The roots of radicalism

Review of Terry Irving, The Southern Tree of Liberty: The Democratic Movement in New South Wales Before 1856, The Federation Press, Sydney, 2006. This review first appeared in Overland No 186, Autumn 2007.

BY TOM O’LINCOLN

Let’s imagine ourselves transported back before the gold-rushes. Say to 1842-43. What’s happening in Sydney?

The colony is mired in depression. Working men raise a mass petition about unemployment, 1000 women sign a statement demanding an end to convict labour in clothes-washing, and a mob jostles the Governor. In municipal elections, voters elect six members of the radical Mutual Protection Association (MPA). MPA secretary Benjamin Sutherland, an upholsterer, launches a radical newspaper and members go out to sell it in the streets.

Society “exists and prospers by great changes,” the paper declares, “and these are never achieved except by exciting discontent.”

This is far from the conventional colonial history we’re used to. Terry Irving’s introduction tells us The Southern Tree of Liberty is “not another history of the constitutional debates … it does not follow the political contests in the Legislative Council … It pays very little attention to the men from the elites … Instead this book tells the story of the mobilisation of the working classes.” To tell this story, Irving has dug deep into the archival material and opened up a fascinating new world, crowded with earthy characters and social ferment.

The book focuses on the first wave of “free” (non-convict) working people, who provide the beginnings of an “alternative public” critical of the colony’s rulers. It traces the formation of radical networks, including a moving portrayal of the collaboration between journalist William Duncan and the “public meeting man”, agitator Henry Macdermott. These two knew how to skewer the colonial elite.

By 1842, the radicals had trounced the right in Sydney’s municipal elections, while at the same time learning from bitter experience that rich scoundrels like WC Wentworth, who claimed to befriend the people, couldn’t be trusted. Having done with Wentworth didn’t end the dilemma of class contradictions, though. As the plural term “working classes” suggests, the radicals’ direct constituency had its own ambiguities. Irving traces these tirelessly.

The MPA’s activists, as one of his many excellent tables illustrates, were mostly tradesmen, especially builders. Some were influenced by Chartism, and even by the French Revolution of 1848. Yet at the same time, for reasons partly to do with property qualifications, its elected councilors were noticeably more middle class.

In the end class confusion helped undermine the MPA. Many of its leaders, exasperated with Governor Gipps, supported a campaign against him by the squatters. With this decision William Duncan had no patience, yet his decision to support Gipps was equally fraught; it led him to argue that an enlightened autocratic Governor was better than class-ridden democracy. Confusion reigned. “Radicals were expected to decide whether they thought the Government or the ‘cormorant squatters’ were their worst enemy, when they might have been agitating to create the union of the working and middle classes”.

There was also differentiation at the base of the movement. In addition to the “constitutional radicals” such as James McEachern who still sought harmony between different social layers, and the likes of Duncan, new voices from the depths made themselves heard. In a tantalizingly brief passage Irving acquaints us with a “plebeian radicalism” more directly reflecting the interests of unskilled labourers, journey, seasonal workers and seamen -- even “the prisoners of the Crown”.

The plebeians found a voice in such papers as The True Sun and The Star and Working Man’s Guardian. The Sun considered that “the people were condemned to struggle incessantly” unheeded by their rulers, “a small number of privileged persons” of vast wealth and aristocratic instincts.

Other plebeian publications included scandal sheets retailing stories from the police courts, which “derided the police as much as the offenders”. That was a popular sentiment, often translated into action on the streets. A particularly entertaining, and analytically excellent chapter considers street riots.

I sense Terry Irving likes writing about riots; the quality of his style clearly lifts at this point, and I notice the index has eleven entries under “Rioting” compared to four under “Strikes.” We first read the story of shoemaker Claude Burrows, killed by a stray bullet on the fringe of a street mob that demolished police stations. Irving tells us a ripping yarn about the clashes, without forgetting to analyse the geography of the scene and the class structure of the crowd:

A leadership of naval and other seamen, an activist core of stone-throwing labourers and youths, and a larger fringe of excited but mainly non-violent supporters, many of them “respectable” tradesmen.

A particularly original aspect of this chapter is the discussion of election riots. These weren’t a simple matter of the masses in revolt against the ruling class; on the contrary certain mobs followed the colours of the plutocrat WC Wentworth. Still there was a class dimension. Since property qualifications excluded the lower classes from voting, street action was the only effective way they could support candidates. “The key point to understand is that the battle to demonstrate command of the streets was just as much an integral part of the election as the poll itself.”

The Southern Tree of Liberty takes us through to 1856, with much detail, reflecting the author’s view that “after 1848 the democratic movement entered its most effective phase.” I didn’t find this entirely convincing. Certainly the movement achieved electoral success. But unless it stimulated grass roots activity, there was limited value in electing politicians. Irving concedes that “the string of successful electoral campaigns … masked a weakening of the democratic mobilisation … there was the problem that it was easier to regard these campaigns as the main strategy, because the radicals knew how to win them’.

Perhaps this ambiguity in the argument explains why I felt the book lost some direction towards the end. All in all, however, it represents a significant contribution to the writing of Australian history. The Federation Press is to be congratulated on publishing it, and The Southern Tree of Liberty deserves a hearing beyond academic circles.

Unfortunately it has some weaknesses that may impede this. I like a strong empirical base, but sometimes in this book we get lost in a forest of detail. While it’s interesting to learn about meetings in pubs, do we need to know the name of each of the dozen pubs used by every union in Sydney (p. 42)? More seriously, the two opening chapters aren’t a complete success. By discussing the European revolutionary firebrand Johann Lhotsky and the adventurer John Stephen, Irving hopes to “discover how the fundamentally opposed traditions of public life, the democratic and the elitist, were laid down.” Yet both individuals were surely too unusual to do this effectively.

My greatest concern about the book concerns what isn’t there. Aborigines are almost invisible in their own land. Where they do appear they’re utterly marginal, including the back cover graphic featuring whites on the hustings. If you look closely, the picture does show black faces on the fringe of the crowd, but the fold of the jacket tucks them away out of sight. Non-whites are slightly more noticeable when it comes to immigration issues, but only as a problem for Europeans. Yet we can hardly understand Australian radicalism without some discussion of racism.

Similarly, the story is all about “workingmen”. Admittedly there isn’t much about working class women on the public record, but even if it’s hard to document their role, doesn’t that very fact merit some comment? It would also have been good to see a bit more about how an Australian “civil society”, with its radicals and workers, emerged out of the convict system.

On the other hand, the book’s bottom-up perspective casts new light on Gipps, the squatters, the gold rushes and the transportation issue. And it’s this perspective, along with the meticulous research, that makes the book a success. Irving recounts Henry Parkes’ election to the seat of Sydney, after which the radical People’s Advocate exulted that “Power is with the People” which needed only some “master-spirit” to make it bear fruit. By master-spirit they didn’t mean Parkes, whom by this time the radicals saw as a fake.

They meant the popular mobilisation itself. “This was the role of the idea of self-government: it impelled people into action”. It was the key to making history in colonial Sydney, and remains so today.