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This book gives a lively account of the growth of the city of Hobart from its earliest days as a convict settlement to a metropolis with wide streets and fine buildings.It is the story both of the city and of the people who built the city, its saints and sinners, its rich and its poor: the Franklins, who inspired the cultural life of the town; Farrell, who could not keep out of gaol; Henry Propsting, the goose-stealer who made good through chapel and charitable society.The transformation of the convict settlement to Hobart, capital of the flourishing island state of Tasmania, is paralleled in the lives of its people. Their lives have proved false the old belief in an ineradicable strain of villainy in convict blood, incapable of redemption. As this book shows, the people now have cause to be proud of their forefathers, both bound and free, who built for them a rich heritage from unpromising beginnings.This is a fascinating study of past generations, their foibles, failures and successes, perhaps above all their courage and determination.

This book was published by ANU Press between 1965–1991.

This republication is part of the digitisation project being carried out by Scholarly Information Services/Library and ANU Press.

This project aims to make past scholarly works published by The Australian National University available to

a global audience under its open-access policy.

HOBART TOWN

Published with the assistance of the Literature Board of the Australian Council for the Arts

Hobart TownPETER B O L G E R

AUSTRALIAN NATIONAL UNIVERSITY PRESS CANBERRA

1973

© Peter Böiger 1973

First published in Australia 1973

Printed in Australia for the Australian National University Press, Canberra

United Kingdom, Europe, Middle East, Africa and Caribbean: Angus & Robertson (U.K.) Ltd, London

North, South, and Central America: International Scholarly Book Services Inc., Portland, Oregon

Southeast Asia: Angus & Robertson (S.E. Asia) Pty Ltd, Singapore Japan: United Publishers Services Ltd, Tokyo

This book is copyright. Apart from any fair dealing for the purposes of private study, research, criticism, or review, as permitted under the Copyright Act, no part may be reproduced by any process without

written permission. Inquiries should be made to the publisher.

Registered in Australia for transmission by post as a book

ISBN 0 7081 0072 4Library of Congress Catalog Card no. 73-82847

ToA.E.W.

P R E F A C EThe capsules of history are wrapped by each generation. People of each age are able to take a stand, to review the story of their progress, to look back, consider how it all came about, and ponder why. This book is a contribution to this process of analysis. In passing it considers the opinions of many citizens who were doing the same thing. The introduction begins with a historical attitude of the 1890s, others of the 1850s and 1860s are described. Itself, the book is a view taken from the point of the 1970s, which is a time when the ‘convict cringe’ in Hobart has almost ended. The convict cringe, that cringe away from convict ancestry, is the long persisting and irrational fear that there could be genetic weakness passed down through the generations from an early convict ances­tor. This book sets out to disprove such fears and show that there were emancipists of such talent that they could challenge the restrictions by which the free settlers discriminated against them.

The stumbling block to emancipist ambitions was less their incapacity as a group than the opposition of free citizens to con­vict reputation. Yet the problem which this book attempts to con­front is a fascinating one. The British transported their criminals for several reasons: to save money, to found new settlements, to make life safer at home, but also because they believed that criminals were genetically inferior and if allowed to remain and breed would weaken the British stock. It is this eighteenth century definition of crime and inheritance which the citizens of Hobart accepted and preserved. If such theory was correct then a city where the transported criminals were congregated ought to have been, and ought to be still, a most inferior community.

This book shows that this is patently not so, and reinforces the point that it is not the weakness of character inheritance which has done the community any harm but the fear of such character inheritance. The influence of the convict traits has remained in the minds of men and not in their blood.

Papua New Guinea, 1972 P.B.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This portrait of Hobart Town society was made possible by the good nature of many people. I am indebted to those members of the University of Tasmania and the Australian National Uni­versity who were patient whilst they could not see where it was all leading, to my friends in the State Archives of Tasmania who always knew so much more about Hobart than I did, to the Universities of the West Indies and Papua New Guinea who were generous towards a topic which was far from the centre of their attention. I acknowledge the kind permission of the National Library of Australia, the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery and the Tasmanian Library Board to publish photographs of material within their care. And to the many individuals who helped with criticism and typing I can only give thanks and hope they feel that the effort was worthwhile.

CONTENTS

Preface vii

A cknow ledgm ents ix

A bbreviations XV

C hronology xvii

In tro d u c tio n 1

1 T he C am p 3

2 T ow n or Prison ? 24

3 Citizens 43

4 Freestone, Shingle, and Iron 55

5 G olden F reedom 67

6 A Sort of U n ity 8 8

7 Paupers, P rostitu tes, and Pupils 107

8 A Loss of F a ith 124

9 Renew al 135

10 From C aste to C om m unity 14811 Keeping up w ith the Tim es 16412 T he Full L ife 179

Epilogue 194

Notes 200B ibliography 220Index 231

xi

ILLUSTRATIONS

Facing page

1 Hobart Town on the River Derwent, 1830 462 The Hutchins School 463 The wall of the old gaol 474 The city of Hobart Town, 1855 475 Liverpool Street after reconstruction 7S6 The Emily Downing, a Hobart Town whaler 787 Split shingle dwellings 798 Scouring the wharfs for neglected children 1429 Elizabeth Street in the Depression 142

10 Lady Franklin’s Ancanthe 14311 Colonial satisfactions 17412 Cycle racing, a new sport 175

MAPS

1 The camp, 1804 62 Governor Macquarie’s plan, 1811 103 Shops and houses, 1847 384 The city, 1889 187

Maps drawn by Hans Gunther of the Cartographic Office, Depart­ment of Human Geography, Australian National University.

xiii

ABBREVIATIONS

A N Z A A S A u str a lia n a n d N e w Z e a la n d A s s o c ia t io n fo r

th e A d v a n c e m e n t o f S c ie n c e

H A J H o u s e o f A s s e m b l y J o u r n a l

H R A H i s t o r i c a l R e c o r d s o f A u s t r a l i a

J R A H S J o u r n a l o f t h e R o y a l A u s t r a l i a n J l i s t o r i c a l

A s s o c i a t i o n

M L M itc h e l l L ib r a r y , S y d n e y

R S T P R o y a l S o c i e t y o f T a s m a n i a , P a p e r s a n d

P r o c e e d i n g s

T H R A P T a s m a n i a n H i s t o r i c a l R e s e a r c h A s s o c i a t i o n

P a p e r s

T S L T a s m a n ia n S ta te L ib r a r y

CHRONOLOGY

1803 First settlement at Risdon1804 Occupation of the site of Hobart 1810 Publication of first newspaper1824 Governor Arthur reaffirmed penal purpose1837 Governor Franklin founded the Tasmanian

Society1845 Governor Wilmot faced the Patriotic Six 1850 Governor Denison helped the emancipists1852 Municipal Council Election held1853 Last convict ship arrived1856 First independent Parliament met 1862 Maxwell Miller spoke about depression1869 Under sea cable link established1870 End of British establishment 1876 Main Line railway completed1880 Mining and borrowing boom1881 Hobart Town renamed City of Hobart1890 Maritime strike1891 Bank of Van Diemen’s Land closed 1894 Unemployed given relief1901 Federation of Australia

xvii

Introduction

A conference of the Australian Association for the Advancement of Science met in Hobart during 1892. Lectures were given in the old High School building on the Domain which then housed the University of Tasmania and in the old brick and stone halls such as the Temperance Hall and the Mechanics’ Institute. To the delegates in the Town Hall James Backhouse Walker delivered an address on a subject close to his heart, and one well suited to the occasion.1

He called it ‘Old and New Hobart’ and he made his lecture the epic of a community progressing from the black depths of a penal camp to the light and urbanity of a city which could possess a Town Hall such as this—the pipes of its organ prominent behind him—in which he could address such a learned body of persons. His talk achieved a beautiful sense of presence and occasion and Walker was well qualified to deliver it. A bachelor, eldest son of a widow, a solicitor who found it difficult to get out of bed in the mornings and who had been disappointed in his one desperate love affair with the mysterious ‘E’ of his diary pages, he had long found his pleasure in seeking the identity of the people who called themselves Tasmanians.2 He collected, at great expense, every manuscript about the years of discovery and he talked to many old people about their experiences in the city’s early days. His own memories went back to the 1850s and his mother’s before 1830. Walker edited the History of Tasmania3 which James Fenton had written and, as a member of the Board of the Colonial Library, he established the basis of the Tasmanian Collection of manuscripts and books.

To Tasmanians history has been a two-headed monster. It was satisfying at times to look back upon the depths and feel virtuous about the present but it could be alarming to ponder upon the shallowness of the progress which covered the old evils. Cer­tainly it was less troublesome to look ahead than backward and by the 1890s, when Walker spoke, a glorious future as a State of Australia was almost certain. And yet all of the virtues of the

1

2 Introductionpresent must necessarily arise from out of the past, and all the glories of progress have had to be described in terms of it . 4

When James Bon wick sought Tasmanian Government funds for the transcription of historical records, a myth-building task which he was undertaking in London for the government of New South Wales, the parliamentary reaction in Tasmania was cool. What might he transcribe? What horrors lay in those records? Mean­while the Chief Justice, Sir William Lambert Dobson, campaigned to have all convict buildings and relics destroyed so that the slate of memory could be wiped clean and a phoenix exist without past knowledge. This attitude horrified Walker, who took the opposite view, glorying in the development of a proud colony from what­ever inauspicious beginnings. He was deeply distressed when a mysterious fire swept through the prison township of Port Arthur and suspected that fear of the past had turned men to arson and destruction.

Which man was right and which wrong? Could Tasmanians afford to forget the unpleasant experiences of their land, or were Sir Lambert Dobson and his kind fashioned of all their history, the good and the bad? The scourge had dwelt alongside the beauty from that first day the tread of intending settler had compressed the sand below the bush ridge which was to become the city of Hobart. Walker, Vice-Chancellor of the University and invited lecturer at that end-of-the-century meeting of the Aus­tralian Association, was quite sure of his own interpretation of history. A community evolved from the interaction of all its parts and all its past. His theme on 'Old and New Hobart’ was well received and provoked much thought.

The Camp

O n the sheltered side of the river the big hunchback mountain lay covered by green forest from shoreline to brown summit cliffs. Around a bluff point and a low, sedgy island a deep bay scalloped into the coastline, enclosing a beach of fine, light sand. To the south the shallows formed a marshy flat, red with samphire and yellow with tussock beneath the sloping forest bank. On the right hand the island protected a stream-mouth which narrowed where the teatree and the dogwood met across its steepening gully, the gap almost roofed before the salt tide ended. Behind the bay stony ridges covered in timber offered deep shelter from the westerlies which blew white caps across the clear, free water of the estuary.1

A person clambering up the bank 40 feet above the water could see the mountain shape past the straight trunks and tangled dull foliage of the forest. The ridge of land was almost flat, rising slowy to the south, but a short way through the prickly scrub the ground fell sharply to the rivulet, which took its course along the base of a yellow bluff almost parallel to the cove where the boats lay drawn upon the sand.

Upon the ridge and in the woods all was peaceful; there was no single sign of man. A blue wren scolded in a cherry bush, a Duke William thrush called insistently. The sun shone brightly in the north above the mountain’s cloud shadow, pink heath glowed, un­trampled. A breeze soughed in the high branches and the feeling was of space.

Commander David Collins, surveying the scene, accepted that this quiet woodland could be the site for a settlement; upon this broad ridge the first tents would be pitched, here the permanent buildings erected. Though other coves of the estuary offered flatter land, though there was as good protection for ships and

4 The Campless scrub to be cleared on the eastern shore, no other place promised the pure water of the long stream fed from those distant cliffs. And, because the land was an unknown bush, where a leader could not take risks with his command, Collins apprecia­ted the defensive security of the abrupt ridge from which the boats could be protected against attack by native canoe or French brig.

The people who had spent the previous six months across the river camping at the first settlement of Risdon spoke happily about the weather in these parts of Van Diemen’s Land. Though wildly, changeably stimulating throughout the winter and spring, and unpredictable in its moods, the climate had remained always within the comfortable ranges of temperature. ‘Precarious’ was the evocative word they used to describe the continual sense of change imposed by this far southern atmosphere on the brim of the forties latitudes. The clouds racing in from the south-west somehow carried with them the look of storms on many thousand miles of waters.

In this agreeable but primitive scene the men from Sydney placed the beginning of a new city. Standing with the rough grass about his knees and the breeze in the treetops, Collins named the new settlement Hobart Town after the Secretary of State for the Colonies. Between themselves the settlers found names for the Rivulet and the Table Mountain. The bay they called Sullivan’s, after Lord Hobart’s Under Secretary, whilst Hunter’s Island was named in honour of Collins’s old commander. Other sites were named from the uses to which they were put; the point suited for a battery, the area where stores were landed, the government garden and the stone quarry. People took possession as with their labels they assumed rights. By applying names the places became theirs, not unknown and unoccupied but used and familiar.

The stores were landed upon the island and covered with tar­paulins to protect them from the weather, red-billed gulls, and light-fingered prisoners. The boats touched at the surfline on the beach where footprints soon masked the fresh sand. The time of penguins ended as that of men began. The long centre-scratch of splayed toes marked the lines of the birds’ climb to nesting holes upon the high ground where tent spaces were now cleared in the scrub. The blackened cooking-pots of the first settlement at Ris­don were shipped across the river and camp was made secure at

5The Campthe new site. At evening the long-boats were tied to saplings on the banks of the creek, their ropes sniffed by the orange water rat and nibbled by platypus. On the flatness of the ridge, where the pioneers slept inside military tents pitched in two precise lines between the tree boles, guards stood in the darkness against imagined dangers.

Before the Commander’s tent a level patch was cleared into a gathering area. The trees were felled and the prisoners, using their heaviest axes upon the hard and aromatic timber, split the wood to make the frames of the first rough huts. Wattles from the scrub, puddled clay from the creek bank, roof thatch of speargrass and shingles of split timber—trophies gained from the wilderness,

such houses are soon reared. Posts, joined by wall plates, fixed in the ground; woven with wattle rods, plastered with mingled clay, sand, and wiry short grass, and whitened—a grass thatched roof; a chimney of turf piled on stone, a door and a window: the cottage is finished.2

Constructing the buildings was a communal task, marine and con­vict worked alongside surgeon and settler; for not only was this the gaol for unwilling British criminals, it was also a home and shelter. Discrimination between bond and free was not necessary in those first days since all provisions came from the commissariat store and all cooking was on big fires burning the waste branches. The long days of the summer of 1804 were spent in the forest shade. On Sundays the small community enjoyed the ramblings of the parson, red-faced Bobby Knopwood. On weekdays they all worked upon the store sheds and the barracks or built the track along the island’s tidal causeway. In free time the prisoners paid attention to their own chosen spot of land and their own shelter from the rain and sun; marking the spot, clearing the tree roots and collecting material from the bush. The convicts made their own huts from sods and wattle or logs and initiated a cottage style, the brittle and irregular material limiting their ingenuity.

Exploring parties were sent into the vast wilderness bringing pleasing accounts of the rich soil they found where the streams from the mountain ran through scrub-filled flats. Seeds were planted on cleared patches in the bush and convict men who had lounged the streets of an English city hacked away the wiry plants, uprooted the wild heath, hoed the unbroken land and cast the commissariat’s grain in the summer showers. Twenty acres of

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The Camp 7wheat covered in smut and two of spindly oats and rye were harvested before the first winter.

The pioneers were of many separate talents; there were army officers and surgeons, a mineralogist, a surveyor, a commissary agent, and a chaplain. These were the official men who were to make all the decisions. There were forty marines sent to enforce regulations and thirteen military wives. Three hundred prisoners would provide the labour of the settlement whilst serving their sentences and there were a dozen free settlers, with their wives and children, who enjoyed a status in the prison camp assured by official sanction. The British Government believed that much expense could be saved if free settlers were allowed to join penal stations, for they could be given a grant of free land which would then produce cheap food for the commissariat. They would help to institute the community spirit which free men would respect and even a convict needed. Everyone in the settlement—free, bond, or official—was supplied from the government store, but as stocks grew low with passage of time and no new sails appeared in the bay, the rations were reduced. Living was not easy during the first months and at times there was doubt whether the settle­ment could survive. Sickness and cold affected many who were short of fresh food. Scurvy and diarrhoea from poor diets killed five men in the first winter. Nine more convicts died during the three spring months and seven between November and Christmas 1805.

In desperation the wilderness was searched for sustenance and any local thing which appeared wholesome was eaten. The mesembryanthemum which grew along the beaches was cooked and the eggs of small honey-eaters were taken. Quail, emu, pigeon, penguin, conger eel, crayfish, shark, and oyster were all good eating. Before 1805 was over the last of the thirty-nine black swans from the creek lagoon had gone and game grew scarcer. Desperation brought ingenuity and adaptation. Some men wan­dered through the scrub in a nomad existence, hopefully searching for edible fruits and leaves. The basic diet became vegetables and the meat of kangaroos and emus carried in from ever further afield. A marine achieved notoriety because he took two convicts as labourers and maintained a monthly delivery of more than 1,000 lb of wild meat. For this the storekeeper gave out promissory notes at Is. 6d. a pound of meat. Food was precious and convicts

8 The Campwere encouraged to leave the settlement and live in the bush independent of the stores. Their prison became a cleared wood­land patch in secluded vales a comfortable distance from the soldiers’ tents.

The frontier town had little to choose in propriety between the boisterous troops, the crude convicts they supervised and the supposed gentlemen who held control. As in all camps the restric­tions on behaviour seemed far distant as the married settlers sought to shield their families from the more blatant crudities. In 1808 new ships appeared in the bay but, though they carried stores, they brought no melioration of exile for they brought 200 hardened settlers from the abandoned penal settlement of Norfolk Island in mid-Pacific. After twenty years’ isolation such people had little propriety to teach the pioneers of Van Diemen’s Land. Norfolk Island was said to ‘exhibit the extremes of natural beauty and moral deformity’, and now Van Diemen’s Land seemed head­ing for the same end. The historian, John West, claimed that these were the inevitable dark ages which are to be found in the history of every country, when men who have been allowed to be their own masters remote from public opinion produce a time of social disorganisation.4

The shape of a town quickly emerged from the chaos of human activity as the most convenient ruts between the guardhouse and the barracks, between the jetty and the storehouse, between the convict rows and the tavern shanties, assumed the character of roads. Carts began plying on set routes between the settlers’ cottages and the main area by the guardhouse. The creek was bridged directly on the track between the parade square and the northern fields and each morning and evening the work gangs clattered across its planks. Clearings were made upon the ridges for signal stations as the character of the area became familiar. A climber with a barometer provided the information that the Table Mountain was 3,964 feet high, a figure which was close to accuracy. During much of the winter the flat topped peak was streaked with snow and at any time of the year there could pour down upon the harbour sudden gusts of wind; for these the troubled look of whirling clouds, tumbling in the high cliff’s lee, came to be sufficient warning. Everyone learned to watch the mountain to see how the weather was changing. The cove anchor­age was well-protected from the steady north-westerlies blowing

9The Campover the land, but the open water was uncomfortable holding when the squally winds crept around to the south at the tail end of storms. A ferry across the Derwent gave access to the drier area in the east, which seemed heaven in cold wet seasons but not in the heat of February when the mountain glades offered more attraction. To the north good grazing land lay on the track to a new settlement on the Tamar, more than a hundred miles away. The hinterland was larger than first impressions had suggested for the central plains were lightly timbered and well-grassed after rain. Southwards the land was different; in that direction the approach by sheltered waterways was to colder timberlands with forest-backed coves where bay whalers could beach placid mon­sters killed in the green channel’s chill. Westwards there was nothing but range upon range of wild mountains which grew blue in the distance when viewed from the top of the mountain. They were covered in a scrubby moorland vegetation quite use­less for stock and difficult for men to even penetrate.5

Governor Lachlan Macquarie came in 1811 to inspect this out­post of his wide domain. He was the Governor of New South Wales and Commanding Officer of all the Australian settlements. In the breezy springtime his vessel headed in from the open estuary towards the few shapes of human effort looking dwarfed beneath the mountain backdrop. But once ashore Macquarie’s enthusiasm for the site began to show. The beach, the causeway, and the ridge above were crowded by convicts and settlers eager to greet him, hats raised in hands and voices loud with such un­usual excitement. By this time there were over 1,000 of his subjects resident within this part of his colony.

Macquarie was a planner with a tidy mind. He had experience already of new towns in British India and could see the chaos which lack of forethought was bringing to Sydney. During his stay he drew a plan of seven main streets and one main square superimposed across the rough woodland tracks which already existed. He named the main streets after himself and his wife, and in so doing he promoted the first urban renewal—for in tracing his plan upon the ground it was found that twenty-one of the convict skillings needed removal. Macquarie’s plan was a modified gridiron, the camp plan of hot and dusty Indian plains reinter­preted for a landscape of ridge and stream. One line of his streets began abruptly at the yellow cliff above the beach, rose steadily

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11The Campfor 150 feet and plunged once more to the rivulet bed before climbing steeply to 300 feet above the sea. Such steep brows were to give trouble to traffic, yet beyond them good building land stretched a mile inland and half as wide before the foothills began to impede construction.

The prisoners were set to work to build the penal settlement. The centrepiece was the gaol, with a barrack building as its appendage. There was need for a jetty and wharf on Hunter’s Island, for a solidly constructed warehouse to protect the com­missariat stores, and a customs house to regulate traffic. At govern­ment expense the convicts built a wooden church in the graveyard during 1810 and the same year they buried there the first Lieu­tenant Governor, David Collins. About this time the community was given its first newspaper, the Derwent Star and Van Diemen s Land Intelligencer, which ran as a local gossip sheet and official order notice for a few months. Lodging houses opened and taverns and small-fronted shops with private storerooms and loaded counters indicated the demand for the give and take of normal business speculations.

There was implicit competition between the need to keep the strict control of a penal camp and the creative, ambitious ideas which were being entertained by the settlers. Home makers and businessmen became infuriated by shortages of goods which were often followed by gluts of the commonest articles. The merchants were most aware of opportunities being lost for profit. The high prices of scarcity made attempts at production attractive. There were few craftsmen in the first ships, for if more Englishmen had enjoyed such talents there would have been less of a convict problem. Officers and settlers were usually above the social level of journeymen, and convicts too often below it. Yet some time- expired men tried their hands at business. Daniel Mendes in a newspaper of 1816 advertised black lead pencils, birdcages and Venetian blinds, all of his own making.0 Other men set up small pottery workshops; for the local clay was good and there was plenty of wood for fuel. Some made candles from animal or whale fat. Others began a small trade in jams and such soft drinks as nettle beer and dandelion wine. There was brewing and distilling from the harvesting of the first grain crops until regulations interfered.

12 The CampSuch was the beginning of local manufacturing, which was

always on a minor scale. There was no sign of any cottage industry; no spinning and weaving of wool, which for Europeans was a traditional homecraft, and little organisation of the making of clothes from skins. Local furniture was rough, though the timber was good, and only the simplest nails, tools, and utensils were made. The reasons for the slowness of industry lay probably in the risks involved. The arrival of a single ship could glu: the market in a commodity and make investment unwise. The shadow of undercutting by the factories of nineteenth-century Britain lay upon all manufacturing except that of such bulky, heavy articles as wagons, carts, boats, and whale oil barrels. Gradually the supply of goods from overseas became less erratic and it was obvious that profit lay in trade rather than production. There was constant pressure upon the Lieutenant Governors to yield trading rights to individual settlers until in 1813 Colonel Davey made the first concession.7

Though the initial decisions to establish a settlement had been political ones, and the expenses had been met by the British Government to provide another dumping place for convicts and forestall foreign competition, there were many individuals, both in high office and of more practical bent, who knew that colonial expansion offered opportunities for profit. Their progress did not depend solely upon government decision but also upon social and economic needs. The first profitable enterprises in the new colony were those exploiting the oil and skins from whales, seals, kangaroos, and possums. By 1820 colonial development added the profitability of agricultural production and trade to that of hunt­ing and fishing. It was difficult to make a clear distinction between official and non-official enterprise and it was not in the interests of the settlers to attempt such distinction. Governor Thomas Davey did not object to profit-making out of the settlement, the shipping of cargoes of oil and wool and the import of go>ods for consumption. He joined in the profit himself taking 3,000 acres of farm land to produce crops which he could sell to his own commissariat.

Many of the military officers appointed to run the camp were new to the task of civil administration. They knew how to ‘destroy a fort, or erect a tent; but to subdue the earth to the plough, or to construct a town, required another education’.8 Some of them

13The Campnever learned such talents, yet most officers quickly picked up the rudiments of profit-making on the side. Many who intended to make their stay a profitable sojourn dabbled in speculation and became part-time merchants and farmers. Hobart was so remote and of such a penal reputation that it served as an official dump­ing ground for the worst of British sinecurists. Every single com­missary officer before 1820 was known to have fiddled his books. Surgeons proved a doubtful asset in the community, for with scarcely an exception they gained reputations of extreme dis­soluteness and alcoholism. One was reported to his superiors in London to be Very low and Vulgar in his Manners’. Deputy Judge Advocate, Samuel Bate, was imprisoned for insolence after a long history of addiction to ale house company had reduced his personal respect to the mere title of his position.9

Against this rabble administrators of talent showed up favour­ably. Edward Lord exceeded Governor Davey in the land he acquired and his farm became known as the best-maintained in the colony. Yet he did not turn his back upon the town; official duties kept such men at the camp centre and Lord developed in Hobart a prosperous trading warehouse and store. He used con­vict labour to build himself a small but elegant two-storeyed house in the camp of tents and huts. After six years he resigned his commission and settled down to a chosen life as merchant, farmer, and shipowner. His brig Spring collected seal skins on Bass Strait islands and his farm at Orielton supplied large quantities of meat to the commissariat market. Officers such as Lord held all the advantages in such a camp, with status deriving from rank as well as wealth; though it was not long before they were rivalled by the civilian merchants who soon made up their lack in influence by befriending senior officers and demonstrating their greater trading talents.

Thomas William Birch was established as a merchant in India; his business had been based upon Calcutta.10 He was one of the many thousands of Englishmen who carried the British Govern­ment further into Empire by probing for profit in frontier con­flicts. He came hastening for the new prospects opening in Van Diemen’s Land and brought a large stock of capital, which soon showed effect. He owned boats, built warehouses and constructed a noble town house complete with castellations and roof-top cannon. This was grander than Lord’s Ingle Hall and, being

14 The Campgrander even than the Governor’s residence, became the scenes for many official banquets. Birch exported oil and skins, wood andl grain and supplied the home market with meat, milk, and vege­tables from his farm, as well as fruit and trees from his orchard!. His ship the Sophia killed a whale within sight of the main streelt in 1818 and its Captain Kelly explored the coast of the south weslt leaving the names of Birch’s Inlet and Kelly Basin as souvenirss upon the map and a Huon pine timber concession as a furtherr source of income. By the Adamante Birch received a shipment oif hats of beaver, silk and leather; jackets, trousers and waistcoats; frocks of duck and frocks of guernsey; shirts described as cotton., twist, white, scotch and red woollen; stockings, patent lamps, Irish butter, millinery, cutlery, ironmongery and stationery. The? sale of buttons and hooks was the substance of Britain’s eminence in the world as the homes of many towns like Hobart slowly filled with possessions.

The penal character of the settlement was broken first by such enthusiastic free traders, yet socially the officer class remained dominant. The purpose of the settlement remained official and all initiative began with them. The round of dinners and balls which centred upon Government House marked the progress of the year. In the tart commentary of Henry Melville, the class who deter­mined the tone of society, ‘were entirely military, and enforced a military discipline; these rulers, composed of themselves a little? nest of social friends, and never, by any chance, mixed with either the emancipist or the prisoners they had in charge’.11 They accepted association with the settlers upon their own terms of friendship. Rigid adherence to the precedence of rank structured the whole of society and an air of militarism pervaded the most sociable event. The King’s Birthday of 1816 was celebrated by a parade of troops and at six o’clock a ‘sumptuous and splendid’ dinner was enjoyed by officers, ships’ captains, and gentlemen. Its after effects were said to be the mixed tastes of loyalty and hilarity upon every breath in the cold winter air.12 The convicts performed the manual work for the community and all other colonists lived dominated by commissariat office routine.

By 1820 it was obvious that such tedious official pacemaking could not continue in the face of change. As the end of the wars with France brought lowered prices for British goods, and un­employment in Britain, with fears of overpopulation, made life

15The Campthere less attractive, there was renewed enthusiasm for colonisa­tion. Ships were chartered to carry settlers with their Birmingham and Huddersfield goods to far-off sunlit homes of promise, where it was hoped they would yield a quick profit. Shopkeeping and emigration together provided avenues to bypass the impediments of name and birthright which had frustrated all generations of Englishmen until colonisation brought promise of a new society. The arrival of emigrant ships in the Derwent was as exciting for the goods they brought as for the new faces; the leavening of numbers reduced the military grip upon this gaol settlement and the profit from commodities made men independent of the military purse.

After 1817 the new Governor, Colonel William Sorell, came to appreciate the culture and wide vision of the adventurous mer­chants. He was ‘popular with his fellow citizens and had a definite policy . . . to encourage free migrants, entice wealthy settlers and to afford facilities to the merchants’.13 Through the talents of profitmakers the produce of the land began at last to show a surplus, with an export trade from the Derwent to Sydney, India, and Mauritius and increasing returns from exploratory wha-ing into the cold seas, where the winds always blew from the west. The settlers took up farms, or began trading, or bought whale- ship shares, or combined all three enterprises and, except for using cheap convict labour, they were not concerned to maintain the identity of gaol camp. Denied the responsibilities and duties of office they could turn towards the study of their own interests; enjoying the protection of troops and the patronage of the com­missariat. With the riches of under-developed land abounding, their accounts showed excellent return for their voluntary priva­tions in choosing to dwell within the limits of a penal colony. Their deepest cares came to be the risks to cargoes from strange seas and stranger piracies. Fortunes had often to stand the shock of one calamity after another. Winds and coasts needed learning and the approaches to the port for some hundreds of miles became littered with the stumps of breaking wrecks. Too frequently the remains of both goods for Hobart warehouses and servants for domestic halls rested upon reefs discovered by costly trial and error. There were heroic tales of escapes and tragedies. They seemed most poignant when told of ships coming to grief on the last day of a six months’ voyage, having successfully rounded the

16 The CampSouth Cape for home. Yet there was compensation for risk in the social standing which wealth could extort within a small com­munity. Wealth soon rivalled ascribed official position as a source of local power. Every man in the official hierarchy knew well his place, as befitted men on duty, but the merchants distributed goods more desirable than those of the official store and beyond the gift of the Crown. Whilst settlers still needed to cultivate associations with the officers, all concession being from the government, the needs of the gaol itself increased reliance upon a vigorous class of independent citizens. After the first few years the feeding of the prisoners was beyond the capacity of official provisioning. The government invested in the system by granting the labour for private development from the official store. Cheap, slave-type labour, though inefficient, gave precocious rates of growth to the private sector of the economy and shortened the wait between the investment of capital and drawing of profits.

In 1820 the Hobart Hospital was nothing more than a house and had been overcrowded from the start, but the new barrack building, the new gaol, the garrison church, the commissary stores, the guard house and the church of St David’s with its tall spire rising above the rooftops, were all fine, carefully- designed buildings built regardless of cost to English taxpayers. The earliest works were in bright orange, thumb-marked bricks burnt from local clay. These were replaced for the larger buildings by freestone from the government quarries which was carefully dressed by the chisels of stonemason convicts and transported in heavy loads by ox wagon, teamster, and whip. The government architect was John Lee Archer, a man well schooled in the clas­sical tradition. A new bridge close to the hospital was called the Palladio in celebration of the most prominent Italian style, which dated from the sixteenth century but became the common-place possession of nineteenth-century colonists. Formal pedimented front suited the Irish-wide streets of Macquarie’s plan and the official buildings in bright new stone seemed fitted to their setting. In contrast, only the richer private houses could show to advantage across the sidewalks of such wide avenues. There were perhaps fifteen or twenty dwellings thought worthy of the name of house before 1820 and commanding a rent of £.200 or £300 a year. These were the flights of merchants’ fancies, built florid fronted and double storeyed on rising ground close to the town

17The Campcentre. They were limited in their opulence more by the restric­tions in building skill than by the aspirations of their owners. Private dwellings of less than £.50 rent made up the bulk of build­ings and there were more than 300 of the huts known as skillings. Most turf, log and wattle hovels disappeared during the activity of the early 1820s when scaffolding and loads of bricks blocked every pathway. Stone was too expensive for most private building but around the old central section new brick houses formed a better area. Carved freestone was used for corners and decorative motifs, but shingle roofs were still almost universal, with slates a costly alternative. The poorer cottages, the homes of emancipists, often consisted of a wooden front attached to an older skilling.14 Newer cottages began with two rooms on the street line and additions were pushed out behind as lean-tos of sawn weather­boarding. Such small houses crowded the flat Wapping land close to where the ships’ boats landed and the creek banks where the steep cut of the rivulet channel wove its drunken way across the town gridiron. Cottages competed for river frontage with the watermills, which were squat structures of rough stone served by leat and storage pond. Each had a white waterfall from the mill wheel into the muddied creek waters below. Warehouses loomed large on the flat land near to the creek mouth. The rock of Hunter’s Island, proving attractive as commercial site, dis­appeared from view beneath the foundations of bulky work buildings, each still decorated with classical embellishments.

Almost all of the people of town were British, though there were a few Europeans amongst them, and some Americans and Pacific Islanders landed as crew members of ships in port. All the comings of note were by ship up the Derwent and people measured the months and years of their sojourn on the island by reference to the name of the vessel and date of arrival. A majority came by convict transport but there were settlers’ ships chartered by groups paying their own passage and cheap immigrant ships upon which passengers came by advance of fare. The landing of boatloads of free females by the Immigration Societies was the most particularly appreciated event. The girls would land and within the day Vanish like a dream’, grist to the mill of a vigorous community. A matron complained that ‘tidy handmaidens are wooed, won and married in such quick succession. . . .’15

18 The CampThe lower parts of the land continued to fill with poor emi­

grants and down-at-heel convicts from Britain, who were by force of numbers bound to be the core of this town’s population. Many of those branded with the stigma of conviction were able to use their talent and wit to help their sons to live it down. Others without the disadvantage of having been convicted were of similar class and habits to those who had. In large cities like London, where they were the outcasts of society, such people were so much part of the social system they mattered little. But in Hobart the same classes were of much more consequence, because there were so many like them that their habits had to be recognised and allowed for. In London there was plenty of dis­tance between poor thief and rich merchant, so that one did not have to confront the other and there was room for tolerance. In Hobart the well-to-do mingled in the streets with pickpocket, forger and thief. Proximity and communication between classes brought the development of customary barriers of protection which were unnecessary in Britain. Freedom from established social patterns meant less freedom from the judgment of one’s fellows; freedom from old prejudice brought men face to face with new discrimination. In this way social survival could be more difficult in the colonial community than it had been back at home.

In 1825 Henry Burgess was found guilty by the magistrate of the burglary of a city house.10 There was a common type in this town, a petty criminal continually in trouble with the police and limited by a narrow vision of opportunity but Burgess by rising above this level was to prove an outstanding exception. Another was Samuel Crisp who was landed from the Earl St Vincent in 1826. He was a country sawyer from Chelmsford in Essex, a strong Wesleyan chapel man and very close to his family. Sentenced to death for sheep stealing at county assizes, he was lucky enough to have the sentence reduced to transportation. Mrs Crisp brought two children by the Lady of the Lake in 1829 and the Crisps remained together as man and wife, reared two more children during the difficult years of establishing respectability and saved enough to open their own timber yard.17 Another arrival during the early years was Abraham Rheuben, then sixteen years of age, a small-sized tailor’s apprentice from the Mile End Road with everything against him; his Jewish looks, his conviction for steal­ing and his cockney accent. Youth was his only asset in the town.18

19The CampA more easily accepted type was Henry Propsting from rural Middlesex, where his father was a butcher. The Propstings’ life had been gentle and uneventful, five brothers together in the family home, until one Christmas Henry had been caught with stolen geese for sale. He was described in the Court records as a labourer but was a cut above this.10 He had been to school and being a good prospect for advancement, soon found a place of responsibility in the offices of the commissary and congenial com­pany within the devout and influential Wesley an-Quaker group of settlers and merchants. The Home Office records contain many such details about the sort of people who formed the core of this community. They describe such characters as a father and son named Press, convicted together of stealing a goose and gander, and Edward Fairhall of Brighton transported for stealing radishes. There were Irishmen like John Cunningham from Armagh, con­victed of assault during the fruit harvest in Kent, or Charles Paton, a Donegal weaver who had burgled to keep alive in Glasgow. There were men like William Worley, a house-breaking grocer from Wiltshire and Randle Flowers, a gardener who served seven years for attempting to kill a deer in the same county.20

It took an unusual type of settler to choose to settle alongside such villains. One who voluntarily joined the community for the advantages he felt he gained was John Woodcock Graves from Cockermouth in Cumberland; a landscape of hills, lakes, and woods which was not widely different from that of Van Diemen’s Land. He came as providore on an emigrant ship; looking after the self-provided supplies.21 He was a coach painter by trade, thirty-eight years of age on arrival and with only £,10 of capital to show for his life of work. Pie brought the youngest four of his six children and his once-beautiful Abigail, who bore him two more children before she abandoned him when he became quite mad and an object of fun in Hobart. It was no profit for Graves that he had known the horse-dealing John Peel and had written that nostalgic song about the life he had enjoyed as a Cumberland hunter.

It is difficult to see why such men as Graves would leave home for life in the penal settlement except for hope of profit and those imponderable sentiments of change and adventure. Several score of able urban dwellers who were not failures in their own home towns became good citizens of Hobart, attracted by something in

20 The Campthe colonial life. What temptation made John Dobson give up his solicitor’s practice in England to set one up in Hobart? What made any man migrate to a gaol colony? For George Washington Walker, a draper of sorts, the pull was a vision of philanthropy in the penal sump, mixed in whatever proportions with his yearning for Sarah Benson, whom he had met when visiting the colony with James Backhouse.22 For John Morgan, a later arrival, it was avowedly a passion for the colonial life itself, learned amongst the woodlands of Canada, which led him to the shipside.23 But it was failure to succeed as an officer in the colony which threw him upon the town as a journalist and into the melee of local affairs. William Crowther, a doctor, seemed to be risking much in the new town when he settled there with a large family of sons in a [jig house yet, through practising medicine and speculating in ships and cargoes, he came to enjoy a rich, diverse and very profitable life.24 Joseph Allport abandoned a romantic attempt at farming in New South Wales for the insecurity of Hobart. He had been trained in Staffordshire as a lawyer and began anew finding business so good that he stayed on to enjoy the life.25 Together as citizens such people formed an odd crew, each striving to make something of life, each wanting some progress and each more ambitious for having left the settled background of generations. In Britain the limits to success were more obvious than in a novel colonial situation and for their new life the ambitions of many were as high as the skies.

The settlers prospered so well that they began to assert their interests against those of the Convict Department. They wrote home inviting others to join them and books were published which set out the attractions of colonial settlement in Van Diemen’s Land. The tone of such publications alarmed the government in Britain, as did demands from the settlers that they should be joined by more emigrants.20 Vociferous talk of colonial rights to prosperity did not accord with the original idea—was this not the gaol colony for which the British paid out a large burden of taxa­tion hard-won from the electorate? All such talk was as if Hobart was one of the model colonies in South Australia and New Zealand, ideas of which were beginning to catch the public imagination.

To control such tendencies Governor George Arthur was picked as administrator for his reputation of firmness in suppressing dis-

The Camp 21content in the West Indies. He was instructed that his new terri­tory must operate within its intentions as a gaol. The slide towards a colony of settlement must be stopped. Arthur proved to be an excellent choice; it was said by his admirers that he revealed inflexible determination, unceasing energy and great powers of administration. He was a different sort of character from the Governors who had gone before. Whereas the others had accepted compromise Arthur was a perfectionist who saw evil starkly and knew that it must be eradicated.27 By general British standards of the nineteenth century there was no doubt that society in Hobart was extremely licentious, but it was not a normal com­munity. Arthur seemed not only to wish for the standards of ‘Home’ but to improve upon them and make the residents of the gaol colony conform to the morality which the English imposed upon their poor and feeble in institutions—standards which were not what most administrators expected of themselves.

Governors Davey and Sorell had openly kept mistresses. Such habit had been accepted and widely practised, though subject to criticism. Many officers and settlers, whose rank in life made them unwilling to contract lawful marriages with prisoners or their offspring . . .’28 were delighted to have them in their beds. Others of the townspeople were convicts and emigrants drawn from the ranks of British society which had never learned middle-class ideas of chastity. The loneliness, disillusion and separation of families produced by transportation served to loosen the sanctions which British community life imposed upon its people. Arthur sought remedy in morality imposed by government decree. One of his decisions was that the favours of government should be immediately denied to anyone found to be living immorally.29 They could have no land grant and receive nothing from the stores, could make no use of the wharfs and enjoy no part in the social calendar of events. The penance for the sin was harsh, but Arthur was a harsh man who understood that his charge from the British Government was not an easy one to perform. A caricature of life in a penal colony which appeared in the Edinburgh Review during 1823 illustrated the reputation which had to be refuted:

a little wicked tailor arrives . . . he is turned over to a settler, who leases this sartorial Borgia his liberty for five shillings a week, and allows him to steal, and snip what, when, and where he can. The nefarious needleman writes home, that he is as comfortable as a

22 The Campfinger in a thimble; that, though a fraction only of humanity he has several wives, and is filled every day with rum and kangaroo.80

Arthur’s efforts consisted of deepening the involvement be­tween prisoners and guards. He sought to make provision for every convict need, to discipline, improve, and succour them with an ethical authority. Church parade became the weekly social highspot and the reaffirmation of the purpose of settlement for the whole community. Soldiers sat in the galleries on three sides of St David’s, whilst on the centra] floor the tall mellowed cedar pews, with lockable doors, denied glimpses of elegance to the prisoners who crowded the body of the nave. Alongside this spiritual involvement the extent of social care which became avail­able for convicts was extraordinary for the century; the hospital, the orphan schools and the Female Factory, when judged by the standards of the day, were unusual welfare institutions. One effect of this was to leave Arthur’s administration open to the charge that convicts were too well looked after. It was tartly said that, ‘they were fed and clothed and lightly worked; they were free from care, their time was running out, and they were objects rather of envy than of commisseration’ . 31 Even convicts on parole and working for settlers were inspected regularly to see if they were being treated adequately, and their masters were liable to penalty if found wanting. Yet while convicts became more pro­tected they also became more strictly controlled and punishments were made more severe. Tightening discipline inevitably made life less pleasant for the settlers. Arthur explained to his superior in London:

In exacting many of the wholesome restrictions on the prisoners it is frequently necessary to trench upon that unrestricted liberty which is claimed by the free population . . . the free inhabitants . . . should be looked on as Visitors. . . .3-

The effects of such single-minded purpose were remarked upon by the French novelist, Alexandre Dumas, some years later. Dumas portrayed the colonists in a novel33 as full of sombre gravity and dulled by the oppressive need to discipline the prisoner population. At the same time it was only superficially that such pressure affected the rumbustious delights of low-class living. In a convict’s fife of oppression a little more did not alter basic conditions. A deeper result of Arthur’s improvements to the penal system was the isolation which resulted for the free poor

23The Campand free sick. Under the new principles, aid for these people could be achieved only by their submission to the penal system. Unpleasant as this was and loath as the free were to submit to the Convict Department, the availability of such relief inhibited the development of alternative methods to help the needy by way of charity or community action. In place of involvement the settlers merely found added cause for resentment against the system which distorted their daily lives. The Governor’s discipline be­came a goad to hasten colonists towards rebellious thoughts and a core of opposition to government formed which persisted through the easier period when Arthur had gone.

Town or Prison?2

In 1844 a young Welsh woman named Louisa Anne Meredith travelled from a home in Sydney to one in Van Diemen s Land. Her gentle European upbringing had already been offended by many aspects of colonial life; its crudeness and brashness, its discomfort and heat. Hot, dusty, and unhappy she trailed faith­fully after her husband to a posting in the most notorious penal colony of all. From a knowledge of the early development of the gaol on the Derwent, Louisa had no reason to believe that it held any happiness for her, yet as she took up residence she was delighted to discover that Hobart had assumed a character be­yond that of gaol, an unlikely-seeming, gentle air. Under the system which had developed she found she had to suffer little contact with convicts and gaolers, the ‘great difference between Sydney and Hobarton struck . . . forcibly . . . in point of pleasant­ness’.1 She could see the gardens bright with geraniums and children who were rosy-cheeked from the cool breezes playing under verandahs hung with clematis. She saw not the roistering Hobart Town of the camp and the whalers but the ‘Hobarton’ of the settlers, a creation which was something else apart.

Louisa lived in a house at New Town alongside the richer merchants and the families of officials. This was already a pleasant suburb with brick and stone houses in large gardens surrounded by sweet briar and hawthorn. It was an area of peace and restfill­ness where wives met for chatter about the stupidities of domestic servants, whilst husbands commuted on horseback to city office and warehouse and families travelled by carriage for the enter­tainments of town.

Town society was to her taste. It was delightful she thought and perfectly safe. Ladies could walk about the streets; the climate allowed this pleasure (how different from the other

24

Town or Prison 25colonies). So settled was the life that there was time for the ‘feverish terror of being said or thought to do anything “ungenteel” or “unfashionable”. . .’.2 Censure was swift upon females who were deemed unfit for respect. One lady who had formerly been allowed the joys of society’ was cut when a new arrival revealed past scandals. Another time the matrons decided that an editor’s wife, Mrs MacDowell, was not acceptable after she unwisely admitted in a conversation that she had anticipated their marriage by sharing his home and bed. It was a paragon of a place. Louisa remarked, ‘nowhere were the decent and becoming observances of social and domestic life more strictly maintained . . .’,3 than in this small outpost of polite society.

G. T. W. B. Boy es, a sojourning government official, who had no long-term interest in the pulse or future of the colony, watched its passing show from the periphery of the city at New Town and recorded its scandals, real or imagined, in his diary. The circle he described was one of pretended English gentility in a rough setting. He described such events as the Government House balls, ‘much crowded, very dusty, indeed almost to suffocation . . . the Young Beauties in White Muslin . . . sitting or reclining in clusters about the room, fresh and fair as a rich bed of roses raising their delicate heads above the light wreaths of a June snowfall’.4 Unlike Louisa, Boyes was not altogether blind to the conflict of social circles within this small town of 10,000 inhabitants. ‘Hobarton’ persisted upon the surface while intense antipathies existed be­tween the classes of society.

The settlers increasingly resented the Convict Department feeling, ‘ground and depressed by the Mother Country and mocked by the Officers sent out to rule them’.5 The officers, dis­illusioned and petty men most of them, sycophants or trouble makers, scrabbled for peculation or career advantage. Escaping from unsuccessful pasts to accept postings here they resented anyone who obstructed them. Then there were free labourers feeling such superior dignity as they had never known in Britain, for here they had a class beneath them—the class of convicts. The convicts seemed to be everywhere, whether emancipated or still in suits of grey and yellow. There were convicts in work gangs and convicts as constables—paid 2s. a day by the police and twice as much in bribes by innkeepers—convicts as shopkeepers and convicts as servants. Perhaps they were Cornish ploughboys like

26 Town or Prisonthe one described by Boyes as having been convicted for attempt­ing to steal a gaudy neckscarf at St Just Fair. Taken into the house as a domestic he would soon have ‘utterly destroyed a China Dinner Service, chipped and broken <£15 worth of Cut Glass, scratched your Plate with a sandpaper, and used the furni­ture brushes in scrubbing, with the aid of soap and water, the French polish off your tables and side board . . .’.6 Other convicts had been hardened city criminals, used to pillaging their environ­ment and preying upon the class of people who lived surrounded by their possessions.

‘Hobarton’ was born of the need of the middle classes to escape from the threat of these other groups. The settlers who came flock­ing to join the colonial prosperity needed to create a sympathetic retreat of gentleness. They needed an illusion of culture and urbanity forgetful of the wild bush and vast ocean spaces. It was seldom any longer the pioneering with axe and gun which chal­lenged the men, but rather the problem of hewing out a business or a practice in a place where the constant arrival of immigrants provided a market and the British gaol subsidy provided credit. Profits could be large but the costs were high, particularly for wives and daughters suffering isolation without the challenges open to men. In answer there developed the fantasy land with its airs and graces which so suited Louisa.

During 1836 there arrived as Lieutenant Governor the re­nowned explorer Sir John Franklin. Having been everywhere, from the Arctic to the Antarctic and most parts between, Franklin was unimpressed by geographical isolation; he carried his culture and his civilisation along with him. He was one of those scientific men peculiar to the century, for whom the whole world was a labora­tory. The improved communications of the industrial revolution and the peace of the British Empire opened to inquiring minds the corners of the world discovered in earlier centuries. Franklin’s vision of TIobarton’ was singular. His duties as Gaol Commander were peripheral to his main preoccupation, which was developing scientific research within the region of the colony. He believed that he had merely to set an example and the community of settlers and officers would respond to the delights of discovering the unknown by way of research into this pristine natural environ­ment. Nor was his vision in error, for the new land was rich and

Town or Prison 27exciting in its treasures and its residents clearly awaited the stimulation of leadership.7

Lady Jane Franklin was more than her husband’s match. She was a classicist, leaving the map of the island plastered with names drawn from mythology and seeing in the blue skies and dry hills a fresh and perfect Attica. Close to Hobart she con­structed a new-world Parthenon; this one not a temple to the deities but to her husband’s gods. It was to be a natural history museum with simple pediment columned in brown stone, rising with Greek precision from a rough valley of shattered eucalypt, and bearing the name Ancanthe. Jane’s vision was of a polis, a city of cultural achievement and learning, and this vision found some slight reflection of truth in this Athens of the Southern Ocean; where men educated in the English classics tradition formed a tight, elite community served by slaves and visited by traders; with leisure and isolation and time to contemplate the things of quality.

Franklin’s scientific association, the Tasmanian Society for the Study of Natural Science, was an overwhelming success. Its journals, which told the world that ‘the sole objects of our easy and pleasant labour are the collection and publication of know­ledge’,8 had no counterpart within the colonies. Papers delivered to its meetings in the Governor’s parlour (at which Sir John reserved the right to snore) were often drawn from original dis­coveries. The gatherings of townsfolk were attended by such enthusiastic scientists as John Gould, who became England’s leading ornithologist, and Joseph Dalton Hooker, son of the famous botanist of Kew Gardens. Gould talked so much about the island and its delights that his son migrated later to become the Tasmanian Government Geologist, whilst Plooker published the first description of Tasmanian plants. Franklin’s reputation attrac­ted Captains Ross and Crozier of the Royal Navy’s investigation ships Erebus and Terror. Ross reported to the Society on the first southern meteorological station he founded at Rossbank within the town, and the descriptions of the Antarctic Ross Sea explora­tions, on which his ships were engaged, cast upon the gatherings the fascination of the unusual corner of the world in which they lived. Such example awakened talent from amongst the colonists. James Barnard, the Government Printer, published papers in statistics. Dr E. S. P. Bedford began to study the biology of the

28 Town or Prisonlocal marsupials. Ronald Campbell Gunn turned from office duties with the Convict Department to editing the Tasmanian Journal of Natural Science," besides collecting plants for the Hookers and managing Ancanthe for Lady Jane. Behind his house he grew plants from the precious seeds brought back from the Kerguelen, Marion, and Crozet expeditions, and came to attain international recognition as a botanist through his work as correspondent for Kew Gardens. W. L. Crowther, son of the immigrant doctor, a boy of seven on arrival in Hobart, grew to maturity within the community. He collected skins and skeletons and paid his way through British medical college with 500 specimens, returning when qualified in 1843 to resume the delightful life of prosperity and intellect, which he was eventually to crown by being nomina­ted a Fellow of the Royal College of Surgeons (see p. 182).10

The Franklins’ polis offered a very different complexion of society from that of the original camp, yet the two characters of the town persisted side by side; alternate faces which called out different responses from individuals. The first Anglican parson, Bobby Knopwood, had been a pioneer, a hard-riding, hard- drinking servant of a forgiving God. In contrast, within a week of the first Anglican Bishop Frederick Nixon stepping earnestly ashore in 1843, he had ladies inspecting his landscape sketches.11 Given a lead, culture did not long remain confined to the Frank­lins’ drawing-room. Soon after Nixon’s arrival there was the burgeoning of an active artist group, with John Skinner Trout as its teacher. Many residents dedicated their time to catching upon canvas the scenes and symbols about them. Colonial Government official P. G. Frazer, Colonial Secretary W. Bicheno, and W. Porden Kay, Director of Public Works and nephew of Franklin’s first wife, were typical dilettantes. Their ladies were not slow to join them. Joseph Allport’s wife exceeded all by becoming a pro­fessional artist, gaining fame particularly for her miniatures painted on ivory. Louisa Anne Meredith was impressed that ‘a landscape and water-colour fever was raging with extraordinary vehemence . . .’12 when she landed in the town. Outdoor sketching became very popular along the rocky coastal headlands and in the deep mossy fern-glades, where the favourite spots soon bristled with empty champagne bottles and greasy sandwich papers, which spoiled both the bush and the artists’ composition. The fashion drew to it some of the lower classes; artisans of

Town or Prison 29artistic skill who romped to sudden glory. T. G. Wainewright was a competent portraitist and so was William Gould. Both had been transported for forgery. Wainewright, it was said, was a man of taste and sensibility with a real gift for taking a likeness, though he was never allowed alone during sittings with the daughters of the gentry in case he was tempted to take anything else.13 Thomas Bock and Benjamin Duterrau, who had established reputations before coming to the colony, assisted in the formation of a local school of professional painters and attracted to them­selves a circle of devoted admirers.

In 1845 the southern continent’s first art exhibition was held; paintings were lifted gently from parlour walls for public viewing. John Dobson, the brashly popular, Vulgar, drunken’14 solicitor hazarding his family and career in this penal city revealed another side of his character in this artistic craze. He showed many oil paintings, all of Gateshead-on-Tyne, the home upon which he had turned his back. Dr J. W. Agnew, small boned and slight, a Con­vict Department surgeon who had thrown up his commission to begin private practice, repeated the sad nostalgia with scenes of Devon. Agnew was taking the first steps in what was to be a fascinatingly successful career. Enthusiastic in all things he tried, he seemed to gain as much pleasure from the art exhibition as did Bishop Nixon who organised it. Nixon hung his own attempts at water colours alongside his collection of precious Turner land­scapes, and in the hall he bustled about, running up and down the library steps, clucking and chattering to everybody. The Bishop took so lively an interest in the affair that Boyes mused in his diary that Nixon believed his reputation as a ‘Connoisseur of the fine arts’ depended upon the success of this one exhibition.

With so many townsfolk developing their tastes for the quality of living their thoughts turned towards education for their sons. And in this debated field no tradition but the most fashionable English one would suffice. The schools of Hobart were intended to uphold the best of public school spirit. Thomas Arnold’s son was given the government’s education system to reform; as if every lean-to school beside a church could enclose that precious Rugbeian flame within its wooden walls.15 J. P. Gell, another Rugby scholar, was offered the proposed Queen’s School and, on the plan’s failing, he was made head of Christ’s College. His thin nasal laugh and speech impediment mocked his classical phrases

30 Town or Prisonin the classrooms of this pretentious college, which was ‘first established in all the grandeur of medieval pomp, with its warden, its vice warden, its fellows, its lecturers, its tutors, . . . its chapel, its library and its refectory—everything in fact except its . . . students’.16 The Hutchins School was more successful. Intended to be the feeder Grammar School for Christ’s College it too was cloistered and ivy-covered in a gentle neo-Gothic building. It was administered by Dr Arnold’s nephew and staffed by Cambridge graduates. Its Anglican bias and the resentment such preference aroused caused the formation of the rival High School, which became a ‘Proprietary’ school run by a committee of Noncon­formists. Leaders of the group were the Presbyterian John Lillie, the Congregationalist Henry Hopkins, and the Quaker G. W. Walker.17 A fine new Elizabethan-style construction for the Pligh School was built to grace the lower slopes of the Queen’s Domain, and the existence in a small town of rival grammar schools of such distinction, each offering its own interpretation of the great Protestant English principles, lifted high the oppor­tunities for native youths.

All this and more culture still the community came to offer its members. There was a choral society, a piano-playing group and a plush-chaired theatre. There seemed to develop organisations for every need and occasion and truly the lives of many Hobart people during the 1840s must have been unusually satisfying. The community was great beyond expectations so few years away from the gaol image. By 1850 the population had not reached 25,000, yet the city between snow-capped mountain and blue Derwent offered cosmopolitan learning and company in the clear atmosphere of a landscape which swrept in forested ridges to the edge of the intrusive tide. These years were the high point of the polis of the Southern Ocean and perhaps can partly be explained by the nature of communications; for though London manners and London culture were half a world away the journey was a direct one which had been undertaken by almost all citizens. In this way ‘Hobarton’ appeared to its members as a satellite of the world’s metropolis, far richer in self-assurance than it was to be later as a mere dependency of other colonial cities.

Such development of taste and quality coloured, but could not diminish, the older characteristics of the town. The new character merely grew as an embellishment upon the old, whilst prisoners

Town or Prison 31continued to arrive and take their places in the probation stations. Fresh immigrants took up lodgings or constructed temporary, rough houses on the edge of the built-up area. The minds of many middle-class people were eased by the temptation to lose them­selves within the good life and ignore the inhumanities of a penal settlement. Visitors saw only what their prejudices allowed them and mixed only within the circles of their hosts, some of whom enjoyed their good fortune as if the chain gangs did not exist. Joseph Hooker, ashore from the Erebus, was feted and lionised around ‘Hobarton’ parlours. He was shown, and could see, only the Franklin splendour and this was the preoccupation of his letters home, ‘music is much cultivated . . . At Government House there is always excellent music and the military band is one of the best in the lines’ . 18 He met his father’s friend, the emancipist Jorgen Jorgensen, who had at one time been the King of Iceland but had become a sad alcoholic destroyed by marriage to an insane convict harridan . 19 Jorgensen should have revealed the other side of Hobart life to Hooker but it seems that, though the meeting left the botanist filled with wonder and disgust, it gave him no understanding. The prevailing dedication to pleasure amongst the middle classes was seen differently by James Back­house, a visiting Quaker missionary. He noted that there were pianos in every large home and believed that, like drinking and smoking, they seemed to be used to relieve boredom and to fill time which ought to be turned to helping fellow citizens towards heavenly good.20

Franklin’s ‘Hobarton’ was a strangely exotic growth within a savage landscape; the unspeakable existing alongside eloquence. As Gell took to the scholarly study of Tasmanian Aboriginal languages, and rotund gentlemen listened from their easy lounge chairs to his lectures on the habits of the natives, the survivors of that primitive people languished in a government settlement, sick of the diseases which European contact had given them. Backhouse and G. W. Walker both attempted but failed to bring the tribes any useful help, and Bishop Nixon’s pastoral visits to the islands in Bass Strait established no worthwhile contact with the Aboriginal families there. Neither scientific interest nor Christian charity could halt the slow extinction of the native race. 21

32 Town or PrisonThere was no nineteenth-century British city which did not

contain Christians dispensing philanthropy. G. W. Walker, the leader in the development of charity in Hobart, found a few like minds among the settlers; for good works were not only a Christian duty, they were also an imported cultural habit, an established social response of immigrants from European society. Walker worked assiduously towards practical moral improvement through the formation of societies and by the good example of his personal integrity.22 He went into business as a draper but soon used half of his shop as a savings bank. He was constantly on the spot to accept labourers’ small instalments to encourage their frugality, prudence, and industry. Fifteen thousand accounts were opened in the first twelve years and the bank eventually grew to be a civic institution in one of the most tastefully designed buildings in the whole city.23 The Maternal and Dorcas Society, which began in 1835, was wholly a voluntary charity supplying layettes of baby clothes for free and thrifty mothers and grocery orders for God-fearing pensioners.24 A Wesleyan Strangers’ Friend Society of 1829 and a Benevolent Society of 1832 provided money or food to people who were in dire poverty. Short-lived relief organisations became a common response to charitable demands, despite antipathy generally against becoming involved in doing the Convict Department’s work for it. Through months of un­employment in 1839 a Society for the Relief of the Distressed Poor raised £-800 from the subscriptions of wealthy merchants and professional men. There was sympathy for down-and-out immigrants; many colonists had raised their voices in demanding more labour during the 1830s only to see too many labourers facing too few jobs in the slump of the next decade, and settlers who had pushed hard through Immigration Societies to bring labourers to the colony had a right to feel responsible for their distress. Free labourers could find some sympathy in reaction against the emancipist threat. The emancipists were blamed for taking free labourers’ jobs, wages, houses, and food, and for lowering the standards of all labour to their own lowly position.

Dr E. S. P. Bedford was one of the Convict Department sur­geons who broke away to take up private practice. The son of the colony’s second Chaplain he had ‘sat in’ at the Colonial Hospital before taking a journey to Britain to qualify as surgeon. Deciding finally to make his home in Hobart he published his

Town or Prison 33views that the convict institutions were insufficient for a develop­ing community. He began a voluntary subscription hospital in 1847 which was designed to emulate the large London city hospitals which he had come to know. St Mary’s opened in a private house before moving to the small but magnificent Gothic building built close to St David’s cemetery in Davey Street. Bedford’s idea was to provide means 'to enable the rich to help the destitute sick’, and to ‘encourage the efforts of the working classes in providing aid at their own expense’.25 Any subscriber could nominate three out-patients for his guinea or the right to a bed cost <£5 a year. Poor people could buy hospital insurance for their families. An example given was that an eighteen-year-old joining for life secured free hospital and medicine for Is. 6d. each month. Such a comprehensive scheme seemed pleasing and modern and showed what new social institutions were possible in an apparently tradition-free colonial community.

Could the difficult but exciting process of turning a penal camp into a city take place despite the presence of the convict stations? Such optimists as Bedford believed that it could and for much of the 1830s developments followed this trend. Yet all chances for the gradual growth of a stable system of social organisation were ruined by a decision of the British Government to send to Hobart many more thousands of convicts; to vastly increase the pace of transportation to the colony.26 During 1842 five times as many convicts landed in the city as had formerly arrived in a year. This change of pace altered the balance of many institutions. New crisis was produced by increasing pressures for economy which, coinciding with expensive ideas about the reform of convicts, aggravated the problem of the increased rate of transportation from Britain to Van Diemen’s Land. The British Governments of the day were sensitive to the popularity they lost by demanding taxes from their electorate. To the eyes of men in London demands upon the public purse for the molly-coddling of far-off colonists seemed unjustifiable. Hence the Van Diemen’s Land officials were under duress to cut expenses or to raise more funds locally.27 They understood that, though they had a moral duty to save the weak, it was folly to be providing welfare where there was even the slightest chance of any self-help producing the solution. Instructions were given for the Convict Department regulations to be more stringently imposed. There were new

34 Tow n or Prison

demands made of the public for payments towards the quartering of children in the Orphan Schools and for the use of beds in the Convict Hospital, ‘rough, comfortless, evil smelling and dreary’, place that it was even so.“8 Eventually the Convict Department officials stipulated that their responsibility went no further than the succouring of any convicted persons who could be shown to have been infirm at the date of arrival or who became ill during the period of compulsory labour. Government relief was to be refused to all free persons. It seemed that growing British con­cern for the humanity of their prisoners was to be paid for by increasing the colonists’ commitment to charity.

As it grew in size the community became less comfortingly personal than it had been in the early days, when there were few families but many friends. People who made it their home for twenty or more years gradually established family ties and strong alliances which could help tide them through bad times. For these older hands the early paternalism of the small camp found sub­stitute in clique identification which yielded human contact enough. Yet ships landed convicts and immigrants every month at increasing rates and the new people who came were just as open to isolation as the first settlers had been. Increasingly the social care provisions they could expect from the government became less as the penny-saving reforms begun by Governor Arthur continued to drive a wedge between the prisoners and the rest. To convicts within the strict stages of the probation system there remained sufficient provision for welfare, but free paupers and convicts on tickets-of-leave were steadily weaned away from this source of relief through stricter tests of eligibility and harsher conditions within the Convict Hospital. The help the government offered to charity-seeking emancipists after their period of proba­tion dwindled and aid was withdrawn from any free person who fell upon hard times by sickening or becoming invalid. This neglect was greater even than that experienced by such people in Britain or Ireland, where there always remained traditional sources of relief. Certainly British poor law provisions, even after amendment in 1834, were taxed by population growth and the urbanisation brought about by industrial change. Yet, through modification and innovation, the old-world system always found breadth enough to cater for periodic distress by way of parish initiative. In the colony, where there were no families for new-

Town or Prison 35comers to rely upon, where there was little communal or official commitment to welfare, and no system of parish responsibility, the victims of distress were most insecure.

It was fortunate that the periods of economic depression before mid-century were relieved by the opportunity to take ship for the mainland colonies. Emigration was a safety valve which relieved much of the burden of charitable relief. During every year of the 1840s, whilst new arrivals poured into Hobart, almost as many of the 'old hands’ moved out to seek their fortunes away from the convict capital. Hobart became a staging post of passage migrants. Many convicted persons stayed barely to serve their sentences before moving on to where no one knew of their disgrace. Con­victs skipped the island illegally without waiting for their dis­charge certificates, and caused the searching and suspicion of all departing ships to be another trial for free people living in a penal colony. Such movements took many convicted criminals away and were regarded as fortunate by the settlers, yet probably the community would have been healthier overall without such a safety valve, for in that case the obligation to deal adequately with social problems would have forced the colonists into action. Instead the poor and needy were benefited only by a succession of petty associations as individual organisers concerned them­selves with the problem. For any citizen who attempted phil­anthropy there was always the bitter thought that the distressed who caused the bother were not the colony’s own but the scrap­ings of English or Irish slums. To make the pill yet more bitter, the quality of convicts deteriorated as the rural yokel caught out in an indiscretion became rarer alongside a new type of twice- convicted criminal brought from India or New South Wales to be confined in the Van Diemen’s Land penal colony as the final dumping-ground/50 Such wretches too often finished their globe­trotting lives of crime as beggars around the back doors of settlers’ houses. Philanthropists found support to be grudging and tardy and a widespread reluctance to accept social duty blocked the tide of evangelical ideas. People would pay out once or twice when the initial publicity was strong but, when an immediate crisis passed by, so too did public interest. Within the middle- class community there was little prestige to be gained from com­mittee work and there were no bequests made to charity.

36 Town or PrisonThere was some obvious justification for the settlers’ distaste

for mendicant emancipists. Many of them were unattractive specimens of humanity. Transportation was an efficient form of selection of inadequacy; most of the convicts from the British Isles suffered from a congenital lack of intelligence or from emo­tional instability. Much of their trouble was due to physical weakness or deformity, or a deprived upbringing which produced similar results. Governor Arthur complained that a quarter of his convict labourers were idiots and the convict stations did indeed maintain a large crop of mentally defectives. There were several exceptional groups of convicts who came to Van Diemen’s Land and these individuals would not fit the general description. The Chartists, the Captain Swing and Rebecca Rioters, the Tol- puddle Martyrs, and the Irish Exiles were all groups which included men of intelligence and talent. Yet, with the exception of some of the agricultural labourers, few of these people became identified with the community of their prison.31 Moreover not one of the individual convicts of talent and reputation, such as Jorgen Jorgensen, Smith O’Brien, John Frost, Zephaniah Williams, or William Cuffay, established a colonial family of any note. This experience differentiated Van Diemen’s Land society from that of New South Wales, as the much greater social gap which afflicted life in the southern city inhibited the social mobility of emancipists. The convicts sometimes appeared like a pariah caste rather than as a lower class.

The settlers could scarcely make head or tail of the convict ways of life. Boyes wrote in his diary an almost anthropological account of a social evening he observed. A convict-constable named Williams tried unavailingly to get his drunken wife to bed. She defiantly flirted with Boyes’s servant, Davis, and a farm servant named Bridgeman, until Williams caught the latter ‘making free with Mary Ann’s lips’. The husband gave Bridgeman a thrashing on the spot and dragged his wife away to beat her to sleep. Boyes was astonished and amused at such primal behaviour. A visitor, William Gates, noted with alarm, ‘in the streets it is as common a thing to see females as males reeling in all the filth of beastly drunkenness, and blasphemy most horrible . . , ’ . 32

It was always easier for the lower classes to forget the isolation and rawness of the settlement than it was for their betters to do so. Despite the loss of family and friends; despite the rough

Town or Prison 37severance of former patterns of living, the labourers could find many small compensations away from the shadows of the peni­tentiary. Crews from the whalers in port and common, rough seamen filled the wharfside pubs with noise and laughter, slipping easily into the company of convicts. Their tales of lonely rocks covered in seals, of stormy blue-green waters and bushbound coasts lit by the fires of natives, brought a tremor of excitement to lives which knew nothing of the dilettante pleasures of ‘Hobarton’. Refuge lay in the taverns behind slab walls within sound and smell of the waterfront. Selling English and Colonial ale, small beer, and cheap Mauritius rum, the drinking shanties of draughty weatherboard and shingle roof were the focus of a way of life. Upon their doors were posted the notices which were the means of communication between rulers and ruled; from their lintels hung the only form of lighting in the streets (excepting the big lantern over the stocks at the gaol gate in Murray Street). Close by the public houses occurred most of the newsworthy incidents and topics of conversation of lower town. The churches possessed the Sunday but the drinking houses kept all the week. And, when not at the bars, the men and women torn from the pleasures of poaching and trysting around the brook edges of Britain could find delight in the rich woodlands and sparkling waters of their new homeland. After they had got used to the initial strangeness of a new landscape the fern gullies and cool heights of the mountain beckoned to all, and many men who had been London thieves learned late in life the pleasures of lying in an anchored dinghy pretending that the fish were going to bite, until the cool sea-breeze ruffled the blue water’s mirror of the Bedlam Walls and the pull back to harbour began. Open air and natural pace alleviated many tensions imported from the old and bitter world.

Despite compensations life in the wild antipodes could never fully replace the affection for home or soften the threats of lash and prison gang always awaiting those caught out of favour with the constables. The emancipists, like all other citizens, looked forward to a future which would be better than the present. The official class, the settler class, and the labouring classes all wished for peace in the settlement; all hoped for a progress only time would bring. Change and development could mean only improve­ment in lives so full of upset, and this fundamental confidence

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Town or Prison 39in a brightening future was the greatest difference between the colonial society and the rigid English lives left behind; where future had held no necessary improvement over past, and life had always been endurance for most people.

It was the regularity and quality of the nourishment which fertile land and Convict Department rations provided that pro­duced the impressive physical appearance of the native-born colonial children. They were not a different human strain but the old one uninhibited by disease or deprivation; the type in its full potential at last. John Mitchel, an Irish political prisoner with no love for the land of his prison, noted in his Jail Journal

Native Tasmanians, both men and women, grow up frequently tall, straight and handsome, with a mild expression of countenance, and manners always affable, gentle and kindly. They have, how­ever . . . that soft, luxurious, voluptuous languor which becomes the girls better than the men.33

The new colonial environment affected the outlook of the con­victs by offering release from the pressures of their former lives; by giving them space and food and hope for their future or pride in their children. Yet such changes could not immediately make all of them different persons. Even though many must have realised their fortune in dwelling within such beneficent sur­roundings, emotionally they were the victims of their old selves. Church services enforced by government—attempts to control the inner spirits of the people—passed by most of them unavail- ingly. Though they remained largely unacceptable to Christian standards in their morality and habits, the convicts who lived in Hobart were not particularly aggressive people. In Britain deprivation produced desperation and the true evil of violence amongst those whom the British transported. No man travelled the ill-lit streets of free London without knowing the midnight risks; yet within the penal colony, where the convicted evil-doers were collected together, there was a surprising calmness and even gentleness. There was little room for lasting hate, but by similar token there was no power capable of imposing middle-class honesty and uprightness upon such an assembly. A witty news­paper column based upon the observations of a visitor calling himself Simon Stukeley contained a typical tale. Stukeley was most impressed by the open faces and smiling eyes as he pressed his way through the amiable town crowds, ‘Happy people, and

40 Town or Prisonthrice happy Simon Stukeley, to have left your retirement, to come among them!’ Could this be the hated penal settlement? But on return to his hotel his watch and his money had gone from his pocket.34 They smiled, were fed and settled to a degree, yet they had learned responses in a harder school which they could not lose so quickly. The people seemed above all kindly, but so woe­fully dissolute. Emancipists were certainly no middle-class, Pro­testant angels. The romps, the grogging, the jealous bickerings of rival lovers, were typical Saturday evening scenes but most Monday court activity was devoted to drunkenness or offensive behaviour and not to more serious crimes.35

Penal control appeared to remain essential for the exceptional conditions which caught the attention of observers, the occasional lurid depravity which filled newspaper columns the world over and seemed to prove all fears. Pearce from Macquarie Harbour, arraigned in the Hobart courthouse, wept as he confessed himself guilty of eating all of his fellow escapers. A few other men for scarcely less dramatic crimes were dragged to the magistrates, the houses of correction, the triangles and the gibbets. Their notoriety and reputation fed the reluctance of many administra­tors to see much hope for normal institutions and to fear that the gaol camp was the only form of administration possible. Nor did the settlers wish to jog too hard the hands of law and order, for whilst the propertied classes resented the presence of the gaol the walls offered protection from these strange and fearful creatures who shared their city.

This was a complicated community, a confused and contra­dictory place in which the roles of men were sharply defined and sharply divided. Reality was brought home with sad tragedy in the years from 1843 to 1847. Governor Franklin, with his expen­sive tastes, far outspent his budget from the British Colonial Office and reaction to a period of economy was inevitable. Since dis­satisfaction with affairs in the colony came to a head during a period of renewed uncertainty in Britain about the efficacy and method of penal reform a decision was made from outside the colony to alter the system of relationships between its people. Within the London chambers of the Colonial Office a new-broom Lieutenant Governor was chosen, Sir John Eardley Wilmot; such a hurried appointment that when he reached Hobart the Franklins in innocent ignorance still held court in their ‘agora’.36 The victim

Town or Prison 41

had arrived. Wilmot s instructions were to save money and to make the convict system achieve its aims. He was told to make the settlers earn their own fortunes without subsidy and the convicts endure their sentences without colonial ease. This would have been a difficult enough task for any man, but for Wilmot it was impossible. His attempts to overrule the settlers’ wishes led him to a constitutional impasse when all of his elected Council mem­bers defied him. His attempts to define a mould and shape for community made him intensely unpopular with people who had for long entertained their own hopes and dreams. He picked upon Franklin’s Tasmanian Society as the extreme example of provocative settler-oriented expense. Wilmot sought to make it a useful institution within the terms of his instructions by inform­ing the Society’s members that its function in future would be to conduct research into more efficient ways of producing food in the colony; that it would accept an officially-nominated Council and a subsidy to supervise the government garden. Henceforward it would be known as the Royal Society. 17 Only ignorance of the Society’s symbolic importance to the settlers could excuse this miscalculation. Amongst those insulted by such presumption was Bishop Nixon, church guardian and artist as well as Tasmanian Society Vice-President. ‘They had corresponded with men of the first scientific circles; and they published a journal which widely extended the physical knowledge and European fame of this hemisphere’ .38 Now they were to be gardeners for the Convict Department; no greater insult could be paid to men whose pride was delicate.

Wilmot made other mistakes; he failed in his attempts to improve the convict system and he misjudged the moral tenor of polite city society. Licentiousness and loose living amongst the middle classes, the habits of the early camp settlement, had not died away but persisted in a mannered convention of not noticing what remained unnoticed. Mrs Meredith was a fine player of this game whilst Wilmot handled the dual standard very badly. Boyes wrote spitefully of this old man ‘selected by Lord Stanley as the chief instrument in the solution of one of the most difficult of human problems, . . , ’39 who instead of getting on with it carried on silly gossip with young wives and sat upon sofas with his arms draped about their necks. Wilmot went further than this and

42 Town or Prisonfinally lost public respect by driving for weekends at New Norfolk with Julia Sorell, the bright eyed, vivacious and very desirable granddaughter of the early Governor. She was a much-courted, handful of a girl who later, through a marriage with Thomas Arnold, became the grandmother of Aldous and Julian Huxley. The matrons of ‘Hobarton’ did not allow open scandal to pass without censure, while, if Boyes is to be believed, they were ignoring many other things going on beneath their own blankets.

Wilmot successfully offended everyone, even Julia in the end, but his misfortunes were only partly due to his own ineptitude. They were also caused by the impossible task he had been set. His attempt to live in the style of the early camp governors was an abrupt miscalculation of the tone of society; so was his illusion that the fantasy-land of the Franklins could be crushed by official edict and that a reversal towards penal aims was possible after the glimpses of freedom of the ‘Hobarton’ years. His end was tragic. Bishop Nixon, smarting from his loss of office as Vice- President of the Tasmanian Society and bewailing the disintegra­tion of the life he had shared with amateur scientists and enthusiastic painters, reported to the new Secretary of State, the prudish W. E. Gladstone, that Wilmot was morally inadequate both in his personal life and in his example before the ‘bestial’ tendencies of the convicts. Wilmot was dismissed without notice or recompense and the disgraced sixty-year-old man was dead within two years. It was easier to initiate and foster social growth as Franklin did than to curb and redirect it as Wilmot tried. He was crucified upon the cross of a divided community; whose division was soon to become even more open until something like revolution seemed probable.

«8 * 3Citizens

At the approach of mid-century the feelings about independence and self-government became intense and charged with high emo­tion. The relationship between the officials and the other colonists became one of conflict and contest in which every concession made by the government was accepted greedily as of right by the people, and every attempt at regulation was bitterly resented as a foreign domination. The clash of interests was not clearly under­stood by the British Colonial Office, whose members persisted in their illusion that their duty lay in managing a dependent colony. In the history of individual British colonies, seen from afar, the process of a gradual melioration of the despotic condition could be discerned. ‘Democratic’ progress had become thought to be natural progress since the American colonies made their successful breakaway. The British settlers in Van Diemen’s Land accepted as self-evident the idea that their colony was undergoing the successive stages of this process. Its fact was scarcely discussible and its justification was unnecessary, only the timing and traumas of organisation marked the progress towards self-government. After the sad conflict faced by Wilmot all administrators found an attitude so ‘essentially democratic’ that it would brook little delay in the accelerating process of local control. Even mild- mannered Wesleyan ministers became obsessed with the growing need for free institutions. John West of Launceston, a champion of the settlers and opponent of official recalcitrance, began the two-volume book which he was valiantly to name The History of Tasmania to distinguish the new ideal community from the old Van Diemen’s Land. This production focused patriotic ideas and provided a lasting testimony to colonist integrity and idealism.

W. T. Denison, a new engineer Governor chosen by the Colonial Secretary for his skill as the organiser of a workforce of

44 Citizensconvicts as much as for political acumen was clear-headed enough to be able to distinguish ends and means and to suggest that, as far as all practical benefits went, the whole quest for inde­pendence was ill-founded.1 He believed moreover that anti­transportation sentiments were thoroughly wrong-headed. He saw that the colonists remained in a position to sell at a high gain to themselves the servicing of Britain’s prisons. If only they would remain willing to harbour convicts in their penal stations, and emancipists upon their streets, they could reap the benefits of both worlds. Denison believed sincerely that he could serve the interests of his superiors in London and the colonists simul­taneously; and in cold logic he was correct. It was chagrin to him that the colonists should allow wild sentiments to cloud their judgment by insisting upon a single-minded solution to the com­plex problems of arrangement.

Yet the anti-transportation agitators nurtured concrete griev­ances against the system, with the free labourers smarting under the competition of cheap convict labourers and settlers resenting the responsibility of being called upon as supervisors to bonded labour; a task which many employers found onerous. West force­fully stated their point of view, ‘Who can value the toil and time, and wear and tear of life, in bringing the stubborn, ignorant, and vicious to drive the plough and reap the harvest’.2 Home owners resented the risks always present to their property whilst con­victs were at large, and community pride was injured by the knowledge of the aimless waste of the bureaucratic probation system which degraded both bond and free. ‘The body bends and gives through hours of ineffectual motion’; and ‘triangles disgrace a civilized nation, and the colony is filled with violence and vengeance’.3

The settlers saw the presence of the convicts as the cause of most of their ills and blamed them for their own impediments. These were thrown into their faces by such bad publicity as an article appearing in The Tunes of Boxing Day 1846, which declared that the colony of Van Diemen’s Land, being too evil for any emigrant who had the interest of his family in mind, was fit only for the remnants of society. It was the cesspit of an Empire, and would always remain so. Many settlers already half believed such tales, and West fed their feelings by reminding them that, whether there was truth in them or not, ‘the reputation of the

Citizens 45colony is formed from the census, and the land becomes a by-word and a hissing’. The hurt of knowing that their homeland was a joke in the outside world lay so deep within the consciousness of colonists that it was difficult for Denison or his superiors to under­stand their passion. To the uninvolved the transportation question could be distinguished from idealistic statements about British rights and was in the nature of a deal; to Denison it was a situa­tion amenable to bargaining. But to all the colonists who identi­fied themselves with Hobart, who wished for no other home or hearth, the deal meant selling themselves and their families. Their wives’ and daughters’ dignities, and even their moral and physical safety, were at issue; so too were their children’s chances of education towards respected adulthood and their own peace of mind as they walked through the streets to Royal Society meet­ings or watched their gardens grow. Was the land to be truly theirs? The colony was their life, their place, their promise. Why should it be prostituted for common English profit or conveni­ence? How could such a thing be bargained about?

And the benefit the colony could gain from such a deal was doubted and demeaned in their common conversation, until they convinced themselves that all benefit was illusion after all; that an end to transportation was absolutely necessary and that prosperity lay with freedom in the future.

That land which they tell you will become a desert when the clank of chains, the cries of torture, the noise of riot, and the groans of despair shall he heard no longer, will not become a desert; ‘it will blossom abundantly, and rejoice with joy and sing­ing’, when your sons and daughters shall go forth, the free among the free.4

They imagined the happy days ahead when the impediment of transportation would be removed, when the natural dignity and virtue of colonial men could have free scope to overcome all the minor disadvantages of colonial isolation. The good time would arrive for all—out convicts! out mismanaging Colonial Office! The time for initiative was rapidly approaching! The tide which began to flow with the first concession made to a free settler, from the first trader in Hobart Town allowed by the Governor to con­template his profit within his own warehouse, was in full stream by mid-century. The administrators talked simply in terms of the mechanics of government, the patriots spoke in the inspired

46 Citizensspeech of men fighting for their whole future, and their dedication and fervour brought them triumph in the glorious decade of the 1850s. First they enjoyed the dreams, later came the actuality with the right to build a community of their own. This was promised them in the years of mid-century. What greater gift could accrue to a people? There was joy throughout the land! The people of the Independent Colony of Tasmania, population eighty thousand, were to be given rights to govern, administer, and plan for their own future. The patriots believed that their breathless, promised years had begun.

The vision of the future which appeared attractive and reason­able to the settlers puzzled outsiders. G. C. Mundy made measured judgments of all the colonial settlements in his book Our Antipodes in 1852; it was the extravagant cocksureness of Hobartians which intrigued him,

The colonists know their own business best, and it is none of mine: but it appears to me that their aspirations are somewhat premature. The ground floor of their social edifice has been built of mud. Let it at least have time to harden before they attempt to superimpose a structure of marble.5

He did not doubt that the people had their sights upon a marbled structure, they seemed so sure of themselves. Robert Elwes dis­liked such ‘jockey-knowingness’,0 whilst Boyes became enraged at all signs of parochial complacency. He hated these gumsuckers; conceited, empty-headed young men, he thought them, with silk linings to their satin waistcoats and oily hair and gold pins.

They believe they are the most remarkable men on the Globe, and that their little Island ‘whips all Creation’. They are all Radicals of the worst kind, and their children are brought up in the belief that all Governments are bad—that they are deprived of their rights, and that they are ground and depressed by the Mother Country and mocked by the officers sent out from England to rule them. Their views are all of the narrowest and most selfish kind.7

Boyes spoke for all the sojourning officials. The growth of settler pride was an infernal nuisance, their thinking of the city as being theirs made them unsympathetic to government plans. They refused to be taxed, advised or directed, and yet they clung to the advantages they enjoyed from the subsidy of the British Treasury. They also glibly accepted profit from their easy sales to the commissariat market and their use of convict labour.

Reproduced by courtesy of the National Library of Australia.

1 Hobart Town on die River Derwent, 1830.

Reproduced by courtesy of the National Library of Australia.

2 The Hutchins School: part of a grand design (see p. 30).

1

Reproduced by courtesy of the National Library of Australia.

4 The city of Hobart Town, 1855. Fifty years of growing.

Reproduced by courtesy of the Tasmanian Museum.

3 The wall of th^ old gaol, Murray Street, from the only surviving daguerrotype (see p. 31).

Citizens 47‘Patriots’ caused endless trouble; in 1846 the journalist John Morgan, irascible, anglicised Welshman,8 disgraced half-pay marine lieutenant, protested before the magistrates that colonial dog licences were nothing more than taxes. In winning Supreme Court support for his appeal he cast doubt upon the validity of all colonial laws, and reduced the colonial statute book to ridicule and impotence. During 1847, on a similar principle, the municipal voters decided that the government’s so-called ‘gift’ to them of an elected Commission to 'improve the lighting, paving and cleaning of the streets’, was another ploy to secure tax for the upkeep of the convict gaols, and the members of the Commission were forced to abandon attempts at municipal improvement. Morgan again interfered by agitating and publishing his pamphlet The Municipal Act*

Throughout the contest the British Government and its ser­vants, the officers of administration and commissariat, provided a worthy opposition against which settler power could be tried. Morgan was an individual typical of those British men whose awareness of the political and moral issues of the day flourished under the stimulation of colonial frustrations. The burgeoning talents of the settler class of immigrants occupied the centre of the political scene and their volubility hid from view another conflict within the town. The settler opposition to official rule led to a polarisation of social groups.10 The hardening of class rela­tionships was against the interests of emancipists; for settler rule meant the fossilisation of old attitudes of hate and distrust, a permanent subjection of the convict third of the population to discrimination. Some few emancipist families had already estab­lished toeholds upon the status ladder, and it was to such people that the domination of a settler scale of values offered most threat. The path to social promotion lay most easily through trade. There was never any bar to emancipist participation in selling or dealing about the city market places. Bespectable people claimed never to trust any ex-convicts, and the whispering about convict careers was a ploy to defeat emancipist business preten­sions. Yet the gap between the social classes was wide enough for direct competition to be rare and discrimination was genial enough until individual emancipists lifted their heads too high above the motley where they belonged.

48 CitizensThe length of residence of emancipists in the colony, the dis­

tance in time since their transportation, assisted acceptance to­wards respectability. Philip O’Reilly’s hat factory and Patrick Bolger’s boot store were respected because their owners were old residents.11 Abraham Rheuben was an early arrival and so more trusted and more popular than any newcomer. Rheuben put no foot wrong in his career. He found it extremely difficult to raise credit on the strength of his record yet, using his savings, he began dealing in second-hand goods, turning later to buying and selling produce and property. In 1847, twenty years after his adolescent conviction for stealing, he lived in a good house in New Town Road and owned three others valued together at £-143 per year. He had married and supported a large family and his sons, Moses and Philip, attended the expensive and prestigious Hutchins School. Rheuben almost reached the ceiling of modest success to which emancipists of talent and dedication were allowed to climb. He became an alderman and a justice of the peace. Obituaries on his death, though short, spoke with favour of this ‘entirely self made man’, a comment which patronised whilst it praised.12

At the property valuation in 1847 Henry Propsting,13 the goose stealer, owned five small houses. Henry Burgess had title to six worth £270, most of his wealth being tied in his new grocery store. Samuel Crisp owned eight properties together worth £ 165, including his wood yard. Ownership of city land and houses was an excellent indicator, not only of advancement, but also of stake in the community. The status of propertied emancipists was low compared with that of men such as David Lord, who held twenty- seven titles valued at £2,027, or Henry Hopkins’s fifteen build­ings worth £818. Dr Crowther’s big house was valued at £100 on its own, whilst the single valuation on the best house in town, Westella, almost equalled the highest savings of any emancipist.

Though the houses they owned might have been small, the ex-convicts’ advancement to propertied society was example to others who sought to climb in status. Propsting had joined the Society of Friends and achieved wide respect for his activities with that dedicated philanthropic group. He was a total abstainer and a worker amongst the poor and distressed. His godliness muted criticism of his origins and the attendance of his sons at the High School, of which he became a prominent shareholder,

Citizens 49was noticed with satisfaction by many liberal-minded low church­men. Burgess made money from his grocery business and ensured that his sons received good education. Crisp became respected for chapel attendance and his timber yard prospered to the extent that his sons were sent to the Hutchins School, whence two of them were put through the Inns of Court in London. The younger, also a Samuel, was called to the Bar in 1847 and returned to practise in Hobart, reflecting glory upon his father’s success. Samuel Crisp the elder was a popular and outgoing town charac­ter who turned transportation into some sort of happy ending.14

However, these few were men of exceptional ability, even though only the Crisps had begun to demonstrate pretensions above trade. The secret of success in each case was a patience over the years to earn first a toleration and then a little respect from a circle of free acquaintances. An old devil the settlers knew well could be excused the harshest strictures, whereas life was not so easy for ambitious upstarts and convicts later arriving in the port. The older emancipists profited from the gap they could maintain between themselves and the men still in yellow jackets and were most careful to follow the habits of their betters.

Such gentle easing of a small number of emancipists to the threshold of acceptance was suddenly clouded as the social oppor­tunities available to them narrowed sharply inside a few mid­century years. In 1847 the struggling free workmen became sufficiently enraged by their frustrations to strike at convict competition for work and wages by joining John Morgan’s Free Labour Union. Two years later Dr William Bailey started the Tasmanian Union to assert emancipist rights in opposition; this was the beginning of class militancy in this community. Bailey and Morgan were at odds as rival newspaper editors but Bailey had been convicted of fraud whilst Morgan had narrowly avoided this fate after being found responsible for a deficiency of stores at the Swan River colony, and was (though he never admitted it) lying low in Van Diemen’s Land, an unsuccessful, impecunious settler. It was the insecure amongst the free who faced most threat from the emancipists of the Tasmanian Union, and it was the most ambitious of the emancipists who felt con­stricted by the continual emphasis placed by the free upon criminal pasts. The emancipists of the Union, sensing that the growth of the anti-transportation party had produced a time of

50 Citizenscrisis, organised their opposition. Their spokesman announced ‘the time has arrived to rescue our people . . —We know thesilent grandeur of our strength’. 15 These words announced the only concerted action of ex-convicts within Hobart society; the only challenge of this subservient group to arrogant settler expectations that the city was theirs. In the first place the emancipists spoke out against the lower class of free immigrants and only later did they extend their attack to include the settlers and merchants.

Morgan reacted neurotically by forming his Hobart Town Trades Union, more extreme than his earlier Free Labour Union, and by screaming for help to the Colonial Office. ‘My Lord . . .' he wrote in the editorial column of his newspaper The Britannia and Trades Advocate,

presently we shall have here, not a war of races and colours, but of castes and classes . . . The convict authorities . . . would have us adopt the red republican, socialist, levelling principles of revolutionary France by which all distinctions are abolished. 16

In so saying he recognised that the convicts and their gaolers were ready to make a common cause against the free colonists. A challenge to the settler supremacy was beginning to take shape for the emancipists and the officers of the government were united in their opposition to the pretensions of the settler class. Most of the contest proceeded at a low key, though none the less bitter for being so. Light relief was supplied by the dramatic imagina­tion of Morgan who was never content to see matters at life size. He was an avid scholar of the French and American revolutions. At his most extreme he urged upon the settlers a Committee of Public Safety on the Parisian model, claiming that a mixed array of troops and armed convicts was massing at the edges of Hobart ready to descend upon the homes of free colonists. He claimed that Governor Denison planned military occupation of the city to usurp settler power and replace it with an emancipist tyranny. 17

The debates and propaganda used in this contest were subtle because the differences which separated free from bond were not a suitable subject of open speech and the ideals which separated the parties were difficult to define. All sides sought what they believed to be their British rights. Arguments depended upon an interpretation of the question whether criminal convic­tion permanently invalidated traditional British freeman status.

Citizens 51The settlers could invoke liberal, yet loyal, sentiments to justify the stand by which they were defending liberty and integrity. In the settler argument the convicts were criminals and republicans and the officials were oppressors of British freemen; such cate­gories made ready villains, enabling settlers to cast themselves as virtue’s children. On the other hand it was an awkward situation for the propagandists of the challenging emancipists. It was difficult for them to isolate any form of appeal which was not either abrogated by the settler group or redolent of the convict stigma. Seemingly their only clear path to virtuous image lay by way of Christianity. Hence emancipists, finding the Tasmanian Union valueless and Bailey discredited, formed the carefully- named Society for the Propagation of the Charities, etc., of the Gospels and through this organisation they clearly expressed their sense of growing oppression and crisis. The Society’s title was intended as a reminder to all colonists that the world was in need of a little of Christ’s charity. But this worthy sentiment kept becoming confused with a Boston, tea-dumping liberalism into which the emancipists fell as easily as did the spokesmen of the settler classes.

‘MEN and BRETHREN!’ a full-page notice in the Hobarton Guardian began on 30 January 1850,

Unite—organize—act! Above all things ACT. . . . crush all faction, all slandering, all oppression, all uncharitableness and all tyrannis­ing usurpation of ours and our children’s dearest rights.

West used his book as propaganda to gather sympathy for the anti-transportation settlers and their case was very strong. But the emancipists had more desperate stake in this community than any man of profit and fought more bitterly because of it. The breezes through the garden trees and the passage of clouds from the west, the fine buildings and the marsh flowered street edges, the level of wages and prices and the uneasy relationship between bond and free; all of the facts of life in this southern city were not of emancipists’ deliberate choice or creation, all of the charac­teristics of the town had been imposed upon them as the shapes of their prison. Beyond further emigration and a life of wanderings this community, as it stood, was the emancipists’ only sure hope for life and pride. It was otherwise for the settlers who had made deliberate choice to remain and profit in this environment. A notice from the Committee of the emancipists’ Society for the

52 CitizensPropagation of the Charities, etc, of the Gospels claimed: "They’ came to make their fortunes and now ‘They’ rail at you who ‘They’ forced to come. ‘You’ outnumber ‘Them’ by many thousands, \ . . have you not made the colony what it is? Has not your sweat, in so few years, made this land . . .? Have not your labours given these wandering adventurers at least the position of settled abodes and something of a decent competency?’18 There was much truth in these words. The Boxing Day, 1850, edition of an unusual and short-lived emancipist newspaper called The Irish Exile and Freedom’s Advocate reported a surge of cheering for five minutes when William Carter told an electoral meeting that moral con­tamination by crime was a myth, for he could show them good families who had lived in the city for twenty years without the slightest debasement. He railed at those settlers who had made use of convicts to gain their wealth, to build their warehouses and mansions which a prince might envy; men who had arrived with £100 and had accumulated <£20,000 or £50,000 by using cheap convict labour. Now these settlers sought to kick down their helpers and openly despised those whose labours had brought their profits. Why should they? What right had they? Carter concluded his speech by asking why should not the settlers be the ones to go away, to clear out now they had made their fortunes and leave the ‘People’ alone?

Meanwhile Carter’s ‘They’—the settlers—saw themselves as the 'People’. They were the rightful inheritors, whilst the emancipists were the interlopers who should leave or remain silent. There were tight lips, for both sides were determined to win this struggle for families and future and home. Settlers held most of the advantages of wealth and influence; the emancipists had only numbers and the help of Governor Denison. Through the Masonic Lodges and Oddfellows’ meetings the emancipists desperately proclaimed their loyalty. They loudly expressed their admiration for the Queen and her Lieutenant Governor, William Thomas Denison. They spoke their distrust of unpatriotic republicanism, their love of solid English Protestant virtues, and hatred of foreign ideas of united religions or secular morality. The many Irish Catholics amongst them could emphasise only their loyalty and common humanity and keep quiet about the rest; for they had few attributes which would evoke easy sympathy from English­men. The result overall was the confused spectacle of two sides

Citizens 53espousing the same cause, each claiming the true inheritance of British, Christian, liberal, and monarchist ideals.

The contest became political in elections for the first Municipal Councils in 1852 and 1854, and the bitter temper of the city com­munity moved closer towards the usual nineteenth-century contest with the division lying between the few who had wealth and power and the masses who sought to acquire access to those assets. The peculiar difference in Hobart was that the government was aligned quite clearly upon the side of the have nots.19

William Watchorn and William Carter, two city merchants acting out of type, stood forward as champions of the combined emancipist and official interest. They were safely elected to alderman position by the majority of one-vote working men. The richer settlers with their multiple votes, arrogantly sporting the blue rosettes of the anti-transportation faction, could make little headway against the mass opinion of the emancipists. In 1854 five of the seven aldermen were supporters of the emancipist cause and three aldermen of the seven, including Rheuben him­self, had themselves been convicts.

A definite pattern of social power seemed to be clearly emerg­ing which, if continued, would provide a firm basis for the city community of the second half-century. The settlers held the widest sway and were very strong. Their devotion to the cause of ending transportation eventually resulted in the decision of the British Government to send no more convicts to Van Diemen’s Land after 1852. Also it was settler pressure, coinciding with political fashion in England, which initiated the constitutional changes to bring into being the independent Tasmanian Parlia­ment of 1856. The spoilsmen, the lawyers, doctors, merchants, landowners and others who would reap the fruits of office, had by 1850 begun to assess their own positions, to calculate, plan and intrigue for the local perquisites which the ending of official rule would yield to them. The Convict Department officers, realising their stint in Van Diemen’s Land was coming to an end, could look forward to early leave, a home posting, perhaps, or promo­tion. Or, should they wish it, they could choose resignation from government service to glean what they could of colonial profit; their status in competition with settler-politicians assured by their official experiences and connections.

54 CitizensFor the emancipists it appeared that the future held a con­

tinuation of discrimination but it would be tempered by control of a majority in municipal politics and of at least a healthy minority in the legislature—a combination which seemed reason­able access to a share in social power. It was a basis for future if not immediate equality. The emancipists' position was improved by inflation during the early 1850s which brought added value to their small homes, so that the numbers of them with a right to vote under a <£ 10 household franchise increased. As more city people became eligible to go to the polls, tinkers, tailors, and carpenters seemed to be becoming a significant political power in the city. It appeared as if municipal-council membership would, in a similar way to the new-type councils in British towns or in Sydney and other mainland cities, assume, 'the common pattern of such institutions, providing “new men” with a ladder to respectability and influence’.20

Such prospects, mild as they seemed later, brought a sick taste into the mouths of many settler citizens to whom it appeared, as independence approached and transportation ended, as if they had won the battle but lost the war for control of the city.

^ 4Freestone, Shingle, and Iron

On this turbulent frontier of the southern oceans, where the barques and the barquentines rushed down the Roaring Forties for 7,000 miles until they reached a landfall of forested dark mountains, the passage into port was through the green channels of Bruny Island reefs. From the bluer water of the Derwent River the first view was gained of the town hard against the mountain drop. The open water faced the front of the town where the afternoon breezes urged the hundreds of small craft clustered around the old wooden wharves before rustling around the roof­tops and dispelling the enervation of the morning. Home was streets and buildings, wharves and jetties, shops and workshops, public buildings and churches, carriages in the ranks in Murray Street, fire engines in the insurance companies’ stables, European elms and American locust trees lush above the chimneys, fenced gardens with apricots and apples, sunny windows or the sound of rain upon new iron roofs. After a mere half-century the public buildings of the city already had a beautiful squat and settled look about them which surprised voyagers expecting to find a bush township. Tor a city of but fifty years growth . . .’ exclaimed H. Butler Stoney, 'none ever equalled Hobarton in beauty’.1 A tourist, John Martineau, wrote a letter home to say it was ‘the most beautiful spot for a city I ever saw in the world . . .’,2 and even the much-travelled Anthony Trollope thought it to be

as pleasant a town of the size as any that I know. Nature hasdone for it very much indeed, and money has done much also . . .the place is too pleasant, and the air too sweet. . . ,3

The overwhelming physical setting provided the main element of its appeal and character. The city looked dwarfed when seen from the sea, its foothills foreshortened against the bulk of the mountain so that the shadowed edge seemed to rise immediately

55

56 Freestone, Shingle, and Ironbehind the huddle of roofs and steeples. The better buildings were built of a glowing yellow stone roofed with purple Welsh slates, but red brick was commonly used for houses and spread throughout was the silvery grey of weathered timber on walls, fences, and roofs. Corrugated iron was only then becoming cheaply available and the harsh, brash colours of paint made little visual impact. Around Liverpool, Murray, and Elizabeth Streets, the shop-fronts presented apparently unbroken facades to the traffic, yet every block contained a green centre and in the false start of a September springtime the noisy wattle birds, the honey- eaters and the blue-winged parrots found the blossom as delightful as the people found wattle bird pie.4

Around Government House in Macquarie Street, in the Bar­rack Square, and over St David’s graveyard, the English trees already reached as high as the church steeples and outside the Treasury in Murray Street a pair of healthy poplars threatened to undermine the masonry of the mellowed soft-stone buildings. Behind the town the dark hills were penetrated by hopeful tracks along the larger valleys and a few steep, green fields showed the results of laborious clearing where ridges of bush reached down towards the town centre. Three-quarters of the city’s population lived in the central area between the harbour, Molle Street, Warwick Street, and the Domain; the rest were widely dispersed beyond these limits. Early in the 1850s the 24,000 persons calling Hobart home made it third in population of the Australian cities. Sydney then held over 50,000 inhabitants and Melbourne came to hold many more in the years immediately after the rush for gold, but Hobart people rated the potential of their city at least as great as those others. Nevertheless the central city area remained small in size and compact in concentration. The business district was confined to six blocks.5 Here was contained one-fifth of the value of city property while one-twentieth of the whole valuation lay within the single block bounded by Liverpool, Murray, Col­lins, and Elizabeth Streets. The main shopping area lay some hundreds of yards away from the administration centre near where Elizabeth Street traffic lurched down the steep dip to clatter onto the planks of Wellington Bridge, passing Tegg’s Corner, which was named after the bookshop. This was the sociable centre of town life. Here friends arranged to meet under the clock and here the flash young men loitered to offend the

57Freestone, Shingle, and Ironpassers-by with their cocky colonial assurance, quite unlike the half-abject impudence of Europe. The busiest shopping street was Liverpool on each side of its crossing by Elizabeth Street. The southern side consisted of shabby little stores tightly clustered together on the brink of the banks down to the rubbish-filled creek. In the middle of the block there was a hotel while even on the northern side, which was the better class with several double­storey shops, there were still a few wooden shanties offering open fronts for the greengrocers, the butchers, and the fishmongers.

Until gold prosperity allowed the extravagant building of Villas’ it was almost unknown for shopowners or their assistants to live away from business premises. The assistants slept in a dormitory above the owners’ rooms in the larger buildings, or in one of the hovels in the centres of the main blocks which were penetrated by dogleg lanes. These warrens behind the facades housed a dense population in old, rough dwellings which were scattered in no sort of order across the uneven ground; a remain­ing legacy of the pioneering first years of settlement before the main streets assumed firm shape. Street front building along Macquarie’s plan had begun during the 1820s so that by 1850 the continuous lines of shop-fronts stretched along Elizabeth Street from the Macquarie Street guardhouse as far as Brisbane Street, and along Liverpool Street from Richard Lewis’s big store at Argyle Street to the huts uphill from Harrington Street where lived the newly-arrived or newly-emancipated.6

Joseph Hooker had thought that Hobart shops were every bit as good as those in Sydney and the trading in them was certainly lucrative. Liverpool Street offered to settlers the delights of civilisation and metropolis, ‘the savings of the great bulk . . . of the population are . . . brought to town to be wasted in finery and dissipation’.7 The traders viewed with pleasure the mud- covered wagons bearing bedecked and hard-handed country wives in for the six-monthly visit and a few days of big spending. The best stores in Liverpool Street belonged to Quakers, these were Mathers’s linen drapery in Brock’s Buildings and Walker’s drapery. Burgess and Barrett’s Store was on the Murray Street corner and the Saliers’ Gold Mine Drapery a block away across Elizabeth Street from the bookshop which was owned by Walchs from 1846. The south side, Murray Street end of the main shop­ping block was the stronghold of a prosperous Jewish community.

58 Freestone, Shingle, and IronThe wholesale premises of Nathan and Saul Moses at Miller’s Corner were surrounded by tailors’ and pawnbrokers’ shops clustered close, their small-paned windows cluttered with goods and samples for view. Behind lay the warehouses and workshops controlled by Leo Susman and Abraham Rheuben; and here one could discern a living geared to urban pursuits with little refer­ence to the forests, the sheep plains and farming life of the lonely island spaces.

The 150 taverns and beer shops were roughly grouped into three areas and these were the lower-class ones.8 Most pubs clustered down near the old wharf within reach of the ships, but there were others around the Theatre Royal and the Convict Barracks in Campbell Street. At the upper end of Liverpool Street, near Goulburn Street, there were many drinking places which degenerated from fancy facade and impressive name board to rough-plank beer shanties and boozing dens. In these obscure and unattractive areas the emancipists had their homes. The cheaper living areas were either uncomfortably close to the warehouses on flat ‘unhealthy’ ground, such as the Wapping end of Collins and Campbell Streets, or else pushed up onto the steep and featureless sides of hills; areas which were difficult of access for road build­ing yet enjoyed no worthwhile view of the water or particular eminence of site. Cheapness explained the spread of wooden shanties along steep muddy tracks following the slopes of Knock- lofty from Goulburn Street towards Poet’s Road, but a few better houses already occupied the vantage points even higher on the baroque cartographer’s dream of Crescent Fields. This was a magnificent, mathematical plan derived from Bath or Cheltenham which spanned a roughly level terrace on an airy hillside of West Hobart. Desirability of home sites increased with the convenience of access to town but of greater attraction were good open views on gently wooded heights not far from shops and offices. The most chosen places were upper Macquarie and Davey Streets, the top ridge of Battery Point and the ridge near ‘new’ Trinity Church. Settlers preferring site over access to office favoured the deep soils of New Town looking down upon the bay, or chose to build on the sun-baked small-holdings cradled under Mount Nelson. Here in a half-mile strip of orchards and gardens along Sandy Bay there was a new suburb exceeding in beauty the older

Freestone, Shingle, and Iron 59and crowded New Town, which was further from boats and beaches.

To the wayfarer who entered the town it was the atmosphere as well as the vignettes of individual buildings and street fronts which provided the face of Hobart’s character. The streets seemed wide, bare and unbearably hot on a few summer days or, shifting rapidly to the other extreme, they became barriers of mud lashed with cold rain. Most typical of all the constant, nagging winds made ’ ' ’s more impediment than help. Yet formost of the year, in the early light of a mild July frost or a cares­sing morning in January before the sun’s heat began its tussle with the bay breezes, the streets could be walked in comfort and pleasure.

The character stamped by the dominating official buildings overwhelmed any derived from the domestic and commercial life. Streets and locations were remembered most from where they lay in relation to the big institutions which raised their solid, settled lines with satisfying permanence against the sky of changing clouds. Directly opposite the end of Elizabeth Street was the white wooden gate and main guardhouse of the Gover­nor’s house. The most noticeable feature of the residence was a large weatherboard annexe which Governor Denison had erected as a ballroom. Its lathed and creepered walls projected from and dominated the main building, which was quite modest.9 Before the garden a white paling fence reached several hundred yards from Argyle Street to the backs of the government offices in Murray Street and behind the house a thick copse of gum trees stretched down to the cove below; there the chink of stone­masons’ chisels was a reminder of the new quays being built.10 Between the front gate and the Murray Street Treasury building the small paddock usually contained a few captured kangaroos and occasionally a Tasmanian emu, until these became extinct and mainland ones were imported in their stead to decorate the official grounds. At this spot on the plan drawn by Lachlan Macquarie was the green patch named George’s Square which later became Franklin Square. Sentries at each gate stood stiffly in their red coats and shako hats topped with a white woollen ball. When off duty they crossed Macquarie Street to the main guard­house in Elizabeth Street, to sit on benches in the sunlight, the woollen balls hobbling as they called to the girls fetching water.

60 Freestone, Shingle, and IronIn the centre of Macquarie Street stood an ornamental tower, the end of a pipeline from the rivulet. Here children ran with buckets for household water and the barrel carts stood between oxen’s drooping heads whilst the Cascades’ water poured from leather pipes and ran down Elizabeth Street gutters. The waste was carried in a wet stain by wagon wheels across Collins Street and trickled away from the sea into the rivulet at Wellington Bridge.

All of the Davey, Murray, Macquarie Street block was domina­ted by the high brick wall of the gaol; the gibbets barely showing over its spiked iron top. The town stocks lay at the gaol gate in Murray Street where the cabs waited amongst the smell of horses and of the cabbies’ tobacco. Wooden benches by the wall gave drivers a good view of public affairs, for facing the gaol across Murray Street were the round-topped, pilastered windows of the stone buildings used as Treasury, Courts, and Police Offices. Together they formed an impressive classical triptych in the design of John Lee Archer. From these same windows macabre- minded citizens enjoyed an occasional breakfast view of the hang­ings on the gibbet platform inside the gaol wall. Close by, and diagonally across Macquarie Street from the gaol, rose the stuccoed and painted brick Cathedral of ‘new’ St David’s. Like the government offices it had high, round-top windows which lit a rectangular nave beneath the square tower. The original coppery green spire, like the extinguisher upon a candlestick, was replaced during 1835 by the lead-covered dome which became known as the ‘pepper pot’. The tower’s three-faced clock struck the hour sonorously and could be heard all over the quiet town, upon the decks of ships jarred by the water-slop and high in the sun- washed wattle clearings on the airy sides of Knocklofty foothills.11

Other official and military installations were scattered away from the centre; the gun batteries and the soldiers’ barracks occupied commanding positions on the ridges overlooking the town and the two convicts’ barracks crowded into undistinguished settings on low ground. The main convict penitentiary—the ‘Tench’ separate from the gaol—lay on a block of land beyond the hospital and consisted of a typically classical building behind another high wall which ended in a pretty little church of brick trimmed with stone. ‘Old’ Trinity was Wrennish in design, less severe and more ornamental than most other public buildings of

61Freestone, Shingle, and Ironthis remote Regency city. Such public buildings seemed too good, too decorative for their uses. Of a simplified style, they were decorated by unwilling convict hands out of the soft freestone which could be found at a slight altitude on any of the surround­ing hills. Designed by commissariat officers, paid for by English taxpayers, built by forced labour under the supervision of military engineers, there was no reason at all why the convict buildings should suit either civic function or civic skyline, yet their gentle formality fulfilled the situation admirably.

Newer, wilder quirks of architectural fashion derived from London or Dublin styles were lost within the colonial setting . 1 - Complicated work was beyond the skills of local craftsmen and the cost of importing specialists to carve stonework of quality was too high. Fashionable variations were soon forgotten in their detail and in architecture as in all things the colonists’ nostalgic visions of aptness lapsed into a generalised memory of English manners. The European formalism of the Regency period was transmuted into the sparser dignity of colonial Georgian; in some ways it was the most satisfying of all classical styles because the most architecturally simple. And, since the stone available in Hobart was very good, the public buildings of the city were pleasing to the eye. The Treasury buildings and the house they called the 'Rat’s Castle’, the barrack buildings, the Macquarie Street 'Stone Buildings’, the line of the wharf warehouses upon which Governor Arthur had made a sound profit, the Ordnance Stores and the expansive Customs House near the New Wharf, were similar enough in material and shape to be all of a piece, providing a strong idiom which gave the town much of its charm.

The most effective ecclesiastical example was the Battery Point Anglican Church of St George’s, which had been started with great classical ambitions. Its original plan included a large tower which would have inclined it towards the baroque, but in the manner in which it was finished it was a simpler, slightly rustic church. It was scarcely more pretentious than St John’s, the Macquarie Street Presbyterian Church which also had a columned portico, but St George’s made a more prominent landmark, offer­ing its distinctive pedimented profile to the breezes on the open heights of the ridge above the harbour. Other churches dotted the flat town land. Governor Arthur had rather favoured the aptness of Gothic shapes for ecclesiastical use and the first alterna-

62 Freestone, Shingle, and Irontives to the colonial Georgian were the smaller churches designed during his period of office.13 The Scots Church of St Andrews, built in 1824, with pointed windows, was the earliest gesture towards Gothic revival. St Joseph’s, the Catholic Church, was almost brutally primitive in its Gothic shapes, whilst the design of St John’s at New Town made it a beautiful church for the Orphan Schools. By judicious use of cast iron columns in the nave Archer had achieved the air of an ancient decorated church in a small compass without finishing up with a village chapel. W ith similar restraint James Blackburn played with Romanesque ideas in his New Town Congregational Church and others along the northern road. The flourish of the ‘Hobarton’ period brought a greater extravagance to building experiments with ‘New’ Trinity church squat upon its hill, followed by the Tudor touches to be seen in the Hutchins School and the Eliza­bethan chimneys of the High School on the Domain. St Mary’s Hospital and the baronial lines of the new Government House were other signs of the decay of the Regency order and the spread of Gothic revival. Once the dedication to strict classical shapes was lost the path was open to modification, experiment, and imitation leading towards the discovery of new Renaissance styles during the gold decade which became the favoured taste of the independent colonists under Henry Hunter’s tutelage from I860.14

There was only one professional block of office accommoda­tion; these were in the fine ‘Stone Buildings’ on the corner of Murray Street facing the gaol and the Cathedral. Simpler and even cleaner in line than most of the government designs, these buildings housed the lawyers’ offices and insurance companies’ agencies. Most private architecture took its cue from the official tenor. Commercial buildings never dominated institutional ones and the business town remained recessive, hidden behind the visual magnificence of the mountain above and the commissariat buildings beneath. There were almost no factory buildings of any size. Cleburne’s soap-boiling establishment close to the abattoirs was perhaps the most noticeable. Warehouses of some size and dignity had been built to answer the needs of importers and exporters. Charles Swanston’s bonded store most rivalled the com­missary in presumption,15 though none of the private warehouses on Hunter’s Island could compete with the facade of government

63Freestone, Shingle, and Ironstorehouses or the big Customs House behind the piles of landed timber near the New Wharf.

Around the harbour Constitution Dock was finished and a second new dock progressing under Denison’s daily inspections. Other large constructions were the mills which used up every inch of stream from the Cascades right down into Murray Street.1'1 Their leats and ponds complicated the fords and stepping stones by which the streets crossed the stream, but in places they kept houses away from the water’s edge so that the meandering water meadows of the rivulet above Murray Street offered green fields for milch cows, and retained pastoral views for many of the resi­dents of the slopes on either side. Degraves’s brewery at the Cascades and Walker’s brewery and mill in Collins Street pre­sented cut freestone fronts to the street, but stone was not suitable for industrial premises, and they became hidden by wooden lean-tos which were cheap and functional if not elegant. Wooden additions even hid the lines of the careful, segmental stones of the windmill which thrust in rivalry across the road from St George’s on Battery Point.

The poor and most shopowners lived between weatherboarded fronts and, if tempted to decorate a window frame, made up a mock pilaster in eucalyptus wood which cracked and warped in the weather. More often than not the new cottages of wood in Battery Point or north of the town centre remained without decorative motif and only the dimensions of classic harmony relating window size to roof height expressed the okl-worldliness of the mechanics’ homes on their small lots. Theirs was an even meaner caricature of that simple classical theme repeated so often and at so many levels of expression. The overall impression was like an eighteenth-century provincial town of Britain and Ireland but one in which the street scenes and house-fronts did not jar against the grandeur of mountain dominance. The harmony of scale went a long way towards obscuring the poverties and banalities of colonial improvisation in a raw town of the frontier.

Such was the capital city at the beginning of the decade of self-government, yet it was a period of rapid change. In 1854, when H. B. Stoney looked appraisingly about the city, he sniffed at the solid, freestone, commissariat buildings. As a stranger he noted the insecure parsimony of the physical convenience of the streets and public services and compared this to the rumbustious self-

64 Freestone, Shingle, and Ironconfidence with which the residents faced their future. He wrote there are as yet but few buildings of any note . . .’, not stopping to consider how odd it was that there should be any buildings of note at all in a small and very remote town, ‘the funds of the town are inadequate to support its rising greatness . . . \17 Such com­ments were an accurate reading of the rhythm of development. The city had absorbed capital freely for many years and when Stoney wrote few people considered that this would not continue, for the gold rush years gave confidence that the future would be much better than the past. Stoney calcnlated that optimism exceeded potential and bemoaned the poverty of most private building, but it was the excessive capital investment in public buildings which was unusual about this town.18 Another observer, Daniel Ritchie, was less analytical in his appraisal of the cockiness and jauntiness of the Hobartians who faced him as he walked the ground which fifty years before had been coastal scrubland. He decided it was an opulent-looking city with an amount of anima­tion and gaiety in the streets which would prove exhilarating to any stranger and certainly suited his tastes.19

It was a lively place to live in at that time and seemed to be developing so fast that soon its old character would be quite lost. The central area was the oldest part of the city, where many of the backs of buildings were still survivals of the original wattle and clay daub and patches of the bark wall sheets or roof shingles of the early amateur builders could still be discovered. At the street fronts new sawn-timber facades covered the squalor but solider, brick or stone buildings, professionally designed and built, were more common in an outer ring, leaving a decrepit, older core. A strange series of calamities during 1854 promoted renewal of the centre. The dense wooden huts clustered close to the creek banks, too close to water which was still used for drink­ing purposes despite what was done to it upstream. One summer day a disastrous fire blowing with a hot breeze from the north destroyed the central blocks. After a short interval the rivulet, spilling over its banks with mountain rain, cleared much of the debris into the harbour. Rebuilding was hampered by an even worse flood a short time later and the final touch was a second fire which completed the clearance and took some of the rebuilt structures along with it.20 Buckets were useless against such blazes even close to the creek and without mains water fire fighters faced

65Freestone, Shingle, and Ironan impossible task. The 1854 fire in Liverpool Street cost the insurance underwriters over £.100,000, including the damage caused by the ignition of a private gunpowder store in the middle of the main shopping block. In an attempt to minimise their risks the insurance companies maintained carts consisting of large barrels of water with heavy two-handled pivot pumps. Their spray could reach to a mere 20 feet or so and a large crowd watched, fascinated, as a wooden drainpipe smouldered on Kissock’s high storehouse inches above the water splash. Teams of men com­peted to exert more pump pressure to gain that extra height. Eventually, within sight of everyone, a fickle breeze fanned the flame to ignite the wooden shingle roof and the whole block was reduced to ashes.21

Suburban living increased with the gold decade. The new houses of the poorer people spread out across the undistinguished middle land towards the north whilst the villas of the rich became concentrated upon the ridges. Battery Point remained fairly open and grass and trees still stretched in fingers through to St David’s Churchyard. In these undeveloped patches new houses appeared, particularly in the area around Secheron, St George’s and the Barracks. The higher crest, with views across the blue of Sandy Bay, became dotted with the earliest Italianate stone ‘mansions’ cradled in the trees of Elboden Place above Davey Street. There were many new buildings around in the mid-century decade and there were extensions and improvements to older ones, but the shape of the city was firmly fixed. The development of the 1850s was an embellishment of the old structure and not a departure from it. The New Market, built to the order of Governor Denison, was a large open building, well in keeping with the ideas he shared about the city’s future prospects. Designed by W. Porden Kay, the Director of Works, it was magnificently faced in stone and decorated in the newly-fashionable wrought iron work. Civic improvements made under the Municipal Acts included additions to the lines of brick tunnel-sewers built by convict labour and plans for a new water scheme to extend Governor Arthur’s sys­tem, which reached to Macquarie Street, Cottage Green, and the wharf.22 New and larger bridges were built over the rivulets in the main streets and in Wapping a new Gas Works Company was building a large round storage tank. The Company erected lights on street standards to replace the hurricane lamps of old.

66 Freestone, Shingle, and IronIn these ways city growth during the 1850s completed the fabric within the framework designed for Convict Department purposes. Development reflected the confidence of the settler classes and the assurance of approaching independence.

G. W. Walker, writing to his son, described with delight the improvements visible on every side, the new houses and road extensions and everyone with plans for growth and change. In the old English city of York, complete with Minster and city walls and all the established delights of a settled civilisation, J. B. Walker noted in his diary his homesickness for his colonial native town. He longed for the mellow light of day upon rough grey timber or yellow stone and the brightness of water at noon. He thought about the way the cold rainstorms would gather behind the mountain rim before rushing down the valleys to drum upon the rooftops and muddy the half-finished streets, where yellow flowers bloomed in overgrown gutters.2"’

By mid-century Hobart was a place which could be loved. It represented much more than just the gaol and held the hopes of many people who wanted no more than to think of the city as home. And yet in carving the city from the bush something had been lost. The rivulet gullies were no longer tree-lined bird haunts but sewers of broken pots and iron and tumbling walls. The beach walk around Battery Point lay across heaps of rubble thrown over the fences of new houses and the bathing bay east of the stream mouth was unbearable for the stench of the out- pipe from the abattoir. Since sewerage improvement lagged behind the pace of growth each new house possessed a cesspit which was emptied at night into a large barrel. The creaking sound of wheels was familiar in the early hours as the barrel was emptied into the tide too close to the town for comfort.

At first all such defects could be blamed upon the Convict Department. But when the city was made into a Municipality with its own Council from 1853, and when the island became an independent colony with its own government from 1856, the responsibilities became those of the inhabitants alone.

^ 5Golden Freedom

In the settled parts of the European world and on such fringes as the British Isles and the Turkish Empire the years of 1848 and mid-century were notable for revolution, political unrest, and riot. In the new world outside Europe, the satellite, colonial world, these years were torn apart by gold—gold in California in 1848, gold in Victoria and New South Wales in 1851, hints and rumours of gold in Canada in 1852. These excitements occurred at the time when the citizens of Hobart were adjusting to their political changes. The commercial future seemed to widen alongside the democratic successes. It was discovered that supply routes to California around Cape Horn or across the Isthmus of Nicaragua could be rivalled by direct voyages across the wide Pacific. Miners’ ships, foiled by headwinds in rounding Cape Horn, ran down the Forties to re victual in Hobart Town before launching out across the ocean for the west coast of America. A few advantage-seeking merchants and wild adventurers from Tas­mania were quick to respond. Emancipists and native-born youths took passage for San Francisco, from there to set off into the wild interior. In the holds of the ships they sailed on were Tasmanian products consigned by Hobart merchants. Apples, onions and potatoes, timber, grain and carriages; even horses and cattle were sent off in speculative cargoes to the isolated market on the American Pacific Coast.1 During 1850 an average of one ship a week sailed from Hobart to San Francisco loaded to the limit. The Salier brothers, four small, self-satisfied and round-bodied dealers who managed a family business in Liverpool Street, renamed it the Gold Mine Drapery and sent James off for California with an entire boatload of their goods. The cargo included a row of small wooden houses lashed on to the decks of the brig. They made a

67

68 Golden Freedomgood profit when they eventually were hauled ashore and set up on American soil.2

Such exciting contact with California left Hobart people well prepared to cope with the news that golden riches were dis­covered on the nearby mainland too. The demands of the new Australian fields were the same as those of America: emigrants, miners, food, hardware, carriages, timber, tents, clothes. The Hobart merchants sent all of their stocks and quickly despatched orders to England for replenishments. Sawmillers trebled their output, carriage makers enlarged their premises, flour mills used up their ponds of stored water grinding flour for miners’ dampers and the millers looked hopefully for rain clouds over the mountain. A score of small factories producing such things as candles, soap, and mineral waters joined the trade between Hobart and Mel­bourne. Gold produced an enlarged market which benefited farmers, merchants, and manufacturers. A business elite well used to trading with Sydney, Melbourne and all of the new settlements could easily adjust old methods to new opportunities. Brisk selling of local produce to Victoria, with exports doubling in value within twelve months, soon caused prices to rise at home.3 The gold demand sucked away the colony’s possessions and replaced them with devalued coinage, yet still the colonists could not resist the temptations to trade. Local coasting ketches loaded with sawn timber passed the Iron Pot into the breakers of Storm Bay with their decks level with the water, slow but stable and safe, so long as the cargo and hull remained roped together through the pitching seas. The value of timber exported rose from less than <£50,000 to almost £500,000 as the centre of the trade shifted from southern Hobart to north coast ports.4 Every serviceable ship was pressed into use for carrying cargoes, including whale-ships hastily converted when they were abandoned in port by their crews taking passage for Victoria. The whales took a respite from the hunt as every imagination focused upon the diggings instead of the southward seas. When the ships reached Melbourne it was a devil’s job to get together a crew to bring them back to Hobart, for every man wanted to stay.

Hobart’s growth had never been hindered by a lack of working hands, though the settlers’ demands for convict labour had been sometimes hedged by government restrictions so that free immi­gration was called for. But in the 1850s labourers of all kinds,

Golden Freedom 69free, bond, and emancipist alike, felt attracted to the greater prospects of the goldfields. As they left the island in droves an increasing rate of arrivals from Europe kept pace with departures. The last few convict ships berthing fully loaded in Sullivan’s Cove were jostled by the crowded vessels carrying emigrants attracted by the gold lure. A direct passage to Melbourne would have been much easier, for most of these labourers did not hesitate long in Van Diemen’s Land before crossing Bass Strait. Yet many of them placed their families into comfortable Hobart homes before setting forth hopefully with pick and pan for the search; the numbers of women and children in the city increased as the numbers of men decreased . 5

Charles Edward Walch, the sailor son of Major James Walch, returned from the sea in time to buy a horse and cart in Hobart and ship it and himself to Port Phillip. He and his friends carried certificates to prove that they were free men and found every­where a close camaradie amongst their fellow islanders, as well as a common antipathy to 'Van Diemonians’, which was the name given to the Tasmanian emancipist diggers. 6 Walch stayed on the goldfields for five months, working always with fellow ‘Derwen- ters’ or 'Tasmanians’, who formed a clique distinct from both mainlanders and other islanders. Most ‘Van Diemonians’ never returned to Hobart, except in shackles, but the sons of free men usually kept enough cash for a passage home and considered the goldfields trip as an excursion only. Waleh returned to Hobart before long. Most diggers would have made more profit from trade than from gold dreams and the sons of the settlers found their way back to share in their fathers’ good fortunes. Waleh found so great a boom in trading in Hobart that the shopkeepers were desperate to find goods to sell. There was no lack of demand for books in his own family’s shop and it held long waiting lists for titles ordered from London. The prospects seemed endless. Hobart looked clean and prosperous after the muddy morass of Ballarat or Castlemaine and the future had never looked more promising than it did to men returning home at the peak of the boom.

In contrast emancipists saw little reason to return to the island of their shame. Many thousands of 'Van Diemonians’ merged quietly into the Australian population, where their origins soon became lost in the general confusion of immigration and move-

70 Golden Freedomment. Many a hangdog ex-convict quickly became transformed into an upright Ballarat burgher supported by fictitious tales of passages from Britain on emigrant ships and family backgrounds fabricated to fit a new respectability. This chance for freedom was very different from the prospects within Tasmania where emanci­pist status remained as bitter as one of the stages of servitude. Many people still under conviction in the island saw no reason why they should lose this opportunity to take their fortunes and their freedom in one brave move. The Convicts’ Prevention Act of Victoria was intended to prohibit the entry of undesirables into that colony and the search across the goldfields for escaped ‘Van Diemonians’ was ceaseless.7 Upon every ship sailing out of the Derwent the passengers were lined along the decks for scrutiny of papers and faces. The task of preventing escape from the island was far beyond the resources of the Convict Department, for convicts found countless methods of evasion and were prepared to pay £ 5 to cross the 200 stormy miles of Bass Strait in leaky tubs from a hundred small beaches and coves. No one will ever know what lonely drownings took place, nor how many solitary rowers successfully pulled their skiffs onto Victorian beaches to begin a long walk to the goldfields. In Hobart the 1852 Govern­ment Gazette noted that, though over 200 convicts had been apprehended in Victoria already, at least another 500 were missing and suspected to be there posing as honest immigrants. Gold made mockery of the gaols and made certain that transpor­tation would cease.8

The stories of gold adventures formed fascinating tales which were told and retold in ever increasing exaggeration. But there were unsung tales of the unusual emancipists who chose to swim against the tide and to return to set up their homes in the convict capital. Propsting, Rheuben, Burgess and the earlier generations of convicts were fully identified with Hobart, settled in business and property and at such an age by the 1850s that it was under­standable that they should prefer to face the future they knew. None of these men ventured from their hearths, yet a few younger emancipists actually experienced the joys of Victoria and still made a decision to return and follow their careers in Hobart, to live down their reputations and attempt success.

In 1842 there had arrived on the Candahar the seventeen-year- old Charles Davis.9 Son of a London lampmaker, he had been

Golden Freedom 71transported after a second conviction for minor theft. Being a hard worker with a good record Davis was soon allowed proba­tion and began operating a tiny ironmonger’s shop in a Bathurst Street shed by 1847. He was twenty-eight in the year of gold fever when he closed his shutters and crossed the Strait. But he quickly realised that scratching around could not compare with the profit to be made from tinsmithing and working in galvanised iron in the prosperous Hobart of this time. Making a choice not to set up shop in Victoria Davis returned to his store to re-open his busi­ness in partnership with John Semple and became a well-known character, active, lively and popular in the small town, where over the years he took five wives and sired numerous children.

An even stranger decision to settle was that made by the news­paperman John Michael Davies.10 His father, Michael John, the managing clerk of a London attorney’s office, had been sent out to New South Wales in 1830 convicted of false pretences. Mrs Hannah Davies brought the younger children to their father in 1832 but John had already in 1831 made his way to the colonies through two similar convictions. Maliciously, it seemed, the con­vict authorities sent the young man to serve his close confinement in Van Diemen’s Land, but as soon as he was allowed John left for New South Wales. Later he worked at Port Phillip and tried his hand in various workplaces such as police offices and public houses. Finally he found his profession in journalism and his interests in the theatre. During the 1840s he turned away from the prospects of Melbourne to settle again in Hobart and there he remained. He bought the Ilobart Guardian, began the Mercury during the 1850s, and became manager of the fine Theatre Royal.

The decade of mid-century offered an opportunity for any ambitious emancipist to escape. The names of most individuals are lost and their adventures can only be imagined. From the records of migration and census-taking only the net results of thousands of personal journeys can be discerned. Gold had dramatic effects upon the population characteristics of the Hobart community. There were so many people arriving and departing over the years that the end result was a social structure quite different from that which had been gradually established. With the ending of the officials’ hierarchy of status the city seemed to be left to the settlers, challenged by the rising masses of emanci­pists and poor free labourers who would begin to make common

72 Golden Freedomcause with them as fellow workers. But the gold migrations took away almost all of the important class of persons between the two extremes of this social structure, and left a divergence so embar­rassingly great that communication across the gap was more difficult than it had ever been. The groups which were reduced in numbers were the energetic and pushing shopkeepers, builders, shipwrights, petty agents, clerks, messengers and skilled mechanics. Significantly the Hobart Jewish community almost ceased to exist in the 1850s and most similar men of the respectable middle ground left with them. Over all the island:

The wealthy, landed, commercial and professional groups and the poor emancipists . . . were left facing one another across a wide stretch of social territory sparsely populated by small farmers, citizens, shopkeepers and other lower middle class groups.11

In the countryside the big farmers took over as a landed aris­tocracy but within the city the leaders who emerged more clearly were merchants, lawyers, and doctors. With the middle of the social hierarchy gone those who were left, these middle-class men and the emancipists who lacked even the wit to escape, became the doers and the done for—the polarised extremes who inherited the city and its independence after 1856. The fortress which the middle classes were able to create through their control over the distribution of colonial prizes was not to be assailed for forty years. After transportation ended and the busy gold years passed, immigration almost ceased so that this gap in the social hierarchy took long to fill, and many years without challenge allowed the petty elite time enough to settle its roots deeply. In this way some people attained the position of a hereditary ruling group without ever discarding their middle-class sets of values. The gold migra­tions, by removing the malcontents, removed also any challengers to the successful, for the remaining members of the labouring class were too inefficient to threaten. Almost all of those who felt underprivileged and had axes to grind removed their discontent to other places. This interruption in the process of social change provided conservative prejudices with an idyllic respite by enabling many of the attitudes of the convict days to persist into the later decades of the century.

Moreover, as the gold-seeking men moved out they were re­placed by non-productive groups. The young men who left their homes and excitedly took ship passage or walked to the north

Golden Freedom 73coast to cross by small sailing skiff to Victoria left behind their women. Some they left as wives and even more they left with babies. In such time of optimism as a gold rush decisions about personal relationships are easy to make, and promises in thought and deed were left for the future. The census statistics indicated that there were large numbers of girls and young women in the city during the 1850s because of a substantial movement into the city of women and children. Many men left their families in the security and cheap accommodation of Hobart rather than take them to Melbourne, and many women immigrants who came into the port did not cross over to Victoria. One ship alone, the Caroline Middleton, landed 500 emigrant girls at Sullivan’s Cove in 1854 and most of these must have stayed in the capital. It seems also as if many deserted wives and families from the country districts moved house into the city rather than remain in their bush homes when their men had gone. Whatever the causes, the result was a city population of fewer men and many more women and children during the mid-1850s and this was an acute alteration of the pattern of previous years; for ever since the first settlement there had been an over abundance of adult working males.

The immigrant origins of the population had always given it peculiar characteristics. At the census in 1847 there had been three adult males for every female. At that time four inhabitants of every ten were men of mature years and the proportion of children in the community was exceptionally low. The changes in the ten years to the 1857 census reversed the entire situation. In that year there were more women under the age of forty-five than men. There was a particularly large proportion of girls aged between fourteen and twenty-one years and, as a consequence, many more babies and children. The gold years’ optimism and opulence produced the century’s highest birth rates. There had been a great rush of marriages reaching 22 per 1,000 of the popu­lation in 1853, but strangely 1852 was the year in which births reached the highest rate of 50 per 1,000 people. The reversal of the usual order in which changes in marrriage rates precede those in birth rates is a local phenomenon which has yet to be explained.12

Altogether the sudden turmoil of a few years altered the nature of the population from one characteristic of an immigrant, fron­tier society to one more suited to stable conditions. This was

74 Golden Freedomsplendid for a community which had been too long distorted by its large numbers of lonely degraded men but it had short-term consequences which were not to be so happy, taxing the accom­modation of a town designed for different sorts of people. One of the first results was that the increase in trade soon found its limiting factor. If merchants hazarded capital on a load of flour for Melbourne they discovered too soon that there were no men in Hobart to load it on board. If they got goods loaded there were no seamen to sail the ship. If they reached Port Phillip there was not a man to bring it back again. Timber millers found no one to handle their axes and saws, nor could farmers shear their sheep or harvest their corn.13 Many a town workshop lost hand after hand until at last the owner closed his shutters and followed the men away to the other side of the water. Blacksmiths, iron­mongers, and bootmakers seemed to be the tradesmen most attracted by the diggings, for, despite the new business which was offering, the number of city forges decreased by half over the gold period and there was a similar fall in the number of shoemaking shops. The number of coopers declined rapidly with the uncertain future of whaling. A few trades flourished—builders were kept busy by the sudden demand for new houses, whilst twice as many wheelwright s shops as before looked after the new-rich carriage-folk. The number of coachbuilding establish­ments in the city rose by one quarter during the 1850s. Hobart had some manufacturing advantage over Melbourne suppliers who for some years had difficulty with workshop space and tools and had to endure even dearer labour costs. Tasmanians took their opportunity and made wide investment of capital in manu­facturing workshops. Eleven of the city’s small windmills turned to the use of steam and water power, six glue makers and two soap boilers’ establishments were equipped with vats, boilers, and furnaces while the number of town sawmills increased five-fold. Many of these improvements were labour-saving ones, for wages rose as all trades and businesses competed for workmen.14 Civil servants started to resign their jobs, which were in a state of uncertainty already between the leaving of the English profes­sional clerks and the recruitment of new colonial administrators. The lure of gold profits took men from dark desks until the government offices were almost deserted. An emergency measure

Golden Freedom 75was passed through the Legislature increasing civil service salaries to almost double the previous rate.15

The moods these changes produced in the community could he well understood; if they killed the contest for supremacy between settlers and emancipists they reassured those who believed that the colony was a good place. In such new, buoyant conditions any future might be possible. The surviving impedi­ments, the remnants of official government, the convict stain, the isolation of the settlement, none of these seemed to matter any more. Gold could cure everything. The trends of years were forgotten and everyone’s wildest dreams made sense. The sudden riches of Victoria accentuated the heady optimism of self- government as the settlers increased their lead in status and power and security.

Inflation conditions followed boom, the amount of coin in circulation more than doubled, the income from land revenue doubled; prices followed wages and rose so high that persons on fixed incomes found great difficulty in making ends meet, fames Barnard remembered that:

The streets of Hobart and Launceston . . . began to swarm with lucky diggers and numerous visitors, the former bent upon enjoying the fruits of their success with their friends, the latter to take up their abode more or less permanently, attracted by our superior climate, and our more quiet, better protected towns. The demand for dwellings at once exceeded the supply, and soon there was not a house to he had without a scramble, rents rising three hundred or four hundred per cent.10

There was such an inflow of wealth from profits, from the savings brought in by the immigrants from Victoria, from the remittances of successful gold diggers, and from continuing commissariat funds that there was an actual embarrassment of riches. James Bonwick’s Hobartian in the novel Tasmanian Lilij described it by saying, ‘We were, in short, disgustingly rich’.17 In 1852 a Brisbane Street Independent Church collection plate was returned con­taining a shining gold nugget. If such incidents were common­place in Ballarat they were rare enough to cause a stir in Hobart congregations. Tales became common of the wild behaviour of successful diggers in Hobart streets. Edward O’Sullivan recalled most vividly the way they threw their spare pennies to the boys whilst driving by in new carriages with their necks decked in

76 Golden Freedombright scarves and heads topped by hats placed jauntily on a shock of oiled hair.18

Success to the diggers meant spending and all spending ir. the town was profit to the stay-at-homes. The gross annual turn­over of the big flour mill belonging to John Walker was near £18,000 until 1852 when it rose to £25,000. His brewery enjoyed peak sales worth £68,000 in 1854.10 These were the years when the funds held in local banks were the highest for the entire century. Frederick Mackie, a Quaker visiting on a world tour who kept one of those useful journals of all of his adventures and impressions, noted with wonder the huge profits of 2(0 to 300 per cent which were being made in wholesale and retail businesses in Hobart. He wrote that the directors of G W. Walker’s savings bank were ‘obliged to limit the deposits . . . they have refused as much as £25,000 owing to the difficulty of investing it’.20 Chickens coming home to roost; which settlers would now bother to look back upon the origins of camp or feel the need to cling to the commissariat subsidy? City businessmen could review many years when their speculations had remained subservient to the needs of the penal camp; now it could be seen that their secret visions had been true ones and that freedom and independence were golden.

It was reasonable to look forward to continuing prosperity, for the city seemed well placed for the further development of several trades. Whaling had been an exciting and lucrative busi­ness which demanded workers who could build, repair, supply and man the big ships which set out into the wild seas.21 Into the port they returned with the boiled whale oil which gave employment to coopers making their tuns of blackwood and to riggers, sailmakers and the sellers of provisions and sustenance. Ships were slipped below Battery Point where a community of boat builders set up home in shacks and shanties between the rocky shore and the steep bluff behind.22 There were so many foreign whalers around from New Bedford, Salem, Brest, Cher­bourg and other exotic ports that competition, whether for service or entertainment, was often fierce. Though Hobart coopers seldom saw the foreign oil tuns, which remained securely below decks to save payment of dues, nevertheless there were several hundred pounds of business to make out of every foreign whaler and the accumulation of specialists in town enhanced the advan-

Golden Freedom 77tages of local whale-ship building and ownership. Whaling investment had its greatest boost during the 1840s when oil prices were high. Profit brought from England by immigrants, or made from the marketing of goods or farm products, was ploughed into ship-shares during the years before 1850. As the choicest land grants of the colony were taken up and farming became less attractive shipping replaced land as the best invest­ment for city speculators. Such names as Fisher, Hedberg, Seal, Roope, Facy, Belbin, Dowdell, and Morrison recur in newspaper shipping notices. The men who owned shares in whale-ships made big profits in a risky trade, with much capital tied up in the wooden hulls and the chances of shipwreck high in the uncharted seas. The crews were paid in proportion to the overall profit of a voyage and were frequently sent silly by the splendour of their winnings.

I can remember the time when fully 30 whalers were registered there. There used to be roaring times along the wharves when a number of these came into port about Christmas time. Like returned diggers who had been fortunate, they spent their money freely, and the industry undoubtedly gave great impetus to trade. In those days Hobart was the New Bedford of the Southern Seas . . . whaling was a calling for which the young Tasmanians were well fitted . . . and the result was the existence for many years in Southern Tasmania of as brave and hardy a race of mariners as ever went to sea.23

O’Sullivan went on to recall standing on the dock with a crowd of other small boys watching a carcass worth perhaps £1,000 being towed into the shallow water of Sullivan’s Cove to be cut and cleaned and boiled down to produce the clean golden oil which left its characteristic smell everywhere.

Whaling provided the basis for the local shipbuilding industry. There was plenty of excellent timber and a force of skilled work­men was gathered together from emancipists, immigrants, and native-born. All along the hard there were shipyards, mostly quite small individually, yet more ships were built at Battery Point for many years than in all of the other Australian ports put together. Boats, needed for pleasure as well as for local transport and for whaling fleets, maintained a continuous demand for con­struction and repairs. Small boats were needed to provide local transportation in the new land with its few roads and long series of waterways.24

78 Golden FreedomConditions changed with gold. For a while there was little

whaling done and afterwards the industry was slow to regain its previous strength. In-shore whales had been fished out and the black whalebone whale was extinct within reach of Hobart. Moreover the price of oil became unsteady with the introduction of house lighting by coal gas and lubricating with mineral oils. But the talents of shipowners were challenged by the promise of sperm whales down in the wild Antarctic seas. These were the widest and hardest areas of ocean in the world, yet the whales were there if men were prepared to look. The trade was at the point where capital was needed for bigger ships, more expensive and better equipped ships, and fortunately with the gold years that capital was available.

Moreover the great age of steam vessels was beginning and thoughts of expanding fleets intrigued local owners. During the 1850s, the carrying trade about the coasts of Australia had proved lucrative both in goods and passengers. Hobart businessmen were anxious to extend their interests. John Ross, the shipbuilder, borrowed capital to construct a large patent’ slip made of iron to handle hulls over 700 tons. Its construction along Battery Point was an event which was thought to be of significance and por­tent.25 Plans were laid in parlour and office for new ventures and speculation made the small community agog with excitement. G. W. Walker was astonished one night to be told that his neigh­bours William Coote and Alexander McNaughtan had just bought a 500 ton steamboat. A new fleet was assembled for the Tasmanian Steam Navigation Company. Shares were taken up in an East Coast Steam Navigation Company and a Sorell Steam Navigation Com­pany.26 William Crosby, a shipowning captain long experienced in runs between Hobart and London, formed his own company in 1853 with a fleet of two whale-ships, a tea clipper, and a thriving agency for shipping wool and oil to England. His ships returned loaded with cargoes of manufactures, food and wine from Europe, sugar and spirits from Mauritius, calicoes and spices from the East. In 1859 the firm opened a branch in Melbourne, the better to compete with mainland agencies, though the main office remained in Hobart. The McGregors, the Salier brothers and Dr Crowther were the liveliest in expanding their whaling fleets to regain ground lost through the gold melee. Crowther fitted-out the brig Offley to fish in Kerguelen waters and almost half the

Reproduced by courtesy of the National Library of Australia.

5 Liverpool Street after reconstruction (see p. 64).

Reproduced by courtesy of the National Library of Australia.

6 The Emily Downing, a Hobart Town whaler (see p. 78).

(see

p.

101

Golden Freedom 79townspeople seemed to be involved in provisioning, outfitting, making sails, inspecting the ship on the slips and seeing their sons away with her into the oceans where frostbite, fogs, and icepack added to the old dangers of whale fishing. Later Crowther diversified his shipping interest by obtaining rights to a small guano-covered island in the Coral Sea and employing a crew to dig and ship the fertiliser.27

Not all of the new capital went into shipping, for there was renewed investment in the Bank of Van Diemen’s Land and other financial institutions. New insurance companies opened as well as a Permanent Building and Investment Association and a Derwent and Tamar Assurance Company.28 The excitingly new Gas Com­pany found willing subscription from the men who founded the Hobart Town Chamber of Commerce in 1851, ‘Merchants, Direc­tors and Officers of all Public Institutions connected with com­merce, Shipowners, Ship masters, Traders and Manufacturers carrying on business in the City’.29 Control was passing every day more firmly into the hands of a business elite. Some newcomers found their way in, some few rich men from the Victorian fields who chose to join this city group. G. W. Walker held an exag­gerated idea of their significance:

so many of the Victoria capitalists find their way over here and, liking the place and climate, become permanent residents. It is this in some measure which is giving such an impulse generally to trade and commerce.30

Such newcomers may have helped to promote change, but the names of shareholders and officers in the city’s various small companies suggest a remarkable continuity and closeness. Three- quarters of the shares of the Derwent and Tamar Assurance Company went to eighty Hobart people.31 The Bank of Van Diemen’s Land came to hold the savings of almost half the city professional people. The company flotations were all locally based and locally financed, the shares being subscribed for by a narrow group of people whose names reappear bewilderingly on the lists of shareholders and directors of all companies. The main sub­scribers to the proposed Sorell Steam Navigation Company were Askin Morrison, a local dealer, property owner and Legislative Councillor, Alderman P. O’Reilly of the Municipal Council, and F. Lipscombe, a small-holder, seed merchant, and minor entre­preneur of Sandy Bay. These three were all at the same time busy

80 Golden Freedomgetting involved in various other city companies. Lipscombe was also a shareholder in the East Coast Steam Navigation Company and the Tasmanian Steam Navigation Company besides himself being an alderman.

The lists of shareholders of the TSNC, reveal the familiar sur­names of the local business coterie. They included Joseph and Peter Facy, William Guesdon the auctioneer, Captains James Fisher and John Clinch both masters of merchant ships, Richard Cleburne the local soap-maker and merchants William Rout, Alexander Kissock, Charles Bastian, A. G. Webster, John Beau­mont, and ‘Tea and Butter’ Tommy Chapman.3- They all were local businessmen, owners of warehouses, ships and shops. With them was Olaf Hedberg the oil merchant, a survivor of the Baltic whale trade and one of the few non-British men who became established. The same names occur in the lists of subscribers to the Bank of Van Diemen’s Land where the family holdings can be traced in the share lists through till the closing of the bank in 1891.33 The Reports of the Gas Company contain the same re­peated names, together with those of G. W. Walker, Henry Hopkins, George Whitcombe, Henry Hinsby, Dr Bedford and C. M. Maxwell.34 There is little doubt that the capital which was drawn upon during the 1850s was largely local in origin and was not borrowed from outside. It was the accumulation of the profits from half a century firstly from trading with the commissariat, secondly from the wool, wheat, and whale oil sales and then from the gold profit coming home to roost in the pockets of the city’s entrepreneurs. So confused was the control of finance in the small town that distinctions between companies were sometimes ludicrous. At a meeting and lecture for the directors and share­holders of the Gas Company in 1854 only James Barnard, the Government Printer, turned up. The wrath of the organisers was allayed when they realised that their date had coincided with a TSNC meeting and the local businessmen could not be in two places at once.35

The signs of confidence and delight showed in all the temper of the 1850s. Home and office constructions were an obvious sign of this. People watched the new rich moving their homes from the city to the suburbs, the rebuilding of the central blocks, the planning for new Municipal Buildings. During this confident period plans were laid for the construction of a Town Hall to be

Golden Freedom 81worthy of the capital city, on the site adjoining the old Govern­ment House in Macquarie Street. It was so pretentious that critics were able to scoff, 'Grandly your proud Italian walls look down upon the town . . . rich and tasteful, and . . . worthy of Venice’.86 The Royal Society Committee expressed its intention of building a museum and scientific rooms in a style similar to the Town Hall, an imitation of the Roman Farnese Palace planned by the local architect Henry blunter. The museum would stand in Macquarie Street on one side of the Town Hall whilst on the other side, beyond the home paddock of old Government House, a new Supreme Court, fit for a colony’s capital would be built. The elegant Customs House building by the New Wharf, decorated in classic form by painstaking stonemasons during the 1830s, provided an ideal home for the independent colonial Parliament to meet, until a magnificent new Westminster could be built on the selected site in the Barrack Square.

There was renewal of building activity upon the new Govern­ment House on the Domain land. Its foundation stone had been laid in 1847 but, since the plans showed a building little short of a palace, there was not enough capital or confidence to continue work until 1855. Its turretted massiveness was completed inside three years, costing very much more than its original estimate for there was such shortage of building labour with the gold rushes and so much local construction in progress that wages paid to the skilled stonemasons were extremely high. Its design was described as Tudor-Gothic, a baronial style suited to country houses of the Scottish border but cleaner and warmer here in the southern sunshine with light, soft stone surging past richly- mullioned windows into three towers capped by monstrous gar­goyles. Anthony Trollope noted in his travel book,

The Government House is, I believe, acknowledged to be the best belonging to any British colony. It stands about a mile from the town, on ground sloping down to the Derwent, and . . . lacks nothing necessary for a perfect English residence.87

It was good to be able to look about and contemplate the wonderful progress showing all around. People drove in carriages to inspect the new buildings and the new roads which led onto the Queen’s Domain. Behind new Government House was the large area of the gardens which belonged to the Royal Society. Sunny weekend afternoons were the times for a gentle walk about

82 Golden Freedomthe paths and bowers. Two thousand people passed through the gates in 1850 but at the end of the decade the number was 20,000. It was a most pleasant retreat where each Saturday regi­mental bands completed the pleasures of green lawns sweeping beneath tall trees to touch the clear salt water. At the top, near to the main gate, was the already mellowed red-brick wall, threaded with chimney flues which provided heat for vines grow­ing espaliered. A small stream trickled through a moist ferny gully whilst glasshouses and gazebos lay along the paths beneath Government House belvedere. The raw new landscape of the colony could be forgotten during an afternoon in the gardens. There was no shortage of exotic plants, especially useful fruiting ones: pears, plums, medlars, figs, over twenty varieties of apple, cherries, pomegranates, apricots, nectarines, peaches, and mul­berries, all these grew to perfection. Alongside were the strange antipodean plants grown for their wonder and in an attempt to assess their commercial value. Increasingly they became valued for their own spiky beauty; there were twenty-five different types of wattles, nine of banksias, five of leptospermum teatrees, various hakeas, melaleucas, varieties of correa, grevillea, casuarina, calo- thamnus, and dodonoea. In pride of all place there was the blue gum, the island’s own eucalyptus with long strap-like leaves redo­lent even at rest of the oil which provided a local export industry and made the scent of the colony familiar to the world in the privacy of bathrooms. Its seeds, moreover, were being distributed throughout the warm temperate parts of the earth for the blue gum grew fast, providing excellent fuel and shade and acquired a respect for its usefulness in drying marshy mosquito ground.38

With loyalties divided between the cottage plants and these local wonders the colonists lived in two worlds and still attempted to make the new one as similar to the old as possible. John Graves, son of the fox-hunting man and a local solicitor, success­fully introduced house sparrows to chirp upon the gutters and puff their round black bibs as if they had always inhabited this land. Dr E. L. Crowther was thought to have acted as a public benefactor in liberating the starlings which flocked noisily in the trees on winter nights and stalked leg after leg, head-bobbing through the garden grass. Skylarks, goldfinches, rabbits, hares, blackbirds, and deer were successfully introduced, whilst many other creatures which were tried failed to spread. The Acclima-

Golden Freedom 83tization Society set out with deliberate policy to bring in foxes and pheasants and anything which could provide sport. Attempts to establish trout and salmon in the clear mountain streams were only delayed by the technical problem of bringing live eggs through the tropics on a long sea voyage.™

In some ways the tradition of ‘Hobarton’ was persisting, yet it persisted in a paler image of that era. Unlike the Franklin period there were now no skilled naturalists of the calibre of Gould or Gunn, no visitors like Hooker or Ross whose names became famous. Enthusiasm was local and talent was amateur. The Walkers spent many weekends of the late 1850s crating and despatching tree ferns and roots and seeds to acquaintances in England. In his memoirs J. B. Walker commented that his inspira­tion was gained entirely from his schooling in England and he lamented the inadequacy of the classic-oriented colonial educa­tion which failed to promote new scientific enthusiasm in the young.40 He underestimated the local tradition of intellectual enterprise, yet there was a distinction between the new cultural wave and that of ‘Hobarton’ days. The new was more a derivative, provincial effort with new-rich parvenus attempting to capture the delights of quality and slightly missing the mark.

It was the same with artistic fashion. After an interval of several years drawing once again became the respectable activity for the young daughters of the well-to-do of town. Enthusiasm was maintained through the media of education. From 1851 the Mechanics’ Institute employed the Reverend W. R. Wade, a committee member of the Bible Society, to conduct its evening classes. By 1859 this Drawing Class for Ladies was by far the most successful class and in the series of public lectures of the Institute Dr Bedford spoke for an hour on ‘Expression with Reference to the Fine Arts’ and again on ‘Grecian Statues’. On another occa­sion Bishop Nixon discussed ‘English Schools of Painting’.41 Yet, whilst the gestures towards artistic sensitivity remained, the pro­fessionalism of Tasmanian painting was past; Wainewright had died in St Mary’s hospital, Duterrau died in 1851, Prout was back in England, Bock lingered old and frail till 1857. The art work produced after mid-century was more playful, more amateur, more modestly parochial, whilst a new Art Exhibition in 1858 showed how the colony remained fixed in a provincialism tighter than that of the 1840s.42 Mrs Allport showed her same miniatures

84 Golden Freedomon ivory. Her sons, Morton and Curzon, added their water-colours to the choice works brought down from drawing-room walls. Bishop Nixon produced his same two Welsh landscapes by the famous Turner, and added one Gainsborough portrait and two small Watteau’s. Dr Agnew still concentrated on nostalgic scenes of Devonshire whilst John Dobson again brought out his six views of Gateshead-on-Tyne. Alexander Kissock, Scottish merchant, revealed his peculiar mixture of obsessions with bronze statuettes of ‘Stag’, ‘Stag Browsing’ and ‘Cupid on the Lion’s Skin’. Joseph Hone, Chairman of the Court of Requests and the butt of the humour of half the city for his grimacing antics in court, exhibited just three photographs—those of the Queen and the Prince Con­sort proudly flanking one of himself. Many viewers enjoyed another snigger at his expense. The centrepiece of the whole exhibition, representing the idea which made it all worth while, was the Chief Justice’s canvas of the large, handsome and impres­sive view of Hobart Town from Sandy Bay painted by John Glover. This painting was later taken into the colony’s collection, for it revealed larger and more romantic than life the scene of a civilisation in the wilderness which was the city’s glory.43

The rejoicing in the community was of freedom from Convict Department regulations, freedom from the necessity for each man to be a gaoler for his fellows upon the streets. Freedom fortified by the prosperity of the gold years produced a massive yielding to self-indulgence and relaxation. Delight was expressed through mundane communal occasions; during 1857 a Horticultural Society show crowded the New Market buildings well into the dark evening hours as dancing and music under the spluttering lights of the new gas lamps represented all the wonders of past progress, future pleasures, and present attainments. In place of the bitter political activity, the anti-transportation opposition to the government, and the wearying self-discipline which had been required of anyone living within sound of the chain gangs, there was a release of energy to coincide with renewed self-confidence. All of the institutions for leisure activity increased their member­ship at this time. Proceedings were published in periodical form by the affluent Royal Society for every year of the 1850s and a large audience was sure to attend each monthly meeting. These have remained the busiest years and the most prosperous years

Golden Freedom 85of the Society’s long existence. Denison had assisted its progress by offering to pay the Museum Curator a government sinecure salary to supplement the Society’s £100 retainer. He thus pro­vided a full-time editor for the published papers. The incumbent was Dr James Milligan, an Edinburgh medical man, left behind after the transportation officers left. Milligan led research into the languages of the fast-dying Tasmanian Aborigines who, by being pushed to the perimeter of colonial life, were becoming academically respectable.44

Evenings out listening to lectures or music became very popu­lar. J. J. Salier’s series of ‘Concerts for the Million’ were much appreciated as were works by the Orpheus Club and the Choral Society. After forty years E. O’Sullivan’s most-remembered images of Hobart life were the light operas and pantomimes and the scarlet melodramas which delighted audiences. Many wandering players who had worked the Californian goldfields followed the crowds to Castlemaine and Bendigo and then dispersed to odd and isolated centres. Hobart offered them its Theatre Royal, efficiently managed by J. M. Davies and Richard Lewis, recon­structed in gold and crimson during 1856 with scrolls and leafs and ormolu-embossed rococo columns. It had secret boxes and rows and rows of red velvet seats to hold an audience of over 600 members of an opulent, independent and pleasure seeking community.45

Many colonists were anxious to spend their savings to educate their children. It was the trading profit from the drapery and the savings bank which gave J. B. Walker the opportunity to attend several preparatory schools. He then spent some years at the High School in Hobart before being sent to finish at an English public school. His father’s death in 1859 altered the situation and so reduced the family prospects to make necessary the recall of James and he had to find work instead of his expected place in Normal School. Education was seen as the means whereby the benefits of hard pioneer living could be passed on to the next generation and transformed into a genteel, modern and cultivated way of life. Hutchins School and High School enrolments rose sharply during the decade of the 1850s as boys were drawn from families down the social scale. Emancipist parents were so anxious to educate their sons that with the two Grammar Schools beyond the reach of most of this class there was a demand for cheaper

86 Golden Freedomimitations of the settlers’ pretentious academies. Gold-rich scholars put their winnings into the furnishing of school houses which were of doubtful educational value but gave a spurious illusion of quality. One was well described in J. B. Walker’s memoirs. It was managed by a

little old gentleman, an Independent [Congregational] Minister, the Rev. Mr. Day. He was a quaint little anatomy of a man . . . a good Hebrew Scholar having written a version of the Proverbs, the work of nearly a lifetime, from which he expected fame but which fell stillborn from the press. . . . I used to go backwards and forwards with our porter James Watson as pedagogus carry­ing my books in a square white basket with a lid. I remember little of the teaching I received here, little more than the successive houses in which the little old gentleman lived.46

R. Leach, cajoled to the colony by a contract to head a Normal School, a premature plan of the 1840s, began the Beaulieu House Academy on ‘solid English’ lines, whilst Scotsman Alex Cairnduff at the Hobart Town Academy offered to prepare pupils for ‘Mercantile pursuits’. R. Giblin’s Classical and Commercial Academy attempted to combine both fields, its brochures offer­ing mercantile pursuits with liberal attainment.47 Giblin had once served the Convict Department as a harsh guardian of its Orphan Schools and his move into a colonial career was typical of the attraction offered by school business ventures. Such private schools advertised much broader curricula than the government schools, the most favoured course for boys up to fourteen years of age being the ‘solid English education’ which was Classics with French, Drawing and the study of the English language and literature. Many sons of lower-class families, boys whose cousins barely made the grade in Ragged Schools in England, were pushed and persuaded into useless acquisitions of Greek and Latin through the penny-pinching sacrifices of their parents. After their private school education they emerged as antipodean imita­tions of those peculiar European creations known as gentlemen. Colonists retained for many years their awe of prejudices in­herited from their ‘Home’ society and used their energy and savings to make their sons into relics of the old world who dwelt upon the edges of the bush.

The gold prosperity provided a start for the ambitious schooling of girls but in this field there was indecision about the intellectual needs of colonial females. Perhaps Mrs Fletcher’s Educational

Golden Freedom 87Institute for Young Ladies summed all ideas by offering Kind and Maternal Treatment and Useful Accomplishments based on Strictly Moral and Religious Principles’. Girls were educated but not taken seriously during the 1850s. It was years before they were allowed to compete in the local examination contest and try for scholarships. This system was established on a firm basis for colonial boys during the first years of self-government, after talk of beginning a university to compare with the new one in Mel­bourne led to deferment of such a bold plan.48 The lesson of Dr Bedford’s grand project of a Hobart Medical School in 1853 was well remembered.49 The Royal College of Surgeons had been invited to allow’ credit towards its finals for three vigorous years spent under the science and anatomy tutelage of Bedford and the liberal arts lecturing of Arnold, the Schools’ Inspector. Students were expected to flock from all harder-pressed mainland areas to this bright new centre for careers. Also Tasmanian parents were assumed to be waiting for just such an opportunity to boost their sons to profession. In the end the Royal College declined the invitation and scarcely a scholar enrolled, for parents still pre­ferred to spend their <£450 a year on a sure education in England rather than risk it on a doubtful colonial venture. Yet, though it was too early, the Medical School typified the bravado of the period, the tremendous thrill of attainment and achievement which left the 1850s the most memorable and the most formative decade in the history of the city of Hobart.

*¥& 6A Sort of Unity

The 1850s had more than merely the richnesses of gold to make them memorable. In any colony’s history the years when indepen­dence is granted must always remain notable. It is a time for change and reassessment, a time for a new, bright look at home and friends and living. From 1856 there was in Tasmania a new constitution, a new form of government and a new electorate consisting of almost half of the adult males. From this date the islanders had to begin to learn about governing and about the ways of independent nations and communities. The farmers, merchants, and professional men accepted these extra burdens with glee, for not every generation wins a chance to gain ascendancy in a new competition. From the island population of less than 100,000 persons a full Parliament of two houses, a Cabinet Ministry modelled on Westminster with opposition benches and a bureaucracy of civil servants had to be recruited. Nor was this all, for with self-government came the establishment of local municipalities and local councillors and aldermen were required to be elected from the people to fill these lesser positions of government.1

The spirit of the first years of independence became reform and reformation. The mood spread from government down to all institutions; the churches reassessed their administrative struc­ture and some of the denominations altered their methods of securing income; the Hospital Board took a new look at the sys­tem of honorary attendance of doctors, new masters eager with ideas were put in charge of schools and the structure of the police force was altered to give more local control. New associations and societies for benevolence, charity, temperance, and insurance; for music, sport, entertainment, and improvement were formed as the institutional structure for the second half of the nineteenth

88

A Sort of Unity 89century took shape. Such a flurry of organising inevitably affected the quality of life in the city. Hours of committee work, nights sleepless for lack of decision, and evenings lobbying support for some new scheme began to fill the months and years. The former agitators against transportation became transformed into mana­gers. Ideals fled as erstwhile patriots became responsible, prag­matic decision-makers and a new hard-headed concern with immediate problems and practical solutions replaced the public meetings and oratory of mid-century.

The style of local politics placed its own character upon colonial life. Several officials who stayed behind to seek colonial careers enjoyed great advantages of prestige and made use of such power. An ex-Colonial Secretary, W. T. N. Champ, became a Premier. The Comptroller of Convicts, W. E. Nairn, became President of the Legislative Council. The Attorney General, Francis Smith, became first Premier and later Chief Justice, gathering himself a K.C.M.G. before leaving to resettle in Britain. Many colonists resented these careerists who had accepted financial compensation for loss of office yet wished to retain the substance of their former prominence. New parliamentarians drawn from the rank amateurs of colonial acres or business houses competed for office against these professionals. The rural squires made complacent, unimaginative Members of Parliament who tended to look askance at the businessmen, lawyers, merchants, doctors, and newspapermen who represented city electorates. Yet colonial politics did not split along the division between town and country. This was an era of clique alliances in which interests gathered together for specific issues and fell apart just as quickly, giving ministries fickle support and short tenure of office.-

A few politicians acquired early reputation for taking the side of the working men. In contrast to the massive self-interest of the rural squires any politician who talked of the interests of other classes stood to be damned as ‘democratic’. James Gray, an emancipist from Monaghan, attempted too brash an association with democratic rights. He was successful during the early 1850s when he could depend upon the support of many of his own kind. After the gold rushes support had weakened and democratic issues became less popular. Such was the opposition offered to Gray that he retired from his parliamentary career. Until 1872 he languished as a big man amongst the remaining emancipists,

90 A Sort of Unitychairing many unimportant working-class meetings. His re- election to Parliament in the 1870s brought him no distinction for his talents and his tone were not modified to suit the changed conditions.3

The most successful of the ‘democrats’ in the first years of the independent Parliament were the journalists Maxwell Miller and J. M. Davies, who found that a little restrained demogoguery went down well with many readers who were at heart liberally inclined, though fearful of the threat of the emancipist classes. Davies was the best man at finding social and political balance. The details of his settling in Hobart have been described earlier. His reputation as emancipist, as Jew, as former publican and as actor was against him. His low-class unpleasantly grating accent compromised his position in society. He aroused violent opposi­tion. Even in Melbourne he left bitter memories including the comment that when he played the part on stage of an evil-visaged grave digger he was not really acting at all. He was a ‘chubby, red-cheeked, dark haired, unmistakably Jewish-visaged person­age, he had a whole foundry of “brass” in his face, and was not only self-assertive, but cheeky. Though comparatively illiterate, he owned other gifts to make up the deficiency . . .’.4 In 1855 opposition to his editorial prestige erupted in the form of a scur­rilous attack by Henry Jackson, editor of the Daily News, upon Davies, 'late Constable at Bathurst etc., etc., . . the etceteras were meant to be understood by everyone. Yet Davies had wit, determination, ability, a heavy walking stick, and a quick temper. Years later another hard-pressed rival editor was to write that, though Davies suffered from ‘personal experience’ and ‘enuncia­tion’ which were not favourable (these being euphemisms for conviction and low class), nonetheless he had come to wield, ‘almost overwhelming influence . . . over the whole social structure of Hobart Town’.5

One attempt to oust him from the Legislature succeeded, but the contest for re-election brought Davies back into the House of Assembly. Frederick Maitland Innes accused him in the House of peculation, a difficult charge to defend with two convictions for forgery. Other members openly mocked Davies’s intrusions into the affairs of ‘honest’ men or ‘refreshed Mr. Davies’ recollection on some points connected with the cause of his first visit to this Colony’.0

A Sort of Unity 91Such snide attacks crushed lesser characters but Davies used

the cudgelling power of both his journalistic pen and his big stick. He served a gaol sentence for an assault upon Samuel Prout Hill and other men carried scars of his encounters. The defence Davies chose was to make himself more British than the Governor, more Anglican than the Bishop and more patriotically conserva­tive than either. He emphasised the integrity of the common men when gathered together in the associations of the Friendly Societies or the Volunteers, stressed their social consciences, their patriotism and their integral part in community when taking part in these formal institutions of town. He guardedly and gently put forward in the Mercury columns the idea of the dignity of every man. He wrote at length about the independence of his own purse and person. He suggested mildly that men, whether emancipist or free, whether poor or rich, had rights within community. His newspaper column influence was much in the manner of the earlier Dr Bailey, but, in comparison with the alienation of the 1850 group of emancipists, Davies more successfully asserted his own equality with the best by cleaving to loyalty and a middle- class scale of values. Even so Davies suffered much discrimination.

If parliamentary politics remained a hazardous means of promo­tion for emancipists the way seemed open for municipal politics to supply the necessary avenue. Indeed this had appeared to be an established ladder in the early 1850s.7 But James Bonney, Robert Worley and Philip O'Reilly, the radical yellow jacket' aldermen of that period, lasted no more than two terms before the opposition they aroused forced them from office. Their per­sistence depended upon the support of the energetic and dis­affected people who by and large had left for Victorian gold, and in the absence of this support the leaders lapsed once more into anonymity. For a few years some other emancipists did achieve the status of aldermen. Abraham Rheuben was elected for a couple of terms. Henry Propsting was elected in 1859. Rheuben, when quite old, had a further term in office during the 1870s and the Crisps were notable members of the Municipal Council. But these men were far different types from the active, status-pushing challengers of the early 1850s. All had already by 1860 acquired considerable city property, and stake in city estate became the most common characteristic of aldermen. Typical aldermen were builders like the Seabrooks, timber mill owners like the Crisps,

92 A Sort of Unityand Rheuben himself, as they subdivided North Hobart blocks of land. Opinion ranged only from David Lewis, the shop and warehouse owner still inclined to be liberal in his views to Frederick Lipscombe, the Sandy Bay suburban nursery-man, small-holder and shareholder inclined the other way. A few score similar sorts of men got themselves tied up in municipal affairs.8

Yet the bricks-and-mortar level did not become the dominating tone of municipal politics because of the presence of the Colonial Parliament in the city, alongside the Municipal Council. The holding of municipal office became a further arrow to the bow­string of men fighting for parliamentary precedence. Hobart politics represented a large part of colonial affairs and Parlia­mentarians of ambition sought to control this further section of the public for their own purposes. Council meetings became so dominated by political career men that it was common for a retired or prospective Premier and a brace of portfolioed ministers to be found sitting around the Council table, or even contesting for the mayoral chain of office. In this way the limited administra­tive talent of a small community did not become attenuated and thinly spread across the boards of all levels of government. Instead career-seeking became an embracing drive which drew its par­ticipants into membership of many disparate bodies from Legisla­tive Council to Total Abstinence Society, from Choral Club to Gardeners’ Association. The problems of one social institution were carried by committee members into the affairs of another, and the dominating characters influenced all institutional levels of city life.

As the 1850s ended and the prosperity of gold lapsed into a rather sweet memory the overriding problem of all administrators came to be the financial one. The colonists had no tradition of paying taxation, just as the politicians had no experience of colonial finance budgeting. Ministry after ministry broke upon the budgets of the independent colony.9 The essential difficulty was that, despite independence and self-government, the colony was not free of the penal-camp commitments. A penal colony was more expensive to run than a normal community. Nor was income easy to raise, for the taxable wealth was unevenly spread throughout the population and the classes who had the money also had the power to push ministries out of office.

A Sort of Unity 93Every time a minister found himself in difficulty he was faced

with the dilemma of problems inherited from the previous identity of gaol settlement of an Empire. The extreme example of inheri­ted institutions was the system of the police force and gaols. The newly-independent community could not afford to make cuts immediately in the expensive gaol camp method of controlling what remained of the convict population. In I860 the Legislature received a Return of Criminal Statistics which set out to show how expensive policing was in an ex-penal community. In Tas­mania there was one constable for every 269 people, whereas in the Welsh County of Caernarvon there was only one for 2,500 people. Yet this report overdid the contrast between Tasmanian police work and the British. All the 20,000,000 people in England and Wales employed about 20,000 policemen, so that Tasmanians spent four times as much per head to maintain police forces.10 Four times the policing required four times the expense; either four times the income or so much less spent on other social institu­tions. Hence the need to control the population hindered the development of community. There could be general agreement with the attitude of the Hobart Chamber of Commerce when its members, deciding that present control must take precedence over future improvement, urged that the government should cut its vote for education from <£14,000 to £2,800, the rest to be spent upon strengthening the police force to protect shops and business premises.11

Police forces in Britain and in the other Australian colonies were at this period being drawn together, made more efficient and placed under central control. The Tasmanian answer to the problem of police was to disperse police control to those who feared the emancipist population, through the formation of muni­cipal and local police forces. This gesture had the virtue of ensuring that those who wanted police protection would have to pay for it from local rates, instead of leaving a tax issue languish­ing to plague all colonial ministries. Yet still the government in Hobart had to maintain a colonial Territorial Police alongside the old and expensive gaol buildings, whilst the imperial subsidy for their upkeep dwindled steadily away. During the 1860s emanci­pists and a few men still designated as ‘convicts’ accounted for 94 per cent of invalids, 89 per cent of gaol prisoners, 85 per cent of paupers, 84 per cent of lunatics, and 60 per cent of all patients

94 A Sort of Unitytreated at the Hobart Hospital.12 Colonial pleas that the British should further subsidise police and gaol costs and aggressive demands that the Home Office should repatriate British criminals from the colony were futile. This was an incubus which this community would continue to face. It was a depressing prospect for the new administrators who had so joyfully assumed office. Their hopes and visions were well expressed in a philanthropic association report of 1860.

As a colony we are put upon a great and momentous trial, liberty to shape our own institutions has been conferred upon us with hardly a shadow of restraint. We shall make our own character and mould our own destinies.13

Such an illusion underestimated the effect of established character upon future destinies. And so the paradox of the 1860s became that of optimistic and creative community builders being forced into repairing the deficiencies in their old community structure before being able effectively to seek progress.

Because every constructive innovation to improve society was brought up short against the problems persisting from the penal settlement it was difficult to avoid morbid obsessions with criminality and moral stain. Behind all of the glorious and satisfy­ing social activities of a free community, the Institute classes, the Royal Society discussions of Aboriginal languages, the pride in new steamships and new gas lighting, there still lay the canker of convict kingdom. Yet the problem of the caste apart, the emancipists, was changing. No longer was it suitable to discuss convict origins and convict problems openly, for these emancipist fellows were now fellow-citizens. After the census of 1857 no statistician dared to pose the question of the civil condition upon which citizens had gained entrance to the colony. At that count two out of three adult males and over a quarter of all city people, adult and child, male and female were registered as having arrived under conviction. The enormity of this proportion alarmed all who considered it. What implications did life in such a com­munity hold for those who sought decency? John West had summed up most secretly harboured fears, a ‘feeling of caste . . had originally ‘guarded the habits of the free . . .’ but even so ‘familiarity with crime, although it may not corrupt the judge­ment, must abate the moral sensibility’.14 How after independence could that old feeling of caste be maintained? How in a tightly-

A Sort of Unity 95knit community could such separation be achieved? These fears were more real when families had cast their lot in this city, when a new generation of tall and handsome sons and daughters were forming their personalities. Suspicions brought a tightness to the lips of many a stonehouse matron and a harshness in her tone of admonition to fresh-complexioned daughters. Wide-skirted young girls they were, with shoulders fashionably narrow whilst their minds were not usually so, or not enough to please their mothers.

There was constant memory, seldom spoken about in polite circles, that in the early camp days the settler and official classes themselves had not been without stain. The examples of Governors Davey and Sorell had been emulated frequently. The soft, dark skin of native women had been enjoyed during past youth by more ageing citizens than cared to admit. Rowdy and debauched memories of the days when the general state of society had been ‘low and lewd’ were a part of every old settler’s consciousness.15 The gentle widow of G. W. Walker, whilst reminiscing recalled her youthful life. As Miss Sarah Benson, a devout Wesleyan, she had observed her community about her. In those early days, she told her son James ‘nobody knew who was living with whom, from the Governor downwards’. The tentative understatement of the old lady’s descriptions enforced a realisa­tion of the train of memories running through most family homes. Settlers in the 1860s could remember these things and turn open their copy of John West’s History of Tasmania to read,

No colonist can forget his shudder at the first spectacle of men in chains: none can be unconscious that the lapse of years has deadened the sense of social disorder.17

The wildness of the convicts in the frontier town of the past had been such that any non-convict felt virtuous, and able con­sequently to overlook his own minor indiscretions. But now this great contrast was changing as a growing quietness of the lower classes left the scandals of their betters exposed to public scrutiny. Alcoholism, piracy, graft, mutiny, murder of the natives, con­cubinage and all the ‘vices described in their Bibles’ were part of this people’s history and could not be blamed upon the convicts alone. Cynicism was fed by the continuing tradition of such evils. Despite the teetotal meetings, despite the beginnings of denomina­tional temperance societies and the enthusiastic introduction of the Independent Order of Rechabites and the Order of the

96 A Sort of UnityKnights of the Grand Templars, tippling remained a habit popular through all classes. Civil servants traditionally took beer at lunch time. The wiser men used small beer but ale was by no means uncommon until it was expressly forbidden during working hours by a ministerial minute in the 1890s. One government official, Henry Edward Smith, carefully noted in his daily journal the habits of his fellow clerks, the problems of attending to work on hot afternoons when men dozed and even snored at desks, and the difficulties of covering up for his assistant Boothman week after week to protect the fellow’s family.18 Alcoholism amongst the respectable classes runs as a theme throughout Smith’s journal and a widespread liking for the pot seems certain to have remained general throughout the century. Drunken mobs stoned the windows of Walker’s teetotal house on Sebastopol night; yet his own sons did not keep to the pledge,19 and it was not for fear of the mob. No liquor licence was refused for temperance reasons before 1891, though the open ale shops decreased in numbers as sophistication grew. The breweries attached to what had once been watermills remained prosperous forms of manufacturing enterprise and the colonial income from excise duty on liquors remained the steadiest taxation source for all of the century.

If the problems posed by the persistence of the emancipist class seemed monstrous, the reformers must have been hampered in the striking of a right attitude by the awareness of such motes in the eyes of their own sort. With skeletons in the past and bogeys in the present what was to become of the future? One reaction which could be expected was towards a strict intransigent puri- tanism; Sabbath breaking by boys playing marbles (claimed an inspector of the workhouse poor) if allowed to continue, would have the same fearful tendency that had brought Paris to a state of anarchy and bloodshed.20 But the colonists were seldom tempted to be moralistic in this fashion. Puritan strictness was not a typical Tasmanian reaction and, despite all the muttering about convict behaviour and the strictly decorous facade which was maintained, none the less the level of practised morality remained at a lower level. The censoriousness of matrons emerged as rather a social than a moral judgment and many cheeks were ready to turn away from the high spirits of youth. Belly laughs and hilarity remained the common tone at dinners and picnic parties were popular occasions for philandering. Victorianism in its more

A Sort of Unity 97restrictive form touched lightly upon the habits of this community.

By the 1860s the excesses of convict behaviour had passed. The relaxed conditions which eased the strictness of middle class judgments had the opposite effect upon the emancipist classes. Easier colonial living, the freedom of space and land and water offered to the professional and merchant people an attitude to life more bucolic than that permitted by the principles of Benedic­tines or Quakers or Scottish Presbyterians. The same easier con­ditions led the lower classes away from the brutishness of European poverty which had produced the original convicts. The Hobart administrators came to know well the areas of concern. Their problem was not with a vicious, dangerous and frightening mob; it was with a host of laggard, lost and apathetic dependants, who increasingly needed not retribution but care, not anger but compassion, to make them effective citizens. A typical man“1 was Dublin-born and educated in a National School before being apprenticed to a house painter. He had left Ireland long before that country’s worst troubles began and volunteered to join the English army. In Bombay, where his posting lay, he had proved too wild for the disciplined life and appeared on a dozen charges of insubordination and drunkenness before being brought before a court martial. At the hearing the soldier broke out into a brazen and obscene denunciation of the ways of the British Army and the characters of his officers, an attack which ensured his quick passage to Hobart Town—the sump of the British Empire. Whilst sentenced to the detention centres he was a frequent absconder and was on each occasion caught and returned before many days had passed hiding in the bush. At Proctor’s Road, in an isolated valley some few miles behind the city, he grew hungry on one of these escapades and snatched a ham from the larder after threatening Sarah Proctor with a gun. Unfortunately the con­stables had been hiding in the scrub waiting for him and they rushed out to knock him down and tote him back to the peni­tentiary cells. This was his most vicious act and the crime brought him an additional four years close confinement before he was loosed upon the streets on ticket-of-leave. But not for long was he a free man, for within a year he was in prison again for an alleged intent to steal. On release he stole food, in gaol again he escaped again to be placed once more in the secure main penitentiary; the ‘Tench’ of evil repute. In subsequent years he was convicted on

98 A Sort of Unityseparate occasions of stealing a pair of trousers, sixpence and various other small articles. Gradually his offences lapsed into allegations of disorder, drunkenness and idleness in the streets. The police brought the man before the courts on thirty separate counts until in his dotage he was being assisted into the dock on legs which could scarcely support him. Finally, like so many of his kind, he was given his ticket of admittance to the New Town Invalid Depot and here, within the cold whitewashed walls, his life in institutions varying from army barrack to workhouse ended with a government burial.

What use were citizens such as he, how could such people be dealt with? There were many men very much the same and women of a similar type transported for one trivial offence amidst a life of constant lawbreaking which did not end with colonial self-government. The court records were full of descriptions of them; Eileen Cavanagh who stole a bag valued at Id. containing 8s., Alice Nylan who purloined a roll of twenty-six yards of cloth, Ann Gifford found in possession of two shawls, Winifred McIntyre who took a pretty dress and Mary Maher a pair of shoes.-- All served their three or six months sentences and then came upon the town again to live with husbands or paramours amidst a thin scattering of children in shack and skilling within jug-carry of the taverns. Against such people, who needed care rather than bullying, punitive police control could appear unjust as well as inefficient. During 1854 Eliza Maguire, an Irish domestic, was marched thirty miles to Hobart Gaol because she had been impertinent to her mistress.23 On the long journey down country roads she was accompanied by a single police constable. This was an established practice of the convict era which raised imaginative pictures of liberties taken in secluded bowers with female prisoners who dared not complain. She was sentenced under the Master and Servant’s Act to three months’ imprison­ment and the loss of not only two months’ wages but also her waist-length hair. After the event, and to the dismay of the magistrate, Eliza Maguire proved herself to be a free immigrant by showing that no more than three months before her disgrace she had arrived free on a passenger ship in Hobart Town. This free colonist had been treated like a convict woman! Such policing was too much, it degraded everyone and there were widespread murmurs of complaint. A special government bill set

A Sort of Unity 99Eliza free but it could not replace her hair, which became a symbol of injustice; an indicator that a new order needed to be established. To add to the feeling for change the police system did not seem to achieve the desired effect upon the behaviour of the emancipists. Imprisonment did not alter the ways of people whose whole life had been spent in such institutions and who merely accepted further sentence with a shrug.

Yet how best to deal with these people whilst not perverting all community life? There was abundant evidence that a large pro­portion of the remaining emancipists were puny, weak specimens of humanity, ill-nourished in childhood. Many were in chronically poor health, which did not suit a robust, colonial, working life.24 Most would not tackle a regular job if it could be avoided. Un­aware of the progress which colonial living offered, they could seldom be interested in saving to own houses or land if subsistence was possible without. They cared little for education and even less for religion, and tended to see children as economic assets rather than the base of a better civilisation. Life which could be salvaged from the unavoidable curses of sickness and imprison­ment was for them a savouring and experiencing rather than serving as a time of preparation for something better in this world or another.

Such down-at-heel, shambling inefficients shared the fertile land between mountain forest and salt water with a highly sophisticated community of middle-class expatriates, whose most characteristic attitude to life was that of the evangelical liberal. For them life was an arranging not an experiencing. Present restraint and discipline led to the future rewards of comfort and prosperity, whilst poverty derived solely from the idle fecklessness which led to disaster. The inefficiency of the one class affected the efficiency of the other when both shared a restricted area. Years later Sir Edward Braddon remarked that the only outstanding dishonesty he found in the ex-convict colony was in the concept of an honest day’s work and it was in this sort of way that the atti­tudes of the emancipist classes towards life survived even after criminality lapsed.25

One of the problems was that the colonial low-class standard of living was generally higher than that in the memories of these people who had been British paupers. Emancipists’ small lots brought more ease than English or Irish conditions of housing,

100 A Sort of Unityeating, or working. There was more to spare from pittances for beer or tobacco, more to spend on meat for children and eggs for ageing invalids, more for decoration for the necks of wives or fancies and more to set by for an easier old age. Examples to illustrate this condition were used in immigrant-booster pamphlets which set out to provide an attractive picture of colonial life,

these men are able to waste money and time after this fashion, and yet live well, for they eat meat three times a day, what doubt need there be as to a sober hard-working man getting on?26

Such conditions encouraged the emancipist masses to sink into an accepting, apathetic inefficiency with scarcely a spark of self- respect nor yet enough dissatisfaction to produce demands for change.

After 1853 there was no murmur of protest or rebellion from the lower classes. By then most illusions of returning home to Europe had passed and a meagre colonial existence became suffi­cient Elysium. The particular social problem in Hobart for twenty years was neither crime nor social protest but a deep apathy and acceptance which was alien to the minds of nineteenth-century liberals. Protests for wages through strikes and unionism did not begin until a toehold of skill placed some mechanics upon a ladder of progress from which they could measure the achievements of the classes above them.

Fortunately the administrators could fall back upon English precedents for socialising their lower classes. Social consciousness and social conscience were nineteenth-century fashions through­out the European world. Social mechanics, the devising of sys­tems to make the machine run more smoothly, had been recognised as a noble activity at least since Jeremy Bentham’s lifetime earlier in the century. The social investigation of the subcultures of great cities was being practised in England by such diverse reformers as Southwood Smith and Friedrich Engels, even whilst Hobart citizens faced their own problems. Between 1856 and 1876 the investigations into the means for coping with the lower classes in Tasmania gave rise to seven Royal Commissions, four Special Commissions and a dozen Select or Joint Committees of Parlia­ment. The task officially stated in the House of Assembly was that,

the change from bond to free, from single men and women to families, from classes constantly under the eye and control of Government to a community dispersed and detached from Govern-

101A Sort of Unityment supervision and control, requires that the Institutions for the necessitous classes of the people should be reconsidered by the Government.-7

In 1853 a meeting of Protestant churchmen decided to establish a City Mission to assess the extent and condition of Christian observance within the city, and to remedy through concerted action the deficiencies found. The built-up area was broken into three divisions with a missionary to take charge of each. His duties were to poke into every shack and lodging house, to row out to every river-hulk used as a residence, and there were many, to look into the back of every shop and every building recorded in the census, and to find any that were not. The task was long, and complicated by unexpected discoveries. There was a record in the census of a man who lived in a tree between two houses in New Town and it seemed to mean inside the hollow rather than up amongst the branches. Down the creek hanks and on the sides of Knocklofty were huts which had not been known to exist and had never been entered by officials. The original convict camp had been a squatter settlement and some of this nature lingered. At each home the missionaries inquired into the number of residents, their sexes, ages and religious affiliations, whether any church was attended and whether the children went to day or Sabbath schools. The work was never accomplished in full and no definite picture emerged; for the work was beyond the capacity of the men appointed when they found their time absorbed in soothing old and troubled emancipists, sitting with the dying and blessing the sick instead of continuing with their questioning. Yet, accepting the investigation as the best of its kind for a century, it is possible to conclude that about three-quarters of the city slums were explored over an interval of twenty-seven months and that the missionaries’ journeys took in about half of the city area.

In their reports they judged 3,807 individuals to be Visitable’. These were one in six of the population who were deemed to be in need of charitable attention. One-third disclaimed religious affiliation of any form and many others said they were Catholics when the Protestant cleric showed his face, far more than entered the word ‘Catholic’ upon their census forms. A report deplored that,

The deepest ignorance and irreligion prevail. It is common to meet persons to acknowledge that they have not entered a

102 A Sort of UnityChristian sanctuary for the last 7, 10 or even 20 years, except in cases where a christening or a burial has required their presence. Many declare that they have never voluntarily listened to a single sermon since they have resided in the Colony.28

Over half of the children had not enrolled in any school and very few could show that they were regular scholars. Sunday schools were rather better attended than day schools. Many couples, almost a third of those visited, were not formally married. Many could not be because of legal marriages still holding them to spouses in the British Isles. Others chose not to be or had never troubled to gain Convict Department permission to marry and so lived in a condition of sin in the eyes of the missionaries. Down at the wharves the crewmen coming ashore from the merchant ships and whalers mixed with ruined diggers and ex-convicts to produce a romping and boisterous congregation which threatened to spill out and contaminate other slum areas like Veteran’s Row and Watchorn Street. Single men lived in taverns and in the notorious lodging houses which appeared as most ungodly places, each housing perhaps a dozen or twenty men of all ages, young seamen to gnarled London pickpockets. Their aimlessness and despair without families left the missionaries wordless to describe them. They merely stated in their reports that such men remained ‘open to all possible vices’ and left the readers to complete the details from their imagination. The lodging houses without names were worse even than the well-known hostels such as Black Jemmy’s in Argyle Street or John Johnson’s and Joe the Barber’s, while there was little to choose between them and such licensed premises as Mrs Jackson’s Whaler s Return or the barge The Odd­fellow anchored at the Old Wharf, which was the scene of much riotous Saturday behaviour.29

The mission reports related to the turbulent and rich years of unrest which were untypical because of housing shortages, high rents and prices and the many abandoned families. Nevertheless they provide the only available descriptions of what city life was like for the emancipists. The reports are perhaps most interesting as providing evidence of the beginnings of new compassionate interest in local poverty and the news they contained did indeed spur citizens to action. In 1857 the editor of the Colonial Times called a public meeting to discuss the plight of the orphans who slept in the wharf sheds. These were the small, unwanted children

103A Sort of Uniti/who, ‘homeless and penniless, are nightly wandering about, sleep­ing either in the streets, or creeping for shelter in some un­occupied building’.30 These young wanderers, the children of convict parents who died or were ill or imprisoned, caused a great deal of concern. The criminal stigma was not extended to them, for they were regarded as colonists true; native-born whose characters threw reflection upon the integrity of the community from which they had sprung. In 1857 a letter from an anonymous correspondent to the editor of the Colonial Times brought coldly to people’s minds the idea that penal camp obsession with morality and guilt had produced a community which inadequately catered for flesh and blood.

Sir, we have our Missionary Societies for the conversion of the heathen, our City Mission, our noble Bible Society, our Colonial Missionary Society, we have our Religious Tract Society, and Association for the conversion of the Jews to Christianity, we have our Christian Knowledge Society and other such: have we no individuals, sir—I do not ask for a society—who will begin by endeavouring to reclaim these outcasts . . .? 31

The letter described at length the plight of a young convict woman, recently delivered of a bastard child in a free bed in Dr Bedford’s hospital. Acting on her behalf to obtain charitable relief it was found that the established convict camp institutions were too rigidly conceived to cope with such cases of distress. The Brickfield’s Pauper Asylum and the Infirmary wing of the General Hospital accepted only the poor who were sick; the girl was not ill. The Maternal and Dorcas Society would not consider assisting anyone who could be considered depraved, as this girl could. The Penitents’ Home was intended for such sinners but the girl had no wish to be separated from her child and all penitents were expected to show contrition by yielding their bastards to the Queen’s Orphan School. Rejected by all of the institutions of town she had been found sleeping with her baby behind a garden fence.

Another case in the same year concerned James Cunningham, a labourer who was married with a single child. At the Gas Works, where he had found employment, the little-understood fuel acci­dentally blew out part of the retort apparatus. Cunningham was blinded and crippled to the extent of being incapable of ever working again. Dependence upon the existing social provisions

104 A Sort of Unitywould have entailed breaking the small family into three accepted classes of citizens; one more sick pauper, one more ‘orphan’ and one more woman upon the streets. The shocking thing was that the Gas Works company, which was only a group of local share­holders, owed its crippled employee no compensation or con­sideration of any form. Cunningham was lucky that G. W. Walker, ever the philanthropist, was himself a director of the company. Walker took the hat around and invested the .£54 collected in his own savings bank to be doled out shilling by shilling as Mrs Cunningham rented and furnished a small lodging house to support her man and child.32

During these years of inquiry about the local community there was even a private investigation into the state of prostitution in the city. During 1858 the amateur and anonymous reporter claimed that there were over twenty known and recognised brothels, that one Hobart woman in sixteen earned at least some money from prostitution, and that a total of more than 500 of these women were available. Husbands, parents, and paramours, according to the anonymous author, acted as goads or pimps and he gave the impression that any visitor could be expected to be followed about the streets by a crowd of hustlers.33

All such publicity indicated the fresh approach to social prob­lems. Instead of the previous settler disdain and the coercing of the weak through stiff police control, in the manner of the camp officials, there grew an interest in welfare organisations to raise the tone of the community towards a middle-class ideal of decency. During 1859 and 1860 public discussion expressed through parliamentary hearings, newspaper publicity and private debate reached the point where some definitions of the desired ideal could be formulated. Beginning with the recollection of the ‘dark ages’ of Hobart civilisation, when the immoral officials tyrannised a population of sordid criminals, the Committee of the Ragged Schools’ Association looked forward to that day of success when,

that proportion of neglected and ignorant children shall be so small, as not to demand exceptional institutions—when education shall be better appreciated by parents, and the blessings of knowledge shall be the common possession of every order of society—and when the principles of morality and religion shall be diffused through every class.34

105A Sort of UnityThe events after mid-century fortified a growing sense of con­

fidence that there could be a rational and gradualist solution to the problem of a convict community. The author of Words to Women, the tract about Hobart prostitution, believed that the solution lay through community effort to raise the general level of education in the city and a campaign to make the streets clean and tidy. Moral ends could be gained through social means, he suggested. There were many members of the influential Non­conformist congregations who were ready to agree, and to oppose lingering sentiments that improvement and charity should take second place to police control.

The temper which most suited the situation was the evangelical one of individual self-help, the idea that individual responsibility led by way of individual satisfaction to common good. The colonial community had never inherited the British tradition of organic social responsibility by which the rich commanded, employed and succoured their fellow villagers. Perhaps such a complex cultural system was not exportable. To replace it the Anglican High Church concept of a paternal guidance was scarcely satisfactory, nor was the Catholic idea of corporate par­ticipation in a life of faith, hope, and charity sufficient to change attitudes towards employment and living on a daily basis. It was the evangelical churchmen who initiated the pace of reform and maintained its momentum. Many Congregational, Wesleyan and other Methodist, Presbyterian, Baptist, and Quaker men and women spent increasing amounts of their time in work to con­struct a decent, wholesome community. These were the people who saw their own personal salvation lying in the same direction as the improvement of their community and so they were doubly blessed in working to save the convict survivors.

In 1859 the Mercury newspaper printed a most admirably com­prehensive statement of the complex task facing people engaged on the mission to set their community to rights. It was necessary, the writer claimed, for government and citizens to work together to provide,

relief for the sick and the poor, for the widow and the orphan . . . Institutions for the reformation of the abandoned or the preven­tion of crime . . . [education for] the young and that moral and religious instruction which is the surest safeguard against the depravity of our nature . . . and . . . a knowledge of Science, of Art and of Literature amongst the people.35

106 A Sort of UnitijIndeed the surviving settlers were finding at last that there

were truths in the forecasts of the Reverend John West. In 1850, at the centre of agitation which was to lead to the alteration in status to independent colony, West had written that the task to, ‘clear away the refuse of a long-existing social state and to build anew was a formidable undertaking . . .’.30 This task filled the years after 1856 with massive social activity, the colonists had inherited their land, now they were having to cultivate it.

Paupers, Prostitutes, and Pupils

N one of the commissions of inquiry produced a comprehensive scheme for social renewal. Perhaps the problem was too great and the financial resources too slight for any master plan. Yet priorities did emerge to determine the directions of change. It appeared that since the independent colony had inherited a set of institu­tions from the Convict Department these should be adapted to fill some of the needs of the city. Also it became obvious that the physical and social conditions which impeded change needed to he eased before it was worth spending money on improvement. At this point there was a division of opinion, for whilst some people were ready to think about ways to improve the conditions of living, others were more concerned that the lower classes clung to vicious habits which were sinful and led to the breakdown of family and respectability. Yet, whether the task was a moral one or a social one, most people agreed that these habits must be broken to interrupt their train of consequences. But how to alter habits? Many if not most of the emancipists could not be reached by way of improvement, that magic process of the time. If they could not be improved they could, perhaps, be infused with a new spirit of community; one in which all elements of society would be offered a chance to reach for understanding, truth and knowledge. A ladder towards progress could be constructed which could be used by all of the population. There was a growing con­viction that henceforward there must be no continuation of the failings of this generation, that a stop must be put to iniquity with the dying of the transported convicts. The native-born children must be saved if the community’s future were to be assured. This was the vital point; an attitude which explains much in the reac­tions of citizens towards the growth of the charitable associations which began to sprout and blossom after self-government. A

107

108 Paupers, Prostitutes, and Pupilsletter-writer to the Mercury during 1860 pleaded earnestly for full concentration upon ‘this urgent claim for public interference between the neglecting parents and their neglected offspring’. The need was vital and immediate he believed:

This claim if long deferred, will inundate society with a large number of most vicious, ignorant and idle youths, men and women, preying upon the industrious, and absorbing, in their supervision and punishment, infinitely more of the resources of the colony, than would be necessary now to bring up virtuous and industrious citizens. . . .x

It was a question of balance between income and needs. There was a limit to the amount of its wealth a community could spend upon social welfare and reform; it was one matter to decide the most efficient means to achieve an end and another to agree upon the details of financing such social rescue work. The sparks of charity which had raised a small flame in the days of Governor Arthur had been dampened by the penny-pinching restrictions of later British governing. The attempts of the designers of the so- called Probation System to drive a wedge between the settler population and the time-serving convicts had emphasised the official prerogative of welfare responsibility.2 From the time of Denison there was renewed attempt to involve private charity, but the widespread cynicism of government motives which per­sisted into the period of self-government made charitable action an unrewarding battle for the individuals who joined together on committees and boards of directors.3

Few people tried to reach personal glory through public endow­ment as they did in other communities of the English world. Rather than grand gestures being the way of philanthropy, charitable action was achieved through a patient dedication to the Christian task. In a community which gave them hesi­tant support a minority of Hobart people felt impelled by con­viction towards accepting the personal burden of charity. A score of men such as G. W. Walker, Peter Facy, the Salier brothers, and Alfred Kennerley, and a few women such as Sarah Crouch and Grace Salier, provided leadership in philanthropic associa­tions existing with meagre support. A pattern of welfare manage­ment emerged in which the impetus to an association originated with voluntary subscription paid to an elected committee. Since the subscriptions quickly proved inadequate to maintain the

109Paupers, Prostitutes, and Pupilswork, government subsidy was then sought and obtained, and the level of voluntary support could be allowed to lapse further until a larger subsidy was required. The most characteristic form of organisation came to consist of a voluntary committee spend­ing funds which were derived almost entirely from government sources. There were voluntary committees of management appoin­ted even for the 'Depots’, the convict barracks which became pauper workhouses.

Several of the old buildings could be used for housing pauper emancipists; the Cascades’ Female Factory, the Brickfield’s build­ing and the buildings of the Queen’s Orphan Asylum at New Town which were clustered about their own beautiful little church. The need for pauper workhouses was only too obvious— for the ageing convict men and women were losing their ability to live on their wits. Being fuddled and bemused by a lifetime of drink and, lacking kin or family to shelter them, they took to the roads. Benjamin Flughes wandered over all the island and fre­quently came into the city, where he was a familiar sight standing at tavern doors with all of his possessions on his back and the mud of hedges and bush showing at his knees. Flughes was no less than a fabled swagman, humping his pathetic bluey wherever his spirit willed, or more frequently to where he could find a Benevolent Society willing. John Smith, another of the hundreds of similar wanderers, had a bad reputation for persistent begging. The disfigurement of his ugly neck-cancer frightened domestic servants and vicars’ wives at back doors where he waited for bread. Smith’s greatest notoriety, and perhaps his greatest success, was that everywhere he went he was followed by his faithful woman; the two were inseparable tramps. But when Smith accepted the ultimate defeat and allowed himself to be put into the Pauper Asylum, one day when a cold southerly was blowing, then he was parted at the door from his one comfort.4

The standard English rules of least eligibility for workhouses applied in these Tasmanian ones too; the act of the local Parlia­ment which governed the Depots stated that the conditions available within their doors should never be comparable to the minimum standards available outside.5 The theory of the 1834 Poor Law Act in England was that there should be no relief offered to paupers outside of workhouse doors (though most parishes in England continued many of their old relief arrange-

110 Paupers, Prostitutes, and Pupilsments which softened some of the impact of the New Poor Law). The colonial organisers, reading about the letter of English intent and not understanding the spirit, attempted to impose conditions which were harsher than English ones by forcing all aged paupers into the Depots or into useful work. It taxed the Christian spirit of charity to endure the venalities of these toothless felons and many colonists resented the Pauper Asylums as they resented their worthless occupants.

Part workhouse, part infirmary, part prison, the inmates of these institutions were required to undertake to remain sober, to behave like Christians and to wear the government uniform. Those who were still healthy were required to undertake productive work from nine till twelve noon and for two afternoon hours. Their greatest incentive and pleasure was the allowance of one-and- three-quarter ounces of tobacco per week for satisfactory work and, just as it had been in the penitentiary days, deprivation of the tobacco was the main punishment. This disciplinary measure was backed by cancellation of Tuesday passes out of the gates and by the threat of solitary confinement up to forty-eight hours without a magistrate’s order. With official approval the punishing confinement for regulation-breaking paupers could be extended to three months without trial. Absentees were liable to be charged with vagrancy and suffer these punishments, but this was no more than emancipists had known for most of their lives. These old men and women were so inured to threats and insecurity that such details served little to interfere with their incorrigible roving. The Depot discipline could only have been made to work through massive and strict application but the expense of this was far beyond the means of the independent colony. Eventually the supervision of aged paupers softened into a working compromise. The workhouses were always full to overflowing during periods of wet and cold weather but when the sun shone and tales of easy pickings were heard the inmates would drift away again. They would appear on streets and at the back doors of church vestrys, would shamble into view from drawing-room windows or be squatting at the edge of picnic spots waiting to pick over the leavings. The Hobart Town Benevolent Society reported in 1864 that half of its work concerned old invalids, who when provided with a comfortable house in the asylums are constantly leaving

Paupers, Prostitutes, and Pupils 111them without a prospect of supporting themselves otherwise than by begging or stealing’.6

Whether noble swagmen, inefficient emancipist beggars, or depraved social outcasts, such people were the burden of the ex-penal community. The spectre of the wandering, old, hairy beggar was a reality of life, an impediment which it was believed disgusted many visitors and discouraged immigrants. The silent mercy came to be the element of time, for every year the com­munity was able to bury more of its paupers and the under­standing grew that if one could wait long enough this particular problem would solve itself. ‘Until lately’, wrote C. G. H. Furlonge in a pamphlet to persuade doubtful immigrants,

there has been so little immigration that newcomers, being in the minority, have more frequently lapsed into the ways of these ‘old hands’; but as it is now settling in more rapidly, and the old hands are gradually dying off, . . . it may be anticipated that this state of things will not last much longer.7

The workhouses were never a matter of pride to Hobart people, they were a sordid necessity. Most opinion—and it was expressed by George Salier, by the committee of the Benevolent Society, by witnesses before the Parliamentary Commissions and not least by those resting comfortably in the lounges of the Tasmanian Club and the Chamber of Commerce—was that the pauper asylums were too palatial for their unworthy inmates. Many people believed that through offering refuges from poverty they had struck upon ‘the worst device that the folly of man could have employed to infuse the spirit of pauperism among the lowlier classes of the community’.8 Yet what else could be done? If the taxes they paid to maintain the Depots be cut, if the colony did not spend <£6,500 to renew the Depot buildings, then the city would be inundated at all times by these people. Like Asian beggars they would lie and die in the streets. And anyway, as the voice of one man who remembered his Christianity, the Reverend F. Hudspeth, cried before a Royal Commission, ‘The fact is often overlooked that inmates of the Queen’s Asylum are very much like other human beings’.9

The workhouse Depots were the final retreat for the British convicts; the final stage in that long line of humiliating institu­tions from lockup in British shire town, through prison hulk and convict ship, penal station and chain gang to probation station.

112 Paupers, Prostitutes, and PupilsThe workhouses existed within the same stone walls as the convict penitentiaries, the views from their barred windows were the same and to the old men they seemed like softer versions of the familiar. As the caste apart slumbered out its lingering days on the sunshine benches of the unsettled Tasmanian summer there was only one consolation for the community: that whether born of parents who had been convicts or born in respectable beds the native children were indistinguishable by colour, speech or habits from each other. Unlike the offspring of less fortunate societies where the physical brand of discrimination was carried like a flag, in this city only the malicious tongue of foolish gossip remained to separate man from man and woman from woman in the new generation.

Before the task of saving the children could succeed, many thinking people believed that the intolerable vices of alcoholism and prostitution had to be checked. The earliest voluntary associa­tions of the independent community were bent to those ends. Temperance societies and female-rescue associations grew out of their counterparts in the penal era, but were stronger and more actively promoted at the time of rebuilding than any other. During 1854 all of the temperance associations and total absti­nence associations combined into one big union.10 In 1856 this was renamed the Tasmanian Temperance Alliance and a determined effort was made at that time to ensure that the new colony should adopt prohibition following the examples of laws in Maine and New Brunswick. A massive petition organised under the direction of G. W. Walker sent its blue round-robins into every city home.11 Seven thousand signatures were secured, more than a quarter of the population. But since alcohol was a colonial staple not only of pleasure but also of considerable excise income this reform failed. The prohibitionists accepted the token victory of dry Sundays and yielded before the more moderate temperance advocates, who commenced a long campaign to provide such attractive alternatives that the taverns would lose their allure. Tea-drinking orgies would replace those of Mauritius rum, and glees and melodies would fill social gaps. A meeting room and library with warm reading room would supplement coffee houses and temperance lodgings. The People's Friend, a temperance newspaper, would keep everyone in touch with the progress of

Paupers, Prostitutes, and Pupils 113this great cause in the service of which several men like Peter Facy lived and died.12

The realisation of the need for organic soundness in civic relationships with an end to temptation characterised the theo­retical approach to prostitution, but in practice the convict forms of control prevailed. Laws against the trade remained stricter than elsewhere, any woman suspected of selling herself was treated as a prostitute until she could prove otherwise and on all occasions the burden was placed upon the woman to show she had no venereal disease. But the law, the police, and gaols to­gether had little effect until a Lock Hospital was begun in the Cascades Building. The Lock Hospital idea was hastily pushed through a shamed Parliament after the Premier received word from the Commander of the Pacific Squadron of the British Navy that Hobart was considered too dangerous a port of call for his ships, for they were losing too many crewmen from diseases contracted there.13 Meanwhile voluntary work tackled the edges of the problem. A new Home for the Depraved was begun in 1857 under the patronage of the Governor’s wife, and Sarah Crouch opened her justly renowned Gore House Home for Servants which, by providing cheap rooms, fuel, and respectable company for girls languishing between jobs, attempted to keep them from the streets and taverns.

The essentially practical nature of the organisation which was necessary was clearly illustrated by the needs of destitute or unmarried mothers. The old system of pushing the mother into the Depot and the child into the Orphan School self-evidently created more dependent citizens and severed family connections. The Maternal and Dorcas Society kept to its part of the task by seeing poor but respectable mothers through their confinements; supplying layettes and home visitors (there were no midwives in the city so their attendance was not in question).14 The Hobart Town Benevolent Society began a lying-in home for unmarried mothers, the costs of which were reimbursed entirely out of government funds. The ticklish point was raised that if money spent was later reimbursed then this was using subscriber’s virtuous money on the depraved—subsidies for sin as it were— and, after a stormy General Meeting of the Benevolent Society, the Treasury was called upon to furnish working credit in advance to save good money being spent on bad women.15

114 Paupers, Prostitutes, and PupilsThe moral guardian function of the Benevolent Society was

secondary to its central concern, which was to keep as many citizens as possible above the 'poverty line’. The ideas behind the Society’s creation were discussed before the Parliamentary Com­mission of 1858.10 A benevolent society could provide a source of relief unofficial in nature, and hence more acceptable to the poor, to prevent people in distress from becoming completely indigent. It was to be a fence between decency and the Depots and as such it grew to be the city’s central welfare institution. The Society’s committee, made up from leading citizens and churchmen, came to be the sole arbiter of alms-giving and relief-provision in Hobart as it evolved into the local version of London’s Charity Organiza­tion Society. Its officers kept a record of each mendicant, sold soup tickets to householders so that they might give these to beggars in place of their own food or money (ensuring that no beggar could turn his need into a profession) and acted as a clear­ing house to advise the Police Magistrates, W. Tarleton and B. T. Solly, on the needs of individual cases. The Society’s officers made the decision whether each particular applicant needed hospital treatment, Depot admission, regular outdoor assistance or temporary relief.17

Subscriptions paid during 1859 and a few years after were satisfyingly regular, but in the harder times the funds available from voluntary sources dwindled away, to be unobtrusively re­placed by higher government subsidies. The elected committee of twenty-nine and the membership, which averaged less than seventy men and women, resolutely rejected each attempt by the government to increase official control over the spending of these funds. The founder of the Society was a churchman, the Vener­able Archdeacon Davies, other city ministers of all denominations were committee members ex officio, whether they wanted to be or not, whilst each Mayor was President of the Society. The actual hard work was done by a paid agent under the instructions of the Chairman. Alfred Kennerley, an Anglican parliamentarian, held the original executive position and Dr E. Swarbreck Hall, the city’s Officer of Health and most prominent lay Catholic, was a later Chairman. Other men who dedicated their days to this organisation were: Thomas J. Crouch, the teetotalling Wesleyan who attended Benevolent Society meetings for thirty years;18 Philip Oakley Fysh, a new immigrant who became a liberal

115Paupers, Prostitutes, and Pupilspolitician and successful Premier; David Lewis, the 1852 friend of the emancipists who survived that experience to prosper in local business; R. A. Mather, the representative of the city’s Society of Friends community; and R. G. Gray, the City Mis­sionary for whom philanthropy became a profession.19

The fortunes of the Benevolent Society constitute an entire story on their own. Old emancipists were provided with just enough relief to keep them out of people’s hair, or were bundled into the Depots. An apparently inexhaustible stream of old beg­gars flowed into Hobart from the country districts whenever the weather or the wool prices took a turn for the worse. Every family in trouble, every wife left abandoned with children, while men crossed to the mainland or chased New Zealand gold, came into the city for relief. If there were any able men with them then these wage-earners were given wood to chop in the Society’s yard before being sent on their way to find work. But the com­mittee was determined that, whatever the cost, the children should not be turned away onto the roads of the colony. In the first year of the Society’s operation more than 1,000 children were fed and given clothes in the attempt to prise the ‘numberless, help­less children’ from their Vicious, drunken and idle parents. . . ’.20 Here again it was decided not to separate families for fear that such separation would relieve ‘the worthless father or mother, or both, of their natural responsibility and thus render them more capable of indulging in their dissolute habits . . .’.21 It would also perpetuate the unnatural isolation of children in the Orphan Schools.

The Queen’s Orphan Schools were an invention of the Convict Department which lingered into the free colony. Children, the many children of the baby boom of the gold years, were the hope and joy of an independent land but many of them were fathered by the worthless convicts who died, or wandered, or went into prison, or in some fashion failed as parents. Children originally admitted to the Queen’s Orphan Asylum were either true orphans or the neglected children of convicts, babies born between the dark walls of the Female Factory or in less savoury places. During 1858 the system was extended to accommodate colonial orphans (those of free parents) at a charge to the Tas­manian Government of Is. 3d. per day.22 Meanwhile, despite independence and the ending of transportation, the Convict

116 Paupers, Prostitutes, and PupilsDepartment retained nominal control of the Institution. The Orphanage became a symbol of the previous system, an anomalous continuation of the old regime which was criticised heavily by the free colonists. Life inside was never intended to be pleasant. Amelia Jones and Ann McKenna both lived there all their lives. In their evidence to a Royal Commission in 1859 Ann did not know her age. Amelia, at twenty-four, was illiterate and worked as a housemaid.23 These girls may have been mentally defective, as most orphans were sent out at the age of fourteen, the boys to be apprenticed as farm labourers and the girls as domestics in the supposed Arcadian innocence of the country districts. At one time it was shown that over half of these youths found their way back into the city after a year or two; the Orphan Schools were not a way to break the old habits.

Nor did conditions within the schools seem to do more than brutalise the pupils in the way the penal system had done. R. Giblin, a head teacher there, had found it necessary to punch the boys to keep order. In 1859 a little girl died after she had been whipped, there was public outcry that such things were not going to continue to scandalise the free colony, and the inquiry revealed shocking conditions. Mortality rates were appalling, the food was atrocious, the staff all appeared to be manipulating the books. Yet teaching there was no holiday, with classes of seventy ranging in age from seven to fourteen. Children supposedly learned morals, literacy and industrial training. They did their own housework and slept segregated in four great dormitories corresponding to the four great divisions of mankind; male, female, Catholic and Protestant. The Report of the Royal Com­mission found them to be unruly, defiant and difficult, yet reprimanded the Matron for her use of the gutta-percha horse­whip and noted with satisfaction that she had discarded it for a leather strap. Soon these schools passed into colonial management and were allowed to run down, there were fewer orphans from the newly-stable population and the Benevolent Society kept many families intact.

The easing situation allowed room for other organisations to strike directly at the source of social regeneration, breaking the link between parent and child. For the paradox was that, though family stability had to be encouraged, the emancipist parents could not be trusted to teach right values to their children. The

117Paupers, Prostitutes, and Pupilsgroup which was most effective in correcting parental laxity called itself the Ragged Schools’ Association. Its major strength was the passion of its members for scouting and routing the back streets and wharves for pinched little faces and shoeless feet. This was the positive social drive to nudge and cajole and bully which government school or department could never do.

A morbid jealousy of Government action is characteristic of the class of parents we have to deal with . . . an amount of personal interest, and a force of personal suasion, are required such as no rigid system can embrace and no official appointment secure.24

Ragged schools began in 1853 in a three-room house along Watchorn Street, the rent being paid by William Rout. A second house was taken at the Wapping end of Collins Street and another towards Goulburn Street, so that there was a school centred in every low class area. Evening classes in Bible reading came first from volunteer teachers but later there were day classes for the youngsters and evening vocational classes for teenagers. Many more than 1,000 street arabs were subjected to this pressure before 1860. If on the one hand parents needed constant bullying to maintain the children’s attendance, on the other they made little objection to this interference in their family affairs by committee visitors. Parents seemed happy enough to accept what was being done. The Ragged Schools’ Association soon began supplying a little in the way of food for the pupils and even suits of clothes (though the old ones had to be burned or else the new found their way into Liverpool Street pawn shops within the hour).

Funds for the schools of the Association, which were all Protes­tant controlled, were raised from subscriptions yet these were replaced through time by the inevitable government subsidy. The farce of voluntary charity was brutally exposed when the Catholic controllers of a denominational ragged school, called St Luke’s, applied for parity of subsidy with the Protestant schools in 1878.25 The thought of state subsidy for Catholic education shocked all low church consciences. Stormy protest meetings pro­duced resignations and threats of abandoning the schools of the Protestant Association; but the scare stimulated no renewal of voluntary financial support. If anything it had the opposite effect and the valuable social work had to continue with the hypocrisy

118 Paupers, Prostitutes, and Pupilsrevealed and both the Catholic and the Protestant schools operat­ing on taxpayers’ money.20

By no means all thoughtful citizens saw universal education as a means of social rescue, but a majority were in favour of extend­ing the public school system to all children. Those active in this cause produced major reorganisations in the government educa­tion system in 1853, in 1857, and again in 1863.27 It was a period of great change in schooling methods the world over and educa­tional advance was uncertain and uneven everywhere, for it was one of the most confused and difficult tasks which Victorian people set themselves. In Hobart the problem was confounded by more than the reluctance of the middle classes to pay for fancy ideas exercised on behalf of the children of convicts. The school- age population as a proportion of total population rose dramati­cally in numbers through the decade of the 1850s. At the beginning of the period about 20 per cent of city people were of school ages, while at the end almost 30 per cent were. The vote for education had to increase proportionately merely to maintain educational standards.28 This increase appeared to be possible in 1853, and likely even in 1857, but it was manifestly impossible in 1863. By then the public finances were at a very low ebb. Moreover Tasmanians, with their problem population, were pay­ing out three or four times as much as other Australian colonists for the various organs of socialisation, social relief, and social reform. The expenses of social control and charitable institutions left less for schools. During the 1860s New Zealanders spent three times as much per head and South Australia, the most niggardly Australian colony, spent almost twice as much per head as Tas­manians did on education.29 Parliament allocated a slightly increased vote to the public education system from a rapidly fall­ing budget, yet with the rise in school population the amount available per scholar fell from £-3 8s. in 1861 to £ 2 10s. in 1870.

Results were more crowded classrooms and continued use of such dreadful old buildings as huts tacked onto the sides of churches, with earth floors and leaking roofs; but most important of all was the slump in the quality of teachers. A Principal and staff for a hopeful Normal School were appointed during the ambitious 1850s, and a half dozen college-trained teachers were imported from England. The worth of training in colleges was demonstrated by the long lasting influence of these few men. The

119Paupers, Prostitutes, and Pupilspresence of James Rule, James Bonwick, and R. Leach had more effect upon education in Tasmania than all the private peda­gogues and local teachers. They rivalled John Buckland and Richard Harris in influence. Financial stringency led to the abandoning of plans for the Hobart Normal School and resort instead to a system of teacher-apprenticeships, in which new teachers learned their trade acting as monitors to the old; helping out in crowded classrooms.

Two or three trained teachers introduced from the Mother Country were doing excellent work under great difficulties, there being a very meagre supply of even the simplest school appliances. A few others, not specially trained, but possessing that natural aptitude for teaching and management which is the best of all qualifications, were also doing good work. The rest were, for the most part, persons whose only qualification was that they had never attempted any other business but that of keeping school, or had been placed in their present position from mistaken motives of charity. . . .30

Lack of skill amongst teachers brought as its corollary stricter central control of the public school system, in an attempt to main­tain standards from above. Promotion by results and frequent inspection of schools kept teachers up to the mark, but helped to reduce education to a formalisation of rote-learning and the profession of teaching to a menial fee-dependent and supervisor- ridden boredom. For such reasons the public school system lost much of its opportunity to alter social habits. Compulsory attend­ance was an ineffective legal myth for many years31 and only one- quarter of school-age children regularly attended public schools. Nevertheless the emancipist parents had never enjoyed even such opportunities and education remained important as a force for the severance of generations.

Ragged and day schools together did not cover the problem of the utterly neglected children; gaol and Orphan School had absorbed these delinquents blindly enough but only by reducing them to the lowest level. The Reverend T. Gellibrand, whilst on holiday in Europe, became an ardent admirer of German and English models of Industrial Schools where young offenders were treated as unprotected children, were taken into residence, given firm control and taught useful skills before being released into the community on probation. Gellibrand’s return to Hobart initiated public activity,

120 Paupers, Prostitutes, and Pupilsa public meeting was convened at the Alliance Rooms, . . . A committee was then appointed to take action on this subject, and was constituted of individuals of known philanthropy belonging to almost every religious denomination.32

An Act of Parliament followed which permitted children found begging, vagrant, in the company of reputed thieves, orphaned, deserted or declared uncontrollable to be admitted into such schools—the perfect instrument it seemed for bridging the final gap in the control of the young. Yet the relationship between philanthropic initiative by individuals and government interven­tion had reached a delicate point. Colonial subsidy was offered to the Industrial Schools from the beginning and there was to be no farce that they were subscription affairs. On the other hand the government would accept no part in initiating the organisation of such schools; for philanthropy was thought to be the responsibility of its private advocates and citizens were expected to tread where government could only provide funds.

A girls’ Industrial School soon grew from the Female Refuge where several churchwomen already supervising older girls could take in children by using the proffered subsidy to engage staff and increase accommodation.33 The lack of a committee for a boys’ school was overcome, after long vacillation, by the forthright action of Alfred Kennerley who paid £1,756 from his own pocket for house, land, and furniture. He took in twenty boys on his own initiative and challenged his fellows to take up the work from there on. This was one of the few examples of charitable endow­ment in the history of this town.34 Kennerley was repaid from government capital and voluntary subscription but the home retained his name in recognition of his generosity. The boys spent their mornings at cooking, washing, wood-cutting, milking, and gardening and their afternoons at lessons which included Anglican Bible instruction.

When it is considered that most of the boys when application is made for their admission are described as ‘wild’, ‘unmanageable’, and the like, it is the more remarkable that they should be joined living together month after month, not only with no attempt to escape and return to the old freedom, but with the happy con­tentment which marks a well ordered home.35

Their case histories illustrate the problems of these years after transportation had ceased. Only eight of the first twenty-six boys admitted to the Home had fathers alive: of these two were in

121Paupers, Prostitutes, and Pupilsprison, three were invalid and three had abandoned their families. One child was described as, ‘Father dead, mother not to he found, boy apprehended on the wharf living in boilers, deser­ted, friendless and destitute’. Another had no mother and his father ‘learning at Launceston there was a Home for poor boys at Hobart Town, walked down in fourteen days in a very weak state of health and, having succeeded in his object, endeavoured to return there, but was found dead in the bush near Campbell Town’.36

In Britain a measure of the dignity of the working man, a mark of his right to be considered a decent citizen with electoral privileges shared with property owners, came to be the existence of Working Men’s Colleges of various kinds. There there were many able and intelligent men whose rise in social status was blocked by the old social immobility. Such characters benefited greatly from Dr Birkbeck’s Institutes and were able to maintain adult education schemes under their own momentum. The situa­tion was quite different in the colonies, for here such a cor­responding type of person, with intellectual ability and literary skill, was mobile both geographically and socially. Hobart’s work­ing men had no hidden nucleus of leaders who could shine through adult education. From 1826 the Hobart Town Mechanics’ Institute enjoyed indifferent success until the 1850s tide of independence optimism swept the movement into full flood.37 A rival Mechanics’ School of Arts enjoyed a brief day at the beginning of the decade and the Institute was brilliantly re­organised in 1857 to carry forward the work of offering urbane advantages to the working men. It was rediscovered that the School of Arts Committee had found:

not only is there a general desire for self improvement among the working classes, but that apprentices and young persons whose season of school-improvement has passed away are not indifferent to the necessity of mental cultivation.38

The Institute assumed a place alongside the associations for pro­moting temperance, for inhibiting prostitution and for maintain­ing families within the borderlines of respectable society as a means of social regeneration. The aim of the volunteer committees was,

without false modesty the civilization and mental improvement of hundreds whose only source of recreation, prior to the formation

122 Paupers, Prostitutes, and Pupilsof these Institutes has been the unrefined and grovelling indul­gence of mere sensual gratifications, . . .39

When the new committee took over from the fading old one in 1857 the Reverend John Lillie, G. W. Walker, and other stalwarts who had patiently tended the Institute affairs for a quarter of a century, took their leave. A brisk drive brought the highest attendance and membership of any voluntary institution. The day, 18 June 1857, was proclaimed a civic half holiday to com­memorate the Institute’s thirtieth anniversary and in celebration the government raised its annual subsidy from £,150 to £250 and granted a free site for a hall in Melville Street. All was poised for renewal, ‘there are at least three thousand residents in this city, who are, or ought to be, interested in the promotion of its success’.40 Classes were to be bright and apposite; visiting teachers rented classrooms and were allowed to take a small profit. Systematic courses in literacy and science replaced the erudite flourishes which had formerly passed for lectures. The 1857 Chemistry Session worked its way from light and heat, through animal electricity and chemical philosophy to the principles of organic analysis. The Inspector of Schools, J. J. Stutzer, taught English language by dictating long passages which were to be copied scrupulously in longhand.41

By 1859 the whole flourish was in a state of collapse; the Ladies’ Art Class was the only group still in regular session and everyone knew what that meant in an Institute. Musical evenings, social outings, and the excellent library which fed the entertainment- hungry middle classes were all very well, too well, patronised, but of mechanic-students there were none.

The attention of the Committee has been directed to the un­justifiable attacks which have been of late made upon the manage­ment . . . they have endeavoured to do all that lay in their power to import an Educational character to the Institution . . . fre­quently, at what cost, and with what little return, classes for systematic study have been formed . . . If the working classes will not avail themselves of their privileges, surely it is unreasonable to cast the blame on the Directors.42

It was conceded that the adults were too heavily stained by con­vict experience and would not avail themselves of improvement. It was an example of the disappointments awaiting the men and women of Hobart who were dedicated to the task of social regeneration. For each step upon the ladder of progress seemed

Paupers, Prostitutes, and Pupils 123less substantial from above than from below. Even as the means were established the worth of the enterprise came into question once more. Projects which appealed in the optimistic conditions following self-government appeared beyond attainment during the decade which followed.

^ 8A Loss of Faith

D uring 1862 Maxwell Miller, the proprietor of the Tasmanian Daily News who had been elected to the new Parliament, stood before an audience in the hall of the Mechanics’ Institute. Many of the benches were empty, though this was a political meeting and not one of the surviving Institute classes. Miller’s tale was of woe but not one of the old stories of injustice or convict threat. He began by describing the terrible dullness which seemed recently to have smitten the town and the forlorn look of the cob webbed windows of 860 houses deserted along the streets. He lamented that the number of labouring men had fallen from 4,500 in 1851 to 3,000 in 1861. Houses seemed to be bare of ser­vants, there were less than half as many cooks, housemaids, and grooms around as there had been ten years before. Birth rates had been dropping steadily since the previous decade when the city had been full of babies. The rates had gone down past the expected level of 35 births per 1,000 population to 29 per 1,000, which was a disturbingly low level during the nineteenth century.1

Nor was Miller the sole prophet of woe. The Government Census Officer, Edwin C. Nowell, suspected he knew of mys­terious forces at work reducing the vigour of the proud colonial people. He believed that the fields, now being long past their virgin fertility, needed rejuvenation through manures, but this old farming practice had been neglected and forgotten through the careless, easy years. Everyone was eating vegetables grown on phosphate-deficient soil and the chemical lack made Tasmanians lose their vigour and reduced the number of pregnancies. Add cow manure, he advised, and raise the birth rate.2

Empty houses, fewer children, lack of working men—an ener­vating lethargy and dullness had crept in with the decade of the

124

A Loss of Faith 1251860s. The spirit and fire, the sense of making and mission, had ebbed away and no-one knew where it had gone.

The young men brought up here leave continually for the other colonies where they often do very well, but this is just draining the place of its life blood. It makes it very disheartening for those who are left.3

Such was the comment of J. B. Walker, returned from Britain, resident once more in the city and a sensitive diarist of events in the town. It seemed to be true that many young men found life boring in the island capital and wandered away. It was believed that this had been true both during the convict years and through­out the gold rushes which followed, but no-one had worried about it then for the desires to leave had been understandable. During the 1860s, after some experience of independence, it was different. Now it was colonists who were leaving, native sons, men whose fathers one knew, youths whom one had seen at school. They were abandoning the home land which ought to nurture them. George Stanton Crouch joined the rush to the New Zealand gold­fields in 1863. His father was the temperance worker and his mother the inspiration of Hobart’s Female Refuges. George Crouch found his gold in Invercargill through ownership of both of the rival Southland News and Southland Times as he intro­duced to the roaring digger port the Wesleyan message of hope and self-denial. It was the lure of New Zealand opportunities which took him away to spread the habits he had learned in Tasmania.4 It was the attractions of big city life in Melbourne and Sydney which called E. O’Sullivan from his boy’s job with the Mercury in Hobart. After years of experience he found a place in the political fray of New South Wales.5 Every attraction away showed that someone lacked incentive to build up a Tasmanian career and was a loss of that contribution to community life. There was a bitter element growing with it too. Small frustrations of hopes began to be felt as the initiation of independent govern­ment was accomplished and the basic wrangling had been com­pleted. There was a tendency to look for instant success and, on its failure to show, there crept in the disillusioning thought that no matter what plans were laid the community remained its old fallible self, changing slowly if at all.

The bitterest farewell to the city was paid by Dr Bedford. Bedford as much as any person had cast his future with this

126 A Loss of Faithcommunity. He had returned full of enthusiasm from training at British hospitals. He had patronised local painters, played his part in Royal Society and Mechanics’ Institute, started St Mary’s Hospital, organised the Hobart Medical School and joined local education boards. By his duties as Medical Officer of Health on various committees and meetings he had done much to provide a solid, professional basis for civic institutions. Bedford’s growing disillusionment was typical of many but more voluble than most. Sickened of constant conflict with fellow citizens, plagued by bickering and self-seeking, dejected by lack of signs of change and progress he was called before a Parliamentary Royal Com­mission inquiring into the working of the local hospital systems in 1861.6 The inquiries, debates and soul-searchings about the forms for society had involved Bedford and his fellow citizens for several years and they were still continuing, but he had had enough of it. He told the Commissioners a weary tale of his hopes for community and the blind folly of their rejection by confused and muddling men, 1 have pressed for years on this community subjects which were new . . .’.7 He claimed that these subjects included methods for the suppression of pauperism as a means of moral regeneration and for the encouragement of a proud, responsible and independent working class. He said T have laboured daily for twenty years in support of these views’. But progress was minimal, as too many citizens seemed still enchained by the old penal settlement fixations and too ready to hope that the convict classes would stay as ineffectual, inefficient paupers rather than risk their competition in open society. Bedford resigned his official appointments, turned his back on Hobart and settled in Sydney with his brother-in-law, Sir Alfred Stephen, to become associated with the Prince Alfred Hospital in the larger city.8

The widespread sense of frustration was the result of the grow­ing self-image of a community, insular, and inward-looking. These were new emotions representing a new phase, for until this decade the transient and immigrant nature of the townspeople had pre­vented such melancholic thoughts. Jeremiahs began to be heard. Were future riches assured, was it worth putting capital into development? Anthony Trollope, travelling south along the wind­ing convict highway in a red English coach, expressed his admiration for the posthorn, the soft upholstery and old-worldly, rather decadent, charm but noticed an unkempt, neglected look

127A Loss of Faithto the fields and houses. He listened to the complaining of dis­satisfaction and failed to see its cause.9 Governor Thomas Gore Brown was persuaded that it was the convict inheritance still dragging which held back the economy. The work force he thought was quite noticeably different from one which had always been free.10 Edward Braddon, fresh from India, was dismayed at Tasmanian lethargy and apathy. He commented on the one o’clock dinner-hour with elastic sides, he thought that ‘today’ and ‘now’ were words which workmen did not understand, yet it was a happy land with decent conditions, little incentive to dishonesty and very little reason for self-pity.11 Yet perhaps this was the problem; that the social fabric created by the colonists was sound but the materials of an ex-convict labouring class were shoddy. They are lazy and depraved, demanding high wages and doing bad work’ noted J. B. Walker in 1865.12 During all the years when the British taxpayer had stood the expense the inefficiency of convict labour had not mattered; the highways, bridges and stone buildings which were the colony’s glory had been formed by slow, reluctant hands. But what use was such a workforce in a separate, independent and unprotected colony which lived upon the produce of its own labour?

John West had told the anti-transportation settlers that their land would ‘not become a desert’.13 But now surely the special pleading of his polemic was exposed. The customary sources of wealth were drying up. The subsidy from the British commissariat steadily dwindled through the 1860s from its highpoint of <£4 per head of population in a year. The soldiers’ garrison gradually withdrew its spending in preparation for the withdrawal of troops.14 The markets for grain and meat and re-exports began to close. For thirty years the island had helped supply the spread of settlement across the vastness of the mainland with food and hardware and clothes, but the gold rushes which produced the zenith of the trade also brought it into wane; for afterwards the mainland cities were sufficiently established to provide goods for their hinterlands.15 Even through the New Zealand gold rushes Melbourne and Sydney stole the cream from Hobart’s eager merchants. Mainland competitors came to feel the pinch a little after the Victorian gold years had over-extended their capital confidence. Throughout southern Australia trading became shar­per during the 1860s. Mainland legislatures protected infant

128 A Loss of Faithindustries against outside competition and Tasmania was left an isolated island.

During 1859 exports fell below <£1,000,000 in value for the first time in a decade.16 The value of timber exports was quartered, that of grain exports halved and only the wool staple remained undiminished in this period when the whale fleets had not been reconstituted to their previous strength. During 1854, a rich year, the cost of goods imported had been almost double the income from goods exported from the island. Deficits such as this, though seldom so extreme, had been usual for many years and had always been met out of the capital brought in by immigrants and the British subsidies. The hidden exports which had kept the colony solvent over many years had included the sale of services ren­dered to the Convict Department. In contrast, during the 1860s any wild spending of this sort had to be paid for out of capital accumulation; for trading profits barely paid for essential imports. Coin on deposit fell over a year or two from £1,000,000 to less than £200,000, the rest went out to creditors. Local manufactur­ing slumped as all of the small enterprises founded to supply the gold diggers faded once more. And moreover, with more efficient shipping and improving sales-distribution techniques, the mass products of factories in Britain appeared more regularly and more cheaply upon Hobart retailers’ shelves. The 1860s was the decade in which the industrial revolution began to have telling inter­national effect. Wood-shingled roofs steadily yielded to North Wales’ slate and South Wales’ iron; the first Oregon beams re­placed heavier, difficult eucalypt across the timbers of roofing, now fastened by Black Country factory nails instead of hand- forged local ones. Cobalt blue pottery from Liverpool, Chelsea, Stoke, and Delft nudged out the rough Pottery Road products and household gadgets ingeniously contrived of cast iron and wood relieved the drudgery of domestic work. Candles of paraffin wax and soaps of vegetable oils replaced sheep tallow products. The local market was too small to support useful industry. It became more profitable to send away the hides and tallow, to supply blackwood for Victorian wheelwrights’ shops and stone for Melbourne buildings; to send all of the primary products of the soil away untreated and to buy back the processed articles of leather or wool. It was useless to attempt processing on a small and inefficient scale. Industrialisation as a model for the city was

129A Loss of Faitha faded vision from this decade, leaving a few small, specialised workshops sheltering from the free trade in mass industrial pro­ducts. And moreover, what was not less important, imported goods were now being trans-shipped first in Melbourne so that the larger ships could miss out the journey south to Hobart Town.17

The sun still shone, the breezes blew, but the economic status of the small capital city slipped firmly from the exalted levels it had enjoyed towards a position as capital of a small colony and distribution centre for the southern part of Tasmania. The northern half was better reached from Melbourne through the Bass Strait ports. As trade slumped and depression seemed to settle over the countryside no one starved; the land was extensive enough to supply food for many times the population which existed upon it. There were few bankruptcies and slow profit was still possible from unspectacular consumer demand. Labourers and craftsmen could still make a living better than that available to the majority of their relatives in Britain.18 But, if survival could still be pleasantly achieved, it was clear that there were now no fortunes to made here. Fortunes were elsewhere, a hint of exile crept in, a sense of missing the events of the world and this was an enervating feeling, particularly for the young and lusty.

And so Maxwell Miller talked to his audience about the 860 empty houses along the streets of town and of the seemingly never-ending stream of young men leaving to make their careers elsewhere. Was Hobart to be a ghost town deserted by all its talents? This came to appear very likely, particularly as Miller developed his theme. He said,

And now I would ask the attention of the meeting while I give a rough, hut I think, an approximation, to the number of adults between the ages of 21 and 45 who have abandoned the colony during the last few years. . . .

Thereupon he produced a detailed calculation based on migration records and census counts which bewildered most of his audience. He concluded,

so that there has been an actual decrease in our males of 3,907 upon our total population. And this took place at a time when we were importing migrants . . . in all 4,524 persons at a cost of £-52,805 3s. 9d. [otherwise, without migrants] our male adults would have been over 5000 less than they were 4 years ago.19

130 A Loss of FaithHe viewed with alarm the departure each day of twenty-five working men from the colony. The sense of depopulation was strongest in the capital city which had once been so prosperous. All economic conditions seemed to support his gloom, the empty houses and the difficulty of finding good labour, even whilst there was still unemployment of rough unskilled hands. And the depres­sion in confidence was perhaps worse; the tedium of the slump in marriages and births, the dullness of social activity, the falling membership of the Royal Society, the closing of private schools. Everything contributed to the loss of faith in home. Blame was cast to right and left; upon the Victorians for their discriminatory tariffs and upon the land for its infertility, but mostly upon the scapegoat of the emancipists for their lack of vigour. There was a loss of hope as profound as any of the booms of confidence through the good years before. It became a custom to denigrate the town, to belittle home and dream of far-off places where things happened.20 Tasmania’s rustication, its idyll, was the mood of the 1860s which became a waiting-period when all of the trends so rapidly changing in the years before became fixed and set and rigid. It was a time when the old covert fears of in­adequacy, the hated stain of convictism from which all Hobartians cringed, became fortified by ideas of further inadequacies due to isolation and insularity, so that the settler classes had secured their castle but they remained neurotically fearful of all signs of challenge to it.21

Neither Miller nor his contemporaries could see the reality behind their fears. Miller relied upon statistics gained from census counts, and did not handle them too competently. It was the inaccuracy of migration statistics which led him to assess incorrectly the census figures and to see calamity where there was only a changing population structure.22 The emigration he feared was at worst the re-establishment of old patterns of behaviour. It was not at anything near the old levels of magni­tude as had existed during the 1840s when everyone had looked with favour upon the loss of ‘Van Diemonians’. The massive emigration Miller thought he witnessed in 1862 was mainly illu­sion; many young men left, for there was much coming and going in ships and most ambitious youths sampled life away from the island. But most who went away returned and depopulation was a slackening problem not an intensifying one during the 1860s.

131A Loss of FaithThe drop in emigration rates during the twenty years from mid­century was hidden by the varying rate of immigration. At times immigration was strong and then emigration was not noticed; at other times, when immigration was slack, all attention was focused upon the emigrants from the island, for there was then a dearth of new faces to supplant the old and a slackness in selling goods and leasing land. Through all of these changes people were leav­ing to live elsewhere, but the numbers leaving were gradually lessening as the community became more settled and more home- proud. As immigration eased it left the emigration more obvious to those who stayed and watched.23

During the 1840s the immigration of both free labourers and convicts had hidden the large-scale emigration which was mainly of emancipists. From 1852 there was all of the coming and going of the gold years which left a surplus on the island, though it was the talk of leaving to go digging which left the strongest impres­sion. During the gold decade, when both legend and statistics maintained the myth that the island suffered massive depopula­tion (5,037 persons in all according to the migration records), there was an actual net gain of 8,167 persons. After 1857 the free immigration faded away with self-government and the continuing habit of emigration to the larger colonies appeared as startling and worrying for the first time; even though it was at a lower rate than during the previous years.

Moreover Miller’s statistical method was inadequate. His calcu­lation of the number of men aged between twenty-one and forty- five made no allowance for the age structure of the population. Because the community was largely of immigrant origins (in­cluding convicts) there was a preponderance of mature-age men and a corresponding lack of adolescents and of women. Thus when immigration slackened in the mid-1850s the age groups of the population remained frozen in these proportions. Through the following decade many of the men growing older passed out of the census group of males aged twenty-one to forty-five years, but since there had been few adolescents in the population there were not as many young men turning twenty-one to take their places in the census group. Thus it was not necessary for there to be any emigration for the census totals to show a loss of working-age men. It is clear that from 1851 to 1861 less than 3,000 men actually emigrated from the island whilst over 8,000

132 A Loss of Faithappeared to have been lost in the census totals and Miller grasped at the illusion to prove his story.

Yet, though Miller was wrong and there was only a slight increase in emigration over a year or two, he was rightly con­cerned at this abrupt loss of men from the workforce. The causes of the loss in the long run were the ending of transportation and the ending of immigration. The adjustments between one pattern of population renewal and another, between a community depen­dent upon immigrants to one dependent upon its own natural increase, reduced the city’s workforce by 1,000 men and increased the number of dependants by 2,500. The percentage of male breadwinners in the community fell from 35 to 22 in a period when 32 per cent of the British population were mature males engaged in productive work. It can be seen from this how quickly the Hobart community reverted from one advantaged by the transportation of working men to one disadvantaged by their selective age grouping. By 1870 there were more Hobart men aged between forty and sixty years than there were men aged between twenty and forty years. Working males aged twenty to fifty years constituted only 15 per cent of the total population, whilst the numbers of children whom they supported had doubled since 1850. All of these figures reveal a kinked population struc­ture which had as much effect upon prosperity as did directly economic setbacks.24

To make the results of these changes more intense the gold profits altered the proportions of the various occupations in the city. In the smaller workforce of the 1860s there were more gentle­men, merchants, professional men and shopkeepers and cor­respondingly a smaller proportion of labourers and mechanics than there had been before the gold rushes.25 The workforce of 1860 was a less productive one than in 1850 and this helped to bring about the dullness of trade at the time Miller spoke. Nor was emigration alone responsible for the empty houses of Hobart. Corrected emigration totals show that the houses which were registered as unoccupied during a five year period of the 1860s were sufficient to have held the emigrants of twenty-five years, let alone of five. Empty houses were a fallacious signal of doom, for they were caused by the changing nature of the population. During the convict years many childless adults living singly or in pairs had pushed together their own rough dwellings to avoid

133A Loss of Faithlife in the penal institutions.26 By 1860 the same people were either dead, living with younger relations or consigned to the Depots. They had been replaced as tenants by young families. The occupied houses of these later years held a much more crowded population of parents with children and many of the small, single lodgings had fallen into disuse; to appear broken- windowed signs of dereliction, desertion, and despair.

All of the causes of despondency can be argued away, but the sense of dejection was none the less real. Perhaps for the first time many Tasmanians came to realise their insular vulnerability. During the decade of the 1860s the city people found what it meant to conduct business in a competitive world, unshielded by the perquisites enjoyed as a colonial outpost of Britain. Besides the British payments for the maintenance of the penal camp which had subsidised the whole population, the colony had in­directly benefited beyond estimation through the trade promoted by the gaols, through the captive labour force of unwilling con­victs and through the skills of the officers seconded there on duty.27 By financing public works and social welfare, by under­writing trade, and by promoting a rich cultural life, the British connection had been the means through which the community had developed the brash sophistication which began the drive for independence. The colonists had never known what it meant to have to pay for their own survival, just as they had never known how to plan their own social organisation. All of these tasks had been performed for them by the imperial authorities. Many clicheridden amateur politicians, John Morgan for one, had un­thinkingly cried, ‘No taxation without representation’. It was lamentable that they felt unrepresented, but their freedom from taxation was an understatement; not only were they not taxed, but from 1803 to 1856 they were heavily dependent upon the hard- pressed British taxpayers for the fat conditions which had given them the confidence to demand their independent rights.

Though acclaimed widely as history’s culmination; though revered in the patriotic mystique of Tasmaniana as the beginning of all good things, nevertheless self-government and the end of transportation were very mixed blessings. The triumphs helped to bring crashing the old levels of living standards and by increas­ing isolation so reduced stimulation that the confidence of the people of Tasmania and Hobart was never quite the same again.

134 A Loss of FaithOne Governor remarked in his memoirs,

through the first half of the time I lived there it was almost looked upon as a bad compliment . . . if you did not condole with them on its hopeless depression, and inevitably approaching ruin . . .2S

A sense of underlying inadequacy and self-pity thus became a part of each citizen’s make-up. The character of the Hobart people can never be understood by concentrating upon the birth of the free society, for the effects of the penal camp were not ended at independence. The convict cringe persisted amongst the Tasmanians as an insecurity which underlay all their attitudes towards the realities of the hard world. Hobartians could never be those cocky, assertive types whose beneficent world had never trembled. They were not brash colonials, such as were to be found on the mainland, who sang their songs of resentment against old-world prejudices in the last quarter of the century. Instead the island bred a quieter, perhaps more thoughtful type of person who knew the decay at the root of things and took his pleasures with a slight reserve of confidence.

9 ^

Renewal

T he loss of a sense of personal progress is one of the least bear­able of life’s experiences. The depression of the 1860s brought a freezing in social postures, a hardening of relationships compared to the fluidity before. It appeared that henceforward change could not be so fundamental to the structure of society; rather was the character of Hobart life seen to be set in its form. Yet change did continue, though different in pace and style from the old ways. The 1860s were by no means the death of the world, nor even the onset of a chronic disease, but just the beginning of a new phase of development. Once this was understood the in­fluences which were to prove significant for the next two or three decades of growth could be recognised; for some elements of com­munity change from the depression years had considerable influence upon the habits of Hobartians during the vigorous decades later in the century.

The most pleasing trend of the 1860s and 1870s was the fading away of the old convicts. Yearly their old and lined faces grew scarcer as age decreased their importance. The peak years for deaths of emancipists were 1875 and 1877; years when many of them, crowded together into common senility by their ages when transported, fell victim to minor epidemics of scarlet fever and influenza.1 As they were inefficient and worthless in the workforce so in their dotage did they quickly become feeble dependants upon social welfare, a self-cancelling debt from the past. In 1857 they had been a third of the city population2 whose every act of degeneration into pathetic loneliness was registered meticulously in the records of the law courts, which remain the biological registers of Britain’s unwanted men and women.3 By 1875 the proportion was much less than a third, though there is no way of knowing quite how much less for the question of origin was

135

136 Renewalno longer officially asked of citizens. By that date convicts as such, compared to emancipists, were almost a memory. Only the infamous Denis Dogherty, who was serving life imprisonment for assault whilst still under his original conviction, remained in gaol upon imperial charge.4 He was the only person who had never been out for long enough to secure a ticket-of-leave. All other emancipists appeared in the records as colonial citizens. Even Mark Jeffrey, who wrote a book about his adventures and called himself ‘The Great English Burglar’, was officially a colonist and no Englishman at all.5

As the old men sat fondling their weekly plug of tobacco, comfortable within their shabby workhouse clothes, they watched from the tree-shade the sunlight upon the tower of St John’s Church and talked about the past. Their memories were of masters they had admired, of officers they had despised, of the bad luck which had brought them so often before the judge, occasionally about their childhood and that other life, the home and wife and family they once had enjoyed; the England or Ireland of their rosy memories. To them the island remained an asylum which they accepted on sufferance, out of lack of hope and ambition. Their acceptance was conditioned more than many realised by the advantages which life in the settlement offered; though in their talk present comfort could never compete with romantic memories for pride of place. If they remembered the summer cuckoos of their youth they realised less their welcome for the brain-fever call of the antipodean cuckoos, which visited the blue gum trees in November. If they longed for the flash of gold in the gorse thickets of the Galway coast, where linen dried in the slight grey sun, they underestimated their new love for the yellow wattle drenched in the heavy blossom of springtime.

As they sat and became older there was growing a new genera­tion around them. The rise in the number of native-born was abrupt after independence. From 1804 to 1830 the numbers of children born in the colony were insignificant amongst all of the coming and going of convicts, immigrants, and officials. Yet by the decade of the 1850s natural increase had reached appreciable levels.0 There were 2,000 babies a year in the colony and 700 a year in the city by that time. Rising birth rates were largely a result of the increased free immigration of the early 1850s, for convict spawnings had remained always at low rate. Perhaps it

Renewal 137was difficult for prisoners to maintain stable relationships whilst they were the chattels of government. Living in lodging houses, bars, and detention centres was not conducive to family rearing and, for all of their alleged fornications and careless liaisons, con­victs produced few children. Settlers believed that venereal disease, the wages of prostitution, had made most of the bonded women infertile. West had told patriots hearteningly of these trends:

Their domestic increase, compared with equal numbers of free persons, is insignificant—partly by the effects of vice, and in part by the impracticability of marriage: they melt from the earth, and pass away like a mournful dream.7

The shortage of females left a dearth of lovers, wives, and mothers within the lower-class community. In contrast the free women, with more settled home lives, produced more than their share of children, partly making up for low birth rates amongst the con­victs. H. M. Hull estimated that the usual family size in respect­able households was five surviving children, as many women bore eight or more babies in a lifetime.8

By the 1847 census one in five of the city population had been born since the 1837 count, in all 5,000 children. These children, aged up to thirteen at the year of mid-century, were followed by the babies born during the years of high birth rates in the 1850s, which reached 45 per 1,000 compared to a century average of 25 per 1,000 population. The gold decade migrations further in­creased the concentration of children in the city. For every 100 children registered as having been born locally during the ten years from 1837 there were 110 in 1861 and the 5,000 children became 5,500 teenagers, instead of the group declining slightly in number through mortality, as would have been usual.9 This seemed to be undoubted evidence that while adult males were moving out of the city to go to the goldfields children were being settled there, either from the country districts or by immigration from overseas.

Demographic changes in population have their delayed effects. Increases in birth rates place immediate pressure upon midwives, hospitals, and cot manufacturers; they strain educational resources after a decade and they affect the workforce and the social vigour of a community within thirty years. Not least of all do they pro­duce another crop of babies in due time. In these ways the demo-

138 Renewalgraphic quirks of the convict years and the gold years had effects which recurred over the rest of the century. The increase in births and the differing migration patterns of the various age and sex groups drastically altered the nature of the population structure which had existed before 1850.10 At the count of the 1861 census a few of the old peculiarities survived. In that year there were as many adults aged between thirty and forty years as there were young people aged between ten and twenty. This pattern was not usual in stable populations and it had changed by the 1870 census. Then, with the emancipist age groups fading rapidly and the native-born children growing up, there were twice as many young people aged between ten and twenty as adults aged from thirty to forty. Moreover as the trend continued to the next census count in 1881 the young group became three times as numerous as the adult group.

Something like the older pattern of immigration became estab­lished once more as the years passed. Pressure was put upon new governments to subsidise the importation of mechanics from Britain and there was a small but persisting passage of better-class settlers.11 Some came to begin businesses and some to enter the civil service. Many in the 1870s came to work upon the railways, whose labour camps followed the lines for many years.12 During the 1880s there were altogether 9,000 new arrivals on the island and, when the comings and goings were balanced there were an extra 6,000 Tasmanians from outside sources.13 Some of these people left a mark upon Hobart society. Leonard Rodway, a botanist, and R. M. Johnston were both later migrants who brought with them some of the British ideas and attitudes of the years after the Great Exhibition and the Second Reform Act. It is difficult from the migration records to separate from the total the settlers who came to the capital city. But it was evident that during the 1880s Hobart attracted more than its share of immi­grants and the loss to the rest of the island was temporarily halted.14 To encourage settlers it was necessary to persuade people outside that the old Van Diemen’s Land criticisms no longer applied to Tasmania.

It was realised quite soon that well-kept criminal statistics could be used as evidence of the decline of convict tendencies amongst the people.15 Johnston, who took employment as Govern­ment Statistician, compiled carefnl lists which revealed the dis-

Renewal 139tinction between the old generation and the new. By the 1880s the city’s crime rate by any measure, whether of convictions or apprehensions or reportings of offences, was less than that in Australian cities which had suffered no direct transportation; it was less even than that in the British homeland of Hobart’s criminal classes. Not surprisingly the statistics of crime in the colony bore close relationship to those of the deaths of the old men. Over a period of twenty years there was a decline to one- fifth of the former number of gaol inmates and to one-half of the drunkenness convictions of the first years after self-government. By the 1880s the settler, his family and his property could be shown to be safer in Hobart than in any other Australian city, and they would be only half as likely to meet drunken louts upon the streets as in Melbourne or Sydney. This was the purport of the statistical evidence which was gathered together into one persua­sive volume in 1890 by Johnston. It was named the Tasmanian Official Record.

In that same year there was an unexpected outcrop of burglaries in the city. Such crime was now so unusual that people did not know what to make of it. Even if the old people still harboured memories of what the convicts had been like they had quite for­gotten the feeling of the insecurity of a town where most men one met were convicted criminals. In 1890, when they gossiped about the cause of the thefts from houses, the old worriers decided that this must be the influence of the evil cities across the water. It was so easy in days of steamships for low-class Melbourne larrikins to cross to the island and plunder respectable Hobart homes. ‘Suspicious men—supposed to have come over on cheap trips—have been prowling around in this neighbourhood. Old Frank Butler shot at one . . .’.1(i The city which had been named the ‘metropolis of murderers’17 was by the 1880s not used to the idea of vicious crime committed by young men. A majority of Tasmanian law-breakers were old men and almost all of them were born outside of the colony. Johnston’s statistics provided quite clear evidence that it was the old emancipists who were to blame. They continued their bad habits through into this period when the population had been filled out with young folk, three- quarters of them native-born colonials and not disposed to crime.

This new generation of working men quite simply did not follow the example of their parents but their characters were

140 Renewalformed by the influence of their colonial environment. As for the old men, the signs were clear that the habits they had learr.ed in their youth were difficult to unlearn. The formative exper:ences of convicts on the one hand, and those of their native-born sons on the other, were of such different natures that the two genera­tions grew up to be quite dissimilar. Colonial conditions eased old age for emancipists and caused much distinction between the generations—for young Tasmanians enjoyed good times between 1870 and the 1890s. Payment for workers in employment was at all times beyond the threshold of subsistence. Bishop Nixon, in a pamphlet titled ‘Self Help’, a reprint of one of his lectures to the working men, admonished them. The Tasmanian labourer receives good wages, and generally receives them in a lump by cheque; this cheque he carries straight to the public house’. No-one attempted to refute his argument. Pay was sufficient to fres men from the eternal competition merely to earn enough to live Time and energy saved might well be expended in the public house or ‘swallowed up by indolent luxury or enervating debauchery,18 but there was also a general rise in the standard of diet and an increase in the popularity of cricket, gardening, fishing and a wealth of other enjoyments. It was this relative ease which solved the problem of crime in Hobart, for the native-born had no need to steal and found it against their own interests to raise protests against the inequalities of their world.

Wage rates had been exceptionally high during the gold boom, higher even than prices, so that stay-at-home workers improved their economic positions considerably, even to the point of buying land or houses and developing a strongly independent carelessness towards work. All prices and wages fell during the slump of the 1860s but after that decade there was a marked improvement in living standards which affected all sections of the population. Taking the calm 1851 as a base year, the cost of living in the city gradually rose by a quarter before 1890. At the same time skilled mechanics’ rates rose by 40 per cent. Labourers could demand even better increase, for their mid-century convict wage rates had been very low, and they enjoyed 75 per cent rises. Domestic workers’ pay rates rose 50 per cent over the forty years; the best prosperity, as in all trades, was enjoyed in the early 1880s.0

Throughout this period the threshold of secure prosperity, the level at which a family could afford the frills of bourgeois society,

Renewal 141lay at an income of £300 a year whilst the minimum for decent and independent family living was closer to £100. Over the years after 1870 the average income for skilled mechanics was £135. The more numerous semi-skilled workers lived just on the minimum of £100 while labourers and domestics never quite reached that level by day labour alone.-0 Improved conditions were indicated by reports that the number of paupers registered in the city declined during the 1880s to a proportion of 5 persons per 1,000 of the total population. The books of the Benevolent Society held the names of less than 200 persons, a number which included widows and old people in a land where pensions were scattered blessings and the support of extended families was still uncommon. Old people could only fall upon the Society if they came into need.21

In contrast, whereas wage rates in Britain also tended to rise during the same period, there remained in that closely settled countryside many pockets of poverty and many sections of the population which knew little improvement. There were many British people living in crowded and insanitary urban conditions, or in almost deserted croft-villages, whose real standard of life was much less desirable than that enjoyed by their North American or Australian contemporaries.22 This is not to make any claim that riches went begging for every colonial worker but merely to emphasise that, here, for the first time in history, any man who had a will could maintain his dignity in independence. In Hobart Town, which was not large enough to produce urban conditions of any severity, there was seldom any economic reason after 1870 why able-bodied persons should distort their lives merely to earn enough to eat to stay alive or to fill out the limbs of their children.

Above the mechanic and labouring classes life was even fatter for those who had established toeholds upon professional or business careers. Merely a third of the colony’s 1,200 salaried civil service officers, the new bureaucracy which was increasingly important as an employer, were in receipt of income above the level of a tradesman. The other 800 were rural postmasters and the like, but the capital city held the elite of the service. About 280 men, clerks and minor office holders, drew from £100 to £300 a year and lived well on it. A further sixty, the career men of the civil service, waxed fat on amounts up to £ 500 with twenty

142 Renewalincluding the Governor and Judiciary receiving more than this.23 It would appear that the immigration agent, T. C. Just, was about right when he advised immigrant clerks that they would be offered from 10s. a week upward but that they could hold out for £.125 a year in city offices.24

The merchant and professional group in the city, which in the census numbered about 700 persons, included 165 schoolteachers. Many of them were pupil teachers who were paid as little as £16 a year. The best position in the public education system—head of the Model School—brought the incumbent a lordly £800. The lowest city headship was worth £200 whilst the average income for teaching was £165 for men and £96 for women teachers. These figures included school fees, which were an integral and expected part of income.25 Schoolteachers in the minor private schools earned what they could gather, which was anything up to £350 but usually more like £100. The Grammar Schools were considerably more profitable. The Rector of the High School, the Reverend Harris grossed £1,000 plus profit from boarders, but out of this he paid £120 to a general assistant and £200 with board to the second master. Harris kept £550 and all he could glean, but he did much of the teaching and his wife ran the boarding school for it. At the Hutchins School the Reverend Buckland found his income from fees whilst enjoying the castel­lated, cloistered school-buildings rent free. He probably kept about £400 and distributed the rest of the income to three assistants. This appeared to give him a comfortable enough life with a large monthly account at the brewery and enough over to subscribe to all Church charities.20

Church of England clergymen in the city parishes were paid between £250 and £450. The Bishop and his Archdeacon received £1,000 each but had many fixed expenses absorbing perhaps £200-£300. Bishop R. W. Willson, the Catholic primate, took £500 and the lowest of his four salaried priests was paid £250, which as it happened was also the customary amount paid to Wesleyan ministers by the Circuit Steward.27

Only about half a dozen landowners of a safe £600 a year income resided in the town.28 The extent of the wealth they accumulated, as well as the fortunes of businessmen, lawyers, and doctors, was kept secret enough at the time and there were no returns or assessments of income for tax or statistical purposes.

Reproduced by courtesy of the National Library of Australia.

8 Scouring the wharfs for neglected children (see p. 116).

Reproduced by courtesy of the Tasmanian State Library.

9 No fortunes would be made here: Elizabeth Street in the Depression (see p. 128).

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Renewal 143However, the introduction of probate duties upon death left some indication of wealth.29 Henry Hopkins, the merchant adventurer who had also invested in land, left an estate estimated to be worth <£58,000. This presumably included his lovely old house, Westella, in Elizabeth Street but not his subscriptions to the building of the Memorial Congregational Church outside his own back door, almost a memorial to himself. John Beaumont, an entrepreneur and landowner, left £28,000, which was more than most of his kind. John Walker, the popular miller and brewer who supplied the beer for two generations of men, died worth £20,000. Billy Guesdon, the opulent man who took brass bands along to play whilst he fished from his ketch, died worth £300,000—possibly the richest man in all the city. He used his wealth to build a hall for the Working Men’s Club to re-establish a reputation tarnished by scandal.30

Outside of business accumulation was substantially less.31 Buckland left a bare £1,000 and Bishop Willson just £500. Emancipist Rheuben (despite becoming a Justice of the Peace, a successful member of the Oddfellow and Volunteer classes, and an entrepreneur who traded with the best of them ) left only £75. This was the equivalent of one year’s labouring income. The pro­fessional men were a different affair, as were the politicians. This was where the income of the city lay, surpassing that of the merchant families. Unfortunately details were hard to come by but it was obvious that practice and politics supplemented each other. One of the most assured at this game was John Dobson’s son, Sir William Lambert Dobson, a man who won at everything but popularity. As a leading barrister and member of the Colonial Judiciary he left rough jottings of his income proudly upon the fly leaf of a notebook.32 His private practice brought in £1,000 or so and his Attorney-General stipends supplemented this to an extra £800 a year. Such spoils were well worth the battle through which such men attained positions within the hierarchy of the colony. Lambert Dobson’s thousand was probably within reach of the top half dozen city professionals. Most of them had irons in many fires and redistributed the wealth flowing into the colony, from mineral sales and from borrowings on the English money market, to their own advantage. Cecil Allport typically loaned his own mortgages on property, underwrote small busi­nesses and speculated in shares. He left behind an enormous

144 Renewalcollection of scrip certificates, symbols of the circulation of community savings, for most of them were investments in lasmaman mining companies.

The economic recovery of the islanders’ fortunes began close to 1870 but reached full flow in the early years of the next decade. The 1880s came to represent for many the good times, for this was the first period when the newly-patriotic could relax with pride and confidence in a homeland. Early in the century com­missariat subsidy and merchandising income had sustained the economy but through the 1860s the unfading wool cheque be­came the only staple. Then in 1873 the receipts from custom’s tariff showed the first increase once more. Soon the benefits were felt of heavy government borrowing overseas to pay for the new railways84 and other capital improvements intended to raise the productivity of the land. The borrowed capital fed the specula­tions on mineral prospecting in the remote areas. Discoveries of payable deposits of gold, tin, and silver-lead assured renewed prosperity. In 1881 Lieutenant General Sir J. H. Lefroy, informed his Colonial Office superiors in London,

I am happy to report a condition of general prosperity in the Colony . . . Not an inconsiderable amount of Capital flows in from England and Victoria and New South Wales for mining investment. . . 85

Consumer spending, that indicator of confidence, regained the levels of the gold years in 1876 and rose annually until 1883. By that year the colonial income from gold and tin combined was larger than the wool cheque and within twenty years it was to be exceeded sevenfold.36 Yet little of the activity depended upon the capital city bound firmly facing towards the Southern Ocean. There were newer and brasher towns upon the north coast between the mines and the mainland ports which could more easily serve the mineral booms. Only the years of firm establish­ment of the convict metropolis stood it in good stead in its isola­tion and kept the management of many Tasmanian companies dependent upon the services which only the capital city could offer.37

The future of Hobart’s own business affairs remained limited. There was some development of fruit processing factories but even more of fruit packing to ship it away for processing else­where. Many businesses became local agencies of foreign firms

Renewal 145and local owners became managers. The sea and the southward vision remained the final but fading inspiration of independent industry. There were ten whalers working out of the port in 1879, from which year they declined rapidly as costs rose and prices fell. George Salier and Alexander McGregor were the last whale- fleet owners and the reputation brought them much respect.38 There were also forty part-owners of whalers and trading ships, a relic of mid-century sharing. But company shipping was taking over as iron and steam increased capital involvement and took shipbuilding away from Battery Point. The Tasmanian Steam Navigation Company, the last and most successful of the local companies, maintained a hold on the Hobart to Melbourne trade and competed on the runs to Bluff at Invercargill and through to Auckland. The TSNC became a symbol of pride and patriotism and there was considerable affection for the ships, their black funnels and their flag. The largest project was the steamer Flinders of 900 tons deadweight. But the days when local ship­ping lines could survive were past and the TSNC went down in competition against the big Australian and New Zealand lines, which for two seasons offered passages completely free merely to kill the island line. Its death was taken much to heart for many families held shares in this company and many heads had turned when the ships came smokily up the Derwent to tie at Hobart wharves.39

The prosperity of the late nineteenth century brought a bustle to Hobart living, but it was an incomplete triumph. The Main Line Railway of 3 foot 6 inch gauge connecting the northern and the southern coast brought capital, machinery, and labouring workers in through the city but it also led business away to Launceston and other ports. Navvies, the skilled, itinerant and troublesome construction labourers who followed the world’s railroads, were imported from abroad and many local labourers followed the camps to the end of line. Such enterprises acted as catalysts to regions outside of the capital.40 In the city the Benevolent Society suffered a renewal of activity as men followed the tracks and left their wives behind abandoned in the city.

In 1878 spending began once more upon public buildings, tardily and warily this time following the over extension of con­fidence after 1860 when Town Hall and Government House payments had proved such a burden. The golden-stoned Town

146 RenewalHall had been completed during such a depressed period that for a decade interest repayments alone were made upon its capital cost. During the 1880s official rebuilding was slight. The idea of a new Parliament House was not revived for the Customs House was now recognised as an amply elegant seat of government. Dotted about the town were the mellowly-beautiful convict build­ings which still adequately, if darkly and antiquely, housed government departments. Why should the small colony need more? The colonial civilisation huddled beneath the shadow of the imperial penal structure; the old majesty and glory of a time before coloured lives of provincial pride.

Expansion in the 1880s was in the commercial and home build­ing spheres with an Exhibition Building as the archetype.41 Homes were needed for the growing population of families of newly secure lower classes. Houses spread Victorian Gothic with new Italianate touches up the broadly sloping valley to the north of the city centre and over the rise to join the New Town with the old.42 This was the first period of ribbon suburban growth and the self-conscious shapes of wooden villas spread as far as the foothills beyond Forest Road. Battery Point and Sandy Bay areas were popular for home building, the houses quite modest and con­structed more often of wood or brick than of the stone of mid­century and the roofs almost all being of galvanised iron. The scale of values of the speculators and builders had dropped from the chisel-marked sandstone of the camp days: in the long run the simple skillings of wood overcame the cottages of stone to become the local type of dwelling house. Yet wood and tin pro­vided excellent cover in a climate of un-English mellowness. This was not a renewal of the old-style Wapping skilling of rough sawn timber and poky windows but neat, if cheap, little boxes of mill-cut boarding even in the poorest areas. There came to be a less wide spread of housing standards than in many cities. Origin­ally there had been something like the European range from meanest hut to finest mansion but after 1860 there was a smaller variation around the common type and common size of family dwellings, which were comfortable but pretentious only in their superficial wooden decorations. They in no way reached com­parison with the old-world style which had stopped being used during the 1860s depression but which still survived in scores of examples. The peak year for building in the city was 1889,43 when

Renewal 147the Municipal Council took note of construction beginning on 104 dwelling houses and amongst them plans appeared for double storeys, bow-front windows, steep-pitched gables and ornate bargeboards. Some new houses had classic vases set at impossible points of balance on pinnacles and eaves, pretending to be stone but usually turned from timber and painted; and always looking what they were, excrescences upon a simple structure, decoration as an afterthought. Also under construction during that year were the Baptist Tabernacle, Gibson’s Flour Mills, Bond’s Bark Mill, the Hobart Coffee Palace, and the Melville Street Temperance Hall. All were unhappy-looking Victorian buildings which awk­wardly filled the gaps between the elegant sandstone structures of earlier days.

•8 * ioFrom Caste to Community

Life can be difficult for the children of immigrants and pioneers. The parents unsteadily straddle a divided world with which the next generation must come to terms. The native-born children of the convict classes were perhaps luckier than many, for the life styles of their parents were so despised in all the circles around them that children were brought to revulsion of their own folk. There arose from the convict life no idea of virtue in truculence or defiance; there was no association established between convict status and deprivation of human rights, nor between dignity and criminality. It was noticeable that the few transported Rebecca rioters, the Tolpuddle Martyrs or Chartists like John Frost, expressed no sympathy towards the other convicts. The two likeliest leaders, William Cuff ay and James Gray, spoke a little to sympathetic audiences during the 1850s at the time of self-government.1 They were noted as radicals during that interval of change but this was a temporary and passing role and they took little part in community after 1860. The political prisoners trans­ported for some ideological stand found little in common with murderers and pickpockets. John Mitchel, one of the 'Irish Exiles’, reviled this city, calling it ‘that metropolis of murderers and university of burglary and all subter-human abomination— Hobart Town’, expressing his own despair at finding himself in such debased company.2 There was nothing in the tradition of transportation which a child of emancipist family could cling to with pride, nothing to persuade them that the harsh judgments of the settler classes about their parents were not merited.

The effect of environment led the young away from aping their forebears’ responses to life.3 Where the parents had been faced with only the outlets of protest or petty thieving rebellion, the sons could dissipate their greater energies in half a hundred

148

149From Caste to Communityhopeful ways. Nurture overcame nature as the native-born were drawn into the busy and pleasant life of the colony; where the spur of personal progress was more compulsive than the burden of personal defeat. Yet the situation produced a new generation of convicts’ children maturing with an insecure grasp of any cultural tradition. Other people had group mores which they could hate or love, grasp or reject as best suited them; but which always served as guidelines for a generation’s way of living. The convict sons’ experience was truncated since their personal past was not usable as a springboard to life, so bitterly did they reject it. The best of the emancipists had chosen life across the water and the uselessness of the remaining ageing inefficients provided no criteria which their sons and successors could find acceptable, no life-style they could usefully copy or any source of pride in the group from which they had sprung. It was just as much in the interests of spry young bootmakers or jobbing carpenters as in those of office managers, warehouse owners or company directors to leave behind any connection with the old and feeble citizens who had once been convicts.

The native-born sons were a new sort of people; they had to be for they found it difficult to model themselves upon any example seen before them in the city and in the colony. The settler image; upright, self-righteous, and with that peculiar colonial type of anti-transportation, anti-taxation radicalism which turned easily to selfish conservatism after independence, was not to the taste of labouring men. What other life-style could a dis­possessed generation assume? Hindsight can supply for it a common proletarian awareness growing forth from some root either in convict seed-bed of discrimination or in lower-class English, Scottish, and Irish struggle through combinations and unions towards an equality which colonial conditions encouraged.4 It can be pointed out that Morgan had begun the association, which he called the Trades Union Free Labour Movement, in 1848.5 A line can be drawn from here to the few electoral speeches at the time of independence, such as on the night of 26 March in 1857 when Chartist William Cuff ay spoke from a hustings platform to a crowd of working men about the need for an independent press.6 And later the genesis of new unionism can be traced, as with increasing confidence the occasional strikes for better wages and working conditions showed that through their

150 From Caste to Communityworkplaces the lower classes could attain a sort of unity. Reading ease and the quickening of inter-colonial communications widened the scope for local men to measure their status and wages against conditions in comparable Australian cities. A letter to the Mercury during 1872 reminded them that, ‘we mechanics are already far behind our brother tradesmen in other colonies in both wages and hours of labour . . .’.7 A letter the same day from a shipwright revealed the beginnings of the sense of corporate pride amongst the workmen. The ‘shipwrights of Hobart Town . . . are too inde­pendent for work, they having been offered the work to copper the barque Nautilus and refused to do so.’8 From here growing egalitarian sentiments attract attention. A letter writer to the Southern Star in 1882 asked,

Why is it that foremen have easier times than the men who do the work on the streets? I see the overseer in the morning in fine working trim, with the pipe in his mouth and his hands in his pockets, giving orders to the others. Why should this be the case . . .?9

During the 1880s the committee-members of the Working Men’s Club threw open their warm rooms to the Anglers’ Associa­tion, the Red Cross Knights, the Druids and also to the new Boot­makers’ Union, the Carpenters’ Union, the Bakers’ Union and, upon its formation, to the Trades and Labour Council.10 Thus a continuity can be seen and links established which indicate a proletarian movement undergoing birth pangs until labour was achieved. But it seems upon viewing the total activities of this community that continuity of influence can be over-stressed and such hindsight of the development of ideals is wrong. This may have been the way for the development of proletarian movements in Europe but the experience which led to the rise of the British working class was not that of Tasmanian workmen. Nor was the intellectual concept of solidarity available to colonial men in a strong enough form to act as a motivating force until the last fifteen years of the century. This left a gap of twenty or so years in which the new generation of Tasmanians sought social roles.

From the early years after self-government, in the late 1850s and early 1860s, it seemed impossible for the native sons of con­victs to find any distinctive model to imitate. They had no positive drive whatsoever, only the strongly negative response to deny the convict inheritance. The underlying concern of most of the

151From Caste to Communitynew generation of labourers and mechanics became that of making themselves suitably respectable to avoid the old stigma. Such cleaving to social acceptability was a response to the dis­grace of the hated stain which went back long before the period of self-government. The reactions of the emancipist challengers of the late 1840s and early 1850s had been to express themselves as more patriotic, more normal’ even than the settlers who opposed them. Through allegiance with Governor Denison, through espousals of conservatism, the emancipists had set out to prove their dependability in the teeth of settler scorn. This urge remained for long the one the emancipist groups found the most compulsive. They formed a social element more conservative than the least imaginative farmers, more fearful of the convict image than the most insecure matron in settler household. When Denison left the colony the members of the Friendly Societies presented him with a gift of silver plate which they claimed was worth £2,000—they made great show of this gesture. Immediately their hero Denison was gone they set about to ingratiate them­selves with his successor Sir Henry Fox Young; cleavage to authority was their source of strength, though Fox Young unlike Denison never trifled with their affections.11

Oddfellowship was a useful term evocative of the procedure of joining the Unity of Oddfellows or one of the other Friendly Societies. Such membership appeared as a means of combining several ends. Through the societies the insecurity of working life could be eased, for the lodges offered unemployment, sickness, and funeral insurance. Besides this they offered daily pleasure in the way of meeting places and organised amusements. A less noticed function was that they provided secure avenues to social identification and advantage away from the convict image. Odd­fellow Brother E. H. Ivey claimed:

if Oddfellowship was extended, it would allay all political andpersonal feeling, render unnecessary Police Offices, and CriminalSessions and make [the lawyers’] Stone Buildings tenantless . . .12

Such general claims were made for the Manchester Unity of Oddfellows, the Ancient and Independent Order of Oddfellows, the Orange Lodges, the Hibernian Society, the Druids and the ninety-two branches of all societies which lodged returns with the government in 1886.11 Lodge activity became one of the most common forms of communal life and by and large the claims

152 From Caste to Communitytended to be true. The fundamental image of the respectability of the Friendly Society movement (with some reservations about certain ‘low’ elements) became one acceptable to polite society. ‘Masonry certainly was a leveller in a place with so many cliques’, claimed an Englishman who spent a few happy years in the city.14

Freemasonry was introduced into the penal settlement by the regiments soon after 1804 and lodge membership gained steadily particularly from 1830 until numbers reached a peak soon after the best years of gold.15 There was a slump in the depression but from about 1,500 lodge members in the city in the 1870s the number doubled in little more than a decade until there were over 3,000 Friendly Society Members at a time when the work force consisted of barely 10,000 persons.10 The Manchester Unity alone boasted of 1,200 members in the city during 1889 and, though lodging of returns with the government office was dilatory and true totals are difficult to check, the numbers seem about right. By the last twenty years of the century Friendly Societies were an essential part of the fabric of the community. In Britain they offered extensions of the benefits of the old craft associations to workers who were not journeymen in the traditional trades; in the colonies almost every worker was without an institutional group to whom he could pay allegiance. The new society of industrialisation in Britain could provide models of organisation for the communities of nineteenth-century colonisation.

The ceremony to elevate the Reverend Harris, the High School Headmaster, to the office of Most Worshipful Grand Master of the colony’s Freemasons was attended by the Governor of New South Wales and the Chief Justice of South Australia.17 Resplendent in his gown Harris fairly glowed and in the audience which attended him many sons of convicts found a sure identification in their lodge participation with such honoured men. Yet there was hierarchy even amongst the societies themselves with the Masons most respected and the ‘blackguard Oddfellows’ at the bottom. The latter were composed mostly of working men who had only begun to develop pretensions of bettering themselves. Oddfellows’ activities offered the expansive, joyous way of life which suited such people; a conviviality and bumptiousness not too different from the taverns, beer shops, and common lodging houses of earlier years. At first the rough elements in lodge activities attracted scorn from observers. Meetings were com-

153From Caste to Communitymonly held in the back parlours of public houses and the mumbo- jumbo ceremonials frequently were seen to lapse into tipsy festivities. In 1872 the Inter-Friendly Societies Grand Demonstra­tion brought out the brethren in full regalia and to guard them came all of the Municipal Police. On the Domain the ‘obnoxious game of kiss in the ring’18 took place and a rough crowd of 500 ‘Oddfellows’ obstructed the policemen’s attempts to break it up. The assumption that they were in fact ‘Oddfellows’ was signifi­cant. At another time when a civic party to celebrate the opening of new waterworks turned into a stampede for the refreshment tables the ‘blackguard Oddfellows’ received the blame in press reports, once more with little evidence.19

A majority of the members resented such events in the history of Oddfellowship in the colony. They were an admission that the lower classes were no better than they were expected to be, and reawakened that anti-emancipist ‘can any good come out of Galilee?’ attitude which lodge members with any foresight wanted so much to disprove. Many of the middle classes reserved their judgment about the lodges. They could see that members con­sisted of the emancipist classes, could see that the Orders were achieving success and increasing in influence within the com­munity. The deduction could easily be made that here lay a new emancipist plot to overturn society. Indeed the realisation that the lodges were a toehold for convicts to set foot on the rungs of society was sufficient criticism for nervous property-owners. Dis­trust of the pretensions of lodge members was seldom openly expressed but there was one letter to the Church News written by an acclaimed non-member who feared that, ‘a society of that kind might sometimes do harm in a community by using its in­fluence to bring unworthy persons into offices of emolument . . .’.20

The answer to the intemperate reputation which clung to the societies was constant pressure from within the lodges to lessen the association between meetings and drinking, and to use every opportunity to raise the integrity of their repute. Invitations were extended to leading citizens to attend dinners and functions. Toasts were always meticulously phrased in strict patriotic order. The charitable purposes of the lodges were emphasised, their objects to succour the indigent, to sympathise with the distressed, to wipe the tear of sorrow from the orphan’s eye and to cheer and soothe the aching bosom of the widow were reiterated at every

154 From Caste to Communitymeeting.21 A vital measure in the bid towards respectability was to sever the connections between lodges and hospitable landlords. When the Oddfellows eventually opened an unlicensed hall they established a major social nucleus. It was used to the full on every night of the week whilst other lodges began to use the Working Men’s Clubrooms or the old Mechanics’ Institute Hall. Steadily the association with public houses became weaker.22

Other routes to respectability were of even stronger import than merely clearing up the existing societies. The association between low-class alcoholism and convictism was so strong that temperance movements could always exact vocal public support, though never to the lengths of prohibitive legislation. Temperance sentiments became openly equated with anti-convictism and with a pureness even beyond that of the old settler households. To­wards temperance some lodgemen began to lean in their constant search to elude the old stigma. In 1859 the Albert Lodge of the Oddfellows restricted its membership to those who had signed the precious pledge never again to allow alcohol to pass their lips, and very soon other new temperance or teetotal Friendly Societies were drawing crowds of enthusiastic members.23 The idea of Rechabite Lodges with strict teetotal ‘tents’ originated in the United States and drifted to Tasmania by way of Sydney and Launceston in 1858.24 There was no question that there was much innovation in then- Tasmanian adoption, but they did suit the local needs for they seemed to offer most of the advantages of older societies with glee meetings replacing the rowdy, beery sessions. The officers of the Southern Cross District of the Inde­pendent Order of Rechabites were all prominent, evangelical temperance workers. With the coming of the Rechabites many rising working-class people hastened to change their lodge affilia­tions, membership rose quickly to over 700, with wives and young people meeting in separate ‘tents’ on the same evenings.

The Independent Order of Good Templars was introduced in 1874 and quickly acquired a following even greater than the Rechabites.25 Peter Facy, the editor of the local temperance magazine, transferred his allegiances from the Rechabites to this new order, which expanded very rapidly through the 1870s, drawing people of all classes into its fold.20 The symbolic link between lodges and public houses was finally broken during the 1880s when even the notorious Hibernian Society began to hold

From Caste to Community 155its annual celebration in Heathorn’s Cafe instead of in a room behind the bar. After this when the wild Irishmen, who were convict scions if there ever were any, went by steamer to New Norfolk on a St Patrick’s Day picnic their procession was led by no less a brass band than the ‘Hope of Rechabite’, the teetotal trumpet players.27 At the beginning of the 1890s the ideal of lodge membership was represented in the person of George Stanton Crouch, Mayor of the City, a strict Wesleyan, a strict teetotaller and an active lodgeman.28

The further criticism of the lodges, that they were being used as a pathway for status advancement, could not be refuted. Crouch’s virtue and Harris’s dignity were unquestioned. The Crouch name was famous not only through the colony but also throughout the temperance world for the unremitting energy of George’s father, Thomas James Crouch.29 Harris on the other hand had become a symbol of respectable, if unimaginative, authority since mid-century when he had emerged from the academic cloisters of Britain to be the High School’s first success­ful Rector. A self-styled descendant of the Royal Tudor line he was popular with generations of pupils teaching, ‘Latin and Greek in a rational way not common in these times’.30 Yet he was remembered best for his canings and the swift girlish giggle which echoed down the mock Elizabethan halls of the High School building. Harris lent dignity and status to the Masons but a successor of his as Most Worshipful Grand Master was Charles Ellis Davies of quite different background; an emancipist son who held this exalted office for twenty-one years. His brother John reached the position of Deputy Grand Master of the Order.31 Here was the plainest proof of the coincidence of Lodge member­ship with advancement: whilst both boys were being pushed firmly forward into the correct school company at the High and the Hutchins Schools their father John Michael had been assidu­ously attending to Oddfellow affairs,32 and he introduced his sons early to the Order. But they, being free of his limitations, soon transferred their attentions to the more prestigious Masonic Order and entrenched their positions firmly in that increasingly influential institution. The success of the undertaking was obvious in the Davies’s rapid accession to many other forms of local fame besides their Masonic positions. Inheriting the Mercury from their father, Charles became a Member of the Legislative Council

156 From Caste to Communitywhilst John became a leading Member of the House of Assembly. Charles helped form the Southern Tasmanian Agricultural and Pastoral Society and acted as its Secretary for twenty years, whilst John became a renowned cricketer and the prime organiser of Hobart’s ‘Great Exhibition’ (one of the echoes of England’s 1851 show which rippled around the colonies for many years). John became a Chief Magistrate and Mayor of the city and in the early years of the next century he was honoured with a knighthood.

The Davies family seemed almost to refute the claim that no emancipist was ever forgiven, but not quite, for J. M. Davies himself was never accepted fully and any respect he gained he forced from fellow citizens by using all of the available avenues to success.33 He joined the Oddfellows as soon as he came to Hobart and through its meetings he began openly to assert him­self. It was claimed that in his youth he had been audacious and impudent; he was audacious indeed and able withal, a detail which gaol reports did not include. His ability soon attracted an admiring audience among the Hobart citizens. He spoke wittily and well to a gathering of the Oddfellows of all Lodges of the Ancient and Independent Order in 1855.34 In 1860 when the Oddfellows formed their own Volunteer Rifle Brigade Davies became a Captain, being then aged forty-six. During that decade the Mercury editorial columns were used to put forward the ideas of the patriotism and respectability of the Friendly Societies and the useful function they fulfilled in the city community. As it was the leading and at times the only Hobart newspaper this preach­ing did not fail to have effect. When Davies told the people that ‘everyman, whatever his station and position [should] feel he was doing a duty to society by joining one or other’ of the societies his message impressed people in every class as a sincere and useful contribution to solving the local problem.35

He used Oddfellow patronage to secure his seat in the House of Assembly and kept it to survive the challenge which forced a re-election. He spoke constantly about the dignity of the common man but always as a means to emphasise the theme of their loyalty and patriotism. The Oddfellows rewarded him by electing him to be their Grand Master on six occasions. Davies held no truck for idealistic liberal ideas and he taught his lesson well to his sons. In 1887 John G. Davies, then in the House, opposed the ’iberal proposal to change the hated Master and Servant Act. Easy

From Caste to Community 157liberalism was not the safest cause for the insecure man who was intent on making progress. Both of the young Davies progressed not only up the Lodge hierarchy from Oddfellows to Freemasonry but also through the ranks in the Volunteers to Major and Lieutenant Colonel.'6 The achievements of the family were most exceptional, representing the ends which other emancipist families were attempting to reach by similar means; but it was the Davies who were outstandingly successful.

Abraham Rheuben was a Brother in the Oddfellows but he had not the flair of Davies, nor did he have the Mercury. James Gray, transported for forgery and said to be the son of a murderer, was the only emancipist besides Davies to be elected to the House of Assembly. He was an active Lodge member of the Saint Patrick’s Benefit Society and for many years he served as its Grand Master.37 Here through such social involvement lay a loophole of weakness in the middle-class castle of impregnability. Through Oddfellow braggadocio the emancipist status seekers and their sons told the world that they too cherished the conservative image of a prosperous, law-abiding loyal community and that they could make the grade of respectability alongside the best.

The social niches occupied by the Friendly Societies and by the Volunteer Brigades had so much in common that it was no surprise that social success could be found through voluntary army service as well as through wearing the regalia of the lodges. Men entered into community spirit by offering themselves as militia. As a unit of the Empire the colony was defended alike from external threat and internal riot by the British taxpayers’ army and navy. Imperial troops remained garrisoning in small numbers until 1870 and even in years after this a Royal Naval Squadron sailed the Pacific coasts on tours of duty. Self- government brought to the independent colony of Tasmania the insecurity of a fledgling as well as the excitement of free flight. During the Crimean War when imperial sentiment was bringing indignation and tears into British eyes throughout the world the Oddfellows of Hobart subscribed lavishly to support the widows of men killed on the coast of the Black Sea.38 The Russians firmly supplanted the Dutch and the French as the evil foreign menace and for all of the remainder of the nineteenth century it was Czarist ships which were believed to be poised in Storm Bay for the assault upon the city. People were afraid that

158 From Caste to Community‘our people could be massacred, our women dishonoured and children spitted on the bayonets of Russian savages’.39 During 1885 fears were so acute that individual preparations were made against the invasion day—money was cached and cottage hide­aways in the hills were provisioned. One old lady told a cab proprietor to send a conveyance to her door as soon as the enemy ships passed the Iron-pot lighthouse so that she at least could be sure of getting clean away from the spits and her dishonour.

The feeling of need for a militia was real, though the need itself was more questionable. Colonial finances could never hope to run to anything substantial in the way of defences against external attack. The military forces were generally poorly equipped and the Tasmanian Navy consisted for a long time of one torpedo boat and two torpedos.40 After years of storage the government agreed that practice in firing was essential for efficiency and trials took place in Storm Bay. The first torpedo went off with a great surge and was lost because it sank, whereupon the torpedo boat with Tasmania’s remaining torpedo crept back into dock there to remain unused, a dry-land Navy. From 1887 the colony shared in the maintenance of an Australian Squadron of British ships which ostentatiously patrolled the coasts and provided memorable social occasions in all ports where the crews lingered.

Most of the port defences were concentrated in batteries in­tended to challenge any possible approach of alien gunboats. Accepting that an enemy captain would choose to steam directly towards Government House the batteries were so trained as to be capable of striking the invader with 365 shots in half an hour.41 It was a reassuring prospect for those cossetting their wives and possessions in waterfront villas and for the Governor doing the same in his baronial hall, though it was an exercise which was never put to the test. The Volunteer movement was a vital and useful one in the community. It could be joined in a spirit of service and with a knowledge that such services would some­times be appreciated. There was attraction in the regiments’ corporate activities, the uniforms, the marching, the drills; during 1879 only twelve officers and nineteen men attended a wet even­ing’s rifle exercise whilst in the same year over 200 of the Rifle Regiment regularly joined the street marches behind the Band. On the Prince of Wales’s Birthday in 1882 seventy men pulling two brass howitzers spent a whole day deployed in the hills to the

159From Caste to Communityeast of the city. They stopped to shoot at targets anchored in the waters of Ralph’s Bay and forced an imaginary enemy away from the village of Clarence. Photographs showed them resplendent and straight-backed in red, green or blue uniforms with con­trasting pipings and facings. Their officers had golden ribbons and pips and held canes tightly beneath their arms. Throughout the exercise they were accompanied by the Volunteers’ band.42

The regiments were joined for the gain in respectability and status they afforded as well as for the small payments which offered added incentive to the poor. The only conditions imposed upon membership were physical ones, minimum height was 5 feet 8 inches and chest 36 inches.43 During the 1860s there was little difficulty in recruiting such men but there was some division of opinion about the worth of the militia. If they were looked down upon by some it was because the men of the Rifle Regiments were considered to be of such very lowly types. It was the Oddfellow story over again. There was much mockery of the ‘noble six hundred’ which the dishonoured Private Secretary, Colonel W. H. St Hill, raised upon his own initiative. Plis private army was com­posed of rough larrikins and drip-nosed boys, one was described as ‘the little, mis-shapen, crosseyed, shambling dwarf, the watch­maker Potter’.44 It was easy to make mockery of them, yet many Friendly Society members found the military forces attractive social propositions. The First Rifles became known as the Free­masons’ Corps and the Second Rifles, the Oddfellows, was com­manded by Grand Master Captain John Davies himself. The Third Rifles were the Manchester Unity Corps with H. W. Seabrook as Lieutenant. When the pay allowances were with­drawn in 1870 the cost of uniforms meant that volunteer service was an expense rather than a source of income and the toehold to participation was denied to the poorest people.45 Yet by that date many men were already climbing ladders of promotion and membership in the Volunteers was important to them.

The Artillery Corps was joined by men of highest status, even the plain gunners of that Corps were public servants and city clerks, proudly conscious, native-born men intent on their sense of belonging. The Artillery was rather like a recreation club for the urbane but in contrast the Rifle Corps provided one of the few avenues for the growth of comradeship across social barriers. The City Guards were paraded by J. M. Wilson, a Scottish settler

160 From Caste to Communitywho owned the local Cascade’s Brewery and became a Premier of the colony. Assisting him were the city merchants Kissock, Macnaughtan, McPherson, and Webster, all Scottish settlers ready to meet fellow-soldiers more tolerantly than fellow-citizens. 40

T. Y. Lowes, the patron and prop of the Buckingham Rifles, made his money as a city auctioneer and bought land to the north of the town where he opened rifle butts and exercised his troop of faithfuls, to whom he seems to have appeared as a kind of father.47

Edward Ivey, the active liberal, was a Sergeant in the First Rifles, and Edward Maher, a budding radical, was Sergeant Major of the Manchester Unity Rifles. A cross-section of society was attrac­ted into the appropriate ranks of the corps and many unusual friendships were struck in this fashion.

Though the progress through the lower ranks towards social acceptance usually took two generations the climb of some volunteer officers towards social status was plain. John O’Boyle’s father was Sergeant at Government House, a sort of messenger who saw-to Franklin and Wilmot.48 John became a counting- house clerk and civil servant after scraping in an important year at the Hutchins School. He remained loyal to volunteer service for thirty years, continuing to maintain the guns even during years when the force was disbanded and on his own initiative retained the honour of setting off the daily one o’clock bang. He began in the ranks but retired behind the mantle of the title Lieutenant Colonel O’Boyle. Professionally he was still a civil servant, albeit a successful one, but his army title helped him to a prominent appointment in the bureaucracy and Lieutenant Colonel O’Boyle was served dinner at Government House tables around which his father had fussed in years before .49 Such military titles sounded grand, producing much effect when bestowed and most officers used them constantly after appointment and made use of the device of accepting one rank promotion upon retirement. With the ancient barracks buildings secure and mellow beneath their maturing trees and unoccupied by any professional army the militia had a wonderfully prestigious base in which to meet. The Officers’ Club in the barracks came to rival the Tasmanian Club in self-regard and here John G. Davies could find a place around the fire, for like his father he was a volunteer officer. Trading upon his father’s success and lacking the impediments of the old battler John rose to the status of Lieutenant Colonel in the

From Caste to Community 161part-time defence corps, a title which eased the climb to later knighthood.50

Such men as these were in command of the Southern Tasmanian Artillery on the occasion when the militia was called out by the government to protect the peace of the city.51 During 1878 a lapsed Catholic Priest, the Canadian Charles Chiniquy, was on a lecture tour of the colonies speaking of the iniquities of Romanism and particularly about the power the confessional afforded priests over their young women penitents. This was always a popular topic with anti-papists and one which allowed prurient imagina­tion on both sides to run riot. Chiniquy’s invective raised to crisis level the usually tolerant dislike between Orange Protestants and Catholics, adding to the peaceful city some of the bigotry which was traditional in some Canadian communities and had long spiced the Septembers of cities on the Irish Sea when the memory of the battle of the Boyne was celebrated. It seemed for a while as if Chiniquy s lectures would cause rioting in Hobart streets and the Volunteers were ordered to stand-to as protectors of the public. The most vigorous Orangemen were in the Rifle Corps, which also included many Hibernian Lodge Catholics. The call to duty divided the set who were struggling in a sort of unity for social recognition. It was a test of the solidarity of the community which was forming of the emancipist remnants. The Orangemen, cleaving to loyalty and to their deep sense of accepted values, stepped forward eagerly to defend truth, honour, and property. In contrast many Catholics called upon to defend the community for the symbols of the Protestant monarchy answered by compromise or default. Some refused the call to arms and hid under their beds. Fortunately, and significantly in line with other exhibitions of the temper of this maligned gaol metropolis, the riots were mild. Little damage was caused and by the time the courts-martial of the Catholic deserters came around the overall sense of calm had returned so no penalties were inflicted.

The experience of living closely within the narrow society of a small city necessarily threw all types together. Just as workmen came to know their bosses better than they knew many of their own kind, riflemen met on close terms with their officers and their lodge committees. Contact helped both sides of the social gulf towards understanding but much of the effect was lost upon the

162 From Caste to Communityolder residents, who remained fixed in their prejudices. The old people had less opportunity to meet new acquaintances since the social institutions they had established after Independence still required their attention. Old settlers lived long and retained their positions of responsiblity upon the committees of the various institutions of town. Peter Facy edited the temperance People’s Friend for over twenty years. T. J. Crouch remained chairman of the Temperance Alliance and office holder of the Benevolent Society until his death at the venerable age of eighty-five. Dr Agnew became a wizened, gentlemanly figure most often seen at the race course but actively engaged in practically everything else, retaining his seat on various boards from Racing Association to Royal Society for over fifty years. The only chair he could not retain for long was that of Colonial Premier, though even at this he took his turn.52

Though the older settlers remained heavily involved and missed opportunities to mix they did find through familiarity an apprecia­tion of some of the old emancipists who were their contemporaries. These became the devils they knew, a feeling which tempered disgust and fear. The result was a slackening of personally direc­ted animosity within the community because it was not easy to fear every one of the other class equally. Yet the memory of hate was so strong that parents still trained their children to the idea of caste. The native-born heard much but saw little of this crisis. They were told by their parents of the iniquities of early Hobart Town, knew by repute that little John Davies was not a fit com­panion to share lunch with, that the Rheuben boys had a skeleton in their past. But prejudices were difficult to uphold in a boyhood of marbles and yabby fishing. The ‘hated stain’ did not lose its sting in Hobart but it did lose its point. When Caroline Leakey wrote a novel about the city in I86053 she had her hero advised never to allude to convicts in polite company in case there was a relative of one present. And this was how it became. All citizens knew of the stigma attached to convict ancestry and whispered to their own brothers and sisters that Uncle This was not talked about, or Grandma That was not to Mother’s taste. Everyone came to assume that everyone else was hiding a secret or two so that rumours would run their course and spinsters could nod knowingly.54 It was for long the staple of social game playing with occasionally more bite such as when the black balls rolled

163From Caste to Communityin the Tasmanian Club. But it came to matter very much less at the practical face to face level because most people of the new generation were in it together and there was far too much to do in an exciting era of change to bother with fear of the past.

• s * 11Keeping up with the Times

In the recovery of the Tasmanian economy after 1870, when there were great mineral discoveries in the north and west of the island and when the Colonial Government discovered the magical device of raising capital loans upon the London money-market, the working community entered upon a long period of peace, stability, and secure conditions. Hobartians no longer held illu­sions that their city was to be a great and thriving metropolis but became content with a slow pace of provincial living. Disputes and divisions within society were no longer fundamental to its social structure, participation was the mood and pervaded com­munity life; particularly in the search for pleasure which came to occupy increasing amounts of colonists’ attention and energy. The literate lower classes took a part in the life of reading, dis­cussion, and music and they wholeheartedly provided support for all the leisure activities of summer evenings and sunny Sun­days. A corporate rhythm to the working week became estab­lished for the first time since the end of compulsory church attendances—a rhythm which was determined by the desires of citizens rather than imposed upon them by the authorities as when townsfolk had been paraded to every event and every ceremony.

This was not now a rough environment where pioneers carved out of the wilderness a fortune, it was a community with balance and sophisticated means of advancement. Hence personal educa­tion and career-seeking came first in many young men’s minds. They found it good to share the experience of living in a com­munity whilst establishing identities within the world of things and ideas. Rather than follow their fathers into the older institu­tions of the city the younger generation tended to begin associa­tions of their own whose concepts were culled from current

164

Keeping up with the Times 165British fashion read in the journals of the day. They were not harassed and beleaguered settlers in a convict city, nor temporary official sojourners, but prospering, provincial middle-class bur­ghers. Lady Franklin’s museum, Bishop Nixon’s paintings, the Tasmanian Journal of Natural Science, the brief spasms of Mechanics’ Institute glory—all of these were the cultural milieu of their formative years, and the influence of them showed in the turn of their interests, but they were also strongly affected by the tide of fashion and events in the world of the late nineteenth century.

The most vocal set of the new generation became professional men, mainly lawyers and doctors, bankers and finance-house officers. Some few became businessmen, directors of their fathers’ merchant warehouses, which they helped turn into distribution agencies and service centres as the mysteries of trading were guarded more carefully by the Melbourne monopolies. Some of the richer young men were educated in England, though this remained more common for country sons as farmers held to the older traditions longer. The city boys relied upon the Hutchins School and the High School, while for the few rich years in the 1850s even the Catholic boys had a seminary in town which offered them secondary education.1 The registers of the grammar schools recall the names of many citizens and politicians. Most of the nonconformist sons took their lessons with Harris in the High School but the Hutchins School took in a spectrum wider than its Anglican basis.2 In 1846 the headmaster admitted G. S. Crouch aged twelve and his older brother T. J. Crouch junior. In 1847 the first of the Dobson boys registered. In 1852 G. P. Fitz­gerald went up to the school and the same year of gold saw the admittance of J. G. Davies aged six; Buckland accepted the con­vict sons alongside those of their despisers. In 1853 C. A. Crisp, aged fifteen, son of the popular Samuel Crisp, was admitted and some weeks later he was followed to school by C. Davies second son of John M. as well as the first two sons of Abraham Rheuben. The Crowther boys went to Hutchins, so did William Champ’s son, James Barnard’s sons, the Allport boys, F. M. Innes’s sons, Dr Bedford’s sons and many more. A surprising number of the same boys also spent some time in the halls of the High School, as if sampling the wares of both. The High School being pro-

166 Keeping up with the Timesprietary its committee of shareholders kept a tighter hold upon its management than Buckland ever suffered at Hutchins.3

School set the basis for allegiance in later life where the testing ground was career-seeking. Failing a university the Colonial Government set up a scholarship scheme; Newcastle Scholarships took boys to the grammar schools and Tasmanian Scholarships to British universities. Most years two places only were offered and other youths took a local 'degree’ called an Associate of Arts which was later accepted as Melbourne matriculation.4 The Tas­manian Scholars and first-class Associates of Art were usually lost to the colony, for very few took up permanent abode there after completing their studies. In contrast many of the citizens who were later prominent as lawyers and as politicians had taken out second-class awards in the Associates of Art examinations; such was a penalty of provinciality.

There was a long period of transition during which dependence upon British professional qualifications gradually altered to an acceptance of colonial forms of training. Local accrediting in many fields began hesitantly. Lambert Dobson went to Britain and university, ate his dinners at the Middle Temple and returned as barrister; the younger Henry Dobson was called to the local Bar after serving articles in Hobart solicitors’ offices. All alike acted as barristers and solicitors, there was no distinction made locally, but the English qualification carried the greater prestige.5 There were great plans for a liberal arts career in a British college for J. B. Walker but with the onset of depression and his mother’s widowhood he was reduced to a time as solicitor’s runabout before passing the local Bar and entering the city’s close legal fraternity. Unlike many of his competitors he declined its oppor­tunities for political career.

The failure of Dr Bedford’s Medical School in 1853 denied doctors any form of local training until 1860 when Dr Thomas Christie Smart’s training scheme of medical apprenticeship to the hospital honoraries was accepted as credit towards MRCS and MRCP, but the students had still to travel away to complete their medical qualifications at university somewhere.0 This break seemed to divorce doctors from local causes more than lawyers and the legal profession remained the ultimate passport to influ­ence and power, the arbitrators of the spoils of a self-governing people.

Keeping up with the Times 167Clergymen were mostly of overseas origin. Anglicans were

recruited in England with a few exceptions such as the one-time Premier Thomas Reibey who attended English universities.7 The temper of evangelical churchmen was different though the old ministers were all British. The livelier Nonconformist pastors spoke on equal terms with colonial youths and by the 1880s most chapels had local lay preachers. C. E. Walch was one and another was G. S. Crouch, who took control of the Wesleyan circuit after his return from New Zealand.8 The first exception to the import of Catholic priests from Ireland or England was Joseph Sheehy. His brothers stayed at home, two to become apprentice solicitors and another a chemist, but Joseph was sent away to a New South Wales seminary at the age of eight. After a short residence back in Hobart when he was twenty he went on to further study at the Propaganda College in Rome, before returning ordained to preach in his native community from 1863. After Sheehy there were a few native-born priests, yet all like him were educated among foreigners.9

Training for most other careers was catered for locally; teachers through their monitorial duties, all types of skilled craftsmen through indentured apprenticeships, civil servants through classi­cal education in the government and private schools and time­serving in offices. Serious consideration was not paid to the education and training of girls until the 1880s, many years after the boys’ pathways to career were established, but increasing numbers of girls were attending private schools after the mid- 1860s and a talented few were seeking further education overseas.10

The organising touch of the young was surer than the old, their way of expression more self-satisfied. During 1884 the Walch brothers published a thin volume bearing the title The Seven Rovers. . . .n The lively pamphlet told the tale of the group of young men, mostly native-born or of recent immigration, who whiled away their summer vacations sailing small boats in the waters enclosed by the beautiful southern coastline. They beat into the spray of fiord channels, passed between islands and pulled through gentle surf to camp upon white-sand beaches, where the candlebark trees leaned their sparse shadows over the edge of the sea. In their tents at evening surrounded by the black mysteries of the southern oceans they produced their books, reading aloud to each other under the firelight:

168 Keeping up with the TimesThe characters stand out in living form as we make our comments and discuss the men and women of the novelist’s creating. We admire or condemn them in our hourly talk, and they become distinct additions to our party without adding to our number or decreasing our stock of provisions.12

C. E. Walch was one of the party, his days as seaman useful experience in the teeth of bluff north-westerly squalls. R. M. Globulus’ Johnston was there, the newly-arrived Scotsman who already knew more about the island’s wild things than did his homegrown peers. He talked to them of the limpets on the rocks and the platypus in the creeks, the penguins and albatross they saw in the bays or the flowers and leaves which grew around their romantic camp sites. The Reverend George Clarke, another of the party, was a Congregational minister who earned the con­fidence of this generation of Tasmanians with his easy example of a practical and pleasant Christianity. While Johnston talked of natural science Clarke told willing listeners that they should bear in mind the Greater Science and the idea tied together the harmony of the whole affair.

The Seven Rovers, the tone of all of their interests so different from what had passed before in their community, seemed to represent the character of the new generation which was growing. The literature and the poetry of the hour, the excited out-pourings of the English romantics, topical questions at the heart of nineteenth-century civilisation, all were grist to the mill in the conversations at the favourite meeting place of the Macquarie Debating Society.13 Clarke had started the society in 1855 whilst its young followers were scarcely out of school and had yet to begin their travels on the roads towards colonial careers. The close band of youths displayed keen intellectual sympathies as well as high ideals and lofty aims. They were all deep admirers of Clarke and influenced by his able, scholarly preaching, which was worldly-wise and exceptionally liberal for those days. Many of them framed their attitudes to life upon his example.

The youthful leaders were Charles Rarclay and William Robert Giblin, the two opposing each other in type and talent—Giblin the reader and conversationalist who idolised Tennyson and kept up with all of the current magazines so that he was a fount of information on passing world affairs. Rarclay was dogmatic, logical and monotonous, seeming to have a fund of good,

Keeping up with the Times 169solid, improving books behind him. Giblin was so full of flourish and ornateness that he was persuasive until Barclay tore holes in the structure of his arguments. The Society debated conscientiously with notice of the main force of their reasoning delivered in advance to opponents so that the reply could be sharpened. They judged the morality of Charles I and his head and of Henry VIII and his wives. They discussed the meaning of poetry and contemporary political events; the American Civil War, the advantages of trial by jury or any likely problem in the wide world of their largely second-hand experience.

Membership was by ballot and attendance was enforced by fines, as were reticence in debate and talking beyond the allotted time limit; for the young orators took themselves most seriously. At the centre were the Congregational Church Sunday School teachers, but the new generation was a unit beyond sect, and one of the Catholic Sheehys—Thomas, an articled clerk—as well as Leo Susman, a shopkeeping Secretary to the Hebrew Congrega­tion,14 were welcomed into this influential group. Of the very young men who romped through these debates Barclay became the Manager of the Commercial Bank, a leading financial institu­tion of the city. J. B. Walker became the University’s Vice- Chancellor and the city’s man of letters. Henry, Alfred, and Lambert Dobson, through positions in Supreme Court, Parliament, and Government House gave their own name to a political period, the ‘Dobsonia’ of the 1890s.15 But Giblin remained the shining product. Accomplished orator at twenty, he was a respected member of every substantial institution by the age of thirty; his political sense so good, his hold on the Colonial Premiership for eight years so firm, that it became known as the ‘Continuous Ministry’ in this land of fly-by-night political alignments. His death at the age of forty-two left a gap no one else could fill.16 Giblin was an example to the native-born and chivvied them on their self-complacency and nihilism. He told them of their advantages and strengths, the sense of limitless future for the colonies, the virtues of living in Hobart and the opportunities for a new civilisation there.

The certainty of the new touch was seen most plainly through the growing fervour of the Sabbath school movement. Attendances at the schools grew through the 1870s until over half of the city’s school age children were regular Sunday attenders.17 The young

170 Keeping up with the Timesmen of the Sunday School Union were told that ‘through such work that which all thoughtful men and women long for—the amelioration of the social and moral condition of the people— would be brought about . . .\18 Into the ranks of the Associated Sunday Schools (500 strong in 1868) were drawn most young men of sensitivity and spirit and not merely those belonging to the constituent Nonconforming churches. J. B. Walker was of dedicated Quaker inheritance yet taught the top class in the Davey Street Congregational School. Another teacher was the young Henry Dobson, whose family were Anglican by tradition. W. R. Giblin attended that school as did Lyndhurst Giblin who was student and teacher there before taking his scholarships to London and Cambridge and later fame in the Australian Commonwealth.19

The spark and dominating personality behind the Union was its Secretary C. E. Walch, who could see with all of the assurance of the presumptious, liberal churchman that he had been, ‘called to God for this one work, and specially prepared for it, . . . woe unto me if I allowed anything to interfere with or mar its full and complete performance . . .’.20 For all of his adult life he dedicated himself to this mission, refusing offers of municipal and political careers in order to superintend the moral training of groups of youths and maidens, 400 at a time. He set himself, ‘To carry out this higher public work, to implant within them those principles . . . which will make them better citizens . . .’.21 The joyful syn­thesis, the metaphysical armour of men who through teaching others to be like themselves attained assurance of eternal reward at the same time as achieving civic progress! The influence within the community was strong. The sureness, the smugness, the easy assumption of the universality of all human needs for all classes was something distinctly new. The teaching touched some sym­pathetic core within lapsing parents who wanted better things for their colonial children than they had suffered themselves. And the children too, becoming less wild than their older brothers who had hid in barrels on rain-swept wharves, began to accept more easily the rhythm of the weeks, becoming milder, softer, perhaps happier personalities than their own sort a generation before. When the Duke of Edinburgh, the first of royal blood to visit Australia, landed on the shores of the Queen’s Domain he found himself faced by C. E. Walch, boldly striped in a blue sash,

Keeping up with the Times 171backed by the smiling, eager faces of 516 teachers and 4,618 Sunday School children poised ready to sing their ‘Ode of Wel­come’, which had been composed specially for the occasion by Louisa Anne Meredith to H. A. Packer’s music.22 The Sabbath schools united the younger people such as no other institution did, particularly to laugh when Joseph Bidencope the dapper hatmaker fell into the river from the welcoming launch as he released one hand to salute the Duke.23

Young people reared in the environment of the colony’s capital had much in common. Not only were their experiences of life similar but also the physical conditions of their upbringing. Colonial youths formed a new and common type of person. Straighter and taller than their parents they impressed visitors by a keenness and directness of eye, they revealed more open, less complicated personalities than were usual amongst the confused, dissatisfied, accented, immigrant stock from which they sprang. Perhaps the other side of the coin was the loss of sophistication amongst these people of the southern island as they acquired their reputation of rustic simplicity even amongst colonial Australians. Self-appointed appraisers of the charms of the young girls of Hobart considered them plentiful enough and rosy-cheeked, but gauche. Members of the Royal Navy’s Flying Squadron judged their partners in this port to be silly and gigglish, disappointing in their stiff movements with awkward elbows and ankles, lump­ing inept dance steps the wrong way around the floor. But for all that they were eager partners without false airs or graces who knew how to be hospitable and the sailors looked forward to their visits.24 The men were open-faced, slower speaking than the Melbourne types, perhaps gentler and certainly less troubled by pragmatic problems of competition. An editor could suggest to Hobart readers,

perhaps there may have been an element sluggish and fossilized growing up amongst us during a previous half century and as a society we have not kept pace with the general progress of civilization.25

Thus there came to be a central type of person, a small, pro­vincial town product towards which the children of emancipists rose and the children of settlers sank, a common look and attitude, which was quite what the settlers had always feared for their children brought up in the company of the prisoner population.

172 Keeping up with the TimesThe weakness in the position of the old anti-transportationist

settlers, even when they turned their hands to the social recon­struction of the early years of independence, had been their lack of any useful concept of what part the lower classes could play in community. They were very clear that the labourers ought not to be what they had been—emancipated criminals—but not so sure what they ought to be. Against the troubled background of society many influential people seemed to retain a simplistic hope that the community could somehow become unified within one single ideal, that all men could be urbane and middle-class and literate. There was always a dichotomy between the drive to keep emancipists apart and that to make the lower classes more like the image of the middle class. In contrast the younger generation, better-rounded personalities with less raw edges, found in liberal attitudes a rational explanation of the structure an ideal society could assume. The old perennial fear of ‘democracy’ was that power given to the emancipist classes would foment a social force against the settler interests; insecurity had been the compulsion to resentment. Now with the new security some of the literate and youthful groups were ready to accept the reassurances ol such thinkers as J. B. Walker that ‘the independence which republican ideas encourage is tempered by the feeling of mutual depen­dence’.20 Republican ideas could now be bandied about because it was felt that the community was organically sound; that as there was a place for middle-class lawyer and clerk there was honoured place too for honest labourer and skilled mechanic. The rational functions of classes need only be allowed free play and the lodestone of understanding in every man would provide a basis for the growth of a healthy community. Men had grown tired of the harping of their fathers on the old theme. Their land had outlived the threat of convicts and all that remained was ‘the bad spirit engendered by those who in the bad old days rode triumphant over their fellow men . . ,’.27

The old settlers’ continuing warnings about ‘ultra democrats’ and ‘chartists’ amongst the labouring leaders were no longer listened to. These sentiments persisted only in the memories of the old emancipist remnants and their counterparts amongst the diehard settlers. Both working men and young liberals were developing a sense of their place within community and it was as far removed as they could make it from the convict-kingdom

Keeping up with the Tunes 173image. The liberal sons expressed their belief in the idea of a united community and the message was one well suited to the problems of the mechanics and labourers who needed to progress away from any legacy of caste. Hobart working men for long held small brief for what European intellectuals were beginning to call proletarian solidarity. They were far too busy escaping from the old images and needed the confidence of acceptance into the community in their own right before they could act as an effective social group. The idea that society should be so struc­tured as to make it possible for everyone to seek personal progress was one which labouring men could begin to understand once most of them had some stake in possessions or property. As moderate success affected lower-class people and they joined into the debate about the nature of community the most influential image they saw before them was that of their own generation of dilettante liberals.

The young men were not obsessed with social control but influenced by the strong liberal and humanist ideas of Europe and the United States. The isolation from ideas was brought rapidly to an end by startling improvements in communications. Steamships ensured quicker and more reliable delivery of books and periodicals. A cable link with the mainland was opened and broke down in 1859 and a second one transmitted messages relayed from London from 1869. In the relationships between the classes the spread of liberal outlook led to a sense of com­munity stronger than the old sense of apartness. This was ex­hibited in many ways but most strongly in the form given to a new attempt at an improvement society which supplanted the Mechanics’ Institutes and Schools of Art. It was true that there was formal persistence of the old halls and meeting rooms and that for a time the Institute continued with singing and drawing classes.28 But no longer were they even pretended to be means for improving the labouring classes. The government grant to those flirting grounds of hoop-skirted gigglers grew steadily less. Instead a bright, new concept of workers’ education association filtered in from Britain, by way of periodical articles in the fortnightly reviews. Their name was Working Men’s Clubs, their method to provide congenial and innocent shelter for the leisure activities of labourers—at least this was the interpretation placed upon them by the young Macquarie Debating Society men. They

174 Keeping up with the Timesclaimed that the Hobart Working Men’s Club worked essentially through co-operation rather than by way of either coercion or paternalism. It was started in 1864 and flourished sufficiently to last the century. The usual library facilities were offered in a room with a big fire, on tables were placed chess, draughts, and dominoes whilst in a smoke room there was coffee and cakes, music and singing. Every evening the hall opened for the labourers’ use and doors were never shut whilst it was raining. The Club became a haven, a successful counter to the public-house bar. Fees were paid weekly rather than the usual quarterly and a Penny Bank with Provident Fund turned the groats of working men into savings and insurance.29

The statement of aims made in the 1870s appears in startling contrast to the sense of apartness in commentaries on similar themes which were made twenty years before.

Our Young Men have few innocent places of recreation to go to, they can meet nowhere to talk, to discuss, to recreate themselves after their day’s work in a rational and innocent manner except in a Licensed House of Entertainment, for it must be remembered that it is not everyone to whom the study of abstruse science or even the use of phil. apparatus is a ‘recreation’ and even the use of books is an acquired taste. Young men are inclined to be gregarious and if they have nothing innocent the fear is they will seek vicious amusements and pleasures so invitingly put before them. . . .30

This concept of the method of approach contrasts with that of the old Mechanics’ Institute which was expectedly grandly to, ‘contribute its quota to the intellectual, moral and social advance­ment of an enlarged and prosperous community’.31 The Institute had pressed its aims by subjecting mechanics on wooden benches to lectures about ‘The Authority of Truth as an Element in the Progress of Civilization’ and ‘The Structure and Function of the Organs of Respiration’ which widely missed the point of their intention. Such old institutions were denigrated by the new leaders as clusters of,

ripe scholars, gentlemen, and philanthropists, who pour forth the abundance of their learning for the benefit of the benighted Mechanic who declines to drink of the flowing stream so generously provided.32

The question of control of workers’ institutes was always a tricky problem. At times in Hobart there had existed Mechanics’

Reproduced by courtesy of the National Library of Australia.

11 Colonial satisfactions: leisure, literature and sunshine (see p. 167).

12 Cycle racing, a new sport (see p. 183).

Keeping up with the Times 175Institute by-laws which attempted regulation of the proportion of mechanics on committees, but such ploys to involve the men in management had scarcely been successful. By the 1860s this problem was easing. The new labouring-class men were not so abject as their fathers though it still remained true that no men of talent remained long as labourers. A working-class committee could succeed with merely one or two advising philanthropists present. During 1865 Harry Bastow and Charles Barclay, acting as the agents of the young liberal reformers, would,

be able to smooth over those jars which are the ruin of most societies managed by working men alone and keep the wheels of the Club oiled so that they may go smoothly, and will also be able to keep up the tone of the Club, and prevent the introduction of anything at all lowering in tendency, which would infallibly end in disaster. But all this should be done through the men, while the promoters should keep in the background for we want to call out the men’s thinking powers and only help them to help themselves.33

Through the seasons the remarkable W. R. Giblin was the strongest personality amongst the Club’s officers, he was president for twenty-two years until his death. Secretary for just as long was the shy, book-loving J. B. Walker, whose brother Ridley operated the Penny Bank for fifteen years. A Vice-President was P. O. Fysh. The Treasurer was II. Dobson. A committee member was Dr Agnew, still open to new ideas despite the age gap between him and the others. Nor were these men, four of whom were to become Colonial Premiers, mere figureheads for they were all personally involved in the Club and its week by week affairs. Its Secretary wrote,

the class we have to deal with . . . know and like us and we find it pretty easy to guide them, but I thoroughly believe that if we left go for a moment the whole thing would collapse. They so want self restraint that it would end in a series of squabbles. So we have to stand by. . . ,34

There was much dabbling in the radical forms of liberalism amongst the new middle-class professionals. Convinced con­servatives with the arrogance of Lambert Dobson were little affected by such fashion, but his brother Henry was. So were W. R. Giblin and J. B. Walker, G. P. Fitzgerald and P. O. Fysh. The claim in electoral puffs of concern for the working men became no longer a risk but rather, in the city if not in the country

176 Keeping up with the Timesaround, an expected and fashionable statement. The slumber­ing resentment against the old Master and Servant Act was championed as a cause for complaint by liberal, intellectual politicians and, after long battle, alteration was effected in the 1880s against the wishes of the unchanging, old-guard con­servatives who held the rural districts and still talked about the fear of uprising and need for maintenance of a strong police force.35 Andrew Inglis Clark, 'an honest fellow, with views and knowledge, but wanting in practical ability, too much of a doctrinaire politician . . .’3C found ready support for his ideas on improving the condition of mankind and gave speeches telling, 'democracy to roll on and make the world its own’.37

Such men who were personally secure within themselves, indi­viduals like Clark and Fysh and E. H. Ivey, found ideas of democracy and manhood suffrage attractive. Seeing a new place for the lower classes they offered their patronage to the hesitant mechanic leaders to enable them to join in new forms of com­munity organisation. The prime example was the Minerva Club, a debating and lecture association which aimed at a democratic understanding of social functions. Clark was its founder and he edited the monthly Quadrilateral, addressing it to all who were dissatisfied with the condition of Mankind. His club provided a link between the Macquarie Debating Society and the Working Men’s Club, offering participation in community away from the divisions bound by convict chains towards a new ideal relationship of men.38

Clark, locally born and High School educated, was one of Walch’s best customers, spending the equivalent of a month’s salary a year on his book-buying account. He saturated himself with ideas of American democracy, ran the American Club virtually alone and began the enthusiasm for intellectual electoral checks and balances which produced the complicated Hare-Clark system of voting; a Tasmanian phenomenon.39 During the follow­ing years middle-class radicals such as he came together formally once more in the Political Reform Association, which moved the debate on ideals out into the arena of colonial politics and, by confronting the clique alignments of contemporary ministries with a political creed based upon ideals, altered the structure of Tasmanian politics. The enthusiasm for liberal Utopias affected many of the professional classes beyond those who tried their luck

Keeping up with the Tunes 177in Parliament. It became fashionable to espouse such views in personal conversation, in debating society and on fishing trips or picnics and translations of the ideas into practical civic affairs brought significant alteration to the methods of civic improvement associations.40

Such talk made ready sense to the more intelligent of the young working class. It was not a proletarian tradition, nor yet a trade unionist one but essentially liberal humanist. In so far as the eager Oddfellows or Rifle Brigade members came to have any political enthusiasms, until the 1880s they were of this nature. But by that decade they also had the idea of trade unionism to consider. Small communities do not easily lend themselves to stratification accord­ing to common skills but rather favour workshop alliances, even those between bosses and men. Easier economic conditions lent strength to worker demands for concessions and prepared the way for the formation of the earliest craft unions. The association of Hobart men in such unions eventually took place under the urging of mainland delegates who were despatched by the burgeoning trade unions in the big cities of Melbourne and Sydney. They took ship and train for the fringe settlements full of robust enthusiasm for the new cause they espoused and took the mission to cloth-capped audiences in the outlying townships of the Aus­tralian area. In Hobart their visits aroused eager response. Trade unionism was a variation of the liberal doctrine of worker dignity which made sense and harmonised with the native-born working men’s awareness of their own strength and integrity. Thus the social conditions for trade unionism had been forming for many years, though it took the mainland delegates to establish the connection and cause the unions to begin.41

The Journeymen Bootmakers associated in 1875 and the same year G. W. Hall, of the Melbourne Typographical Society, in a week’s visit to the city, persuaded the printers of Hobart to form a self-protective union. By the early 1880s these groups, together with the newly formed unions of the engineers and the carpenters, formed a Trades and Labour Council, again at the persuasion of delegates bringing rousing letters from Sydney and Melbourne unionists. The new unions and the Trades and Labour Council were offered accommodation in the Working Men’s Club and the association between that artifact of the middle-class liberals and the trade union movement remained strong. The Club’s Secretary,

178 Keeping up with the TimesJ. B. Walker, was invited to lead a demonstration demanding an eight hours working day and he was tempted to accept but at the last minute mistrusted the further implications beyond libera­lism. To be like their liberal tutors the working men formed a Trades and Labour Debating Society which would train orators for union activity and through the 1880s the popularity of vaguely amalgamated liberal and unionist ideas spread. Even the churches opened their own working men’s clubs to compete with the secular field. Working Men’s Club patron, P. O. Fysh, announced that he had always been a true Liberal and in Parliament would henceforward openly support the cause of working men and unionists; a plea which assisted his bid for Premiership.

As 1890 approached this new and exciting wind blew more strongly. The whole social situation had altered. The conservative Church News published editorials supporting social equality and was loud in dismay at tidings of the London dockers’ plight in the late 1880s.42 As the editor of the Day Star commented, ‘The strike of London dockmen is awakening sympathy everywhere . . . in their struggle for a happier condition of life’.43 At last a synthesis of views about the structure of society had been reached, a syn­thesis which made good sense and alienated only the most die­hard conservatives. The ‘happier condition of life’ was every man’s due in the colony. The colonial workman was neither so abject nor so isolated from his richer bourgeoise fellows as the English dock labourer and from his privileged position each colonist could view the conditions on the London docks as symbols of the older, more wicked world which good fortune had enabled them to leave behind. These were the fruits of eighty years of colonial development and colonists were truly grateful.

*»»• 12The Full Life

The gentle life offered too many diversions for Hobart people to bother much with crime. They lived in an area of promise beyond compare, with a city way of life yet only minutes in a carriage or bus from the fern-gladed feet of 200 foot forest trees, or less than an hour’s ramble from berry-strewn rock ridges on the mountain peaks. The bush was full of flowers; scarlet waratah and wild orchid in the light bush-shade and Christmas bells succulent upon the banks. The Duke William thrushes whistled where the eucalypts in Sandy Bay grew by the white sands and the tide scoured a hard breast of beach. In a climate made for vigour, where cold hailstorm and ocean blast alternated capri­ciously with the joyous ease of summer days, the colonists came to realise their blessings and during years of plenty they filled their lives with indulgent pursuits.

Life was full, the years slipped by in gentle satisfactions which were the best therapy for a reconstructed community. The prosperous years excised for good the last lingering relevance of emancipist truculence and waywardness. Henceforward the memory of the convict inheritance would exist only as an attitude in the minds of men, a cultural stereotype. It became a quick response on the lips of anyone seeking justification for prejudice. In place there grew obsessive concern for personalities and relationships, a harping and a dwelling on parochial events. Every year or so scandal racked the tight community. Many Hobart people took sides in favour of Archdeacon Reibey, the ‘ecclesiasti­cal debauchee’ in the vivid court case of the early 1870s. They upheld the view that it was the cleric’s steadfast refusal to use his influence for the gain of others which led to allegations that he actively sought the seduction of married women. Reibey lost the

179

180 The Full Lifelibel action and retired from the Church, but he soon returned as successful politician and Premier. 1

At another time Billy Guesdon, a successful city auctioneer who led the local racegoers to the Melbourne Cup each year, flouted public opinion by showering attention upon Maud Smith, a compliant sixteen-year-old niece of the Dobson clan .2 The family sent her to safety in Melbourne but Guesdon was a man of parts. He rescued her from seclusion and brought her home by ketch and private coach, which undertook a wild career down the hundred miles of the Midland Highway, eluding the graspings of a brother at Launceston, an uncle lying asleep at Bridgewater and a whole posse of relatives on the outskirts of Hobart. The Lochinvar reached the safety of his castle and locked Maud inside, claiming she was now employed as governess to his family. His wife and children were locked inside at the same time. Mem­bers blackballed him in the Tasmanian Club but some voices were heard in his favour. Hobartians, even of this exclusive establish­ment, were cynical about virtue for they had long had cause to be. They were not broadminded enough to admit anyone of local emancipist family to their club during the century yet they were as tolerant as any clubmen towards the carousings of their peers. Walker thought that, even in the Guesdon case, men would have shut their eyes conveniently and said that the morals of members were their own business if the Dobsons had not had powerful friends on the Tasmanian Club Committee. As he noted in his diary the point was that the man deliberately ‘seduced a girl belonging to a family in society— (for if she had been a servant girl I admit it would be looked at differently) ’ . 3 Perhaps the things a man could get away with, so long as he was not of co ock,were wider than in many other small communities. A Colonial Secretary, and as such the legal guardian of all the colony’s wards in government institutions, used the privileges of his position to seduce a girl from the Girls’ Home Industrial School, gaining access to the school as one responsible for all of the delinquent girls. The affair was hushed and he resigned, but was back in politics after a year or two—after all she was only a servant girl.4

Rightly could Anthony Trollope refer to the ‘taste of slavery which has not yet lost its relish on the palate of many Tas­manians’.5 It was a sort of cavalier attitude towards other people

The Full Life 181and particularly servants which could have been a lingering result of the gaol camp habits.

Of greater shame was the scandal which became legend—that of Dr W. Crowther and the last of the Aborigines.0 Crowther was a man of substance and enterprise; medical practitioner, ship­owner, island owner and politician. He was many more things as well; the small community allowed its figures to fill many diverse roles. In 1869 William Lanner, a seaman, the last full- blood Aboriginal male, died at the Dog and Partridge Hotel. It was a significant event even to men who had assisted in the extermination of the natives. The coffin was sealed with wax and the single word WORLD was impressed upon it. The pall was a black possum skin rug joined to a cotton Union Jack and crossed waddies were placed at the foot; the warrior was going to his rest. Aged thirty-four he had been handsome in his own way. Attribu­ted the title of King Billy he had travelled to London to shake the hand of fellow sovereign, Queen Victoria, and in recognition of his rights was to be given a full military funeral in the Cathedral of St David’s in Macquarie Street. It was a sad and solemn occas- sion to consign to the earth the last seed of a race, to celebrate an extinction. Taxonomists agreed, for there was no record of a com­plete Tasmanian skeleton in existence, and the public mourners were unaware that the long and solemn ceremony was held over a mutilated corpse. For whilst the body had lain in the hospital dead-house, Crowther and his son, using their Hippocratic privileges and a spare key, had gained access and removed the skull, substituting for it that of another corpse. This act was embarrassing to the government, since an earnest request in the name of Science and the Royal Society Museum for the preserva­tion of the relic had been refused on the grounds of Christian propriety. Now that the proprieties had been sundered by Crow­ther the Colonial Secretary allowed John Graves, the Curator, to take the hands and feet of King Billy as museum pieces. The stumps within the coffin were carried in slow procession through St David’s aisle, between standing mourners, and those remnants alone were placed in the graveyard soil under heavy police guard. But Crowther was resourceful yet; not knowing that the extremities were missing he bribed the police chief, who was a Propsting, to relax the guard whilst he exhumed the coffin—to find it empty even of the foreign skull! A trail of blood led Crowther to the

182 The Full Lifehospital gates. With the backing of supporters he raced through corridors in an attempt to locate the prize, broke down doors with hammers and forced his way past obstructions, but found no more than one bloody wheelbarrow and an uncleaned charnel room. Too late! The dismembered parts were in the safe-keeping of Graves and the Royal Society. Crowther was foiled and his opponents had avenged the loss of the skull to his enterprise.

Though everyone was tainted by the hypocrisy and venturism of the leading citizens Hobartians knew that life was brutal and politics crooked. It had been so for more than half a century. There were plenty of people ready to defend Crowther and sug­gest that his political enemies had put their own construction on the affair to score against the Doctor. His suspension as Honorary Medical Officer at the hospital was short and he was soon returned to Parliament as member for the city with a large majority. Twelve hundred signatures supported a petition to reinstate him with all his former advantages. After some time his gift to the Royal College of Surgeons in London of the bones of King Billy, the last male Tasmanian, earned for him a Fellowship of the College, so that in the long run his callous manoeuvres appeared to be completely successful.

Little wonder that when a decade later Truganini, the last full blood female, faced death she was tormented by dreams of the fate of her parts and extracted a promise of a full Christian burial from the government of the day. The burial she got, the word was kept, but the exhumed body of Truganini duly took its mummified place in the Royal Society Museum. This was the nature of the town, a boiling-pot of rectitude and vice, a microcosm of the world and its contradictions. Dull, insular, censorious and hypo­critical, blase, long-suffering, cruel and venal, all the types of humanity together formed the evolving community and, though tolerance as such was not a virtue preached, no less a practical tolerance for the idiosyncrasies of fellow men was a product of this life in an isolated city.

As the working people became more secure their interests moved away from the limited old staples of drinking, carousing, cock fights and traditional, usually illegal, pursuits. Instead they came to join into communal events which had less of class bias. The growth of sport as a pastime was made easier by the ending for most people of Saturday afternoon work, so that roars from

183The Full Lifecrowds at cricket or football matches echoing across the suburban vale of North Hobart from the Queen’s Domain replaced the old- time working bustle which had been typical of Saturdays.

By 1885 400 cricketers were in an association. There were five football clubs, four cycling clubs, two clubs for rowing and others for lawn tennis, royal tennis, shooting, sailing, racing and swim­ming. The wealth and variety of sporting clubs contrasted strongly with the paucity of such associations which had existed at mid­century.7 During the 1880s large crowds attended football matches, the first of such regular events to attract to their gates a cross- section of the city population to join a common experience. A sporting newspaper selected public personalities of football, running, and boxing, and sports columns in all of the papers pushed aside the cables from outlandish places or the syndicated horror stories with which editors had filled their middle pages since colonial newspapers began.8 In 1886 a Melbourne cycle team raced through the city streets and was barracked as it defeated the Hobart team by a large margin.9 The tenor of community had changed completely from that of the early days, when there had been such contrast between the intent and serious application of official duty and the despised escapism of riotous pleasures near the wharf pubs. The great gatherings at sports events in the 1880s became the first release from the working life to bind together the disparate elements of what was becoming a remarkably homo­geneous society. There was scarcely a class of absolute paupers, no one very rich, a more even spread of education and an equal access to leisure time. The illusion of egalitarianism which began to take root was fed by Australian writers and painters who rejoiced in their differences from England and emphasised the comparative classlessness of colonial life.

Yet there was class even in sports. The irrepressible Dr Agnew was Chairman of the Gymnasium Club in 1877. A. G. Webster, a businessman of the city, was Commodore of the Derwent Sailing Boat Club. These were elite institutions. The many Vice-Presidents of the Southern Cricket Association were politicians, magistrates, and professional men. In contrast cycle racing and salt water fishing were mainly for the shop assistants. The Bowling Club was the resort of shopkeepers and building contractors. Lawn tennis courts were constructed in the prim gardens of Stowell, Secheron. and Lenna houses and the ultimate, the Royal Tennis

184 The Full LifeCourt in a building off Davey Street, was for a very select group only. Admission to a Ladies’ Cricket Match in 1891 was by invita­tion only and the audience included, ‘The Governor and Teresa and nearly all the fashionable world . . .’.10

In the evenings corporate activities prospered again. There was renewed joy in walking through gaslit streets to Glee Club nonsense-singing, which offered in its part-songs traditional English village culture and sentimentality carrying overtones of a simple, natural morality. The Club achieved a steady member­ship exceeding 100 over many years.11 More serious culture intending groups began to increase in numbers after 1880. The Liedertafel, the Philharmonic Society and the Orchestral Union all demanded considerable skill of their amateur players and were new features on the social scene. The churches were a valuable repository of musical talent; W. C. Eltham, Samuel Tapfield, and Frederick Packer were leaders of local choral groups as well as church organists and choir masters. The Orpheus Club began as the Holy Trinity bellringers and developed into a select choral society with an enthusiastic following.12 An Anglican Diocesan Choral Association typified the ever-growing involve­ment of the denominations in all secular social activities as the churchmen attempted to capture occupants for their pews by competing with the growing attractions of city life.13

Churches followed even into the fashion for dramatic societies which flourished about this time. Amateur theatricals took up much of the time of the Theatre Royal. The influence of Lady Teresa Hamilton, the Governor’s wife, was behind the Gaiety Players who were led by the civil servant, F. M. Hudspeth.14 Two Hudspeth daughters joined Miss Hamilton, Miss Butler, and Miss Elliston, all from the city’s judicial and upper-crust families, to flirt backstage with the sons of city professionals and govern­ment servants. C. W. Butler, S. K. Chapman, and H. Walch were Gaiety Players and all gay young blades of the day. Though amateur dramatics were generally spared the puritanical opposi­tion they aroused elsewhere, they still could put a flutter into the well-covered colonial breast.

The forwardness of the new generation of girls became very obvious; feminine progress being much talked about and much practised. The Congregational Literary and Christian Association attracted audiences of six youths and twenty-four maidens. Five

185The Full Lifemember societies formed the Literary and Debating Societies’ Union which published its own journal from 1889. A thousand people, well over half of them women, watched a debate final in the Town Hall.15 One prize essay was entitled ‘The Future of Australia’. The extempore elocution prize went to another speaker on ‘Australian Federation’ and the major topic of debate was ‘Woman’s Suffrage’. The ladies were pressing forward in book circles. All groups in the city joined the Australian Home Reading Union, the literature said to be a stimulus, ‘for discussion on all sorts of problems of the time . . .’,1(i by the enlightened girls, who now expected to take an interest in all current events much as the young men had done twenty years before. Lady Teresa began the Nil Desperandum Literary Society in Government House drawing­room and invited the idle daughters and wives of the better merchants, professional men, and politicians.17 The Governor’s wife allocated topics and expected brisk discussion after the patronising homily of her own introductory address on each sub­ject. Her wrongheaded discipline led to a schism in 1891 when a Dobson-Hamilton quarrel erupted between the wives of Chief Justice and Governor. The twelve women who resigned joined Lady Dobson, the wife of the Chief Justice, Miss Stephens, daughter of the public education head, and Miss Edith Giblin in a rival group across the city and the book discussions went on regardless.

Young women in the new girls’ schools, the Proprietary Ladies’ College above all, were graduating with a greater introduction to artistic pursuits than to any fitting them for gainful occupation.18 Art teaching was ladylike and accepted, and consequently poorly paid. Despite the known surfeit of lady painters more and more artistic bluestockings sought instruction. Such favourable circum­stances attracted professional painters to begin art classes for paying students. Monsieur F. Maurice, a typical example, left disconsolate after raffling twenty paintings for eighty tickets at 10s. apiece; for the urbane interest in such matters had little solid substance, artists were considered dilettante and were humoured but not respected.19 William Charles Piguenit was more successful than most. His romantic images of Hawkesbury River crags and Tasmanian mountain mists, in all their indigenous splendour, struck a sympathetic chord. An admirer of Piguenit’s work was Dr Agnew who managed whilst acting as Premier,

186 The Full LifeHonorary Secretary of the Royal Society, and President of the Art Association, all at the same time, to combine his roles har­moniously and sweetly in this small-town capital. He combined them sufficiently well to produce a government-financed art gallery built to match the Royal Society’s handsome museum.20 In its dark classical rooms the new Art Association brought together the creative drives of the community amateurs.

Various girls are constantly seen there copying pictures . . . Some of them have sufficient talent if they have anyone to teach them .. . The present state of things is enough to demoralize a generation or two. However to have excited the interest is something and it may be possible to regulate it a little in the course of time.1’1

Meanwhile, in a minor renaissance of the 1840s scientific flourish, a few migrants of talent found the backwater attractive. Leonard Rodway, R. M. Johnston and the native-born William V. Legge, all had books published on topics of natural science and took part vigorously in local community. Johnston with his broad Scots accent it was said, ‘would be as eloquent and earnest to an audience of cabbages as to anything else . . .’22 but at least some of his audiences in the Royal Society rooms had progressed beyond that cabbage-state typical of mid-century. From the liveliest of the native-born a new interest in the culture of science re­awakened the Society’s enthusiasm, so that the work on Aborigines and Tasmanian natural history during the 1890s was a useful contribution to learning.23

Access to periodicals and publications and to news of innova­tions of all kinds was vital to these people shut away on the limited island. The Walchs, who managed the most significant book service in the Australia of their time, conceived of the idea of publishing lists of books newly arriving from London. Before the Suez canal was opened they were prepared to hasten special orders by bringing the books across the desert by camel train, expensive though this was.24 The Literary Intelligencer remained the standard book-buying reference for over fifty years and was supplemented by regular newspaper columns of adver­tisements to feed a book-hungry public. In one of the editions of another best-seller, Walch’s Catalogue of Books, 5,000 titles cur­rently available were listed, including three of the Walch’s own publications.25 The arrival of English periodicals containing the episodes of Dickens’s latest novel were awaited week by week.

188 The Full LifeThe popular woman novelist Mrs Humphrey Ward was the daughter of Julia Sorell, still remembered as the downfall of Governor Eardley Wilmot. The novels by Caroline Leakey and James Bonwick with settings in Hobart added to reading the flavour of local participation. All the libraries in town prospered, and there was particularly strong demand for periodicals and novels at the Mechanics’ Institute and the Public Library where the circulation of borrowed books increased six-fold in twenty years while population rose by a mere tenth.-0 In the dusty windows of his book depot William Westcott exhibited manu­scripts and editions of any publication throwing light upon the exploration and discovery of these lands of the south. A historical consciousness was growing. From a buying agent in Britain, and from Westcott, J. B. Walker began to gather the library which eventually formed the basis of the colony’s treasured collection of books on Tasmanian history. Walker thought Westcott to be, ‘a true specimen of the book stall man, dirty and rapacious, with a considerable knowledge—indeed, altogether too great a know­ledge—of what is rare . . . the old harpy’.27

Art Unions in their original form were lotteries for the com­mercial distribution of paintings, engravings and small statues. Walch’s were agents for several Unions based on Edinburgh, London, and Melbourne. They were a useful institution when few immigrants arrived with carefully stowed treasures. The purchase of tickets gave the illusion of a grasp upon the civilised world of quality, even though the only results most colonists saw were the consolation prizes of cheap prints depicting Pre- Raphaelite sentimentality.

Anyone could sense that by the last quarter of the nineteenth century the city of Hobart had become something rather pleasing in its own way. Not only was the setting magnificent, the town was architecturally restful with all of the old sandstone buildings, and it had its own ease and lack of threat as the complacent burghers assiduously tended the pleasures of their own lives. It was a life far removed from the grime of factory chimneys and the long and crushing lines of suburban shops. Hobart offered all of the attributes of a pocket city, an ideal place of relaxation and parasols; if the wind would stop blowing. As the community contrived once again to present its best face to the world it was quite suddenly discovered by the tourists who were a new

189The Full Lifephenomenon of Australian life. After twenty years development from the gold-rush chaos, Melbourne, on the Bass Strait, was a city of workaday lives and secure incomes. Before mid-century the one thought of any colonist with spare money and time on his hands had been to get back to Europe, but this changed rapidly after 1860. Then there were more people in the Australian colonies rich enough to spend a little time on holidays every year and these prospering middle classes promoted a growth in tourism. In this period the southernmost metropolis came to be considered a gem.

One strength of the attraction of Hobart for the tourists of the nineteenth century was that the nostalgia for ‘Home’ persisted strongly, with widespread love for any reminders of English characteristics. It was the yearning of colonists in a bare brown land for gentle green hills and misty seascapes. Many of the colonial population were immigrants who were always half want­ing to be ‘Home’. Their children bore the full brunt of the division of allegiances between the mythical land of the talcs their mothers told and their own. There remained fascination with origin of family and the source of the possessions seen in the houses of their parents. The ideal leisure environment for Australians was still a cold temperate one and the ideal pace of living dependent upon coolness and elegant dressing in suits and fine wool clothes. Sun, beaches, and surf, the glories of wide brown plains or hot tropical forests were still alien to most people. The deep attraction towards such scenes, amongst those who walked in the light of this land, remained unspoken until near the end of the century. The acknowledgment of such sentiments being a part of the rough grasping of Australian nationalism which took years to grow acceptable to every class of society. Tasmanians who visited the mainland returned with tales of dislike of the land’s intense heat. In return the coolness of Mount Wellington’s fern gullies in sum­mer was a delight to those seeking retreat from baked plains beyond blue ranges. Hobart became a spa, a health resort, whilst offering an emotional haven in its mythical Englishness. Its super­ficial similarities with Britain became magnified to excess; its quiet, stonefaced, Georgian buildings became seen as a Bath or Cheltenham in exile and to many a visitor with hazy memories of Europe the days spent on vacation in Hobart were the best of the year.

190 The Full LifeJames Smith, the Victorian Parliamentary Librarian, delivered

a series of enthusiastic lectures to Melbourne audiences describing his holidays in Hobart.

All the elements of the picturesque are there—the lofty hedge­rows, white with blossom in the spring and crimson with berries in the autumn, the luxuriant foliage, the winding lane, the sweet breath of the new-mown hay, the sweep of the scythe through the long lush grass, and the rustic bridge spanning a brawling brook; . . . Many of the houses I passed had a square, solid, substantial look about them, suggestive of permanence and comfort. They seemed to say, 'Look at us! We were not run up by a speculative contractor the week before last; and we have no intention of tumbling down the week after next!’28

Such publicity brought visitors in droves and produced a new consciousness of Hobart as a commodity with saleable value. Boosters struck upon the title T he Sanatarium of the South’ and there were proposals to use the island as the recuperation centre for the sun-tired officers of Indian Army regiments as well as refugees from Australian sheep stations and suburban deserts. In 1888 grandiose plans for a rambling spa-hotel in Lower Sandy Bay, at the end of the horse-bus route, were published.29 It was to have all amenities, including the croquet lawns and gardens of the English image and the shark-free bathing pool of the Aus­tralian one. It would have capped the development of a decade and fixed the image in stone, but the capital of £20,000 was never raised and Hobart missed this opportunity to have a large convention centre in the hydro style, such as developed in other playplaces of the Empire at this period.

The opportunities for profit were real and the effects of tourists upon a little city were fresh and unsettling.

The season is now in full swing, parties and picnics everywhere, naval men in force, strangers monopolising the Club, and all the usual accompaniments of Summer. Buses now run to the Bower, the Mountain, Mount Rumney and all sorts of places. This after­noon swarms of cabs and drags . . . have been returning from the mountain crowded with people . . . every place is full of them, loafing about with nothing to do . . . so that one is led to hate them and express one’s feelings in language. Although it is no doubt good for the town, and for one’s self to be stirred up by these periodical arrivals, I confess I often sigh for the quiet summers of my youth, when we followed our own devices and had our quiet and enjoyable picnics in our own quiet way and when the advent of a stranger was an event.30

191The Full LifeThe tourists enjoyed the brisk sea breezes and the cool north- westerlies. They loved to visit the ice houses in the shadow of the cliffs, 4,000 feet above the city streets, and to gaze down over the red brown treetops to white sails dotting the blue of the Derwent. They loved the gardens and fences and the sight of church spires and fruit blossom close to the open quays, where occasional seals raised their heads between the loading vessels at the wharf and the gulls were harried by skuas from both poles of the earth. They took trips out to the open water where gannets fished and albatrosses followed the ferry ships. But they were attracted also by the people who inhabited these city spaces, the community which seemed to have reached such gentle, united urbanity and yet which kept concealed, barely beneath its surface, the horrors of the convict days whose relics one could visit and view.

The 1890s brought to Hobart a change once more in the sense of identification. The strengths and joys of prosperity, the in­creasingly intimate connections with the mainland Australians, the sense of interests diverging from English ideas and all of the coming and going of colonial living brought a new set of loyalties. The idea of Federal Union was generally popular in the small colony and, when Federal Conventions were held in Hobart, the newspapers and their readers became agog with the ideas which opened up. Obviously the larger Australian cities woidd fight tooth and nail to become the national centre and would cancel each others’ chances. Why could not a pleasant retreat, a non­competitor like Hobart, fulfil the need and become a Federal capital as well as that of a colony? Such thoughts began a measur­ing of worth and myth. Australian nationalist feeling rapidly became a force, as if all of the years had been spent building to­wards this end. During the 1880s, before Federation seemed assured, there were detectable beginnings of a nationalism of the independent Tasmanian, separate from the Australian sentiment which replaced it. A self-congratulatory air became apparent in the discourse of Hobartians. J. B. Walker wrote to his sister Mary,

1 believe in the capacity of Tasmanians. But a Tasmanian is very little good until he has been away and seen the world. Those who come back after that can hold their own with most. What all of us want is to get rid of the insular and provincial ideas of this little place. . . .31

192 The Full LifeAccepting him at his word, whilst studying at an art school in London, Mary took up with a French artist. When she eventually returned home to Hobart to teach in the Ladies’ College, it was thought she was much improved from her vision of the wider world, but had come back to real life.

Underneath the process of self-examination lay a growing sense of alienation from English society. Identification with Britishness died hard; colonists appreciated their good life, but not at the expense of losing their patriotic associations. After 1880 the jingoism and self-confidence of burgeoning British imperialism left colonists feeling peripheral and different. It was not they who were abandoning England but the English who abandoned them. To Englishmen the Australian colonists were just another part of the vast outside world which was foreign, though mostly under British influence. Such lack of special warmth from the Home Country was frightening and irritating to colonists, who believed they deserved a unique sentimental connection with the land they had extended over the seas. The neglect of English understanding over the New Guinea affair came as a shock even in Hobart 2,000 miles to the south of the tropics.

We are Englishmen, if we are resident in Australia—our residence here does not make us any less part of the great English Nation; and although for many reasons of convenience we manage our own affairs in the main, why can’t we remain part of the great nation to which we belong, without our brothers in the old world perpetually telling us they want to cast us off. The cold, indifferent tone that you in England assume towards the colonies will work mischief and do much to alienate colonial feeling and perhaps eventually produce a hostile sentiment towards the people at Home.32

The alienation was slow and bitter and at its centre was a sense of loss, but it was all far from negative. Colonials were in the same plight together; a new nationality offered hope as well as rejection. At times the future prospects of the colonies seemed so vast that Britain seemed halt and lame by comparison. It was commonly believed that there was nowhere on earth where people could be so free from want and so insulated from anxiety as they could in comfortable little Hobart. In contrast England seemed a dour land of toil and overcrowding. J. B. Walker wrote of the joyous sense of sharing in the formation of a new nation and the privilege of having lived through those creative years

193The Full Lifewhen the nature of an original community was being forged. Similar sentiments were held by other people including the editor of the Southern Star:

As yet Tasmanians are quieter in their habits, and perhaps a little less progressive in their ideas than their Australian neighbours. But we belong to the same noble parent stock, and we are all Australians, and hope some day to become an integral part of the great Australian nation.33

An affection for Australia often brought a voluble rejection of Englishness. The casting-off of the old skin, the sloughing, accom­panied the revelation of what had been growing beneath it during all those years. Mary Walker resented her acceptance by the English as colonial, slightly foreign and slightly inferior. Her complaints drew the comment from her brother,

I am glad you stood up for your country and declared yourself an Australian—Don’t let the haughty English—or German—lord it over the freeborn Tasmanian. As the Americans used to say ‘This is going to be a big country. Yes Sir! . . .’ I really do think that there is a chance here for starting a nation on improved lines—it is not often in history that there comes an opportunity of a clear start unencumbered by all sorts of vexed questions.34

With the passage of time the convict camp people had reached such vision of themselves as a community. Here was its sense of arrival. But, unlike individuals, communities seldom die and, though Hobart had a clear beginning, its story had no end as development continued into the new century. The city remained well described as being, ‘half brick, half stone with a superfluity of drapers and solicitors’ .35

E P I L O G U E

Events made the 1890s one of the most dramatic decades of the century and continued the growth of Hobart away from the simplicity of the camp at Sullivan’s Cove and further towards the status of being a capital city of one of the States of Australia.

INCIDENT ONED uring the spring months of 1889 Tasmanians in the security of their kingdom contributed gladly to the fund to bring relief to the suffering dock labourers in London. The least which lucky colonists could do was to help the underprivileged of the bad old world. There were collection boxes at the Working Men’s Club and others for the Trades and Labour Council. Appeals were made around the churches and in St David’s Cathedral the special plate for the London dockers returned heavy with change. Hobart money was part of the Australian subsidy of <£30,000 which enabled the Port of London working men to hold out to success in their strike against their employers. And why not? This was exactly what the social activity in Volunteers, Lodges, and Liberal Clubs had been about for twenty years. The dockers’ leader was said to have exclaimed ‘This, lads, is the Lucknow of Labour, and I myself, looking to the horizon, can see a silver gleam . . .’.l It was the same gleam which lit the eyes of the new generation of colonists. But by the September of the next year, 1890, there was a complete change of heart. The editor of the Church News in Hobart wrote ruefully of the folly of having supported those dockers. ‘This unfortunately was an instance of preparing a rod for our own back . . .’. For in the meantime Australian com­placency had been shattered by the seamen’s and the shearers’ strikes. And the shock waves hit hard at the independent colony of Tasmania. Since the gold rushes there had been no similar event throwing all colonies together; since the ending of transpor­tation there had been no such violent threat to the hegemony of the middle classes.

194

Epilogue 195The diary of J. B. Walker, which contained so many eulogies

of the liberal success of the Working Men’s Club and so many humanitarian comments on the Trades and Labour Council, the Eight Hour Day Movement and the right to strike, reflected his sense of betrayal. The working men of Hobart, inspired by those of the mainland, turned to bite the hands which had patted their heads. Walker wrote to his sister Mary,

The men don’t profess to have any grievance. It is simply a struggle for supremacy.. . . the tyranny of the Trades Unions in Australia has been quickly growing unbearable. . . . One hears from masters even here, many stories of the way in which men act, refusing to obey orders and pleasing themselves about the times they come to the workshop. If remonstrated with they pay no attention and, if the master dis­misses them, all the hands take up their tools and go. . . . I most sincerely hope the men may get a lesson for otherwise there will be something like a social revolution. . . .. . . Australia, the paradise of working men. . . .2

What had been the virtue of liberal principles if they had merely assisted the threat of caste to be replaced by the threat of class? Hobart citizens were left wondering if their progress from the convict days was as complete as they had imagined.

INCIDENT TWOOn the morning of the third day of August in 1891 the doors of the Bank of Van Diemen’s Land did not open. There was shock and consternation. A large crowd collected outside the stout wooden panels. Men shook the shining brass door knobs and spread talk­ing in groups across the roadway and the corner. What could have happened? The shares of the bank were held almost entirely by the old city families. The deposits of many respectable citizens were locked away in its vaults or placed within the trust of its security. The bank symbolised the stability and independence of the city. Had there been misjudgment in the placing of confi­dence? Shareholders had a few months before received a 9 per cent dividend. There had been no hint of insolvency before the day the doors stayed shut, no threat that the small world was less than self-sufficient, no warning of this sudden collapse. What was happening?

The bank, it was slowly learned, had fallen victim to the whims of outside events. Secure within the island the Directors had long

196 Epilogueinvested widely, with security only partially arranged. Nor had such schemes ever come amiss. The managing director, W. H. Burgess, took out £74,000 for his own investments, of whiclh half was completely unsecured. Then without notice a crediting bank in England, stung by the depressed economy there, had recalled its Hobart credits. The Bank of Van Diemen’s Land Directors had sought vainly to attract support from mainland sources but all financial houses were wary and saw no profit in aiding the institutions of the island colony. They had allowed the bank to sink.3

Many of the city’s major business houses owed the bank money. If it were to recall their loans they would be ruined; yet if it remained closed the savings of many retired settlers were written- off. The entire wealth of the Beverend George Clarke from the Congregational Church was lost and there were others in similar positions. Everyone in town was involved in part, life it now seemed had depended upon no more than the insecure thread of London credit. Henry Hopkins had been a director of the bank, so had Anthony Fenn Kemp and John Beaumont and Thomas Giblin. Abraham Rheuben had owned shares and J. G. Davies, John Watchorn, Alexander McGregor, George Crisp and dozens of others.4 The remiss director, W. H. Burgess, was a grandson of that now most-respectable family, but could they ever really be trusted or was this a sign? The whispering was inevitable in a town with a history like that of Hobart; yet Burgess had been Colonial Treasurer and Premier of the colony before this financial debacle.

G. P. Fitzgerald, politician, shopowner, and friend of the ideals of the working men, was called in to put the pieces together.5 Assets were disposed of in a lottery of 300,000 <£1 sweepstake tickets. Houses and hotels changed hands by the drawing of a number. But confidence could never be the same again; the ship was no longer watertight. Australian creditors came in to under­write and absorb the debts of local firms and Hobart became a financial province.

INCIDENT THREEO n a winter’s day in 1894 the Reverend Archibald Turnbull, followed by two bands from the Friendly Societies and a crowd of unemployed estimated variously between 750 and 4,000 people,

Epilogue 197marched upon Parliament House in Hobart. The mobs carried flaring torches and banners and surrounded the old and elegant Customs House, which was guarded by uniformed Territorial Police supported by the Hobart Municipal Police. It was no use calling out the Volunteers as militia, for they were out already. They were the faces on the other side glaring at the lighted windows where Parliament debated whether to admit Turnbull. They argued whether they should listen to him speak in support of a petition that the government should provide work and wages for the thousands of Hobart men who were unemployed in this terrible 1890s depression.6

Turnbull bragged that he alone was responsible for the orderly conduct of the mob outside and hinted at the threat of violence from the discontented and unemployed. The face of Sir Edward Braddon must have paled somewhat as the Anglican priest raised his finger and assured the Premier that only he, Turnbull, ‘stood between the Government and fury’. The editorial comment in the Mercury next morning reduced the incident to parochial levels and showed how little the middle classes knew about the world wide passion of socialist ideas culled from Henry Georgism and the New Utopianism of Edward Bellamy which fuelled the dis­content of the hungry labourers. Davies’s newspaper pronounced ‘there is something ridiculous in unemployed persons marching down to Parliament House with a band of music at their head and with blazing torches there to listen to wild, whirling and most impractical speeches’.7

Hobartians could scarcely grasp that the ‘something ridiculous’ was almost a third of the city’s workforce clamouring for bread and meat. As the depression of the 1890s locked the community in a colder grasp the have-nots realised once more that, as in the convict days, the ‘people’ were dispossessed by their fellow men within their own city. A problem for the future was to be that of inequality of wealth as that of the past had been one of inequality of opportunity.

INCIDENT FOURThe last day in December 1900 turned out a ‘fragrant, exhilarat­ing Tasmanian day’. It was perfect for the beating of ‘Hearts apulse with the glow of nationhood’. By such phrases the writers of the Tasmanian Mail of 5 January 1901 attempted to establish

193 Epiloguean image of the passing of one century .luring which the island had been, ‘a little isolated colony’ and the beginning of another when ‘she was a living member of the Australian United Nation’. National life began at noon on 1 January when a posse of police lined the steps of the Supreme Court to hold back the crowds while the colony’s Chief Justice, Sir John Dodds, declared inde­pendent Tasmania to be at an end.

The Tasmanian Mail editor reminded Hobart people that the passing of the first century, and of independence, were each in themselves poignant events. They could look back upon great change, great perils’ and forward to, ‘a great future for our island home’. They could detect, ‘a curious feeling as of hope tinged with regret as the closing century waned swiftly to its end’. For, though Hobart people enjoyed freer air than their ‘fathers breathed a hundred years ago, and, while the air had been cleansed of the hated elements [yet] great exploits had been done’ by the pioneers of the city.

When the newspaper had finished with its superlatives about significance and got down to describing the scenes, its reporters were forced to admit that public reaction was cool. The ceremony met with little ‘animation and no display of enthusiasm’. Various congratulatory addresses to His Excellency the new Administrator (also John Dodds) by ‘certain Friendly and other societies’ were postponed to a time when there were more members present. The dignitaries at the top of the steps looked over the heads to watch the townsfolk hurrying by ‘on the trams, in vehicles and on foot to enjoy themselves after the usual New Year’s Day fashion’. Hobart people not only preferred their own entertainment to ceremony but also were lukewarm about this passing of status to the mainland cities. A consensus opinion, it was suggested by the newspaper, would have been, ‘We would have stood out if we could; but unfortunately we could not afford to’. So why get excited about it?

The ceremony was poorly attended from the official side, for the first day of Federation revealed the disadvantages of life as a small part of a big nation. Almost all of the members of the government and the judiciary had accepted the perquisites of nationhood to take their wives at public expense to represent Tasmania at the gorgeous pageant of the Sydney celebrations. There they enjoyed the mingling of notables at a series of fine

Epilogue 199dinners, a massive fireworks display and a procession five miles long, which included both troops from India representing the Empire and Volunteers drawn from each colony.

It was the chance of such glories which was being renounced in Hobart through Federation. Small wonder that the Tasmanian Mail, desperate for comment, drew the conclusion that interest, ‘was evanescent, save to the irrepressible small boys, who seemed endowed with an inexhaustible supply of reserve force’.

The children knew no home but this with all its virtues and weaknesses. The past story of the penal colony was a deliberately muted subject in their history books but awareness of it lay not far beneath the surface of their pride. They would grow up assured of their Australia but thinking little of Tasmanian colonial glory and knowing their Hobart to be a city which had to be wary of its past.

NOTES

Introduction

1 Manuscript of the talk ‘Old and New Hobart’ in the possession of the Royal Society of Tasmania.

2 The collection of Walker papers which was used extensively for this book is held by the University of Tasmania.

3 J. Fenton’s A History of Tasmania from its Discovery in 1642 to the Present Time was published in Hobart in 1884.

4 Note the historical section of Cyclopedia of Tasmania, 2 vols., Hobart, n.d. [1900]; Tasmanian Mail, 26 October 1889.

Chapter 1

1 Chapters 1 and 2 are based more than the rest upon secondary sources. Much more has been written about the early history of Hobart than about the second half of the century.

2 J. West, History of Tasmania, Launceston, 1852, vol. 1, p. 36. West’s indispensable book has been reproduced in facsimile by the Libraries Board of South Australia, Adelaide, 1966. 2nd ed. Melbourne, 1971 with editorial notes by A. G. L. Shaw. R. W. Giblin, The Early History of Tasmania, 2 vols., London 1925 and Melbourne, 1939. See also A. Rowntree, ‘Early Growth of the Port of Hobart’, THRAP, vol. 3, no. 6, October 1954, pp. 92-101. The best description of the period is by G. Rimmer in G. J. Abbott and N. B. Nairn (eds.), Economic Growth of Australia 1788-1821, Melbourne, 1969.

3 Sources differ on the numbers of convicts. Figures given here are of the correct order. See P. R. Eldershaw ‘The Convict Department’, THRAP, vol. 15, no. 3, Jan. 1968, p. 130. HRA III, i, 783 n. 8 tells that 464 persons embarked at Sydney but several died on the voyage.

4 West, History, vol. 1, p. 38.5 There is useful description of the environment in G. W. Evans,

A Geographical, Historical and Topographical Description of Van Diemens Land, London, 1822, in facsimile Heinemann Ltd, 1967.

6 There are newspapers available for the period from this date in the Tasmanian State Archives. The longest lasting were the Hobart Town Courier, Hobart Town Gazette, Colonial Times and Colonial Advocate.

7 From 1820 there is R. M. Hartwell, The Economic Development of Van Diemens Land 1820-1850, Melbourne, 1954. See also H. M. Hull,

200

Notes 201Statistical Account of Van Diemens Land 1804-1823, Hobart, 1856; Statistical Summary of Tasmania from the Year 1816 to 1865 Inclusive, Hobart, 1866.

8 West, History, vol. 2, pp. 123-4.9 A. G. L. Shaw, ‘Some Officials of Early Van Diemen’s Land’,

TIIRAP, vol. 14, no. 4, Apr. 1967, pp. 129-41; R. W. Baker ‘The Early Judges of Tasmania’, THRAP, vol. 8, no. 4, Sept. 1960, pp. 71-84.

10 Use here was made of the Tasmanian State Archives collections of card catalogues. The Wayn Index lists individuals and gives references to their mentions in newspapers and certain official documents.

11 The History of Van Diemens Land, London, 1835, p. 3. Melville is better reading than West on the 1820s.

12 Hobart Town Gazette, 8 June 1816.13 Rowntree, ‘Early Growth’. See also Rimmer, Economic Growth.14 R. J. Solomon, The Evolution of Hobart, unpublished Ph.D.

thesis, University of Tasmania, 1968.15 L. A. Meredith, My Home in Tasmania, 2 vols., London, 1852, vol.

1, p. 209.16 Hobart Town Gazette, 4 March, 1825.17 Mercury, 26 June 1869; 28 June 1889; Home Office 11/6, 27/31.18 Mercury, 26 Sept. 1876; Tribune, 26 Sept. 1876; Home Office

26/32.19 Mercury, 17 Dec. 1901; Home Office 27/30.20 Home Office 27 series. The official records of convict careers pro­

vide a rich source of social history. They were used by L. L. Robson in The Convict Settlers of Australia, Melbourne, 1965; ‘The Origin of Woman Convicts . . .’, Historical Studies, vol. 11, no. 41, pp. 43-53; ‘Male Convicts Transported to Van Diemen’s Land 1841-1853’, THRAP, vol. 9, no. 2, June 1961, pp. 39-55; H. S. Payne, ‘A Statistical Study of Female Convicts in Tasmania 1843-1853’, ibid., pp. 56-69; and by A. G. L. Shaw, Convicts and the Colonies, London, 1966.

21 Mercury, 17 Aug. 1886. Memorial stone in St David’s Park, Hobart.22 J. Backhouse, Narrative of a Visit to the Australian Colonies,

London, 1843.23 P. Bolger, John Morgan . . ., unpublished B.A. thesis, University of

Tasmania, 1964.24 W. E. L. H. Crowther, ‘A Surgeon as a Whaleship Owner’, Medical

Journal of Australia, 1943, no. 1, pp. 549-54.25 Australian Dictionary of biography, vol. 3, Melbourne, 1969;

Mercury, 30 Oct. 1877.20 J. T. Bigge, the Commissioner sent out to investigate the situation,

agreed with the settlers.

202 Notes27 Discussion on Arthur’s character in C. M. H. Clark, A History of

Australia, vol. 2, Melbourne, 1968; A. G. L. Shaw, ‘A Colonial Ruler in Two Hemispheres, Sir George Arthur in Van Diemen’s Land and Canada’, THRAP, vol. 17, no. 3, May 1970, pp. 80-96.

28 West, History, vol. 1, p. 98.29 Ibid.30 Ibid. vol. 2, p. 127n.31 Ibid. p. 310.32 Outward Despatches, 23 March 1827, Governor Arthur to Secre­

tary of State.33 The Journal of Madame Giovanni, English translation, London,

1944, p. 43.

Chapter 21 Meredith, My Jlome, vol. 2, p. 21. She wrote several other books

and pamphlets including a description of her life on the mainland, Notes and Sketches of Netv South Wales, during a Residence in that Colony from 1839-1844, London, 1844, and books for children.

2 Ibid., p. 32.3 Ibid.4 G. T. W. B. Boyes’s manuscript diary is in the Royal Society Collec­

tion in Hobart. Besides being scurrilous and petty it is also untidy and difficult to read. Yet it provides unrivalled social commentary for the period from 1829 to 1852. The State Library of Tasmania has a type­script abstract which is more convenient.

5 Ibid.6 Ibid.7 Sir John Franklin’s unusual career has attracted several writers.

K. Fitzpatrick, Sir John Franklin in Tasmania, 1837-1843, Melbourne, 1949; F. J. Woodward, A Portrait of Jane, London, 1951. Ancanthe remains standing today.

8 Boyes’s Diary.9 Bound copies of these papers are widely available.10 The life stories of men of the early period are collected in the

Australian Dictionary of Biography; vols. 1 and 2 cover the period 1788-1850.

11 The stereotyped image of Knopwood put forward by West and others was qualified by R. and T. Rienets, ‘Some Notes on the Ancestry and Life of the Rev. Robert Knopwood’, THRAP, vol. 12, no. 4, Apr. 1965. For the life of Bishop Nixon, N. Nixon, The Pioneer Bishop in Van Diemens Land 1843-1863, Hobart, 1953.

12 My Home, vol. 1, p. 204.13 R. Crossland, Waineivright in Tasmania, Melbourne, 1954. Review

by C. Turnbull, THRAP, vol. 4, no. 2, July 1955, pp. 32-3; R. Cross-

Notes 203land, ‘Wainewright: the Tasmanian Portraits’, THRAP, vol. 2, no. 5, Aug. 1953, pp. 99-103.

14 The description of John Dobson is Boyes’s as are most of the details about the art exhibition. The catalogue of exhibits is in TSL.

15 P. Howell, Thomas Arnold the Younger in Van Diemens Land, Hobart, 1964. The Arnold papers in the Alexander Turnbull Library, Wellington, New Zealand, contain Arnold’s letters from Tasmania.

1(! Southern Star, 18 Oct. 1882. There are numerous pamphlets avail­able about the colleges. T. Stephens, Christ’s College and Hutchins’ School, Hobart, 1912; Anon, Christ’s College, Tasmania, 1838-1905, Hobart, 1906. For the Hutchins School see papers in the miscellaneous manuscripts of J. E. Calder, ML.

17 Report of the High School Council and Deed of Association of the High School, Hobart, 1848. Miscellaneous papers, account book, and list of subscribers of the Hobart High School, 1847-83, ML.

18 L. Huxley, Life and Letters of Sir J. D. Hooker, London, 1918, vol. 1, p. 107.'

1!* Ibid. See also F. Clune and P. R. Stephenson, The Viking of Van Diemen’s Land, London, 1954.

20 Narrative of a Visit.21 Ibid.; N. J. Plomley (ed.), Friendly Mission—The Tasmanian

Journals and Papers of George Augustus R.obinson, Hobart, 1966.22 Besides the Walker papers there is J. Backhouse and C. Tylor, The

Life and Labours of George Washington Walker, London, 1862.2:! Hobart Savings Bank, booklet issued to commemorate the opening

of new premises, Hobart, 1958.24 W. H. Hudspeth, The Hobart Maternal and Dorcas Society,

Hobart, 1942; Maternal and Dorcas Society, Reports, annually, 1884-79.25 St Mary’s Hospital, Report, 1856.20 Shaw, Convicts and the Colonies.27 B. M. Richmond, Some Aspects of the History of Transportation

and Immigration in Van Diemen’s Land 1824-1855, unpublished M.A. thesis, University of Tasmania, 1956.

28 This comment was by J. B. Walker. Walker papers, A II 5 (i); see also ‘Tasmania: the Colony as it was in 1837 . . . and its experience during the last sixty years’, Daily Telegraph Diamond Jubilee Number, 1897, ML. The most bitter comments on the hospital came from John Morgan in the editorial pages of the Britannia and Trades Advocate, 1846-51.

29 Chief Secretary’s Office Papers 24/254/101/29.30 Shaw, Convicts and the Colonies; Richmond, Some Aspects of the

History of Transportation; A. McKay, The Assignment System of Con­vict Labour in Van Diemen’s Land 1824-1842, unpublished M.A. thesis, University of Tasmania, 1958.

204 Notes31 G. Rude, ‘Captain Swing in Tasmania’, THRAP, vol. 12, no. 1,

Oct. 1964, pp. 6-24; A. Briggs ‘Chartists in Tasmania’, Bulletin of the Society for the Study of Labour History, no. 3, 1961, pp. 4-8.

32 Recollections of Life in Van Diemens Land, C. Mackaness (ed.), Sydney, 1961, vol. 2, p. 33.

33 Glasgow, 1876, p. 263.34 H. Savery, The Hermit in Van Diemens Land, Hobart, 1829, 2nd

edition, C. Hadgraft and M. Roe (eds.), Brisbane, 1964.35 The newspapers are the best sources of information about low life

but they tend to concentrate upon the occasions when the people ran foul of authority. One of the few accounts of life as a convict is H. Savery, Quintus-Servinton, Hobart, 1830, 2nd edition, C. Hadgraft (ed.), Brisbane, 1962, but this tells little about the lives of illiterates.

30 Boyes describes these exciting days, 18, 19 August 1843.37 E. L. Piesse, ‘The Foundation and Early Work of the Society . . .’

RSTP, 1913, pp. 117-66; J. Somerville ‘The Royal Society of Tasmania, 1843-1943’, RSTP, 1943, pp. 199-221; A. Morton, ‘History of the Royal Society of Tasmania’, RSTP, 1894-5, appendix pp. 1-6; ‘Some Account of the Work and Workers of the Tasmanian Society and the Royal Society of Tasmania . . .’ RSTP, 1900-1, pp. 223-30.

38 West, History, vol. 1, p. 236.39 Boyes’s Diary.

Chapter 31 Varieties of Vice-Regal Life, London, 1870.2 West, History, vol. 2. p. 329.3 Ibid., p. 335.4 Ibid., vol. 1, p. 283.5 Vol. 3, p. 162.0 A Sketcheds Tour . . ., London, 1854, p. 265.7 Diary.8 P. Böiger, ‘Lieutenant John Morgan: The Dog Tax Martyr’, JRAHS,

vol. 55, pt 3, Sept. 1969, pp. 272-81.9 Hobart, 1852.10 M. Roe, ‘The Establishment of Local Self Government in Hobart

and Launceston 1845-1858’, THRAP, vol. 14, no. 1, Dec. 1966, pp. 21-45.

11 Listed in such directories as: Pratt and Son, Hobart Town Direc­tory . . . containing the Name, Calling and Address of Each House­holder . . ., Hobart 1857. The advertisements appearing in newspapers and the references to business houses in newspaper columns give indication of the popularity of shops.

Notes 205

12 Walch s Tasmanian Almanac, the Red Book, usually included a list of citizens who had died during the past year. This enables news­paper obituaries to be traced. Rheuben’s obituaries are in the Mercury and the Tribune of 26 September 1876.

13 The valuation rolls have been analysed by Solomon, The Evolu­tion of Hobart.

14 Information on individual citizens is scrappy and details are often discovered fortuitously. Obituaries remain the quickest reference, also the Wayn Index in TSL. Otherwise, once names of notable families are recognised, a patient reading of the newspapers of many years produces a sparse but rewarding crop.

15 West, History, vol. 1, p. 297.1(1 26 Dec. 1850, a most un-Christmasy message for an editor to be

writing.17 These exciting days are best followed by reading Morgan’s

Britannia and the scornful comments of his rival editors, notably the Hobarton Guardian.

18 Hobarton Guardian, 26 Dec. 1850.19 Roe, ‘The Establishment of Local Self Government’; also Hobart

City Council Records, General Correspondence, 1843-1904. List of Ratepayers in the City of Hobart Town, Hobart 1855. Reports in newspapers are concentrated in the few weeks about election time.

20 Roe, ‘The Establishment of Local Self Government’, p. 38.

Chapter 41 A Residence in Tasmania . . ., London, 1856, pp. 11, 12.2 Letters from Australia, London, 1869, p. 61.3 Australia and New Zealand, Melbourne, 1874, pp. 367, 385.4 This description is made up from many sources. J. B. Walker’s

manuscript notes for his history lectures in the 1890s are most vivid, particularly Walker, A II 5. See references to travellers’ tales in P. Bolger, ‘The Changing Role of a City: Hobart’, TIIRAP, vol. 16, no. 1, July 1968, pp. 6-17.

5 Solomon, The Evolution of Hobart.0 Most easily seen in the figures and maps of R. J. Solomon, The

Evolution of Hobart: A Case Study of Urbanization 1803-1963, Mel­bourne, 1972.

7 Tasmanian Athenaeum, Feb. 1854.8 Although an understanding of the morphology was arrived at

independently through travellers’ descriptions and the newspapers this section benefited from later access to the manuscript of R. J. Solomon, whose geographer’s eye picked out many details which could other­wise have been missed.

9 J. Somerville, ‘Government Houses in Macquarie Street’, RSTP, 1944, pp. 109-14.

206 Notes10 For an example of the piecemeal information from which such

environmental descriptions are culled see Rowntree, ‘Early Growth’. Miss Rowntree listed eighteen separate references to the Hobart Toivn Courier alone.

11 Architectural history has been a popular field in Tasmania in recent years. M. Sharland, Stones of a Century, Hobart, 1952, is only one of its kind. See also R. Smith, ‘Tasmanian Architecture of the Nineteenth Century’, THRAP, vol. 15, no. 4, May 1968, pp. 151-6.

12 H. Preston, ‘Early Domestic Architecture in Hobart’, THRAP, vol. 5, no. 4, Feb. 1957, pp. 67-72.

13 Smith, ‘Tasmanian Architecture’.14 A. C. Walker, ‘Henry Hunter and His Work’, 19th ANZAAS

Report, Hobart, 1929, pp. 419-25.15 S. J. Butlin, ‘Charles Swanston and the Derwent Bank 1827-50’,

Historical Studies, vol. 2, no. 7, 1943, pp. 161-85.10 K. M. Dallas, ‘Water Power in Tasmanian History’, THRAP, vol.

8, no. 4, Sept. 1960, pp. 85-93.17 A Year in Tasmania, p. 26.18 K. M. Dallas, ‘Transportation and Colonial Income’, Historical

Studies, vol. 3, 1944-9, pp. 297-312.19 The Voice of Our Exiles, Edinburgh, 1854, p. 113.20 Tasmanian Athenaeum, March 1854, pp. 194-5.21 W. Nicholson, The Late Fire in the City, Hobart, 1854, ML.22 J. N. Gale, Report on the Various Works for the Water Supply of

the City, Hobart, 1861.23 Walker, letters between J. B. Walker and G. W. Walker during

1855.

Chapter 5

1 Fenton, History, p. 201; C. Bateson, Gold Fleet for California, Sydney, 1963, pp. 39, 40; Hartwell, Economic Development, p. 234; Mitchel, Jail Journal, p. 237.

2 Australian Dictionary of Biography, s.v., Salier; Mercury, 18 Aug. 1894.

3 S. Bennett, ‘The Effects of the Victorian Goldrush on the Economy of Van Diemen’s Land’, ANU Historical Journal, vol. 1, no. 1, Oct. 1964, pp. 69-83; W. T. Denison, Information regarding the Colony of Van Diemens Land, Hobart, 1853.

4 Statistics of Van Diemens Land, 1844-1854, Hobart, 1854. After 1856 the statistics appeared annually in the Journals of Parliament.

5 Ibid.0 The Story of the Life of C. E. Walch, Hobart, 1908; J. Bonwick,

Notes of a Gold Digger, Melbourne, 1852.

Notes 2077 Convictions under Convicts Prevention Act . . . , Votes and Pro-'

ceedings of the Legislative Council, Victoria, 1854-5, vol. 3, paper C, 18a.

8 W. P. Morrell, The Gold Rushes, London, 1940, p. 214.Home Office 11/13, 26/47; Mercury, 22 Sept. 1914; anon., The

Foundation and Progress of Charles Davis Ltd, Hobart, 1921.10 Australian Dictionary of Biography, s.v. J. M. Davies. Garryowen,

The Chronicles of Early Melbourne, 1835-1851, Melbourne, 1888, p. 846. Home Office 11/8, 26/36.

11 H. Reynolds, The Island Colony, unpublished M.A. thesis, Uni­versity of Tasmania, 1963, p. 2.

12 Statistics of Tasmania.13 Denison, Information.14 Statistics of Tasmania.15 Fenton, History, pp. 253, 255; House of Assembly Journal, 1856,

paper 20.10 Quoted by Morton, ‘Some Account of the Work and Workers of

the Tasmanian Society’.17 London, 1873, p. 55.18‘From Colony to Commonwealth’ unpublished manuscript, ML.1!> J. Walker, various papers, ledgers, cash books, daily sales books

and business diary, 1829-82. Very full records. TSL.20 ‘Journal of a Visit to the Colonies’, 2 vols., 1852-5, p. 60, University

of Tasmania.21 Walker, A 5(ii). A very good account of a whaling expedition.22 A. Rowntree, Battery Point Today and Yesterday, Hobart, 1951;

J. E. Calder, Tasmanian Industries, Hobart, 1869; Marine Board of Hobart, One Hundred Years, Hobart, 1958; J. E. Philp, Whaling Ways of Hobart Town, Hobart, 1936.

E. O’Sullivan, Mercury Supplement, 3 Feb. 1890.24 E. H. Webster and L. Norman, A Hundred Years of Yachting,

Hobart, 1936.25 Rowntree, Battery Point.2,i East Coast Steam Navigation Company, Deed of Settlement,

Hobart, 1854; Colonial Times, 3 Feb. 1857; Tasmanian Trade Circular, 24 Nov. 1S54.

27 Cyclopedia of Tasmania, vol. 1, p. 76; Australian Dictionary of Biography, s.v., Crowther; Crowther, ‘A Surgeon as Whaleship Owner’.

28 Colonial Times, 20 Jan. 1857.2<J Rules and Constitution of the Chamber of Commerce of the City

of Hobart Town, Hobart, 1851.30 Walker, A I 2, letter G.W.W. to J.B.W., 6 March 1853.31 Derwent and Tamar Fire, Life and Marine Assurance Co., Deed

of Settlement, Hobart. 1852.

208 Notes32 Colonial Times, 3 Feb. 1857.33 Bank of Van Diemen’s Land Register of Shareholders, 1828-80.34 Hobart Gas Company, Deed of Co-partnership, Hobart, 1854.35 Tasmanian Athenaeum, Feb. 1854, pp. 173-4.36 Arcanum Scribendo, Squibs and Crackers, Hobart, 1868, ML.37 Australia and New Zealand, p. 368; M. Dennis ‘Government

Houses—Past and Present’, The Lone Hand, Sydney, March 1909, pp. 591-7.

38 Catalogue of Plants in the Royal Society’s Gardens, Hobart, 1857; Handbook of Greenhouse Culture in Tasmania, Hobart, 1870, ML.

39 Mercury, 12 Nov. 1880; Rules and Objects of the Tasmanian Acclimatization Society, Hobart, 1862; Cyclopedia of Tasmania, vol. 1, pp. 284, 285.

40 Walker papers, A II 1, A II 4, and A II 5 (i).41 Mechanics’ Institute Minute Books 1839-67, ML; B. Smith,

European Vision and the South Pacific, Oxford, 1960, p. 223.42 Catalogue of the Art Treasures Exhibition, Hobart, 1858.431. Mead, ‘John Glover’s Tasmania’, Age, Melbourne, 2 July 1966.44 Somerville ‘Royal Society’; Morton, ‘History of the Royal Society’;

Piesse, ‘Foundation of the Society’.45 M. Roe, A History of the Theatre Royal Plobaii from 1834, Hobart,

n.d.40 Walker, A II 5 (ii).47 There are frequent boosting advertisements for such schools in

the newspapers of the period.48 House of Assembly Journal, 1860, no. 28. ‘Report of Commissioners

appointed . . . to inquire into the State of Superior and General Education in Tasmania’.

49 St Mary’s Hospital, Report, Hobart, 1856.

Chapter 6

1 W. A. Townsley, The Struggle for Self Government in Tasmania, 1842-56, Hobart, 1951; K. R. Von Stieglitz, A History of Local Govern­ment in Tasmania, Hobart, 1958; F. C. Green, A Century of Responsible Government 1856-1956, Hobart, 1956.

2 C. I. Clark, The Parliament of Tasmania: An Historical Sketch, Hobart, 1947; Reynolds, The Island Colony.

3 P. D. Edwards and R. B. Joyce (eds.), A. Trollope, Australia, Brisbane, 1967, pp. 505n., 506n. Mitchel, Jail Journal, p. 275.

4 Garryowen, Chronicles, p. 846.5 Tasmanian Tribune, 12 June 1872.(i Weekly Advertiser, 15 Feb. 1862.7 Roe, ‘Establishment of Local Self Government’.

Notes 2098 Correspondence relating to Municipal Elections and the Appoint­

ment of Mayors, 1858-1906, Hobart City Council Records.9 L. L. Robson, ‘An Introduction to the Tasmanian Colonial Parlia­

mentary Period 1856-1901’, T//RAP, vol. 2, no. 5, Aug. 1953, pp. 95-8; Press and Politics, a Study of Elections and Political Issues in Tasmania from 1856 when Self Government came into Effect, to 1871, un­published M.A. thesis, University of Tasmania, 1955; J. Reynolds, ‘The Colonial Parliamentary Period in Tasmanian Politics as a Field for Research’, THRAP, vol. 1, no. 2, 1951, pp. 3-6; W. A. Townsley, Chap­ters in Tasmanian Constitutional and Administrative History, un­published M.A. thesis, University of Tasmania, 1951.

10 House of Assembly Journals, 1860, paper 51; G. Howard, Guardians of the Queens Peace, London, 1953, p. 150.

11 Colonial Times, 10 Feb. 1857.12 H. Reynolds, ‘That Hated Stain: The Aftermath of Transportation

in Tasmania’, Historical Studies, vol. 14, no. 53, Oct. 1969, pp. 19-31.13 Hobart Town Ragged Schools Association, Report, 1860.14 West, History, vol. 2, p. 333.15 P. Winskill, The Temperance Movement, London, 1893, vol. 3,

p. 284.16 Walker, A III (i).17 Vol. 2, p. 333.18 Journal 1867-1870, Manuscript, ML. He was Chief Clerk of the

Colonial Secretary’s Office.19 Walker, A II 4.20 House of Assembly Journal, 1871, paper 63, ‘Charitable Institu­

tions: Report of Royal Commission’, p. 105.21 This composite sketch is fictional. Parts such as the Proctor’s Road

attack and the admittance to the Depot have basis in newspaper accounts and Benevolent Society lists.

22 Home Office 10/43 contains details of the reconvictions of trans­ported convicts for offences they committed in the colony.

23 Mercury, 8 Aug. 1887.24 T. A. Coghlan, Labour and Industry in Australia, London, 1918,

vol. 2, p. 771. Coghlan named these survivors ‘the inefficients’.25 E. N. C. Braddon, ‘A Home in the Colonies’, letters to The States­

man and Friend of India, 1878, University of Tasmania.29 C. G. H. Furlonge, Emigration to Tasmania, London, 1879, p. 5.

Written under pseudonym ‘A Recent Settler’.27 House of Assembly Journal, 1858, paper 61, p. 1.28 Hobart Town City Mission, Report, 1853.29 Register of shore addresses of ships’ crews, manuscript, 1863-7,

TSL; newspaper reports of court proceedings.30 Hobart Town Benevolent Society, Report, 1860, p. 15.

210 Notes31 Colonial Times, 6 Jan. 1857.32 Walker, A I 2.33‘One of Four’, Words to Women: A Plea for Certain Sufferers,

Hobart, 1858, ML.34 Hobart Town Ragged Sehool Association, Report, 1860.35 Mercury, 7 Feb. 1859.3<i History, vol. 1, p. 290.

Chapter 7

1 18 Sept. 1860.2 Richmond, Some Aspects of the History of Transportation, J. C.

Brown, Development of Social Services in Tasmania 1803-1900, un­published M.A. thesis, University of Tasmania, 1969, p. 82.

3 Brown, Development of Social Services.4 Hobart Town Benevolent Society, Reports, annually, 1860-88.5 Regulations of the Neic Toten Charitable Institution for Males,

Hobart, 1880.6 Hobart Town Benevolent Society, Report, 1864.7 Emigration to Tasmania, p. 4.8 Tasmanian Independent, March 1872.9 House of Assembly Journal, 1871, paper 63, p. 100. Letterbook of

Confidential Despatches, G.O. 27/1, pp. 232, 233, Lefroy to Secretary of State.

10 Tasmanian Total Abstinence Agency Association, various letters 1842-57, ML; Report of the Proceedings of the Tasmanian Temperance Conference, Hobart, 1859, ML.

11 Walker, A XI.12 Australian Dictionary of Biography, s.v., P. Facy.13 House of Assembly Journal, 1879, paper 33. Reprints of letters

received from the Commander and Surgeon of the Australian Squadron, 1877-9.

14 Hudspeth, Maternal and Dorcas Society; The Hobart Maternal and Dorcas Society, Reports, 1844-79.

15 Hobart Town Benevolent Society, Reports, 1863-74.10 House of Assembly Journal, 1858, paper 61, ‘Report of Joint Com­

mittee to enquire into the state and sufficiency of the Institutions for Charitable Purposes that are supported or aided by the Government’.

17 Hobart Town Benevolent Society, Reports.18 Australian Dictionary of Biography, s.v., T. J. Crouch; G. S.

Crouch, Reminiscences of G. S. Crouch, Hobart, 1912.19 Mather papers, private possession; Centenary of Australian

Quakerism 1832-1932, Hobart, 1933; Australian Friend, 1887-94.20 Hobart Town Benevolent Society, Report, 1860.

Notes 21121 Ibid.22 House of Assembly Journal, 1858, paper 61.2:! House of Assembly Journal, 1859, paper 72, ‘Royal Commission

into the Queen’s Orphan Schools’ Superintendent’s allegations that Matron was purloining food and was cruel and rude’.

24 Hobart Town Ragged Schools Association, Report, 1860.25 Ibid., 1878.2.1 Christian Witness, 23 May 1878.27 ‘How Shall the State Promote Education’, Tasmanian Church

Chronicle, Aug. 1852. Board of Education and Council of Education and Department of Education Reports from 1861 in House of Assembly Journals.

28 Statistics of Tasmania-, House of Assembly Journal, 1860, papers 67, 82; 1875, paper 67.

2!’ House of Assembly Journal, 1883, paper 70, ‘Report of Royal Commission into Public Education’, p. XXXI.

30 T. Stephens, The Education Department, Tasmania, Sydney, 1904. Stephens was the first Director of Education and his pamphlet is an intelligent criticism of his work and its difficulties.

31 Southern Star, 4 Oct. 1882; Mercury, 18 Aug 1886. A report of some of the very rare convictions for truancy. Church Neics, 1 June 1888, for comments on the system’s efficacy.

32 Tasmanian Catholic Standard, Nov. 1867.33 W. H. Hudspeth, manuscript notes, 1945, University of Tasmania;

Girls’ Industrial School, Minute Books 1862-1945, University of Tasmania.

34 Boys’ Home Industrial School, Report, 1870.35 Ibid.3.1 Ibid.37 Rules and Orders of the Mechanics’ Institute, 1828. Annual

Reports are only available for 1843, 1852, 1856, 1858, 1859, 1860. Minute Books, 1839-67, ML.

38 Van Diemen’s Land Mechanics’ School of Arts, Report, 1851.39 Ibid.40 Hobart Town Mechanics’ Institute, Report, 1858.41 Hobart Town Mechanics’ Institute, Syllabus of Lectures for the

Chemistry Class, Hobart, 1857, ML.42 Hobart Town Mechanics’ Institute, Report, 1859.

C h apter 8

1 M. Miller, The Financial Condition of Tasmania, Hobart, 1862.2 E. C. Nowell, On the Vital Statistics of Tasmania, reprint from

RSTP, Hobart, 1875.

212 Notes3 Walker, A II 4.4 Crouch, Reminiscences.5 O’Sullivan, ‘From Colony to Commonwealth’.6 House of Assembly Journal, 1861, paper 34.7 Ibid., p. 29.8 Australian Dictionary of Biography, s.v., E. S. P. Bedford.9 Trollope, Australia and New Zealand, p. 367.10 Coghlan, Labour and Industry, vol. 2, p. 771.14 Braddon, A Home in the Colonies.12 Walker, A II 4.13 History, vol. 1, p. 283.14 Dallas, Transportation and Colonial Income’.15 W. A. Townsley, ‘Tasmania and the Great Economic Depression,

1858-1872’, THRAP, vol. 4, no. 2, July 1955, pp. 35-46.16 Statistics of Tasmania.17 Townsley, ‘Tasmania and the Great Economic Depression’.18 Bolger, Hobart Town Society, appendixes 18, 19.19 The Financial Condition of Tasmania, p. 25.20 Trollope, Australia and New Zealand, pp. 340-6.21 Reynolds, The Island Colony, pp. 4, 5.22 Bolger, Hobart Town Society, appendix 6. In the Menzies Library

of the Australian National University the copy of Statistics of Tasmania 1856-62 contains a loose manuscript calculation of migration correc­tions between 1848 and 1862. This goes far enough to counter any ‘gold-depopulation’ theory. It is reproduced as appendix 5 in Hobart Town Society.

23 F. K. Crowley, ‘Immigration into Tasmania from the United Kingdom 1860-1919’, THRAP, vol. 3, no. 6, Oct. 1954, pp. 103-8.

24 All calculations based upon Statistics of Tasmania (mainly 1901, p. 81) census summaries of 1841, 1847, 1851, 1857, 1861, 1870, and 1881 contained in the House of Assembly Journals, and R. M. Johnston, Tasmanian Official Record, Hobart, 1890.

25 Census Abstracts, occupations of the people.26 Hobart Town City Mission, Report, 1853.27 Dallas, ‘Transportation and Colonial Income’; Shaw, Convicts and

the Colonies, p. 353.28 C. Du Cane, Past and Present, Colchester, 1877, pp. 19-20;

Denison, Varieties of Vice-Regal Life.

Chapter 9

1 Statistics of Tasmania.2 Census abstract 1857, House of Assembly Journal.

Notes 2133 Failing access to the Convict Records the same picture can be seen

in Home Office 10/43 and in newspapers since the activity of the law courts was regularly reported.

4 House of Assembly Journal, 1875, paper 49, ‘Report of the Royal Commission into Prison Discipline’.

5 M. Jeffrey, A Burglar’s IJfe: or the Stirring Adventures of the Great English Burglar, Mark Jeffrey, Launceston, 1893.

fi Statistics of Tasmania.7 History, vol. 2, p. 330.8 Tasmania as a Field for British Emigrants, Hobart, 1875, p. 30.9 Bolger, Hobart Town Society, appendix 10.10 G. Blainey, ‘Population Movements in Tasmania, 1870-1901’,

TIIRAP, vol. 3, no. 4, June 1954, pp. 62-70.11 Crowley, ‘Immigration into Tasmania’.12 W. A. Townsley, ‘The Launceston and Western Railway Com­

pany: How the Railway Age came to Tasmania’, TIIRAP, vol. 3, no. 1, Feb. 1954, pp. 4-12; ‘The Tasmanian Main Line Railway Company’, TIIRAP, vol. 5, no. 3, Aug. 1956, pp. 40-52.

13 Crowley, ‘Immigration into Tasmania’, appendix 1.14 This is a refinement of the conclusions reached by Blainey, ‘Popu­

lation Movements’, based on a closer assessment of census abstracts.15 Reynolds, The Island Colony and ‘That Hated Stain’ both deal

with this point; Bolger, Hobart Town Society, appendix 16.4,! Walker, A II 2, letter J.B.W. to Mary, 22 Jan. 1890.17 Mitchel, Jail Journal, p. 236.18 Tasmanian Athenaeum, Feb. 1854.19 Bolger, Hobart Town Society, appendix 3.20 Ibid., appendix 19.21 Hobart Town Benevolent Society, Reports.22 P. Deane, The First Industrial Revolution, Cambridge, 1965, p.

269.23 Hull papers, especially letter to Mr Allison, 12 Nov. 1878, Uni­

versity of Tasmania; Johnston, Tasmanian Official Record, p. 46.24 The Official Handbook of Tasmania, Launceston, 1883.25 Hull, Forty Years in Tasmania; Statistics of Tasmania; Just,

Official Handbook, p. 79.20 House of Assembly Journal, 1860, paper 28, pp. 25-8.27 Church News, June 1868, Nov. 1889; Hull, Forty Years in Tas­

mania, p. 36; Crouch, Reminiscences, p. 49.28 H. M. Hull, The Royal Kalendar and Guide to Tasmania, Hobart,

1858, p. 61.29 Sorell papers 1861-80. William Sorell was Registrar of the Supreme

Court and lists of probate duties paid rest alongside his private letters. TSL. For Guesdon see Chapter 12.

214 Notes30 The Excursionists Guide to Tasmania, Melbourne, 1869, p. 90.31 Sorell papers.32 Walker, A II 1, letter J.B.W. to Butterworth, 30 Aug. 1882; W. L.

Dobson, register of fees for professional services, 1846-70. TSL.33 Allport Museum collection, Hobart.34 Main Line Railway, Prospectus, Hobart, 1874.35 Letterbook of Confidential Despatches to the Secretary of State,

1869-1906, G.O. 27/1.36 Statistics of Tasmania.37 Blainey, ‘Population Movements’; The Rise and Decline of the

West Coast’, TIIRAP, vol. 4, no. 4, Feb. 1956, pp. 66-74.38 Australian Dictionary of Biography, s.v., Salier; A. McGregor,

personal papers and records of Whaling and Shipping, Mining and Insurance Business, 1871-98, University of Tasmania.

39 Walker, A I 2, letter J.B.W. to Mary, 13 June 1891.40 Blainey, ‘Population Movements’.41 J. G. Davies, Official Record of the Tasmanian Juvenile and

Industrial Exhibition, Hobart, 1883.42 Solomon, Evolution of Hobart.43 Letterbooks of the City Surveyor 1882-98. Correspondence con­

sidered by the Public Works Committee, 1854-84, 1886, 1889-92.

Chapter 10

1 See, for example, Mercury, 26 March 1857.Mitchel, Jail Journal, p. 236. Mitchel’s arrogance was matched by the

superciliousness of William Smith O’Brien and Thomas Meagher. They seemed to have little in common with the general run of convicts. J. H. Cullen, Young Ireland in Exile, Dublin, 1928; T. J. Kiernan, Irish Exiles in Australia, Dublin, 1954; J. Frost, Horrors of Convict Life, Preston, 1856.

3 See discussion in K. Macnab and R. Ward, ‘Nature and Nurture in the First Generation of Native Born Australians’, Historical Studies, vol. 10, 1962, pp. 289-308; R. Ward, The Australian Legend, Melbourne, 1958.

4 R. Gollan, Radical and Working Class Politics, Melbourne, 1960, comes out more strongly on the side of colonial conditions summarised as ‘the towns and the goldfields. The way of life of the back country . . .’ which produced radical attitudes (p. 7).

5 Britannia, 21 Dec. 1848.r> Mercury, 6 March 1857.7 Ibid., 16 Nov. 1872.8 Ibid.9 15 Sept. 1882.

Notes 21510 Walker, A XII, Notes of Secretary of Working Men’s Club.11 Independent Order of Oddfellows, Report, 1855.12 Ibid., p. 25.13 Statistics of Tasmania, 1886.14 A. D. Luekman, Sharps, Flats, Gamblers and Racehorses, London,

1914, p. 72.15 Cyclopedia of Tasmania, vol. 1, p. 269.16 Statistics of Tasmania.17 Walker, A I 2; Mercury Supplement, 1 Jan. 1891.18 Mercury, 29 Oct. 1872.19 Walker, A II 5.20 Sept. 1890.21 Second Anniversary Tasmanian Grand Lodge Ancient and Inde­

pendent Order of Oddfellows, Report, 1855, p. 9, ML.22 People’s Friend, July 1890.23 Ibid.24 Mercury, Centennial Issue, 1903.25 Christian Witness, 2 May 1878.2(1 Australian Dictionary of Biography, vol. 4, s.v., P. Facy.27 Tasmanian Catholic Standard, Apr. 1886.28 Crouch, Reminiscences; Australian Dictionary of Biography, s.v.,

T. J. Crouch.29 Winskill, Temperance Movement.30 Walker, A II 5 (ii); Mercury, 24 Dec. 1899.31 Cyclopedia of Tasmania, vol. 1, p. 270.32 Mercury, 29 July 1869.33 Obituaries in newspapers, 12 June 1872. Australian Dictionary of

Biography, s.v., J. M. Davies.34 Ancient and Independent Order of Oddfellows, Report, 1855.35 Mercury, 29 July 1869.36 Cyclopedia of Tasmania, vol. 1, p. 208.37 Catholic Standard, Apr. 1886; Tasmanian Catholic Standard, Feb.

1888.38 G.O. 27/1, Viscount Gormanston to Secretary of State, 6 March

1900.39 Walker, A II 4, 12 June 1885.40 E. M. Dollery, ‘Defences of the Derwent’, THRAP, vol. 14, no. 4,

Apr. 1967, pp. 148-65.41 G.O. 27/1, Lefroy to Secretary of State, 27 Dec. 1880; R. H.

Eccleston, Handbook for the Tasmanian Artillery Volunteers, Hobart, 1882.

42 Southern Star, 13 Nov. 1882.

216 Notes43 Eccleston, Handbook for Volunteers. The requirements for the

First AIF in 1914 were 5 feet 6 inches and 34 inches (K. Inglis pers. comm.).

44 Walker A II 4, 12 June 1885.45 Newspaper cuttings relating to Tasmania, vol. 1, ML.46 H. M. Hull, The Volunteer List, Hobart, 1861.47 T. Y. Lowes, Address from Volunteers, Hobart, 1862.48 Boyes’s Diary.49 Dinner Lists, Government House, G.O. 63/1/2; Mercury, 2 Apr.

1907; Cyclopedia of Tasmania, vol. 1, p. 379.50 Cyclopedia of Tasmania-, P. Serie, Dictionary of Australian

Biography, vol. 1, Sydney, 1949.51 E. M. Dollery, ‘The Chiniquy Riots’, THRAP, vol. 9, no. 4, March

1962, pp. 118-44.52 For Agnew’s career see Serie, Dictionary; Cyclopedia of Tasmania,

vol. 1, p. 60.53 C. Leakey, The Broad Arrow, Hobart, 1860, p. 276.54 Walker, A II 4.

Chapter 111 W. Reeves, A History of Tasmanian Education, vol. 1, Melb.,

1935; T. Stephens, Christ’s College and Hutchins’ School, Hobart, 1912; W. F. D. Butler, ‘The Foundation of Public Institutions for Secondary Education in Tasmania’, RSTP, 1917, pp. 21-59; The Friend’s School: Seventy Fifth Anniversary, Hobart, 1961.

2 The Hutchins School Register, a fascinating manuscript for anyone interested in the life of this town. J. Buckland’s careless writing records the address and age of each boy admitted, sometimes with a word or two identifying the father or guardian, TSL. B. Rait, The Official History of the Hutchins’ School, Hobart. 1935.

3 Walker, A II 5 (ii) Notes on the High School; A II 2, letters referring to the High School.

4 Southern Star, 13 Dec. 1882. The University of Tasmania: A State­ment of Facts, Hobart, 1903, compares the cost of scholarship schemes and university. House of Assembly Journal, 1882, paper 116, and Southern Star, 16 Oct. 1882, examine the whole scholarship scheme when Charles Dowdell persuaded Parliament to pass a special Bill granting his son £800 for four years study. A. P. Canaway, Tasmanian Scholarship Scheme Considered, Hobart, 1882.

5 W. Wolfhagen manuscripts. Reminiscences of a lawyer, references to lives of others in the profession. TSL. Walker, A II 1, letter 30 Aug. 1882, describes the legal profession in Hobart.

6 P. S. Seager, Hobart General Hospital Centenary Celebrations, Epitome of its History, Hobart, 1921; Australian Dictionary of Biog­raphy, s.v., T. C. Smart; House of Assembly Journal, 1862, paper 6.

Notes 2177 Australian Dictionary of Biography, s.v., T. Reibey.8 Crouch, Reminiscences; Walch, The Life of C. E. Walch.9 Cyclopedia of Tasmania, vol. 1, p. 252.10 Proprietary Ladies’ College, Reports, 1875-90; Walker, A I 2

passim.11 Walch, The Seven Rovers . . ., Hobart, 1884.12 Ibid.13 Walker, A II 5 (ii).14 M. Gordon, Jews in Van Diemens Land, Melbourne, 1965, p. 92.15 Australian Broadcasting Commission, Tasmania in the Nineties,

transcripts, 1965.16 Alfred Deakin called him ‘a remarkably impressive man’, obituary,

Mercury, 18 Jan. 1887; Australian Encyclopedia, s.v., W. R. Giblin.17 Tasmanian Independent, Nov. 1871.18 Ibid.19 Walch, The Story of C. E. Walch; Walker, A II 4; D. Copland

(ed.), Giblin: the Scholar and the Man, Melbourne, 1961.20 Walch, The Story of C. E. Walch.21 Ibid.22 Ibid.23 H. E. Smith, MS. journal of a civil servant, 1867-70. ML.24 J.B., The Cruise Around the World of the Flying Squadron,

London, 1871.25 Australian Friend, Aug. 1887.29 Walker, A II.27 Tasmanian News, 28 Aug. 1882.28 Mechanics’ Institute, Minute Books, ML.29 Walker, A II.30 Walker, A XII, letter signed W.M.C.31 Van Diemen’s Land Mechanics’ Institute, Report, 1851.32 Walker, A XII, letter, W.M.C.33 Walker, A XII, letter J.B.W. to J. Page, 20 Sept. 1865.34 Walker, A XII, letter from J.B.W. to unknown.35 Reynolds, The Island Colony, pp. 8, 9; Tasmanian News, 28 Feb.

1884; Mercury, 8 Aug. 1887.30 Walker, A II 4.37 Daily Telegraph, 16 Nov. 1907.38 A. I. Clark papers, D 4 (3), University of Tasmania; Reynolds,

The Island Colony, p. 56.39 J. Reynolds, ‘A. I. Clark’s American Sympathies and his Influence

on Australian Federation’, Australian Law Journal, vol. 32, 1958-9, pp. 62-75.

40 Walker, A II 4.

218 Notes41 Walker, A XII.42 Feb. 1890.43 Sept. 1889.

Chapter 12

1 Australian Dictionary of Biography, s.v., T. Reibey.2 Walker, A. II 4; Luckman, Sharps, Flats.3 Walker, A II 4.4 Ibid.5 Australia and New Zealand, p. 346.0 This story has been told several times but is most interesting when

followed in the daily newspaper accounts. See Mercury, 8, 13 March 1869; Australian Encyclopedia s.v., Truganini.

7 The Vet, Old Time Echoes of Tasmania, Hobart, 1896, p. 141; Athletic Association, Program, 1884, ML.

8 Tasinanian Sportsman and Licensed Victuallers Gazette, 25 Feb. 1886.

9 Ibid., 4 Feb. 1886.10 Walker, A I 2, J.B.W. to Mary, 2 March 1891.11 Musical and theatre programs, 1817-93. A scrapbook collection

of entertainment pamphlets, ML. Records of the Hobart Musical Union, 1880-90, a similar collection.

12 Orpheus Club, various notices, reports and programs, 1880-1900; Tasmanian Supplement, 13 July 1895.

13 Church News, Feb. 1888, Aug. 1890; The Story of Trinity, Hobart, 1933.

14 F. Davenport, Diary, 14 Nov. 1872. Davenport papers.15 The Literary Competitor, Hobart, 1889.19 Walker, A I 2, J.B.W. to Mary, 25 June 1892.17 Nil Desperandum Literary Society, manuscript notebooks, 1889-94.

TSL.18 Proprietary Ladies’ College, Report, 1875.19 Walker, A I 2, various letters, 1887-90.20 Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery, Centenary, Hobart, 1963.21 Walker, A I 2, J.B.W. to Mary, 1 Oct. 1889.22 Walker, A II 4, 14 July 1892.23 Papers were printed by the Royal Society from 1863; for those on

its own achievements see Chapter 2, n. 37.24 Walch, The Story of C. E. Walch.25 J. Walch & Sons, Walch’s Literary Intelligencer, from June 1859.

See Jubilee Number 608, Hobart, 1909. J. Walch & Sons, Walch’s Catalogue of Books, Hobart, 1887.

Notes 2192,i A. E. Browning, ‘History of the State Library of Tasmania’ manu­

script, 1958. TSL.27 Walker, A II 5 (ii), A II 2.28 T. H. Braim, New Homes, London, 1870, p. 155.29 The Excursionist’s Guide to Tasmania, Melbourne, 1869; Tas­

manian Steam Navigation Company’s Guide for Visitors to Tasmania, or How to Spend My Holiday, Hobart, 1890 (this is merely one of several similar productions); Queenborough Park Hotel Company Limited, Prospectus, Hobart, 1888.

30 Walker, A I, J.B.W. to Mary, 16 Feb. 1890.31 Ibid., 20 Sept. 1891.32 Walker, A I, J.B.W. to James Backhouse, 20 Aug. 1884.33 23 Dec. 1882.34 Walker, A I, J.B.W. to Mary, 14 Dec. 1890.35 W. M. Bell, Other Countries, London, 1872, p. 301.

Epilogue

1 G. D. H. Cole and R. Postgate, The Common People, London, 1961, p. 430.

2 Walker, A I, J.B.W. to Mary, 6, 22 and 29 Aug. 1890.3 Walker, A II 4.4 Bank of Van Diemen’s Land, Register of Shareholders and Share

Transfers 1828-1880.5 Australian Dictionary of Biography, s.v., G. P. Fitzgerald.9 P. Hart, ‘The Reverend Archibald Turnbull, Agitator’, TIIRAP, vol.

12, no. 2, Nov. 1964, pp. 44-55; ‘The Conservative Churchman, Bishop Montgomery and the Radical Churchman, Archibald Turnbull’, Aus­tralian Broadcasting Commission, transcript, Tasmania in the Nineties.

7 Mercury, 12 July 1894.8 Historical Studies, vol. 7, nos. 26-7, 1956.9‘Chartists in Tasmania: A Note’; Society for the Study of Labour

History Bulletin, no. 3, Autumn, 1961, p. 8.

B I B L I O G R A P H Y

BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTES

A n attempt to write the ‘total’ history of a community involves looking at every source available. Often these are to be found scattered to surprising places. Much of the study of an Australian city can be con­ducted from records in Britain and within Australia such collections as the Mitchell Library in Sydney hold manuscripts about communities distant from New South Wales. Nevertheless the local archives, whether they be close to the area of study or in the capital city, contain the bulk of the material useful for any project.

PRIMARY SOURCES

The study of a community may most easily commence with the official records. The published statistics of Tasmania are available from 1844. These appear at first acquaintance to be more useful than they do later. It is surprising what one cannot find from statistics, mainly because categories or areas of classification were not designed with social historians in mind. The main source of demographic information is the census records but it is desirable to have access to the actual household sheets. In Tasmania, with the exception of part of a census in 1848, the household sheets were meticulously destroyed after abstracts were made of information which seemed significant at the time. Too frequently the researcher would like to have put different questions to the householder or to have assembled the information in a quite different form.

Within the parliamentary system most formal institutions of com­munity were required to submit annual reports which were reprinted in the government papers. For Hobart some thirty such institutions from Public Cemetery to Defence Forces submitted reports. Besides these there are reprints of the findings of most commissions or com­mittees of parliament which make dry reading but need not produce dry history. All the Australian colonies except Tasmania paid for Hansard reporting of the proceedings in the houses of parliament. These perhaps are of as much value about the people who spoke as about what they spoke about; the political process was a large part of community life but it only provides one particular complexion of its diversity.

Turning from the legislative to the executive branch of government there are records of the various administrative departments. The most

220

Bibliography 221celebrated of these in Tasmania are those of the Convict Department. These are quite remarkable documents. In some ways the meticulous recording of birth marks, behaviour, occupation and character offer an unequalled source of information for social history. Tasmanians are aware of this and the convict records are admirably maintained in the State Archives. In 1961 Asa Briggs, the British social historian, wrote, ‘The contemporary contrast between the public’s attitude to early records in Edward Gibbon Wakefield’s South Australia and in the convicts’ Van Diemen’s Land is itself a fascinating sociological phenomenon’.

The careers of convicts were also documented by officials of the Home Office in England and microfilm copies of these records are held in the collection of the National Library of Australia. In this book any information about convict careers owes its origin to the Home Office records and not to those of the Convict Department held in Hobart.

After the convict period the work of the public service proliferated whilst the references in them to individuals by name declined. Amongst those found useful were the records of the Social Welfare Depart­ment, the Chief Secretary’s Department, the Council of Education papers and the records of the Governor’s office. In this last the annual reports and confidential despatches of the Governors were found in­valuable for the Governors interpreted the life of the community not in its own terms but as external judges.

Judicial records are a fine source of social history. During the con­vict periods all reconvictions were recorded and this practice continued until about 1870. Such information would be of less value in a com­munity where crime and the legal processes which followed were not as fundamental to society as they were in Hobart.

There are other official records such as those of local councils. I enjoyed open access to the books of the Hobart City Council which included the Council minutes, the Town Clerk’s letterbooks and the General Correspondence books which were continuous from 1843. The rating assessments were a source to which I did not pay enough attention.

I was disappointed in the information I found in church records. In the Church House Archives of the Church of England my results were limited to two marriage registers and one burial register. All were for single parishes and for limited periods. Other researchers may be luckier or more diligent and if other parish records are found the information in them could be a valuable source for work either in historical demography or for family biographies.

After this there is resort to whatever accounts were left by private individuals no matter in what capacity they wrote. Such records were particularly numerous with the extended literacy of the nineteenth century and may be located in abundance in any archives. A list of

222 Bibliographythose pertaining to Hobart follows having been selected to indicatethe sorts of papers which are to be found. Their location is the Tas­manian State Library except where otherwise noted.

MISCELLANEOUS PAPERS, REPORTS, NOTICES AND LISTS

Rules and Objects of the Tasmanian Acclimatisation Society with a list of the officers, members and subscribers to the Society, 1862.

Report of the Amateurs’, Gardeners’ and Cottagers’ Horticultural Society, 1883, ML.

Archer Papers, 1847-74, 7 vols.; 6 reels microfilm; Letterbooks, 1867-72, Archives, University of Tasmania.

Prospectus of the Hobart Town Athenaeum, n.d., ML.Bank of Van Diemen’s Land, Register of Shareholders and of Share

Transfers, 1828-80.Bayley, M. E., Shopkeeping Daybook, 1858-69.Reports of the Hobart Town Benevolent Society, annually, 1860-88.Boyes, G. T. W. B., Diary, 1829-52, Royal Society of Tasmania Library.Reports of the Boys’ Home Industrial School, annually, 1869-88.Rules and Constitution of the Chamber of Commerce of the City of

Hobart Town, 1851.Rules and Regulations of the Hobart Town Choral Society, 1847.Reports of the Church Society for the Diocese of Tasmania, 1881-3.Reports of the Hobart Town City Mission, 1853, 1854, 1856, 1860, 1874,

1876.Clark, A. I., Papers: Personal and Professional to solicitor’s business.

Many essays on political and moral theory, draft federal constitution, Archives, University of Tasmania.

Davenport Papers, Letters from Fanny in Trinity Parsonage c. 1866-9. Diary of Fanny M. Davenport 1871-4. Unsorted.

Davey Street Congregational Church Papers, MS. Minute Book of Teachers’ Meetings, 1862-7. Various Registers, Roll Books and Marks Books 1842-85. Very full and detailed collection.

Hobart Debating and Literary Association, various notices, 1880-1, Allport Collection, Hobart.

Prospectus of the Hobart Town General Dispensary and Humane Society for Providing Medical Attendance, Medicine and other Aid for the Indigent Sick, free of Expense, 1847.

Dobson, W. L., Solicitor, Register of fees for professional services in private practice, 1864-70.

Reports of the Girls’ Home Industrial School, 1879, 1881, 1884, 1885, 1887, 1897.

Code of Laws of the Hobart Town Hebrew Proprietary School, 1862.Hobart Town High School MSS. and printed papers, account books,

and list of subscribers, 1847-83. ML.Hobart Musical and Theatrical Programmes, 1871-93. ML.Reports of the Hobart Town Ragged School Association, 1856, 1857,

1859-61, 1867-9, 1873-6, 1879, 1883-5.

Bibliography 223Rules and Regulations of the General Hospital and Dispensary Hobart

Town, 1871, 1877. ML.The Hutchins School, MS. Register of Admissions, 1846-92.McGregor, Alexander & Co., Personal Papers and Records of Whaling

and Shipping, Mining and Insurance business 1871-98, Bank of Van Diemen’s Land list of members 1883, Archives, University of Tasmania.

Mackie, F., photocopy MS. Journal of a visiting Quaker. Intelligent commentary on conditions, 2 vols., 1852-5, Archives, University of Tasmania.

Rules and Regulations of the Macquarie Debating Club, 1860.Reports of the Maternal and Dorcas Society, annually, 1844-79.Reports of the Mechanics’ Institute, various titles, 1828, 1843, 1852,

1856, 1858-60.Mechanics’ Institute, Hobart Town, MS. Minute Books 1839-67, ML. Regulations for the New Town Charitable Institution for Males, 1880. Nil Desperandum Literary Society, MS. Minute Books, 1889-94 (as

Hamilton Literary Society), 1894-1903.Report of the Second Anniversary of the Tasmanian Grand Lodge of

the Ancient and Independent Order of Oddfellows, 1855. ML. Orpheus Club Records, various notices and programs, 1880-1900. Reports of the Proprietary Ladies’ College, 1875-90. ML.Rot/al Society of Tasmania Papers and Proceedings, 1851-59 and

186:3----- .Reports of the Sailors Home, 1885, 1887, 1888.MS. Register of shore addresses of ships’ crews, 1863-7.Robb, W., Estate Agent, Journals, Registers and Ledgers 1856-75. Smith, H. E., MS. Journal of a senior civil servant 1867-70, ML.Sorell, W., Registrar, Supreme Court. Papers 1861-80, mostly personal

but some official, including lists of probate duties paid.Tasmanian Total Abstinence Agency Association, Letters 1842-57, ML. Report of Proceedings Tasmanian Temperance Conference, 1859. ML. Report of the Van Diemens Land Asylum for the Protection of Desti­

tute and Unfortunate Females, 1849.Southern Tasmanian Volunteer Artillery Attendance Lists, 1879. Walker Papers. Diaries, Letterbooks, MSS. Historical Notes, Remi­

niscences, Records of various societies of which the Walkers were officers. Archives, University of Tasmania.

Walker, J., Brewer and Miller. Various papers, Ledgers, Cash Books, Daily sales Books, Business Diary, 1829-82. Very full records.There were thirty-one newspapers and periodicals published in

Hobart or describing Hobart matters during the nineteenth century. Some, such as Bell’s Life in Tasmania, ran for less than a year whilst the Mercury was continuous from 1854. Some, such as the Australian Friend, 1887-94 and the Irish Exile and Freedom’s Advocate, 1850 were the mouthpieces of particular groups, whilst others sought the widest public. Newspaper study is very demanding of time and con-

224 Bibliographycentration but is capable of returning much information. It is impor­tant to notice not only the topics which the editorial staff address directly but also the advertisements, public notices, court reportings, lists of subscribers and letter writers.

Of much less use are the Directories, Almanacs, and Guides which flourished in the later half of the nineteenth century. The Hobart Coffee Palace Visitors’ Guide to Hobart and Suburbs, 1889 and Davies’ Commercial Almanac limited their information to their editors’ or advertisers’ ideas of importance. On the other hand Walch’s Tasmanian Almanac, because it had such a long run from 1863 annually, is most useful as a check on community life at wide intervals. Also much can be made of the Hobart Town Directory and Book Almanac containing the Name, Calling and Address of Each Householder residing within the City of Hobart Town, 1857 and Middleton and Maning’s Tasmanian Directory and Gazetteer, 1887. R. J. Solomon covered the description of street and land use for his The Evolution of Hobart: A Case Study of Urbanization 1803-1963, and the methods he used are of interest to any social historian.

Some members of the community of Hobart published books about their own experiences. Other visitors recounted their impressions of the town as they found it. What was not said is as important as what was, though the commentaries on town life do provide some sort of a mirror to reflect current judgments about the state of society.

Here follows a selected list of books which refer to life in Hobart.

BOOKS WRITTEN DURING THE NINETEENTH CENTURY

Atkins, Rev. T., The Wanderings of a Clerical Ulysses . . ., London, 1859.

J.B., The Cruise Around the World of the Flying Squadron 1869-1870, London, 1871.

Baird, J., The Emigrant’s Guide to Australasia: Tasmania and New Zealand, London, 1871.

Bell, Major W. M., Other Countries, vol. I, London, 1872.Bonwick, J., The Tasmanian Lily, London, 1873.Braim, T. H., New Homes . . ., London, 1870.Buck, F., Tasmania: Official Handbook, London, 1870. ML.Calder, J. E., Tasmanian Industries, Hobart Town, 1869.Crouch, G. S., Reminiscences of G. S. Crouch, Hobart, 1912.The Cyclopedia of Tasmania, 2 vols., Hobart, n.d. [1900].Dean, J., On Sea ami Land, A Trip to California in 1850-53 . . .,

Hobart, n.d. [1905].Denison, Lieutenant-Governor W. T., Varieties of Vice-Regal Life,

London, 1870.----- . Information regarding the Colony of Van Diemen’s Land, Hobart

Town, 1853.Du Cane, Charles, Tasmania—Past ami Present, a lecture given at the

Town Hall, Colchester, 1877.

Bibliography 225Dilke, C. W., Greater Britain, 2 vols., London, 1869.Elwes, R., A Sketchers Tour Round the World, London, 1854.Fenton, J., A History of Tasmania from its Discovery in 1642 to the

Present Time, Hobart, 1884.Hull, H. M., Tasmania as a Field for British Emigrants: Its Produc­

tions, Resources, Lands, Commerce, and Population, Hobart Town, 1875 and various dates and titles.

Johnston, R. M., Tasmanian Official Record, Hobart, 1890.Just, T. C., Tasmaniana, Launceston, 1879.----- . The Official Handbook of Tasmania compiled under the instruc­

tions of the Government Board of Immigration of that Colony, 1st ed., Launceston, 1883.

Leakey, C. (under pseudonym Olive Keese), The Broad Arrow, Hobart Town, 1860.

Lloyd, G. T., Thirty Three Years in Tasmania and Victoria, London, 1862.

Malone, R. E., Three Years’ Cruise in the Australasian Colonies, London, 1854.

Martineau, J., Letters from Australia, London, 1869.Meredith, L. A., My Home in Tasmania during a Residence of Nine

Years, 2 vols., London, 1852.Mundy, G. C., Our Antipodes, 3 vols., 2nd ed., London, 1852.O’Rell, M., John Bull & Co., London, 1894.Partington, J. E., Random Rot, Altrincham, 1883.Puseley, D., The Rise and Progress of Australia, Tasmania and New

Zealand, 4th ed., London, 1858.Miller, M., The Financial Condition of Tasmania, speech to public

meeting, Hobart Town, 1862.Nicolson, Rev. W., The Late Fire in the City, Hobart Town, 1854. ML.Nowell, E. C., On the Vital Statistics of Tasmania with especial

Reference to the Mortality of Children, reprinted from RSTP, Hobart Town, 1875.

‘One of Four’, Words to Women, A Plea for Certain Sufferers, Hobart Town, 1858. ML.

Ritchie, D. (ed.), The Voice of Our Exiles, Edinburgh, 1854.Roberts, J., Religion and Society in Tasmania in 1857-58, Hobart Town,

1858.Sim, E. C., Our Travels Round the World 1892-94, London, 1897.Stephens, T., The Education Department, Tasmania, Sydney, 1904.Stoney, H. B., A Year in Tasmania, Hobart Town, 1854.Syme, J., Nine Years in Van Diemens Land, Dundee, 1848.Trollope, A., Australia and New Zealand, Melbourne, 1874.Walch, C. E., The Story of the Life of Charles Edward Walch with a

Selection of his Writings, Hobart, 1908.West, J., History of Tasmania, 2 vols., Launceston, 1852.

226 BibliographySECONDARY SOURCES

O ne way or another over the years a great many books and articles are published about the way life was in a city. This is inevitable when the field of interest is as wide as a whole society. Yet there has been remarkably little published which is directly on such a topic as this. Australian historians have generally confined themselves to other issues, but some economic historians approach closest to the theme. The writer of a local history must above all other things maintain a wide vision to avoid the unwarranted belief in uniqueness. English speaking urban communities were more similar than dissimilar during the nine­teenth century and it was mainly in their total experiences or by virtue of a few particular idiosyncratic traits that they can be shown to be different. I have included below the major publications referring to Hobart life and a few which may be used for comparison with cities overseas. Should any reader wish to consult a complete bibliography for the study of Hobart I refer them to that in the copies of my doctoral thesis which are deposited in the libraries of the Australian National University and the University of Tasmania.

BOOKS

Abbott, G. J., and Nairn, N. B. (eds.) Economic Growth of Australia 1788-1821, Melbourne, 1969.

Austin, A. G., Australian Education 1788-1900, Melbourne, 1961. Australian Dictionary of Biography, D. Pike (ed.), vols. 1 and 2,

1788-1850, Melbourne, 1966, 1967; vols. 3 and 4, 1851-1890, 1969 and 1972.

Barrett, W. R., History of the Church of England in Tasmania, Hobart, 1942.

Bowden, F. and Crawford, M., The Story of Trinity, One Hundred Years 1833-1933, Hobart, 1933.

Christ's College, Tasmania, 1838-1905, Hobart, 1906.Clark, C. I., The Parliament of Tasmania: An Historical Sketch,

Hobart, 1947.Coghlan, T. A., Labour and Industry in Australia, 4 vols., London,

1918.Cullen, J. H., The Catholic Clmrch in Tasmania, Launceston, n.d.

[1949].Dugan, C. C., A Century of Tasmanian Methodism 1820-1920, Hobart,

n.d. [1920].Dupain, M., Georgiati Architecture in Australia, Sydney, 1963. Fitzpatrick, K., Sir John Franklin in Tasmania 1837-1843, Melbourne,

1949.Fogarty, R. N., Catholic Education in Australia, 1806-1950, 2 vols.,

Melbourne, 1959.Forsyth, W. D., Governor Arthurs Convict System, Van Diemens

Land, 1824-36, London, 1935.

Bibliography 227Friends, Society of, Centenary of Australian Quakerism 1832-1932

Memorial Pamphlet, Hobart, 1933.Gordon, M., Jews in Van Diemens Land, Melbourne, 1965.Green, F. C., The Tasmanian Club 1861-1961, Hobart, 1961.----- . (ed.) A Century of Responsible Government 1856-1956, Hobart,

1956.Hartwell, R. M., The Economic Development of Van Diemen’s Land

1820-1850, Melbourne, 1954.Heyer, J., The Presbyterian Pioneers of Van Diemens Land, Hobart,

1935.History of Freemasonry in Tasmania, Launceston, 1935.Höre, L. F. S., Digest of Cases Decided in Tasmania 1856-1896,

Hobart, 1897.Howell, P. A., Thomas Arnold the Younger in Van Diemens Land,

Hobart, 1964.Hudspeth, W. H., The Hobart Maternal and Dorcas Society, Hobart,

1942.------. The Theatre Royal, Hobart, 1837-1948, Hobart, 1948.Johnston, R. M., The R. M. Johnston Memorial Volume, Plobart, 1921.Levy, M. C. L, Governor George Arthur, Melbourne, 1953.Luckman, A. D., Sharps, Flats, Gamblers and Racehorses, London,

1914.Marine Board of Hobart, One Hundred Years, Hobart, 1958.Mennell, P., The Dictionary of Australasian Biography . . . 1855-1892,

London, 1892.Nixon, N., The Pioneer Bishop in Van Diemens I^and 1843-1863,

Hobart, 1953.Norman, L., Pioneer Shipping of Tasmania . . ., Hobart, 1938.Philp, J. E., Whaling Ways of Hobart Town, Hobart, 1936.The Public General Acts of Tasmania (Reprint) 1826-1936, 7 vols.,

Sydney, 1936.Reeves, C., A History of Tasmanian Education, vol. I, Melbourne, 1935.Robson, L. L., The Convict Settlers of Australia, Melbourne, 1965.Roe, M., Quest for Authority in Eastern Australia, 1835-1851, Mel­

bourne, 1965.------. A History of the Theatre Royal Hobart from 1834, Hobart, n.d.

[1965].Rowntree, A., Battery Point Today and Yesterday, Hobart, 1951.Serie, P., Dictionary of Australian Biography, 2 vols., Sydney, 1949.Sharland, M. S. R., Stones of A Century, Hobart, 1952.Shaw, A. G. L., Convicts and the Colonies, London, 1966.Sisters of Charity, A Century of Charity in Tasmania, Hobart, 1947.Smith, B., European Vision and the South Pacific 1768-1850, Oxford,

1960.-------- . Australian Painting 1788-1960, Melbourne, 1962.Stephens, T., Christ’s College and Hutchins School, Hobart, 1912.

228 BibliographyTownsley, W. A., The Struggle for Self-Government in Tasmania

1842-56, Hobart, 1951.Von Stieglitz, K. R., A History of Local Government in Tasmania,

Hobart, 1958.

ARTICLES

Baker, R. W., ‘The Early Judges in Tasmania’, THRAP, vol. 8, no. 4, Sept. 1960, pp. 71-84.

Blainey, G., ‘Population Movements in Tasmania, 1870-1901’, THRAP, vol. 3, no. 4, June 1954, pp. 62-70.

Böiger, P., ‘The Southport Settlement’ THRAP, vol. 12, no. 4, Apr. 1965, pp. 99-113.

Brigden, J. B., ‘Tasmania: An Economic Sketch’, Handbook to Tas­mania, Australasian Association for the Advancement of Science, Hobart, 1928, pp. 116-35.

Briggs, A., ‘Chartists in Tasmania: A Note’, Bulletin of the Society for the Study of Labour History, no. 3, Autumn 1961, pp. 4-8.

Butler, W. F. D., ‘The Foundation of Public Institutions for Secondary Education in Tasmania’, RSTP, 1917, pp. 21-59.

Craig, C., ‘Early Town Planning in Hobart’, RSTP, 1944, pp. 99-108.Crowley, F. K., ‘Immigration into Tasmania from the United Kingdom

1860-1919’, THRAP, vol. 3, no. 6, Oct. 1954, pp. 103-8.Crowther, W. E. L. H., ‘A Surgeon as a Whaleship Owner’, Medical

Journal of Australia, 1943, no. 1, pp. 549-54.Cullen, J. H., ‘Bishop Willson’, Australasian Catholic Record, Sydney,

vols. XXVI-XXXI, New Series, 1949-54. (A series of eighteen articles.)----- . ‘Transportation and Colonial Income’, Historical Studies, vol. Ill,

1944-9, pp. 297-312.Dollery, E. M., ‘The Chiniquy Riots’, THRAP, vol. 9, no. 4, March

1962, pp. 118-44.----- . ‘Defences of the Derwent’, T PI RAP, vol. 14, no. 4, Apr. 1967, pp.

148-65.Giblin, L. F., ‘The Demography of Tasmania’, RSTP, 1913, pp. 173-6.Ginswick, J., ‘The Tasmanian Trade Cycle: The Turning Point of the

Forties’, THRAP, vol. 5, no. 3, Aug. 1956, pp. 53-65.Hart, P., ‘The Rev. Archibald Turnbull, Agitator’, THRAP, vol. 12, no.

2, Nov. 1964, pp. 44-55.Hudspeth, W. H., ‘Notes on Tasmanian History’, Handbook for Tas­

mania, ANZAAS, Hobart, 1949, pp. 59-65.MacKirdy, K. A., ‘Adjustment Problems in Nation Building: Tasmania

and the Canadian Maritime Provinces’, Canadian Journal of Eco­nomics and Political Science, vol. 20, Feb. 1954, pp. 27-43.

McRae, M. D., ‘Some Aspects of the Origins of the Tasmanian Labour Party’, THRAP, vol. 3, no. 2, Apr. 1954, pp. 21-7.

----- . ‘Educational Controversies in Van Diemen’s Land, 1847-55’,THRAP, vol. 10, no. 4, July 1963, pp. 74-87.

Bibliography 229Morton, A., ‘History of the Royal Society of Tasmania’, RSTP, 1894-5,

appendix pp. 1-6.Payne, H. S., ‘A Statistical Study of Female Convicts in Tasmania,

1843-53’, THRAP, vol. 9, no. 2, June 1961, pp. 56-69.Piesse, E. L. ‘The Foundation and Early Work of the Society with

some account of other institutions of early Hobart’, RSTP, 1913, pp. 117-66.

Preston, H., ‘Early Domestic Architecture in Hobart’, THRAP, vol. 5, no. 4, Feb. 1957, pp. 67-72.

Reynolds, H., ‘That Hated Stain: The Aftermath of Transportation in Tasmania’, Historical Studies, vol. 14, no. 53, Oct. 1969, pp. 19-31.

Reynolds, J., ‘The Colonial Parliamentary Period in Tasmanian Politics as a field for Research’, THRAP, vol. 1, no. 2, 1951, pp. 3-6.

----- . ‘A. L. Clark’s American Sympathies and his Influence on Aus­tralian Federation’, Australian Laic Journal, vol. 32, 1958-9, pp. 62-75.

Robson, L. L., ‘Male Convicts Transported to Van Diemen’s Land, 1841-53’, THRAP, vol. 9, no. 2, June 1961, pp. 39-55.

----- . ‘An Introduction to the Tasmanian Colonial Parliamentary Period,1856-1901’, THRAP, vol. 2, no. 5, Aug. 1953, pp. 95-8.

Roe, M., ‘The Establishment of Local Self-Government in Hobart and Launceston, 1845-1858’, TPIRAP, vol. 14, no. 1, Dec. 1966, pp. 21-45.

Rowntree, A., ‘Early Growth of the Port of Hobart Town’, THRAP, vol. 3, no. 6, Oct. 1954, pp. 92-101.

Rude, C., ‘“Captain Swing” and Van Diemen’s Land’, THRAP, vol. 12, no. 1, Oct. 1964, pp. 6-24.

Solomon, R. J., ‘External Relations of the Port of Hobart 1804-1861’, Australian Geographer, vol. IX, no. 1, March 1963, pp. 43-53.

----- . ‘Four Stages in Port Evolution: The Case of Hobart’, TijdschriftVoor Econ. en Soc. Geografie, Juni/Juli 1963, pp. 163-8.

Somerville, J., ‘The Royal Society of Tasmania, 1843-1943’, RSTP, 1943, pp. 199-221.

Stillwell, G. T., ‘The Congregational Cemetery, New Town, Tasmania’, Australian Genealogist, vol. 7, 1952-5, pp. 116-20.

Townsley, W. A., Tasmania and the Great Economic Depression 1858- 1872’, THRAP, vol. 4, no. 2, July 1955, pp. 35-46.

Walker, A. C., ‘Henry Hunter and His Work’, Report of the 19th Meeting of the Australasian Association for the Advancement of Science, Hobart, 1929, pp. 419-25.

THESES

Brown, J. C., The Development of Social Services in Tasmania 1863- 1900, M.A., University of Tasmania, 1969.

Fry, E. C., The Condition of the Urban Wage Earning Class in Aus­tralia in the 1880’s, Ph.D., Australian National University, 1956.

McKay, A., The Assignment System of Convict Labour in Van Diemen’s Land 1824-1842, M.A., University of Tasmania, 1958.

230 BibliographyReynolds, H., The Island Colony, M.A., University of Tasmania, 1963.Richmond, B. M., Some Aspects of the History of Transportation and

Immigration in Van Diemen’s Land 1824-1855, M.A., University of Tasmania, 1956.

Robson, L. L., Press and Politics: a study of elections and political issues in Tasmania from 1856, when self government came into effect, to 1871, M.A., University of Tasmania, 1955.

Solomon, R. J . , The Evolution of Hobart, Ph.D., University of Tas­mania, 1968.

Townsley, W. A., Chapters in Tasmanian Constitutional and Adminis­trative History, M.A., University of Tasmania, 1951.

SOME WORKS ABOUT THE HISTORY OF OTHER CITIES

Bate, W. A., A History of Brighton, Melbourne, 1962.Brockett, A., Nonconformity in Exeter 1650-1875, Manchester, 1962.Dyos, H. J . , ‘The Growth of Cities in the Nineteenth Century: A

Review of Some Recent Writing’, Victorian Studies, vol. IX, no. 3, March 1966, pp. 225-37.

----- . (ed.) The Study of Urban History, London, 1968.Grainger, J., The Auckland Story, Wellington, 1953.Plandlin, O., Bostons Immigrants 1790-1865, Cambridge, Mass., 1941.----- and Burchard, J. (eds.), The Historian and the City, Cambridge,

Mass., 1963.Millar, J . , The Merchants Paved the Way, Wellington, 1956.Morley, A., Vancouver—From Milltown to Metropolis, Vancouver,

1961.Reynolds, J . , Launceston, Melbourne, 1969.

I N D E XAborigines: as concubines, 95; extinc­

tion of, 31, 181-2; research into, 85, 186

Acclimatisation: Society, 82-3; species introduced, 82

Agnew, Dr J. W.: art patron, 29, 84, 185-6; and Gymnasium Club, 183; Premier, 185-6; and Royal Society, 186; social leader, 162; and Working Men’s Club, 175

Agriculture, 12Alcoholism: in early camp, 13, 14; and

Friendly Societies, 152-4; lower class, 37; amongst settlers and officials, 14. 96

Allport family: Cecil, 143-4; Curzon, 84; Joseph, 20; Mrs Joseph, 28, 83; Morton, 84, 165

American sympathies, 50, 176; see also Clark, Andrew Inglis

Ancanthe, 27-8Anti-transportation sentiment, 43-5 Archer, John Lee, 16, 60, 62 Arnold, Thomas, 29; marries, 42; lec­

tures, Medical School, 87 Art Association, 186; classes, 122; ex­

hibition, 29, 84; fashion, 83. 185-6; Gallery, 186; professional school of, 29; teaching of, as ladies career, 185, 192; unions, 188

Arthur, Governor George: policy, 20-1; architectural influence, 61; measures for economy, 34; on nature of con­victs, 36; profits from building. 61; water scheme, 65

Artillery Corps, see Volunteers Associate of Arts Degree, 166 Associated Sunday Schools, see Schools Australian Association for the Advance­

ment of Science, 1892. 1 Australian Federation, 191, 197-9; con­

ventions, 191; as debate topic, 185 Australian Home Reading Union, 185

Rackhouse, James, 20; mission to the Aborigines, 31

Bailey, Dr William. 49, 51. 91 Bank of Van Diemen’s Land: sharelists,

79-80; closure of, 195-6 Barclay, Charles: as debater, 168-9;

Working Men’s Club patron, 175 Barnard, James: education of sons, 165;

reminiscences, 75; shareholder. 80; statistician, 27

Bastow, Henry, 175 Bate. Samuel, 13Battery Point: residential area, 58. 65-6;

shipbuilding at, 77-8, 145

Beaumont, John, 196; wealth of, 143 Bedford, Dr E. S. P.: career, 32-3;

comments on society, 125-6; educates sons, 165; opens medical school, 87, 166; starts St Mary’s Hospital, 33, 103; scientific interests, 27, 83; share­holders, 80

Beggars, 109-11 Bellamy, Edward, 197 Benevolent Society in 1832, 32 Benevolent Society, Hobart Town: work

described, 113-16, 141; and convict beggars, 110-11; and family rescue, 116; and unmarried mothers, 113; rail­way construction, feels effect of, 145

Benson, Sarah, 20, 95 Bicheno, William, 28 Bidencope, Joseph, 171 Birds, about town, 56, 82, 136, 191 Birth rates: 1847-57, 73; effect of con­

victs upon, 136-7; effect upon com­munity of changes in, 138; fall in, 124

Blackburn, James, 62 Bolger, Patrick, 48 Bonney, James, 91Bonwick, James: author, 75, 188; his­

torian, 2; teacher, 119 Bootmakers’ Union, 177 Botanical Gardens, see Parks, Royal

SocietyBowling Club, 183Boyes, G. T. W. B.: career, 25; opinions

on ( convicts) 36, ( settlers) 46,(Lieutenant Governor Eardley Wil- mot) 41

Braddon, Sir Edward: Premier, 197; on convict honesty, 99; on labour force. 127

Brickfield’s Pauper Asylum. 103 Britannia and Trades Advocate, 50 British Government, influence on nature

of settlement of, 7, 12, 33, 43 Brown, Governor Thomas Gore, 127 Buckland, Bev. John: admits scholars,

165-6; influence, 119; wealth, 142-3 Buildings, commercial. 32, 62, 147 Buildings, industrial, 62-3 Buildings, official: construction of, 16,

56, 145-6; discussion on character of, 16, 61, 146, 189; value of, 16; Bar­racks, 16, 60, 109, 112; Commissariat, 11; Custom’s House, 61. 6-3, 81, 146; Government House (Macquarie St) 14, 25, 27, 56, 59, 81, (Queen’s Domain) 62, 81, 160, 185; New Market, 65; Supreme Court, 81; Town Hall, 1, 80-1, 145-6, 185; Treasury, 56, 59-60

231

232 IndexBurgess, Henry, 18, 49, 70; as property

owner, 48Burgess, William Henry, 196 Business district, description of, 56 Butler, C. W., 184

Cable, undersea, 173 Cairnduff, Alexander, 86 California, 67 Canada, 67Cannibalism, amongst convicts, 40 Capital, 52, 64, 128, 144, 195-6; and

investment, 74, 77, 78-80, 190 Captain Swing rioters, 36 Carter, William, 52-3 Cavanagh, Eileen, 98 Chamber of Commerce, 79, 93 Champ, W. T. N., 89 Chapman, S. K., 184 Chapman, Thomas, 80 Charity: to Aborigines, 31; to paupers,

32-5, 102-3, 105, 108; in Friendly Societies, 153; financing of, 32-3, 93, 104, 108-9, 113-17 passim, 120

Chartists, 36, 148Children: condition of, 39, 102-3, 108,

115, 148, 162; education of, 48-9, 165, 169; in institutions, 34, 115-16, 120-1; numbers of, 7, 69, 73, 118, 137

Chiniquy, Charles, 161 Choral Society, 85 Church attendance, 22, 39, 102 Church denominations in community

life: discussion of, 52, 105, 116, 117, 184; Catholics, 101, 105, 116, 142, 161, 165, 169; Protestants, 101, 116, 161; Anglicans, 28, 30, 83, 91, 105, 119, 120, 142, 165, 178, 194, 196; Congregational. 30. 86, 168-9; Pres­byterian, 30; Wesleyan and Metho­dist, 18, 125. 142, 155, 167; see also Jews, Quakers. Evangelical attitudes

Church music, 184 Church News, 153, 178, 194 Churches: Baptist Tabernacle, 147;

Brisbane Independent, 75; Davey St Congregational, 170; Holy Trinity (new), 58, 62, 184; Holy Trinity (old). 60; Memorial Congregational, 143; New Town Congregational, 62; St Andrew’s, 62; St David’s, 11, 16, 22, 60, 194; St George’s, 61, 63, 65; St John’s, 61; St John’s, New Town, 62; St Joseph’s, 62

City Mission, 101-2Civil Servants, 74-5, 88; income of,

141-2Clark, Andrew Inglis, 176 Clarke, Rev. George, 168, 196 Cleburne, R., 62Clergymen: income of, 143; training of,

167Clerks, income of, 142 Climate, evaluation of, 4 Clinch, Captain John, 80

Coffee Palace, 147Collins, Lieutenant Governor David, 3,

11Colonial identity, development of, 37,

43-7, 51, 136, 165, 188-93 Colonial Times, 102, 103 Colonists, see Convicts, Immigrants,

Native born, Settlers Commercial Bank, 169 Commissariat, 5, 11-13, 16, 26, 39, 46,

127Congregational Literary and Christian

Association, 184 Continuous Ministry, 169 Convict Department, 32, 39-41, 47, 70,

128Convicts: as citizens, 18, 25-6, 34-7,

48-51, 90-1, 99, 103, 127, 136-9, 172-3; as concubines, 21; as depen­dants, 7, 34, 93, 97; in early camp, 59; effects of goldrush upon, 69-72; life style of, 19, 21, 36, 37, 39, 97-9, 109-12; morality of, 36, 39, 40, 42, 95, 102; in occupations, 5, 25-6, 77; and politics, 50, 53-4, 89-91; popula­tion of, 7, 18-19, 33, 35, 47, 94, 111, 135-6; as prisoners, 8, 16, 22, 25, 33, 35, 40-1, 60, 70, 136; and settlers, 44, 46, 52, 94, 162-3, 179; in trade, 47-8, 71; in work force, 14, 16, 32, 44, 68, 100

Convict’s Prevention Act, Victoria, 70 Coote, William, 78 Crisp, C. A., 165 Crisp, George, 196 Crisp, Samuel (elder), 18, 48-9, 165 Crisp, Samuel (junior), 49, 91 Crosby, William, 78 Crouch, George Stanton, 125, 155, 165,

167Crouch, Sarah, 113Crouch, Thomas J. (senior), 114, 155,

162Crouch, Thomas J. (junior), 165 Crowther, Dr E. L., 82 Crowther, Dr William, 20, 48, 78-9,

181-2Crowther, Dr William L., 28, 181 Crozier, Captain, R. N., 27 Cuffay, William, 36, 148, 149 Cunningham. James, 103-4 Cunningham, John, 19

Daily News, 90Davey, Lieutenant Governor Thomas,

12 21 95Davies, Charles Ellis, 155-6, 165 Davies, Sir John George, 155-6, 160,

162. 165, 196Davies, John Michael, 71, 85, 90-1, 156,

159Davies, Michael John, 71 Davis, Charles, 70-1 Death rates, 7, 135 Day Star, 178

Index 233Democracy, see Political ideas Denison, Lieutenant Governor William

Thomas, 43-5, 50, 52, 59, 63, 65, 85, 151

Depravity, convict reputation for, 40 Derwent Sailing Squadron, 183 Derwent and Tamar Assurance Com­

pany, 79 Derwenters, 69Descriptions of the city, 55, 63, 188 Dobson, Alfred, 169 Dobson, John, 20, 29, 84, 143 Dobson, Sir William Lambert, 2, 143,

165, 166, 169, 185 Dobsonia, 169Doctors, training of, 28, 32, 87, 166 Dodds, Sir John, 198 Dog Tax affair, 47 Drainage system, 66 Druids, Ancient and Independent Order

of, see Friendly Societies Duke of Edinburgh, 170-1 Duterrau, Benjamin, 29, 83 ‘D’ye Ken John Peel’, 19

East Coast Steam Navigation Company, 78, 80

Economic function of the city, 128, 129, 144-5

Economic trends, 54, 75, 127-8, 144, ̂ 164, 196-7

Edinburgh Review, 21 Eight Hour Day Movement, 178, 195 Eltham, W. C., 184 Emancipists, see Convicts Emigrants, see Immigrants Emigration, from Tasmania, 35 Evangelical attitudes, 99, 105, 168, 170 Exploring, 9, 14, 27

Facy, Peter, 77, 80, 108, 113, 154, 162 Fairhall, Edward, 19 Families: of convicts, 36, 49, 102, 136-

7; examples of, 18-19. 71; and gold rushes, 69, 73; and welfare institu­tions, 33, 103-4, 115-17, 170

Family life: early days, 7; in penal colony, 21-2, 25, 45, 52, 95; in period 1847-57, 73

Family size. 137 Female Factory, 22, 109 Female Refuges, 103, 113, 120, 125 Fenton. James, 1 Fires and fire fighting, 64-5 Fisher, Captain James, 77, 80 Fitzgerald, G. P., 165, 175, 196 Flooding, 64 Flowers, Randle, 19 Flying Squadron, see Royal Navy Franklin, Lady Jane, 27 Franklin, Sir John, 26, 40 Frazer, P. G., 28 P’ree Labour Union. 49. 50 Freemasons, see Friendly Societies

Friendly Societies, 52, 91, 151-7, 159- 61, 196, 198

Frost, John, 36, 148 Fysh, Philip Oakley, 114-15, 175, 178

Gaiety Players, 184 Gaol, 11, 16, 37, 40, 60, 93 Gas Company, 79-80, 103-4 Gell, J. P„ 29, 31 Gellibrand, Rev. T., 119 George, Henry, 197 Gibbets, 60Giblin, Lyndhurst, 170Giblin, Robert, 86Giblin, Thomas, 196Giblin, William Robert, 168-70, 175Gifford, Ann, 98Girls’ Home Industrial School, 120, 180 Gladstone, W. E., 42 Glee Club, 184 Glover, John, 84 Gold rushes, 67-9, 115, 127 Gore House Home for Servants, 113 Gothic revival, see Housing, Churches Gould, John, 27, 83 Gould, William, 29 Government Gazette, 70 Graves, John Woodcock (senior), 19 Graves, John Woodcock (junior), 82,

181-2Graveyard, 56, 181 Gray. James, 84, 148, 157 Guesdon, William, 80, 143, 180 Gunn, Ronald Campbell, 28, 83 Gymnasium Club, 183

Hamilton, Lady Teresa, 184-5 Hamilton Literary Society, see Nil Des-

perandum Literary Society Hangings, 60Hare-Clark voting system, 176 Harris, Richard, 119, 142, 152, 155 Hedberg. Olaf, 77, 80 Hibernian Society, see Friendly Societies High School. 1, 48, 62, 85, 155, 165,

166Hill, Samuel Prout. 91 Hinsby, Henry, 80 Historians, 1, 43, 188 History, sense of: in 1840s, 37-9; in

1850s, 75; in 1860s, 133; in 1870s, 148; in 1880s, 37, 178; in 1890s. 1-2, 191, 198-9

Hobart Town, see Descriptions, Reasons for settlement, Town plan. Town site

Hobarton, as a way of life, 24, 26, 31, 42, 83

Hobarton Guardian, 51, 71Holy Trinity Church Bellringers, 184Hone, Joseph, 84Hooker, Joseph Dalton, 27, 31, 57, 83 Hopkins, Henry, 30, 48, 80, 143, 196 Horticultural Society, 84 Hospital, Colonial, Hospital, General,

see Hospital, Hobart

234 IndexHospital, Hobart, 16, 22, 32, 34, 83,

93-4. 103; see also Benevolent Society, Lock Hospital, Maternal and Dorcas Society. St Mary’s Hospital

Houses: Ingle Hall, 13; Lenna, 183; Rats’ Castle, 61; Secheron, 65, 183; Stowell, 183; Westella, 48

Housing: condition of, 64, 101-2, 124, 132-3; construction of, 5, 17, 56, 64, 146; styles, 16-17, 146-7; valuations, 16, 48 '

Hudspeth, F. M., 184 Hudspeth, Rev. F., I l l Hunter, Henry, 62, 81 Hunter’s Island, 4, 17 Hunting, 7, 12 Hutchins School, 30, 62, 85 Hutchins School students, 48-9, 155,

165

Ice houses, 191Immigrants: non-British, 17; in penal

colony, 15, 18, 23, 25, 26, 29, 32, 35, 111, 126; relief for, 32-5; as work people, 44, 49, 69, 77, 119

Immigration: organisation of, 17, 19-20, 32, 73, 100; rates of, 15, 69. 130-2, 138; reasons for, 19-20

India, 13, 35, 127, 190 Industrial development, 11, 12, 68, 74,

76, 128-9. 144-5 Industrial Schools, 119-21 Industries: barrel making, 12; brewing,

11; brick making, 16; candle making, 11, 68; carriage making, 12, 68; dis­tilling. 11; eucalyptus oil making, 82; foundry work, 74; furniture making, 12; gas working, 65; glue making, 74; jam making, 11; milling, 17, 68; pot­tery making, 11; shipbuilding, 12, 76- 9. 150; shoemaking, 74; soap making, 68; soft drink making, 11, 68; stone quarrying, 16; textile making, 12; timber cutting, 68. 74. 128; tinsmith- ing, 71; wagon making, 12; whaling, 9, 13-14. 68, 76-8, 145

Innes, Frederick Maitland. 90, 165 Insurance companies, 65, 79 Irish Exile ana Freedom’s Advocate, 52 Irishmen, 19, 36, 52, 98, 155, 161 Ivey, E. II.. 151, 160

lews, 58, 72, 90. 169 Johnston, R. M.. 138, 139, 168, 186 Jones, Amelia, 116 Jorgensen. Jorgen, 31, 36 Journalists, 90, 124, 155

Kay. W. Porden. 28, 65 Kemp, Anthony Fenn, 196 Kennerley, Alfred, 108, 114, 120 King Billy. 181-2 Kissock, Alexander, 65, 80, 160 Knopwood, Rev. Robert, 5, 28

Labour force: development of, 68-9, 73, 124, 131-2, 145, 197; nature of, 127, 132

Labour history, 149-50 Labour movement, 194-5 Law and order: in penal camp, 8, 13,

18, 21; in growing city, 40, 44, 75; in independent colony, 96-8, 138, 139, 151-3, 161, 181, 196-7

Lawyers: income of, 143; training of, 20, 49, 166

Leach, R., 86. 119 Leakey, Caroline, 162, 188 Lefroy, Governor Sir J. H., 144 Legge, William V., 186 Lewis, David, 92, 115 Lewis, Richard, 57, 85 Liberalism, see Political ideas Libraries, 1, 122, 188 Liedertafel, 184 Lillie, Rev. John, 30, 122 Literacy, 186, 188Literary and Debating Societies’ Union,

185Literary Intelligencer, 186 Lock Hospital, 113 Lord. David, 48 Lord. Edward, 13Lower classes, see Convicts, Immigrants,

Native born Lowes. T. Y., 160 Loyalty, expressions of, 50-3, 91

McGregor, Alexander, 78, 145, 196 McIntyre, Winifred, 98 McKenna, Ann. 116 McNaughtan. Alexander, 78, 160 Mackie, Frederick, 76 Macquarie Debating Society, 168-9,

173-4Macquarie, Governor Lachlan, 9, 59 Macquarie Harbour, 40 Maguire, Eliza, 98 Maher, Edward, 160 Maher, Mary, 98 Marriages, 17, 73 Master and Servant Act, 98, 156-7 Maternal and Dorcas Society, 32, 103,

113Mauritius, 37, 78. 112 Maxwell, C. M., 80Mechanics’ Institute, 83, 121-2, 173-4,

188Mechanics’ School of Arts, 121 Melbourne, 56, 71, 78, 166, 190 Melville, Henry, 14 Mendes, Daniel, 11Merchants: as citizens, 13-15, 18, 20,

91-2, 159-60; fortunes of, 11, 12, 15, 17. 67-8. 74-6, 79, 127-8, 142-5; as investors. 79-80

Mercury. 71, 91, 105, 108, 155, 156, 197 Meredith. Louisa Anne, 24, 41, 171 Middle classes, see Officers, Settlers

Index 235Military: as occupying force, 7, 8, 14,

22, 50, 59-60, 127; as protectors, 4, 60, 127, 157-8; see also Royal Navy

Miller, Maxwell, 90, 124, 129-32 Milligan, Dr James, 85 Minerva Club, 176 Mitchel, John, 39, 148 Morgan, John, 20, 47, 49-50, 133, 149 Morrison, Askin, 77 Moses, Nathan, 58 Moses, Saul, 58 Mount Rumney, 190 Mount Wellington. 3-4, 8, 37, 179, 189 Municipal Commission, 1847, 47 Municipal Council, 53, 54. 66, 91-2 Museum: Ancanthe, 27-8; Royal Society,

81, 85, 186

Nairn, W. E., 89Native born: careers of, 30, 77, 165-7;

as citizens, 46, 103, 148-51, 164-5, 171-3; numbers of, 139

Newcastle Scholarships, 166 New Guinea, 192 New Poor Law, 1834, 34 Newspapers: the first, 11; see also in­

dividual names of papers New Town, 58-9Nil Desperandum Literary Society, 185 Nixon, Bishop Frederick: as art connois­

seur, 28-9, 83-4; as social figure, 41-2; income of, 142

Normal School, 85-6, 118-19 Nowell, E. C., 124 Nylan, Alice, 98

O’Royle, Lieutenant Colonel John, 160 O’Brien, William Smith, 36 Oddfellows. Ancient and Independent

Order of, see Friendly Societies Oddfellows, Manchester Unity Inde­

pendent Order of, see Friendly Societies

Officers: in official capacity, 13-14, 21, 25, 43, 47, 53; as settlers, 13, 89; as social class, 7, 11-13, 15-16, 20, 25, 27-8, 71

Orange Lodges, see Friendly Societies Orchestral Union, 184 O’Reilly, Philip. 48, 79, 91 Orphan Schools, Queen’s, 22, 34, 62,

86, 103, 115-16 Orpheus Club, 85, 184 O’Sullivan, Edward, 75-6, 77, 85, 125

Packer, Frederick, 184 Parks, 56, 81. 82, 153 Parliament, 88-93. 100. 118, 196-7 Paton, Charles, 19 P a tr io t in S iy 41Patriotism: Australian, 1, 189. 191, 193,

198-9; Imperial, 52-3, 157, 192; Tas­manian, 46. 191. 193

Paupers, see Convicts, Immigrants, Wel­fare

Pearce, the cannibal convict, 40 Penal colony: effects on settler colony

of, 20-1, 24, 92, 95, 103, 108. 133; as official posting, 13; world opinion of. 44

Penitentiary, see Gaol Penitent’s Home, see Female Refuges People’s Friend, 162 Philharmonic Society, 184 Piguenit, William Charles, 185 Police, 25, 93, 98-9. 105, 153, 197 Political ideas: conservative, 52, 89, 151,

156, 157. 172; liberal, 51, 175. 177; radical, 23, 43. 89, 91, 148-50, 172-3; Utopian, 176-7, 197

Political Reform Association, 176 Population: loss of, 125; number of, 9,

30, 56, 88; origins and nature of. 7, 17, 25; statistics of, discussed, 129- 32; structure of, 71, 73, 138

Port Arthur, 2 Prices, 11, 68, 75Proprietary Ladies’ College, 185, 192 Propsting, Henry, 19, 48, 70, 91 Prostitution, 104-5, 113 Protest movements, 49-53, 100, 161,

196-7Prout. John Skinner, 28, 83

Quadrilateral, 176Quakers. 19-20, 30-1, 48, 57, 115, 170 Queen’s Domain, 30, 81, 153, 183

Racing Association, 162 Radical politics, see Labour movement,

Political ideasRagged Schools Association, 104, 117,

119Railways, effects of. 138, 145 Rats’ Castle, 61Reasons for settlement, 1, 7, 11, 12 Rebecca rioters. 36, 148 Rechahites, Independent Order of, see

Friendly Societies Reibey, Rev. Thomas, 167, 179-80 Religious dissension. 161 Rents, 75; see also Housing Residential areas, 56-8. 65, 117, 146 Rheuben, Abraham: business interests,

58, 143, 196; career, 18, 48; as citi­zen. 70, 91, 157, 165; wealth, 143

Rifle Corps, see Volunteers Risdon, 4-5Rivulet, Hobart. 3. 17, 63. 64, 66 Rodway. Leonard, 138, 186 Roope, L., 77Ross, Captain, R. N., 27, 83 Ross. John, 78Rossbank meteorological station, 27 Rout. William, 117 Royal Commissions, 100. 116. 126 Roval Navy, 27. 113. 157-8 Royal Society. 27-8. 41-2, 81, 84-5, 130,

181-2, 186Rugby School, influence of, 29-30

236 IndexSt Hill, Colonel W. H., 159 St Luke’s Ragged School, 117-18 St Mary’s Hospital, 33, 62, 103 St Patrick’s Benefit Society, see Friendly

SocietiesSalier Brothers, 57, 67, 78, 85, 108, 145 Sanitarium of the South, 190 Sandy Bay, 58, 65, 179, 190 San Francisco, 67 Savings Bank, Hobart, 32 Scholarships system, 87, 166 Schools: attendance at, 101-2; effective­

ness of, 119; private, 29-30, 86; public system of, 29, 118-19; Sunday, 101-2, 169-71; teachers in, 30, 118- 19; tertiary education and, 1-2, 87, 166; see also Ragged Schools, Indus­trial Schools and names of individual institutions

Seabrook, H. M., 159 Seal, Captain, 77Self-government, 43, 53, 66, 88, 94, 198 Settlers: arrival of, 7-8, 15; attitudes to­

wards colony, 46-7, 51, 72, 99, 149, 162, 172; as citizens, 9, 19-20, 22, 24, 159-60; and convicts, 16, 23, 40, 44, 47, 49; family size, 137; morality, 41, 95-6; as profitmakers, 11-12, 15, 20, 46; as social class, 7, 11, 14-15, 20, 25, 47, 50, 53, 89, 153

Seven Rovers, 167-8 Sheehy, Joseph, 167 Sheehy, Thomas, 169 Shipbuilding, see Industries Shipowners, 1, 2, 13, 77-9, 149 Shipping, 8, 17, 35, 67-8, 77-9, 145 Ships: Adarruinte, 14; Candahar, 70;

Caroline Middleton, 73; East St Vin­cent, 18; Erebus, 27, 31; Flinders, 145; Lady of the Lake, 18; Nautilus, 150; Offley, 78; Sophia, 14; Spring, 13; Terror, 27

Ships’ crews, 17, 68, 74, 77, 102 Shipwrecks, 15 Shopping district, 56-7 Shops, 11, 57, 67, 186-8 Smart, Dr Thomas Christie, 166 Smith, Sir Francis, 89 Smith, Henry Edward, 96 Smith, James, 190Social classes: conflict between, 18, 25-

7, 31, 34, 40, 47, 49-54; contact between, 5, 18, 24, 33, 49, 94, 156-7, 162-3, 175-6; described, 11. 13, 21, 24, 27, 72, 162; mobility between, 15-18 passim, 36-7, 54, 152-3, 158-60

Social conditions compared, 24, 35-6, 39, 97

Social investigations, 100-4 Social occasions: of early camp days, 14,

21-2, 24-8 passim, 30-1, 37; of mid century, 82-3, 85, 122; of indepen­dent colony, 152-3, 158-60, 167-9, 171; of century end, 182-6, 189-90, 198; see also Sports

Society of Friends, see Quakers Society for the Propagation of the

Charities, etc., of the Gospels, 51-2 Society for the Relief of the Distressed

Poor, 32Sorell, Governor William, 15, 21, 95 Sorell, Julia, 42, 188 Sorell Steam Navigation Company, 78-9 Southern Cricket Association, 183 Southern Star, 193Southern Tasmanian Agricultural and

Pastoral Society, 156 Sports: bathing, 66, 183, 190; cock

fighting, 182; cricket, 183, 184; cyc­ling, 183; fishing, 183; football, 183; lawn tennis, 183; racing, 183; rowing, 183; royal tennis, 184; sailing, 167, 183; shooting, 183

Standard of living, 7-8, 32, 99-100, 140-1

Stocks, prisoners’, 60 Stoney, H. Butler, 55, 63-4 Street improvements, 65 Street lighting, 37, 65, 84 Streets; Barrack Square, 56; Campbell

St, 58; Cottage Green, 65; Collins St, 56, 58; Crescent Fields, 58; Davey St, 33, 58, 65; Elboden Place, 65; Elizabeth St, 56, 57, 59; Franklin Square, 59; George’s Square, 59; Har­rington St, 57; Liverpool St, 56, 57; Macquarie St, 56-9 passim-, Molle St, 56; Murray St, 56, 59; Poets’ Road, 58; Warwick St, 56

Streets, description of, 8-11, 16, 56-9 Strikes, 149-50, 178, 194 Stukeley, Simon, 39-40 Sullivan’s Cove, 3, 4, 77 Sunday School Union, see Schools Susman, Leo, 169 Swanston, Charles, 62 Sydney, 56, 125, 126, 127

Tapfield, Samuel, 184 Tasmanian Club, 160, 162, 163, 180,

190Tasmanian Mail, 197-9 Tasmanian Scholarships, 166 Tasmanian Society, see Royal Society Tasmanian Steam Navigation Company,

78, 80, 145Tasmanian Union, 49, 51 Taverns, 8, 11, 57-8, 96, 102; reputa­

tions of, 25, 37, 152-4; substitutes for, 112, 174

Teachers: income of, 142; training of, 119; see also Schools

Temperance Hall, 147 Temperance movements, 95-6, 112, 154,

155Templars, Independent Order of Good,

see Friendly Societies Theatre Royal, 58, 71, 85, 184 Tolpuddle Martyrs, 36, 148 Tourist business, 55, 188-91

Index 237Tourist hotel, 190 Town plan, 3, 8-9, 16-17, 58, 65 Town site, 3-5 Trade, 12, 14-15, 78, 128 Trade unionism, 149-50, 177-8, 194-5 Trade unions, 49-50, 150, 177 Trades and Labour Council, 150, 177,

194-5Trades and Labour Debating Society,

178Trades Union Free Labour Movement,

149Transport, 8, 9, 11, 24, 77, 190 Transportation, 19, 33, 35; end of, 53;

opposition to, 43-5 Trollope, Anthony, 55, 81, 180, 181 Truganini, 182Turnbull, Rev. Archibald, 196-7 Typographers’ Union, 177

Unemployment, 32, 130, 196-7 University of Tasmania, 1, 2, 87, 169;

see also Associate of Arts Degree, Newcastle Scholarships, Scholarships system, Tasmanian Scholarships

Urban renewal, 9, 58, 64

Van Diemonians, 69 Volunteers, 91, 157-61, 197, 199

Wade, Rev. W. R., 83 Wages and incomes, 74-5, 81, 140-4,

150, 197Wainewright, T. G., 29, 83 Walch, C. E., 69, 167-8, 170-1 Walch, H., 184Walker, George Washington: career of,

20, 85; as business man, 57, 66, 76, 78-9, 80; as philanthropist, 30-2, 96, 104, 108, 112, 122

Walker, Mrs G. W., see Benson, Sarah Walker, James Backhouse: career, 66,

83, 85, 166, 169, 188; opinions, 1, 2,

86, 127, 191-3, 195; as philanthropist, 170, 175, 178

Walker, John, 76, 143 Walker, Mary, 191-3 Wapping, 58, 65 Ward, Mrs Humphrey, 188 Watchorn, John, 196 Watchorn, William, 53 Water supply, 60, 65 Wealth, 15, 16, 141-3 Weather, 8, 59, 66, 189-90 Webster, A. G., 160, 183 Welfare, 22, 32-4, 93, 101, 103-4, 108-

10, 115Wesleyan Strangers’ Friend Society, 32 West, Rev. John, 8, 43, 51, 94-5, 106,

127, 137Westcott, William, 188 W’haling, see Industries Wharf construction, 11, 59, 61, 63 Whitcombe, George, 80 Williams, Zephaniah, 36 Willson, Rev. Bishop R. W., 142-3 Wilmot, Lieutenant Governor Sir Eard-

ley, 40-2, 188 Wilson, J. M„ 159 Windmills, 63, 74Women: advancement of, 28-9, 86-7,

122, 167, 184-6; behaviour of, 21, 22, 24-5, 36, 95, 98, 158, 179-80; native born, described, 39, 171; as part of population, 7, 17, 26, 69, 73, 137; protection of, 32, 45, 98, 103-5, 109, 113, 120, 125

Workhouses, 109-12 Working men: income of, 140-1; as

social force, 54, 174, 175 Working Men’s Club, 143, 150, 173-5,

177-8, 194-5 Worley, Robert, 91 Worley, William, 19

Young, Governor Sir Henry Fox, 151

Peter Bolger graduated at the University of Tasmania in 1964 and gained his Ph.D. at the Australian National University four years later. He was Lecturer in Economic History at the Trinidad campus of the University of the West Indies and later Senior Lecturer at the University of Papua New Guinea.

1^1

Text set in 11 point Caledonia, two point leadedand printed on 85 gsm Semi Matt Mechanical Coated Printingat The Griffin Press, Adelaide, South Australia.

P e t e r B o l g e r graduated at the University of Tasmania in 1964 and gained his Ph.D. at the Australian National University four years later. He was Lecturer in Economic History at the Trinidad campus of the University of the West Indies and later Senior Lecturer at the University of Papua New Guinea.

Litho view of Hobart from the Australasian Sketcher, 10 May 1879. By courtesy of the National Library of Australia.

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