How on earth, the
reader asks, did the University of Sydney take
form in a society emerging from the murky
sub-soil of a penal settlement?
How indeed? Generations of students
enduring examinations in the Great Hall of
the University of Sydney look upwards or
sideways at a statue of William Charles
Wentworth. William was conceived outside
wedlock. His father, D’arcy Wentworth, was a
military officer stationed on Norfolk Island
who had four times been before the English
courts on allegations of highway robbery,
which were ultimately dismissed through
insufficient evidence. William’s mother was a
convict. D’arcy Wentworth had pretensions.
He was a kinsman of the noted aristocratic
Anglo-Irish Fitzwilliam family. He and his son
William stressed these pretensions. William Charles Wentworth, through study,
toil and
eloquence, rose to be an eminent landed
proprietor. He helped give form to the
eventual New South Wales constitution. He
believed the colony should have an upper
house of peers modelled on the British House
of Lords. The origins of Wentworth’s Whig
ideas are shown by John Gascoigne to be
related to various writers and thinkers of the
English Enlightenment. John Macarthur, Wentworth’s contemporary
and ultimate ally, who pioneered the wool
industry, came to the colony as a marine, but
forsook the military life to make money and a
name for himself. Macarthur’s ideas feature
prominently in this book. He too joined the“
top people”, known in Sydney as the
exclusives. These two, and the early reformist governor
Lachlan Macquarie, a Scot, provided
intellectual façades, justifications, for
Australia’s leading administrators and the“
squattocracy”. John Gascoigne’s
handsomely presented large format book
connects their ideological positions directly or
indirectly with the English-speaking
Enlightenment. The book’s introduction outlines the English
connections with the French philosophes and
presents English writers who influenced
Australian colonial administrators and
authors. Part I depicts religious and political
contexts in Australia’s early colonies, showing
how Deism, anti-clericalism and sectarianism
corroded the Erastian assumptions of the
Church of England in the new setting. In
politics, the book highlights the influence in
Australia of the English philosophers John
Locke and Jeremy Bentham. Their names, and
their promotion of the idea of moral and
intellectual progress, figure often in the rest
of the book along with the colourful Anglo-
Franco-American Tom Paine, whose notion of
human rights was embraced as integral to“
freedom” by Australian pioneer thinkers less
radical than he. Gascoigne pinpoints the word“
improvement” as the key to much of what
follows in his Part II, dealing first with the promotion of agricultural
and pastoral
development. Under the heading Science and
the Land he shows how 18th century science
was far from “pure”. The British Royal
Society, partly inspired by the Utilitarians
Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill,
promoted applied science. This part of the
book will interest graduates in science and
may help explain why the research of
Australia’s Commonwealth Scientific and
Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO) is
today scientific and industrial. A second section of Part II deals with “the
improvement of human nature” and
addresses what underlies much modern
Australian educational theory and practice.
Here we have the origins of the oft-used
Victorian distinction between “refined” and“
common”. Hotly debated issues in
criminology - reform versus deterrence - were
present in the colonies before transportation
ended in 1850. Alexander Machonochie, a
humane Scotsman who introduced a “mark” (merit) system when
he ran the Norfolk Island penal settlement, 1840-1843, was indebted
to post-Enlightenment penological writings
of Bentham and the Italian Cesare Beccaria. The book introduces Machonochie
(pages 139-145), a good and persistent man. Chapter 8, in Part II, accounts
for the replacement of early humanitarian attitudes
toward Australia’s Aborigines by use of the
controversial word “race”. The sequels? -
overt racism and policies of segregation and
marginalisation. William Charles Wentworth,
in his prosperous maturity, was greeted with
cheers when he told the New South Wales
Legislative Council “that ëthe civilised people
have come in and the savage must go
back.’”(p.164) Phrenologists and pseudogeneticists
wrote of “races”, using skin
colour as marker. As early as 1822 the
German writer Johann Blumenbach used the
odd word Caucasian to mean white. Today, in
reading about him we meet ideological
premonitions of 20th century Australian
racism. Enlightenment ideas in the Australian
colonies were sometimes “fig leaves” covering
naked ambition, greed and promiscuity among decision-making
elites.
High-minded people on Australia’s “Fatal
Shore” were frequently participants in low
life. The Wentworths, Macarthurs and some of their emancipist
friends wanted to be “gentlemen”.
In the New South Wales (NSW) Corps, non-commissioned officers
(NCOs) and
other ranks, often described as “scum”, were
broadly from the same social classes as the
convicts. Their daily lives and the earthy
diversions of their “betters”, can be glimpsed
in the English cartoons of Hogarth, James
Boswell’s recently unveiled private journals,
and the novels of Thackeray and Dickens.
Many NCOs and other ranks in the NSW Corps
were Bog Irish, or Cockney habitual criminals.
Their tipple and favoured currency, also used
in Sydney by the gentry, was rum. They were
comparable with the foot soldiers at the
Battle of Waterloo, of whom Wellington,
contemplating them before the battle, is
reported to have said, “I don’t know what
you are going to do to the enemy, but by God
you terrify me.” Their accents have moulded
subsequent Australian speech at all levels.
They mocked top poppies, “the best people”.
Their music and verse were gaudy (and
bawdy). Standard works on the Wentworths
and Macarthurs and many other “exclusives” show
how in their private lives they too could be promiscuous, brutal
and acquisitive.
Duelling and horsewhipping were normal
ways to satisfy “honour” and assert “respectability”.
Their private lives suggest comparison with the militarised Prussian
Enlightenment Society under Frederick the
Great, Voltaire’s patron and friend. Their
“enlightened” ideas shine somewhat
pharisaically in the seedy imperial outpost
where they held sway.
The illustrations of the book are in period.
They could be starting points for week-end
excursions around Sydney: to the Barracks
Museum and Old Mint in Macquarie Street,
Vaucluse House, the Rocks area (including the
Garrison Church and Argyle Place), Old
Government House, the towns of
Windsor and Camden, and Lanyon in the
Australian Capital Territory. These sites call to
mind the Australian Enlightenment - and the
full story.
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