How Victoria Differs from New South Wales and Tasmania – AN Historical Case Study

Patrick Morgan has published and edited a number of books on topics where history, literature and politics converge. His most recent book is The Vandemonian Trail – Convicts and Bushrangers in Early Victoria. Patrick Morgan has written for the magazine Quadrant over the last half century, and was formerly a council member of the National Archives of Australia, and of the Australia Council. As all Australia school children know, the British colonies of NSW and Van Dieman’s Land began as convict settlements. In the case of Victoria and South Australia, convicts were not part of their settlement and these later developed colonies prided themselves on having escaped the stain of transportation. On Monday 24 April, Patrick Morgan addressed The Sydney Institute to discuss differences in the mindsets of Australia’s oldest states, from their foundations.

HOW VICTORIA DIFFERS FROM NEW SOUTH WALES AND TASMANIA – AN HISTORICAL CASE STUDY

PATRICK MORGAN

The Sydney journalist Alan Reid reported federal politics at Parliament House Canberra, but when a budget came out he said he always first looked at how well his own state, New South Wales, had done. In this talk I’m likewise thinking as a Victorian first.

I recently published a book called The Vandemonian Trail on how gangs of rough Tasmanian ex-convicts and bushrangers came across Bass Strait and terrified Victorians during the gold rushes of the 1850s. In working on this theme, I came to realise how different the founding of our state Victoria was from New South Wales and Van Diemen’s Land. In the second half of this talk I’m going to show the opposite – how these experiences were turned by our early novelists into a self-image for the whole of colonial Australia.

Victoria was established as a convict-free colony, uncomfortably wedged between the two surrounding, originally convict colonies, of NSW and Tasmania. So our social profile was very different. The gap was even greater because Victoria was founded in the brief period 1835-1851 before gold by a special, socially elevated group – the sons of the minor aristocracy and gentry of England, the so-called “Port Phillip Gentlemen”.

We were founded 50 years after NSW at a time when army officers were being demobbed following the Napoleonic wars, and when land enclosures and industrialisation were driving rural gentry in England, who wanted to continue living the free untrammelled life of grazing on broadacres, to seek out the golden lands of Australia Felix in order to live in their accustomed style. From the start, the Port Phillip gentleman, who founded the Melbourne Club, had pretensions to high status. Victorians were poles apart from the convict desperadoes to their north and south. So from early on Victorians considered themselves superior, both socially and because of their enormous riches from gold. You are the premier state but we Victorians considered ourselves for these reasons the leading state, and perhaps still do. Of course, similar events happened in the other Australian colonies, but it was the extreme social contrast – high aristocratic aspirations fighting off low convict and criminal ruffians – that made early Victoria unique.

Across the Strait

Victoria was founded by a pincer movement of overstraiters from Van Diemen’s Land (VDL), the majority group, and overlanders from NSW, the minority group. Both groups contained a number of former convicts. Even before Victoria was settled by Europeans in 1835, convict escapees from VDL were making their way across Bass Strait. After Melbourne was founded, former convicts and other desperadoes escaped in groups over Bass Strait into Victoria causing mayhem and murder on the mainland. With the discovery of gold, the overstrait traffic increased immeasurably, with a quarter of the VDL population, many with convict origins, coming across. We had gold and no convicts, and VDL had convicts and no gold, so the transfer was inevitable The Governor of Tasmania, Denison, reluctantly offered a reward of £500 for finding gold, and then remarked in a high tone that his state was so fortunate as not to find it, since he feared gold rushes would bring anarchy in their train.

The first thing Henry Kingsley, Australia’s first major novelist, noticed on arriving in Melbourne in 1853 was that the locals were terrified that a gang of Vandemonians – with the emphasis on demons – would come over the strait and terrorise their respectable colony, as the Mike Howe gang had done in Tasmania. Victorians thought they could distinguish Tasmanians by their physiognomy, as though criminality was branded on their persons. The new Victorian government was so worried it passed a Victorian Convicts Prevention Act, like today’s border protection legislation, to keep all ticket-of-leave men out.

Three Outrages

The first VDL convict outrages occurred around Melbourne in the early 1840s. The rough quasi-criminal VDL contingent soon moved north along the Vandemonian trail to the mountains when gold was discovered around Omeo. The miners on the trail included the bushranger Bogong Jack and the Tichborne claimant Arthur Orton, both butchers who had worked together in Hobart, and who were to become legendary figures of Australian folklore, because stealing gold (Bogong Jack) or an English title and estate (the Tichborne claimant) were short cuts to making a fortune here.

In addition, some of the overlanders from southern NSW into northern Victoria had convict origins. A number of the squatters of the Omeo and Wangaratta regions, coming south from the Monaro, were ex-convicts who got caught up in bushranging activities, forming their own interrelated family gangs. The bushranging gangs engaged in four types of criminal activity. First, stealing horses or cattle, rebranding them in the Australian alps and then selling them on the other side. Secondly, cutting up stolen cattle to sell as meat on the goldfields (the occupation of butcher was a suspect one), third, bumping off your opponents, and fourth, holding up gold consignments. The second major outbreak of bushranging mayhem, including multiple murders led by Bogong Jack’s associates, occurred around Omeo in the later 1850s.

The third outbreak occurred when the criminal gangs, pursued by the police, moved over the mountains to northeast Victoria – Dan Morgan and the Kelly gang. The Kellys father was a former Vandemonian convict, and his criminal relatives mixed with existing gangs. The Australian public saw the Kelly outbreak as a new phenomenon coming out of the blue, but it was in fact the last hurrah of the Vandemonian fraternity.

The Major Early Novelists

Why these events are doubly important is because they were immortalised in folklore and in the Australian imagination by Australia’s three major early novelists, Henry Kingsley, Marcus Clarke and Rolf Boldrewood, who all came to Victoria as part of the gentry group. They wrote on the same topic – the great misty cloud of folklore that grew up around the Tichborne, Bogong Jack and associated legends in the mid nineteenth century. These stories were all about Tasmanian and NSW convict-bushranger gangs wreaking havoc wherever they went.

Kingsley’s Geoffry Hamlyn describes a gang of this type at Omeo, Clarke wrote extensively on Tasmanian convictism, and His Natural Life of course fixed in the Australia imagination the horror story of VDL convictism; one story line in that novel retells the Tichborne story in fictional form. Boldrewood’s novel Nevermore based on the Omeo goldfields, amalgamates the Tichborne, Bogong Jack and Ned Kelly outbreaks as one story.

The three major early novelists – Kingsley, Clarke and Boldrewood – had a lot in common. They all settled in convict free, gentlemany Victoria, they wrote on the same folk myths, and they set their fictions largely not in their own state, Victoria, because respectable Victoria prided itself on never producing home grown bushrangers – they all came from interstate. They set their novels in Tasmania and NSW (Omeo was in transport terms part of Monaro at this stage), as they were fascinated with the convict-bushranger fraternity quite opposite in social terms to their own group. All three novelists had distinguished gentry status backgrounds themselves, out of which they were dropping. The three hoped they might prosper in Australia, but they also feared they might relinquish their gentry status here. So their fictions are not just detached observer accounts, but also displaced musings on their own very real status anxieties, of their own possible predicaments taken to imagined extremes of wealth or failure.

Fluid Identities

Their experience, worrying about failure or success, was the lot of all emigrants in the new country. The novels and folklore, reflecting reality, described are very rapid swings, for better or worse, in one’s wealth or social status, as you’d expect after gold was found in prodigious quantities. So rapid were social shifts, that you often find in these stories characters who have fluid identities. People simultaneously took on the extremes of both low and respectable behaviour – the gentleman bushranger, the aristocrat down on his luck, the ex-convict squatter, the lost heir.

I’ll mention two examples of the shifting identities common in this unformed society. Rolf Boldrewood, after two failed squatting ventures, made a small fortune and a reputation for himself with his fictions. Boldrewood (like the Tichborne claimant) had faked a gentry background for his antecedents. Rolf Boldrewood, alias Tom Browne, was the illegitimate grandson of an Irishman named O’Flaherty from Galway; to hide this the family assumed a moveable identity by adopting the surname Browne after a notable English gentry family in the west of Ireland, a real life story just as fanciful as anything in his novels. Just imagine if Boldrewood had rolled up to the infant Melbourne Club in the 1830s as an O’Flaherty – he might not have got in so easily.

Captain Standish was Chief Commissioner of Police in Victoria during the hunt for the Kelly gang. From a minor aristocratic background he had led a dissolute life in England and had come first to Tasmania to dodge gambling debts. On the Victorian goldfields, he was convicted of sly grogging. But he suppressed his English and colonial past on arriving in Melbourne, faked a military career (he told people had a commission from the Sandhurst military academy, joined the Melbourne Club and was made chief of police from 1858 to 1880, no questions asked.

Social Mobility

A key thing was not just downward social mobility in class terms, but dropping from a status to a class society. The earlier status society contained the layers of aristocracy, gentry and commons, a fixed system based on birth, inheritance, land and manners – once a gentleman always a gentleman. Australia was founded as this type of society based on inherited status was being replaced by a class one based on employment and earned wealth, which allowed movement between the ranks. The great horror was of dropping out of the status system into the class one, and the great hope of the ordinary Australian was to get back into the former. The attraction of the Tichborne case was that an ordinary Australian working man could end up not just wealthy – many did that – but as a lord with an English seat. Australian squatters could sit on their verandahs enjoying life in a way the landed classes in England could not, bypassing the changes occurring in England. An impressive book on this theme is Arcady in Australia by Coral Lansbury, the mother of Malcolm Turnbull.

Four Early Stories

Of course, NSW (Ben Hall gang) and other states had similar events and experiences. I want to show now how the experiences described by the three novelists became the template by which Australians viewed themselves in the nineteenth century. The basic structure of these events, and of the novels and folklore which arose from them, is revealed if we recite the four early mystery tales of the infant district of Port Phillip which gripped the imagination of the settlers. A white man named William Buckley had escaped, gone bush, and in succeeding years lived with Aboriginal tribes and then rejoined European society in the mid 1830s. In the next decade, the 1840s, a distressed white woman had been seen with an Aboriginal tribe presumed to have taken her captive. It was thought she was a survivor of a shipwrecked boat from Bass Strait. Rescue parties were sent out to retrieve her, Aboriginal tribes were harassed to produce their captive, but the supposed white women was never found.

In the next decade, the 1850s, another Bogong Jack, a respectable farmer from the Ovens Valley, escaped into the remote high plain country and lived with an Aboriginal tribe near Omeo for a number of years, before he settled back to his former life. In the next decade, the 1860s, an English butcher Arthur Orton sank to the lowest rungs in Australia society before he returned in style to England to claim the Tichborne baronetcy.

The Deep Pattern of Events

Merely to recount these stories is to reveal a similar patterning in their structure. In each case, an individual leaves England for Australia, the first step in a succession of exiles and social descents. Then he or she moves away from society in Australia and retreats into the bush, which, being strange and unknown, was another move away from civilisation. Then a further descent, living with low-life criminals or nomadic Aboriginal tribes, the very lowest, to the Victorian mind, rung of existence. Then comes the reverse movement towards resurrection, as the central figure slowly mounts the steps back to normality by leaving his low company, emerging from the bush, and rejoining society with its civilised ways in Australia, and then in England, even aspiring to go the whole hog and become an aristocrat, as with the Tichborne claimant.

The descent of the hero into the underworld or wilderness, where he undergoes trials and challenges which have to be overcome before returning to the upper world, is a common mythic archetype. nineteenth century pub talk seized on stories which could be readily shaped, in one’s own wish-fulfilment imagination, into these familiar outlines.

In the nineteenth century, Australians did not see their country as an independent entity existing in its own right, but as an experience dependent on and closely related to home, England. Our English past and Australian present were to be merged together as one. Nineteenth century Australians didn’t see Australia, as later mateship nationalism did, as opposite to England. Life here was just a part of a larger venture, the British way of life, and we could succeed if we used our temporary Australia sojourn to improve our lot so that we could return better than when we left. Australia was therefore a roundabout of improving our British status. On the other hand Australia could be a place where you reverted to barbarian and low behaviour.

This British-Australian amalgam, created by the novelists, was the great self-ideal and self-image of nineteenth century Australia, just as mateship nationalism was in the twentieth century and multiculturalism is in this. The Kelly outbreak was the tipping point where the earlier status ideal was transformed into the mateship one, based on class antagonism. In addition, they added Catholic and Irish elements which introduced further divisions. Mateship discounted England, putting the Australia and England in opposition to each other. This obscured the early narrative recounted in this talk, which had been the organizing principle for the most widespread version explaining life in colonial Australia.