The Making Of The Australian Working Class

The luck of the Irish so often in history was chronic bad luck. That’s how it looked for 250 Irish convicts when theirship, the Hive, sank ignominiously off the NSW coast in 1835. Miraculously, all survived, guided to safety by local Aboriginal people. Using this fascinating case study, in her new book The Luck of The Irish,Babette Smith looks at how the suvivors of the Hive helped lay the foundations of the Australia we know today. Babette Smith is a writer and historian, and also the author of A Cargo of Women and Australia’s Birthstain, The Startling Legacy of the Convict Era (Allen & Unwin) Babette Smith addressed the Sydney Institute on Tuesday 22 July 2014.

THE MAKING OF THE AUSTRALIAN WORKING CLASS

BABETTE SMITH

My book The Luck of the Irish begins with the wreck of the convict ship Hive, which ran aground in 1835 on a beach just south of Jervis Bay.

On board were 250 Irish prisoners and 29 soldiers – eight of them with their wives and children. Commander of the guard was 25 year old Edward Lugard who was travelling to rejoin his regiment in India. His younger brother, Henry Lugard aged 22, had just graduated as a Royal Engineer. New South Wales was his first posting.

Thanks to the heroism of the ship’s chief officer, Edward Canney, all of them got safely to shore. But they had little idea where they were, except that it was a day’s sail from Sydney. They were guided to the nearest European several miles away, by members of the local indigenous community.

In Sydney, they found an Irishman ruling the colony. Richard Bourke had been Governor of New South Wales since late 1831. He was a Protestant from Limerick.

Bourke was loyally supported by two leading citizens who were also Irish but Catholic. They were John Hubert Plunkett who was Attorney General and Roger Therry, a prominent barrister. The Sydney Morning Herald sneered at the Irish trio, nicknaming them “the O’Connellite tail” – a reference to reformer Daniel O’Connell’s successful campaign for Catholic emancipation in Ireland.

The Luck of the Irish follows many of these people including Bourke, Henry Lugard, Edward Canney, and Private Patrick Tierney a soldier who settled with his family in the colony. However my main interest, as always, was tracing the experience of the convicts, and placing them in the broader context of the penal settlement and its aftermath.

Three main questions arose from my research. The first came from researching the crimes in Ireland. We usually classify Irish convicts as mainly sheep-stealers or property thieves, mixed with feisty protestors. Statistically that’s not wrong but statistics can be misleading. My research discovered hair-raising violence which could be loosely categorised in four groups: political violence, religious violence, tribal violence and sexual violence. One of the issues of the book is whether that violence was transferred to Australia.

A second question related to the wreck: The men plainly weren’t scared of bloodshed. And 250 prisoners on that beach were overwhelming numbers compared to 29 soldiers and a couple of officers. Why didn’t they take the opportunity of the shipwreck to escape?

Thirdly, of course, was the question of what happened to them in the penal colony? Not unreasonably I expected a sorry tale of prejudice, of rampant sectarianism and disadvantage. In other words a convict colony that was laying the groundwork for the experience of the Irish in Australia as a downtrodden minority in the face of Protestant ascendancy. However, we forget that the history of the Irish was conceptualised by the Roman Catholic Church, which claimed lack of priests was gross discrimination.

My research reveals that we cannot be sure how aggrieved Irish prisoners really felt at the lack of priests, because being Catholic became the perfect excuse for escaping compulsory religion. Furthermore much evidence exists to confirm that, whatever their ethnicity, convicts resented divine service as an interruption to their free time. Visiting a pastoral estate on a Sunday, emigrant Alexander Harris commented, “Nobody here keeps the day as anything more than holiday. Men wash their shirts, and grind their wheat ration, and visit [each other].”

To sum up: rather than discrimination, I discovered an Irish community that, thanks to Governor Bourke, even achieved religious equality in the 1830s. Bourke was determined that discrimination against the Irish due to religion should not be replicated in Australia. His Church Act of 1836 provided funding for all denominations equally to bring out priests and clergy and to build churches here. It prevented the Church of England becoming the “established” church by putting the Roman Catholics and subsequently the Presbyterians, Methodists and also the Jews on an equal footing. The Irish they understood and valued the religious equality they gained in this way. The statue up the road in front of the State Library is a testimony to their gratitude.

We also assume the Irish suffered discrimination in New South Wales because they were a ethnic minority group. However, that assumption fundamentally misreads the dynamics of the convict colony. In those times, the Irish weren’t a minority at all. Lumped together with the other convicts, they were part of the majority, the prisoner workforce, whose influence and wishes were so powerful. It’s the workforce I’ll focus on tonight.

The work of the great Marxist historian E. P. Thompson called The Making of the English Working Class suggested the title of tonight’s talk. The allusion however is more to emphasise difference than similarity. When most of our convicts left Britain, Marx had not yet published his manifesto. The Luddites had protested by smashing things up, but Chartism barely existed and the English parliamentary Reform Act of the thirties were of little moment to most people transported to the penal colony. Craft guilds had begun a transition to trade unions but the movement was embryonic.However, you do find traces of unionism in penal Australia. A prisoner appointed by his peers to receive their rations was called a “delegate”. And a carpenter I was tracking from the ship Hive was a unionist transported for throwing acid in the face of a man who had not paid his dues. The right to combine in order to strike – or lack of it – had become notorious in Britain and Ireland after it was banned in 1799, repealed in 1824 and banned again in 1825. Even the bottom layer of British society would have heard something of this.

Furthermore, in Australia there were no middle class leaders to promote these ideas that were just starting to circulate at home. No gentry radicals to conceptualise workforce issues. The workers had to do it themselves. As a result,our workers’ actions contained no cultural deference or respect but instead expressed the often derisive opposition of a workforce resisting coercion.

In Australia, however, we did meet what E. P. Thompson argued was the fundamental requirement for the making of a class: we had a huge number of people, the majority of the community, in fact, who were bonded by group consciousness. In our case it was a group who defined themselves as prisoners, ex-prisoners and the children of prisoners.

So our workers were not organised by ideas. Here their actions arose from the dominance of the penal workforce.

The power of the workers lay in their numbers.The gap between a tiny group of gentry settlers on the one hand and criminals past and present on the other was enormous. The disproportionate numbers on the beach between 250 prisoners and 29 soldiers was replicated throughout the penal colony. It is part of the great Australian ignorance of our history that the implication of this is not something we have considered before.

True, we’ve not been helped by official documents. For instance, a decision was taken for the 1836 Census to describe everyone but serving convicts as “free” settlers. The total population in 1836 was 77,000. The new form of classification allowed the census-takers to claim there were: 32,000 free people compared to 45, 000 convicts. Nearly equal. And very misleading.

But what about the forces of law and order I hear you ask? Well the top figure for the military in the thirties was 2835 soldiers in 1837. And they were scattered all over the colony. In 1835 on Norfolk Island for instance, there were 1200 prisoners and only 150 soldiers plus their officers. Commandant Joseph Anderson reckoned the odds against them if there was another revolt and planned to arm the 100 ex soldier prisoners if necessary

From 1826 there were small squads of mounted police in addition to the military guard. They were usually ex-soldiers who had resigned from the Army. In 1839 a Border police force was formed to patrol the ever-widening perimeters of settlement. Its members were all ex-convictsoldiers. And of course up to 1850, there were police constables of convict background. Nevertheless, the forces of law and order were always vastly outnumbered and their allegiance was often doubtful.

The disproportionate numbers made the settlers afraid.

Their situation was like building a house today in the middle of a maximum security prison – and opening the doors. At a personal level, a family of say five, with say two servants they brought from home could find themselves living with 20 assigned prisoners, a couple of ticket-of-leave men and perhaps an emancipist. Emmeline Macarthur described how her father Hannibal wouldn’t let a convict cross the threshold. He employed domestic servants from India instead.

In the Hunter Valley in the 1830s, pastoralist Robert Scott greeted visitors with a double barrelled shot gun, demanding identification.

Some settlers were particularly afraid of the Irish. Illawarra settler, James Spearing, wrote that all his 16 servants were Irish. He thought they were conspiring against him. And the prisoners could smell his fear. As the local magistrate commented “He has all along been afraid of his men and they know it.”

Like Spearing, some settlers saw Irish bogeymen everywhere they looked. They were always expecting a rebellion, particularly by the Irish.

When it didn’t happen, the gentry had the answer. They told Charles Darwin that the convicts were cowards.

Of course people who said that took no account of the conditions from which the convicts had come. Furthermore these commentators failed to see the “mutiny” that was actually occurring. They missed it because it occurred in the workplace.

Official documents might proclaim regulations that create an image of a well-ordered, tightly controlled gaol. However, contrary to expectation, it was the convict workers themselves who shaped the structure of their work, many of the conditions of work and the rewards for work.

For example: The tradition of prisoners working for themselves dated back to the earlydays of settlement when they demanded work calculated by tasks completed rather than length of hours. Governor Phillip negotiated with convict agricultural gangs over the amount of work they would complete. His second in command, John Hunter, found it necessary to negotiate with his workforce on Norfolk Island about setting task work that the prisoners felt was realistic. Later when he was governor, Hunter confronted a gang of sawyers at the Hawkesbury settlement who had apparently set their own taskwork. In his opinion, they had set it too low, because it gave them half a day free each week. But Hunter’s real concern was the way they openly bargained with government officials over their reward for any extra labour above their task work. They also negotiated directly with free settlers on a contract basis. Hunter tried to regain some control by formalising the hours of work and curtailing the prisoners’ ability to influence the subject. His lack of success can be seen by the fact that Governor King was still grappling with the problem of a standardised working day in 1801.

In Governor Macquarie’s time, Major Druitt was responsible for workgangs. He told Royal Commissioner Bigge in 1819, that he used the task work system because he found it “the best mode of securing the performance of a Fair Days work”.

In the 1830s, convict Michael Moran was a skilled carpenter. Theoretically restricted to government work, Moran operated a thriving sideline making and repairing whatever was needed for Newcastle’s leading citizens. He was aggrieved when told that he could not do private work in his own time. And doubly so because he claimed that he did it with his overseer James Pumpfrey’s permission. Pumpfrey and the two Newcastle gentlemen who had been utilising Moran’s services. went into meltdown trying to explain their complicity. Under investigation, Pumpfrey told the bench, “It has been my practice to give the good men leave to work in their [own] time such as Saturday—they seem to work better for government from these indulgences.” In other words, the prisoners had convinced their masters that a carrot was more effective than a stick.

Sir Edward Parry, who ran the Australian Agricultural Company whichhad a large labour force, wrote, “A convict, unless he is well watched, will not perform the same amount of labour [as a free worker] except in the case of what is called task work.”

Task work enabled the men to work at a pace that allowed time to themselves. And “Time of their own” did not just mean an hour or two after the day’s work was done but soon extended to the men having one whole day off per week. In this, their expectation was always assisted by official policy that prisoners should receive the benefit of religion although as we’ve seen, in the men’s minds, time to themselves took precedence over religious observances

With the right to a day off established, negotiations occurred over time toentrench two refinements. By 1828 the men constructing the Great Northern Road officially worked only until 2 pm on Saturdays and then “were taken to a pond or river to bathe and wash their clothes.” Sunday remained their day off. Historian Stephen Nicholas drew a comparison with workers elsewhere when he wrote “The convicts in New South Wales generally laboured five days per week to perform an average of 56 hours work. [They]. . . worked fewer hours than most coerced, contract and free workers. [By comparison] a six-day working week was the standard for bonded Indians and Spanish and American slaves. As well as free labourers in Britain.”

Of great significance to Australian history, however, is recognising the extent to which this work structure was achieved by negotiation and pressure from the convict workers themselves.

By the 1830s prisoners were testing the idea of “time in lieu” if a master’srequirement intruded on his servant’s free time. In explaining his refusal to work on a Monday, prisoner Edward Gill spoke as though it was a commonplace assumption. “I had been working all week like the rest of the men and took out the sheep on Sunday to oblige my master. On Monday when I told [the overseer] I would not work, I thought I had a right to half of that day having been at work [also] all day Saturday.”

Try as it might the government never succeeded in ending the day off, inattitude or in fact. The practice was still common nearly 50 years after the Europeans arrived. For example, engineer John Busby was asked to explain why his convict miners were picked up drinking in town pubs. They had proffered the traditional explanation of being “on their own time”. Busby was asked “is it is the practice for prisoners of this department to be allowed the whole of Saturday to themselves?” Busby replied, “It is not the practice here.” Almost certainly he, like many colonial employers, had taken the line of least resistance and turned a blind eye.

The prisoners’ success regarding task work and working hours are just two examples of their power in the colony. There were many others – wages, for example.

Initially, convicts were paid wages only for extra work. Then, for about ten years, government regulations set a general wage to be paid to them. Under pressure from the prisoners some employers kept paying wages even after the official rate was abandoned. Other employers offered incentives instead. I found evidence of employers giving sheep or cattle to men who were still serving their sentence. Some men built up large herds while still prisoners. which they were allowed to graze on their masters’ land.

Rations were always a major issue across the convict colony. And it was only sometimes a question of the prisoners being underfed. Just as often it was the quality of the food that caused strife between master and men. Or the provision of tea and sugar, which regulations insisted on describing as a privilege. In reality, convicts were addicted to sugar and tea – as only people who never had them at home could be. They soon regarded these items as entitlements and would strike if they were not provided.

In Australia, men from the lowest socioeconomic level at home developed the confidence to strike for their entitlements and bargain collectively. And they did so while prisoners, decades before the development of trade unions and the arrival of immigrant union leaders.

The prisoners, including the Irish, gained this workplace power because the government – and the pastoralists – needed their help. The source of their power, however, was their overwhelming numbers – and the fear this created in the gentry.

The power of the workforce continued throughout the convict era andbecame a dominant characteristic of Australian society thereafter.

And as regards the Irish in the workforce, it is important to understand, that the penal colony subsumed difference of race, ethnicity and religion. The researcher looks in vain for evidence of discrimination against the Irish. They were equal members of the workforce sharing its disadvantages but drawing strength from its collective and power through its numbers.

Difficulties experienced by the Irish in obtaining documents such as tickets-of-leave are no different to convicts of other ethnicity or colour. Their prominence in workplace disputes is equaled by the Scots and the English. Peter Hammond’s study of violence in the Hunter Valley found no greater participation by or against the Irish. Tim Causer’s research into Norfolk Island established that the proportion of Irish sent there was consistent with their numbers on the mainland. By comparison, however, Sue Rosen found more Irish prisoners labouring on the Bathurst Road, the only significant aberration in the pattern.

Most evidence indicates that the penal authorities, whether bureaucrats or magistrates, acted with little regard to whether a prisoner was Irish, Scottish or English, black or white. Their status as a prisoner was far more important. Prejudice where it operated must have occurred at a personal level between individuals.

And between the prisoners themselves, differences of race, religion and class, were irrelevant in a shared struggle to survive their penal servitude. In 1846 for example an Irish prisoner could describe Australia as “this comfortable country”. In an extraordinary statement if you think of the sectarianism some of us grew up with – he told Caroline Chisholm “Catholics and Protestants live quiet here. I’ve never seen a fight between a Protestant and a Catholic over religion.”

The Irish also benefited from the culture which the prisoners created in the approximately 30 years between the First Fleet and the arrival of free settlers in any significant numbers in the twenties. During that time the prisoner colonists became possessive about the society they had created. Traditionally we have been led to believe that Australians fear foreigners but examination of our convict years reveals that “foreign” had nothing to do with it.

The convicts feared being overwhelmed by the British class system which would return them to outcast status. They waged a relentless campaign that forced free migrants to take on the local ethos. “New chums”, they called them. Or more insultingly “Self-imported devils.” This “colonization” process which could often be harsh or even cruel to newcomers was well-known at the time. James Macarthur commented in 1837, “They feel the colony is theirs by rights, and the emigrant settlers are interlopers.” Adopting local ways and leaving the past behind was the sticking point. If a newcomer showed willing, he or she was welcomed into the Australian “club”. The Irish prisoners took part in creating this ethos because they recognised it would help prevent replicating the discrimination that existed in Ireland

Analysis of penal society answers the long-standing question about why the prisoners, specifically the Irish, did not rebel.

For all the notorious mutinies on Norfolk Island, Tim Causer found that the men there “contested their captors on the “ordinary battlefield” of day-to-day life.” My research concludes that Norfolk Island was a microcosm of what occurred on the mainland. In their way, the male convicts never stopped rebelling, the Irish among them. But their revolution has not been detected because it occurred in the workplace.

Some kept hoping for a full-on and bloody revolution. For example, when Frederick Engels heard of trouble on the New South Wales goldfields in 1851, he wrote with great excitement to Karl Marx predicting, “The British will be thrown out and the united states of deported murderers, burglars, rapists and pickpockets will startle the world by demonstrating what wonders can be performed by a state consisting of undisguised rascals. They will beat California hollow. But whereas in California rascals are still lynched, in Australia, they’ll lynch the gentry.”

In Australia, neither the Irish nor anyone else felt the need to rebel. The gentry had been expecting Engels’ “lynch mob” for years and the working man already had the power that Marx theorised could only be achieved by bloodshed. Preserving what they had won was far more significant.

Task work survived despite endless official pronouncements to the contrary. In an exercise of power, the convicts’ weapons were the strike, the “go slow”, an insistence on penalty “rates” such as tea and sugar and tobacco, demanding “time in lieu” for working on Sunday. And in effect negotiating what became the Great Australian Weekend – By the end of transportation, a work structure was entrenched which consisted of half day Saturday and all Sunday to themselves. A strike by convict sawyers which lasted three weeks revealed that some also deployed the concept of enterprise bargaining. The fact these tactics occurred across the mainland and including Norfolk Island demonstrates the fundamental role they played in the life and culture of the penal colony.

In Australia, the Irish working man gained power along with his fellow prisoners. A convict in Western Australia spoke for the rest when he wrote “the bond class… are perfectly conscious of their power and only quiet and orderly because they see there is nothing to be gained by a contrary course.” I’d suggest that, for many he might have added, “And much to lose.”

In 1974, Craig McGregor wondered “Why do the wealthy feel under some pressure to be accepted by ordinary working Australians rather than the other way round?”

Convict Australia provides the answer. The nub of our famous egalitarianism is not based on the usual markers of education or money, or birth or religion. It’s not limited to the superficiality of manners but something far more profound. Unlike other societies where a faux equality of manners might be granted from above, Australian egalitarianism rests on the attitude and self-belief of the workers. The prisoners made a whole community in their image rather than just a working class.