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Book Review
| Hilary Golder, Politics, Patronage and Public Works: the Administration of New South Wales, Volume 1, 1842–1900, University of NSW Press, Sydney, 2005. pp. xii + 268. $59.95 cloth.
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| Hilary Golder has approached the history of colonial government administration in New South Wales with a broad understanding of administration. She writes with verve and authority about its standard components — the structure, functions, and personnel of government — but all the time she is concerned to make a more challenging point, to remind us of the effects of the reach of government in the colony. The controlling idea of the book is that of a system of power, rooted in and branching out from central government. In recent years, historians have neglected 'high politics', especially as a way of synthesising historical knowledge. Golder, however, has brought together state power and politics. Instead of a narrow study of the public service she has written a political history of colonial New South Wales from the perspective of government. In this sense her book is a very significant and welcome achievement. |
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It is also very accessible. Faced with covering a large slab of time, she chose to avoid the tedium of moving fixedly through the long nineteenth century by focusing on three crucial moments — 1842, 1856, and 1895. From these vantage points she allowed the story to move backwards and forwards, at the same time picking up the main themes, in order to bind the whole together. Part one begins with a chapter on the organisation and financing of government activities in 1842. Then there are two retrospective chapters on the convict system that introduce important, continuing themes: administrative improvisation, government responsibility for welfare and education, and the continuing control of the centre in the process of devolving activities to local government. Chapter four is a snapshot of working for the government in 1842. Here one learns of the difficulties caused by the imperial role in patronage, and of the vast amount of clerical labour needed to run the centralised system of documentation of people's lives during the convict period. |
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| Part two focuses on 1856, that is, government administration under responsible government, a topic for which Golder provides, as she says, 'a mildly revisionist reading'. She begins with a chapter on the preceding 13 years of the partly-elected Legislative Council, when the public service was 'under siege'. During these years the elected members harassed the Governor in a kind of prefiguring of the power they would eventually wield under responsible government. This chapter also deals with the impact of the gold discoveries on the methods and scope of government. Chapter six discusses the administrative arrangements of the early responsible government years. Particularly noteworthy is the account of the uneasy coexistence of Executive Council and Cabinet, and the development of cabinet meetings to offset the continuing power of the Governor. She also emphasises another element of continuity, the resort to statutory officers and boards reporting to the Executive Council because of the incompetence of ministers and the effects of ministerial patronage. |
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In the next chapter, in which the deregulation of the public service is the focus, Golder's revisionism comes into its own. Extending Loveday and Martin's argument about the stability of the faction system of politics, she shows how, in the absence of political parties, patronage served as the democratic political glue. At the same time, as the core business of government shifted from 'the management of information' to the 'construction of material assets', government no longer thought in terms of an administrative elite running an essentially clerical service. The result was that power in the service shifted to professionals (especially engineers), while in the electorates ministerial patronage of minor appointments created a separate, politicised element of the service. Chapter eight provides a set of detailed case studies of this system, while chapter nine deals with the 1870s and early 1880s when the crisis tendencies in the system (particularly its cost) came to a head. Finally, chapter 10 shows how a resolution was possible. The growth of electoral machines and the appearance of quasi-parties meant that parliamentary majorities could be constructed without patronage. Hence retrenchment and public service reform were possible, culminating in Reid's Public Service Act of 1895. |
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In a 'Postscript', Golder assesses the impact of the Act, projecting forward to 1917, when a new public service inquiry was held. She shows how the Public Service Board created a myth about its post-1895 reforming zeal that unfairly denigrated the administrative successes of the previous 40 years. Not even its claim to have slashed public service numbers can be trusted, nor that those posts that were cut were unnecessary. The huge scope of government activity — the sphere of the state — explains most of the size of the colonial public service. This point underlines the novelty of her two main propositions. The administrative challenge of the situation was met by improvised solutions that were effective. And patronage was a rational response to organising democratic politics at a time when the issues were not ideological but developmental. |
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Of course, readers have to remember that 'high politics' is not the entirety of politics. Once or twice I felt that the view from the top and the centre led Golder into forgetting this. For example, her passing comment about the 1842 self-government petition, that it 'read like a balance sheet rather than a stirring call for constitutional rights. (None of that American nonsense about life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness!)', is correct about the petition but not about the popular reaction to it, nor to the intrigues that had produced the petition. Part of that reaction was James McEachern's publication, The Indefeasible Rights of Man. Public life in the colony, and the conflict between civic and government ways of administering it, might well be the theme of a complementary book to Golder's. |
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My quick description of Golder's book has had to ignore the nuances in the argument and the fascinating detail in the story. I do not need to dwell on the exceptional depth of scholarship in the book, given Golder's standing among administrative and political historians. I do want to conclude by emphasizing how readable the book is. To avoid clogging up the text, Golder has used break-outs in order to add colour to the argument, to traverse the details of issues, and occasionally to discuss philosophical and theoretical questions. Her writing is direct, and lifted by pithy sentences. Her asides about deregulation and privatisation in the late twentieth century add a dimension of contemporary reflection that gives both a sharper edge and perspective to her argument. |
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This is a book that deserves to be widely studied and discussed. |
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| University of Sydney |
TERRY IRVING | |
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