Babette Smith - Journalist
ABN 11623652975
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ABN 11623652975 |
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Articles by Babette Smith: * In A Class of Our Own * * Out of Sight, the civic heritage of the convict era * * Diggers True Blue * _____________________________________________________________________________
IN A CLASS OF OUR OWN
First published in The Australian 23 January 2010
Most Australians nominate 'egalitarianism' as a key value of our society. We are sure it exists, yet we struggle to describe what we mean.
Outsiders have not found it difficult. In the 1920s, visiting novelist, D.H. Lawrence wrote, 'There was really no class distinction. There was a difference of money and of "smartness". But nobody felt better than anybody else, or higher; only better off. And there is all the difference in the world between feeling better than your fellow man, and merely feeling better-off.'
How did Australian society achieve this unique composition? I believe its roots lie in the convict era and we have never been able to describe it because, traditionally, we lacked detail about that time.
Our ignorance was compounded by scorn that a penal colony could give rise to such distinctive equality. In 1958 when Russel Ward, an historian of the 'Old Left' made this claim in his book The Australian Legend he was attacked by young historians of the 'New Left' for whom class shaped everything. But, fifty years on, the New Left is old and, in the intervening years, research in the convict archives has proved Ward right.
The first major contributor to Australia's egalitarianism was the culture the prisoners brought with them. My research into convicts' crimes in Britain revealed our founders were defiantly unrepentant, making a virtue of necessity by boasting about their crimes and ridiculing anyone who appeared self-righteous. In the 1820s, surgeon Peter Cunninham who made several voyages on convict ships wrote 'Thieves generally affect to consider all the rest of mankind equally criminal with themselves... It is their constant endeavour to reduce everyone to the same level with themselves.' This levelling attitude was bolstered by the presence on nearly every ship of a lawyer, or doctor or architect, sometimes a couple of merchants, even the occasional clergyman - middleclass people rendered equal by the criminal conviction.
In crowded, hierarchical Britain, the sceptical criminal ethos was scattered through society and had no broad influence. It is our good fortune that Britain put all its bad eggs in one basket, which reinforced their levelling instinct and enabled them to create a community in their own image.
In Australia, events conspired to reinforce the wistful egalitarianism of transported criminals.
Most startling to people used to being disregarded outcasts, was Governor Phillip's order in 1788 that rations in the starving settlement were to be shared equally regardless of rank. By this, Phillip made it clear that the humanity of the most lowly convict was as important as his own. Furthermore, he conferred value on the prisoners in their own eyes as well as others. The significance they placed on Phillip's decision can be judged by its long-lasting effects. Evidence exists that the practice of giving everyone equal worth and sharing equally was cherished from Phillip's day. The convicts made it the pattern for how Australians related to each other.
For instance, by the 1830s when their master shortchanged the convicts' rations, the men implemented an egalitarian practice which took care of everyone. Bushranger Martin Cash reported, 'I have seen meat for forty men weighed off in a lump, which then had to be divided into individual shares by the men themselves... all of whom shared alike. I believe it to be a fair representation of nearly all others throughout the colony.'
Cash was right. It was not an isolated example. Out on a reconnaissance with Major Mitchell, sharing freezing conditions on a mountaintop in NSW, five convicts in a scouting party divided the remaining ration of one of their number into five equal, if tiny, portions. It got them through the night until they reached the depot next day.
The enduring nature of Phillip's decision was on display in Japanese camps during WWII where the Australian practice of sharing resources regardless of rank is well-documented. We can see the same influence today in the community consensus that our government should always provide a 'safety net' for the less fortunate.
These qualities in our society are not accidental. They arise from our past experience.
Another factor in developing Australia's egalitarianism was the sparse information which the British government sent here about its transportees. For over thirty years, colonial authorities managed the penal colonies with only the date of the convicts' trial and length of sentence. Details of their crime were not provided until the mid-1820s. In the vacuum, a culture developed of judging people by their character and behaviour here rather than by their background. This suited the prisoners, many of whom arrived here sporting a tatoo which read: "Speak of me as you find." What began inadvertently became a defining characteristic of our society. In the 1850s it was evident again when an ex-convict digger displayed the slogan 'Live and let live' above his goldfields business.
In Australia, the traditional markers of birth, or education, wealth or religion were not the passports to status that they were in Britain even after a later influx of educated middleclass migrants. In the 1870s, novelist Anthony Trollope was intrigued that 'Men are constantly hired without any "character" but what they give themselves; and the squatters find from experience that the men are able to do [what they claim]'
Try as they might in the early years, the 'authorities' never succeeded in bending the convicts entirely to their will. Sheer weight of numbers combined with the obstreperous nature of the transportees meant the penal colonies had to be largely a co-operative venture with the prisoners. Local society was far more fluid than envisaged by policymakers in London.
From 1788, individual relationships broke down what elsewhere would have been ranks of power and status. Officers and convict women became lovers. 'Infatuated soldiers' from the other ranks settled here with their convict partners when the original guard returned to Britain. In NSW, a notorious pickpocket became Superintendent of Convicts. Prisoners and ex-prisoners became policemen, soldiers in the NSW Corps, farmers on their own land, householders. Many disregarded instructions to do what they wished. James Ruse, for instance, successfully farmed for the government, then dropped his co-operative facade and led a band of convicts and emancipists to farm at the Hawkesbury without authority. Court-martialled soldiers transported as convicts also blurred discrepancies of power and class: deals were done and liberties taken because so often the gaolers found common ground with the people they guarded.
British expectations of hierarchy, control and orderliness were turned upside down. Each boatload of newly arrived prisoners was confronted with a society that lacked the traditional barriers of class and privilege. They could see that their own kind were among the police constables, the scourgers, the ships' crews and military guards, the clerks and employers, the pastoralists and squatters, the wealthy as well as the poor. Convicts and emancipists intended to keep it that way.
In the approximately thirty years between the First Fleet and the arrival of free settlers in any significant numbers, the colonists became possessive about the society they had created. Traditionally we have been led to believe that Australians fear foreigners but examination of our convict years reveals that 'foreign' had nothing to do with it. The convicts feared being overwhelmed by the British class system which would return them to outcast status. They waged a relentless campaign that forced free migrants to take on the local ethos. "New chums", they called them. Or more insultingly 'Self-imported devils." This 'colonization' process which could often be harsh or even cruel to newcomers was well-known at the time. James Macarthur commented in 1837, 'They feel the colony is theirs by rights, and the emigrant settlers are interlopers upon the soil.'
Most free settlers were from the same socioeconomic group as the prisoners and although sometimes quite ruthlessly indoctrinated, they conformed to fit in. Middle class settlers bitterly resented the attitudes of the locals. In 1834 George Bennett wrote: 'It is well known that free emigration is detested by most of the convict party, and a wealthy individual of this class once remarked, 'What have the free emigrants to do here? The colony was founded for us. They have no right here.' Twenty years later, Reverend John West declared resentfully 'A community of little more than half a century old cannot be entitled to denounce Englishmen as foreigners or to complain that strangers usurp the rights of the country born.'
Another contributor to egalitarianism was work practices and attitudes that sprang from the power the prisoners possessed when the government needed their help to put the colony on a sustainable footing. Many continued throughout the convict era even after the system tightened.
It was thirty-two years before a barracks was built in Sydney to house the convicts. Until other accommodation was built prisoners lived in their own houses where they developed private lives and private possessions. They operated businesses in their homes. Their households provided board and lodgings and in many cases, employment, for later convict arrivals.
Being assigned to work for one of their own kind was a major contributor to our democratic culture. Throughout the penal era, convicts were assigned to employers who had themselves been prisoners, some of whom were wealthy which continued the levelling ashore which began on the convict ships. In 1819, when Commissioner Bigge investigated the penal colonies, he found that many ex-convict employers shared their living arrangements with their convict servants and maintained 'little if any Distinction' between them'.
Feisty women convicts played their part in social levelling. The records are littered with examples of women acting with fine disregard for the master/servant relationship or a discrepancy of power. Some insulted their employers' social status, claiming it was less than their servant was used to. Others took more direct action. A woman was punished for a physical tug-of-was with her employer. Another who was assigned to a laundry business run by ex-convicts dunked her master's head in a bucket of water.
In Governor Phillip's day the convicts announced that they would 'sooner perish in the woods' than be obliged to work regular hours, nor anything like a full day. They demanded task work instead. This meant that once the daily task was completed, they were allowed free time to earn money, plant their gardens, play or wander as they chose.' Many were still working under the task system thirty years later.
Initially, convicts were paid wages only for extra work. By the early 1820s however, pastoralists were obliged to pay their convict workers a wage set by Government regulation. When this policy changed in 1823, many masters continued to pay wages as an incentive and the practice faded slowly. The provision sugar or tobacco as incentives became entrenched in the system of convict management. Sometimes, if these were not provided prisoners went on strike.
The convicts recognised that withdrawal of labour gave them power and used it more frequently and effectively than we have realised. Combined with a refusal to defer, a disregard of rules and a determination to do only what suited them, it could leave even a commandant with arbitrary power at his wits end. At the remote punishment settlement of Wellington Valley in the 1820s, the Commandant despaired about what he called 'the insolence and treachery' of the prisoners. With embarassment, he conceded, 'It must appear strange that from the civil and military situation I had held for some years before, I should now find it difficult to manage a few convicts.'
Through experience, the prisoners developed a technique of enforcing their wishes from below which extended eventually to the style of leadership they were prepared to accept. One of the clearest examples can be found in the way convict members of Major Mitchell's exploratory party treated his Assistant Surveyor Granville Stapylton, who was the blacksheep of an aristocratic family and expected deference and obedience. By comparison, Mitchell treated the men according to how they performed on the spot and, in return, they supported him. In the 1840s squatter Arthur Hodgson described what was required to get the best from his convict workforce when he said 'They must be led not driven. They must be humoured not ordered; for knowing their own worth they will only exert themselves [according to] the treatment they receive.'
Those who believe that being a convict in Australia was the equivalent of slavery maintain that slave colonies in the West Indies prove the discrepancy in numbers in Australia between a tiny middle class and a large convict population did not eliminate class. This point demonstrates the danger of applying a remote British Empire yardstick to Australia, carrying within it assumptions that are the product of the dominant class in Britain. More than one group participates in the creation of class. It is not simply the product of beautiful Georgian houses, wealth and carriages and lots of sheep. Attitudes count. Self-assertion of class is meaningless, its power circumscribed, if it is not accepted by those excluded from the privileged group. And in Australia it never was.
Evidence for the rejection of class is scattered through the records in a variety of ways, in different situations, at different times and locations. Free settlers did not displace the ethos developed in Governor Phillip's time and sustained thereafter by the intense colonization which locals inflicted on newcomers. Using humiliation and mockery, convict society ensured that social class designators were kept at bay. In Van Diemen's Land, James Boyce gave one example of many describing how "[Bushranger] Matthew Brady targeted the pretensions of the free. settlers. Brady made the aspiring gentry assume the roles of their servants. He also gaoled soldiers in their own cells. The enormous popular support Brady received, and the speed with which his exploits became legend, reflected how deeply this challenge to the pretensions of the elite resonated in popular culture."
It was no different on the mainland.
From the earliest times, the prisoners pressured otherwise middleclass people to act as if they were equals. In the 1830s, Martin Cash described how he would offer a cup of tea because "... at this time any gentleman travelling through the bush was not above sharing our hospitality, it being a general understanding through the colony
This pressure for classlessness continued after the convict era. In 1902, when Henry Montgomery returned to England from his post as Bishop of Tasmania, it was very clear he had absorbed the enforced democracy of the ex-convict community. Writing a manual for clergymen sailing to the colonies, he told them 'Make sure to clean your own boots and learn to shoe a horse. Don't use "the affected voice or manner". And never speak about "the lower classes". Australians don't like it.'
Observing the same phenomenon in 1974, author Craig McGregor wondered 'why the wealthy feel under some pressure to be accepted by ordinary working Australians rather than the other way round?' In the 21st century, the same pressure - its source unrecognised - makes the Prime Minister feel obliged to sit beside his driver.
Dig deep in our penal history and you will find the underlying dynamics of Australian society.
For much of the penal era, free settlers could not come to the convict colonies without permission which delayed the creation of a middle class. The vacuum allowed the prisoners' ethos to consolidate. Even after free settlers began to arrive from the 1820s, they were still substantially outnumbered by emancipist families and their descendants not just for decades but, I would argue, throughout the nineteenth century. The free settler figures have always been fudged because later generations wanted to promote the idea that convicts were insigificant. Opponents of transportation promoted the idea they had few descendants. 'Most died childless' proclaimed John West who led this group. He also originated the idea that the goldrush had subsumed the remaining convicts, something many Australians still believe.
The mobility of convicts around Australia has been underestimated since the threat of their 'contamination' was a key plank in West's scaremongering. With much hysteria, Victoria and South Australia passed legislation to keep them out. As late as 1870 Anthony Trollope was required to get a passport from Western Australia which certified he had never been a prisoner. Without it South Australia and Victoria would not allow him to land.
In this as everything else, the convicts proved adept at outwitting the state. Even before transportation ended, thousands of prisoners, often with families, moved around the continent following gold or escaping the stigma of convictism that could occur in the community where they served their sentence. Thankfully for us, they took their insistence on an egalitarian culture with them. copyright Babette Smith 2010.
This article is based on my 2009 Russel Ward Lecture at University of New England. _____________________________________________________________________________________
OUT OF SIGHT, the civic heritage of convict transportation This article originated as a speech to the Independent Scholars of Australia Association (ISAA). It was published in The Australian on 24 January 2009 under the title Safe Harbour . As historians consider their draft for the national history curriculum, it is important they find a place for close study of the convict era. Not just the First Fleet. Not just New South Wales. Australians need to understand there were convicts somewhere on the continent for over eighty years and that, once free, they moved through all states of Australia, a reality with lasting implications for our society School is the only time for the whole population to absorb and analyse this information yet some reports about the planned curriculum suggest that significant study of Australian history will start from Federation in 1900. Study of the 19th century will be consigned to primary school and taught mainly from the angle of family history. Or simply as an extension of European society. Let me explain what we will lose if convict history is not given due weight in our schools. Over and above all else we will lose the ability to understand the origins of our distinctive Australian culture and character. They were hidden long enough by shame about our penal foundations, shame that in the late twentieth century too often transmogrified into derision from those caught in the paradigm created by opponents of transportation. For the last 150 years the idea that convict foundations were a blot on Australia's history has shaped political, social and intellectual thought to such an extent it is as though the first sixty - eighty years never existed. The reality and strongly developed ethos of a flourishing convict society is neither remembered nor understood. Its people have been reduced to caricature. They are 'out of sight', taking with them knowledge of out civic heritage from the transportation era. Convict society in full flourish - was careless, rough, exuberant, optimistic and energetic. Humorous. Blasphemous. Egalitarian ...everyone had been rendered equal by a criminal conviction... Tolerant - many cultures were in the same boat - literally. Above all, people were judged only by what they were. In fact many of the convicts had a tattoo that read - 'Speak of me as you find'. Some argue - historian John Hirst is to the forefront on this (see The Monthly July 2008) - that if we accept the penal community was not just a slave colony as the stereotype depicts, then it must have been simply a British working class society. Nothing different or distinctive about it. No particular influence from the convicts. Hirst, for instance, argues that Australian humour is nothing more than ordinary working class British and Irish humour. But research in the actual convict archives, as well as the trials in Britain, proves him wrong. Firstly, convict humour contains little trace of the good-humoured deference that can be found among law-abiding Britons. Crime made deference irrelevant. A criminal conviction made it unnecessary. Secondly, unlike their compatriots, the criminals who founded our nation used humour as a weapon. It was the means by which convicts and ultimately their wider community subverted authority, pricked pomposity and 'levelled' any attempt at class barriers. Thirdly, and more seriously, humour was used by the convicts to hide their fear and misery and vulnerability. For some, humour was a shield to face death. For others, a resource which helped them endure physical and emotional privation. Given the numerical dominance of emancipist families throughout the nineteenth century, it is not surprising that humour...a distinctive, sardonic, gallows humour became entrenched as a 'typically' Australian characteristic. And to those who would suggest that free settlers overwhelmed the convict numbers making them irrelevant, I would reply that idea is yet another of the great distortions. Misled by secondary sources, we have failed to recognise that the convicts and their children intermarried with the immigrants in significant numbers. We owe our pervasive secularism to penal society. Blasphemy flourished in convict Australian. Indeed, over time, the local preference for inserting a profanity at every second word resulted in "bloody' being described as 'the great Australian adjective'. And why not? Most of the former prisoners and subsequently their families had little reason to feel grateful to the church. In Britain it was frequently clerical magistrates (the younger sons of aristocrats) who decided whether to let off an offender with a warning - or to commit them for trial. In the colony, it was evangelical clergymen who judged the convicts by middle class standards they could not possibly meet. In the middle of the nineteenth century, it was clergymen who led the shaming campaign that declared the convicts a source of depravity and contamination, forcing the former prisoners and their descendants to hide their past. With that history, the kind of religious underpinning we see so vividly in American culture, could never take root here regardless of what religion it was. The later migrants tried, but they failed to change the attitude that dated back to convict times. If we do not study the 19th century in some detail, we will never appreciate that Australian tolerance began in the convict era. Certainly the prisoners who disembarked in their thousands were mainly from England, Ireland and Scotland but they were never entirely homogenous. Black faces and foreign accents were sprinkled amongst them on virtually every ship. Convict society was always multi-racial, drawing its numbers from the far reaches of the British Empire as well as cosmopolitan London and the seaports of Liverpool and Glasgow. Hottentot bushmen from the Cape of Good Hope were convicts. So were Maori from New Zealand, negroes from America and the West Indies. And men and women from India and Mauritius. Described in the ships' indents as 'men (or women) of colour', they shared with the 'whites' the common denominator of a criminal conviction. Being populated by people like this, the absolute bottom layer of society - not just the poor, or the 'deserving' poor but the desperately poor - meant that any concern about race and ethnicity and religion had been overwhelmed by the need to survive. The shared struggle created fellowship between people of a different background, an ethos that was recreated in the colony. Racism can be found towards the Aborigines as modern research has conclusively demonstrated. However, racism is notable by its absence towards others who were not white-skinned. The proof that tolerance has deep Australian roots can be found in the huge number of migrants who have been absorbed peacefully in the years since the convict era. But, in convict society - and modern surveys reveal this continues today - there was always a condition to the welcome: newcomers were expected to adapt to the local ethos and customs. Contrary to modern assumption, this requirement historically had nothing to do with race. Its source was the ex-convicts fear of being overwhelmed by British free settlers who would return them to the outcast status that was their rank in Britain. The former convicts were determined that the class structure and economic privilege of Britain would not to be replicated in the community they had created. Using mockery and humiliation, they quickly cut down anyone with pretensions to social or economic superiority. In the colony, a man or woman was to be judged without the usual markers of birth, education, wealth or propriety. Three elements contributed to this distinctive ethos. One was the criminal conviction which in a stroke rendered everyone equal. No lawyer or doctor or merchant found guilty by the courts could claim greater virtue or status than your common-or-garden highwayman or pickpocket. Secondly - and fundamental to refuting those who search for a class drama - is understanding that there was no large body of free settlers to create a middle class through almost the entire duration of the convict colonies. There was no 'Us' and 'Them'. It was evident for all to see in the police constables, the scourgers, the ships' crews and military guards, the clerks and employers, the pastoralists and squatters, the wealthy as well as the poor that 'Them' was 'Us'. They were one and the same. And you could find Irish as well as English in any one of the roles. The third contributor to our precious social ethos began in 1788 when Governor Phillip decided that every one, regardless of rank, should share equally in the starving settlement's rapidly diminishing food. In issuing that order Phillip overturned every expectation of the class-ridden society from which the colonists had come. He made it clear that the humanity of the most lowly convict was as important as his own. The value the convicts themselves placed on Governor Phillip's decision can be judged by its long-lasting effects. Evidence exists that the practice of giving everyone equal worth and sharing equally was cherished from Phillip's day. By the 1830s it was deeply entrenched. In the twentieth century, this heritage could be observed among our men who were prisoners in Japanese camps. Its influence can be seen today in the community consensus that our government should always provide what has come to be called a 'safety net'. If this history was understood, we might judge our fellow Australians less harshly when they repeat today the mantra of 'preserving the Australian way of life'. Of course they don't understand why they feel so strongly on this subject, nor can they explain what constitutes 'the Australian way of life'. How could they? No one has taught them the history necessary to comprehend its roots. John Hirst and I agree on one point: convict society was a functioning working class society. Forget the traditional images of chain gangs, and flogging, and a dominant cruel force of soldiers and guards mixed with a few privileged overseers who had lickspittled their way up from the ranks of prisoners. This was only true in a limited way. Most of the male prisoners (something like 75-80%) did not experience it. Just as 90% of the women were not the drunken, useless whores traditionally depicted. But our functioning working class had distinctive features created by its penal context and the fact its citizens were predominantly ex-convicts and their descendants. For example, we need to understand that the prisoners weren't afraid of contradicting a magistrate. Nor were they behind in ticking off their employers. They had a strong sense of their rights and frequently stood their ground in an argument. And once they realised that many of their employers had themselves arrived as convicts, there was no holding them. Stuck in the distorted historical stereotypes no one has yet analysed these early industrial relations. When their history is finally written, it will be revelatory about the character of the Australian people and the origin of our working culture. Because they were successful, the ugly template created by the opponents of transportation has been accepted as fact. Analysis of Australia ever since has been shaped by their propaganda. The Reverend John West the leading strategist of this group, wrote a history book that is still used by historians as a primary source. Until now, no one has challenged his claim that convict society was a system of 'revolting severity and prisoners debased by habit', that it left 'a class embittered by ignorance and revenge'. West's book was a template for the gothic histories produced in the 1880s and 1890s (for example Marcus Clark's 'Term of His Natural Life') and for the attitudes displayed in the Bulletin magazine at that time. It remains the template for too much contemporary analysis. Family historians began researching the convict records in significant numbers during the late 1970s. They quickly discovered that convicts believed in the future of Australia. It was they and their children who built the social as well as the physical infrastructure. Their children served on the local councils of our cities and towns. Some of those children became community leaders such as the local mayor and in one case Lord Mayor. Some were squatters. Some of them became professional men. Some started newspapers. Many were small businessmen and women, an occupation with very long roots in Australia. It was convict families with their 5 - 10 - 12 children who populated the country - increasing exponentially throughout the 19th century and intermarrying with the immigrants who came later. It was their grandchildren - and in some cases children - who fought at Galipolli. It was convict culture that moulded the character of the diggers who served in World War 1. Equating the convicts and the diggers is not overstretching it. Consider the following similarities: In the 1840s, the squatter C.P. Hodgson said about his ex-convict workforce, 'They must be led, not driven; they must be humoured, not ordered; for knowing their own worth they will only exert themselves according to the treatment they receive.' In 1918, General Monash said about the Australian soldier,, 'Psychologically, he was easy to lead but difficult to drive... he required a sympathetic handling, which appealed to his intelligence and satisfied his instinct for a "square deal"...' Because we don't know the convicts, we have not seen the link to the diggers. In turn their historical prominence owes much to the vacuum about what preceded them. We will never comprehend the military emphasis in our history if we fail to understand what created it in the 19th century. And the culture exemplified by the diggers will remain bewildering without that earlier knowledge. This idea that early Australia was nothing but a brutal slave colony has dominated our history books and our popular imagination for too long. It blocks a realistic analysis of the first eighty years of European settlement. Gripped by this gothic template, we fail to understand the origin of some of our best qualities and by default recognise only the bad because they seem a logical outcome of that image. © Babette Smith 2008 Diggers True Blue First published in The Australian 26 April 2008
Some opponents of their pilgrimage claim it glorifies war. Others blame politicians for overemphasising the commemoration of Gallipoli. One commentator even argued that the behaviour and character of the diggers was nothing more than 'a performance' to placate the audience back home. Despite such claims that their faith and their interest is misplaced, young Australians remain steadfast in their view At Gallipoli in 2006, one of the young explained quite clearly what it meant to them, telling a journalist, 'Its not about empire. Its about us.' And they are right. The World War 1 diggers run deep in our society, right back to the convict era.. No connection is generally recognised between the prisoners and their military heirs but evidence for the link is not hard to find. The reluctance of the World War I diggers to salute is one obvious example. Raised in an egalitarian society that emphasised respect for the person rather than the badge they wore, why would they? But behind the boys stood thousands of grandfathers, and in some cases fathers, who had too often been compelled to do so. The Rules and Regulations of the penal settlement at Port Arthur, for instance, stipulated: 284. They [the convicts] will invariably touch their caps on passing an Officer, and are never to address any Officer or remain in an apartment where one is present, without taking off their caps; they are also to stand up when any of the principal Officers enter their messroom or other apartment, or the exercise-yards; this order also applies to Officers of the Army and Navy, dressed in uniform, or known to be such. With that cultural history, any self-respecting Australian would have to be dragged to salute. Their irreverence drew extra strength from another quarter too. We are ignorant that approximately six thousand of the bad boys of the British army were transported to Australia as convicts. They helped create the template for how to behave in the army. C.E.W. Bean described a quality of the diggers as 'a sort of supressed resentfulness, never very serious but yet noticeable, of the whole system of officers.' Bean would not have known about the soldier convicts and would have been loath to link them with the diggers if he had. Court-martialled in the far reaches of the Empire, their offences included not only desertion (an ambiguous offence since it often involved visiting a wife or parents), but other military 'crimes' directly relevant to Bean's observation, such as - mutinous conduct; striking a sergeant; striking two sergeants; insubordination. Ex-soldiers like these were spread throughout the shiploads of convicts transported to New South Wales, Van Diemen's Land and Western Australia. Their subversive message was disseminated on the ships and in the settlements of the penal colonies. It permeated the culture of Australia. As the English poet John Masefield recorded about the men at Gallipoli, '...they didn't care a damn for anybody.' An even more profound link between convicts and diggers than their notorious irreverence is revealed in the description of his troops by General Monash in 1918. Describing the Australian soldier, Monash said, 'Psychologically, he was easy to lead but difficult to drive...Taking him all in all, the Australian solder was, when understood, not difficult to handle. But he required a sympathetic handling, which appealed to his intelligence and satisfied his instinct for a "square deal"...' In other words, the Australians were not like British troops who were trained to obey an order 'do or die'. Australian soldiers were resistant to direction - to orders. They would only deign to obey when they judged the 'request' made sense. And respect for the man who was asking was essential From his run at the Darling Downs, C.P. Hodgson said, 'They must be led, not driven; they must be humoured, not ordered; for knowing their own worth they will only exert themselves after [according to] the treatment they receive.' The diggers' qualities were not a performance. They were not a 'construct' created by peer pressure and expectations at home. The diggers were organic to Australian society, home-grown products of the convict era. They carried in them the cultural influences of that time, as well as the human qualities of their fathers and grandfathers - the convicts. Any close study of the crimes of the latter, not to mention their behaviour in the penal colonies, reveals that they excelled in wit, daring, opportunism, the ability to keep their nerve, the courage not to weep, the stoicism to endure and the determination to find a way when everything was ranged against them. Their boys combined these qualities with a joyous devil-may-care 'lightness of being' that was the legacy of those who understood the difference between captivity and freedom. Some called this latter quality 'larrikinism'. Ignorance of our history provokes these disagreements about the importance of the World War 1 diggers. They reveal us as victims of the social amnesia created by shame about our years as a penal colony which caused us to cover up what happened during that time. It was an induced shame, created by people who wanted to end transportation, but it was real. As a consequence it became impossible to discuss our penal foundations, let alone identify as a convict family. People stopped talking about convicts. They were glossed over in history books and dropped from community celebrations. Eventually, memory of what they were really like was lost. With that loss went our ability to see the link to the diggers. In turn, the soldiers receive their emphasis partly because of the historical vacuum created by silence about the men who were transported.. 'Its about us,' say young Australians gathering at Gallipoli. Too right it is. And don't let anyone tell you differently. © Babette Smith 2008 ____________________________________________________________________________ COHESION & RESPONSIBILITY - THE PROMISE OF THE REPUBLIC Becoming a republic offers Australians the chance to shrug off what author Paul Kelly has aptly described as the limitation of our "psychological pessimism". Like the United States, Australia is the land of the dispossessed but, unlike the United States, we never conceptualised ourselves as the land of the free. Such optimism has flared only briefly in our self-image - expressed at different times, as "the wide brown land", as "the lucky country", and, more recently, as "the most successful multicultural society in the world". But each wave of optimism has faltered and disintegrated, beaten back by cynicism or by a pervasive intellectual, political and social cowardice which causes avoidance, denial and distortion of reality. The source of this corroding mindset is as much a result of things that have not happened, as those that have. Too often the defining moments in Australian history have been made under duress or to the timetable of others. The convicts didn't ask to come here. European Australia was not founded by choice, nor was it created with noble ideas of religious tolerance and personal liberty like the United States. We did not have to fight for the freedom of our civil and legal rights. Ours evolved peacefully from a penal system, which encompassed the common law rights of true-born Englishmen and women. Federation of Australia was an achievement but not an inspiration. It was predominantly a pragmatic decision - urged on us by the British who wanted to deal with one national government rather than six squabbling colonies. Gallipoli was our glorious moment, but even though willingly accepted, it was thrust upon us - as were the heroic battles of World War II, Korea and Vietnam. This time it is important that we choose our future with clear-sighted deliberation. And we must make the choice for constitutional change now because if we vacillate, the old pattern could recur and it could be thrust upon us by Britain out of the need to complete her integration with the European Community. We must select a moment which is historically relevant for us. The anniversary of Federation on 1st January 2001 is that moment. Imagine how we will feel if we wake up the morning after the referendum to discover we have voted "no" to change. A negative result will not mean that we congratulate ourselves on our good sense. Instead, we will make common cause with embarassment in the eyes of the world - and shame in our own. Though a nation of gamblers, we will recognise in the stark light of day that, when the test came, we did not have the faith and the courage to risk the toss. The self-defining action of voting Yes will strike a blow against our national pessism. For once we will do something to create optimism and enhance our pride in ourselves and our belief in the future. Creating an Australian republic allows us finally to address the tyranny of distance by publicly acknowledging the region in which we live: not Europe, not England, not the Atlantic, but the Pacific - Asia-Pacific. Most importantly, a republic offers us the chance to rediscover social cohesion. While it is true that our system of government still functions well enough and, in that sense, is not "broken", Australia is no longer united under the Crown. One half of the community finds it alien and the other half is resentful that its validity is questioned. Perpetuating the status quo will not heal the rift which exists, only change and adaptation can do that. By removing the source of friction, the republic will increase cohesion. Because it fails as a symbol for so many people, the relationship with the Crown IS broken and the constitutional tie between Australia and Britain is now detrimental. The constitutional legacy is another matter. Evolutionary change is a British political tradition. A peaceful transition to a republic offers the greatest chance to restore perspective on the British legacy and recognise the value of that country's contribution to this one. With a republic achieved, Australians will again be comfortable acknowledging their great British cultural and constitutional inheritance. Confirmation of its value will banish the Anglo-Celtic antagonism towards a republican movement whose rhetoric has too often claimed that the past, particularly the British past, is worthless. As part of an Australian republic, those citizens with a British background - or even those who are simply anglophiles by education or experience - can once more feel legitimate. By acting as a linchpin to muliculturalism, the republic will heal the Anglo-Celtic sense of displacement and address the question that has remained unacknowledged for two decades, when they ask: But where do WE fit in multicultural Australia?" The answer, in a changed Australia, will be "Under the Republican umbrella with everybody else." By clarifying this issue, an Australian republic will be a force for national cohesion. It will bond our ethnic mix, banishing any danger that our valuable diversity could ultimately be nothing but exotic fragmentation. Becoming a republic will facilitate reconciliation with the indigenous people, something, which I believe, most Australians earnestly desire to achieve. In using the British constitutional legacy to become a republic, we put colonialism behind us forever and with it the sins committed in the name of conquest and Christianity. With this gesture, we will make it possible for the Aboriginal people to forgive the Europeans, without which reconciliation will be impossible. A republic is the means by which Australia can rediscover cohesion in a mutlicoloured, multifaceted form. The banner of an Australian republic will encompass Europeans of all descent and Aboriginal and Torres Strait people of many tribes. It will wrap around Asians and Africans, around Indians and Lebanese and Turks, around Chinese, Fijians and Russians, around all the immigrants and their descendants whether resident here for forty thousand years, or two hundred, or only one. It will be our choice, THE self-defining act of Australian citizens and it will be what we make it. An Australian republic offers us not only the opportunity to redefine our common values, but to find, at last, the optimism and the emotional courage to articulate them. Australians are achieving independence without bloodshed or aggression, so we have no need for a Declaration of Independence. Our need is different - more subtle and more complex. We must create an Australian Declaration of Values that allows all Australian voices to be heard, something that every school child can learn, and every adult can remember - with a shiver of identification at the bits that resonate for them.
THE VOICES OF AUSTRALIA
And we the indigenous people known as the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders came to the land and it possessed us as its ancient power possesses all who live here And we, the men and women who came after, acknowledge our debt to the first inhabitants for teaching us that we do not, in spirit, own the land but are owned by it and that we share with the indigenous Australians a responsibility for its care and conservation which we hereby pledge ourselves to observe Together we declare that Australians are people of many races from around the world, that we celebrate our diversity and welcome all those who are prepared to live in peace and harmony with us, respecting the values of tolerance and equality and a "fair go" for all, without discrimination against any person on the grounds of race, religion, sex or sexual orientation, age or disability In honouring the tradition of mateship forged by Australians in peace and war, we hold it self-evident that the weak should be nurtured by the strong and the development of our community should strive to balance reward for individual effort with benefit for all. We value achievement in the arts and sciences, in business and in sport and aspire to excellence in all our endeavours be they physical, spiritual, mental or intellectual, scientific or cultural. Recognising the constitutional legacy derived from Great Britain through the successful establishment of a democratic nation in this continent, we recommit ourselves to the principle of one vote for each adult citizen and hereby assert that the rule of law and equal civil, legal and political rights and responsibilities are fundamental to Australian society And we the citizens of Australia, humbly relying on Almighty God, are united in one indissoluble federal Commonwealth which derives its power and value from our consent to such unity and from these fundamental beliefs that we share © Babette Smith 1998 _____________________________________________________________________________ ISSUE THAT'S NOT DISCUSSED A recent conference in Canberra organised by the Attorney-General's department highlighted how unacknowledged homophobia damages all men's lives. This week the Department issued a discussion paper on fatal offences against the person that once again puts homophobia on the agenda. But the media release from the Minister for Justice, Senator Amanda Vanstone, demonstrated the distortion which ensures that homophobia remains subterranean to other issues rather than being frankly discussed. The love that once "dared not speak its name" is today the fear that is never expressed. The Senator's office cast the entire debate about abolishing provocation as a partial defence for murder in terms of its effects on women (an aspect which must undoubtedly be considered). The use of homosexual panic as mitigation for killing was ignored. The Discussion Paper is the work of the Model Criminal Code Officers Committee of the Standing Committee of Attorneys-General (SCAG) and it includes a careful disclaimer that it does not necessariily represent the views of SCAG itself. The Committee consists of approximately equal numbers of men and women, including many with experience as prosecutors or defence counsel and several distinguished legal theorists. Other lawyers refute this. Provocation was conceptualised originally as a response to tavern brawls between men and, essentially, it remains today an excuse for a man's loss of control despite some success by women's groups at redressing its inherent gender bias. In most states, now provocation has been attentuated by legislative reform to accommodate the "battered woman" syndrome, but the discussion paper argues that the actual route to equality is to abolish the doctrine altogether. "A significant number of cases where provocation is raised concern the death of women by a jealous husband/lover. This paper argues that such circumstances don't provide an excuse for murder and the provocation defence should be removed," said Senator Vanstone. Certainly, it can be argued that abolishing provocation as a defence raises the value placed on a woman's life because it removes the implicit endorsement of men's entitlement to jealous rage over their female "possessions". And "self-defence" will remain to protect women. An unacknowledged factor in the proposal to abolish provocation is the increasing use of homosexual panic as an excuse for sufficient loss of control to kill another human being. Although, frequently justified as being associated with sexual abuse as a child, it is also raised in some cases as grounds in itself. A taskforce in NSW in 1996 was sufficiently concerned to recommend that judges instruct juries that the 'ordinary person' would not act as the result of prejudice toward, or fear of, homosexuals or homosexuality and, furthermore, that "the law does not treat a homosexual advance.... as an act of provocation to any lesser or greater degree than if he had made a comparable sexual advance upon a woman." The suggestion has not been implemented. It is hard not to sympathise with gay activitists who claim that "provocation" is often nothing more than unadulterated homophobia. And to appreciate that it plays well in a courtroom full of similarly fearful males whether sitting on the jury, at the bar table, or on the bench. Research for my own book Mothers & Sons exposed the pernicious influence of homophobia. How it inhibits men's friendships with one another. The damage it causes between mothers and sons because of men's fear that something mothers do can turn their sons into homosexuals. Too much of boys behaviour is governed by the constant homophobic need to "prove" their sexuality. It prompts disruptive behaviour in class, disavowal of "girlish" things, like reading books, and is often the unrecognised cause of bullying or suicide. Untold destruction is inflicted on the relationship between fathers and sons because men confuse surface masculinity with male sexuality and fathers pressure their boys to "act like a man". Of course, homophobia would play well as a defence. It lies at the heart of the male culture which is embodied in the law of the land. The abolition of provocation will be cast by some lawyers as against women's interests, but "common cause" may be a more accurate description.
_____________________________________________________________________________ PNG SEEKS TO BRING LAW TO THE PEOPLE Despite considerable political turbulence in Papua New Guinea, the rule of law got a boost from the country's first national legal convention which was held in Port Moresby this week. Convened by the Chief Justice, Sir Arnold Amet, the conference was an attempt to tackle problems of access to justice for the broad community, an issue which Papua New Guinea shares with Australia and other common law countries. In his opening remarks, Sir Arnold pointed out that the theme of the conference which was devoted to "Alternative Dispute Resolution", carried an underlying assumption that conventional structures, methods, practices and procedures do not adequately meet the needs or demands of the clientele for efficient and effective dispute resolution, an assumption with which he agreed. "The system that we have inherited and adopted is far too complex and costly and is therefore inaccessible to the vast majority of our indigenous people," he told the audience. The Chief Justice emphasised that Papua New Guinea had the opportunity to learn from local experience but also "to learn from the best alternatives developed elsewhere" and to adapt them formally into the PNG judicial dispute resolution processes. And he saw the judiciary as accountable to the users of the system for efficiency in the administration of justice. ""Timely, less expensive and more user friendly and accessible dispute resolution methods are issues of public accountability," he said. The Chief Justice believes that ADR processes will improve access to the judicial system for litigants "by making the process more user-friendly and by making a substantive number of decision-makers available".
The drive from on high by the Chief Justice to incorporate ADR into the formal legal system is simultaneous accompanied by a successful propagation of ADR processes at the village level by organisations such as the Catholic PEACE Foundation.
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