This information was provided by John Tendero - President U3A Pine Rivers

 

 

 

 

Some early Australian notables

 

 

Sir George Arthur - and the Black Books

 

 

No Governor in the history of Van Diemen's Land looms larger than the notorious George Arthur, possibly because his name is forever connected with Port Arthur - the colony of secondary punishment that was deliberately designed to deter convicts from committing additional crimes in the colony by making the punishment for such colonial infractions both savage and incessant. This is unfortunate in many ways, because it tends to dominate Arthur's reputation, and to obscure the reasons that led this Governor to be one of the most respected colonial administrators in the eyes of his employers at the Colonial Office in London ever sent to Australia. At the same time, he was also one of the most hated and feared men in the colony over which he presided, and his invention of the so called Black Books has much to do with these two contradictory opinions.

 

George Arthur was born in 1784 in Plymouth, England, and joined the army as a young man aged twenty. This was the period of the Napoleonic wars and the youthful officer soon found himself on active service against the French. Arthur served in Italy, Sicily, Egypt, and the Low Countries. In 1814 he was appointed as Lieutenant Governor of Honduras, where his sympathetic treatment of the slaves won the commendation of the British Government which was coming increasingly under the influence of humanitarian abolitionists led by William Wilberforce. In the Colonial Office, abolitionist influence was strong, especially in the person of the permanent Under Secretary, the influential James Stephen, and Arthur's character was much admired. In 1822, he left Honduras, and shortly thereafter was appointed to the position of Lieutenant Governor of Van Diemen's Land a position he occupied from 1824 until 1836.

 

When Arthur arrived in Van Diemen's Land, he found the colony to be in some disarray after the disastrous commands of Thomas Davey and William Sorell. These two predecessors had led lives of notorious irregularity, and the strictly moral Arthur was determined to re establish the rule of law and a sense of decorum as the norms of behaviour for government employees in the colony.

 

He was also determined to wipe out cohabitation of settlers with the female convicts, and the heavy drinking and sexual immorality that were common among the convicts themselves. A complete reorganisation of the convict system provided the means for Arthur to begin cleaning up the settlement in keeping with his excitable and passionate adherence to the dictates of evangelical Christianity. The administrative reforms undertaken by the “new broom” at Government House received the enthusiastic endorsement of the authorities in Britain because the reforms fitted into the broad thrust of developing policy that had, as its over¬riding aim, to restore the deterrent effect of a sentence of transportation to Australia. The British believed that such a sentence had lost much of its inhibiting effect because it was well known in England that the Australian colonies provided lower class criminals with a breadth of opportunities for bettering themselves that was unavailable in the home country. Furthermore, it was also widely believed that the life of a convict was not one of suffering and torment, but rather one of comparative ease and comfort, where the criminal was better fed, better clothed, and better housed than he or she could ever have hoped to be in Britain as free labourers.

 

The centre piece of George Arthur's reforms lay in a relentless and almost mechanical precision that characterised a convict's progress through his time in servitude. A series of classifications were introduced into the convict system, and a felon's behaviour determined whether he or she moved steadily through the different levels to increasingly easier treatment and greater amounts of freedom, or retrogressed down the levels where treatment became progressively more ferocious as the convict descended. The final stages of this process for well¬ behaved and dutiful prisoners was the issue of a ticket of leave under which the convict was released into the wider community, although still under probation, and still liable to be returned to the prison system if further crimes were committed. This could be followed by a conditional pardon which removed all restrictions other than that the felons could not leave the convict colony until the period of their original sentence had been served. The ultimate condition was the free or absolute pardon which restored all the civil rights of a freeborn English citizen.

 

At the other extreme of the spectrum lay the descent into the colonies of secondary punishment, such as Port Arthur, in which conditions of life were made almost unendurable, and in which brutal and barbaric punishments were widely inflicted on the hapless inhabitants. Only about five per cent of serving convicts ever made it to these hell holes, but the mere threat of them normally proved sufficient to bring the most recalcitrant and rebellious convict to heel. It was Arthur's intention that the convicts' own behaviour would determine the treatment that they received, and, in this way, he hoped to create an incentive for their good behaviour.

 

Obviously, such a scheme could work only if there was an efficient and comprehensive system of convict records, and it was in the creation of this information data base that the Black Books made their appearance. These were the extensive records of every individual convict's passage through Arthur's prison system, from the time of arrival in Van Diemen's Land, where the physical description of the individual was carefully inscribed, together with: a report of their trial and a record of the sentence; a report from the ship's Surgeon of their conduct on the voyage out; and a thorough charting of their movement through every stage of the classification scheme to the end of the period of servitude. Nor did the records stop with the release of the prisoner, for every subsequent infraction of the law that brought a former convict to the attention of the colonial authorities would continue to be entered into that person's record in the Black Books which were kept up to date until the death of the subject.

 

The administrative characteristics of George Arthur can be delineated very comprehensively when we study the detail of his reforms of the convict system during his time in Van Diemen's Land. To begin with, there was his absolute thoroughness and attention to detail. Allied to this was a deliberate policy of concentrating all administrative power in his own hands. Arthur exercised a degree of personal control over his colony that would have been quite impossible in the larger mother colony of New South Wales. Moreover, Arthur created a most efficient machinery for the gathering of information on all aspects of life in the rural areas of Van Diemen's Land. He established nine police districts, each under the supervision of a stipendiary magistrate, and each with a force of mounted police who were directly answerable to the governor via weekly written reports on the conduct of the convicts and ticket of leave holders in their districts. These convict constables also reported on the behaviour of the convicts' employers much to the chagrin of the free population who resented the reflection on their conduct which such reporting represented. In order to gain full control over the justice system, to co ordinate, and make consistent, sentences handed down by the courts. George Arthur reorganised the previous system of local magistrates and justices of the peace. He replaced this with a new arrangement involving stipendiary magistrates who were dependant on the administration for the payment of their salaries and who were, therefore, unlikely to challenge the authority of the central government.

 

When Arthur arrived in Van Diemen's Land in 1824, the population of the colony numbered about twelve thousand Europeans, of whom almost half were still convicts. By the time of his departure in 1836, the free population alone had risen to more than 18,000 and the prison population had also dramatically increased by a similar proportion. The close superintendence, which Arthur's system demanded, made it virtually impossible for his successors to maintain the degree of personal control that had become the distinguishing characteristic of his time in the colony. To do so would have required a level of devotion to duty that most colonial governors just did not possess, and the growth of the settlement made the control of a single individual over all aspects of daily life (as had been exercised by Arthur) both impossible and inadvisable to continue.

 

Nevertheless, it was this personal control and meticulous record keeping ¬epitomised by the “Black Books” upon which was rooted Sir George Arthur's high reputation with the Colonial Office in London. He is one of the very few governors of Australia's convict colonies who went on to a future career in the colonial service. Australia destroyed the health and the reputations of most colonial governors in the convict period, but George Arthur was the exception to this

general rule. After leaving Australia, he became Lieutenant Governor of Upper Canada (1837 41) and, following that, he was appointed Governor of the Bombay Presidency (1842 6). He was further rewarded with a baronetcy. He died in England in 1854 with the army rank of Lieutenant General. The rewards seem little enough for a lifetime of duty and service. In all his years of colonial service between 1814 and 1846, George Arthur had spent only three years at home.

 

 

Samuel Marsden – Loved in New Zealand; Loathed in New South Wales

 

 

 

Samuel Marsden was born at Farsley in Yorkshire, and educated at Hull and Cambridge for service in the Church of England. He came from a lowly background and never entirely lost the common resonances in his speech. His education was sponsored by the Elland Society, which concentrated on providing promising members of the poorer classes with the education necessary for them to embrace the life of an English curate. He was recommended by William Wilberforce an associate of the society for appointment to the new penal colony of New South Wales in 1793, just a few weeks after he had been ordained. Marsden, accompanied by his wife Eliza, arrived in New South Wales in 1794 to take up his appointment as Assistant Chaplain to the Reverend Richard Johnson ¬who had sailed as Chaplain with the first fleet. The newly arrived assistant was given a residence at Parramatta, which was to become the centre of his clerical, legal, and pastoral activities.

 

In 1800, Richard Johnson returned to England, and Marsden became Acting Chaplain. However, he did not receive formal appointment as Chaplain until 1810, despite his being the only clergyman in the colony. It is possible that this delay reflected some doubts and lack of confidence in Marsden by the high ¬church Anglican establishment which controlled colonial appointments. As a churchman, Marsden favoured the low church evangelicalism of his roots, and cleaved to a literal scriptural fundamentalism that rendered him intolerant of other denominations. He was quite illiberal in his attitudes and in his administration of the law in his capacity as a colonial magistrate. That almost half his flock were Roman Catholics and Irish did not cause him to temper his dislike of their race, or their faith, with any degree of tolerance or understanding¬ and it is in his hatred and mistreatment of the Irish that Marsden's reputation as an arch hypocrite was established. This imputation was strengthened in the Chaplain's apparent inability to see the potential for conflict between his dual roles as magistrate and clergyman to the convicts.

 

In 1800, the authorities in New South Wales also received word from their network of informers among the convicts that a rising was planned by the Irish. Samuel Marsden used his powers as a magistrate to order the flogging of one of the suspects, a man named Paddy Galvin, in an effort to force him to inform on his countrymen. Galvin was flogged with a cat o' nine tails but all to no avail. Paddy Galvin made it plain that he would die rather than pass information on to the authorities about his fellow Irish. This incident reveals that Marsden was prepared to misuse his powers as a magistrate and to subject a man who was entitled to be presumed innocent until proven guilty¬ to torture in an effort to make him reveal information. The entire proceedings were illegal under English law, even in a penal colony.

 

But even when he acted within the law, Marsden behaved with a savagery that incurred the hatred of the convicts. He appeared to believe that the Word of God could be forced into a man through cruelty, and so free was he in ordering floggings for those who appeared before him in court, that he became known as “the flogging parson of Parramatta”. The incongruity that was so clearly perceived by the convicts - that the man who preached the virtues of the gentle Jesus on a Sunday should hand out such savage punishments on the following day was never recognised by Samuel Marsden himself, but it goes far towards explaining the contemporary opinion that he was a hypocrite who did not practise what he preached.

 

Samuel Marsden was similarly unsuccessful in other areas of his religious life but none more so than in his total failure to Christianise the Aborigines. Despite repeated attempts over a period of almost twenty years, Marsden did not succeed in securing a single Aboriginal conversion. Far from seeing this as something of which to be ashamed, Marsden interpreted it as evidence that the Aborigines were so irredeemably stupid that they could not recognise the truth¬ even when it was placed before them. Indeed, it was only in his farming avocations in New South Wales that the Reverend Samuel Marsden can be said to have made an unequivocal success, and he is rightly honoured as one of the earliest pioneers of the fine wool industry.

 

In contrast to the overwhelmingly negative perceptions of the man in Australia, the name of the Reverend Samuel Marsden is highly revered in New Zealand, and he is referred to there as “great heart Marsden”. There is no doubting the courage that Marsden demonstrated in the two decades before formal British annexation of New Zealand which occurred in 1840. During these two decades, Marsden made repeated voyages as a missionary to the Maori tribes. At this time, the two islands of New Zealand were in chaos as Maori tribes waged war against one another over territory and resources. The Maoris were feared as one of the finest warrior peoples that the British had encountered anywhere in the world. From the end of the eighteenth century, Maori war leaders had increasingly obtained firearms from European traders, and the incessant warfare provided a very useful training for their use in battle. Maoris were also known to practise cannibalism. So, when Samuel Marsden turned his attention to evangelising the Maoris and establishing permanent missions among that warlike people, he was not taking any easy option, but one fraught with danger and difficulty.

 

Marsden's personal bravery was recognised by the Maoris who honoured him for it. But, more importantly, the Maoris (unlike the Australian Aborigines) embraced Christianity with great enthusiasm. By the final decades of the nineteenth century, almost ninety per cent of the Maoris had become Christians, and they venerated the man who had first brought that religion to them. Furthermore, they admired Marsden's attempts to protect them from the worst of the effects of unregulated white settlement from New South Wales. Marsden became an enthusiast for British annexation because he believed that only the mantle offered by properly enforced British law would provide the breathing¬ space necessary for the Maoris to come to terms with the massive and irreversible changes to their world brought by the Europeans. The Maoris never doubted that he had their best interests at heart.

 

Finally, Marsden is admired because he was responsible for first producing the Maori languages in written form. Prior to Marsden's missionary work, Maori society was functionally illiterate. It was Samuel Marsden's ambition to make the Scriptures available to the New Zealanders in their own language, and it was this ambition that produced the great breakthrough to literacy. The Maoris quickly recognised the benefits that a written form of their language would confer, and they became and have always remained very keen on literacy. Indeed, today, any New Zealander can elect to write his assignments, and take his university exams, in the Maori language. That right, which is enshrined in the New Zealand constitution, can be traced back to the efforts of the Reverend Samuel Marsden to turn the Maoris into Christians.

 

So we are faced with the conundrum that a man disparaged by contemporaries and succeeding generations of Australians as a base hypocrite, was (and is) highly esteemed and respected by contemporaries and succeeding generations across the Tasman Sea. The epithets “flogging parson of Parramatta”, and “great heart Marsden”, reflect the complexity of one of the most enigmatic and unfathomable characters of Australia's colonial past.

 

It may never be possible, and perhaps we should not even try, to bring these apparently contradictory dramatis personae into congruence. The Reverend Samuel Marsden died at Windsor, near Sydney, in 1838.

 

 

Charles Joseph La Trobe - a Most Unlikely Governor

 

 

Charles La Trobe (1801 75), was born in London, the son of a family of Huguenot origin. The family had migrated to England in 1688,and his father and grandfather had both been ordained clergymen in the small Protestant sect known as Moravians, for whom his father rather appropriately named Christian had worked as a missionary in Africa in 1815 16. Christian was also active in the campaign against slavery, and enjoyed some personal contact with the enormously influential leader of the abolitionist cause, William Wilberforce.

 

The family maintained its contacts with the continent and Charles was educated in Switzerland, with the intention of continuing the family tradition and entering the ministry. He did not carry through this intention, however, and instead became a school teacher at a Moravian boys' boarding school in Manchester. Following this, he obtained an appointment as a tutor to a Swiss nobleman's family (who were also of Huguenot background) in 1824, and remained in this position for almost four years. In his spare time, he became quite an accomplished mountaineer and walker, climbing mountains, without the help of guides or porters, and going on extended walking bouts of Switzerland and Italy.

 

This marked the beginning of a lifetime obsession with travel and visiting exotic places. It also represented the start of Charles La Trobe's career as a writer of travel stories. In 1829, he published his first such book in which he described Swiss scenery and manners, and, in 1832, his second book, on rambles in the Tyrol, came out. These works were lightweight but pleasant enough, and sufficiently well received to encourage their author to keep producing more of them. Between 1832 and 1834, the son of the family for whom he tutored embarked on an extensive tour of North America and Mexico, and Charles accompanied him. A two volume account of his American adventures emerged in 1835, followed by a another one of their Mexican sojourn the year after. It was during this trip to the Americas that the American writer Washington Irving, who accompanied the two travellers for six months, described La Trobe in the following terms:

“He was a man of a thousand occupations; a botanist, a geologist, a hunter of beetles and butterflies, a musical amateur, a sketcher of no mean pretensions; in short, a complete virtuoso; added to which he was an indefatigable, if not always a very successful, sportsman. Never had a man more irons in the fire; and, consequently, never was a man more busy or more cheerful”.

 

In 1835, at the age of 34, Charles proposed marriage to Sophie de Montmollin, a Swiss girl who was a relative of the young count whom La Trobe had tutored. He had some doubts concerning his acceptability and his slender means, but, with three published books to his name, and with more in prospect, he probably felt that he was in a position to offer marriage. The family did accept his proposal, and the young couple were wed in the British Legation at Berne according to the rites of the Church of England.

 

The following year, Lord Glenelg, the Secretary of State for the Colonies, appointed La Trobe to report to the British Government on the administration and use of the funds voted by Parliament, as part of the package in which slavery was finally abolished, which were expressly intended for the education of the former slave population of the West Indies. It seems likely that patronage flowing from his father's long association with the abolitionist cause was the key to this, for there was little in Charles's career to this date to suggest his being the appropriate person for such an appointment.

 

In 1837, La Trobe submitted three detailed and extensive reports on Negro education in the West Indies which he had visited alone because Sophie was expecting their first child. The baby was born in her family's home in Switzerland on 2 April 1837, only four weeks after La Trobe's departure, and he did not return from the West Indies until July 1838. This pattern was to recur over and over again for the remainder of their lives together, as La Trobe's wanderlust was continuously at odds with his undoubted affection for his wife and family. Sophie came, in time, to hate her husband's prolonged and repeated absences.

 

Lord Glenelg must have been impressed with La Trobe's reports, because, in January 1839, he offered La Trobe the position of Superintendent of the Port Phillip District of New South Wales. Port Phillip, although within the territory of New South Wales, had been colonised from across Bass Strait and Van Diemen's Land in 1836. The new settlement grew rapidly, and it had become obvious that it needed an administrator on the spot, because enterprise and development were being stifled as a result of having to wait for long periods for decisions on local concerns to arrive from Sydney. Once again, we have to point to patronage to explain the appointment of a man who did not possess the usual background of a colonial governor. La Trobe had no army or naval training, and little if any administrative experience, yet he was given the task of administering a new settlement and protecting its native population from the colonists in the rip-roaring days of its earliest development quite a step up from writing travel yarns!

On 30 September 1839, Charles Joseph La Trobe accompanied by his wife, his daughter, and two servants arrived at Melbourne, after spending eight weeks in Sydney making contact with his superior Sir George Gipps, the Governor of New South Wales, and receiving a detailed briefing from Gipps on the state of affairs in the Port Phillip District. This marked the beginning of an increasingly warm and mutually supportive relationship between the two men, and there were clear signs of a warm father/son interaction that developed between them as the years went by, La Trobe was not ambitious to replace Gipps, and showed that he valued the experience and advice of his mentor. After all, up until this time, the only authority that La Trobe had exercised had been in a school room, and he was sensitive enough to recognise that he could learn a great deal from George Gipps.

 

The La Trobes were not well off financially. In fact, while in Sydney the family had been forced to shift to a cheaper hotel to stretch their resources as far as possible. In addition, Sophie La Trobe enjoyed only indifferent health, causing her entertaining and visiting activities to be reduced. When they arrived in Melbourne, the La Trobes had erected a six roomed prefabricated house, which they had brought with them from England, on land owned by the government, because Charles could not afford to purchase land in Melbourne on the rising local market. Eventually, Gipps authorised the auctioning of the land on which the La Trobes had squatted, and, in a gesture that demonstrates the respect Charles had already earned in the eyes of the locals for his fair mindedness and genial disposition, the only person to bid on the 12 ½ acres he wanted, was Charles himself. The market value of the land was about 300 400 pounds an acre, and Charles purchased his estate at the reserve price of only twenty pounds an acre. He had certainly got a bargain!

 

The La Trobes named their property Jolimont after the house in Switzerland where they had spent their honeymoon, and, although they added rooms and outbuildings as the years went by, it always remained an exceedingly modest residence. La Trobe lived a quiet social life in Melbourne. As a Superintendent, he did not have the burden of entertaining as extensively as was expected of a vice regal representative and Charles did not feel obliged to keep up appearances just to impress his fellow citizens. Sophie La Trobe's lack of facility in the English language might also have played some part in circumscribing the social life of the family, as well as the fact that she gave birth to a further two children during their stay in Melbourne.

 

In the years before the Victorian goldrushes, La Trobe seemed content to remain subordinate to Gipps, and then to Sir Charles Fitzroy, in Sydney. He appeared to administer the Port Phillip District competently enough, although it is almost impossible to point to any particular development or initiative that he could claim as his own singular contribution to the rapidly expanding settle¬ment. He spent much of his time indulging his love of travel, and his journals show that he made more than ninety trips away from home during his Victorian period. Much of this was not strictly necessary, as the personal presence of the Superintendent was not a prerequisite for any decision that he had to make. Sophie fretted greatly at these sometimes prolonged absences on the road, and always waited fearfully for him to return safe and sound. While he was away, she would pray for his safety, and, when he returned, her reaction provided ample evidence of the worry and mental agitation she suffered. Charles loved travel, and, in this case, it is possible that some of his trips were little more than excuses to escape the atmosphere of sickness and restriction at home.

 

The limitations of Charles Joseph La Trobe as an administrator began to emerge in the years after Port Phillip became the Colony of Victoria in 1850, and he himself became the new colony's first Lieutenant Governor.

He antagonised the British Colonial Office by giving in to colonial pressure in refusing to allow the convict transport Randolph to unload its cargo of convicts in Melbourne. In this decision alone, he may well have shipwrecked his career, for he was never offered another post after his return from Australia.

 

During the massive dislocation caused by the discovery of gold in Victoria, La Trobe can be described merely as coping adequately with the problems that emerged. He copied the licence system then operating in New South Wales, and, in so doing, may be said to have laid the groundwork for the rebellion at the Eureka Stockade several years after his departure. He reorganised the machinery of government to deal with the massive increase in work that was an inevitable consequence of the huge growth in the colony's population once the news of the gold discoveries reached the mother country, and he built up the police presence on the goldfields so that the Californian experience of anarchy and mayhem was not repeated in Australia.

 

By the end of 1852, La Trobe submitted his resignation to the Colonial Office. He had been in Australia for thirteen years, his eldest daughter had been sent back to Switzerland to be educated, and they had not seen her for five years; and Sophie was desperately homesick for her child and her family. Although the resignation was accepted, La Trobe was not relieved until 1854. In the interval, Sophie and the children preceded him to Europe. They would wait for him to rejoin them in Switzerland.

 

The period following the departure of his family was a hard one for La Trobe, and he missed his wife and children enormously. A week before La Trobe was due to sail out of Australia and rejoin his family, he was perusing an English newspaper to catch up on the events at home. In the newspaper, he found, purely by accident, Sophie's death notice. Sophie had died in Switzerland in December 1853. She had spent all her married life waiting for Charles to come home after his travels, but this time she had not waited, and had embarked on the longest journey of all without him.

 

Charles grimly served out his final week in Melbourne, and took ship a shattered man. He rejoined his children in Switzerland, and, a year later, he married his wife's widowed sister Rose. He never took another position in the colonial service, and even his plans to write an account of his time in Australia came to naught, as his eyesight failed, and he went blind long before his death in 1875. He is most remembered in Victoria today, by the university that bears his name, and as the provider of Melbourne's Botanical Gardens.

 

 

Alfred Deakin - Australia's Most Eccentric Prime Minister

 

 

Alfred Deakin was born in Melbourne in 1856, the year the Colony of Victoria began to exercise full responsible government. He was the son of an English migrant who had emigrated to South Australia, and who had then been drawn to Victoria by the goldrushes. His father did not make a fortune in the goldrushes, and found regular employment as a book keeper with the coaching company Cobb & Co. Although Alfred's family was not wealthy, his father used carefully accumulated savings to ensure that Alfred attended Melbourne Grammar School before moving on to study law at Melbourne University. In 1878, he went to the bar, but he experienced difficulties in securing enough work to make a living.

 

In his politics at this early stage of his life, Deakin was a free trader with a conservative outlook, but in 1879 he met David Syme, the owner of the Age newspaper, and Syme converted Alfred from his previous beliefs into a liberal protectionist. This was a most important shift in Deakin's outlook, for David Syme was one of the most influential men in the colony and a political career with Syme's support became a distinct possibility for the aspiring young lawyer. For the rest of his public life, Alfred Deakin never wavered in his commitment to the principles of liberal protectionism which he had imbibed under the tutelage of his mentor, Syme. He began writing for David Syme's newspapers, the Age and the Leader, and in 1879, with Syme's support, he stood unsuccessfully (as a Liberal Protectionist) for a seat in the Victorian lower house, the Legislative Assembly. The following year he stood again and lost, but in a further campaign later in the year, he exhibited the rhetorical skills for which he would later become famous, and easily won a seat. Within three years Deakin held the portfolios of Attorney General and Water Supply in the Service Berry coalition admin¬istration, and had become Commissioner of Public Works. It was Deakin who, in the drought years of the early 1880s, brought out the Chaffey brothers from California to plan the irrigation schemes on the Murray River in the Mildura district.

 

Altogether, Deakin's career in Victorian politics lasted from 1880 to 1890, when he lost office with the Gillies government. This change in his circumstances freed him to devote his time to the Federation movement, and he laboured :unceasingly for the next decade to bring this about. Alfred Deakin probably became the single most influential person working to bring about the political union of the Australian colonies during the decade of the 1890s, and, because he could devote himself full time to this work, he provided the driving force to turn the concept into a reality. He entered the first Federal Parliament of the new Commonwealth of Australia in 1901 under the Prime Ministership of Edmund Barton. In 1903, Alfred Deakin became the second Prime Minister of the new nation, following Barton's resignation to take up a judicial position on the new High Court. He held the office of Prime Minister for three terms, 1903 5, 1905 8, and 1913 until his resignation later that year.

 

In his federal career, Deakin proved to be a progressive liberal, and, with the support of the Australian Labor Party, brought down a great deal of socially innovative legislation in which the government intervened in the economy to secure minimum standards of living, and enshrined these standards as part of a standard of wage which employers were not permitted to undercut.

 

So far, we have looked at the main outlines of a fairly conventional political career. However, beneath the surface of conformity, there lurked in Alfred Deakin an unexpected and occasionally outlandish streak that he kept hidden from the public gaze. In his private world, Deakin was an eccentric with a bewildering and unusual set of beliefs and behaviours.

 

He first met his future wife, Pattie Browne, when she was a girl of fourteen, and he was her Sunday School teacher in the Spiritualist Progressive Lycaeum in Melbourne. When they married in 1882, she was still a teenager of nineteen and he was twenty five years of age. It was clearly a love match that lasted for life, and, for the next thirty years, Alfred commemorated each of her birthdays and their wedding anniversaries by writing her a sonnet to mark the occasions. These sonnets are not great poetry, but they are evidence of a warm nature and an affectionate heart.

 

In matters of religion, Alfred Deakin was distinctly not mainstream. He had, like many spiritual seekers of that time who wanted a direct personal experience of the transcendent, been drawn to spiritualism from the age of eighteen. He consorted with mediums and attended séances on a regular basis, and became very impressed when he received encouraging prophecies regarding his marriage and political career when both seemed impossible. Alfred received political advice from a variety of spectral sources, including Sophocles, John Knox, John Stuart Mill, Lord Macaulay, an a great liberal statesman Edmund Burke, all of whom spoke to him via the agency of his enthusiastic amateur mediums. Perhaps the most useful of his ghostly advisers was the spirit of Richard Heales, a former Premier of the colony of Victoria who had died in 1864.

 

Spiritualism proved to be the sort of eclectic and tolerant religion that suited the young Deakin, and, by 1878, he had become the President of the Spiritualist Association of Victoria, in addition to filling the role of the organisation's Sunday School teacher. To facilitate his work in the Sunday School, Deakin produced his first book in 1877 which bore the title Lyceum Leader. This was a selection of extracts culled from the writings of a miscellany of poets, sages, and religious teachers from a variety of traditions and from all ages. Exhibiting the great moral earnestness of the Spiritualists, the publication also included a catechism of sorts, in which the precepts of conventional moral teaching stood alongside material extolling the virtues of communicating with the dead.

 

Communications from “the other side” did not come to Alfred Deakin through his mediums only. For a while, he believed that he, himself, possessed abilities as a medium, with a particular skill in the area of automatic writing. He found that if he emptied his mind of conscious thoughts, and sat ready to receive the messages from the spirit world, words flooded into his brain with such fluency that they could not possibly be his own. He believed that he was receiving the thoughts of the spirit of John Bunyan, who had chosen him as the conduit for the transmission of a sequel to Bunyan's famous book - A Pilgrim's Progress. Alfred Deakin's effusion was entitled “A New Pilgrim's Progress”. It appeared later in 1877, although not to any great acclaim even among the Spiritualists. It certainly was used to embarrass him during his political campaigns in 1880, when it was described by a Melbourne newspaper, the Daily Telegraph, in the most uncompromising terms.

 

In later years, Deakin rejected his book as being the work of the dead John Bunyan, and similarly rejected much of the teachings of the spiritualist organisations but he always maintained an interest in the occult, and he moved on to an involvement in the Theosophical Society and an abiding interest in comparative religion, which he continued for the remainder of his life. He also found the area of prophecy quite fascinating, and remained convinced that the predictions made to him by the mediums he visited in 1876 and 1880, ¬concerning his future marriage and political career, provided incontrovertible evidence that there was a great deal more than chance at work.

 

Inclined to see the hand of supernatural forces at work in the great movements of the age, Deakin felt quite happy in ascribing the success of the campaign for Australian federation to the workings of a greater destiny. Consequently, the man who had done more than anybody to bring federation about, stated that: “its actual accomplishment must always appear to have been secured by a series of miracles”.

 

Not all of Alfred Deakin's eccentricities were confined to the area of religion, and there are aspects of his behaviour that indicate youthful enthusiasm and idealism continuing well into his middle life. One good example of this emerges from the 1890s, when he lived a life of devotion to the cause of federation.

 

In 1897, Deakin and other fathers of federation, including Edmund Barton and Charles Kingston the Premier of South Australia were in London negotiating the final shape of the draft constitution for the new Commonwealth of Australia. Negotiations had stalled on Clause 74 of the constitution which related to appeals from Australian courts of law to the Privy Council in England. Deakin, Barton and Kingston arranged an “eleventh hour” compromise with Joseph Chamberlain, the Secretary of State for the Colonies, and, on 17 May, the three had a private interview with Chamberlain at his room at Westminster, in which Chamberlain accepted, on behalf of the British Government, the suggestion proposed by the three Australians. Federation was now certain. When the British statesmen and officials finally left the room, Alfred Deakin described what happened next:

“When the door closed upon them and left them alone, they seized each

others hands and danced hand in hand in a ring around the centre of the

room to express their jubilation."

 

Another unusual facet of Alfred Deakin's behaviour - which was also kept secret from the Australian public was that the English newspaper, the Morning Post, employed him to write a regular column on Australian affairs from 1901 to 1911. The column was unsigned, and was attributed by the newspaper's editors to “Our Australian Correspondent”. The money was a useful addition to the meagre parliamentary salary earned by Deakin, because, with a wife and three daughters to support, he needed to earn additional income to maintain the comfortable middle class way of life to which they had all become accustomed. However, the fact was that the Australian correspondent of the Morning Post was writing on the political performance of himself and his own Party even when he held the office of Prime Minister!.

 

The ethics of the arrangement which has to be seen as a major conflict of interest never seem to have bothered Deakin, and it was only pressure of work and failing powers that forced him to cease writing his regular assessments of Australian political affairs for his English readers.

One final endearing quality in this eccentric behaviour pattern is Alfred Deakin's continued refusal to accept a knighthood from the British Crown in recognition of his rank as Prime Minister, or his status as one of the Fathers of the Australian Nation. In this, he has more in common with the Labor Prime Ministers, none of whom have accepted imperial honours, than with the non-¬Labor side of politics, the leaders of which have usually accepted knighthoods, titles and the other regal honours so beloved by conservative politicians in Australia until the 1970s.

 

Alfred Deakin retired from Federal Parliament in 1913. His memory was failing and his powers of oratory had deserted him. He died in 1917 following a massive stroke one of the most loved, respected, and genuinely eccentric leaders Australia has ever had..

 

 

 

John Tendero

 

March 2006

 

 

Source: The Big History Question – Snapshots of Australian History

Frank G. Clarke