Australian History For Dummies. Alex McDermott

occasional human head — all flourished, even though King was also tasked with enforcing the East India Company’s trade monopoly, and countering the highly devious and admittedly quite brilliant ruses employed by the mostly ex-convict businessmen to get around these regulations. King also did much to ensure the whaling grounds near Port Jackson (which American boats were discovering and exploiting at the same time) were actively developed, as well as heavy sealing in Bass Strait. Local industries were encouraged as well; weaving, ship building, leather tanning, textile weaving and dying, pottery and glassblowing, as well as the manufacture of shoes, hats, blankets, soap and candles, all expanded dramatically as traders, forced out of the easy profits to be had from selling high-priced imports, began to think more laterally.

      Ending the rum trade (well … points for trying)

      King went into battle against rum importation and trade, but his actions here were mostly counterproductive. He attacked the grog trade by turning away shiploads of spirits and outlawing private distilling. This, contrary to King’s expectation, actually made things worse — cutting back on grog allowed in or made locally only drove the price up, and it didn’t stop people drinking it. The prohibition also encouraged smuggling in contraband and illicit distilling.

      These restrictions meant that if you were a farmer and had, say, a surplus crop of peaches, you weren’t allowed to distil them into liquor, but had to throw them away or feed them to the pigs. This was profoundly irritating.

      LAYING A CLAIM IN VAN DIEMEN’S LAND

      Although Abel Tasman sighted the coast of Tasmania in 1642, he was too modest to call it Tasmania — that name didn’t happen until the 1850s. Instead, he called it Van Diemen’s Land. He didn’t stop for long, though, passing on to other explorations.

British settlement in Van Diemen’s Land began in 1803. Governor King of NSW got worried about the continued interest the pesky French seemed to be showing in the region, and sent off a small party to establish a settlement there. The British Government were getting the same idea, and sent out their own settlement party under David Collins. Soon the towns of Hobart and Launceston were established on the south and north coasts of the island, and Collins got to enjoy the unique experience of being largely ignored by both NSW and Britain. Hardly any ships were sent with further supplies and, as with the first years of NSW, starvation threatened. Collins gave many of the convict and other settlers weapons to go off into the ranges and hunt kangaroos to bring back for food. Unsurprisingly, plenty of the armed roo-hunting convicts decided life out beyond the confines of settlement ranging the bush was preferable to starvation with Collins, and didn’t come back. They took to raiding huts and isolated farms, and soon enough a new word emerged to describe this phenomenon — bushranging. (You can follow some of the individual bushranging exploits in Van Diemen’s Land in Chapter 6.)

      Pardoning convicts

      King instituted a world first in punishment — he began letting convicts go free, conditionally, before their time had expired. This was the first time that what would become known as parole was experimented with anywhere in the world. In NSW, it was called ticket of leave. He also introduced conditional pardons, which were valid in the colony only. King’s rationale for initiating these pardons was again illustrative of the chief priority in these early years: Don’t worry about reforming the blighters, or punishing them either, just save us some money.

      King wanted to get as many convicts off public rations as quickly as possible, and if a convict with skills turned up on the incoming shipload — a carpenter, say, or a builder, or a bookkeeper — or had connections and capital, then King would free him or her with a ticket of leave instantly.

      

In the early years of the colony, no-one cared about making sure convicts were actively punished after they were transported — the prevailing view was let them start earning money and look after themselves. The transportation itself, the act of exile, was seen as the major punishment (until word started leaking back to Britain that convicted felons were getting rich and doing what they wanted). As long as the convicts were transported, kept out of the way for the period of their sentence, and didn’t cost too much, no-one cared too much about how exactly they spent their time Down Under.

      King offered his resignation in 1803 (the stresses of trying to maintain order in an unruly colony seemed to age him considerably) and his resignation was duly accepted.

Fixing up the mess

      Thanks to the efforts (and, sometimes, lack of efforts) of various ambitious convicts, the NSW Corps and Governors Hunter and King, the new colony was starting to thrive. However, some of the methods used to create the new productivity had been, let’s say, questionable. On top of that, the convict and ex-convict populace seemed to be placing an exceedingly low priority on decency and decorum. Thanks to the outraged Evangelical reverends and missionaries based in NSW, word had gotten back to Britain about these questionable methods and the unruly state of affairs. No-one was pleased.

      The British Government thought they needed a man to set everything — and everyone — straight. Instead, they got someone who quickly set about putting everyone’s noses out of joint.

      Choosing Bligh for the job

      The missionaries had their great patron — William Wilberforce — and he was close to Sir Joseph Banks. Banks was someone who’d long liked to think of himself as the special patron of this colony and the settlement he’d advised (refer to Chapter 3). At the same time, Whitehall was complaining how incredibly expensive this convict colony was still proving to be. They contacted Banks and asked him if he could suggest anyone who might be suitable to go out and bring this colony back into line, destroy this terrible rum monopoly that everyone’s talking about, and put some morality back into this depraved sink of fallen humanity.

      ‘Actually, yes’, Banks says (or something like it). ‘Come to think of it, I’ve got just the fellow. A naval protégé of mine. Been in some scrapes, got a bad reputation for having crews mutiny on him (happened twice so far, once the infamous Bounty, the other time closer to home). But for a case like this, it’s probably not such a bad thing — he certainly won’t stand any nonsense. Fellow by the name of Bligh.’

      

Britain had started out with only a vague idea of what sort of shape the colony was going to take. Self-sufficient farming was to be the order of the day for the mass of urban criminals being transported from London.

      In sending William Bligh out to Australia, and in instructing him to crack down on various ad hoc practices that had sprung up in the absence of any workable instructions or assistance coming from Britain, the powers that be were working with a set of mistaken assumptions:

       They didn’t expect a society to have so quickly and spontaneously grown out of the dregs that had been deported. But it had.

       They didn’t expect it to be so modern, or so mercantile, or to consist of anything other than convicts and self-sufficient yeoman (peasant-like farmers). But it was and it did.

       They fully expected it to be a moral cesspit, thanks largely to both ingrained attitudes about the moral depravity of the criminal underclass, and to the bad press the colony had been given by the Evangelicals — Reverends Johnson and Marsden, and missionaries who’d arrived in NSW in the 1790s. But it wasn’t.

      Bligh gets down to business

      In came Bligh. He knew he’d been chosen by Sir Joseph Banks as the man to bring an unruly and disobedient