The problem of lawlessness

How critical was the nature of policing to the development of resistance among miners in Victoria in the early 1850s? [1] The development of policing in Victoria was influenced by two traditions of law enforcement: a crime preventative, ‘civilian’ style of policing epitomised by the London Metropolitan Police, consciously non-military and unarmed, supposedly working in partnership with and with the consent of the local community; and the ‘paramilitary’ style of the Irish Constabulary, centralised, armed and kept away from the local community in barracks, whose function was to check social and political disorder and dissent, as much as crime. [2] The first model of policing was adopted in colonial Melbourne but the more militaristic style was applied to the goldfields. [3] 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 goldfields... [there was] a force requisite to defeat them [the miners], should their mutual irritation come to a crisis. [4]

Opinions vary as to the scale of crime on the gold fields particularly between 1851 and 1855. [5] An unknown journalist wrote that ‘All the letters from Mt Alexander dwell upon the lawless condition of the place and the deeds of rapine and bloodshed that disgrace it’.[6] 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’. [7] Even within the same goldfield it is evident that there were local variations in the level of criminality. 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 while his police officers often left him ill-informed about real levels of criminal activity.

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. [8] 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. In January 1852, La Trobe reported 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…’ [9] 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 were considered a ‘pariah amongst diggers all over Australia’. 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.

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[1] King, Hazel, ‘Some Aspects of Police Administration in New South Wales, 1825-1851’, Royal Australian Historical Society Journal and Proceedings, Vol. 42, (1956), pp. 205-30; Sturma, Michael, ‘Policing the Criminal Frontier in Mid-Century Australia, Britain, and America’, in Finnane, Mark, (ed.), Policing in Australia: Historical Perspectives, (University of New South Wales Press), 1987, pp. 15-34; ibid, Neal, David, The Rule of Law in a Penal Colony, pp. 141-165; Finnane, Mark, Police and Government: Histories of Policing in Australia, (Oxford University Press), 1994, pp. 3-30, provides a useful context for this issue.

[2] Brogden, Michael, ‘An Act to Colonise the Internal Lands of the Island: Empire and the Origins of the Professional Police’, International Journal of the Sociology of Law, Vol. 15, (1987), pp. 179-208; Anderson, D. M., and Killingray, David, (eds.), Policing and the Empire: Government, Authority, and Control, 1830-1940, (Manchester University Press), 1991.

[3] Taylor, David, ‘Melbourne, Middlesbrough and morality: policing Victorian ‘new towns’ in the old world and the new’, Social History, Vol. 31, (2006), pp. 15-38, provides an interesting comparative focus for the late nineteenth century.

[4] The Goldfields Commission Report, 1855, (Red Roster Press), 1978, pp. 17-18.

[5] Serle, pp. 35-36.

[6] Cit, ibid, Annear, Robyn, Nothing But Gold: The Diggers of 1852, p. 268.

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

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

[9] Cit, The Ragged School Union Magazine, Vol. 6, 1854, pp. 27-28.

The dog that didn’t bark!

Today we have entered that nether space between the end of the election campaign and the advent of its results.  Time to reflect perhaps on what was both  a ‘safe’—from the politicians’ point of view—and dull—from the public’s—six weeks.  I’ve seen ballets with less orchestration.  We were all waiting for something, anything to happen.  Early on we had Michael Fallon’s mention of Ed’s relationship with his brother when talking about Trident for which he was roundly attacked in the media and by his opponents for ungentlemanly conduct.  Then we had Ed’s stumble in the last TV debate but no tumble.  There were no Gillian Duffy moments as in 2010.  Politicians kept to the script—or were kept to the script—and unsurprisingly the polls did not really change dramatically with the nightly Newsnight poll showing up one seat, down two…with dull monotony.  And where were the politicians?  Yes there was 24/7 coverage of what the party leaders and their deputies were doing with the occasional outing for other leading figures but where were Theresa May, Vince Cable and the rest.  Well apart from sporadic interviews on television and radio when their particular departments were under scrutiny, they have been largely invisible.  The highlights (if that’s what you can call them) of the campaign were the TV debate when the ‘public’ finally had the opportunity of interrogating Cameron, Clegg and Miliband and the inexorable rise and rise of Nicola Sturgeon and the SNP.  Douglas Murray in his excellent article in yesterday’s Spectator is right when he argued that ‘This election campaign has shown a democracy in a horrible state of disrepair’.

Now you could argue that none of this is surprising in a political society dominated by the traditional and social media.  What the public knows or is allowed to know is tightly controlled both by the campaign teams and by what the media chooses to cover and social media is often characterised by pundits and politicos talking to each other.  The key was always to be on message.  So the Conservative narrative focused on the economy and persuading voters not to allow Labour to mess it all up (again).  Labour banged on about the NHS only being safe in their hands because of ‘creeping privatisation’ while omitting to say that there had been more privatisation between 1997 and 2010 than in the last five years, and how the better-off in society benefitted from Conservative government while the less well-off and especially those on benefits suffered from an aggressive and inhumane policy of austerity proposing to replace the inequity of the ‘bedroom tax’ with the morally superior ‘mansion tax’.  Conservatives promised to enshrine tax policy for the next five years in legislation while the recent ‘Ed-stone’ from Labour contained promises so vacuous that I’m reminded of the notion of ‘let he who is without sin throw the first stone’.  There has been a great deal of promises but very little substance of how any of them will be funded.

What has been remarkable in the campaign has been the failure of all those involved to address what many people regard as the central political issues.  Given the anger felt in many communities about unfettered immigration from the EU and whether or not Britain should remain within Europe—the silence has been almost deafening.  This is hardly surprising as neither Labour nor Conservative have a good record on either.  The upsurge of immigration took place under Labour’s watch after 1997 while David Cameron’s promise to bring down immigration to tens of thousands a year has spectacularly failed.  The Conservatives argued that the only way to get a referendum on Europe is to re-elect them but then focussing too much on the issue throws up the splits in the Conservative Party over Europe.  For Labour, no referendum unless there are treaty changes—well we’ve heard that before from Labour but we didn’t get a referendum over the Lisbon Treaty under the last Labour government despite the same promise.  The campaign was also bereft of any serious discussion of Britain’s place in the world apart from the Trident question and that’s settled anyway as both Conservative and Labour support Trident just disagreeing over whether it should be three or four submarines.  There was equally little discussion about Libya or Syria or Iraq.  Or law and order, the environment—apart from by the Greens—fracking and HS2…I could go on and on about the things that barely made it on to the political stage.  If an election campaign is to motivate the public, then it needs to address those issues that lead to political engagement and that has been largely missing from what has been a highly controlled, anodyne process.