Leviathan (29 page)

 

Where lies power in the city? With the mayor? In the office of the premier? In the boardrooms of the high towers? With the mandarins of the state? The courts? The wealthiest, most ruthless criminals? The people? At first it may seem simpler to answer in the context of a small transplanted prison colony, but even in the Sydney of canvas tents and mud-daub huts, the governor's supposedly supreme authority was illusory. Long before William Bligh was deposed at gun point, other governors, less troublesome and more reflective than he, had seen their will thwarted and their rule covertly undermined or even brazenly defied. The stomach pains of which Governor Phillip complained in his first despatch were exacerbated for years by his deputy, Major Ross. A quarrelsome, bad-tempered whiner, Ross was deeply unpopular and constantly looking to pick fights and sew discord. Judge-Advocate David Collins wrote of his ‘inexpressible hatred' for the man; whilst Ralph Clark said he was, without doubt, the most disagreeable commander he had ever served under. For Phillip the personality clash was more serious, with Ross seeming to take grim delight in frustrating the Governor's rule at every opportunity. He encouraged his officers to disobey Phillip's commands, stirred up trouble between the marines and the convict guards, complained bitterly of his men sleeping under canvas and then hindered Phillip's efforts to build a barracks for them. Phillip must have danced a quiet jig when Ross returned to England in December of 1791.

Unfortunately his replacement, the friendly, easy-going Francis Grose, proved a lot more malleable but infinitely more destructive. Grose had distinguished himself in the American War of Independence, getting shot to pieces in handsome fashion on two separate occasions. Invalided home, he passed a couple of years as a recruiting officer, eventually being offered Ross's position in Sydney as the head of the proposed New South Wales Corps. The British army then was not the professional force of today and you have to grasp the differences to understand why things went so horribly wrong in 1808. When Grose was offered the chance to raise the regiment, it was as much a speculative venture as a military one. He was, in Ross Fitzgerald's phrase, the proprietor of the corps. He promised to set up the companies without expense to government, put out his shingle and waited for the right sort of chaps to buy their commissions. British officers of that era were not full-time professional warriors. Most were paid for specific periods of service, often for specific missions. Many bought their way into a regiment with a keen eye for the plunder it might bring. A posting in Sydney, on the edge of a continent ripe for the plucking and with a guaranteed supply of virtual slave labourers, appealed to these struggling middle class types whose advancement at home was severely curtailed by their want of filthy rich ancestors. Thus they often arrived in Sydney deeply in debt and on the lookout for a piece of the action.

And action they found, due to a woeful lack of foresight in setting up the convict outpost. The problem, as SJ Butlin so succinctly put it, was that the equipment of the First Fleet did not include money. Nobody thought to fold a bit of cash in amongst the thousands of tonnes of gear crammed into those groaning wooden tubs. Or, as Phillip himself wrote, ‘this country has no treasury'. He had been given authority to buy livestock and supplies en route, with bills drawn on the British Treasury, but these were gross and unwieldy implements for dealing with smaller transactions. The architects of the settlement had not considered what would happen when it evolved into something other than a prison farm with a small, strictly controlled command economy. Money wasn't needed in prison, went the reasoning, therefore it had no place in Sydney.

In reality, of course, prisons are thriving Petri dishes of economic activity, with all manner of goods and services bartered between inmates and captors. Tea, tobacco, dry socks and blowjobs all had value in convict Sydney and could be traded for something as coarse as a mug of home-brewed rotgut or as refined as a love letter. The multiskilled felon, Thomas Barrett, who minted those near perfect replica coins out of melted-down belt buckles and pewter spoons during the fleet's stopover in Rio, knew more about the human condition than the high ministers who consigned him to exile. He understood that people have needs and desires, which they will pay to have satisfied, no matter how far from home they are or how low they have fallen. Trade is inevitable. But Phillip was not equipped for it and so substitutes for a local currency had to be found.

Some small sums were dug out of the pockets of convicts and marines – forgotten pennies and shillings, the sort of low-grade travel shrapnel anyone who's been overseas would be familiar with. Butlin also argues that a few of the craftier transportees probably managed to smuggle some of their ill-gotten booty into the settlement. Traders, explorers and military expeditions also called into the harbour from time to time, leaving deposits of coinage and small banknotes. So much global small change had accumulated by 1800 that Governor King was moved to assign purely local values to the town's stockpile of guineas, gold mohurs, ducats, pagodas, rupees, Spanish dollars and Dutch guilders. Large batches of foreign
geld
tended to leak out of the colony quickly, however, spent on supplies purchased from visiting ships. Four and a half thousand Spanish dollars, sent to Sydney after Phillip complained to London of his cash shortage in November 1788, were soon dissipated. As colourful and varied as the colony's supply of early coinage was, it remained hopelessly inadequate, forcing the settlers to rely on more primitive, makeshift arrangements.

The first of these – promissory notes – were a simple, if occasionally problematic alternative. Lacking banknotes, convicts, soldiers and free settlers merely shrugged and wrote their own. These notes, which were nothing more than promises to pay for a product or service, passed from hand to hand as often as a modern banknote. They were transferable, negotiable IOUs, written by everyone from the meanest lag to the governors themselves, for debts of three pence up to hundreds of pounds. But in a society of forgers, con men and thieves of course, they often changed hands at a heavy discount. Written on any scrap of paper, often torn, smudged and glued back together, they were a highly dubious system of exchange, because anyone with a quill could literally print their own money. Some printed their notes in very fine ink on very flimsy paper, hoping never to have to make good on their promise. Many were forged over the names of the colony's leading lights. In 1799 Chapman Morris was sentenced to death for erasing a letter from James Williamson and writing in a promise to pay £23 above the signature. Butlin writes that the ready acceptance of torn notes, pasted back together, led a number of rogues to rip up notes from the same person and tack them together to create bills of greater value than those originally issued. ‘Even when individuals had printed forms stamped with their initials to ensure forgery of at least no other name, notes with these initials cut away were accepted in spite of the note itself advertising forgery.' Vexed by the number of worthless, grubby, fading notes which constantly reeled through the nano-economy of early Sydney, Governor King repeatedly tried and failed to remove them from circulation. But even the courts ignored his orders to pay the private notes no heed, and they were still circulating when Macquarie sailed for England nearly twenty years later.

Many of the notes promised to pay a certain amount of money, but just as many promised to pay in wheat or other goods, indicating another important form of exchange in this rickety, jury-rigged marketplace – barter. And foremost amongst the many items which might be bartered was rum, a catch-all name which meant any sort of spirituous liquor, from fine French brandies to mouldy bladders of toxic moonshine. Rum's narcotic embrace offered the surest escape from the burdens of a life lived so hard that tea and sugar were considered a luxurious indulgence, and it remained a preferred method of payment to labourers for up to forty years. It was not the only method of payment of course. Sometimes, if only rarely, money itself was used. More often employers combined several modes of remuneration, with tea, sugar, wheat, meat, clothing and rum all being common. When Captain Anthony Fenn Kemp was paymaster of the New South Wales Corps, he refused to pay his men in cash, setting up a store in town and fobbing them off with whatever useless crud he had managed to lay in since last payday. If some insolent private demurred, perhaps not understanding the advantages of being paid a month's wages in the form of a grossly overpriced coil of rope or some old hessian sacks, the good captain would scream abuse at him until he saw the error of his ways. In one recorded instance he turned on one upstart in a furious rage, yelling that he was ‘a damned saucy, mutinous rogue' and threatening ‘to have him flogged for his impertinence. Against this bullying the soldier had no redress; he was forced to take his pay and dispose of the goods as best he could.' Most workers were only too happy to take their wages in kind, however, creating a serious problem for the governors, a business opportunity for the officers, and a fault line in the power structure of the town which would crack wide open in 1808.

Every governor from Phillip to Macquarie railed against the rum trade and its attendant evils, and all failed to suppress it. When Phillip sailed from Sydney for the last time he made a gift of two ewes belonging to the Crown to every settler, on the condition that they be retained and used to increase the colony's flock. No sooner was he out of the heads than his former subjects were rushing to trade in their windfall for grog. Every settler, bar one, was said to have sold their ewes ‘at five gallons of spirit a head' to the officers of the corps. Governor Hunter, whose complaints about the spirit trade and widespread drunkenness were as impotent as they were frequent, nonetheless recognised the value of a tipple in motivating an otherwise dozy workforce. Much work which cold hard cash itself could not purchase would be done by labourers for a small tot of rum, he advised London. Behind the success of so many officers' farms lay a large body of convicts or emancipists who worked in their spare time simply to procure such delicacies as tea, sugar or rum, and Hunter believed that the public accounts would benefit greatly and more satisfaction be ‘given to the workmen were we in possession of those little luxuries so much sought after'.

The unfortunate episode with Phillip's ewes however, shows that the central role of rum in the economy worked to benefit some more than others. In
British Imperialism and Australia
, Brian Fitzpatrick describes the system of paying farmers and labourers in grog as being ‘highly profitable to perhaps one in two hundred of the colonial population and oppressive or ruinous to the one hundred and ninety-nine'. In June 1796 Hunter, who had tried to regulate the spirit trade, found it necessary to alter his previous order licensing a small number of operators to run retail liquor stores, proclaiming that far from solving the problem he found ‘nothing but drunkenness and idleness among every part of the settlement'. He banned the payment of spirits for grain and reinforced his ban on unlicensed grog merchants.

Governor Bligh, who cared little for alcohol himself, was in no doubt about its evils.

As was the case when Government House tried to regulate the physical growth of the city, proclamations and orders designed to suppress the growth in spirit trading failed in large part because the people charged with enforcing the rules – the officer class – were the same ones who profited from undermining them. Bligh for one was quick to sort out the villains and victims of the trade.

In a sense the conflict was inevitable. Marooned on the far side of the planet, with no way of knowing whether London had remembered to send out desperately needed supplies – and, if it had, whether those vessels had survived the hazardous voyage – the colony was forced to turn to private initiative to survive. If the state was unable to guarantee the delivery of supplies, individuals would have to take its place. Those individuals, as Butlin points out, would have to be free, with access to capital, worthy of credit and with some education and organising ability. They would need to combine to defeat the monopoly of ships' captains who called into the starving settlement to dangle tantalising cargoes of food and drink before famished customers. There was only one group who fulfilled all of these requirements – the officers of the corps. They had access to reserves of foreign exchange through bills drawn on the Treasury in London for their salaries. They controlled the court system. Under Grose they effectively administered land grants and the supply of labour. And of course not to be forgotten, in the background, marching and drilling and raising clouds of red dust on the parade ground which looked down over the town, were the hundreds of well-armed men they commanded.

The solidarity of the corps in the face of outside challenges should not be underestimated. They sent a clear message to everyone that crossing one member of the corps meant crossing all of them. In their willingness to stand by their rough-headed troops and see off all comers the gentlemen of the New South Wales Corps at times resembled nothing so much as a latter-day chapter of drunken Hell's Angels. In the first week of February 1796, for instance, the civilian populace of the town were given reason to fear for their lives and property after a master carpenter named John Baughan had a set-to with the military. Baughan and some private were nursing a feud from having previously worked together. Whilst he was supposed to be guarding a storehouse, the soldier, who knew Baughan to be working in a building nearby, lay down his rifle and wandered over to chat with a friend standing outside. The subject was Baughan, the conversation was loud and the language would have made an old sailor blush. Baughan, too smart to be drawn into an open confrontation, crept out the back of the house, saw the soldier without his weapon and quietly snuck away to retrieve it himself. He carried the musket off to the sergeant of the guard who had no choice but to put the private on report.