|
|
|
BOOK REVIEW
| Peter Cochrane, Colonial Ambition: Foundations of Australian Democracy, Melbourne University Press, Carlton, Vic, 2006. pp. xv + 581. $34.95 paper.
|
| The process by which self-government came to the Australian colonies has been described before, but never has the story been told with the detail, verve and colour provided here. Colonial Ambition provides a masterful account of the complex manoeuvres, shifting alliances, public protests and incessant argumentation that marked the struggle in New South Wales, from the establishment of the partially elected Legislative Council in 1843 to the achievement of self-government in 1856 and the passage of a democratic franchise and electoral act two years later. |
1
|
|
Cochrane organises his deceptively straightforward narrative around the volcanic figure of William Charles Wentworth and his explanation as to why the explosive tensions of the 1840s reached a peaceful consensus around the concept of 'Britishness' – an approach that gives much scope for irony: the traditions of the British constitution invoked by radicals and conservatives alike; republicans relying on imperial authority to thwart the pastoralists' scheme for aristocratic independence; an imperial governor supported by the urban working classes against the land-hungry squatters. The greatest irony of all can be found in the career of Wentworth himself, whose shambling figure bestrode the colonial stage and provided much of its colour. A relentless anti-democrat and champion of the pastoral interest, his own disreputable origins as the illegitimate son of a surgeon exiled for suspected highway robbery meant that he could never be accepted as a respectable member of society. He laboured tirelessly on behalf of forces who despised him as an upstart, rejected his proposals of marriage and refused to meet him socially. He denounced the urban orators as foul-mouthed prophets of mobocracy, yet was himself notorious for his intemperate language. Calling for Australian independence, he could still attack a proposal to end the requirement for colonists to travel to London in order to qualify as a barrister because it would destroy the authority of the legal profession. The crowning irony came after the defeat of Wentworth's plan for a restricted franchise that would have kept power in the hands of the people who refused to dine with him. Too late they realised that he had been the only personality capable of holding them together, with the result that their side had disintegrated during his absence in England. On his return to Sydney the arch-opponent of democracy found that the rise of the riff-raff had brought him what he had always wanted: acceptance by the pure merinos. By then he was too old and bitter to care. When the new premier, Charles Cowper (generous though subtle in victory) offered him the presidency of the upper house on condition that he support the bill providing for everything he had fought against – manhood suffrage, equal electorates, the secret ballot – he embraced the unexpected honour and became the executioner of the social order he had devoted his life to preserving. |
2
|
|
Colonial Ambition offers a fresh interpretation of Wentworth's infamous proposal for a hereditary aristocracy to supply the personnel for the upper house, an Australian House of Lords – in history and legend, laughed into oblivion by the republican Daniel Deniehy's mockery of the scheme as 'a bunyip aristocracy'. He suggests that the aristocracy idea was a red herring from the start, intended to disguise Wentworth's real objective, which was a nominated upper house, with members appointed for life. Having achieved this, he was happy to let the bunyips sink quietly back into their billabong. But the most original aspect of Colonial Ambition is its stress on the importance of Britishness in providing the reference point for almost all the debate about the New South Wales political settlement and generating the set of shared values that allowed a democratic constitution to be achieved with minimal violence and scarcely any bloodshed. 'Entitlement to parliamentary liberty had become a defining characteristic of Britishness abroad', writes Cochrane. 'It was the intellectual property of nearly every educated colonist, whether immigrant or native-born, and it was the first principle of the political struggle in New South Wales' (p. 10). Whether squatter, landed gentleman or urban artisan, employer or workman, exclusivist or emancipist, democrat or authoritarian, all participants in the struggle proclaimed their loyalty to the Crown and insisted that their only ambition was to claim the imprescriptible rights of free-born Englishmen as guaranteed by the British constitution since time immemorial. Both sides in a Legislative Council debate about whether to block supply cited the supposed conduct of imagined Anglo-Saxon ancestors as providing the appropriate model for the language of political remonstrance in 1851; as the member for New England and Macleay (having a dig at the flamboyant Wentworth) pointed out, 'no characteristic of the Anglo-Saxon race is more distinguished than ... modesty of demeanour and decency of language, which they added to their love of liberty and unflinching resolution' (p. 313). It might well be true that the language of old Saxon remonstrances was 'calm and dignified' countered the next speaker, but that was because they were on the spot; dealing with 'a distant oppressor', however, required a stronger tone. As Cochrane comments, some members exhibited such familiarity with the habits of the Anglo-Saxons that it was 'as if they had some spiritual hotline to their forebears' (p. 316). |
3
|
|
One of the most attractive features of Colonial Ambition is the way it entices the reader with all the raciness of a political thriller. (Neal Stephenson's Baroque Cycle comes to mind.) Would New South Wales have a 'new kind of economy, based not on one product but on many, not just on landed wealth, but on a dynamic capitalism in the urban sector'? The democrats wanted 'a diversified productive sector sustained by local demand, rather than a plantation-type society dependent on the British call for wool' (p. 249). Or would Australia remain 'a vast sheep-walk forever', run by a few great landowners using transported convicts as their labour force and constituting a colonial aristocracy that would hold off the corroding influence of 'furious democrats', as John Macarthur hoped? Because the democrats achieved most of their objectives it is easy to forget how closely fought the contest was, and how near the squatters came to securing a constitution that disenfranchised the urban and working classes and concentrated power in the hands of the pastoral elite. Among other qualities, it is a useful corrective to the argument of older revisionist texts such as A New Britannia, in which Humphrey McQueen argued that the conservatism and incorporation of the Australian working class owed much to the fact that democracy was handed to them on a plate – that they were never needed to 'vanquish feudalism' as in some other (more revolutionary) places. It is true that 'our upstart exclusives ... could not reproduce the English class structure in Australia', but they made a mighty effort, and in Wentworth's 1853 constitution they nearly succeeded. As Cochrane demonstrates so vividly, it was only the strength and determination of the informal alliance of the urban bourgeoisie and working classes with the British Colonial Office and its liberal ministers that stopped them. With its blow-by-blow accounts of the struggle that ended in the defeat of the squatters' program, Colonial Ambition should enthral even the most jaded reader of history and perhaps even engage the attention of the odd undergraduate student. |
4
|
|
|
Content in the History Cooperative database is intended for personal, noncommercial use only. You may not reproduce, publish, distribute, transmit, participate in the transfer or sale of, modify, create derivative works from, display, or in any way exploit the History Cooperative database in whole or in part without the written permission of the copyright holder.
|