Australian History And Crime – The Soldier’s Curse

Early colonial Australia was rife with ambiguities – a small and tarnished population, adrift in the south Pacific where, so far from home and the administration of the Empire, petty grievances and jealousies regularly created situations of personal danger and injustice. Brutality mixed with human folly and evil make a melting pot. On Thursday 7 April 2016, internationally acclaimed Australian writer of historical fiction Tom Keneally joined his daughter Meg Keneally, co-author with her father of The Soldier’s Curse: Book One, The Monsarrat Series, to discuss their new work and the role of crime in the Australian identity. The paper which follows is an edited transcript of Tom Keneally’s talk.

AUSTRALIAN HISTORY AND CRIME – THE SOLDIER’S CURSE

TOM KENEALLY

Some years ago I wrote a book about Australia’s penal origins, called The Commonwealth of Thieves. I tried to do something new in that book. There have been a number of books that undertake to write about the phenomenon of the First Fleet, the first three fleets, and the Phillip era, in a new way. My reason for writing it was I felt that the connection to George III and England, the politics of the Georgian era, had it not been adequately explored. Nor had the question of how the attitudes of high and low from Europe were reincarnated in Australia been examined.

Alan Atikinson’s Europeans in Australia did this from the point of ideas. But I wanted to look at the First Fleet from another point of view. I called it the Commonwealth of Thieves, because I found that captured, in a protean form in the history of early Australia, an image of the way Australia would advance.

So I called it the Commonwealth just as, 112 years later, the Australian community called itself a commonwealth. And the question is, to what extent does that “commonwealth of the thieves” still resonate in us? And to what extent does their discourse still resonate with us? And to what extent were they thieves?

I also claimed or posited that Arthur Phillip had a concept of “commonwealth” operating in his enlightenment soul. He had huge authority and yet he exercised it in a benign, paternalistic way, very much according to the principles of the enlightenment whose child he was. And these principles created expectations in convicts and free alike. The government, in other words the authorities, existed to intervene, to create British equities. The “Tree of Liberty” as Dan Moody said. Equities amongst the imprisoned and the guards and the officials.

It’s interesting that the society that succeeded the Penal era did grow up with such expectations, ones that had operated when a young teenage convict, Henry Cable, took a ship’s captain to court in the first civil case in Australia and won. Strict American libertarianism, as the century progressed, never appealed to Australians. And I feel that there is at least a foreshadowing of the rejection of strict libertarianism amongst the convicts and amongst the guards. If you had talked to your average marine or average convict I doubt if would have said, “I’m going against libertarianism, mate.” But, in practice, that’s the way their souls developed under the regime in Australia.

It was a commonwealth between an absolute authorit,y exercised by an enlightenment man, and convicts, soldiers and administrators alike over a penal equation. A historian once said to me that the first settlement was far too protean for me to apply any idea of commonwealth to it, or to read too many signs of later Australia. The first settlement had principles, such as convicts getting the same ration as Garrison as the supplied food decreased. Philip resisted the idea of differentiating between free and convict. The question is, did such principles influence later Australia in the way we went without belief in the social contract and the, sort of, diaconate compact that was made early in federation when you had an placatory-like deacon introducing pensions and votes for women and the conciliation and arbitration system? Well, we don’t know.

It is my strong feeling that convictism is a river that runs through the Australian consciousness. Not in the sense that we grieve for the crimes of our forefathers, but in the sense that there were attitude brewed in many cases particularly by convicts and I’ll give some examples. Whether the period of the first three fleets generated some of these concepts, or not, they did take on a more mature form in later Australian society.

Geoffrey Blainey believes that too. I’ve heard Blainey speak about how there was commonwealth, a sort of socialist setup, in early Australia with commissar, the serfs and the guards because it was quite a gulag. But Blainey says there a number of things that governed our expectation of the government intervention such as Philip intervening in the matter of rations and so on. Our expectation of government intervention grew out of convictism, British liberalism, Irish expectations of democracy and the size of the country. Naked capitalism to which America became a field for deployment could not be applied to many aspects of Australian life. The telegraph for example, came of necessity and was a not immediately profitable, non-private, capital based enterprise and so on.

So we grew up with an expectation of intervention just as Henry Cable expected intervention from the judge advocate to get him the money back that he’d left with an officer on his convict ship. I have to say I take a delighted view, a perverse view, in the fact that we began as a purpose designed penal colony.

I am fascinated by the fact that we have no creation myth in Australia. We have an arrival myth, certainly. Our Adams and Eves were pre-fallen. There’s no Garden of Eden in our arrival and we had already eaten of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil by the time we got here. Of the minor fruits of that tree. But, none the less, we were already cast out of the garden.

The American view is encapsulated in Thanksgiving, a people who don’t have crimes branded on their forehead but have righteousness there. People who are too good for England, while ours were too bad for England. and the impact on the native peoples was, in all cases, round about the same whether you were righteous or convict. America begins with righteousness, this inheritance. The righteous coming into their own, their individualism and the Calvinistic ethos which is redemption through endeavour. It’s miraculous that a penal settlement could develop into a sophisticated society. And I’m interested in why it happened.

My argument is that it was because not all the convicts were criminals, or their crimes were not such that they saw them as criminals. Some of the criminals were promising folk too. It could not be otherwise. I’ve made a lay study of what the great grandchildren of convicts did and I have a few examples. But why did we prosper? In parts, because so many convicts were social bandits – people who don’t believe they’ve done anything wrong.

John McQuilton wrote a book about Ned Kelly, a social bandit. Ned Kelly didn’t think he’d done anything wrong after Stringybark Creek when he shot down three policeman. With every hostage group he took after that, he harangued them about how he was justified. It was his loss of innocence in a way. And it’s what destroyed him. He had half the population of Jerilderie locked up in The Royal Hotel. He harangued them on how everyone thought he had killed the police. And so he had – he and his gang. But to Ned, they were responsible in their own destruction and he hadn’t meant to do it and he regretted it and so on.

There were people like Ned Kelly before Stringybark Creek in our history. There were swing rioters in Britain, people who had destroyed property, which is a crime. But they saw themselves as rioters against landlordism, which of course had reached a high pitch in the early nineteenth century with the added tension of land hunger. There was also an agricultural revolution, making it appropriate for landlords to get rid of their land holders, particularly in Ireland and Scotland but also in England. There were Ribbonmen in Ireland who were like the swing rioters.

My wife’s great grandfather was one. He was a man who went through a process of presenting his grievances, rather passionately, to a landlord. He belonged to a secret society called The Ribbonmen. They took an oath to act together to prevent evictions. They had a three step process: to post a notice, to issue a threat in person to the landlord and the last stage, actually rarely reached, called moral outrage which was to kill the agent or landlord. On his ship to Australia the Parmelia, in 1834, he was one of 70 Ribbonmen. We now know that those men did not consider themselves criminal. They considered the land system in general, or their landlord as the criminal.

That sort of protest does carry with it a certain moral force with it that helped us to survive as a society. The fact that so many of our criminals were not criminals in their own mind. There were poachers who belonged to secret poaching societies whose aim was to poach because they liked it or as a protest against landlordism. In their view, why should they be the only beasts who could not enter the landlord’s forest. The fox could go in, the bird could go in, but not humans. So poaching could be a matter of oath and protest. So many Australians were transported merely for taking or administering an oath to belong to a secret rural society and so it goes on. Only the Hougoumont, the last convict ship, was a different scene.

But the discourse of these people doesn’t end. They live on. They tell their children what is happening. Numerically, there are four million of us that are descendents of convicts. In Australia before World War I, there were convicts still alive including Ned Kelly’s young brother and a man that my wife’s ancestor had given birth to and who lived until 1946. These were not blunted or vacant voices in our society, and they influenced attitudes in many ways we need to research. As each immigrant assumes Australian identity one at a time, there may well be a sense in which every new immigrant is a child of the convicts.