Early Australia: Nobles And Convicts In The Age Of Liberty – Andrew Tink

Andrew Tink was educated at the Australian National University. He practised as a barrister, before his election to the New South Wales Legislative Assembly for the Liberal Party in 1988.  In 2003, he was appointed Shadow Attorney General. He retired from Parliament in 2007 and has since written a biography of one of Australia’s greatest early settlers, William Wentworth (1790-1872) – William Charles Wentworth – Australia’s Greatest Native Son (Allen & Unwin, 2009). On Tuesday, 17 November 2009, Andrew Tink addressed The Sydney Institute to share his fascinating insight into the life and times of William Wentworth.

EARLY AUSTRALIA: NOBLES AND CONVICTS IN THE AGE OF LIBERTY

ANDREW TINK

William Charles Wentworth was the son of a convict. But he was also a kinsman of one of Britain’s most aristocratic families. And his life’s work was to champion liberty in his penal colony birthplace. So his story neatly fits this evening’s topic.

The man who claimed to be William’s father, D’Arcy Wentworth, was a distant relation of Charles Watson Wentworth, Marquis of Rockingham, who had twice been British Prime Minister. On Rockingham’s death in 1782, his estate, which generated an annual income of £60,000 or $8 million in today’s money, passed to his nephew, William Wentworth Fitzwilliam, the second Earl Fitzwilliam in the peerage of Great Britain and fourth Earl Fitzwilliam in the peerage of Ireland.

During the mid 1780s, D’Arcy Wentworth tried to match Lord Fitzwilliam’s expensive London lifestyle. But D’Arcy’s modest surgeon’s income was not enough to keep up with his distant cousin and he was soon supplementing it with the proceeds of crime. Tried and acquitted of four separate highway robberies, D’Arcy was finally persuaded to make his own way to Botany Bay before he was sent there in chains.

On the voyage out in the Second Fleet transport Neptune, D’Arcy began an affair with a convict, Catherine Crowley, who had been sentenced to seven years’ transportation for stealing one pound eleven shillings worth of clothing. Apparently as a result of this affair, William Charles Wentworth was born in August 1790, a few weeks after the Neptune‘s arrival in Sydney Cove.

Following his mother’s death in 1800, young William was sent to England to be educated. Upon arrival he was looked after by his father’s London agent, Charles Cookney, who also acted for Lord Fitzwilliam. The youth excelled academically and even though Fitzwilliam kept his distance, he provided financial assistance.

Returning to Sydney for what today we would call an extended “gap year”, Wentworth famously crossed the Blue Mountains before again making his way to England. There in 1817 he announced to Lord Fitzwilliam that he would acquaint himself with “the British Constitution…to advocate successfully the right of my country to a participation in its advantages”.

In London, Wentworth studied to be a barrister, passing himself off as a young English gentleman. All went well until an allegation surfaced that his father had been a highwayman. Suddenly, just about every senior barrister seemed to have a D’Arcy Wentworth story to tell.

Claiming that he was “cut to the quick”, Wentworth’s ambition to replace New South Wales’s autocratic form of government with a “free constitution” became a consuming passion. In 1819, he wrote the first book by an Australian born author to be published, demanding that ex-convicts be allowed the right to vote and to sit on juries.

Alarmed that such reforms would destroy the deterrent effect of transportation, the British Government blocked both, settling for a nominated Legislative Council and the continuation military juries in criminal cases. Nevertheless, the Government did establish a new Supreme Court.

Returning to Sydney in 1824, Wentworth was admitted as one of Sydney’s first barristers. He also established the colony’s first independent newspaper, The Australian, which championed the rights of ex-convicts. Although this posed a challenge to the government’s heavily censored Sydney Gazette, Governor Brisbane decided to allow “the full latitude of freedom of the press.”

Brisbane’s replacement, Governor Darling, was less progressive. And he was soon at odds with Wentworth. Things came to a head after two soldiers, Sudds and Thompson, were punished for a minor theft. Intent upon deterring others, Darling increased the soldiers’ punishment, thereby exceeding his authority. Then Sudds died.

Wentworth now accused Darling of murder, a charge which in similar circumstances had resulted in the execution of the British Governor of Senegal. The colony’s independent newspapers also attacked Darling, leading to a furious round of defamation cases most of which Wentworth, a first class barrister, won. So Darling countered by attempting to muzzle the press through licensing, registration and taxation, complaining also that Wentworth had turned the Supreme Court into a “de facto Parliament.”

Finally, the Governor attempted to cripple the newspapers by withdrawing those convicts who had been working on them as reporters and printers. Darling reassigned them to road gangs. But this earned him London’s displeasure as did his manipulation of military juries.

To celebrate Darling’s departure in 1831, Wentworth advertised a public barbeque at Vaucluse, complete with free beer, as a result of which 4,000 people turned up. And when the Governor sailed down the harbour for the last time, they lined Vaucluse Bay to jeer him on his way.

Darling’s replacement, Richard Bourke, was a much more enlightened governor who agreed with Wentworth on the need for reform. But opposition continued from the colony’s so called “exclusives” who did not want to see ex-convicts given the right to vote or to sit on juries.

With the new governor on side, public meetings replaced the courts as the forum for this struggle. Standing six feet five inches tall, with a barrel chest, drawling voice and sharp wit, Wentworth was the ex-convicts’ champion at these meetings which endorsed petitions to London demanding trial by jury and “taxation by representation”.

By the late 1830s, civilian jury trials were a reality and the first partly elected Legislative Council was convened in 1843. However as one of the colony’s leading squatters, Wentworth had become increasingly conservative, especially over transportation. Migrant workers had been flooding into Sydney. But very few of them wanted to work in the bush. So Wentworth, the “convict brat” as his political enemies called him, had opposed the abolition of transportation to Sydney in 1840. Without the assistance of “convict shepherds”, he growled, how could he tend his huge flocks?

Although Wentworth had been elected to represent the Sydney district in the newly constituted Legislative Council, he eschewed the customary top hat and frock coat on the first day, wearing a squatter’s corduroys instead. Now keen to preserve the squatters’ power, he agitated for transportation to be renewed and fought to ensure that the vote was limited to men of property. This limitation would exclude most migrant workers who opposed transportation because it hindered their ability to find paid work. But many ex-convicts, who had done well financially, would qualify to vote.

Before long, Henry Parkes emerged to demand that the vote be extended to migrant workers like he himself. Despite their differences, Wentworth and Parkes agreed on the need for colonial self government. And Wentworth again led the way, demanding of London that the Governor’s wide executive powers be handed over to a local Ministry selected from within a fully fledged colonial Parliament.

The push for self government climaxed in the early 1850s just as hordes of gold digging migrants swarmed into Sydney. Wentworth knew that his demands would now have to be run in tandem with a rearguard action to preserve the squatters’ political power against these new arrivals. So he championed a Parliament in which a nominated upper house would act as a check on an elected lower house.

Among other things, Wentworth proposed the establishment of a local hereditary peerage which would provide members for the upper house. But Wentworth’s opponents ridiculed his “bunyip aristocracy”, accusing him of wanting to be “the Duke of Vaucluse”. Wentworth himself hotly denied any such ambition.

In the end, Wentworth settled for a nominated upper house and an electoral gerrymander in the lower house to hold the ‘democratic haranguers’ at bay. These proposals duly passed the Legislative Council, which was still dominated by squatters, and Wentworth then went to London to see them through the British Parliament.

Although Britain’s senior law officer described Wentworth’s proposals as nothing short of a “legislative declaration of independence”, Parliament agreed to them, largely unchanged. The result, in 1856, was the establishment of responsible government, so called, in New South Wales.

During the late 1850s, Wentworth remained in London where he championed a “Confederation of Australia” under which representatives of the colonies would meet periodically to make laws on inter-colonial issues like tariffs and postage. But Parkes’ priority was to democratise Wentworth’s constitution. And so federation had to wait another 50 years.

Wentworth returned briefly to Sydney in 1860 and was appointed President of the Legislative Council. There he supported reforms to move from a nominated to a narrowly elected upper house. His motive was to preserve the squatters’ power from the threat of an even wider franchise. But in the end, the government decided to stick with nominees.

Nevertheless, Wentworth had ended up supporting an elected upper house, a reform proposal which would not be bettered until 1978.  Upon Wentworth’s departure for London in 1861, Governor Young wrote to his superiors: “if a Baronetcy [hereditary knighthood] is to be conferred…it should be…on Mr Wentworth…the colonist most distinguished by genius and service.” Later it was claimed that Wentworth had turned this honour down.

After Wentworth’s death in 1872, the New South Wales Parliament offered his family a State Funeral, Australia’s first. Half Sydney’s population turned out to pay their last respects. As the Premier of the day put it:

After the advantages of an English education…[Wentworth] came back…to his native country…[which was] then little better than a large prison…[And] what he claimed for himself, he claimed also for others and so while contending for a free press, for trial by jury, and for a share in the making of the laws by which we are governed, he fought the battle of the humblest as well as the highest.