The "Squatters", who now represented the arrowhead of econ
omic progress, owned no land or mansions, had no time to loll
in carriages and were too short of labour and too far from magis-
strates to exact discipline with a knotted lash. Mudie was out-
19* James Ryan, Reminiscences of Australia (Sydney, 1894), p.20.
20. P.P. S.C. on Transportation, E.A.Slade's Evidence, p. 56.
21. Ibid, James Mudie's Evidence, pp. 110-11.
Decade 41
of-date in 1837 when he dismessed Squatters as "ticket-of-leave men that have become free ..." These were the rogues and vaga bonds, who had established themselves on waste land between properties within the boundaries, where they scraped a living stealing cattle or selling sly grog to assigned convicts on neigh
bouring estates. By 1838, "Squatters" were mostly young or youngish "persons of sanguine temperament" embarked on the haz ardous adventure of making money by overlanding sheep, estab lishing stations beyond the boundaries, dispersing justifiably hostile or thieving aborigines and grappling with foot-rot and scab in sheep and the human perversities of an increasingly in adequate labour force. Most of them liked to consider them selves gentlemen although they worked with their hands, smell ed of sheep and rank tobacco and came from diverse social back grounds. Many were immigrants anxious not to be lumped with convicts, ex-convicts or Currency Lads. Captain Foster Fyans, first resident magistrate in the Geelong and Portland Bay districts, wrote:
The squatting population consists of such various class es of persons that it is impossible to speak of it as a body. Many of the squatters are gentlemen, worthy and excellent men, of undoubted character and well connect ed at home...Another class of squatters is a kind of shop-boys. A plain man can barely approach them. They have wonderful sources of wealth and comfort, with dirty huts and no comfort, but with plenty of pipe-smoking, grumbling, and discontent...Here is a country yielding aLl that man can require for only a little labour.lt abounds in a class who care for nothing excepting self-interest ...Another class consists of old shepherds...I have known many of them to become weathy, and some who did not for get themselves; but most were out of their places, and
it would have been better for the community had they re mained shepherds rather than become masters.u3
23» Thomas Francis Bride, Letters From Victorian Pioneers (Mel bourne, I
898
). Edited by C.E. Sayers, Melbourne, 1969? pp. I85
-7
."New Gentry" and many"Squatters" had been attracted, as sat irical Thomas Bartlett pointed out, by misleading visions of "an Arcadian life in a country in which there is no cold winter’s blast, no snow" free from "sulphurous fogs" under "a pure Ital ian sky" but most of them found no time "to luxuriate ... and at the same time .... amass a large fortune by the exercise only of common prudence" or "to enjoy the pleasures of continued summer, with only the short intermission when the rains fall, and to revel in the possession of almost perfect health .... There[was}
something of romance, too, and an appearance of courage in mak ing the attempt «... it is thus by a union of exaggeration and im agination, that a number of persons voluntarily exile themselves,
Zu.
and, generally, for life
In contrast to the indignities and disappointments associat ed with tending scabby sheep in the harsh interior, New Zealand and the islands offered adventurous young Australians what the Rockies and the prairies provided for American Mountain Men and those who took the trail to Santa Fes a free, lawless and risky way of making money supplying sought-after commodities for a seem
ingly inexhaustible market. In Australia, Emancipists Kable, Underwood and Lord showed the way by their rapid, profitable and unscrupulous development of the local sealing industry. Their native-born apprentices and rivals were soon forming crews and building ships to share with American sealers and whalers in the ruthless exploitation of largely uncharted seas.
As with the Mountain Men and the Santa Fe traders, the bon anza years were comparatively short-lived but while they lasted they opened the way for hundreds of young Australians to escape from wage-slavery or rural exploitation in an increasingly bourg
eois world although the most successful of them, like John Jones
24* Thomas Bartlett, New Holland; Its Colonization, Produc tions and Resources, pp. 2-4«
Decade 43
and James Kelly, rapidly succumbed to embourgeoisment themselv
es. Certainly, the rank-and-file native-born showed no par
ticular egalitarian social political consciousness. Their fat
hers, the convicts, had been divided from each other, a3
John Manifold has pointed out, by differences of social back-
25'
ground, education, regional dialect and degree of criminality.
All they had in common was their exile. The educated or aspir
ing among them had no wish to stay in the anonymous egalitarian
ism imposed on them by law. The Australian Patriotic Associa
tion's equation of property with citizenship appealled to their
sense of respectability. The ignorant, unlucky or vicious had
little political or class consciousness beyond a feeling that Aus tralia was their "home" and that they were the only true-blue
"Australians". "Surly defiance, dumb insolence and ... impu-
_ 24
dent mockery were {theif} usual forms of resistance to the system." The convict legacy provided an inheritance for the Cabbage Tree Hat Mob and later larrikins but handed down no tradition of political rebelliousness to Currency Lads despite the heady rhe
toric of 21-year-old Horatio Wills, native-born son of an Eng
lish highway robber, who urged*
Look, Australians, to the high-salaried foreigners
around youJ Behold those men lolling in their
coaches-- rioting in the sweat of your brow-- while
you, yes, you, the Sons of the Soil, axe doomed to
eternal toil— the sport and ridicule of pettifogging worldlings...your children shall imbibe from the breasts that suckle them the all-absorbing desire of' revenge— and look, with eager expectation, to the day when their numerical strength will justify them in
declaring, 'We were not made for slaves'.^
Rather than imbibing the desire for revenge with their moth
ers' milk many Currency Lads were sober, hardworking and an-
25« John Manifold, Who Wrote the Ballads? (Sydney, 1965)>P*22.
26. Humphrey McQueen, "Convicts and Rebels", Labour History,
NoJ5>November, 1968. pp. 12-13*
27* Currency Lad, 24 November, 1832. Quoted C.M.H. Clark,
xious to improve their status by other than political means.
There is a good deal of evidence to suggest, as Ken MacNab and
Russel Ward have argued, that convicts, Emancipists and Cur
rency Lads shared strong attachment to Australia but little to show that they developed an egalitarian class interest that hel ped shape the early political development of New South Wales or
Van Diemen's Land. They supported the Australian Patriotic
Association rather than any immigrant brand of Chartism or colon
ial version of democracy. Their inchoate nationalism, with
its contempt for immigrants, probably hampered rather than
helped the growth of a colonial democratic political movement. Nor is it easy to accept the argument that "our ancestors usual ly had the right of it when they assumed that material progress was likely to bring moral progress in its train ...."** That many Emancipists and some Currency Lads achieved material success is
indisputable. That they gained moral stature thereby is less
certain.
Respectability rather than rebelliousness was the common
bond between many Currency Lads. Fiery young Horatio Wills,
who wrote some of his most trenchant pieces when suffering a
hangover, turned Souatter. By Jubilee Year he held a valu-_
able pastoral lease on the Molonglo, where he presumably con
sorted with the liberal-minded Catholic but essentially conser
vative Terence Aubrey Murray of Yarralumla. The following
year he began a marathon overland trip with 5^00 sheep and 5 0 0
cattle into the Port Phillip District where, in due course, he
became "something of a country squire, taking active interest
in church, agricultural, immigration and charitable movements".
As a member of the Victorian Legislative Council he canvassed
land reform, exclusion of Chinese, colonial defence and penal
28. Ken MacNab and Russel Ward, "The Nature and Nurture of
the First Generation of Native-born Australians", His -
torical Studies, Vol.lO, No.39> November, 1962, p.289-
Decade 45
reform- His eldest son, Thomas Wentworth Wills, attended Rugby, the English public school, and played cricket for Vic- toria?°
John Jones, Wentworth's partner in an ill-starred attempt to buy the South Island of New Zealand for a few hundred pounds, is a remarkable example of a Currency Lad whose material success quickly dispersed any egalitarian notions he might have cherish ed initially. His successful career, which culminated as shipowner and whaling master, began with illicit trade between ships in the harbour and the Rocks. At the age of sixteen, he had made enough money to pay £800 for the Sydney Packet, on which he shipped as his own super-cargo for a profitable voyage around the whaling stations of New Zealand. The following year he had three boats and 36 men working for him in New Zealand waters* In March, 1837» he joined with "the Merchant Shipowners of the Port of Sydney" in resisting an agitation for increased wages by
seamen and wharf labourers who had formed what the shipowners considered "a combination on the part of the men which they be lieve they can carry into effect at this important and busy sea son of the year".52.
The rise of Captain James Kelly of Hobart Town was hardly less spectacular. Born at Parramatta, the son of a seacook and an unmarried convict mother,he was apprenticed at thirteen to Kable and Underwood to learn "the Art of Master Mariner" prom ising in his indentures "not to absent himself day or night from his Said Masters vessel ... nor haunt alehouses, taverns, or play houses ..." Whether he followed these instructions to the letter or not, young Kelly finished his fifth and final year of apprenticeship earning £12 a year and began an adventurous and profitable career as sealer, whaler, merchant and ship- 30. A.D.B., Vol. 11, pp.605-6.