LA LITERATURA DE LA COLONIA

How are we to explain the paradox that the liberals advocated a form of upper house which, in other colonies, proved to be a more rigid obstacle to their cause than the nominated house favoured by the conservatives? Part of the answer is that the upper houses which they proposed were often designed to be only moderately conservative. Cowper, for

instance, wanted a chamber which would not be subject to dissolution and whose members would be elected for ten years

5

with half retiring every five years. He expressed no preference on the qualification for voters, and probably

intended it to be the same as for the lower house. Even with a liberal franchise such a house would have reflected changing electoral opinion only slowly and would have been a strong

^People's Advocate, 5 December 1853. 2

Empire, 5 December 1853. 3

J.D. Lang, An Anatomical Lecture on the New Constitution..., Sydney, 1854, p.12.

4

See Chapter III, below. ~*S . M.H. , 6 September 1853.

conservative influence in periods of very rapid political change. However, it would probably have been no more

obstructive than the nominated Legislative Council proved to be. Similarly, the Constitution Committee's proposal and many of the plans advocated in the petitions would not have resulted in a chamber as hostile to liberal reforms as the Victorian

Legislative Council showed itself to be after responsible government. The liberals had no desire to create an

impregnable stronghold of conservative oligarchy. For them, it was not as important to have an 'expansive principle' to remedy

a deadlock between the houses as it was for the conservatives, for the type of elective chamber which they wanted was less likely to indulge in protracted warfare with the Assembly than the type advocated by Martin.

However, this explanation is not sufficient for it is clear that most liberals wanted an upper house very like that proposed by the conservatives: they wanted one which would be conservative, but which would not have the power to ignore strongly expressed public opinion for too long. The British solution to the problem was to have a conservative upper house which could, if necessary, be swamped by appointing an unlimited

number of nominated members. It was this solution which the conservatives adopted. To have favoured nomineeism would, however, have been political suicide for a liberal in 1853. It is true that in the 1840s the liberals had advocated a nominated upper h o u s e / but in context this had not been an avowal of nomineeism. Without responsible government, the

liberals were faced with the inevitability of having government nominees in the legislature and they advocated their

separation into a second chamber because they believed it would weaken both the government and the conservatives. Consequently, when liberal advocacy of a nominated upper house is viewed in the context of the politics of the 1840s, it is apparent that it was motivated by hostility to the nominees - that it was designed to limit their influence and strike at the

conservatism and government influence with which they were associated.

In 1852 and 1853, when the debate centred around

constitutions which were avowedly designed to introduce some form of responsible government, it was unthinkable that a

liberal should advocate a nominated upper house, for by then it was possible to consider the alternative of an elective one. Consequently, the liberal Robert Lowe, who in 1848 had

repudiated Wentworth's suggestion that the colony lacked the materials for a nominated upper h o u s e / now wrote from London

inviting Parkes to publish his view that as far as appointments for life were concerned,

Your present public men are not as a body worthy of so marked a distinction, or rather so close a monopoly; and I am quite sure that, if they are appointed for life, in a few years you will be heartily ashamed of them, and find that you have

anticipated your resources by putting worse men in a place which might have been occupied by b e t t e r .^

In 1853, to advocate a nominated upper house was to advocate nomineeism, whereas in 1848 it had been to attack it. It would therefore have been inconsistent for a liberal to continue to advocate a nominated chamber in 1853; it would also have ended the political career of any politician dependent upon the

'popular' vote.

Even 'upper class' liberals like Darvall were better situated than the conservatives to appreciate the depth of anti-nominee sentiment in the community, for their political associations brought them into contact with other sections of society, including the most radical. They thought anti-nominee prejudice so strong that a nominated house would be unable to

secure the public support which it needed in order to stand up to the lower house. Consequently, even had they favoured

nomineeism in principle, they would have been forced to abandon it in practice because of their desire to make the upper house conservative. They had to devise other methods of creating

/ o w e , S . M .H . , 4 May 1848. 2

Lowe to Parkes, 6 April 1853, reproduced in Sir Henry Parkes, Fifty Years in the Making of Australian His t o r y , 2 vols, vol.l, London, 1892, pp.44-5. Parkes published the letter in the

an upper house which would have been conservative, but .not dangerously obstructive.

By choosing a nominated upper house, conservatives in New South Wales marked themselves off as men shaped by different ideals and circumstances than their Victorian counterparts, who deliberately chose an oligarchic elective chamber. Some clues as to the reasons for this difference may, perhaps, be afforded by a comparison of the different standards of debate in the

two colonies, for such a test makes it clear that Victoria lacked the educated, conservative elite which dominated the proceedings in New South Wales.^ In the late 1830s, when Macarthur was already theorizing about the benefits of a

2

colonial aristocracy and Wentworth was long established as a political leader adept at the manipulation of constitutional principles, Victoria was still an extended sheep run in the

south of New South Wales. Consequently, in the early 1850s, Victoria had no long-established gentry to produce a Macarthur; and Melbourne, which had been turned by the gold rushes into

'a cross between a military staging-camp and a wild-west 3

frontier town', was not old enough to have produced an 'urban aristocracy' capable of nourishing the attainments of men

comparable to Sydney's Stephens, Mannings, Plunketts and Thomsons. Moreover, the squatters, preoccupied with

establishing themselves, were even more inarticulate than their counterparts in New South Wales, for they had no Wentworth to

4

speak for them. In general terms, Victoria lacked any

significant body of legislators who were sufficiently acquainted with Whig constitutional theory to define their interests in

terms of it. It is perhaps partly because of this that

conservatives in the southern colony had less appreciation of ^The Victorian debates are printed in G.H.F. Webb (ed.), Debate in the Legislative Council of Victoria on the New Constitution Bil l , Melbourne, 1854.

2

Article on Macarthur in A .D .B . , v o l .2. 3

Geoffrey Serie, The Golden A g e , Melbourne, 1963, p.67. 4C f . ibid., p.138, et p a s s i m .

the virtues of the 'expansive principle' and were more,

inclined to the 'purse test of political worth'. Certainly, not even James Martin could have matched A n n a n d 's unblushing claim that if 'any one had made £18,000 by sly-grog-selling... he would be anxious to keep it, and would therefore be a proper person to be a member of the Upper H o u s e ' .

Yet, it must be doubted whether a lower level of political sophistication was the major reason for the Victorian rejection of the principle of nomination, or even an important one. The major reason, surely, was that the Victorians were threatened

far more directly by what Wentworth called the 'Americans, Chartists, Socialists, and all manner of undesirable people'

2

brought by the gold rush. Between 1851 and 1853, the

population of Victoria increased by 129 per cent while that of 3

New South Wales increased by only 15 per cent. The result was that Victorian conservatives feared that radical political change was likely to follow the revolution in the social and economic life of the colony. They therefore took steps to build the most rigid possible barriers to thwart it. They had not wanted any change in their constitution for fear that such

4

a move would be the prelude to democracy and, when Pakington's despatch forced their hand, they sought in an oligarchical

upper house a substitute for imperial protection.

In New South Wales the onset of the gold rushes in 1851 had caused panic in some circles. Wentworth had urged the

5

despatch of troops to the fields to keep order; and Macarthur had urged the temporary prohibition of mining to halt 'the deranging and upsetting of our social system to its very

foundation' and to stop the 'spoliation' of the country's

resources. However, mining was not prohibited; troops were not ^A r g u s , 11 February 1854.

2

Silvester, op.cit., p.51. 3

Based on the table in Clark, op.cit., p.664. 4

Serie, The Golden A g e , p.146. 5

Molony, op.cit., p.83, n.46.

^Macarthur to Thomson, 29 May 1851, Macarthur Papers, vol.24, A2920.

sent; and, although Deas Thomson was initially concerned at the possibility of disruption as a result of the rushes, he was satisfied by the end of 1851 that many of the expected troubles had not eventuated.^ In 1853, Wentworth, perhaps

resentful of the fact that exports of gold ha;d been nearly four 2

times as valuable as exports of wool the previous year, still continued to deprecate the mining industry as a 'branch of

3

anarchy and discord' and to wish for its decline, but he was exceptional. The government had offered a reward for new gold discoveries; and in September 1852, Plunkett noted that gold had not disrupted other industries and that, thanks to the police and to ‘the orderly character of the diggers as a body,

4