far from a punishment block. It was a centre for the orderly allocation of skilled convict labour, the prisoners who had once been artisans and craftsmen but had fallen on hard times and turned to petty crime. These were the men Macquarie needed for the hundreds of public buildings which he believed would elevate Sydney from convict colony to conurbation, the first of which was a handsome hospital financed from a specially imposed duty on rum.
With the infrastructure of his city largely complete, Macquarie turned his mind to reducing the colony’s dependence on imported food. ‘Macquarie towns’ were established along the fertile banks of the Hawkesbury River up towards the Blue Mountains, rich agricultural land ideally suited to grain and sheep farming. In towns like Windsor, Macquarie sought to realize his vision of colonial redemption by offering thirty-acre land grants to those who had completed their sentences. Richard Fitzgerald had been a London street urchin sentenced to transportation at fifteen, who had quickly established a reputation for ‘remarkable activity and regular conduct’. Macquarie made Fitzgerald superintendent of agriculture and stores for the Windsor area. Within just a few years, the former delinquent was a pillar of society, proprietor of the Macquarie Arms pub at one end of town and builder of a solidly imposing local church, St Matthews, at the other.
As more and more convicts did their time or earned remission of their sentences, the character of the colony began to change. With only one in fourteen electing to return to Britain, there were already more free people than convicts in New South Wales by 1828 – and some of the old lags were fast becoming
nouveaux riches
. Samuel Terry was an illiterate Manchester labourer who had been transported for seven years for stealing 400 pairs of stockings. Freed in 1807, he set himself up in Sydney as an innkeeper and moneylender. So successful was Terry in his dual role that by 1820 he had amassed an estate of 19,000 acres, something like a tenth of all the land possessed by all the other freed convicts put together. He became known as the ‘Rothschild of Botany Bay’. Mary Reibey, who eventually won immortality on the back of the Australian twenty-dollar note, had been sent to Australia at the age of thirteen for horse theft. She married well and did even better in trade, shipping and real estate. By 1820 she was worth £20,000.
By the end of his term as Governor, Macquarie had made his share of enemies. In London he was regarded as profligate, while there were some in Australia who regarded him as over-lenient. Still, he could quite legitimately claim: ‘I found New South Wales a gaol and left it a colony. I found a population of idle prisoners, paupers and paid officials and left a large free community thriving in the prosperity of flocks and the labour of convicts’.
But what had happened to punishment? The success of Macquarie’s policies meant that New South Wales was fast becoming a prosperous colony. It also meant that transportation there was no longer a deterrent to crime, but rather a free passage to a new life, with the prospect of a golden handshake in the form of a land grant at the end of one’s sentence. The governor of one British prison was astonished when five Irish female prisoners strongly objected to their sentences being reduced to a prison term. They left him in no doubt that they would rather be transported.
That said, not every convict could be redeemed in the way Macquarie envisaged. The question was what was to be done with the hardened reoffenders. The answer was that from the outset there had to be prisons within the prison. Early in his time as Governor, Macquarie had ordered the abandonment of the hellish Norfolk Island, but reoffenders continued to be consigned to Van Diemen’s Land, now Tasmania, and Moreton Bay in Queensland. At Port Arthur in Tasmania, the camp commandant Charles O’Hara Booth was effectively given a free hand to take ‘the vengeance of the Law to the utmost limits of human endurance’. At Moreton Bay, Patrick Logan routinely hospitalized convicts with the punishment he termed ‘flagellatio’. After Norfolk Island was reopened as a prison, new depths of brutality and sadism were plumbed by John Giles Price, who strapped men to old iron bedsteads after they had been whipped, in order to ensure their wounds became infected. Few men in the history of the British Empire have so richly merited the sort of death he suffered at the hands, hammers and crowbars of a group of convicts at Williamstown quarry in 1857.
But if reoffenders were systematically brutalized in such places, it was nothing compared with the way the indigenous or aboriginal people of Australia – of whom there were about 300,000 in 1788 – were treated. Like the American Indians before them, they were the victims of the white plague. The colonists brought with them contamination in the form of infectious diseases to which the Aborigines had no resistance, and cultivation which implied the exclusion of the nomadic tribes from their ancestral hunting grounds. What sugar was to the West Indies and tobacco to Virginia, sheep were to Australia. By 1821 there were already 290,000 sheep in Australia, overrunning the bush where the Aborigines had hunted kangaroo for millennia.
Macquarie, paternalistic as ever, hoped that the Aborigines could be brought from, as he put it, ‘their rambling naked state’ and transformed into respectable farmers. In 1815 he tried to settle sixteen of them on a small farm on the coast at Middle Head, complete with specially built huts and a boat. After all, he reasoned, if convicts could be turned into model citizens by being given the right kit and a second chance, why not Aborigines? But to Macquarie’s despair they quickly lost interest in the well-ordered life he had in mind for them. They lost the boat, ignored the huts and wandered off back into the bush. That kind of indifference – in marked contrast to the belligerent response of the New Zealand Maoris to white colonization – was to seal the Aborigines’ fate. The more they rejected ‘civilization’, the more the land-hungry farmers felt justified in exterminating them. Their ‘only superiority above the brute’, one visiting naval surgeon declared, ‘consisted in their use of the spear, their extreme ferocity and their employment of fire in the cookery of their food’.
In one of the most shocking of all the chapters in the history of the British Empire, the Aborigines in Van Diemen’s Land were hunted down, confined and ultimately exterminated: an event which truly merits the now overused term ‘genocide’. (Trucanini, the last of them, died in 1876.) All that can be said in mitigation is that, had Australia been an independent republic in the nineteenth century, like the United States, the genocide might have been on a continental scale, rather than just a Tasmanian phenomenon. When the novelist Anthony Trollope visited Australia two years after Trucanini’s death he asked a magistrate:
what he would recommend me to do ... if stress of circumstances compelled me to shoot a black man in the bush. Should I go to the nearest police station ... or should I go on rejoicing as though I had ... killed a deadly snake? His advice was clear and explicit: ‘No one but a fool would say anything about it’.
 
Trollope concluded that ‘it was their [the Aborigines’] fate to be abolished’. Yet one of the peculiarities of the British Empire was the way that the imperial power at the centre endeavoured to restrain the generally far more ruthless impulses of the colonists on the periphery. Concern in Parliament about mistreatment of indigenous peoples led to the appointment of Aboriginal Protectors in New South Wales and Western Australia in 1838 – 9. To be sure, these well-meaning efforts could not prevent atrocities like the Myall Creek massacre in 1838, when a group of twelve cattle-ranchers, all but one of them ex-convicts, shot and stabbed twenty-eight unarmed Aborigines to death. A long, low-level war would be waged for decades between farmers and Aborigines as agriculture spread into the outback. But the presence of a restraining authority, no matter how distant, was something that distinguished British colonies from independent settler republics. There was no such restraining influence when the United States waged war against the American Indians.
The case of the Aborigines was a striking example of the way attitudes diverged over distance. The British in London regarded the problem quite differently from the British in Sydney. Here was the very essence of the imperial dilemma. How could an empire that claimed to be founded on liberty justify overruling the wishes of colonists when they clashed with those of a very distant legislature? That had been the central question in America in the 1770s, and its ultimate answer had been secession. In the 1830s the question was posed again in Canada. But this time the British had a better answer.
Since the American War of Independence, Canada had seemed the most dependable of Britain’s colonies, thanks to the influx of defeated Loyalists from the United States. But in 1837 French-speaking Quebecois in Lower Canada and pro-American reformers in Upper Canada revolted. Their main grievance was not unfamiliar: despite being represented in their own House of Assembly, their wishes could be ignored at will by a Legislative Council and Governor who were solely accountable to London. There was genuine alarm in Britain that the rapidly growing United States might seize the opportunity to annex its northern neighbour; its incorporation was, after all, explicitly envisaged in article XI of the American Articles of Confederation. In 1812 the United States had even sent a 12,000-strong army into Canada, though it had been roundly defeated.

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