Sorting out fact from legend
The name ‘Rum Rebellion’ actually does more to confuse than clarify understanding of what actually happened. Rum had little to do with it, and the notorious ‘rum monopoly’ that the officers of the NSW Corps had established in the colony had been dismantled ten years previously (refer to the section ‘Ending the trading monopoly game’ earlier in this chapter for more on this).
And neither was the disturbance a rebellion, or mutiny, even though that’s what the British Government decided to call it when they put Johnston, one of the rebellion’s leaders, on trial for mutiny. Rather, it was a revolt, supported by almost the entire township of Sydney — soldiers, convicts, ex-convicts alike — by those down on the low rungs of the social ladder as well as just about all the established entrepreneurs and businesspeople in the colony who weren’t working for Bligh directly as officials.
Chapter 5
A Nation of Second Chances
IN THIS CHAPTER
Within 20 years of the establishment of NSW as a colony, it had become a place of second chances — a place where people who had made a mess of their lives in Britain could wipe the slate clean and start again. For convicts, this was the reality of the colonial world that they’d been living in almost since 1788 — ever since the first few nightmarish starvation years — but this wasn’t what the Colonial Office, and most of the powerful people in Britain, wanted the colony to be.
The Colonial Office sent out a series of governors (such as Governor Bligh) to try to fix up the mess, but it didn’t end well for any of them — particularly Bligh, who ended up being arrested by the NSW Corps (refer to Chapter 4).
After the Bligh fiasco, the Colonial Office figured they had a troublesome colony on their hands — after all, you don’t arrest the governor unless you’re a rag-tag rebellious lot, right? So the next governor to arrive — Lachlan Macquarie, veteran of the American War of Independence and various skirmishes in India — was told to expect a colony gone wild, full of rapacious profiteers, angry and drunken ex-cons, and a place ripe for rebellion. Macquarie’s instructions were to quickly restore some order.
But something strange happened when Macquarie turned up in NSW in 1810: He liked what he saw. Then, to top it off, he went rogue. Macquarie wasn’t particularly interested in punishing convicts, or in making the place so brutal that it scared Britain’s would-be crims into behaving themselves. He embraced the fact that the colony gave convicts a second chance and made it official policy to reward people who had turned their lives around. If they succeeded and became prosperous, influential or simply useful, Macquarie wanted to know them. This was in complete opposition to what the Colonial Office believed official policy should be.
In the end a stern-faced commissioner was sent out from England to inquire into Macquarie’s rule, and it was found wanting. Macquarie returned to Britain and died a few years later, bitter and unappreciated. But in Australia the mark he left was deep. He ruled New South Wales for 11 years — from 1810 to 1821 — and when they buried him they inscribed his tombstone with the words, ‘Father of Australia’. The colony was already a nation of second chances before Macquarie arrived. But he was the first governor to try to make it official.
In this chapter, I cover the wide-ranging effects of Macarthur’s rule, and the outside forces (and one Commissioner Bigge) that brought him down.
Macquarie’s Brave New World
Governors in this period of British colonial rule generally turned up at the various tin-pot little outposts they’d been assigned to, imposed His Majesty’s will as much as they reasonably could, then got out (with hopefully a promotion), and headed off to the next assignment. The list of governors who began to identify with the interests of the colonists, against the British Government’s orders, is about as short as your little finger. Shorter even.
To start with, Macquarie seemed to have had no intention of varying this pattern. Having spent 30 years with the military, and seen postings that took him from New York and Charleston in the American Revolution through Jamaica to various battles and cities in India, his chief concern when being assigned to NSW was that such a distant and unimportant posting would mean he’d be overlooked for any upcoming promotions. But then, after arriving, the bizarre happened. He fell in love with the place, with the new kind of world that people were making in NSW.
Converting Macquarie
After Bligh, and because of the bad press circulating from various disgruntled Evangelical Christians and people of influence (refer to Chapter 4), Macquarie arrived in NSW fully expecting a crime-ridden, chronically inebriated nightmare hellhole. Instead, he found a social experiment that had been bubbling along for some 20 years. Starting out with the maligned ‘dregs’ of British society, the unplanned experiment seemed to show that if you took even criminals and misfits and gave them
A chance to start again
In a new place entirely
With plenty of chances to get ahead
Lo and behold, people often did succeed.
As well as the very