Alex McDermott - Australian History For Dummies

Suddenly convicts were working incredibly hard, often putting in overtime to get tasks done. Not having had much chance to get alcohol since they’d left London, now they went after it with a zest that was almost awe-inspiring. One observer who saw it (David Collins, the future founding governor of Van Diemen’s Land) said that ‘the passion for liquor was so predominant among the people that it operated like a mania’.

Major Grose reported back to London, professing great wonderment: ‘Whether their efforts result from the novelty of the business, or the advantages they promise themselves, I cannot say, but their exertions are really astonishing’. What Grose neglected to mention, of course, was the crucial and illicit trigger for this explosion of activity.

The convicts kept coming from Britain, so the NSW Corps officers also had a great number of convicts to use. Grose and the Inspector of Public Works, John Macarthur, ensured that the officers were given about ten convicts each. The Home Office wrote to Grose, specifically instructing him that the government would pay for only two convicts per officer for a period of two years, adding that spirits not be sold to convicts (word had started getting back). But the convicts would drink, and alcohol was one of the biggest motivators that had been found to get them to work. So Grose completely ignored these instructions. And a certain degree of chaotic and riotous abandonment ensured.

With proper order and proper morality largely ignored in favour of what you could call a culture of highly productive alcoholism, the colony was no longer an economic basket case, limping along at or below subsistence level. The colony had taken off like a rocket, and was starting to make a lot of people a lot of money very quickly — but not everyone was happy with the trajectory of the rocket.

Word was beginning to get back to London: NSW was no place of punishment, and was out of control, said the alarmed reports. Many of the reports were written by furious Evangelicals — religious Anglican ministers (such as Reverend Johnson and Reverend Samuel Marsden) who had arrived in the colony expecting to be respected as pillars of the establishment order, only to find themselves largely ignored by the convicts, and by the common soldiers and the officer Corps as well.

Early NSW was anything but pious. Neither the convicts, nor the common soldiery, nor many of the officers, military or civil, set any real store on forswearing their preferred pursuits — swearing, gambling, drinking and fornicating. In this they were broadly reflective of the habits and pursuits of the bulk of Georgian England, but in NSW the established authorities and arbiters of proper morality held far less sway.

The Evangelicals were just launching their great moral revival at this time in late Georgian Britain; its chief exponent, William Wilberforce, experienced his ‘conversion’ at about the same time as the First Fleet was sailing. The Evangelists’ deep sense was that England had ‘fallen’ from the state of religious zeal of the previous century, and been seduced and corrupted by the luxuries and excesses that modern life offered. They wanted to ‘reclaim’ modern Britain from the various excesses and debaucheries that the 18th century had become famous for. The Evangelicals had some really positive social reform to their credit — most notably, the abolition of slavery in Britain — but they had their work cut out for them in the new colony of NSW.

Under the tutelage, direct and indirect, of Wilberforce, who was a friend of Prime Minister William Pitt and Sir Joseph Banks (a lot more about Banks in Chapter 3), clergymen of Evangelical bent were sent out to the new settlement.

Once in NSW, Reverend Johnson railed against the laxness of the Corps when it came to enforcing piety, and for allowing convicts to throw ‘aside all regard or reverence for the Sabbath Day, and to render all public solemn worship utterly contemptible’. Convicts were paid to work on Sundays. Other convicts were left to pretty much do whatever they wanted.

While Johnson was conducting services, he claimed the bulk of convicts ‘were either asleep in their hammocks or sitting in their huts, or otherwise gone out to work for officers or other individuals’. Just as bad, ‘spiritous liquor was the most general article and mode of payment for such extra labour, and hence in the evening the whole camp has been nothing else, often, but a scene of intoxication, riots, disturbances, etc’. Evangelical missionaries escaping from threatened violence in Tahiti in 1799, according to Johnson, found in the colony of NSW ‘Adultery, Fornication, Theft, Drunkenness, Extortion, Violence and Uncleanness of every kind’.

These expressions of horror and outrage were generally applied by Evangelicals to the various ‘unclaimed’ parts of England itself — whether it was the ‘debased’ aristocrats or the ‘lower orders’ then chiefly congregating in London. Yes, the people in NSW liked to whore, gamble, swear and drink, often to excess — but that didn’t mark them out as particularly different from a lot of people in the Georgian era.

The Evangelical reverends in NSW were aghast at the lack of morality in the new colony, and all this righteous anger was reported back to William Wilberforce, who was the chief exponent of the Evangelical movement. The reports soon spread, with the Duke of Portland in Whitehall claiming, ‘Great evils have arisen from the unrestrained importation of spiritous liquors into our said settlement … whereby both the settlers and convicts have been induced to barter and exchange their live stock and other necessary articles for the said spirits to their particular loss and detriment’. In response, the next governor, John Hunter, arrived in NSW in 1795 with clear instructions from the Duke: Clean the place up.

Yet on his arrival in the settlement, Hunter — himself a deeply religious Christian and sympathetic to the Evangelicals — raved about the place. Having been in NSW with Governor Phillip at the beginning of white settlement, he was staggered that so much progress had been made in so little time.

Hunter wrote to the Duke of Portland in London describing the ‘very great success’ that individual farmers had had in growing grain and breeding livestock. True, Hunter conceded a little reluctantly, it was self-interest rather than the public good that motivated everyone. Yet ‘it certainly succeeds better with them than in the hands of Government’. And he also approved of the rum incentive payments — initially, at least. ‘Much work will be done by labourers, artificers and others for a small reward in this article, and (without any injury to health) which money could not purchase.’