The long, long goodbye: Cameron or Miliband?

It’s 29 days until the General Election but it does seem as if the campaign has been going on in earnest since the beginning of the year.  And what a lack-lustre campaign it has been so far.  The essence of the arguments from the three major UK parties seems to be: ‘don’t elect Labour, let us finish the economic job we’ve already started’, ‘we’ll basically continue with the Conservative austerity measures but do it a little more slowly and with more humanity’ and ‘if you elect us and we have another coalition government, we can prevent the excesses of the other parties’.  With the Conservatives focussing on the economy, Labour on the NHS and the Lib-Dems, well focusing on surviving I suspect, there is really little new in what has been promised so far…that is if you believe politicians’ promises in the first place.  Labour bangs on about creeping privatisation in the NHS forgetting that there was more privatisation before 2010 than after.  The Conservatives keep talking about how poor Miliband would be as Prime Minister and they are perhaps right though, as Tony Blair pointed out yesterday in a passionate and well-argued defence of the EU, he did have the courage to resist calls from within his own party to commit himself to a referendum on Europe.  The Lib-Dems’ message seems to be, please don’t punish us for being in the coalition.  Given this negative campaigning, it’s hardly surprising that the polls have moved little since the campaign began with both Labour and the Conservatives neck and neck around 33 per cent.

Yes, it’s breakfast at Tiffany’s!

This election is being spun as the most important election for a generation—aren’t all elections—but the indications seem to be that there will be a hung parliament.  Neither Conservative nor Labour have yet made the electoral breakthrough suggesting that they will form a majority government.  But what is significant is that Labour look like being massacred in Scotland by the SNP and their position in Wales, though perhaps less precarious, is coming under sustained fire from Plaid Cymru.  If the polls are right, then it is unlikely that Labour could form a majority government or, in fact, end up being the largest party in the new parliament.  It simply looks tired in Scotland where its natural right to rule had been increasingly questioned since the mid-2000s while in Wales it has failed to deliver effective government in the National Assembly particularly in the NHS and education.  The first past the post system makes it difficult for the Greens and UKIP to make electoral headway but any MPS at all could make them influential in a hung parliament.  It is, however, UKIP that is making heavy weather of the election largely because it needs the oxygen of publicity to get its message across and  during an election that is diluted.  The only way it can grab the headlines—and it has failed to do so—is to make outlandish claims that may well appeal to their core voters but are liable to put everyone else off.

So two weeks in to the campaign proper, the Conservatives and Labour are constantly recycling their rather worn mantra, the Lib-Dems are praying for forgiveness for supporting an increase in tuition fees while the smaller parties are desperately seeking votes to give them a say in a hung parliament.  So little new there then.

Licensing Gold

Regulations for gold licenses were issued on 18 August.[1] The problem was that La Trobe lacked sufficient manpower to make them effective. [2] From 1 September 1851, all diggers had to pay 30 shillings a month (the equivalent of a week’s wages) for a license whether they were successful or not or risk prosecution. He hoped that this would provide sufficient territorial revenue to maintain services such as road-building and law and order, and limit those thinking of leaving their regular employment to try their luck on the diggings. Gold Commissioners were appointed, a process not completed until December, to police the license system and to defuse any disputes on the goldfields. Nicholas Fenwick, Commissioner of Crown Lands and a magistrate was appointed on 18 August to apply the regulations and issue licenses in the settled district around Melbourne. [3] Some diggers were able to pay the fee but many more were not and it created widespread resentment. La Trobe was described by the Geelong Advertiser as ‘our Victorian Czar’ imposing an unrealistic tax before any goldfield had shown a profit. [4] La Trobe thought he was acting in an appropriate and fair-minded manner by imposing the rule of law equally on all diggers. His was a desperate approach to the problem of maintaining government in Victoria and resulted in growing opposition.

Why did the gold license prove so unpopular in Victoria? The government needed additional revenue to police and administer the goldfields and many diggers accepted that some taxation was necessary to provide services and protection. A license to mine would in principle have had some deterrent effect on the disruption to the colonial labour market by providing a small barrier to entry into the industry and paid before any income could be earned in the industry. As it was paid monthly, it also provided inducement to leave mining where incomes were modest. Whatever the intention behind the license fee, it was considered unjust. It was a direct tax without legislative sanction. In the mid-nineteenth century, direct taxation was still uncommon and resistance to direct taxes like the poll tax had entered folk memory. The level of the fee was also a major source of resistance since only a minority of diggers were, as yet, paying their way. Was this an attempt to keep the poor from seeking their fortunes, many angrily retorted? Finally, some goldfield officials were tactless and arbitrary setting a precedent for events in 1854. In its haste to control the gold rushes, the Government had neither justified its actions (it was not to do so for two years) nor considered more acceptable alternatives.

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[1] This is evident in La Trobe to Earl Grey, 10 October 1851, ‘Further Papers relative to the Recent Discovery of Gold in Australia’, Parliamentary Papers, Vol. lxiv, 1852-3, pp. 42-43. See ‘Licenses to Dig and Search for Gold’, Argus, 21 August 1851, p. 2.

[2] Goss, Alan, Charles Joseph La Trobe, (Melbourne University Press), 1956, pp. 103-126; Reilly, Dianne, ‘“Duties of No Ordinary Difficulty”: Charles Joseph La Trobe and the Goldfields Administration’, Victorian Historical Journal, Vol. 72, (1 & 2), (2001), pp. 173-186, 181-201, and ibid, Drury, Dianne Reilly, La Trobe, pp. 216-231, are useful studies of La Trobe’s problems.

[3] Argus, 21 August 1851, p. 2.

[4] Geelong Advertiser, 26 August 1851.

Is the ‘Westminster system’ discredited? My thousandth post!

Looking back over the posts I’ve written over the last few years it seems appropriate, that having spent a great deal of time writing about the nature of and reasons for radical change in Britain, Canada and Australia and about how women and men struggled to get their voice heard by the political establishment, my thousandth post should be on the challenge facing contemporary British politics.  Nicola Sturgeon, perhaps the most thoughtful of the party leaders—and I mean this as a compliment-- today promised that her party would reform the discredited ‘Westminster system’ to meet the demands of ‘ordinary people’ across the UK. Though her agenda remains Scottish independence, she has articulated something that is blindingly obvious to anyone beyond the ‘Westminster village’—the current Westminster system is in need of radical reform.  Since devolution was introduced in Scotland and Wales in 1998, the major political parties have failed to address this issue.  Yes, they’ve tinkered round the edges but this has been largely cosmetic rather than ‘real change’.

There have been moves on House of Lords reform but they appear to have stuttered to a halt.  Attempts at electoral reform and changing constituency boundaries foundered with the proportional representation referendum and party politics in Parliament.  Belatedly, the Conservatives have come to the conclusion that things like the NHS and local government cannot be managed from Westminster.  But, and it was exemplified on the debate on the use of the secret ballot in relation to the Speaker, many politicians do not recognise that what they do appears petty, corrupt and out-of-touch with the lives of ordinary people.  Insulated in their ‘bubble’, they only emerge when they need your vote and even then tardily if it’s a ‘safe’ seat.  Is the system ‘discredited’ in the eyes of many voters?  Well, if voter turnout is a good indicator, and I think it is, the falling number of people who bother to vote in any elections—local, national or European—makes clear just what people think of politicians.  Now, politicians have never been the most popular of individuals but in the last decade there has been a shift from indifference to what politicians do to one of visceral dislike.  They give the impression of a disregard for the electorate, in the public imagination borne out by the expenses scandal, and complete unawareness of the needs and plight of their fellow citizens.  We increasingly have a career cadre of politicians in all of the major parties whose experience of work is limited to being research assistants or running their own business, who have been educated in high-flying public or state schools and universities and whose motivation appears less concerned with helping the public than with helping themselves. 

Although there is a crying need to reform our public institutions—and I’m not just talking about the political ones—we should be clear that institutions are not in themselves the cause of the discredited system, it’s the people who inhabit and run them and it’s this as much as anything that explains why reform has not taken place.  Those within any political system have a marked unwillingness to reform it: it might affect them.  Take the House of Lords as an example.  Getting rid of the ‘hereditaries’ or at least most of them, was not a real problem as their position was and is indefensible in a democratic system but turning it into an elected House now that’s another matter.  Labour may call for this but, it appears, with little enthusiasm to push the matter through—it had thirteen years to do so and failed.  Having the ‘gift’ of being able to appoint life peers is, whatever your party, an important tool for managing Parliament.  Am I surprised that calls for a federal UK, something discussed at length in the aftermath of the Scottish referendum, have declined from an overwhelming shout to a quiet whimper in the past months?  Not really even though it is an obvious solution to the growing crisis in the constitutional legitimacy of government.  Whether it’s further devolution, Britain’s place in the European Union, austerity politics or the NHS, the fires of discordance are being stoked by politicians who want to scare us into voting for them because, as far as they’re concerned, everything will be fine if you elect their party into power.  The point, and Nicola Sturgeon recognises this, is that it won’t and before long the public, not easily roused from its constitutional apathy, will assert its democratic voice.

And the official campaign hasn’t started yet.

The most recent BBC Poll of Polls puts both Conservative and Labour on 34 per cent with UKIP on 14 per cent, the Liberal Democrats on 8 per cent and the Greens on 5 per cent.  The narrowness or non-existence of a Labour lead before the campaign proper gets under way is confirmed across all of the major polls with a lead not exceeding 3 per cent.  Generally it is expected that, where a government is unpopular the opposition has a good lead as it goes into the campaign and that, as the incumbent party often improves its position during the campaign, it is often a case of the opposition trying to hang on to its lead up to Election Day.  In the more volatile, less two party oriented nature of British politics today, there seems to be less interest in the election itself than on the possible variations of what all the pundits believe will be a hung parliament and on the ‘honest’ but politically inept admission by the Prime Minister that he will only serve for one more term should he be elected spawning a feeding frenzy in the ‘Westminster village’ about his successor.  This is going to be an intensely negative campaign by the coalition parties and Labour.  The basic premise appears to be…we’ve had the pain of five years of austerity and, for the Conservatives, its a plea to ‘let us finish the job’ while from Labour ‘there are more cuts to come but we’d do it more slowly’.  So little innovative political thinking here.

If the assumption of a hung parliament is correct, and it’s far from clear whether this will be the case, the question is what form government will take beyond May.  Did the coalition represent the natural 'next step' in party dealignment and the evolution of multi-party politics? Was coalition in practice a historic innovation in itself, or did the essential principles of Britain's uncodified constitution remain untroubled?  The horse-trading has already begun.  Let’s assume that Labour is the biggest party but without an overall majority—likely given its parlous position in Scotland if the polls are right—it’s already ruled out a coalition with the SNP but a week is a long time in politics and the realities of its position after May may change things.  The problem with the SNP is that its agenda is clear—independence—and Mr Salmond has already said that he could bring down the government if Labour joined in, with David Cameron ‘locked out’. The Conservatives accused him of ‘trying to sabotage the democratic will of the British people’ though in reality this means the ‘English people’.  It is part of their continuing attempt to portray Mr Miliband as a weak leader whose strings are being pulled by Mr Salmond but it could well precipitate further moves towards Scottish independence.  The question is whether English voters—a demographic majority of the UK--would be prepared to accept Scottish voters and SNP MPs gaining benefits for Scotland at the expense of England, a case of the historical boot being on the other foot. 

The problem for the Conservatives if they form the largest party is equally fraught.  Perhaps the easiest option would be a continuation of the coalition with the Liberal Democrats.  Although it is likely that there will be fewer Lib Dem MPs—they will take the brunt of voter dissatisfaction with the coalition—the existing coalition has probably worked better than many people initially thought and the need for their support may well have blunted some of the more ideological policies of the Conservatives—well at least that’s the Lib Dem narrative.  It is also likely that the Conservative would have the support of UKIP, the only way it will get the referendum it craves, and also support from the more conservative Northern Ireland parties.  Although in the past, Irish MPs have determined whether a minority government could govern effectively, today the question is not whether this is possible—there’s no constitutional obstacle—but whether it would be acceptable to the electorate.  The issue is that without a federal constitutional structure that could legitimate this type of coalition, it appears simply as a pragmatic and somewhat crude way of achieving power.  But then this is a consequence of a multi-party state where small parties can punch above their numerical weight.

Victoria copes with gold, 1851

Until 1846, La Trobe’s government of Port Phillip proved effective and was the result of his close working relationship with Sir George Gipps and the clear instructions he received. Fitzroy’s approach was different as he expected his subordinates to act on their own initiative and did not maintain the same level of contact with La Trobe. Fitzroy was supported by his experienced Colonial Secretary, Deas Thomson who knew La Trobe well recognising that he preferred ‘to avoid taking responsibility’ with ‘his constant reference to the Head of the Government on points which he ought to settle at his discretion’, a major weakness in his management style. [1] This reticence would undoubtedly have posed a problem for effective governance in Victoria once it was separated from NSW but it was magnified by the discovery of gold.[2] Without clear instructions La Trobe floundered.

Initially, the discovery of gold created economic problems in Victoria. John Sherer reported:

No wonder that the small shop keeper was shutting up and abandoning his counter; no wonder that seamen were running away from their ships, printers from their type, doctors from their drugs. In fact everything has assumed a revolutionary character. [3]

Charles La Trobe

Wages doubled between 1851 and 1853 but even with these inflated rates it was difficult to find and keep workers while surface gold was plentiful. Squatters had considerable difficulty keeping their sheep stations going with both the shortage and cost of labour. Farmers were badly affected haemorrhaging workers though the harvest in January 1852 was saved and increased demand saw higher prices paid for the grain produced. However, continued labour shortages made profitable wheat-farming difficult for the next two years resulting in the bulk import of cheap flour. The few dairy farmers and vegetable-growers did well but between 1851 and 1853 the land under cultivation fell by 40 per cent. In the long run, however, during the 1850s the pastoral industry was extremely prosperous as wool prices rose and the diggers provided a huge new market for meat.

As people flocked to the diggings, Melbourne was deserted and La Trobe commented in October that of Melbourne’s 25,000 population ‘not one man is left’; 80 per cent of the police force had resigned and his civil servants deserted their posts.

Within the last three weeks the towns of Melbourne and Geelong and their large suburbs have been in appearance almost emptied of many classes of their male inhabitants…leaving their employers and their wives and families to take care of themselves…[4]

Collins Street, Melbourne, 1851

Crime and poverty were rampant though La Trobe believed this was embroidered by the press. [5] In January 1852, of 35 ships in Melbourne, only three had full crews; 417 of their total crews of 816 men had deserted. [6] The city was described by an unsympathetic Sydney Morning Herald in very critical terms:

I must say that a worse regulated, worse governed, worse drained, worse lighted, worse watered town of note is not on the face of the globe…in a word, nowhere in the southern hemisphere does chaos reign so triumphant as in Melbourne. [7]

Experiences did, however, vary and other writers depicted the fledgling city in a more positive light. [8]

The discovery of gold exposed La Trobe’s limitations. In the twelve years he had been in the colony, its population had increased from 11,738 in 1841 to 77,345 in 1851 but by 1854 it reached 236,776. This derailed his plans for the development of the colony and created unstable conditions for his remaining months in Australia. He mistrusted social disorder and democracy and found the social instability created by the discovery of gold perplexing. Yet, he recognised in early July 1851, that his government of the goldfields must meet needs as they arose. [9] With increasing population and growing demands on the barely developed infrastructure, government expenditure dramatically increased and La Trobe readily adopted the licensing system already in place on the NSW goldfields to bring in revenue.[10]

Melbourne City, 1851

The choice of candidates on 15 July for the Executive Council proved disastrous in conditions that would have tested even the most effective colonial administration. [11] Captain William Lonsdale was reluctantly appointed Colonial Secretary, a post he held until 1853 and for which he recognised he was entirely unfitted. [12] Alastair McKenzie, the Colonial Treasurer and James Cassell, the Collector of Customs proved equally ineffective. The final place went to William Stawell, Attorney-General from 1851 to 1857 and the most able individual on the Council on whom La Trobe especially relied. [13] The Argus was effusive in its support for Stawell while suggesting: ‘Would that every other office of the new Government were as adequately filled!’ [14] Though he considered himself a liberal in politics, he was seen by many as impulsive and intolerant of opposition. La Trobe only nominated Lonsdale and Stawell to the Legislative Council; Cassell and McKenzie were ignored. This meant that the remaining three Government representatives were obliged to defend policies that they played no part in formulating. Serle concluded that: ‘indecisive leadership, inexperience and the narrow social sympathies which all displayed were quickly to discredit them.’ [15] La Trobe desperately needed money to fund additional policing, but found his hands tied by a legislature dominated by squatters who loathed the miners since the stampede of workers to the gold fields threatened their livelihoods.

Elections for the Legislative Council took place in September though it did not meet until early November 1851.[16] Government nominees and the squatters’ representatives elected under a restricted franchise were supposed to control the Council. However, elected members were generally unsympathetic to La Trobe, the Executive Council and official nominees but lacked the organisation, discipline or clearly expressed policies necessary for effective opposition. Melbourne [17] elected the most radical members; Geelong [18] and the country towns were represented by moderate members with democratic leanings, while the country electorates were mostly conservative. There was a group of businessmen from Melbourne, North and South Bourke [19] and Geelong nominally led by William Westgarth, leader of the Melbourne business community and John O’Shanassy, a shambling Irishman and leader of Victoria’s Catholics. [20] ‘Democrat’ in temper, they were liberal in viewpoint promoting values associated with Chartism especially adult suffrage, directly elected representatives and above all, land reform. The squatters formed another grouping whose views were ‘anti-democratic’ and who sought a return to the hierarchical order of pre-gold rush society. Conservative in attitude, they saw the Legislative Council as a means of protecting land policy and leaned politically towards the government.

Although party organisation was almost non-existent, pressure group politics was already evident in 1851. The Chamber of Commerce in Melbourne acted as the focus for business interests and in Geelong, local farmers influenced local politics. Popular reform organisations also emerged in Geelong: a People’s Association in July 1851 of some three hundred artisans, shopkeepers and others formed to promote ‘the moral, social and political advancement of the people’ and met several times before collapsing when the gold rushes began. [21] It was ‘determined to maintain the rights of the people as British subjects’ and Serle argues that there was ‘obvious chartist inspiration’ since two of its aims were land reform and equal rights. [22] The Association was characterised by its opponents as ‘republicans, chartists, socialists’, and although it appropriated Chartist rhetoric, the context for ‘Chartist inspiration’ in Victoria was very different from in Britain and its direct influence should not be exaggerated. In September, a Reform Association was formed in Melbourne to work for responsible self-government, the ballot, an extended franchise, fair electoral districts, abolition of state aid for religion and a national education system but it too collapsed under the influence of gold. [23] These two organisations consisted largely of immigrants of working-class or lower middle-class origin who were outside the colonial establishment and were determined that the social inequalities of Britain should not be replicated in Australia. Supported by the Argus, they represented the beginnings of democratic opposition to the government in and outside the Council.

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[1] Minute of Deas Thomson on La Trobe to Colonial Secretary, 7 June 1848: NSW Archives Office, 4/2823, 48/466, cit, ibid, Drury, Dianne Reilly, La Trobe, p. 217.

[2] La Trobe was installed as Lieutenant-Governor on 15 July 1851, Argus, 16 July 1851, p. 2.

[3] Ibid, Sherer, John, The Gold-finder of Australia: how he went, how he fared, how he made his fortune, p. 9.

[4] La Trobe to Earl Grey, 10 October 1851, ‘Further Papers relative to the Recent Discovery of Gold in Australia’, Parliamentary Papers, Vol. lxiv, 1852-3, pp. 45-47.

[5] La Trobe to Earl Grey, 2 March 1852, ‘Further Papers relative to the Recent Discovery of Gold in Australia’, Parliamentary Papers, Vol. lxiv, 1852-3, pp. 170-171, printed in Clark2, pp. 30-34.

[6] The question of desertion by sailors in Australia was debated in May 1852, Hansard, House of Commons, Debates, 14 May 1852, Vol. 121, cc.630-633.

[7] Sydney Morning Herald, 4 November 1852, p. 8.

[8] For example, Davison, Graeme, ‘Gold-Rush Melbourne’, in ibid, McCalman, Iain, Cook, Alexander, and Reeves, Andrew, (eds.), Gold, pp. 52-66.

[9] La Trobe to Earl Grey, 8 July 1851, ‘Further Papers relative to the Recent Discovery of Gold in Australia’, Parliamentary Papers, Vol. lxiv, 1852-3, 1607, pp. 219-221.

[10] Birrell, Ralph W., Staking a Claim: Gold and the Development of Victorian Mining Law, (Melbourne University Press), 1998, considers the problems faced in establishing equitable and workable mining legislation.

[11] ‘The Appointments’, Argus, 15 July 1851, p. 1, and ‘The Appointments’, Geelong Advertiser, 18 July 1851, p. 2; see also ‘Official Appointments’, Sydney Morning Herald, 4 August 1851, p. 2..

[12] Penny, B. R., ‘William Lonsdale (1799-1864)’, ADB, Vol. 2, pp. 124-12.

[13] Francis, Charles, ‘Sir William Foster Stawell (1815-1889)’, ADB, Vol. 6, pp. 174-177.

[14] Argus, 14 July 1851, p. 2.

[15] Serle, p. 13.

[16] La Trobe issued a proclamation in the Government Gazette including the date for the first session of the Legislative Council on 17 October, Argus, 23 October 1851.

[17] ‘City Elections’, Argus, 11 September 1851, pp. 2-3, ‘The City Election, Declaration of the Poll’, Argus, 15 September 1851, p. 2.

[18] ‘Geelong’, Argus, 8 September 1851, p. 4.

[19] ‘The Elections, South Bourke, Evelyn and Mornington’, Argus, 10 September 1851, p. 2.

[20] Serle, Geoffrey, ‘William Westgarth (1815-1889)’, ADB, Vol. 6, pp. 379-383, Ingham, S. M., ‘Sir John O’Shanassy (1818-1883)’, ADB, Vol. 5, pp. 378-382.

[21] ‘The People’s Association’, Argus, 30 August 1851, p. 4, detailed the second meeting of the Association.

[22] Serle, p. 17.

[23] ‘Melbourne Reform Association’, Argus, 20 September 1851, p. 2.

Eureka and memory

In the immediate aftermath of the rebellion, two alternative views of Eureka emerged. Many Australian were reluctant to recognise the importance of events in Ballarat. By the early 1860s, there were few diggers left; mining was now the preserve of large mining companies. The prevailing conservative climate caused people to shrink from the memory of what happened at Eureka. One of Henry Lawson’s short stories demonstrated the mood perfectly describing how two old friends take a walk after dark, and allude to the events at Eureka twenty years before

And sometimes they’d get talking, low and mysterious like, about “Th’ Eureka Stockade;” and if we didn’t understand and asked questions, “what was the Eureka Stockade?” or “what did they do it for?” [1]

Eureka had become a whispered memory. Historians were also uneasy about the lawlessness of the Stockade and saw it as an alien aberration. The result was the development of pervasive myths about Eureka that persisted well into the twentieth century. Edward Shann said that the Ballarat Reform League ‘with clumsy obstinacy [it] repelled his [Hotham’s] conciliation and reiterated their ‘demands’ and gave no credit to the rebel side at all. [2] Ernest Scott and A. W. Jose blamed Eureka on ‘foreign agitators’. [3] For Jose, the Reform League was ‘an instrument of foreigners and political rebels’ and the police and military confronted a ‘body of rebels nearly five times as large’. This misrepresented both the composition and number of the rebels. [4]

Whether, as many have argue and still argue, Eureka was a ‘watershed’ in Australian politics remains contested. The constitutional changes that occurred in 1856 with Victoria’s new constitution were not a direct outcome of the rebellion but the changes, especially in the electoral arrangements in the colony and the rapid move towards universal male suffrage suggest that the principles of popular sovereignty that played such an important role in 1854 had taken deep roots. This is, however, not evident in the contemporary sources that played down the events in Ballarat that only achieved their significance in retrospect.

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[1] Lawson, Henry, ‘An Old Mate of Your Fathers’, in While The Billy Boils, First Series, Sydney, 1896, pp. 6-10.

[2] Shann, Edward, An Economic History of Australia, (Cambridge University Press), 1930. See also, Snooks, G. D., ‘Shann, Edward Owen Giblin (1884-1935)’, ADB, Vol. 11, 1988, pp. 574-576.

[3] Ibid, Ernest Scott, A Short History of Australia, p. 178. Fitzpatrick, Kathleen, ‘Scott, Sir Ernest (1867-1939)’, ADB, Vol. 11, 1988, pp. 544-546 and ibid, McIntyre, Stuart, A History for a Nation: Ernest Scott and the Making of Australian History, 1994, provide important biographical material.

[4] Jose, A. W., Growth of the Empire, Sydney, 1897, pp. v-vi; Short History of Australasia, Sydney, 1899, pp. 154-156; History of Australia, 15th ed., Sydney, 1930, pp. 133-134.

I say vicar…it’s a farce.

To say that the current state of play over TV debates before the General Election is a complete farce is an under-statement.  No one has come out of this slow-motion disaster with any real credit.  The broadcasters clearly did not think through their plans sufficiently by initially excluding the Greens but, having addressed that issue, they are still denying the Northern Irish parties any role in the planned debates.  So they still haven’t got it.  Either you include all the political parties with MPs in Parliament or just forget it.  The DUP is still considering taking legal action and I think—based on even the tightest legal definition of ‘reasonableness’—that they have a good chance of winning.  If it is ‘reasonable’ to include the Greens, then it is undoubtedly reasonable to include the DUP which had many times more MPs. 

I can’t see how the group of broadcasters responsible for coming up with the plan for the debates failed to appreciate just how unfair and unreasonable their decisions have been, when the solution was blindingly obvious.  The critical distinction is not whether political parties have MPs in Westminster but whether those MPs are members of a UK party.  This means that the UK debates should be between the Conservatives, Labour, Liberal Democrats, Greens and UKIP.  This does not mean the other national parties are excluded from debate but their involvement should be confined to televised debates in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland.  This is so obvious a distinction that I’m surprised that no broadcaster appears to have come up with it. 

Politicians have been equally culpable.  David Cameron, a staunch advocate of the debates in 2010, had done just about everything he can to stymie them in 2015.  His argument appears to be that if the debates are held during the campaigns, then they’ll ‘suck the air out of them’.  The threat of the empty podium, one response from the broadcasters, is simply childish and is something that equally might be challenged in the courts.  Ed Miliband, the Martini man…any time any where, any place…is little better and was quite prepared to accept that the Greens not be included…he can hardly claim the moral high-ground on the issue. 

The problem is that politicians of whatever party want the debates to be structured to benefit them while the broadcasters want good television and neither should, on the basis of the fiasco that has evolved, be left in charge of anything to do with it.  Far better for a body like the Electoral Commission to draw up the structure of the debates and that political parties and broadcasters have no right of veto over them.  Having the debates is something that the electorate overwhelmingly support but I fear that the issue has become so toxic that it might be better if they did not take place at all.

Reaching a thousand

I’ve been blogging regularly since July 2007 on my two blogs Looking at History and the History Zone, putting the posts I write on both.  Both sites are designed to promote history as a subject as well as providing me with a vehicle for putting forward my own ideas on the subject as well as on current political issues.  History Zone began life as a blog on Windows Live before migrating to WordPress at the beginning of October 2010; Looking at History has used the Google blog platform from the outset.  The only reason for having two blogs with broadly the same material is the result of a comment from a friend who said it would allow me to maximise audiences.  He was right…Looking at History has had over 830,000 hits in the intervening years while History Zone  has had a mere 71,000…such is the influence of Google as a search engine. In many respects the blogs acted as first drafts of material that later found its way into some of my published books and though marketing was not one of the reasons why I began blogging, it is now an integral part of my marketing strategies. 

Both blogs are now within spitting distance of a thousand posts, an average of 125 posts a year or just over two a week.  This reinforces the point made by many professional bloggers that the key to building and retaining an audience is to post regularly and, in the case of political comments, make them current…little point in commenting on the question of tuition fees two weeks after politicians proposed to reduce them from £9,000 to £6,000 should they win the General Election.  That, and their subject matter, has resulted in building a large audience in the UK, United States, Canada and Australia but also in Germany, France, Ukraine, Russia, Spain and India.  At this moment, the blog is being looked at in the UK, Australia, United States, Germany, Italy, Switzerland, Algeria, Kenya, the Netherlands and the Philippines using computers, phones, tablets and iPads.  The blogs have become truly global in their audience, have been referred to on other blogs and have even found their way into several academic books.

Many people begin blogging with good intentions only to fail after a few posts or the posts become so irregular that the blog ends up lacking an real coherence.  I was lucky in that I had a pretty good idea about what my intentions for the blogs and, though they have evolved over the years, those intentions remain largely unchanged.  So I plan to continue doing what I’m doing and what I enjoy and hope that my audience agrees. 

Why not get rid of tuition fees?

I was one of the lucky ones.  When I went to university there were no tuition fees and, depending on parental income, there was a maintenance grant.  My parents were not high earners but I still only got two-thirds of the grant, not an enormous amount but, combined with working during every university vacation, it was enough to get through four years doing a degree and PGCE without any student debt.  When I went to university perhaps 5 per cent of my age cohort followed suit; today it’s heading for 50 per cent.  I was the first in my family to go to university and came from what I suppose was a non-manual working-class background.  Was I at a financial disadvantage at university?  Of course I was…on my landing were two scions of local business families who could easily have afforded to pay the running costs of the hall of residence without drawing breath.  They had cars…very noisy sports cars I remember…could afford all those expensive things that an eighteen year old craved at the time.  Wealth, of course, did not buy intelligence and they were not the brightest individuals…mannered rather than cultured, on occasions annoyingly patronising (though they would not have recognised it as such) but also considerate and grateful when given assistance with their work.  It was a learning experience for all of us: me from grammar school, them from minor public schools.  But then, that’s what university was about in the late 1960s and early 1970s when a degree was your passport into the professions and a reasonable, though rarely excessive, income.

It was taken for granted that, although maintenance costs were the individuals’ responsibility, tuition fees should be paid through national taxation.  Everyone, at least in theory, had the opportunity of going to university—though in practice the numbers remained stubbornly low—and so financing this was the responsibility of society as a whole which would benefit from the expenditure.  Doing a university course, irrespective what the subject, was a ‘good thing’ that would contribute to the ‘commonweal’ of society.  Universities were already beginning to recognise the untapped human resources in areas where university admission was never considered an option and started a process of evangelising and popularisation that still continues.  By the 1990s, this ‘benefit to society’ view was increasingly questioned as the costs of higher education burgeoned and universities increasingly looked to the free-market approach to university funding evident in the United States and elsewhere.  Should the state be funding the costs of higher education or the individual who benefits, in terms of greater earning-potential, from having a degree?  The free-market won the argument with the introduction of tuition fees in 1998.

Today it is almost taken as read that students should pay tuition fees either during or after their courses and is rarely challenged lest you raise the ire of Vince as an ‘economic illiterate’.  The argument is not about whether but how much…£3,000, £6,000, £9,000!  In which case, vote for me and you’ll pay £6,000 and for them £9,000 but never we’ll abolish them.  A 1p rise in income tax raises £3 billion so, assuming that universities need £10 billion to operate that’s just over 3p to make university education free.  If, and all political parties go on about the need for an educated workforce, a university education is essential to society’s well-being, then there is a case for society funding at least the cost of the courses.  This does not eliminate student debt—cost of living during the courses remains—but it does remove the debt to the state that is increasingly being written off anyway.  Individual students will have to negotiate their own overdrafts with their banks to fund term-time expenditure while holiday jobs can then pay it off.  This leave living costs, which you would have to have paid anyway, the responsibility of the individual.

The reality is that the free-market in university education has not really worked.  The question, ‘what is university for?’ is today answered not as a place for the development of learning, but in accounting terms.  Value is defined not in terms of value to the individual or to the broader common good but almost entirely in terms of its contribution to the development and continuance of the free-market enterprise economy.  Yet there is no reason why what is of value about university education should not be both individually and socially enhancing.  In the increasingly competitive jungle of higher education, academics are only as good as their last piece of research—and that research must accord with political priorities—not the service provided for the paying undergraduates frequently taught in large groups and often by post-graduates dependent on the patronage of their supervisors.  Whether they get value for money is debatable though there is probably little difference between contact times for Chemistry and History today than there was in the 1970s.  Chemistry courses cost more than History courses, so why should history students pay the same as Chemistry students?  The answer is that money from cheaper courses is used to supplement more expensive ones.  This reinforces the argument that the free-market  is an illusion, a valuable construct to defend fees but without recognition by universities of the financial implications that it implies. 

Rising tuition fees and student debt.

I can remember when the Labour government introduced tuition fees making the announcement just before the end of the summer term in 1997 to be applied to students taking A Levels and going to university in 1998.  The students finished their first year thinking that their fees would be paid at university and began their second year knowing that this was no longer the case.  Did it put people off from applying to university that year?  Well, two people who I would have expected to apply decided not to.  Did it affect which university they applied to?  Again slightly, with two or three students applying to universities nearer home so they could reduce their living costs and keep part-time work.  For these students, there was to be no student debt at the end of three years…they earned sufficient to cover tuition and other costs.

If the average student debt today is £44,000 then the issue is not living costs as universities seem to be arguing but tuition fees: £27,000 fees and £17,000 living costs.  It suits universities to divert attention away from tuition fees.  Many students who I’ve spoken to about this suggest that their courses did not provide value for money.  For instance, a History student who has a seminar a fortnight and two lectures a week in the second and third year of her course is not getting value for money…and that was at one the Russell Group universities.  In that respect, Ed Miliband’s proposal to reduce fees from £9,000 to £6,000 makes some sense.  The response has, however, been predictable: universities are concerned that their loss of revenue will impact of what they can deliver while the Students’ Union is all in favour of the proposal.  To argue as Mr Miliband is expected to say that ‘the government has designed a system which is burdening students with debt today and set to weight down the taxpayer with more debt tomorrow.’, implying that it’s all the Conservatives’ fault takes a little swallowing.  Was it not Labour that introduced tuition fees in the first place?  Student debt was an implicit feature of tuition fees from the outset…the question is what is an acceptable level of student debt?  So too was writing off that debt after thirty years.

What is being suggested is a blatant piece of electioneering.  If you vote Labour in the election then you’ll pay £9,000 less for tuition fees over three years…it’s a good ploy but will it work?  Labour's private polling suggests that tuition fees isn't just an important issue for young people, but that older voters too dislike the idea of the next generation apparently being saddled with debts.  Now I’m not really cynical about polling—oh yes I am—I can see the question ‘do you like/dislike the idea of the next generation being saddled with debt?’  No self-respective individual is going to say that she ‘likes the generational debt.  It rather like the now almost forgotten promise to cap fuel bills…it’s all smoke and mirrors.  Today’s headline is tomorrow’s forgotten promise. 

Forgotten and whispered memories: Eureka and its contemporary sources

The precise nature of violent events is often problematic. What was said or written about them is not always what occurred. Society’s interpretation of violent events changes over time and differs across different sections of society. Low economic status, ethnic heterogeneity, residential mobility and high population turnover lead to disruption of community cohesion and organisation. [1] Explaining the context of a violent event is often easier than explaining the event itself.

This problem is linked to the ways in which the actions of crowds have been perceived. There have been two leading interpretations of the politics of working-class crowds. One sees popular protest as occurring spontaneously and without prior organisation as a reaction to immediate material deprivations such as food shortages or wage reductions. The other views the crowd as an inchoate and unselfconscious mass that can be galvanised into activity, shown how to constitute itself as a potentially revolutionary class, only by an elite, usually of middle or upper class provenance, who may exploit its potential for violence for their own social and ideological agendas. The problem, Rudé observed

…is that conservatives and ‘Republicans alike had projected their own political aspirations, fantasies and / or fears onto the crowd without having asked the basic historical questions’...law-and-order conservatives, he complains, see all protest as a ‘crime against established society’; liberal writers have tended to comprehend all crimes as a form of protest.[2]

The classic conservative images of proletarian anarchy are Edmund Burke’s depiction of the rioting mob as a ‘swinish multitude’ in Reflections on the Revolution in France, and Hippolyte Taine’s account of revolutionary action as the breeding-ground for the ‘dregs of society’, ‘bandits’, ‘thieves’, ‘savages’, ‘beggars’ and ‘prostitutes’.[3] By contrast, the Leninist approach assumed that the revolutionary activities of the crowd must be directed by an elite, the Party, converting anarchic energy into effective political action. Rudé in his earlier writings, tended towards Leninism concluding that the sans-culottes were on their own capable of nothing more than economic motivation and that movement beyond that required the leadership and political ideas developed by bourgeois intellectuals, a model he later questioned recognising that the lower classes had ideas and motivations of their own.[4]

Both these issues are evident in the sources for the Eureka rebellion in December 1854 and create major problems for historians who want to describe and explain what actually happened. For example, government sources tended to overestimate the threat posed by the rebellion if only to justify the draconian actions that it took and playing up the role of ‘foreigners’, especially the European revolutionary participants at the Stockade while playing down the role of Americans. A further problem with the sources lies in the nature of the protest at Ballarat in late 1854. Although there is a succession of reports from the goldfield to Sir Charles Hotham that provide a developing view of the position of authority, most of the information from those involved in the protest was written after the Stockade was stormed and contains a strong dose of self-justification. Only the less than neutral reporting of the local and Melbourne press provides evidence for the developing crisis on the goldfield from the perspective, and then via a critique, of the miners’ stance.

The accounts of Eureka in various histories of Australia have a tendency to elide the specific details of the incident in favour of situating the event in a narrative of the nation. [5] The writing of histories of Eureka began soon after the event. The difficulty is that unusually the production of sources on Eureka and the early writing of histories of Eureka were almost indistinguishable. Many of those involved on both sides of the rebellion wrote accounts that were both partial and attempted to locate Eureka within a causal nexus. Normally, these accounts would have been used by historians to construct their narratives but not in this particular instance. It was not until 1913 that a specific history of Eureka was written as opposed to a literary heritage was published. [6] Hotham’s version of events is contained in a despatch to the Colonial Secretary dated 20 December 1854 [7] with the account in the Report from the commission appointed to inquire into the condition of the goldfields following in late March 1855. [8] Surprisingly few participants at Eureka wrote accounts of the event and they are for the most part partial. Lalor, [9] Vern [10] and Carboni produced accounts in 1855 and H. R. Nicholas [11] and John Lynch[12] in the 1890s. The same can be said of the only eyewitness account from the government camp written by Samuel Douglas Smyth Huyghue, a Canadian who was chief clerk to Robert Rede the Resident Commissioner on the Ballarat gold fields. Though originally drafted in Ballarat in November 1857, it was revised in September 1879 and not completed until 10 December 1884, some thirty years after the event.[13] The contemporary diary of Samuel Lazarus, though valuable on the aftermath of the attack, is silent on the attack itself that Lazarus appears to have slept through. A neglected source is the history of Ballarat written by W.B. Withers who deliberately sought out written and oral testimony from those involved in the rebellion.[14]

The most remarkable is Raffaello Carboni’s The Eureka Stockade that offers a vivid if unconventional history.[15] Geoffrey Serle made little sense of the book

Carboni Raffaello’s Eureka Stockade stands apart as a literary freak…its qualities of vigour, observation, humour and sarcasm raise it to considerable heights.[16]

Although roughly linear, Carboni included commentaries on events and what characterises him as a narrator was the mobility of his stance, ‘using the voices of reporter, judge, polemicist, philosopher, satirist, historian and participant’. [17] It is, however, a mistake to view the book as the record of a partisan and a tale of damnation of tyranny without scholarly detachment rather than a history. In two important respects, The Eureka Stockade is clearly a history: first, its use of particular narrative forms and secondly, its attention to evidence.[18]

Carboni wrote within the European historiographical tradition that had begun in the eighteenth century based around distinctive forms of emplotment, the narrator’s position and reader’s expectations. His account is consistently written in the forms of satire, comedy and tragedy but all these devices are subordinate to a romance of heroes, a vindication of his own character and those of the diggers. [19] Carboni was writing for the future in the expectation that the events at Eureka would be accorded the ‘historic’ status they deserved. He saw the book as an act of remembering events for the future that he was sure would be forgotten:

…it is in my power to drag your names from ignoble oblivion and vindicate the unrewarded bravery of one of yourselves...But he [Ross] was soon forgotten. That he was buried is known by the tears of a few true friends! The place of is burial is little known, and less cared for. [20]

He supported his case by an extensive accumulation of evidence that provided both the basis for his narrative and his means of authenticating the text as historically accurate. Carboni also drew on a much older form of history, the notion of historian as witness and made this claim explicit in the introduction:

I was at the centre. I was an actor and therefore an eye-witness. The events I relate, I did see them pass before me. [21]

Carboni was right that Eureka would not be instantly remembered in written history. Once the battle ended, the focus for most historians moved to Melbourne to pursue the effects of events: the demonstrations in the capital and across the goldfields, the resignation of Colonial Secretary Foster; the reform of the goldfields and the constitution and Hotham’s death. This shift was possible because Eureka was on the cusp of two processes already in motion: the demise of imperial autocracy and the emergence of limited self-government dominated by colonial liberalism. The introduction of the miner’s right deflated the causes of the crisis of 1854 and the local political élite, liberated by their new constitution, had little appetite for grappling with demands from the forces of popular protest, ‘the dark side of their commitment to democracy’. [22] Eureka had served its purpose and, with reforms secured, the rebellion became an event that had passed quickly and for the moment was left in the past.

This was clearly the case with Peter Lalor. His statement in April 1855 was, unlike Carboni, neither a narrative of heroism nor a history. [23] It is a defence of the diggers’ actions written by a man who deeply regretted having been forced to take up arms. His lesson from the rebellion was that reforms should have been introduced earlier and that, despite the bloodshed, civilisation would prevail. His only use of the word ‘history’ was in his boast that ‘I have taken measures to have the history of the outbreak and its causes brought before the House of Commons’, a very different audience to the one Carboni had in mind. Whether Lalor was a ‘forgetter’ as Molony suggests, it was increasingly the case that Lalor, now the parliamentarian, regretted Eureka as an ‘unfortunate affair’. [24] These characteristics were shared by other immediate historians of the event. Captain H. Butler Stoney arrived in Ballarat shortly after the battle and, like Carboni, relied heavily on evidence especially the Royal Commission and the report of Captain Thomas to provide a historical veneer. [25] His explanation for the rebellion was an even-handed apportioning of blame to abuse of power and wayward citizens and was the first historian to focus attention on foreigners.[26] ‘Even though their wild passions of rebellion had for a moment made them lose sight of their loyalty and obedience to her law’, Stoney concluded that the diggers were really loyal to the Crown, that there had been substantial progress in Victoria and that it was a fine place for investment opportunities.[27] For him, Eureka was an unfortunate aberration in the inevitable progress of the colony to economic prosperity.

Myth is a highly charged concept when linked with the study of history. To suggest that fable and fact may be reconciled to explain the past suggests that truth and falsity can explain the same historical event. Yet myth cannot be easily dismissed from a consideration of history, particularly from histories of nations and national identity. All histories have some element of myth, a distortion of the truth produced to draw out a significant explanation of the past; a sense of significance shared by a cultural group embracing a mythic explanation of the past in order to reinforce shared values. [28] Ernest Scott, for example, sought to explain how British racial origins and an accompanying heritage of liberal ideals creatively flourished in Australia. Gifted with ‘the most liberal endowment of self-government that had ever been secured in the history of colonization by dependencies from a mother-country’, the ‘thoroughly British’ Australian population had been left ‘free to work out their own destiny’. Thus Australia became ‘…a field for the exercise of their racial genius for adaptation and for conquering difficulties’. [29] In his identification of shared British origins, Scott offered a reassuring sense of familiarity, proudly enhanced by an account of how Australians had proved themselves worthy of their inherited traditions and faced the challenges of developing a new country.

---

[1] Reiss, Albert J., Understanding and Preventing Violence, 2 Vols. (National Academies Press), 1993, Vol. 1, pp. 31-41, 129-139.

[2] Kaye, Henry J., ‘Introduction: George Rudé, Social Historian’, in George Rudé, The Face of the Crowd: Selected Essays of George Rudé, (Harvester Wheatsheaf), 1988, pp. 7-15.

[3] Ibid, Kaye, Henry J., ‘Introduction: George Rudé, Social Historian’, p. 6.

[4] Ibid, Kaye, Henry J., ‘Introduction: George Rudé, Social Historian’, p. 24.

[5] Elder, Catriona Being Australian: Narratives of National Identity, (Allen & Unwin), 2007, pp. 23-40.

[6] Ibid, Turner, Henry Gyles, A History of the Colony of Victoria From its Discovery to its Absorption into the Commonwealth of Australia, Vol. 2, pp. 23-51, and Our Own Little Rebellion: The Story of the Eureka Stockade, Melbourne, 1913. McCalman, Iain, ‘Turner, Henry Gyles (1831-1920)’, ADB, Vol. 6, 1976, pp. 311-313.

[7] Duplicate Despatch Number 162 reporting a serious collision and riot at the Ballaarat Gold Field: Victoria Public Record Office: 1085/P, Unit 8, reprinted in ‘Eureka Documents’, Historical Studies: Eureka Supplement, (December 1954), pp. 3-7.

[8] Anderson, Hugh, (ed.) Report from the Commission appointed to inquire into the Condition of the Goldfields, 1855, (Red Rooster Press), 1978.

[9] Lalor, Peter, ‘Statement on the Ballarat rebellion’, Argus, 10 April 1855, reprinted in ibid, ‘Eureka Documents’, Historical Studies, pp. 8-14.

[10] Vern, Frederick, ‘Col. Vern’s Narrative of the Ballarat Insurrection, Part I’, Melbourne Monthly Magazine, November 1855, pp. 5-14. Part II does not appear to have been published.

[11] Nicholls, H. R., ‘Reminiscences of the Eureka Stockade’, The Centennial Magazine: An Australian Monthly, (May 1890), in an annual compilation, Vol. II., August, 1889 to July, 1890, pp. 746-750.

[12] Lynch, John, ‘The story of the Eureka Stockade’, Austral Light, October 1893-March 1894, republished as a pamphlet Story of the Eureka Stockade, (Australian Catholic Truth Society), n.d. [1946?].

[13] Huyghue, S.D.S., ‘The Ballarat Riots’, printed in O’Brien, Bob, Massacre at Eureka: the Untold Story, 1992, (The Sovereign Hill Museums Association), 1998, pp. 1-39.

[14] Ibid, Withers, W. B., History of Ballarat, pp. 72-163.

[15] Ibid, Raffaello! Raffaello!: A Biography of Raffaello Carboni, and Rando, G. ‘Raffaello Carboni’s Perceptions of Australia and Australian Identity’, based on a paper presented at the Eureka 150 Democracy Conference, University of Ballarat, 25-27 November 2004 and ‘Raffaello Carboni’s Perceptions of Australia’, Journal of Colonial Australian History, Vol. 10, (1), (2008), pp. 129-144.

[16] Serle, p. 360.

[17] Healy, Chris, From the Ruins of Colonialism: History as Social Memory, (Cambridge University Press), 1997, p. 137.

[18] Ibid, Healy, Chris, From the Ruins of Colonialism, pp. 139-142.

[19] Rando, G., Great Works and Yabber-Yabber: The Language of Raffaello Carboni’s ‘Eureka Stockade’, St Lucia (Qld), 1998, considers Carboni’s use of language.

[20] Ibid, The Eureka Stockade, p. 2.

[21] Ibid. The Eureka Stockade, p. 2.

[22] Ibid, Healy, Chris, From the Ruins of Colonialism, p. 141.

[23] Lalor, Peter, ‘Statement on the Ballarat rebellion’, ibid, ‘Eureka Documents’, Historical Studies, pp. 8-14.

[24] Ibid, Moloney, John, Eureka, p. 210. See also Sunter, Anne Beggs, ‘The Apotheosis of Peter Lalor: Myth, Meaning and Memory in History’, paper in Remembered Nations, Imagined Republics: Proceedings of the Twelfth Irish-Australian Conference, Galway, June 2002, Australian Journal of Irish Studies Vol. 4, (2004), pp. 94-104.

[25] Stoney, H. Butler, Victoria: With a Description of its Principal Cities...and Remarks on the Present State of the Colony; Including an Account of the Ballarat Disturbances, and of the Death of Captain Wise, 40^th Regiment, London, 1856.

[26] Ibid, Stoney, H. Butler, Victoria, pp. 106-138 considers Eureka.

[27] Ibid, Stoney, H. Butler, Victoria, p. 137.

[28] Collins, Rebecca, ‘Concealing the Poverty of Traditional Historiography: myth as mystification in historical discourse’, Rethinking History, Vol. 7, (2003), pp. 341-3, 356.

[29] Ibid, Scott, Ernest, A Short History of Australia, pp. 330-332, 336.

Australia and Irish settlement: after the Famine

A strong Irish network existed in Melbourne before 1850 and indeed the meeting place of the first Parliament of Victoria was St Patrick’s Hall.[1] Bounty immigration swelled Irish numbers before 1850, but major waves of migration commenced only after the discovery of gold in Victoria and during the reconstruction of Irish agriculture in the period after the 1840s famine.[2] As a result, while the vast bulk of Irish settlers in Melbourne were drawn from rural Ireland and most likely from the small land-holding class, a steady stream of Irish professional men arrived in the 1850s, especially lawyers and doctors, who made an early and long-lasting mark on Melbourne life. The new University of Melbourne was shaped by its association with Trinity College, Dublin, most notably through the Irish political economist and one of the four foundation professors at Melbourne, W.E. Hearn. The first chancellor of the university, Redmond Barry, had also graduated from Trinity and emigrated in 1839. He founded the Melbourne Mechanics Institute, sat on the Supreme Court bench and played a central role in the creation and expansion of the State Library of Victoria.[3] Another Trinity graduate, Richard Ireland, born in Galway in 1816, was admitted to the Irish Bar in 1816 and arrived in Melbourne in 1852, where he defended the Eureka rebels before becoming a minister in governments headed by Irishmen Charles Gavan Duffy and John O’Shanassy.[4]

Bourke Street, Melbourne c1890

In Melbourne, the Irish settled most densely in the inner city. For a time some of the poorer lanes of the central city sustained conspicuous Irish populations. Yet the Irish-born were never a numerical majority in any local government area or city ward, even though they may have controlled local political and cultural life. In the city itself, Bourke, Gipps and Lonsdale wards had populations which were more than 20 per cent Irish in 1871, the peak year for the city’s Irish-born population. Irish women, who most typically worked in domestic service, moved from these concentrations to wealthy suburbs such as St Kilda and Kew. For most of the nineteenth century the inner municipality of Hotham (North and West Melbourne) was the most Irish locality, largely because of its position near the unskilled labour markets in the railway yards, warehouses and wharves and in carting at the western end of the central city.

Ulster Protestants gradually established a place in the skilled trades of Melbourne and also dominated some civil service departments by the end of the 1860s. Catholic Irishmen were typically unskilled workers or small shopkeepers. They too sought to cement networks in government employment, filling many positions in the ‘uniformed working-class’ such as the railways, post office and customs services. From its formation, the Victoria Police was structured along the same lines as the Royal Irish Constabulary and the typical constable was likely to have been born in Ireland, as were many of those he arrested.

‘Canvas Town’: South Melbourne in the 1850s showing temporary accommodation during the Gold Rush

There had been surprisingly little movement during the Famine and the heaviest influx was delayed until the 1860s. While the 1850s remained the most significant decade for Irish migration to Victoria, perhaps more important single years of emigration were 1864, 1879 and 1884, peaks associated with crises in Irish agriculture. The last great Irish immigration occurred between the mid-1870s and mid-1880s when immigration to the United States was less attractive because of depression in its economy. Australia was only ever the destination of choice for Irish immigrants when recession elsewhere made foreign labour markets unattractive for immigrants. The same applied when Australia experienced depression as it did in 1867, 1878-1879 and 1885-1886 when Irish immigration slackened. Colonial demand for immigrant labour and a willingness to provide assisted passage was greatest when there was significant economic growth in the absence of a large settled population. Victoria, South Australia and Tasmania offered little assistance after the 1860s while Queensland invested heavily in immigration during the 1879s and 1880s. NSW stopped providing assistance between the late 1880s and 1910. Since most Irish immigration depended on some form of state or private assistance, this resulted in settlers in different colonies coming largely from different generational cohorts. The most significant county of origin remained Clare but comparatively rich farming regions such as Meath, Tipperary and Armagh were more highly represented than the poorer western counties of Kerry, Galway and Mayo. Extended chain migration allowed these regional concentrations to persist until the last decade of the nineteenth century.

Melbourne Cricket Ground, 1864.

Although Victoria proved a magnet for immigration in the 1850s, the other colonies continued to receive Irish immigrants. The 1859 census for Western Australia records 2,406 Irish-born representing 16 per cent of the total non-Aboriginal population. This had risen to 3,569 by 1870 and 9,862 during the gold rush of the 1890s though many of these came from the eastern states rather than directly from Ireland. The Irish made up about a tenth of the convicts sent to the colony between 1850 and 1868.[5] NSW also saw an increase in immigration in the 1850s partly as a result of gold but also because of the continuing distress in Ireland. Most assisted immigrants between 1848 and 1870 were Catholic but about a fifth was Protestant. Apart from higher levels of literacy, there was no real difference between the two religious groups: men tended to be labourers and women farm or domestic servants. In the 1850s, for example, there was much distress in rural Donegal.[6] Under the British landlord system, the native inhabitants had to pay rents and were liable to be evicted if they could not keep up the payments.[7] After 1855, some of these emigrants took advantage of the NSW assisted immigration scheme. Under this, residents of NSW could pay a contribution to the government in Sydney to bring out a relative or friend from Britain or Ireland with the government subsidising the cost of the passage. As the immigrants of 1855 became established in NSW, many sent sums of money ranging from £5 to £50 back to Donegal to help their relatives to survive or to emigrate. By 1858, there was mounting concern in Australia about news that landlords were squeezing Donegal people off the land to make way for more profitable farming procedures such as large-scale sheep-raising, using Scottish shepherds.

In May 1858, Archdeacon John McEncroe, a Catholic clergyman from County Tipperary, convened a public meeting in Sydney to form a Donegal Relief Fund. McEncroe had been in NSW since 1832 and was the founder of a periodical newspaper, the Sydney Freeman’s Journal. He sought to make systematic use of the government’s assisted immigration scheme and took a deputation from the Donegal Relief Fund to interview government officials in July 1858. He gave the government a deposit of £900 pounds that then issued a certificate providing passages for 225 people. This special fare to Australia was £5 per male and £3 per female. McEncroe made subsequent deposits, bringing the total for 1858 to £3,800 and the government issued further certificates for passage. The first batch of Donegal Relief Fund migrants arrived in Sydney from Liverpool on the Sapphire in May 1859 after a voyage of 15 weeks. The vessel landed 286 passengers though not all sponsored by the Donegal Relief Fund. The sexes were evenly balanced with 138 males and 133 females over 12 years including 42 married couples, plus eight boys and seven girls under 12 years. The arrival of each the subsequent four Donegal Relief Fund ships was reported in the Sydney Freeman’s Journal, which recommended the passengers to prospective employers as farm labourers or domestic servants. The NSW government encouraged the immigrants, especially the men, to go to ‘immigrant depots’ in country centres such as Maitland, Newcastle and Bathurst, from where they would be hired by landholders. The Donegal Relief Fund enormously boosted the number of Irish migrants to NSW in 1859. According to parliamentary reports, 3,723 immigrants entered NSW that year from all sources under government’s assistance scheme. Of these, the Irish accounted for 2,544, more than 68 per cent of the total, of which about a third came under the Donegal Relief Fund scheme.

Only two per cent of those who left Ireland in the nineteenth century came to Australia and the majority of these came through assisted passage. This seems to have been more likely the case for women since British and colonial authorities maintained assisted female emigration over longer periods and at lower rates. Irish women made up between 50 and 60 per cent of assisted female migrants during the 1850s and 1860s and in NSW they made up to 80 per cent. The peak periods of female immigration coincided with years of heaviest assistance. There was a boost to early Irish female immigration to the colony with government-sponsored ‘bride ships’ of the 1850s containing poor, predominantly Catholic Irish women.[8] Many of these girls went into the country as servants and sometimes married Protestants but more often men from the bond class. They represented a small if important part of the large-scale process of female migration to Australia that gathered momentum in the 1850s and 1860s. Some 1,700 single British and Irish women came to Western Australia but substantially more came on colonial-sponsored schemes to NSW (18,000), Victoria (13,000), South Australia (9,100), Queensland (46,000) and Tasmania (1,600).[9] The reason why many of these women migrated may have been to seek a spouse[10], but the attitude of colonial society was more ambiguous and bidders at the immigration depot included middle-class women seeking domestic servants of whom there was a major shortage as well as single men.

Over half of Irish women, even in the 1880s and 1890s entered domestic service and they appear to have not sought alternative avenues of employment though their daughters frequently entered factory work. There were several reasons why a higher proportion of Irish women than any other nationality entered domestic service. First, they came from a largely rural background and had no familiarity with factory work. Secondly, domestic work provided food and lodgings as well as wages and allowed women to save money easily to send back home to pay debts, to buy land or acquire a few luxuries. Finally, domestic service was a job that did not compete with the male labour market and work was available even during economic depression.

The Irish in Australia in the nineteenth century were simplistically seen as either Catholic, nationalist and republican or Protestant, empire loyalists, Orangemen or members of Masonic lodges. Irish Protestants made up a small proportion of the total Irish migration and comprised about five per cent of the total Australian population in the nineteenth century. Despite this, they played a disproportionately important role in the development of the country.[11] They can be divided into the Anglo-Irish who originated in the Irish gentry and who emigrated to Australia from the 1820s and Ulster Protestants representing a cross-section of Ulster society. The Anglo-Irish, dependent on their British connection, became the main stay of colonial administration, followed traditional routes into the law, the church or the military or entered the professions. The Trinity College link proved important and by 1880, for example, four of the five judges on the Supreme Court of Victoria were Irish Protestants.

The Australian Irish, like the American Irish, came from a variety of destinations and had emigrated for a variety of reasons. Many were born in Ireland but others arrived only after perhaps years in some British city or in the eastern and then western United States and who came with other ‘diggers’ in search of wealth on the goldfields. Yet while Irish descendants in America have retained pride in their ancestral culture, this is less the case in Australia. [12] The nineteenth-century Irish represented the major discordant element in what were strongly Anglicised colonies. Their role as loyal opposition, niggling and ridiculing the dominant English colonial culture was however a defining element in the shaping of Australian society and the Australian character. Their identity was Australian first and Irish second.

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[1] Strauss, Valda, ‘Irish influences in early Melbourne’, Mallow Field Club Journal, Vol. 14, (1996), pp. 149-153.

[2] Davison, Graeme, ‘Gold-rush Melbourne’, in McCalman, Iain, Cook, Alexander and Reeves, Andrew, (eds.), Gold: forgotten histories and lost objects of Australia, (Cambridge University Press), 2001, pp. 52-66 and The Rise and Fall of Marvellous Melbourne, (Melbourne University Press), 1978.

[3] Phillips, John H., ‘A Black-Letter Lawyer’, La Trobe Journal, Vol. 73, (2004), pp. 23-28, and Ryan, Peter, ‘Sir Redmond Barry, (1813-1880)’, ADB, Vol. 3, pp. 108-111, provide contrasting succinct studies of Barry. Neither Galbally, Ann, Redmond Barry, An Anglo-Irish Australian, (Melbourne University Press), 1995 nor Ryan, Peter, Redmond Barry, A Colonial Life, (Melbourne University Press), 1980, are enthusiastic about Barry’s judicial qualities.

[4] Ingham, M., ‘Sir John O’Shanassy (1818-1883)’, ADB, Vol. 5, pp. 378-382.

[5] Oriesen, I.H. van den, ‘Convicts and migrants in Western Australia, 1850-1868: their number, nature and ethnic origins’, Journal of the Royal Australian Historical Society, Vol. 72, (1986-1987), pp. 40-58.

[6] McClintock, May, ‘Donegal Orphan girls’, Donegal Annual, Vol. 53, (2001), pp. 59-65 considers Donegal orphans sent to Australia 1848-1850. Conaghan, Pat, The great famine in south-west Donegal, 1845-1850, (Bygones Enterprises), 1997 examines the impact of famine.

[7] See O’Donnell, Martina, ‘Government intervention in land improvement in county Donegal, 1846-1880’, Donegal Annual, Vol. 48, (1996), pp. 158-192.

[8] Erickson, Rica, The bride ships: experiences of immigrants arriving in Western Australia 1849-1889, (Hesperian Press), 1992.

[9] Gothard, Jan, ‘Wives or workers? Single British female migration to colonial Australia’, in Sharpe, Pamela, Women, Gender and Labour Migration: Historical and global perspectives, (Routledge), 2001, pp. 145-162.

[10] Britain had a ‘surplus women’ problem: in 1851 there were 1042 women to every 1000 men and by 1901 this had risen to 1068. Assisted emigration was a possible solution to this problem for Britain by reducing the number of women and for the colonies by reducing their imbalanced sex-ratios.

[11] Forth, Gordon, ‘”No petty people”: the Anglo-Irish identity in colonial Australia’, in O’Sullivan, Patrick, (ed.), The Irish world wide: history, heritage, identity, Vol. 2: the Irish in the new communities, (Leicester University Press), 1992, pp. 128-142.

[12] Ibid, O’Farrell, Patrick, The Irish in Australia: 1788 to the Present, pp. 5-21 considers the contentious issue of Irish Australian identity. Campbell, Malcolm, ‘Irish nationalism and immigrant assimilation: comparing the United States and Australia’, Australasian Journal of American Studies, Vol. 15, (2), (1996), pp. 24-43 provides comparison.