History of Australia (1788–1850)

When the Bellona transport came to anchor in Sydney Cove on 16 January 1793, she brought with her the first immigrant free settlers. They were: Thomas Rose, a farmer from Dorset, his wife and four children; he was allowed a grant of 120 acres; Frederic Meredith, who had formerly been at Sydney with HMS Sirius; Thomas Webb (who had also been formerly at Sydney with the Sirius), his wife, and his nephew, Joseph Webb; Edward Powell, who had formerly been at Sydney with the Juliana transport, and who married a free woman after his arrival. Thomas Webb and Edward Powell each received a grant of 80 acres; and Joseph Webb and Frederic Meredith received 60 acres each.

The conditions they had come out under were that they should be provided with a free passage, be furnished with agricultural tools and implements by the Government, have two years' provisions, and have grants of land free of expense. They were likewise to have the labour of a certain number of convicts, who were also to be provided with two years' rations and one year's clothing from the public stores. The land assigned to them was some miles to the westward of Sydney, at a place named by the settlers, "Liberty Plains" on the Country of the Wangal people. It is now the area covered mainly by the suburbs of Strathfield and Homebush.

One in three convicts transported after 1798 was Irish, about a fifth of whom were transported in connection with the political and agrarian disturbances common in Ireland at the time. While the settlers were reasonably well-equipped, little consideration had been given to the skills required to make the colony self-supporting: few of the first-wave convicts had farming or trade experience (nor the soldiers), and the lack of understanding of Australia's seasonal patterns saw initial attempts at farming fail, leaving only what animals and birds the soldiers were able to shoot. The colony nearly starved, and Phillip was forced to send a ship to Batavia (Jakarta) for supplies. Some relief arrived with the Second Fleet in 1790, but life was extremely hard for the first few years of the colony.

The Second Fleet in 1790 brought to Sydney two men who were to play important roles in the colony's future. One was D'Arcy Wentworth, whose son, William Charles, went on to be an explorer, to found Australia's first newspaper and to become a leader of the movement to abolish convict transportation and establish representative government. The other was John Macarthur, a Scottish army officer and founder of the Australian wool industry, which laid the foundations of Australia's future prosperity. Macarthur was a turbulent element: in 1808 he was one of the leaders of the Rum Rebellion against the governor, William Bligh.

Map of Australia and New Zealand 1788–1911

Convicts were usually sentenced to seven or fourteen years' penal servitude, or "for the term of their natural lives". Often these sentences had been commuted from the death sentence, which was technically the punishment for a wide variety of crimes. Upon arrival in a penal colony, convicts would be assigned to various kinds of work. Those with trades were given tasks to fit their skills (stonemasons, for example, were in very high demand) while the unskilled were assigned to work gangs to build roads and do other such tasks. Female convicts were usually assigned as domestic servants to the free settlers, many being forced into prostitution.[19]

Where possible, convicts were assigned to free settlers who would be responsible for feeding and disciplining them; in return for this, the settlers were granted land. This system reduced the workload on the central administration. Those convicts who weren't assigned to settlers were housed at barracks such as the Hyde Park Barracks or the Parramatta Female Factory.

The Castle Hill convict rebellion of 1804

Convict discipline was harsh; convicts who would not work or who disobeyed orders were punished by flogging, being put in stricter confinement (e.g. leg-irons), or being transported to a stricter penal colony. The penal colonies at Port Arthur in Tasmania and Moreton Bay in Queensland, for instance, were stricter than the one at Sydney, and the one at Norfolk Island was strictest of all. Convicts were assigned to work gangs to build roads, buildings, and the like. Female convicts, who made up 20% of the convict population, were usually assigned as domestic help to soldiers. Those convicts who behaved were eventually issued with ticket of leave, which allowed them a certain degree of freedom. Those who saw out their full sentences or were granted a pardon usually remained in Australia as free settlers, and were able to take on convict servants themselves.

In 1789 former convict James Ruse produced the first successful wheat harvest in NSW. He repeated this success in 1790 and, because of the pressing need for food production in the colony, was rewarded by Governor Phillip with the first land grant made in New South Wales. Ruse's 30-acre grant at Rose Hill, near Parramatta, was aptly named 'Experiment Farm'.[20] This was the colony's first successful farming enterprise, and Ruse was soon joined by others. The colony began to grow enough food to support itself, and the standard of living for the residents gradually improved. In 1804 the Castle Hill convict rebellion was led by around 200 escaped, mostly Irish convicts, although it was broken up quickly by the New South Wales Corps. On 26 January 1808, there was a military rebellion against Governor Bligh led by John Macarthur. Following this, Governor Lachlan Macquarie was given a mandate to restore government and discipline in the colony. When he arrived in 1810, he forcibly deported the NSW Corps and brought the 73rd regiment to replace them.

Parramatta in 1812

Sydney Cove, from Dawes Point about 1818

From about 1815 the colony, under the governorship of Lachlan Macquarie, began to grow rapidly as free settlers arrived and new lands were opened up for farming. Despite the long and arduous sea voyage, settlers were attracted by the prospect of making a new life on virtually free Crown land. From the late 1820s settlement was only authorised in the limits of location, known as the Nineteen Counties.

Many settlers occupied land without authority and beyond these authorised settlement limits: they were known as squatters and became the basis of a powerful landowning class, the Squattocracy. As a result of opposition from the labouring and artisan classes, transportation of convicts to Sydney ended in 1840, although it continued in the smaller colonies of Van Diemen's Land (first settled in 1803, later renamed Tasmania) and Moreton Bay (founded 1824, and later renamed Queensland) for a few years more.

The Swan River Settlement (as Western Australia was originally known), centred on Perth, was founded in 1829. The colony suffered from a long-term shortage of labour, and by 1850 local capitalists had succeeded in persuading London to send convicts. (Transportation did not end until 1868.) New Zealand was part of New South Wales until 1840 when it became a separate colony.

Australian colonies in 1846

• 13 May 1787 – The 11 ships of the First Fleet leave Portsmouth under the command of Captain Arthur Phillip. Different accounts give varying numbers of passengers but the fleet consisted of at least 1,350 persons of whom 780 were convicts and 570 were free men, women and children and the number included four companies of marines. About 20% of the convicts were women and the oldest convict was 82. About 50% of the convicts had been tried in Middlesex and most of the rest were tried in the county assizes of Devon, Kent and Sussex
• 18 January 1788 – The First Fleet arrived in Botany Bay but the landing party was not impressed with the site, and moved the fleet to Port Jackson, landing in Sydney Cove on 26 January 1788 (now celebrated as Australia Day).
• 1788 – New South Wales, according to Arthur Phillip's amended Commission dated 25 April 1787, includes "all the islands adjacent in the Pacific Ocean" and running westward to the 135th meridian east. These islands included the current islands of New Zealand, which was administered as part of New South Wales.[lower-alpha 1]
• April 1789 – an outbreak of smallpox decimates local tribes.
• 1790 – the Second Fleet of convicts arrives in Sydney Cove.
• 1791 – Third Fleet of convicts arrives
• 1793 – January: the first free settlers arrive in NSW.
• 1793 – March–April: visit of the expedition led by Alessandro Malaspina.
• 1824 - May: Founding of Brisbane
• 14 June 1825 – the colony of Van Diemen's Land is established in its own right; its name is officially changed to Tasmania on 1 January 1856. The first settlement was made at Risdon, Tasmania on 11 September 1803 when Lt. John Bowen landed with about 50 settlers, crew, soldiers and convicts. The site proved unsuitable and was abandoned in August 1804. Lt.-Col. David Collins finally established a successful settlement at nipaluna on the Country of the Muwinina people and named it Hobart in February 1804 with a party of about 260 people, including 178 convicts. (Collins had previously attempted a settlement in Victoria.) Convict ships were sent from England directly to the colony from 1812 to 1853 and over the 50 years from 1803 to 1853 around 67,000 convicts were transported to Tasmania. About 14,492 were Irish but many of them had been sentenced in English and Scottish courts. Some were also tried locally in other Australian colonies. The Indefatigable brought the first convicts direct from England on 19 October 1812 and by 1820 there were about 2,500 convicts in the colony. By the end of 1833 the number had increased to 14,900 convicts of whom 1864 were females. About 1,448 held ticket of leave, 6,573 were assigned to settlers and 275 were recorded as "absconded or missing". In 1835 there were over 800 convicts working in chain-gangs at the penal station at Port Arthur which operated from 1830 to 1877. Convicts were transferred to Van Diemen's Land from Sydney and, in later years, from 1841 to 1847, from Melbourne. Between 1826 and 1840, there were at least 19 ship loads of convicts sent from Van Diemen's Land to Norfolk Island and at other times they were sent from Norfolk Island to Van Diemen's Land.
• 1825 – New South Wales's western border is extended to 129° E.
• 21 January 1827 – Western Australia was created when a small British settlement was established at King George's Sound (Albany) by Major Edmund Lockyer in order to provide a deterrent to the French presence in the area. On 18 June 1829 the new Swan River Colony was officially proclaimed, with Captain James Stirling as the first Governor. Except for the settlement at King George's Sound, the colony was never really a part of NSW. King George's Sound was handed over in 1831. In 1849 the colony was proclaimed a British penal settlement and the first convicts arrived in 1850. Rottnest Island, previously known by the Nyungar name Wadjemup, off the coast of Perth, became the colony's convict settlement in 1838 and was used for local colonial offenders. Around 9,720 British convicts were sent directly to the colony aboard 43 ships between 1850 and 1868. The convicts were sought by local settlers because of the shortage of labour needed to develop the region. On 9 January 1868, Australia's last convict ship, the Hougoumont brought its final cargo of 269 convicts. Convicts sent to Western Australia were sentenced to terms of 6, 7, 10, 14 and 15 years and some reports suggest that their literacy rate was around 75% as opposed to 50% for those sent to NSW and Tasmania. About a third of the convicts left the Swan River Colony after serving their time.
  

  Charles Fremantle declares Swan River Colony for Great Britain in 1829; the name was changed to Western Australia in 1832.
• 1835 – the Proclamation of Governor Bourke, (10 October 1835) reinforced the doctrine that Australia had been terra nullius when settled by the British in 1788, and that the Crown had obtained beneficial ownership of all the land of New South Wales from that date. The proclamation stated that British subjects could not obtain title over vacant Crown land directly from Aboriginal Australians, effectively quashing the treaty between John Batman and the Aboriginal people of the Port Phillip area.[21][22]

The proclamation of government in South Australia, 1836

• 28 December 1836 – the British province of South Australia was established. In 1842 it became a crown colony and on 22 July 1861 its area was extended westwards to its present boundary and more area was taken from New South Wales. South Australia was never a British convict colony and between 1836 and 1840 about 13,400 immigrants arrived in the area. Between 1841 and 1850, another 24,900 arrived. Some escaped convicts did settle in the area and no doubt a number of ex-convicts moved there from other colonies. On 4 January 1837 Governor Hindmarsh proclaimed that any offenders convicted in South Australia, and being under sentence of transportation, were to be transported to either New South Wales or Van Diemens Land, by the first opportunity.[23]
• 1841 – New Zealand is separated from New South Wales
• 1846 – The colony of North Australia was proclaimed by Letters Patent on 17 February, which included all of New South Wales north of 26° S. Revoked in December 1846.

In the first two years of settlement the Aboriginal people of Sydney, after initial curiosity, mostly avoided the newcomers. In November 1790, 18 months after the smallpox epidemic that had devastated the Aboriginal population, Bennelong led the survivors of several clans into Sydney.[41] Bungaree, a Kuringgai man, joined Matthew Flinders in his circumnavigation of Australia from 1801 to 1803, playing an important role as emissary to the various Indigenous peoples they encountered.[42]

In 1815, Governor Macquarie established a Native Institution to provide elementary education to Aboriginal children, settled 15 Aboriginal families on farms in Sydney and made the first freehold land grant to Aboriginal people at Black Town, west of Sydney. In 1816, he initiated an annual Native Feast at Parramatta which attracted Aboriginal people from as far as the Bathurst plains.[43] However, by the 1820s the Native Institution and Aboriginal farms had failed. Aboriginal people continued to live on vacant waterfront land and on the fringes of the Sydney settlement, adapting traditional practices to the new semi-urban environment.[44][45]

Escalating frontier conflict in the 1820s and 1830s saw colonial governments develop a number of policies aimed at protecting Aboriginal people. Protectors of Aborigines were appointed in South Australia and the Port Phillip District in 1839, and in Western Australia in 1840. While the aim was to extend the protection of British law to Aboriginal people, more often the result was an increase in their criminalisation. Protectors were also responsible for the distribution of rations, delivering elementary education to Aboriginal children, instruction in Christianity and training in occupations useful to the colonists. However, by 1857 the protection offices had been closed due to their cost and failure to meets their goals.[46][47]

Colonial governments established a small number of reserves and encouraged Christian missions which afforded some protection from frontier violence. In 1825, the NSW governor granted 10,000 acres for an Aboriginal mission at Lake Macquarie.[48] In the 1830s and early 1840s there were also missions in the Wellington Valley, Port Phillip and Moreton Bay. The settlement for Aboriginal Tasmanians on Flinders Island operated effectively as a mission under George Robinson from 1835 to 1838.[49]

In more densely settled areas, most Aboriginal people who had lost control of their land lived on reserves and missions, or on the fringes of cities and towns. In pastoral districts the British Waste Land Act of 1848 gave traditional landowners limited rights to live, hunt and gather food on Crown land under pastoral leases. Many Aboriginal groups camped on pastoral stations where Aboriginal men were often employed as shepherds and stockmen. These groups were able to retain a connection with their lands and maintain aspects of their traditional culture.[50]

The liberal/conservative divide of British politics was replicated in Australia.[62] This division was also affected by that between 'emancipists' (former convicts) and 'exclusivists' (land-owning free settlers).[63] The conservatives generally saw representative government as a threat, since they were worried about former convicts voting against their masters.[64] The leader of the conservatives was John Macarthur, a wool producer and a leader of the Rum Rebellion.[65] The conservatives believed themselves to be leading and protecting the economic development of the colony.[66]

William Wentworth established the Australian Patriotic Association (Australia's first political party) in 1835 to demand democratic government for New South Wales. He had petitioned the British government for self-determination in 1827.[1] The reformist attorney general, John Plunkett, sought to apply Enlightenment principles to governance in the colony, pursuing the establishment of equality before the law, first by extending jury rights to emancipists, then by extending legal protections to convicts, assigned servants and Aboriginal peoples. Plunkett twice charged the colonist perpetrators of the Myall Creek massacre of Aboriginal people with murder, resulting in a conviction and his landmark Church Act of 1836 disestablished the Church of England and established legal equality between Anglicans, Catholics, Presbyterians and later Methodists.[67]

Opening of Australia's first elected Parliament in Sydney, 1843

In 1840, the Adelaide City Council and the Sydney City Council were established. Men who possessed 1,000 pounds' worth of property were able to stand for election and wealthy landowners were permitted up to four votes each in elections. Australia's first parliamentary elections were conducted for the New South Wales Legislative Council in 1843, again with voting rights (for males only) tied to property ownership or financial capacity. Voter rights were extended further in New South Wales in 1850 and elections for legislative councils were held in the colonies of Victoria, South Australia and Tasmania.[68]

By the mid-19th century, there was a strong desire for representative and responsible government in the colonies of Australia, later fed by the democratic spirit of the goldfields and the ideas of the great reform movements sweeping Europe, the United States and the British Empire. The end of convict transportation accelerated reform in the 1840s and 1850s. The Australian Colonies Government Act 1850 was a landmark development which granted representative constitutions to New South Wales, Victoria, South Australia and Tasmania, implementing a Privy Council committee recommendation to establish in each of the colonies "a Governor, a Council, and an Assembly".[69] The colonies enthusiastically set about writing constitutions, which produced democratically progressive parliaments—although the constitutions generally maintained the role of the colonial upper houses as representative of social and economic "interests" and all established constitutional monarchies with the British monarch as the symbolic head of state.[70]

Since time immemorial in Australia, Indigenous people had performed the rites and rituals of the animist religion of the Dreamtime. The permanent presence of Christianity in Australia however, came with the arrival of the First Fleet of British convict ships at Sydney in 1788. As a British colony, the predominant Christian denomination was the Church of England, but one tenth of all the convicts who came to Australia on the First Fleet were Catholic, and at least half of them were born in Ireland.

A small proportion of British marines were also Catholic. Some of the Irish convicts had been transported to Australia for political crimes or social rebellion in Ireland, so the authorities were suspicious of the minority religion for the first three decades of settlement.[85] It was therefore the crew of the French explorer La Pérouse who conducted the first Catholic ceremony on Australian soil in 1788—the burial of Father Louis Receveur, a Franciscan friar, who died while the ships were at anchor at Botany Bay, while on a mission to explore the Pacific.[86]

A steeple-chase at Five Dock, 1844. Equestrianism was one of the first organised sports in the country

In early colonial times, Church of England clergy worked closely with the governors. Richard Johnson, Anglican chaplain to the First Fleet, was charged by the governor, Arthur Phillip, with improving "public morality" in the colony, but he was also heavily involved in health and education.[87] The Reverend Samuel Marsden (1765–1838) had magisterial duties, and so was equated with the authorities by the convicts. He became known as the "flogging parson" for the severity of his punishments.[88]

Catholic convicts were compelled to attend Church of England services and their children and orphans were raised by the authorities as Protestant.[89] The first Catholic priest colonists arrived in Australia as convicts in 1800—James Harold, James Dixon, and Peter O'Neill, who had been convicted for "complicity" in the Irish 1798 Rebellion. Fr. Dixon was conditionally emancipated and permitted to celebrate Mass. On 15 May 1803, in vestments made from curtains and with a chalice made of tin he conducted the first Catholic Mass in New South Wales.[89]

The Irish led Castle Hill Rebellion of 1804 alarmed the British authorities and Dixon's permission to celebrate Mass was revoked. Fr. Jeremiah Flynn, an Irish Cistercian, was appointed as Prefect Apostolic of New Holland, and set out from Britain for the colony, uninvited. Watched by authorities, Flynn secretly performed priestly duties before being arrested and deported to London. Reaction to the affair in Britain led to two further priests being allowed to travel to the Colony in 1820: John Joseph Therry and Philip Connolly.[85] The foundation stone for the first St Mary's Cathedral, Sydney was laid on 29 October 1821 by Governor Lachlan Macquarie.

The absence of a Catholic mission in Australia before 1818 reflected the legal disabilities of Catholics in Britain and the difficult position of Ireland within the British Empire. The government therefore endorsed the English Benedictines to lead the early Church in the Colony.[90] The Church of England lost its legal privileges in the Colony of New South Wales by the Church Act of 1836. Drafted by the reformist attorney-general John Plunkett, the Act established legal equality for Anglicans, Catholics and Presbyterians and was later extended to Methodists.[67] Catholic missionary William Ullathorne criticised the convict system, publishing a pamphlet, The Horrors of Transportation Briefly Unfolded to the People, in Britain in 1837.[91] Laywoman Caroline Chisolm did ecumenical work to alleviate the suffering of female migrants.

Sydney's first Catholic Bishop, John Bede Polding requested a community of nuns be sent to the colony and five Irish Sisters of Charity arrived in 1838 to set about pastoral care of convict women and work in schools and hospitals before going on to found their own schools and hospitals.[92] At Polding's request, the Christian Brothers arrived in Sydney in 1843 to assist in schools. Establishing themselves first at Sevenhill, in South Australia in 1848, the Jesuits were the first religious order of priests to enter and establish houses in South Australia, Victoria, Queensland and the Northern Territory, where they established schools and missions.

Watkin Tench, captain-lieutenant of the Royal Marines on the First Fleet, author of seminal works of Australian literature

Initially, education was informal, primarily occurring in the home. However, the administration of the colony, led by Governor Richard Bourke, had adopted the British liberal creed that education was critical for popular participation in politics.[93] Francis Forbes had founded Sydney College in 1830.[94] At the instigation of the then British Prime Minister, the Duke of Wellington, and with the patronage of King William IV, Australia's oldest surviving independent school, The King's School, Parramatta, was founded in 1831 as part of an effort to establish grammar schools in the colony.[95] By 1833, there were around ten Catholic schools in the Australian colonies.[85]

More than a hundred men who practised medicine are known to have been transported to Australia as convicts in the 80 years between 1788 and 1868. Medical qualifications were not standardised at the time, and many would have been unqualified. Many were not criminals in the true sense, but had been transported to New South Wales as a result of youthful, impetuous statements or actions in the wrong quarters. Three practitioners were recognised for their medical abilities and as founders of several institutions that developed as the settlement evolved from a gaol to a colony. D'Arcy Wentworth was a medical student in London who lived beyond his means and after being acquitted of highway robbery was advised to leave Great Britain and serve as assistant surgeon on a convict ship. He arrived in Sydney in 1790. In 1809 he was appointed Principal Surgeon of the colony. An entrepreneur, he acquired much wealth, including as one of the contractors of the notorious Rum Hospital and as a founder of the Bank of New South Wales. William Redfern had taken part in a mutiny and been sentenced to death, but instead was transported in 1801. To prove his surgical skills, which impressed the Governor, he was examined before three doctors and so became Australia's first medical graduate. He laid the foundations of the colony's public health and has been called the "father of Australian medicine". William Bland joined the Royal Navy as a surgeon's mate in 1809. An impetuous man, he threw a glass of water over the ship's purser and reluctantly participated in a pistol duel with the man, whom he killed. He was sentenced to seven years' transportation, arriving in 1814; he was pardoned a year later. In 1818, however, he was sentenced to 12 months' imprisonment after writing insulting satires criticising Governor Macquarie. He was a democrat, favouring radical democracy and land reform, and worked in support of the poor throughout his subsequent political career.[96][97]

Robert Hawker Dowling, a notable early artist famed for his paintings of Aboriginal people, 1860

Australian composers who published musical works in this period include Francis Hartwell Henslowe, Frederick Ellard, Charles Edward Horsley, Isaac Nathan, Stephen Hale Marsh (1805–1888), and Henry Marsh (1824–1885). Some Australian folksongs date to this period.

The house and garden, in Mills Plains, Van Diemen's Land, of prominent early Australian artist John Glover

Among the first true works of Australian literature produced over this period was the accounts of the settlement of Sydney by Watkin Tench, captain-lieutenant of the marines on the First Fleet to arrive in 1788. In 1819, poet, explorer, journalist and politician William Wentworth published the first book written by an Australian: A Statistical, Historical, and Political Description of the Colony of New South Wales and Its Dependent Settlements in Van Diemen's Land, With a Particular Enumeration of the Advantages Which These Colonies Offer for Emigration and Their Superiority in Many Respects Over Those Possessed by the United States,[98] in which he advocated an elected assembly for New South Wales, trial by jury and settlement of Australia by free emigrants rather than convicts. In 1838 The Guardian: a tale by Anna Maria Bunn was published in Sydney. It was the first Australian novel printed and published in mainland Australia and the first Australian novel written by a woman. It is a Gothic romance.[99]

European traditions of Australian theatre also came with the First Fleet, with the first production being performed in 1789 by convicts: The Recruiting Officer by George Farquhar.[100] The Theatre Royal, Hobart, opened in 1837 and it remains the oldest theatre in Australia.[101] The Melbourne Athenaeum is one of the oldest public institutions in Australia, founded in 1839 and it served as library, school of arts and dance hall (and later became Australia's first cinema, screening The Story of the Kelly Gang, the world's first feature film in 1906).[102] The Queen's Theatre, Adelaide opened with Shakespeare in 1841 and is today the oldest theatre on the mainland.[103]