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CONTESTED HISTORIES FORUM
Was the 'Southern Tree of Liberty' an Oak?
Paul A. Pickering
| For reasons that are unclear an important thesis is sometimes not published. The effect of this failure on subsequent scholarship and, in turn, historical understanding, can be unfortunate. The existence of the thesis means that other research projects don't proceed and other books aren't written. It sits like a block in the historiographical road, known primarily to academicians and available only to a privileged audience with access to inter-library loans. Terry Irving's thesis, 'The Development of Liberal Politics in New South Wales, 1843–1855', is a case in point. Completed in 1967, closer to the centenary than the sesquicentenary of responsible government, it deserved prompt publication and a broad audience. Irving has returned to the subject 40 years later to publish his research – and more besides. |
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In many respects the book has been worth the wait.1 It is not difficult to reflect at length on its many excellencies. First, the book adds greatly to the store of biographical knowledge about members of the nascent democratic movement in Sydney. In his account of what he dubbed the 'strange birth' of colonial democracy John Hirst argued that 'No noble men and deeds were left to posterity to revere'.2 Although he does not explicitly respond to Hirst, Irving offers us heroes aplenty. Only readers familiar with the fragmentary nature of the sources will recognise the painstaking research that has gone into the compilation of the thumb-nail sketches that are dotted through the book. The biographical approach is supplemented by tables and appendices that record details about leading radicals and liberals. The emphasis in all cases is on charting activity diachronically; occupation is the only sociological characteristic that is documented. This provides a useful overview but Irving has chosen not to provide a quantitative analysis; nor is there is any attempt to employ the techniques of prosopography to compare these activists on a range of variables. |
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Second, Irving offers a refreshingly expansive view of democratic culture. In these pages there are sustained glimpses of a vital and vigorous street politics, and an extended repertoire of social action not hitherto seen is a study of mid-nineteenth century Sydney. In what, for this reader, is the best section of the book, Irving undertakes a systematic analysis of street violence between 1840 and 1851 and 'mass activity' from 1848 to 1855. Along the way he offers some important conclusions about mobilisation in colonial politics that contributed to what he describes as a 'sense of crisis in these years'.3 For a decade, he notes, Sydney was a 'turbulent city' and 'popular tumults were a regular and inescapable part of public life'. Irving rightly points out that historians 'have barely registered this persistent disorder, and when they have they have denied its political significance'.4 Examining an election riot in 1843, for example, Irving rejects previous explanations which attributed the violence to hooliganism, high spirits and alcohol. Instead, he argues convincingly, the election riot was an expression of popular power: 'collective disorder was not just an effect of class and political power. It went hand in hand with the emergence of politics among working men, and it elicited a strong reaction from the governing elite'.5 |
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Finding the place of street violence in the repertoire of popular politics leads him, in turn, to some important reflections on the development of a public sphere (or spheres) in Sydney (although he does not use the term in the Habermasian sense) and on the nature of elections and of the concept of representation. His discussion exposes the tension between the traditional idea of representation as a form of trust and the growing belief that parliamentarians should be delegates of those who voted for them. This debate impinged not only upon the question who should vote but also who should be entitled to stand (and what they should do once they were elected). Irving's capacious definition of politics is most welcome. Many readers will be keen to explore further the turbulent, vibrant, dynamic, democratic society that emerges from Irving's pages. |
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For all its importance the book has a number of shortcomings. The first concern is about chronology or, more particularly, the decision to halt the account in 1855. The reasons for this are hard to fathom. 1856 saw the triumph of 'the bunch', the sobriquet given to the candidates (Henry Parkes, Charles Cowper, Robert Campbell and James Wilshire) who, at the head a formidable alliance of radicals and liberals, swept all before them, capturing the four Sydney seats at the poll and laying the groundwork for constitutional reform in 1858. In Sydney Hamlets, by contrast, a fierce battle between liberals and radicals pitted Dick Driver, one of the 'heroes' of Irving's book, against the liberal Premier-in-waiting, Stuart Donaldson. The themes and conclusions about the nature of demotic politics that Irving patiently develops during the book needed to be tested in the light of the 1856 'election' in the broadest sense of the term. |
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The second shortcoming relates to perspective. Irving stubbornly refuses to view colonial politics through the lens of the British world. His lingering attachment to the radical nationalist idea that Australian history was in some way sealed off from the rest of the world tells us a lot about the attitudes of the time when he first conceived his thesis, but in 2007 it is unhelpful. On the one hand it produces some throwaway remarks from the heart rather than the head. Radicals, he writes, to take one example, 'were less devoted than many believe' to the British Constitution.6 Nowhere does he attempt to explain or substantiate this remark, or engage with the extensive literature on the development of popular constitutionalism in the British world that is directly relevant to it. The sources themselves groan under the weight of references to 'British' freedoms and the evidence of British political culture. In an important chapter Irving describes the political geography of Sydney and points out the significant features of a radical precinct including the 'red house' in King Street where, inter alia, the People's Reading Room and Library operated in 1852. Irving does not take us across the threshold of this institution to cast an eye at the newspapers strewn on the reading tables. If he had done so he would have shown us an impressive range of public prints: from mother country's best known newspaper, The Times, and the London dailies, the Observer, and the Spectator, to the oracles of provincial English liberalism, the Manchester Guardian, the Sheffield Times, Liverpool Albion and Nottingham Mercury. The British radical press was there – the leading Chartist newspapers, the Northern Star and Reynolds' News, as well as the journal that had been founded by the Anti-Corn Law League, the Economist. In addition to a comprehensive slate of local and regional newspapers there were also a large number of 'Scotch, Irish and Foreign papers' – from the United States of America, Southern Africa, New Zealand, Singapore, Mauritius, Batavia, and the East Indies – as well as a selection of the better-known British magazines including Chambers' Edinburgh Journal, the Family Herald and the Catholic Weekly Instructor.7 This diet of printer's ink and paper was prepared for readers who were open, outward-looking, citizens of the world. Nor is the model that the promoters of the Reading Room explicitly had in mind for their institution difficult to find: it was the radical mutual improvement societies that were to be found all over Britain, and which had been a vital part of the social culture of Chartism. |
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Irving's insular view also denies him some useful comparisons and contextual material. The Sydney version of Paddy Kelly's Budget, a scurrilous scandal sheet published by Henry Evers in 1844, for example, borrowed its name and its tone from a long running Dublin journal of the early 1830s. Similarly, his discussion of the small holding schemes, driven, as he notes, by the ideology of colonisation,8 or the cultural divide within popular politics based on drink and sensibility,9 would have been all the richer if reference had been made to the analogous and interrelated debates occurring elsewhere in the British world. |
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Irving's conclusion, that while 'the forms of parliamentary government came from Britain, the thrust to democratise them came from a movement that had been developing [in New South Wales] since the late 1830s',10 is unsustainable. In 1840 the population of New South Wales was approximately 200,000. Between then and 1855 slighter fewer than half a million people arrived, mainly from England, Scotland, Wales and Ireland. These people brought with them ideas, strategies, lessons, hopes and aspirations that shaped the society they joined. For the vast majority of people in New South Wales, if not for Charles Harpur (who penned the words), the Southern Tree of Liberty was an English Oak planted in 1788. |
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The most damaging shortcoming in this book is its silences. First, it is not a book about New South Wales. Apart from a brief excursion to examine the revolt on the Turon goldfields it is a book about Sydney. The story of the democratic movement in the rest of New South Wales in these years is still to be written. Secondly, and most disappointingly, it is an account of white men. The stories of the women and the Aboriginal people of Sydney are not recorded. A fleeting reference to 'militant' women abusing the hapless Governor, George Gipps, in 1844, or, four pages from the end, to 'at least one women' in the radical movement (Adelaide Ironside), are the full extent of the attention given to women. Aborigines feature not at all. No one pretends that these stories are easy to tell – or that that the movement was not dominated by white men – but, if not explored, the silences ought to be acknowledged. And yet, despite Irving's inattention, women and Indigenous people press their case for a place in his account. Two illustrations,11 one of them repeated on the back cover, invite a second glance. One is an engraving from the Illustrated Sydney News of a massive meeting at Circular Quay in September 1853 to protest against the new constitution drafted by the Legislative Council. Under the watchful eye of nervous authorities the meeting heard speakers (including Parkes) skate close to the edge of sedition, invoke the 'ancient privileges of Britons', and approve a petition to the Queen praying for her to grant them a 'Constitution which should give them the laws which they have hitherto been accustomed to live under (Three cheers for the Queen)'.12 Even a cursory look at the illustration shows that the crowd – estimated at anywhere between 4,000 and 12,000 people – was made up of women as well as men. We should not be surprised to see them. We know that women (referred to by Parkes as the daughters of Australia)13 had played an important role in collecting signatures for the petitions against convict transportation in the previous two years. Like the women in the Anti-Slavery movement, Chartism, and the Anti-Corn League in Britain, these women had carved out a place for themselves in the male-dominated public sphere. Their story deserves to be told. |
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The second illustration is equally revealing. Again from the Illustrated Sydney News it depicts the hustings in Macquarie Place for the by-election in 1854 that resulted in the election of Parkes and anticipated the triumph of 'the bunch' in 1856. In many ways it is a perfect image for this book: it depicts the democratic public sphere grouped tightly around the platform; the crowd is obviously differentiated by class (and gender); hawkers patrol the perimeter selling newspapers, pamphlets, ribbons or pies, a reminder of the richness and breadth of the political. It is a scene, notwithstanding the bullocks and dray, that we might find anywhere in the British world. In the left foreground, however, stand a group of Aborigines (three men and a woman). They are depicted beyond the fringe of the meeting with their backs to the viewer according to the standard portrayal of the outsider in art at the time.14 But they were there, and they appear to be paying attention. So should we. These two illustrations, included without comment, might have set the agenda for the book; instead they undermine it. |
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Paul Pickering is Senior Fellow and Director of Graduate Studies in the Research School of Humanities, The Australian National University.
<paul.pickering@anu.edu.au>
Endnotes
1. Terry Irving, The Southern Tree of Liberty: The Democratic Movement in New South Wales before 1856, Federation Press, Sydney, 2006.
2. John Hirst, The Strange Birth of Colonial Democracy, Allen & Unwin, Sydney, 1988, p. 103.
3. Irving, The Southern Tree of Liberty, p. 184.
4. Ibid., p. 154.
5. Ibid., p. 155.
6. Ibid., p. 197.
7. See People's Advocate, 12 June 1852, 26 June 1852, 31 July 1852.
8. Irving, The Southern Tree of Liberty, p. 121.
9. Ibid., p. 135.
10. Ibid., p. 251.
11. Ibid., p. 186.
12. People's Advocate, 10 September 1853.
13. People's Advocate, 5 April 1851.
14. I am grateful to Kate Bowan for this reference.
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