183 CHAPTER SEVEN

SHAPING NEW WORLDS WITH OLD IMAGES

When John Richardson bought John Moores 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 childrens 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 neer 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 Richardsons writing.

1 Robert Richardson, Bulletin, 19 October, 1901, the Red Page. 1 8 4 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 Gods 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 Richardsons 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 Richardsons message was childrens 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. 1 8 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. 1 8 7 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. 1 8 8 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 Wards 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 Womens 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. 1 8 9 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 Australias early history. The massacre at Henry Dangars 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 Australias 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 Dangars 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. 1 9 1 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. 1 9 2 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 Sargents 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. 1 9 3 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 Blythes 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. 1 9 4 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. 3 7 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 Harriotts 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. 1 9 6 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 Thomass 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. Mulligans 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 persons 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. 1 9 7 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.) 1 9 8 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 Victorias 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 Rorkes 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. 1 9 9 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 Rorkes 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 Barkers Second Relief of Lucknow, 1857 or Napier Hemys 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 Brigade53 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 Rorkes Drift.54 For a generation of Australian middle and middling class boys born

50 Cassells 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. 2 0 0 near the end of Queen Victorias 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 Wards Australian legend and its singular emphasis on the single male.

A respectable mans sense of worth derived from his skill at manipulating the economic environment, and being able to support a family. The old idea of making ones 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 ones fortune was giving way to the more sober ideal of achieving ones goals. The language of success was beginning to change. Men were no longer blessed with success, but achieved success. Obituaries sketched a mans 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. 2 0 1 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. 2 0 2 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 liens62 , 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 managers] 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, Managers 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. 2 0 3 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 Adamss 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 banks 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 Managers 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 Gods 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 Lakes 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 Gods 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. 2 0 6 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 girls 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

7 5 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. 2 0 7 which were underscored by obvious tension between clergy and laity, the major issue of concern was that the girls moral character had been impugned. As one of her champions expressed it:

Supposing that 20 years hence, when surrounded by a family, she was to have been recognised as having been dismissed from the Choir, and without explanation, might it not be imputed to immoral conduct?78

Perhaps, most surprisingly, no one questioned this speculation. So much were women under the unrelenting gaze of moral guardians that such a speculation was entirely believable. So persuasive was the speculation that Miss Frederick was reinstated in the choir.

Religion and education were significant institutions in moulding acceptable womanhood. However, the media were particularly influential in presenting a range of female stereotypes all the more effective because they came under the guise of light reading for leisure. From 1871, the Armidale Express expanded its offering to eight pages and included regular columns of serialised fiction and feature articles on family, courtship and marriage. The Express re- published many articles from British and American magazines and journals including Liberal Review, Truth, New York World, Whitehall Review, Once a Week and the Ladies Home Journal. Through the media, respectable women were galled by many negative images, crafted in the interests of men.

The strategies of power were the prerogatives of men and the strategies of persuasion the resort of women. But in the common literature those very strategies of persuasion which were the only resort for women, were often presented negatively through the repeated use of some very familiar stereotypes. There was the woman of discord who, by her very nature was prone to subtle, malevolent scheming. This image was tied to the paramount schemer, Eve of the Garden of Eden, the mother of all sin. In one outburst against women preachers published in the Armidale Chronicle, the more conservative rival to the Express, there was reference to she-devils in the guise of lecturers, social reformers, missionaries, tract distributors and advocates of womens rights, whose principal aim was to keep men in bondage a little while

78 Church of England, AE, 23 June, 1876, p.6. 2 0 8 longer . 79 A less fearsome version of the scheming temptress was the fast widow, angling for a husband, setting snares, spinning inviting webs, and plotting grand sentimental coups. After a full column of fearfully mixed metaphors, one expert author concluded that it is a dangerous experiment to marry one of these fast w id o w s 80 and no doubt left his male readers cowering like wet puppies at the thought. Another persistent theme was the nagging wife torturing herself with groundless fears and silly imaginings during the day and inflicting these on her hen-pecked husband at night . 81 If there was a common theme to this outpouring of second-rate journalism, it was that the respectable woman should be less inclined to practise the arts of influence and more inclined to submit to her refined and respectable man.

In 1891, when Henry Parkess proposal to extend the franchise to women was first placed before Parliament, the editor of the Armidale Express, penned a vigorous editorial, not celebrating the fact that the proposal had been defeated, but expressing great concern that the defeat was by a scant majority. The editor employed the usual stereotypes of strong minded spinsters in military musters advocating womens rights and invoked the image of a parliament presided over by a woman speaker granting the sweet privilege of her sex of all chattering at once. The editorial was not one of the best examples of the editors logical skills. The franchise for women was not needed because women might not care to use it. Joan of Arc had come to the forefront in her times without the aid of a franchise. Strong minded women might vote against their husbands and other women might be completely dominated by their husbands. Both situations were undesirable. Inevitably the editor invoked the possibility that the female menstrual cycle might incapacitate women on polling day. 82 This was not confident writing. It was defensive and confused and as such it reflected the debate in some of the major national journals of the time.83

79 Women Preachers, Armidale Chronicle, 1 January, 1874, p.l. 80 Fast Widows, AE, 21 August 1874, p.7 (extract from the Liberal Review). 81 Incompatability of Temper, AE, 21 October 1871, p.3 (extract from the Civilian). 82 AE, 4 August, 1891, p.4. 83 Docker, op. cit., p .25 . 2 0 9 Men felt threatened. For all the negative images hounding respectable women into submission, there were also negative images of men in the ordinary literature. These were juxtaposed with images of what the respectable domestic man ought to be like. Most of these images came from Britain and had a particular appeal to women of the middle and middling classes in Australia, many of whom were immigrants who had been born and bred in Britain. Women in Australia took these images and shaped them to their own family situations using strategies of influence appropriate to their roles. When Henry Thomas and his superviser fought each other over a management dispute at Saumarez in 1857, Caroline Thomas registered her disapproval in the strongest way she could, and made it quite clear that she would remember the incident for a long time to come. For four days after the incident, Henry felt Carolnes disproval accutely through her pointed silences and cool behaviour. 8 4

One of the important findings of Davidoff and Hall, in their review of the formation of ideologies in Britain, was that the new roles for men and women were created largely through literature churned out by a host of minor writers many of whom were women. It was women for instance who were insisting on the vital tasks of motherhood, not men who were imposing such ideals on them. 85 It was women who were insisting that men change. Women were creating the stereotype of the heartless brute who was not simply the lower class man who beat his wife, but also the middle class man insensitive to his wifes needs. As one journal wrote, if a woman grows dissatisfied, it is the fault of the husband. 86 The absent husband, the frequenter of clubs, taverns and mens meetings, came in for attack most especially if he had thrown himself in the way of drinking. 87 The temperance movement was creating a vast array of images of the drunken husband and the victims of alcohol abuse, made more pointed by the insistence that drunkenness could be overcome by simple moral determination.

84 Entries, 5 and 8 January, 1858, Caroline Thomas Diaries. 85 Davidoff and Hall, op. cit., pp.149, 176 86 Husbands", AE, 30 September, 1871, p.3 (extract from Once a Week). 87 A Whisper to a Newly Married Man: On domestic habits, AE, 3 0 September, 1871, p.3. (extract from the London Journal). 2 1 0 Animating all the images were the realities. The court reports in local and national papers were full of stories of destitute wives and children deserted by men who used every ruse to avoid paying maintenance. There were stories like that of 17 year old Alice Ewen, daughter of a publican who ran a wayside inn at Carlisles Gully south of Armidale. She brought a paternity suit against Philip Macarthur King, great grandson of the third governor of New South Wales and son of the manager of the Australian Agricultural Companys Goonoo Goonoo station. 88 Despite the scandal of a man from a very wealthy and respectable colonial family secretly and repeatedly having sexual intercourse with a young girl in her fathers own home, Alice Ewen had to bring him to court twice to secure maintenance. 89 Then there were stories of widows left to fend for themselves like Frances Bradshaw whose husband, Lloyd Bradshaw, Chief Constable at Armidale and son of an Anglo-Irish gentry family, had shot himself in 1869 whilst labouring under insanity. Within a year, she, too, attempted suicide as the result of loneliness and a want of food and, when she was brought before the court, a numerously signed petition pleaded for leniency. %) It did not take much to realise that the system of patriarchy, notwithstanding all the overtones of respectability and morality, could be particularly and frequently harsh on women and children.

Far from being a unified dominant ideology, respectability was a locus for struggle between men and women. The insistence of separate spheres as one of the foundations of respectability had created an absurdly gendered society. But out of that came a far greater awareness amongst women of their status as women. The ideology of respectability had set up a dissonance between the real and the imagined and that dissonance was to be a force for change in the legal and economic positions of women by the last decade of the nineteenth century. Anne Summers has left the impression that women were resigned to the role of Gods police as the best of the stereotypes being forced upon them. 91 On the contrary, women were far more pro-active in their shaping of respectability than her

88 A Remarkable Affiliation Case, AE, 18 December, 1874, p.6; and King, Philip Gidley (1817-1904), in Douglas Pike (ed.), Australian Dictionary of Biography, Vol. 5 (1851-1890), Melbourne, 1974, pp.29-30. 89 As well as the original application for maintenance in 1874 referred to above, see Affiliation Case, AE, 30 May, 1879, p.4. 90 Attempting Suicide, AE, 30 July, 1870, p.2. 91 Summers, op. cit., pp.292-294 and 313. 2 1 1 interpretation suggests. On the other hand Marilyn Lake saw the struggle primarily between the masculinist bushman ethos on the one hand and the feminist ethos of domestic respectability on the other. 92 There was no doubt that such a struggle occurred, as seen in the pages of the Bulletin. However, Lakes approach ignores the strong masculinist imagery within domestic respectability and the struggle between men and women to shape the roles of mother, father, husband and wife within the respectable family.

As well as the gender dimension of respectability, any concluding statements on ideology must take into consideration the concept of class. As has been shown above the ideology of respectability suited many men and women of the property owning classes. But it also infused, to a degree, the propertyless classes. It was respectability which drove a wedge between white collar workers and blue collar workers. Bank tellers, school teachers and shop assistants were obliged to adopt respectable behaviour in both their working and leisure hours. Theirs was supposed to be the world of firesides and books and homely pleasures. The billiard halls and pubs and street corners were for others of inferior social standing. It would be an awkward idea which suggested that George Kingdom the shepherd and Robert Elliott the shearer, both of Gostwyck station, would find any common cause with Elizabeth Adrain the school teacher at Kellys Plains and John Glass the young teller at the Armidale branch of the Commercial Banking Company of Sydney. Yet they all stood on the same side of the great divide between those who owned property and those who did not. Thus the ideology of respectability blurred the perception of class divisions.

Class consciousness was blurred in another sense by the overlay of respectability. For many married women of the working class the tenets of respectability must have seemed attractive. For these women, their class identity was vicarious, experienced through their husbands. But their gender identity and their roles within the family were direct experiences. If respectability challenged male prowess, and especially male drinking and male violence, then it must have been alluring to many such women. Thus working class women might well have developed a different

92 Lake, op. cit., pp.11-15. 2 1 2 perspective to their husbands with regard to class. Their influence on their husbands should not be discounted if we can be guided by recent contemporary research which has shown that women influence the subjective class identity of their husbands.93

But there was also a counter infusion across class divisions. The images of raw masculinism, so well suited to a propertyless class of manual workers were attractive to many men of the middling and middle classes, men who could scorn the pretensions of respectability. One such man was Arthur Hunter Palmer, for over twenty years the manager of the Dangars Gostwyck station. Palmer lived in New England throughout its male-dominated frontier days. After his unsuccessful attempt to marry Margaret Dangar, he put off marriage until he was in his mid forties. He had obviously imbibed the rough manners of the frontier bachelor and there was something of the larrikin evident throughout his days as premier, colonial secretary and treasurer of Queensland. As one journalist who fell foul of him reported: nobody could truthfully affirm that Sir Arthurs temper, even at the best [was], strictly speaking, of the angelic type. 94 A biographer later added to the legend with the speculation that, at his birth, Sir Arthur,

. . . almost swallowed his fist in the first hour. Nurse prophesied therefrom he was born to be great. Tradition saith the princeling tried to swear at her. . . [Today] knows more swear words than most two men, and keeps in practice.95

Like Sir Arthur, there were many others who scorned the affectations of respectability, especially those who, whilst owning property, were required to work it with their own labour. Many small farmers, for instance, had little time for the refined images of urban sedentary man and prided themselves more on the qualities of the heroic bushman of Lawson, Paterson and the Bulletin or the other strong rural image of the noble pioneer.

All the groups and individuals discussed so far have been within the pale of predominant ideologies. They found a place where they could, in varying degrees, articulate themselves. But beyond the pale were people who could not articulate themselves —

93 Janeen Baxter, Michael Emmison, and John Western (eds), Class Analysis and Contemporary Australia, Melbourne, 1991, p.220. 94 Sir A. Palmer in the Witness Box, AE, 26 August, 1881, p.6. 95 Sir A.H. Palmer, AE, 24 September, 1886, p.3. 2 1 3 people who were spoken about, sometimes spoken to, but never heard. These were the people of the underclass, the chronically poor and unemployed, the deserted, destitute women and children, the alcoholic and the racially excluded. The ideology of respectability made much of these people. They became the abnormal against whom the normal could be measured.96

At this level the predominant ideologies of raw masculinism and respectability affected other ideologies. In particular, for the Anaiwan people who had survived the invasion of their lands the predominant ideologies affected the ideology of racism enlarging it and bringing it within mainstream discourses. Under the ascendancy of raw masculinism, with its ennobling of prowess, Aboriginal people on the frontiers in particular were denied their basic humanity, were re-constructed in the image of wild beasts, were hunted and killed. Long after New England had been conquered, the life of an Anaiwan person was discounted.

In October 1855 two 13 year old boys, Hugh Mosman eldest son of Archibald Mosman probably Armidales most prominent citizen at the time, and David Starr, son of James Starr of Mihi Creek, went shooting along Dumaresq Creek two and half miles west of the town. They came across a young Anaiwan boy of similar age named Tommy who was a servant of John Gallegos, a creekland farmer. After an exchange of words, whether in anger or in jest was never established, David Starr aimed his gun at Tommy and shot him dead. Starr and Mosman both claimed that the shooting was an accident and that there was no ill-feeling between them and Tommy, 97 but evidence from one witness 98 and a letter from another person 99 indicated that the relationship between the boys might have been rancorous. The local magistrates thought there was enough evidence to bring the matter to a criminal court. However, a numerously signed petition from the most influential people in Armidale claimed that the shooting was an accident, that

96 Lynette Finch, The Classing Gaze, St Leonards, 1993, p.48. 97 Depositions of James Moore and Hugh Mosman, 15 October, 1855, Regina v. Starr, Supreme Court on Circuit, Maitland 1856, AONSW, 9/6404. Also Armidale, Maitland Mercury, 27 October, 1855 (supplement) and Armidale, Maitland Mercury, 24 November, 1855, n.p. 98 Deposition of Bazle Dumas, 16 October, 1855, AONSW, 9/6404. 99 James Starr to Dear Mother, 22 October, 1855, Regina v. Starr, AONSW, 9/6404. 2 1 4 the witness who said there was ill-feeling between the boys was unreliable and begged the Attorney General to stop all proceedings in the case. 1 00 This he did.101

Racism within the masculinist context was crudely constructed. But there was an irony. Aboriginal people could find room for self- articulation in the masculinist world. For men their prowess and their bush skills might be admired. There was no doubt that Duke was held in esteem by his young white compatriots during their 1860 expedition to Mackay in Queensland. Other Aboriginal men were admired for their skill with horses and some Anaiwan men became noted horse breakers and stockmen. 102 For Anaiwan women, their physical attractiveness in the eyes of white men could be a basis for sexual abuse, but it was also true that enduring relationships based on some degree of happiness were formed.103

Under the influence of respectability, the discourse of racism became more refined and more erudite. Aborigines throughout the British Empire were still depicted as inferior but now this was seen in the context of some grand teleological plan, such as the inevitable domination of the world by the white race and the extinction of all those races which could not compete. Alternatively, as Rev. Charles Greenaway explained it one night in 1870 in the Armidale School of Arts, the degeneracy of the Australian Aborigines was due to their disastrous moral decline as a result of being cut off from the rest of mankind. 104 Either way they became the antithesis of fully evolved or morally ascendant Europeans. In late nineteenth century Armidale, the respectable would not countenance the sort of violence which, on several consecutive nights, impelled some of the youth in the town to attack a nearby Blacks camp and beat an old man and woman. 105 But nor could the respectable countenance

100 Petition from Inhabitants of Armidale, AONSW, 9/6404. The petition contains 31 signatures including Rev. Septimus Hungerford, John Moore, Joseph Scholes, Edward and George Allingham, James Gilchrist, Edward Baker and Owen Gorman. 101 Entry 5, David Starr, Judgment Book 1856, Maitland Circuit, Supreme Court Criminal Jurisdiction, AONSW, 4/5754. 102 Matthew Henry Marsh, Overland from Southampton to Queensland, London, E. Stanford, 1867, p.67; and AE, 28 June, 1856, p.3. 103 Evidence of Poll, 17 March 1847, in the case of William Reid for assault, Armidale Bench of Magistrates, Bench Book, 24 November, 1844 - 9 September, 1847, AONSW, 4/5488. 104 AE, 12 November, 1870, p.2. 105 AE, 15 August, 1868, p.2. 2 1 5 informal contact between black and white. The sensibilities of women had to be considered, 106 and the examples set before children were of utmost importance. When James Pearson, a young and athletic teacher at Saumarez Creek School, was refused permission to compete in a foot race with an Aboriginal he was informed by his superiors in Sydney that foot racing with aboriginals for wages [is] incompatible with the occupation of a Teacher.107

There were fewer means for Aboriginal self-articulation in the dominant culture. Consistently, over decades, the editors of the Armidale Express lampooned the Anaiwan as figures of fun, the somewhat embarrassing obverse of civilised man. But, when the laughter subsided, a mind set developed that the Aborigines should be controlled and their contact with Europeans limited. The bureaucratic oppression of Aborigines which was to last throughout most of the twentieth century was about to begin in the name of respectability.

Raw masculinism and respectability, the two predominant ideologies discussed in this chapter, were certainly class and gender based. As such their relative predominance changed over time. Raw masculinism was associated with the early days of Armidale, with a largely male population and a limited ownership of private property. It was the ideology of a bark-roofed town of unformed streets and a lack of refined comforts. Respectability emeged with a more gender balanced population, with family life and the development of private property. It was the ideology of solid brick buildings of pretentious facades, lathered in a stucco grooved to resemble stone. It was the ideology of churches and schools, parks and picket fences. The ascendancy of respectability and the partial eclipse of raw masculinism occurred in the context of struggle. The use of public spaces and private homes changed and the dimensions and contentions of that change are described more fully in chapter nine.

106 Letter to the Editor from Ben, AE, 16 September, 1871, p.2. 107 James Pearson to W. Wilkins Esq. 4 May, 1879, and attachments, Saumarez Creek School file, Department of Public Instruction, AONSW, 5/17596.4. 2 1 6 However, the dichotomy and the struggle were never clear-cut. There was considerable blurring. Respectability contained many values significant to those who lived at the core of the middle class, raw masculinism had the same importance for those men at the core of the working class. Between these unequivocal associations, there were vast areas of infusion especially across the social terrain occupied by the white collar workers and the middling class. For many women the gender dimensions of respectability were more relevant than their putative class positions. There would be no clear class consciousness in such a climate. Colonial New Englanders did not construct mental worlds divided by class. They used the term without precision — there could be working classes or a working class, middle ranks or lower orders. They tended to formulate and express other divisions — the rich and the poor; the respectable and the common; the civilised and the savage; the ladies and the gentlemen; and, in the masculinist context, they devised a world of scabs and mates, of mice and men. 2 1 7 CHAPTER EIGHT

THE STRUGGLE FOR THE LAND

Previous chapters have described the contours of power and the strategies of power in relation to the class and gender divisions in colonial Armidale. The struggles which took place across this terrain have been outlined as have the predominant ideologies which emerged and gave meaning to the lives of ordinary women and men. In the next two chapters, two major struggles for the social and economic resources of the community are described. In the first instance there was the struggle for the land. In the second instance there was the struggle for control of the town.

The struggle for control of the land was essentially a struggle between a group of middle class pastoralists on the one hand and a variety of people from the middling class together with some socially mobile people from the working class on the other hand. This struggle was seen by contemporaries as a class struggle, but it was also frequently construed as a struggle between the rich man and the poor man, the popular definition of the poor man often encompassing a farmer on several hundred acres of land.

The contours of power were defined, in part, by a set of legal sanctions in the form of an innovative piece of legislation known as the Robertson Land Acts which had come into force in New South Wales in January 1862. Although the Robertson Land Acts were only part of the power structure, the legislation was perceived by contemporaries as being that part of the structure most amenable to manipulation and change. But more important than the legal sanctions were the economic sanctions. Land was sold at £1 per acre, had to be improved at the same rate, and had to realise a profit. Access to reserves of capital which could be diverted to the purchase and improvement of land determined the limits of action for virtually all the protagonists. As well there were non-variable environmental factors which determined the use to which land could be put and these environmental realities were often at odds with the perceptions of what the land might be used for. This was a complex interaction of forces which had determined the nature of rural society by the mid 1880s. In looking at that outcome, many 2 1 8 historians have addressed the issue of the extent to which the Robertson Land Acts were successful l . Were small crop farmers and large, export-oriented pastoralists each able to find a place in rural Australia? The same question occupied the minds of contemporaries. Some saw harmony emerge from contention.

On a cold, wet winters night in August 1874 a well attended testimonial dinner was held at the St. Kilda Hotel in Armidale for a resident of the district who was leaving New England after seventeen years. The man honoured was Henry Arding Thomas, squatter, of Saumarez, who had sold his property and was moving to Cobbity, near Sydney, with his family. The Armidale Express described the dinner as testifying the esteem in which Mr. Thomas was held by all classes of the community. 2 The comment was not without its grain of truth. Earlier in the day a number of small freehold farmers and free selectors who had taken up land on the old Saumarez Run, presented Thomas with an illuminated address and the evenings festivities, despite the bitterness of the weather, were attended by storekeepers, tradesmen, local public officials, members of the clergy, a local politician and a number of free selectors. The presence of this latter group was worthy of remark by several speakers as belying the traditional image of animosity between squatter and selector. Remarkable also was the fact that Thomas condemned such animosity in other parts of the colony, gave cautious support to the land legislation of the time and recognised the rights of both squatter and selector to a share of the resources of the land. The lion indeed seemed to lie down with the lamb. Many guests on that evening expressed the feeling that New England, or at least Armidale, was different and exemplary in finding place for both squatter and selector.

There were a number of subsequent variations on this theme of different and better. In April 1881 an editorial in the Armidale Express celebrated the fact that the number of conditional purchases taken up in the Armidale police district in the previous year was higher than in any other part of the colony and that the

1 For a good summary of the range of research on this topic see Bill Gammage, Who Gained, and who was meant to gain from land selection in New South Wales, Australian Historical Studies, Vol. 24, No. 94, April, 1990, pp.109-111. 2 AE, 28 August, 1874, p.6. 2 1 9 small average acreage was an indication of bona fide selection and `rather goes to prove that the selection in this district has been of the most desirable character.3

Just on two years later, Augustus Morris and George Ranken delivered to Parliament their watershed report on the administration of the public lands and the operation of the land laws of New South Wales. New England, the report stated, has been settled by bona fide selectors perhaps more than any other district in the Colony ... . 4 With their preference for finding fault rather than favour, Morris and Ranken subsequently qualified the expression of success. Dummying was prevalent, delay in survey was harassing, agriculture on the tableland was unscientific and too many of the poor and unthrifty had got onto the land rather than a more desirable industrious class of selector. But, by their own statistics, Morris and Ranken showed that of all the selections in New England 8 out of 20 were taken up by desirable selectors and a further 5 out of 20 were selected by the poor man — poor in money, education and intelligence against whom Morris and Ranken harboured a prejudices but who were, nonetheless, genuine selectors. However qualified, this was a measured success.

Historians have equivocated on the success of free selection in New England. However, success is in the eye of the beholder. For instance R. B. Walker, in an early article on free selection in New England, focussed on the reasons inhibiting the success of free selection; the clauses in the Land Acts of 1861 adverse to the genuine selector; and the aggravated disaster resulting from other aspects of the administration of the legislation. 6 Nonetheless in this and a subsequent work Walker showed that by 1882 more than two-thirds of the alienated land in New England was that which had been purchased conditionally; that the squatters gained about half the land alienated ; 7 and that an estimated 60-70 per cent of New

3 AE, 29 April, 1881, p.4. 4 Morris, Augustus and Ranken, George, Report of Inquiry into the State of the Public Lands and the Operation of the Land Laws, Journal of the Legislative Council of New South Wales, 1883, Vol. XXXIV, Part 1, Sydney, 1883, p.335. 5 Ibid, p.336. 6 R.B. Walker, Squatter and Selector in New England 1862-95, Historical Studies, Vol. 8, No. 29, Nov., 1967, pp.69, 71, 72. 7 Ibid, pp.69, 77. 2 20 England selectors had bona fide intentions . 8 Walkers focus may have been on failure but a picture of some success emerged.

For the purposes of this study an independent measure of success was attempted. An analysis was made of all selections taken up in New England in the year 1875. 9 Altogether, in the districts of Armidale, Glen Innes, Inverell and Tenterfield there were 746 selections, of which 177 lapsed, were forfeited or declared void, leaving a total of 569 validated selections. Of these validated selections 182 or 32 per cent were in the hands of the lessees of the respective runs by 1891. 10 It was possible to get a figure for suspected dummying by separating from the rest, those selections which fell into the hands of a squatter within eighteen months of the completion of residence requirements by a dummy (ie within 42 years from the date of selection). There were 92 such suspected dummies for all of New England for 1875 or 16 per cent of all validated selections. Expressing the same statistic differently, 84 per cent of all validated selections in New England in 1875 were made by selectors other than squatters and their dummies, and this figure is much higher than R.B. Walkers estimate of 60-70 per cent genuine selections mentioned above, and Morris and Ranken s 13 out of 20 from which figure Walker probably derived his own.

This exercise represents one measure of success, a statistical measure. The successful acquisition of rural land by small farmers and pastoralists took place in the context of a complex power structure which was both constraining and enabling for those who sought to fulfil their ambitions on the land. In the case of Henry Arding Thomas and the small farmers at Saumarez Ponds, it

8 R.B. Walker, Old New England, Sydney, 1966, p.63. 9 Conditional Purchase Registers (Head Office), Armidale, Glen Innes, Tenterfield and Inverell, AONSW, 7/2780, 7/2914, 7/4785, 7/2967 respectively. (Note: The head office registers were kept up to date for all transfers and mortgages of C.Ps. The district registers which have been widely used by historians in the past were not kept up to date or accurate). 10 This figure was arrived at by comparing the chain of transfers for each validated selection against squatting lists for New England for 1875, 1878 and 1885 as follows: Further Return to an Order, Crown Lands Held Under Lease or License, VP, 1875-6 (6 Vols) Vol. III, Sydney, 1876, p.1031, et passim; Return (in part) to an Order, Crown Lands under Pastoral Lease and Conditional Purchase - Particulars Respecting, VP, 1878 -9 (7 Vols), Vol. IV, p.327, et passim; and Annual Report of the Chief Inspector of Stocks and Brands, VP, 1885 (3 Vols), Vol. III, p.575, et passim. 2 2 1 appeared that there was almost perfect harmony. But if those who attended Thomass farewell dinner had cast their minds back a decade, they would surely have recalled some bitter disputes. If squatter and selector did find neighbouring homes in New England, if the lion did lie down with the lamb, the happy result was achieved only after some considerable baring of fangs and some bleating and snarling. There had been a struggle for the land. Squatter and selector competed for the same land. Newspaper columns were periodically filled with outrage and vitriol and courts of enquiry were kept busy. The Robertson Land Acts became a focus of attention and of inter-class rivalry.

The Acts were in force from 1862 until their repeal in 1884 after the tabling of the report by Morris and Ranken. Strategies for action within the constraints of the law evolved over time, and in response to various practices which were seen to be in contravention of the spirit of the law, the acts were amended, most especially in 1875. Thus there was change over time. These changes over time were reflected over space. The initial impact of the legislation was felt closest to Armidale, on the fertile lands of Saumarez, Gostwyck and Tilbuster. These were the lands closest to the flour mills, the road networks and the retail outlets. This initial contest had been resolved by the late 1860s. By the 1870s and early 1880s, other land, a little farther away, a little less fertile was contested. The struggle had shifted to Eversleigh and Gara or Gyra. Here the tactics were different, as were the outcomes. The coming of the railway made viable lands farther away in grazing country which had always been remote and had been free from virtually any pressure under the Robertson Land Acts. In this better country farther out the battles were fought within the parameters of an entirely different piece of legislation.

This chapter concentrates on the battle for Saumarez, Gostwyck, Tilbuster, Eversleigh and the confusingly named Gyra or Gara. This spread of pastoral runs encircling Armidale shows the full extent of tactics, conflicts and outcomes under the Robertson Land Acts.

222 MAP 8.1

Saumarez Run

In 1858

2 1 0 2 4 KILOMETRES

1

ARMIDALE

ARMIDALE

THE SAUMAREZ RESERVE L__ • I HEADSTATION Thomas Lagoon ,, • I , r The Little Lagoon e ---..- - i Slatherom Swamp - c4-?: _J Outstation • —r-- -1 ■1 I URALLA I f-t A 1 cA lambing Gully 7/PPE RA .;;,.. , Outstation 1 /---1 ----GuL—LY GOLD FIELDI ilf RESERVE I RESERVE I The Barley •s, e Range Outstation SI ° Field Lagoon I a 6: m ov),,,, URAL LAA I Outstation •

AUSTRALASIAN CARTOGRAPHICS ARMIDALE 2 2 3 Tilbuster was the first station to feel the pressure of outside encroachment when the town of Armidale was formed in 1839 and grew within the southern boundary of the run until a formal town was surveyed in 1849. Under the provisions of the 1847 Order-in- Council, the very legislation which had granted the squatters some security of tenure in the form of fourteen year leases, the government could withdraw lands from the squatting leaseholds for the purposes of village or town reserves. By the mid 1850s the Armidale Reserve had cut a swathe of land from the southern one third of Tilbuster, as well as from the central eastern part of Saumarez and from the northern plains of Gostwyck. On the Rocky River, the far southern boundary of Saumarez, gold had been discovered in 1852 and a substantial Goldfield Reserve had been established along the river and around the village of Uralla (see map 8.1). From the middle of 1856, fertile lands within the Armidale Reserve were subdivided and put up for sale at auction and by 1861 farming communities at both Saumarez Ponds and at Kellys Plains were well established. These communities saw their future in wheat. They moved into the crop at the very time it was blighted in the Hunter Valley and looked forward confidently to a rapid expansion of demand for wheat in an increasing market.

Well before the passage of the Robertson Land Acts in 1861 the squatters in the vicinity of Armidale had begun to defend their runs. The 1847 Order-in-Council had made provision for the squatters to claim extensive pre-emptive rights to select blocks of land on their runs. As early as 1852 Henry Dangar had purchased the head station block on Gostwyck under the pre-emptive right provisions and by the time of his death in 1861 he had secured some 4,300 acres by the same manner. 11Creek frontages were taken up as were open grazing lands around back country waterholes. On neighbouring Saumarez the process was more modest. Elizabeth Sophia Dumaresq, widow of Colonel Henry Dumaresq, had consolidated a few small portions of freehold land before selling her run to Henry Arding Thomas in 1857. It was up to her successor to continue the process but bureaucratic delay ensured that he was not able to make full use of the pre-emptive right provisions under the 1847 Order-in-Council.

1 1 John Ferry, Henry and Grace Dangar and the Gostwyck Estate, ADHSJ, No. 31, April, 1988, pp.99-101. 224 Thus several years before the introduction of the Robertson Land Acts both Saumarez and Gostwyck had come under pressure from small farmers wishing to secure freehold farms on the rich alluvial lands along Saumarez Creek. In the same period the squatters had commenced a strategic defence of their runs. Although the Robertson Land Acts came into force on 1 January 1862, they recognised the fourteen year leases established by the previous legislation and the fact that these leases were not due to expire until 1 January 1866. Thus there was a four year period between the introduction of the Robertson Land Acts and the throwing open of the pastoral runs to free selection. In the meantime the lands which were available were those Crown Lands unclaimed by any pastoral lessee including the lands within town and village reserves. It was this fact which determined the strategies of both squatters and selectors on the Saumarez and Gostwyck runs.

The Robertson Land Acts provided two main methods of purchasing Crown Lands. The first and best known provision allowed any person to select up to 320 acres of land, roughly mark out its borders and register the selection in anticipation of a proper survey some time later. The selector had to pay a deposit of 25 per cent on the selection and then, to secure occupational right, he had to reside on the selection and improve it through fencing, clearing, building and cultivation to the extent of a further £1 per acre. The remainder of the purchase money was to be paid off over time. However the legislation also allowed for sale of Crown Land at auction at the long established minimum upset price of £1 per acre. As a result of an auction sale all monies had to be in the hands of the Treasury within three months. Obviously auction sales suited the men of capital while conditional purchases suited those of more modest means wanting to get a start on the land.

The second of the Robertson Land Acts continued the previous provision whereby land could be withdrawn from the old runs and reserved for sale at auction. 12 Under this enabling clause, the Armidale and Uralla reserves were greatly extended in April 1862 until fully half of Saumarez Run and a third of Gostwyck was

12 An Act for regulating the Occupation of Crown Lands, Clause 5, T h e Public and General Statutes of New South Wales From 16 Victoriae to 25 Victoriae inclusive (1852-1862), Sydney, 1862, p.3385. 225 withdrawn to allow for sale at auction. This same reserved land was also thrown open to free selection from the moment the extended reserve boundaries were notified in the Government Gazette. Thus the extension of the Armidale Reserve allowed large tracts of Saumarez and Gostwyck land to go to auction or be claimed as conditional purchases several years before they would otherwise have been available. This provision was obviously of benefit to potential free selectors as is evident by the fact that the Armidale and Uralla Reserves were extended in 1862 following a petition from residents of Rocky River and Uralla. 13 But, despite Henry Arding Thomass complaint in 1874 that half of his run had been taken as a reserve, the reserve provision was also of benefit to squatters if they could bring the land, formerly a part of their runs, to auction sale. Auction sale gave advantage to capital and both Grace Dangar, Henry Dangars widow, and Henry Arding Thomas had ample reserves of capital upon which to draw.

Not surprisingly, both squatters pressed the local surveyors throughout 1862 and 1863 to measure land for sale within the Armidale Reserve. The official correspondence urging the survey of such land throws some light on the motives behind the administration of the Robertson Land Acts in their earliest phase of operation. In May 1863 Albert Augustus Dangar, one of the youngest sons of Grace Dangar, wrote to Licensed Surveyor Hungerford requesting that former Gostwyck land be measured for sale. Hungerford in turn forwarded the letter to the Acting Surveyor General with the following marginal comment

I am aware of the facts connected with this application. I deem it my duty to state that, unless the land is laid out soon and put up to auction a portion or two of it may be selected which will in all probability destroy the value of the whole block to the present applicant and, as Mr. Dangar is prepared to buy the whole — good and bad — I would consider it better to let him have it than to chance selling two or three hundred acres to conditional purchasers. 1 4

13 Petition from the Residents of Rocky River and Uralla to the Honorable John Robertson, Minister for Lands, presented by George Markham, 11 February, 1862 bundled with 62/8566 Surveyor Generals Letters Received, AONSW, 5/5621. 14 A. Dangar to W.H. Hungerford Esq., Surveyor, 2 May, 1863 bundled with 63/5269, Surveyor Generals Letters Received, AONSW, 5/5641. 226 Hungerford, the son of one squatter and the brother of another, was no doubt favourably disposed towards the squatting interests as was his immediate superior District Surveyor Greaves, himself a squatter. Indeed earlier in the same year a free selector at Walcha accused Hungerford of getting his instructions from the squatters to prevent selectors getting a home . 15 However, Hungerfords representation in favour of the Dangar interest met with no objection from the Surveyor Generals Office and the land was measured for sale at auction as a matter of course. Presumably Hungerfords contention that the government would gain more from auction sale than from the free selection of a few choice blocks secured a result favourable to the Dangars. The potential for Crown revenue seemed to be an important factor in the administration of the acts and this single incident supports P.N. Lambs general claim that budgetary difficulties of the period prompted Treasurers to seek a way out of their troubles by turning the Crown Lands to better account . 16 It must be remembered that an auction sale placed all the revenue from the sale in the government coffers within three months whereas a conditional purchase only required the payment of an initial 25 per cent of the purchase price, the balance to be paid at a much later date. Henry Arding Thomas, too, applied successfully for former Saumarez lands within the Armidale Reserve to be measured for auction and by December 1862 he had purchased some 1,700 acres of well watered land.17 On Gostwyck, Grace Dangar converted almost 5,000 acres to freehold title and consolidated most of the northern section of the old run, effectively blocking the small farmers at Kellys Plains from further expansion) 8

Early in 1864 the two squatters had to respond to a changing situation and their response presented the government with an unexpected outcome of the legislation. The squatter strategy and the official response illustrate the weakness of the original

15 John ODowd to the Honorable John Robertson, 7 February, 1863 bundled with 63/3569, Surveyor Generals Letters Received, AONSW, 5/5637. 16 P.N. Lamb, Crown Land Policy and Government Finance in New South Wales, 1856-1900, Australian Economic History Review, Vol. VII, No. 1, March, 1967, pp.49-50. 1 7 Result of Crown Land Sales at Armidale, 22 December 1862, Land Sales Armidale 1861 to April 1865, folios 41-42, AONSW, 5/3246. 18 Ibid., 30 December 1861, folios 1-2, 3-4, 13-14, 17-18, 19-20 and 23 January, 18 December, 1862 and 16 September, 1863. 2 27 legislation and the confusion surrounding its administration. In that year the Great North Road was re-surveyed some kilometres east of its old location, a new bridge was thrown across Saumarez Creek and a village reserve surveyed and proclaimed at the crossing. Free selector demand for land now centred on the area around the new village. Thomas applied for land in this vicinity to be measured for auction and Licensed Surveyor Hungerford completed the task in February 1864. 19 The sale of these blocks was advertised for 11 March, 1864. However, these measured portions could be conditionally purchased by free selectors prior to the advertised sale. Thomas was now to test the Robertson Land Acts to the letter in order to prevent the land falling into free selector hands.

His strategy was based upon section 20 of the Crown Land Alienation Act which stated that land conditionally purchased and forfeited through non residence may then be sold at auction . Thomas was also aware of a circular from the Surveyor General to Crown Land agents which clarified section 20 by stating that forfeited conditional purchases could not be re-selected by another party and `will be brought to sale at auction. 20 The act was equivocal, the circular was not.

Before the land measured by Surveyor Hungerford was to be sold at auction, Thomas, acting as agent for his wife and children, selected in their names a number of measured portions of land as well as nearby blocks of unsurveyed land thus forestalling any potential free selector. 21 During the course of the next three months other members of Thomass family selected further land in the vicinity as did several members of a family named Powers who, it is reasonable to assume, were employees of Thomas. All these free selections were subsequently forfeited through failure to fulfil the residence requirements 22 and it was the applicants themselves

19 Plan of Portions in the Parishes of Dangarsleigh, Arding, Butler and Saumarez, County of Sandon, February, 1864, AONSW, Map 10308. 2 0 Crown Lands (Re-selection of Forfeited Selections), Return to an Order, VP, 1865-6 (3 Vols), Vol. III, Sydney, 1866, p.70. 21 Conditional Purchase Register, Armidale, U.N.E. Archives, S41. 2 2 Schedule: Conditional Purchases of H.A. Thomas as agent for the following parties, bundled with 64/12624, Surveyor General s Letters Received, AONSW, 5/5687. 2 2 8 who requested forfeiture. 23 Thomas now demanded that these conditional purchases which he and his family and employees had deliberately forfeited, be brought to auction.24

Precisely the same tactic was used on Gostwyck. Dangars manager, A.H. Palmer, had formally requested the measurement for sale at auction of lands east of Saumarez Creek and south of the Armidale Reserve. 25 This land was outside the reserve and within the leased area of Gostwyck and technically not available for sale. The government was presented with a clear demand for land all of which was likely to be sold if the technical difficulty could be overcome. In this instance, the District Surveyor, W.A.B. Greaves, merely presented the facts to the Acting Surveyor General without recommendation and requested instructions on how to act. 26 The reply instructed Greaves to cause the land applied for to be measured in portions of suitable areas and propose boundaries for the extension of the Armidale Reserve to include the measurements. 27 Such extensions of town reserves into areas well beyond the actual town were matters of expediency. Once again the potential for revenue seemed to be crucial in the routine administration of the acts.

The areas of land were duly measured for auction and the technical requirement of an extension of the Armidale Reserve was gazetted on 26 April, 1864. 28 The sale of the measured portions was scheduled for 13, 14 and 15 June, 1864 some six weeks after the gazetting of the reserve extension. This hiatus presented Grace Dangar with the same problem as had been faced by her neighbour, Henry Arding Thomas, on Saumarez a few weeks earlier. There was a free selector demand for the very land she wished to

23 District Surveyor W.A.B. Greaves to the Surveyor-General, 16 July 1864 (and marginal comments) 64/8197, Surveyor Generals Letters Received, AONSW, 5/5679. 24 H.A. Thomas Esq. to the Secretary for Lands, 2 September, 1865 in Crown Lands (Re-selection of Forfeited Selections), op.cit., p.73. 25 A.H. Palmer to District Surveyor Greaves, 18 October, 1862, bundled with 63/7220, Surveyor Generals Letters Received, AONSW, 5/5646. 26 Mr. District Surveyor Greaves to the Acting Surveyor General, 28 June, 1863, ibid. 27 W.R. Davidson, Acting Surveyor General to W.A.B. Greaves, District Surveyor, 24 June, 1863, Surveyor Generals Copies of Letters sent to Surveyors, District Surveyors and Licensed Surveyors, 19 June, 1863 - 2 March, 1864, folio 16, AONSW, 4/5450. 28 NSWGG, No. 87, Tuesday, 26 April, 1864, p.992. 2 2 9 purchase at auction. However, she had Thomass successful course of action to guide her.

On 28 April, 1864 the first Land Office day after the gazetting of the new Armidale Reserve boundaries Dangars sons, William John Dangar, Henry Cary Dangar and Francis John Dangar; her daughter, Florence Blanche Dangar; her brother-in-law, Richard Cary Dangar and his daughter, Lucy (both resident in England); her business partner, James Gilchrist; and Gostwyck employees, John Gill and Alfred Ryder Bennett all applied for conditional purchases through Albert Augustus Dangar who acted as their agent. 29 None of these free selectors could possibly fulfil the residence requirements of their conditional purchases. However their swift action had blocked other potential free selectors. Once again the `bogus selectors themselves requested that their own conditional purchases be forfeited and brought to auction.

This strategy on the part of Thomas and Dangar was certainly an unexpected outcome for which the government was not prepared. The Armidale Express referred to much indignation being expressed in Armidale on the matter and demanded that

diligent enquiry should be made into all the circumstances connected with the wholesale violations of the spirit of the Land Act, and if it be found possible to cancel sham applications it should forthwith be done. 3 u

What annoyed bona fide selectors was the fact that the Gazette notifying the extension of the Armidale Reserve did not arrive in Armidale until several days after its publication in Sydney. Albert Augustus Dangar obviously received the information by telegram from Sydney and acted promptly before even the Land Agent in Armidale knew that the reserve extension had been gazetted. The bureaucrats simply had not taken into consideration the time lag between publication of a gazette in Sydney and its arrival in remote Armidale.

As urged by the Armidale Express, diligent enquiries were indeed made. Robert Forster, member of Parliament for New

2 9 Armidale Conditional Purchase Register, numbers 84-89 and 91, 92 and 94, U.N.E. Archives, S41. 3 0 AE, 7 May, 1864. 2 3 0 England wrote to the Minister for Lands in July 1864, bringing to his attention the plan now being attempted to defeat the Provisions of the Crown Lands Alienation Act by the Squatters in the New England District . 31 Forster sought clarification as to whether the forfeited selections had to be brought to auction or whether they could be conditionally purchased by another party. The result of this request indicated that the government was acting neither for the squatters nor the selectors but was rather attempting to respond in an ad hoc manner to an unforeseen contingency. The matter was referred to the Crown Solicitor for advice and he gave the opinion that the act was permissive (` may ) not mandatory

This opinion favoured the selectors who could now claim the land forfeited on both Saumarez and Gostwyck under the usual free selection provisions. However, the Crown Solicitors opinion was challenged by Henry Arding Thomas who had the matter referred to Parliament. Thomas maintained that the circular to Land Agents specifically stating that forfeited selections would be brought to auction had been displayed in the Land Office in Armidale for perusal. To Thomas, this was an unequivocal statement of the governments intentions which had been publicly advertised. Thomas protest was upheld by Parliament and ultimately the forfeited selections were deemed to be unclaimable until they could be brought to auction. Not surprisingly, when the forfeited selections, totalling some 1,931 acres on Saumarez and 1,900 acres on Gostwyck, were brought to auction in 1865 Henry Arding Thomas and Grace Dangar purchased them all.

The strategy of requesting extensions of the Armidale Reserve and then purchasing at auction the lands thus made available continued throughout the mid to late 1860s. As well, Dangar and Thomas made use of the provision in the Robertson Land Acts for the purchase, without competition, of Crown Lands upon which

31 Robert Forster M.P., Member for New England, to the Honorable, the Minister for Lands, 12 July, 1864, bundled with 64/3687, Surveyor Generals Letters Received, AONSW, 5/5670. 3 2 John Williams, Crown Solicitor to the Under-secretary for Lands, 16 June, 1865, Crown Lands (Re-selection of Forfeited Selections), op.eit., p.71. 231 MAP 8.2

ARMIDALE

PARISH of ARMIDALE 3 APPROXIMATE BOUNDARY SAUMAREZ GOSTWYCK RUN HOMESTEAD 2

F.77=71 PARISH PRE- EMPTIVE of (-) RIGHT 0 SAUMAREZ J ( IMPROVEMENT KELLYS PLAINS PURCHASE CASTLEDOYLE OUTSTATION

VV V V V PURCHASE OF VV V V V PARISH V st V V V FORFEITED CP s of TIVERTON

PURCHASE AT • BY AUCTION

NOVA ZEMBLA MOUNT LONSDALE OUTSTATION I L OUTSTATION URALLA /-

PARISH FALLS PARISH El of eters of GOSTWICK URALLA PARISH of MIHI

PLAINS THE GOSTWYCK STATION, - HOMESTEAD METHOD OF PURCHASE

/ BY

/ HENRY AND GRACE DANGAR

PARISH / 1852 -1869 of SALISBURY / KILOMETRES 2 1 0 2 4 KILOMETRES 232 MAP 8.3

Method of Freehold Aquisition on EVERSLEIGH RUN Saumarez SUBDIVISION

1863 1858 — 1870

2 2 4

KILOMETRES

O

J r PARISH LINDSAY RUN , I of BUTLER SUBDIVISION \I N A \ ARMIDALE 1865 1---

N\ N WITHIN ARMIDALE RESERVE SOLD OFF TO SMALL HOLDINGS FROM 1857 PARISH of ELTON SAUMAREZ HEAD STATION to o o 0°0 ° o PURCHASED BY PRE-EMPTIVE V RIGHT 0

VVVV IMPROVEMENT VV V V V V PURCHASES PARISH of ARDING

PARISH of DANGARSLEIGH WITHIN GOLDFIELD

RESERVE

PURCHASE OF FORFEITED CPs AFTER SALE AT AUCTION 1,

yP PURCHASE DIRECTLY BY SY A SALE AT AUCTION N

AUSTRALASIAN CARTOGRAPHICS ARMIDALE 2 3 3 improvements had been effected. Thus by the end of the first decade of the Robertson Land Acts, Grace Dangar had secured a freehold estate on Gostwyck of some 28,500 acres while the neighbouring Saumarez freehold amounted to approximately 14,000 acres. Eighty two per cent of all this land had been alienated under the auction sale provisions of the new acts. (See Maps 8.2 and 8.3)

If Saumarez and Gostwyck showed the relative success of freehold consolidation of old runs by the respective squatters, the story of the neighbouring Tilbuster Run shows what could happen when the squatter had neither the means nor the resolve to defend his run.

Captain William Dumaresq, brother of Colonel Henry Dumaresq the first licensee of Saumarez, had taken up Tilbuster in the mid 1830s from a base in the Hunter Valley where he had sizeable estates. By 1859 Dumaresq also held Glen Innes run where his son, William Alexander Dumaresq, was ultimately to establish himself as a resident squatter. It is difficult to determine precisely the family strategies in relation to their properties but Tilbuster did not figure prominently. The value of the run had been reduced considerably by the survey of the town of Armidale and its adjacent reserve which took in almost half of the old run. But as early as 1847 Dumaresq had allowed his resident manager Joseph Daly to take out his own squatting licence for a ten thousand acre run in the northern part of Tilbuster. 33 By 1859 Dumaresq was actually leasing his run to his former overseer William Maister who paid an annual rental of £1,850. 34 Tilbuster was regarded as an investment rather than an estate upon which sons or daughters could establish themselves in the future.

Little was done by Dumaresq to defend Tilbuster. Under the pre-emptive right provisions of the 1847 Order-in-Council two

3 3 Copies of Papers Received from the Lessee of Springmount , Lands Department, Occupations Branch, Pastoral Holding File No. 566, Eastern Division, Tilbuster AONSW, 3/1234. 34 Affidavit of William Dumaresq, 1 September, 1865 and Affidavit of Robert Payne, 27 December, 1865, Supreme Court in Equity, Case Papers, Case 2022, Moore and Others v. Cheesbrough and Another, AONSW, 3/3794. 2 3 4 blocks of land were purchased in 1857 securing the head station.35 A few other blocks were purchased by pre-emptive right provisions of the Robertson Land Acts. However, between 1862 and the end of 1869, 53 conditional purchases in 32 different family names were taken up on Tilbuster. All of these were bona fide selectors. None acted as a dummy for Dumaresq and Dumaresq made no purchases at auction. In 1885 when a comprehensive review of all squatting runs was undertaken in New South Wales, Tilbuster consisted of 2,200 acres freehold and 2,261 acres of conditional purchase, 36 most of this latter being consolidated by Dumaresqs successors. This was far short of the original 65,000 acre run. Therefore, without effective competition from the squatter, the Tilbuster example shows the effect of unhindered free selection.

The case studies to this point have centred on the runs bordering the town of Armidale where, as a result of the existence of a large town reserve, pressure from free selectors occurred in the first four years of the operation of the Robertson Land Acts. After 1 January 1866 all the old squatting runs were thrown open to selection and from that date the full operation of the acts became evident. But now the focus switched from Saumarez, Gostwyck and Tilbuster, where the struggle had been played out, to adjoining runs which had been previously unaffected because they were outside the Armidale Reserve.

The final two case studies, Eversleigh and Gyra or Gara, show the tactics used by squatters to defend their runs through the use of dummying. On Eversleigh the strategy was quite blatant. On Gyra or Gara dummying was more subtle especially after 1875 when the strategy was declared a misdemeanour and outlawed by the first successful amendment to the Robertson Land Acts.

Eversleigh was originally part of the Saumarez Run, taking in all the portion of that run to the north and west of the town of Armidale. It had been created in 1863 when Henry Arding Thomas subdivided Saumarez, selling the grazing rights of Eversleigh to his

3 5 Land purchased under Pre-emptive Right, Register of Land Purchases, folios 57/44 and 57/45, 4 August, 1857, AONSW, 7/962. 3 6 Application for a Pastoral Lease, Pastoral Holding File, Tilbuster. 2 3 5 brother-in-law, Algernon H. Belfield. 37 In order to go onto the land, Belfield needed financial partners. His backing came from two clergymen, Rev. Septimus Hungerford, the Anglican Vicar of Armidale and Bishop Tyrrell of Newcastle. Tyrrell later dropped out of the partnership but Hungerford, the son of Captain Emanuel Hungerford a squatter on the Liverpool Plains and brother of Licensed Surveyor William Hungerford of New England, remained with Belfield who was the active partner. Theirs was a small operation centred on one run, but it was enduring. Descendants of Algernon H. Belfield still live on Eversleigh land.

Free selection began on the southern boundary of Eversleigh in 1866 when bona fide selectors such as James L. Mitchell and John Howe secured small farms. By 1885 Mitchell had consolidated a moderately large sheep station of 2,300 acres while John Howe was farming on 550 acres. 38 However little real encroachment had occurred by July 1871 when Belfield decided to act to defend his run. Belfield relied almost entirely on the process of dummying and when a comprehensive review of the Eversleigh holdings was undertaken in 1885 under the requirements of the Crown Lands Act of the previous year, Belfield had secured some 8,300 acres by this strategy. 3 9

Before the 1875 amendment to the Robertson Land Acts made dummying illegal, the procedure was quite simple. One example will suffice by way of illustration. In September 1871 Joseph Edmonds, an illiterate teamster in the employ of A.H. Belfield40 selected 80 acres at Sawpit Gully on Eversleigh Run. Belfield acted as agent for this selection. Within nine months of this original selection Edmonds selected another 200 acres as additional conditional purchases. A plan of the portion was drawn up by a local surveyor in April 1872 and two other Belfield employees, who were themselves to act as dummies, testified that Edmonds lived on

3 7 Passport Book, New England (containing summaries of correspondence received by the Commissioner of Crown Lands) folios 48-50, AONSW, 4/5501. 3 8 Annual report of the Inspector of Stock and Brands, op. cit., p.583. 3 9 Application for a Pastoral Lease, Lands Department, Occupation Branch, Pastoral Holding File No. 242, Eversleigh, AONSW, 3/1206.. 4 0 Ross Edmonds, From Somerset to Saumarez: A history of three generations of the Edmonds family, published by the author, May, 1988, p.44. 2 3 6 his selection. Inspector of Conditional Purchases, Frederick Trollope, son of the author Anthony Trollope, visited the selection shortly afterwards and verified that Edmonds was resident and that some improvements had been effected. In October 1874, just on three years after the selections were made, Edmonds declared that all residence and improvement conditions had been fulfilled and the Land Agent in Armidale certified the declaration. Eighteen months later Edmonds transferred all the land to Algernon H. Belfield.41

During the period 1871 to 1875 twenty other employees acted as dummies for Belfield selecting thousands of acres of Eversleigh land . 42 Generally the strategy worked smoothly. However one dummy selector, Thomas Smith, died suddenly in the bush only ten months after selecting. 43 In this case Belfield made a claim against the intestate estate maintaining that he had loaned Smith the £80 deposit on his 320 acre selection and thereby Belfield was able to secure the administration of the deceased estate. 44 Belfield put his nominee on the land to fulfil the residence conditions and in due course the land was transferred to him.

Belfields strategy was not to change after the passing of the 1875 amendments outlawing dummying. In fact it was to become more blatant. In March 1878 Belfield organised another large selection of land through dummies. An outraged free selector described the openness of Belfields breach of the law.

It is now quite a common thing to see Squatters bring in their dummies every Land Office day and shepherd them until they see the deposit paid .... Only fancy a thoroughly educated man sending his poor, ignorant and timid servants into a land office with a lie

41 Various documents, Lands Department, Conditional Sales Correspondence File, 87.1429 Cor., AONSW, 10/20789. 4 2 Conditional Purchase Registers (various) for Conditional Purchases 71/2950-51; 71/3448-51; 71/3455-58; 71/3462; 71/3584-91; 71/3624-29; 71/3694-97; 71/3460; 72/1324; 72/2596-99; 72/5617-18; 72/6696; 72/2705; 73/3581; 74/11772-74. 4 3 W. Martin to the Hon. J. Copeland, 8 September, 1887, Lands Department, Conditional Sales Correspondence Branch, File 93/4147 Cor., AONSW, 10/20914. 44 Letters of Administration in the Interstate Estate of Thomas Smith, 11 December, 1874, Supreme Court, Ecclesiastical Jurisdiction, Series 2, Number 1074, AONSW, 17/1769. 2 3 7 in their mouths, and a falsehood upon their lips, to commit both falsehood and perjury, to serve his own selfish purpose! 4 5

A meeting of the Farmers and Free Selectors Association in Armidale raised the issue of dummying publicly 46 and the President of that association wrote to the Minister for Lands specifically complaining of dummying on Eversleigh.47

An investigation was held into at least one 320 acre selection made on Eversleigh in March, 1878. The matter came before the Local Land Board seven years later when the board concluded that

The whole evidence points to but one conclusion viz that the conditional purchaser was an agent or dummy for the Lessee of the run. He was in the employment as shepherd when he took up the selection and continued so during the whole time in same capacity. The land was paid for by Mr. Belfields (the Lessees) Cheque and altho it is denied by the selector that the applications to take up the land are in the writing of Mr. Belfield it is within our knowledge that the writing of the description LI Mr. Belfields. 4 8

The board decided unanimously that the conditional purchase be forfeited. Belfield was not prosecuted for a misdemeanour as the law allowed. In fact his agents, Wilson and Rankin of Sydney, actually disputed the decision of the Local Land Board in a letter to the Chief Commissioner of Conditional Sales. 49 Ultimately Belfield was able to acquire the land he had forfeited. In 1886, only a matter of months after the forfeiture of the land, Alexander McDonald, another of Belfields dummies, selected the same portion. This time a formal mortgage was effected between McDonald and Belfield and under the terms of the mortgage McDonald transferred the land to Belfield in 1891. The local Land Board accepted this arrangement.50

4 5 Correspondence: The Land Law the only Law which is Violated with Impunity, AE, 26 April, 1878, p.6. 46 Loc cit. 4 7 AE, 21 June, 1878, p.4. 4 8 Decision of Local Land Board, Lands Department Conditional Sales Departmental Branch, File 92/2218, AONSW, 10/17841. 4 9 Wilson and Rankin to the Chief Commissioner of Conditional Sales, 19 May, 1885, Lands Department, Conditional Sales Departmental Branch, File 92/2218, AONSW, 10/17841. 5 0 Decision of Local Land Board, 2 September, 1891 and Caption to Deposition of Witnesses, Lands Department, Conditional Sales Departmental Branch, File 92/2218, AONSW, 10/17841. 2 3 8 On the Gyra or Gara Run, a clearer picture emerges of how dummying was effected and why it remained a successful strategy. The run had been formed in the 1860s following a legal dispute between the lessees of the old Gara Run and the old Gyra Run. The compromise was a new run with the unusual and confusing name of Gyra or Gara. The run, just to the east of Armidale, but largely beyond the Armidale Reserve, had a series of owners who did little to defend their land. However, beginning in 1877, the lessee, James Glass, began the process of consolidating his run. His main tactic was dummying despite its illegality and its status as a misdemeanour carrying a two year gaol sentence. There were at least eight separate Land Board inquiries on suspicious conditional purchases totalling over 4,000 acres on Gyra or Gara. In each case, dummying was obvious, in no case was there a conviction or even a successful recommendation for forfeiture.

Glass was a little more subtle than Belfield on Eversleigh but his tactic was basically the same. The difference was that Glass used two dummies within the first three years after a selection had been made. One dummy would make the original selection, and later transfer to the other dummy who would claim to have fulfilled the residence requirements. By the time an inquiry was held, invariably, one or both selectors had left the district after transferring the selection to Glass. The only person who could give evidence as to the bona fide residence of these dummies on their selection was Glass overseer.

Inquiries were usually undertaken when the routine report of the local Inspector of Conditional Purchases, William Harper, raised doubts as to the genuineness of the selection. For instance on one series of CPs and additional CPs totalling 634 acres, Harper reported no sign of recent residence, only a dilapidated hut which had not been occupied for some time. 5 1 Harper was fully aware that this was a case of dummying and stated that the land had transferred from two bogus selectors to the lessee. 5 2 Sydney Blythe, the resident commissioner, took evidence at a subsequent court of

5 1 Report by William Harper, Lands Department, Conditional Sales Departmental Branch, File 04/6994 Dep., AONSW, 10/19477. 5 2 Report of Inquiry held at Armidale (same file as above). 2 3 9 enquiry. His report had to weigh suspicion against provable evidence. His concluding remarks reflect the frustration.

This may be taken as a sample of the selections on Gara it is most difficult to disprove statements made or to prove that from first to last the selectors were merely acting as Agents for the Lessee altho the surroundings lead to a very grave suspicion that such is the case:— I can only take the evidence as sworn before me .... 5 3

On this basis the conditional purchase, by then in the hands of James Glass, was passed.

Blythe passed a considerable number of suspicious conditional purchases with seeming reluctance. Blythe was not simply acting in the interests of squatters. On one occasion he felt he did have sufficient evidence to have a dummy selection declared forfeit and so recommended in this report. However, his superiors in Sydney overturned his recommendation on the usual basis expressed by the Chief Commissioner as follows

I think I am compelled to pass this CP although I am of opinion that the selectors were dummies for Glass, but there is not sufficient evidence for proceeding under the 9th section (of the amendment Act). 5 4

The law indeed was an ass. One of the key proscriptions of the 1875 amendment was simply and successfully ignored.

There seem to have been few successful attempts to prosecute for dummying and, when a thorough investigation was undertaken it was usually the result of a public outcry. But in this regard many a genuine selector was circumspect. While ever maximum acreages for selections were low, as indeed they were throughout the period of the Robertson Land Acts, selectors, too, would resort to dummying. Even for those who were motivated by a sense of righteous mission to expose dummying, it was difficult to know who was selecting what land and when.

One attempt at exposing dummying was made against James Glass himself. The run concerned was not Gyra or Gara but Glass other property, Millers Creek, in the Murrurundi district. The

53 Loc cit. 5 4 Marginal notation, Decision of Local Land Board, Lands Department, Conditional Sales Branch, File 05/20821, AONSW, 10/19699. 2 4 0 complainant was a selector whose name had allegedly been used by Glass as a dummy without the selectors knowledge. There was sufficient outcry on this issue to bring the matter before a Select Committee of parliament. 55 Although Millers Creek is outside New England a few useful points can be made about this enquiry. Some of the witnesses who were free selectors on Millers Creek bore the same names as the phantom dummies on Gyra or Gara.56 The local inspector of conditional purchases at Murrurundi who approved an obviously bogus selection suffered selective memory loss before the committee and confessed to an incompetence nothing short of dim- wi tted . 57 He was obviously corrupt. The Chief Commissioner of Conditional Purchases, Abram Orpen Moriarty, a former Commissioner of Crown Lands based in Armidale, vigorously denied that there was a reluctance amongst his officials to investigate cases of suspected dummying nor was there any victimisation of junior officers who raised such irksome issues . 58 Perhaps not all were convinced. Ultimately nothing came of the parliamentary investigation. James Glass died in 1881, his runs heavily mortgaged to the Mercantile Bank. In effect he died broke, 59 one of the squatter victims depicted by Morris and Ranken. The bank took over Gyra or Gara retaining Glasss son as manager for many years. There was little point in proceeding with the parliamentary enquiry. The guilty party was beyond reproach.

The above case studies highlight the squatters defence of their runs. Yet in this same area free selection worked. Some of the best agricultural lands near Armidale were secured by small farmers intent on crop cultivation especially on the old Saumarez Run in particular and to a lesser extent on Gostwyck. Much of Tilbuster

5 5 Progress Report from the Select Committee on Conditional Purchase on Millers Creek Run, V&P, 1883-4 (11 Vols), Vol. III, p.627 et passim. 5 6 William Clay gave evidence at the enquiry. A William Clay and an Isabella Clay both acted as dummies on Gyra or Gara. 5 7 Evidence of Thomas Argent, Select Committee on Conditional Purchase on Millers Creek Run, op. cit., pp.649-651. 5 8 Evidence of Abram Orpen Moriarty, ibid, pp.651-653. 5 9 Assets were valued at £39,545 including Gyra or Gara Station and Millers Creek Station. Liabilities were £43,780 including very large debts to the Mercantile Bank, to the executors of a former neighbouring squatter and to his mother, herself a squatter. See Affidavit under the Stamp Act, Stamp Duties Office - Death Duties Branch, Deceased Estate File Z1406, AONSW, 20/6978.

241 MAP 8.4

FREE SELECTIONS VICINITY OF ARMIDALE 1862-1870

• 2 0 2 4 6 8 10 kilometres

EVERSLEIGHu I 11

I

fi

ki c] SALTMAREZ ■ i ( L • 1 ,--- —11 . c.—N r I r \ t, 1 ,... 1W Vt,. 3(-_, II URALLA ,,,,) L. c,-P— - — GOSTWYCK ) I1 - 7 .1"— ■) 1 i ® ci -re • f 1 i ° .f B II . am ri of 0 • - m ENMORE \ j • ( 0 ,-,---\ Ill i? 1 .5—s l ■14 I 1,—.11 3 El = LZ2 MIHI CREEK ( ,..-2 1 i ® -----) i ") / "-.-1.--) 1., "ISALISBURY .....,,,____, ,..) H 1 11— , r ,..../ Li .---j I ------Boundary of County of Sandon ------Boundary of reserve from conditional purchase on account of population. _1 1 Boundary of the Armidale and Walla reserves 1862, (lands within open to free selection from 1 January 1862)

Run boundaries outside the reserves,(lands outside reserves not open to free selection until 1 January 1866)

Free selections taken up 1862-1865 inclusive.

Free selections taken up 1866-1870 inclusive. 242 had been turned into small grazing properties as had Eversleigh and parts of Gyra or Gara. Between 1862 and 1869 inclusive, the first eight years of operation of the Robertson Land Acts, some 9,000 acres were purchased conditionally on Saumarez alone by bona fide free selectors60 (see Map 8.4). Only a few hundred acres were ever to revert to Thomass successors, F.J. and J.C. White.

Despite the many deserved accolades at Thomass farewell dinner, free selections and squatter purchases across Saumarez and Gostwyck in the early and mid 1860s had not occurred without some clashes. Thomas, making a virtue of necessity, was quite happy to proclaim his willingness to allow some free selection on Saumarez and, indeed, to offer assistance to the farming community at Saumarez Ponds. But he had clearly in mind a belt of land south and southwest of the homestead and along the Great North Road which was to become the Saumarez freehold. Selectors who tried to encroach on this area were in for a fight.

Thomas had a political mind and, had his health been better, many claimed he would have dominated the political scene in New England. 61 Be that as it may, he had an insight into the ways of bureaucracy and was always careful to cultivate the friendship of District Surveyors and their employees as well as at least one solicitor from Armidale. He was also well advised by his major solicitors, Huw Walker Co., from Maitland. Most of his disputes were with individual selectors. Most of his victories were quietly achieved by the well placed letter through the right channels. 6 2 But when necessary, as was shown earlier, Thomas was prepared to take a dispute to the bar of Parliament.

Nonetheless the tactics used by Thomas and Dangar engendered some resentment amongst the small farming communities, especially at Kellys Plains. In July 1868, Grace Dangar had written to the Minister for Lands requesting the closure and

60 Armidale Conditional Purchase Registers. 61 The Late Mr Henry Arding Thomas, AE, 11 July, 1884. 6 2 H. A. Thomas to the Honourable, the Minister for Lands, 9 January, 1864, Surveyor Generals Letters received file 64/1584, AONSW, 5/5666; and H.A. Thomas to the Honorable the Minister for Lands, 8 August, 1867, Lands Department, Alienations Branch, Letters Received, file 67/6514, AONSW, 10/3486. 2 4 3 sale to her of all unnecessary roads on her Gostwyck estate. 63 This was not an unusual practice and was covered by the provisions of the Robertson Land Acts. When surveys were made, surveyors had to ensure that each portion of land had access to a public road and so a maze of minor roads was built into each survey. However, when many adjacent portions had been purchased by the same person, there was no need for these minor roads. In fact they were a nuisance, since they remained publicly owned ribbons of land across privately owned paddocks and made fencing extremely difficult.

Grace Dangars application to purchase the unnecessary roads was published in the Government Gazette in 1873, in accordance with law. 64 There was an immediate protest from residents of Armidale and Kellys Plains who sent a petition to the Minister for Lands objecting to the road closures. 65 The petition included the names of almost all the small farmers at Kellys Plains, with the notable exception of the largest farmer in the area, Robert Issel Perrott. The petition also contained the names of six aldermen of Armidale Municipal Council, Walter Craigie, the editor of the Armidale Express, the Vincent brothers who published the rival Armidale Chronicle, and a number of retailers and tradesmen in the town. It is hard to see how the townsmen would be adversely affected by the closure of minor unformed roads ten miles south of Armidale, but no doubt they were showing their solidarity with the selectors in opposing the Dangars. An investigation of the objections by District Surveyor William A.B. Greaves found that the petition was initiated by a free selector named Samuel Munsie, who, it was claimed, was motivated in his opposition on account of some quarrel when he was a tenant of the Dangars. Greaves further claimed that most of the petitioners questioned by him were unaware of the whereabouts of the roads in question. 66 On the strength of Greavess investigation the petition was dismissed and the roads duly alienated in 1881.

6 3 Grace Dangar to the Honourable the Minister for Lands, 18 July, 1868, Lands Department, Miscellaneous Branch, file 81/9960 - 81/9990, AONSW, 2/1260. 6 4 NSWGG, No 287, Friday 5 December, 1873, p.3402. 6 5 Petition containing 69 signatures to the Minister for Lands, 5 January, 1874, Lands Department, Miscellaneous Branch, file 81/9960-90, AONSW, 2/1260. 6 6 W.A.B. Greaves, Blank cover reply, 5 September, 1874, same file as above. 244 A request in 1870 from Henry Arding Thomas to close roads on Saumarez met similar opposition, 67 although there were far fewer names than on the Dangar petition. These two petitions were the harbingers of a more organised opposition by free selectors. In the initial stages of free selection disputes tended to be at the individual level, and although usually resolved in favour of the squatter, the root cause of the dispute was often seen as a failure of the legislation which would in time be remedied. But, during the late 1860s the language in which free selection was discussed, changed. Disputes which had once been most commonly expressed in terms of squatters and selectors, were being described in terms of the rich man and the poor man — an incipient language of class. The rich man was becoming a term of invective, the poor man was a broader term which included not only free selectors but all struggling small businessmen. The poor man, in this context, was synonymous with the independent battler, the struggling pioneer, not the indigent underclass.

Still, throughout the 1860s and early 1870s, Armidale had no organised free selector opposition to the squatters, unlike other New England towns such as Tamworth and Inverell which had their farmers and selectors associations. 68 Armidale saw itself as different and when a travelling reporter for the Sydney Morning Herald, described Armidale in 1866, making a particular point of the failure of free selection in the area, the Armidale Express w a s outraged and published a very different account listing the achievements of a dozen notable local selectors . 69 Much of this perception of success was no doubt due to the liberal attitude taken by Thomas of Saumarez towards free selection on his run and the fact that the Dumaresqs were not defending Tilbuster run at all against free selection. Resentment had only sedimented at Kellys Plains where the Dangars had successfully blocked all selector expansion in the area (see Map 8.5). The situation changed, however, in 1873 with a major local dispute between Richard Hargrave Junior, eldest son of the squatter of Hillgrove station, and selector James Kelly.

6 7 Petition of Residents of Kellys Plains, 5 February, 1869, Lands Department, Miscellaneous Branch, file 70/116, AONSW, 2/1057. 6 8 AE, 25 November, 1873, p.4. 6 9 AE, 7 July, 1866, p.3.

245 MAP 8.5

THE PURCHASE OF LAND IN THE VICINITY OF ARMIDALE, r------17, 1 1852-1870 \ x I ,.. IL■,_.. 3 ■_____ I -

L r--1 2 0 2 4 6 8 10 kilometres

r-

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I®c? 1...... t ,..,,N. —1 1 —1 i i I-- M 4.— \ 1 I— --, I 1 ./.., ,-. ROCKY RIVER; L./ ---\ I GOLDFIELD It 1 k r RESERVE I .-,,...■ I t .i (1, 1URALLA::4 1... e..../"..--) I - i t ) I / I ,-i-, , 4 1 `...../1 1 ■ r ■ i .EN/VIORE ■ a j.,—\,..._—_, 1 I MIHI CREEK ----..,-- 7 ,__I ...= 3 () ,-, l I ,..... I Eal ( ,--,,, -----1 s I i I 1 1 SALISBURY ,,,,_(----/ r ..,1 L, ...... -- ../ ,..// ,--- i. i T as sti Li aam. --. a -1- ------Boundary of County of Sandon I I 2 1 ". 1 Freehold lands purchased by small farmers, townspeople i— and speculators. C/ a 1 i----1 / ___I I— I \. Freehold lands purchased by squatters under the ti___I I--—1 ,______, Robertson Land Acts and previous legislation. 1_, I r—la Conditionally purchased lands acquired under the —1If__i I _i Robertson Land Acts. I_ • I L___ J--. 2 4 6 Kelly had selected 214 acres on Hillgrove station and, although he had registered the selection, it had not been formally surveyed. In August 1873, Kelly was moving a flock of sheep across land he maintained was part of his selection when young Hargrave rode up, claimed that Kelly was trespassing on Hillgrove station, and impounded the sheep. Having driven the sheep about two miles towards Hillgrove headstation, Hargrave noticed that Kelly had ridden ahead of the flock and had climbed a large rock from which position he pointed a gun at Hargrave and ordered him to release the sheep. Hargrave complied but brought Kelly to court for illegally rescuing a flock of impounded sheep and for menacing him with a gun. The magistrates did not put the onus of proving the trespass on Hargrave but instead found against Kelly who was heavily fined.70

This case had all the emotional force of a rich man/poor man saga and captured the public imagination. Hargrave was the son of a wealthy squatter who was also a bank director, Justice of the Peace, former Member of the Legislative Assembly and brother of Judge John Hargrave of the newly formed Divorce Court in Sydney. Kelly was portrayed as a struggling old selector with a few hundred sheep, the result of a life time of hard work and careful saving.71 There was the deference between selector and squatter — a resonance which had carried all the way from the manor estates of England. At the height of the confrontation, the court was given a verbatim account of the conversation:

[Kelly] had a gun in his hand, and after standing at the rocks a minute or so he came close up to him, and said, Mr Hargrave, will you give up the sheep to me? He replied I will not, Kelly. 7 2

Kelly was 70 years of age, Mr Hargrave was 19. But above all, there was the verdict which, even a magistrate from Inverell maintained, was unjust and contrary to the principles of the onus of proof.73

From this incident there emerged an ad hoc committee to raise funds to pay Kellys fines and to support an appeal against the

7 0 Richard Hargrave Junior v. James Kelly, AE 30 August, 1873, p.6. 7 1 Hargrave v. Kelly, AE, 20 September, 1873, p.6. 7 2 AE 30 August, 1873, p.6. 7 3 Letter of James Williamson, AE, 20 September, 1873, p.6. 2 4 7 verdict of the local court. But more importantly the incident prompted a decision to form a Farmers and Selectors Mutual Protection Society which first met in Armidale in November 1873.74 Some of the main protagonists in the establishment of this organisation included Samuel Munsie, Thomas Baker and Alexander McMillan all of Gibbons Plains in the centre of the old Gostwyck run and Enos Scott, Thomas Franey and John Kilkelly all from the vicinity of Kellys Plains. The prominence of such men indicates that resentment towards the Dangars of Gostwyck might have been an undercurrent in the formation of this selectors union. Notable for their absence from the committee in its formative period were farmers from Saumarez Ponds by then the largest farming community in the vicinity of Armidale.

The free selectors association never flourished. Meetings were regular but attendance fluctuated. There were at times some lively debates on the need for reform of the Robertson Land Acts, and after the amendment of 1875, local selectors concentrated on effective means of countering dummying which was supposed to be illegal. In 1876 a proposal was put to the editors of the Armidale Express to publish the names of all new selectors so that any cases of suspected dummying could be brought to the attention of authorities . 75 This the editors agreed to do, but it did not alter the fact that it was still difficult to prove legally an allegation of dummying. At the height of the Eversleigh dummying case, a series of good suggestions was mooted, but each suggestion had practical difficulties. One criticism of the land laws was that no declaration as to the bona fides of a transaction was required of the selector.76 This was certainly true as the usual form required only a declaration that residence and improvement conditions had been fulfilled. But even if selectors were required to state on oath that they were not acting on behalf of another it is doubtful whether this would deter any more than a few potential dummies. Another solution proffered was to offer a reward to dummies who testified against their employers. 77 Simple though this solution may have seemed it would have led to abuse and blackmail. Nor could squatters be legally excluded from buying land selected on their

7 4 AE, 22 November, 1873, p.4. 7 5 AE, 24 November, 1876, p.6. 7 6 Farmers and Free Selectors Association, AE, 26 April, 1878, p.6. 7 7 Loc cit. 2 4 8 runs as was sometimes suggested as a solution to dummying. Such an enactment would have been easily circumvented and even if squatters could be so excluded, the bona fide selector, in many instances, would have thereby been denied the most willing, and perhaps the only future purchaser for a selection.

Ultimately the local Farmers and Free Selectors Association was ineffective. It only ever had limited support amongst free selectors partly because of the apathy of those who were doing quite well, and had no axe to grind, and partly because the very practice of dummying, which so occupied the minds of members, was not restricted to squatters. As one speaker at a Free Selectors Association meeting pointed out many selectors employed dummies to block the expansion of their neighbours, 78 and other selectors used dummying to secure properties far bigger than the maximum 640 acres allowed under the 1875 amendment to the act. For instance, on the old Tilbuster run, a selector named John McCully was able to secure by 1885 a grazing property of 6,000 acres,79 basically by the process of dummying. The loopholes in the law did not favour, unequivocally, one group against the other.

For the people of colonial Armidale, the contours of land-based power seemed to be dominated by the Robertson Land Acts, in force for over twenty years. The acts were the focus of intense debate and repeated attempts at amendment over twenty years. The importance of the acts lay in the fact that they were a focus, that they were amenable to change, that they had emerged from the heart of the political process. They were a vehicle for the allocation of Crown Lands. But the examples in this chapter show that the legislation had been drafted naively (or perhaps deliberately ambiguously). Key terms, upon which the essential meaning of the acts depended, terms such as any person, residence and improvements, were not adequately defined. A whole industry arose from the need to interpret and apply the law to real situations. Although bureaucrats never lost sight of the revenue raising potential of the Robertson Land Acts, they adopted an ad hoc approach to the administration of the legislation and

78 Meeting of the Free Selectors Association, AE, 23 June, 1876, p.6. 7 9 Indenture of Mortgage, Mary McCully to the Union Bank of Australia Ltd., 4 July, 1890, LTONSW, Old System Register, Book 488, No. 40; and Annual Report of the Inspector of Stocks and Brands, op. cit., p.585. 2 49 administrative agendas were often set by unexpected outcomes. Over the years more and more officials were appointed to try to administer the legislation particularly at the local level. Too much discretion was in the hands of local surveyors and inspectors and there was obviously room for corruption. Senior bureaucrats seemed to operate to minimise contention fearing the possibility of political investigation.

The Robertson Land Acts gave effect to the need to pass Crown Lands into private hands. This aspect of the legislation was not questioned. The private ownership of land was at the core of the ideology of capitalism. But the pressing question of who got what was determined by more solid, more permanent features of the contours of power. As land was a commodity the advantage was always with those with the means to purchase. The most successful consolidation of a pastoral estate was by the Dangar family who saw Gostwyck as an important family holding, and who had an estate of £280,000 at their disposal after the death of Henry Dangar in 1861. 80 On the other hand, Tilbuster was not defended because, as was clear from the will of William Dumaresq, it was only peripheral to family investments . 81 In terms of the inability or disinclination of some pastoralists to fully defend their runs, there was room for free selection to succeed but here again the most successful selectors, and certainly nearly all the ones listed as successes by the Armidale Express in 1866, were men of modest amounts of capital who had already invested in freehold purchases before they took up any selection.

Equally as important was the productive capacity of the land which was partly a matter of perception, partly a matter of environmental and economic reality. Throughout the period of the Robertson Land Acts, these economic and environmental factors definitely favoured the pastoralist over the agriculturalist. Farming expectations were often unreal, small farmers were often unable to capitalise on new technology and, ironically, the markets for wheat,

80 The Last Will and Testament of Henry Dangar, dated 7 February, 1852, Supreme Court of New South Wales, Ecclesiastical Jurisdiction, Series 1, Number 5050 (probate granted 6 April, 1861). 81 The Last Will and Testament of William John Dumaresq dated 19 September, 1868, Supreme Court Ecclesiastical Jurisdiction, Series 1 Number 7859 (probate granted 18 December, 1868), AONSW, 14/3425. 2 5 0 the main crop, were restricted to the pastoral areas of the state. By contrast, pastoralism was conducted on an efficient scale, was geared to an export market, and made full and profitable use of technological improvements most particularly in transport and communication.

The strategies of power centred on the legal possibilities under the Robertson Land Acts. Here access to legal advice was important. Squatters relied on metropolitan legal firms, usually well connected politically. Some firms like Wilson and Rankin, whom Belfield of Eversleigh always retained, worked almost exclusively for squatters. Free selectors were usually restricted to using local solicitors or those who set themselves up locally as free selection agents. The quality of advice was markedly different. The access to legal advice was just one example of the difference in networking where the squatter networks were usually nationally oriented, the free selector networks usually local. Even when organised it was difficult for local free selection associations to have a great impact on the working of the legislation. Even at the height of the outrage over dummying, the Armidale branch often failed to gain a quorum at their meetings. 8 2

The strategies of power gave expression to an inter-class division between the rising middling class and a middle class of pastoralists who had been established on the land for some decades. The contest was at times bitter, more so in other regions of New South Wales than in the Armidale district, but here, too, there were some sharp clashes between squatter and selector. The property-owning classes could hardly be depicted as a united block of stable interest groupings. As chapter nine will show, divisions within the urban middling class could be extremely acrimonious at times. However, despite the divisions, there were clearly evident foundations for solidarity. Property owners tended to be employers, some periodically, some permanently. Property was the basis of status and prosperity. It was often central to the planning of futures by landed families and, as will be shown in chapter ten, such families generally tried to keep property and family name linked from one generation to the next. Once the fundamental question of who should own what had been settled, as it had been

82 AE, 10 March, 1876, p.3; and 7 December, 1877, p.6 2 5 1 around Armidale by 1891, the solidarity of the property-owning classes would emerge as a social and political force.