White Savages? Sketches of Colonial Manners

Associate Professor and author Penny Russell is fascinated by snobs and social climbers, scandals large and small, and the mysterious ways people lived, loved and learned in times past. Firmly wedded to the nineteenth century, Russell avidly pursues the “small talk” of history in Australia and England, finding within private writing and the intimacies of social encounters (domestic and exotic) the political landscapes of gender and class, race and colonisation. On Tuesday 15 February 2011, Russell addressed The Sydney Institute on issue raised in her new book Savagery and Civility: A History of Manners in Colonial Australia (New South Press).

WHITE SAVAGES? SKETCHES OF COLONIAL MANNERS

PENNY RUSSELL

Valerie Desmond did not like Australians. The English journalist toured the country in 1911, and immediately voiced her scathing opinions in the columns of the Sydney Sun. She then gathered her comments together into a little book, titled The Awful Australian, which was published in several colonial cities simultaneously. Desmond’s abusive tone thus seems to have been designed from the outset to appeal to a self-deprecating streak in the Australian populace.

“There has been so much adulation lately of Australia, Australian institutions and the Australian people,” she began, “that the people of the Commonwealth have come to believe that they are the salt of the earth, and that their country is the earth.” It was Desmond’s self-appointed mission to disabuse them of this belief. “I think it is time,” she declared, “somebody called upon the self-satisfied Australians to show cause why a little more humility and a little less arrogance were not seemly.”[i]

Desmond launched her barbs in all directions, condemning in turn the power of labour and the failures of political rhetoric, the convict stain and the vulgarities of new wealth, the boorish behaviour of the general public, the inelegant appearance of the women. She hissed her deep contempt alike for social climbers and for clodhopping provincials who spilled coffee over a fellow dancer without so much as an apology. “Nobody ever apologises in Australia,” Desmond complained. “One gets used to that after one’s toes have begun to get callous from frequent treading on by strange feet.”[ii]

Wherever she went, Desmond’s senses, like her toes, were assaulted by the sight, the sound and the obtrusive, uncouth presence of “awful Australians”. She was particularly offended by the “horrible patois” and “weird jargon that passes for English in this country”.[iii] The discordant, sing-song intonation of voice bore in “every syllable the sign of the parvenu”.[iv] In every society, she acknowledged, one must expect to meet with the new rich: even “at Home, we are occasionally forced to encounter individuals whose sudden access to money is revealed by their tongues”. But at least at home the more intellectual and cultured circles, as the “product of generations”, were generally immune to such invasions. Not so in Australia. There, even the most elite circles were “turned out while you wait, with all the uncouthness of their fathers. Australia alone of all the countries in the world has lingual hobnails in its culture”.[v]

Desmond found the conduct of Australian crowds particularly irritating. No one ever considered the convenience of others, she fumed. Women would congregate at the doors of elevators and ferry turnstiles, standing to chat with complete indifference to the lengthening queues behind them. There was no pedestrian regulation. “People in the streets of every civilised portion of the world” – a region far distant from Australia – “walk on the right hand side of the footpath”, but in Australia pedestrians and police were alike indifferent to the problem. In consequence the footpaths of colonial cities were a “struggling chaotic mass” of confusion, where pedestrians wandered “like sheep – and with the same directing intelligence”. In the “boorish behaviour” of women on trams Desmond also found cause for continual offence. They swarmed on board before letting others get off, and would plant themselves firmly in the centre of a seat, leaving no room for the unfortunate male passenger squashed against the wall.[vi]

Notwithstanding her persona as shocked and disapproving outsider, Desmond was for the most part echoing criticism that Australian colonists had been directing at themselves for decades.  As early as the 1870s, Melbourne’s Argus opined that the city streets exhibited far too much independent national spirit. “It is the miserable selfishness of refusing to think oneself only a part, instead of a whole, which is so detestable,” the columnist complained.

A fierce independence and an aggressive self-reliance are, perhaps, at the bottom of this neglect of pedestrian regulations, and, in its way, it may be accepted as an evidence of national resolve and determination expressed individually. But its inconvenience needs no argument to demonstrate it, and we could well afford to relinquish a little of the national independence in favour of something more of common courtesy.[vii]

Etiquette writers reinforced such views. “It is quite time that some rule of the road was established for Sydney pedestrians,” declared Theodosia Wallace in 1909.[viii] Mrs Erskine was shocked to see young girls in trams and omnibuses “dropping into the nearest seat without a moment’s thought for their grown-up companions”, and thought that “if mothers only taught boys and girls to be ready to give up their seats to older people, we should not hear so many complaints of want of consideration too often shown by our fellow-travellers”. She sympathised with “the tired men coming home from a long day’s work, who see impatient women crowding into an over-full tram”; yet she could not respect “the man who does not feel uncomfortable at seeing a woman standing while he is seated”.

Women were as much to blame as men, however. Some were so “wanting in decency” that they received the attentions of friends or strangers without acknowledgement; others rejected them with still less grace. “A gentlewoman,” Erskine advised, “has a slight bow for the stranger who stands aside to let her pass, a smile for the husband who opens the door or takes her parcel, and a gentle ‘Thank you’ for the man of whatever class who offers her his seat on the tram.” The woman who tactlessly refused the proffered seat made everyone uncomfortable “by lurching about in a crowded vehicle” and gave the man who offered it “an excuse for not doing so on a future occasion”.[ix]

While Theodosia Wallace declared it a “breach of etiquette” to enter a tramcar or omnibus when it was full, Valerie Desmond thought that the unmannerly officials who allowed the tramcars to get overcrowded in the first place were equally to blame. Indeed, she found a spectacular example of colonial “chaos and ill-manners” in the tramway system itself: “The tramcars do not run on the wrong side of the road. I’ll say that for them. But they commit every other offence against civil management that it is possible to think of.” The officials, too, woefully failed to keep order, or to prevent frequent accidents amongst their equally bad-mannered passengers. An “old time bear-pit must have been a refined assemblage as compared with a Sydney tramcar”.[x]

Desmond thus evoked the shadow of barbarism to give voice to her indignation at the failures of refinement in a not-yet-quite-civilised world. A few years earlier, a society journal had evoked the savage in much the same way, in the midst of a scathing denunciation of the facilities and administration of the railways: “If there is one thing that speaks but little for the march of civilisation”, Table Talk had declared, “it is the condition of a smoking carriage at 5.30 p.m. on a suburban railway. The hut of the untamed savage who has not yet had the revised version of the bible presented to him is a drawing room compared to it”.[xi]

I gave my history of Australian colonial manners the title Savage or Civilised? – not because I hoped to answer the question, but because it seemed to me that the question itself, replete with moral and cultural anxiety, lay at the heart of colonial society, and was almost inseparable from all discussion of manners. Again and again, the terms surfaced – of civilisation, refinement, cultivation on the one hand, and on the other savagery, barbarism, primitivism.[xii]

Throughout the nineteenth century, discussions of manners in the Australian colonies took it for granted that savagery was the natural state of humanity. In civilised society, human nature was educated, regulated and refined into a highly polished “finish”. Savagery was replaced by urbanity, rudeness by civility, primitivism by cultivation, vulgarity by refinement. Civilised beings possessed cultivated abilities and talents, refined emotional and moral sensibilities, political responsibility, civic consciousness, sophistication of thought, propriety of conduct, dignity of bearing. They possessed, above all, good manners: they showed respect and consideration for the feelings of others, they were unfazed by the labyrinthine social rules of introductions and greetings or the niceties of the table. They knew, as no savage could, how to manage and control their impulses, their appetites and their passions.

As ideals of civilisation were formulated with growing precision in the post-Enlightenment world, the idea of the “savage” itself gathered form and specificity – the product of these imaginings, I would argue, rather than a pre-existing entity. Grotesque, violent, impulsive, childish, sensual, licentious, gluttonous, improvident, lawless and pagan, the “savage” became a powerful presence at the edges of European imagination. Sometimes this presence was taken as a comfort: a neatly contrasting marker of the achievements of white civilisation, of its refinement, order and restraint. The imaginary figure of the “savage” belonged to a timeless state of primitivism, against which the historical progress of the civilised world – its relentless, astonishing march forward – could be regarded with pride, awe and complacency.

Yet the victory was never complete. Every adult had to struggle to subdue anger, greed or desire before society could be deemed fully “civilised”; every child had to tread the path to civilisation anew. The very rituals that governed social relations hinted at the effort involved in taming savage instincts. Sometimes playfully and sometimes with a suggestion of real alarm, self-appointed experts and observers wrote of primitive passions and appetites that lurked everywhere, barely restrained by the codes and regulations that governed courtesy in a civilised society. And so the idea of the “savage” was not always a comfort. It lurked, menacingly, at the very heart of civilised society itself.

The British laid claim to the lands of New Holland on shaky – if any – legal grounds. In compensation or rationalisation, they appealed instead to a grander moral premise: that they were bringing civilisation to a savage world. It was a matter of profound importance, therefore, that the manners of the colonists should at all times seem more “civilised” than those of Aboriginal Australians. Alas, the behaviour of settlers struggling to scratch an existence from the alien wilderness did not always live up to the ideal. Rough, rude, reticent and violent, too many of those nineteenth-century settlers appeared instead to be turning savage themselves. Meanwhile, some perceptive colonists noticed that, though unfamiliar, the ways of the Aboriginal people were not lacking in courtesy. “If they be savages, thought I, they are very civil ones,” exclaimed an early coloniser of the upper Hunter Valley, after observing an act of simple generosity between Aboriginal friends.[xiii] But even he assumed that the standard of civility, and of civilisation, was ultimately set by British colonists. The idea of “civilised manners” was from the outset thoroughly entangled in the politics of dispossession.

The “savage” hovered everywhere in the colonial imagination, making the regulation of manners a matter of intense significance. Sometimes the “savage” was understood in racial terms, identified with the dispossessed Aboriginal Australians. But its spectre was also glimpsed in the foul-mouthed convict, thrown a portion of meat without benefit of plate or cutlery; in the haggard, uncouth gold-digger locked in the soulless toil for wealth; in a “half-naked race of children” growing up “in semi-savagery” on drought-stricken farms with neither education nor domestic comfort; in the brutish drunkard of the harsh frontier or inner-city slum, who beat and abused his wretched wife; or in that “outer-barbarian”, the rising politician who thoughtlessly picked his teeth with his pen-knife or snatched a potato from a passing dish at a state banquet.

Valerie Desmond devoted one chapter of her diatribe specifically to “Australian manners”. The average Australian, she asserted, “simply doesn’t know the meaning of the word”.[xiv] It would indeed ‘be difficult to find any country in the older and more cultured world in which the common decencies of civilisation would be so completely ignored’.[xv] Measured against Desmond’s metropolitan ideal, everything that was strikingly different about Australia was also strikingly inferior. The fact that Australians did not automatically accept this equation only showed their appalling sense of “self-sufficiency”. If her harsh truths succeeded in shaming the Australian, she considered her book would have achieved its object. If, conversely, they provoked “a howl of indignation”, the condition of affairs would be shown to be even worse than she thought, “and nothing will be left but to declare Australia past redemption”.[xvi]

Perhaps not surprisingly, the howl of indignation was not long in coming. It was emitted by one Malcolm C Donald, who lurched into print a year later with a vigorous defence of what he termed The Real Australian. Donald attacked Desmond’s credibility on all fronts, yet judged her attack significant enough to warrant a response: “whether he wishes the services of a defender or no, ‘The Awful Australian’ at least deserves a champion”. He flung himself intrepidly into the task.

Desmond’s assertion that Australians did not know the meaning of the word “manners” was “so puerile as to be scarcely worth the labour of contradiction”.[xvii] Donald thought that Australian slang was both “pithy” and humorously apt,[xviii] and the Australian accent “by no means beyond the euphonic pale”.[xix] Desmond’s concerns about “atavism” and the convict stain betrayed a shameful “little-mindedness”. Australians were shirkers? Nonsense, cried Donald.[xx] Gluttonous and ill mannered? “Utter, unmitigated balderdash!”[xxi] Lacking in poetic genius? ‘I really feel sincere pity for this lady’s warped judgment and circumscribed outlook on her world.’[xxii]

Beyond exclamatory denials, Donald had really only two points to bring in defence of Australian manners. Against Desmond’s strictures he had just “this to say”: that Australian “manners (beastly word, by the way) … are scarcely better, and certainly no worse than those of the bulk of Great British dwellers”. Think, after all, of the insolence of the peer towards the commoner, and that “subtle hostility of class to class” evident across British society.[xxiii] Think, too, of the “Arctic condition” of metropolitan sociability. “At Home”, in Britain, people might live side by side yet know nothing of each other. In Australia, by contrast “everyone knows the other fellow, and, however barren of immediate blood relations one may be, one speedily becomes a unit in a more or less pleasurable social strata if one so desires”.[xxiv]

Yet Donald sorrowfully acknowledged that this egalitarian sociability did not prevail everywhere. Here and there, especially in the “large residential and manufacturing centres”, the shrewd observer might detect the “mark of the beast”: the “same petty class demarcations, the same social ostracisms, the identical nonsensical society usages, exactly similar absurdities running the whole gamut of human emotion”.[xxv] But this was a departure from the main trend, not “a leaven which pervades the whole”!

Desmond might have some foundation, then, for her criticisms of urban society. But her strictures on rural Australia were unbearable. She had given one illustration of the character of the Australian squatter – drunk and uncouth – as “representative of a type”. Could she really think that all Australian squatters resembled such “an unspeakably disgusting brute” as she had described? Donald insisted that generally speaking the Australian squatter was a very decent fellow, who stood for:

… everything that spells M.A.N.! His home surroundings are invariably redolent of comfort and an infinite refinement; … his genial hospitality is proverbial; his standard of honour and code of morals rank with the best among his compeers in other lands; … his manner of living is at once dignified and simple.

Donald had met this representative squatter more than once, had dined with him and enjoyed his “open-handed hospitality”. He spoke of him as he found him: “Can Miss Desmond say as much?” How dare she “belittle a condition of men and affairs of which she knows nothing”! The “Australian on the land” was deserving of hearty sympathy and good-fellowship:

His mental attainments may not be great; his conversational powers are decidedly limited, but – he is as his environment has fashioned him, and he justifies his existence.[xxvi]

I read Desmond’s Awful Australian – with a certain horrified delight ­– quite early in my research on Australian colonial manners. Not until I was near its end did I read Donald’s response. By then, steeped as I was in the self-critical, anxious mentality of colonial Australians, I was powerfully struck by Donald’s wilful denial of Australian elitism, and his wilful erasure of the variations in colonial sensibility.

Donald presents a vision of Australian egalitarianism that is familiar to us all. He claims freedom from snobbery, fluidity of social boundaries, an open, frank and natural demeanour, and an impatience with meaningless rules of etiquette as peculiarly Australian – and peculiarly rural – qualities; and robustly contrasts them with the effeminacy, particularity and reserve of “English” manners. He does not for a moment indulge in any fear of the “savage within”, nor does the word “civilised” feature in his arguments. Donald shifts the discussion of Australian manners firmly from the frame of civilisation to that of nation-building, and in so doing he changes the character of the discussion to one that we know well.

The national terms that dominated discussion of manners after the turn of the century did not simply alter conceptions of the present: they also hijacked the colonial past into the service of a new nationalism.

Such celebrations as Donald’s – and the more familiar poetry and prose of Henry Lawson, Banjo Paterson and their ilk – tended to simplify Australian culture in a way that Valerie Desmond’s wholesale condemnation, curiously, did not. Desmond condemned the manners of men and women of all classes on the streets, on public transport, and in the entertainment venues of the cities. Donald did not repudiate all her criticisms, but simply told her that she was looking at the wrong people. She had failed to seek out the “real” Australian where he dwelt in the open spaces of the bush. The varied urban crowds who so forcibly assaulted Desmond’s senses were in Donald’s terms the exception rather than the rule: they were not the “real Australian”.

Such an attitude, for a long time afterwards, shaped popular and even academic understandings of Australia’s colonial past. We looked for the emergence of a distinctively Australian sensibility and defined all who did not share it as visitors, newcomers, nostalgic and backward-looking Brits. By casting manners in such dichotomised, nationalist terms, we imposed a particular shape, a particular understanding, on the trajectories of Australian colonial history.

Whereas in British, European or American historiography the plethora of writings on labour relations and radical movements is matched by an equally significant body of work on the middle class, in Australia historians have struggled to find the cultural space to examine the forces of respectability, social aspiration, elitism, morality, and social authority in colonial society. There have been several important studies of elite and middle-class culture over the years, of course,[xxvii] but such studies have relatively little impact on broader public understandings of Australia’s history, and even these, to some degree, tend to reinforce the idea that the middle class was a voice crying in the wilderness – stuffy, reactive, backward-looking, and powerless to stem the rising tide of national egalitarianism.

And of course – as with most paradigms – there’s a lot of truth in this one. But in Savage or Civilised I wanted to reconnect with a more fractured and self-doubting colonial history. To do so I needed to adjust the focal lens, to find ways to capture the complexity, the messiness, the unresolved nature of history as experienced, not the smooth unfolding of a progressive narrative. In the vulnerability of unrehearsed, unpredictable encounters, where social codes were disputed or unknown, we can see how manners affected the daily lives of individuals, how they played out not in principle but in practice, not in precept but in people.

Manners were a part of colonial life. They affected everyone differently. My book examines the manners of everyday encounters, showing how people tried, and often failed, to negotiate complex social situations. It shows how a poor choice of words, an unintentional slight, a misunderstanding or a disagreement could alter a relationship forever. Different chapters in the book tell the stories of men and women who tried to maintain civility in themselves or enforce it in others, who suffered or resented or inflicted insults, who demanded consideration or defended personal honour as best they could. Their stories were not ‘typical’ of colonial experience. Together they do not represent the sum of colonial history: yet each, I hope, may help us to understand it better.

Take, for example, the searing experience of Niel Black, an early representative of that squatting class that Desmond decried and Donald celebrated, when he stayed one night at the Wool Pack Inn in Corio, or Geelong, which then consisted of scarcely half a dozen houses. I tell his story early in the book in order to reflect on the importance of ideas of savagery and civilisation to the colonial enterprise – both as a guide to individual, gentlemanly conduct, and as a broad ethos that might stake a claim to the moral righteousness of dispossession.

On a warm Sunday evening in February 1840, a group of squatters had gathered at the inn. They had been down with their wool to Melbourne, and perhaps they had some profitable sales to celebrate. Most were old acquaintances, and as the summer darkness crept upon the tiny town some half-dozen settled down for an evening of heavy drinking.

Gentlemen all, by birth, they gave some semblance of formality to their evening’s entertainment by electing a “Chair” to preside over the meeting. There was no other formality about the proceedings. In a basin in the centre of the table they mixed a toddy of gin, rum and “satern”. After emptying each bottle into the mix, they would dash it into the fireplace, spraying shards of glass across the floor. They ladled the toddy into large tumblers: glasses did not hold enough for cheer. As was the custom for a “jovial party” of this kind, the men had discarded their coats and neck cloths, and were in a state of comfortable undress suited to the hot night. They lounged about the table, one or two entertaining the rest with comic songs.

Niel Black, staunch Presbyterian and aspiring squatter, was a deeply reluctant participant in these festivities. He had arrived at Corio late that day, having earlier missed his way and wandered some distance before getting back on the right path. By evening he was longing for his bed. In general he had no objection to sharing a bottle of wine with a friend, but he disapproved of Sunday carousing. Despite the racket, he retired to rest at about ten o’clock.

A little before midnight, he was rudely disturbed by two men who came to his room to invite him to join their party. He refused, but his protests were overruled. Through the thin walls of his room he could hear William Yuille, who chaired the meeting, propose that a second deputation be sent to fetch him. Annoyed and indignant, Black reluctantly decided he must yield. He had no wish to acquire a reputation amongst his peers for being “too rigidly correct”. More immediately, he feared that if he refused he would be “taken naked by head and heels and carried into the room”. On both considerations, Black thought he “acted upon sound policy” in consenting to join the party – but as he left his chamber, he muttered a small prayer for forgiveness.

His appearance was greeted with three cheers, but he spent an uncomfortable evening:

Such a prostration of human nature I may fairly say I never saw before. Devotedly and determinedly sitting down to get drunk till they could no longer remember they were men. They exulted and gloried in the feat they were about to perform … It is impossible to describe the scene that followed, each trying to outvie the other in every species of madness … Those that got drunk and went to bed were dragged back and placed upon their chairs till they could not move.

Black himself “added very little to the hilarity of the evening, for I never felt more unhappy in my life”. His horror at the whole scene was “indescribable”. By three o’clock he was able at last to steal away to bed “and was no more troubled, but such a night I never witnessed before”. Though it was his first exposure to such a scene, he knew them to be “of too frequent occurrence”.[xxviii] It was, to him, just one more reminder of the sacrifices that gentlemen seemed only too willing to make in their pursuit of a squatting life: the sacrifice of honour, refinement, even manliness itself.

Niel Black had landed in Sydney a few months earlier, and made his way to Melbourne, then a fledgling city, gateway and administrative centre for the rich pastoral lands of the south-east. The district was already populated by a swarm of opportunistic young gentlemen who had swept in and scrambled up country to claim the land and build a fortune. None of their land had been officially alienated for settlement, so all were “squatters”, establishing a claim to tenure through presence and use, not by grant, purchase or even formal lease. They lived rough and played high, periodically converging on Melbourne to sell their wool, escape their squalid station huts and gather in their exclusive clubs to drink, gamble and squabble amongst themselves. Some were the younger sons of peers, very conscious of their social rank; others owned to backgrounds more respectable than aristocratic, but had ambitions to rise as “gentlemen” in the fluid social and economic conditions of the colony. Opportunity was the watchword of all.

At least, until they had gradually acquired the wealth and grand homes for which they later became famous, the life of squatters was typically a comfortless, hand-to-mouth existence, in which to maintain a semblance of cultivated manliness was a continual challenge. Not all rose to it, many seeming content to revel in a pared-down social existence that offered, if nothing else, freedom from scrutiny.

In an era when the pressure to rise in respectability and social distinction was almost everywhere, the anonymity of the bush could seem to some like a welcome refuge of unselfconscious egalitarianism. The bush life encouraged at once a tough, hard-headed pragmatism, continual watchfulness, and a delightful sense of irresponsibility about social niceties. It could also be, at times, almost intolerably lonely. All in all, as innumerable commentators noted with varying degrees of disapproval, the pastoral frontiers were a curious social world, marked by manners forthright to the point of coarseness, by hard riding, hard swearing and hard drinking.

Niel Black – himself “a farmer’s son who gradually climbed into good society”,[xxix] had a powerful sense of his own gentlemanly status. Perhaps, indeed, the very precariousness of his social position made him especially anxious to maintain it. But from the moment of his arrival in the colony he found himself thrust into a strange, disordered world, where the manners he thought integral to character were set at nought. Could he preserve his character as a gentleman if he adapted himself to his company? Could he secure his social position as a gentleman, if he did not?

He was appalled by the makeshift conditions and wretched poverty he witnessed in the Western District, and at times experienced: a station hut “no better than a tinker’s hut in the highlands”;[xxx] another made entirely of bark sheets propped against each other and sparsely furnished with beds fashioned from sticks, branches and sheepskins.[xxxi] What shocked him most was that gentlemen should wilfully endure such appalling conditions for the sake of future prosperity. “The more he loves his home,” Black observed, “the more urgent will be his desire, by foul or fair means, to obtain the command of a little money to enable him to return to it.” In the meantime, he wondered: “What would be said to this life at home?”[xxxii]

Rich and poor, gentlemen and self-made men alike made shift in the most ungentlemanly conditions. For Black, their rude existence encapsulated the paradoxes of colonial society. If the gentlemen who endured such conditions had only been willing to live so frugally in Britain, they might have amassed a fortune long ago, he thought, and need never have left home at all.[xxxiii] Now, their very character was under threat. Their degraded and degrading living conditions blunted sensibility, cultivation and morality. Carelessness of their standing as gentlemen was the inevitable result.

Imagine a person going about for twelve months half dressed, half not, unshaven, unshorn, shoes never cleaned, living upon tea and damper, his pocket knife serving him for a spoon, his bed on the floor or rather the ground (for a floor is seldom laid here) not a chair or stool to sit on but a block of wood or stone, not an article of furniture in his house but a few tin pannikins and a frying pan. What sort of man can this be after a few years spent in this way? Does he not contract peculiarities and singular notions that he can never get rid of?[xxxiv]

Neglecting “the comforts and little elegances of life”, a set of “money-making bachelors” had become by their own volition, he feared, “half savages, half mad”.

It is perhaps not surprising that in such conditions binge drinking should flourish: it was, indeed, as integral to gentlemanly culture as it was to working-class camaraderie. If the varied rituals of drinking firmly marked the hierarchies of a hierarchical society, its common effects threatened to undermine them by reducing all men to the level of brutes – or sots who “could no longer remember they were men”.

This was the paradox of drinking. It was repeatedly decried for the way it stripped men of the civilised manners that defined their place in society, marked them as respectable, and were so deeply ingrained that they equated with self-respect. Yet drinking – perhaps especially for those who regarded themselves as gentlemen – was surrounded by minute but stringent laws of etiquette, to break which might prove social suicide. Men of conscience and moral principle faced a difficult choice between self-respect and social acceptance, between integrity and conviviality. Sometimes, indeed, the choice was scarcely theirs to make: witness the awful fate of William Cuningham Hunter, “branded by his drunken companions for refusing to sing a song”.[1]

At the other end of the social scale, drunkenness appeared as both cause and symptom of social deprivations and anomalies. The Rev. David Mackenzie thought that drink obliterated the line between good and evil: the drunkard wilfully resigned the “guidance of his reason” and was willing “to purchase the indulgence of his passions at whatever hazard either to body or soul”.[1] Such pronouncements linked drunken debauchery with deprivation and depravity, and implicitly with the poor and working classes. But drink also threatened such social boundaries. It threatened to obliterate all that was refined in humanity, to unleash the “animal” in man. “What hope is there,” asked novelist Catherine Martin, “for a vice that wrecks the will so completely – a vice that overcomes a man till he lies sunk below the level of brutes?”[1]

The repeated refrain in such critiques was the loss of boundaries: between reason and passion, right and wrong, gentlemen and the lower orders, humanity and brutes. Hardbitten men on the frontier were frequently described as “white savages” for their drunkenness and brutality. Drink licensed the indulgence of primitive appetite. It unleashed the savage within civilised man.

In my chapter on Niel Black, I show how the fine line he trod on the question of drink mirrored the deeper ethical conflict he experienced over the violence of dispossession itself. Repeatedly he heard casual justifications for the callous slaughter of Aboriginal people: “lead is the only antidote” for theft, he was told. Once “a few are shot”, the rest were “easily kept at bay”. They could then be managed by “threats till they become civilised”.[xxxv]

In a society which officially condemned and outlawed such violence, a culture of bravado flourished, bragging claims being conveyed by “hints and slang”. A sickened auditor, Black thought the settlers’ callous allusions left “a worse impression on the stranger’s mind than the whole naked truth would do”. Even making allowance for some exaggeration, he was convinced that:

great numbers of the poor creatures have wantonly fallen victims to settlers scarcely less savage tho more enlightened than themselves’.[xxxvi]

It was only “outside”, Black reassured his friends at home, that men were “ever called upon to act in so brutal a manner”. For himself, he would not do so. “I could not stand the thought of murdering them,” he wrote, “and to tell the truth I believe it impossible to take up a new run without doing so.”

The prospect of having to kill for the sake of the gentlemanly prosperity he so urgently desired sent Black’s Presbyterian conscience spinning, temporarily rudderless. He plunged into an eddy of platitudes, seeking some firm position of right by which he might reconcile a practice he could not condone with the acquisitive ambition he would not surrender. Having fully recorded the justifications for violence he heard on all sides, he still could not stomach the thought of inflicting it himself.

And the solution, after all, was obvious. Anyone, he wrote cheerfully, “may buy a run already occupied, and where the natives occasion as little annoyance, and I may with truth add much less, than a party of three or four tinkers or Gypsies at home”. And so he chose not to go “outside” but instead to purchase stock and rights to the “most wonderful” pastoral run in the colony.

The blacks, he was told, had formerly been very “troublesome” in the area and had been “very cruelly dealt with”. The previous superintendent had led an outright massacre of an Aboriginal camp, killing 35 to 40 men, women and children. The murder had come to the ears of the Chief Protector, George Robinson, and the superintendent had fled, fearing to be arrested and tried for murder. “The poor creatures,” wrote Black with ruthless pity, “are now terror stricken and will be easily managed. This was my principal reason for fighting so hard for it.”[xxxvii] If this moral compromise ever troubled his conscience, he gave no sign of it. To reap the benefits of former violence would not stain his character, so long as his own hands remained clean of blood.

Niel Black was shocked by the violence of his fellow squatters, just as he was shocked by their tolerance of barbaric living conditions and their fearsome capacity for drink. In such an environment, men were always in danger of “forgetting themselves” by making a temporary sacrifice of principle and practice. Black responded with instinctive gestures of self-protection.

From the outset Black thought of himself as a permanent settler, making a life and not just a fortune in the bush. As a permanent settler, it behoved him to live as a gentleman, and according to the character he wished to sustain. He would not live in squalor in an unfurnished hut, devouring meat and tea to sustain life. He would not murder, and he would not drink himself into mindless, brutish drunkenness. He had withstood as well as he could the pressure of his drunken companions in those uncertain days before he took up his run. He would continue to maintain his reputation for sobriety, focusing on creating in the bush the gracious living and gentlemanly status of which he had dreamed. Indeed, Black’s behaviour at that drunken party is something of a metaphor for his colonial conduct more generally. He did not join in, but nor did he make his disapproval apparent. He simply sat, a silent, non-participating presence, and then took himself off to bed, his sense of personal integrity firmly intact.

Black’s anxieties and moral compromises were a far cry from the simple celebration of honest manly toil and forthright egalitarian manners favoured by Malcolm Donald. They are, however, but one example of the fraught and fragile sensibility of colonists in a world where manners mattered, not simple as a matter of polite usage in good society, but as the prime indicator of “civilised behaviour” in a world where the foundations of civilisation itself could often appear extremely shaky.

Endnotes

[i] Valerie Desmond, The Awful Australian, Melbourne, Sydney, Adelaide: E. W. Cole, 1911. Foreword.

[ii] Desmond, Awful Australian, p 26.

[iii] Desmond, Awful Australian, p 15.

[iv] Desmond, Awful Australian, pp 17-18.

[v] Desmond, Awful Australian, p 18.

[vi] Desmond, Awful Australian, pp 23–25. Regulations advising pedestrians to keep to the right on footways were introduced in Melbourne in 1879 but at first largely ignored. In Sydney, pedestrians were instructed to keep to the left; Melburnians crossed over in 1925 in the interests of pedestrian safety. See Andrew Brown-May Melbourne Street Life, Melbourne: Australian Scholarly Publishing, 198, pp 53-55.

[vii] Argus, 28 May 1874, p 5.

[viii] ‘A.L.O.A.’ [Mrs Erskine], Etiquette in Australia, Sydney,: William Brooks, 1902, p 56; Theodosia Ada Wallace, The Etiquette of Australia: A Handy Book of the Common Usages of Everyday Life and Society, Sydney: Dymock’s, [1909], p 8.

[ix] Erskine, Etiquette in Australia, pp 63, 66–67.

[x] Desmond, Awful Australian, p 25.

[xi] Table Talk, 3 July 1885, p 10.

[xii] Penny Russell, Savage or Civilised? Manner in Colonial Australia Sydney, UNSW Press, 2010.

[xiii] Robert Dawson, The Present State of Australia; A Description of the Country, its advantages and prospects, with reference to Emigration; and a particular account of the manners, customs and condition of its Aboriginal Inhabitants, London: Smith, Elder & Co, Cornhill, 1830, p 11.

[xiv] Desmond, Awful Australian, p 22

[xv] Desmond, Awful Australian, p 23

[xvi] Desmond, Foreword (no page number)

[xvii] Maclolm C. Donald, The Real Australian: A Reply to The Awful Australian Melbourne: E.W. Cole, [1912], p 22.

[xviii] Donald, Real Australian p 19

[xix] Donald, Real Australian p 21

[xx] Donald, Real Australian pp 37-8.

[xxi] Donald, Real Australian p 49

[xxii] Donald, Real Australian pp. 52-3.

[xxiii] Donald, Real Australian pp 22-3.

[xxiv] Donald, Real Australian pp 24-5.

[xxv] Donald, Real Australian p 24.

[xxvi] Donald, Real Australian, p. 48.

[xxvii] See for example Beverley Kingston My Wife, My Daughter and Poor Mary Ann, Melbourne: Thomas Nelson, 1975; John Rickard Class and Politics Canberra: ANU Press, 1976; Paul de Serville Pounds and Pedigrees: The Upper Class in Victoria, 1850–1880, Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1991; Richard Waterhouse Private Pleasures, Public Leisure: A History of Australian Popular Culture since 1788, Melbourne: Longman Australia, 1995; Linda Young, Middle Class Culture in the Nineteenth Century: America, Australia and Britain, New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002.

[xxviii] Niel Black, Journal, 2 Feb 1840, in Maggie Mackellar, Strangers in a Foreign Land: The Journal of Niel Black and Other Voices from the Western District, Melbourne: Miegunyah Press/State Library of Victoria, 2008, pp 150–52.

[xxix] Paul de Serville, Port Phillip Gentlemen, Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1980, p 18.

[xxx] Black, 3 and 4 Dec 1839, pp 98, 100, 102.

[xxxi] Black, 23 Jan 1840, p 144.

[xxxii] Black, 7 Dec 1839 and 22 Jan 1840, pp 105, 142–43.

[xxxiii] Black, 10 Dec 1839, 1 and 22 January 1840, pp 109, 131, 142–43.

[xxxiv] Black, 1 Jan 1840, p 131.

[xxxv] Black, 9, 18, 25 [24] and 25 Dec 1839, pp 107–108, 119, 140–41.

[xxxvi] Black, 9 Dec 1839, pp. 107-8.

[xxxvii] Black, 4 Jan 1840, p 133.