Leviathan (33 page)

 

Violence is the last resort of the impotent. When influence has faded and power ‘vanished like a dream', we stand naked before fate. Hundreds of armed soldiers marching on a dinner party at Government House and dragging the King's own representative into custody at bayonet point may present, at first blush, an image of absolute power. But in fact it was a manifestation of growing impotence. The officers displayed their unchallenged power when they acted in concert to first drive down the price a visiting ship's captain could demand for his cargo, and then ramped up the price their monopoly charged for the same goods sold into a captive market. The officers demonstrated their lack of power when, unable to manipulate the court system on 25 January, they launched a military revolt the following day. Every decrease of power is an open invitation to violence, as Arendt observes, if only because those who once held power and feel it slithering out of their grasp have always found it difficult to resist the temptation of substituting brute force in its place. Violence however, unlike the exercise of power, needs a justification, and thus the men who launched the coup had to cast about for a reason to explain themselves to London, whose authority they had effectively usurped. They found one. Without so much as a smirk they pleaded that without their armed rebellion there would have been … an armed rebellion.

On 26 January 1808, the town, according to the rebels, trembled on the threshold of a mass revolt which would have been much uglier than their considered actions. At Johnston's court martial his witnesses lined up to paint a picture of an unholy, disorganised bloodswarm rising from the hovels of the common people and sweeping away all in its path as they exploded against William Bligh's frightful tyranny. So inflamed was the population that the corps was merely performing its duty of protecting the Governor by removing him from office. Unfortunately for Johnston, Bligh produced just as many witnesses, of somewhat greater credibility, who described the town as being in a peaceful state, except for some understandable tension amongst those few leading citizens actively involved in the Macarthur crisis. Chief constable Oakes described Sydney on the evening before and the morning of trial as being ‘in peace and quietness; a few people met about the court house door when the officers assembled'. He disagreed violently that the uprising was necessary to restore the peace. ‘Public peace restored!' he choked. ‘I don't know that it was ever broke, unless they were the military who broke it; I never saw anybody else break it and I was a witness to every transaction that took place …' Asked whether there was a ‘a great concourse of people' at the barracks as Johnston was driven towards it, he replied:

Far from rising and demanding the corps overthrow the Governor, Oakes testified that most of the townsfolk were greatly alarmed when the drums and fife beat the order to arms. James Harris, a shipwright working in the cove, swore that, ‘No person, that I could hear, knew the cause of their marching up, nor for an hour after they had been in front of Government House; upwards of two hundred persons were round me, and not one of them knew the cause of it.'

The immediate cause was John Macarthur's inability to lever his inebriated adversary, Judge-Advocate Atkins, from the bench. Macarthur had arrived at the large red-brick courthouse with a quiver full of poison arrows to fire at Atkins, who only just managed to convene the hot, crowded courtroom before the accused leapt to the fore, demanding the judge remove himself from the bench. Atkins tried to shout him down, ruling him out of order, but Captain Kemp, one of six officers arrayed around the bench, told him to ‘shut up and let Macarthur speak'. Pandemonium broke out, with the judge, the accused, the officers and the crowd of onlookers all bursting into argument. Atkins slipped out of his seat, keen to remove himself to a safe distance from his fellow judges while Macarthur lit into him with a stream of abuse from a prepared statement, ending with a rhetorical flourish directed to the six officers.

Atkins suddenly yelled out from across the room that he would have Macarthur committed for contempt, at which Kemp raged, ‘You commit! No Sir! I will commit you to gaol!' Atkins lit off through the mob, forgetting to take his papers with him in his panic. Seizing the indictment, the officers were able for the first time to see the case against Macarthur. Atkins, with the assistance of a convict attorney, George Crossley, had reached into a lucky dip of charges, including seditious libel of the Governor. The indictment read in part:

As Ross Fitzgerald and Mark Hearn point out, one irony was that in compiling the charges, Crossley and Atkins referred to an edition of
Blackstone's Commentaries on the Laws of England
edited by Professor Edward Christian, brother to Fletcher who had sent Bligh over the side of the
Bounty
so many years earlier.

Anthony Fenn Kemp, having seen off Atkins, called the court to order and, with his brother officers, ruled that the defendant's objections to the judge were ‘good and lawful'. A series of notes passed up and down Bridge Street over the next few hours as the officers demanded Bligh replace Atkins and Bligh refused, demanding the return of the judge's papers. At three-thirty in the afternoon the officers wrote again, informing Bligh that Macarthur would not be spending any time in the lock-up, as they had it on good authority that the ‘infamous' George Crossley was conspiring with some other ne'er-do-wells to murder him there. (Admittedly, Crossley was pretty infamous. One story had him placing a fly in the mouth of a corpse so as to claim there was life in the body as he held the corpse's hand to forge a signature to a dodgy will.) Bligh signed an arrest warrant for Macarthur and requested the corps' commander, Major Johnston, crawl out from under his hangover and restore some order to his men. Johnston begged off, citing serious injuries from his little accident following the mess dinner. Bligh spent the evening before the coup hunkered down at Government House. Macarthur attended to his designs for the trial, which went a little awry at nine the next morning when Provost Marshal William Gore caught up with him and executed Bligh's arrest warrant.

The Governor meanwhile, wrote again to Johnston, informing him that his officers seemed to be guilty of treason and thus would have to appear before a panel of magistrates. When Johnston read this letter, he said it ‘occasioned temporary forgetfulness of my bruises, and I immediately set off in a Carriage to the Town' where, at five o'clock in the afternoon, he ordered the gaolkeeper to release John Macarthur. Macarthur returned the favour by writing out a letter imploring Johnston to remove the Governor, ‘as every man's property, liberty and life were … endangered by the alarming state of the colony'. It was signed by about 100 people, mostly well after the rebellion, undermining Johnston's defence that a huge congregation of the leading colonists had been desperately urging him on. Indeed, even his supporters had trouble naming more than a handful of civilians who gathered at the barracks late that afternoon, and all of them were Bligh's implacable enemies.

However, to seize power and then to wield it successfully, without retribution, the rebels needed at least the facade of legitimacy, a fig leaf, however small, behind which to hide their naked ambitions. Nobody really bought it of course. Macquarie was right on the money when he damned the corps on behalf of the King and packed the whole mutinous lot of them back to England. It was a fatal move for many of them. Having been twenty years in the mild climate of Sydney, the first northern winter killed off scores of the soldiers, their wives and children.

Johnston, who had been skilfully inveigled into leading the mutiny, was cashiered by his court martial. He was lucky to escape with his life. Allowed to return to New South Wales, he saw out his few remaining days with an ex-convict wife and a mountain of liquor and died from alcoholic excess. Bligh, the man he deposed, was never really vindicated. Of all the players in the drama of 1808, however, Macarthur himself perhaps best reveals the protean nature of power in Sydney, the way its form constantly shifts and changes. He remained in virtual exile in England for nearly seven years after Johnston's trial, beset by despair, physical pain and encroaching madness, and fearful of being arrested and tried for treason by Macquarie. In September 1817 he was finally reunited with his family in Australia. But he, like his arch-nemesis Bligh, could not surmount his own nature and it was not long before he was dabbling in politics and squabbling with governors once more. By 1821, even as he consolidated financial and political power again, fate schemed to ruin him. As his most generous biographer MH Ellis wrote:

As his plans for the Australian wool industry came to fruition and his long influence of colonial affairs was recognised with a seat on the Legislative Council, his once keen Machiavellian mind began to fail. Madness and paranoia stalked him through the halls of his Camden Park home. Plots, enemies and danger lurked everywhere. He accused his loyal wife, the loving and long-suffering Elizabeth, of adultery, and in 1832 he was finally declared insane. He died on 11 April 1834.

 

David Finney, a freed convict, was bashed to death on a cold day in June 1843. Rain, or the threat of it, lay hard on the city, as it had for most of that month. Thunderheads lumbered like sleepy elephants around a horizon which faded in and out of view as thick smudges of rain scudded low over the plains. A fierce southerly which had been blowing on and off for days moaned through the rigging and snapped the waterlogged canvas of more than seventy ships then resting in port.

Scores of Finney's former colleagues scuttled over the waterfront at the Cove that winter, cutting and laying stone for the new Circular Quay. The ringing of the convicts' picks and hammers was the only significant activity in Sydney at that point, however, as the town slouched through the worst depression in its history. Each day new bankruptcy notices appeared in the
Herald
as the colony's opulent merchants went belly-up with sixty, seventy and eighty thousand pounds worth of debt to their names. The newspapers all carried long reams of adverts for auctions where the canny shopper could pick up boatloads of luxury goods at crippling mark-downs. Shareholders and directors met constantly, fretting on omens and storm warnings which seemed to promise that worse was on the way. The week Finney was killed, the shareholders of the Sydney Banking Company fought through the rain to meet at the banking house on George Street to consider winding up the business.

The bank, which had problems with sticky-fingered staff, had been drawn into the crazed speculative boom of the late 1830s, only to spear-dive into the crash of the early 1840s. This was the same catastrophe which gave Caroline Chisholm her start in migration and charity relief, as thousands of poor British workers arrived in a port where the economy had flatlined. The tangled roots of the crisis ran deep. An insanely successful wool industry had sucked in millions of pounds of British capital during the 1830s. The colonial government spent a million pounds of its own money importing poor families on bounty ships as labour for the pastoral industry. These gross tidal flows of capital through the entrepot of Sydney excited fantastic growth in what we now call the service sector, with enormous fortunes made by auctioneers and banks and the soft-handed professional classes who serviced them. They in turn poured their wealth into luxurious new townhouses and estates, while the men they employed – hundreds of carpenters, stonemasons, blacksmiths and coopers, painters, bricklayers and engineers – all spent their generous wages in new shops and taverns, filling the pockets of publicans and waiters, cooks and coach drivers, tailors, barbers, shoemakers and brewers. These men and their families also needed houses, and hundreds of rough two bedroom humpies mushroomed out of the mud around the city fringes. The streets roared with life and madness and greed and the gritty red dust thrown up by carts and horses racing to the waterfront to deliver teetering mountains of wool and wheat and load up with even larger piles of furniture and fine goods for the interior. Speculators gambled their newly found fortunes buying land and cargo which they simply sold on to the next greedy fool, who again sold it on and on and on. And when the game had spiralled out of everyone's reach it kept spiralling still. Away into the immense, timeless antipodean sky, fuelled by credit which was advanced by banks, controlled by the very same merchants who'd grown so wealthy in a giddy round of commercial poker where the stakes kept soaring long after everyone had run out of chips. The rocket soared up and up until, of course, it burst. A depression in Britain wiped out demand for Australian wool. El Niño's hot breath ruined the harvest for two years. Convict transportation to New South Wales ended after local agitation, taking with it all of the home government's associated spending and, just as importantly, the settlers' supply of cheap labour. The money from land sales which the colonial government had held in local banks was siphoned off, spent on shipping over thousands of migrants, most of whom turned out to be completely unsuited to rural employment. The banks called in their own markers. And the giant, confused, untenable, creaking mountain of debt on which everything rested suddenly slipped and crashed.