Leviathan (35 page)

The Wentworth of 1843, however, while still a firebrand, was not the much-loved people's tribune of his youth. His increasing wealth had fostered a commonality of interest with the same freeborn gentry he had made a career of tormenting. And his contest with Captain O'Connell, a favourite of the Catholic working class, inflamed sectarian feeling amongst those very same starving, unemployed artisans who were denied a chance to vent their frustrations by the restrictive nature of early voting laws. Only wealthy white adult males were entitled to vote in 1843, excluding two-thirds of the colony's men and all the women from any say in the first parliament. Desperation denied one form of expression will usually find another and the murder of Finney was but one outburst of political fury that week. The wonder is that the authorities, who had long harboured fears of mob uprising amongst the poor – and specifically the Irish poor – didn't foresee the trouble and prepare.

The nomination ceremony for the city electorates, held on Tuesday 13 June, had spun out of control when a crowd of seven or eight thousand (more than double the number of eligible voters) had swarmed into Macquarie Place where the hustings had been erected. The huge, raucous crowd, which seems to have included most of the town's adult population, jammed the nearby streets, causing terrible confusion. They spilled over the balconies and out of the windows of surrounding buildings and blocked all access to the platform where the candidates were to be nominated. In the days before traffic, machinery and high-rise buildings, the roar of the masses must have reached to the outskirts of town. In the immediate vicinity the noise was so great as to drown out all else, especially as fist fights and vicious brawls erupted within sections of the crowd, transmitting their violent energy through the close-packed unwashed hordes.

Unaware of the scenes which awaited them, William Wills, the Lord Mayor's secretary, who had exhausted himself preparing for this day, recorded his weary pleasure at seeing the official procession to Macquarie Place, where his boss was supposedly in charge of proceedings. ‘The mayor was in his carriage drawn by four beautiful greys,' he wrote in his journal, ‘accompanied by two of the aldermen, the Town Clerk and his secretary – the turnout altogether would not have disgraced the Lord Mayor of London.' The scene at the hustings, unfortunately, was a disgrace to Sydney. Hundreds of supporters of each candidate had marched on the scene with bands playing and flags flying. Wills had thought to control access to the small wooden hustings platform by issuing tickets to the candidates and a few supporters; but, spying each other across the sea of top hats, cloth caps, suit jackets and workmen's bibs, the contenders charged the steps instead. The loud, constant rumble cycled up into a thunderous roar as they met and fought for possession of the platform. Newspaper reports of the wild melee vary according to the sympathies and biases of the proprietors, but it seems O'Connell's men gained the ascendancy and repelled the attacks of Wentworth's crew with all the savage, bloodthirsty glee of any well-entrenched defenders seeing off a disorganised, inflamed rabble. Wentworth's running mate Dr Bland was nearly choked to death by one assailant and thrown bodily from the decking into the nineteenth century mosh pit. About two to three hundred brawlers were engaged at one time, with random bursts of ugliness flaring elsewhere in the huge assembly, especially around the omnibus where brewing baron Robert Cooper's low-rent supporters fell on any opposition with muddied hobnailed boots while Cooper harangued them from above.

Cooper, whom Wills described as ‘a huge tall man of most repulsive visage and dress', provided the campaign with both comic relief and a frisson of Victorian horror. He was transported for receiving stolen goods and Wills described him as ‘a most illiterate fellow [who] has not two ideas beyond distilling gin, at which he is so successful as to be one of the richest men in NSW'. Cooper drew his support from the lowest reaches of the city, from the poorest workers and the hardest drinking, most unruly criminals. When his legions marched they did so behind loaves of bread spitted on pikes to demonstrate their champion's concern for the everyday struggles of the underfed. To the city's burghers and merchants, those soggy loaves must have looked uncomfortably like the severed heads of the French aristos during the republican uprising of the previous century. However, while the underfed could march and parade to their hearts' content, they could not vote. The softening of their woes would have to rely on the tender mercies of the propertied few, represented by Wentworth and Bland, and as these fine chaps were apparently in favour of importing Asian protoslaves to drive down the price of labour, it's perhaps not surprising the lower orders jacked up when, at about one in the afternoon on polling day, it became obvious that neither Cooper nor their other favourite, the dashing populist officer O'Connell, were likely to get a guernsey in the first elective assembly.

The worst trouble broke out, as might be expected, in the slum district of the Rocks. Polling booths had been erected there, high above the harbour, on the boggy, windswept crest on which the colony's flag staff stood. Kent Street runs at the foot of this hill, past the Lord Nelson Hotel, now one of the oldest pubs in Sydney, then one of the biggest buildings at Millers Point. A clutch of cottages, a windmill, some shipbuilding yards, wharves and a couple of more substantial terraces complete the picture in JS Prout's 1843 sketch of the area. Voters making the hard climb up the hill passed long-horned goats grazing amongst massive sandstone boulders. The whole area had been ‘a waste howling wilderness' until recently. As the count progressed a large, ill-tempered group who had gathered on the heights turned nasty. Sneers and threatening stares directed at opposing campaign workers turned into snarls and insults, which quickly escalated into an uglier, two-fisted debate. The mob, who were allegedly fired up with lashings of Robert Cooper's gin, turned on Wentworth and Bland's supporters. They attacked the booths and workers, demolishing everything and scattering the terrified staffers. John Jones, a ship owner and Council alderman, was besieged, his sister screaming, ‘Murder! Murder!' as someone (reports vary as to whom) ran down the steep, slippery banks of the hill to Jones's own wharf to alert a band of whalers and seamen to their boss's distress. They armed themselves with whale lances, blubber spades, axes and harpoons before charging up the slopes to do battle. Jones meanwhile had run through one of the attackers, John Holohan, with a spring blade concealed in a walking stick, jabbing the man in the elbow and driving the spike home till it emerged from his upper arm. Holohan later claimed he had been standing quietly with his hands in his pockets when the agitated ship owner had knifed him. Jones in reply said that Holohan had come at him with a club. The whole convulsive, hysterical circus was smashed by a charge of the mounted police who thundered into the riot and let fly on all sides. No sooner had they broken up this mob when the heavily armed whalers from Jones's ships arrived and the police had to wheel around and sail into them as well. Again, reports of the panic differ according to the prejudices of the journal or paper reporting the scene, but they all agree that around about this point, Jones himself fled the area, either to escape his attackers or the police. Either way, he legged it successfully, flying down the slopes and leaping into a small boat which carried him to safety on the other side of the harbour.

The angry, frustrated mob streamed down the slopes of Flag Staff Hill and dispersed through the muddy streets of the town, quickly meeting up with other friends and allies in a rolling series of riots which surged around the city all day, killing David Finney and laying waste to dozens of houses and buildings whose owners had the audacity to display the colours of Wentworth's victorious ticket. One reporter suggested that ‘a delusion had got into the heads of some Irishmen' that rioting on election day was not a punishable offence, possibly because their preferred candidate was the son of the colony's military commander, Sir Maurice O'Connell. Chances are, though, things would have got out of hand even without this piece of muddle-headed sophistry. Politics involves a lot of symbolic action in democracies, even unformed neophyte democracies. The ballot on which so many rest their hopes is as much a device for channelling and defusing the wild spirits of a population as it is a means of apportioning power. Locked out of the process at a time when the hard earned comforts and certainties of their lives were under violent assault from the depression, it's not surprising the proles and the
untermenschen
reacted so aggressively.

Nor were the punches coming solely from one direction. Early in the day a rambling crew of Wentworth's supporters were only too happy to rub up hard against anybody they found wearing the green ribbons of their enemy. Isolated fist fights and head kickings flared all over the central city area as agents of the two groups met. Hyde Park, then a vast expanse of open ground known as the Race Course, was the scene of a massive brawl which saw the end of any effective presence by the Wentworth contingent. ‘After this,' reported the
Australasian Chronicle
, ‘the partisans of O'Connell and Cooper mustered in such strength that their opponents were unable to keep the field.' They then turned on the nearby homes of Wentworth supporters such as Sam Lyons, the auctioneer. Ripping palings from fences and wrenching stones from the ground, the rabble launched a fusillade of improvised missiles at the auctioneer's handsome villa, smashing up to 100 plate-glass windows. They attacked Dr Whittle as he rode his carriage down Pitt Street; devastated the Australian Hotel in Lower George Street; and fought their way into the house of Isaac Moss, driving his wife and children from their bedrooms. Here and there leaders on horseback charged ahead to keep an eye out for the mounted police. The inflamed mob howled and made for the polling booths at the Race Course, destroying Wentworth and Bland's little camp as they had done on Flag Staff Hill. At this point, according to the
Herald
's man, the mounted police arrived and were joined by Captain Innes who asked their sergeant to help him capture the ringleader. Putting their spurs to the flanks they charged, but one of the rioters swung at Innes's horse with a club, catching it with a heavy blow to the jaw at which the animal reared up and took off. Before Innes could regain control, he had run down a woman wearing a green ribbon, further enraging the mob. The captain steadied his horse and returned to the unconscious woman, crying out for someone to get her a doctor. But he was soon surrounded by angry men, all bearing clubs and sticks, yelling that they would kill him. He managed to break through the press and crush, galloping off to the protection of the mounted police and asking them to join him in a charge to disperse the crowd. Volleys of rocks and fence palings followed him and the sergeant begged him to flee, fearing the mob would finish him off. Innes demurred as the rioters charged the police, turning his mount and making for the edge of the park as more stones and clubs sailed through the air, thudding into his back and his horse. He put the charger to the fence rails and cleared them in one regal bound, ‘wooden leg and all'. As night fell, it was feared the depredations would worsen and hundreds of troops from the 80th Regiment marched down from the barracks. Retracing some of the Rum Corps' steps, they fanned out through the town to secure the peace. However, while armed troops, bad weather and alcoholic stupor helped return a semblance of order to the streets of Sydney, the creation of an elected government was to bring chaos.

It may be important that Sydney was, in effect, a
tabula rasa
. Unlike the cities of the Old World, no slow sedimentation of history lay beneath its streets. It had no long-established power structure. It was what JW McCarty would call a commercial city, a pure product of capitalism's global expansion in the nineteenth century. Old World centres founded in Roman or mediaeval times grew organically, their modern forms still influenced by a patchwork of buildings and streets, canals and bridges, and political, economic, military and religious institutions established hundreds or even thousands of years in the past. In contrast, the cities of the New World sprang into being, often at a single, identifiable moment in time, to find themselves according to McCarty ‘fully exposed to the levelling effects of the expanding world capitalist economy'. Sydney shares in this a common heritage with the metropolitan centres of other recently settled areas in America, Canada and New Zealand. No gradual, millennium-long transfer of power from rural hinterland to urban core marked their evolution. Nor did industrialisation prompt their emergence on the world scene, as it had in Manchester with its cotton mills, or Pittsburgh with its steel foundries. Rather, the fantastic growth of the commercial city was fuelled by economic globalisation, hundreds of years before the term's currently fashionable incarnation. Sydney has always been a global city, subject to the ebb and flow of the world's capital, even when it was little more than a semirural village and a couple of rickety wooden wharves.

It was those wharves that were important. They were the point at which the city's inhabitants touched the vast, roaring river of world trade and were either dragged under and drowned or came away clutching ingots of silver snatched from the current. Manufacturing, in contrast, was not important in the early days of the commercial city. It followed rather than inspired urbanisation. In 1843 Sydney's factories were still an inconsequential part of its economy. Isolation made it necessary to produce locally simple goods like shoes and hats, and industry, such as it was, first arose to meet these needs, only diversifying with the growth of the rural sector. Milling, brewing, glass and pottery making, spinning and boatbuilding all played early roles but no matter how large or sophisticated the town's factories became, the primary role of the city was as a base ‘for the opening up of new lands'; an assessment which was passionately embraced by the colony's leading citizens, that aristocratic junta of wool-growing princes which Wentworth alternately attacked, envied or defended, depending on his own situation at the time. They believed Sydney existed simply to provide the means of moving their wool into the overseas market as cheaply and efficiently as possible, and they had the money and power to ensure this vision was not challenged.