CHAPTER SEVEN - Research UNE
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183 CHAPTER SEVEN SHAPING NEW WORLDS WITH OLD IMAGES When John Richardson bought John Moore's store and flour mill and moved to Armidale in 1872, he brought with him his wife, twenty years younger than he, and a young family consisting of seven surviving children. His eldest son, Robert, was 22 years of age. Although other sons would choose to join their father in his retailing business, Robert turned to writing children's books, most of which were published in London and Edinburgh where he lived through the 1880s and early 1890s. His career was blighted by a lack of talent. Nonetheless an independent income kept that harsh reality at bay. But he was not so lacking in ability that he failed to see his own limitations. By the time he wrote Ad Musam, a poem which served as his obituary in the Bulletin, he was resigned to his critics' opinions and addressed the Greek muse of poetry somewhat bitterly: Yet others get the gift and win thy love; They get the gift while I but stand and wait; They enter calmly through the enchanted gate That leads unto the mystic Dellian hill . . And I but linger in the valleys chill, With timid groping feet, and as I pass Gather some withering leaves of wayside grass, And hear through the hushed twilight faintly falling The voices of my happier brothers calling, And watch afar with aching, dazzled eyes, Clear peaks that climb into the lucent skies By shining paths my feet will ne'er surprise.' Robert Richardson died of gastric catarrh in Armidale in 1901 aged fifty. He was unmarried. Richardson set his stories in the Australian bush, which he described in English terms for his English readers — too full of wildflowers, rills and rivulets to ring true, a benign wilderness where children got lost. The bush was a counterpoise to the city. Man made the city but God made the bush. The bush was moral, the city slightly damned. There was always the hint of the bushman ethos in Richardson's writing. 1 'Robert Richardson', Bulletin, 19 October, 1901, the Red Page.
184 Richardson wrote with moral intent. His characters were always worthy, in gender specific, class specific, and racially specific ways. Boys played practical jokes, contrived adventures with ghosts and treasures, and, when older and beyond the age of crying, always went into the bush armed. They encountered exotic animals, marvelled at them, described them, gave thought to God's creation, then killed them. 2 Girls were often ill, which is what brought them to the bush in the first place — for the air. When confronted with the need to be heroic girls became selflessly devoted, risking their own well-being to protect younger brothers and sisters. They always took much longer to recover from their ordeals, going down the path of pitiful wasting before turning the corner towards robust good health. 3 Lost children ultimately owed their lives to the bush skills of gentle, 'civilised' Aboriginal blacktrackers like Black Harry and Tommy Sundown. 4 Even bushrangers were prone, at times, to outbursts of decency.5 Everyone was basically good and did what goodness expected of him or her. Respectability ran amuck through Richardson's novels. Robert Richardson carried messages from one generation to another. He showed his young readers what life ought to be like. His novels encouraged girls to develop roots and boys to develop wings. He showed both boys and girls that the Empire was good; that civilisation was good; that a simple life in a simple setting was good; and that good boys and good girls grew up to be good men and women. He shaped ideals that were transportable across time and space, the ideals of a generation in love with righteousness. The medium for Richardson's message was children's literature, but on his death certificate, his occupation was recorded as journalist. In a sense that Richardson appreciated, the author and the journalist were interchangeable. 6 Both dealt in moral messages. 2 Robert Richardson, The Hut in the Bush: A tale of Australian adventure, Edinburgh, Oliphant, Anderson & Ferrier, 1883. 3 Robert Richardson, A Little Australian Girl; or, The Babes in the Bush, Edinburgh, Oliphant Anderson & Ferrier, n.d. 4 Loc. cit., and Robert Richardson, Black Harry; or, Lost in the Bush, Edinburgh, Oliphant Anderson & Ferrier, c. 1894. 5 Robert Richardson, 'Interview with a Bushranger' in Mrs A Patchett Martin (ed.), Under the Gum Tree:Australian "bush" stories, London, Tischler & Co., 1890, pp.183-196. 6 Robert Richardson, 'The Literary life', in Cosmos: An Illustrated Australian Magazine, 19 February, 1897, pp.290-291.
185 So too, of course, did the churches, the schools and the law courts. Education, religion, the press, popular literature and the law were the main purveyors of Victorian ideologies.? In the power imbalances of colonial society, ideologies were important. They were effective in legitimising the structures of power and the strategies of the powerful. At the same time, they provided those who needed to resist with a god and arbiter to whom they could appeal. Ideologies spoke of class and race, gender and marital status. They provided an embellished overlay for basic human interactions. Ideologies were also at the core of personal identity which has always been defined in terms of difference — of some sort of superiority. Ideologies provided a surplus of meaning to categories such as worker, wife, woman and whore. However, any analysis of ideologies is problematic. In the first place, ideologies did not coincide clearly with power structures. There was not, in colonial Armidale, an ideology for power and another ideology that ran counter to it. It would be wrong to assume that there were fixed interests on the one hand and definite discourses representing them on the other. 8 In fact, certain ideologies were employed by people with quite contradictory interests. From diaries, letters, newspapers and court transcripts it is clear that both men and women resorted to the discourse of respectability within the context of gender struggle. Men tried to assert their dominance, and women tried to control men through reference to notions of respectability. 7 Many writers seem to use 'ideology' and 'discourse' almost interchangeably. See, for instance, Scott Lash, 'Coercion as Ideology: The German case', in Nicholas Abercrombie, Stephen Hill and Bryan S. Turner (eds), Dominant Ideologies, London, Unwin, Hyman, 1990, p.93. and Nicholas Abercrombie, Stephen Hill and Bryan S, Turner, T he Penguin Dictionary of Sociology, (second edition), London, Penguin, 1984, pp.118-119. However, Foucault himself, as well as some of his post- structuralist followers, sought to keep the terms quite separate because they had quite different agendas to those who wrote in the 'dominant ideology' debate. See M. Foucault, Power/Knowledge: Selected interviews and other writings 1972-1977 (C. Gordon ed.), Brighton, Harvester Press, 1980. Nonetheless my preferred term is 'ideology' not in the sense of a carefully constructed system of rigid political and economic beliefs but an interlocking set of precepts and conditioned responses by which people bond together and exclude others in their daily interactions. 8 Stewart R. Clegg, Frameworks of Power, London, 1989, p.154.
18 Furthermore there was no clear dominant ideology where ruling ideas could be easily associated with ruling classes. Nor was it easy to accept a concept of hegemony with the powerful explanatory potential which Connell and Irving sought to realise.9 Such concepts leave little room for explaining change in social relationships over time. Such concepts also overemphasise the deliberate intent of the middle class and fail to recognise the uneasy impact of dominant ideologies on the supposed dominant class itself. That much said, there is no need to go to the opposite extreme of seeing ideologies as masses of floating discourses spontaneously combining and re-combining without reference to material constraints or structures of class, gender or race. 10 People were engaged in struggle. They formulated their interests according to those ideologies most readily acceptable to their condition in life. They bonded with people similarly positioned and excluded others. Many propertyless male workers valued displays of physical prowess and bush know-how and despised the new chum, the milksop, the city swell and the bookish pedant. In an entirely different lifestyle, Caroline Thomas drew strength from quasi- Christian respectability, admired skills in music and home decoration, and appreciated sensible conversation tinged with affability. She set herself against rough manners and moral turpitude and only tolerated those of her circle, like Dr West and the Marshes of Salisbury Court, whose conversation she found frequently 'stupid'. Clearly ideologies were related to those social structures around which people built their lifestyles. Power imbalances and material inequalities were important contributing factors and it is quite easy to see their relationship to ideologies. To this extent it is possible to speak of predominant ideologies 11 while avoiding the more rigidly structuralist concept of a dominant ideology. 9 R.W. Connell, and T.H. Irving, Class Structure in Australian History, Melbourne, 1980, pp.22-24. 10 S. Hall, 'The Problem of Ideology: Marx without guarantees', in B. Matthews (ed.), Marx: A hundred years on, London, Lawrence and Wishart, 1983, p.79 quoted in Clegg, op. cit., p .180 . 11 The word 'dominant' suggests an overwhelming advantage based on power. It is synonymous with 'ruling'. 'Predominant' however, suggests a narrower advantage over other contenders, It suggests a recent ascendancy and recognises the existence of close challengers.
187 The rise and fall and the metamorphoses, of predominant ideologies were evident in colonial New England and can be related in part to demographic changes. If there was a noticeable gender imbalance in central New England throughout the late nineteenth century, then that imbalance was slight when compared to the gender profiles of the European population in the 1840s and 1850s. In 1846 there were 622 adult men for every 100 adult women in the New England Pastoral District and by 1851 the imbalance was still extraordinarily high with 354 men to every 100 women. The convict proportion of that population was significant, with convicts making up 42 per cent of the population of New England in 1841 and 13 per cent of the population in 1846, six years after the official end of transportation. Almost half of the 1846 population were ex-convicts freed by servitude. 1 2 Thirty five years ago, Russel Ward described the emergence of a special ideology from this unusual population mix. He examined the demographic profile from every angle, emphasising convict origins, Irish infusions, the native born chrysalis and the transmutation of these elements into something new in the remoteness of the pastoral outback. He explained the power of a new ethos by pointing to the peculiar levelling effect of the Australian condition where social fluidity and the pervasiveness of the convict system routed the old world order of deference and obeisance, of ranks and degrees. In the tradition of nationalist history he revealed the Australian Legend and explained its genetic make-up claiming, in a sense, to have discovered the basic DNA of Australian culture. 13 He emphasised what was essentially new as it emerged from Australian ballads and poetry and played down the fact that this 'new music' contained many old songs. In emphasising the convicts, the celts, the currency lads and the bushmen Ward failed to see the full importance of the gender imbalance that was such an obvious characteristic of colonial populations. Certainly, he recognised that there was a shortage of 12 Abstract of the Returns of Population . . . of New England, New South Wales Census of the Year 1841, Archives Office of New South Wales, X947; Census of the Population of New South Wales, Supplement to NSWGG, No. 92, 3 November, 1846, pp.1327-1379; and Census, Supplement to NSWGG, No. 128, 7 November, 1851, p.11. 13 Russel Ward, The Australian Legend, (illustrated ed.), Melbourne, 1978, pp.66, 136.
188 women particularly on the pastoral frontiers and claimed that this led to an increase in bush drunkenness and to a greater intensity of mateship bonding, occasionally mutating into sodomy in the backwoods bush huts. 14 But he did not see that his bush ethos, his nomad tribe, his Australian Legend was essentially a masculinist construct. He saw men being convicts, men being Irish and men being bushmen, or gold miners or Anzacs. But he did not see men being men. In searching for the unique, he did not see the typical. Men were constructing masculinities and given a peculiar combination of time and place, the result in nineteenth century Australia was bound to be different. But the difference was no more than a variation on a theme. Not surprisingly, writers have found many of the supposed traits of the typical Australian evident amongst progenitor groups such as the wandering poor of the streets of London. But the tendency amongst Ward's critics, has been to describe class traits not gender traits and certainly not masculinist traits.15 Ideologies of masculinity have come only recently onto the agenda for historical investigation. Early accounts have focussed on the 1890s and the dichotomous struggles between the bushman hero and the emasculated bread-winning domestic man, the symbols of more abstract masculinist and feminist political discourses . 16 Such dichotomies were soon under attack for oversimplifying the issues, debates and diverse arguments of the nineties . 17 Granted that there was diversity and that men throughout the nineteenth century expressed their masculinity in different and changing ways, it should be realised also that masculinist constructs were built upon the same basic foundations. As was shown in Chapter Six, the Victorian era, before the passing of the Married Women's Property Act of 1893, represented the apogee of the economic domination of women by men. All ideologies of masculinity must be seen as emerging from this 14 Ibid., pp.124-130. 15 M.B. and C.B. Schedvin, 'The Nomadic Tribes of Urban Britain: A prelude to Botany Bay', in John Carroll (ed.), Intruders in the Bush, Oxford, 1982, pp.82-108. 16 Marilyn Lake, 'The Politics of Respectability: Identifying the masculinist context', in Susan Magarey, Sue Rowley and Susan Sheridan, Debutante Nation, St Leonards, 1993, pp.1-15. 17 John Docker, 'The feminist Legend: A new historicism?' in Susan Magarey et al., op. cit., pp.16-26.
189 economic, political, legal and customary domination. This was a fact about the Victorian social world that had profound consequences for the character of men.18 The construction of masculine ideologies naturalised male domination. The valorisation of male sexuality was part of this process. Male discourses of sexuality prevailed and, in so far as they gave expression to male interests, those interests became privileged, validating male power. 19 The valorisation of male sexuality was embodied in the penis which symbolised male strength, prowess and barely controllable urges. Strength and prowess were good, aggression, unfortunately, was only natural. This became the mythology of every day life for countless men and women. Man the hero, the hunter, the competitor, the conqueror became the ubiquitous subject of narratives and scripts for living. Under stress, the performance of these scripts could become aberrant. The very establishment of New England as a pastoral district and the appointment of Commissioner Macdonald and his border police to that district in 1839 had followed one of the most notorious outbreaks of uncontrolled masculinist aggression in Australia's early history. The massacre at Henry Dangar's Myall Creek station and the systematic extermination of Aborigines along the upper Namoi and Gwydir River valleys of northern New South Wales has been a particular focus of historians since the mid 1960s. The fact that such a crime was so well documented was unusual in Australia's history. The saga of Myall Creek, with the violent preludes, the massacre of at least twenty eight men, women and children, the arrests of the perpetrators, the two trials of those charged with murder and their public executions in Sydney has been fully told, the most recent narrative being part of a massive work on frontier violence in northern New South Wales in the late 1 830s. 20 Most attention had been directed at the wider context of the massacre and convictism and racism were seen as the main 18 Tim Carrigan, Bob Connell and John Lee, 'Towards a New Sociology of Masculinity',in Harry Brod (ed.), The Making of Masculinities, Boston, 1987, p.64. 19 Arthur Brittan, Masculinity and Power, Oxford, 1989, pp.54-55. 20 Roger Millis, Waterloo Creek, Ringwood, 1992.
1 90 forces which shaped these frontier murders. 2 ' However, one historian found such explanations valuable but incomplete. Michael Sturma, in trying to explain what precipitated these men to violent action, analysed more immediate contextual features such as the remoteness of the frontier, the lack of normal social constraints, the physical dangers and the frustrations and subsequent aggressions of those who saw themselves in a war-like situation. 22 Quite effectively, Sturma drew parallels between the massacre at Myall Creek and the massacre at My Lai in 1968 during the Vietnam War. Sturma seemed to be moving towards a masculinist context for the Myall Creek massacre without articulating such a concept. Recently a letter came to light written by Dangar's station manager at Myall Creek, William Hobbs, who clearly stated that the victims 'were principally women and children'. 23 Masculine sexual imagery was strongly associated with the Myall Creek massacre. From the beginning, there was a sexual dimension to the relationship between the Weraerai people and the stockmen at Myall Creek. The massacre itself was not a spontaneous occurrence but a well planned exercise by intentionally armed men who spent days seeking their victims and knew precisely what they were going to do. In the language of that time and place, 'a drive was on'. In the lead up to the massacre there was plenty of time for fantasising and sharing fantasies. At Myall Creek the victims were bound with rope to increase their helplessness. They were marched to the killing field. The bloodbath came as a climax to days of purposeful activity. The weapons of death and mutilation were phallic — cutlasses and sabres which could thrust and penetrate. Only two shots were fired. The decapitated bodies were thrown into a triangle of logs and burnt, swallowed up as it were. In the aftermath of the massacre there were isolated killings of more Aborigines found in the vicinity. Then for three days the 21 See, for instance, Norma Townsend, 'Masters and Men and the Myall Creek Massacre' The Push from the Bush, No. 20, April, 1985, pp.4-32; R.H.W. Reece, Aborigines and Colonists, Sydney, 1974, pp.140-174; and A.T. Yarwood and M.T. Knowling, Race Relations In Australia: A history, Sydney, 1982, pp.106-107. 22 Michael Sturma, 'Myall Creek and the Psychology of Mass Murder', Journal of Australian Studies, No. 16, May, 1985, pp.62-70. 23 William Hobbs to E.D. Day, Esq., 9 July, 1838, (photocopy), New England Historical Resources Centre, Myall Creek file.
191 murderers went on a binge of drinking and singing at a nearby station. Thus their deed was valorised.24 Myall Creek was an ejaculation of male violence. It was an expression of extreme masculinism. Racism and convictism and the stress of the frontier go part of the way towards explaining it. But a masculinist context is needed to complete the picture. Beyond the exultancy of an hour or so of consummated aggression, in the preliminaries and the afterglow of murder, the men deceived their consciences with euphemisms. They spoke of 'looking after the blacks' and having 'settled the blacks'. In other times and places Nazi murderers would refer to sonderaktionen (special. actions), U.S. Army spokesmen in Vietnam would refer to 'population control' and 'free-fire zones' 25 and in the 1990s, rabid Bosnian irregulars spoke of 'ethnic cleansing'. This is the language of a masculinism which transcends time and place, which links Myall Creek to countless other such atrocities across New England, across Australia and across the world. Racism, convictism and other constructs interlocked, but masculinism was the common gene. Extreme physical violence derived from the more common need of many men to feel powerful. The power motive was central to constructions of masculinity. It boiled down to a striving to have an impact on others and on the environment. 26 The power motive was enhanced by an awareness of the capabilities of the male body and the skills to which it could be attuned. The power motive was also enhanced by the consumption of alcohol, especially socially and competitively. 27 Although there is a complex set of reasons which must be employed to explain alcohol abuse, including sex-based biological factors 28 and other social explanations such as peer pressure and 'drinking for consolation', 29 it is clear that gender, class and ethnic factors determine levels of social drinking. Power relations theories 24 Millis, op. cit., pp.274-321. 25 Sturma, op. cit., p.68. 26 Hilary M. Lips, Women, Men and Power, London, 1991, p.37. 27 Ibid., p.41 28 Perry Treadwell, 'Biological Influences on Masculinity', in Harry Brod, op. cit., p.276. 29 Margaret Sargent, Drinking and Alcoholism in Australia, Melbourne, 1979 (1987), pp.78-100.
192 are significant in making sense of the culturally-based data. 3 0 Drunkenness had the effect of freeing a man to feel powerful through fantasy. 31 Thus people who had little power, such as working class and underclass males, might adopt a lifestyle where drinking was an important factor, the more so if it was encouraged and rewarded by peers. The psychological importance of alcohol can be demonstrated by the early history of white Australian communities in the nineteenth century. Notwithstanding all the basic human needs and fundamental social wants imperilled by remoteness and harsh conditions, there was always an ample supply of alcohol on the frontiers and in the bark-roofed towns. The demand was obviously great and methods were devised to overcome the enormous problems of supply. For men without the status of property and material possessions, drinking was a great leveller. It provided self-esteem on the cheap. The pub became associated with concepts of working class egalitarianism, and, in terms of this study, the Australian habit of the 'shout' was described in Armidale as early as 1880.32 The typical pattern of consumption was 'binge drinking'. It came to be associated with many working class groups. The ritual of the 'shout' determined that the pace of drinking would be as fast as the fastest drinker and to this extent a type of prowess came into play. Railway workers were notorious for 'knocking their cheques down'. The editors of the Uralla Times described the pattern of drinking as it unfolded in their town in 1882: Monday last was pay day on the railway works at Uralla and the town for the nonce assumed a somewhat busy appearance. At night the seven or eight drinking places were literally besieged by the 'representatives of bone and muscle' who during the evening consumed enormous quantities of 'soft and hard tack' and at the same time rapidly dissipated their hard earned money. However, although there was considerable talk during the evening, the worshippers of Bacchus kept themselves sufficiently within the pale of the law as not to call for police interference, the men as a rule being a very orderly set. Their chief aim seems to be 30 Margaret Sargent's work quoted immediately above is a sophisticated version of a power relations theory. However, it is a structuralist approach based too fully on dominant groups, dominant ideologies and rigid social structures. The impression is often given of a middle class with a single-minded purpose in deciding upon and employing strategies for dominance and control. 31 Lips, op. cit., p.41. 32 AE, 19 November, 1880, p.2.
193 how much beer they can dispose of in the shortest possible time, and their efforts in this respect are generally pretty successful. 3 3 This was public drinking — prowess drinking — by men with few material assets to otherwise mark their status. The pubs were a venue for the working class and publicans often showed an allegiance to the working man as evident in 1889 when Mrs Slough of the Star Hotel organised subscriptions in aid of the men on strike at Moses' Boot Factory.34 But it must be borne in mind that drinking was a favoured pastime of many in the middling class as well, although the drinking habits of these people tended to be more private. Clerk of Petty Sessions, Sydney Blythe, did his drinking at night in the Court House. One evening in November 1870, inspired to great thoughts by a bottle of cognac shared with a friend, Blythe committed his reflections to parchment: Can the men who find this drink their twelve glasses of grog a day — I doubt it — We can — The name of my eldest son is Edward Vyner — Louis Napoleon is kicked out of France by the Germans and Paris we hear is bombarded My friends whoever you may be who find this, rest assured that the world has wagged before your time, and that nothing is certain but Death For and on behalf of my numerous creditors Sydney Blythe 3 5 When the bottle was drained, the parchment was inserted and both were hidden under the floor boards of the Armidale Court House, then undergoing renovations. A little over one hundred years later Sydney Blythe's time capsule was discovered. In that one moment in his life, warmed by good brandy and friendship, he was induced to strut before posterity and tell us of his prowess at drinking a skin full, fathering a son and thumbing his nose at those most powerful figures in his life, his creditors. Another significant focus for the expression of male prowess was the horse. Although riding was not restricted to men, the discourse which surrounded the horse was definitely male 33 Uralla and Walcha Times, 8 November, 1882. 34 'The Local Boot Strike', AE, 24 September, 1889, p.3. 35 Armidale Folk Museum Collection, quoted by Lionel Gilbert, An Armidale Album, Armidale, 1982, p.71.
194 terrain . 36 When women rode, they rode graciously. Men rode boldly. Women rode side-saddle, men straddled their horses, the power of the animal locked firmly between their legs. As one correspondent to the Armidale Express, stated in a letter in 1878 protesting the inclusion of prizes for ladies' horse jumping at the local Pastoral and Agricultural Society show: Ladies are not destined to seek fame and money rewards, by publically excelling in bold achievements, such as flying on jumping horses over barriers . . . Would that the courageous young lady riders would consider that not boldness, but modesty, and the charm of female grace and dignity, will entitle the humblest dweller in a bush home to be deemed a lady, in the true sense of the word. And, besides that, performances in the ring on jumping horses competing for a public prize are — to say the least, as far as women are concerned, unaesthetic, and sure to cause a stigma on their womanly good sense which a £5 or £10 note, or a trophy, and the admiration of a crowd, cannot counterbalance. 3 7 The editors of the Armidale Express agreed. The horse was a metaphor for virility in the same way that, in later generations, the automobile would be. The horse was a subject of conversation through which men could bond with each other. Horses, for instance, were at the centre of all the activity leading up to and following the Myall Creek massacre. On the night after the killing the stockmen had sat around 'romancing' and 'talking about their horses and which was the best racer and so on'. 38 On the pastoral stations the horse and its trappings were the quintessential status symbols. As one old timer wrote: In the old days the squatters dressed very little better than their men . . . The only way you could tell a squatter from his men, was he was better mounted than his men, riding a more showy horse and polished stirrup irons, also bridle bit . . . In the old days stockmen used to look after their saddle and bridle taking a pride in looking after them. 3 9 Men like Thomas Warre Harriott, Commissioner for Crown Lands for New England in the late 1860s, thought constantly about his horses which figured prominently in the diaries he kept during his years at Armidale. In fact we get more of an insight into 36 Davidoff and Hall op. cit., p.171. 37 'Correspondence', AE, 29 March, 1878, p.4. 38 Quoted in Millis, op. cit., p.299. 39 William Telfer Manuscript, Mitchell Library Mss, A 2376, quoted in John Ferry, Walgett Before the Motor Car, Walgett, 1978, p.54.
1 95 Harriott's relationship with his horses than into that with his wife. An obsession with horses could well drive husbands and wives apart but in other family situations horses could bring fathers and sons together. Henry Arding Thomas of Saumarez had a somewhat uneasy relationship with his eldest son Willie, an indifferent scholar. But it was horse riding which brought them together. By the time the boy was eleven, he was riding out most days with his father, which made Caroline Thomas 'so thankful that Willie [had] the opportunity of being so much with his dear papa'.40 However, the real celebration of the horse took place on the race track. Just as Armidale was liberally stocked with alcohol from its inception, so, too, was it graced, from the early 1840s, with a racecourse on the flat land to the east of the town which the Anaiwan called Alperwan. The annual and holiday races became the major social events on the calendar bringing hundreds of people into the town, and we have a description of such a race gathering as early as 1843. 41 By and large the horses were owned by squatters from the region who competed on the more formal, organised level. However, between races, there was opportunity for young men to test each other out on the race track. The results were sometimes fatal as when young William Allingham, son of the storekeeper, miller and squatter of Gara, Edward Allingham, was killed in 1868 in an impromptu race with his friend E. J. Clerk and young solicitor, William Proctor. 42 The death registers in the Armidale Court House record many deaths of young men as the result of horse accidents. As well as hard drinking and hard riding, fist fighting completed the masculinist trilogy in colonial Armidale. Many men felt it necessary to defend their honour or assert their power violently. The three facets of masculinism could all be represented in one afternoon. At the mid-year races of the New England Jockey Club in 1880, Michael Shea, Thomas Burnham and James Moore, son of merchant John Moore, were all arrested for a boozy brawl at the racetrack. The magistrates despaired of the fact that such 40 Entry 3 February 1868, Carolyn Thomas Diaries (transcribed by Ann Philp), typescript, New England Historical Resources Centre. 41 Diaries of A.M. [Baxter] Dawbin, Dixson Library (Sydney), MSS Q181, quoted in Gilbert, op. cit., p.15. 42 'The Late Fatal Accident', AE, 18 April, 1868, p.3.
196 behaviour was common amongst young men at race meetings. 43 As always, the young men pleaded, by way of justification, that a matter of honour had been at stake. Fighting in the name of honour was evident amongst males across all classes in colonial Armidale. It was honour which sparked a fight between Henry Arding Thomas and his overseer Angus Macinnis in 1857 within months of Thomas's purchase of Saumarez Run. In this dispute, codes were adhered to with the issue of a formal challenge by Macinnis and the arrangement of a date and time for a fist fight. In due course, honour was satisfied and Thomas acquired a black eye. 44 In 1866, James Mulligan Jnr, whose efforts in the name of righteousness on board the immigrant ship which brought him to Australia were described in Chapter Two, brought two men to court for assaulting him. It was not the first or last time Mulligan stood in front of a court as a result of being involved in a brawl. Mulligan's sense of honour was as sharply honed as his sense of righteousness. He loved to fight the good fight — literally. On this occasion Mulligan, an Irish Protestant, came to the aid of his Irish Protestant friend John McLean who was being beaten up by two men of a counter persuasion, incensed because McLean had called them 'damned papist dogs'. All involved had been drinking at the Royal Hotel run by James Mulligan Senior.45 This small encounter demonstrates that ideologies, in this case religious ideologies, were not just casts loosely fashioned from reality to provide ornaments for living. They were much more than this. They were moulds for shaping personalities. They became part of a person's self-structuring. For many people ideologies were worth fighting and dying for. By the late 1860s, James Mulligan had moved on to Queensland. For many years he was a publican in the far north. He died in 1907 at the age of 70 from complications arising from injuries he received in a brawl outside 43 AE, 4 June, 1880, p.6. 44 Entries, 21 December, 1857 and 5 January, 1858, Caroline Thomas Diaries. 45 James Mulligan Jnr v. Michael Cannon; and James Mulligan Jnr v . Christy Byrne, AE, 1 September, 1866, p.2.
197 his hotel in Mount Molloy. On this last occasion he had gone into battle in aid of a woman who was being beaten.46 The masculinist ideology with its hard drinking, hard fighting, hard riding and, indeed, hard swearing, was in its ascendancy in the earliest days of colonial Armidale when gender imbalance was at its greatest. It was an ideology with particularly strong class overtones. Prowess, in all the forms described so far, was centred on the male body. Status went to the strong, the young, the skilled and the intimidating. There was no particular status accorded wealth or property neither of which could find visible expression in frontier New England beyond the ownership of livestock. Thus masculine prowess was an ideal which found particular favour amongst the propertyless working class. The initial thrust to dent the armour of crude masculinism came just before Christmas in 1849 when the Crown sold the first allotments of land in the town of Armidale. Landed property now became a basis for status. New people with new aspirations came to Armidale. With the advent of resident squatters and an urban middling class of young entrepreneurs their wives and growing families, of people such as Caroline and Henry Thomas, John and Sarah Moore, Robert and Fanny Perrott, and Sarah and Joseph Scholes, crude masculinism came under sustained attack. The new ascendancy belonged to the ideology of respectability — a complex array of values and images, loosely grouped but tightly understood. Indeed, the success of respectability as an ideology was due to that very complexity. Discourses of gender and class were interwoven. Respectability was essentially a middle class ideal oriented towards the family as the foundation of morality and property as the basis of status. But the respectable shunned conspicuous consumption in favour of a sober enjoyment of modest wealth and a pride in passionless thrift. To this extent it was not impossible for many people beyond the middle class to become respectable. Respectability had something substantial to offer men and women of the middle and middling classes as well as some women and men of the working class. 46 Lynette F. McClenaghan (ed.), From County Down to Down Under: Diary of Jas. Vn. Mulligan: 1860, Armidale, 1991, introduction (n.p.)
198 Respectability took men in hand and sought to re-teach them. The essence of masculinity was no longer prowess. The emphasis was no longer on the male body but on the male character. At the highest level of manliness there was a reinvention of Camelot. In early nineteenth century England there had been a revival of chivalry — a medieval notion twisted into a Victorian idea1. 47 It was no coincidence that the noble protector and gallant knight reemerged in England at the time when women were forced into a greater dependency on men than had ever existed previously. During Victoria's reign great icons to the courage and character of men were fashioned and paraded, especially before children. There was the story of the sinking of the troop ship Birkenhead, when a company of British soldiers on board helped women and children into the few life boats then stood back in parade ground formation on the deck of the stricken vessel and, never breaking rank, went down with the ship. 48 There was the charge of the Light Brigade, the glorious death of General Gordon at Khartoum and the heroic defence of Rorke's Drift during the Zulu Wars. Another of these icons to imperial valour was the siege of the British Residency at Lucknow in 1857 where Caroline Thomas' sister Cordelia, wife of Henry Thomas' half brother Captain Lancelot Thomas, was one of the victims. If it was any consolation to Caroline and Henry, the fate of their siblings was part of one of the great stories of Empire. Tennyson wrote a poem where the harrying thought for the defenders at Lucknow was the fate of the women and children: Frail were the works that defended the hold that we held with our lives Women and children amongst us, God help them, our children and wives! Hold it we might — and for fifteen days or for twenty at most 'Never surrender, I charge you, but everyman die at his post!'4 9 The Cassell Company published the eighth volume of its Illustrated History of England in 1861, giving prominence to the Indian Mutiny. From the siege of Lucknow the editors derived the image of brave officers and men refusing to be intimidated by 47 Mark Girouard, Return to Camelot: Chivalry and the English Gentleman, New Haven, 1981, pp.90-92. 48 Mark Girouard, The Return to Camelot, New Haven, 1981, pp.8-13. 49 Alfred Lord Tennyson, 'The Defence of Lucknow', in Tennyson: Poems and plays, London, 1965, pp.482-484.
199 enemy shot and shell, and, at the height of the bombardment, walking across the exposed parade ground of the residency compound rather than running to take cover. Casualties, of course, were fearful but courage never flinched. 50 Central to most of these stories of valour were women cast in the ornamental role of desperate supplicants in need of protection. Not surprisingly, General Gordon at Khartoum and the 24th Regiment, South Wales Borderers, at Rorke's Drift were defending a motherland, not a fatherland. The focus in Australian historiography on the apotheosis of the bushman in the 1890s has blurred these other heroes whom colonial Australians were prone to worship. The heroes of the Empire figured in school texts, often illustrated by representations of heroic paintings such as Thomas Barker's Second Relief of Lucknow, 1857 or Napier Hemy's The Wreck of the Birkenhead.51 One of the main features of Booloominbah, the grand mansion built by Frederick White on the outskirts of Armidale in the mid 1880s, was a magnificent stained glass window above the main staircase, featuring the life and death of General Gordon of Khartoum. 52 Even in Armidale it was not difficult to find people who were personally touched by these great events of Empire. The children of Henry and Caroline Thomas would have had a proud boast for their governess whenever they turned their textbooks to the siege of Lucknow where their uncle had fought and their aunt had died. Henry Dumaresq, the first squatter of Saumarez, had been a veteran of Waterloo. Arthur Berckelman of the Armidale Police had fought with the 17th Lancers during the Crimean War, being present at the charge of the Light Brigade 53 and District Surveyor, John Sofala Chard, who lived in Armidale in the 1880s and 1890s had a cousin who had been a hero at the defence of Rorke's Drift.54 For a generation of Australian middle and middling class boys born 50 Cassell's Illustrated History of England (9 Vols), Vol. VIII, London, Cassell Petter & Galpin, 1861, p.475. 51 H.O. Arnold-Forster, The Citizen Reader for the Use of Schools, London, Cassell and Company, Limited, 1886, pp.120-122;and 131-137. An Australian edition was first prepared by C.R. Long, Inspector of Schools in 1906. 52 Bruce Mitchell, House on the Hill: Booloominbah home and university, 1888-1988, Armidale, 1988, pp.24-25; and 27-29. 5 3 'Obituary: The Late Mr. A. Berckelman', Hawkesbury Herald, 22 January, 1904, p.12. 54 Uralla and Walcha Times, 9 July, 1884, p.2.
200 near the end of Queen Victoria's reign, these were the images and ideals which would impel them towards Gallipoli and the Somme. These cultural heroes and the chivalrous ideals they embodied were the foremost echelons of respectability. They had dethroned the man of muscle and installed the man of morals. But there was more to the concept of respectability than high heroics. Respectability was the discourse of everyman. Respectability subsumed a variety of complementary ideologies, including domesticity, femininity, masculinity, beauty and romantici sm. 5 5 These ideologies were ascendant in early nineteenth century Britain when they were clearly associated with Evangelicalism and the rising capitalist middle class. Many of the values and images of these interlocking ideologies can be seen in colonial Armidale where newspaper articles, obituaries, tombstone inscriptions and speeches at valedictory and testimonial dinners all gave expression to the collective notions of respectability. Above all, the central organising concept underscoring middle class respectability was the 'separate spheres' of public and domestic life. New roles, giving central importance to the family, were written for women and men. However, men had a life in both spheres, women in only one. Where such discourses held sway there was little room for Russel Ward's Australian legend and its singular emphasis on the single male. A respectable man's sense of worth derived from his skill at manipulating the economic environment, and being able to support a family. The old idea of 'making one's fortune', like Dick Whittington, depended to a large degree on luck. This common phrase indicated a world that was barely controllable, where fate ruled. But fate was losing its substance. Of course there was still the allure of luck. The gold fields and tin mines of New England tempted many a man to risk a small fortune to snare a large. But the hope of making one's fortune was giving way to the more sober ideal of achieving one's goals. The language of success was beginning to change. Men were no longer blessed with success, but achieved success. Obituaries sketched a man's achievements rarely 55 Davidoff and Hall, op. cit., and Catherine Hall, 'The Early Formation of Victorian Domestic Ideology', in S. Burnam (ed.), Fit Work for Women, London, Croom Held, 1982.
201 making any reference to the generosity of his father or the good fortune of inheritance except in cases like that of Edward Baker who spent the last forty years of his life living off a 'nice fortune from a relative in the old country'. 56 But Edward Baker was the exception to prove the rule. He was noted for his eccentricities, for being a man who held to breeding and rank, for being a man who believed in Church and King and the free-born rights of an Englishman, for a man who set his face against democracy, for being a man of the eighteenth century rather than the nineteenth. To aim for achievable goals was to lay some claim to the future. Respectable Victorian men began to see themselves in charge. Building societies, oddfellow societies and insurance companies were all expressions of the belief that a feral future could be tamed. Never short of a 'sensible admonition' the editors of the Armidale Express urged fathers to 'teach [their] boys to look up and forward, never down and backward'. 57 Their model of the sensible young man was John Glass, son of one of the oldest families in the Armidale district, a young man who had trained in a local bank and who was promoted to his first managerial position in the distant town of Walgett. Unfortunately he died there of chronic diarrhoea at the age of 26 in 1877. He was unmarried. The Express made his short life into something of a paragon paying tribute to his 'proverbial forethought' in insuring his life with the Australian Mutual Provident Society for £500 and leaving a will.58 The media, comprising newspapers, magazines and popular literature, were only one institution pressing for the adoption of respectable behaviour in the public world of men. Financial organisations could be quite insistent on certain standards of behaviour expected of potential borrowers. Banks maintained a formal surveillance of local communities and especially of middling class entrepreneurs. In 1856, when the Australian Joint Stock Bank opened a branch in Armidale, not only did the directors appoint a manager but also a local patron, Richard Hargrave, squatter of 56 'God is love', AE, 18 November, 1902, p.4. 57 'Sensible Admonition', AE, 30 July, 1870, p.2. 58 Minute, 25 April, 1864, Minutes of the Board of Directors of the Commercial Banking Company of Sydney, Vol. 4, 22 April 1864 - 6 July, 1866, National Australia Bank Group Archives; and AE, 20 April, 1877, p .4.
202 Hillgrove and Member of Legislative Assembly. 59 The Commercial Banking Company of Sydney and the Bank of New South Wales which opened branches in Armidale in 1864 and 1868 respectively did not formally seek local patrons but nonetheless valued the opinions of private correspondents who were encouraged to write to the directors on local matters affecting the bank and its customers. 60 Managers and local patrons as a rule of thumb wrote reports to the directors on the businesses of all debtors with overdrafts of more than £400.61 Certainly the public behaviour of clients, beyond the testimony of their balance sheet, was of interest to the banks. Branch managers of the Commercial Banking Company of Sydney were urged to take into account the personal character of applicants for wool liens 62 , and, where actual correspondence regarding clients has survived, the character of the client certainly played a part in determining bank action. 63 Learning whom to trust was regarded as 'the leading subject of the [bank manager's] daily education' and the key to the mastery of that lesson lay in building up a network of respectable informants who could report on the financial respectability of others.64 But it was the bank staff who experienced the most careful surveillance, candidly expressed by one exceptionally well known banking publication as 'espionage upon the private conduct' of officers. 65 There were some salient lessons from Armidale. In 59 Minutes, 9 September, 1856 and 4 June, 1858, Minutes of the Board of Directors of the Australian Joint Stock Bank, Westpac Archives, A-3/39. 60 Minute, 7 October, 1864, Minutes of the Board of Directors of the Commercial Banking Company of Sydney, Vol. 4, 22 April, 1864 - 6 July, 1866, National Australia Bank Archives 61 Op. cit., A-3/57, Minutes 23 September, 1870 and 15 November 1870, for instance. 62 J.B. Calden to the Manager, Armidale, 1 February, 1882, Circular Letters from Head Office 1878-1885, Commercial Banking Company of Sydney, National Australia Bank Archives. 63 R. McDonald to A.J. Cope Esq., solicitor, 15 April, 1884, Manager's Letterbook, Commercial Banking Company of Sydney, National Australia Bank Archives, ff. 109, 116, 121-122. 64 George Rae, The Country Banker„ London, John Murray, 1885, pp.1-13. It was reported to me by Mr Bernard McGrath, Chief Archivist of the National Australia Bank Archives in Springvale, Victoria that this book was provided to each branch manager of the Commercial Banking Company of Sydney in the 1880s. Ultimately the publication ran to at least seven editions between 1885 and 1930.. 65 Ibid., p.181.
203 1865, a few months after Edward Baker was encouraged to correspond with the Board of the Commercial Banking Company of Sydney on branch matters in Armidale, the directors learned that the local manager, Mr Adams, had been seen on occasions playing billiards. Despite Mr Adams's contrition and his promise to give up 'so inordinate a partiality' to which a 'degree of disrepute attached', he was removed from his position four months later. 66 In 1869 Mr Larnach, the manager of the Bank of New South Wales in Armidale was dismissed from his position, despite his being a nephew of one of the bank's London directors, for exchanging abusive and intemperate letters with Mr Sheridan the manager of the rival Commercial Banking Company of Sydney. Mr Sheridan, in his turn, although not dismissed, had inflicted upon him the punishment that the 'remembrance of his injudicious correspondence [would ever be] in the minds of the Directors' of his bank.67 Certainly the Bank of New South Wales tried to recruit locally only those lads of 'respectable parents', 68 but, even so, in 1873 complaints were made by an Armidale correspondent about the 'private habits' of the staff of the bank, and the matter had to be dealt with by the general manager. 69 By the mid 1870s, Shepherd Smith, the well known general manager of the Bank of New South Wales in Sydney, had issued rules and regulations governing the conduct of staff in their working and leisure hours and these regulations were tightened and made more proscriptive over the next twenty years. No staff member of the bank, wherever located, could play billiards, gamble, associate with persons of questionable character, be guilty of intemperance, live beyond his means, frequent a public house or reside or board at a hotel or inn. By the 1890s no officer on a salary of less than £200 per annum could marry without the consent of the Board of Directors. 70 There may 66 Minutes, 7 October, 1864; 21 February, 1865; and 7 July, 1865, Minutes of the Board of the Commercial Banking Company Sydney. 67 Shepherd Smith to Donald Larnach, 3 December, 1869, General Manager's Private Correspondence, Westpac Archives, GM/1/3; and Minute 3 December, 1869, Minutes of the Commercial Banking Company of Sydney. 68 J.R. Hill to the Manager, Armidale, 24 October, 1868, Armidale Branch file for the Bank of New South Wales, Westpac Archives, 2/9/1. 69 Minute 22 August, 1873, Minutes of the Board of Directors of the Bank of New South Wales, Westpac Archives. 70 Bank of New South Wales, Rules and Regulations to be Observed by the Officers of the Bank of New South Wales, Sydney, John Sands, 1876, p.4;
204 have been a celebration of the bush legend in the Bulletin in the 1880s and 1890s, but the heroic bushman would never have got a job in the bank. Still the bushman was probably assured knowing that, happily, he would find no place amongst those born to be men and condemned to be clerks. This sketch of the public profile of respectable man has been juxtaposed with the earlier sketch of the man of prowess. There was clearly a class difference between the man of prowess who essentially lived without property and respectable man whose virtues were founded largely on a modest to comfortable amount of wealth. That juxtaposition is necessary to point out what respectable man was, and was not. It was the man of prowess who became the man of legend, the Bushman, the Lone Hand, the Digger. These figures came to represent something that was distinctively Australian and therefore historians in the nationalist tradition paid them much attention. Respectable man, on the other hand, was not particularly Australian. But he did represent a major life style image for many Australian men. Nor was respectable man the servile, house bound, emasculated creature which the Bulletin portrayed and lampooned. Rather, respectability was in large part a male construct which pushed aside aristocratic notions of breeding, lineage and ordered estates and shunned working class ideals based on physical strength, skill and bluster. Respectability was ideally suited to an ascendant middle class, but had a wider appeal to many men in the middling class and some men in the working class and was more international than parochial. The juxtaposing of the man of prowess and respectable man calls forth another juxtaposition — that between respectable man and respectable woman. There was no doubt that respectable men and women should be married. The family became the basis of respectability and the centrepiece of conservative, middle class imagery. Roles of mother, father, husband and wife were carefully refined, and in analysing these new Victorian constructs historians have sought to answer the question of the extent of the active involvement of women in shaping the ideology of domestic respectability. and Bank of New South Wales, Book of Rules, Regulations and Instructions, Sydney, John Sands, 1897, p.5.
2 05 Writing in the tradition of dominant ideologies, ruling elites and social engineering, Anne Summers depicted respectable women seeking a token status in an oppressively patriarchal society by adopting the role of God's police. 71 She argued that the socially engineered ideology of respectability was at least an improvement over earlier convict based constructions and women made the most of it. Over a decade later, Marilyn Lake interpreted gender relationships in late nineteenth century Australia quite differently. She saw a modestly effective struggle by feminist activists to counter the images and the ideology of raw masculinism as eulogised by the national press and particularly the Bulletin. Although Lake acknowledged a convergence of various interests in the refinement of domestic man, she basically saw a gender struggle between misogynists and feminists — a struggle for the hearts and minds of men. By the 1920s according to Lake, the feminists had won . 72 To a considerable degree, men had been domesticated. Although Lake's work sparked a debate about the interpretation of gender relations in late nineteenth century Australia, that debate, as always, seemed to centre on the masculinist image of the heroic bushmen and the over-emphasised influence of the Bulletin. 73 Rather, the question which should be raised concerns the extent to which men created roles for women or women created roles for men within the late Victorian family. There is no doubt that there was a struggle to shape the roles within the family. The extreme positions were represented by those who advocated the untrammelled freedom of men who wanted to be nothing more than married bachelors and those who championed the emancipated woman, self assured, outgoing, publicly active, and usually depicted as an American aberration.74 But it must be borne in mind that this struggle was waged across a male terrain. As has been established clearly in Chapter Six, the 71 Anne Summers, Damned Whores and God's Police, Ringwood, 1975, pp.292, 294 and 313. 72 Lake, op. cit., p p .11-15. 73 See Docker, op. cit., pp.16-26; 74 For an example of the latter extreme see 'An "Emancipated" Woman', AE, 30 September, 1871, p.3.
206 gender structure of Victorian society produced contours of power which gave all the strategic advantages to men. Clearly, many of the images of women being constructed in colonial Armidale validated male power and naturalised male dominance. Because male lusts were believed to be barely controllable, and because there was an underclass of women who catered to those 'natural passions', respectable women had to be ever vigilant of their virtue for fear their social standing would be compromised. Once the antithetical divide between proper conduct and scandal had been crossed, there was no return. Community scorn made sure of that. Armidale was a town terrorised by gossip. So distressing had the situation become that on Quinquagesima Sunday 1889 a pastoral letter from Bishop Torreggiani devoted entirely to the subject of malicious gossip in the community was read in all Roman Catholic churches in the diocese of Armidale and was subsequently published in the Armidale Express.75 The story of Miss Frederick illustrates the fragility of a young girl's reputation. Miss Frederick was the 17 year old daughter of coachbuilder James Frederick, and amongst her attributes was a fine singing voice. She was a member of the Church of England choir in 1876, when the cathedral designed by John Horbury Hunt was new and strikingly impressive in what was still a stringybark town. Miss Frederick was not the first or last person to discover that solemn occasions in solemn settings sometimes provoke an attack of 'the giggles' in young people. One Sunday in June Miss Frederick laughed in church. Compounding her misdemeanour, she was alleged to have passed a paper and, during the offertory she, like some others in the congregation, refused to stand up. Her father disapproved of such innovative rituals and told her not to do so. Consequently, Miss Frederick was dismissed from the choir without warning and without explanation. At the next parochial meeting she had a champion who took up her cause and debated the issue with the Bishop 76 and from there the matter was reported in the press and argued even further in subsequent weeks in the letters to the editors. 77 Although matters of doctrine were involved 75 'Pastoral Letter', AE, 8 March, 1889, p.7. 76 'Church of England', AE, 23 June, 1876, p.6. 77 Letter from W.C. Proctor, AE, 30 June, 1876, p.6; and letter from 'Fair Play', AE, 7 July, 1876, p.4.
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