Well folks, we have now finished our journey through some key moments that I selected to illustrate my hypothesis that throughout the nineteenth century we experienced a number of minor rebellions that contributed to the evolution of democratic political inclusion in Australia.

What is that? We became social democrats earlier than any other country and were a role model to Britain and Europe of relatively peaceful social and political change, resulting in visits by social reformers to discover how we managed to do this.

The military junta that deposed Governor William Bligh in 1808 was quashed by the British government who could not allow the military to govern a colony. This dealt a death blow to the ambitions of officers of the NSW Corps who wished to establish themselves as a colonial elite more powerful than the legitimate governor.

We contrasted the settlement of the Western District of Victoria by free settlers in the 1840s with the earlier convict system that created the first unfree working class in the colony. Former freed convicts merged seamlessly into the general community, most making successful working lives for themselves and their families.

The Eureka Uprising on the Ballarat goldfields in 1854, although a minor skirmish by foreign gold seekers and Irishmen, had the remarkable effect of being one of the catalysts that introduced the right to vote for all adult men, regardless of their wealth or status. Hence colonial parliaments, by the late 1850s, were more able to settle issues of social and economic hardship through the participation of working class voters and members of parliament.

The Kelly Outbreak in the 1870s was a response against the hard times that selectors in North East Victoria were experiencing during an economic depression. This was one problem that the Victorian parliament had been tardy in addressing and this area became notorious for cattle and horse theft. Even after the gang robbed banks and killed three policemen there was still considerable community support for the Kellys, although even their staunchest supporters baulked at rising up against the government. Parliamentary government was far from perfect but was seen to be the best option available.

Finally, in the last years of the nineteenth century, as manufacturing and industry became mechanised, strikes were used as negotiating tools between workers and their employers. The shearers’ strikes in 1891 and 1894 and the great strike of 1917 as well as a number of lesser confrontations led to the formation of unions that took over direct negotiation with employers. While disruption would exist for several months in some cases, as both groups flexed their muscles these actions provided a solution to negotiating working conditions and led to the formation of the earliest Labor Leagues and the Labor Party.

This summary hasn’t the space to provide the subtleties of any of these events. For fuller accounts visit my web site australiancolonialhistory.com. During June, I will be uploading summaries of our sessions and listing the resources we used. Thanks to all who came and participated.
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Meg Dillon

In May we used photo and film resources to look at Marvellous Melbourne in the 1880s. This was the end of the long economic boom that started in the 1860s. Throughout that period the Victorian colonial government, industrialists and home owners had borrowed massive amounts of money from overseas investors to fuel this boom. We still see some of the extraordinary buildings they erected:  the State Library/Art Gallery; the exhibition building; government house, the State Treasury and Parliament to name but a few. Hospitals and asylums as well as an ambitious sewerage plan that pumped sewage over to the Spotswood Pumping Plant [now the Spotswood Science Museum] as well as a huge railway network that spanned the state including many uneconomic branch lines. Industry moved into bigger factories in the outer suburbs of Preston, Brunswick and Footscray and workers followed this, investing in family homes.

It couldn’t last. Wheat and wool prices started to drop, British investors withdrew their capital making huge losses, unemployment rose, the price of land and houses crashed and in 1893 the banking system also crashed. NSW and Victoria were worst hit but the depression lasted in the cities till Federation in 1900.

Meanwhile in western NSW and central Queensland a drought caused havoc in the wool industry in marginal areas. We looked at the Shearers Strike of 1891 aided by some great folksongs of the era to gauge the effects on the working class shearers. Strike breakers were brought in, men on the wharves went on strike and police numbers were increased to control huge camps of shearers. Although the strike failed after many weeks, it resulted in the formation of the first Labour Party in the world whose aim was to represent working families and the campaign to get working class men to register to vote.
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Meg Dillon

In April we continued our journey by looking at a 1950s movie made in the Benalla district about the Kelly Outbreak.  I posed the theory that the last stand at Glenrowan represented a bank robbery gone wrong, unlike Ned’s previous successful robberies at Euroa and Jerilderie.  The gang had been on the run for sixteen months and were broke and exhausted when they planned one last heist in Benalla, perhaps planning on moving interstate to start fresh lives afterwards. But at Glenrowan, initially intended to be a diversion of police power prior to the robbery the next day, absolutely everything went wrong that could possibly happen. The resultant chaos led to the gang’s deaths and Ned’s capture. I can recommend the recent book Glenrowan by Ian W Shaw, available in our local library, for a well-researched narrative of the gang’s last two years of mayhem.

We moved onto looking at The Big Hole in the Ground, a summary of how mining has dominated our economy and opportunities. Prospecting for gold was dominated by individuals and small groups of around five men who moved across Victoria looking for new fields throughout the nineteenth century.  We looked at short videos of the Kalgoorlie gold rushes of the late 1890s comparing them to the earlier Victorian rushes in the 1850s. But Deep lead mining took over and we moved onto the more dangerous job of mining copper up to 1000feet underground for large companies. The 1912 Mine disaster at Mt Lyall in Tasmania and the 1946 strike at the Mt Isa copper mines in Queensland provided some interesting contrast to gold mining. Amazing footage exists of these incidents that helps us go back in time to better relive these incidents.
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Meg Dillon

Our two sessions in March looked firstly at the settlement of the Western District of Victoria, predominantly by free Scottish settlers in the 1840s. We were helped by viewing the wonderful watercolours in the Challicum Sketchbook by Cooper, a partner in the Challicum Run south west of Avoca.  These watercolours documented the first ten years of the run as it was developed from tents to a whole range of timber buildings. This settlement pattern was quite different from  that seen much earlier in NSW and Van Diemen’s Land.

Our second session took up again the concept of “revolution” in the colonies. We revised the Vinegar Hill Convict revolt in 1804 in NSW and the Rum Rebellion when officers of the NSW Corps deposed Governor Bligh in 1808. Both were quite different types of revolts and both were put down by the Colonial administrators.

What of Eureka in Victoria in 1854? We were helped by two useful film productions: an account of the actual Stockade incident in which S.T. Gill watercolours gave us a good impression of conditions on the Ballarat goldfields; and more importantly a film produced by the ABC of the trial for treason of 13 prisoners taken by the soldiers. This explained the little known strategies of the defence lawyers to win the case and have all declared not guilty. Within two years several of these men were elected to the Victorian parliament and helped introduce full voting rights for all men in the colony including Aborigines. The predominance of Irish settlers was noted in these events and will be continued with an examination of the Kelly outbreak in Victoria in the 1870s.

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Meg Dillon

Captain William Bligh, Hero or Villain, was the subject of our first session as we tried to decide to what extent he was responsible for the mutiny on the Bounty in 1789.
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Bligh was always an ambitious, parsimonious man given to violent tempers and abuse of his crews. Despite this he was not a flogging Captain and controlled most of his sea voyages successfully. Bligh’s early experiences as a merchant navy captain taking his father-in- law’s ships to the British slave colonies of the Caribbean; his naval service under James Cook; and his later service in the war with the French all passed without serious incidents.

The Bounty voyage however presented a number of problems that were different from any he experienced on other voyages. The Bounty was seriously overcrowded even by C18 standards because a great portion of its lower deck was made over as a nursery for the breadfruit plants that were to be obtained from Tahiti. Bligh had taken on a lacklustre crew of midshipmen, many of whom were not fully competent as able seamen and so could not control or teach skills effectively to the common sailors. Bligh was parsimonious with rations as he was purser in addition to being Captain, a most unusual combination. Bligh had agreed to a huge reduction in salary from £500 to £50 for his services as he expected to make money from the plantation owners when he delivered the breadfruit to the Caribbean. These and other issues including his vicious outbursts and demand for perfection from his crew created an atmosphere of uncertainty that infected the ship, finally resulting in the mutiny after the ship left Tahiti after a five month stay to collect the plants.

The film “Rogue Nation” demonstrated the amazing feat of navigation he performed in getting the small cutter crowded with eighteen loyal crew to Timor after the mutineers cast them off from the Bounty. Finally, most of us agreed that a complex mix of circumstances was the likely cause of the mutiny along with his temperament and inability to keep the respect of the crew.
Next session we will look at the development of the young colony of New South Wales, its increasingly complex social mix and the staging of the Rum Rebellion against Bligh as Governor. Here Bligh met his nemesis, the invincible John Macarthur. The clash of the two inflexible and opinionated men brought the young colony to its knees and was the first of several rebellions as the colony started to develop in ways unanticipated by the British government.
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Meg Dillon

“History” is very much a “shape shifter”. It’s a personal presentation that reflects a particular historian’s point of view. So there is no such thing as infallible history only various propositions about what probably happened. We can never truly recreate the past, but only interpret it according to the best evidence that has survived and our personal beliefs about what the evidence shows.
 
We will use discussion, art, photos and videos where possible to explore the following five topics that are based mostly in the nineteenth century.
 
1.  The indomitable Captain William Bligh: Hero or Villain?   
​Using the stories of the mutiny against Bligh on the Bounty and the rebellion against him in 1808 in the young settlement of Sydney, we will examine the tensions, jealousies and power plays that fractured the first thirty years of the colony.
 
2.  The Squatter Kings in Grass Castles   
Neil Black settled at Glenormiston near Terang in the Western District of Victoria in 1844.   He was one of the most prominent of the many Scots who made their fortunes there in wool and weathered the emergence of Democracy and the demands for land for small farms. But where were the Aborigines or the women? And how did the large land holders contribute to the good of the broader community in Victoria?

3.  The Large Hole in the Ground   
The Australian colonies made their wealth in the nineteenth century by mining. We all know of the gold in the 1850s but what of the others? We will take a look at gold in Kalgoorlie in Western Australia, Mount Isa Mines in Queensland and Mt Lyall in Tasmania.
 
4. The Boom/Bust Years. Is it all about greed?
Land sharks, shysters, con men and investors! Who could tell them apart? And didn’t everyone want their piece of the action in the 1880s? “Marvellous Melbourne” would be created then wracked by the optimism and despair of this period of economic growth and disruption.
 
5. The Growth of the Labour Movement in the 1890s
The Shearers Strikes in Western Queensland in 1891, 1894; the Sunshine Harvester Strike of 1911 in Victoria; and The Great Strike of 1917 that started at the Randwick Tram Sheds marked a resumption by a new generation of workers of demands for a “fair go”. Did this all start with the Eureka Stockade in the 1850s? Or were these the first great battles between capital and labour that would come to define Australian politics in the twentieth century? And how do these actions fit with the Fabian Socialism of Sidney and Beatrice Webb who visited Australia in 1898?   

​Meg Dillon