Leviathan (34 page)

Sydney in that bleak wet June had a sombre, somewhat bucolic appearance. The great surge of development which would be fuelled by the gold rush lay another decade in the future. The city, while much progressed from the simple, handsome township Macquarie had left, was still largely contained within the valley of the Tank Stream. Cows, goats and sheep wandered and grazed at its fringes. The principal streets were still impassable in bad weather. Some factories, tanneries and breweries had been established around the swamps to the west, but the economy had not diversified or matured into the massively complex structure it would later become. One big hit was enough to stop it dead. The fusillade of blows which rained down in the first years of the 1840s simply made the rubble jump. By the winter of 1843 hundreds of building workers were out of jobs. Dozens of half-finished cottages – in one of which the broken, bloodied figure of Finney would shortly be found – were scattered amongst the rotting timbers of others which had collapsed and been abandoned by bankrupt developers. The homes of working men were stripped bare as landlords, unable to extract any cash for their rent, took furniture and even clothing in lieu.

Ben Sutherland, an unemployed upholsterer retained by the government to survey the working class districts, encountered destitute families where nobody had eaten in days. He described the house of a silversmith in Castlereagh Street where just a few broken sticks of furniture remained scattered about the floor. The man's children were all crying from hunger and his wife was dressed in miserable tattered rags which had been patched so many times they were beyond any further mending. In the house of a labourer named McLeod he found a number of children with the distended bellies and dull eyes of starvation, chewing at dirty potato parings they had scavenged from the street. At another address Sutherland talked to an immigrant named Turton who was unable to leave his hovel. Having given all his clothes to the landlord and shopkeepers in trying to maintain his family, he had been left naked.

There were, perhaps, two shafts of light to penetrate this gloom. In the
Colonial Observer
of 14 June, Edward Campbell advised the hungry, shivering inhabitants of Sydney that new equipment for ‘roasting, cooling and grinding' coffee was available at his family's George Street premises. It produced a rich, heady brew, far superior to anything then available in the colony, and was so popular that Campbell roasted twice daily. ‘A luxury the public had not the benefit of before,' he said, and very much appreciated by the continentals then resident in Sydney, ‘particularly those who have had the advantage of Parisian residence, where coffee is brought to the very acme of perfection …' The same paper carried extensive reports of another innovation which was sure to raise the town's depleted spirits: the colony's first election. The long struggle between Government House and the town's rival power centres – a replay at high speed and in miniature of hundreds of years of European political development – was inevitably heading from the autocratic to the democratic. The despotic executive powers of Phillip and his successors had been crimped, if only a little, by the creation of a Legislative Council and some legal reform in 1823. It wasn't much of a democratic revolution though. The council consisted of about half a dozen of the Governor's best buddies. They were appointed by him and had the privilege of offering advice which he would then ignore. The number of good old boys who got to take vice-regal tea and crumpets while being ignored increased over the years, as did the range of stuff they got to be ignored over. In 1843, however, all that changed with the first
sort of
democratic elections to a council which
sort of
had some power of its own.

It wasn't a smooth transition, however, as David Finney discovered around eleven o'clock on polling day when a fearsome mob of drunken partisans, disenfranchised Irishmen, hungry labourers and opportunistic criminals fell on him at Brickfield Hill and clubbed and kicked him to death. A man named Mooney, a wheel-wright, was arrested and tried for the murder, but so confused was the attack that despite a large number of witnesses, the court was unable to discover who struck the fatal blow, or indeed who struck any of the blows. Finney's injuries were massive, and yet all confined to the skull, indicating a frenzied but well-directed assault. His right eye was jellied, the temple on that side of his head obscenely pulped. A long ragged wound had been torn open over his left ear, exposing the gristle and bone beneath and affording the doctors who performed the post-mortem a good view of the massive eggshell fracturing which ran from left to right across the orbits, even before they peeled back the skin and opened the skull to discover a large pool of dark, thickly coagulated blood on the surface and at the base of the brain. Bashed unconscious and left for dead in the mud, he was dragged into the unfinished shell of a nearby house and left there, sightlessly staring up into the day's bleak drizzle. Five hours later, with just a weak flicker of life in his undamaged eye, he was picked up and carried to the Benevolent Asylum where Dr Cuthill, assessing the damage, decided ‘no medical skill could have saved the poor man's life'. He died shortly after.

The mob which did for Finney was one of many which roamed at will through the town on election day, forming, splitting, clashing and merging like frenzied amoeba of political violence. Most of the fury seems to have been directed at the supporters of William Wentworth, the eventual victor. Although a fiery liberal in his younger days, Wentworth increasingly found himself snuggled up with the champions of landed wealth. He was a fascinating character, the product of a bit of raunchy business below decks between the disgraced surgeon D'Arcy Wentworth, one of the builders of the Rum Hospital, and convicted clothes thief Catherine Crowley. D'Arcy made a pile in the colony, where he worked as a merchant, surgeon and police chief, despite allegations that he had ridden as a highwayman in the old country and been forced to Sydney by the subsequent scandal. His wealth purchased a classical education for his son and fuelled William's acute desire to be accepted into Sydney finest salons and drawing rooms, a desire which foundered on the town's rigid segregation of former convicts and the freeborn pastoral elite. William never forgave those ignorant snobs, seizing at any chance to avenge the insults they heaped upon his parents. Arrogant, obstinate, mischievous and contemptible, the pastoralists – with their wagons circled tightly around their mad leader John Macarthur – often winced under the lash of Wentworth's caustic rhetoric.

The pastoral elite, of course, were themselves mostly one generation removed from embarrassment and owed their high station to land stolen from the black natives and worked by white slaves or the poorest indentured migrants. What they lacked in breeding, however, they more than made up for in self-delusion and hypocrisy. An aristocratic junta, Wentworth called them, ‘who monopolised all situations of power, dignity and emolument'. When the enlightened Macquarie broke their oligarchy and promoted the interests of the emancipated convicts, he ‘instantly drew on himself their unrelenting and systematic hostility'. But, as Wentworth explained, with Macquarie initially enjoying the support of London, the wily curs in Sydney eased their public protest against his liberal policy ‘although it was still as repugnant as ever to their feelings'. Instead they shifted ground and, while praising the soundness of the principle, leapt on every chance to condemn its application.

D'Arcy had suffered at the hands of this ‘vituperate ingenuity', when JT Bigge, whose commission of inquiry put a bullet into Macquarie's administration, repeated the slander that Wentworth the elder had been packed off to Sydney in chains rather than as a free man (even if under a dark cloud). In reply, Wentworth Jnr savaged Bigge the ‘booby Commissioner', challenged anyone repeating the lie to back their words up with a duelling pistol and set out to destroy the power and privileges of those high-born dogs who had cocked their mangy legs on his beloved father's name. Ironically, while his unrelenting assault on ruling-class interests laid the foundations of Australian democracy, he grew to mistrust and oppose that democracy as his own fortune and power waxed fat. The legacy of his opposition, and of the hostility of the pastoral lobby to those rude popular forces which reached their highest pitch in the metropolis of Sydney, was 150 years of laissez-faire chaos within the cauldron of the city.

Legal study in England prepared Wentworth for his assault on the citadels of power in Sydney, but the polish of elite schooling could not disguise the roughness of his personality. A shambling, raw-boned man, a commanding orator, he inherited his old man's good looks and powerful physique. He presents in a later-life portrait which now hangs in Parliament as a barrel-chested elder statesman, a sad-eyed prophet with a mass of white leonine hair and a truly Roman sense of his own importance. The artist was kind, or perhaps Wentworth's wife scolded him into dressing properly for the sitting, which shows him in a dark, natty-looking jacket and a handsome if slightly excessive bow tie. His daily appearance was more eccentric, especially for one so wealthy. Shabby old corduroys and an unfortunate, ill-fitting morning coat were his preferred ensemble in Parliament. A generous entry in the
Australian Dictionary of Biography
describes him as a ‘Gulliver in Lilliput', Elizabethan in spirit, ‘splendid and defiant'. A deep sense of history, an enduring faith in the classical values and a love of Burke's splendid oratory, with its ‘evocation of the greatness of Augustan Rome and England' were his guiding intellectual lights. But his passions were more Byronic and violent and warred within him his whole life. Manning Clark, who seems to have been unable to forgive him for abandoning the lower classes, wrote that ‘it was as though the gods had planted in him great talents and fatal flaws for their sport'. Clark opened up on him with both barrels in the second volume of his history, describing the first member for Sydney as being possessed of a ‘rancour and malevolence in his heart towards all who stood in his way'. Honourable members of the British Parliament, learned judges and that other mighty ego-maniac John Macarthur all felt the hot blast of his wild temper when they dared slight him or his family name. Macarthur made himself a target when, having agreed to allow young Wentworth the honour of his daughter's hand, he withdrew the offer. ‘I will pay him off in his own coin,' growled a wounded, incensed William to his father.

Manning Clark thought the slovenly and disrespectful younger Wentworth had largely squandered his great gifts in vulgar vendettas by the time he took his seat in the Legislative Council.

Wentworth could have sat in the Council many years before but had refused to be appointed to the position, arguing that the early, unelected form of the Council was a ‘wretched mongrel substitute' for an elected assembly. He called it an ‘anomalous and unnatural creation', before setting out to obtain its destruction. His early adult life was devoted to curtailing the autocratic powers of Government House, and his public career was marked by decades of bruising and sometimes savage confrontation with a succession of governors as he sought to claw away the armoured authority of that office. His feud with Ralph Darling, governor from 1825–31, was an epic confrontation unrivalled since the clash of Bligh and Macarthur twenty years before.

During the reign of Darling's predecessor, Governor Brisbane, Wentworth and his partner Dr Robert Wardell had grasped the nettle of press censorship and set up a newspaper, without reference or deference to Government House. Sydney had never known a free press where those violent shifts and fault lines of opinion which constantly cleaved its small, incestuous society could find expression, and the Colonial Office in London was none too keen on the idea. Brisbane, however, was all for the experiment and thus audacity triumphed, much to the chagrin of Darling, the cold, hard-hearted militarist who quickly crossed swords with Wentworth and Wardell and the crop of rambunctious newspapers which sprang up in the space they cleared. Darling, who had wondered back in London ‘whether he would have the power to silence' this ‘vulgar ill-bred' demagogue, discovered that he did not. When Wentworth and his fellow editors attacked the Governor, stirring up trouble and agitating for trial by jury and an elected assembly, Darling attempted to destroy them by imposing a tax on the papers and empowering the courts to banish any recalcitrant press men from the colony. He went after Wardell and Wentworth's publication, the
Australian
, for seditious libel, but his hapless, ill-prepared legal counsel were demolished in court by the ‘effrontery and talent' of the defendants.

It was an exemplary victory. Macquarie would have banged them away in irons. Bligh, at a guess, would have hung them by their thumbs and screamed incomprehensibly at them. For Darling, whose whole career was a testament to unswerving military obedience, the challenge to his authority was anathema. But there was little he could do. It was a long time since Government House had been the seat of all power in Sydney. Even though the weak, faux liberal institution of the unelected Legislative Council was more a symbolic curb on Darling's will, it was a potent sign of the accelerating drift of power away from his office. As JJ Auchmuty puts it, since neither a ship nor a prison makes any pretence at democracy, the personalities of the governors were of dominating importance for the first fifty years of the colony's existence. For all their problems and the constant, niggling challenges to their rule, the governors' decisions determined how the inhabitants of Sydney would live their lives. When Ralph Darling was sent packing in 1831 that was no longer the case. Wentworth celebrated his recall to London with an awesomely debauched open house at his Vaucluse property. Over 4000 Sydneysiders trekked out along the rough path of the South Head road to launch themselves on a mountain of free food and grog. Gin, beer and thousands of loaves of bread were laid on while a whole bullock and twelve sheep were slowly roasted, rotating over the coals on an enormous spit. The party kicked on until dawn the next day, cementing Wentworth's place in the hearts of the common folk.