The Clunes incident, 1873

During the 1840s and 1850s, the discovery of major gold reserves in northern California, Victoria and later British Columbia and New Zealand transformed the European settler societies of the Pacific Rim. [1] The full extent of the Chinese role in the emergent central Victorian goldfields society has only recently been recognised. Although best known for their role in the gold mining industry, they were involved in other activities on the goldfields working as herbalists, merchants and restaurateurs.[2] As a cultural group they stood out because most retained their identity and customs and the ‘Chinese question’ began to vie with the other major issue of the day, the ‘unlocking’ of Crown Lands. European miners were angered by their increasing presence in the fields and in 1854, an irritated group of European and American miners met in Bendigo and declared that a ‘general and unanimous rising should take place for the purpose of driving the Chinese off the goldfield’. Local constables acted quickly to prevent the uprising and warned the miners against any further vigilante action. The event was only the beginning of greater anti-Chinese tensions.

In December 1873, a major disturbance against Chinese miners occurred in the Victorian gold mining town of Clunes, some twenty miles north of Ballarat. [3] The scale of the incident and the level of violence were only slightly less than occurred in the riots at Buckland River in 1857 and Lambing Flat in 1860 and 1861. [4] Despite this, the events at Clunes have not been accorded the same significance and those historians who have written about it offer little detail on what transpired there. Generally the incident is mentioned in passing or used to moralise about colonial Australia’s hostility towards Asian peoples. Much of what has been written is inconsistent and unreliable and examining contemporary colonial newspapers casts doubt on the traditional ethnic explanation.

Historiographical confusion

This is evident in the most widely disseminated account of the Clunes incident: a paragraph in Manning Clark’s A History of Australia

When news reached Clunes in Victoria on the morning of 9 December 1873 that numbers of Chinese were about to move onto their field, the miners took instant action. The bellman was sent round the town to alert the diggers of the impending arrival of ‘the leprous curse’. Work was immediately suspended in all the principal mines, and on what remained of the alluvial flats. Public meetings were held at which miners and diggers unanimously resolved to drive the unclean yellow men off the fields. Axe- and pick-handles and waddies of all descriptions were distributed to the men waiting for the arrival of the Chinese. Women turned out in hundreds to incite their menfolk against the Chinese. That morning one thousand men, accompanied by troops of women and children and inflamed by the fire-bells ringing out the alarm as well as by stirring music from the brass bands, erected barricades at the junction of the Ballarat and Clunes Roads to stop the Chinese coaches. Ploughs, drays, timber, stones and bricks were used. As soon as the Chinese coaches came within distance, a hail of stones and bricks fell upon the occupants. The police tried gallantly to protect the Chinese and restore order, but all in vain, as the miners, ably assisted by their better halves, who shouted and cursed and swore and cast stones with the best of the men, compelled the Chinese to retrace their steps back to Ballarat, to the cheers of the victors in this battle for Clunes. Before returning to work the miners again declared their determination to oppose the introduction of Chinese labour in the mines at Clunes. The Australians might not have been capable of creating a Paris Commune, but they were capable of defending the slogan ‘No Chinamen’.[5]

Clark provided three sources in the footnote for this colourful passage but references to the Sydney Illustrated News seven years after the event and a note in the Bulletin thirteen years later were clearly second-hand accounts. However, he also cited a newspaper report from an unidentified ‘Clunes correspondent’ printed in the Age, the important Melbourne paper, the day after the disturbance. The Age’s account stated:

The bellman was sent round the town to apprise the inhabitants, and work was immediately suspended in all the principal mines. The miners, to the number of over five hundred, assembled, and headed by a band of music, paraded the streets. Public meetings were held, and it was resolved to resist to the utmost the introduction of the Chinese...As soon as the coaches came within distance a perfect storm of stones and bricks fell upon the occupants, and a charge made to assault the Chinese. The police, though few in number, fought well, and for a short time maintained their position, but the overpowering and determined onslaught of the miners, assisted by their better halves, compelled them to retrace their steps back to Ballarat. The battle, for nothing else can it be designated was fought with determined energy and bravery...[6]

Clark relied heavily on this passage adding detail to give dramatic vividness to the description and in the process taking liberties, especially when describing the behaviour of the townspeople. The newspaper stated that their wives ‘assisted’ the miners but for Clark the women ‘shouted and cursed and swore and cast stones...’ He also included descriptions of the Chinese as ‘unclean yellow men’ and as ‘the leprous curse’ highlighting the bigotry of the rioters implying that they were recorded remarks. However, they did not occur in the newspaper report or any other record of the event. Clark was not simply guilty of selective quotation but of putting words into the mouths of the participants.[7]

Historians examining colonial race relations have also used this 1873 account as a main source on the Clunes incident. Andrew Markus is less emotive than Clark and he refrains from embellishing the facts but his account is distilled from this report.[8] It was used by Eric Rolls though he added information from another colonial newspaper, the Melbourne weekly Australasian. However, Rolls provides no source for the assertion that the miners at the barricade ‘tried to haul the Chinese from inside [the coaches]’, or for the claim that the police sergeant escorting the coaches was ‘a kindly man who had helped Chinese lepers cast out of Ballarat’. [9] Markus and Rolls, as well as Charles Price, all mentioned that the Chinese were being brought to Clunes to break a fourteen-week miners’ strike. [10] The Age’s account stated that this was the cause of the riot though Clark omitted this crucial point from his melodramatic telling of the story leading readers to assume that the miners’ action was openly racist.

This alternative explanation that the townspeople were angered by strike-breaking places the incident at Clunes in a different light. In the decade before Clark and Markus penned their descriptions, prominent Labour historians such as J.T. Sutcliffe[11], Edgar Ross[12] and Joe Harris[13] had argued that far from being chiefly motivated by racial intolerance, the miners were protecting their livelihoods from dilution by cheap labour. Ross neatly avoided mentioning either the ethnic aspects or the violence of the Clunes incident, insisting that it marked a turning in the labour movement

A miniature ‘Eureka Stockade’ in December, 1873, contributed to the militant spirit of the period. This occurred during a strike of Clunes miners for the right to have Saturday afternoons off. The Clunes Miners’ Association under the presidency of the Mayor of Clunes, W. Blanchard, erected barricades of timber and stone to bar the way to five cartloads of scabs recruited by the Lothian [sic] Mining Company and being escorted by police. About 1000 unionists and a contingent of irate women assembled, and the scabs and the police were forced to retreat to Ballarat. The Clunes action is generally regarded as providing a stimulus for the formation in 1874 of the Amalgamated Miners’ Association with a constitution to cover all miners in Australia and New Zealand.[14]

However, despite agreeing that a strike was under way, Ross, Sutcliffe, Harris and other labour historians differ on the level of hostilities and what the miners’ grievances were: did the miners want reduced hours on weekends, were they pressing for an eight-hour day or was the dispute about calls for wage increases.  The strike-breaking explanation had also been advanced twice by Geoffrey Blainey. The first occasion was in his history of mining, where, following a passage outlining how mining companies shunned employing Chinese except when they could be used for some devious purpose, he wrote:

In December 1873, for example, Peter Lalor, the hero of Eureka, and his fellow directors of Clunes companies tried to break a strike by employing Chinese in their deep quartz mines, but the coachloads of Chinese they recruited were halted by an angry crowd on the outskirts of Clunes.[15]

For Blainey, the initial charge of racism should be directed at the Lothair Company that treated Asian employees as readily exploitable, a view apparently shared by Price in The Great White Walls are Built. Blainey said more on the townspeople’s motivations when he revisited the subject twenty years later in his history of Victoria

In 1873 at Clunes, the Lothair gold mine, of which the Eureka hero Peter Lalor was a director, resolved to break a miners’ strike by recruiting Chinese miners and bringing them from Creswick in horse-drawn coaches. On reaching the edge of town the Chinese were driven back. Fear that the Chinese would lower the high standard of living for the average Victorian was the strongest of all fears directed against them.[16]

The inference was that existing employment conditions were being threatened with reductions leading miners to strike. However, Blainey failed in either text to cite a specific source on the Clunes incident though he consulted Withers’ The History of Ballarat, an important source of information on the district. W.B. Withers was a reporter and sub-editor for the Ballarat Star at the time of the Clunes riot giving him a unique slant on the event. Yet apart from Blainey, historians have overlooked Withers and the neglect of this text and especially its revealing aside on the political figures involved is surprising. Withers wrote in his account of the incident at Clunes

There were a few Chinese digging gold in Ballarat as early as 1852, but there was no rising of the ‘yellow agony’ in the district till the year 1873, when a dispute at Clunes led to a disturbance of the peace of 9^th December. There had been a strike of miners employed in the Lothair mine, as the directors refused to give a Saturday afternoon holiday shift as was generally the custom … The directors of the mine, including Mr Francis (then Premier), and Mr Lalor, the whilom hero of freedom, &c., at the Eureka Stockade, decided to counter-plot against the strikers by employing Chinese labor, of which Creswick and Ballarat offered an ample supply...the more emotional of the commentators in the Press championed their doings and some were silly enough to compared the riot to the stand made at the Eureka Stockade. This was not wonderful if not very wise, for the business was a medley of conflicting legal and moral rights. [17]

Keith Windschuttle identifies Timothy Coghlan’s pioneering work, Labour and Industry in Australia as the foundation for most left-wing versions of the incident.[18] This is evident Coghlan’s text where wrote that the Chinese were being used by employers to prevent controversial claims presented by their workforce.

In December 1873 there was a strike of goldminers at the Lothair mine at Clunes. The men had asked for shorter hours and increased wages, the employers refused their request and determined to obtain Chinese from Ballarat to fill the strikers’ places. This infuriated the miners, who summoned a meeting of the Miners’ Association, and resolved to prevent the Chinese from working. The Government had sent an escort to protect the Chinese, but this did not prevent a riot, as soon as the strike-breakers prepared to set out, and they were unable to get to their destination. The Government made no attempt to prosecute the miners, and at the end of January the strike ended by the concession demanded being granted to the miners.[19]

The problem is that Coghlan’s assertion that the mining company was not trying to force a lowering in wages and conditions, as Blainey maintained, but to prevent them increasing is not supported by any references. It appears to be derived, at least in part, from the colourful memoirs of the miners’ union organiser William Spence published a decade earlier that described the Clunes riot in some detail.[20]

The excitement and cheering was great, men, women and children joining in the resistance. Nearby was a heap of road metal, and arming herself with a few stones, a sturdy North of Ireland woman, without shoes or stockings, mounted the barricade as the coaches drew up. As she did so she called out to the other women, saying: ‘Come on, you cousin Jinnies; bring me the stones and I will fire them.’ The sergeant in charge of the police presented his carbine at the woman and ordered her to desist. Her answer was to bare her breast and say to him: ‘Shoot away, and be damned to ye; better be shot than starved to death.’ With the words she threw a stone, cutting the cheek of the officer. After that stones flew rapidly; the horses began to plunge, and the Chinese to yell; whilst the terrified director (by name of Solomon) in charge crawled into the boot of the coach for safety.[21]

Lively though this certainly is, Spence’s description of the Clunes hostilities is questionable. Penned more than thirty years later, it appears to be a much-embroidered fiction. There is no record of an official of the Lothair Gold Mining Company called Solomon at the barricade and the three representatives who were there (Pascoe, Samuels and Bryant) did not retire into the boot of a coach. The police sergeant in charge gashed his temple when he fell to the ground, not his cheek when a stone struck him and the lowly Irish agitator who supposedly instigated the violence appears to be a fabrication arising from an unidentified stout woman at the front who tried to pelt the driver of the lead coach with stones and missed him each time. Spence was employed at Bendigo at the time of the riot he implied he witnessed and did not even get the year correct. It was 1873, not 1876 as he stated.

---

[1] General discussion can be found in ‘The Chinese’, in ibid, Jupp, James, (ed.), The Australian people: an encyclopedia of the nation, its people and their origins, pp. 197-204; Curthoys, Ann, ‘Men of All Nations, except Chinamen’: Europeans and Chinese on the Goldfields of New South Wales’, in ibid, McCalman, Iain, Cook, Alexander, and Reeves, Andrew, (eds.), Gold: forgotten histories and lost objects of Australia, pp. 100-123, and Lake, Marilyn and Reynolds, Henry, Drawing the Global Colour Line: White Men’s Countries and the International Challenge of Racial Equality, (Cambridge University Press), 2008, pp. 15-47. The experience of Chinese immigrants in Victoria during the 1850s and after can be explored in Daley, C., ‘The Chinese in Victoria’, Victorian Historical Magazine, Vol. 14, (1931-1932), pp. 23-35; Serle, pp. 320-335; Price. C., The Great White Walls are Built: Restrictive Immigration to North America and Australasia 1836-1888, (Australian National University Press), 1974; Markus, A., Fear and Hatred: Purifying Australia and California 1850-1901, (Hale & Iremonger), 1979; Gittins, J., The Diggers from China: The Story of the Chinese on the Goldfields, (Quartet Books), 1981; and Cronin, K., Colonial Casualties: Chinese in Early Australia, (Melbourne University Press), 1982. McLaren, Ian F., The Chinese in Victoria: Official Reports and Documents, (Red Rooster Press), 1985, is an invaluable study including critical sources from the 1850s.

[2] Lovejoy, Valerie, ‘Depending upon Diligence: Chinese at work in Bendigo 1861-1881’, Journal of Historical and European Studies, Vol. 1, (2007), pp. 23-37 provide a valuable case study.

[3] The most recent historiographical discussion can be found in Heathcote, Christopher, ‘Clunes 1873: The Uprising that Wasn’t’, Quadrant, Vol. LIII, (12), (2008). See also, Baker, David, ‘Barricades and batons: A historical perspective of the policing of major industrial disorder in Australia’, in ibid, Enders, Mike and Dupont, Benoît, (eds.), Policing the lucky country, pp. 199-222, especially pp. 202-204, Small, Jerome, ‘Reconsidering White Australia: Class and anti-Chinese racism in the 1873 Clunes riot’, BA (Hons) thesis, La Trobe University, 1997 and Griffiths, P.G. ‘The making of White Australia: Ruling class agendas, 1876-1888’, PhD thesis, Australian National University, 2006, pp. 97-136, 349-458.

[4] Reeves, Keir and Wong Hoy, Kevin, ‘Beyond a European protest: reappraising Chinese agency on the Victorian goldfields’, in Mayne, Alan, (ed.), Eureka: Reappraising an Australian Legend, (Network), 2006, pp. 153-174, is a crucial revisionist contribution to discussions of the Chinese in Victoria in the 1850s. There is a growing literature on Lambing Flat: Carrington, D. L., ‘Riots at Lambing Flat 1860-1861’, Journal of the Royal Australian Historical Society, Vol. 46, (1960), pp. 223-243; Walker, R. B., ‘Another Look at the Lambing Flat Riots 1860-1861’, Journal of the Royal Australian Historical Society, Vol. 56, (1970), pp. 193-205; Selth, P., ‘The Burrangong (Lambing Flat) Riots 1860-61: A Closer Look’, Journal of the Royal Australian Historical Society, Vol. 60, (1974), pp. 48-69; Connolly, C. N., ‘Miners’ Rights: Explaining the ‘Lambing Flat’ Riots of 1860-61’, in Curthoys, A., and Markus, A., (eds.), Who are Our Enemies? Racism and the Australian Working class, (Neutral Bay), 1978, pp. 35-47, and Messner, Andrew, ‘Popular Constitutionalism and Chinese Protest on the Victoria Goldfields’, Journal of Australian Colonial History, Vol. 2, (2), (2000), pp. 63-78.

[5] Clark, C.M.H., A History of Australia, Vol. 4, The earth abideth for ever 1851-1888, (Melbourne University Press), 1978, p. 350.

[6] Age, 10 December 1873. See also Argus, 10 December 1873, p. 5.

[7] Clark would probably argue that this was justifiable poetic licence.

[8] Ibid, Markus, A., Fear and Hatred: Purifying Australia and California 1850-1901, pp. 76-77.

[9] Rolls, Eric, Sojourners: The Epic Story of China’s Centuries-Old Relationship with Australia, (University of Queensland Press), 1992, pp. 181-182.

[10] Price, C.P., The Great White Walls are Built: Restrictive Immigration in America and Australasia, (Australian National University Press), 1974.

[11] Sutcliffe, J.T., A History of Trade Unionism in Australia, (Macmillan), 1967, p. 53.

[12] Ross, Edgar, A History of the Miner’s Federation of Australia, (Australasian Coal and Shale Employees’ Federation), 1970, p. 49.

[13] Harris, Joe, The Bitter Fight: A Pictorial History of the Australian Labor Movement, (University of Queensland Press), 1970.

[14] Ibid, Ross, Edgar, A History of the Miner’s Federation of Australia, p. 49.

[15] Ibid, Blainey, G., The Rush that Never Ended: A History of Australian Mining, p. 89.

[16] Blainey, G., Our Side of the Country, (Methuen Hayes), 1984, p. 50. This remained unchanged in A History of Victoria, (Cambridge University Press), 2006, p. 50.

[17] Ibid, Withers, W. B., History of Ballarat, pp. 214-215.

[18] Windschuttle, Keith, The White Australia Policy, (Macleay Press), 2004. In her review of the work in The Age, 18 December 2004, Marilyn Lake said that it was ‘a deeply political work - combative in tone, often contemptuous of other people’s work, passionate and polemical in argument. But politically driven history and the urge to cast historical subjects as heroes or villains can pose a barrier to understanding a complex and ambiguous past.’

[19] Coghlan, T., Labour and industry in Australia from the first settlement in 1788 to the establishment of the Commonwealth in 1901, 4 Vols. (Oxford University Press), 1918, Vol. 3, p. 1473.

[20] Spence, W.G., Australia’s Awakening: Thirty Years in the Life of an Australian Agitator, (The Worker Trustees), 1909, pp. 48-50

[21] Ibid, Spence, W.G., Australia’s Awakening: Thirty Years in the Life of an Australian Agitator, p. 49.

Forty years on…

As Christopher Daniels reminded me in his recent article on historical sources, it’s forty years since we wrote out first article on history education.  Not only does that means that we’re both growing disgracefully older but that, in the interim, little has changed in the ways that examination boards approach the evaluation of sources.  Particularly, and this is the core of Chris’ paper, visual sources are still largely ignored when assessing students.  In fact, perusing some old examination papers and comparing them with today’s equivalent, the types of sources used has barely changed at all.  What visual material there is is generally in black-and-white rather than colour, the norm in say Geography papers. 

http://www.johncatt.com/downloads/pdf/magazines/ccr/ccr51_1/

Dr J. A. Langford (1823-1903): A Self-Taught Working Man and the Sale of American Degrees in Victorian Britain

In the next few weeks, I will be publishing under my imprint Authoring History  a short pamphlet on John Alfred Langford (1823-1903) written by Stephen Roberts.  This is my first venture into publishing another author’s work and it is a pleasure to take what is well-researched and written and original material into print. 

Langford was a man much like Thomas Cooper--whom he knew well.  He was an autodidact and the author of much poetry.  He also wrote a lot of local history, notably the compendiums A Century of Birmingham Life and Modern Birmingham (1868-73)  that are still regularly consulted  by local historians.  Unlike Cooper, Langford did not get involved in Chartism but worked closely with middle-class radicals like George Dawson in promoting Birmingham's famous ‘Civic Gospel’.  Most interestingly, he acquired a doctorate from a little-known American college--a little digging has discovered that this particular institution was selling degrees in mid-Victorian Britain--more than 50 men acquired them according to his research and there was much controversy in the newspapers.

Worker and protest movements 1870-1900

Before the 1880s, radical movements tended to be short-lived and focus on specific issues. From this decade on, however, as waged labour became the only means for the majority of people to make a living, industrial unions expanded and socialist ideas began to play a part in the labour movement.[1] The part police would take in the on-going conflicts between employers and workers was foreshadowed in the 1870s as workers began to organise themselves into industrial unions. In 1873, police openly intervened in a miners’ strike at Clunes. After consulting with the directors of the mine, the Chief Commissioner, in an attempt to defeat the fourteen week strike, provided an armed police escort for a convoy of strike-breakers brought into the town. The formerly peaceful dispute erupted into a riot when strikers and police clashed. In the same decade police in rural areas used the provisions of the Masters and Servants Act to break industrial action taken by shearers against squatters; in one case police arrested fifteen striking shearers.

Some commentators argue that there is little evidence of repressive policing of worker movements in Australia. This conclusion fails to take adequate account of the way worker organisations and socialist and radical ideas have been policed. Because of the inequality of bargaining power between capitalists and workers, workers need to join together to take effective action to challenge the system under which power is distributed. Worker or socialist organisations are also necessary to build working class consciousness. Changes in working class consciousness are necessary if any substantial and effective challenges are to be mounted against the ruling class.

If one looks at the policing of worker action in the context of the policing of worker organisations and radical opinion, history provides ample evidence of repressive policing. Police harassment of socialists and militant workers became widespread in the 1880s as class organisation, action, and militancy increased amongst workers. Victoria’s first socialist organisation, the Australian Socialist League (ASL), was established in early 1889. Police forbade property owners to allow the group to use their premises to hold public meetings; arrested or threatened to arrest members selling the group’s newspaper; constantly interrupted and threatened to arrest socialist speakers addressing gatherings. A leading ASL spokesperson maintained:

‘Socialism aims at the abolition of the present system of state and society by which a small class, the Bourgeoisie, rules a large class, the workers, the proletariat; rules it, and exploits it, keeps it deliberately in ignorance, and oppresses it mercilessly. They are backed up by canon, bayonet, and the policeman’s baton, and are determined to keep up this system of theirs’.

The 1890s saw the onset of mass unemployment in Australia, leaving many families and communities in a state of near-starvation. Melbourne was worst hit by the depression; by 1893 nearly one third of all workers were unemployed. The extent of unemployment, combined with the involvement of radicals as organisers, meant that protests against unemployment were more politicised than earlier demonstrations. Demonstrations often attracted thousands of people and speeches were made about socialism, anarchy and other ‘social reforms’. The police played an integral part in containing protest and undermining the political organisations of the unemployed. Police used their batons liberally at demonstrations: ‘defenceless men were beaten in a “brutal fashion” and women and children were pushed and abused’. Police also used a range of laws to persecute the politically active unemployed. One of Melbourne’s best known unemployed activists was arrested and gaoled as a vagrant; others were arrested for ‘seditious language’, disturbing the peace, and holding processions without the permission of the Mayor.

The fear of imprisonment was enough to make other activists flee the state. The criminalisation of dissent thus effectively deprived the unemployed movement of its leadership. The use of vagrancy laws during the depression to gaol the unemployed, ill, injured, infirm and women struggling to support children, reinforced the idea that poverty was the result of personal failure, rather than structural inequality and provides an early example of how policing feeds into the production of ideas favourable to the maintenance of capitalism.

---

[1] Love, P., ‘From convicts to communists’ in ibid, Burgmann, V. and Lee, J., (eds.), Staining the Wattle: A People’s History of Australia since 1788, pp. 152 and 154. See also, Markey, Ray, ‘Australia’, in Van der Linden, Marcel and Rojahn, Jürgen, (eds.), Formation of Labour Movements, 1870-1914: An International Perspective, (Brill), 1990, pp. 579-608.

Land, policing and Ned Kelly

By the 1840s, squatters in Victoria had a firm hold of the land, occupying most of the useable land and all of the best land. Squatters simply took possession of unoccupied crown land beyond the boundaries of location. Initially they paid nothing for the land. Later they were required to obtain a government licence, but as the cost was nominal they paid virtually nothing for use of the land.

Most of the squatters seem to have come from the British gentry or tenant-farmer class. There were no openings for the poor because grazing required substantial sums of capital. Land Acts were passed in the 1860s after the gold rush, partly to compensate diggers for their loss of economic independence as mining became the almost exclusive preserve of companies. These acts allowed would-be farmers access to small parcels of land called selections. However, the same acts also protected the tenure of squatters and, in substance and administration, discriminated against selectors. Squatters managed to evade the provisions of the Land Acts, especially legislation before 1865 and keep their stock runs intact by virtue of various manipulations, like ‘dummying’ and ‘peacocking’. The former involved individuals selecting blocks, ostensibly for themselves but really for squatters. The latter saw squatters selecting areas for themselves such as creeks frontages, and fertile river flats that made the rest of the run useless for farming.[1]

By the end of the 1860s, selection was a major social and geographical phenomenon. For complex reasons, including inadequate legislation and manipulation by the squatters, selection was not an economic success. The poverty of the selectors compared with the wealth of the squatters and the squatters’ highly visible attempts to frustrate selection, resulted inevitably in a divided rural community. The selectors resented the squatters and periodically expressed that resentment by burning fences, obstructing railway lines and illegally releasing impounded stock. Squatters, for their part, viewed the selectors as socially inferior and lawless and made no distinction between theft and the selector customs of slaughtering stock for ‘personal use’ and horse ‘borrowing’.

Police in rural areas, like those previously deployed on the goldfields, were paramilitary in style, and drew heavily on the Royal Irish Constabulary as a model. This was partly because Irish-born police dominated the force and approximately half were former members of the RIC. In addition, Chief Commissioners up until the beginning of the 1880s were either military men or proponents of the Irish model. The geography of the rural communities also favoured the mounted patrols used by the Irish Police over the foot patrols used by England’s civil police. Police in Victoria’s rural areas were likewise heavily armed and alienated from the selector communities they policed. They generally came from outside the area, knew nothing of local habits and made little effort to find out. Selectors suffered police corruption, incompetence, brutality and intimidation. The Victoria police, like the RIC, were held in low esteem by the majority of the rural community. On the other hand, squatters found a natural ally in the police. The higher ranks of the force moved in the same social circles as the squatters; the lower ranks, often posted to rural areas at the squatters’ request, like the squatters, made no distinction between killing stock for ‘personal use’, ‘borrowing’ horses, and theft. A strong alliance formed between the squatters and police and by the 1870s selectors, not unjustly, viewed the police as ‘squatter’s men’.[2]

Tensions in the rural community came to a head with the Kelly Outbreak, and many aspects of policing were brought to public light. Because the Kelly saga was subject to so much contemporary commentary and subsequently documented by a Royal Commission and a host of ‘Kelly scholars’, it can be seen as a microcosm of the role and reputation of police in rural Victoria during the 1870s. The police station at Greta, the setting for the Kelly outbreak, was established in 1869 at the request of local squatters, who wanted selector-duffers/stock thieves dealt with. Hall, the police officer placed in charge of the station, set up a system of spies, and used threats and intimidation to control the district’s ‘criminal classes’. An incentive to corruption was supplied by the local Stock Protection Association, comprised of squatters that supplied rewards for the arrest of suspected stock thieves. Hall vigorously pursued the rewards and arrests were often indiscriminate. Selectors could complain about police but the complaints were never heard or dismissed.

Ned Kelly

In 1871, Hall arrested the then sixteen year old Ned Kelly, a member of a selector family over use of a horse. In the process he tried, more than once, to shoot Kelly, who was unarmed, and administered a severe pistol whipping when his gun failed. The arrest triggered resentment throughout the selector community in the district. Kelly was subsequently sentenced to three years hard labour on perjured police evidence. Hall’s successor, Flood, later threatened to give Kelly ‘worse than Hall did’. The whole Kelly family, including women and children, were harassed by local police. These incidents provided the background for the events at Stringybark Creek in 1878, where three police officers were shot and killed by Kelly and his gang. Four police set out on Kelly’s trail after an altercation at the Kelly family home in which a police officer was slightly injured. Although Kelly was later found guilty of murder by a Supreme Court jury there is evidence supporting Kelly’s claim that the police were shot in self-defence. The police hunt for the gang over the following twenty months and its climax at the ‘siege of Glenrowan’, demonstrate both the militaristic style of policing in the area and the extent of police alienation from the community.

Local people, generally thought Kelly was ‘a man made outlaw by persecution and injustice’ and refused to cooperate with police in the hunt. One local newspaper reported that three out of every four of the male population in the area were on Kelly’s side.[3] Chief Commissioner Standish shared this view, lamenting:

The Gang were secure of the good will of a great proportion of the inhabitants of these regions…Indeed the outlaws are considered heroes by a large proportion of the population of the North Eastern district who…look upon the police as their natural enemies.

Unable to count on local people’s help, police resorted to spies and arresting ‘Kelly sympathisers’ during the hunt. In addition, search parties were heavily armed. Police finally caught up with Kelly and his gang at Glenrowan. During a siege lasting several hours police blazed away at an inn containing the gang and dozens of unarmed civilians. Police bullets fatally wounded three civilians, including an old man and a child, and injured others, one a teenage boy shot in the back after he tried to escape the potential death trap. One police officer, fully aware of who he was shooting at, repeatedly shot at a woman carrying a baby as she ran out of the building seeking safety, a bullet lightly grazing the baby’s head. While the police showed little regard for the civilians’ safety, the gang tried unsuccessfully to negotiate safe passage for those trapped inside. After the siege one journalist wrote that: ‘The want of judgement displayed by them [the police] was criminal. The indiscriminate firing into a house filled with women and children was a most disgraceful act’. Nevertheless the government paid the police involved in Kelly’s capture substantial rewards.

The legendary armour

The seminal place Ned Kelly and other bushrangers have in Australian history suggests that they symbolised more than individual criminality. The Kelly Outbreak was linked to a broader struggle over land and challenges to squatter privilege. Indeed, writing half a century ago Hancock maintained that, after the gold rushes and reforms to the democratic process:

Australian nationalism took definite form in the class struggle between the landless majority and the land monopolising squatters.[4]

Because police were at the forefront of repressing selector agitation they were inevitably part of that struggle. As one police officer at the time described it, the Kelly Outbreak was a form of ‘guerrilla warfare’ and the police of the region were ‘an army of occupation’. The unpopularity of the police in rural areas assured the hero status of bushrangers in Australian history. It is true that Kelly’s ‘enemies, even more than his allies, helped make him a legend’.

As at Eureka twenty-five years previously, economic oppression combined with repressive policing to provide the backdrop for escalating conflict and loss of life during the Kelly Outbreak in the late 1870s. The Kelly saga also has some continuity with earlier struggles over land. One Aboriginal tribe includes Ned Kelly in their Dream stories that depict Kelly as ‘concerned with freedom, dignity and true justice’ because he opposed the police, who Aboriginal people associate with theft of land and destruction of life. Chief Commissioner Standish refused to address a police parade after Kelly’s capture until the Queensland Native Police, who had assisted in the hunt, were removed.

In the early 1880s policing in Victoria’s rural areas became less militaristic. These changes are usually credited to the pressure for reform brought by the Royal Commission into policing and the far sightedness of individual police. It is also true, however, that the changes to policing coincided with a shift in the significance of land as a basis for social division. Land was the major means of production in the first century of Australia’s history. By 1880, however, Victoria had moved out of plantation and development-style economies, typified by the ascendancy of the squatters and the gold rushes and into an economy where industrial capital dominated. From this time on major class divisions revolved, not around land, but around the divisions between wage labour and the capitalists that employed them. For most Victorians survival after the gold rushes and the failures of selection meant waged labour. Those selectors who survived into the 1880s generally only did so by working part-time, fencing, shearing, and the like. In the 1880s, the focus of police repression also shifted away from rural areas towards cities and regional towns where worker movements and militancy were on the rise.

---

[1] Morrissey, S., Squatters and Selectors: A Social and Economic History.

[2] Molony, J., I am Ned Kelly, (Allen Lane), 1980, 2nd ed., (Melbourne University Press), 2001.

[3] Pastoral Times, 10 July 1880.

[4] Hancock, W. K., Australia, p. 60.

Policing the goldfields

The overcoming of Aboriginal resistance did not see police in Victoria lay down their arms and adopt a less military mode of policing; the discovery of gold in 1851 transformed the colony and provided new enemies for the authorities to overcome with the assistance of paramilitary police and the military. Opinions vary as to the scale of crime on the gold fields.[1] Some writers reported ‘the lawless condition of the place and the deeds of rapine and bloodshed that disgrace it’. Others, like the future Lord Cecil, were pleasantly surprised, finding ‘less crime than in a large English town, and more order and civility than I have witnessed in my own native village of Hatfield’. [2] Even with the same goldfield there were local variations. The problem is that the possible sources for this are all tinged with their own political agendas. The Argus, for example, probably exaggerated the level of crime to embarrass the Government, something repeated in the Sydney and Adelaide papers to discourage migration to Victoria. By contrast, La Trobe had a vested interest in playing down the extent of crime and his police officers often left him ill-informed about the real level of criminal activity.

William Strutt: En route to the diggings, 1851

The problem of lawlessness on the diggings was made worse by a drastic shortage of police in the early days of the gold rush. In July 1851, all but two of Melbourne’s forty police resigned and fled to the gold fields and there was considerable fear for public order. The ‘police’ presence at the gold fields was provided by a small contingent of Native Police. [3] Established in 1837, the Native Police played an important role in the discovery of gold and the early government regulation of the Victorian diggings. Native Police troopers escorted the first pack-horse convoys carrying gold to Melbourne from the goldfields. At the beginning of 1852, La Trobe wrote of the Mount Alexander diggings: ‘The field now became the general rendezvous of...the most profligate portion of the inhabitants of this and the adjacent colonies...’ He clearly needed to employ additional police, but the Legislative Council stubbornly refused to allow him to spend the government’s general revenue on any service connected to the gold fields except administration.

A degree of self-regulation became necessary, with some crimes receiving summary justice, and most disputes being settled between diggers ‘in a practical manner’. In February 1852, for example, the Miners Association tried to organise patrols by diggers at night in the Castlemaine area. The most frequent crime was theft and normally the punishment was banishment from the goldfields or lashings. Expulsion was no small matter: those punished felt ‘every mark of disgrace and ignominy’, and was considered a ‘pariah amongst diggers all over Australia’. The crime and punishment was widely publicised in newspapers to ensure such banishment was complete. Diggers’ justice was a response to the lack of formal policing on the goldfields and was a far from perfect legal model with punishments determined by the makeshift ‘jury’ at hand. It was an unarguably simplistic judicial system but one that kept a tenuous order over the goldfields.

Initially recruiting for the police was challenging. First, wages bore no comparison to potential earnings on the diggings. Secondly, most possible police recruits were unreformed convicts, many lacking the honesty necessary for law enforcement. The diggers recognised ‘good’ authority when they saw it and were largely unimpressed with the new police. Despite the financial constraints, La Trobe raised daily wages from 2/6d to 6/- and accepted anyone who was willing to join the force. This attracted many young, inexperienced recruits and ex-convicts, who would prove to be harsh and corrupt as they collected the gold licence fees. This lack of respect escalated into outright contempt when a force of 130 military ‘pensioners’ from VDL was used to relieve a regiment stationed at the Mount Alexander diggings [4] Instead of inspiring respect for their experience and age, the response from the diggers as the pensioners arrived was laughter and derision. It was only a fortnight later that the Commissioner petitioned La Trobe for further troops.

Recruitment problems proved temporary. [5] By March 1852, the Melbourne force was at full strength. By mid-1853, there were 875 police stationed in Victoria and a year later 1,639 establishing the relatively high police to population ratio of 1:144 in the colony.[6] La Trobe’s government invested in badly needed bridges and roads for the diggings and recruited extra police, who were paid 12/6d a day, plus board and lodging. In September 1852, a new cadre of police ‘officers’ was set up to lead the disorganised troopers: educated individuals or immigrants who had found themselves unsuited to digging. [7] This new ‘gentrified’ police force further inflamed the diggers. Their methods of policing were clearly antagonistic and they bore the brunt of digger contempt and cooperation between diggers and authority deteriorated further. In 1853, the Government removed control of police from local magistrates and established the centrally controlled Victoria Police.[8] The reorganisation allowed the Government to enforce its goldfield policies effectively and to check movements for reform that had emerged amongst the small independent miners. In September 1853, the Colonial Secretary wrote to the Chief Commissioner of Police asking that police attend political meetings on the goldfields

...it is very desirable that intelligent men should attend all public meetings to watch the proceedings and to take down accurately such words used as may appear to them desirable’.[9]

The Police Regulation Act of 1853 was modelled on the London Metropolitan Police Act, however policing in rural areas and on the goldfields continued to be militaristic. Large numbers of heavily armed police along with soldiers were dispatched to the goldfields; for example at Castlemaine in 1854 the ratio of police to population was 1:56. [10] The purpose of the show of force was to overcome resistance to the licence fee. It was not only the licence that was odious; the way the tax was enforced was also resented. Rather than combating crime, the police operated as a repressive tax-gathering and surveillance force. Licence or ‘digger’ hunts regularly interrupted work; police demanded to see licences several times a day and forced even those not working to pay. This repressive, inefficient approach was compounded by the government’s decision to grant half the proceeds of fines for evasion of licence fees and sly-grogging to those police responsible for convictions. As a result, the police concentrated on securing licence fees and fines rather than combating crime and this led to widespread corruption. Many police, some accustomed to a system of convict discipline performed their duties in a rude, bullying manner. Others, like Superintendent David Armstrong, were brutal thugs. Armstrong’s habit was to burn the tents of suspects and beat those who questioned his methods with the brass knob of his riding crop. He was eventually dismissed, but left boasting that in two years at Ballarat he had made £15,000 in fines and bribes. This strategic concentration of resources was not seen as an attempt to contain increased crime, but a conscious attempt to control the civilian population on the diggings. When giving evidence to the Gold Fields Commission of Enquiry in 1855, Chief Commissioner MacMahon admitted that police at Ballarat were used primarily as tax collectors and could not operate efficiently as law enforcement officers while this remained their role. [11]

In 1853, the government removed control of police from local magistrates and established the centrally controlled Victoria Police.[12] The reorganisation allowed the government to effectively enforce its goldfield policies and provided a means to check the movements for reform that were emerging amongst the small independent miners on the goldfields. The reduction in the power of pastoralist magistrates over police also marked a move away from a plantation-style economy based on the export of primary products to Britain, towards a more development style economy associated with mining.

Following on from riots on the Ovens goldfields in 1853, in late 1854 Ballarat diggers built the Eureka Stockade to resist the efforts of the authorities to collect the gold licence and protect themselves against the predations of police and soldiers. After a police agent provocateur at the Stockade was unable to persuade the diggers to attack, two hundred and seventy-six police and soldiers mounted an attack on the Stockade: about thirty miners and four soldiers were killed in the battle that ensued and many more were injured. Mounted police, in particular, were credited with gratuitous violence during the storming of the stockade, killing bystanders and stockaders alike well after all resistance had ceased.[13] The 1855 Report of the Goldfield Commission Enquiry neatly summed up the situation:

Instead of that happy accord between the police and the orderly citizen, exemplified everywhere but on the gold-fields... [there was] a force requisite to defeat them [the miners], should their mutual irritation come to a crisis. [14]

This practice of policing generated hatred for the licences, contempt for the force and ultimately resistance from the diggers. They were angered by the lack of policing of actual crime and outraged by a system that portrayed them as criminals. As J. B. Humffray observed:

Honest men are hunted down by the police like kangaroos, and if they do not possess a licence...they are paraded through the diggings by the commissioners and police...and, if unable to pay the fine, are rudely locked up, in company of any thief or thieves who may be in the Camp cells at the time; in short, treated in every way as if they were felons. [15]

By 1854, the demands of radical diggers had broadened to include not only reform of the licence system but also changes to the democratic process and the unlocking of lands held under protected tenure by squatters. In the aftermath of the Eureka Stockade diggers were granted the vote and the right to elect their own regulatory bodies. Furthermore, soldiers were not again used for law enforcement in Victoria. However, policing in rural areas remained militaristic and access to land continued to be an important issue.

---

[1] Serle, pp. 35-36.

[2] Scott, Ernest, (ed.), Lord Robert Cecil’s Gold Fields’ Diaries, (Melbourne University Press), 1935, pp. 18-19.

[3] Fels, Marie Hansen, Good men and true: the Aboriginal police of the Port Phillip District, 1837-1853, (Melbourne University Press), 1988.

[4] The ‘pensioners’ were non-commissioned officers and privates who had agreed to serve out their army careers as convict guards in exchange for a grant of land and a cottage.

[5] Ibid, Victoria Police, Police in Victoria 1836-1980, pp. 5-10 and ibid, Haldane, R., The People’s Force, pp. 7-47.

[6] Ibid, Goodman, D., Gold seeking: Victoria and California in the 1850s, p. 75.

[7] Ibid, Goodman, D., Gold seeking: Victoria and California in the 1850s, pp. 78-79, discusses this élite group.

[8] Ibid, Victoria Police, Police in Victoria 1836-1980, p. 7; see also ibid, Haldane, R., The People’s Force, pp. 29-30

[9] Colonial Secretary Foster to Chief Commissioner of Police, 24 September 1853, cit., Goodman, D., Gold seeking: Victoria and California in the 1850s, pp. 74-75.

[10] The Goldfields Commission Report, 1855, (Red Roster Press), 1978, pp. 60-61, concluded that abolishing the licence fee would reduce the size of the police force by between half and two-thirds.

[11] Mellor, G., ‘Sir Charles MacMahon (1824-1891)’, ADB, Vol. 5, pp. 189-190.

[12] Ibid, Victoria Police Police in Victoria 1836-1980, p. 7; ibid, Haldane R., The People’s Force, pp. 29-30.

[13] Molony, John, Eureka, (Viking), 1984, 2nd ed., 2001, remains the best study.

[14] Ibid, The Goldfields Commission Report, pp. 17-18.

[15] Ballarat Times, 21 October 1854.

Policing the Victorian frontiers

From the beginning, the nature of policing in the Port Phillip District, Victoria after 1851, was profoundly influenced by the need to overcome Aboriginal resistance to dispossession.[1] Aboriginal resistance expressed itself in a type of guerrilla warfare involving sporadic attacks on settlers, who were generally well armed and often shot Aboriginal people indiscriminately.[2] It is estimated that at least 20,000 Aboriginal people and approximately 3,000 settlers were killed across Australia in one hundred and fifty years of prolonged conflict.[3] The intensity of this conflict and Australia’s convict origins, accounts for the paramilitary nature of the settlement’s first police who, unlike their British counterparts, were heavily armed and military in appearance and operation.[4] Australia was the original police state.[5] Because Port Phillip was a free colony, not a penal settlement like NSW or VDL, Aboriginal people, rather than convicts, tended to be the major preoccupation of the colony’s early police.

When police were initially deployed around Port Phillip in 1836 their main task was to create a space in which settlement could grow, by keeping Aboriginal people off their own land once it was deemed fit for pastoral use. Alienation from the land deprived Aboriginal people of the material and spiritual basis for existence and all but destroyed their society. Although the official mandate of Port Phillip’s first police included protecting Aboriginal people and minimising conflict, the police sided with settlers, not only failing to protect Aboriginal people but joining in the killing.[6] This is hardly surprising given that police at the time were under the supervision of local magistrates, who were dominated by pastoralists. By the late 1830s, Aboriginal resistance in Port Phillip was met by a combination of Mounted, Border and Native Police. It was the latter force, however, established in 1837 and recruited from local tribes, who were in the vanguard in overcoming Aboriginal resistance. Port Phillip’s Native Police are said to have been relatively benign compared to their counterparts in other parts of the colony. ‘Relatively’, used in this context, must be kept in perspective. During the first years of European settlement, massacres, rapes and casual killings of Aboriginal people were so common they barely rated discussion. It is not possible to quantify precisely the extent of the carnage inflicted upon Aboriginal people by the Native Police of Port Phillip, because, as Bridges puts it, ‘naturally enough the more colourful, but illicit, exploits of the Corps were not enshrined for history in its official records’.[7]

Nevertheless, there is sufficient evidence to indicate that the killing of defenceless Aboriginal men, women and children by Port Phillip’s Native Police was of a scale that would be deemed unthinkable if it involved non-Aboriginals as victims. Summing up the role of the Native Police Corps in Port Phillip, Bridges maintained:

‘What it did do was to make the rule of force more effective through summary punishment, while operating to all appearances within the law, and by inhibiting depredation through fear. The Corps’s true task was a more basic one than that of white police for whites. If the Aborigines’ status as British subjects was ever to have any meaning, and if they were to live in peace with the destroyers of the native economy, they had in fact to be subjected to the will and code of the invader. The Corps was an instrument for forcing them to face this unwelcome fact.’[8]

Occasionally the Governor of Port Phillip encouraged prosecutions over the murder of Aboriginal people. Frontier society, however, was so dominated by those whose interests directly opposed those of its native inhabitants that prosecutions inevitably failed. For the most part, crimes against Aboriginal people by police and settlers were ignored; the charging of three Border police over the killing of two Aboriginals marking the exception rather than the rule. Police were not neutral in the conflict between settlers and Aboriginal people; instead they provided military reinforcement for the forced expansion of white settlement, thereby presiding over the wholesale destruction of Aboriginal society. The thoroughness of the destruction of Aboriginal life achieved with the help of Port Phillip’s police is attested to by the fate of its Native Police Corps. By the early 1850s, less than twenty years after the first police were sent to the district specifically to deal with the ‘Aboriginal problem’, there were so few Aboriginal people left that not only did the corps no longer have a reason to exist.[9]

---

[1] Ibid, Connell, R.W. and Irving H., Class Structure in Australian History: Poverty and Progress, p. 35 and ibid, Sturma, M. ‘Policing the criminal frontier in mid-nineteenth-century Australia, Britain and America’, p. 23.

[2] Bridges, B., ‘The Native Police Corps, Port Phillip District and Victoria, 1837-1853’, Journal of the Royal Australian Historical Society, Vol. 57, (1971), pp. 113-142; Davies, S. ‘Aborigines, Murder and the Criminal Law in early Port Phillip’, 1841-1851’, Historical Studies, Vol. 22, (1987), pp. 313-335; Reynolds, H., Frontier: Aborigines, Settlers and Land, (Allen & Unwin), 1987, pp. 7-22; Broome, R., ‘The struggle for Australia: Aboriginal-European warfare’, 1770-1930 in McKernan, M. and Browne, M., (eds.), Australia: Two Centuries of War & Peace, (Allen & Unwin), 1988, pp. 102-103; and Elder, B., Blood on the Wattle: Massacres and Maltreatment of Australian Aborigines since 1788, (Child & Associates), 1988.

[3] Ibid, Reynolds, H., Frontier: Aborigines, Settlers and Land, pp. 7-9; 29-30; 53; ibid, Broome, R., ‘The struggle for Australia: Aboriginal-European warfare’, pp. 116-119.

[4] Haldane, R., The People’s Force: A history of the Victoria Police, (Melbourne University Press), 1986, pp. 5-39; ibid, Connell, R.W. and Irving H., Class Structure in Australian History: Poverty and Progress, p. 35; and, Palmer, D., ‘Magistrates, police and power in Port Phillip’ in Philips, D. and Davies, S., (eds.), A Nation of Rogues?: Crime, Law and Punishment in Colonial Australia, (Melbourne University Press), 1994, pp. 86-90.

[5] Davidson, A., ‘Big brother is watching you’, in ibid, Burgmann, V. and Lee, J., (eds.), Staining the Wattle: A People’s History of Australia since 1788, p. 3.

[6] Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission, Racist Violence: Report To The National Inquiry Into Racist Violence in Australia, (Australian Government Publishing Service), 1991, p. 39.

[7] Ibid, Bridges, B., ‘The Native Police Corps, Port Phillip District and Victoria, 1837-1853’, p. 126.

[8] Ibid, Bridges, B., ‘The Native Police Corps, Port Phillip District and Victoria, 1837-1853’, p. 130.

[9] Ibid, Bridges, B., ‘The Native Police Corps, Port Phillip District and Victoria, 1837-1853’, p. 130.

Can we shrink the size of the state?

The debate about the proper balance between what the state should provide and what individuals should provide for themselves has a long pedigree and has never been fully resolved.  The critical question is how can we have a ‘good society’ and a ‘good state’?  As the state has grown bigger so those areas that previously would have been left to individuals have been vacuumed up leading to an expanding public sector and higher levels of taxation to fund those services whether through direct or indirect tax or through National Insurance contributions.  This had led to growing concerns that the state is doing too much and that it costs too much (a cost that is unsustainable) and  that individuals are taking little responsibility for their livelihoods.  It is true that over the past century the state has taken responsibility for providing benefits for those in need through the welfare system and provided ‘free at the point of need’ health care through the NHS.  This ‘welfare state’ has proliferated over the last twenty years with a growing number of increasingly confusing benefits that people may claim giving rise to the notion of a benefit culture with an imprecise numbers of people—the so-called ‘scroungers’—being supported by the state from cradle to grave.  This, combined with an aging population that puts pressure on pensions and health-care, has led to calls particularly though not exclusively from the political right that we need to ‘roll back the state’.  The problem is that people want the benefits but don’t actually want to see their personal taxation rise to pay for them and many people are prepared to countenanced benefit cuts as long. of course, it’s not their benefits that are cut.   Cutting the role of the state is fraught with difficulties since many benefits the welfare state provides have been accorded the status of sacred cows making them virtually untouchable by politicians without disastrous electoral fallout.

Therein lies the conundrum, politicians recognise that the current public sector is financially unsustainable and yet its reform requires political courage that most of them clearly do not have.  They are not prepared to say that we cannot continue with a financially burgeoning NHS or that people must (not should) take responsibility for providing certain things for themselves.  So they seek to reform or rather tinker round the edges of the problem hoping to reduced costs sufficiently to allow the unwieldy state to survive in its current form for a few more years.  As a society we have to accept that either we will have to pay more through taxation for the current services or that we will have to take greater responsibility for providing for ourselves through saving.  In Australia, for instance, people save about a tenth of their income for this purpose while in Britain the figure is less than half that.  This applies particularly to saving for old-age and saving to deal with health problems through private insurance.  We insure our private possessions against damage or theft and yet the overwhelming majority of people do not do the same for their own health.  We assume that, irrespective of our health needs, the state will provide free care. The same applies to pensions though recent attempts to make making private provision has been made easier for those in the private sector.  In both cases, this would shift responsibility from the state to the individual.  But, I hear you think, what about those who do not make such provision?  Well you can’t let them starve in old-age or die for want of medical treatment so individual provision has to be mandatory much as it is now with NI contributions but with a private provider not with the state.  But private providers aren’t reliable are they?  Well at present probably not but but there is no reason why they shouldn’t be…we take out health insurance when we travel abroad so why not when we’re at home?  There’s also no reason why private providers cannot do things better than existing state providers…in fact you might think they couldn’t do worse!!

Suger: The Life of Louis VI 'the Fat'

JUST PUBLISHED

The kingdom of France when Louis VI came to the throne in 1108 was a patchwork of feudal principalities over which the authority of the French Capetian monarchy was weak. Beyond the heartlands of Capetian power around Paris, kings of France had little power and the rulers of the great principalities such as Aquitaine paid little heed to the authority of the French state. Under Louis VI, this gradually began to change and, although it took a further two centuries to complete the process, the feudal supremacy of the French monarchy began to be asserted and the lands over which it had feudal hegemony began to expand. Much of what we know about Louis' reign comes from his life written by his friend and advisor Suger Abbot of St-Denis. Suger was a talented individual who straddled the often perilous divide between Church and State with considerable skill. He was a diplomat, administrator in both ecclesiastical and political spheres and staunch defender of his monastery. He witnessed many of the important events of Louis' reign and knew many of the people he wrote about. His Life of Louis VI is a partial biography, like most medieval biographies, that aims through recounting Louis' life to demonstrate what the nature of 'good' kingship should be--to defend the weak, to dispense justice, to defend both Church and State from those who sought control over them and to defend France against attack from within and without. His is an epic tale of good versus evil, justice versus injustice and right against wrong.

This volume provides a translation of Suger's work with detailed annotation that identify the key participants and explain the significance of the key events. The introduction provides a brief biography of Suger and examines what his intentions were in writing his book. Two appendices look at the French defeat at the Battle of the Two Kings at Brémule in 1119 and the murder of Charles of Flanders in 1127 through the eyes of other medieval writers. There is also a detailed bibliography.

A democratic deficit

The idea that there is a democratic deficit at the heart of the European Union is nothing new.  It has been a recurrent theme of those critical of the EU for several decades.  There is also a growing realisation that there is a democratic deficit at the heart of the British system of government as well.  Yes we elect MPs every five years but once they are elected they appear to forget those who elected them until it comes to the next electoral cycle.  What people find increasingly irksome is the patronising attitude of politicians who appear to take the view that you elected us and if you don’t like what we’re doing you can vote us out at the next election!  Now this might have been a (barely) acceptable position before the 1960s but people are more politically aware and confrontational today.  They have views and expect politicians to respond to their concerns which they are often unwilling or unable to do.  The result of all this is that political decisions are frequently made by a small cadre of career politicians or, in the case of the EU, unelected officials both of whom have their own agenda that they pursue irrespective of what people say.

Herein lies the problem of the democratic deficit and it’s a problem facing all ‘democracies’.  Democracy is increasing losing its core principles: ‘of the people, by the people and for the people’ in favour of a technocratic view of democracy in which frequently unaccountable ‘experts’ propound solutions that are then implemented by elected politicians.  This is not to suggest that those solutions are wrong or that they do not benefit the people but that misses the point.  The essence of a democratic system is that it is accountable to the people and ‘technocracy’ is, by its nature, largely unaccountable.  Take the vexed question of the proposed referendum on Britain’s continued membership of the EU.  It is clear, whatever your views, that the British people have been crying out for the right to vote for or against the Union for the past decade (if not longer) but it has not happened despite the promises of successive governments.  The reasons for this are relatively simple: politicians of all parties generally say that this isn't the right time largely because they think they’ll lose. 

Refighting the First World War by today’s politicians

It is hardly surprising in the centenary year of the outbreak of the First World War that historians, politicians and countries are reappraising its origins, course and consequences.  We have already seen the publication of a tranche of books on the subjects including the excellent study by Max Hastings of its beginnings and David Reynolds’ superb study of its ‘long shadow’ during the twentieth century and there is undoubtedly more to come.  Now there’s nothing wrong with re-examining past events and coming to different interpretations of those events—the essence of what being a historian is about—but I also become a little jaundiced when politicians enter the fray largely because their comments are normally ill-informed and designed to attract the media and because those comments often have little to do with the events themselves and rather more to do with contemporary political agendas.

Michael Gove’s comments in the Daily Mail last Thursday is the case in point.  He argues that people’s understanding of the war had been overlaid by ‘misrepresentations’ which at worst reflected ‘an unhappy compulsion on the part of some to denigrate virtues such as patriotism, honour and courage’.  ‘The war was, of course, an unspeakable tragedy, which robbed this nation of our bravest and best,’ wrote Mr Gove. ‘But even as we recall that loss and commemorate the bravery of those who fought, it's important that we don't succumb to some of the myths which have grown up about the conflict.’ ‘The conflict has, for many, been seen through the fictional prism of dramas such as Oh, What a Lovely War!, The Monocled Mutineer and Blackadder, as a misbegotten shambles - a series of catastrophic mistakes perpetrated by an out-of-touch elite.’  Then comes the critical point: ‘Even to this day there are left-wing academics all too happy to feed those myths.’  Yes, it’s a further assault on Mr Gove’s bête noire…left-wing academics even though the origins of the idea of ‘lions led by donkeys’ came from Conservative politician Alan Clark’s revisionist history.  What Michael has done is to erect an Aunt Sally that few historians now believe in and proceed to knock it down.  The importance of Clark’s The Donkeys is that it initiated a debate into how the war was conducted—which was his intention—rather than simply an attack on the incompetence of the ‘top brass’.  Today we have a more nuanced view of how the generals ran operations during the War—and perennial trench warfare was beyond most of their experiences—and historians recognise that there were some poor and some very good military leaders and that no general, good or bad, could sensibly regard their troops merely as cannon-fodder to be thrown pointlessly against the enemy trenches. 

That there has been a response from the Labour Party should come as no surprise.  Shadow education secretary and TV historian Tristram Hunt also criticised Mr Gove's ‘crass' comments. ‘The reality is clear: the government is using what should be a moment for national reflection and respectful debate to rewrite the historical record and sow political division.’   While Sir Tony Robinson commented that ‘I think Mr Gove has just made a very silly mistake; it's not that Blackadder teaches children the First World War. When imaginative teachers bring it in, it's simply another teaching tool; they probably take them over to Flanders to have a look at the sights out there, have them marching around the playground, read the poems of Wilfred Owen to them. And one of the things that they'll do is show them Blackadder.  And I think to make this mistake, to categorise teachers who would introduce something like Blackadder as left-wing and introducing left-wing propaganda is very, very unhelpful. And I think it's particularly unhelpful and irresponsible for a minister in charge of education.’   Tony’s mistake was that Michael Gove did not mention teachers in his article though others, including Jeremy Paxman, have criticised schools for relying on episodes of Blackadder Goes Forth to teach about the conflict.  The critical word here is ‘relying’ and in my long experience in teaching I have never come across any teacher who would ‘rely’ on fictionalised drama to teach about the War.  Drama provides one interpretation of the War, Wilfred Owen another and Rupert Brooke yet another.  I am reminded of Nikita Khrushchev’s comment that ‘Historians are dangerous and capable of turning everything upside down. They have to be watched.’  Undoubtedly Michael Gove would agree.