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Australian History Lesson!

RUM
John Macarthur was also a leading member of the Rum Corps, a clique of powerful officers, which bullied successive governors (including William Bligh of bounty fame), and grew rich by controlling much of Sydney’s trade, notably rum. But it’s racketeering was ended in 1810 by a tough new governor named Lachlan Macquary.
 Under Macquarie’s administration the major roads of modern-day Sydney were constructed, some fine public buildings built ( many designed by talented convict architect Francis Greenway) and the foundations for more civil society were laid.

Macquarie also championed the rights of freed convicts, granting them land and appointing several to public office. But this tolerance was not shared by the ‘exclusives’.
These large landholders, middle-class snobs and senior British officials observed a rigid expatriate class system. They shunned ex-prisoners, and scoffed at the distinctive accent and the easy-going manners of these new Australians.

By now word was reaching England that Australia offered cheap land and plenty of work, and adventurous migrants took to the Oceans, in search of their fortunes.
At the same time, the British government transported more and more prisoners.
 
In 1825 a party of soldiers and convicts established a penal settlement in the territory of the Yuggera people, close to modern-day Brisbane. Before long this hot, fertile region attracted free settlers, who were soon busy farming, grazing, logging and mining on Aboriginal land.

SHEEP

In the cooler grasslands of Tasmania, the sheepmen were also thriving, and they too were hungry for new pastures. In 1835 an ambitious young squatter named John Batman sailed to Port Phillip Bay on the mainland. On the banks of the Yarra River, he chose the location for Melbourne, famously announcing that” This is the place for a village,” Batman then worked a staggering swindle: he persuaded local Aborigines to sell’ him their traditional lands ( a whopping 250,000 hectares- roughly 100 sq miles) for a crate of blankets, knives and knick-knacks. Back in Sydney, Governor Burke declared the contract void, not because it was unfair, but because the land officially belonged to the British Crown. Burke proved his point by granting Batman some prime acreage near Geelong.

LAND

Each year, settlers pushed deeper into the Aboriginal territories in serch of pasture and water for their stock These Men became known as squatters ( because they suatted on Aboriginal land’s), on Aboriginal lands), and many held this territory with a gun. In the USA the conflict between settlers and the indigenous people formed the basis for a rich mythology known as ‘the wild west’. But in Australia the conflict has largely passed from white memory, so white historians now disagree about the extent of the violence.

Aborigines still recount how their water holes were poisoned and their people massacred. Some of the bitterest struggles occurred in the remote mining districts of central Queensland. In Tasmania the impact of settlement was so devastating that today, no full blood Aborigines survive all of the island’s Aborigines are mixed heritage.

On the mainland many of the squatters reached truce with the defeated tribes.
In remote regions it became common for Aborigines to take low paid jobs on farms, working on sheep and cattle stations as drovers, rouseabouts, shearers and domestics. In return, those lucky enough to be working on their traditional lands adapted their cultures to their changing circumstances. This arrangement continued in outback pastoral regions until after WWII.

GOLD& REBELLION

Transportation of convicts to eastern Australia ceased in the 1840s This was just as well in 1851 prospectors discovered gold in new South Wales and central Victoria.
The news hit the colonies with the force of a cyclone. From every social class, young men and some adventurous women headed for the diggings. Soon they were caught up in a great rush of prospectors, entertainers, publicans, sly-groggers, prostitutes and quacks, from overseas. In Victoria the British governor was alarmed- both by the way the Victorian class system had been thrown into disarray, and by need to finance law and order o n the goldfields. His solution was to compel all miners to buy an expensive monthly licence, in the hope that the lower orders would. return to their duties in town.

But the lure of gold was too great. In the reckless excitement of the goldfields, the miners initially endured the thuggish troopers who enforced the government licence. After three yars the easy gold at Ballarat was gone, and miners were toiling in deep, water-sodden shafts.
They were now infuriated by the corrupt and brutal system of law that held them in contempt. Under the leadership of a charismatic Irishman named Peter Lalor, they raised the flag of the Souther Cross and swore to defend their rights and liberties.

They armed themselves and gathered inside a rough stockade at Eureka, where they waited for the government to make its move. In the ore-dawn of Sunday December 3 1854, a force of troopers attacked the stockade. In 15 terrifying minutes, they slaughtered 30 miners and lost five soldiers.
The story of the Eureka stockade is often told as a battle for nationhood and democracy as if a true nation must be born out of blood.

But these killings were tragically unnecessary. The eastern colonies were already in the process of establishing democratic parliaments, with the full support of the British authorities. In the 1880s Lalor himself became Speaker of the Victorian Parliament.

The gold rush also attracted boatloads of prospectors from China. The Chinese prospectors endured constant hostility from whites, and were the victims of ugly race riots on the goldfields at Lambing flat ( now called Young) in NSW in 1860-61. Chines precincts developed in the back-streets of Sydney and Melbourne and, by the 1880s, popular literature indulged in tales of Chinese opium dens, dingy gambling parlours and oriental brothels.

But many Chinese went on to establish themselves in business and particularly in market gardening. Today the busy Chinatowns of Sydney and Melbourne, and the ubiquitous Chinese restaurants in country towns, are reminders of Chinese vigour.

Gold and wool brought immense investment and gusto to Melbourne and Sydney. By the 1880s they were stylish modern cities, with gas-lights in the streets, railways and that great new invention: the telegraph. In fact the southern capital became known as “Marvellous Melbourne”, so opulent were it’s theatres, hotels, galleries and fashions.  

Meanwhile, the huge expanses of Queensland were remote from the southern centers of political and business power. It was a tough, raw frontier colony, in which money was made by hard labour- in the mines, in the forests and on cattle stations. In the coastal sugar industry, southern investors grew rich on a plantation economy that exploited Tough Pacific Island  labourers, (known as Kanakas), many of whom had been kidnapped from their Islands.       

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