Leviathan (36 page)

All through the last century and up until the Second World War, the rich of Sydney and indeed of all New South Wales, were drawn overwhelmingly from the ranks of these pastoralists and, to a lesser extent, from the merchants who serviced them. Bill Rubinstein, writing in the
Australian Economic History Review
, undertook the substantial task of ranking the State's top fifty wealth holders in each five-year period between 1817 and 1939. Graziers and landowners topped the survey at every stage, followed by their commercial brethren in exporting, warehousing and somewhat less often in retailing. It was only in the 1920s and 1930s, with the rise of large-scale manufacturing and mass consumer society, that other sources of significant wealth really established themselves. Before then agriculture had no rivals as the big rock candy mountain of the antipodes. That's not really surprising. What is surprising in Rubinstein's analysis was how
poor
the rich were. Perhaps the single most important statement which can be made about the very wealthy in Australia, he wrote, was their very low level of wealth, at least comparatively speaking.

By 1845 New York was home to 113 millionaires. By 1892, while Australia was belly-crawling through another of its culture-defining economic catastrophes, over 4000 American millionaires were sitting on their treasure chests, cackling with avaricious glee. However, in the entire period between 1788 and 1939 Rubinstein could find only eight bona-fide millionaire estates in New South Wales, two of which were probated largely in England. Until the gold rush and the long boom of the late nineteenth century, any man who could lay his paws on £10 000 would rank amongst the wealthiest on the continent. John Macarthur, for instance, left an estate of only £40 000. This in a country with one of the highest per capita levels of income in the world.

Rubinstein posits a couple of obvious explanations such as the minuscule size of the local market, limited local capital, state-owned railways and intercolonial trade barriers. A more intriguing possibility, however, lies in cultural factors. Many of the wealthy came from the ‘shabby genteel' class of England and Scotland, who were not big risk takers but rather innate conservatives, a group Wakefield disparaged as being of the twentieth rank in society. They came in the 1820s, as had the men of the Rum Corps, seeking opportunities denied them at home. James Henty, one of the more substantial early migrants, set forth the rationale in a letter to his brothers.

The free settlers of means in the 1820s and 1830s were practical and robust but not necessarily gifted or innovative. They tended to ferret out a niche and settle into it, seeking as much indulgence and help from the government as they could. The conservatism of these leading figures is difficult to comprehend across the arc of 200 years. It was a conservatism not so much monolithic as simply ubiquitous. There were many divisions within their closed little world but the fracture lines ran over shared ground, part of which was ‘a loathing of taxation too absolute for the twentieth century mind readily to comprehend', and of course an intense fear of the mob rule of democracy. What state would you be in, asked Governor Denison, were you to throw political power into the hands of such an ignorant and vicious population as existed in New South Wales?

The image which entranced the colonial elite was of the landed gentry of England, whose style of life they sought to impose on New South Wales, in spite of the drastic dissimilarity between English and Australian rural conditions, and to the great detriment of those who lived as blue and white collar workers in the rapidly growing metropolis on Sydney Harbour. The dozen or so noble villas which appeared atop the ridge at Woolloomooloo in the 1830s were material expression of the new elite's affinity for old-money expressions of style and dominance; the titles, the veneration of landed estates, the hierarchical attitudes, the myth of gracious living, as GC Bolton put it. So powerful was this vision of arcadian splendour to the tatty yeomen who chased it that
any
change was perceived as a threat. On New Year's Day in 1850 for instance, the
Herald
reflected smugly on the steady progress for which the town and colony could thank the settled and somnolent pastoral industry. Not for New South Wales the explosion of California's gold rush. When the precious metal was subsequently discovered the paper was aghast. The colony was about to be ‘cursed with a gold-digging mania'. James Macarthur, John's son, an otherwise considerate and intelligent conservative, was so freaked out by the menace of gold that he wrote to the Colonial Secretary urging ‘the government [to] temporarily prohibit all mining' and halt ‘the deranging & upsetting of our social system to its very foundation'.

This social system would have warmed the heart of his crazy old man. James's brother Edward once explained the naked workings of this ‘social pyramid' as being determined by ‘an all pervading law – they who possess Capital will be always proportionately few in relation to the numbers to be employed'. Any undue departure from this happy circumstance – happy for James and Edward that is – could only be destructive. ‘The Capital and substance of the Community will be squandered and the elements of its prosperity dissipated.' The proper role of those drunken, rioting, unemployed Irishmen who tore up the town on election day was not to sit around in their grimy hovels waiting for an improvement in the building industry. Their role was to chase sheep around the Macarthurs' paddocks, to harness themselves to a plough, to fell trees or engage in some other worthy rustic pursuit. They were to think of themselves as the solid foundation on which a kind of wonderful plantation economy would erect a civilized superstructure. They weren't to aspire to anything more than this. It would be ‘destructive'. And they were certainly never, ever to contemplate taking power themselves. The very idea was an affront to the natural order.

James developed this line of thinking with reference to rival owners of capital – and competing centres of power – when he published an extended treatise on the constitution of the colony in London in 1837. His book argued that in a convict colony mere riches did not necessarily qualify the wealth holder to sit amongst the first rank of society and guide its development. Convict inn-keepers might have as much money as a respectable landholder, perhaps more, but that did not make them better or even equal men. A sense of honour and virtue was lacking. Unfortunately some of these disreputable characters and their bastard offspring were beginning to think ‘that the colony was
theirs by right
, and that the emigrant settlers were interlopers upon the soil'. These presumptuous chaps needed to be excluded from power. The destiny of the colony had to be left in the capable hands of the gentry, those two or three hundred families whose great estates marched ‘south and west from the capital' and were centred around Camden, Campbelltown, Goulburn and Bathurst and in the river valleys of the Macquarie and the Hunter.

Michael Roe characterises the men who headed these families as the lords of Australia. Distinguished lineages were uncommon, but many had gleaned some idea of leadership in the army or navy. Their elegant mansions were filled with fine crystal and china. The walls were adorned with original oil paintings of British heroes like the Duke of Wellington, the first Earl Grey and Sir Walter Scott. London's merchants provided French-polished mahogany dining chairs, rolls of the finest quality Brussels carpet and ‘rich crimson silk and worsted bell ropes with tassels and rosettes'. They rode together in hunt clubs; masters, servants and twenty hounds tearing through the fields of Pennant Hills. They dined and played billiards at the Australian Club, where ‘election was by ballot, and one black ball in ten would exclude a candidate'. They read the latest English journals at the Australian Library, which was just as exclusive. They built churches and chapels for the Anglican cause and established private schools where their sons might not be trained simply in Latin and mathematics but also in leadership and ‘that gentlemanly tone and bearing which are difficult of acquirement in a Colony so peculiarly situated as this'.

The
tone
of their lives, the style with which they comported themselves, was almost as important to the
nouveau riche
as the practical business of amassing and protecting their fortunes and influence, not surprising given the sort of low-rent villains like Robert Cooper who shared or even exceeded the landed barons' wealth, if not their sense of decorum and pretensions to breeding. In a new, wide-open society where everything was up for grabs, these members of the bourgeosie cast around for ways to express their superiority over the less worthy and settled on the concept of respectability. Cooper and even Wentworth might be commercially successful, but one was thought a pirate and the other the son of a damn'd whore and a highwayman. The great mass of the populace, it goes without saying, were not even worthy of the consideration given to these parvenu. In reply Wentworth, who could be a real trouserman and party animal when the mood took him, mocked society's obsession with respectability in his book of 1824. ‘Scandal appears to be the favourite amusement to which idlers resort to kill time and prevent
ennui
,' he wrote ‘and, consequently, the same families are eternally changing from friendship to hostility, and from hostility back to friendship again.'

Nonetheless, those who took it seriously took it very seriously indeed. During the 1830s the
Herald
could work itself into an apoplectic spasm at the prospect of former convicts throwing back gin slings and cucumber sandwiches at Governor Bourke's garden soirees. Government House was the focal point of society with Lady Denison recording that ‘Being, or not being, admitted here is, in this place, considered as the great criterion of a person's social position.' Good breeding and high station guaranteed access, indeed demanded it. Colonel Mundy, deputy commander of the forces under Sir Maurice O'Connell, had hardly unpacked his bags on arriving in Sydney before awaking to discover ‘a mound of visiting cards, interlaid with numerous invitations to dinners and evening parties'. For others, gaining that entry was more problematic, as the merchant GF Davidson discovered.

The testimonial, a letter of introduction, could be a passport to the city's self-serving oligarchy, but naturally one had to be very careful from whom one sought testimonials, as a correspondent for Charles Dickens's journal,
Household Words
, discovered.

The gentry did not merely perceive themselves to be at the social pinnacle of Sydney, they ‘sought to impress this principle on the legal and political institutions of their adopted country'. Of course their preferred model for society was a sort of vaguely despotic rural theme park, while the centre of their world was a rapidly modernising commercial sea port which was about to endure fifty years of fantastic, unrestrained growth. The gentry themselves, however, did not fare so well. Many were wiped out by the depression of the 1840s. Many more, unable to compete with the squatters who simply seized land, were forced to abandon their expensive estates and strike out beyond the boundaries of settlement as squatters themselves. Here they entered a much more primitive, hostile world, coarsened by the violence of an undeclared war between natives and invaders. Here says Roe, were men acting without grace or restraint or care for the public good, their struggle with the Aborigines – exemplified by the massacre at Myall Creek – reflecting not only contempt for the law but crude ugliness of thought and deed. The wool they grew still underpinned the entire economy, however, giving the squatters the same power and interests as their refined prototypes and leaving the tension between city and country unresolved. With time of course, and a steady accumulation of money, the squatters began to take on the cultured characteristics of the gentry they displaced until, by the end of the century, they were almost indistinguishable. They maintained the same gracious villas in town. They sent their children to the same exclusive schools. And they sat in the billiards rooms of the same clubs, drinking the same brandies and laying the same plots against the same enemies. One of the principal enemies, then as now, was the city and its insatiable appetite for scarce resources which should have been directed to making the grazier's lot that much more comfortable and secure.