A colonial liberalism: the lost world of three Victorian visionaries 9780195547603

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a

“COLONIAL LIBERALISM.

_ To David Webster, who taught me history

THE LOST WeRLD OF THREE VICTCRIAN VISIONARIES

STUART MACINTYRE OXFORD

OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS AUSTRALIA

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© Stuart Macintyre 1991 First published 1991

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Copying for educational purposes Where copies of part or the whole of the book are made under section 53B or section 53D of the Act, the law requires that records of such copying be kept. In such cases the copyright owner is entitled to claim payment. National Library of Australia Cataloguing-in-Publication data: Macintyre, Stuart, 1947—

A colonial liberalism Includes index. ISBN 0 19 554760 8.

1. Syme, David, 1827-1908. 2. Pearson, Charles H. (Charles Henry), 1830-1894. 3 Higinbotham, George, 1826-1892. 4. Liberalism — Australia — History. 5. Australia — Politics and government — 1851-1901. I. Title. 994.03

Edited by Lee White Typeset by Syarikat Seng Teik Sdn. Bhd. Printed by Impact Printing Victoria Pty. Ltd. Published by Oxford University Press, 253 Normanby Road, South Melbourne, Australia

CONTENTS

Preface vii

1 Constructing a Lineage / Nettie Palmer’s disappointment 1 Remembering the founding fathers 2 The problem of colonial liberalism 10

2 George Higinbotham and the Tasks of Self-Government 17 A place of transgressions 17 The reticent newcomer 20 The owner of the Argus and its editor debate democracy 25 The forms of colonial politics 36 Constitutional deadlock 41 Defeat and despair 55 ‘You have no business to be indifferent’ 64

3 David Syme and the Pursuit of Progress 66 David Syme’s contempt of parliament 66 The dominie’s sons 69 The Age and its owners 76 David Syme wins control 78 The press as the medium of liberal politics 83 The moral economy of colonial liberalism 87

The land question 97 v

Vi CONTENTS

Protection 102 The rights of labour 107 The meanings of progress 112

4 Charles Pearson and the Realization of Citizenship 115 Pearson’s crisis of faith 116 The sacred and the secular in colonial Victoria 119 The State becomes schoolmaster 128 Pearson decides to waste his culture on the bush 141 The university and the ladies’ college 146 A blueprint for a civic culture 152

: The second constitutional deadlock 158 Minister for Public Instruction 162

5 Reconsiderations 169 Colonial triumph 169 The frustrations of self-government 172

An end to progress 180 The limits to reason 187 The liberal subject and his liberal subjectivity 193 Masculinity and nationalism 207

Lineages 2/4

6 Epilogue 2/8 Notes 223 Index 250

PREFACE

The origins of this book lie in a curiosity about a tradition that

shaped the public culture of this country, and an unresolved attachment to and rejection of the values it embodies. I conceived the study as an exercise in comparative history that would locate the Victorian and Australian colonial liberals within their

imperial context, as variants of a settler colonialism of global dimensions whose apogee lasted from the middle of the last century to somewhere in the present one. In the end I have worked with a cast of three men, and the book closes at the point when their successors began to wrestle with the recognizably modern

problems of nation and class. At some point in the future I would like to return to this phase of the subject and trace the outcome of the postcolonial liberals’ endeavours. In writing about my three principal figures I have relied on

the work of their biographers — C. E. Sayers, whose life of David Syme is both sympathetic and shrewd; John Tregenza, whose biography of Charles Pearson is a distinguished exercise

in the genre; and Gwyn Dow, whose study of George Higinbotham sheds light on so much beyond his attempt to resolve the relationship between church and state. My obligations to other scholars will become apparent, but I would like to record here the most important: at almost every point I have been guided by Geoffrey Serle’s intimate knowledge of the history of Victoria. He has described his two volumes on the 1850s vil

Vill PREFACE

and 1880s as ‘blocking in’ previously undeveloped areas, but they are lasting works of historical scholarship and literature, and each time I return to them I gain new appreciation of their riches. I am grateful also for his characteristically gentle suggestions about how my manuscript might be improved. A number of other friends and colleagues read or heard and commented or advised: Marian Aveling, Peter Beilharz, Geof-

frey Bolton, Verity Burgmann, Chris Connolly, Alastair Davidson, Hume Dow, Mark Francis, John Hirst, Stephen Knight, the late Stephen Murray-Smith, David Philips, Len Richardson, Sir Ninian Stephen, Carla Taines, Luke Trainor and Ray Wright. Susan Janson helped with research and helped sus-

tain my enthusiasm. Gwyn Dow made over a vast body of Higinbotham material she had gathered, tried to guide me through its complexities, and has been a warm supporter. Hitherto I have avoided the conventional acknowledgement of the spouse’s sustenance (while availing myself of it) but here I wish to thank Martha Macintyre, who helped me untangle the knots

in my text. For the shortcomings that remain after I have received such counsel, I take full responsibility.

I was assisted by financial support from the Australian Research Council, the University of Canterbury (whose award of a Canterbury Fellowship in 1988 enabled me to explore New

Zealand parallels and begin writing in the most congenial circumstances) and my own University of Melbourne. Stuart Macintyre

1

CONSTRUCTING A LINEAGE

Nettie Palmer’s disappointment Nettie Palmer did not know until she read the brief announcement in the morning paper that the Higinbotham statue was to be unveiled that afternoon. It was a muggy Friday late in 1937 and the clouds that were building up over Melbourne increased

the humidity. She was tired and dispirited from a year spent seeking support for the Spanish republic as it fought to survive against fascist insurgents. She had to go into the city for a meeting of the Spanish Medical Aid Committee, but on this occasion she arranged for the committee to finish early so that the members — all three of them — could go to the ceremony.

Her two colleagues were a little uncertain about George Higinbotham, whom one recalled dimly from school lessons as

a minor colonial politician of the previous century. As they walked up the Collins Street hill towards Spring Street she ex-

plained to them a little of his heroic place in the democratic struggles of the 1860s and the quixotic originality of his public gestures when he became Chief Justice of the Victorian Supreme Court. She herself was uncertain about the site of the statue. Near the Exhibition Building, someone said, and they pressed on as the first drops of rain began falling from a leaden sky,

until they encountered a large crowd. It was the funeral of a popular fireman. Retracing their steps, they eventually found a 1

2 A COLONIAL LIBERALISM

handful of people squeezed between the Treasury Building and the early rush-hour traffic on Macarthur Street. The speech of Chief Justice Mann was almost over, the sodden audience already beginning to drift away. Palmer caught the last platitudes of the speaker over the rattle of a passing tram: ‘No man in Australia did more to bring about the full development of the principles of responsible government in this country, and they owed it to his powerful and logical mind that the perfect freedom of the Parliamentary institution had become a com-

monplace in Australia ...’ Caught up in the forlorn causes of the 1930s, weary of the Red-baiting and repression that vitiated national life, Palmer recognized the emptiness of the rhetoric. She also heard the aged Labor parliamentarian Tom Tunnecliffe tell anyone who would listen how Chief Justice Higinbotham had never served as Lieutenant-Governor because he would not truckle to Britain. That too was a hollow compliment from a superannuated socialist serving out his days as Speaker of the Legislative Assembly. More striking was the absence of friends whose opinions she respected — radical lawyers like Maurice

Blackburn and John Barry, or the poet militant Bernard O’Dowd, who revered ‘Greek-browed Higinbotham’. In truth,

the sculpted Higinbotham she saw before her was a bundled anonymous figure, his heavily wigged head inclined as if to catch

the words of a faltering witness. As the assembly broke up, Palmer encountered a columnist from the Argus who asked what

had brought her to such a dull affair. Patiently, she explained

her interest and startled the man by pointing out that Higinbotham’s portrait hung in the office of his own newspaper since he had been its editor. ‘One meets all sorts of delightful folk at such a ceremony’, the journalist enthused next morning. The episode depressed her. The shallowness of the tributes,

the superficiality of the occasion, caused her to ponder the deficiency of the Australian historical awareness. ‘[T]he whole affair makes me wonder if there isn’t some essential lack in us, something missing that keeps our life from having meaning and

depth — interest in our past, reverence for those who have shown outstanding qualities of mind or spirit.”!

Remembering the founding fathers How did Nettie Palmer remember George Higinbotham? Her husband Vance panegyrized him in his National Portraits as the

CONSTRUCTING A LINEAGE 3

one true Athenian of nineteenth-century public life, the democrat who did not shrink from jostling in the assembly but drew pride from the soil beneath him when he stood up in the name of the people. He was, claimed Vance Palmer, an inspiration to the young men of his time and there was a vivifying heat in him

that was still not exhausted. Among the young men whom Palmer cited as disciples was H.B. Higgins, his own wife’s uncle. As the favourite niece of ‘Uncle Henry’ and later his biographer, Nettie Palmer knew how deliberately Higgins had followed in the footsteps of Higinbotham. The novitiate seeking admission to the Victorian Bar in the 1870s had arranged for the legendary advocate to nominate him. Just as Chief Justice Higinbotham had publicly supported the unions in their great contest with the employers in 1890, so Higgins the President of the Commonwealth Arbitration Court strove to reconcile the

labour movement to his new province for law and order. Of the tributes that were offered Higgins on his retirement from the Court, the one that pleased him most came from the Labor parliamentarian who said that “The cloak that fell from the dead

shoulders of the late Chief Justice Higinbotham has found a worthy wearer in the person of Mr Justice Higgins; and more than that I cannot say.’ When in his last years Higgins attended

a meeting of the Melbourne Trades Hall Council for the unveiling of a portrait of Higinbotham, the assembled delegates stood and cheered his entry.? Others claimed a share of this patrimony. The tempestuous reputation that Higinbotham attracted in a foreshortened political career — “There is but one God and Higinbotham 1s his Prophet’, wrote a beleaguered squatter in 1865 — was trans-

muted into immaculate legend upon his retirement from parliament. ‘King George’ the mockers had dubbed him, and

his authority was indeed regal, but it was an authority that derived from the very essence of the man rather than from any temporal trappings. No discussion of constitutional reform was complete, no point of propriety clinched, unless the memory of Higinbotham was invoked. He was, said Charles Pearson, ‘a gentleman whose name is never heard without respect’. Pearson, an Oxford don flung into the hurly-burly of Victorian politics, clung to the example of Higinbotham as evidence that there was room in public life for a man of principle. With more piety than

plausibility, Pearson’s widow would claim that her husband

4 A COLONIAL LIBERALISM

‘resembled him both in character and temperament as nearly as any man could’. When the young Alfred Deakin first turned to

politics it was ‘the towering figure of Higinbotham’ that attracted him: his idol’s standards were too high and his scrupulousness too undiscriminating, but if he was too great for the positions he filled he was nevertheless filled with ‘a holiness of purpose that in many a crisis crowned as with an aureole his singularly beautiful head and face’. It was Deakin who in 1886 promoted Higinbotham to Chief Justice, while Higinbotham in his last year nominated Deakin as ‘the “rising hope”’ of Young Australia in all its best aims and highest aspirations’.° The lineage was strengthened by further bonds. Deakin and Higgins first met as law students at the University of Melbourne in the 1870s. Both became members of a debating society es-

tablished by Pearson, then a lecturer at the University, and under his guidance each cultivated the graces of the Oxford Union. Deakin wrote to Pearson upon his teacher’s election to parliament in 1878, to say that no public leader ‘with the exception of Mr Higinbotham’ possessed such general confidence as Pearson did. He attributed his own escape from the conservative orthodoxties of his upbringing to the example of Pearson. On his departure from Victoria in 1892 the older man returned the compliment: ‘It is no flattery to say that I think you are the

only man in politics under fifty years of age from whom the country has anything to hope.’ Meanwhile, Higgins, contemplating entry into politics, turned to his friend Deakin for advice; and in 1906 it was Deakin who appointed him to the Commonwealth Arbitration Court.‘ The links are too numerous, the mutual tributes too studied,

to be merely incidental. Higinbotham, Pearson, Deakin and Higgins: the four men stand in a liberal lineage, a lineage that they built up by word and gesture during their lifetimes and which ultimately acquired canonical status in the hands of their

literary executors — Higinbotham’s son-in-law, Pearson’s widow, Deakin’s son-in-law and Higgins’ niece. Higinbotham

was the patron saint, nonpareil in sweetness and virtue. He bequeathed to his successors the model of the liberal as a man of honour, fastidious in rectitude, unswerving in attachment to duty, impervious to insult. Those who followed found them-

selves acting out a role that was prescribed partly by circumstances and partly by conscious choice. Each became a

CONSTRUCTING A LINEAGE 5

figure of controversy, bound into Melbourne’s professional élite

by marriage, career and taste, yet standing at a remove from polite society and even regarded by it as an apostate. While maintaining a studied reserve in his daily dealings, each of them stood unbowed on the public platform where, indeed, he came

most fully to life. In striking contrast, their private personae were muted, their chief pleasures the solitary habits of reading and writing, their companionships restricted to a narrow masculine circle — as husbands and fathers they come to us as little more than ciphers. Dissatisfied with religious orthodoxy and placing an awesome trust in the capacity of human reason, they

remained prisoners of a secularized Protestant conscience, though not even its stern dictates could still their need to believe. Each exhibited a characteristic earnestness, industry and hypo-

chondria. Since their hopes and expectations were repeatedly dashed, it became all the more important to hold true to the memory of those who had gone before. The liberal tradition they embodied was more a code of con-

duct than a precise political programme. Like other nineteenth-century liberals, they held sacrosanct the idea of freedom. Their model of the autonomous, self-sufficient individual assumed the capacities of reason and moral responsibility, both

to guide desire and emancipate the bearer from the tyranny of impulse. They sought to establish a sphere of freedom in which all citizens could meet each other, safe from interference and liberated from the hierarchical bonds of traditional society — hence their affinity for the public platform. Liberals favoured a representative form of government both as a check against despotism and an expression of the principle that all citizens were free and equal in political rights. But if the majority really ruled, could freedom and privacy be safe? Since colonial liberals were committed to the principle of popular sovereignty they sought to embed necessary safeguards within the fabric of self-government — hence the insistence on tolerance, privacy and the rule of law. And since it was difficult to win popular acceptance of such values, they marked out the liberal political culture in their own conduct — hence the importance of the honorific tradition. Running alongside the memory of Higinbotham there was another influence — more worldly, less altruistic, equally insistent — David Syme, newspaper magnate and éminence grise of Victorian politics. Syme acquired control of the Age when it

6 A COLONIAL LIBERALISM

was a struggling scandal sheet with a few thousand readers. While it remained the reflexive instrument of his will, he built it into the most widely circulating newspaper in the country. His influence became legendary. The programme and composi-

tion of more than one liberal ministry was submitted for the Age’s approval — ‘necessarily, of course,’ as Syme explained, ‘because it made and unmade them’. Yet as Deakin observed, no party ever satisfied Syme for long and no programme was sufficiently ample for his appetite; and this gaunt, forbidding man was given to fits of passionate resentment and indignation

at what he considered to be public abuses or (though the distinction did not occur to him) at any crossing of his will. Deakin and Pearson were just two of many liberal parliamentarians whose careers were sponsored by Syme, and since both earned an income by writing for the Age, their dependence was all the greater. Higgins also kept the wolf from the door during his early days at the Bar by coaching two of Syme’s sons, and he too initially enjoyed Syme’s backing in politics, but it was not an obligation that Higgins cared to recall. There was something distasteful to the liberal conscience in such dependence on the favours of another, especially one so capricious and demand-

ing who was not even answerable to the electorate. The cultivation of a power unrestrained by responsibility was the hallmark of a tyrant, and Syme was dubbed ‘King David’ and worse. “Ours is not so much the Legislature of the colony as it is the Legislature of Boss Syme’, one critic claimed in 1879. Sev-

eral years later it was suggested that Alfred Deakin’s collar should bear the inscription, ‘I am David Syme’s puppy’.® The Syme-Deakin relationship was not quite so one-sided as that. The briefless young barrister was already contributing to Syme publications when he was taken up by the proprietor to

become his house guest and constant companion. Deakin’s vivacious intensity evidently met some inner need for intellectual and emotional companionship that the older man usually con-

cealed behind a dour unapproachability: in the wide-ranging conversations that accompanied their long walks, Syme encouraged Deakin to indulge his enthusiasm for literary romanticism and religious speculation so that he could play the tough-minded sceptic. Deakin could hardly have been oblivious of the advan-

tages of his position as, in his own words, ‘the pet of the proprietor’. When the liberal organization consulted Syme to

CONSTRUCTING A LINEAGE 7

find a candidate for a parliamentary by-election, he nominated his twenty-two-year-old protegé and threw all the resources of the Age into securing his election. There was a price: Deakin had to surrender his initial attachment to free trade in favour of Syme’s idée fixe, protection. As the younger man recalled it, they were walking over Princes Bridge one evening on their way back to the Age office when Syme convinced him that he had ‘crossed the fiscal Rubicon’. The classical conceit could harldy disguise the nature of the submission and one can readily see how the public taunt that he was David Syme’s lapdog soon became intolerable to the rising statesman. While the friendship with Syme survived Deakin’s establishment of independence, real intimacy ended at that point.’ The significant contact between Syme and Deakin makes the lack of intimacy between Higinbotham and Syme seem the more remarkable. The driving forces of Victorian liberalism from the early years of responsible government, the two older men led and inspired the next generation, a generation whose careers criss-crossed their own. Yet between them there was a complete absence of fellowship. Part of the explanation, no doubt, lies in

their secluded habits. Both worked long hours and shunned social intercourse. Yet it goes beyond this. Syme could never comprehend Higinbotham’s quixotic independence, while Higinbotham, though he did not say so directly, was affronted by Syme’s expediency. The common front they presented to the enemy during the fierce battles of the 1860s and 1870s also concealed significantly different emphases. Whereas Higinbotham was prepared to go to almost any lengths to vindicate the principle of self-government, Syme was more concerned with the uses to which the principle could be put, and above all else with the advance of progress.

It is hardly surprising that later liberals should venerate Higinbotham more easily than they acknowledge Syme. Whereas the former won their devotion by selfless purity of purpose, the latter was installed in the shadowy recesses of the liberal pantheon as the unrelenting patriarch who embodied the masculine qualities of masterful authority. Efforts to soften this

image contrasted the public and private man, the outward notoriety of a legendary despot and the little-known acts of generosity of a shy. recluse. Thus Deakin acknowledged that Syme’s public manner was ‘cold, stern, severe and choleric’, and

8 A COLONIAL LIBERALISM

then explained that manner as a necessary carapace that shielded its wearer from importunity and abuse. ‘Grim experiences had made him grim’, but ‘underneath the rigour of his challenging

scrutiny or the shadow of his frown was an inner spring of warmth’. This characterization displaces a structural feature of liberalism into a mere quirk of personality. It was the demarcation of private and public spheres of behaviour, with distinct codes appropriate to each, that created the disyuncture. Since the

freedom enshrined by liberalism was marked out within an inviolable space of personal autonomy that was maintained by witholding innermost feelings from public scrutiny, what was to save public life from becoming impersonal, instrumental, even coercive? The beneficiaries of Syme’s patronage seldom dwelt on these disturbing implications of the liberal paradigm. Rather, they allowed Syme’s public reputation, his peremptory manner

in the conduct of his business and his blatant use of his newspaper to dictate personal instructions, to personify their

predicament.’ Syme’s place in the liberal lineage is complicated further by

a reputation for expediency. Here again he is counterposed to Higinbotham, whose adherence to principle was unshakeable and exemplary, and again the attribution serves to exorcize a problem that troubled all colonial liberals regardless of their constancy. Settler societies applied the known to the unknown and necessarily modified expectations in the light of experience. However universal the liberals might consider their axioms, colonial liberalism embodied colonial circumstances. Syme’s willingness to follow this logic outstripped others because his pragmatism extended to first principles. He was not content to bend the orthodoxies of free trade to the needs of the Victorian economy but must reformulate the science of political economy.

He did not simply criticize the constitutional practices that allowed local politicians to resist his blandishments, but made Pearson help him erect an historical scaffolding for his complete restatement of the theory of political representation. It was not enough to resolve his own problem of religious belief; he had

to badger Deakin, then a member of the Commonwealth Cabinet, to help revise his dissertation on the soul. This was pragmatism on an heroic scale. In these extremes, as well as in his unique capacity to influence

public opinion, Syme was inimitable, but another aspect of his

CONSTRUCTING A LINEAGE 9

voracious pragmatism provided the liberal lineage with its continuity and forward momentum. Higinbotham, after all, endured active political life for less than two decades and departed parliament in despair before Pearson, Deakin, Higgins or others of the next generation entered it; Syme endured. As Deakin put it: His ambition for the Age was to see it conducting a continuous campaign of resounding victories won with or from either side as occasion offered. The legislation he desired he seized, whether it came as flotsam, jetsam or cargo delivered in due course, so long as it could be added to the trophies of his multifarious activities.

This suggests a pragmatism that shades into ruthlessness and egoism, and underplays the cumulative significance of such per-

sistent endeavour. For Higinbotham, liberalism prescribed inviolable principles from which there could be no retreat — indeed, one of his disciples observed that his selfless attachment to duty made him ‘the most powertul and dreaded of leaders’. Few could stand the rigours of such purism; even Higinbotham succumbed to weariness and despondency. For Syme, liberalism was a cumulative project that had to be built up over time from

the materials at hand. He endured. He also grasped that the accomplishment of the liberal project required something more than the enlargement of liberty. If the agglomeration of settlers thrown together on this rich tract was to cohere and prosper, if its citizens were to channel their energies constructively for common benefit, then citizenship had to be given meaning and purpose. In his journalism and other writings he searched for doctrines that could join individuals in such mutuality, and his successors followed the same path. Charles Pearson’s eyeglass and Oxford drawl invited ridicule, but he maintained a cleareyed appreciation of the importance of education in preparing citizens to discharge their responsibilities. Deakin’s particular goal became the realization of a national identity for this citizenship to which Australians could give their highest loyalty. Higgins would apply his energies to the resolution of class antagonisms that threatened to tear the nation apart.’ These objectives were conceived as instalments of the larger programme that was liberalism: they were pursued as sequential stages in a march of material and moral progress, prosecuted in the name of the people and portrayed as conferring universal

benefit through the enhancement of individual capacity.

10 A COLONIAL LIBERALISM

However, each separate objective raised afresh the problem of

authority. In colonial circumstances, where the democratic temper scarcely tolerated differences of rank let alone the obligations that elsewhere were attached to wealth and status, the first principle of public life was that high-sounding principles had to be realized in numerical majorities. Tossed and buffeted in the bearpit of politics, even the most resilient liberal eventually wondered whether ‘the people’ for whom he acted was anything more than an ideological abstraction dignifying the factious impulses of a fickle multitude. How, then, was headway to be made? Higinbotham clung resolutely to civic virtue, Syme placed greater reliance on numbers, weight and influence, and their successors struggled to reconcile these divergent impulses of public life. The noble rhetoric of liberalism seemed to turn on the ignoble realities of the political process. In this way,

however rough the justice it meted out to its obverse emblem, ‘King George’ and ‘King David’ came to symbolize the two sides of colonial liberalism.

The problem of colonial liberalism In 1856 the fading English poet, Richard Hengist Horne, rode on horseback to the goldfield town of Heathcote to offer himself as a candidate for the first Victorian parliament. As he described the excursion six years later, it was a cheerful fiasco. Notwith-

standing the fact that he finished bottom of the poll, well-wishers toasted Horne’s departure with such generosity that he lost the way back to Melbourne and when darkness fell took refuge in a smoky roadside hut. To his surprise, he found a copy of Mill’s Essay on Liberty — ‘leaves uncut though; that explains it’.!°

Did it explain? Mill’s essay was not published until 1859, so

the wayside hut owner could hardly be reproached for ignorance of it three years earlier. The dubious anecdote nevertheless

serves to emphasize how those who sought to comprehend colonial peculiarities reached instinctively for imperial norms. ‘I am an advanced English liberal’, declared an opponent of the Victorian liberals; Pearson warned that the conservative press in Melbourne repeatedly tried to parade its party as the represen-

tative of English liberalism. Others played with similar paradoxes and pointed to the ‘strange and unaccountable transformation of the word in the Antipodes’, as if colonial liberalism

CONSTRUCTING A LINEAGE 11

were just one more freakish inversion of the natural order along with the duck-billed platypus and summer Yuletide, except that in this case the fault lay with the colonists for their departure from the verities that had been bequeathed them."! Historians have reduced the charge from perversion to neglect. They see liberalism as part of the cultural baggage that colonists brought with them only to lay it aside when it turned out to be largely irrelevant to the practical tasks that engaged their attention. As soon as self-government was achieved and its immediate consequences set in train, any interest in debating fundamental principles quickly disappeared so that the reforming zeal associated with genuine liberalism gave way to the pragmatic pursuit of personal advantage guided only by ‘vague attitudes of enthusiasm for progress and development’. Liberalism was not betrayed by the colonists, it died of inanition.!? These ways of thinking about colonial liberalism are really ways of not thinking about it. In construing the couplet as an

oxymoron they render ‘colonial’ as derivative, imitative and deficient, ‘liberalism’ as fixed, extraneous and unattainable. Two

lines of response are available. One is to contest the colonial

mentality that regards the life of this country — as Nettie Palmer did, momentarily at least — as lacking meaning and depth. I have no desire to take issue with that proposition at this point since I regard the whole of the book as a response to it. The other is to reconsider the meaning these sceptics attach to liberalism. Characteristically, they define it canonically by assembling a group of seminal figures who articulate its core principles: the philosophical empiricism of Locke and Hume and the market liberalism of Adam Smith; the radicalism of Paine

and the constitutionalism of Burke and Macaulay; Bentham’s utilitarianism and Mill’s individualism. Here already liberalism is given a metropolitan cast; it can be stretched to cover the

founding fathers of the American republic who articulated

principles of independence, and it can accommodate non-Anglophones such as Tocqueville, but it has no room for the creative contribution of nineteenth-century Australians. A more serious difficulty with this mode of exposition is that it assumes what it is meant to define. The liberal canon it constructs has no coherent unity; on the contrary, it is made up of individuals operating in different contexts, with different concerns and different assumptions, asking and answering different

12 A COLONIAL LIBERALISM

questions. The principles they enunciate do not yield a clear and

consistent pattern; they are complex, ambiguous, protean. Rather than treat liberalism as a coherent system, it is more realistic to regard it as a way of seeing the world and acting on it.'9

What of the phenomenon of colonial liberalism? Its nineteenth-century meaning was commonly understood in terms of an absence of history and a corresponding freedom to invent the future. European liberalism defined itself against the past through protracted contestation of the established order. In the colonies of settlement, where there were few traditional forms and no established ruling class, there seemed precious little for liberals to contest — or, as conservatives often lamented, little to conserve. John Fitzgerald Leslie Foster, squatter and admin-

istrator, son of a Tory member of the British House of Commons and grandson of a bishop, made the comparison during the elections for the first Victorian parliament: In England, with its established church, a large standing army and navy, a national debt, an hereditary peerage, and innumerable vested interests, he could understand what there was to be preserved and what to be uprooted. Here ... we had nothing to preserve, and nothing to destroy. We had landed on a naked shore to form, to found, to create.

What happened to liberalism when it was deprived of its natural enemy? It evidently acquired a new energy that struck such an acute observer as Alexis de Tocqueville when he first saw the

settlers of the new world ‘cutting their institutions like their roads in the midst of the forests where they have just settled’, or Higinbotham who described the immigrants to goldrush Victoria moulding the political and social clay ‘while it is yet pliable to the hand’. In such a setting liberalism shed its oppositional connotations and became a constructive endeavour, so that Foster predicted: ‘A man for the times must lead the way — must know how to build the great edifice — must be in reality, not in name, a liberal’.!4 This way of regarding colonial liberalism is certainly more helpful than those noted earlier. Instead of seeing it as a mere distortion or degeneration of the original stock, it invites us to consider the generic form in interaction with the local habitat. Thus Charles Gavan Duffy, Irish rebel turned colonial statesman, described the Australian colonies as saplings from the same

CONSTRUCTING A LINEAGE 13

root as the imperial tree ‘flourishing in a soil and under conditions of their own which render some modifications of structure inevitable’. We might liken the process to the introduction of exotic flora and fauna, like the rabbit and the blackberry, which run wild because of the absence of ecological checks and bring —consequences far in excess of those experienced in their place of origin. That comparison was actually proposed by the owner of the Argus, Edward Wilson, who in 1857 warned Higinbotham that the natural balance (‘When the sparrow is sent into the field some particular hawk seems specially commissioned to keep watch on him’) was endangered by advanced Victorian liberals. It became commonplace to see this absence of restraint as the obverse of new world freedom, as in the observation of the Professor of Law at the University of Melbourne in his textbook on The Government of Victoria that ‘many tendencies, at present only latent in English politics, or kept in check by powerful

counter-influences, here in Victoria run their unhindered course’. Similarly Pearson observed that the writings of such seminal British liberals as Mull, Fawcett and Thorold Rogers were perhaps not as well known or judiciously estimated in Vic-

toria, but they exercized incomparably more influence ‘in a country where the retarding forces are small than in one where they are all-powerful’. A similar approach was taken by the American historian Louis Hartz when he argued that the new world settlements each embodied a fragment of European civilization which expanded to fill its imagination.!°

It was Edward Wilson, as founder of the Acclimatisation Society of Victoria, who to counteract the ‘savage silence’ of the Australian countryside set loose the sparrows that quickly out-

stripped the hawks. While Higinbotham and those who followed him were versed in the conventional wisdom of political checks and balances, the problem that exercized them was not an excess or liberalism but rather the failure of the measures they implemented to bring about the outcomes they anticipated. This study follows their response to that failure, from initial optimism in the efficacy of their project to increasing awareness of its limitation and a consequent questioning of assumptions about the springs of human conduct. At the same time it reveals a growing appreciation of the obstacles within the colonial setting to the realization of liberalism.

14 A COLONIAL LIBERALISM

The setting presents a particular colonial conjuncture. Victoria was not an old colony established as part of the eighteenth-century strategy of empire with its garrison, closed port and bond or penal labour force. Nor was it one of the nineteenth-century experiments in systematic colonization, like South Australia or

Canterbury, with planned liberal foundations. It fell between the old and new. Moreover, the lateness of its white occupation in the 1830s, the rapidity of its pastoral development in the 1840s, and then the dramatic impact of gold (which brought an influx of half a million people in the 1850s) accentuated lines of division that ran through settler colonialism. There was the pre-

goldrush generation whose fortunes were based on simple occupancy of the Port Phillip District tor wool production and who wished to consolidate their supremacy in a stable social hierarchy with limited political participation. Then there were the newcomers of the 1850s to the now separate colony of Victoria: acquisitive, impatient, abrasive, wanting an open society, democratic government and liberal institutions. As early as 1853 that astute participant observer, William Westgarth, characterized the squatters and gentlemen as constituting the ‘exclusive party’ and suggested that ‘conservative’ was not an apt descrip-

tion since they were not so much preserving a way of life as endeavouring to rear up institutions opposed to the people and the age. In practice their opposition quickly assumed conserva-

tive forms, for in comparison with the other colonies of Australasia, Victoria had more people, more wealth, more ambition, more energy. Because of the vigour of the liberal impulse and the strength of the resistance to it, it presents in concentrated form a contest that elsewhere was softened and modulated by less abrupt breaks with the past. Yet the struggle in Victoria was sufficiently protracted for liberals to maintain

continuity and coherence, and sufficiently fierce for them to explore a wide range of possibilities. In the course of that struggle they created the lineage that is the subject of this book.'¢

A lineage is a conservative device. It is created by looking back to those who went before, renewed by conscious transfer of possession from one hand to the next. In including some, it excludes others. Among those omitted from this lineage of colonial liberals are a number who considered themselves to possess strong claims for recognition. Notables such as Sir Charles Gavan Duffy and Sir Graham Berry were deemed to

CONSTRUCTING A LINEAGE 15

have forfeited their position by yielding to worldly temptations — the titles provide the clue, for it became a point of honour

among the Victorian fraternity to refuse imperial honours. Across the Murray, the most eminent of all nineteenth-century statesmen in the Australian colonies, Sir Henry Parkes, stood unbowed by bankruptcy and unashamed in marital excess as the definitive example of how far a Brummagem lad might go and

still maintain his liberalism. In Victoria, on the other hand, Higinbotham precluded that possibility when he ridiculed knighthood as a ‘base, contemptible distinction’, and by the late 1870s Pearson could pronounce that ‘no man who values polit-

ical influence in Victoria would now venture to accept a knighthood’. The men who are the subject of this study won high office and exercized great influence, but they took pride in adherence to ideals that called for resolution and sacrifice. Their liberalism was no tepid orthodoxy, it was a consuming passion.” The scope of the study is at once restricted and diffuse. It is restricted in that the cast contains just three principal figures, Higinbotham, Syme and Pearson, with walk-on lines only for others, who all played out their parts in one corner of one of Britain’s settler territories. It is restricted all the more in that while the liberal lineage leads from Victoria into Australia at the

turn of the century, when Deakin, Higgins and colleagues moved on to a national stage, this study stops short of that transition. It is diffuse in that it ranges summarily across whole aspects of what was involved in colonial politics — its constituency, forms of organization, methods and outcomes — and further still across the history of law, journalism, education, religion and the family in pursuit of the three men who left such tantalizingly incomplete traces of their inner lives. The period

offers up a number of public artefacts. The document, the printed speech, the newspaper, the building, the altered landscape are some of the objects wherein these liberals left their mark, yet the meaning of none of their statements is self-evident. Then there are the intangible elements of reputation, personality, influence, the modes of thought that we inherited and the axi-

oms we no longer share. Their politics, to moderns with little confidence in salvation by politics, was overblown in its rhetoric and unrealistic in its expectation of unfolding progress. We are too habituated to liberalism to appreciate the radical novelty of

16 A COLONIAL LIBERALISM

its constitution of the individual as a social actor and of society as a voluntary association of sovereign individuals. It is by considering the implications of the liberal cosmology through the lives of its practitioners, with the multiple interactions of their

private and public selves, that its far-reaching implications become apparent. By considering the practitioners as historically

bound figures we can learn something about the construction of traditions and their fragility.

2

GEORGE HIGINBOTHAM AND THE

TASKS OF SELF-GOVERNMENT

Why do you all but ignore the discovery of gold and its many consequences? You know perfectly well what it meant to us materially ... but have not realised perhaps the extent to which it revolutionised our early politics ... It gave us a large proportion of the best of our population, men with a far wider and more advanced liberalism ... Alfred Deakin !

A place of transgressions It began as you approached the forest of masts in Hobson’s Bay. Your past three months had been spent under sail, the voy-

age unbroken by sight of land or news of those you had left behind. You had long since learned to avoid uncongenial companions, exhausted topics of conversation with the remainder; but as the ship edged along Bass Strait and you first sniffed the sharp tang of eucalyptus on a warm north wind, expectations

revived. At the entrance to Port Phillip Bay the pilot came aboard. Through the Heads you passed and along a sandy shore

fringed with tea-tree and smudges of habitation, until the approach to the wharfs sent all spectators down to their cabins to gather belongings. Then your troubles commenced. First you had to arrange for the landing of your trunks, and the charges demanded by lightermen were outrageous: heaps of abandoned items strewn on the foreshore testified to the despair of those who had sunk all their savings on the voyage. Then you had to get to Melbourne. 17

18 A COLONIAL LIBERALISM

You could take a boat up the Yarra, past mud flats, stinking fellmongering works and slaughterhouses where dropsical pigs

wallowed in offal; you could clamber aboard a horse-drawn omnibus to be jolted along an improvized road; or you might strike out directly from Sandridge through scrub and trees, skirt the clearing at Emerald Hill all covered with canvas and calico,

until at last you crossed the stone bridge over the Yarra.

Melbourne itself was bedlam. The streets were crowded with vehicles, people, animals; flies and dirt were inescapable in hot weather, and when it rained Swanston and Elizabeth Streets were awash with coffee tins, sardine boxes, discarded clothes, butcher’s waste and household refuse. Accommodation was prohibitively expensive and lodgers bedded down on tables, benches and floors. At the primitive post office you collected your mail only to find it had been rifled. You determined to head for the diggings as soon as possible but first you had to assemble a tent, blankets, a pick and shovel, frying-pan, billy and provisions, all marked up to several times their expected prices. The rapacity was accompanied always by the advice to like it or lump it.’ These experiences form the opening chapters of almost every account of the early years of the Victorian goldrush. There were

dozens of them published in the 1850s, as much to entertain those who stayed at home as to instruct the prospective goldseekers, and their standard form is suggested by the parody in the Melbourne Punch that records the joy of the narrator on arrival to discover that he is ‘really in Australia’ and that it was ‘not a mere literary figment but solid and actual as the streets in London’. The quantities of wealth were so prodigious, their impact so disturbing, that they could only be comprehended in hyperbole. Within the colony the discovery of rich deposits of

alluvial gold suspended the natural order: crews deserted ships, crops were left unharvested. When the news spread further, shipping lines had to rearrange their schedules to meet the demand for passage to Victoria: a quarter of a million persons sailed from Britain during the 1850s and there were smaller contingents from most other European and Pacific countries. In the course of the 1850s they took from the ground more than 600 tonnes of gold with a value, greater than the output of the Australian economy over the previous decade.’ Gold dazzled. It filled the imagination and blinded the observer to what had gone before. Published accounts of Victoria

THE TASKS OF SELF-GOVERNMENT 19

during the 1850s contain only fragmentary traces of a past that is barely registered before it is wiped clean — groups of Aborigines standing in bemused silence on street corners, brutalized convicts serving out their sentences on the hulks moored off Williamstown. The theme of transformation dominates these accounts and gold is a symbol of both regeneration and disorder. The goldrush diverts resources from productive energy to feverish speculation. The diggings disfigure the sylvan tranquillity of the countryside, and the natural fertility of the soil is neglected for mere depredation. The hunger for gold is a madness that attracts the dangerous classes and deranges the rest. It loos-

ens all restraint so that greed and rapacity run unchecked. It creates no lasting attachments among the diggers who move under its spell from one place to the next until finally they carry off their treasure. It sunders the ties of providence and modesty, duty and respect, so that you see women whose red feet peep out from below hems of the richest silks and satins, and rough diggers who flaunt their wealth and boast, ‘It is our turn to be masters now’.* Melbourne served as a place of entry and exit, but already it was something more. In 1854, when Melbourne passed Sydney as the largest Australian city with a population of 75 000, the first railway service in the country opened between Sandridge and Flinders Street, and the first telegraph linked Williamstown to the city centre. The foundation stones of the University and the Public Library were laid in the same year and a year later

construction began of the grandiose Parliament House at the top of Bourke Street. Gas lighting, sealed roads and reticulated water consolidated a transformation that had begun less than twenty-five years earlier with the arrival of Batman and Fawk-

ner. The contrast never palled between their primordial wilderness and ‘yonder city, illuminated by its magic lamps, its windows glittering with wealth, a city with palaces worthy of kings, and temples worthy of gods’, as celebrated by the stonemason Charles Jardine Don in 1857. Every aspect of the life of the city — its pubs and coffee-stalls, theatres and restaurants, emporia and street vendors, even the prostitutes who plied their trade by night — contributed to the metropolitan ambience.° Indeed, Melbourne willed itself into existence by inventing urban forms. The rectangular grid of the city, broad thoroughfares and sweeping avenues of approach, were laid out on paper

20 A COLONIAL LIBERALISM

and filled in later. The surrounding suburbs were planted with

familiar names like Richmond, Kew and Brighton, and any others that seized the fancy, such as Heidelberg or St Kilda — even the canvas town on Emerald Hill, which might have passed for diggings except for its lack of holes, had a Regent Street and Bond Street. The city centre was a perpetual construction site, a gap-toothed celebration of architectural licence. As intention outran capacity, so the palatial facades fell away at the rear to improvized skillion; and the more ambitious the project, the longer the delay between conception and realization — Parliament House is still incomplete.

The incongruous, unfinished effect struck David Syme’s brother Ebenezer when he landed in Melbourne in 1853. Just as he was disturbed by an unpredictability of attire that allowed a wealthy digger to dress in moleskins and a remittance man to

parade in the height of fashion, so ‘the eye of the visitor is offended at each turn by the close contiguity of hovels and palaces, weatherboard one-storied cottages attached to lofty stone edifices’. It was a place of transgressions.°

The reticent newcomer Among the newcomers was George Higinbotham. He arrived unaccompanied in the autumn of 1854, just short of his twentyeighth birthday. Within weeks he was admitted to practice at the Bar but struggled to obtain briefs and supported himself as a freelance journalist; possibly he made a foray to the diggings, and family lore has it that in Bendigo he met a parlour maid, Margaret Foreman, who had emigrated from Kent. In September 1854 they married and set up house in Emerald Hill.

Beyond these bare facts and unsupported hypotheses, the record of Higinbotham’s early years in Australia is empty. Higinbotham himself kept it so. Even in the family circle, where other successful colonists recounted their youthful endeavours, he kept silent and dismissed with a smile any anecdote that was

put to him. While still in middle age he issued an instruction that all his papers were to be destroyed on his death, unread by anyone except his wife; ten years later he repeated the injunction: ‘all my manuscripts, books and old diaries, all political and professional remains and papers, without delay to be burnt’. His reticence was absolute. It covered both his personal life, whose privacy he guarded as others would guard a dark secret, and his

THE TASKS OF SELF-GOVERNMENT 21

public career, which was legendary. Around such enigmatic eminence, apocrypha had to serve in place of testimony: thus a relative was said to have told him as a boy that God meant his creatures to be happy here on earth, but George corrected her, ‘No! not happiness, goodness,’ and with so much force that fifty years later the unnamed relative apparently still remembered the incident. The Higinbotham who comes down to us as the progenitor of colonial liberalism is inaccessible to direct scrutiny. We glimpse him through the eyes of others; even his journalism and his oratory lack the tangibility of the holograph.’ Why did he come? The Higinbothams were an Irish family of Dutch descent who traced their ancestry back to the army

of William of Orange. George was one of eight children of Henry Higinbotham, a merchant, and his wife, Sarah Wilson, who was the daughter of the United States consul. Trading in the fashionable quarter of Dublin, Henry Higinbotham enjoyed modest respectability and moderate wealth; all but one of his six sons was educated at Trinity College, the nursery of the Protestant Ascendancy, and two of them took holy orders in the established Anglican church. George, the youngest of the family, was born in 1826 and went up to Trinity College from the Royal School of Dungannon with a scholarship. His undergraduate studies revolved around classics, mathematics and philosophy. He excelled but had to settle for an early degree off the class-list when his father’s business suffered from the effects of the Famine. In 1847, following the complete failure of the potato crop and a harsh winter, a quarter of a million people left Ireland for north America or Australia, and as many again crossed the Irish Sea. George Higinbotham was one of them. He went to London and entered himself as a student-atlaw at Lincoln’s Inn. While reading for the Bar and eating the requisite number of dinners at the Inn (which was the only for-

mal requirement an aspirant barrister had to satisfy), he supported himself as a journalist on the staff of the Morning Chronicle. This was the leading liberal newspaper until bought in 1848 by a group of Peelite conservatives, after which it lost its lustre: Dickens had been a parliamentary reporter in the 1830s, Thackeray wrote for it in the 1840s, and Henry Mayhew was still contributing his acute observations of labouring life in

London when Higinbotham worked alongside him as a reporter.

22 A COLONIAL LIBERALISM

Thackeray liked to tell the story of the dinner party at a country house where the table was entertained by the learning

and wit of a visitor from London. ‘Who is that monstrous pleasant fellow?’ asked one of the squires. His companion explained that their guest was a celebrated author and contributor to leading periodicals. “Good heavens!’ said the squire,

quite horrified, ‘A literary man. I thought he had been a gentleman.’ Many briefless barristers used their pens to supplement their meagre resources and found, like Thackeray’s young scapegrace, Arthur Pendennis, that the association with

Grub Street endangered standing in_ polite society. Higinbotham was acutely sensitive about such matters and as an outsider with no connections at a time when the legal profession was desperately overcrowded, he must have found his marginal status intolerable. In a rare admission years later, he conceded ‘I was in despair about making my way at home’. He sailed for Australia within six months of being called to

the Bar, apparently with the intention to prospect for gold, for it was on the advice of a friend that he packed his wig and gown. Beyond the fortuitous conjecture that it might sustain other activities than digging, he knew nothing of the place to which he was going other than its location.? He was one of many lawyers who thought they might benefit from the bonanza. In 1851 when Victoria separated from New South Wales, there were half a dozen barristers in Melbourne. Over the next four years their numbers increased tenfold until the lanes and alleys in the north-east corner of the city became a warren of legal chambers, stationers, and scriveners. Some prospered in the highly litigious environment. Archibald Michie began practising with the establishment of the Victorian Supreme Court in 1852, and within three years his earnings rivalled

those of the leaders of the English Bar; Richard Ireland, who came a year later, and Butler Cole Aspinall, who had worked with Higinbotham on the Morning Chronicle and arrived in Melbourne just a few months before him, achieved comparable success, while Henry Samuel Chapman rejected the offer of a

governorship in the West Indies to join them in 1854. All became prominent public figures, all enjoyed ministerial office. There was a close association between the legal profession and

colonial politics, particularly close in the aftermath of the Eureka rebellion when all these advocates appeared for the men arrested | |

THE TASKS OF SELF-GOVERNMENT 23

and put on trial for high treason. If the diggers’ defiance of authority had caused alarm, the butchery committed by the troops at the rough stockade on the outskirts of Ballarat swung public opinion against the administration and in favour of the

prisoners. Huge crowds attended the courthouse during the early months of 1855 to cheer their acquittal, and Michie, Ireland and Aspinall shared in their triumph.!° Higinbotham took longer to establish his career. As an advo-

cate he was more restrained than the dazzling Michie, less formidable than Ireland, slower to seize an opening than mercurial Aspinall. He prepared his cases thoroughly and presented them with grave, even ponderous deliberation. In dealing with clients he was disconcertingly scrupulous. His fees were low and he never sought silk. Beyond these self-imposed limits on

his professional practice, he spurned self-advertisement. Whereas the leaders of the Bar were gregarious, clubbable men who projected their personalities on to Melbourne’s social scene, Higinbotham avoided such exposure. He did join the Victorian Club, formed in 1856 as a second-string Melbourne Club, but took little part in it. Apart from acting as trustee for his local Anglican church and serving in the voluntary militia, he joined no public bodies. This reclusiveness was attributed to his marriage. A well-connected Englishman who visited Victoria in the 1860s was told that Higinbotham ‘had married a woman below him in rank, who was not received in society ... He was not to be met with at the Club nor was to be seen in general society, for he declined

to go where his wife was not admitted’. While there is no evidence of anything as tangible as a rebuff, the few first-hand reports of his enigmatic spouse are consistent with the report.

Tall, slender and gentle to the point of delicacy, Mrs Higinbotham’s reticence was unnerving. She spoke seldom and

never about herself, giving an impression that she lived in a world of her own — ‘she didn’t quite fit in’. While George was joined in Melbourne by his brother Thomas, who became chief engineer on the Victorian Railways and lived under the same roof with George and Margaret for the rest of his life, there is no trace of any Foreman relative. Even with her own children (two sons and three daughters) there was a seeming failure to

connect. Her closest companion was Miss Grant, the family governess.!!

24 A COLONIAL LIBERALISM

A young woman, newly married and_ visiting the Higinbothams for the first time, formed the impression that her host might be a domestic martinet. The suggestion seems preposterous. He was celebrated for his exquisite conduct towards all women, regardless of rank or station. ‘Off would go his hat to his cook with a gracious bow with which another might greet a duchess.’ His own daughter recalled the story of the female guest who, when she saw Higinbotham putting on his coat to go out into the rain and post a letter, urged him to let the maid take it and was told: ‘She too 1s a woman’. Note, however, that

it was Higinbotham who prevailed. Insistence such as this, enforced with elaborate courtesy, might well disconcert a newcomer who witnessed it practised between a man and wife.’ Higinbotham was commonly described as feminine in his pu-

rity of conduct and sweetness of manner. His appearance — clean-shaven except for side-whiskers in a period when most men wore beards — encouraged the typification. His cleanliness left an abiding impression on grandchildren who used to wait outside his bedroom door to escort him down to breakfast: he would appear, pink of cheek, smelling of soap and eau-de-Cologne, and shake out the whitest of handkerchiefs to put in his

breast pocket. A journalist described a compact figure of medium height, a pale complexion, light blue eyes, rounded face ‘dimpled in what one calls a feminine manner’ and a placid coun-

tenance. Deakin thought it a ‘singularly beautiful’ face, ‘cameo-like in its delicacy’; another called it ‘lamb-like’. When Higinbotham’s sympathies were excited, wrote a colleague, “he displayed an almost womanly tenderness of emotion; for, as it seems to me, he combined a masculine vigour of intellect with a feminine warmth and goodness of heart’. A critic put the same distinction differently when he ascribed Higinbotham’s failings

to ‘a certain feminine strain in his character’ that marred his judgement so that he ‘quickly rose to shrieking point when opposed’; and another suggested that his ‘unbounded capacity for spite and hatred’ indicated ‘a feminine kind of nature’.¥ The notion that appearance reveals character is by no means peculiar to the nineteenth century, nor is the recourse to gender stereotypes; but the meanings assigned here to masculine and feminine are not necessarily ours. When Higinbotham’s contemporaries described him as feminine they intended no suggestion of sexual ambivalence. The femininity to which they referred

THE TASKS OF SELF-GOVERNMENT 25

was a quality of emotional spontaneity (whether tender or spite-

ful) that they contrasted with masculine restraint. To them it was a basic difference, as categorical as the dichotomy of nature and culture, and one that informed their demarcation of the pri-

vate from the public sphere: they expected the feminine sentiments to flourish within the bosom of the family, worldly masculine qualities to prevail outside, and enclose and protect those within. Higinbotham subverted this distinction. He was too pure, his conscience too tender. When told the hoary tale of the ratcatchers who took care to leave some rats so that there would be work next time, he protested “Oh, do not say that’.

If a joke was told, he would look round the room and see if anyone could possibly be hurt before joining the laughter. To see him leading a blind man across a city street was to admire him; to share his legal chambers and endure the perpetual traffic of beggars whom he never turned away, was another matter. He was dangerously unworldly.'* Higinbotham’s faith in the essential goodness of humanity was deeply religious, but what was his religion? Abhorring public displays of piety, he was variously described as a deist, a

theist, a pantheist. While remaining an active layman in the Church of England (two of his brothers were clergymen), he was seemingly untroubled by the doctrinal controversies that wracked that church along with the other Protestant denominations. His religion was stripped bare of those articles of faith that stressed man’s fallen state and conspiciously free of the preoccupation with sin that tormented the zealots. God’s mercy and love was apparent in all that he had created; all of God’s

creatures were endowed with divine excellence: hence Higinbotham’s confidence in human capacity for reason and

right conduct, and his corresponding mistrust of those doctrines and practices that came between the individual and his creator. True religion consisted in opening one’s heart and one’s mind to this indwelling truth and goodness, and applying reason and morality in all spheres of conduct.’

The owner of the Argus and its editor debate democracy During his first two years in Melbourne, Higinbotham supplemented earnings at the Bar as a freelance journalist. In 1856 he became editor of the Argus which was then, with the Sydney

26 A COLONIAL LIBERALISM

Morning Herald, the leading newspaper in the country. Its senior partner, Edward Wilson, was a large, insistent man who had earned the reputation of the ‘Cobbett of the South’ for his denunciation of administrative abuses, but with the Eureka affair and the prospect of self-government the Argus drew back and

deprecated radical mischief-making as roundly as it had previously denounced the Governor and his circle. An embittered employee accused Wilson of using ‘the prerogatives of an autocrat’ to betray the popular support he had so lucra-

tively cultivated. Wilson had already yielded financial management of the Argus to a junior partner and failing eyesight caused him to entrust the editorship to Higinbotham. Alike in sombre rectitude, each readily accepted the terms the other laid

down: Higinbotham that he should be allowed to continue to practice at the Bar, Wilson that his editor should shun society lest he give even the appearance of belonging to a coterie. One

further condition of Higinbotham’s editorship was tacitly assumed — that his views approximated to those of his employer.'!¢

The assumption was quickly tested. On three occasions over the next three years the proprietor and editor of the Argus debated political differences in the columns of the newspaper until,

by the middle of 1859, they finally parted company. Yet throughout the exchanges both men appealed to a common set

of principles, which indeed were affirmed by the scrupulous courtesies they maintained as they exchanged polemics. Both stood at a point of transition between a political tradition that we might call Whig and the emergent doctrine that came to be known as liberalism. The old was splintering into the new as nineteenth-century reforms calmed the earlier excitement of oppositional Whiggery, so that each now called himself a liberal, using that term with its contemporary shades of meaning — a love of freedom but not licence, openness to change so long at it preserved order and harmony, amplitude but not excess — as he sought to adjust earlier assumptions and connotations to new

circumstances. If, in the end, they arrived at different conclu-

sions about the appropriate balance, they reached those conclusions through a shared discourse. Like Wilson, Higinbotham set the new postulates of liberalism within the framework of accepted wisdom. He recognized the right to economic freedom while holding to a moral hier-

THE TASKS OF SELF-GOVERNMENT 2/7

archy of the ends such freedom might serve. He accepted the sovereignty of numbers while insisting on the need for safeguards. He sought to harmonize the autonomy of the individual with the preservation of liberty and virtue. Not all liberals were democrats — there was tyranny in numbers, and the individual was safer in a family or a community than in a crowd — but the liberal insistence on equal rights led inexorably towards equality in political rights. Democracy was thus the inevitable form of the modern age, and to oppose it in the rising colonial settlements was double folly; but like all irresistible forces, democracy had an enormous power for good or evil: Every society must contain the element of conservatism, and the element of progress. In our case, the development of the latter is unusually rapid ... [I]f the relationship between the two elements be destroyed, that development will become morbid, and the symmetry of the entire social body will be spoiled.

Higinbotham’s idea of public life derived from eighteenth-century civic humanism, where the maintenance of liberty depended on strenuous moral effort and there was a clear continuum of public and private duty: ‘Self-government 1s perceived to possess a double meaning, individual and political, each exhibiting the closest correlation with the other; and in proportion to a man’s self-control is observed to be his capacity to be entrusted with

political power.’ On to this stock Higinbotham grafted a Tocquevillean recognition of the actual devolution of political power, and a corresponding appreciation of the need to guide rather than oppose change.!’ Higinbotham tested and refined these principles by applying them to the constitutional issues before the colony in the 1850s. The British government had acknowledged that the Australian colonies were destined for self-government when in 1852 it invited New South Wales, Victoria and South Australia (and, in 1854, Tasmania) to draft constitutions for representative parliaments exercising legislative, financial and administrative control over their own affairs. The constitutions had been submitted to the Colonial Office and enacted in 1855. They were modelled

on the British constitution with governors to represent the Crown and bicameral legislatures that mimicked the House of

Commons and House of Lords so that the lower chamber would operate on a broad franchise while the exclusive upper

28 A COLONIAL LIBERALISM

chamber would act as a brake on rash measures. The principle of responsible government was recognized by requiring the governor to choose as his ministers members of parliament who enjoyed the support of the popular lower house. At the same time the governor was something other than a constitutional monarch and the colonial parliament something less than a fully

competent legislature. The governor was appointed by the

Colonial Office in London and answerable to it. The colonial parliament had no power to legislate on what were deemed imperial matters and indeed all of its bills were subject to disallowance by the Crown.!® The drafting of the Victorian constitution had occurred with remarkably little public discussion (unlike the lively debate in

New South Wales) at a time when the gold rush absorbed the energies of the majority. Its architects were Foster, the Colonial Secretary, and William Stawell, the Attorney-General, both nominees of the governor on the rudimentary local legislature to which the task was entrusted. Convinced that ‘those who are possessed of wealth are less likely to try chimerical experiments than those who have no stake in the country’, they prepared a series of defences against levelling democracy. A voter for the Legislative Assembly had to be an adult male resident in the colony for at least a year who owned or occupied property or else held an annual miner’s licence, while his representative had to own property worth £2000; elections were spaced at five-year intervals and the distribution of electorates penalized the centres of population. The restrictions on the representative character of the lower house were but the outer ramparts around the con-

servative stronghold in the upper house. Unlike New South Wales, which adopted a nominated Legislative Council, the Victorians chose an elected one. Foster and Stawell foresaw that

a nominated chamber was vulnerable to an influx of new appointees, whereas election of members (for ten-year terms) on a restricted franchise (possession of freehold property worth £1000) from the ranks of the rich (the £5000 freehold property required of members would be equivalent to present-day muil-

lionaire status) made the Victorian Legislative Council a well-nigh impregnable bastion of pastoral wealth. Since the con-

sent of both houses was needed for all legislation (including alteration of the constitution), and no provision was made for the resolution of deadlocks, (not even a double dissolution), the

THE TASKS OF SELF-GOVERNMENT 29

Legislative Council had effective right of veto over the statute book. An oligarchical upper house was thus made to serve as a substitute for imperial protection against the weight of numbers.!?

As the restrictive nature of the Victorian constitution became apparent, attempts to reform it gathered momentum. The process began even before the parliament assembled for the first time with the adoption of the ballot for the elections that were

due in 1856 — Victoria led the world in shielding the voter from the surveillance of fellow citizens. The first parliament abolished property qualifications for members of the lower house, introduced manhood suffrage for their election (though balanced this by allowing an additional vote in as many electorates as a man held property worth £50) and reduced the life of a parliament from five years to three. Two further instalments of democracy, payment for members and a more equal distribution of electorates, were withheld. Higinbotham supported most of the reforms. He thought the ballot would curb the practice of candidates ‘treating’ voters with gifts, which debased the electoral process. He welcomed the abolition of property qualifications for members of the Legislative Assembly: “To be rich here is evidence of nothing but that a man has made money; and if it be right at all to impose any restriction upon the free choice of electors, it is difficult to conceive a worse and more inapplicable test than that of wealth.’ He accepted the widening of the franchise and opposed the plural vote.*° He conducted the public debates with his employer on the question of the franchise. In an opening salvo of letters to the editor, Wilson presented himself as one who had long advocated

the widest possible extension of the suffrage but who had become mindful of the pitfalls now that the actual prospect of democracy was before him. Too perfect an electoral equality would concentrate power in the hands of the majority, whose interests might be an obstacle to the progress of the colony. The result would be class legislation, trampling on the rights of the minority and endangering their property (for the class that Wilson had in mind was the labouring class). His proposed solution was to safeguard the various ‘interests’ (pastoralists, farmer, Miners, merchants, manufacturers, etc.) through separate representation. Wilson’s admixture of eighteenth-century Whig and

nineteenth-century liberal doctrines, positing an organic

30 A COLONIAL LIBERALISM

harmony of interests while prescribing a crude mechanism to check the tyranny of a class, drew from Higinbotham an impassioned defence of democracy: We hold ... that the great end of all electoral systems is, as far as possible, to secure justice and good government to every individual; that no amount of wealth gives any one an extra claim as to these matters; that a community is not a commercial company, in which a man should have a voice potential in proportion to the number of shares which he is able to buy; that the claim to be well governed rests upon something quite apart from one’s power of paying the expenses

of government; that Lazarus has as much right to be considered in legislation as pives; and that all men who live a life in a country have so large an interest in its good government, and so equal a stake in it, that their mere pecuniary possessions are but as dust in the balance.

The waves of rhetoric have a rhythmical force that sweep irresistibly to the final declaration; yet the distance that separated Higinbotham from Wilson was not so great as the passage might suggest. While he accepted that ‘the aim of Liberals is always

towards extension of the franchise’, he could see ‘a point in political progress where this must cease’: you could give every man a vote, every woman, but eventually you would exhaust

this avenue of advance. Nor did he discount the danger of a tyranny of the majority: he rejected Wilson’s schemes for the representation of minorities for the same reason that he condemned the plural vote, namely that it was conducive to the class legislation it was meant to prevent. He held no exalted expectations of democracy and advocated manhood suffrage ‘not because it is an infallible, but because it is the best practicable expedient for securing representative government’.”! Higinbotham’s support for a free and equal suffrage derived from his fastidious views on representation. He had an exalted expectation of legislators serving the public good above the ruck of sectional interests. He rejected the suggestion that members

of parliament were mere delegates of their electors and deprecated all attempts to reduce their freedom of judgement. Preferring the ‘dilettanteism of the well-fed to the greediness of the decidedly hungry’, he opposed payment of members when this was first suggested. Similarly, he condemned party organization

inside and outside parliament on the grounds that nothing should come between a member and his duty: ‘Our anti-party theory simply amounts to this, that every one ought to speak

THE TASKS OF SELF-GOVERNMENT 31

the truth, and to vote the truth, and to think the truth, so far as he can, upon every question as it arises ...’ These views sat awkwardly with the striving for office, the log-rolling and factionalism, the ‘self-seeking intrigues’ and ‘the collective bribing of the entire constituency’ that marked colonial politics from 1856 onwards. His distaste often took a patrician form, as when he described the expenditure of public funds on registration of voters as ‘the purchase of costly pearls for undiscerning swine’. Disenchantment extended to the constant schemes of reform: ‘Are we never to cease or pause in our constitution tinkering?’ His faith in democracy relied also on assumptions about colonial society that were equally fragile. It was an axiom of the science of government that the form of politics should match the state of social development. In Europe, where extremes of wealth and poverty excited violent conflict, Higinbotham judged it scarcely safe to endow all citizens with political equality, but thankfully this was not the case in Australia. The colonies had no ‘dangerous class’ of paupers and every citizen had an interest in defending the just rights of property. The first elections satisfied Higinbotham that ‘the masses of society in Australia are essentially conservative — attached to law and order and determined to seek reforms through constitutional channels’. Thus his confidence that the colonies could safely adopt institutions that in Britain would be dangerously advanced.” Subsequent developments shook this confidence. An issue that

the imperial administration bequeathed to the new legislature was land tenure. In the 1830s and 1840s the fertile regions of Victoria had been turned into sheep runs by squatters (whose possession of the land rested on simple occupancy). From 1846 they were able to take out licenses but the question of ownership was left unresolved. In 1857 the government introduced legislation that would leave the squatters undisturbed, a prospect

that enraged land-hungry immigrants in the towns as well as on the diggings where alluvial deposits were fast becoming exhausted. The aggrieved elements came together in a Land Convention whose delegates, elected at mass meetings across the colony, gathered in Melbourne in mid-1857. Their meeting place

was a hotel opposite Parliament House, set up to resemble a legislative chamber with its banner (a flash of lightning, inscribed vox populi, passing through a Southern Cross) hung above the

speaker’s chair (which was occupied by the radical lawyer,

32 A COLONIAL LIBERALISM

Wilson Gray). Their amphitheatre was the Eastern Market, a row

of long, open arcades half way down the hill on the site now occupied by the Southern Cross hotel, where leading members harangued the crowds that congregated in flickering torchlight at the end of the working day. The atmosphere was described afterwards by one who at this time wrote for the Argus: You saw men who had fought in the streets of Paris; political refugees from Frankfort, Berlin, Vienna and Buda Pesth, and Carbonari from Italy. Mostly young, ardent, enthusiastic and animated by more or less Utopian visions of reconstructing the political and social institutions

of mankind so as to bring about an era of universal peace and prosperity, these heterogeneous exiles flung themselves heartily into the popular movements of the day.

While the Convention’s immediate object was to defeat the land bill and obtain a measure that satisfied popular needs, it quickly broadened its demands into a far-reaching programme of constitutional reform. Higinbotham sympathized at first with the

aspiration to open up the land, but he was scornful of the delegates’ absurd pretensions and the ‘impudent nonsense’ they

talked about politics. Just as his contributor dwelt on the im-

practical excesses of these exotic hotheads, he too was so alarmed by the spectre of revolution that he overlooked the sheer orderliness of the Convention’s procedures and the symbolic significance of its mimicry of parliamentary forms.” Weak as the land bill was, and generous to the squatters, it proved too strong for the Legislative Council, which rejected it. The Convention dispersed until the following year when pro-

posals for electoral redistribution were sent up from the Assembly to the Council. When the Council rejected this bill,

popular discontent came to a head. A huge crowd (the Age claimed 20000) gathered at the Eastern Market on the evening

of 1 June 1858 and marched up Bourke Street, with banners warning “Where Justice Is Denied, Allegiance Ceases To Be A Duty’ and singing the Marseillaise, Mourir pour la Patrie, Yan-

kee Doodle and Rule Britannia. They nailed a board on to Parliament House: ‘To let, the upper portion of this house’, and

returned to the Eastern Market with three cheers for liberty, equality and fraternity. Higinbotham was outraged. ‘So the blessed reign of mobocracy has set in!’ ‘Scamps’, ‘idlers’ and ‘loafers’ had worked on the ‘vulgar passions of the unreasoning

THE TASKS OF SELF-GOVERNMENT 33

mob’ and treated parliament with contempt. ‘Why weren’t they scattered by a few staves, and sent home to finish their orgies in the slums they emerged from?’

Twenty-five years later, when Higinbotham opened the Trades Hall chambers where his portrait kept company with a bust of Wilson Gray, he paid a belated tribute to his compatriot and friend: ‘He was the most stubborn uncompromising politician I ever met’. Back in the 1850s, Higinbotham explained, he had disagreed with Gray about how to deal with the land issue and at that time, he thought, both men had been groping in the dark. But Gray ‘never compromised a principle. I wish I could say the same for myself.’ It is true that Higinbotham’s views on the land question hardened as he came to appreciate the folly of seeking a compromise between the squatters and selectors, yet the depth of his hostility to the Convention and the violence of his language reveal something more than passionate moderation. The radical agitation disturbed him profoundly because it cast into doubt his trust in human reason and faith in colonial

redemption. He wanted desperately to believe that Victoria could be the site of an advanced democracy where divine prov-

idence could be realized. Two weeks after the torchlight procession he was reassuring himself that ‘there is throughout our society a calm, complacent consciousness of the possession of political power that prevents any wide-spread sympathy with any of these really purposeless demonstrations’. It was true that

the bulk of the population was composed of the ‘working classes’, true that their unsettled state disposed some to unrest, but the settlement of the land question would resolve their dis-

contents and bind them into society. Thus, ‘with the most radical institutions, we are, in truth, a most conservative people’. Nevertheless, the memory of tumult and disorder still worked

on his imagination and the spectre of a dangerous class in the colony continued to haunt him.’®

There is an important distinction between the terms that Higinbotham uses here for acceptable aggregates (‘society’, ‘the people’) and his description of dangerous assemblies (‘the mob’). Liberals generally sought to reconcile the freedom of the individual with the claims of mutuality and sociability. Higinbotham believed that the fully developed individual accepted social obligations; he was even prepared that certain obligations should

be enforced, since it was in their performance that men and

34 A COLONIAL LIBERALISM

women realized their full human potential. His underlying concern was that all should exercise the reason and conscience with which God had endowed humanity. Hence, a calm, contented and free people was a fulfilment of divine purpose. A mob, however, was unreasoning and tyrannical — unreasoning since it

was excitable and impetuous, tyrannical because it could be used by demagogues to trample on liberties. Above all, it was an affront to his faith in the innate goodness of man.

Throughout his editorship of the Argus, Higinbotham wavered between exaggerated confidence and black despair in his evaluation of political prospects. The people were credited with wisdom and steadiness, and they were chastised for their fickleness and inattention to duty. He reposed his greatest trust in those who accepted the burden of public office in a spirit of service. When he declared his hopes for ‘the spontaneous growth of an Aristocracy, not founded on force, or maintained by priv-

ilege, but sprung from, and resting upon, actual merit and a people’s love’, he was prefiguring the self-appointed mission of

the colonial liberals. The distinctive qualities of this ‘natural aristocracy’ were foresight (‘In the march of progress the first place for the true leaders of the people is in the van’), candour (he ‘will not stoop to flatter the mob’), forbearance (he ‘manfully rests his case on his known character’), self-mastery, independence, honour: in a word, manliness. Manliness is a pervasive

value in nineteenth-century liberal discourse, drawing on the gendered qualities of mastery of oneself and one’s circumstances that were associated with masculine virtue and counterposed, in the civic humanist tradition, to feminine fortune.?’

Was there a place in Victorian politics for a man of virtue? The record of the first parliament, which sat from 1856 to 1859, was not encouraging. The Legislative Council quickly embarked

on a course of obdurate resistance to democratic reform that evidently surprised Higinbotham. The Legislative Assembly was hindered by a constant scramble for office among shifting alliances of members whose views stretched from Tory to radical.

For all but one of the first eighteen months the Premier was W.C. Haines, a bluff gentleman-farmer who drew his principal support from the conservatives. The Argus generally supported

the administration and the radical Age even accused Higinbotham of being its creature when it appointed him Justice

of the Peace in 1857; but his support of the ministry was not

THE TASKS OF SELF-GOVERNMENT 35

partisan — it was for him simply the least objectionable alternative.” When the squatters withdrew their support from Haines early in 1858, he was succeeded by John O’Shanassy, a massive, ungainly draper from Tipperary whose conservative instincts were belied by his leadership of the Irish Catholic community. His close associate, until the two men fell out, was Charles Gavan Duffy, who arrived in Victoria early in 1856 with impeccable

liberal credentials: leader of the Young Ireland nationalists, gaoled in the 1848 rising, sent in triumph to the House of Commons, friend of the Carlyles, farewelled by Mill, and welcomed in Melbourne with a gift of £5000 subscribed by wellwishers to

allow him to enter the Assembly. Higinbotham was already

antagonistic to O/’Shanassy and his ‘ragged regiment of politicians’, and he quickly conceived a special antipathy towards Duffy, whom he accused of vanity, petulance, shiftiness, ‘insufferable irritability and vulgarity’. Both then and later, Duffy alleged that the reason for this hostility was the sectarian bigotry of an Ascendancy Irishman against a Catholic. While Higinbotham denied the charge and criticized those who flung

about the name of William of Orange, he himself accused O’Shanassy and Duffy of cultivating support, with the assistance of priests, among their co-religious countrymen. His principal

complaint, however, was the O’Shanassy ministry’s abuse of patronage and general corruption of public life. Meanwhile, the squatters filled a war chest in preparation for the approaching elections with the clear intention of buying their way into office.

As the first parliament served out its last days, Higinbotham was close to despair: ‘It is a mere rabble of political desperadoes ... Every man is for himself and parliamentary life has degenerated into a mere scramble.’”? In 1858 Edward Wilson wrote to his friend and fellow newspaper proprietor, Henry Parkes, of his own disillusionment with Victorian politics, which, he claimed, were sliding rapidly into a system of rule by mobs. ‘It is a bitter pill for me, and particularly so as the Argus is an aider and abettor. Higinbotham 1s a most estimable man, but occasionally wild in his opinions and stubborn in adhering to them.’ By 1859 Higinbotham was ready

to give up the editorship. As his practice at the Bar grew, so the task of combining two careers became more taxing. He was not ‘a man of affairs’, as one who worked for him on the Argus

36 A COLONIAL LIBERALISM

put it, and was inclined to compose his copy too carefully and direct it over the heads of readers. Another recalled how the need to arrive rapidly at judgements on the latest public development weighed on the conscience of the editor. The increasing divergence of his own views from those of the paper’s owners decided the matter. He might have been estimable, he was certainly stubborn, but he was hardly wild. Rather, by 1859 his

passionate moderation had been stretched to breaking point between contempt for the squattocracy and fear of the mob.*°

The forms of colonial politics Higinbotham practised at the Bar with increasing success. In 1860 the family moved to the fashionable suburb of Brighton, where he and his brother designed a house they would share until death separated them. A single-storey cottage enclosed by a deep veranda, its rustic simiplicity contrasted with the florid excess of surrounding residences; even so, theirs was a substantial property with sweeping lawns and gardens set on ten acres of beachfront real estate. In the following year George Higinbotham advanced sufficiently to enter parliament. He offered himself to the voters of Brighton as an independent and was elected unopposed. In the Legislative Assembly he sat on the crossbenches and voted as he saw fit. This was unsatisfactory to the ministry as well as to the opposition, both of whom ran candidates against him in a general election held later in the same year. Higinbotham was defeated. Regaining his seat in a by-election in the following year, he resumed his role as an independent. He spelt out the reasons for the refusal to align himself in his first address to the Brighton electors in May 1861. The parlia-

mentary divisions that had formed and re-formed since the advent of representative government were factious and artificial, driven by personal aggrandisement rather than principle, productive only of intrigue and instability. The same pattern was

apparent when he entered parliament. Defections had driven O’Shanassy from office at the end of 1859 but within a year he had lured supporters of his successor, William Nicholson, into joining him in a vote of no confidence. The new ministry was

headed by Richard Heales, a coachbuilder of progressive sympathies, and it increased its support at another general election in 1861, only to be brought down four months later by a

THE TASKS OF SELF-GOVERNMENT 37

combination of O’Shanassy and his erstwhile opponents. O’Shanassy then assumed office with Haines as Treasurer and

Duffy as Minister for Lands, while Richard Ireland had the dubious distinction of serving as Attorney-General in both the defeated and the new administration. Well might Higinbotham argue that in the absence of proper parties based on consistent lines of approach to national issues, Victoria’s system of government was a mockery.*!

Some of the conditions of party politics appeared to exist. The aspirations of the enfranchised majority contrasted with the wealth and privilege of an entrenched élite; the terms ‘liberal’

and ‘conservative’ were freely used to distinguish those who spoke to such aspirations from those committed to the defence of hierarchy; the difference was mirrored in patterns of electoral support, with the more affluent suburbs of Melbourne and the

business centre returning conservatives, and liberals drawing their support from the working-class suburbs and goldfield constituencies. This broad division was ill-defined, however, and qualified by other, more immediate loyalties. Sectionalism was a pronounced feature of colonial politics as members of parlia-

ment banded together to press the interests of their localities and principal industries; thus the representatives of the mining districts constituted a distinct parliamentary bloc, while other members would pledge their support to the faction that provided the most spoils to their constituents. The pragmatism of such ‘roads and bridges’ members overrode any ideological con-

siderations, and imparted a constant fluidity to parliamentary divisions. Religion was a further complication. Among the conservatives, Anglicanism was the norm; O’Shanassy led a solid core of Irish Catholics, whereas the advanced reformers were largely Scottish and overwhelmingly Nonconformist.” The very design of the Legislative Assembly seemed calculated to increase the fragmentation. In contrast to the House of Commons, where government and opposition faced each other from

lines of benches extending the full length of the chamber, the seating in the popular house of the Victorian parliament was arranged in a three-sided square. Ministerial supporters sat on the left arm, their opponents on the right, and along the base there were crossbenches where those belonging to neither side arranged themselves. The precise choice of position expressed

further gradations of opinion: independents inclined to the

38 A COLONIAL LIBERALISM

ministry sat on the left junction of the U, known as the “government corner’, while those more critical occupied the right or ‘opposition corner’. A move towards or away from the corner thus signified a shift in loyalties and would be reported accord-

ingly in the press. Throughout the period the members occupying the ministerial and opposition benches were usually outnumbered by those in the corners and on the crossbenches.*? The ministry appointed a whip, who moved among the lob-

bies shepherding government members and cajoling independents. The caucus existed (though the term was not used until 1864 and, even then, pejoratively) as an infrequent meeting

of like-minded members whose leader outlined policy for the coming session. While those who attended such meetings were expected to support its decisions, no means existed to enforce their compliance. A ministry, therefore, relied for its majority on patronage. Whether it involved special consideration of an individual constituent’s application for a land grant or benefits for an entire locality through public works, the list of administrative favours the government could bestow seemed almost inexhaustible — and the local member served as the medium between ministers and the people. The use of patronage was freely admitted. ‘In my department’, declared one minister, ‘the practice is to give those members friendly to the Government the right of patronage to the minor appointments within their respective districts.” Every administration took in civil servants from its clientele and gazetted long lists of appointments to pub-

lic office. The political efficacy of such methods was limited only by the resentment that accumulated among those outside the favoured circle, since members dissatisfied with the division of spoils would attach themselves, in the expectation of more sympathetic treatment, to a rival faction.>*4

Extra-parliamentary organization flowered at election time. Central committees endorsed candidates and provided speakers, organizers, literature and financial support. Local committees organized the public meetings at which the candidates declared their programmes and were formally adopted; they canvassed and enrolled voters (for until 1859 it was necessary for all eligible voters to enrol, and registration cost a shilling), arranged publicity and saw their man to the polls. Such ad hoc structures were something less than parties. They had no formal rules, they did not enrol members on any formal basis, they dissolved as

THE TASKS OF SELF-GOVERNMENT 39

soon as the election was over. The Central Elections Committee which campaigned for Heales in 1861, and the General Regis-

tration Society which worked for conservative candidates in 1863, were, as their names implied, mere adjuncts of the parliamentary groups they were created to support, a broadening of participation by the many in decisions taken by a few.* Relations between parliamentarians and major interest groups were articulated instead by separate organizations like the Land

Convention, which operated as a base of support for radical members of parliament in the late 1850s, or the Constitutional Society which the squatters formed to fight the 1859 election, and the Victorian Association which served the same purpose in 1861. Even these bodies waxed and waned as Higinbotham’s hopes for an alert and engaged citizenry were mocked by the cynicism and apathy of the electorate. A minority of those eligible to enter their names on the electoral roll did so during the

early years of representative government, and a minority of those on the roll actually voted in the elections of 1856, 1859 and 1861. The miners of Anderson’s Creek threatened to duck the electoral registrar who visited them when registration was

made a public responsibility in 1859, and scribbled obscene remarks on the forms he distributed or applied them to unmentionable purposes.°*°

To awaken interest and encourage participation, political events were made into occasions of drama and spectacle. As an election drew nigh (and polling dates for general elections were staggered across several weeks), crowds would assemble behind

brass bands and march to the meeting place where speakers struck their gestures on the platform and interjectors hurled insults from the floor. On election day rival groups gathered in

the pubs and made their way to the polling place to hear the returning officer read the writ, and leading citizens propose and

second the candidates, who then delivered their speeches of acceptance to groans and cheers. After a show of hands, the returning officer would then announce the date of the ballot. Upon the declaration of the result, the same ritual of speeches, toasts and noisy demonstrations was re-enacted until the successful candidate left for Melbourne and politics returned to the confines of parliament.*”

Higinbotham had little time for vulgar proceedings that detracted from the dignity of public life. Most of his colleagues

40 A COLONIAL LIBERALISM

participated in the histrionics of popular politics in much the same spirit as they engaged in jobbery on behalf of their constituents — like bread and circuses, they were a distasteful but necessary part of a career in public life. So, too, they tolerated party organization so long as the outward forms of their independence were preserved, recognizing that it was a means of imposing some stability on the vagaries of representative government. He scorned such duplicity. It was his habit to address the electors of Brighton at the end of each parliamentary session and render an account of his actions. At election time he would declare his intentions. Beyond this, he insisted on absolute free-

dom to speak and vote as he saw fit, and he refused to ask special favours of the government for his constituents. Far from accommodating himself to popular politics, the formal nature of his dealings with electors underlined the distinction between

them and him. His hostility to the party was unremitting. It was the antithesis of his ideal of representation since it encouraged those under its influence to sacrifice duty to partisan behaviour. The reckless party spirit seemed to him ‘to deprive sane men of reason, to make men of honour utterly regardless for the time of the obligation of truth, and to strip the gentleman of his proper qualities of courtesy and reserve’.°® The man who spoke these words became the dominant figure in a ministry and the hero of a popular movement that charged Victorian politics with a more partisan tone than in any other Australian colony. How did the transformation occur? During 1862 and 1863 Higinbotham’s hostility to O’Shanassy hardened until he moved from independence to outright opposition. The

turning point was the Land Act that Duffy brought down in 1862, ostensibly to allow selectors to take up agricultural holdings; the legislation was riddled with loopholes that the squatters exploited to the full and it emerged that members of the ministry, including O’Shanassy and Ireland, had consulted with the squatters when the legislation was drafted. The O’Shanassy min-

istry fell in June 1863 and was replaced by a coalition of conservatives and liberals. James McCulloch, a sticky-fingered Glaswegian merchant with a sufficiently good conceit of himself to withstand diehard disapprobation, became Premier. Heales, the most prominent liberal, took charge of the lands department until he died in 1864 and was succeeded by James Grant, a fiery

lawyer of radical disposition. Higinbotham and Archibald

THE TASKS OF SELF-GOVERNMENT 41

Michie were the law officers and the nexus between the two elements. The government was pledged to rectify the Land Act and given its heterogeneous composition, it proceeded with marked irresolution that proved quite unavailing since its proposals were rejected summarily by the Council. This fortuitous event breathed new life into the ministry. In 1864 it went to the polls on a popular programme of land reform and reform of the Legislative Council, and in the course of the election campaign Higinbotham finally cast off his reservations. Here was a clear issue of fundamental principle. A small but enormously powerful class — in his election address Higinbotham dubbed them ‘the wealthy lower orders’ — had used its monopoly of political

power to establish a monopoly of the public estate ‘to the exclusion of the mass of the people’. There was no alternative but to confront and defeat them.*? Higinbotham’s expressive phrase ‘the wealthy lower orders’

was on everyone’s lips as the government swept to a record majority. When the fourth Victorian parliament met on 28 November 1864, only five members of the opposition were left with a further eleven in the opposition corner. The supporters of the government were so numerous that they spilled over the ministerial side of the chamber and on to the crossbenches.

Constitutional deadlock There was widespread expectation that the government would at last confront constitutional obstacles to change. In the decade that had elapsed since the advent of self-government, the Victorian Legislative Council had rejected no fewer than fifty-nine

bills. Some degree of legislative disjunction was inherent in colonial politics, given the nature of the bicameral parliaments that had been created in Australia and the absence of any mechanism to resolve deadlocks; South Australia had experienced a conflict between its upper and lower houses within eight days of the inauguration of the first parliament, and a major crisis in

1861 between the Assembly and the Council in New South Wales was solved only when the nominee upper house gave way

before a threat to swamp it with new members. In Victoria, where that possibility did not exist, the lower house with its unprecedented popular mandate met the unyielding resistance of an impermeable upper house. The force of the collision sent shock waves through the colony.‘

42 A COLONIAL LIBERALISM

The new Legislative Assembly quickly sent a bill to reform the Legislative Council up to that chamber, which, to no one’s surprise, rejected it. The Council’s wholesale amendment of Grant’s land bill was equally predictable. However, the government chose as the casus belli another issue altogether. In the election it had campaigned on a third plank, tariff reform: it proposed to replace the existing tax on gold exports as well as customs duties levied on a narrow range of consumer goods with new duties on a broader range of imports; while the change was to be revenue neutral, the new tariff schedule was expected to provide incidental protection of local industry. Protection enjoyed considerable support at a time when the colony was making the difficult transition from reliance on gold to other, more marginal, forms of enterprise, but it was opposed by merchants, pastoralists and others whose fortunes were tied to free trade within an imperial division of economic functions; and hitherto the protectionists had failed to achieve sufficient unity of purpose to shake that orthodoxy. The McCulloch ministry comprised freetraders (including the Premier himself), as well as protectionists, and some of the more radical protectionists crit-

icized the ministry accordingly. McCulloch’s decision to proceed with the tariff was therefore a calculated political gamble: it resulted in the immediate defection from the ministerial side of some dozen freetraders, whose loss was compensated by increased support from the radicals, thereby shifting the balance of the ministerial party in a more radical direction.*!

Tariff reform, moreover, lay within the competence of the Assembly in a way that land or constitutional reform did not, for it was a convention of the Westminster system that such revenue measures could be implemented, in expectation of their final enactment, on the basis of a simple resolution of the lower house. Thus, on the advice of Attorney-General Higinbotham, the new duties were levied as soon as the budget was brought down, on 19 January 1865. When this assertion of the authority

of the lower house brought upper house threats to block the legislation, the Attorney-General unveiled a further weapon. It was accepted usage that the British House of Commons, as the representative branch of the legislature, controlled legislation to authorize government expenditure, known technically as appropriation. In March 1865 the Victorian government announced that it was prepared to attach the supply bill containing the new

THE TASKS OF SELF-GOVERNMENT 43

tariff schedule to an appropriation bill. Since the Legislative Council had no power to amend such a bill, it had either to concede the tariff or bring the administration of the colony to a standstill. The Council took up the challenge. Even before the Assembly joined the tariff to the appropriation bill it declared that such a

‘tack’ was unconstitutional, and, for good measure, rejected a number of other government measures. On 20 July the tacked bill completed its passage through the Legislative Assembly. On 25 July the Legislative Council laid it aside. On 28 July the

Treasurer announced suspension of payment of all official salaries and wages. The deadlock seemed intractable. The Council was prepared to submit the dispute to the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council but the Assembly would not countenance

such a reflection on the constitutional competence of the Victorian parliament. The Assembly was prepared to meet in conference with the Council and seek a solution to the impasse but the Council insisted that it had disposed of the issue on 25 July. In November the ministry offered a compromise when it untacked the legislation and sent a separate tariff bill up to the Council. The Council rejected it. In December the Governor called fresh elections for the Assembly. The result was a complete victory for the government, which returned stronger than ever. One opposition member remarked that ‘if a gorilla came forward as a ministerial candidate he would get in’. Perhaps even a drover’s dog.*? This renewal of the ministry’s mandate failed to impress the Council. Its claims rested on an interpretation of parliamentary practice derived partly from that ancient and ineffable source of

wisdom, the English Constitution, and partly from strict construction of the Victorian Constitution Act. According to the former, the upper and lower houses were equal and co-ordinate branches of the legislature, while section 56 of the Victorian Constitution specified that appropriation bills originated in the Assembly and could not be amended by the Council; in laying a tacked bill aside they were protecting their privileges in conformity with this section. For his part, Higinbotham relied on section 34 of the Victorian Constitution, which provided that in the absence of specific standing orders governing the business

of the Assembly, the Council and business between them, the Victorian parliament should follow the usages of the imperial

44 A COLONIAL LIBERALISM

parliament. He submitted that there were precedents for tacking supply on to appropriation, and that while the House of Lords still held a notional right to reject a bill of supply or appropriation, it was ‘part and parcel of the Constitution of the country that that right should not be exercised except on (sic) exceptional circumstances such as had not occurred in the mother country

for upwards of two hundred and thirty years’. The argument turned on a distinction between the letter and spirit of the law. When the authors of the Constitution Act spelt out the rules of government in the colony, they formalized prin-

ciples that were qualified in practice by the accretion of experience and they froze procedures that worked because they

were left fluid to accommodate change. The House of Lords might possess a nominal equality with the House of Commons, but its chief function by the second half of the nineteenth century was as a dignified adjunct to public life, as that artful realist Walter Bagehot put it in 1867 when he cited the Victorian pre-

dicament as a demonstration of ‘the evil of two co-equal Houses’. What dignity could attach to a body made up of the wealthy lower orders and insulated from the judgement of the people? Because the Council was elected, its defenders claimed for it rights that had been surrendered by the House of Lords;

for Higinbotham and his colleagues this only weakened its standing. The members of the Council answered to an electorate less than one-tenth the size of that for the Assembly; they were

put there at fixed intervals for ten-year terms from electoral divisions that discriminated grossly against the centres of population, and they were representative only of the pastoral and mercantile élite. If the justification of a second chamber was that it could provide an unhurried and mature review of legis-

lative proposals above the jostle of partisan interest, then its particular interest in the question of the tariff was all too clear.** The Age observed that the two houses stood for different and antagonistic positions: “The Assembly represents the active progressive intelligence of the whole community; the Council, the passive immobile force of vested interests.’ In fanning the flames, the Age made it clear that the deadlock was above all an occasion

of excitement when passions ran high. From the outset of the crisis the two sides were urged on by their respective partisans, the Age speaking for the liberal protectionists, the Argus for the conservative freetraders — by this point these correlates were

THE TASKS OF SELF-GOVERNMENT 45

firmly established. Mass meetings of a Free Trade League were capped by monster meetings of a Protection League. The parliamentary galleries were packed for the principal debates. The election in the new year occurred in circumstances of uncer-

tainty, depression, unemployment and drought, so that the Governor proclaimed Friday 5 January a day of humiliation and fasting when all businesses closed and special services beseeched

the Giver of all good gifts to grant relief. Against this background the Liberal Reform Association came into being as an organization and a movement.* Higinbotham’s role in these developments was pivotal. He was the principal strategist in the cabinet and the dominant fig-

ure in Assembly debates, the hateful object of conservative vilification and the popular hero. His standing was elevated by his isolation — especially after Michie’s resignation in 1866 —

for he took no part in the formation of the Liberal Reform Association at the end of 1865 and still eschewed the party platform. He fought not for party but for the principle of representative government. He explained to the electors of Brighton that there was a widespread belief that freedom required weak government. The opposite was the case. The people would see that ‘the best protection of their liberties will consist in maintaining a very strong Government and also in making that Government responsible’.*¢ Like the most dangerous fanatics, he was utterly sincere. The Argus quickly identified him as a deranged enthusiast who dominated the government and others detected a similar mesmeric power, all the more malignant because of his spotless integrity. He ruled the Premier with spurs and bit. He was the Frankenst-

ein and the Governor was his creature. He was Jack Cade, ‘instilled in the spirit of putting down kings and princes’, he was Robespierre and Cataline. In the immediate aftermath ot the 1866 election the brother of his defeated opponent assaulted

him in a railway carriage, spat in his face and threatened that the volunteer militia would settle his account.*”

Since his claims for a strong and responsible government reached beyond parliament, the conflict widened. At the begin-

ning of 1864 the Supreme Court judge Redmond Barry peremptorily notified the Governor that he was departing the colony on holiday. The Governor referred Barry’s communication to his Attorney-General, who in turn advised the Governor

46 A COLONIAL LIBERALISM

that judges had no right to take leave from their duties without permission and that such permission should be granted by the Executive Council (that is, with the advice of his ministers). A series of increasingly acrimonious letters passed between Barry and Higinbotham, via the Governor, for more than a year. Barry claimed that judges of the Supreme Court were responsible to

the Governor alone, Higinbotham that this would place the judiciary ‘outside the limits of the system of responsible government’. The dispute took a new twist later in the year when the wife of another judge, Robert Molesworth, petitioned

the Court for divorce on grounds of cruelty and the judge counterpetitioned on the grounds of his wife’s alleged adultery with Richard Ireland and others. While Molesworth was suc-

cessful, evidence of sordid debauches on the court circuit tarnished his reputation and Higinbotham instructed him that he should no longer hear divorce cases. Molesworth wrote back denying the right of the attorney-general to interfere with the distribution of court business, though he added that he had decided to remove himself from divorce jurisdiction since it was ‘personally so distasteful to me’; Higinbotham answered curtly that he would ‘not entertain the protest’.

These arguments had both a particular constitutional and general political significance. The judges contended that their independence was guaranteed by the Constitution Act, which stipulated that they could be removed from office only on a motion of both houses of parliament; Higinbotham claimed that two earlier statutes giving the executive power over them

were still in force. They asked the Governor to refer their clam to the Privy Council; he insisted that such requests should be addressed to the Executive Council and that the Privy Council’s views could have no bearing on the matter. He sought to clarify the position in a new piece of legislation; the Council rejected it. When the law officers of the Colonial Office confirmed his interpretation, he insisted with charac-

teristically perverse consistency that their opinion was gratuitous. For supporters of the ministry such niceties mattered less than the welcome spectacle of Higinbotham rebuking the

pretensions of the high and mighty. When he called Barry ‘an officer in his department’, the Age applauded. When he informed Molesworth of his ‘hope that the judges will eventually see that it is their duty to set an example of obedience

THE TASKS OF SELF-GOVERNMENT 47

to the law, and of respect to the Government under which they hold their high offices’, his popularity increased all the more. When he fell into dispute with the Chief Justice, Sir William Stawell, those whose memories went back to Eureka (when that notable had been the most merciless of Governor Hotham’s advisers) celebrated Higinbotham as the people’s

champion. When he spurned the judges’ request to consult what the Age described as ‘an Olympian tribunal of superannuated lawyers on half-pay called the Privy Council’, its joy was unbounded." The Court also signalled its claims to exercise a wide supervisory jurisdiction over the legislature and executive. As the interpreter of the Constitution Acct, it relied on strict canons of legal reasoning. Rather than accept that document as establishing a system of complete responsible government, or see it in an historical context embodying inherent political rights, it recognized only those powers and rights that were expressly created by its provisions. This led to a number of decisions where the Court denied the capacity of the Legislative Assembly to exercise powers by the House of Commons. The most important of these cases arose directly out of the deadlock when merchants (whose advocate was a member of the Legislative Council) challenged the right of the government to collect the new customs dues before the tariff bill became an Act. The Court rejected the Attorney-General’s argument that such dues were collected in Britain on the authority of the House of Commons, and that section 35 of the Constitution Act stated that all privileges of

the House of Commons were to be defined by the Victorian legislature. “The Legislature here is not a court,’ pronounced the Chief Justice. ‘It does not assume to determine what are its own powers.’*?

The judges also struck at the arrangements Higinbotham devised in 1865 to carry on the business of government in the absence of an Appropriation Act. Since customs revenue was

deposited as a matter of course in banks, the government arranged to borrow sums from one of them, the London Chartered Bank, that the bank then recovered in uncontested actions against the Crown. This bank, it should be noted, had as its local director the Premier, James McCulloch, while the other five banks were hostile to the ministry and challenged the legality of the scheme. The Supreme Court eventually decided

48 A COLONIAL LIBERALISM

against it on the grounds that no revenue could be available to a suitor unless parliament had appropriated it for the purpose.*?

Higinbotham refused to accept the Court’s ruling on the customs duties (indeed he warned the merchants who refused to pay them that they would incur a heavy penalty) and long

before the Court handed down judgement on the loans, the ministry’s opponents turned to a surer haven — the Colonial Office. At the end of 1865, just after the Governor dissolved parliament and called fresh elections for the Assembly, he re-

ceived a petition from twenty-two former ministers (who technically retained membership of the Executive Council even though they took no part in its meetings). They complained that the Governor had sanctioned the unlawful collection of customs

and taken part in the improper raising of sums from public revenue. In forwarding the petition to London, the Governor criticized the character and motives of its signatories. The Colonial Office had followed recent events in Victoria

with mounting alarm. The permanent head was annotating despatches from Melbourne with acerbic comments on his reck-

less local adviser and criticism of the Governor’s ‘want of judgement’ in accepting Higinbotham’s advice. It was a ‘very awkward state of things’, agreed the Minister, but ‘I suppose it is a state of things that the Secretary of State can hardly interfere in’. “Certainly not at present’, answered the civil servant. In

November the Colonial Office informed the Governor — though because of the delay in communications he was yet to receive the despatch — that ‘the present proceedings of your government have been manifestly illegal’. The arrival in London

of this petition, with its ‘violent and, I should say, unjust personal attack’ on its signatories, convinced the Minister that the Governor had compounded his earlier failures with partisan bias. On 26 February 1866 he was ordered home.>! The Governor, Sir Charles Darling, had taken up duty in Vic. toria in September 1863. A military officer of mature years, he served as secretary to his uncle, Ralph Darling, during that conservative autocrat’s stormy term as Governor of New South Wales thirty years earlier. His own position during the Victorian constitutional crisis was unenviable. As the head of state of a supposedly responsible government he was obliged to take the advice of his ministers. As a member of the colonial service he

reported regularly to the Colonial Office in London, which

THE TASKS OF SELF-GOVERNMENT 49

issued him with instructions. “You will, I trust, Sir,’ he wrote to the Secretary of State as early as March 1865, ‘excuse me for

saying that the twofold and inevitable responsibility of the

Governor’s office in a Colony rapidly developing under Responsible Government is quite as much as any man however experienced in public life can bear at all.’ London was weeks away and the mandarins of the Colonial Office could hardly anticipate the difficulties that crowded in on Darling after the Legislative Council laid aside the appropriation bill. For practical as well as constitutional reasons, he depended heavily on the judgement of his Attorney-General.>

The problems that beset him in his dual role were demonstrated in the Shenandoah affair. The Shenandoah was a warship of the American Confederacy (though of British origin) that put

into Melbourne early in 1865 during the final phase of the American Civil War. The United States consul protested that the ship was a pirate and demanded that it be seized. However, the Governor observed strict neutrality in conformance with British policy. He allowed the Shenandoah to dock and take on board supplies; he looked on impotently while its captain was féted in the Melbourne Club, and he failed to prevent the recruitment of additional crew when the Shenandoah made off into the Pacific to resume its depredation upon the United States mercantile marine. The United States pursued Great Britain for damages caused by the Shenandoah and other vessels, and eventually obtained compensation of $15 500 000. This was clearly an imperial matter where the colonial government had no power

and the Governor had to act as the sole agent of the imperial government. Yet he did draw his advice from Higinbotham, and

while Higinbotham insisted that this advice was not that of a responsible minister, he tendered it at formal meetings of the Executive Council as a Crown Law Officer. The distinction between imperial and domestic functions on which Higinbotham insisted broke down under pressure in illogical compromise.*° Following the elections of 1866 the Governor had good cause to believe that the Constitutional deadlock could be resolved.

In February the Council let it be known that it was prepared to accept the tariff providing it was sent up from the Assembly in the proper manner. The Assembly passed a separate supply

bill in March. When the Council rejected that bill because its form was still objectionable, the ministry resigned. The

50 A COLONIAL LIBERALISM

Governor invited a leading member of the opposition to form a ministry and, when he failed, recalled McCulloch. A conference of representatives of the two houses then agreed, in the absence of Higinbotham, on a compromise: providing the Assembly gave up its claims to control supply, the Council would grant it. A new bill was drafted accordingly and on 17 April it passed both houses. Only then was the news of the Governor’s recall made public. These events were played out against a background of public turmoil, for the Council’s rejection of supply in March triggered a fresh round of torchlight processions, open-air protest meet-

ings and excited threats. Rumours of Darling’s recall which swept the colony increased the unrest. McCulloch, who appreciated the need to reach an accommodation with the Council before the Colonial Office’s criticism of the Governor and his Ministers was made known, played both ends against the mid-

dle, using the disorder both to intimidate his conservative opponents and to justify the compromise to the enthusiasts of

his own party. Higinbotham, who was excluded from the negotiations, watched silently as the ministry surrendered the ground he had seized and held over the past year. Perhaps he was constrained by foreknowledge of the fate of the man who had relied on his advice.**

With the announcement of Darling’s recall he broke his silence. ‘I am bound to say that I decline to enter into a justification of any of my acts, or of any advice I have tendered His Excellency the Governor in consequence of any criticism which the Secretary of State may have been pleased to make.’ There was no need for him to do so, he maintained, since the Secretary of State had no authority to pass an opinion on the actions of the Victorian government. ‘I am not responsible to the Secretary of State.” Here he enunciated the position he would maintain as politician and judge with absolute finality, that with the passage of the Constitution Act the colony gained full sovereignty over its internal affairs and that the authority of the imperial government applied only to imperial affairs. His interest was not in the Colonial Office but in the circumstances that allowed the Colonial Office to interfere: ‘if we were a united people among ourselves, I should view with utter unconcern the illiberal or harsh views of a Secretary of State, provided that we ourselves fully understood and duly valued the principles of responsible

THE TASKS OF SELF-GOVERNMENT 51

government’. However, he pointed out that this was not the case:

we are a divided people, with hostile interests against one another. There is in this country a large class — large, not indeed, in the number

of those who belong to it, but large in varied interest and in great power — which, I believe, is now hostile to the continuance of responsible government in this colony. The general mass of the people — the mass that never takes a prominent part in politics, that are not heard of in public life, that cannot easily be designated by any special name, except it be one of those opprobious terms which vile persons sometimes attach to them — terms which only recoil in shame or dishonour upon those who use them — this general body of the people are, I believe, perfectly satisfied with the system of government under which we live. I believe more. I believe, and I say it without flattery, that there is not a community upon the face of the globe that may be more safely entrusted with constitutional liberties than this community

The speech reveals how far Higinbotham had advanced on opinions expressed in the previous decade, and how unaltered were his fundamental concerns. He had suppressed his earlier antagonism to the unreasoning mob, or transferred it to the wealthy lower orders, and he had hardened his aspirations for self-gov-

ernment into an absolute insistence that it existed. There

remained his underlying unease: were the general body of the people capable of exercising their freedom, or were their liberties to be vitiated by division?*> The dismissal of the Governor produced such a wave of sup-

port for the popular cause that the initiative returned briefly to the intransigents, one of whom proposed that Darling’s succes-

sor should not be allowed to enter the colony. A select committee of the Assembly, which was appointed to prepare an

address of support for Sir Charles, recommended that Lady Darling receive a public grant of £20 000 in recognition of her husband’s services to Victoria. Since the Colonial Service regulations forbade a governor’s family to receive such gifts, Darling informed the Assembly that his wife could not accept the money until he received official sanction in London. He then departed

the colony amidst extraordinary scenes of public mourning. Huge crowds (the Age claimed 40 000) assembled at the Treasury Building on the morning of 7 May to see the procession

leave, the Governor in the first carriage, McCulloch and

32 A COLONIAL LIBERALISM

Higinbotham in the next, then other public figures, two bands, the trade unions, fire brigades and other voluntary associations. At Princes Bridge, where an arch bore the words ‘Honour to the Just’, the horses were taken from the Governor’s carriage so that it could be drawn by prominent supporters to the wharf

at Sandridge. Cannons fired a salute as his ship cast off. But with that departure and the apparent resolution of the differences between the two houses, the tumult quickly subsided.*¢ It revived in the following year when Sir Charles resigned from the Colonial Service. The ministry included the grant to Lady Darling in the appropriation bill for 1867, rejected by the

Council in August of that year. In the course of this second deadlock, which lasted for fully eleven months, the parties traversed much familiar ground. Higinbotham, whose speech in support of the bill was so vitriolic as to almost ensure its rejection by those he described as ‘the very vilest faction by which this country has been cursed’, came back into his own. Gavan Duffy even suggested that if his honourable and learned friend were to fall asleep for just forty-eight hours, he would awake

to find the grant untacked and passed, the crisis resolved. Higinbotham was unapologetic. While he approved of moderation and concession, he saw no merit in concessions that merely postponed resolution of a vital issue. The Council had provoked the crisis and then appealed to an authority ‘in a distant country 16 000 miles away’ which, as far as the question under consideration was concerned, was ‘a foreign country’. In such a contest

there could be no compromise. ‘Let us carry it on fairly, but let us regard it as a contest in which there should be no parley and no truce.’>’

The new Governor who presided over the contest was Sir John Manners Sutton, an experienced administrator anxious to avoid the errors of his predecessor. He refused his Ministers’ request that he prorogue parliament so that the measure could

be reintroduced; when they tendered their resignations he scouted the possibility of commissioning an alternative administration before he called them back and granted their request; he urged them to untack the grant from the appropriation bill; he counselled against Higinbotham’s device of confessing judge-

ment to release revenue; he even arranged for a temporary appropriation to carry on the administration. Only when all expedients were exhausted did he agree to fresh Assembly elec-

THE TASKS OF SELF-GOVERNMENT 53

tions, for February 1868. His caution went unrecognized. On 1 January 1868 the Colonial Office sent a despatch that regretted

his complicity in the tack, conveyed ‘the opinion of Her Majesty’s Government that the Queen’s representative ought not to be made the instrument of enabling one branch of the Legislature to coerce the other’, and made it clear that he should not allow another tacked bill to go forward.*8 Prior to the arrival in Victoria of this despatch at the begin-

ning of March 1868 the degree of popular support for the Assembly was meagre. The public meetings of late 1867 and early 1868 were shrill in tone, sparse in attendance. The fact that both chambers suspended hostilities in November 1867 for the visit of Prince Alfred, the Queen’s second son, spoke eloquently

of their priorities. Observing the members of the Assembly vying with their opponents of the Council in the effusiveness of their declarations of loyalty to the royal voluptuary, a young journalist with the Argus named Marcus Clarke remarked that “They talk like Camille Desmoulins, and act like Jeames in a new suit of plush’. The ministry certainly retained its majority in the new Assembly, but it approached the opening of parliament with little enthusiasm.>*?

With the publication of the London despatch, hostilities resumed. The ministry resigned immediately. For two months the Governor was unable to find an alternative, without which no parliamentary business could be transacted. In the absence of McCulloch, Higinbotham acted as leader of the parliamentary majority and he continually moved adjournment of the House. In desperation the Governor commissioned a leading member of the Council, Charles Sladen, to form a stop-gap ministry but when the Assembly met it passed a motion of no confidence in the new ministry because of its failure to include the grant for Lady Darling in its appropriation proposals. At last the Colonial Office resolved the impasse it had created: it withdrew from the partisan position it had taken up in the January despatch and persuaded Sir Charles Darling to withdraw his resignation from the Service. Since his acceptance of an official pension (including retrospective payment back to 1866) precluded any grant to his

wife, the cause of the deadlock was removed and Sladen made

way for the return of McCulloch. For the Premier and most of his colleagues, the decision to resume office was quite straightforward. By denying supply to

34 A COLONIAL LIBERALISM

Sladen’s skeleton ministry they had turned the tables on the obstructive conservatives and kept faith with their own party (re-established in 1868 as the Loyal Liberal Reform Association). With obligations to Darling satisfied, and with no further

issues in dispute between the upper and lower houses, they

could breathe a sigh of relief as they turned to the more

rewarding, if less dramatic, tasks of administration. Higinbotham’s response to the outbreak of peace was different. T. T. a’Beckett, a neighbour, fellow lawyer and member of the

Council, met him on a railway platform at this juncture and expressed delight with the settlement, only to recoil from the force of the rebuff: “Mr a’Beckett, I can’t speak to you’. No one had been so vilified as he had, no one could better appreciate the accuracy of the assessment made by Charles Dilke in 1867 that ‘class animosity runs much higher, and drives its roots far

deeper into private life in Victoria than in any other Englishspeaking country I have seen’. He had drawn blood as well as shed it and he had further soiled his hands with the distasteful weapons of party politics. All these things he had endured to secure the constitutional liberties of the people, and yet the

ministry now proposed to make peace with the enemies of responsible government without resolving any of the issues in dispute. He sensed that this compromise would lead to others, that without an animating cause colonial politics would lapse back into factional opportunism, and he was right — McCulloch soon gave way to a disaffected supporter, John Macpherson; Macpherson to McCulloch, and two more transient coalitions followed.°!

Higinbotham therefore refused to accept his former post of Attorney-General and after six months he severed connection

with the ministry. He also resigned his membership of the Executive Council and would not use the courtesy title, “The Honourable’, that went with it. He passed his remaining years in parliament as a backbencher with increasing weariness and despair, but he did not abandon the arguments he had advanced during the crisis, nor was his influence spent. In some ways his withdrawal increased his popular following, for as the leader in exile, the king over the water, he received repeated invitations to assume his rightful place and gather together the liberal forces for a new effort.

THE TASKS OF SELF-GOVERNMENT 55

Defeat and despair Why did Higinbotham not make a new effort? First and foremost was his conviction that the conditions for self-government, conditions that previously he had thought existed, were absent and that until a proper basis for representative and responsible

government was secured, mere occupation of the treasury benches was a sham. He came to this conclusion reluctantly, for throughout the constitutional crisis he insisted that the Victorian people exercised sovereignty over their own affairs. The Colonial office’s despatch of 1 January 1868 seems to have been the moment of disillusionment since its instructions to Manners Sut-

ton made it clear that the Governor was something less than the equivalent of a constitutional monarch bound by the advice

of his ministers, and it brought from Higinbotham a new Philippic: Every particular act of the Governor is commented upon. The Secretary of State informs the Governor that he approves of this act; he is good enough to say that ‘he sees no reason to disapprove’ of that act; he conceives it to be his duty to ‘instruct’ the Governor upon a third act; and ‘Her Majesty’ — the deus ex machina is allowed to appear upon an occasion of sufficient importance — ‘reminds’ the Governor of a fourth act. If this system is to continue, what is the meaning of the system which we call responsible government?

The suggestion of revelation here was surely feigned. As Attorney-General for the past five years, Higinbotham knew perfectly well that governors were officials of the Colonial Office ap-

pointed (and recalled) on the advice of a Minister of Great Britain; that they were issued with a handbook of instructions and required to report regularly on the affairs of their colony; that they looked to London for advice whenever difficulties arose. The fate of Darling had made the import of all these restrictions on colonial self-government apparent to all. Higinbotham’s contestation of the imperial interference was triggered by a conjunction of local and distant developments. Locally there was the new Governor’s compliance with his in-

structions over the protests of the popular house —

subsequently Higinbotham would even claim that Manners Sut-

ton ‘came to this country for the purpose of giving the Legislative Council a victory over the Legislative Assembly’. In

56 A COLONIAL LIBERALISM

London there was the hardening of attitudes towards colonies such as Victoria as Britain moved to the apogee of empire. From the middle of the century Downing Street had encouraged colonies of settlement to assume control over their own affairs. Gladstone, the commanding figure of English liberalism, likened this to the Greek model of empire, as opposed to the Roman, based on ties of sentiment and mutual benefit, allowing ‘perfect freedom and perfect self-government’; when, as part of the policy, the British garrisons were withdrawn from Australian soil in 1870 they symbolized the departure of the last Roman legion. By then the tide had already begun to turn. One early sign was the 1868 debate in the House of Lords over the Darling controversy, where most speakers taxed the Secretary of State for the Colonies with overindulgence of the colonial upstarts. Early in 1869 the imperial enthusiasts established a Colonial Society, which quickly attained the dignity of the Royal Colonial Insti-

tute and invited the self-governing colonies to attend a conference and consider proposals to strengthen the ties ‘between the Mother Country and her colonies’. A principal sponsor was Edward Wilson, who announced the conference in a letter that The Times published under the portentous heading ‘National Disintegration’. Wilson was only one of a number of former Australian colonists who had retired with their wealth and investments to England, where they used their influence to

oppose reform — Wilson Gray dubbed them the ‘Australian emigrés, as bitterly opposed to progress in Australia as the old French emigrés were to the progress inaugurated by the French Revolution’.®

The receipt of this invitation to the Victorian government brought Higinbotham’s frustrations to a head. He tabled in the Legislative Assembly a series of propositions. The first declined to recognize the conference proposed ‘at the instance of a selfconstituted and irresponsible body of absentee colonists’. The second acknowledged that Victoria, as a self-governing part of the British Empire, had an obligation to provide for its local

defence. The third protested against any interference by the Imperial Parliament with the internal affairs of Victoria. The last two went further: 4, That the official communication of advice, suggestions, or instruc-

tions, by the Secretary of State for the Colonies to Her Majesty’s representative in Victoria, on any subject whatsoever connected with

THE TASKS OF SELF-GOVERNMENT 57

the administration of the local Government, except the giving or witholding of the Royal assent to or the reservation of Bills passed by

the two Houses of the Victorian Parliament, is a practice not sanc-

tioned by law, derogatory to the independence of the Queen’s representative, and a violation both of the principles of the system of responsible government and of the constitutional rights of the people of this colony. 5. That the Legislative Assembly will support Her Majesty’s Ministers for Victoria in any measures that may be necessary for the purposes of securing the recognition of the exclusive right of Her Majesty and of the Legislative Council and Legislative Assembly ‘to make laws in and for Victoria in all cases whatsoever’, and putting an early and final stop to the unlawful interference of the Imperial Government in the domestic affairs of this colony.

In speaking to his resolutions Higinbotham reviewed the actions of Wilson and his associates, men of ‘ill-used wealth’, ‘vagabond habits’ and ‘low and vulgar tastes’, who had ‘abandoned their

duties to the country to which they owe their prosperity’. He cast scorn on the noble members of the House of Lords for their ignorance of colonial rights. His most studied contempt was reserved for the Colonial Office and its permanent head, Sir Frederic Rogers: I believe it might be said with perfect truth that the million and a half of Englishmen who inhabit these colonies, and who during the last fifteen years have believed they possessed self-government, have really been governed during the whole of that time by a person named Rogers.

In law the Secretary of State for the Colonies was no better than a foreign minister and had ‘no more right to interfere in the domestic affairs of this country than a Chinese Mandarin’, yet in practice he and his principal adviser rendered Victoria’s system of self-government useless. Higinbotham’s resolutions were designed to put an ‘early and final stop to the unlawful interference of the Imperial Government in the domestic affairs of this colony’. In essence, he was insisting that imperial inter-

ference should be confined to those affairs that impinged directly on the welfare of the Empire, while in the internal affairs

of the colony the local executive and legislature should have paramount and undivided jurisdiction.” Note that he describes the colonists as Englishmen. His feel-

ings for what he too called the Mother Country were less

38 A COLONIAL LIBERALISM

matricidal than might be inferred. He honoured the Queen (‘the best constitutional sovereign that has ever sat on the throne of England’) and rejoiced in the fact that his homeland bore her

name. While he criticized the centre for its treatment of the periphery, he did not believe — as did the critics of empire — that the relationship necessarily tended to tyranny and exploitation. The evils he denounced were treated by him as departures from proper English principles, indicative merely of a lack of

sympathy on the part of the ruling class for the legitimate aspirations of the colonists and in no way invalidating the potential of English institutions for freedom and progress. Rather than sever the imperial connection, he wished to adjust it so that a real and lasting union would be freely conceded by both sides.®

All five of his resolutions were adopted by the Legislative Assembly. The Colonial Office deprecated them, the Governor defied them and successive Victorian ministries tried to pretend

they did not exist. Nevertheless, for Higinbotham they were final and he made their realization a precondition of a return to

political office. In 1872 he described governors as ‘only the secret agents of an illegal and absolutely irresponsible authority, the English Secretary of State for the Colonies’; three years later he considered that person’s conduct ‘an insult to the independence of the representative of the Crown, and a menace to the

system of self-government established by law’. ‘And yet,’ he lamented, ‘we are going on speaking, newspapers are writing, and meetings are talking just as if we possessed the right of self-government’. This was the cruellest blow and he blamed the pusillanimity of his former ministerial colleagues for the apparent indifference of the colonists to the restrictions on their autonomy. A stead-

fast and united liberal movement would have pressed the constitutional dispute to a conclusion. Instead the ministry had raised the expectations of its supporters during the protracted confrontation with the Council and the Colonial Office, only to abandon the cause in the accommodation of 1868. In retrospect it seemed to Higinbotham that McCulloch had played on liberal enthusiasm to further his own career. In 1873 when an-

other of his former associates seemed likely to accept a knighthood, Higinbotham appealed to him not to embrace such a ‘base, contemptible distinction’; in the following year when

THE TASKS OF SELF-GOVERNMENT 59

McCulloch became Sir James, Higinbotham’s silence was telling. By this time the antagonism between the two men was marked. Higinbotham’s disapproval was matched by McCulloch’s relief

to have escaped from the doctrinaire intransigence of his law officer. Throughout the crisis, the Premier had in fact drawn upon forces he had not always been able to control as the episodes of greatest excitement established a momentum of their own and the elections of 1864, 1866 and 1868 changed the social and political complexion of the Legislative Assembly.°®

In contrast to earlier parliaments, in which landowners and professional men predominated, the bulk of the MLAs in the late 1860s came from the trading classes. Most of these shop-

keepers, publicans, auctioneers and sundry small business proprietors, were elected as members of the Liberal Reform As-

sociation (and its Loyal Liberal successor) and imparted a strident, rough-edged quality to the liberal movement. They were the jacobins of the Victorian Nonrevolution who stiffened

the resolve of the ministry and barred the path of retreat. Between them and Higinbotham there was an awkward affinity. He was their champion but he was not of them. They were his supporters but he found their political methods quite alien and dealt with them across a wide social gulf. Two issues brought these difficulties into bold relief. The first issue was payment of members. Since the new men had no independent income to fall back on, they took up with

special enthusiasm the longstanding radical demand that the people’s representatives should be paid. Payment of members was embraced by the Legislative Assembly and rejected by the

Council on five occasions during the 1860s. Higinbotham initially opposed the proposal on the conventional grounds that

it detracted from the independence of legislators, but he swung round to support it because he became convinced that the absence of remuneration both restricted voters’ choice and left parliamentarians open to temptation. In 1870 the Council accepted a measure euphemistically described as ‘reimbursing

members their expenses in relation to their attendance in Parliament’ for a trial period. The measure was extended in 1874. It provided for annual payments of £300, which gave members a somewhat greater advantage over the average wage-

earner than that enjoyed by parliamentarians today. Higinbotham would not accept the payment and was quick to

60 A COLONIAL LIBERALISM

sense that those who did, ‘because they are cursed with salaries, are the victims not only of perpetual intrigue but of perpetual misrepresentation and vilification’.®* This was revealed as a second difficulty, corruption. Between 1867 and 1869 no fewer than seven of the ragged regiment of advanced liberals were publicly disgraced. One was gaoled for

forgery, another ran off to Valparaiso, and yet another had to resign from parliament when a testimonial fund, to which any constituent seeking favours was expected to contribute, became indecently large. Charles Edwin Jones, the boldest of them all, came to grief in a massive bribery scandal. A tailor and later a journalist, Jones was elected to parliament for Ballarat in 1864 with the support of the Orange Lodge. He served as Government Whip until late in 1866 when, piqued by his failure to win ministerial office, he led a group of ultra-protectionists into the corner. From there he offered his services to the opposition members and they slipped him £200 to act as their Whip. To the freetraders among them he was alleged to have said: ‘If this bristling Scotch hillock [he meant McCulloch and probably called him a pillock] is to be removed, it can only be done by money. If your soft goods friends will raise the needful, a majority against the Government can easily be obtained.’ To the pastoralists, similarly, he allegedly announced: ‘The Paschal Lamb is ready for the sacrifice; but in these degenerate days the “mint” sauce is wanted.’ They provided Jones with it from a fund of £7000 which they had raised to suborn other members and secure the passage of legislation in their interest. Jones’s duplicity was revealed in a flurry of libel suits that began late in 1868 after he had mended his differences with the

government and become Minister for Railways. At first Higinbotham was loath to accept that a colleague could have behaved so shamefully, especially one who had cultivated his favour — ‘I would gladly give ten years of my life to be like him’, declared Jones. Higinbotham dismissed the accusations when they were first brought to his notice. Later, he defended Jones in the courts and argued in parliament that the blame lay more with the bribers than their victim. He was instrumental in bringing before parliament the wealthiest of the pastoral paymasters, Hugh Glass (whose land and other investments were valued at a million pounds and whose mansion in Flemington was reputedly the grandest in the country). At Higinbotham’s

THE TASKS OF SELF-GOVERNMENT 61

instigation the Assembly committed Glass to gaol for contempt. (Glass appealed to the Supreme Court which ordered his release

and thus reopened the dispute over parliamentary privilege.) Meanwhile Jones was forced to resign his office and his seat in parliament. Unabashed, he stood and won the parliamentary byelection. The Assembly expelled him, the voters returned him and this time he was permitted to take his seat. He held it until

1871 and after marital problems drove him from the colony, achieved success as a temperance lecturer. In the 1880s he returned to Australia — and re-entered parliament. Such bare-faced defiance appalled Higinbotham. Jones’s behaviour, if generally adopted, would be ‘utterly destructive of the principle of an honest representation of the people’. Even worse was the skein of accusations and counter-accusations that was unravelled in parliament to implicate one member after an-

other. He found it hard to think evil of others. He denounced

the ‘trumpery charges’, the ‘vile slanders’, the ‘iniquitous system of vilifying private and personal character’. However the streak

of instability in the ranks of the unco’ guid was too marked to

ignore. Pathologically righteous, these firebrands had the puritan’s intimate knowledge of the attractiveness of sin and they wrestled with such evils as venality, insobriety and lust so constantly that temptation eventually overcame even the most censorious of them. Marcus Clarke’s parody of colonial precocity was disturbingly close to the mark: We breed our squatters bigger, and imprison them oftener; and our politicians get into Parliament sooner and are expelled from it quicker; and our House makes decisions sooner, and gets them reversed sooner than in any other country. So we can go in and reform mankind with

more chance of success than anybody else has had for the last 5000 years.

Clarke’s use of the first person plural touched the liberals on a sensitive point. It was, after all, the electors of Ballarat West who kept returning a self-confessed sinner to parliament. “Whatever this Assembly is,’ Higinbotham conceded, ‘it is no better and no worse than the people. If the Assembly be an inferior body, it is because the people must be inferior.’”° Against these impediments, he could bring little more than oratory. His major statements in the course of the crisis lasted well over an hour and occupy twenty columns or more in the

62 A COLONIAL LIBERALISM

dusty volumes of the Victorian Parliamentary Debates. To read them across the interval of a century is to feel the excitement

they stirred and hear the gasps of shock on the other side of the chamber. He would begin hesitantly, the voice scarcely audible, until launched on his argument when passion charged his words with fierce intensity. Yet always he maintained a luminous clarity of expression and his most telling epithets were delivered with chilling courtesy. Higinbotham’s oratory maintained the classical balance expressive of the poise to which

Victorians aspired. Others practised the art in speeches that reeked of the lamp; for him this form of utterance was appar-

ently spontaneous. There was a daunting quality to the remorseless precision with which he would follow a principle through to its logical conclusion regardless of consequence, as

did another Dubliner, George Bernard Shaw, except that Higinbotham did not know how to strike a note of levity. His rhetoric was at once particular and universal, flagrantly ad hominem in its anger while at the same time appealing to exalted standards of public conduct. Even as he denounced members for their failure to do their duty, he invoked a mixture of antique rationalist precepts as if they could somehow transcend human frailty.”!

How could evanescent words vindicate the principles of selfgovernment? In 1869 when he introduced his five resolutions, Higinbotham declared that he would never again accept office until the constitutional issues were resolved. He regarded a re-

form of the Legislative Council enacted in that year (which halved the property qualifications for members and voters) as

wholly retrograde. It expanded the Council electorate from 12 000 to 20 000 voters, less than a fifth of the number of voters for the Assembly. Higinbotham’s objection was that the apparent enlargement of the representative character of the Council increased its power but did nothing to increase its responsibility. He continued to insist that the Assembly must have exclusive control of finance and to protest against the Assembly’s failure

to insist on its rights. ‘At present we are not a self-governed country in any respect.’ On one occasion during the interminable squabbles between the two houses, doughty James Grant recalled the deadlock of 1865 and reminded members that “The Legislative Assembly ultimately triumphed on that occasion.’ ‘No,’ interjected Higinbotham. ‘To me the result appears to be

THE TASKS OF SELF-GOVERNMENT 63

utter defeat, and the events that followed that victory, as he calls it, seem to confirm the impression that the defeat was far more severe than was at first supposed.’” He himself suffered a personal reverse in the general election

of 1871. The margin was close — just fourteen votes — but the circumstances intensified his mistrust of popular politics.

He was beaten by the aptly named Thomas Bent, who as rate collector for Brighton was able to work the electorate in ways that Higinbotham disdained. Gwyneth Dow, the historian

who knows him best, believes that it was this rebuff that finally unnerved Higinbotham. Upon his re-election to parliament in 1873 as member for East Bourke, he seemed to have lost the capacity for decisive leadership. By this time the political cycle had almost run its course, as a series of short-lived ministries based on shifting coalitions of factional groupings

set the scene for a new reform campaign and renewed mobilization of the reform party. The advanced liberals looked to Higinbotham for guidance he could no longer provide. In the absence of a party prepared to undertake constitutional reform, he could merely lend passive support to those charged with the responsibility of administration, whoever they might be. Much as he deplored the ‘anarchy and chaos’ of political life, the failure of will that subjected parliament to the indignity of sitting six months in every year ‘busily engaged in effecting

nothing’, was ‘a calamity to which we must submit’ until decisive leadership emerged. Other less fastidious champions of reform became exasperated with this refusal to grasp the nettle. “With what confidence can he address himself to us in

that fashion’, demanded one, ‘when, according to his own account he is a political paradox which it is perfectly impossible to unriddle.’ ‘As for myself and others,’ complained another,

‘we feel paralyzed; we can do nothing. His great name and overshadowing influence prevent anybody else from being heard.’ ‘Mr Higinbotham,’ declared the Age, ‘is the most provoking and the most incomprehensible of politicians.’ It did not matter on which side of the argument he lay down the law, his judgement was final. There was a charm in ‘the perfect confidence with which he assumes he has settled the matter he has condescended to notice’, but the charm wore off as the contradictions increased. “The difficulty is intensified

by the fact that he rarely condescends to argument.’”

64 A COLONIAL LIBERALISM

By 1875 the reformers’ patience was exhausted. They came together under the leadership of Graham Berry, a draper turned professional politician with a somewhat spotty record as an advanced protectionist who nevertheless had gained the confidence of the Age. In August he formed a ministry with the programme of increased tariffs and a land tax. Defeated in the Assembly on fiscal policy and denied a dissolution by the Acting Governor, Berry embarked on a course of systematic obstruction of par-

liamentary business with the intention of forcing a general election. Higinbotham was unable to accept Berry’s ‘stonewall’. To requests that he assume the liberal leadership he replied that ‘there cannot be a leader except where there are followers, and

at this moment the Liberal party does not exist as a party in Victoria’. Shortly after, he announced his resignation from parliament:

It is not permitted to a member of Parliament to be a mere onlooker in Parliamentary war. It is his first duty to take his place, and bear his part in the strife on the one side or the other, and the weight of this obligation increases in exact proportion to the importance of the issue. I find that it is impossible for me, in the present emergency, to fulfil this duty by joining the ranks of either side, and I think that I should be doing a wrong to you if I continued at this time to hold the office, while I abstained from performing the duties of a representative.

To the last he cast criticism as self-criticism.”4

“You have no business to be indifferent’ Higinbotham’s parliamentary career was as paradoxical as the man himself. Unfitted, by his own admission, to the rigours of politics, he nevertheless charged public life with a passion that touched those who came after him. No one hated the party as much as he did, no one kindled party conflict so fiercely. His instincts were profoundly conservative: by temperament and training he regarded the law as a necessary expression of the moral sense of the community, reason and conscience as salutary

checks on human desire. Having come to a place where few constraints operated, he wished to see liberal institutions established in it out of a conviction that only liberal institutions could impose order on chaos. His attitude to this place of settlement was similarly ambiguous: on the one hand, it was a site of redemption where the future might be realized because it was free from the incubus of the past; on the other, it was a haven from

THE TASKS OF SELF-GOVERNMENT 65

the evils of modernity. The first alternative used the nineteenthcentury faith in linear progress to contrast the new world with the old; the second derived from an earlier, less optimistic understanding of history as cyclical, so that simple virtues of the antique republic eventually gave way to luxury, discord and despotism. Higinbotham’s fear of such degeneration provided the dynamic for his political progression. ‘At a time when many of the spiritual, and moral, and social forces which used to regulate ... society’ seemed to be palpably losing their force, there was

a polarization of wealth and poverty that threatened to result in a ‘terrible collision’. Could the new world stave off the evils

of the old? Initially he was alarmed by the possibility that a ‘dangerous class’ might emerge in the colony. Subsequently he came to see the real danger as ‘the wealthy lower orders’ whose insensate pursuit of privilege created that possibility. It became his goal ‘to counteract and check by every means this power of wealth, to expose its pretensions, to strip it by force of all special political power which it now claims and possesses’.”5

In the course of this crusade he developed his far-reaching doctrine of self-government. Beginning with Whig principles of

constitutional checks and balances, he pressed the claims of popular sovereignty to a remarkable degree: the upper house, the reserve powers of the Governor, the imperial prerogatives and even the customary separation of legislature, executive and judiciary — all came under review. His arguments for responsible government led him to qualify the conventional restrictions

that liberals imposed on the power of the state. So, too, his initial hostility to party and insistence on the independence of members of parliament gave way to participation in organized collective representation. Above all, he resisted the division that so many liberals tried to establish between public affairs and

personal fulfilment. Notwithstanding his own torments, the common wisdom that politics was a distasteful business best confined to those prepared to soil their hands in it, horrified him: ‘you have no business to be indifferent to these public questions; you must not, as you do at present, appear to be utterly apathetic on all public affairs — utterly buried in your own personal and class occupations and interests, and indifferent

to public and general interests’. Two years after issuing this injunction, Higinbotham retired from politics.”

3

DAVID SYME AND THE PURSUIT OF PROGRESS

We have now succeeded in reforming the political part of the system, but that was only the prologue to the play — we have now to perform the play itself — reform of the social part of the system. Age’

David Syme’s contempt of parliament In the autumn of 1866, while the struggle between the two houses was still unresolved, there was a gathering of liberals at Menzies’ Hotel. They met to wish David Syme good health and a safe return on the eve of a journey to Britain, where he would consult medical specialists about stomach and chest pains he

could no longer endure, and to present him with a silver tea and coffee service engraved “Io David Syme, Esq., Proprietor of the Age newspaper, in recognition of His Eminent Services in the Cause of Constitutional Liberty’. Syme, who generally avoided such public occasions, was moved by the honour they paid him: ‘I have been so used to giving and taking knocks that Iam quite put out by a demonstration of this kind.’ He recalled the commercial difficulties the Age had endured and the hostility it had incurred by championing the weak against the strong. He

did not regret speaking out as he had done, for the Age had always been guided by the motto ‘Measures and Men’. Good measures were essential to the progress of the colony, and the Age had campaigned for them, but good measures could not be

DAVID SYME AND THE PURSUIT OF PROGRESS 6/7

expected without vigilant scrutiny of the people’s representative. ‘We do not expect to get good measures from bad men.”2 Measures and Men. Throughout the constitutional crisis the

Age kept up a flow of invective against the squatters, the merchants and bankers, their parliamentary agents and press, the judiciary and all others it judged to be inimical to reform. It mixed personal abuse (one member was ‘as insensitive to decorum as a nude statue’, another ‘wallowed in filth’) with persistent denigration of the venal motives of its opponents. The Age was forever uncovering plots and conspiracies among enemies of the people; it entertained no compromise; no waverer

could escape its minatory gaze. It did not merely support the

ministry, it spoke for the ministry. It did not simply report events, it created them and in so doing placed itself at their fore-

front. The monster meetings at the Eastern Market that punctuated the deadlock habitually broke up with three groans

for the Upper House and the Argus, and three cheers for Higinbotham, the ministry and the Age.? Giving and taking knocks. In September 1865 when Governor Darling accepted the device whereby the government borrowed funds from the London Chartered Bank to carry on administration, some diehards wanted to indict him for conspiracy. The Age denounced their scheme and identified as its instigator John Dennistoun Wood, legal adviser to two other banks. A former Attorney-General, Wood had crossed swords with Syme some

years earlier when he asked the members of the Legislative Assembly to find the Age in contempt of parliament. This time he laid an action of criminal libel, an unusual form of litigation since it required the court to find that Syme’s words had been calculated to cause a breach of the peace, but far more ominous than a conventional suit since it carried a penalty of imprisonment. The defendant was impenitent: “We invite the Free Trade League, its attorneys, agents, barristers — the whole crew — to

come on jointly, severally, criminally or civilly, to do their worst.’ Twice a jury failed to reach a verdict, twice Syme was recommitted, but an election intervened at the beginning of 1866

and Syme employed all the resources of the Age to oppose

Wood’s candidature. When Wood failed to secure re-election he

dropped the action, though not before he had horsewhipped another of his critics, C. E. Jones.‘

68 A COLONIAL LIBERALISM

It was said that an angry politician who had taken exception

to the Age bearded its owner in his office, pointed to the window and asked what would happen if he were to throw Syme through it and into the street. ‘Why Man, you’d break it!” was the reply. Syme prided himself on his imperturbability. It was his fortress and his prison, held secure by glacial rectitude.

When this defence was penetrated, his suffering was all the greater.°

In April 1867 Syme was called before the bar of the Legislative Assembly to answer a charge of breach of privilege. The com-

plaint was raised by a member accused in Syme’s weekly newspaper, the Leader, of taking bribes from squatters; the member had an unsavoury reputation and would be convicted of forgery before the year was out, but the Assembly was jealous of its privileges and had recently committed the editor of the Argus, at the instigation of Higinbotham, for a similar contempt. The Attorney-General’s more pragmatic colleagues were anxious to avoid such a draconian penalty on this occasion. Syme was the most powerful ally of the ministry, after all, and it was common knowledge that the Leader article had been written by one of his staff, George Paton Smith, who was himself present on the government benches. All that was wanted from Syme to satisfy the dignity of parliament was a suitably contrite acknow!edgement of Smith’s authorship. This Syme refused to give. Instead he read a statement justifying the article and then, for over an hour, he stood there, pale and ill — one member said

he was barely able to keep his feet — and defied the House until ordered to withdraw while the members considered his fate. Higinbotham could see no alternative but to punish him as he had punished his counterpart: ‘I cannot help regarding his explanation as nothing but an aggravation of the original charge.’ At last Paton Smith confessed authorship and Syme was allowed to stand down after reassuring the House that he had meant no disrespect.

It had been a narrow escape from an impasse created by Syme’s inability to surrender his dignity, but consider the account given the following day in the Age. Readers were told how parliamentarians who were accustomed to ‘blackguard each

other like pickpockets’ had banded together to defend their monopoly of abuse. Mr Higinbotham, the Attorney-General, had a queer notion of privilege in his defence of ‘cronyism’, but

DAVID SYME AND THE PURSUIT OF PROGRESS 69

Mr Syme had vindicated the liberties of the press by refusing

to answer ‘impudent’ questions. As a parting shot: “The members of the Assembly who took part in the debate on the case of alleged breach of privilege may well congratulate themselves this morning on having escaped very cheaply from the difficulties with which they had surrounded themselves.” Three months later Syme again matched his will against that of the parliament. This time he was brought before the bar for alleging that several members had taken money from Edward Hargreaves in return for pressing his claim to receive the balance

of a £5000 reward for the discovery of gold. The Assembly

demanded to know the names of the members who had approached Hargreaves. Again Syme refused to answer. When asked what steps he had taken to corroborate the allegation he

said it was ‘a most impertinent question’ — told by Higinbotham to withdraw the expression, he explained that he meant the question was not pertinent. Again a halting apology for his contempt was dragged from him, again he repaired his self-esteem in the Age: ‘We cannot sufficiently express our contempt for those members of the Assembly .. .”” The newspaper was the medium of politics and there was, as Higinbotham put it, ‘a certain correspondence’ between the tone of a popular assembly and the character of the press. In the light of his own experience, Higinbotham was as critical of one as he was of the other: public life was marred by the ‘degraded press’; it was ‘simply a form in which personal passion, unguided either by reason or conscience, gives vent to its own baseness’. Few other liberals could afford such lofty standards. When David Syme spoke, they listened. More than any other colonial liberal,

he demonstrated the uses to which colonists could put their freedom.®

The dominie’s sons ‘I must confess’, David Syme volunteered to his biographer, ‘that I do not look on those early years of my life with much pleasure’, and he straightaway rehearsed them with grim relish.’ A father who never spoke to his son, except to instruct him. A son who never spoke to his father, save in answer to a question. ‘It is difficult for me, even now, to account for his attitude towards us whom he held at arms’ length and to whom he never addressed a word of encouragement.’ It was not that the father

70 A COLONIAL LIBERALISM

was unjust or inconsiderate. He was a devoted husband who denied himself to provide for his wife and five children, but his affection never found expression in word or gesture. “His love

seemed entirely overshadowed by his sense of duty, and he asked nothing from us except obedience.’

A family in which indolence and levity were forbidden. George Syme was a schoolmaster and his four sons, James (b. 1821), George (b. 1822), Ebenezer (b. 1826) and David (b. 1827) were driven remorselessly. James went on to study medicine at

Glasgow University; George, theology at Aberdeen, and Ebenezer also trained for the ministry at St Andrews, leaving David and his younger sister Margaret (b. 1828) to continue their lessons at home. There were no games and no holidays. ‘We commenced our tasks at seven in the morning and continued at them, with short intervals for meals, till eight or nine in

the evening.’ Sunday brought no relief, with attendance at church morning and evening, and reading from devotional texts. A household that was enclosed and beleaguered. As the town dominie of North Berwick, a small town on the Firth of Forth, George Syme served as clerk of the kirk session which governed

the school. Sometime in the early 1830s he fell out with this body and refused further dealings with it on church matters or the conduct of his school: the case was fought through the courts until in 1842 he forfeited his post. By then he had lost most of his pupils by his defiance of local opinion, most ruinously in the parliamentary election of 1841 when he insisted on supporting the Tory candidate in what had always been a Liberal stronghold. After the interloper won a narrow majority, the Syme household was beseiged by an angry mob. David recalled

venturing to peep out of a back gate some days after the poll and a brick striking the gate a few inches above his head.!° Always hanging over the household was the awful shadow of God. David’s childhood coincided with the Disruption of the Church of Scotland and the revival of popular piety. His father’s quarrel with the kirk session is explained by David as arising from dissatisfaction with the laxity of the established church, personified by a minister who neglected his pastoral duties to ingratiate himself with the local gentry. The Symes turned away from worldly temptations to an austere religiosity based on the conviction of human depravity, their faith in Christ’s redeeming sacrifice fretted by constant self-examination and their belief that

DAVID SYME AND THE PURSUIT OF PROGRESS 71

they were among the elect exacerbating rather than easing their anxiety. David recalled this ‘extreme Calvinism’ with horror but its logic seemed inexorable. ‘It was quite a relief to me when Sunday came to an end.’

Written more than fifty years after the circumstances it describes, the reconstruction of this childhood is unremitting. Its carefully rehearsed details, its self-absorption, its insistent call for the reader’s sympathy exploit the literary conventions

of the nineteenth-century spiritual autobiography. Edmund Gosse’s Father and Son, published just as Syme composed his memoir, is a notable example of this genre: the father’s religious zeal and paternal vigilance become tyrannical, destructive of all affection, until the child’s ‘hard nut of individuality’ issues in a declaration of independence from the spiritual and emotional yoke. Even closer to Syme’s experience was that of his fellow

Scot, Thomas Carlyle, to whom he bore a striking physical resemblance. Carlyle’s Reminiscences record the burden of expectations imposed on him by his father — ‘the strongestminded man’ he ever knew and the truest in the ways of the Lord, but ‘I was ever more or less awed and chilled before him’— and the crippling consequences of Calvinism on physical and emotional welfare. Above all, it is the withholding of love, the lack of affection, the denial of the comfort of a father’s arms,

that David Syme puts before us. Here the comparison with Robert Louis Stevenson’s finest fictional creation, Weir of Hermiston, is irresistible, even though Syme disapproved of its author. The stoical father despises his oversensitive son, who in turn comes to detest him. Stevenson reminds us also of the other side of childhood: Do I not know, how, nightly, on my bed The palpable close darkness shutting around me, How my small heart went forth to evil things .. ."

All of George Syme’s children bore the scars of his tyranny,

but it marked David most strongly for he remained under it long past the age at which his brothers had gone to university. By this time George Syme’s health was failing and the regimen of constant study was breaking down: exercises were set but

not corrected, ‘nothing was done to prepare me for a profession’. David’s sense of personal failure was thus compounded by the feeling that he had been ‘almost forgotten’. Even

72 A COLONIAL LIBERALISM

more striking in this account of his childhood are its absences. There are no friendships, no bonds with his older brothers, and a telling lack of accord with his younger sister, Margaret. When he tells us that he would have run away to sea except that his mother would have grieved over him, the emotional bond he describes is a bond of imprisonment. George Syme dominates his son’s recollections as the terrible dead father he can never

escape. He shudders at the memory of the brick striking the gate above his head, but shares the same contempt for conventional opinion and will himself practise the same self-righteous obduracy. He describes the unrelenting patriarchy but will himself reduce all his living relatives to dependence on him. He dwells on the absence of love but will hold his own children at arm’s length. When George Syme died in 1845 David went with his mother and sister to live with his brother James, who was in medical practice in Glasgow. There he followed his brothers George and Ebenezer into the Evangelical Union, a church formed two years earlier that broke with Calvinist orthodoxy on the doctrine of salvation by faith. According to its founder, the Reverend James Morison, Christ’s sacrifice offered universal redemption and was available to all who would come to him. Such a religion, with

its absence of credal subscription and emphasis on ministry, appealed to the zealous Ebenezer, who transferred from St Andrews to Morison’s theological academy at Kilmarnock and subsequently became an itinerant preacher. His brother George also abandoned a pulpit of the Church of Scotland for Kilmarn-

ock at this time and then ministered to a Baptist church in Nottingham — the death of the father had cut the bonds of the

old stern faith. As for David, ‘The more I thought over the dogmas of John Calvin, the less I liked them.’ The doctrines of original sin, of predestination, of the arbitrary salvation of the

elect and the damnation of the non-elect, all ‘were utterly abhorrent to my sense of justice’. He therefore turned to ‘a more rational plan of salvation from which the supernatural element

academy.!2 ,

was altogether eliminated’, and entered the Kilmarnock As he explains this choice of vocation, it is the outcome of

individual judgement informed by reason and justice, rather than of any manifest religious impulse. His account of the two years he spent in Kilmarnock training for the ministry has the same

DAVID SYME AND THE PURSUIT OF PROGRESS 73

cerebral emphasis: he studies Latin, Greek, Hebrew and Arabic, and aims at becoming an Oriental linguist; this ambition has to be abandoned because he finds that he lacks the ear for language

but also because his textual study of the Old Testament unhinges his faith in its inspiration. ‘My enthusiasm died out of me.’ As a retrospective explanation it is revealing — he acknowl-

edges his faith only at the moment of its disappearance and in terms of the damage to his own well-being — but not entirely convincing. For while it is clear that Syme was unable to sustain the predestinarian rigour of his father’s creed, he passes too quickly over his need to find an alternative. He clearly retained

the conviction that man could escape sin only by perpetual struggle, and he gave up Morison’s salvationist theology pre-

cisely because it did not provide the reassuring severity he craved. His sense of personal failure, exacerbated by overwork, reduced him to morbid depression, a condition that would recur at critical junctures throughout his life when his capacity was called into question. Advised to take a water cure, he abandoned his studies and went to Germany. The treatment completed, he journeyed along the Danube and Rhine for the best part of a year. The details of this Wanderjahre are not known (who supported him?) but he does record that he attended classes at Heidelberg University. The exposure to German culture left little discernible mark on his intellectual temper, which remained rigid and mechanical, his systematizing bent that of the Scottish academic tradition, speculation constrained within the limits of robust common-

sense, the standard of judgement that of eighteenth-century rationalism — there is no evidence that he was infected by Carlyle’s enthusiasm for German romanticism. He states merely that he ‘took more interest in Hegelism than in Theology’, and we may infer that it was the exaltation of human intelligence to encompass even religious ideas as objects of scientific reflection that extinguished the last embers of his faith. He also appropri-

ated from German thought a belief in the self-sufticiency of human nature. He returned to Scotland in 1849 knowing only that he would not resume training for the ministry.” After working for a time as proof-reader on a Glasgow news-

paper he abandoned his homeland — with little remorse, it would appear, for he was never sentimental about such ties and a return visit a quarter-century later merely drew the comment

74 A COLONIAL LIBERALISM

that ‘Scotland disgusted me and I was glad to get away’. There

seemed no prospect of advancement, nothing in the place to hold him, and he was lured to California by the goldrush; but he found little success there either. He knew no one, he made no friends, he was appalled by the squalor and brutality. In 1852 he crossed the Pacific to try his luck in Australia.” Here, too, the tribulations continued. As he recounts his ex-

periences, it seems at first that the goldrush is a madness that loosens every restraint and sets every man against his fellow: he asks a traveller the way to the diggings and is threatened by a blunderbuss; he himself greets strangers with a revolver; he falls

ill and is abandoned by his partner. The vagaries of fortune mock his efforts: he sinks a shaft at considerable expense and bottoms on a seam of gold which is immediately flooded. Dishonesty and theft are unchecked: he strikes it rich only for his claim to be jumped. In short, Syme experiences the diggings as the very antithesis of the place they occupy in the radical na-

tionalist mythology, as rough and ready communities of levelling yet convivial self-fulfilment. Syme’s goldfields are more

like those portrayed in early Australian crime fiction: anonymous, brutal and treacherous. At this point in the narrative, however, Syme turns from his own misfortunes to the diggers as a social class and a remarkable change in perspective occurs. His ignoble companions are now presented as victims of official maladministration. ‘Man for man,’ he insists, the maltreated diggers on the Victorian goldfields were ‘physically, mentally and morally equal to any people in the British dominions’. Had they

been treated fairly, had they been encouraged to better themselves through honest endeavour and permitted to cultivate the land around the diggings, the events of Eureka need not have

occurred.

This judgement is clearly retrospective and its political reading

of the events is belied by Syme’s own admission that he had taken no part in the ‘unfortunate affair’ of the ‘Ballarat riot’ or the protests that preceded it. It signifies not an awakening interest in public affairs but the finding of a scapegoat for his own disappointments and a consequent reinterpretation of the goldfields as the site of purposeful endeavour spoiled only by the absence of justice. His four years as a miner had, in fact, intensified his mistrust of those around him, but nervous withdrawal hardened into grim self-reliance. He endured. The manual lab-

DAVID SYME AND THE PURSUIT OF PROGRESS 7/5

our put muscle on to his tall, raw-boned frame; his expression took on a minatory intensity, the mouth held tight, eyes watchful, a beard emphasizing his strong chin. He also discovered a practical bent. His mining ventures involved substantial earthworks and the outlay of capital to hire additional labour, and from 1856 he applied these skills to road construction and became a successful public works contractor. In 1858 he married Annabella Johnson. He was thirty, she twenty, having come five years earlier with her parents from Yorkshire. In the following year their first child, Herbert, was born — they would have five sons and two daughters. By this time also most of David’s family had joined him in Melbourne. His brother Ebenezer came in 1853 with his wife and three children; they were followed in

1857 by his mother, his sister Margaret, her husband John Gourlay and their two children; George completed the transfer

in 1862 with his wife and children, the oldest brother James having died some years earlier.'® If David was the first-comer, Ebenezer was the dominant fig-

ure in the family circle. From Kilmarnock he had taken the Lord’s word to the industrial towns of Scotland and northern England, preaching on street corners and throwing himself into the campaign for the People’s Charter that was then entering its final and most frantic phase. In Manchester he married Jane Rowan. Their first son was christened William Holland after a radical Nonconformist who had sheltered Ebenezer; their second, George, after Ebenezer’s father; the third, Joseph Cowen,

after a wealthy Chartist sympathizer in Durham, where Ebenezer preached in a Unitarian chapel. In 1851, ‘reminded again how much man is the creature of circumstance, and how thought and action flow from feeling and self-interest’, he abandoned the ministry.!” However, he did not stop preaching. Among the subjects he offered as a public lecturer in London in the summer of 1852

were Modern Talmudism, Confucius, Mahomet, Jesus the Galileean Reformer, and Napoleon’s First Wife. He also wrote for the Westminster Review in a style that its editor, George Eliot, described as ‘slash and scoff’; he commanded a wide range of subjects but ‘one feels that he does not write as a gentleman’. George Eliot was unhappy with Ebenezer’s copy but she had little choice but to use it since he was employed by the book-

seller and owner of the journal, John Chapman. While

76 A COLONIAL LIBERALISM

Chapman’s strenuous campaign against monogamy (his wife, George Eliot and another of his lovers were all under the same roof at this time) offended the fastidious, he entertained many of the most advanced thinkers. John Stuart Mill, Herbert Spen-

cer, George Lewes and Harriet Martineau were some of Ebenezer’s fellow contributors, and Chapman’s circle extended to the continental refugees Mazzini, Blanc and Marx. The visitor Ebenezer Syme singled out was Horace Greeley, who had made the New-York Tribune a prodigiously successful combination of scandalmongering and moral enlightenment, preaching land reform, temperance, protection of local industry, abolition of capital punishment, and extolling the redemptive virtues of the new world in a hectoring style the Age would follow."

Ebenezer’s period in London came to an end in 1853. Chapman’s publishing business was in difficulties so it was an obvious economy to terminate the employment of an assistant

whose final contribution to the Westminster Review George Eliot judged ‘worse than ever’. It is possible that David’s reports

of opportunities available in Australia persuaded Ebenezer to emigrate there, more likely that his imagination was fired by accounts circulating in Britain. One of the books he reviewed for the Westminster Review was Samuel Sidney’s The Three

Colonies of Australia, which evoked ‘an El Dorado and an Arcadia combined’ that Sidney had never visited but which he nevertheless promoted as a land of golden promise. The decision to emigrate was influenced also by Ebenezer’s failing health. The privations suffered as an evangelist at large had left a wracking

cough, from which the Australian climate offered a chance of recovery. Shortsighted and consumptive, his febrile energy and vituperative fluency brought immediate success as a journalist, first with the Diggers’ Advocate the radical goldfields paper, and later at the Argus. In 1855 he became editor of the Age, where he was joined a year later by his brother, David.!?

The Age and its owners The Age had been established in 1854 as ‘a journal of politics,

commerce and philanthropy’. Its promoters were John and Henry Cooke, merchants and members of the Independent Church, who envisaged a platform for the Nonconformist conscience — their prospectus announced that the newspaper would

be ‘liberal, aiming at a wide extension of the rights of free

DAVID SYME AND THE PURSUIT OF PROGRESS 77

citizenship’ and the removal of all restrictions upon freedom of commerce and freedom of religion. The Age had to compete with two established papers and incurred heavy losses. At the end of 1854 its proprietors put it up for sale.”°

It was bought by a combination of the compositors, office staff and journalists, each of whom paid £25 for a share in the co-operative enterprise and agreed to contribute from wages to create working capital. In the immediate aftermath of the events at Eureka, Ebenezer Syme joined the co-operative along with his former colleague at the Argus, David Blair, another lapsed Presbyterian minister. Both had parted company with the Argus as it drew back from the radical discontent it had incited. Blair was the principal speaker at the protest meeting called when news of Eureka reached Melbourne, and Syme drafted its resolutions.7!

Under their direction the Age assumed leadership of the popular discontent. It publicized the extensive evidence of abuses presented to a royal commission on the administration of the goldfields. It exulted in the acquittal by Melbourne juries of the Eureka defendants. Its narrow-fronted premises in Elizabeth Street became a gathering place for contributors such as James

Grant, Blair’s brother-in-law and one of the lawyers who waived fees to defend the prisoners; Thomas Embling, a human-

itarian doctor who had chaired the protest meeting; and J. D.

Owens, another doctor and leader of the Bendigo diggers. Crowds of supporters would gather outside to exchange the latest news. By the end of the year the transition to responsible government and preparation for elections under the newly pro-

claimed Constitution gave fresh momentum to the Age’s advocacy of advanced democracy, universal suffrage, liberal land laws and free, secular education. Syme, Blair, Grant, Embling and Owens were all elected to the first Legislative Assembly.” The growing circulation and influence of the Age were offset by a lack of advertising revenue on which its survival ultimately depended. The administration placed no more than a bare min-

imum of public notices in the columns of its scurrilous critic; Melbourne’s prosperous mercantile establishment generally shunned it. Financial difficulties became intractable when the business manager defected, and in May 1856 the remaining

members of the co-operative declared the Age insolvent. Ebenezer Syme bought it for £2000, a sum he borrowed with

78 A COLONIAL LIBERALISM

guarantees from a group of Caledonian sympathizers who in-

cluded James McEwan, the ironmonger, Thomas Rae, a merchant, and James Grant. ‘It was bought’, he declared, ‘in the interest of the people, and it is to the interest of the people that it is dedicated.’”° David Syme joined Ebenezer at this juncture. There is no record of the terms of the partnership and the arrangement gave

rise afterwards to heated family arguments. David probably brought some money into the enterprise as well as contributing

the profits of his business. He took charge of the office and contributed mining reports, while Ebenezer occupied the editor-

ial chair; but the task of repaying the purchase loan left too slender a margin to support both parties and David resumed

contracting in 1857. He returned to the Age in 1859 as

Ebenezer’s health declined." Ebenezer died of consumption on 13 March 1860, leaving a wife and five children. There was nothing unusual about such a fate — tuberculosis was rife and the telltale signs were apparent

to anyone who saw him, flushed and wasted, as he trudged between parliament and the newspaper premises. The extraordinary thing was that he made no will. It was this failure, and

the consequent need for his widow to first establish her in-

heritance and then negotiate an agreement with her

brother-in-law, that spoilt her patrimony. The perils of the unprotected woman — a theme dear to the Victorian moralist — were visited on Ebenezer’s widow with ruinous consequences for her reputation, her estate and her children.

David Syme wins control Jane Syme comes to us from the letters she wrote to her brotherin-law and his wife. The balance of the correspondence is wholly one-sided: their blandishments and demands against her superficialities and tremulous protests. The very fact that she returned to England with her children after Ebenezer died is telling; apart from references to former friends there is no trace of an interest in the causes that occupied her husband during their seven years in the colony, nor of the mission that had possessed him during their courtship. She left Australia in 1861 as a partner of David Syme with a

half-share in the Age, a quarter in her own right and another quarter on behalf of her children. Both partners were entitled

DAVID SYME AND THE PURSUIT OF PROGRESS 79

to equal shares of the profits of enterprise but David was to exercise ‘management and control’ and draw a salary of £9 per week. The economics of the newspaper industry were precarious: the chief expenses, wages and materials, were inelastic while the chief sources of income, sales and advertising, fluctuated alarmingly according to the state of the febrile economy. At this time the Age was an eight-page broadsheet printed on a steampowered press that sold about 2000 copies daily at threepence a copy. The weekly Leader, which reprinted much of the copy

for readers outside Melbourne, had a wider circulation and sometimes sold as many as 10 000 copies. Annual turnover was impressive — £35 000 in 1865 — but profitability unreliable. In

1861 there was a record surplus of £3502 but this fell away sharply to £266 for 1863; recovery during the heyday of the McCulloch ministry came to an end by 1867, when the Age was again subjected to a boycott that starved it of advertising revenue. The profit for that year was just £52, in striking contrast

to the Argus which achieved a surplus of £15694. Syme responded by dropping the price of the Age to a penny with a corresponding reduction in size to four pages, and lifted circulation to more than 10 000, but even at the end of the decade annual profit was a modest £1428.” While David Syme exulted in the battle, his partner feared for

its consequences. When news of a fresh round of hostilities reached her in 1867 she urged her brother-in-law to show ‘less personality and party feeling’ and conduct the paper in what she described as ‘a more Liberal way’. ‘From what I have heard it makes the paper look very shaky’ to be constantly embroiled

in disputes, she observed, and in a comparison that enraged David she pointed out that his late brother had always sought to avoid such hazards. The reason for her alarm is plain — she was wholly dependent on the solvency of the newspaper. Moreover, while David drew his editor’s salary, Jane Syme relied on profits. Under the agreement she had made with him, both drew weekly payments of £10 per week (later £12) as an advance on the annual surplus. This was a comfortable, though by no means lavish income on which to support herself and her five children, and Syme’s reckless disregard of commercial prudence imper-

illed it. She complained repeatedly of his failure to keep her informed about his actions as well as his tardiness in meeting requests for money, and by 1867 had retained a solicitor to act

80 A COLONIAL LIBERALISM

on her behalf. In fact, Jane had overdrawn her share of the Age’s

earnings by nearly £1000, whereas David, who of course had the benefit of his editor’s salary and was in credit by a similar amount, tried to use the financial imbalance as a lever to increase his control.?¢

In this ambition he was prepared to use any additional weapon. In 1868 Jane sent two of her sons out to Australia. The oldest, William, was studying medicine in Dublin and joined

them later, but George, who was 17, went into a Melbourne bank, and Joseph, a year younger, was taken on at the Age by his reluctant uncle. Both George and Joseph boarded with David

and Annie. In 1869 when the partnership agreement was due for renewal and Jane was seeking new terms, the wind was taken

out of her sails by news that George had disgraced himself by late nights, bad company and drink. Jane did not dispute the charges and appreciated ‘the evils to which this theatre going

leads, particularly in a place like Melbourne’, but she was shocked by the severity of David’s and Annie’s letters and especially the insinuation that she had allowed George to develop these vices before he went to Australia. ‘I feel your letter to be written without one spark of kindly feeling or sympathy,” she told her sister-in-law. Turned out from the Syme

household, George went to the dogs, unable to keep any job and dependent on his family for handouts. ‘A hopeless case’, his mother described him in 1873, and a permanent reproach to her incapacity as a mother.?” By then a greater scandal had broken. David’s suspicions seem

to have been aroused by remarks that George and Joseph let slip on their arrival in Australia. Pressed hard, Jane admitted part of her dark secret. Several years earlier she had remarried, secretly, a homeopath named James Palk who had followed her from Melbourne. In England he had changed his name to Hope — with good cause, it transpired, since he had left a Mrs Palk behind. Moreover, the bigamous marriage had not been a suc-

cess. Palk abused Jane and she was about to leave him. She reported these things to David, apologized for keeping them from him and accepted his reproof. Why had she married the man, David asked. ‘In what way could you have put yourself in his power? What had you done that you need be afraid of?” The answer soon came to light. Jane had borne Palk three children, the first of them four years before they married. This final

DAVID SYME AND THE PURSUIT OF PROGRESS 81

revelation made her an outcast and her remaining children by Ebenezer came to Melbourne. ‘I have little left to live for now that my dear children are away,’ she wrote to Annie, ‘but it 1s

for their good and I hope for the best ... Remember me to David, he never writes now.’28 David no longer needed to write because in 1871 her eldest

son, William, reached his majority and was granted power of attorney over his mother’s estate. William had settled in Australia and set up medical practice on the goldfields. To do so he borrowed from his uncle and was at first compliant in meeting David’s wishes. He allowed David to increase his editor’s salary to £15 per week while also receiving interest on his surplus in

the capital account at the expense of the weekly payments to Jane. This cosy arrangement did not continue, however, for as his younger brothers turned 21, they too became co-partners whose consent was required to renew the agreement. While the wretched George was persuaded to make over his share to William, Joseph, who still worked at the Age and was resentful of his uncle’s domineering manner, insisted on exercizing his

rights. In any case, as William pointed out, the division of

income from the Age — ‘you living on your salary and mother drawing on her capital’ — could hardly be sustained indefinitely?’ The Age had weathered its difficulties of the late 1860s and achieved a circulation of 20 000 by 1873, but growth brought new demands. The sum of £3200 was outlaid on new web rotary printing presses that proved unsatisfactory and required costly

modification. Paper prices increased and the expenditure on paper in 1873 rose by £3000 over the previous year. The com-

pletion of the cable linking Melbourne to Britain in 1872 necessitated additional expenditure of the same order on the transmission of news from Europe. The partnership arrangement made it difficult to finance such outlays and hindered the

much-needed capitalization of an enterprise with a turnover now in excess of £50000. By 1876 David Syme was offering William £7500 for his mother’s quarter-share, while William was disputing the division of spoils on the last year’s operations and refusing to sign the balance sheet.*° Thwarted in his negotiations with William and Joseph, David

set off for Britain to deal directly with Jane. He lied about the purpose of his mission (it was, he assured William, necessary

82 A COLONIAL LIBERALISM

for him to pursue legal actions against the suppliers of mach-

inery and paper) but the brothers were in no doubt that he meant to bully Jane and bribe Palk to revoke William’s power of attorney so that he could fix a sufficiently low value on the Age and buy it outright. Jane’s irresolution tried him sorely: ‘I felt that if I upbraided her in any way, I would have been shown the door at once so all that matter about her private conduct | had to keep in reserve’, he reported to his wife. Finally, when Jane would not sign the document he put before her, he delivered his last shot and threatened to abandon the Age altogether and start a new paper. She then said she would go to Australia and discuss the matter with her children. David agreed. ‘If we have them all out here together we shall certainly be able to do something with them, or we shall know the reason why.’ In

thus reporting the matter to his wife, David warned her that since her sister-in-law would precede him she must keep a close

watch and not allow William or Joseph to influence their mother. ‘Of course you must not quarrel with her, at least not yet. She is ... dreadfully alarmed and is really anxious to settle matters, so we must give her a chance. Once settled, we are done with her.”*!

The Melbourne negotiations were protracted and difficult. There were acrimonious arguments over the terms of the original agreement between Ebenezer and David, and all that had followed. Joseph insisted on retaining his interest in the Age and eventually obtained a quarter-share together with responsibility for the printing, distribution and advertising department; David paid £8250 to increase his share to three-quarters. Joseph was to receive a salary of £1000 per annum, David £1500, and they

were to divide future profits in accordance with their shares. There was one last hurdle to clear — under existing law James

Palk might have a valid claim on Jane’s property, so it was judged necessary to obtain his signature to the agreement. After

haggling over the expenses of the mission, Joseph sailed to England only to find that Palk had eloped to South Africa with a new victim just five days before Joseph’s arrival. A lawyer

advised that Palk could be forced to sign under threat of indictment for bigamy so long as the threat was not spelled out, but Joseph decided not to continue the pursuit — and was accordingly taken to task by his uncle. There the matter rested. Jane was bundled out of Melbourne. In 1882 she remarried, to

DAVID SYME AND THE PURSUIT OF PROGRESS 83

another doctor, and emigrated with him to the United States;

but this husband soon died and she ended her days in New

Zealand.*

The press as the medium of liberal politics By such means David Syme tightened his grip on the Age and ensured that it would operate as the instrument of his will. How did he use it? The most common metaphor used to characterize the nineteenth-century newspaper was religious: the press displaced the pulpit as the source of instruction; morning devotions gave way to a secular ceremony performed over the breakfasttable, its devotees finding guidance no longer in the scriptures but in columns of newsprint. Syme’s contemporary, W. T. Stead,

likened the press to ‘a great secular or civic church’, and on Syme’s death the Age quoted James Russell Lowell: ‘What a pulpit the editor mounts daily, with a congregation of fifty thou-

sand within reach of his voice, and never a nodder amongst them.’ The same image had appealed to Ebenezer Syme in his evangelical days, ‘preaching through a town so that all may hear the Gospel if they will but open their door or windows’.*3 The preacher reached no further than his voice carried; or, as Ebenezer remarked with unfortunate prescience, ‘noise is the converting medium and the strength of a man’s lungs is there-

fore the standard of his revival capabilities and piety’. The newspaper was not subject to such limitations. It used the productivity of the mechanized press, the portability of paper and

the distributive capacity of urban transport to circulate daily among a concentrated readership — an English visitor in the late 1850s was struck during her early morning perambulations by the sight of a newspaper on every Melbourne doorstep. Jour-

nalism served the nineteenth-century city as a new and distinctive form of communication, providing its connections and disconnections, creating its intimacies and anonymities. It marked a further stage in the shift from the spoken to the written word that separated the speaker from the spoken. Within the world of symbols, time and space were enlarged, fixed hierarchies and sacred truths dissolved, the reader constituted as a citizen and sovereign individual.**

The spread of print literacy thus cleared a public space on which informed public opinion could contest the authority that had previously been the preserve of a privileged minority.

84 A COLONIAL LIBERALISM

Rank or inherited standing no longer conferred the nght to speak and judge, but rather participation in the rational discourse of the reading public became the hallmark of the man of affairs. The use of shorthand from the end of the eighteenth century allowed verbatim reports of parliamentary proceedings to be published in British newspapers, and opened politics to

critical scrutiny, and efforts to muzzle the press (both by taxation and direct suppression) reflected the alarm of the old ruling class. For the press allowed the circulation not just of

political opinion among the propertied classes who were admitted to the body politic by the Reform Act of 1832, but of radical and seditious agitation among the artisans and factory hands, who were not. Feargus O’Connor, Chartist leader and

editor of the Northern Star, celebrated the threat represented by this ‘counter-public sphere’: For despots, though united, feel distress, And tremble when the thunder of the press Rolls through their kingdoms in the civil storm, Proclaiming justice, freedom and reform.»

Freedom of the press was a fundamental liberal precept, rest-

ing on a confidence that an unhindered interplay of opinion would yield knowledge and enlightenment — liberals generally embraced freedom on the understanding that it entailed truth. The establishment of the Age coincided with the abolition of the stamp tax on British newspapers and their acceptance as conduits of public opinion, the conventional phrase for what was now recognized as a legitimate part of politics. The notion of the press as a Fourth Estate ratified this acceptance, as did the common practice in the Australian colonies of allowing news-

papers to be posted free of charge. The Age displayed the characteristic pedagogic earnestness of the nineteenth-century newspaper. Its narrow columns were filled with small type, the headings small and infrequent, unrelieved by illustration or display advertising. It made few concessions to the reader in its detailed reportage of events or editorial commentary upon them, both of which employed an ornate prose of studied formality.

The leading articles were festooned with classical tags and learned allusions, ballasted with pleonasm and periphrasis. Shipping lists, mining notes, reports of market prices and notices of

public tenders made it a medium of commercial intelligence.

DAVID SYME AND THE PURSUIT OF PROGRESS 85

Lengthy reports of parliamentary debates, court proceedings and public meetings established it as a paper of record. In these respects the Age conformed to the model of the improving journal, but in other respects it practised the vices of the radical press. Whereas the Argus maintained an aura of neut-

rality by marking a clear boundary between reportage and commentary, the Age habitually suppressed or distorted news to make a point. Its unofficial motto — Measures and Men — flouted the conventional precept. Its leading articles were full of violence and rancour. Its epithets (pastoralists were dubbed ‘tallow lords’, merchants the ‘softgoods clique’ or ‘shoddyocracy’, etc.) were calculated to inflame. In refreshing contrast to present-day media magnates, David Syme freely admitted that his press was an active force in forming public opinion: ‘It does not ask the man in the street what he thinks, but it tells him what he ought to think.’ Such concentration of influence over an undifferentiated mass of ‘men in the street’ alarmed liberals like

John Stuart Mill, who thought at first of public opinion as a salutary constraint on unrepresentative government but came to regard it as posing a new and more threatening tyranny.*® Nor was it clear that the newspaper was necessarily a force for social cohesion. Its readership was at once concentrated and dispersed. Thousands of Melbourne households opened the Age each morning and read it as a record of their public affairs, but they did so as individual readers. The very medium that brought

them together, linked their private concerns and marked out their common interests — in short, constituted the private and public spheres of social life — did so in a way that threatened to subvert the moral codes appropriate to each sphere. By extending the operation of the market, it allowed an impersonal transaction of even the most intimate needs — an aspect taken to a scandalous extreme in 1875 when the eccentric bookseller E. W. Cole advertised for a wife and offered £20 as a spotter’s fee,>’

By directing a beam of publicity into the shadowy recesses of politics the Age invited readers to seek their personal advantage through its popular campaigns. In what sense did the Age speak for the people? Its disembodied voice and impersonal tone misled no one: the Age was David Syme. He did not contribute regularly for he was a slow, anxious writer who lacked the lit-

erary graces expected of journalism at that time, but he laid

86 A COLONIAL LIBERALISM

down the direction of the leading articles and determined every aspect of the paper. The control was absolute and peremptory. As one who worked for him recalled, ‘David Syme’s attitude to the man who made mistakes was pitiless. His contempt for this type of unfortunate was almost as great as his fierce dislike of the sinner who did not keep his word.’ His letterbook records a stream of instructions, rebuke, sarcasms and threats: ‘Be so

good as to ...’; ‘What do you mean by ...?’; “Must I for ever ...2’5 ‘Have you any notion of ...?’; ‘Has your memory quite gone, or is it that you have lost the capacity of organising your work?’; ‘If such a thing occurs again, I shall have to consider whether I can retain your services.”

In an account of his daily routine during the 1860s David claims to have worked fifteen hours daily. He rode into the office from his Canterbury Road residence at 9a.m. After attending to business matters and correspondence during the morning, he arranged the duties of the reporters and settled down during the afternoon to study press files. From dusk he was busy with the proofs of the news reports until by 11 or 11.30 p.m. the leading articles arrived. ‘Sometimes they required very little alteration, but many and many a time the writer had missed the whole drift of the argument I wanted unfolded, and I had then to sit down and either recast or write anew the whole

article.” By 2.a.m. the paper had usually gone to press and he mounted his horse and rode home.*? His involvement in those years was intense because he lacked the staff who could carry out his instructions. David Blair had soon fallen out with Ebenezer and David, while James Smith, an accomplished littérateur and leader-writer, also left. George

Paton Smith, chief sub-editor of the Age from 1859, was a protegé of Syme who supported his election to parliament in 1866, but broke with the liberals during the constitutional crisis and turned a venemous pen against his former patron. Yet an-

other Smith, Henry, was a serviceable workhorse until he defected to the Argus in 1867. There were two Irishmen, Gerald Supple and J. W. O’Hea, but since Supple was almost blind and

O’Hea utterly self-absorbed, Syme had to provide both with topics. The myopic Supple left the Age because of Paton Smith’s anti-Catholicism and later opened fire on him in the city — he killed a bystander. George Levey’s services were acquired when

Syme bought out the rival Herald in 1868, but he too was a

DAVID SYME AND THE PURSUIT OF PROGRESS 87

dubious asset. James Harrison, who owned the Geelong Advertiser, contributed leading articles on and off until 1872 when

other interests (notably the development of refrigeration for meat export) claimed his full attention. On Harrison’s departure Syme secured the services of A. L. Windsor, who remained the Age’s editor for the next twentyeight years. Windsor had experience with the Morning Chronicle before joining the Argus in 1863. The sole condition of his em-

ployment there was that he was not to enter the Melbourne Club; since he was even more reclusive than his predecessor Higinbotham the restriction did not irk him but the condescension of the Argus’s owners did. An erudite stylist and political agnostic, he could translate Syme’s jeremiads into coruscating prose. As the Age prospered (its circulation rose to 32 000 in 1876, 41 000 in 1880 and 52000 in 1883 — far and away the

most successful paper in the country), so Syme could afford additional talent. G. F. H. Schuler, a diminutive perfectionist and Windsor’s eventual successor, became chief of staff; A. B. Robinson, a chirpy little man of remarkable financial acumen, was commercial editor and Syme’s business adviser; J. L. Dow cov-

ered the land issue as a special contributor to the Leader; Charles Pearson and Alfred Deakin wrote leading articles. None

of them, with the exception of Deakin, enjoyed real intimacy with their employer but they were well rewarded tor submitting to his dictatorship. In 1884 Windsor earned £1040, Pearson £978, Robinson £780 and Deakin (whose salary as a cabinet minister was supplemented by a special commission to write for the

Age on his tour of north America) was paid the extraordinary sum of £2900. Syme now kept shorter hours in his Age office and the gong he had used to summon miscreants was replaced in the same year by an electric bell.*°

The moral economy of colonial liberalism The Age was a campaigning newspaper. It would take up a cause, publicize the scandalous consequences of its neglect, expound its benefits in special articles, advocate it in editorials,

make its adoption a condition of support, and persist until appropriate measures were legislated into existence. Licensing

reform, the plantation of olive groves, public education, improvement of railway services and port facilities, exploration of the interior, payment of members of parliament, irrigation

88 A COLONIAL LIBERALISM

works, a property tax, coal mines, an old-age pension — these scarcely sample the goals that the Age pursued in this manner. Two causes preoccupied it above all others during the 1860s and 1870s. One was reform of land tenure to end the squatters’ control of the public estate and promote agricultural settlement. The other was encouragement of local industries. Neither crusade was initiated by Syme and the Age threw its full weight behind land reform and industrial protection only after initial equivocation. To break the pastoralists’ monopoly, foster more productive uses of the soil and bring land into the sphere of property relations like any other commodity accorded with the precepts of political economy; but the agrarian radicals did not want land to be treated as just another form of property and the wild threats of the Land Convention in the late 1850s alarmed even the Age. Protection of local industries, on the other hand, flew in the face of a doctrine that had been handed down from Smith and Ricardo to McCulloch and Mill: free trade benefited buyer and seller; it was inefficient, improper and unjust to interfere with the market. In taking up land reform and protection Syme had therefore to bring them into a coherent liberal

discourse; and in placing them at the forefront of a popular reform programme he gave liberalism a distinctively colonial inflection. The circumstances of the colony of Victoria presented an ex-

treme instance of a more general pattern that characterized nineteenth-century settler capitalism. The place was colonized to exploit its rich natural resources. Europeans had driven their

sheep south from New South Wales or shipped across Bass Strait to push aside the Aboriginal inhabitants and take advantage of the lush grasslands. They prospered because they were able to produce fine wool for the world market more cheaply than established producers, and their advantage lay not just in

the plentiful supply at a nominal rent of the crucial factor of production, land, but in their ability to apply the most favourable relations of production. From the moment they put down Aboriginal resistance settlers were free to practise a singleminded pursuit of profit unencumbered by fetters on their use of land and labour. Settler capitalism applied such methods dur-

ing the nineteenth century throughout the thinly populated temperate zones. North America, South America, South Africa,

Australia and New Zealand all flourished as producers of

DAVID SYME AND THE PURSUIT OF PROGRESS 89

commodities tor the expanding global market. Yet their very success generated forces for change. The productivity of settler capitalism concentrated wealth in the hands of a minority and restricted opportunities for the bulk of the population. The lab-

our needs of a pastoralist, for example, could be met by employing a limited number of shepherds, hut-keepers and shearers in primitive conditions; his requirements for equipment, supplies and transport supported only rudimentary local indus-

tries; his control of the land locked out farmers; his export monoculture made the colonial economy extremely susceptible

to downturns in world trade, such as that of the early 1840s which caused a deep depression in Australia. Thus, as a colony grew, so did the pressure for alternative outlets for enterprise. Moreover, settler capitalism tied the commodity producers to the imperial centres on which they depended for markets and capital. Just as the colonists aspired to self-government, so they sought economic self-sufficiency in order that they might truly control their own destiny.*! These pressures were felt in Victoria with an augmented force when a second export commodity, gold, temporarily eclipsed the first. Gold fossicking was a more labour-intensive activity than wool-growing, and more egalitarian since any newcomer capable of digging and washing dirt on the rich alluvial fields of south-east Australia could stake a claim. In the decade fol-

lowing the discoveries the non-Aboriginal population of Victoria increased sevenfold, from fewer than 80 000 persons to more than half a million, and a new range of ancillary industries sprang up to meet their needs. Most of the bullion was simply

taken out of Victoria or used to purchase imports, to the detriment of local producers. As the alluvial deposits were worked out and the tidal wave of people and possessions began to recede (gold exports were worth £8 652 000 in 1861, £6 120 000 in 1870, while the number of miners fell from over 100 000 to 58 000), the constraints of this imperial division of labour became all the

more irksome. The riches that ought to have made the colony ‘fat and and strong and pursy’ had been allowed to dissipate, the Age lamented, and an uncontrolled ‘auriferous drainage’ had resulted in gloom, inanition and social atrophy: We cannot remain a nation of gold diggers and mere traffickers of commerce, with a small sprinkling of tillers of the soil amongst us, and yet become a great nation. The arts of the mechanic and the

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manufacturer must become domiciled amongst us if we are to provide

for our future population, becoming thriving, contented, and good members of enlightened society. In fact if we would stave off poverty, barbarism and crime, we must seek to be a nation at all points: agriculture, mining, manufacturing, trading and shipping.”

A perceptive observer has suggested that mid-nineteenth cen-

tury imperialism was not simply something that a powerful country like Britain did to other countries, but also something that the other countries were persuaded or compelled to do to themselves. By the 1850s Britain had dismantled most of the controls that protected its domestic economy from foreign competition and attached the colonial economies to its own. The repeal of the Corn Laws in 1846 and the Navigation Acts in 1849

completed a transition from mercantilism to free trade. As the leading industrial country, Britain no longer needed to safe-

guard its agriculture since it could import food and raw materials; nor was it necessary to keep the colonies closed to

outsiders since British manufacturers and merchants could undersell competitors in open markets. The liberalization of world commerce sometimes required the use of force — and English liberals welcomed the Opium War against China as necessary to secure ‘a really free intercourse’ in their shipment of that unwelcome item into Chinese ports — but free trade itself was extolled as conducive to peace, prosperity and progress.*°

If free-trade imperialism was something that countries were

persuaded or compelled to do to themselves, then the chief means of persuasion was doctrinal. By the middle of the nineteenth century the principles of economic liberalism had become a conventional wisdom at once scientifically certain and morally imperative. The postulation of economic man with a natural

propensity to barter and accumulate wealth; the liberty and autonomy that the possession of wealth conferred, and the cor-

responding necessity of self-reliance; the notion of the self-regulating market, its participants simultaneously pursuing their own advantage and advancing the common interest; the extension of the market across national boundaries so that trade ran in natural channels and producers maximized their compar-

ative advantages: these propositions were taken from the classical economists, popularized in countless texts and tracts,

and trotted out in everyday usage until they found general acceptance.

DAVID SYME AND THE PURSUIT OF PROGRESS 91

Colonies presented certain difficulties for British liberals. Insofar as they offered fresh fields for endeavour and progress they were unobjectionable; but if they conferred advantages on particular mercantile interests then they exercised a pernicious effect on domestic commerce and government. Britain’s chastening experience with the American colonies was a decisive demonstration of these dangers. To guard against another such débacle and ensure that the remaining colonies were open to all comers, the liberals led a drive to prepare the colonies of settlement for self-government. Even then, the policies that they devised in the 1830s and 1840s were hardly consistent with free trade: the encouragment of emigration by sponsorship or sub-

sidy was calculated to reduce the pressure on the domestic labour market and increase the labour supply in the colonies; and colonial lands were sold at prices designed to cover the cost

of emigration assistance and regulate the ratio of capital and labour. While Wakefield described this system as a ‘self-regulating action’, it was manifestly not one that followed from the injunction laissez-faire. Colonizing was an inherently artificial project that required artifice. Such arrangements assumed, moreover, that the colonies would continue to develop along lines complementary to British needs. Britain would provide labour and capital to exploit the resources of the colonies; colonial producers would provide the

raw materials for Britain to flourish as the workshop of the world. When the Victorian colonists, having embarked on selfgovernment, contemplated their prospects on the ebb-tide of the goldrush, it was hardly surprising that they should turn to argu-

ments developed in other countries that wanted their own workshops. The German, Friedrich List, and the American, Henry Carey, who both challenged the reliance on free trade, were frequently cited; but it was indicative of the supremacy of economic liberalism that Australians usually appealed to the im-

peccable authority of John Stuart Mill. In his Principles of Political Economy (1848) Mill had allowed just one exception to free trade: a ‘young and rising nation’ might provide temporary assistance in order to ‘naturalise an industry’ providing that in-

dustry was suited to the nation’s circumstances. Colonists invoked this section of the Principles so often and so liberally that Mill added a passage to the 1860s edition that carefully insulated his ‘infant industries’ argument from the protectionist

92 A COLONIAL LIBERALISM

heresy he saw flourishing in places like Victoria. Despite this clarification and the additional disclaimers that Mull provided for his Victorian disciples, he continued to receive packets of clippings from the Victorian press claiming him as the authority

for protection. Most of the colonists who chated against the consequences of economic liberalism still clung to its sacred text.* Not so David Syme. For a brief period, as he assumed control of the Age from his brother, there was an effort to avoid open declaration of heterodoxy. Thereafter the leading articles took issue with orthodox political economy on a variety of points.

Characteristically, Syme also embarked on an ambitious reappraisal of economic theory in search of alternative principles that could sustain the policies he favoured. His compendious notebooks reveal his procedures: they begin with inchoate fragments that sketch philosophical and ethical objections against the writers he examines and pass over most of the technical analysis. For guidance he relied at first on List’s National System of Political Economy (1841) and Carey’s Principles of Social Science

(1858), both of which he annotated and digested; but it was the

writing of the Irish economist, T. E. Cliffe Leslie, especially Land Systems and Industrial Economy (1870), that ultimately assisted him to clarify his ideas. These ideas found expression in a series of articles that Syme published in British periodicals during the 1870s and were then systematized in his own Outlines of an Industrial Science (1876).*®

Syme reproached political economy with shortcomings of morality and methodology; he felt it was unacceptable, he needed to demonstrate that it was false. Initially he cast his rejection in ethical terms of a metaphysical bent that recalls his German sojourn. Thus an early notebook entry: P.E. [Political Economy] assumes that what is ought to be. All trade is a system of trying on, an attempt to extort the most money. Should it be? Is there not a right and a wrong? Because in trading there is cheating and dishonesty, should we consider it therefore right to cheat and act dishonestly?

In seeking to apply this criticism to the scientific foundations of political economy, Syme took from Cliffe Leslie the argument that its theorists had erred in their reliance on a priori reasoning

at the expense of the inductive method. From Adam Smith

DAVID SYME AND THE PURSUIT OF PROGRESS 93

onwards, the classical economists had spun their theories from unexamined premises and ignored the evidence of history and comparative observation. Thus their theory of rent derived from postulations about natural fertility and patterns of occupancy in

the dim mists of an imagined past, despite the fact that vital evidence was freely available in the colonies. ‘No one who has studied or watched the progress of settlement in a new country would have any difficulty in promptly arriving at a correct conclusion ...’4”

The one-sided methods used by political economists had ‘clogged and fettered us in the pursuit of truth’ and were ‘utterly

alien to the spirit of modern scientific inquiry’. Their crucial mistake was to assume that man was motivated exclusively by

self-interest. Again, this was a shortcoming that Syme had recorded in his notebook as a rumination on the march of industry: We see men everywhere engaged in some occupation entailing labour

of more or less painful character. They plough, sow and reap; they spin and weave; they clear forests, reclaam swamps, they make roads, bridges and railways; they build houses, workshops and workhouses ... From morning till night and from day to day and year to year labour goes on. These phenomena P.E. to explain. Why this perpetual restlessness, this movement of activity, this enormous expenditure of energy?

Such a formulation, with its view of labour as a painful, expiatory necessity, suggests the lasting effects of Syme’s religious training. Yet it hardly refuted the alternative explanation of economic behaviour given by the classical economists. Indeed, both their explanation and his appealed to innate propensities that they derived from their respective conceptions of human nature — Syme had merely replaced the abstraction ‘economic man’ driven by self-interest, which was the starting point of their dismal science, with his own equally joyless ‘Calvinist man’ driven by conscience. When he invoked the methodological argument to reformulate his position, he was ostensibly freeing morality from teleology and securing it instead as simple, observable fact. He was also shifting from an individualist to a social standpoint. Unlike Locke and Smith, for whom the individual came before society, his economic writings conceived the social as primary

and emphasized the importance of the ties of the family,

94 A COLONIAL LIBERALISM

community and nation. His inductive method showed him that man was a social being driven by homeistic (or social) emotions such as love and hate, and alloistic (or ethical) emotions such as generosity and fidelity, as well as egoism.** Even so, Syme remained preoccupied with the awful potency of perpetual restlessness. Left unchecked, the pursuit of self-interest threatened anarchy since individuals seized with the desire for personal gain would be utterly unscrupulous. Greed, unless balanced by honour, became a form of diabolical possession;

and if a buyer could not trust a seller to deal fairly, the very division of labour on which modern industry rested would break down. ‘The desire for wealth would become avarice in its most hideous form, and the individual under the control of this passion would become a danger to society.” While Syme shared the classical economists’ expectation of progress through acquis-

itive individualism, he did not share their optimism that the pursuit of individual advantage necessarily benefited society at

large. The accumulation of wealth rested upon the desire to secure the fruits of one’s labour, and the fruits of one’s labour could only be secured on the basis of justice. The moral element was therefore crucial as ‘the force that gives cohesion to the social organism’. While the moral impulse was embedded deep in social life it had to be nurtured and sustained. It arose in the family, it was institutionalized in the state: The social affections are an expansion of the domestic affections; the division of functions in society is an extension of the principle of cooperation which takes place in the family; the parental authority is the basis of authority in the state; and the idea of justice, as embodied in positive law, first finds expression in the adjustment of domestic relations.

So Syme’s stern and unbending father became the model of authority; and just as his father had subordinated love to duty, he himself looked to the state to nurture, to instruct and, above all, to insist on righteousness.

Syme found no difficulty in demarcating the ambit of the state. The state was the embodiment of society, so if it was desirable from a social point of view that a certain act should be performed, then the state should perform it. ‘What is good for all, and not merely for an individual or class, should be undertaken by the state; what benefits a few should be left to

DAVID SYME AND THE PURSUIT OF PROGRESS 95

private enterprise.” The common good was served by policies that promoted balanced economic growth for self-sufficiency and general prosperity. He brusquely dismissed the argument that the state should not pursue such policies since they interfered with the natural operation of the market: Every act of administration on the part of the state is an interference with nature: every positive law is an interference with natural law. Is

there anything particularly sacred about industry that it should be looked upon as a sacrilege to lay hands on it? The question does not require a moment’s consideration. The dogma of laissez-faire, if applied

to social life, would be the negation of all law.

Just as there were laws against theft, fraud, adulteration and profiteering, so it was necessary to safeguard against the misuse of economic power to restrict competition. Relishing his casuistry, Syme employed this fair competition argument to turn the principle of free trade back against the opponents of protection and land reform. Thus the monopolistic practices of British manu-

facturers and exporters were nothing less than ‘a system of commercial cannibalism’, and Syme justified protection as restoring fair opportunity to local producers. Again, the appro-

priation of a scarce resource like land smothered improving enterprise and was ‘an unwarrantable monopoly in an era of free trade’.*?

These jibes were aimed at British readers. It is a noticeable feature of Syme’s writing on political economy, as well as on

other subjects, that he located colonial concerns within a broader historical context and arranged for their publication (at his own expense, when necessary) in England. British authorities took little notice of his contribution to economic science — as a theorist he added little to Cliffe Leslie and could be dismissed as merely glossing the Irishman’s assault on the classical school — and Syme confessed himself ‘somewhat chagrined’ at the

neglect. Elsewhere his reputation was more substantial. The Outlines were translated into German and published in an American edition. In his own country Syme set great store by his reputation as an original thinker of international repute. However, his purpose was larger than this. He was reaching beyond the confines of the still embryonic economics profession to a wider audience that still thought of the colonies as append-

ages of the metropolitan economy, and he was setting out a

96 A COLONIAL LIBERALISM

claim for their creative originality. It was one thing to convert

Victoria to protection, and that was a task the Age would accomplish. It was another to win outside recognition of protection as a valid form of colonial liberalism. Liberals in other colonies, most conspicuously New South Wales, upheld free

trade and the debate between free trade and protection became a finger exercise that any tyro in late-nineteenth century Australian politics could rehearse, but in London it was the pro-

tectionist side of the argument that was noteworthy. Syme’s impact here was fundamental. In 1873 when the imperial par-

liament reluctantly formalized the right of the Australian colonies to regulate their trade, Lord Grey, who as Secretary of State for the Colonies from 1846 to 1852 had resisted Australian calls for self-government, said that ‘It was impossible to read the Blue Books without seeing that many of the statesmen of the Australian colonies were in such utter ignorance of the principles of political economy, that of the writings of Adam Smith and Mr Ricardo they seemed never to have even heard.’ Some of his fellow peers might have followed the interminable chain

of despatches between the colonies and the Colonial Office printed in the Blue Books. More of them would have read

Syme’s articles in leading British reviews on “The Land Question’, ‘The Method of Political Economy’ and, just a month before Grey spoke, ‘Restrictions on Trade from a Colonial Point of View’.>°

Syme’s revision of orthodox political economy expressed both particular and general reservations. As a colonist, he objected to doctrines that enshrined the advantages of the world’s most powerful economy; as a moralist, he could not share the general confidence in the beneficent effects of unrestrained egoism; and as a rationalist, he worked his misgivings

into a system of scientific certainty. His system qualified the absolute freedom that economic liberalism celebrated by balancing rights with duties, the liberty of the individual against the interests of society. Yet Syme remained a liberal in his values and assumptions: he regarded history as a movement forward, of growth and progress; he took pride in the achievements of his own era, the new technologies and unprecedented expansion of output; and he saw these achievements conferring moral as well as material benefits on all humanity. The freedom he celebrated was the freedom that this process of improvement

DAVID SYME AND THE PURSUIT OF PROGRESS 97

made possible through enlarged opportunities for self-fulfilment. A man fulfilled himself by mastering his circumstances,

by employing his talents not simply to heap up wealth for its own sake but for the esteem that success earned and the independence it made possible. To be sure, the enjoyment of one’s own independence required respect for the independence

of others — so that an employer should honour the rights of his employees, a workman discharge obligations owed to his employer. Nevertheless, it is apparent that Syme’s notion of independence was defined by patriarchy and property. To

be manly was to be strong, resourceful, reliable, a good provider — the truly independent man sat at the head of his table and carved for his wife and children — and, above all, masterful. Syme made his own success, his endurance of joyless

childhood, his defiance of his enemies and his domination of his own family, into a moral exemplar and universal imperative.

He expected all men to act with the same resolution and his public advocacy was aimed at securing the circumstances in which they would do so.

The land question When colonists tried to give shape and substance to such ambitions, when they anticipated their future destiny and imagined what it might mean to be truly self-sufficient, they

habitually fell back on agrarian modes of thought. They followed the physiocrats in regarding wealth won from the soil as the true basis of prosperity; they used biblical and classical

precepts to endow agriculture with moral purpose; and they agreed with Locke that the soil was the common stock of society to which every man had a right, so that a tract of land became the property of whomsoever worked it. These ideas were evoked

nostalgically in Britain, where commentators lamented the enclosure of the fields and the disappearance of the independent yeoman, along with the haywain, the harvest garland and all the other accoutrements of an idealized golden age. In the colonies,

where nature had still to be appropriated, agrarianism found new force so that the very process of colonization took on vernal associations of growth and renewal. The act of arrival, of

taking possession of the land, of nurture and husbandry, prefigured the growth, the harmony and future greatness of the new nation.

98 A COLONIAL LIBERALISM

Against these expectations the actual course taken in the col-

onization of Victoria seemed all the more unnatural. The squatters, who had seized vast tracts, refused to yield their illegal occupancy and blocked the advance from rude pastoralism to improving agriculture. The Age likened their domination to a Tartar barbarism since it condemned the rich soil of Australia to utter barrenness in order that ‘a few hundreds of semi-civi-

lised masters’ might serve the needs of empire. Then the goldrush had diverted energy from patient cultivation of the soil

to feverish depradation as hordes swarmed over a field, ransacked it and moved on in a grotesque parody of tillage. As the goldrush declined and the popular campaign to open up the land for settlement gathered momentum, agrarians dwelt on the pros-

pect of smiling homesteads and the redemptive virtues of agriculture: Upset squatterdom domination, Give every poor man a home, Encourage our great population, And like wanderers no more we’ll roam; Give, in mercy, a free scope to labour, Uphold honest bold industry, Then no-one will envy his neighbour, But contented and happy we'll be.

The Age shared these hopes: ‘Pan, the god of shepherds, halfman, half-brute, went before Ceres, the beautiful and beneficent

goddess of corn, but did not stand in her way or dispute her claim to be considered the parent of civilisation.”>!

Pan’s colonial devotees were more resolute. Having defied restrictions on settlement to take up occupation of the fertile grasslands of eastern Australia, having broken Aboriginal resistance, having established themselves as the leading suppliers of the British woollen industry and having in consequence won official recognition of their tenure in 1847, the squatters were not going to yield to the newcomers. They did not accept that they were trespassers on the public domain; rather, they styled themselves as patriarchs and claimed the veneration due to the pioneer. Nor did they concede the arguments from liberal political economy that portrayed them as impediments to progress; rather, they defended the mercantilist character of the old colo-

nial system and asserted that they had created the prosperity.

DAVID SYME AND THE PURSUIT OF PROGRESS 99

They therefore resisted with all their wealth and power the attempts to dislodge them.*” The struggle for control of the land dominated the first decade

of colonial self-government as each of the new legislatures

enacted measures for the sale of crown lands. Several factors gave that struggle a particular intensity in Victoria: the rapid nature of its pastoral influx in the 1830s and 1840s had created a powerful phalanx of squatters; its Constitution entrenched them in the upper house, and the goldrush swelled the ranks of

their opponents. For a brief period in the late 1850s the Victorian Land Convention was a genuine mass movement that enrolled thousands of supporters on the gold fields and in the

towns, and exerted a clear influence on parliament. But the histrionics of its radical enthusiasts (‘A Vote, a Rifle, and a Farm’) outran the sympathies of Syme as well as Higinbotham, and the Convention’s leaders overreached themselves when in 1860 they revived their tactic of marching up the hill from the

Eastern Market to Parliament House. On the evening of 28 August the demonstrators were met by mounted police in a wild mélée that led to the immediate passage of a Disorderly Meetings

Act that banned political assemblies east of Stephen (now Exhibition) Street. Thereafter the land agitation remained in the hands of the liberals.>° Syme regarded a liberal land policy as ‘the most momentous

of all political questions’ and ‘the foundation of all future prosperity’. By a liberal land policy, he meant one that would give the greatest possible encouragement to the genuine settler to select a block of land and establish on it a farm that would support himself and his family. It was therefore necessary to throw open crown lands currently occupied by pastoralists (to ‘unlock the land’); to make the land available at a fixed price the farmer could afford (usually £1 per acre with a low initial payment) in quantities that would meet his needs (up to 640 acres); and to guard against impostors (by making residence and improvements a condition of purchase), for if ‘capitalists’ in-

truded between the state as vendor and the industrious

agriculturalist as purchaser, then the intent of a liberal land law would be lost. Syme expected the selector to meet his needs by diversifying his husbandry. “The principles of production which

should guide him should be to aim at the utmost variety and number of kinds of produce ...? He would plant crops, graze

100 A COLONIAL LIBERALISM

sheep, keep poultry and swine, grow vines, olives and figs in the salubrious Andalusian climate. Settlers’ early years might be hard, but ‘no matter how miserable their dwelling and how in-

significant their first cultivated patch, ... if they keep their Crown grants in their pockets, live economically and work hard,

they must succeed’. The immediate task was to embody these provisions in legis-

lation, no easy task when the Legislative Council mutilated every land bill that was sent up to it. The first statute to run the gauntlet successfully, known as the Nicholson Act after the head of the ministry that sponsored it, suffered 250 amendments over the violent opposition of the Land Convention before its passage in 1860. By requiring survey before selection it gave the squatter prior notice of any threat to his holding and allowed his ‘dummies’ to overbid any intending selector. The Manifolds of Purrumbete bought 60 000 acres under the provisions of this Act. The Age condemned the measure as a ‘sham’. Gavan Duffy, Minister for Lands in the O’Shanassy administration, was confident he could make good these failings. The Dutty Act of 1862 set aside 10 million acres, tightened the provisions against dummying and other abuses, and substituted a ballot for auction in case of competition. As the Age was quick

to point out, his legislation was flawed since the penalties it imposed for failure to comply with the residence and improvement provisions applied only to the first purchaser and could not be enforced against any subsequent purchaser. Worse, the O’Shanassy ministry had known of the defects when it drafted the legislation and had actually advised the squatters of them.

So, upon the declaration of the Duffy Act, a plague of land agents descended on the countryside, dummying and engrossing

the land set aside for selection in return for exorbitant fees.

Syme’s scathing condemnation of the government for playing

into the hands of ‘squatters and capitalists’ brought official retaliation when O’Shanassy withdrew government advertising trom the Age; it also completed the breach between Syme and Duffy, with ugly sectarian abuse disfiguring their subsequent exchanges.>°

The Grant Act of 1865 followed the success of the liberals in the 1864 election, which was fought primarily on the land ques-

tion. Drafted with the assistance of Higinbotham as Attorney-General by Ebenezer’s old associate, James Grant,

DAVID SYME AND THE PURSUIT OF PROGRESS 101

now Minister for Lands in the McCulloch ministry, the bill was weakened but not fatally impaired by the Legislative Council. Its chief innovations were the imposition of a period of residence before title was granted and a special clause that allowed the Minister to grant annual licenses for smaller selections near the gold fields; a second Grant Act in 1869 extended these provisions and allowed selection before survey. A feature of the legislation was the discretionary power it vested in the Minister to root out abuses. Grant was erratic, irascible and increasingly the worse for drink, but no one questioned his agrarian zeal. Syme thought that the squatters’ outcry against the operation of the Act was the best evidence that it was working.°’

That judgement proved altogether too optimistic. The overwhelming bulk of the 15 million acres of crown land alienated during the first two decades of the operation of the Land Acts went to the pastoralists — it was not until the end of the 1870s,

as selectors moved on to the Wimmera plains, that the area under crop exceeded 1 million acres and Victoria became selfsufficient in cereals. The effort to unlock the lands had merely allowed the woolgrowers to convert their hold on the choicest positions to freehold possession. Admittedly this required them to expend large sums of money, and their transformation from squatters to proprietors fostered additional investment in the pastoral industry (in fences, pasture, water storage, stock and other improvements calculated to augment returns on outlays) that drew the industry more closely into local finance, product and labour markets. Grazing and farming thus turned out to be less antithetical activities than had been supposed. Both contributed to the growth of the colonial economy and each made use of the other, the pastoralists buying produce from agriculturalists and small farmers who in turn supplemented their incomes by selling labour to the pastoralists. This was a far cry from the agrarian vision of an independent yeomanry, as Syme himself came to realize: ‘an impression prevails [that] we are laying the foundation in this country of a community composed in a great part of an independent yeomanry ... There never was a greater illusion.”*®

Formidable forces worked against the reformers’ hopes. Much of the land was simply unsuited to intensive cultivation. Crop failure, drought, transport costs and undercapitalization thinned

102 A COLONIAL LIBERALISM

the ranks of the selectors and condemned many to wracking poverty. Those who survived — there were 35 000 farmers at the end of the 1870s — did not enjoy independent self-sufficiency but were specialized commodity producers for markets controlled by large commercial enterprises and dependent on economic forces beyond their control. They did not sit under their own fig tree attended by comely wives and blithe children, for the viability of their farms depended on a grinding exploitation of family labour. Above all, their attachment to the land was not blessed by a close and fulfilling permanency. It was a

means to an end, a space bounded by straight lines that they bought and cleared and used and subdivided and sold.°?

If land was to be a mere commodity, what became of the social objects that land reform was meant to serve? Higinbotham identified the essential problem during the debate on the second

Grant Act in 1869. The intention was to settle ‘the great bulk of the people’ on land at a price lower than its market value. “The difficulty is the competition of capital. In that struggle of capital against those who have no capital, whom it is desired to endow with a portion of the advantages resulting from public possession of the lands, capital is always sure to gain the victory.’ He believed the difficulty arose from private ownership: ‘The natural productive powers of the soil of a country were something which no individual created and were, therefore, not

properly the subject of individual possession.’ Equally, the additional value that accrued to a piece of land as the population increased about it should properly belong to the community at large. Syme agreed (as indeed did Mill, whose critique of un-

earned rent had wide currency). Both men supported a Land Tenure Reform League that was established in 1870 to urge that

crown land should henceforth be leased rather than sold, and that a tax should be levied on private estates. The proposals were mild enough — far from challenging property rights, they simply tied them more closely to productivity — but apart from the celebrated land tax that a later liberal ministry introduced in 1877, little came of them. Once the genie of land ownership was released, the liberals had to live with its consequences.

Protection Syme gloried in the title of the Father of Protection, which was the subtitle of his authorized biography. It portrayed him as he

DAVID SYME AND THE PURSUIT OF PROGRESS 103

wished to be seen, a visionary prophet who withstood intimidation to single-handedly convert his people to a novel doctrine and was vindicated by the benefits it conferred on them. He encouraged the belief that Victoria prospered behind high tariff walls, and insisted that support for protection was the touchstone of advanced liberalism in the colonies. Just as he forced Alfred Deakin to cross the fiscal Rubicon as a condition of his

political patronage, so the other colonial liberals, including Higinbotham, Pearson and Higgins, had to overcome their free trade instincts and throw in their lot with protection. Looking back on the early years of the Age, he congratulated himself on his courage and foresight: ‘Not only did the Age at the period I speak of stand alone as an advocate of Protection, but I recollect the time when I myself stood alone as a Protectionist. I knew of no one in Australia who believed in Protection except myself,”6!

Like many legends, this rests on weak historical foundations. Syme did not take up protection until others had prepared the way, and even then he lagged some way behind them. The pro-

tectionist agitation had begun among the farmers on the Bellarine peninsula who were unable to compete with imported produce, and it spread to the manufacturers and artisans of Geelong and Melbourne who were hit by the slump at the end of the 1850s. A Tariff Reform League, formed at the beginning of 1859, dwelt on the barren prospects faced by the colony unless its industries were safeguarded. The Age took up the issue at this point, but did so tentatively and with marked equivocation from a paper usually so sure of its opinions and so forthright in expressing them. It paraded all the arguments — to prevent the dumping of shoddy goods on the local market and to check the efflux of wealth, to safeguard local wages and create jobs for those presently ‘wandering in the streets’ — but hung back from clear endorsement of them, preferring to leave the ‘merely speculative discussion of Protection as an abstract principle’ to the enthusiasts of the Tariff Reform League, and concentrate on immediate considerations. At this juncture, when the colony was committed to heavy outlays on railways, roads and other capital works, customs duties provided half the public revenue. These

duties were levied on a narrow range of items — sugar, tea, coffee, beer, wine, spirits, tobacco and opium — which the col-

Onists consumed with impressive disregard for their health.

104 A COLONIAL LIBERALISM

Would it not be more equitable, the Age argued, to broaden the revenue base and reduce the impost on these items of general consumption; and would it not be more efficacious to levy the new duties on imports that could be produced within the col-

ony? By such means, which Syme described as a policy for ‘incidental Protection’, the revenue requirements would be met in a manner more conducive to economic advance.” If the Age had joined the cry for tariff revision by 1860, it was certainly not in the protectionist vanguard. It supported the Heales ministry in its attempt to introduce a new tariff schedule

in 1861, but did not persist when the Legislative Council blocked the measure. It warned in 1864 against ‘indiscriminate Protection’. It repeated the warning in 1865 and even suggested that it would be helpful if the false antithesis of those two ‘un-

meaning slogans, “Free Trade’ and “Protection”, were disregarded. Even as the great constitutional crisis unfolded, a

crisis that was precipitated by the fiscal issue and fought between the Free Trade League and its protectionist adversaries, Syme insisted that he was no more than an incidental protec-

tionist.° Why, then, did he persist? Beside his genuine conviction that tariff revision was in the best interests of the colony, he was alert to the opportunity it presented to mobilize popular support for the liberal programme. Up to the mid-1860s the efforts of the reformers to open new fields for endeavour had come to little and there was pent-up pressure for change. There was also a general appreciation of the political obstacles that stood between the reformers and their goal, and an awareness of the symmetry between the economic advantages and political privileges of their opponents. Thus in the election of 1864 the Age claimed that there were ‘two great questions before the country, and only two’: land reform and reform of the Legislative Council. When the McCulloch ministry was returned with its record majority, Syme was anxious to press matters to a conclusion: ‘There must be no more trifling; and if the Upper House again refuse to pass a Land Bill adopted by an Assembly fresh from the hustings, the constitutional course will be to stop the governmental machine until it does.’& Note that he still expected the land question to be the issue.

The tariff question had assumed great prominence during the election campaign but for many supporters of the government,

DAVID SYME AND THE PURSUIT OF PROGRESS 105

including Syme, it remained secondary to the land question. For as Grant put it, “Of what use is protection if this country is to

be a sheepwalk?’ Not until the government brought down its budget in the new year did Syme grasp its full potential. The tariff schedule contained in the budget fell on a limited range of foodstuffs, softgoods and other manufactures; the rates were scarcely onerous and the new duties were matched by reductions in existing duties on tea and sugar. The stridency of the response

was remarkable, with howls of indignation from a hastily formed Free Trade League answered by fervid declarations of support for protection from packed meetings of manufacturers and tradesmen, and Syme was quick to exploit its symbolic and practical significance. Henceforth he portrayed the merchants as enemies of the people who, together with the squatters, made up a greedy oligarchy that placed its self-interest before the common good. Moreover, the device of the tack allowed the tariff to be used in a way that land reform could not, as a bat-

tering-ram in an assault on their bastion of privilege, the Legislative Council. There was also the imperial aspect. By this time Britain had conceded the right of colonies to impose pro-

tective tariffs but the Colonial Oftice made no attempt to conceal its displeasure when this was done, and so advanced

liberals like C.E. Jones interpreted the recall of Governor Darling as an attempt to keep them in a state of economic dependency: Simply, because we are able to supply Great Britain with a large quantity of gold, wool and tallow, and take in exchange her manufactured

goods, Mr Cardwell [the Secretary of State for the Colonies] arrives at the conclusion that it would be unprofitable for us to attempt to do anything but dig gold and furnish wool and tallow for export.©

The liberals failed to resolve the deadlock between the two chambers, and the tariff that the Legislative Council eventually passed in 1866 after it was untacked and shorn of its preamble, imposed only a low schedule of duties on a restricted range of items. Syme continued to harbour reservations about excessive and indiscriminate duties, continued to insist that the object was to encourage rather than inhibit competition. Nevertheless, for him, as for other Victorian liberals, the tariff issue had taken on a talismanic significance that it possessed in no other Australian

colony. During the drawn-out confrontation it had come to

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symbolize the legitimate aspirations of the bulk of the people for an outlet for energy and enterprise, and to express their confidence in their ability to mould their own future. For the same reason, free trade was fatally compromised as a popular ideology by its association with wealth and privilege: “The simple truth

is that the Protectionist Party occupy in this country the same ground that the Free Traders do in Great Britain.’© Higinbotham came later to a similar position. Throughout the crisis he claimed that he was a freetrader who supported the tariff as a revenue measure, the protective effects of which were incidental and unavoidable. Even when he professed surprise that new industries had been ‘called into existence by the system of protection’, he denied the alleged betrayal of his free trade beliefs. But — and the qualification was characteristically measured, typically perverse — ‘I have felt at all times, and feel now,

a stronger bond of sympathy and opinion with those who advocate what is called protection than with those who advocate what, in this country, is called free trade’. In substance the two men were not far apart: the difference was that Higinbotham was prepared to admit that he had changed his mind whereas Syme could not.® Eleven times over the next fourteen years, the Victorians revised their tariff, increasing and extending it until by 1880 duties of up to 25 per cent were levied on some 200 items. The major increases occurred during economic recessions and were meant to relieve shortfalls in the public revenue: to this extent Syme’s claim that fiscal requirements shaped tariff policy still held good.

Moreover, Victorian treasurers were constrained by a lack of alternative revenue sources since the colony could not fall back on income from land sales to the same extent as its more spacious neighbours. At the same time the highest duties fell on

commodities that the colony could produce for itself, and deliberately so, for protection had become ‘the settled policy of the country’.® How effective was protection? From the early 1860s the Australian colonies entered into an era of growth that was sustained up to the 1890s. The population increased nearly threefold. The continued development of the pastoral industry was matched by the emergence of other primary industries as the colonists

consolidated their occupation of the continent, and by an increase in the manufacturing and service sectors based in the

DAVID SYME AND THE PURSUIT OF PROGRESS 107

rapidly expanding urban centres. Victoria was the most populous colony and its manufacturers were the most successful. Their factories were larger than those in other colonies, they were quicker to adapt to new technologies and they employed a greater proportion of the workforce. The contribution of the tariff to this success is more difficult to establish. The process of industrialization in Australia, as in other settler capitalist economies, was a process of import substitution whereby local producers were able to take advantage of local markets. Protection sometimes provided the initial stimulus, yet it is noticeable how the neighbouring colony of New South Wales matched Victoria in the long run, and since New South Wales was committed to free-trade principles this would suggest that its lack of tariff protection was less significant than the natural protection afforded by Australia’s distance from overseas competitors (as well as the advantages of the much larger hinterland on which New South Wales industries could draw). The pattern of Victoria’s economic development was heavily influenced also by the demographic bulge of goldrush immigrants, so that its phases of rapid growth (as successive generations married and established households) alternated with reduced growth (as construction activity and associated demand fell away). For this reason the call for higher duties on imports was strongest in periods of recession and budgetary difficulty; and the most substantial increases in duties, in 1866, 1871 and

1879, heralded fresh spurts of growth. So while the tariff increased costs for Victorian producers and may well have handicapped merchants in intercolonial trade, it supported a wide range of quarries and brickyards, sawmills, foundries and metal workshops, clothing and footwear factories, flour mills, bakeries, breweries and various other industrial establishments in which, by 1880, 40 000 Victorians earned their livelihood.”

The rights of labour Land reform and tariff protection were the two most controversial elements of a broader strategy whereby the colonial State promoted economic growth. The circumstances of settler capitalism were such that the State necessarily undertook a range of activities that elsewhere could be left to private capital. All the colonies of settlement therefore supported high levels of public spending, and in Australia and New Zealand they were highest

108 A COLONIAL LIBERALISM

of all — the annual per capita public expenditure of the Australasian colonies in the late nineteenth century was five times that of Germany and more than double that of the United Kingdom. Part of this spending went on the provision of services, part on public investment designed to foster development. Thus, by 1890 the Victorian government had outlayed more than £40

million on railways, roads, bridges, ports and wharves, posts and telegraphs and other facilities that made possible the growth

of output in pastoral, farming, manufacturing and associated commercial enterprises.”°

The liberals supported these activities, including the public borrowing that financed them. Their enthusiasm for state-led development was informed, however, by strongly held notions

of the path that development ought to take. They wanted a strong and self-sufficient economy, one that supported a broad range of industries with openings for all to share in the prosperity. They wanted simultaneously to reduce their dependence as colonists on the imperial division of labour and to augment their independence as thriving producers in their dealings with each other; and their prosecution of land reform and tariff protection was meant to serve these objectives. At the same time,

they were aware that other imperial ties impinged on their internal arrangements. Theirs was a colony, after all, formed by a transfer of people and resources, and its growth and development still depended on a flow of immigrant labour and capital from the metropolitan centre. Initially, the liberals paid little attention to the implications of imperial investment. The need for capital was urgent, its injection from around 1860 brought immediate benefits, and the long-term costs of both public and private sector indebtedness

to British investors were not appreciated fully until the great depression of the 1890s.7! Immigration was a more contentious issue. Since the colonial economy relied heavily on earnings from a narrow band of com-

modity exports, its wage-earners were vulnerable to sharp

fluctuations of demand for their services. The local labour market was subject to pronounced seasonal variation since so many jobs were tied to the calendar. So when an influx of immigrant labour coincided with a depressed labour market, wage levels collapsed and many were left without work. Liberals generally professed confidence in the operation of the labour market, and

DAVID SYME AND THE PURSUIT OF PROGRESS 109

accordingly sought the greatest freedom for the buyer and seller

of labour. Shortly after he became editor of the Argus Higinbotham stated that ‘the true policy is to let the price of labour, like that of every other commodity, be regulated by the laws of supply and demand’. At this stage he regarded immi-

gration, even assisted immigration, as simply part of the operation of this market, and one that posed no threat to wageearners since, ‘in a colony like this, with abounding resources, the natural reward of labour will always be great’. His confidence was shaken by the onset of substantial unemployment in

the winter of 1857, when C.J. Don and other working-class leaders alleged that employers were deliberately flooding the labour market to impose ‘wage slavery’ in the colony. At first Higinbotham scolded these agitators for their ignorance, self-

ishness and mischievous intent. ‘Jealousy’ of this kind was understandable in the ‘old country’ where labour was so completely at the mercy of the capitalist, but was uncalled for in the new setting where all were free and capital could never have the same ‘power for evil’. The blame for unemployment lay with the labourers themselves who would not reduce their wages and

restore equilibrium to the market. However, as the distress mounted others beside Higinbotham abandoned this position. From September 1857 the government took on hundreds of the unemployed and paid them six shillings a day to level land along the Port Phillip foreshore. Higinbotham welcomed the initiative

on the grounds that it was ‘the bounden duty of the Government to ... afford every idle man the opportunity of earning his bread’.”2

Henry Gyles Turner, banker, liberal and historian, would claim that this episode marked a turning point in the colony’s path to perdition. The government had surrendered to the false claim that every man had a right to work, and ‘From that day forward, year after year, the unemployed have been a prominent factor in Victorian politics ...’ Liberals such as Higinbotham and Syme, who were not wedded to laissez-faire dogma, took a different view. For them the paramount concern was to preserve a harmony of capital and labour. The English poor law, with its institutionalization of pauperism, had at all costs to be avoided since ‘the greatest curse to the working man, and the most serious impediment to the progress and prosperity of any

country, was the absence of cultivation of a spirit of

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self-reliance’. The provision of employment by the state was for Higinbotham a necessary corollary of the disadvantage suffered by ‘the labouring classes in this colony’ by a feature ‘in which we take pride — the absence of a poor law’. For Syme, public works had the additional virtue of constituting a work test that sorted the genuinely destitute from the ‘idler’ and the “scamp’ — hence the level of payment should be “bare subsistence’ and no more. Later still, both he and Higinbotham came to accept

that the government could, as an employer, maintain a floor under the labour market to protect living standards, and public works became a standby of liberal administrations.” The device was by no means unique to Victoria; New South Wales and South Australia had already provided public works, other colonies would follow them. Nor were the Victorian liberals unusual in their aversion to the English poor law whose vigilant administrators were notorious for their determination that the public workhouse should be sufficiently austere to deter reliance on the State. The determination of the colonists to avoid the baleful loss of independence associated with a poor law led them towards a dual welfare system: work for those who could work, charity for those who could not. The duality expressed and reinforced the masculine character of liberal self-sufficiency. The vital principle embodied in public works was that a man should be able to earn his living, and this principle expanded to affirm the right of the breadwinner to earn a family wage and the responsibility of the state to ensure he did. Eventually this found institutional expression in the basic wage and the associ-

ated mechanisms of family maintenance and economic management that persisted through most of the twentieth century. The corresponding rationale of charity was that only the

unfortunate, the aged poor, the widows, deserted wives and orphans were in need of assistance, and that non-government agencies were best able to deal with them. Hence the belated appearance of social security in Australia. The attachment to manly independence at the expense of an adequate system of public support was so pronounced as to lead one commentator to describe Australia as a ‘wage-earners’ welfare state’.”4 The lineaments of these attitudes can be traced through the critique that Higinbotham and Syme developed against the practice of encouraging immigrants to come to the colonies with

cheap passages. Initially Higinbotham had defended the

DAVID SYME AND THE PURSUIT OF PROGRESS 111

Wakefieldian device of augmenting the labour supply so as to maintain a balance of the factors of production conducive to colonial growth — yet he was already critical of the actual operation of the assisted migrant schemes whereby British poor

law authorities sent out their ‘idle, vicious and disorderly characters’. The practice of ‘shovelling out paupers’, as an under-

secretary of the Colonial Office had unwisely described it, disturbed him deeply since it threatened to produce a colonial underclass, ‘a class which, in consequence of poverty, and the physical and intellectual weakness which poverty brings upon the individual, are unable to meet their citizens on equal terms’. It was, he said, an iniquitous practice and he justified his support

of tariff protection as compensation for its evil effects. Syme was just as adamant that Victoria did not want ‘the off-scourings of British workhouses, at so much per head’; they deterred free immigrants and were unfitted by dependence and demoralization for life in the colony. In short, for these Victorian liberals assisted immigration was an analogue of the convict transpor-

tation they liked to think their colony had escaped. Victoria reduced its assistance of migration during the 1860s and abandoned the practice in the early 1870s. It was the first Australian colony to do so because it had the least need to continue it. Of the 600 000 persons who made their own way to Australia from the end of the eighteenth century up to 1860, more than half

landed in Victoria during the 1850s. Gold made the bounty system superfluous.” Liberals also supported the principle of the eight-hour day. The eight-hour movement arose in Melbourne during the same period, but it was initiated by craftsmen who, through their possession of specific skills for which there was keen demand, were able to attack the problem of insecurity of employment more

directly by limiting their hours of labour to spread the work more widely. In agitating for an eight-hour day, these skilled workers dwelt on the benefits it would confer on family life and the opportunities it would provide for improving recreation. Such sentiments struck a chord with liberals, who welcomed the

initial campaign of the stonemasons in 1856 and thereafter looked benevolently on Melbourne’s eight-hour anniversary when the trade unions would parade their banners through the city. In practice, of course, the eight-hour day was honoured

more in the breach than the observance, restricted to skilled

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trades and even among them it was liable to be challenged during

trade recessions. While the trade unionists wanted the eighthour day to be put on a legislative basis, the liberals preferred that it remain a benefit for those manly enough to win it by their own efforts. They valued it all the more as an agreement freely entered into on the basis of Syme’s maxim: “The question

with the employer should not be how little he can compel his workmen to take, or with the workman how much he can get out of his employer: but the question with each should be what would be fair and equitable to both the one and the other.’”®

The meanings of progress The colonial liberals spoke for the people. They posited a natural harmony of interest between the fair-minded employer and the

honest artisan who dealt with each other ‘in a spirit of manly independence, with no sense of subserviency or obligation on either side’. The improving selector who furnished the table of both while swelling the demand for their output, completed a trinity of productive classes. Against them were ranged powerful and unscrupulous opponents, the squatter, the warehouseman, the absentee owner, who, as liberals characterized them, prospered by putting their privileges before the public interest. The potency of such a delineation came from its heady mixture of altruism and self-interest: the liberal crusade was at once a fight

for justice and for progress since the eradication of privilege would release the productive energies of the people, enlarge their

freedom and bind them in contented harmony. Thus, the archintriguer Jones was able to characterize his liberal constituency as:

The working men of this colony, and their wives and daughters and sons. They were the men who make up the rank and file of our building societies, of our several trades, of our benefit societies, of our churches, chapels and temperance societies; of the very men who are the sustaining force of every movement for the advancement of the people of this colony.”

While the liberals mobilized sufficient support to carry out much of their programme, the expected rewards were slow to follow. The population of Victoria increased from 539000 in 1861 to 862000 by 1881, but much of this increase was mere consolidation as the goldrush generation married and reproduced. Both agriculture and urban industry struggled until the

DAVID SYME AND THE PURSUIT OF PROGRESS 113

late 1870s, when the railway system still consisted of a few bro-

ken spokes stretching out from the metropolitan hub. The increase in the woolclip was offset by the dwindling of gold. The two decades can be seen as ‘a period of prolonged and pain-

ful adjustment’ to the end of the goldrush; by the 1880s that adjustment had occurred and Victoria enjoyed renewed growth and prosperity. Meanwhile the much-vaunted policies for economic and social progress yielded only meagre results.’8 All the more striking is the constant iteration of their success.

No sooner had Grant’s Land Act been gazetted than Syme trumpeted its efficacy; while the legality of the customs duties was still under challenge, he insisted that they had created full and remunerative employment for hundreds. Triumphalist surveys of the growth of Victoria became a stock-in-trade of the Age. Pamphleteers, publicists and historians calibrated the march of material progress in flocks and crops, bricks and mortar, and equated its concomitant, moral progress, with the amenities that this wealth provided.”? The colonial statistician was perhaps the most ardent enthusiast: “This is an age of marvels, and of all the marvellous facts of the nineteenth century the rapid and solid growth of the Col-

ony of Victoria is not the least marvellous.’ William Henry Archer took charge of Victoria’s official statistics in the early 1850s and developed them into an ‘exquisite mosaic’ of a stan-

dard a visiting Englishman judged ‘the most perfect in the world’. His annual Statistical Register brought together a remarkable miscellany of information; his popular periodical, Facts and Figures: Or, Notes of Progress, Statistical and General was an even more arcane mix leavened with colonial ‘firsts’,

onamotology, local inventions, mathematics for youth and advice on teaching the deaf and dumb. In successive editions of The Progress of Victoria: A Statistical Essay, he brought together salient indices of ‘the general progress of the colony’: rural production, industrial establishments, railway revenue, imports, exports, prices, wages, public revenue and expenditure, bank deposits, religious observance, education, charitable institutions. His statistics were at once a record of achievement, precise and authoritative; a store of useful information; and an affirmation of the multitudinous benefits of progress.®° ‘In this life we want nothing but Facts, sir, nothing but facts’, insisted Thomas Gradgrind. The invention of statistics in the

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nineteenth century as a science and an administrative procedure expressed this faith in exact knowledge. The statistician took as his object of investigation society, a complex and dynamic entity with its own laws of motion that operated at a more fundamental level than government. Using large-scale order and regularity to encompass the multifarious variations in mass phenomena, statistics replaced the confusion of politics with the orderly reign

of facts. The deterministic implications of this new way of understanding society would cause liberals increasing unease, but in their initial enthusiasm for growth and development they grasped it eagerly to measure material and moral improvement. The crucial test they applied to all arrangements was: do they contribute to the advance of the colony?*®!

David Syme appealed to this same utilitarian ethos in all his advocacy. He extended it even to Edward Wilson’s Acclimatisation Society. The Society had been established in 1861, with Archer as a founding member, to introduce, acclimatize and

domesticate ‘all innoxious animals, birds, fish, insects and vegetables, whether useful or ornamental’. It enjoyed viceregal patronage and received government grants to support its work. In practice, however, the release of useful species such as the bee, the silkworm and the angora goat was outweighed by concentration on the ornamental and recreational — fish for the angler, gamebirds, deer and hares for the sportsman — and it

was most successful in propagating itself into neighbouring colonies and across the Tasman. “To barter kangaroos for partridges, black swans for white ones, laughing jackasses for house

sparrows’, and generally to stock Australia with game for genteel sportsmen was in Syme’s opinion a frivolous misuse of the public funds provided to the Society. Rather than leave the field to these ‘dilettante acclimatisers’, he wanted a public agency that would introduce useful species like the llama and useful crops like cotton, tea and rice. In this, as in all his campaigns, he sought to harness the constructive energies of the colonists

for their common advantage. He consistently espoused the preferences that were apparent here: practical improvement, public accountability and a dour prejudice against idle pleasure.

His liberalism aimed to plant the colony with institutions conducive to progress.®

4

CHARLES PEARSON AND THE REALIZATION OF CITIZENSHIP

In the front rank of a stalwart, sun-browned, rough-hewn race of adventurers and toilers engaged in conquering a continent, we are shown in silhouette the stooping figure of a scholar, refinement written in every line of his face, eager in step, his eyes fixed, not too hopefully,

far ahead, but always advancing ...

Alfred Deakin!

One line of progress that the colonial statistician traced was religious observance. Archer, a convert to Roman Catholicism, rejoiced in the achievement of his own Church as well as the other Christian denominations in the period following the gold-

rush. The increase in clergy far outstripped the increase in population; the building of churches provided more and more adherents with a place of worship; rates of Sabbath observance rose from less than one-fifth in the 1850s to nearly one-half by the 1890s.?

These were outward signs of the advance of godliness, but progress, as nineteenth-century liberals the world over came to understand it, had disturbingly impious implications. The march of scientific knowledge posed a fundamental challenge to reli-

gious dogma about the origins of the world and the place of the human species within it. Those who celebrated the growing human dominion over the elements attributed progress not to divine purpose but to laws of development embedded in nature. They constructed a unitary system of knowledge that purported 115

116 A COLONIAL LIBERALISM

to explain the whole of reality. As their exaltation of reason undermined faith in the literal inspiration of the Bible, they found increasing difficulty in accepting miraculous claims. Similarly, those who rejoiced in the march of civilization understood its achievements not as fulfilment of divine providence but as a vindication of the secular principle of social utility.

As moral judgements lost their binding force and became increasingly subjective, the appropriate test of practices and arrangements ceased to be ‘are they in conformity with God’s

will?’ and became instead ‘do they conduce to the good of society?’ Equally, those who welcomed the enlargement of freedom were increasingly loath to submit to religious authority. If fact was objective and value subjective, then everyone had a right to form their own values and hold their own beliefs. The insistence that each person’s conscience was inviolable turned religion into a private, voluntary matter; and once religious conformity

was lost, the possibility of irreligion was virtually conceded. Finally, those who celebrated human capacity found repugnant a creed that dwelt on humanity’s fallen state and the eternal punishment of the wicked. While nineteenth-century secularists counterposed reason and freedom to dogmatic conformity, the Victorian crisis of faith was experienced most insistently as a rejection of the incubus of sin.>

Pearson’s crisis of faith David Syme had passed through such a crisis as a young man training at an obscure theological college in the provinces of Scotland. During the same decade Charles Pearson underwent a similar experience as a Rugby schoolboy and Oxford undergraduate. Both recoiled from evangelical religion, a form of Christianity that responded to the challenge of modernity by imposing particularly intense demands on its adherents. Central to evangelicism was the conviction that Christ’s sacrifice on the cross offered redemption to all who would open their hearts to His redeeming grace, and a corresponding obligation to evangelize. Salvation depended upon personal experience of God’s grace, acknowledgement of sinfulness, and a conversion experience of absolute submission to the inner light. Evangelicism thus combined an inward religious practice of prayerful meditation and inspection of conscience with an outward preparedness to endure ridicule and abuse in following the dictates of the con-

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science. Its best-known practitioners within the established Church of England, the Clapham Sect, were notorious for highminded moral rectitude and reforming zeal. Pearson’s grandfather was a leading member of the Clapham Sect, his father the principal of its Church Missionary College in the London suburb of Islington. He was raised in its virtues

of sincerity, gravity, austerity and introspection. The atmosphere of the family home is caught in the account his mother wrote of the fatal illness of her daughter Isabella at the age of

fourteen: the dying girl summoned her little brother Charles and spoke ‘very sweetly and appropriately’ to explain that she was just going to heaven and to express the hope that he would eventually come to her there; at the end Isabella’s father asked anxiously if she still maintained the same peace and confidence in God, and ‘the answer was in the affirmative but she seemed

unequal to the exertion of speaking’. Pearson took from his mother the compulsion to write, to commit his experiences and responses to words on paper as a way of imposing order upon

them. His own account of his childhood is sombre and selfabsorbed. He writes that the most innocent amusements, from dancing to the theatre, were proscribed: ‘our dissipation was to attend a Bible Society or Missionary meeting’. He describes himself as ‘a quiet, docile boy, who gave no trouble at home’; but once cast into the profane world of the boarding-school, the evangelical conscience became refractory. The overemphasis at Rugby on Latin and Greek composition, for which he possessed a ‘fatal facility’, at the expense of more intellectually stimulating lessons, diverted Pearson to solitary reading and when a master tried to bring him under control by punishment, he ‘took up an attitude of dogged opposition’ that caused him to be removed from the school. Transferred to King’s College, London, he found in place of the puritanism of home and the mechancial discipline of Rugby, ‘a rule of the largest liberty compatible with common order’ and prospered accordingly.‘ From this point Pearson’s ‘Story of My Life’ crosses over

completely from spiritual to intellectual autobiography. He writes of the obligation to teachers like the Christian socialist

F.D. Maurice and his uncle George Gisborne Babington, a ‘moderate freethinker’. He writes of the inadequacies of his Oxford education, of the tutor whose lectures on the New Testament provided an elaborate demonstration that the seven

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beatitudes were anticipated in the seven prismatic colours before the world was created, and another who insisted that Aristotle’s writings demonstrated the doctrine of the Trinity. He writes of his refusal to attend compulsory services and of the undergraduate friends with whom he explored the crosscurrents of modern thought. Of his own beliefs and feelings he writes nothing. His inchoate state impinges on the pious family circle at only one point, when he recalls how a friend he brought home reduced the dinner-table to a standstill with ‘a perfect explosion of free-thinking fireworks’. ‘Luckily’, he adds, ‘my Father was not present.” Pearson’s crisis of faith involved, as did Syme’s, a need to free himself from paternal control. In both cases the father embodied and enforced an unyielding religious faith (all the more inexorable in the case of Syme because his father was dead before the son could release himself from spiritual servitude). The doctrine that nineteenth-century liberals found most intolerable was the doctrine of atonement whereby God’s son had to submit to suf-

fering to redeem humanity from its original sin. The God of evangelical religion was an ambivalent God who was open to the intercession of a compassionate Son but sat in judgement nevertheless with the awful threat of everlasting torment, holding every person accountable for every action and every moment of their time on earth. Syme rose up in open rebellion against oppressive patriarchy in both its aspects. Pearson could not. He confided to a close evangelical friend: ‘I have a kind of feeling that the mind must fight out its intellectual perplexities and the heart know its own bitterness in secret.”

Eventually he found equanimity. He was able to read the Bible as a source of moral guidance and to compose religious verse that expressed a religion of humanity. He came to appreciate that ‘the substitution of the worship of Christ for that of God ... is a very old story. Liberals have always liked the heir apparent better than the actual king.’ He was aware also of the extent of his own indebtedness to the evangelical tradition for his highly developed conscience and elevated moral tone, his feeling of belonging to a morally superior ‘elect’ and a corresponding sense of duty to the non-elect. The biographer of the paradigmatic godless Victorian, Leslie Stephen, has observed that while the children of the Clapham Sect renounced their parents’ belief, the spirit of the coterie was so strong that there

THE REALIZATION OF CITIZENSHIP 119

remained — even down to the Bloomsbury circle — an outlook, an attitude, not unlike that of the Sect itself. But a coterie is a precious bloom, reliant on a particular habitat, that cannot be propagated in new soil (perhaps Pearson encouraged the idea of the colonial liberal lineage as a substitute). Following Pearson’s move to Australia he became less confident that these values would survive the loss of faith. The question that perplexed him more and more was how the ‘moral fibre of life’ could be pre-

served after the ‘masculine asceticism’ of his forebears was finally exhausted. He settled in Victoria just as that prospect finally overtook the colony.’

The sacred and the secular in colonial Victoria The temper of Christianity in Victoria was set by the goldrush immigrants whose energies ran equally to revelry and religious devotion. They included an unusually high proportion of earnest, improving Dissenters. Practising Wesleyans outnumbered both Anglicans and Roman Catholics by 1861; Presbyterians, of a pronounced Free Church bent, were not far behind; and there were substantial contingents of Congregationalists and Baptists. Strongly influenced by evangelicism, the chapel-going newcomers were preoccupied with human frailty, with the need to find God and submit to His redeeming love. The places of worship they built were sombre expressions of the visible word,

the pews hard, scriptural injunctions prominent in glass and stone. They drew their faith directly from the Bible and it turned not on outward forms of worship reliant on priestly intercession within a sacramental, hierarchical church as the guarantee of sal-

vation, but on a direct and immediate relationship with their Redeemer. Such emphases could at once accommodate individ-

ualist urges and resist their secular implications. These Nonconformists retained a pronounced collective dimension; as adherents they assumed a responsibility to save others that en-

couraged the more zealous to act as guardians of public morality; some even sought to make the entire people conform to their divine covenant. There was no lack of outlet for these evangelical enthusiasms in the swollen towns, squalid diggings and benighted rural settlements of goldrush Victoria, and the proselytizing impulse prospered accordingly. While many remained indifferent to the Lord’s message, few

actively contested it and the tribulations of one who did

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illustrate the marginal position of the outspoken freethinker. Raised as a Wesleyan on a smallholding in Kent, Edward Wil-

liam Cole landed in Australia in 1852 just before he reached adulthood. Unsuited to heavy manual labour, ill health and misfortune dogged his ambitions for more than a decade. He made money from the manufacture of cordial on the gold fields, and

lost it in land speculation; joined a friend in commercial photography and fell out with him while rowing down the Murray in search of business. A visit to an Aboriginal mission

at the conclusion of this journey impressed him with the absurdity of imposing strict sabbatarianism on a people with

their own sacred ceremonies, and triggered an interest in comparative religion. Back in Melbourne, Cole kept a pie-stall

by night so he could study in the Public Library during the day, and by 1865 he completed a survey of all the world’s religions in order to separate the good and useful kernel from the unreasonable and unnecessary husk. All the creeds that he had been able to examine proclaimed a Supreme Being and he found a high incidence of divine incarnation among the founders, with equivalent miracles marking their parallel paths. Yet the votaries of each of these faiths contended that theirs was the one true path to salvation. Considered in ‘the light of universal history’, therefore, Cole concluded that the religious opinions of mankind were ‘simply, one and all, emanations from the mind of man’, and he expected an appreciation of this fact to liberate humanity from superstition and conduce to the peace, unity and progress of the world. No publishers would accept Cole’s manuscript, so (sheltering prudently behind a pseudonym) he had it set and printed, initially in sixpenny pamphlets and later in book form. Booksellers were reluctant to stock the works, so he established his own bookstall in the Eastern Market. Neither the Argus nor the Age would advertise them so he rebuked the press in a supplementary tract entitled A Discourse in Defence of Mental Freedom. ‘In matters of thought every man is an independent sovereign in his own right, over himself every man has an undoubted inalienable right to think for himself.” He who denied that right, or shrank from protecting it, obstructed human progress, for ignorance debased and enslaved while knowledge elevated and liberated. Thus Cole anticipated ‘the gradual transformation of vast numbers of human beings from boorish, ignorant, super-

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stitious, unreading, unthinking creatures into respectable, rational members of society’. He himself survived a church boycott and made his bookstall into an emporium of enlightenment and amusement, its brilliant rainbow above the Bourke Street entrance drawing passers-by into an arcade of books and music, easy chairs and ferneries, ornaments and confectionery and gadgets and caged animals. Rampant secularism gave way to a catch-all pluralism that was no less shocking to the austere English visitor J. A. Froude when he wandered into Cole’s Book Arcade in 1885 and found Bishop Butler shelved alongside Renan, Farrar’s Life of Christ beside Strauss’s Leben Jesu, and children helping themselves to what-

ever took their fancy ‘like so many flies round the poisoned tartlets in a pastrycook’s shop’; but this spectacle of precocious consumer sovereignty was no longer offensive to local opinion. The white-bearded proprietor whose Cole’s Funny Picture Book startled generations of Australian children with quaint rhymes and homilies, verbal and visual puzzles, anthropomorphic monkeys and a steampowered whipping-machine for the correction of naughty boys, became famous as an amiable eccentric and left behind his past notoriety as a sacrilegious freethinker. When in his final years he brought all his writings on racial harmony and cotton cultivation and popular education and various other enthusiasms together in a collected edition, he did not reissue the initial assault on religious orthodoxy.® Cole was one of the founders in 1867 of a Liberal Debating Society, which soon became the Eclectic Association and then

spawned a Sunday Free Discussion Society to provide Melbourne’s freethinkers with a public platform. Its leading fig-

ures were eminently respectable infidels like H.K. Rusden, accountant in the Police Department and secretary of the Royal Society. Writing as ‘Hokor’ and ‘Iconoclastes’, Rusden issued more than a score of pamphlets from 1866 onwards that assailed Christianity as an affront to reason and an impediment to progress. He took as his motto “Thorough’ and his writings were notable for the unremitting dogmatism of their glosses on eight-

eenth-century savants and nineteenth-century scientists. His combination of Darwinian social evolution and Spencerian in-

dividualism (‘We invoke and remorselessly fulfil the law of natural selection’) was patently unsympathetic to popular aspi-

rations — such austere atheism freed humanity from the

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superstitious fear of damnation only to reimprison it within the bleak confines of determinism and torment it with unremitting

competition. Compassing such projects as calendar reform, rational penology, family limitation and eugenics, the Sunday Free Discussion Society reached a peak membership of 155 in 1872.?

Equally, the early endeavours of progressive Christians to meet the challenge of the new knowledge fell on stony ground. Most prominent here was the courageous headmaster of Mel-

bourne Grammar School, the Reverend John Bromby. In a public lecture on ‘Pre-Historic Man’ in 1869 he conceded that recent advances in geology, biology and other fields of science had disturbing implications for those who interpreted Genesis literally as an account of human origins. Bromby suggested that the Bible should be regarded as a book of religious rather than scientific truth: ‘the letter killeth but the spirit it is which giveth

life’. His superior, Bishop Perry, regretted that Bromby’s ‘kindly, liberal disposition has partially perverted his judgement’

and denounced the infidels Darwin and Huxley, who under-

mined belief in the Mosaic record of the creation.?° At the beginning of 1882 the colony of Victoria was beset by one of the severe droughts that periodically devastated its hin-

terland. As was the custom, the Government asked church leaders to pray for rain, but the new Anglican Bishop of Melbourne refused. “Don’t pray for rain, dam it’, he is said to have replied. Perry’s successor, Bishop Moorhouse, was an irrigation enthusiast who toured rural areas to lecture farmers on the need to conserve water, so he could see for himself how the land was

utterly bare, ‘as if it had been blasted by the breath of some destroying angel’. That qualification ‘as if’ signals a new religious

sensibility and distances Moorhouse decisively from the unyielding orthodoxies of his predecessor. In treating the avenging angel as a figure of speech, he relegated the heavenly host to a

mytho-historical past along with all the familiar stories of priestly intercession and divine intervention. These were allego-

ries, not precedents. Joshua might have rejoiced that God answered his call to make the sun stand still, the people of Israel

might have believed themselves saved by waters that sprang from a rock struck by Moses, but ‘we no longer live in an age of miracles’. Now that science had traced the laws of nature, it was presumptuous to seek such dispensation: the proper course

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was to accept the new knowledge as a revelation of God’s will and strive to conform to it. Both the Age and the Argus agreed, the latter pushing the Bishop’s logic to the limits of democratic providentialism: “What sort of world should we live in if the elements were hourly distracted in answer to millions upon mil-

lions of conflicting petitions?? Others were shocked by his apparent denial of divine agency. The debate was still raging when the drought broke.!! The incident marks a decisive change in the religious temper of the colony. Up to the end of the 1870s the chief energies of the churches went to the establishment of their mission and the

overwhelming majority of adherents interpreted their faith within a framework of received truth. From this point the Prot-

estant denominations were beset by doubt and anxious argument. While the crisis affected all the Australian colonies, in Victoria it was acute. Where previously only a tiny minority were troubled by such problems, religion now became a topic of debate second only to politics.

In 1879 a new monthly journal, the Victorian Review, appeared with an article by Marcus Clarke, ‘Civilization without Delusion’. It sold 10 000 copies. A well-born and impoverished Englishman forced to support himself with his pen, and drawn

fatally to the Bohemian fascinations of Melbourne’s low life, Clarke had little time for colonial pretensions, liberal or other-

wise. Against the common supposition that the new world offered release from the evils of the old and provided a freedom in which the human potential for improvement could be most

fully realized, he had confronted the readers of his novel His Natural Life (1874) with the gothic horror of convictism. His essay on religion was equally shocking, and deliberately so, for he gathered up the heterodoxies of the age with sardonic relish. Rather than argue against religion Clarke simply assumed its demise as part of the inevitable retreat of gullibility before the advance of reason: ‘the tender time of trustfulness in the super-

natural is well nigh over, and ... the faith of our fathers is passing away from us’. With the abandonment of belief in mir-

acles, the claims for Christ’s divinity collapsed, the fear of judgement and the hope of redemption lost their force, and there

was no longer absolute certainty of any other life than this. Clarke acknowledged the distress felt by those deprived of the consolations and terrors of the supernatural, but there was no

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escape from modernity. A new religion was needed, one that accepted the sovereignty of reason and bestowed upon humanity

the fervour hitherto wasted in sighs and prayer. The progress of the world would become the sole care, and the elevation of the race the only religion, of a Civilization without Delusion." Clarke went too far. Writing with uncharacteristic severity in the following issue of the Victorian Review, Bishop Moorhouse took grave offence at his glib superficiality and affected lamentation: “You cannot kill a living thing by saying it is dead.’ The Victorian Review declined to publish Clarke’s rejoinder and while the rival Melbourne Review agreed to do so, the publisher

of that journal refused to issue the number in which an unre-

pentant ‘Letter to His Lordship’ appeared, so Clarke then circulated it himself in pamphlet form along with his original article and Moorhouse’s reply. It was a pyrrhic victory. Clarke’s sacrilege, together with involvement in a play satirizing colonial politics (the government prohibited its performance) destroyed his prospects of appointment to the post of Chief Librarian of the Public Library, which was his last hope of escape from in-

solvency. He died shortly afterwards at the age of thirty-five. Yet his prophecy was fulfilled. The older certainties were breaking down as more and more of the Protestant clergy and laity were compelled to reformulate dogma in the light of new circumstances. No thinking person could ignore the results of evolutionary theory in science, history and anthropology and their worrying implications for the received Christian cosmology. No Christian conversant with the results of recent biblical criticism could continue to rely on the Scriptures as a literal and infallible guide. No one sensitive to contemporary mores could maintain the Christian eschatology in its strict forms. Since the

effect of all these changes was to destroy the very basis of authoritative theological pronouncements, every concerned Christian had to exercise his (and sometimes her) own judgement in order to reach a satisfactory resolution of the issues which he (seldom she) then felt compelled to make available to others. The result was a cacophany of indignantly faithful and defiantly sceptical voices."

When Higinbotham finally joined this debate, his contribution was received with heightened expectancy. The revered patron of Victorian liberalism and a prominent Anglican layman, he had never before publicly declared his beliefs. He did so now,

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in August 1883, in an address on the topic ‘Science and Religion’

delivered to a packed meeting of the Scots Church Literary Association: both the Age and the Argus published the address verbatim. Higinbotham began by deploring the refusal of the churches to accept the verifiable hypotheses of science, their

consequent inability to nourish the spiritual needs of an educated laity, and their general encumbrance with outworn and divisive dogma. Credal accretions corrupted and obscured the

simple, sublime beauty of Christ’s teachings. They were an impediment to the religious welfare of humanity and they

imposed ‘a burden on the intellect and conscience of the Christian world which is now becoming wholly intolerable’. The need for guidance was urgent. Among the most thoughtful and the most upright there was spreading a ‘mental paralysis’ that was deranging almost every department of human conduct.

It seemed to Higinbotham as if the inability to discern any purpose or design in the natural world, and any basis for con-

duct other than personal interest, was leading to ‘universal intellectual and moral anarchy’. Unable to find any response to

this crisis coming from the narrow and bigoted clergy, Higinbotham called on the laity to join him and withdraw from the ‘lower standpoints of thought that are no longer tenable’ to ‘the high central platform — the rock of all ages’. There they would meet God ‘revealed to the intellect, and also to the responsive human heart, as the Father, the Friend, the Guide, and the Support of our race, and of every member of it, in the simple but profound philosophy, and also in the sublimest life, of Jesus of Nazareth, the Light of the World’.!° Higinbotham’s address appeals to principles to which most liberals subscribed: the rejection of the claims of the clergy to offer authoritative spiritual guidance; the impossibility of subscribing to beliefs that cannot satisfy the intellect; the continuing need for inspiration for the ‘welfare of humanity’. Such attitudes

were hardly novel. Charles Harpur advanced them in New South Wales forty years earlier; in 1851 Henry Parkes had welcomed the struggle between ‘Light and Darkness’, between ‘that erovelling superstition which seeks to fetter and degrade and

that pure religion which tends to liberate and exalt’. Yet Higinbotham’s espousal ignited fierce argument in pulpit and press. His grave and anguished exposition caused far greater offence than Clarke’s irreverent squib: it led directly to schism

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in the Presbyterian Church (where the orthodox majority hounded Higinbotham’s chairman, the Reverend Charles Strong, out of the ministry for having allowed his church to be used as a platform for such heresies) and aroused turmoil in the other Protestant denominations.!¢

The address shocked because it conveyed the urgency of Higinbotham’s conviction that civilization could not survive the loss of religion. The crisis of belief that he described threatened to unhinge the ‘natural vigour of a man’s intellect, and even the

straightforwardness of a manly character’ — and if the adult male laity ‘by whom the affairs of the world are managed’ was disabled, how could it perform its vital duty of ‘educating and training the undeveloped mind of the child and the receptive and dependent mind of the woman’? The consequences were already apparent in division, irresolution, weakness and perplexity, in a social order giving way to social disorder, ‘unregulated by a single ascertained and unquestioned law’. His deepest fear, the fear of a descent into unmanly, insensate anarchy, surfaced anew. The address was doubly shocking because of its author’s manifest reverence. He gave no indication that he himself was afflicted by the uncertainties he described, except vicariously,

and every indication that he had long since taken comfort on the higher ground. The antitheses he employs to explain the dilemma of the educated layman (science/religion, intellect/conscience, head/heart, reason/faith) turn out to be false antitheses that lead dialectically to the one ultimate truth. His rationalism allowed him readily to dispense with ‘the chaos of creeds and babel of striving tongues’ to hear, even more clearly, the voice

of the Great Teacher. His pantheism could accommodate the findings of science and see, more plainly than ever, the ‘unchangeable law of design and increasing purpose of slow and steady progress’. His faith in a God of infinite love and absolute goodness remained stronger than ever. Few of Higinbotham’s contemporaries were able to share his

ability to ‘think with fearless freedom and yet believe’. Like Syme, they looked for a ‘more rational plan of salvation’ and a more merciful doctrine of human fate, only to discover, as he did, that in the course of the quest the inspiration died out of them. Some threw over the vestiges of religion as a deliverance from a crushing burden of guilt, while others regretted the loss of a passion they could no longer feel and a peace they were

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unable to find. Some continued to crave spiritual comfort and others welcomed their emancipation. When Pearson belatedly

joined the discussion in 1888, on the platform of Charles Strong’s new Australian Church, he observed that with the decline in Christian faith ‘self-indulgence has become a faith. I accept it but ask whether we may not one day miss the strength given by austere self-constraint.’ Even the most insistent freethinkers felt the loneliness of self-sufficiency. Syme himself

illustrates the condition with striking clarity. Following his abandonment of the ministry, he turned away from religion altogether and his cast of mind became insistently secular. Too insistently. His constant emphasis on progress, both as a law of nature and an innate human propensity, rested on a teleology no less arbitrary than that of Christianity; and as secular pro-

gress displaced Christianity as the organizing principle of colonial life, Syme came to feel a need for a ‘deeper insight’ into the impulse behind this constant striving. Just as in his economic thought he needed to postulate some higher motive than avarice, so in thinking about the basis of human conduct he was driven to identify a ‘keener sensibility’ and ‘more intense longing for

a higher life’. In his final years he even published a book on The Soul in order to demonstrate scientifically the existence of a primordial force ‘we may call the Organising Power’ that gave meaning and purpose to human endeavour:.!’ The secular aspects of nineteeenth-century liberalism are more obvious than the sacred ones. The insistence on freedom of conscience, the appeal to reason and the utilitarian ethos, above all the sheer worldliness of the liberal concerns — these characteristic emphases seemed to eclipse spiritual authority as a source of knowledge and basis of conduct. Syme’s contortions suggest

that the ghost was not so easily exorcized from the machine, that metaphysical elements remained in even the most thorough-

going materialist systems. While many liberals were anti-religious, few were irreligious. Rather, they displaced a sense of the sacred from the church to the people, allowing those no longer able to subscribe to a conception of God as a morally

perfect Being to still draw inspiration, as Arnold did, from ‘a power not ourselves makes for righteousness’, a religion of hu-

manity. Against latter-day liberal historians who trace the replacement of the sacred by the secular in a process well-nigh complete in Australia by the end of the nineteenth century, some

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other historians plot a concurrent sacralization of the secular expressed in new civic rites and symbols. The public institutions that the colonial liberals constructed did have this sacred dimen-

sion. They were meant to inspire reverence and awe. Their capacity to do so, however, was tenuous for the assumption that national life could provide a unifying framework of values foun-

dered on the prior recognition that values were choices that every citizen must make — or, in Renan’s words, that religion had become a matter of personal taste. As time elapsed, moreover, the vitality of such a religion of the people became more

problematic. What sort of spiritual awareness could there be once God’s presence or absence ceased to be an issue of pressing urgency? What common beliefs could survive the privatization

of the conscience? What could be holy in a moral order based on self-gratification?!8

The State becomes schoolmaster Before these questions could be answered, the site for the civic culture had to be cleared. Liberals conceived this site as a public space, controlled by the State, where the universalism of citizen-

ship prevailed over differences, divisions and secondary loyalties. There was a place for Christian religion within this public space, provided that it was a free and voluntary Christianity that promoted an elevated national character. Freedom of religion was an early feature of the Australian colonies, where

Irish Catholics, Scottish Presbyterians, English and Welsh dissenters had quickly won the right to worship according to their own forms without discrimination, and the Church Acts of the 1830s had effectively placed the Church of England on the same footing as other denominations. Voluntarism took longer to achieve. Mindful of the absence of religion during the

height of the goldrush, and fearful of its consequences, the authors of the Victorian Constitution had provided for an annual grant of £50000 to be distributed among the churches in proportion to the number of their adherents. Liberal Non-

conformists, led by the Age, opposed this arrangement

throughout the 1850s and 1860s but it was not until 1870 that the McCulloch ministry succeeded in repealing the offending clause of the Constitution.

As one who had previously supported the grant,

Higinbotham’s contribution to the debate on its abolition was

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telling. In the strict meaning of the phrase, he had come to re-

gard state aid to religion as ‘not merely foolish but almost impious’. The State could scarcely aid religion, at most it could pay a ‘tribute’ to those endeavouring to advance it. Conversely, he did not think it possible for the State to separate itself from religion. Rather, and following the example of that other liberal Anglican, Gladstone, he insisted that the State had the quality

of a personality since it necessarily performed functions of religious significance. The religion he had in mind here, however, was ‘the religion which recognises the religious sentiment of all without the fanatacism of any of the sects’, the religion that instilled right conduct rather than dogma, the religion that the heads of the principal religious organizations scorned. ‘I can-

not but believe that these persons really overlook their duties as citizens and the interests of the community at large, in the overwhelming anxiety they have for the propagation of their own creeds and for the pecuniary advantage of their own sects.’ Accordingly, ‘I do not see the slightest object the State has in lending them any further support.’!’

He used the word ‘sect’ rather than the neutral term,

‘denomination’. The striving for partisan advantage, the jealousy and mutual intolerance of the different branches of the Christian church were deeply distasteful to Higinbotham, as to other lib-

erals, and not only because of their attachment to freedom of

conscience. They were appalled by the ugly divisions that formed whenever religious passion spilled out of its proper sphere and poisoned public life. They were confounded by the way the lines of division ran along sedulously maintained mem-

ories of wrongs committed at another time in another place, since the perpetuation of these old-world hatreds challenged their confidence in the redemptive qualities of the new. The virulence and persistence of sectarianism seemed to them a species of atavistic savagery.

The deepest division, dating back to the Reformation, was that between Catholic and Protestant. For three centuries after the Reformation, the two opposing camps had sought to maintain spiritual supremacy over their respective territories, if not by positively compelling conformity then at the very least by reserving a privileged status for true believers. Where a subject

nation was penalized for its heresy, as was Catholic Ireland

through its incorporation into a United Kingdom with a

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Protestant Constitution, then grievances took on a broader ethno-religious significance so that the Faith of the Fathers came

to be part of a distinct Irish cultural identity. Antagonism between Irish Catholics and English, Scottish and Welsh as well as Irish Protestants became even more virulent in a colony of settlement, for the freedom enjoyed in the new setting by the transplanted communities merely enabled their emnity to run unchecked. “The hatred of Rome here is incredible’, remarked James Moorhouse soon after he was installed as the Anglican Bishop of Melbourne. And the advent of self-government provided a new focus for its expression. Just as John O’Shanassy worked an Irish Catholic political machine, mobilizing support among his co-religious compatriots and rewarding them with the spoils of office, so an anti-Catholic demagogue like C. E. Jones operated the Orange Lodges as a base for his public career. By the late 1850s a Catholic party under O’Shanassy and Duffy was ranged opposite the predominantly Protestant liberals. The liberal Age served as a platform for abuse of Irish Catholics; the conservative Argus served faute de mieux as their defender.”°

Such an alignment was a remarkable feature of the colonial scene. In Britain it was more common for conservatives to harness Protestant fears and prejudices for political ends, liberals to champion Catholic emancipation. Part of the explanation for the Victorian pattern lies in the Nonconformist background and evangelical temper of most liberals: their objection in principle to the hierarchical and confessional character of Roman Catholicism, the way it made the priest an intermediary between the individual and his or her conscience, was exacerbated by a horror of its dolorist cults and rituals. This antagonism increased

as the result of changes within the Catholic Church as Pope Pius IX, having been forced to flee into exile during the nationalist revolution of 1848, reasserted the primacy of the spiritual over the temporal. In 1864 he consolidated the triumph of papal infallibility with a bull Quanta Cura, to which he appended a Syllabus Errorum. Rationalism, indifferentism and latitudinarianism were among the errors it proscribed; the last and greatest error was the proposition that the Pope should reconcile himself

to ‘progress, liberalism and modern civilization’. A leading English convert to Rome, Cardinal Newman, echoed the pontiff in denunciation of liberalism’s ‘suicidal excesses’ of scepticism, anti-dogmatism and pluralistic tolerance.2!

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In Australia there was an additional factor. The Catholic Church, which had always been predominantly Irish in composition, was coming under the direction of Irish bishops manifesting a distinctively Irish piety that emphasized duty, loyalty, obedience and veneration for Rome. Proud, unyielding and acutely sensitive to external slights, these prelates eagerly ac-

cepted the exclusivist leadership of Pope Pius and the consequent enhancement of their own responsibilities. Their strengthening of the prohibition on mixed marriages in 1869 signalled a determination to guard their flock and resist assim-

ilation. Against these developments and the increased segregation they encouraged, it is hardly surprising that colonial

liberals hardened their hostility. The young Alfred Deakin caught the emphases of the rising anti-Catholicism when he declared: ‘What I detest is not religion but priestcraft and dogma

and intolerance ... 1 would like to break the neck of priestly authority.’ Liberals remained unconscious of the irony that made them, the champions of toleration, as jaundiced against Catholicism as Catholics were antagonistic to liberalism, and they were quite prepared to play on prejudices. While repeatedly

deprecating bigotry, the Age was forever uncovering priestly plots and mocking ‘the inhabitants of that happy land where people and pigs huddle promiscuously’. While it deplored the intrusion of religion into politics (‘Are we to understand that priestly influence is everywhere being used to deprive devotees of the right of free judgement on matters political?’), it exploited the same divisions for its own purposes. The distance between antisectarian declaration and sectarian practice was by no means

as wide as liberals liked to pretend, and the withdrawal of financial assistance from the churches was as much a piece of sectarian spite as it was an antisectarian act of emancipation.” The churches conceded their claim on the public revenue with reasonable grace. Given the ramifications of religious diversity they could not long resist a formal separation of worshipper and taxpayer. But the settling of relations between Church and State raised issues less tractable than the merely fiscal. It was easy enough to draw a schematic distinction between matters temporal and spiritual, more difficult in practice to delimit the

two spheres of authority since, on the one hand, Christians assumed obligations to regulate their practices and outward conduct in conformity with God’s will, while on the other,

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citizens’ performance of their responsibilities required subscrip-

tion to a civic ethos. These claims raised competing codes of morality, of the forms and basis of correct conduct, and the proper means of inculcating them. In circumstances that had brought together a heterogeneous and youthful population — four-fifths of the inhabitants of Victoria in 1861 were under thirty-five years of age — and where institutional foundations were being laid for the consolidation and advancement of the

colony, the claims bore most insistently on the question of education. From a religious viewpoint it was necessary to raise the child in the knowledge and belief necessary for salvation. From ‘a civic viewpoint it was imperative to train the child for the future tasks of self-management as a breadwinner, a parent and a citizen. Who, then, should control education? Under arrangements that Victoria took over from its parentcolony of New South Wales, the State supported two sorts of

schools, the National and the Denominational. Each supplemented the voluntary principle with public assistance: if local patrons could provide a minimum number of pupils and raise part of the building costs, land would be made available, a school

would be built and a teacher’s salary provided. Each allowed for substantial autonomy within prescribed limits: providing the school taught a specified range of subjects from a specified range

of texts, and passed inspection, its patrons could nominate the teacher and regulate its conduct. Each admitted religious instruc-

tion, freely in the case of the Denominational school, circumspectly in the case of the National.” The arrangements were inefficient, wasteful and divisive. De-

pendence on local initiative resulted in a haphazard and inadequate scattering of small schools, while the disbursement of funds through two central boards allowed a duplication of provision in some localities that was rendered all the more otiose by the absence of any provision in others. The Victorian census of 1861 enumerated 87 583 children aged between five and fourteen; the reports of the National and Denominational Boards in that same year accounted for only 33 973 of them. Competition

between the systems was loaded in favour of the Denominational, given the prior capacity of the churches to assemble numbers and resources (many a school doubled as a place of worship). There were 484 Denominational schools by 1861, teaching 24 224 pupils and drawing £87500 of public funds,

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while the 181 National Schools taught 9713 pupils and drew £38 500. Interdenominational rivalries spurred on the multiplication of deficiencies.”4 In the recurrent, seemingly interminable arguments over these arrangements there was general acceptance of the desirability of

education and the necessity of its public support — a new society conscious of its future destiny could not tolerate ignorance. Whether the emphasis fell on religious duty or on the social, political and economic benefits of school training, it was readily apparent that the state would have to contribute resources if provision was to meet need. Beyond that, opinion divided into three camps. The supporters of the Denominational system wanted control of separate schools that would provide

a religious education based on the tenets of their church. The secularists (for whom the Age was founded) wanted the state to take control and banish religion from the classroom. Between them stood Christians like Higinbotham who were committed to a public school system and therefore prepared to forego the

full measure of their own tenets in favour of a ‘common Christianity’. Liberals spanned the second and third positions but throughout the early years of self-government the denominationalists held the upper hand, with the administrations led by the Anglican Haines and the Roman Catholic O’Shanassy bending the operation of the dual system to the advantage of their co-religionists. Nor did the replacement, in 1862, of the National and Denominational Boards by a single Board of Education resolve the conflict. That Board, which was dominated by representatives of the denominations, continued to adminis-

ter a dual system within which the denominational schools captured public funds for their separate educational practices.” There is perhaps no wider gap between today’s conventional

wisdom and that of an earlier age than over this question of diversity — or, as the colonial liberal would have it, division. In the closing years of the twentieth century the oppressed are freed from the tyranny of the monoculture and urged to celebrate difference; in the middle part of the nineteenth century, when that common culture was still under construction, it was expected to liberate the newly arrived citizen from the confines of their sectional allegiances. The liberals’ campaign for genuinely common schools was a fundamental instalment of this project. Higinbotham’s editorials in the late 1850s dwell on the

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responsibility of the state to ‘train up children to be good citizens and good men’, ‘to enable every man to understand the duties of life, as an individual member of a large community’, to instil the capacity to be ‘a good workman, master or servant, husband or father, or citizen’. The emphases here fall on the communitarian aspects of liberalism, subordinating the abstract individual, gendered male, to the interests of society and the State. Yet the common school, in universalizing these values, is expected to empower the masculine individual by removing barriers of mistrust and antagonism engendered by the rival schools

with their rival faiths. Higinbotham thus anticipates a time ‘when the children of neighbours shall walk side by side to school, sit side by side at the common task, and be trained to mutual kindness which may endear them to one another in their common journey through life’. Schooling of this sort was understood as a pedagogical process yielding beneficial social results and was not to be confused with

education proper. Higinbotham could dilate as expansively as any dignitary at a school speech-night on the etymological distinction between instruction and education, between putting in and drawing out. Like other liberals of his generation, he supported the full range of institutions — the university, the library, the mechanics institute — that the colony created and nurtured for the fulfilment of human capacity. If the Victorians placed a somewhat greater stress than their counterparts in New South Wales on the diffusion of useful knowledge, and did not soar to the Platonic heights of Sydney’s John Woolley with his hopes of cultural enlightenment, then that reflected the more demo-

cratic temper of the goldrush colony and left the familiar distinction intact. As Higinbotham explained in a lecture on Self-education to the Brighton Mechanics Institute in 1862, the full realization of a man’s spiritual and intellectual powers was necessarily a process undertaken voluntarily by the autonomous adult male (Pearson used the term ‘self-culture’ similarly twenty years later to define the object of the Working Men’s College)

quite different from the training of the dependent child. You could encourage a man to cultivate his mind, you could not neglect the preparation of children for their future duties.2” At this stage, and for some time after, he was strongly convinced of the need for a religious content in the colony’s schools. Strictly speaking, he remarked in one of his disconcerting asides,

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education was not the business of the State at all; it was a public need best met in local schools nurtured by local endeavour and guided by a common moral purpose. If the settler society was not yet capable of providing such teaching and the State had to make good the deficiency, then the most it could do was provide instruction. Education had a spiritual and moral, as well as an intellectual dimension, and ‘anyone who considered the proper basis of a sound education would see that religion was and ought to be a component part of it’. Common Christianity, as he and other nineteenth-century liberals understood it, was a necessary compromise between the legacy of the past and the needs of the

future, between inherited religious difference and the future requirements of universal citizenship. It abstracted from the Christian religion certain moral regulatory precepts (toleration, charity, restraint) that were necessary if the governed were to govern. In his speech in support of the Common Schools Act

of 1862, he sought to define common Christianity as ‘that essential religious teaching which was necessary for all persons of all sects, and which could be imparted by an honest man of any sect’. An honest man being a layman, since ‘a less degree of importance was attached by the laity to the differences by

which the various religious denominations were separated’, Higinbotham was prefiguring a functional division of Church and State. He hoped that the Board of Education might, over time, assimilate the church schools into a uniform non-sectarian system where such religious instruction would form part of the

curriculum. His position was anticlerical rather than antireli-

gious. It was also hopelessly unrealistic. At a time when the sectarian conflict was plumbing new depths of malevolence, with the Age openly parading the ‘No Popery’ slogan, it was wishful thinking to expect the Catholic laity to forsake their Church. Archbishop

Polding had warned them in a pastoral letter of 1859 that the notion that you could ‘select certain virtues’ such as kindliness, delicacy, charity and unselfishness as ‘the kernel of Christianity’

foundered on the presumptuous and specious assumption that such virtues could exist independently of spiritual guidance and sacramental grace. Bishop Perry had reminded Anglicans in the following year that religion did not consist in lessons that could be given at certain times in the same manner as lessons in French

or in dancing. The appointment in 1863 of denominational

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nominees to the Board of Education by the O’Shanassy ministry

(representing Anglican as well as Catholic interests) gave the Board the appearance of a denominational front for the protection of state aid to church schools and persuaded Higinbotham and other liberals of the need for more radical change. In 1866 the McCulloch ministry established a royal commission to in-

quire into the operation of the Common Schools Act. Higinbotham was its chairman.??

Students of the Education Commission are understandably awed by the assiduity and zeal of its chairman. The Commission ran from September 1866 to January 1867, a period of relative calm between bouts in the constitutional conflict; yet through-

out its deliberations Higinbotham discharged both parliamentary and administrative duties, and continued to rally his more weary ministerial colleagues. That during these twenty weeks he also managed fifty-two sittings of the Commission,

some of up to six hours duration, examined thirty-seven witnesses, collated 500 written submissions and personally drafted the report is remarkable in itself. That he carried with him his ten fellow commissioners is extraordinary. The commissioners were men of standing drawn from all but one of the principal religious groups in the colony: apart from two fellow Anglicans (the progressive Bromby was one), there were representatives of the Presbyterian, Wesleyan, Congregationalist, Baptist and Jewish faiths; and the headmasters of the three leading denominational schools, Melbourne Grammar, Scotch and Wesley, were included among them. Higinbotham’s success in

winning their acceptance of his proposal for state-controlled non-sectarian schools reflected the infectious urgency of his conviction that a comprehensive system of national education was required. To this end the Commission proposed the withdrawal of public funds from church schools and state provision

of education that would exclude the teaching of ‘creeds and

catechisms and formularies’ in favour of a common Christianity.2°

The fate of these proposals finally exhausted Higinbotham’s hopes of a religious settlement of the educational problem. His difficulties had begun at the very establishment of the Commission when the Catholic nominees refused to serve because their Bishop had not been consulted in advance. Catholic suspicion

mounted as this body of predominantly Protestant laymen

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prescribed a curriculum of common Christianity in the immediate aftermath of the Pope’s proscription of that error. There was a further provocation in the presence among them

of the secretary to the Commission, David Blair, who was Ebenezer Syme’s former associate turned placehunter. An Irish Protestant who had been ordained a Presbyterian minister by John Dunmore Lang, in the last round of sectarian skirmishes

he had proved himself to be as rabidly anti-Catholic as his mentor. Discussion of the Commission’s recommendations was quickly overtaken, in any case, by a renewal of hostilities that drew on events abroad as the Irish took their grievances on to English soil and sought to obtain by gunpowder what they had been unable to achieve by peaceful protest. Against this background of Fenian atrocities, the visit to the colony late in 1867

of the Queen’s son, Prince Alfred, became an occasion for Protestant loyalists to flaunt their symbols. When the Orange Lodge decorated the windows of Protestant Hall with a transparency of King Billy at the Battle of the Boyne, Irish Catholics were enraged; when Lodge members who fired on a crowd of

demonstrators (killing a bystander who happened to be a Protestant Irish youth) were acquitted, the Catholics were con-

firmed in their belief that the McCulloch ministry was prejudiced against them. The decision by the Catholic parlia-

mentarians to make common cause with the conservatives

against the Darling grant excited further antagonism, with the Age denouncing the ‘ghostly terrorism’ and ‘aggrandisement of the Roman Catholic Church’. The subsequent attempt on the life of the Prince at a picnic in Sydney by a self-proclaimed Fenian fanned the flames still higher. Amid wild allegations of

a Fenian conspiracy and police reports of clandestine drill sessions, the Age insisted that Catholic schools were hotbeds of

separatism and subversion.?! , Higinbotham was aware of Irish Catholic sensitivities. As Attorney-General he resisted the draconian anti-Fenian legislation that other colonies enacted in response to the attack on the

Prince. As Education Commissioner he gave the Catholics credit, alone among the denominationalists, for at least taking seriously their object of religious education. He could under-

stand, even if he could not accept, their conviction that the Commission’s recommendations amounted to a system of Protestant proselytism in state schools. His proposals foundered not

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on the recalcitrance of that denomination but on the jealousy of its rivals — for if one church was not prepared to surrender its schools, then neither were others willing to be outdone in educational resources and influence. The obduracy of the Prot-

estant denominations, especially the Anglicans, shocked Higinbotham. “They call themselves churches, and, no doubt, they believe that the pestilent energy which they display in collecting property is proof of vitality’; but they were acting as ‘competing companies or corporations’, and ‘their proceedings are not injurious to the cause of education, but a disgrace to our social and political system’. The problem was ‘how to get rid of these turbulent intruders upon the peace and welfare of the State household’.°? Once the Anglicans made common cause with the Catholics

out of their mutual antipathy, Higinbotham’s proposals were doomed. A flood of petitions against the bill to implement the recommendations of the Commission alarmed the nervous McCulloch, who had already announced a free vote on the legislation. Thoroughgoing secularists, including Syme and the Age, regarded it as a half-way measure at best because of its provision for common Christianity. Having warned that he would accept no amendment, Higginbotham withdrew his bill before the vote on its second reading. For him the lesson was clear. The sects had shown that ‘a national system of religious education is at present rendered impracticable by ecclesiastical rivalry and dissensions, and by the unpatriotic policy pursued by the leading Christian sects’. He continued to lament the decline of religious feeling and the corresponding weakening of morality. He was fearful of the prospect of a world bereft of moral guidance, a world that threatened to become ‘a den of cultivated, intellectual, and yet wholly uneducated human wild beasts’. But that danger could only be averted if the State disembarrassed itself from association with the religious bodies that

still clung to it. Henceforth, with regret but with implacable determination, he was convinced that a public system of secular

instruction was ‘urgently demanded by the highest national interest’.*

It came three years later in the Education Act of 1872. Higinbotham was not present at its creation — he had lost his seat in 1871 and did not return to parliament until 1873 — and it emerged out of the discord he detested. In the factional morass

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that followed the exhaustion of the liberal supremacy, protectionists and freetraders needed a common platform on which to unite and overthrow the Duffy ministry. State aid to religion

came readily to hand. After the new Premier, J.G. Francis, announced that he intended to reform the education system, Bishop Goold issued a Pastoral Admonition that was read in every Catholic church: “They boldly and defiantly tell you it is their determination to do away with your Schools and substitute for them godless schools to which they will compel you under

penalty (or imprisonment) to send your children.’ That ill-judged intervention sealed the unity of the anti-Catholic forces and ensured their success. The Francis ministry enacted its legislation. State aid to church schools ceased. The Board of

Education was replaced by a departmental structure under a Minister of Public Instruction directly responsible to parliament. Children were obliged to attend school between the ages of six

and fifteen, and in every state school only secular instruction would be offered, free of charge, in a range of basic subjects. The state schools were to be ‘secular, compulsory and free’.** All three of these principles were rehearsed at length; all three were interpreted so loosely and expediently as to convince the

principal historian of the Education Act that they were mere ‘decoration’ for a piece of political pragmatism; yet their very ambiguities and equivocations reveal how colonial liberals made a public institution serve their civic ethos. Secularism was held

to be indispensable given the obduracy of the denominations, though liberals used the term more often as a synonym for antisectarianism (if not anti-Catholicism) than in an absolute sense, and a loophole in the Act allowed for religious instruction outside school hours. Compulsion signified the higher interests of society over the rights of parents, though the obligation could still be met by attendance at a church school. Free tuition followed from compulsion for reasons of equity and universality, although fees could still be levied for more advanced classes. While the three principles could be linked to a variety of educational objects, vocational and philanthropic, individual and national, the supporters of the measure emphasized above all the correlation of universal suffrage and universal education. Following the precept laid down upon the recent enlargement of the British electorate by Robert Lowe, erstwhile colonial liberal, latter-day antidemocrat in Gladstone’s Liberal Ministry (‘I

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believe it will be absolutely necessary that you should prevail on our future masters to learn their letters’), one member of the Victorian legislature after another insisted that the State must train its citizens. Training here had an immediate and an extended meaning. Beyond the need to ensure that future voters were capable of making informed judgements, the State had to prepare its charges as social subjects capable of self-regulation. While freedom of conscience was respected and parents could keep their child at a non-state school, henceforth they did so at their own expense. The needs of the State were uppermost and the state schools were its missionary centres of Arnoldian sweet-

ness and light, expected to inculcate ‘a new body of State doctrine and theology’ that the minister who introduced the leg-

islation expected to bring about ‘cultured and _ intellectual Victorians of the future’ who would worship in common at ‘the

shrines of one neutral tinted deity sanctioned by the State Department’.*°

This seems such an unlikely vision that it is worth taking it

seriously and considering the obstacles to its realization. It assumes the state system would be open to all whereas in fact it was clearly unacceptable to devout Catholics. It expects the state schools to grow and prosper at the expense of the religious and private ones, but the influx of children of the poor made them unacceptable to the socially exclusive middle class and thus deepened the divisions that a universal state system was meant

to bridge. It requires a public commitment to education and to shared intellectual values that was stifled by the centralization of school administration in the hands of a government department. It calls for a massive increase in educational provision that

was not available from public revenue. It posits a willing participation on the part of parents and pupils; in fact scarcely half the children in the colony satisfied the loose attendance requirements. It depends on properly trained staff using appro-

priate methods and materials whereas both departmental regulation and the practice of payment by results bound the hard-pressed, barely qualified teacher to drill overcrowded classes in the rudiments of literacy and numeracy, grammar and

geography. Higinbotham was under no illusion of the

immensity of the task that remained if the state system was to

fulfil its proper function. Writing in 1875 to the Ballarat Education League and Registration Society, he warned: ‘We are

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apt to suppose that a scheme of national education was fully provided for as soon as the Education Bill became law. The fact,

on the contrary, is that almost everything yet remains to be done.”*6

The defects of the state school of the 1870s are so notorious that the significance of Victoria’s educational arrangements 1s

easily lost. It was the first Australian colony to combine the three elements — secular, compulsory and free — into a system

of state education, and among the first in the world to do so. For all their deficiencies of provision, the settler societies channelled a much greater proportion of their resources into public schools than the European countries did and caught a higher proportion of children in the educational net. When the Australian colonies embarked on self-government, they lagged some way in education behind Canada and the United States, but they

rapidly closed the gap, with Victoria, the most prosperous of them, in the van. The number of state schools trebled between 1871 and 1876, and the increase in enrolled pupils was even greater. Over the same interval the church schools suffered an absolute decline in numbers and slipped from teaching a major-

ity of students to less than a quarter. Notwithstanding its problematic status, the state school had become a tangible pres-

ence in the city and the bush childhood. The task before its devotees was to make it work, to assemble the syllabus and texts that would equip those who passed through it with the knowledge and capacities expected of them, and to infuse its operation with the higher purpose of citizenship. The task was taken up by an unlikely newcomer to colonial liberal ranks, the fastidious and sensitive English scholar, Charles Henry Pearson.’

Pearson decides to waste his culture on the bush Pearson came late to the colonies, settling in 1871 at the age of forty-one — too late in his own life to adjust metropolitan ex-

pectations to local ways, too late in the life of his adopted homeland to achieve the success he craved. Just a few years younger than Higinbotham and Syme, he followed them at an interval of nearly twenty years. They had been young men from the provinces of the United Kingdom with few advantages other

than education and ambition when they made hard-headed decisions to try their luck abroad; they advanced as gold-rich Melbourne advanced from an extemporized frontier outpost to

142 A COLONIAL LIBERALISM

a major city with a fully developed mercantile, financial, political

and administrative structure that gave ample scope for their talents. Pearson, on the other hand, came as a middle-aged English gentleman with the prestige of a superior education, extensive travel and membership of an intellectual élite. Overqualified for ready acceptance in a place that set little store by such credentials, he found Melbourne uncongenial: ‘the place struck me then, and has always impressed me since, as the most inhospitable I have known’. He came out of dissatisfaction. He stayed because he had no alternative and because his services were useful to the liberal leaders until, his health broken and his usefulness at an end, he was cast adrift to end his days in London.?8

Pearson’s biographer, while sensitive to these disappointments, nevertheless claims for his subject the designation Professor of Democracy to affirm his ‘impressive consistency to a whole series of enduring projects’ concerned with the elevation

of a national culture. The colonists of Victoria also fixed the

title of Professor on the distinguished newcomer (in blithe disregard of the fact that he had resigned his chair a decade earlier), but with more latent connotations. ‘Professor Pearson’ carried the resonance of established seats of learning and familiarity with the advanced thinkers of the age; it also fitted ‘a perfect new chum in politics’ who was a ready target for caricature as ‘a purblind pedant’, abstracted, unworldly and impractical.3? He was located within a new formation in English intellectual life, the secularized clerisy that sought to make the universities a force for cohesion in a period of change and uncertainty. This

generation of intellectuals experienced the crisis of religious orthodoxy as a painful but necessary break with the past: in Pearson’s case that had meant rejection of the evangelical enthusiasm of the Clapham Sect. With high moral seriousness, they remained conscious of belonging to an elect: at Pearson’s

Oxtord college the undergraduate conversation was ‘Aristophanic’ and he transferred to another college. Rather than swear to beliefs they did not hold, some felt compelled to give

up academic careers in educational institutions that were still constituted as religious foundations: Pearson did not, though he offered his resignation, and he retained the traits of constant internal scrutiny, absolute candour, self-conscious rectitude, industry and good works that were characteristic of the puritan

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legacy. Applying formidable intellects to the problems of the day, they promoted educational reform away from the classical curriculum, towards the study of society: Pearson took first-

class honours in literae humaniores in 1852 and became Professor of Modern History at King’s College, London, in

1855. With daunting energy they read and wrote to a lay audience for whom they made few concessions, setting forth their arguments not in corner-page journalism but 15 000 words

or more at a time for the quarterly reviews, at corresponding length for the weeklies: Pearson contributed to several such publications and edited one of them. Acutely aware of the need to

reconcile order and progress, they took a keen interest in democratic developments at home and abroad: notebook in hand, Pearson travelled during the late 1850s and early 1860s to

France, Germany, Russia, the Balkans, Italy, Scandinavia, Poland and Australia. In 1867 during the national debate on suffrage extension, he, with A. V. Dicey, Leslie Stephen, James Bryce and other lights of liberalism, was one of the contributors to Essays on Reform.*° The object of these university liberals was to refute the argu-

ments of the leading anti-reform liberal, Robert Lowe, and demonstrate the acceptability, indeed the necessity, of democracy. Their case that good government was consistent with a

larger electorate rested heavily on a vision of educational enlightenment in which intellectuals such as themselves were to

play a central role in upholding morality and imbuing a selfgoverning people with responsibility and purpose; and given the necessarily conjectural character of the ‘leap in the dark’, they drew heavily on the experience of the white settler democracies

of north America and Australia. Pearson’s account ‘On the

Working of Australian Institutions’ was therefore of some significance, especially as Lowe had condemned the experiment with democracy in his former abode where, he claimed, the franchise was so despised that people hardly cared to ‘pick it out

of the gutter’ and men of education and prudence withdrew from public life. While Pearson regretted some antipodean excesses, he was able to reassure English readers that Australia still had three classes of railway carriage, that there was a place for men of breeding and education, that rates of school attendance were higher than in England, and consequently that ‘no

charge of misgovernment can fairly be sustained at present

144 A COLONIAL LIBERALISM

against the Australian colonies’. The 1867 Reform Act did extend the British franchise, though less broadly than the university liberals hoped. Wholly missing, however, was the supposedly concomitant transformation of national life that they

had envisaged as a projection of their values on to society at large. Few successfully made the transition into parliament. Most of their schemes for extending and popularizing the intellectual culture of the universities failed.*! Pearson was an early casualty of these frustrations. Even as a youth he was prone to self-absorption and melancholy. The joyless puritanism of the family home oppressed him, as did the

father’s irritation with a fourth son’s inability to settle on a career. This sense of failure colours Pearson’s ‘Story of My Life’,

where at each turn he reiterates that his father was ‘disappointed’, ‘bitterly disappointed’, ‘very much dismayed’, ‘profoundly irritated’, ‘in despair’. The church was no longer possible; he had no interest in the civil service; he talked briefly

of the army but the father set that choice aside on religious grounds; there was the law but the son had ‘doubts about the morality of the legal profession’; he won an Oxford fellowship but not one he could live on; he started medicine but poor health ruled that profession out. He had contracted pleurisy in his teens from a cold caught standing in the rain as a special constable during the Chartist scare of 1848. Pleurisy returned six years later while on a walking tour of Ireland and Pearson believed himself to be doomed: his companion recalled his patience was indomitable and his consideration for others quite exceptional, ‘but I thought at the time that his recovery was retarded by his disposition to take gloomy views of his condition, and for some time to abandon needlessly every hope of recovery’. In 1861 on

a visit to Italy, ‘I found myself perishing there by a sort of euthanasia’; in 1863 he was ‘severely out of health’ with a sluggish liver, haemorrhoids and nervous exhaustion. He kept ennui and depression at bay with travel and companionship. A sister

was a close childhood companion; at Oxford he established a close network of male friends based on shared accomplishments and interests. These coteries were a feature of undergraduate life

since the Union, the discussion group and the reading party offered a means of informal tuition to make good the inadequacies of the formal. For Pearson they were especially important.

In speeches at the Union he struck a lofty note with his sug-

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gestion that ‘politics should be viewed with religious awe’. Among his male companions he was animated, outspoken, droll; with others he was reserved, dry, even cynical. Graduation dispersed this companionship and threw him back on himself: ‘I have a kind of feeling that the mind must fight out its intellectual

perplexities and the heart know its own bitterness in secret.’ While his contemporaries advanced their careers, he felt all the more keenly his own lack of recognition, debility and poor prospects at King’s College, London: ‘my appointment there was worth nothing, led to nothing and was rather a bar to my getting anything else’. He threw it in for Australia. This first sojourn lasted just two years, from 1864 to 1866. Pearson headed for South Australia with the intention of going on to the land, and he did indeed establish a farm in the Flinders Ranges. Within a year he had let the property and was making a leisurely journey home. The reasons he gave for abandoning

the venture, drought and lack of capital, were undoubtedly important yet other settlers confronted them with greater resolve, and a further reason is surely suggested — the imprac-

ticality of his role as a gentleman farmer. Whatever the explanation for the departure, on his return to England he was more restless than ever. There were more travels, to Sweden, Spain and the United States (where he followed a well-beaten path to the congenial salons of Boston). There were publications,

a History of England during the Early and Middle Ages that was ambushed by that contumacious champion of Teutonic democracy, E. A. Freeman, and a folio of historical maps. There was a spell lecturing for the North of England Council for the Higher Education of Women. There was a college lectureship arranged by his friend Henry Sidgwick at Cambridge, where he

sickened over the drudgery of teaching history to dullards. There was no chair, nor prospect of one, and as Pearson walked the ‘dull roads and flat fields that surround Cambridge’, ‘the longing for the Australian bush came over me’. In 1871 he set his restlessness to verse: For count the gain of twenty, thirty years Passed in some fairy-land of life, divorced From all but trivial aims, and filled with love Worn to mechanic shapes or dulled with use: Can this outweigh in him that is true man The passionate craving after unknown worlds —

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New aether, where the languid pulse may beat Quicker, the brain teem, and the dream be true? Will he not, like Ulysses, turn again To the rough waves, and venture all to know The stern endeavour and the distant hope? Life is not in its pauses, but its toil.

In the same year his mother died, and he lost the sight of one eye. He resolved to quit England and ‘to combine a light literary life with farming’. Sidgwick put it differently: ‘Pearson has just left us to waste his culture on the Bush.’* Again the rural seclusion lasted less than two years. Shortly after taking up residence on his farm, Pearson met Edith Butler, the daughter of a neighbouring landowner, recently arrived from

England, and by the end of 1872 they married. He was fortytwo and she recalled him standing on his veranda to receive her first visit, stooped, bespectacled, his face ‘with its refined and perfectly cut features’ bearing ‘signs of physical and mental suffering’, his manner courteous, his conversation elevated. She was twenty, sheltered, vulnerable, decorous, and Pearson’s

biographer suggests that ‘it was her youth and her very inexperience and naivety that attracted him’. Within a year her inability to endure the summer heat drove them from the farm

— this method of dealing with her difficulties by departure would become habitual with Edith. So Pearson was driven back to teaching. At the end of 1873 he secured a post as lecturer in history and political economy at the University of Melbourne with an augmented salary of £500 per annum.®

The university and the ladies’ college The University, along with the Museum and the Library, was one of the public institutions established in the colony in the

early 1850s by the same circle of notables who drew up Victoria’s Constitution, and as part of the same preparation for self-government. Following hard on the heels of their counterparts in New South Wales, its founders expressed the pious hope that the University would, ‘under Divine Providence, go far to redeem their adopted country from the social and moral evils with which she is threatened’; to ‘reclaim the character, create the taste, form the manners and confirm the loyalty’ of a still inchoate settlement. From the beginning, however, it was a public foundation and strictly secular. The

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need for this ‘liberal and enlightened policy’ was explained at the inauguration ceremony in 1855: a country ‘rearing up’ its social fabric must avoid ‘the sectional antipathies, animosities, and prepossessions which afflict an older people’. Thus there

was no religious test on students. The professors could not be in holy orders and could not lecture, even outside the University, on religious topics. (Nor could they stand for parliament.) No more than a fifth of the governing body could be clergymen. The University that was established on the wasteland north of the city was a hybrid, its uncompleted quadrangle gesturing at the collegiate foundations of Oxford

and Cambridge, its lake and planted walks mimicking the arcadian model, its foundation chairs of classics and mathematics offset by chairs of natural and moral science, and the vocational

emphasis strengthened by the subsequent addition of law, engineering and medicine. The Chancellor, Judge Redmond Barry, thought of his University as a fortress of classical learning, like his own Trinity College in Dublin, and circulated among the guests at his wine parties bottles bearing appropriate

tags from Horace. The Professor of History and Political Economy, William Edward Hearn, had headed his year in classics at Trinity College, yet his great work was an application

of the principles of evolution to economic growth, entitled Plutology (1863) after Plutus, the god of wealth. (His insistence

on free trade and free competition, his contributions to the Argus and his alignment with the Legislative Council against the Assembly caused David Syme to dub him the Professor of Political Dodgery.) Hearn, however, was exceptional both for his productivity and his prominence in public affairs. Up

to the 1870s the University had taught barely 500 students of whom one-fifth had proceeded to a degree. It remained a straitened outpost of received learning.“ Pearson’s arrival coincided with an influx of undergraduates, a new generation born in the 1850s and raised locally who would infuse colonial liberalism with their nativism. Higher education was for them necessarily vocational: an entry to law for Alfred Deakin, John Gavan Duffy, Theodore Fink, H. B. Higgins, John Quick and William Shiels; a qualification to teach for the Suth-

erland brothers, Alexander and George. At the same time the University shaped lasting intellectual interests and served as a

junction, however imperfect, with the broader currents of

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speculative thought that flowed into late-nineteenth century liberalism. Pearson lectured in ancient history, the history of the British empire and political economy. Again he was at his best in the congenial company he assembled in a University Debating

Club, formed midway through 1874, where most of these students tested their rhetorical pinions under the chairman’s watchful eye. While he found Melbourne’s professors ‘essentially of the practical type and regarding knowledge only as a saleable commodity’, he had a ‘singularly pleasant set of pupils, more hard-working and more manly than the Cambridge men’. He failed to apply for reappointment at the end of 1874 because the disadvantages of the first factor outweighed the attractions

of the second. He had two options, a chair at the planned University of Adelaide and the headmastersip of a new secondary school for girls. The first carried an annual salary of £800, the second was

expected to amount with capitation fees to £1200, and with Edith expecting their first child, the money was a consideration.

The school attracted him also because of a sympathy for women’s education that went back to his time at King’s College when he had supported the teaching at Queen’s College, established in 1848 for higher female education. The new Melbourne foundation was the ‘Ladies College in connection with the Presbyterian Church in Victoria’ (afterwards the Presbyterian Ladies College) and was conceived as complementing the Scotch College for boys along the lines of similar academies in Scotland. PLC is commonly celebrated as the first school for girls in Australia to offer a serious academic curriculum in place of small private establishments offering instruction in ladylike accomplishments such as art, music, dancing and deportment. It was not. Alfred Deakin’s sister Catherine, its first matriculant, was

preceded by more than a hundred females who presented for the matriculation examination from among the more than a score of private ladies colleges. These establishments, run by women, observed the conventional distinctions of class and gender: they protected their charges from social contamination, they witheld male knowledge and cultivated an ideal type of

femininity that was dependent, chaste and domesticated; nevertheless, they pushed out the boundaries of female learning to incorporate such subjects as modern languages and literature.‘

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The crucial shift initiated with the establishment of PLC was the supercession of female control of female education in new

structures that institutionalized male control and masculine intellectual rituals. Unlike the campaign for women’s education in Britain, where women themselves played the leading role, the movement in Victoria was conducted by proxy — it occluded female agency. In the case of PLC, a male council constituted by the men of the Presbyterian Assembly appointed a principal, the Reverend George Tait, to administer the school, and Charles

Pearson to conduct the tuition. He was some way in advance of his patrons in his conception of women’s education and the arguments he marshalled to justify it in his inaugural address on The Higher Culture of Women delivered on 11 February 1875 have to be read accordingly. In explaining that the curriculum of PLC would approximate as closely as possible to the curriculum of an equivalent boys’ school, he referred to the irreversible changes that affected women as well as men. A fixed occupational hierarchy was giving way to meritocratic achieve-

ment, patriarchy to rights over person and property, ready acceptance of religious authority to reliance on personal judge-

ment, and it was necessary to ‘fit women to understand that knowledge is taking up new ground every day’. He was at pains to reassure his listeners that subjects such as mathematics and

science would in no way unfit his charges for the duties that the great majority would assume. On the contrary, providing that they did not overtax their physical powers, the studies would make them more companionable helpmeets and more stimulating parents — thus his advice to girls that they should not succumb in later life to frivolities but should always have ‘at least one serious and constant work in hand’. Turning to the male portion of his audience, he again adapted Robert Lowe’s phrase to the tremendous indirect influence that women exercised over ‘children, husbands and lovers’, and enjoined the men to ‘educate our rulers’. Rather than aiming at an elimination of the sexual division, Pearson wanted to redefine it to meet new circumstances.*”

The new Ladies College in East Melbourne prospered and enrolments reached nearly 200 by the end of 1875. Pearson had to modify his system of teaching advanced subjects by lectures, and he had to give up part of the day to the traditional female

accomplishments of music and drawing, but PLC quickly

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distinguished itself in the competition for matriculation results that was a feature of the Victorian secondary schools. But again his career was cut short, this time by a dispute with the principal and council. At the end of 1876 Pearson delivered a lecture at the Emerald Hill Mechanics’ Institute in which he advocated a

progressive land tax, a plank of the liberal platform for the approaching election. The Age was delighted, the pastoralists who made up a significant section of the school’s clientele were not. There was a sharp drop in the number of boarders enrolled for the new year. On 19 February 1877 Pearson appeared again at a public meeting, this time in the Princess Theatre with the liberal leader, Graham Berry. Next day Tait, as principal of the school, demanded the headmaster’s resignation. Pearson countered with an offer to the council that he would refrain from

further political advocacy. Tait ‘inadvertently omitted to mention the offer to the council’ and suggested a reduction of Pearson’s salary. Pearson resigned.‘ It was an 1gnominious entry into politics, one that his oppo-

nents often threw at him. ‘Is it not well known that the honourable gentleman struck and left the ladies’ college because he could not get a higher screw?’ Such wild allegations wounded Pearson, who would reply with long, unreliable explanations to restore his pride. He admitted that he had appeared at Emerald

Hill in response to requests from ‘a certain body of electors’ who wanted him to stand for parliament. Those electors were liberals, mobilizing anew around a programme that the Age laid down as ‘constitutional reform, protection, a land tax, respon-

sible government in fact, not in name, and other kindred objects’. On his first Australian visit Pearson had been unim-

pressed by the Victorian liberals. Predisposed by orthodox free-trade English liberalism to condemn the misguided enthusiasts for the tariff, his prejudices were confirmed by well-to-do

Melbourne hosts who left him with the impression ‘that Higinbotham was an inspired fanatic, and that his associates were rogues’. Observing Victorian politics more closely from 1874, he quickly revised that judgement. The constitution that allowed the undemocratic upper house to frustrate the popular

will was ‘a grotesque parody’ of the English constitution. Higinbotham, who by now had succumbed to isclated intransigence in despair at the refusal of his former colleagues to force a resolution of the constitutional impasse, was a man of the

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highest character. ‘His one fatal fault is that he prefers the position of a free lance .. .”4 For Pearson to avoid that deficiency, he would have to work with the liberals and swallow his scruples. The chief of these was continued opposition to trade protection, and his acceptance of the tariff was rendered all the more imperative by dependence on David Syme. Upon arrival in Melbourne, Pearson had sought to augment his University salary with journalism, and offered material to the Argus, in which an old Oxford associate, Robert

Murray Smith, held an interest. When the submissions were returned as too liberal, he began writing for the Age, a newspaper he had described in the earlier essay “On the Working of Australian Institutions’ as “sometimes rather unscrupulous’. Pearson was a fluent and graceful contributor of leading articles, prized accordingly by Syme who kept him on a longer lead than the harassed staff members and did not expect of him the same absolute adherence to fiscal rectitude that he imposed at this time on the young Alfred Deakin. Even so, the Englishman had to reconcile himself to the sine qua non of Victorian liberalism. So from the moment he contemplated parliamentary candida-

ture, Pearson qualified his empty declaration ‘I am myself a Freetrader’ with the proviso that until the land monopoly was broken and migration stripped of all public assistance, he was opposed to a unilateral application of free trade to local industry. He did not subscribe to all points of the liberal programme. He

opposed payment of members of parliament and he rejected Syme’s current enthusiasm (and the only point of the People’s Charter yet to be realized in Victoria), annual elections.*° This did not lessen the outrage his apostasy stirred or reduce the abuse of a ‘quondam professor and teacher of ladies’ who

had become ‘a trading politician’ and allowed himself to be ‘bossed by a newspaper’. The young Alfred Deakin, who was present at the Princess Theatre meeting in February 1877 and marked Pearson’s speech as the moment of his own delivery from conservatism, recalled that no one was so constantly or so rancorously assailed by the conservative press. The Age was not surprised: “The wealthy lower orders do not easily forgive what they are pleased to consider an act of desertion from their side.’ Pearson, however, seems to have been taken aback to find ‘I am left alone by almost all my old friends’. Writing afterwards for an English readership about Victorian politics, he identified the

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tyranny of the minority as the chief hazard of colonial democracy. Society was not big enough to tolerate disagreement on public issues; wealth was despotic in the hands of ‘two or three hundred half-educated men who find their projects of moneygetting interfered with’ and who, ‘from the habit of rule over dependants, are disposed to bluster down all opposition in the political world also’. Consequently, ‘It is professional ruin for almost any barrister, doctor or schoolmaster in Melbourne to express sympathy with the Liberal Party.”>!

Following his Princess Theatre appearance, Pearson was invited to stand as the liberal candidate for Boroondara, an elec-

torate based on the spacious suburbs of Hawthorn and Kew, where the readers of the Argus outnumbered those of the Age.

The sitting member was George Paton Smith, the former employee and now the bitter enemy of David Syme. While the liberals swept into office, Smith narrowly held his seat with 720 votes to Pearson’s 650. The defeated candidate affirmed his rep-

utation, however, in a spirited reiteration of the liberal programme at a post-election rally: he singled out the need for a progressive land tax, social reform and a complete system of free education from the state school to the university. The Age quickly took up his lead, calling the existing educational arrange-

ments a ‘costly failure’, and suggesting the new minister for public instruction should ‘seek such assistance outside of the department as may enable him to carry into effect the intentions

of the Legislature’. The government complied. Within the month Pearson accepted a royal commission at a fee of £1000 to inquire into the state of public education and suggest the best means of improving it.>

A blueprint for a civic culture The project was contrived. Pearson’s one-man inquiry held no formal meetings and published no evidence — all that issued from eight months of work was a series of recommendations based on Pearson’s observations and conclusions. Furthermore,

since he was instructed to report on the ‘best and most economic’ means of improving education, he had to temper his recommendations with ‘what was likely to be carried out as well as what was actually best’. Nevertheless, he was ardent in his belief in the reformative power of education: ‘the country will

be more and more educated, more and more politically

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intelligent, and also more and more liberal’. And he assumed the sacred principles of secular, compulsory and free: I need not here go over the old ground that an educated community is on the whole more moral, more law-abiding, and more capable of

work than an uneducated one ... What I wish to point out is that democratic institutions such as our own make compulsory education

a necessity ...

He therefore proposed a series of changes to improve the operation of the state schools and enforce attendance; he urged abolition of University fees, the admission of women and other changes to make it more relevant to the needs of the colony; and to bridge the gap between elementary and higher education he wanted the establishment of state high schools. By these means a ladder of educational opportunity would be raised to elevate the coming generation.» Compulsory education meant state control. There was room in Pearson’s scheme for private elementary schools, providing they did not fob children off with substandard teaching or allow evasion of attendance requirements, and there was room for private secondary schools since these could impart knowledge it was not the State’s province to impart. Pearson also wished to decentralize the state system by strengthening local boards of advice. The boards, constituted by the 1872 Act, were lifeless vestiges of the earlier local committees that had operated under the voluntary system and they proved incapable of resuscitation

for the simple but telling reason that parents would carry no part of the financial responsibility that was now assumed by the State. Pearson was also conscious of tension between teaching

as a calling and the rigid structure of control imposed when teachers became public servants. Within these circumscribed limits, however, he affirmed the authority of the State. Attendance requirements were to be increased and more rigorously enforced; the State was to prescribe syllabus and textbooks; it was to train and licence teachers; inspection and promotion were

to be made uniform and regular. This shift of schooling from

individual and voluntary to public control was a common pattern in the nineteenth-century construction of the modern State. Education was stamped with a bureaucratic imprint, applying explicit rules and formal procedures in the application of universalistic criteria, creating an orderly hierarchy of control

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with specialization of function, and affirming impersonal performance of responsibilities. Indeed the educational State served as a prototypical bureaucratic structure that prepared its charges for subsequent structures of control. Especially striking,

therefore, is the degree of centralization of the Victorian and other colonial Australian education systems. Unlike Canada and the United States, for example, where local authorities operated under the watchful eye of central administrators, education here was a function exercised directly by the State. Pearson himself reyected the Canadian system for its lack of uniformity.** Such state control was not simply imposed on an unwilling

population. It met the growing demand for equality of opportunity in an increasingly meritocratic society. For a growing number it also offered an apparent solution to the problem of religious difference. The secular issue remained contentious after the passage of the 1872 Act. Higinbotham’s last speech in parliament, in 1876, raised the problem of school

texts containing religious passages offensive to Jews. The minister ordered their replacement by new texts from which all traces of religious dogma were removed, so that a reference

to ‘the Christian mother’ was altered to ‘the frantic mother’ and ‘the Great Reformer John Wycliffe’ became ‘the celebrated John Wycliffe’. Pearson was not immune from the prejudices of anti-sectarian sectarianism. Like Higinbotham, he envisaged

a future when ‘the children of this country’ would ‘sit on the same bench and have together all the associations of boyhood, and should learn under such circumstances to respect

and love each other’. Like Syme, he could also allege that ‘The Catholic Church is intriguing all over the world’ to set one part of the country against another. Liberals such as Pearson used the language and values of an enlightened Prot-

estantism to make the transition from a society unified by faith to one joined in citizenship. He appreciated the absurdity of expurgating school texts of religious passages and would

have preferred that such items be omitted altogether rather than mutilated. Equally, while he wanted children to learn the facts on which Christians agreed, he could see the impracticality of teaching Christianity if teachers could not speak what they

believed.55

There was an emphasis throughout the Report on modern, practical education. The English classical model, whose influence

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Pearson detected in schools like Scotch College and Melbourne

Grammar, was impractical for the government high school, which should concentrate on modern languages, English, mathematics and science. Similarly, Oxford, Cambridge and Trinity College Dublin presented the wrong model for the University: it needed to develop ‘practical sciences’ such as agricultural and

veterinary sciences, forestry and technology. Pearson’s own experience of Rugby was that there was too much concentration on Latin and Greek, especially on the useless cultivation of an artificial fluency in prose and verse composition; at Oxford he regretted ‘the flagrant inadequacy’ of a curriculum confined to classical literature, ancient history, outmoded philosophy and smatterings of pre-modern science.*® He was to the fore of a reaction against the classical curriculum. Familiarity with the classics had long been a distinguishing

mark of the social and political élite, with the Augustan age serving the eighteenth century as a model of quiet decorum and scrupulous avoidance of excess. Following Grote, whose twelvevolume History of Greece appeared between 1846 and 1856, the mid-Victorian era recast the classics in a rationalist mould. Ath-

ens, rather than Rome, became the centre of attention and Athenian democracy the highpoint of ancient civilization. The Platonic idea of government by the educated had an obvious appeal to liberals who, like Grote, saw the example of Athens as a model for the art of self-government where liberty, prosperity and artistic achievement flourished so long as Attic rigour

prevailed over irrationalism and particularism. The cult of Hellenism provided men such as Higinbotham with a code of private manners and public conduct, joined by a common notion of ‘good form’ that was accessible to all men of good taste and cultivation. Thus the colonists cultivated an urbane civility of tone in their public oratory and imitated classical forms in their public architecture. Parliament House combined a stock repertoire of neoclassical styles that appealed to Palladian principles,

the great Roman Doric portico yielding to a series of richly embellished interior spaces. So, too, the Library, the Customs

House — later the Post Office and the Law Courts — conformed to classical principles, their carefully proportioned stonework, chaste columns and restrained decoration in contrast

to the gothic excess that characterized so many of the city churches.>’

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Others were inclined to regard the classics as an affectation irrelevant to modern needs. The Age used classical allusions in the confidence that its readers were familiar with them. Syme even placed on the pediment of the Age building a statue of Mercury, who slew Argus. Despite this rare lapse into humour, he was adamant that public institutions should not be mauso-

leums. The Age therefore maintained a watch over Barry’s antique enthusiasms at the University, where it welcomed the early introduction of vocational studies; and it sought to ensure that the Library, the Museum and the Gallery should be accessible to the ordinary citizen whom it conceived to be an earnest autodidact eager to partake of the higher culture. So too Pearson, on his arrival in Australia, found that “The eye positively hungers, after a time, for something better than the builder’s

Gothic or bastard Palladian of our colonial structures’. The

English university liberals had complemented their 1867 Essays

on Reform with Essays on a Liberal Education in which they made dethronement of the classics a central issue. If, as Henry Sidgwick contended, the object of a liberal education was to impart the highest culture, then classical wisdom was available in translation and grammar could be taught just as effectively through modern languages. Pearson (who would help edit an edition of Juvenal for use in schools) suggested in his Report that a comparison of Johnson, the most Latinate of English writ-

ers, with Macaulay, the most French, would show the

superiority of French as the basis of language studies in the high school.>8

Pearson thus proposed to eliminate the two great spiritual dis-

ciplines, hebraism and hellenism, that Matthew Arnold considered necessary if anarchy were to be averted in the aftermath of the British Reform Act of 1867 by an induction of the newly enfranchised masses into the life of the nation. What did he suggest might be put in their place? The problem of order had concerned him from his youthful experience as a special constable during the Chartist descent on London in 1848. While

he claimed to have no fears of the innate good sense of the Spitalfields weavers who marched in perfect order to the great rally on Kennington Common, he was convinced that tens of thousands of thieves, prostitutes and loafers were waiting for the opportunity to loot and destroy. The same fears are apparent in the Report when he considers the problem of Melbourne’s

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‘gutter children’. Hitherto, he notes, the department of public instruction had abstained from sweeping these children into the schools lest they impair their tone. Yet he was convinced that a portion of them, even the children of drunkards and the brothers and sisters of thieves and prostitutes, could ‘gradually imbibe notions of order, cleanliness and good taste’. So they should be enrolled and reclaimed, and only those who proved truant or refractory were to be consigned to reformatories. It is apparent that for Pearson education was first and foremost a means of instilling the vital capacity of self-regulation.

In his first annual report as headmaster of PLC he had paid particular attention to conduct and insisted that ‘till that disci-

pline is self-maintained, ull our pupils are a law to themselves ..., I shall regard our work as only half done’. Since the child was an incomplete social subject, it must submit to the process of schooling for its own good. Within the school there should be a firm and reliable regimen. The teachers should be properly trained (he proposed a teacher’s college in place of the existing system of apprenticeship) and they should not be paid

by results (since this induced mechanical rote learning). In assessing a teacher’s management of a class, the inspector should

award one mark for careful rolls, punctual attendances, neat dress and clean copy books; a second mark for absence of noise,

whispering and foot shuffling; and a third for good manners and a sense of honour. He wanted less rote learning and chant-

ing of lists and tables, more individual reading aloud (an American practice he thought conducive to articulacy and confidence). Corporal punishment should be administered by the headmaster. We have here a regimen to instil willing obedience by anchoring the conditions of governance into the selves of the governed. Or, as the principal of the teacher’s training institution put it in the standard manual, ‘we are justified in resorting to rewards and punishments in our government’ of ‘our Schools, the little states that we are called on to manage’.>?

Pearson was singularly unfortunate in the timing of his Report. At the end of 1877, as he concluded his investigations and began to draft his findings, the Legislative Council laid aside

an appropriation bill that included provision for the payment of members. Victoria had entered its second constitutional dead-

lock and there was little prospect that the government would proceed with such an ambitious programme of educational

158 A COLONIAL LIBERALISM

reform; the minister indicated as much when the Report was tabled in March. The changes that Pearson sought therefore had to depend on piecemeal measures that he and other ministers for education implemented subsequently. There were some changes to the University, a teacher’s college was established at the end of the 1880s, attendance requirements were increased in 1890 and greater effort was made to enforce them. High schools, substantial curricular reform and abolition of payment by results had to wait. The lasting significance of Pearson’s work lay less in tangible results than in the conception of state education that he proclaimed, in the viable fiction of the common school and the educational ladder, in the pedagogical mission of the educational state. His mission completed, he seemed likely to return to England.

Then the government bought the retirement of its whip with the lucrative post of parliamentary librarian, and Pearson was brought into the Assembly as member for Castlemaine. His salary, £300 a year, was far from sufficient and from this time Pearson was a regular contributor to the Age. The opposition taunts were predictable: “He is simply thrust on the Premier by the proprietor of the Age newspaper, whose hand is the hand behind the throne.’ The relationship was less simple than that. Pearson, Graham Berry and David Syme were brought together by a constitutional crisis as profound as that of the 1860s, and it was far from clear who would control the forces it released.

The second constitutional deadlock Addressing the electors of Brighton on the eve of the election at which they turned him out, George Higinbotham had predicted that there would be another deadlock. Cries of ‘No, no’ from the audience. ‘Yes,’ he insisted, ‘we shall have another deadlock just as soon as the people of this country have real representatives — and that second deadlock will be our last.’ Great cheering. The last crisis, he continued, had affected the

whole people; the consequences of the next would be more restricted. Its ‘necessary inconveniences’ would be felt by those in the metropolis ‘disposed to aid the Legislative Council in its revolutionary designs’.®!

The revival of the liberals came about through a renewed mobilization of popular support. A Reform League emerged from Ballarat in 1875 and spread its message of land reform

THE REALIZATION OF CITIZENSHIP 159

through the country districts. A downturn in urban industry stimulated the formation of a Protection League in the same year. They came together as the National Reform and Protection

League at the beginning of 1877 in an impressive electoral organization of more than one hundred branches to enrol voters and conduct pre-selection ballots. Two-thirds of the seats in the Assembly changed hands in the election of May 1877 and there was a high proportion of the self-made ‘new men’ as had been

prominent in the previous liberal triumph — contractors, auctioneers, estate agents and other small businessmen — among

the fifty-seven members who crowded on the ministerial side of the chamber. Graham Berry was hardly new (his parliamentary career began in 1861) but his origins as a storekeeper, his

blunt, forceful style and political prescience made him an appropriate leader. There was a general expectation that con-

frontation with the unreformed Legislative Council was inevitable and Berry was anxious to choose the best ground. His ministry’s first measure was a tax on landholdings, necessary for fiscal reasons as revenue from land sales stagnated, desirable in radical eyes as a way of ‘bursting up’ the big estates — hence the enthusiasm for headmaster Pearson’s first political speech.

But here Berry disappointed Pearson and other enthusiasts by framing too flat a tax, and the merchants in the Council were happy to pass it.® Showdown came on another issue, payment of members of parliament. The practice had begun as a temporary measure in 1870, extended in 1874 and now due for renewal. As many of the liberal members were dependent on these payments, the government included them in its first appropriation bill at the end of 1877. This the Council refused to pass. On 8 January 1878 the government retaliated by dismissing several hundred public

servants (including heads of departments and county court judges) who were popularly regarded as friends of the Council. The day became known as “Black Wednesday’, Thursday having

been named after the devastating bushfire of 1851, Friday reserved for another in 1939. What the conservatives regarded as an atrocity, the popular party celebrated as an act of justified

retribution and there was talk of further sanctions — one minister even suggested deportation of the Council members to New South Wales. Then, amidst agitation reminiscent of 1865, there followed a recapitulation of the earlier debate on the limits

160 A COLONIAL LIBERALISM |

of responsible government, except that the messages between Government House and London were this time expedited by :

the availability of the telegraph. Besieged by outraged con-

servatives, the Governor had already established that his |

signature on a message to parliament recommending a money | vote was a formality the responsibility for which rested with | his ministers — indeed the Permanent Under-Secretary of the Colonial Office had advised him that ‘it is now held here that the power of self-misgovernment conceded to the colonies has hardly any conceivable limitations’. But in the aftermath of ‘Black Wednesday’, the Secretary of State for the Colonies censured the Governor for allowing dismissals, and insisted that he was to exercise discretion rather than rely on the advice of his ministers: ‘For anything which he may do or decline to do the Governor is accountable to the Sovereign whom he represents, and not directly to the community over which he is appointed to preside.’ So much for responsible government. The legislative deadlock was resolved in March 1878 by the

passage of two separate bills; the constitutional deadlock continued. The government proposed that all money bills passed by the Assembly could be delayed by the Council for no more than a month, while other disputed legislation should be put to a plebiscite, a scheme that Syme supported and Pearson justified in learned speeches replete with historical and comparative references. The Council remained obdurate in defence of its full legislative powers. Berry then announced that he would go to England and seek reform of the constitution by imperial legislation, again with the support of the Age since Pearson was to accompany the Premier. This two-man embassy, the aspirateless

Premier and the refined backbencher, departed at the end of 1878 (followed by the editor of the Argus on an unofficial counter-embassy) and spent fruitless weeks in London publicizing the Victorian predicament. The most that the British government would do was suggest that the Victorian parliament should be guided by the usages of the imperial parliament. Berry returned to a hero’s welcome with the news that he had brought ‘Peace with Honour’; Pearson followed after a fruitless endeavour to arrange a Westminster debate on the subject.*

At this point, as a poor harvest and difficulties in a public loan flotation exacerbated the effects of a contraction in private investment caused by the land tax and ‘Black Wednesday’, dif-

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ferences opened between Berry and Syme. The Age was strongly

critical of Berry’s upward revision of the tariff late in 1879, arguing that it was a revenue rather than a protectionist measure, indiscriminate in its incidence and dangerous to the liberal alli-

ance between town and country because it would antagonize farmers. Berry’s alteration of the government’s constitutional proposals also angered the Age since Syme and Pearson believed that the new suggestion of a nominated upper house (like that of New South Wales) distracted attention from the vital question of the plebiscite. Berry, for his part, denounced the ‘attempt at dictation’ by ‘the proprietor of a certain journal’, and when the Assembly rejected his constitutional bill, called an election. The disunited liberals lost power to James Service, a moderate free trader, but even he could not carry a reform bill. Another elec-

tion returned Berry, who finally reached agreement with the Council — though even then, at the very end of the negotiations, because Alfred Deakin, recently ‘whirled into politics’ by the Age, revealed his fatal facility for compromise and broke ranks. The property qualification for membership of the upper house

was reduced, the membership increased from thirty to forty-

two, the constituency enlarged to about half that of the Assembly, the term of office cut from ten years to six, and provision made for double dissolution. The Council’s legislative powers were left intact.© While the Age and its leader writer put the best possible construction on the outcome, this was effectively the end of a cycle of mobilization around an advanced and comprehensive liberal programme. Berry’s failure to pitch the land tax directly at the wealthy pastoralists was a signal rebuff to radical agrarianism. Syme’s criticism of the 1879 tariff revision signalled the high-

water mark of protectionism. The embassy compromised Higinbotham’s vital principle of self-government and the changes to the Legislative Council strengthened its legitimacy as a brake on the popular lower house. In the course of the dead-

lock the radical wing of the National Reform and Protection League accused Syme of betraying liberalism out of a fear of the consequences of the crisis for his newspaper and a desire to ‘hang on the skirts of the aristocracy’. The Melbourne Punch, which celebrated the inglorious History of the Victorian Embassy 1n satire and caricature, dubbed him Ananias, the man who sold his property but laid only part of the proceeds at the apostles’ feet.

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Sometimes its cartoonists portrayed him as the grim and overbearing ‘Boss Syme’; sometimes he was transmuted by artist’s licence into Ann Anias, an elderly scold in shawl and poke bonnet adorned with the feathers of the lyre bird. The combined effect was to assert his self-seeking mendacity, a charge that gained plausibility on the ebb-tide of the second constitutional crisis. He continued to urge land settlement, encouragement of local industry and various other pet projects. He never again orchestrated an all-out assault on the rich and powerful.

Minister for Public Instruction After his return from the embassy in England, Pearson resumed dependence on the Age for the bulk of his income. For several leading articles a week he earned an average of £1000 a year, money that was needed to supplement a parliamentary salary in order to support a wife and three daughters. He remained the member for Castlemaine until 1883 and then transferred to the metropolitan electorate of East Bourke. He held office in the

Berry ministry of 1880-1 as minister without portfolio (or salary), lured by an unredeemed promise of appointment as Agent-General to London, and in a conservative-liberal coalition from 1886-90 as education minister. In government or out, he could not disguise his distaste for the expediency of Victorian politics, but all efforts to find a way back to England were fruitless. As he confessed in a letter to a former Cambridge colleague, ‘I am handed over to journalism and Colonial politics, and must abide by the fate which has been of my own making’.°”

In both capacities he pursued educational goals. From 1875 to 1880 he was an elected member of the University Council where, with like-minded reformers such as John Bromby (who had been succeeded at Melbourne Grammar by Higinbotham’s son-in-law, E. E. Morris), Alexander Morrison of Scotch College and M. H. Irving of Hawthorn Grammar, he contested the unyielding traditionalism of Redmond Barry and his circle. The ‘School Master element’, as the old guard dubbed them, secured the establishment of chairs of chemistry, physics and engineering. Their great victory came in 1879 when they carried the admission of women. This was the culmination of a campaign lasting a decade by men on behalf of their daughters, sisters and pupils. Bromby had secured the entry of women to the matriculation examination in 1871; in 1872 his daughter Eliza passed

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with credit. Charles Gavan Duffy’s son John moved in the Legislative Assembly that women be admitted to the University in 1875, the same year his sister Harriet passed matriculation. After his successor at PLC gave notice that he wished to present two young ladies, Pearson proposed the successful resolution in the University Council on 20 October 1879. His reasons, as set out in the Report on the State of Public Education, followed from

the conception of female education advanced earlier in The Higher Culture of Women. Whether women earned their living or remained confined to the domestic sphere, they could only benefit from higher education. There should be safeguards. In subjects such as medicine women would need separate tuition, so his resolution kept that branch of study closed. Music, mathematics and logic were suitable for mixed audiences and could be taught fearlessly providing separate entrances and seating were maintained. Literature and history presented difficulties and females might need to be excluded from lectures on Shakespeare, Voltaire and the moral tone of imperial Rome. In 1880 he piloted legislation through parliament to ratify the change and reform the government of the University.®

Pearson was also in the forefront of liberal efforts to take

control of the major institutions that defined the public culture

of the colony. The chief of these, the Public Library, was another fiefdom of Redmond Barry, senior member of the committee appointed to establish it in 1853 and chairman of its board of trustees for the next quarter-century. Barry conceived the Library as a vital adjunct to the ‘civilization and expansion

of the public mind according as it becomes charged with the exercise of political privileges’; it was to ‘record the achievements of men who helped us to achieve enlightened moderation and liberty’, and to ‘help to make good citizens, useful and faithful subjects of Her Majesty’. He supervised the construction of the original library, with its Corinthian columns and moulded parapet, that was opened on the Swanston Street site in 1856; the extension of the main reading room into an ornate arcade with seating for 650 users, and the addition of the massive portico in 1870. He began the collection with the celebrated order

for all the works cited in Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (a method of acquisition copied from John Quincy Adams, at once honouring and appropriating the parent culture) and later the references used by Hume and Buckle. He

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personally superintended the unpacking and arrangement on the shelves of the first consignment of books. The Melbourne Public Library — Barry referred to it as the National Library — became one of the colonial prodigies that

visitors were expected to admire. You entered a vestibule or Hall of Busts, including a marble bust of Sir Redmond (as he became in 1860) presented by a group of subscribers who styled themselves simply “The Colonists of Victoria’. To the left and the right opened the Museum and Art Gallery, filled with plaster

casts of classical statuary (so many limbs were lost in transit that the effect was likened to a battleground at dusk), coins, antiquities and reproductions of acknowledged masterpieces. Upstairs in the reading room the books, 60 000 of them by 1870, were set out on open shelves so that the reader had free access to the entire collection. ‘A fine building, not quite finished, but replete with all sorts of curiosities, busts, paintings, statuary and

vast quantity of books,’ noted H. B. Higgins shortly after his arrival in Melbourne in 1870. History, geography, science, the arts and manufactures, biography, oratory, belles lettres, classics — all were present in the best octavo editions wherever possible. The collection excluded ‘books of an injurious tendency’, works of ‘a purely ephemeral description’, and those ‘usually classified as works of fiction and of the imagination’. Although after 1869 the Library received all local publications by copyright law, it made little effort to collect Australiana. In short, it was a monument to received good taste, a tangible expression of a literary

canon that judged books by their didactic power for decorous

elevation.°?

Whereas Barry and his fellow trustees regarded popular taste with frank contempt, the liberals sought to mediate between the cultural needs and the interests of the democratic majority. During the 1870s and 1880s, as public institutions came under attack

for their rarified and privileged character, the liberals raised questions of control and access. The question of control concerned the purposes such institutions were meant to serve. As early as 1870 the Botanical Gardens were roundly criticized for the emphasis of their Director, Ferdinand von Mueller, on the collection and cultivation of native and exotic species for sys-

tematic study and commercial propagation. The Duffy government confined von Mueller to the herbarium and appointed a new curator to beautify the Gardens. At stake here

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were two forms of utilitarianism, the scientific and practical util-

ity of von Mueller giving way to ‘a more extended sphere of usefulness’ with pleasing walks through lawns and garden beds’ of ‘art skilfully applied to the embellishment of nature’.”°

An analogous change occurred in the mechanics institutes, those voluntary initiatives so valued in the middle of the century

for the diffusion of useful knowledge, now eclipsed by the stronger attraction of commercial entertainments. George Higinbotham was a patron of the Brighton Mechanics’ Institute in the 1860s. In 1887 when opening the Brighton Free Library, he remarked that its predecessor had foundered on two unsound principles. The first was that it had been ‘an institution established by one class of the community for the benefit of another class’. The second was that the Institute had aimed at ‘instructing the labouring classes rather than providing entertainment and amusement for them’. He now insisted that ‘so long as the majority of the readers preferred light and entertaining literature to serious, difficult and instructive literature, that prevailing taste must and ought to be consulted’. His one qualification was that the library should strictly exclude ‘the realistic French novel, and the newspapers, English or colonial, which sought popular-

ity by stimulating a taste for materials got from the police or divorce courts’. (Two years later, when a consignment of French novels was seized from E. W. Cole, Pearson determined that the work of Zola and de Maupassant was immoral.) With that remaining moral caveat, liberals believed that popular taste should

prevail. The Age got the best of both worlds by publishing lengthy reports of sensational divorce cases alongside depreca-

tion of their ‘unsavoury’ nature.) In other fields of cultural policy, also, the liberals sought to democratize public institutions. Thus the Age criticized the scientific museum, hiacked to the University in 1856 by the idiosyncratic Professor McCoy, for the esoteric character of its collection and described Barry’s

Library as ‘a kind of appanage to his own drawingroom’. It singled out for condemnation the absence of fiction, Australian

material, newspapers and periodicals. After Barry’s death in 1880, liberal appointees to the board of trustees became more influential. Pearson became a trustee in 1881, Syme in 1889.7! The question of access turned not so much on actual exclusion

since most of the institutions were open free of charge to all who wished to use them — indeed the Age joined in complaints

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about the derelicts who took shelter in the Library reading room by day, and the scandalous behaviour that took place in public gardens by night — as on hours of opening. Since most wageearners worked six days a week, their capacity to make use of

such institutions required that they be open on Sundays. Higinbotham raised the issue of Sunday opening on several occasions in the 1870s: on each occasion the Sabbatarians prevailed. In 1883 Pearson was one of the trustees of the Library, Museum and Gallery who resolved that the Museum

and Gallery be opened on Sunday afternoons. The Age applauded. Higinbotham chaired a town hall meeting of the Sunday Liberation Society to welcome the decision. On Sunday

6 May 5000 patrons flocked to the Museum and Gallery. Pearson led the defence of the trustees’ action in the subsequent parliamentary debate as an enlargement of freedom and a victory

for rational recreation: ‘so far as I know anything about the past, the Sabbatarian principle has been strongest precisely where society was darkest and people most ignorant’. But the upholders of the fourth commandment had the numbers and

closed the Museum and Gallery for a further twenty years. Characteristically, Pearson’s interest waned after the controversy. Change and conflict held his interest, routine quickly palled.”2

He faced the same forces of resistance in his determination as Minister of Public Instruction to resist the introduction of scripture teaching to state schools. The secularism embodied in the 1872 Education Act had to be defended in the 1880s against two assaults: from the Catholics, for whom it was discriminatory, and the Protestant evangelicals, for whom it was a regrettable safeguard against Catholic separatism. The determination of the Catholics to maintain their own schools, which they did after 1872 only at great cost and then for only half their adherents, soon threatened the principle of universality on which the Act was based. The Catholics made a strenuous effort to obtain state aid by parliamentary activity in the early 1880s, when they once again held the balance of power in the Assembly. The Irish baronet Sir Bryan O’Loghlen, who replaced Berry as Premier in 1881 with their support, established a royal commission to investigate Catholic educational grievances: to deflect charges of

bias, he asked Higinbotham to chair it, but Higinbotham

declined ‘on account of certain distinct views which he holds

THE REALIZATION OF CITIZENSHIP 167

with reference to the purport and scope of the commission’. The eventual recommendation of the Catholic commissioners that the state support Catholic schools was forestalled by the rout of the ministry in the elections of 1883, when the Age orchestrated a Protestant liberal defence of the Education Act.” This defeat of the Catholics encouraged the Protestants to step up their own campaign. An interdenominational Bible in State Schools League campaigned for the local boards of advice to be empowered to prescribe readings from the scripture as part of the ordinary curriculum. The new coalition ministry held firm to the provisions of the Act that limited any religious instruction to the end of the school day. When a National Scriptural Edu-

cation League revived the demand at the end of the decade, Pearson was adamant. His arguments mixed considerations of prudery (how could a teacher explain circumcision to a mixed class?) and equity (how could Catholic pupils accept the King James version of the Bible?) with the familiar liberal vision of ‘Protestant and Catholic learning their lessons at the same bench, playing together in the same playground, and altogether regarding one another as God’s creatures and fellow countrymen, instead of looking at one another as enemies and national opponents’. The state could not permit denominational rivalry to disrupt the work of its schools. Since religion was voluntary, morality had to be imparted by other means.”* The basis of the future moral order was a principal concern of the book that Pearson wrote in retirement, National Life and Character: A Forecast. A visionary projection of the historical forces he saw transforming the world, it anticipated a disappearance of the energy and creative vitality of European civilization as the temperate zones of America, south Africa and Australasia were fully occupied. This in turn would hasten a transition to the State socialism that settler societies had pioneered. Vigorous independence would give way to reliance on the State, original-

ity to conformity, poetry and drama to journalism and ephemeral criticism, heroism to a secure comfort without deep convictions or enthusiasm. The growth of the State would be

at the expense of those outworn moral props, the family and religion. The secular nation State, which restrained behaviour only when it became dangerous, had already shown itself a more effective moral agent than the Church: better in the maintenance

of sexual purity, in the relief of poverty, the suppression of

168 A COLONIAL LIBERALISM

slavery, protection of women, children and dumb animals, the promotion of education. It was superseding the Church in its

hold on the popular imagination and was as worthy of reverence. Similarly, the rights of husbands and fathers over wives and children were fast disappearing. The religion of the family would die out as the religion of the State became more and more absorbing. In all these prophecies that Pearson spun out of a wealth of contemporary allusions and ancient precedents — notwithstanding his criticism of classical studies he had to be dissuaded by his publisher from calling the book Orbis Senescens — there

was a note of mordant resignation. There would be losses as well as gains in the future national life but the liberal was bound to see it through, bound by a code of duty that might not withstand the transition. In a private journal where he set down his speculations, Pearson had wondered whether the cost of secular

freedom might not be too high. He wrote here of the passing of the Puritan household, of the men and women who had grown up with a sense of the Divine Law that perhaps was never likely to be reproduced. Abstemious, reserved, methodi-

cal, possessed of an awful sense of obligation, they had a concentrated power that was displayed in their various fields of endeavour by Milton, Cromwell and Pascal. Yet ‘the results of that iron drill were obtained at a cost which none who passed through it can forget, or would submit to again, or could endure

to see inflicted on their children’. The inhibition of love and gaiety and pleasure were parts of a system that could be maintained only while the New Testament was regarded as the actual word of God. Some still hoped for further scientific discoveries that would reconcile reason and faith, but that was to assume

that doctrines aimed at spiritualizing the character could be reduced to the condition of propositions that satisfied the intellect. The realist would take comfort in the stable and equable order regulated by concern for fellow citizens and filial feeling for the State. ‘Simply to do our work in life, and to abide the issue, if we stand erect before the eternal calm as cheerfully as our fathers faced the eternal unrest, may be nobler training for our souls than the faith in progress.’”>

5

RECONSIDERATIONS

Walk about in her streets, look at her private buildings, these banks of hers, for instance, and you will see this. They mean something, they express something ... They express a certain sense of movement, of progress, of conscious power. They say: ‘Some thirty years ago the first gold nuggets made their entry into William Street. Well, many more nuggets have followed, and wealth of other sorts has followed the nuggets, and we express that wealth — we express that movement, progress, conscious power.’ Francis Adams!

Colonial triumph It is a symptom of the colonial condition to measure yourself against received standards. During the 1860s and 1870s a trickle of eminent visitors offered impressions of Victoria in the course

of travels around the European outposts. Charles Wentworth Dilke, ascendant radical, approved heartily of its democratic experiment; Anthony Trollope, bluff literary gent, also found much to praise despite his hosts’ inordinate self-promotion. His advice was contained in two words: “Don’t blow’.* By the 1880s the desire of the inhabitants of the Victorian capital to ratify their achievements was such that Melbourne became a magnet for writers. There were celebrants who marvelled at its stately buildings and manifold signs of prosperity, and there were social investigators who explored the vice and squalour that were equally the mark of a great city. There were 169

170 A COLONIAL LIBERALISM

supercilious Englishmen like J. A. Froude, who insisted on the derivative character of a society without a leisure class that made it another Birmingham or Liverpool, and of endless suburban residences like Wimbledon. His appreciation of the Botanical

Gardens was marred by the flies, ‘millions of them’, so he ignored the ‘No Smoking’ signs and lit up a cigar to keep them at bay. There were entrepreneurial Americans who catered to the esteem of the affluent with presentation volumes of lauda-

tory biography and commemorative history. There were novelists like “Tasma’ who turned a sardonic eye on the robust philistinism of a self-made businessman, and Ada Cambridge who from her vicarage drawing-room explored the fragility of social mores and looked back afterwards on ‘the “good times” when we were rich and dishonest and mercenary and vulgar’. There were aspirant young men like Fergus Hume, lured to Melbourne from New Zealand by the professional opportunities it offered his pen and the literary opportunities for criminal fiction in a place of pseudonymous cupidity where people carried their

dark pasts behind a facade of respectability. And there were fading literary lights like the London journalist George Augustus Sala, who coined the term ‘Marvellous Melbourne’ .> Melbourne in the 1880s was at the peak of its development as a colonial city. Improvements in transport and communica-

tions consolidated its prosperity as the administrative, mercantile and manufacturing hub of a fertile hinterland more densely populated than any other Australian colony. Its entrepreneurs stretched further afield to the pastoral districts of the

Riverina and the Darling Downs, the sugar plantations of Queensland and Fiji, and the silver, lead, tin and copper mines of Broken Hill and Tasmania. It was the conduit for an unprec-

edented volume of British investment and the principal destination for a new wave of British migration — 40 000 landed in just one year, 1888. The newcomers, along with the increase

in the native-born as the children of the goldrush generation gravitated to the city to start their own families, swelled its population from 283 000 at the start of the decade to 490 000 at its close, and in turn triggered a building boom. Weatherboard cot-

tages filled in the empty spaces of Footscray, Essendon, Brunswick, Coburg, Preston and Northcote to the west and north; brick villas spread through Kew, Hawthorn, Camberwell,

RECONSIDERATIONS 171

Malvern and Caulfield to the east and south, joined to the metropolis by a skein of railways and tramtracks. Banks and

commercial buildings in the city were loaded with ornate embellishment while iron girders and hydraulic lifts raised their height to ten storeys and beyond.‘

As the decade proceeded, buoyant conditions lurched into speculative excess. With importation of manufactures, consumer and luxury items exceeding export of primary products, there was a persistent deficit on the current account that was sustained only by an influx of capital. More and more of this capital went

into private investment in urban real estate and construction, and into the public investment in the urban utilities (all except sanitation) needed to complete the process. While Melbourne expanded its proportion of the colony’s population from 33 per cent in 1881 to 43 per cent in 1891, the gold fields experienced an absolute decline in population. Towns such as Ballarat (next

after Melbourne with 40000 inhabitants), Bendigo and Castlemaine, whose thriving civic culture had made them strongholds of liberalism for the past quarter-century, were los-

ing vitality. So also the increased social segregation of Melbourne, the greater specialization of economic activity, the sharper edge of competition and the wider gulf between rich and poor, impeded the interaction of citizens through personal dealings predicated on equality of esteem that sustained liberal ideology.

The opening of the Council chamber of the Trades Hall in

1884 thus served as an occasion of renewal for a consensus that could no longer be assumed. On the walls of a pavilion as richly decorated as any business house, portraits of George Stephenson and Samuel Plimsoll, icons of scientific invention and practical philanthropy, flanked portraits of Governor Darling and George Higinbotham, heroes of past battles on the people’s behalf. Ben Douglass, an eight-hour veteran turned government inspector,

introduced the speakers, Berry and Higinbotham. From the platform Deakin noted the contrast between ‘the great Liberal Orator’ and ‘the great Liberal Leader’. Berry, the Leader, was

‘swifter, ruder, plainer, clumsier ... less lofty, less ideal but

much nearer to the average man’s business and bosom’. Higinbotham, the Orator, was slower, grander, more stately. There was ‘a mildness and sweetness in his manner, tone and

172 A COLONIAL LIBERALISM

carriage which were cherubic’, yet he could still rise to a terrible intensity when he recalled his late friend Wilson Gray, the leader of the Land Convention: Alas, gentlemen, by further experience in life I afterwards acquired a lesson which I might have learnt from his splendid example. I after-

wards learnt that his was really the highest policy, and that in his stubborn adherence to principle was to be found not merely the most honest expression of a politician’s views, but the wisest expression of a politician’s policy.®

The frustrations of self-government The last remnants of that reforming zeal had been spent in the futilities of the second constitutional crisis. A conservativeliberal coalition, formed after the 1883 election with Service as Premier and Berry as his deputy, yielded in 1886 to a further coalition of the same elements now headed by Gillies and Deakin, the new liberal leader. These combinations heralded an era of political quiet when the continued rhetoric of party difference belied the broad measure of agreement on the practical tasks of government. Protection of local industry was a settled policy. So too was the encouragement of agriculture, extension of rail-

ways, state irrigation and other public works that provided loaves and fishes for the constituencies. Tepid proposals for so-

cial reform depended on the willingness of the unregenerate Legislative Council to entertain them. The chief questions on which ministries rose and fell were about who should hold the purse-strings and how loosely. Higinbotham had made abundantly clear his distaste for the working of representative government in Victoria long before his resignation from parliament in 1876 took him from active government participation, and elevation to the Supreme Court bench in 1880 removed him altogether. Estranged from the op-

portunism of former colleagues, he clung to an idealized conception of political representation free of all local pressures and party constraints. His hope was for a ‘national council’ com-

posed of members who could stand before their constituents and declare: Your wants are great — they are many; your interests are diverse —

some of them are potent; I tell you I disregard them all; I will not bend to any of them; I will not represent any of them, because you and every other constituency in this country have a national work to do, and I offer myself as the man to do it, or to help in doing it.

RECONSIDERATIONS 173

If Higinbotham had offered himself on these conditions, his experience did not encourage others to emulate him.’

Syme, on the other hand, worked from the premise that a member of parliament acted on behalf of the electors who returned him. The ‘true principle of representation’, he declared in the book he wrote on Representative Government during the second constitutional crisis, was that the parliamentarian was a delegate or agent who took his instructions from his principals. He traced through history the erosion of this principle with the lengthening of intervals between elections, the abandonment of the residential requirement, the introduction of the pernicious custom of collective ministerial responsibility, the growth of party and the manipulation of public opinion. Hence “Govern-

ment by Parliament ... has degenerated into Government by Party, and if we follow the course of Government by Party we shall find it degenerates into Government by a Single Person’. Syme’s history was an English history and the path he traced followed in the same direction as that blazed by Walter Bagehot in a far more sprightly fashion more than a decade earlier. In revising his own work, Syme was assisted by Pearson, who had

worked alongside Bagehot in editing a quarterly during the 1860s.

Yet no local reader of Syme’s Representative Government in England: Its Faults and Failures could miss its significance as a commentary on colonial politics. In the immediate context of

events in Victoria, the ‘Single Person’ most likely to usurp power was unmistakably Graham Berry; the denunciation of the

practice of collective ministerial responsibility had manifest implications for the Berry ministry’s defiance of the Age on constitutional reform; and the jeremiad against ‘the dishonesty

of party tactics, and the evils inherent in the system of party government’ applied clearly to Berry’s manipulation of the Na-

tional Reform and Protection League. The solutions Syme proposed to remedy the defects of representative government were to increase the accountability of ministers to parliament and parliamentarians to their constituents, and these recommendations also bore on the local situation. If, as he suggested, electors were enabled to exercise ‘uninterrupted control’ over their representatives, then he would no longer have to endure the frustration of politicians like Berry using parliamentary forms to insulate themselves from the popular demands that the

174 A COLONIAL LIBERALISM

Age enunciated, or employing the spoils of patronage to concentrate power in their own hands. “The whole system of party government could in this manner be quietly and effectually got rid of.” Little came of these proposals, though the idea of elected ministries revived from time to time in colonial parliaments and was raised again in the federal conventions of the 1890s. Syme’s

own enthusiasm for the Service-Berry coalition he helped arrange in 1883 can be seen as a practical step in the same direction of loosening party control, and it certainly gave him an extraordinary access to the deliberations of the government. The diaries of Deakin, who held the portfolios of public works and solicitor-general, for the years 1884 and 1885 are studded with the entries ‘Age office’, “Called Windsor’, “D. S.’, ‘Lunched D. Syme’, ‘Cabinet. D. Syme’, and ‘Cabinet. Age’. Such entries become less frequent after the leadership of the coalition passed

from Service and Berry to Gillies and Deakin. That ministry proved increasingly resistant to the instructions of the Age and Syme spent the closing years of the decade in futile attempts to force liberals like Deakin out of the refuge of moderation and compromise.’ Higinbotham and Syme, the pivotal figures of colonial liberal politics, were led by their dissatisfaction with its operation to want to do away with party for other, more direct, less mediated forms of popular representation. They lamented the absence of public virtue and the way that mass politics favoured pliability over integrity. They longed for an idealized democracy, actuated by principle, untrammelled by mechanisms that concentrated power in unresponsive hands. But the whole tendency of political life was against them, as the shifting cliques and factions of the nineteenth century gave way to the fully fledged parties of the twentieth, with their platforms, pledges, preselections and extra-parliamentary executives; mass organizations that robbed parliament of its vitality and rendered the principle of responsible government a sham. The press itself was a vehicle for these developments with its partisan advocacy, its simplification and personification of issues, and its eventual reduction of politics to a form of entertainment. The lasting effect of the two men’s efforts, ironically, was to reinforce a division in popular attitudes between the idea of democracy that receives lip-service and the practice of politics that is held in general contempt.

RECONSIDERATIONS 175

Since the legislature could not secure a hold on ministers, the relationship between ministers and their departments became a matter of urgent attention. The widespread use of ministerial patronage that was so characteristic of colonial politics violated the constitutional doctrine of separation of powers, a doctrine

that in the construction of the administrative State came to

embody the bureaucratic model of an efficient, professional, politically neutral corps of public servants. The Victorian Civil

Service Act of 1862, modelled loosely on the celebrated Northcote-Trevelyan report on the English civil service a decade

earlier, stipulated entrance into the service by competitive

examination and promotion by merit. In practice every Victorian ministry circumvented the Act by appointing ‘supernumeraries’, who soon outnumbered the regular officers. Hence the coalition of 1883 undertook a comprehensive administrative reform through the creation of a Public Service Board to control appointments and classifications. This, along with the development of the statutory corporation, was meant to prevent improper political interference in the management and staffing of government departments and public enterprises. The Board would ‘manage the public service’, in the words of Deakin who first held office in the coalition, ‘as if it were a great company of which they were directors’. Pearson, who had served earlier as vice-president of a society for the abolition of patronage, also supported administrative reform. Syme was by no means as enthusiastic. While the Age was always ready to condemn the exercise of ministerial patronage

by its enemies, it clung to an idea of direct democracy that enshrined the unconfined sovereignty of the assembly and emphasized the need for members of parliament to respond to

the needs of their constituents. To pass on the requests of manufacturers and artisans for relief from dumped imports, to represent a selector in his dealings with the Lands Office, to help a local lad become a stationhand, a policeman, a teacher — these were the very activities that sustained the popular coalition that was liberalism in action. An appointed body that came between the people and their representatives was ‘undemocratic in principle, mechanical in operation and corrupting in effect’. Thus the Age opposed the bureaucratic regime inaugurated by the Public Service Board and indeed secured the abolition of the Board in 1893. But in the long run the tide was against Syme.

176 A COLONIAL LIBERALISM

The impartial operation of the administrative state according to strict rules of propriety became the norm, ‘jobs for the boys’ the conventional deprecation of their inevitable infringement. Similarly, whereas nineteenth-century liberals such as Syme considered representation of interests intrinsic to the operation of self-government, by the twentieth century liberal critics such as Frederic Eggleston came to regard sectional demands, with their Capacity to swamp prudent government, as posing a threat to the very viability of democracy.!°

Higinbotham’s position on this issue was coloured by the experience of his brother Thomas, who had followed him to the colony and lived with him in Brighton. Thomas was a bachelor of conservative views and a member of the Melbourne Club, yet there was the closest affection between him and his more controversial younger brother. As chief engineer of the

Victorian Railways for more than twenty years, Thomas Higinbotham faced repeated interference from ministers and individual members of parliament over a range of matters: the routing of lines, the standard of construction, the management

of the Railways Workshop and the acceptability of locally built locomotives and rolling stock, not to mention the placement of tenders and the selection of staff. In 1878 he became

one of the victims of ‘Black Wednesday’ and he was not included in the subsequent amnesty, at least not until 1880 when the Service ministry restored him to his position. The dismissal was a clear act of spite against a senior official who

had publicly criticized the mismanagement of the railways; the minister, who nursed a grievance against the chief engineer,

boasted openly that he had had his revenge. While George Higinbotham made no public comment on the dismissal, his refusal at this juncture of judicial appointment and his frigid reference to the episode upon the death of his brother just six months after reinstatement left little doubt of his abhorrence. ‘Mr Higinbotham,’ he wrote, ‘earned and generally obtained’

the confidence of the government; he never shrank from expressing his professional opinion, ‘however inconvenient and

unpalatable’; and he constantly served ‘the duty which he conceived that he owed to his profession, and to himself as a member of a profession, as well as that which his official superiors were entitled to claim from him’. Did George, as he wrote his brother’s obituary, recall the relish of his earlier

RECONSIDERATIONS 177

prediction that the ‘necessary inconveniences’ of political warfare would be felt by all who resisted constitutional reform?! In one other respect, Higinbotham pursued the liberal principle of self-government with undiminished enthusiasm. As a judge of the Supreme Court of Victoria from 1880 he assumed

a duty to interpret and oversee the operation of the powers granted to the colony under the Constitution Act of 1855. At the same time, as an officer in a legal hierarchy whose highest

appellate tribunal was the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council, he was bound to maintain the integrity of the imperial legal system. The duality in his responsibilities was anticipated when he made his acceptance of the appointment conditional

on a right ‘in my judicial capacity as well as personally as a Victorian politician’ — for he always maintained that the judiclary was not above politics — ‘to resist always and by every lawful means the illegal interference of Her Majesty’s Imperial Government in the domestic affairs’ of Victoria. In a number of judgments delivered over the next decade, Higinbotham propounded an ambitious interpretation of the power of the colony

to determine its own affairs. The most controversial was his dissenting judgment in a case brought in 1888 on behalf of Ah

Toy after Victorian officers prevented his entry into the colony. Since Ah Toy was a British subject from Hong Kong, the imperial government objected to discriminatory colonial legislation that restricted the number of Chinese immigrants and required

them to pay a poll tax. The majority of the Supreme Court found Ah Toy’s prevention from landing unlawful on the ground that the colonial government had no express statutory authority, but Higinbotham insisted that the Constitution Act gave Victoria full sovereignty over its domestic affairs. Pearson, on behalf of the government, was adamant: ‘We are really fighting again that battle which Chief Justice Higinbotham began —

for the right of this people to govern themselves — and we intend to vindicate that right as an integral part of our liberties’. The government appealed to the Privy Council, which reversed the judgment but refused to consider the broader constitutional issue. !?

Higinbotham’s appointment as Chief Justice in 1886 compounded the alarm of the Colonial Office since it was customary

for the Chief Justice to serve as Lieutenant-Governor and act as head of government in the Governor’s absence. Higinbotham

178 A COLONIAL LIBERALISM

had made it clear that he still held to the views embodied in the resolutions adopted by the Legislative Assembly in 1869: that Victoria was a self-governing state, its Governor a representative of the Queen who could be guided on local matters only by the advice of responsible ministers, and consequently

that all communication between the Colonial Office and the

Governor on such matters was illegal. In a letter to the Secretary of State for the Colonies (he addressed him by name rather than by office since he could not allow the Englishman

to think he had any reason to write to him in his official capacity), he denounced the practice of instructing Governors

as a ‘sinister and clandestine policy’ in which he would not collude. The embarrassed British government immediately revised the instructions to the satisfaction of the Victorian government and meanwhile the retired Chief Justice Stawell remained Lieutenant-Governor. Upon Stawell’s death in 1889 the issue broke out anew, for Higinbotham was asked to serve

as Acting Governor in the interval between the departure of

one Governor and the arrival of another. He refused and released the earlier correspondence. Next to a politician, said Higinbotham, the position of judge

was the highest that could exist in civil society. He was not a believer in judicial pomp and display but insisted on respect

for his court. Witnesses were not allowed to lounge in the witness box; a leading medical man was instructed peremptorily,

“Take your hands out of your pockets, sir.’ His demeanour was uniformly grave. Despite the elaborate courtesy, some found him dogmatic and in later years his remorseless deliberation tried the patience of those who came before him. The qualities he thought a judge should possess were a cultured intelligence, the power of sustained attention, strong self-con-

trol, strict impartiality, perfect uprightness of character. Conspicuously absent here is veneration for recondite legal knowledge and legal reasoning by delineation of the inherited

corpus of precedents, practices and traditions that make up the common law. Judged by these standards, he was not a lawyer’s lawyer. Indeed, his failings were satirized by a future

Chief Justice of the High Court of Australia: His firm tones fell like strokes on silver pure, Tones to my weary ear familiar long

RECONSIDERATIONS 179

In laboured judgements lucidly obscure, Perspicuously wrong.

The lines appeared, unattributed, just six months before Higinbotham died and they hurt him. He set great store by his knowledge of the law, and personally undertook a consolidation of the statutes, first in 1864 and 1865 when Attorney-General, and again in 1888 and 1889 when Chief Justice. He also valued the collegial character of his profession and used the increment

in his salary as Chief Justice on a quarterly dinner for Melbourne’s legal practitioners.'* When Higginbotham made the transition from the legislature

to the judiciary, he moved from one branch of politics to another — he scorned the notion that a person who entered ‘the kingdom of judicial heaven is bound to become a political eunuch’. He continued to reject the tendency of colonial courts to sit in judgment on Acts of parliament and to interpret them

according to the strict canons of legal interpretation (as the majority of his colleagues did in the case of Toy v. Musgrove

where they found that in the absence of provision in the Constitution Act for the government’s actions, it did not possess authority). The appearance was that the court was simply the

faithful interpreter of laws laid down by the legislature. The reality was that legal discourse became the criterion against which political action was judged. Rights existed only when embedded in law. The court determined their legal acceptability and there was no appeal from its legalism to political criteria.

Higinbotham was a persistent critic of this development: ‘he believed that the intellectual habits of legal practitioners had a certain tendency to embarrass and unfit their minds for dealing properly ... with questions of legal interpretation, especially of Statutes relating to public rights’. Against the method of strict

legal interpretation he insisted that one had to go beyond the letter of the law to consider the history and external circumstances that led to its enactment, to grasp and implement the intentions of its author. “The laws which are intended to govern the actions of a free people ought not to be open to cavil or to overthrow and defeat, as now they often are, upon grounds like these.” Hence the long labour of his codification was intended to simplify and clarify ‘the supreme will of the Legislature’ and

in so doing to make it intelligible to the general body of the

180 A COLONIAL LIBERALISM

people who would then ‘cherish a loyal attachment to the law’.

It was a labour of Sisyphus. Higinbotham’s claims for the powers of self-government of the colonies have finally been put beyond doubt in legislation enacted in Canberra and London in the name of the Queen of Australia, but in the operation of the state and federal constitutions, in the long record of restrictive judicial interpretation, and in the continued force of a legal discourse that attenuates public control over national life, they have yet to be made real.

An end to progress The liberals, who took such pride in the progress that followed

the goldrush, became more troubled as the prosperity of the colony reached the giddy heights of Marvellous Melbourne. There was much to celebrate in the increase of population, the spread of settlement, the wide distribution of property (building societies, after all, were devices for allowing the home occupier to become the home owner) and the bustle of activity. Never-

theless, as the fortunate members of the goldrush generation basked in their success, the comparisons they drew were not always favourable. Their industry and thrift had yielded to an extravagant profligacy. The entcrprises they established were small-scale undertakings that created real wealth, goods you could see in warehouses and shops, and they grew by generating

their own capital. The land companies that sprang up in the 1880s were speculative undertakings based on paper-chains of credit that attracted other people’s savings in the expectation of windfall gains. Could such cupidity weaken standards of behavi-

our? The minister of Melbourne’s wealthiest church, the Presbyterian congregation of Toorak, explained that “The Chris-

tian Church has no quarrel with material wealth. Such wealth

is not in itself ‘filthy lucre”. It is we who debase it by base feelings and base uses.’ Others sensed the pursuit of wealth had become an end in itself, destructive of all higher feelings. Thus Marcus Clarke’s description of the philistine inhabitants of Nasturtium Villas in a fashionable suburb of Melbourne: Here was a whole family — a whole tribe of human beings — whose only notion of their part in life was to obtain as much money as they could by any legal means scrape together, and spend it upon eating, drinking and decoration of their persons. They have no aspirations

RECONSIDERATIONS 181

and few ideas. They do not read, write, or sustain one ambition which a few bank notes cannot satisfy.

This was one of the earliest (1874) caricatures of suburban life, prefiguring themes that would preoccupy Australian intellectu-

als for more than a century. It was especially disturbing for liberals that all their efforts to liberate the human capacity for self-improvement seemed merely to encourage a mindless hedonism.!°®

They themselves shared in the prosperity. Swelled by its real estate section, the Saturday Age grew from eight to twelve to twenty-four pages, and increased its circulation from 40 000 to 100 000 copies. Syme became one of the wealthiest men in the colony as his share of annual profits rose to more than £20 000 on a turnover of little more than £200 000; and by the end of the decade he was able to pay £140 000 to buy out his nephew’s

quarter-share in the enterprise. In 1880 he bought a modest mansion, ‘Blythswood’, standing in nine acres of grounds in Carson Street, Kew. He also acquired substantial tracts of land in Keysborough, Carrum, Mordialloc and the upper Yarra, but the land was farmed not subdivided. Advised by the financial editor of the Age, he built a substantial portfolio of mining and other shares. But again he stayed out of land speculation, and rejected an offer from one of the biggest landboomers to become a director of his company on the grounds that ‘more might have been expected of the directors than my duty to the paper would have permitted’. Higinbotham was extremely comfortable. Even his legendary generosity could scarcely exhaust an income of

£3000 a year as a Supreme Court judge. In 1890 he sold his Brighton estate to a land company for £12 000, having moved into a smaller house in Murphy Street, South Yarra. By contrast, Pearson needed all his earnings to meet the substantial expenses of his household. A parliamentary salary and earnings from the Age came to about £1500 a year, the same as

the ministerial salary he received from 1886 to 1890. For a decade the Pearson family lived in rented accommodation; never settled, they moved from Carlton to East Melbourne to St Kilda

to Hawksburn to Toorak. At the height of the boom they bought a substantial residence, ‘Narrabeen’ in Brighton, that they could ill afford. Then Edith Pearson had contracted her husband’s restlessness: her eighteen-month tour of Europe in

182 A COLONIAL LIBERALISM

1883 and 1884 would have eaten into reserves. From the early 1880s Pearson became drawn into association with a mortgage agency, and he burned his fingers badly in the crash at the end of the decade.!’ While they lived well, all three men were personally abstemious and disapproved of vulgar displays of luxury. Syme would walk from his Kew home to the Victoria Street bridge and catch a twopenny tram into the Age office. Higinbotham’s views were made clear when he presided over the commission that organ-

ized the International Exhibition to mark the centenary of British settlement in Australia. Lured into the post by government reassurances that ‘his known feeling with respect to wealth’

was ideally matched to their desire to commemorate not just material prosperity but arts and letters, he soon discovered that his fellow commissioners had other ideas. A budget of £25 000

(the stucco wedding cake in the Exhibition Gardens was left over from the previous trade fair of 1880) ballooned to £400 000 as further acres of pavilions were erected. Higinbotham’s mar-

moreal deliberation and insistence on personal authorization of all expenditure irked colleagues who concluded that ‘the infusion of a little commercial energy was requisite’ and

installed the wealthy softgoods merchant and pillar of the Legislative Council, F. T. Sargood, as executive vice-president. Higinbotham resigned.'® Syme’s distaste for profligacy found expression in a number of campaigns he conducted through the Age during the 1880s against excessive government spending, and culminated in an epic vendetta to curb the railways. Beginning with the Berry

ministry, which bought the suburban network of the private Hobson’s Bay Railway Company in 1878, the governments of the 1880s embarked on a programme of reckless expansion. Met-

ropolitan services were pushed to outlying suburbs, an ill-conceived circular line constructed around the eastern fringe,

new country routes added to carry minimal traffic. The Age sought to expose the close relationship between the railway and land values, the high prices paid to influential landowners by the railway itself, and the flagrant pushing of local interests; but

found little support in a parliament where so many members were themselves directors of companies that benefited directly from the land boom. The spoils were too great, the costs borne by public debt. Moreover, the management of the railways had

RECONSIDERATIONS 183

passed in 1883 to a three-man Statutory Commission, the first in the country to run a public enterprise on this scale (by the end of the decade the Victorian Railways had 10 000 employees and was easily the largest undertaking in the colony). The justification given for the Commission was to protect the operation against political interference: in the opinion of the Age the effect was to insulate it against public criticism for, like latter-day equivalents such as Croxford’s Board of Works in Victoria and

the Hydro-Electric Commission in Tasmania, the Railways Commission employed its formidable powers to build support

and override opposition. From 1886 to 1889 the Victorian Railways reported a surplus on operations. Thereafter it incurred heavy losses — £221 000 in 1890, £332 000 in 1891, £430 000 in 1892 — and Syme redoubled his campaign against its autocratic Chief Commissioner, Richard Speight. A series of special reports and leading articles in the Age during 1891 culminated in March 1892 with the suspension of the Commission — a step Syme had insisted on when he installed William Shiels

as Premier. Speight responded with a suit for libel. The case lasted fifteen months, a bonanza for the lawyers (including Dea-

kin, who returned to the bar to help represent Syme) but a potential disaster for Syme who incurred nearly £50 000 in costs and stood to pay £25 000 in damages as well as the costs of the

plaintiff. In the end the jury found for Syme on all but one count and awarded Speight just one farthing, without costs. He was ruined. The liberal precepts of retrenchment and reform did not come cheap in Victoria.!? However, Syme did not escape scot-free from charges of lin-

ing his own pocket at the public expense. In 1869 he had acquired nearly sixty acres of land at Mount Macedon on which he constructed a weatherboard house that he called ‘Rosenheim’. During the summer of 1884-5 he leased it to the Governor, Sir

Henry Loch, for £25 a month. The Governor enjoyed his sojourn on Mount Macedon, which with its cool climate and

lush gardens was becoming a fashionable retreat. At the instigation of Sir Henry, Service as Premier authorized the purchase of Rosenheim as the Governor’s country residence for £5000 with an additional £300 for the furniture. There the matter rested for fourteen years, when a parliamentarian raised allegations of malpractice. He claimed first that Syme had acquired the land improperly using regulations under the 1865 Land Act

184 A COLONIAL LIBERALISM

that allowed miners to lease twenty-acre allotments in the vicinity of diggings; next that the acquisition had been validated through special legislation passed in 1869 at Syme’s instigation; finally, that when Syme formally received the title in 1872, the

land and improvements were valued at £1136 and when they were valued by the Surveyor-General for the government in 1885, the total value was still £1500 less than Syme demanded and received.

Syme, who professed himself unsurprised by such ad hominem attacks from unscrupulous opponents, took the unusual

step of responding with a letter to his own paper. He dealt adequately with the second allegation (since the 1869 legislation

that enabled him to buy the land affected thousands of landholders, his own sixty acres were hardly a convincing motive for its passage) but prevaricated in his explanation of how he had originally obtained the land (he did so by three claims of twenty acres, one in his own name and two others through dummies) and the circumstances of its subsequent sale to the government. When the parliamentary critic pressed his allegations with fresh claims of documentary evidence, the government appointed a judicial inquiry. It determined that the original grant was indeed ultra vires and subjected Syme to an embarrassing examination of how he had lodged three applications in three names but all in his own hand. For the punctilious

proprietor to take refuge in ‘I suppose’ and ‘I have no recollection’ was a sign of his discomfort. In the end, however,

the extant documents did not sustain the allegation of illegal conduct.” By this time the bubble of inflated land values had burst, and

with it the prosperity of the colony. A withdrawal of British funds, together with a combination of factors that hit primary producers, plunged the entire Australian economy into depression in the early 1890s. Victoria, which had ridden highest, fell furthest with a chain of bankruptcies leading in 1893 to the failure of major banks. Between 1892 and 1895 Melbourne lost 56 000 inhabitants, and by the end of the century surrendered to Sydney a numerical supremacy it has never regained. The morale of its élite was as irreparably damaged. Deakin’s withdrawal trom public office in the 1890s to practice at the Bar was made necessary by the need to repair his finances from losses incurred in the crash, and his clients included former business associates

RECONSIDERATIONS 185

and political colleagues whom he helped to escape from the con-

victions they richly merited — so blatant a form of double benefit that even Pearson could not conceal his astonishment. Higgins and Isaac Isaacs, on the other hand, made their political debuts in a forlorn attempt to salvage some public probity from the financial wreckage.*!

The effects of the depression were compounded by the great industrial confrontation of 1890. There had been strikes before that involved particular trades — tailoresses in 1882, bootmakers in 1885, wharf labourers in 1886. This dispute counterposed national associations of employers and workers in the pastoral, mining and maritime industries, and raised the fundamental issue of unions’ right to organize workers in protection of wages and conditions. It turned the port of Melbourne into a battleground.

Here again Higinbotham seemed to possess extraordinary prescience. He had warned during his last years in parliament of a ‘contest of industry seeking its own material and also moral improvement against wealth, which is only blindly seeking its own agegrandisement and increase’. The contest was part of ‘a great battle’ in which he predicted all politicians would eventually be compelled to choose their side, ‘of labour against capital, of the poor against the rich’. His deep-seated fear of the underclass now under control, he chose the side of labour. Thus his celebrated letter of 4 October 1890: The Chief Justice presents his compliments to the President of the Trades Hall Council, and requests that he will be so good as to place the enclosed cheque of £50 to the credit of the strike fund. While the United Trades are awaiting compliance with their reasonable request for a conference with the employers, the Chief Justice will continue for the present to forward a weekly contribution of £10 to the same object.

The terms of this offer are noteworthy. It was the orderly demeanour of the officers of the Trades Hall that impressed him, the unreasonable refusal of the employers to sit down and negotiate with them that he found so dangerous.” The Age also condemned the shipowners for precipitating the disastrous confrontation, and both Pearson and Deakin voted

in favour of a parliamentary resolution that regretted the employers’ refusal to meet the unions. As Deakin put it, in a question of choice between ‘a little flesh and blood with much

186 A COLONIAL LIBERALISM

capital’ and ‘a great deal of flesh and blood with but little capital’, the ‘living and thinking weight must carry our sympathies’. But their response was determined by the official responsibilities that drew their gaze from the Trades Hall build-

ing in Lygon Street to the wharves and factory gates where pickets blockaded deliveries, and to the Yarra bank where agi-

tators preached class war. Once the stoppage began, “The question was whether the city was to be handed over to mob law and the tender mercies of roughs and rascals, or whether it was to be governed, as it had always been governed, under the law in peace and order.’ The threat that alarmed them most was the stoppage of the gas supply that threw Melbourne into darkness for several nights. A city without light! What forces of evil

would that set loose, what opportunities would it afford the criminal classes for ‘carrying on their war against society’? Deakin as Chief Secretary and Pearson as his ministerial colleague declared the Unlawful Assemblies Act, recruited the special constables and called out the troops to enforce it. Much as they regretted the excess of zeal that led Colonel Tom Price

to order his troops to ‘Fire low and lay them out’, they had become combatants on the same side, and Pearson regretted Higinbotham’s public support of the strikers as a ‘wrong-headed act by a man of generous impulse’. Higinbotham, for his part,

‘hoped that the state of war which then prevailed would continue till the workers had obtained their fair share in the profits of their own production’. While he joined with the other liberals

in imagining a future peace on just terms, the events of 1890 posed a fundamental challenge for their notion of themselves as men of good will mediating between master and man.” Historians who search for a turning-point in Australian national life are drawn to the early 1890s. These years marked the end of a ‘long boom’ of three decades of sustained growth in population and expansion of economic output for a world mar-

ket hungry for the primary commodities that Australia produced in such abundance. It heralded the creation of the Labor Party, the political expression of a movement that would

transform public life, and the hardening of class relations in place of earlier hopes of social harmony. It punctured the confidence of the colonists that the new world was a place of regeneration where all could benefit from the enlargement of freedom and opportunity. ‘What took place’, in the words

RECONSIDERATIONS 187

of our greatest radical historian, ‘was like the ending of a childhood: the curtain’s fall on wide-eyed expectation, the entrance instead of uncertainty, doubt and mistrust: “never glad confident morning again’’.’*4

All these elements of periodization are open to revision, to the erosion of old verities by the wash of subsequent research.

The ‘long boom’ turns out to be more fragile in character, more restrictive in its benefits, than the conventional economic

history suggested. The mobilization of the working class is shown to be more uneven, its break with the past less clear, than even temperate socialists expected. The gloomy fears of social retrogression that exercised Pearson and other latenineteenth-century thinkers are seen to be held in check by

the new progressive doctrines that buoyed the mood of conscious nation-building in the new century. Yet when all these qualifications are made, it remains clear that for the old generation a decisive shift had occurred. ‘Never glad confident morning again.” A form of colonial liberalism that imagined itself to be clearing obstacles to the onward march of progress and looked forward with optimism to the liberation of human Capacities, gave way to a new liberalism in which the social impulses had become far more problematic.”

The limits to reason Perhaps the most notorious of nineteenth-century experiments in education was that performed on John Stuart Mill. His father and his father’s associates imagined the juvenile mind to be an unformed ensemble of mental faculties capable of rigorous training to a high pitch providing a proper utilitarian regimen was observed. They taught him Greek when he was three, followed

by Latin, logic, science and law. At thirteen they employed David Ricardo to introduce him to the principles of political economy. At sixteen he published on the subject. At twenty he suffered a breakdown, a ‘dry, heavy dejection’ of intellectual and spiritual nullity from which he finally emerged with a new appreciation of poetry and art. When Mill assumed afterwards

the editorship of the house journal of his father’s circle, the London and Westminster Review, he told one of his friends that henceforth he would restrict the old school of utilitarian liberals

to those things they understood — the influence of circumstances on conduct, the relativist nature of morality, the need

188 A COLONIAL LIBERALISM

for comprehensive change when old arrangements were no longer useful. He would not allow his father’s friends to opine on subjects of which they were ignorant — the nature of his-

torical experience, the need for self-cultivation, the social instinct, the emotional and aesthetic requirements of human nature.” Mill’s development from philosophical radicalism to a more complex and perhaps unresolved commitment to the greatest degree of human fulfilment consistent with individual freedom was a progression that other liberals experienced. They inherited

a notion of duty grounded in Christian doctrines that they found difficult to sustain. They moved — some further than others — towards an austere rationalism that proclaimed the self-sufficiency of the human intellect. This rationalism served

them well in their criticism of dogmatism, intolerance and oppression, but without some higher purpose and a corresponding mission of obligation to others, the liberal personality was incomplete. Syme searched for this vital spark with his alloistic

emotion and scientific account of the soul; Pearson read the New Testament as a source of moral precepts and rewrote the

Ten Commandments as rhyming homilies; perhaps only Higinbotham, who was surely unique in his sublime conviction of the divine element in all humanity, was untroubled by a need

to reconcile reason and conscience. And if religion was in decline, what quickening force would replace it? These liberals had all been formed in protracted encounters with particularly

demanding forms of Protestantism: they shed parts of the theology but retained much of its ethos. The next generation, trained in the state schools, would be a post-religious generation that might indeed fit Higinbotham’s description of ‘cultivated, intellectual and yet wholly uneducated human wild beasts’. This cohort of liberals turned to diverse sources of comfort. Syme toyed with spiritualism, just how seriously it is difficult to tell since he feigned a scepticism that was scarcely consistent with his keen interest in the phenomenon. Pearson also attended a seance as the guest of Ralph Waldo Emerson on his visit to America in 1868. He was less attracted to cults of the supernatural than to the more inward forms of transcendental thought to which his New England friends introduced him. Emerson’s

fusion of idealist philosophy and romantic apprehension of nature, his protest against dogmatic rationalism and materialism,

RECONSIDERATIONS 189

and his lofty conception of a supersensuous religious conscious-

ness expressed in a quest for perfection made a lasting impression on him, as on others of his generation.?’ Yet there remained limits to their heterodoxy. The religious controversies of the 1880s and the struggles over the sabbath

were conducted within the bounds of decorum, with liberals like Higinbotham and Pearson as grave and reverent in demean-

our as their opponents. Such was the strength of militant evangelicalism, so stifling was the religious conformity, that those outspoken atheists of humbler station who engaged in

exhibitionist confrontation received rough treatment. The Australian Secular Association, formed in 1882 out of a wing of the old Sunday Free Discussion Society, brought out from England an uncompromising publicist to lead their campaign.

He ran a gauntlet of official harassment and prosecution. Advising the jury in one of his trials, Higinbotham condemned his ‘gross and outrageous insults upon the faith of a large section

of the community’. The spiritual needs of Higinbotham and Pearson were met by personal reflection, their desire for fellowship in the sympathetic surrounds of Charles Strong’s Australian Church or the Unitarian Church in East Melbourne.?®

Not so with Deakin. His youthful enthusiasm for religious experiment drew him quickly into the spiritualist movement that made such rapid progress in Victoria during the 1870s. In 1874, aged eighteen, he joined a seance circle. As a medium he received communications from a number of deceased persons, including

Bunyan, Sophocles and — at the height of the constitutional crisis — the lost leader of colonial liberalism, Richard Heales. He recorded his experiences in journals and published one series as The New Pilgrim’s Progress (1877) in which the hero, Restless,

sacrificed himself to the mob so that the reign of the tyrants Stupor, Sloth and Nightmare, sons of the old monarch Spiritual Death, could be overthrown; with that experience the people

entered on a life more rich in experience, more complete in expression, more glad in eternal growth, ‘nearer and nearer to the divine perfection of deity’. In 1878 he became president of the Victorian Association of Progressive Spiritualists whose aims

were ‘to extend the domain of science to the realms of the invisible, the impalpable, and the imponderable, and to supersede the supernatural’, and ‘to dissipate erroneous views of the distinction between science and religion and to build up a new

190 A COLONIAL LIBERALISM

Church based on the identities of religious and_ secular knowledge’. He also helped establish an ethical Spiritualist Sunday School for children that the poet Bernard O’Dowd later

took over, and prepared for its handbook a revision of the Beatitudes:

Conductor: Blessed are the dutiful, Children: For they shall find a peace which cannot be bought and

sold...

Conductor: Blessed are the faithful, the dutiful, the punctual, the orderly, the innocent, the pure in heart,

All: For theirs is the republic of heaven.

Deakin ended his membership of the Association after a debacle

when a leading member publicly denounced spiritualism as a fraud and announced conversion to militant atheism, but the quest for illumination continued. In 1885, on his first visit to America, there was a pilgrimage to Emerson’s grave at Concord.

There were the writings of Swedenbérg, who convinced him that the soul could find release from the body. There was theosophy: in 1894 he was founding secretary of a lodge established in honour of Annie Besant. And there was his ceaseless reading

of religious literature, and the writing of prayers, speculations and spiritual experiences.??

The contrast with his undergraduate friend H. B. Higgins is striking. The sickly son of a Methodist manse, Henry found the loving concern of his parents and their faith an awful inheritance. The doctrine of eternal punishment ‘had, from childhood, oppressed me like a nightmare’: at University, where he was exposed to Grote and Mill and Spencer, the torment became

such that he feared for his sanity. With no one to confide in (he could not speak to others ‘lest I lead them astray’), he began a journal, which records his spiritual odyssey. At the outset, in 1873, he used code: ‘I want before High God to think rightly, to act rightly, to fulfil my duty in this great whirligig, but what is my duty? What is truth?’ By 1876, when he went to the Bar: ‘My hieroglyphics must be dismissed; time is too short for such

squeamishness! God help me now in my perplexity!’ And finally, in 1878, when his apostasy was known to his family: ‘I want to do right, to be right. I am prepared to modify my idea

of God, and of everything, but I must cling to my idea of a purpose, a final cause.’ He found it in the service of humanity,

RECONSIDERATIONS 191

and an attic stoicism. The credal viability of Christianity ceased to concern him. When his niece Nettie suggested that he was agnostic, he replied that he did not consider he was either gnostic or agnostic. He did not think (the negative construction again is noteworthy) the scriptures sustained ‘the various inconsistent theories of the “‘after-death” that are current’, but he did habit-

ually pray that God’s Kingdom may come, ‘and if by God’s Kingdom some do not mean exactly what others mean, no matter. The meaning is nearly always good.’ In his darkest moments he turned to the classics: “To my mind there never was a time

in the history of the world in which there was so much need of the free and bold thinking, that clear thinking, that simplicity

with lucidity and sanity which characterised the Greek writers,”°0

Deakin steps into these pages with every advantage of endowment and preferment. Higgins first met him in the University quadrangle, ‘a tall, thin, handsome young man holding forth to a few fascinated students’. Vivacious, eloquent, ‘whirled into politics’ at the instigation of Syme, respectful of Pearson, deferential to Higinbotham, the favoured son readily assumes the lines of continuity. Here at last is the native-born

heir to carry on the liberal lineage. Higgins has to make his own way, teaching to support himself through his studies, coaching the sons of the rich to make ends meet in his early

years at the Bar, patiently mastering the ‘humiliating impediment’ of a stammer. When, having achieved professional

success, he sought to enter politics it was Deakin that he asked for guidance. He would prove himself more faithful to that legacy, more resolute in his attachment to liberal principle, ‘unlike Mr Deakin’, who, the Age had concluded, ‘has always been an opportunist’. Thus when Deakin aligned himself with the Scripture Education League in its renewed campaign during the 1890s to introduce Bible reading, prayer and hymns into the state school, Higgins led the successful resistance. Higgins also carried the clause in the federal constitution that precluded the Commonwealth from establishing any religion or imposing any religious observance — despite the thanks to Almighty

God in the preamble, and the appeal to His blessings at the start of each parliamentary sitting.*! In other ways as well, the future lay with the eclectic enthu-

siast, for the new liberalism and against the antique rational

192 A COLONIAL LIBERALISM

purist. The principle that Higgins sought to maintain affirmed the inviolable sphere of personal liberty: ‘in matters of conscience, in matters which involve the depths of a man’s soul, the less the State interferes the better’. Deakin’s argument fused morality, social cohesion and national purpose: Is not religious teaching an essential element in all culture, the source

and sanction of aspiration, the foundation of morality, the basis of society, and the bond of human brotherhood? And is it not in religious development that individual and national life alike attain their crown?

By the turn of the century there was a discernible movement to make education serve these values. A new emphasis on the development of the individual personality as well as on national efficiency produced changes designed to furnish a more com-

plete education than the old drilling in the three r’s. Composition and poetry complemented reading and writing, history was given greater prominence, nature study, modelling, music and gymnastics were introduced. As part of this change, Pearson’s religion of the State came into full bloom. The first civics textbook had been produced in South Australia by Catherine Helen Spence, who in one of her visions of the future described a school where the lesson of bearing and forebearing, of respect for the rights of others, was taught

thoroughly and ineradicably; but only at the turn of the century was civics fully established in the curriculum. Walter Murdoch wrote one of the most successful texts, The Australian Citizen: An Elementary Account of Civic Rights and Duties

(1912), with an inscription from Milton’s Aeropagitica: ‘Consider what nation it is whereof ye are and whereof ye are the governours’. His final declaration echoed Deakin’s earlier concern that the exigencies and desires of everyday life ‘threaten to exhaust the more unselfish and spiritual interests of the race’: To make the society in which we live a true Commonwealth, in the best sense of the term — not a mere collection of persons scrambling for wealth, each one seeking his own selfish ends without regard for others — but a hearty comradeship for all noble purposes, each one striving for the good of all, and all together seeking for the most splen-

did and beautiful life possible to human beings — that is the task of citizenship.

RECONSIDERATIONS 193

Murdoch’s peroration made no reference to religion, but in the final analysis this mattered little. The problem remained one of reconciling personal ambitions to the construct of common citizenship, a project that was no closer to realization than when the liberals had begun it half a century earlier.32

The liberal subject and his liberal subjectivity The closing years of the century thus saw a reconsideration of liberal aims and methods in the light of their manifest shortcomings. Higinbotham, Syme and Pearson were all aware of obstacles that had impeded the realization of their projects: the failure to carry the principles of self-government against the obduracy of the upper house and the pretensions of the Colonial Office; the correspondingly incomplete nature of the measures designed to enable all to share in the benefits of progress; the divisions that fractured the ideal of education for a common citizenship. Each man continued to struggle for the vindication of his particular objective and for the programme as a whole, but each was forced back also to re-examine the assumptions on which it rested. Thus Higinbotham’s reluctant conclusion that the reason for the failure of colonial self-government lay within the body politic; Syme’s increasing recognition that there were limits to the capacity of the State to lead and shape economic development; and Pearson’s final reflections on the losses as well as the gains in the emergent national life and character. Colonial liberalism found growing difficulties in the expectations with which it had begun, crucially the idea of the sovereign individual who arranged his own affairs according to rational

calculations of self-interest balanced by acceptance of his responsibilities. A new awareness was becoming apparent of the potential for disharmony in powerful attachments to a religious faith, an ethnic group, a gender or a class. There was a height-

ened awareness of the complexity of behaviour and the persistence of atavistic impulses. These were all forces that threatened the notion of the rational individual and his conscience, and they would be taken up more systematically by the

next generation who were confronted more directly by their effects. The older generation worked with axioms of human nature that they found difficult to problematize, let alone discard. Even so, it is instructive to trace them for they take us close to the heart of the problem of colonial liberalism.

194 A COLONIAL LIBERALISM

Nineteenth-century liberalism was a doctrine embodying certain kinds of freedom in the belief that individuals were capable of exercising them. The liberals who have occupied these pages had to emancipate themselves from oppressive structures of spiritual and emotional imprisonment, to abandon their homelands

and travel half way round the world to find opportunity for self-fulfilment. Their success was achieved at heavy cost. Just as

their own experiences demonstrated the need for strenuous moral effort, so they believed that the successful enlargement of freedom throughout colonial life depended on the capacity of the colonists to accept the responsibilities their freedom entailed. Hence Higinbotham’s dictum that self-government possessed a double meaning, individual and political, since on the ability to maintain control over oneself depended the ability to exercise control over public affairs. Equally, they expected the discharge of these responsibilities to strengthen and elevate the character, so that the truly free individual would employ reason and conscience to confirm personal independence. Again, these liberals threw over received structures of authority that were no longer tolerable for one that enshrined the autonomy of the individual. Their own freedom was at once necessary and daunting. As each fought to overcome a deep-seated fear of the consequences of demoralization and disorder, so each cultivated in his own conduct the stabilizing habits of candour, firmness and restraint. What if others would not do the same? This was a question that Mill sought to answer by marking off a boundary between the legitimate interests of society and a sphere of thought and action where the freedom of the individual was inviolable. He argued that the boundary must be defined by the self-protection of society. You could prevent an individual from doing harm to others but the welfare of the individual was not a sufficient warrant for interfering with that individual. “The only part of the conduct of anyone, for which he is amenable to society, 1S that which concerns others ... Over himself, over his own body and mind, the individual is sovereign.’ In practice, the colonial liberals were not prepared to maintain this distinction on a broad range of issues where they believed the welfare of the individual was at risk. Temperance provides a clear example. From the 1850s onwards those opposed to the consumption of alcohol sought to restrict its availability. In 1870 Higinbotham proposed legislation that would allow two-thirds

RECONSIDERATIONS 195

of the ratepayers in a local government area to prevent the grant-

ing of a licence to sell alcohol. It failed. In the same year he suggested the formation of a Permissive Bill Association to sponsor parliamentary candidates committed to the passage of such a law, and served as its president. Throughout the decade

the Association tried unsuccessfully to carry the measure. In 1881 when a Victorian Alliance for the Suppression of the Liquor Traffic revived the campaign, he declined the presidency on the grounds that the office should be occupied by a member

of parliament, but made regular donations. The Age, Pearson and Deakin all supported the Alliance, which finally succeeded in winning the local option in 1885.* The arguments for temperance were commonly pitched at intemperance as a social evil that led to public disorder, vice and misery, and ought therefore to be suppressed. ‘It is manifest’, reported the Age, ‘that the traffic in intoxicating liquors is the immediate cause of most of the poverty, disease and crime that afflict this country.’ Coupled with the ‘permissive’ principle that

provided for a local poll, this consideration enabled Higinbotham to characterize the measure as ‘a voluntary act by which society consented to impose a legal restraint upon itself

in order to arrest a dangerous and growing social evil, ... a mutual compact for the surrender of abstract rights for a common public good’. Mill himself regarded the consumption of

alcohol as an other-regarding activity. Yet at the heart of Higinbotham’s concern there was an abhorrence of the degrading effects of alcohol abuse on the individual. Neither he nor

the others were total abstainers (and both he and Syme were heavy smokers), but alcohol tempted the weak, those released from ‘the customary discipline of labour’ who lacked the cultivation of taste for rational recreation. Drunkenness violated his deeply felt belief in the dignity and divine goodness of humanity. So did gambling, and as Attorney-General he launched a prosecution against the organizers of a charitable lottery conducted at a ladies’ bazaar, an action that earned him the title of “The Puritanical Prig’.**

In their willingness to interfere with the liberty of the individual, the colonial liberals moved easily from the welfare of the

individual to the welfare of society, and were seemingly untroubled by the principles that so exercised Mill. A characteristic

example of this elision came in Pearson’s justification of the

196 A COLONIAL LIBERALISM

benefits of the local option for the hardened drinker: ‘if it will give him a healthy constitution, and enable him to do his duty to himself, to his family, and to the community, I think these are practical results which we need not be afraid of trying to secure by legislation’. By the 1880s liberalism was shading into wowserism, a moral code and practice predicated not on social utility or individual dignity but on sanctimonious suspicion of

the pleasure of others. Pearson was less sympathetic to this development. ‘Our Puritanism’, he wrote to a Cambridge friend, ‘is that of the English and Scotch lower classes’, while to Deakin he confided his disapproval of Syme’s increased susceptibility to the Calvinist straiteners. From a political perspective, this as-

pect of liberalism became more prominent because of the heightened fervour of its evangelical adherents, who by the 1880s operated within the coalition as a distinct ‘morality party’.

From a historical perspective it marks the swerve of liberals themselves towards strategies that might impose regularity on human disorder.*°

Pearson’s formulation of the advantages of temperance also crystallizes a crucial feature of this liberal discourse — its gen-

der. This hardly comes as a startling revelation: masculine authority has been a recurring theme in the treatment of all the principal figures. It was encountered in Higinbotham’s esteem

of manly forbearance, steadiness and virtue, and his critics’ attribution of womanly impetuosity and spite; in Syme’s likening of the discipline embodied in the father to the authority

exercised by the State, and most directly of all in Pearson’s precise demarcation of educational safeguards to protect femininity. The great moral idea of liberalism was manliness, and the vocabulary it employed to mark out the attributes of a fully developed individual — the language of independence, honour, chivalry, resolution and mastery — enshrined masculine qualities. When David Syme sat in his office each evening to read proofs, he struck out every fanciful adjective and ornamen-

tal phrase. The language he wished to see in his organ was ‘strong, terse and virile’.>

A striking counterpoint to this robust masculinity was the preoccupation of all three men with their well-being. Pearson’s

youthful hypochondria and subsequent debility have already been described. Il] health helped drive him to Australia the first time, failing eyesight the second, and in later years he reassured

RECONSIDERATIONS 197

his wife that his ailments were ‘no worse than they used to be’. Syme’s physical condition was an index of his emotions. The characteristic symptoms — neuralgia, chest pains, acute indigestion — afflicted him whenever he was under pressure. He made two visits to England for specialist treatment, each without success. Deakin remembered him ‘always doctoring himself with all kinds of drugs despite his splendid physical endowment’, for even in old age he remained big, iron-framed, all bone and sinew

— ‘Auld Lang Syme’, the Bulletin called him. Higinbotham observed a strict regimen, sculling on the Yarra in his early years, exercising with dumb-bells in later life, and until he de-

veloped heart trouble at the end of the 1880s enjoyed good health. His susceptibility was to accidents. The Argus editorials of the 1850s return repeatedly to the danger to pedestrians from horse-drawn traffic in the city streets. The perils of anarchy were here vivid and demonstrable. Reputedly he was a passenger in a major railway disaster at Windsor (though newspaper reports

do not mention him) and afterwards he could never be per-

suaded to enter a train. Late in life, while travelling by cable-tram from South Yarra to the city, he gave up his seat to a lady and was thrown backwards on to the road from the back platform as the tram turned the Domain Road corner. On a rare trip outside Melbourne to Mount Buffalo he sprained an ankle

and had to be carried to Bright. An era such as ours that is preoccupied with therapeutic regimes over every aspect of the self should not mock the simple anxieties of an earlier age. Even

so, it is noticeable how all three men who worked off their nervous energy in solitary labour revealed such physical vulnerability. They made themselves slaves to duty. “Rest, rest — there is all eternity to rest in!’ insisted Pearson over the entreaties of his wite.>”

Earlier chapters have explored some of the intersections between liberalism as doctrine and liberals in their lived experience. Crucial to these connections and disconnections was

their need as men to achieve mastery of their circumstances. Higinbotham’s veneration for the rule of law held in check a fear of passion breaking through the surface of public life. So too his legendary humility and courtesy could work as devices

to impose his will on others in ways that were no less overbearing than a voice raised in anger. A counsel who had left his

court to obtain confirmation of an assertion returned when

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Higinbotham was instructing the jury. Three times he tried to break in, three times he was silenced by the judge’s expression. Seeing him rise once more, Higinbotham spoke in a tone of dulcet menace, ‘Mr Fisher, if you interrupt me I shall commit

you. Syme’s campaign to overthrow economic privilege and find a

higher motive for commercial transactions than self-interest went with a ruthless usurpation of the Age, his precept that employer and employee should deal with each other on the basis of mutual respect sat alongside his autocratic treatment of his staff. Relations with his nephew Joseph, who owned a quartershare, deteriorated to the point that the two men communicated only by letter. Joseph harboured resentment of his uncle’s treatment of his own mother and siblings (‘No lawyer’s sophistries will get over the fact that you are now retaining what has come

to you wrongly’) and disagreed with his conduct of editorial policy (especially the campaign against the Railway Commissioners and the consequent legal action, which he thought would be even more ruinous than that between The Times and Parnell).

Syme could not tolerate such criticism, especially from one whose lack of respect touched him on the raw. “Your memo to me,’ he finally exploded ‘is unbecoming and unmanly.’ A flurry of lawyers’ letters accompanied the dissolution of the partnership.?®

Even more telling was Syme’s treatment of his children, which reproduced the emotional distance between him and his father.

There were nine and the burden of expectation lay heaviest on the five boys. Try as he might, Herbert, the eldest, could not satisfy a father who allowed him little initiative and then condemned him for his lack of responsibility. There were criticisms

of his shortcomings in managing the rural property on the Upper Yarra, and censure of his interest in horseracing: ‘It is vulgar; but most of all, it is absorbing, distracting to the mind and ruinous therefore to one’s career in the world.’ The only gesture to intimacy, the only oblique appeal for affection, came in David’s regular complaints about overwork and poor health: ‘I feel generally out of sorts which you probably think accounts for the tone of my letter.” Upon the final breach with Joseph,

David informed Herbert, then thirty-two, that he would be expected to take over some of the responsibilities in the

management of the newspaper. This would require his

RECONSIDERATIONS 199

observance of certain conditions. He would have to keep regular

hours, to give up many of his inappropriate associations and dress properly in order to ‘command the respect of your subordinates in the office and of your clients outside’. ‘It will be necessary also to give up (except on rare occasions, perhaps) attendances at horse races and all billiard playing in public places.’ The letter was signed ‘Your affectionate father’. David escaped the tyranny of his father, but for Herbert and his brothers there was no escape.°?

Less is known of Higinbotham and Pearson as fathers. Higinbotham was revered by his three daughters but not so close to his two sons, the eldest of whom was emotionally

unstable and abandoned Melbourne for the bush soon after he finished school. Pearson also was an affectionate and attentive, if rather valetudinarian, father to three daughters who were all

still in their teens when he died. His letters to them strike a

note of composed spontaneity and assumed equality that suggest

he found the paternal role easier than the marital one. He had no son. If a sample of two can have any validity, it would seem that the problematic link was that between the Victorian paterfamilias and his male offspring, given a special edge in this setting by the heightened masculine authority that had to pass from one generation to the next.*° What of marital relations? The difficulty in reaching any firm conclusions about the enigmatic Margaret Higinbotham beyond her reclusive reputation and shadowy presence in the diaries of family friends has already been explained. She scarcely figures in those aspects of George Higinbotham’s life that are open to scrutiny. Not so with Annie Syme, her husband’s chief confidant and emotional support. The pattern of their domestic life was established early and Annie seems to have adjusted to his long absences at the Age office and aversion to evening entertainment. Periodically he would undertake to mend his ways and spend more time with her. She knew him better. In a letter to one of their sons she reports ‘Papa is pretty much as usual. One day better, the next day worse ... he will persist in overtiring himself.’ The extent of his dependence on her is apparent in the letters he wrote from London: ‘I often and often think of you, and what a blank life is without you, but I am often saddened by a thought, what if I don’t make you happy.’ The same concern recurs in an undated letter a decade afterwards:

200 A COLONIAL LIBERALISM

I remember, dearest, some months after our marriage (I recollect the occasion well) that you came and sat down on my knee, and without leading from me, told me in the sweetest words that you were happy. What a pleasure it is to me to recall that occasion! In my darkest hours

I think of this ...

The declaration of need by this undemonstrative man (“We two do not much indulge in sentiment when speaking to or of one another’), and more particularly his need to know that he can evoke a freely given response, contrasts with the guarded, peremptory character of his dealings with others. If his love has an egoistical quality — he acts, she responds — the response can neither be feigned nor forced and hence is purer than any his business dealings could provide. For all its silences, his home offered a haven in a heartless world.*! The Pearson marriage is the best documented and has been skilfully explicated by Charles Pearson’s biographer. From his vantage point it was a misalliance, an impulsive passion for a

‘pre-Raphaelite mistress’ whose youthful inexperience and naiveté captured him in a romantic bush setting. Certainly there were major differences of temperament as well as age. She en-

joyed the pleasures of balls and house parties, and her social circle centred on Government House; he was preoccupied with reading, writing and politics, and preferred the company of older male colleagues. She decamped on a long tour of Europe, where her diary records an aimless melancholy relieved by brief flirtations, while he stayed at home, a prisoner of his enslavement to duty. But the source of Edith’s discontent was of Charles’s making — his defiance of Melbourne’s conservative orthodoxy condemned both husband and wife to a ‘social Sahara’. At the

time when their second child was born and the first fell ill, Charles was away gathering evidence for his education report. ‘Not a soul called to inquire’ after mother or daughters. Again,

on the return from the English embassy her life was ‘sadly dreary’. He took refuge in work, her efforts as an artist and writer of children’s fiction came to nothing. It is small wonder that she became querulous — more noteworthy is that she publicly displaced her resentment into a defence of her husband. Her contribution to the memorial volume that she arranged after

his death is at once a vindication and a sanctification which alludes briefly to her own misfortune in order to reinforce his. Rather than interpret the relationship in terms of two discordant

RECONSIDERATIONS 201

personalities, it makes greater sense to see it as illustrating the distorting effects of gender roles in the late Victorian marriage.” Yet it was Charles Pearson who anticipated the emancipation of women from the constricting effects of marriage as part of the inevitable decline of the religion of the family. “The reforms that are removing woman from the perpetual tutelage of husbands and fathers are unavoidably constraining her to stand alone in many respects.’ She was more at liberty to choose her husband, more free to escape an oppressive one, more able to pursue education and an independent career, and had come to possess nearly equal rights over property. These reforms, whose successful outcome Pearson assumed far too readily in National Life and Character, were all located in the second half of the nineteenth century and in all of them the liberals were active advocates.*?

The issue of divorce arose first because the British government expected its colonies to retain a uniform family law and there-

fore requested that they adopt legislation to conform to the British Matrimonial Causes Act of 1857. This measure took jurisdiction away from the ecclesiastical courts and allowed divorce to male or female petitioners; but whereas a husband had only to show adultery as grounds for divorce, a wife had to show aggravated adultery (that is, adultery with bigamy, rape,

bestiality, sodomy, cruelty or desertion). The higher value placed on a wife’s fidelity expressed a concern for the maintenance of property rights and a desire to ensure inheritance by legitimate issue. The Victorian colonists welcomed the opportunity to change the existing law, which Higinbotham thought degraded women ‘to an almost Asiatic level’ by treating the wife as ‘a portion of her husband’s chattels’. Indeed they went further than the British parliament in their legislation to make desertion in itself a grounds for divorce — this had particular relevance in local circumstances where large numbers were constantly on the move and men abandoned wives with impunity. The Victorian bill passed both chambers but was vetoed by the Crown on grounds of imperial uniformity. Legislation consistent with the British law was enacted in 1861. In 1883 Pearson was co-sponsor with his former student William Shiels of a new bill to allow divorce to women on grounds of simple adultery. He accepted that there were different standards for men and women: ‘All the institutions of the country

202 A COLONIAL LIBERALISM

tended to make the woman self-respecting and pure, while the man, on the other hand, was by the necessities of an active life

thrown into serious temptations, and undoubtedly was not guarded by public opinion in the same way as the woman.’ But he thought legislation moulded public opinion, and to the ar-

gument that wifely purity was necessary to safeguard the inheritance of a father’s progeny, he replied that transmission of estates was not an issue in Australia where the integrity of the family was the primary consideration. The proposal failed, though divorce proceedings were simplified and custody rules made less disadvantageous to women. Further grounds for divorce were embodied in subsequent legislation which the New South Wales, Queensland, South Australian and Victorian parliaments passed in concert after the Colonial Office vetoed a New South Wales bill in 1887. Spurred on by the Age, this time the liberals held their ground and Shiels sailed to London on behalf of the colonies armed with written opinions from a rollcall of eminent local liberals, including Higinbotham, Pearson, Parkes, Sir Alfred Stephen, Windeyer and Kingston. Together they forced the imperial government to give way.

Yet women petitioners still had to demonstrate more than simple adultery in order to obtain a divorce. While Pearson regretted that the law maintained ‘a standard of purity for the woman from which it has deliberately exempted the man’, while the Age condemned ‘the odious theory of female inferiority’ on

which the double standard rested, the majority were not prepared to accept the implications of equal divorce rights. Even Shiels valorized female virtue more highly than male virtue: in

1887 he had carried an amendment to the law of slander that made actionable words imputing unchastity to a woman. The liberals, then, were able to change marriage from a sacrament to a legal contract under conditions prescribed by the State, but the contract remained an unequal one.* The establishment of property rights for women followed a

similar course. The common law treated the husband as the custodian of the wife: unless separate provision was made by settlement or trust, her property was his and he was responsible for her debts and her support. Following the passage of a Mar-

ried Women’s Property Act in Britain, Higinbotham piloted similar legislation through the Victorian parliament in 1870 and it was strengthened in the 1880s.*¢

RECONSIDERATIONS 203

Higinbotham again took the lead on women’s political rights. In 1873 he proposed as ‘an important step towards that general and complete political equality, which it appeared to be the chief

purpose of this age to effect’, that women be admitted to the suffrage. He was a foundation member and generous supporter of the Victorian Women’s Suffrage Society, formed in 1884, and with Bromby, Strong and others was a signatory of the petition for enfranchisement of women presented to parliament in 1889.

Syme and Pearson also supported women’s suffrage. The achievement of their objective was delayed by the Legislative Council for a further two decades, and Victoria was in fact the last of the Australian colonies to admit women to political cit-

izenship. The reasons for that delay, and the frustrations it engendered, reveal the limitations of colonial liberalism.*’

The argument that Higinbotham advanced in 1873 for women’s suffrage appealed to the principle of political equality. He accepted that there were ‘natural differences’ between men and women, just as there were differences of nature, habit and circumstance between men; but these ‘natural differences’ constituted no good ground for “artificial inequalities’ of political rights. The argument draws on a distinction between a private sphere, where such differences were integral to the very constitution of human nature, and a public sphere where individuals possessed rights irrespective of these differences. Others made the demarcation of private and public spheres a gender boundary. The perils of the public sphere were such that women had

to be protected from them; their place was in the private domestic sphere where they could cultivate the higher morality of their sex. There were two possible responses to this powerful

ideology of the separate spheres and its exclusion of women from authority and activity — they could claim equality or they could assert difference. The feminists of the late nineteenth cen-

tury increasingly chose the second option. They engaged in private sphere feminism where they accepted the segregation of

the sexes and agitated for the raising of women’s status and authority within the family — there were clear lines of continuity here with the activities of the male liberals in reform of family law, temperance campaigns and development of women’s education. But there was also an extension of this private sphere feminism into the public sphere as women determined to deploy their moral superiority to elevate the world outside the home.

204 A COLONIAL LIBERALISM

Historians of the suffrage movement have observed a correlation

between women’s mobilization as moral reformers and their success in winning the vote, a correlation that is apparent in the settler societies such as the United States, New Zealand and Australia because of a felt need to redeem the unruly masculinity

of those places. Especially important here was the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union, which began in the American mid-west in the 1870s and spread quickly among evangelical middle-class women across the English-speaking world. A Victorian branch, established in 1887, enrolled more than three thousand members by 1892 in various departments of activity: temperance, sabbath observance, prison visits, social purity and suffrage.*

The superimposition of this feminist concern for the purification of the public sphere on to the existing concern of male champions for the elevation of women’s status in the private sphere created differences of objective and authority. The creation of the Queen’s Fund in the late 1880s illustrates the shift. Lady Loch, the Governor’s wife, proposed the establishment of a fund for women in distress as an appropriate way of marking

the golden jubilee of the reign of Queen Victoria; yet the meeting in the Melbourne Town Hall to establish the fund was

organized by men and Higinbotham, who gave the principal speech, was one of the three trustees of the scheme who were all men. In his speech he paid tribute to the Queen as a monarch and a woman: I don’t think that we ought to regret that the age of chivalry with all its foolery is past; but I don’t think that any of us would say — would that we could — that the age of true honour for women, of true respect and reverence for women, has yet fully come, but we may say that, so far as Queen Victoria has been able to do, she has benefited and advanced the position of women, and increased the respect for them among men.

The administration of the fund would be managed chiefly (‘I wish I could say exclusively’) by women who might be assisted by the advice and experience of men, but were fitted by their discriminating intelligence and sympathetic care to minister to the needs of women. So a ladies’ committee was constituted to consider applications and determine the recipients of the charity,

and its members included both Edith Pearson and

RECONSIDERATIONS 205

Higinbotham’s eldest daughter Edith, the wife of E.E. Morris, who as the founder of Melbourne’s Charity Organisation Society was the chief critic of indiscriminate relief. While relations between the male officers of the Charity Organisation Society and the ladies committee of the Queen’s Fund, as well as the broader network of ladies’ benevolent societies, were sometimes

strained, the Fund did adhere closely to the stern principles enunciated by Morris.‘ Edith Pearson and Edith Morris were also involved in a women’s educational initiative where the question of control proved more difficult to resolve. In 1888 following an offer from

Lady Clarke to provide £5000 for a house of residence for female undergraduates, the Council of Trinity College appointed a committee of ladies to assist in its establishment and management. Edith Morris was a foundation member, Edith Pearson joined later. The Ladies’ Council, as it became, soon found itself in comprehensive disagreement with the Warden of Trinity, Alexander Leeper, over his interference in the operation of their Hostel. They sought the separation of the Hostel from the College (and obtained a supporting letter from Charles Pearson, who as Minister for Public Instruction had provided the land on which the College and Hostel were situated) but the College Council held firm. So did the Ladies’ Council whose members

resigned en bloc and published a remonstrance against the arbitrary interference in their sphere of responsibilities. Leeper blamed Edith Morris for this embarrassing controversy and, in a clear comparison with her father, said she was prepared to go to any length to effect her object.°°

There was another side to Pearson that was less attractive. While Pearson the politician and publicist looked forward to the emancipation of women, Pearson the administrator was unyielding in his insistence on gender inequality within the education department. He maintained salary differences between male and female teachers, he enforced the bar on promotion of

women to the highest grades, he sought to eliminate married women, he upheld the public service reclassification of 1883 that condemned many women to the grade of junior assistant without permanency, increments or opportunity for promotion. One

female teacher resorted to the Supreme Court against the reclassification and Higinbotham found in her favour, but Pearson still refused to make up her arrears and tried to induce the other

206 A COLONIAL LIBERALISM

junior assistants to waive their legal right to them. He justified sexual discrimination by citing the laws of supply and demand, the more robust qualities of men and the inability of women to maintain discipline.>!

Central to liberalism was the concept of privacy as a sphere of behaviour free from public interference. Liberals from Locke onwards treated the family, with its natural ties of sentiment and blood and sexually ascribed status as quintessentially private; but in the long run not even the family could withstand the growing strength of individualism as the overriding principle of social life. Thus the insistence that all individuals should be free and equal came to mean that they should be emancipated from all ascribed, hierarchical bonds. Initially this subsumption of the family into the domain of publicly enforceable rights and

duties was qualified, as in Higinbotham’s early support for

divorce law reform on the grounds that wives who were deserted or maltreated by their natural protectors should be able to call on the protection of the State ‘standing in loco parentis’.

Ultimately it led to Pearson’s observation that ‘marriage 1s tending to be little more than a contract for mutual convenience which the State regulates pretty much on the same principles as it might a mercantile partnership’.** The object of the reforms to the law of marriage and divorce,

child custody and married women’s property rights was to remove all forms of inequality and establish the individualist principle of ‘to each her own’. The family would be transformed

from a regime of patriarchy to ‘a school of sympathy in equality’, as Mill put it, ‘where spouses live together in love, without power on one side or obedience on the other’. This idea of marriage enshrined a freely given affection that would be stronger and purer because of the absence of compulsion. “The modern idea,’ wrote Pearson, ‘is that she should belong to herself, that no man should have a right over her which her

heart does not sanction.’ There was an expectation here of mutual respect, and perhaps also of mutual improvement by the removal of barriers to equality. Just as Higinbotham expected the entry of women into public life to ‘tone the manners of the legislators, to civilize their proceedings so to speak’, so he anticipated the eradication of that ‘prevalent concept’ that regarded the model woman as ‘little better than an amiable idiot’ such that “any women who evinces strength of mind and vigour of

RECONSIDERATIONS 20/7

intellect becomes an object of derision and a butt for the feeble sarcasm of the mentally destitute of the other sex’. Once they released women from constraints and secured their autonomy,

liberals expected self-development to advance women’s character and standing.*?

However, there were clear limits to the liberals’ revision of ascribed gender characteristics. They remained the providers,

the protectors, the reasoners, the wielders of authority. Just as they practised a scrupulous respect and honour towards all

women, so they exalted the feminine virtues of the women

in their own households. Deakin’s reminiscence of his mother is telling: she was wife and mother first and last, and ‘all her womanhood was expressed and absorbed in these relations.

There was no lite for her outside them and no thought of hers that did not begin and end in them.’ Again, he celebrated

his marriage as ‘a charmed sphere of peace and hallowed happiness’, a sacred circle where he could rest and recuperate,

be soothed and solaced against the deadly dangers of disorganization and impurity. The liberals replaced patriarchy with domesticity and left intact the gender qualities that sustained the marital union, along with the gendered characterization of the public world, the individual and his capacities. For all

efforts to extend and apply the principles of liberalism to women, it remained a masculine doctrine.

Masculinity and nationalism Similar limitations applied to the national identity of the liberal subject. In their long campaign for the principle of self-govern-

ment, the colonial liberals worked with expectations of the common identity and shared loyalty of an homogenous populace. They praised patriotism as conducive to the common good because it took individuals beyond themselves and encouraged an altruistic higher feeling. The nature of the attachment to the new nation, and the precise form it would take, were not at first matters of acute concern — it was enough that free institutions be established to claim the allegiance of those who benefited from them. Nor did the colonial liberals perceive any conflict between jealous insistence on their constitutional liberties and

continued attachment to the British Empire. The rights that Higinbotham asserted in his long quarrel with the Colonial Office were the rights of Britons who happened to live in the

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Australian colonies. He remained as ardent in his loyalty to ‘the dear old mother country’ as was Pearson with his claim: There is not one of us who wishes to separate from England, but what attaches us to England is our feeling of loyalty to our Sovereign, the sentiment of nationality, the feeling that we belong to the great English race — that wherever the English arms have planted the flag of victory, and wherever English thought has made its mark in literature, we have

a part in it. Liberals liked to think of this attachment as a source of unity and were loath to acknowledge its limitations, even though they connived in its exploitation for partisan advantage against the Irish, for whom the fervent declarations of British loyalty were a device for exclusion as an alien minority. When colonial liberals affirmed allegiance to England, they were honouring their

filial duty; when other colonists declared support for their ancestral homeland in its struggle to be free, they were accused of importing the ‘racial feuds of the old world’. It was the duty of all Victorians, said Deakin, to ‘endeavour to present the spec-

tacle of a united nation, not fostering rebels or traitors, but devoting itself to its own development in the best and fittest manner’. He issued this appeal in response to a letter that five Irish-born members of the Victorian parliament had signed in

support of Irish Home Rule in 1882. Pearson joined him in condemning the signatories for conduct ‘very like treason’; the

Age saw no need for even that faint qualification, and even Higinbotham’s sympathy for Irish aspirations stopped short of ‘disintegrating the Empire’. The honourable exception was Higgins, who defied the Orange liberal phalanx at some risk to his prospects. With Charles Gavan Dutfy’s son Frank, he agreed to appear at St Patrick’s Hall with the Redmond brothers, sent as emissaries to Australia by Parnell in 1883; the two young men dined together before the meeting and bemoaned the likely damage to their careers at the Bar. It was good preparation for the

greater storm that broke over Higgins later as a critic of the Boer War.°¢

At the close of his career Pearson looked back over what had been achieved in the colonies since they became self-governing

and took charge of their destinies: ‘I suppose if we had to describe the political work done in Australia during the last forty years, in the briefest possible way, we might describe it

RECONSIDERATIONS 209

as the carrying out by Englishmen, Scotchmen, and Irishmen, on virgin soil, of the reforms they had dreamed of at home.’ The Australian colonies were renowned for their manhood suffrage, ballot, eight-hour day and divorce law, but the colonists should not flatter themselves that they were the originators: “We are only giving body and form to English aspirations.’ This pro-

tean metaphor of the colonies as empty spaces awaiting occupation, vacant sites, unfertilized wombs, carried with it the implication of a male possessor who would reproduce himself on and in it. Without this fulfilment of its potential, the colony was a nullity. Speaking to the electors of Brighton at the height of the first constitutional crisis, Higinbotham declared that he sometimes asked himself how much he knew of Victoria before

he came to it, ‘and if I were to confess the truth it would be that I knew where Victoria was situated on the map of the world’. Similarly, David Syme was drawn from his homeland, first to California and then to Victoria, by little more than the allure of gold.>’ Both men prospered, married and reproduced, although nei-

ther seems to have put down deep emotional roots. Syme’s model in the management of his Upper Yarra property was the Lothian farmtoun with trim ricks and sonsie beats; his favourite

recreation was firing the native scrub. Both men assimilated easily as products of the provinces of the United Kingdom to

life in a more distant province. Syme’s broad Doric and Higinbotham’s precise Anglo-Irish inflection were two of many

voices heard in a place where the incomers of the goldrush remained more prominent than the native-born until late in the century — for it was not until the closing decades that a new generation, locally born and educated, gave Melbourne’s elite a consciously Anglo-Australian identity. Higinbotham’s son-inlaw, Edward Morris, registered the transition with his Austral English, a dictionary of Australasian words, phrases and usages that appeared in 1898, and it still emphasized the polyglot character of local borrowings from Aboriginal, Maori, Indian and British sources. The odd man out was the Englishman, Pearson,

whose precious manner and Oxford drawl grated on colonial

ears. As a close friend conceded, ‘His demeanour always retained rather more of academic gravity than is popular with colonists ...’ Of course Pearson was no insular Englishman. He

had travelled over Europe, he spoke half a dozen of its

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languages, he wanted Australians to take on the quality of “Yankee restlessness’. Even so, he, more than the others, thought of the colonies as necessarily derivative, and however well one imitated the original the result was an imitation.°® The growth of an Australian nationalism came late in the lives

of these men and they were slow to adapt to it. Higinbotham saw no prospect of federation during the 1860s and while he expected the country to achieve great comfort, he could not dis-

cern the elements of a great nation. When Duffy sought his support for closer union of the Australian colonies in 1870, that support was withheld. He suggested that the domestic needs of the colonies were better met by their separate endeavours while

the external ambition to annex Pacific territories lay outside their constitutional powers and should be left for imperial decision. When the proposal revived in the 1880s, Pearson saw no intrinsic merits in unifying the colonies except to augment their defensive capacity. As the federal movement took shape in the 1890s, Syme remained carping and suspicious. These men did not feel the stirring of nativism that found expression in literature and art; in new ways of seeing the land and declaring the relationship between place and people; in infusing anticipations

of the future with those intimations of the destiny of the Australian nation that captured Alfred Deakin’s imagination.

For the older generation, the question of how the colonies arranged their common interests remained a practical question of adjusting means to ends.°?

The object that exercised them most in the 1880s was the security of the region as the end-of-century scramble for empire by the European powers threatened to sweep away the web of relations that Australian traders, planters, missionaries and adventurers span across the south-west Pacific. The liberals welcomed Queensland’s attempt to annex New Guinea in 1883. They joined in demands that Britain annex the islands

west of New Guinea as far as Fiji to stamp out the labour trattic (publicized by revelations written for the Age by Higgins’

brother-in-law, Ernest Morrison) and close out the Germans and French. They railed at the reluctance of the British to assume the White Man’s Burden. The Age even talked of separation and warned ‘we should not be satisfied till the flag of Australia floated over the entire Southern Polynese’. Of

further concern was the threat from the north. Pearson’s

RECONSIDERATIONS 211

warning of the teeming Asian hordes (while he concentrated in National Life and Character on the ‘negro problem’ in the settler societies of north America and south Africa, he suggested that the Chinese posed the greatest threat to Aryan supremacy

in Australia) spoke to a growing unease about racial purity that, together with the apparent inability suggested by the Ah Toy case of colonial governments to control entry into Australia, augmented the potency of the new nationalism.®° These anxieties gave fresh urgency to the inter-colonial conferences that led in the following decade to the federal conventions and ultimately, on the first day of the new century, to the Com-

monwealth of Australia. Of the three principal figures, only Syme lived to see the opening of the first national parliament in the Exhibition Buildings. He was suspicious of the compromises embodied in the federal constitution and resentful of the dilution of his political intluence over its enlarged constituency. Before he died Higinbotham also criticized the bicameral nature of the proposed federal parliament, especially the weakening of the sovereignty of the democratic lower house, and while he looked on Deakin as ‘the “rising hope” of Young Australia in all its best aims and aspirations’, he did not share the younger man’s enthusiasms. “He believed that there were some who looked forward to a period of Australian independence. That was a very genuine aspiration. But it was not his aspiration.®! There was another limitation to the colonial liberals’ creation of nationhood, one so basic as to vitiate all their initial assump-

tions about the nature of their project. They thought of themselves as settlers; they were in fact invaders. They appropriated the land by acts of exploration and classification and the imposition of knowledge on what had been for them a blank space, but was in fact rich in meaning to its original inhabitants. They liked to think that the new world could redeem the old, and they ignored their destruction of a civilization more ancient than their own. The persistent refusal to recognize that theirs was a conquest society, while by no means peculiar to them, was an evasion far-reaching in its consequences. The Aborigines are the absent centre of colonial liberalism. The logical sequence that performed this evasion is set out clearly in editorials Higinbotham wrote in the 1850s. By then, the consequences of the invasion were inescapable and he cited

an estimate that in the first quarter-century of the European

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presence in Victoria its Aboriginal population had fallen from 6000 to 600. He made no admission of the deliberate genocide that had marked the initial pastoral occupation: “We have taken possession of a fair and fertile land without having to conquer our way by force of arms. As we have pushed onward our posts

of occupation, the aborigines have retreated before us, or remained to be our dependents and servants.’ Even so, he did acknowledge the responsibility of the occupiers: ‘In that calm

insolence which is inspired by consciousness of irresistible power, we are apt not only to despise the feebleness and appropriate the territory of the aboriginal races whom we superseded, but to refuse to acknowledge their right to exist.’ And: To colonise the waste places of the earth, to cultivate and fertilise the desert and to make the wilderness blossom like the rose, may be, and no doubt are, some of the duties laid upon the higher races of mankind and upon our own race in particular; but it would be doing violence to every sentiment of justice and humanity to assert that the triumph of civilisation over barbarism can only be accomplished by the destruction of the aborigines.

The crucial term here is supersession, with its connotations of inevitable and impersonal displacement. Higinbotham accepts the colonizing mission of the higher race and the necessity for civilization to replace barbarism. The obligations of justice and humanity that he invokes require nothing more than the survival of the aborigines whose lower-case form declares their anonym-

ity. There is no suggestion of property rights or personal freedom, no suggestion of their sovereignty, no admission of the integrity of their culture. The position of the Aborigines is ‘analagous to that of an infant, as yet incapable of self-control, innocent of the knowledge of good or evil’. The only entitlement of the Aborigine is survival, the only way of dealing with them

is isolation and protection from the perils of association with Europeans. Thus, without a trace of irony, he tells of the need ‘to guard them from those temptations and debasing influences to which they are exposed and to which they are incapable of

resisting when thrown into the neighbourhood of civilized

communities’ .6

So the Aborigines were confined to reserves and forgotten.

The ‘Aboriginal problem’ revived from time to time when administrators desired to make excisions from their reserves.

RECONSIDERATIONS 213

Thus the Board for the Protection of Aborigines established a reserve at Framlingham in the Western District in the 1860s, and in the 1880s decided to close it so that the 3500 acres could be used for an agricultural college. John Murray, the member of parliament for the area and a friend of the Aborigines, protested against the inhumanity of driving the residents out of a place of refuge and the injustice of taking their last remaining land. Deakin, as the responsible minister, justified the closure of Framlingham on grounds of economy but gave an assurance that there would be no forced evictions. Murray reminded him of his undertaking a year later when the Board closed the school,

removed the livestock and pulled down vacant huts, and he finally managed to salvage 500 acres for the reserve. Deakin also was responsible for the infamous ‘Half Caste Act’ of 1886 that

introduced the distinction between those of ‘mixed descent’, who were to be removed for incorporation into white society, and the ‘pure’ Aborigines who were expected to pass away. By these measures the older liberal protectionist orthodoxy yielded to a new inclusionist policy that combined the old wish to protect and comfort a dying race with new measures to prevent pauperism. The new emphasis on race as a scientific fact (and a corresponding certainty of the capacities and propensities of different races) allowed the well-meaning insistence that those who were not ineradicably Aboriginal should be raised to the status of free and equal citizens by their self-exertion. The Age, as the chief expositor of Victorian liberalism, faithfully registered this trajectory, from its early pleas for protection to its later impatience with the Aborigines as ‘an incongruous element’ and still later reconstitution of them as objects of scientific curiosity in the sponsorship of Baldwin Spencer’s anthropological expedition into central Australia. And it was Higgins, as humanitarian in instinct as any, who moved the amendment in the House of Representatives in 1902 that denied the Aborigines of Queens-

land and Western Australia the vote. By these means the forms of Australian nationhood were hammered out and citizenship given more particular meanings. As the nation assumed a sacral significance, membership was redefined to demand specific qualities. Initially the colonial liberals embraced all competent and responsible individuals who settled within its borders and the nation was the entity to which they belonged. By the end of the century the gender boundaries

214 A COLONIAL LIBERALISM

of citizenship had become less clear and the racial boundaries more pronounced. As the nation was turned into a site for the resolution of fears and anxieties, it came to embody an idealized plane of loyalty to place, culture and destiny.

Lineages These developments involved new actors who operated in changed circumstances with different expectations, yet the persistence of liberal forms is striking. The Australia nation, like the separate colonies from which the nation sprang, constituted its members as free and equal individuals. The Commonwealth, as had the states that created it, embodied the collective interests of its members through a machinery of political representation. Politics continued to mark off a sphere of public life from the private; the citizen was still expected to give primary allegiance to the State, the State to guide and assist the citizen to self-fulfilment. So many of the programmes for change that have been mobilized in twentieth-century Australia — labourism, welfarism, the market-based neoliberalism of the new right, consensual nationalism and perhaps even multiculturalism as well — employ arguments that are conducted within the terms of liberal discourse.

This book began with Nettie Palmer paying homage to Higinbotham and traced a lineage that extended through her uncle Henry to contemporaries like the radical Dr William Maloney (elected to the Victorian parliament as a labour candidate before there was a Labor Party), to the visionary Bernard O’Dowd (librarian of the Supreme Court while Higinbotham was its Chief Justice), later to Maurice Blackburn (a labour lawyer when that species was still a disadvantaged rarity) and by the 1930s to the Palmers themselves and their beleaguered circle of progressive intellectuals. They revered Higinbotham as a true democrat who used his high office to champion the underdog and vindicate the people’s liberties.

But they were not his only admirers. The statue that Nettie Palmer arrived too late to see unveiled was erected because of a bequest left by the recently deceased Donald Mackinnon, who as a young barrister in the 1880s had assisted the Chief Justice

in his consolidation of the Victorian statutes. Mackinnon descended from a Western District pastoral dynasty, was educated at Geelong Grammar and Oxford, and later operated

RECONSIDERATIONS 215

as a reformer of luminous integrity in the last years before the rise of Labor snuffed out Victorian liberals as an independent political force — but that alignment left him on the other side of the divide from the Palmers and their friends. And there were others of more conservative cast who also laid claim to Higinbotham. One was Sir Henry Wrixon, who entered politics as a disciple of Higinbotham and became the Attorney-General who appointed him Chief Justice; Wrixon’s disdain for wealth and privilege declined after he married an heiress, moved into Raheen, and became more and more fearful of the teeming masses who populated the river flats overlooked by his mansion, yet his veneration of his hero continued. Then there was Sir William (‘Iceberg’) Irvine, another Anglo-Irishman from Trinity College Dublin, who earned renown when he became Premier in 1902 by choosing a cabinet without consulting Syme; the members of the Melbourne Stock Exchange gave him three cheers in the following year when he inflicted a humiliating defeat on striking railway workers. Sir John Latham, an equally

frigid rationalist, went one better as federal Attorney-General in the 1920s by crippling the national union movement. These lawyer-politicans — Irvine became Chief Justice of the Victorian

Supreme Court, Latham Chief Justice of the High Court — celebrated Higinbotham’s spotless character, his grave demeanour and fearless enforcement of the rule of law. When other parties laid claim to the political legacy of colonial liberalism, the alternatives multiplied. Most of these exercises made Deakin, the dominant statesman of the early Commonwealth period, their pivot. Thus Frederic Eggleston presented Deakin as the paradigmatic intellectual in Australian politics who managed to practise statecraft as an art and a science while infusing public life with his exalted concept of citizenship. From Deakin he threw a line back to Higinbotham (‘If Higinbotham

had not lived in a remote colony he would have been an important figure in the history of democracy’) but not Syme. Syme’s forceful and creative contribution had already been overshadowed by his reputation for jealous severity: ‘He was largely

responsible for the heresy-chasing and head-hunting that are a feature of Victorian politics.’ This lineage took in lesser contem-

poraries of Deakin like Sir George Turner, Sir Alexander Peacock and George Swinburne, principled pragmatists who leavened Victorian politics with their practical reforming zeal.

216 A COLONIAL LIBERALISM

But at that point in the early twentieth century the tradition ran

into the sands. For Eggleston, the fusion of the non-Labor forces, conservative and liberal, into a single mass party spelt the demise of genuine liberalism, even though that fusion was managed at the federal level by Deakin himself and carried on the title of the Liberal Party. Thus Eggleston believed that “the belief in human perfectability died a glorious death with Mr Alfred Deakin’. On the other hand, Herbert Brookes, who was Deakin’s son-in-law and close associate, reconciled himself to this realignment and served as a medium between it and big business. Brookes lived long enough to confer a continuity between Deakinite liberalism and the eventual reincarnation of the non-Labor forces in Menzies’ Liberal Party.® Rather than there being a natural line of succession, it is apparent that there were competing variants whose champions constructed and reconstructed the progenitors according to their own predilections and in their own image. ‘I can see him again as he rose from his place on the Treasury bench, came to this corner of the table,’ declared Shiels when as Premier he announced the death of Higinbotham to the Victorian parliament. Given the ambiguities that were embedded in colonial liberalism as a philosophy and a programme, it is hardly surprising that it should yield multiple lineages and understandable that the heirs should record their own ideological descent in such recollections and impersonations. As Wrixon prophesied upon the death of

Higinbotham, ‘the real monument to the man will not be in marble or bronze, but in what he has done and the memory he has left behind him’. Attempts are sometimes made to define a distinctive Mel-

bourne intellectual tradition. The city and its culture is portrayed as doubly Victorian, the product of expectations of progress and improvement, filial in its respect for past achievement, earnest and didactic in tone, meliorist in outlook, believing in enlightenment and happiness for all. It is a tradition that as-

serts the validity of social and political engagement, and the capacity of its bearers to articulate and organize for the good of the whole. The ideological intensity finds expression in journals, parties, societies and clubs, for in Melbourne ideas are spurs to action: and as the custodian of one such Melbourne institution has remarked, ‘often opposing groups have, with whatever reluctance, conceded each other’s place in the landscape and on

RECONSIDERATIONS 217

occasion have joined one another in discussion clubs — to the amazement of visiting Syndeysiders’.® The Boobooks formed a discussion club in 1902. Its members were, and are, restricted to males, who join by invitation. They dine and then withdraw to a sitting-room decorated with stuffed

birds and other paraphernalia of owlery, where one of their number introduces the topic of discussion. The minutes of the

Boobook Club in its early years are a self-conscious mix of young men’s cleverness and not-so-young men’s indulgences, of idealism and convivial banter. Walter Murdoch spoke on the

Futility of Philosophy, John Latham on the Ethics of Belief, while Herbert Brookes defended the Mystic and Frederick Sinclaire (Utilitarian minister, socialist and friend of the Palmers)

presented an account of Modernism. Arthur Robinson (son of the commercial editor of the Age) recalled Boss Syme, “an ogre

grim and great’, Frederic Eggleston discussed The State in Relation to National Development, and Bernard O’Dowd reminded fellow Boobooks of The Eternal Feminine and Other Gynaecentricities. Here, once a month, among the rising young men of the Commonwealth, the liberal tradition revived until at ten sharp the Archboobook drew proceedings to a close and the members went their various ways.°’

6

EPILOGUE

Pearson went first, in the winter of 1892. He had lost his ministerial post with the fall of the Gillies-Deakin coalition eighteen months earlier, his economic security in the financial crash, and his health from acute pneumonia. Under ‘sentence of death’, as he put it, he set to work on National Life and Character and only when it was completed and despatched to the publisher in London did he allow himself, as his wife said, ‘to be put to bed like a child’. He convalesced at Stawell, and then at Corowa, but the patch on his lung persisted so he sailed to Colombo, where his family would join him and continue to England. At a farewell dinner in Parliament House he declared that public life in the colonies ‘presents no shock to the sensitive mind’. Higinbotham presented him with a testimonial signed by friends that assured him ‘A public life of some fifteen years has left your heart and mind unspoiled by the rough storms of politics’.

Edith Pearson wrote in her diary that it was a poor end for their long sojourn in a strange land. ‘Considering the way he has worked for the good of this country, he has been treated very shabbily by his own party, but then the Liberals always do that.”!

To support him in retirement, Syme and Shiels (who Syme had installed as Premier) undertook that he would be appointed to an official post in London. He hoped that the post would be the Agent General, but in the aftermath of the crash the out218

, EPILOGUE 219 going Premier, James Munro, had urgent reasons to leave Melbourne and awarded that plum to himself. Pearson had to make do with the position of secretary to the Agent-General. Worse followed. In 1893 the Shiels ministry fell and Syme arranged the instalment of James Patterson, a personal enemy of Pearson: in January 1894 Pearson received notice that he would be dismissed. By this time his savings amounted to less than £1000 and his cough was incessant. In the time that was left to him he set the agent general’s office in order for the next political refugee, Duncan Gillies (Munro having been forced to return and face his creditors) and tried to earn money with his pen (Syme regretted that he could offer no more than the usual two guineas a piece, preferably on literary or social events rather than politics). Two days before his death, Edith asked him if he would like to receive communion. ‘Not yet,’ he answered and,

after a long pause, ‘I am about to solve the great theological question.” Towards the end he misunderstood another of her questions and insisted, ‘I do not want to go back to Australia.” Edith Pearson’s smouldering indignation intensified her grief.

At the age of forty-two, she was left to support herself and three teenage daughters. A group of Pearson’s English friends, Sidgwick, Seeley, Leslie Stephen, Huxley and others, sought and obtained a pension of £100 per annum from the civil list. Edith tried to supplement this with an Australian pension and as late as 1907 she told Deakin that while she would not have accepted a penny from the Victorian government ‘that really caused his death’, perhaps as Prime Minister he might arrange a national

subvention since ‘with the Commonwealth it would be

different’. Much of her energy went into arranging publication of a collection of Pearson’s essays and then the memorial volume that appeared in 1900. A student friend, William Stebbing, undertook the editing of Pearson’s own memoir, Edith’s reminiscences and the testimonials that she solicited and shaped to her satisfaction. Thanking Deakin for his contribution, she asked him to amend his account of the circumstances that had robbed her late husband of his last post since ‘I do not like the word dismissed as applied to Dr Pearson’. The Age also took exception to Deakin’s suggestion that a delicacy of feeling and shrinking from selfassertiveness had allowed ‘stronger and coarser natures’ to make

use of Pearson, as well as the general feeling of failure that

220 A COLONIAL LIBERALISM

pervaded the book. Pearson had been a fighter, insisted the Age, and earned a place alongside Higinbotham as a second instance of supreme honesty, the highest culture and fidelity to the rights of humanity. While the struggle had been bitter, ‘the Democratic fight has been won’. More to Edith’s liking was the biographical

sketch written to introduce the essays by the warm-hearted H. A. Strong, who had been Professor of Classics at the University of Melbourne and perhaps Pearson’s most intimate friend there. ‘You know I always hated all liberals and disbe-

lieved in their honesty’, he told her. “They would certainly crucify the Saviour.” Higinbotham survived Pearson’s departure by less than six months. He had been troubled by heart strain for some years but refused to reduce his judicial duties. Three days after the Christmas of 1892 he collapsed and survived only until the last day of the year. On his insistence the funeral was strictly private and all his papers were destroyed. He was buried in the Brighton Cemetery and over his grave was set a simple granite cross with the text, “The memory of the just is blessed’.° The legend of Higinbotham the exemplar of colonial liberal-

ism was already well established — his removal from the sophistries of parliamentary politics increased the impact of his later interventions into public affairs as the champion of women,

unions and democracy, which confirmed his reputation as a steadfast friend of the people. The Bulletin began the process of

posthumous sanctification with an obituary written by Price Warung and entitled “The Greatest of Australia’s Dead’. Tocsin, the Victorian socialist paper, reprinted his famous speeches. Aus-

tralian Women’s Sphere recalled his assistance in the establishment of the Victorian Women’s Suffrage Society. Morris, the son-in-law, accepted the office, ‘at the same time painful and pleasant’, of giving a true picture of one ‘whose name and memory have a fascination for many Australians’.®

Against this public canonization of the dead Higinbotham there occurred within the family a strange and distressing sequence of events. Margaret Higinbotham, his widow, retired to London. Edith Morris, the eldest child, died in 1896 and her husband died in 1902 while on leave in London, leaving their

four children to be brought up there. Alice, the second Higinbotham daughter, had married an English naval officer; he

too died and she supported herself and two children as a

EPILOGUE 221

housekeeper at Trinity House in London. George, the elder son, travelled to Melbourne just in time to speak to his father on his deathbed; he later resumed a restless, solitary life as a vigneron in northern Victoria, a gold prospector in Western Australia and

finally a farmer in east Africa, where he died prematurely. Edward, the other son, was studying in 1892 at his father’s university in Ireland; he became a legal officer in Burma and eventually retired to England. Maude, the youngest, sailed with her mother to England and married an elderly clergyman; when he died at the turn of the century, she returned with six young children to Melbourne, as did some to the Morrises. They were the only descendants of the Higinbotham who kept up the connection with twentieth-century Australia. In correspondence with Gwyn Dow in 1964, one of Maude’s sons suggested a reason for this pattern of dispersal. He said that before grandfather Higinbotham died he ordered that all his papers be burned and that the family leave the colony. “Why, why, why is a question I have never been able to find an answer to.’ He asked his mother as late as 1955, shortly before she died,

and was told simply that ‘it was his wish and nobody would dream of questioning a decision from such a man’. The story of Higinbotham’s order is hearsay. It came from an informant born five years after the events he recounts, and he told it as an elderly eccentric who had worked as a jackeroo, rabbit trapper and delivery man while seeking to persuade all who would listen that his climatic research proved a thirteen-year cycle of droughts. Yet Maude’s son’s knowledge of other aspects of the family history was extensive and accurate. He knew of the tragic secret of the family infirmity, of the brother of his grandfather who was confined to an asylum (for whom George made special provision in his will) and of his own sister who had been treated in mental hospitals and who he helped to support. Maude’s son believed that his uncle George was mentally unstable. He himself had remained single, he explained, because he could not afford the risk of children.’ The streak of insanity in the Higinbotham family was in fact no more than a half-secret, the subject of rumour and innuendo.

It surfaced in the first constitutional crisis when the decrepit John Pascoe Fawkner alleged that a madman controlled the

Legislative Assembly, and ‘when I say madman I speak advisedly, for I have been informed that some of the family of

222 A COLONIAL LIBERALISM

Higinbotham had been sent to a madhouse’. Higinbotham never

alluded to it, and it is impossible to say how it bore on any decision concerning the future of his family he might have made at the end of his life. Even so, his obliteration of the historical record and the subsequent removal of his descendants heightens the mystery.®

Syme outlasted the others, increased in wealth, and arranged his biography before he died on 14 February 1908. He left an estate of £972 300 for distribution among his widow and children. The Age continued as a family trust until 1948, when it became a public company and subsequently a subsidiary of another newspaper dynasty more enduring than his own. Rupert Murdoch’s grandfather read the burial service. His remains were interred at the Kew Cemetery in a pavilion built to his instructions, a massive structure decorated with winged serpent and sun, the symbol of the pharaoh. To the end he remained austere and forbidding. Many of his grandchildren found him frightening but one understood him better. She would walk round the garden at Blythswood with him, neither speaking much but both enjoying the companionship. Years later her mother told her that David Syme had said, ‘I like Elaine. She just comes up to me and puts up her fat, plain face expecting to be kissed.”

NOTES

Abbreviations ADB Australian Dictionary of Biography AJCP Australian Joint Copying Project ANU Australian National University CPD Commonwealth Parliamentary Debates

CUP Cambridge University Press

CO Colonial Office

HCP House of Commons Papers JRAHS Journal of the Royal Australian Historical Society

ML Mitchell Library

MUP Melbourne University Press NLA National Library of Australia NSWUP New South Wales University Press

OUP Oxford University Press SLV State Library of Victoria SUP Sydney University Press UQP University of Queensland Press

UWAP University of Western Australia Press

VH] Victorian Historical Journal

VHM Victorian Historical Magazine VPD Victorian Parliamentary Debates

VPLA Votes and Proceedings of the Legislative Assembly

VPP Victorian Parliamentary Papers CHAPTER 1

1 Nettie Palmer, Fourteen Years: Extracts from a Private Journal 1925-1939, Meanjin Press, Melbourne, 1948, pp. 239-41; Age, Argus, 13 November 1937.

2 Vance Palmer, National Portraits, Angus and Robertson, Sydney, 1940, pp. 90-100; Nettie Palmer, Henry Bournes Higgins: A Memoir, Harrap, London, 1931, pp. 75, 123-4, 257; Higgins’ Memoirs in Higgins Papers (NLA ms.

223

224 A COLONIAL LIBERALISM 1057/3); Dr Maloney in CPD, vol. 93, p. 3739 (20 August 1920) — he sent the tribute to Higgins (NLA ms. 1057/1/425); John Rickard, “Nettie Palmer and Her Uncle’, Meanjin, vol. 37 (1978), pp. 434-42. 3 Niel Black to T. S. Gladstone, 20 December 1865, quoted in Margaret Kiddle, Men of Yesterday: A Social History of the Western District of Victoria 18341890, MUP, 1961, p. 216; VPD, vol. 36, p. 2694 (15 June 1881); Edith Pearson in William Stebbing (ed.), Charles Henry Pearson: Fellow of Oriel College and Education Minister in Victoria, Longmans, London, 1900, p. 265; Alfred Deakin, The Crisis in Victorian Politics, 1879-1881: A Personal Retrospect (ed. J. A. La Nauze and R. M. Crawford), MUP, 1957, p. 3, and The Federal Story: The Inner History of the Federal Cause 1880-1900 (ed. J. A. La Nauze), MUP, 1963, p. 10; interview with Higinbotham in British Australian, 11 January 1893.

4 Deakin to Pearson, 8 June 1878, Pearson Paper (SLV ms. 7313), quoted in John Tregenza, Professor of Democracy: The Life of Charles Henry Pearson, 1830-1894, Oxford Don and Australian Radical, MUP, 1968, p. 139; Pearson

~to Deakin, 16 August 1892, Deakin Papers (NLA ms. 1540/4162); John Rickard, H .B. Higgins: The Rebel as Judge, Allen and Unwin, Sydney, 1984, . 68.

5 Syme quoted in Ambrose Pratt, David Syme: The Father of Protection in Australia, Ward Lock, London, 1908, p. 303; Deakin, introduction to ibid., p. xix, and in C.E. Sayers, David Syme: A Life, Cheshire, Melbourne, 1965, p. 145. 6 Rickard, Higgins, pp. 56, 87; Higgins’ Memoirs (NLA ms. 1057/3); VPD, vol. 30, p. 296 (29 July 1879), vol. 45, p. 140 (17 June 1884). 7 J. A. La Nauze, Alfred Deakin: A Biography, 2 vols, MUP, 1965, vol. 1, pp. 36-7; Sayers, David Syme, pp. 145-6. 8 Deakin, introduction to Pratt, David Syme, p. xi. 9 Ibid., p. xix; William Shiels in VPD, vol. 71, p. 3784 (10 January 1893). 10 [R.H. Horne] ‘An Election Contest in Australia’, Cornhill Magazine, vol. 5 (1862), pp. 25-35; see also Ann Blainey, The Farthing Poet: A Biography of Richard Hengist Horne, 1802-84: A Lesser Literary Lion, Longmans, London, 1968, p. 213.

11. Robert Murray Smith to Christopher Crisp, 15 July 1881, Crisp Papers (NLA ms. 743/1/171); Charles Pearson, ‘Democracy in Victoria’, Fortnightly Review, vol. 31 (1879), p. 690; J. F. Hogan, ‘Manhood Suffrage in Victoria’, Victorian Review, vol. 2 (1880), p. 526. 12 The decline of liberalism in New South Wales after the 1850s is argued by P. Loveday and A. W. Martin, Parliament, Factions and Parties: The First Thirty Years of Responsible Government in New South Wales, 1856-1889, MUP, 1966, from whom the quotation ts taken (p. 56). A similar view of the fate of liberalism is suggested by C. N. Connolly, “Politics, Ideology and the New South Wales Legislative Council’, Ph.D. thesis, ANU, 1974, and J. M. Ward, ‘Colonial Liberalism and its Aftermath: New South Wales, 1867-1917’, JRAHS, vol. 67 (1981), pp. 81-101; John Hirst takes liberalism more seriously in The Strange Birth of Liberal Democracy: New South Wales 1848-1884, Allen and Unwin, Sydney, 1988, as does R. B. Lyon, “The Principles of New Zealand Liberal Thought in the Late Nineteenth Century’, Ph.D. thesis, University of Auckland, 1982. 13. Anthony Arblaster, The Rise and Decline of Western Liberalism, Basil Blackwell, Oxford, 1984, p. 6; see also D. J. Manning, Liberalism, Dent, London, 1976, ch. 2.

14 Foster’s speech reported in the Melbourne Herald and quoted in G. R. Quaife, ‘The Nature of Political Conflict in Victoria 1856-57’, M. A. thesis, University of Melbourne, 1954, p. 102; Tocqueville quoted in James T. Schleiffer, The Making of Tocqueville’s Democracy in America, University of North Carolina Press, Chapel Hill, 1980, p. 46; Higinbotham in Argus, 5 January 1858.

NOTES 225 15 CC. Gavan Dutfy, On Popular Errors Concerning Australia, George Robertson, Melbourne, 1866, p. 19; Edward Wilson, An Enquiry into the Principles of Representation, William Fairfax, Melbourne, 1857, p. 25; Edward Jenks, The Government of Victoria, (Australia), Macmillan, London, 1891, p. vii; Pearson, ‘Democracy in Victoria’, p. 690; Louis Hartz, The Founding of New Societies: Studies in the History of the United States, Latin America, South Africa, Canada and Australia, Harcourt Brace, New York, 1964. 16 William Westgarth, Victoria, Late Australia Felix, Oliver and Boyd, Edinburgh, 1853, pp. 284-5, 296n., quoted in Geoffrey Serle, The Golden Age: A History of the Colony of Victoria 1851-1861, MUP, 1977, p. 17. 17 Higinbotham in Australasian, 17 May 1873; Pearson, ‘Democracy in Victoria’, p. 704. A contemporary acknowledgement of the influence of Higinbotham’s denunciation of imperial honours appears in A. Patchett Martin, Australia and the Empire, David Douglas, Edinburgh, 1889, p. 102.

CHAPTER 2

1 Deakin to Lionel Curtis, 13 March 1912, quoted in J. A. La Nauze, Alfred Deakin: A Biography, 2 vols, MUP, 1965, vol. 1, p. 105. 2 This opening passage draws principally on Ellen Clacy, A Lady’s Visit to the Gold Diggings of Australia in 1852-53, Hurst and Blackett, London, 1853; Frank Fowler, Southern Lights and Shadows, Sampson Low, London, 1859; William Howitt, Land, Labour and Gold: Or, Two Years in Victoria, 2 vols, Longman, Brown and Green, London, 1855; P. Just, Australia: Or, Notes Taken During a Residence in the Colonies, Durham and Thomson, Dundee, 1859; William Kelly, Life in Victoria: Or, Victoria in 1853 and Victoria in 1858,

2 vols, Chapman and Hall, London, 1858; E. Daniel and Annette Potts (eds), A Yankee Merchant in Goldrush Australia: The Letters of George Francis Train, 1853-1855, Heinemann, London, 1970.

3 Melbourne Punch, vol. 1 (1855), p.4; the statistics are taken from Wray Vamplew (ed.), Australians: Historical Statistics, Fairfax, Syme, Weldon and Associates, Sydney, 1987, pp. 88, 129, 131.

4 {J.H. Kerr], Glimpses of Life in Victoria, By a Resident, Edmondston and Douglas, Edinburgh, 1872, pp. 127-8. I draw here on David Goodman, ‘Gold Fields/Golden Fields: The Language of Agrarianism and the Victorian Gold Rush’, Australian Historical Studies, vol. 23 (1988-89), pp. 19-41. 5 R.N. Ebbels (ed.), The Australian Labour Movement 1850-1907, Australasian Book Society, Sydney, 1976, p. 67. 6 Ebenezer Syme, ‘First Impressions of Melbourne’, Syme Papers (SLV Box 132/4).

7 The bare facts are given in Edward E. Morris, A Memoir of George Higinbotham: An Australian Politician and Chief Justice of Victoria, Macmillan, London, 1895, who notes the fate of his personal papers on p. ix. Other sources of basic biography include the lengthy obituaries in the Argus, 2 January 1893,

and the Illustrated Australian News, 1 February 1893; and the entry for Higinbotham in ADB, vol. 4, pp. 391-7. The story of how Higinbotham met Margaret Foreman is in a letter from his grandson, Charles Reade, to Gwyn Dow, 8 July 1964, among other family papers and correspondence collected by her. The boyhood story appears in Morris’s Memoir, p. 318. I have been greatly assisted by other material gathered by Gwyn Dow as well as an expanded draft of her ADB entry. 8 Morris, Memoir, chs 1-3; R.B. McDowell and D. A. Webb, Trinity College Dublin 1592-1952: An Academic History, CUP, Cambridge, 1982, chs 5-6; A Catalogue of Graduates in the University of Dublin, Hodges, Smith and Foster, Dublin, 1869, p. 272; Stephen Koss, The Rise and Fall of the Political Press in

226 A COLONIAL LIBERALISM

Britain. Volume One: The Nineteenth Century, Hamish Hamilton, London, 1981, ch. 3.

9 Gordon N. Ray, Thackeray: The Uses of Adversity (1811-1846), OUP, London, 1955, pp. 195-6; J. R. Lewis, The Victorian Bar, Robert Hales, London, 1982; Morris, Memoir, p.30. Higinbotham confessed his ignorance of Victoria in a speech reported in the Age, 29 January 1866. 10 John Leonard Forde, The Story of the Bar of Victoria, Whitcombe and Tombs, Melbourne, n.d. [1913]; Arthur Dean, A Multitude of Counsellors: A History of the Bar of Victoria, Cheshire, Melbourne, 1968; and individual entries in the ADB.

11 Journal of Stanley Leighton, 1868, vol. 2, pp. 3-8 (NLA ms. 360); Mollie Turner Shaw to Gwyn Dow, 5 August 1964, and correspondence between Hilda Morris and Gwyn Dow; Melbourne Punch, 14 January 1897. 12 Hilda Morris to Gwyn Dow, 5 April 1965; a slightly different version is given in Morris, Memoir, p. 318, from whom the quotation concerning cooks and ' duchesses is taken. 13. Hilda Morris to Gwyn Dow, 12 July 1964; Melbourne Bulletin, 24 February 1882; Alfred Deakin, The Federal Story: The Inner History of the Federal Cause 1880-1900 (ed. J. A. La Nauze), MUP, 1963, p. 10 and The Crisis in Victorian Politics, 1879-1881: A Personal Retrospect (ed. J. A. La Nauze and R. M. Crawford), MUP, 1957, p. 22; G. V. Smith, quoted in Robert A. Johnson, ‘Groups in the Victorian Legislative Assembly 1861—70’, Ph.D. thesis, La Trobe University, 1975, p. 699; James Smith, quoted in Morris, Memozr, p. 50; ‘A Colonial Statesman’, Review of Reviews, 20 May 1895; ‘History of Victoria’, Imperial Review, no. 29 (January 1895), p. 71.

14 Morris, Memoir, pp. 224, 321; Forde, The Story of the Bar, p. 183. 15 Higinbotham’s subsequent declaration of his religious beliefs is discussed in Chapter 4, but his unorthodoxy was apparent from the 1850s. Morris, Memoir, pp- 39, 51 quotes the vicar of St Luke’s, South Melbourne, where he worshipped from 1857 to 1860, and James Smith, who describes him as a “Christian theist’. Charles Bright in Cosmos, vol. 1, no. 9 (31 May 1895), p. 464, recalls that his beliefs at this time were ‘distinctly Pantheistic’. A visiting Englishman

recorded that ‘he was said to be a Deist’; Leighton Journal, vol. 2, p. 5. The subject is treated with insight in Gwynneth M. Dow, George Higinbotham: Church and State, Pitman, Melbourne, 1964, esp. pp. 7-14. 16 ADB, vol. 6, pp. 412-5; ‘Caustic’ [David Blair], The Anatomy of the Argus, Hough and Co., Melbourne, 1854; Morris, Memoir, ch. 6. 17 Argus, 13, 17 February, 25 October, 14 December 1858. In distinguishing the Whig and liberal traditions I have drawn on J. G. A. Pocock, Virtue, Commerce and History: Essays on Political Thought and History, Chiefly in the Eighteenth Century, CUP, Cambridge, 1985, and J. W. Burrow, Whigs and Liberals: Con-

tinuity and Change in English Political Thought, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1988.

18 The circumstances that led to the passage of the colonial constitutions are discussed in W. G. McMinn, A Constitutional History of Australia, OUP, Melbourne, 1979, ch. 3; A.C.V. Melbourne, Early Constitutional Development in Australia, UQP, 1963, part V; John Manning Ward, Colonial Self-Government: The British Experience 1759-1856, Macmillan, London, 1976, ch. 9.

19 Report from the Select Committee on a New Constitution for the Colony, VPLC, 1853-54, vol. 3; G. H. F. Webb (ed.), Debate in the Legislative Council of Victoria on the Second Reading of the New Constitution Bill Caleb Turner, Melbourne, 1854. Two older versions of Victorian constitutional history are Edward Jenks, The Government of Victoria (Australia), Macmillan, London, 1891, and Edward Sweetman, Constitutional Development of Victoria 1851-6, Whitcombe and Tombs, Melbourne, 1920. The most useful accounts are J. M.

NOTES 227 Main, ‘Making Constitutions in New South Wales and Victoria, 1853-1854’, Historical Studies, vol. 7 (1955-7), pp. 369-86, and Geoffrey Serle, The Golden Age: A History of the Colony of Victoria 1851-1861, MUP, 1963, pp. 146-61. 20 Argus, 28 November 1856, 7 February, 21 October 1857, 27 January 1858. 21 Wilson’s series of letters to the editor appeared in the Argus on 29 December 1856, 14, 22 May 1857, 6-8 April 1858, and were answered by Higinbotham in leading articles on 31 December 1856, 6 January, 18 May 1857, 8, 13 April 1858. Wilson reprinted the first two exchanges in An Enquiry into the Prinaples of Representation, William Fairfax, Melbourne, 1857. The long quotation comes from 18 May 1857 and is reproduced in Morris, Memoir, p. 58 and Serle, The Golden Age, p. 276. See also G. H. Nadel, ‘Mid-Nineteenth Century Political Thought in Australia’, M.A. thesis, University of Melbourne, 1950, chs 15-16.

22 Argus, 9 January, 26 March 1857, 1 February, 1, 5, 23 April, 22-4 June, 14 December 1858, 18 January 1859. 23 Argus, 6 January 1857 (reprinted in An Enquiry, pp. 21-2), 16 March 1857. 24 Argus, 18, 21, 28, 29 July, 7 August 1857; see Edith Rulevich, “The Victorian Land Convention and the Land Reform Movement of the Late Fifties’, B.A. thesis, University of Melbourne, 1956. 25 Argus, 10 March, 2, 3 June 1858. Serle, The Golden Age, p. 279 asks of this violent denunciation, ‘could it have been Higinbotham?’ There is some evi-

dence that it was not. Higinbotham’s bound volumes of the Argus (he presented them to the State Library and some were subsequently transferred to the Baillieu Library) mark particular leading articles with a cross on either

side of the headline. Those so marked that deal with the Convention (for example, 18 July, 7 August 1857) are harsher than others in the same volume not so marked. It is possible that the marked articles were written by someone other than the editor, for James Smith (quoted in Morris, Memoir, pp. 49-51) identifies some leading articles that he contributed and Higinbotham (in two undated letters to H. S$. Chapman, held in the SLV) indicates that other contributors also wrote leading articles. However, Smith adds that Higinbotham would discuss the subject with his staff and if the prospective contributor’s views differed markedly from those of the editor, the task would be entrusted to another ‘whose views might happen to be more thoroughly in accordance with those of the editor’. It is unlikely that the views expressed here differed substantially from those of Higinbotham. 26 Argus, 8 March 1884, 15 June 1858. 27. Argus, 25 August 1856, 9 April, 6 October 1857, 22 January, 13, 17 February,

16 September 1858. I draw on Burrow, Whigs and Liberals, pp. 87-8, and Stefan Collini, “The Idea of “Character” in Victorian Political Thought’,

Transactions of the Royal Historical Soaety, 5th series, vol. 35 (1985), pp. 29-50. 28 Age, 15 August 1857; Argus, 17 August 1857; Higinbotham to H. S. Chapman, n.d. [January 1858], quoted in Serle, The Golden Age, p. 278.

29 Argus, 9, 13, 26 March 1857; Charles Gavan Duffy, My Life in Two Hemispheres, Fisher Unwin, London, 1898, vol. 2, p.292; Argus, 11, 12 June, 7 October, 12 November, 18 December 1858, 29 January, 16, 17, 20 May 1859. 30 Wilson to Henry Parkes, 12 April 1858 (ML ms. A 930); James Smith quoted in Morris, Memoir, pp. 49-51; Charles Bright, “George Higinbotham’, Cosmos, vol. 1, no. 9 (31 May 1895), pp. 461-6. See also his rejection of the offer of a testimonial presentation from the staff; Higinbotham to James Smith, July 1859 (ML ms. 212/1, pp. 83-6). 31 Argus, 13 May 1861. 32 Johnson, ‘Groups in the Victorian Legislative Assembly’, ch. 11. 33 Duffy, My Life, vol. 2, p. 168 criticized the novel seating arrangements in the Victorian parliament; see also Johnson, ‘Groups’, ch. 2 and Geoffrey Bartlett,

228 A COLONIAL LIBERALISM ‘Political Organisation and Society in Victoria 1864-1883’, Ph.D. thesis, ANU, 1964, part 6. 34 The frank minister was James Grant, quoted in Johnson, ‘Groups’, p. 668; he takes the report from the Age, 6 May 1867. Bartlett ‘Political Organisation’,

p.19 takes a slightly different version from the Argus. See also Grant’s statement in VPD, vol. 4, p. 1219 (11 June 1867). 35. Johnson, ‘Groups’, ch. 12. 36 James Smith, ‘The Year 1863’, Meanjin, vol. 37 (1978), p.425. In 1863 the

O’Shanassy ministry amended the electoral law to create a dual list of voters. Ratepayers were enfranchised automatically whereas other eligible voters had to make personal application and pay a shilling fee. This, together with an extension of the period of residence required of non-ratepayers to twelve months, curtailed the popular franchise from nearly 169000 in 1861 to 107000 in 1864. 37 Bartlett, ‘Political Organisation’, part 2; G. R. Quaife, ‘The Victory of the Ballot in 1856: The Mechanics and Mores of an Election Campaign in Victoria’, VHM, vol. 38 (1967), pp. 144-58.

38 Argus, 22 September 1856; Speech Addressed to the Electors of the District of Brighton by the Hon. George Higinbotham ... on December 4, 1865, Wilson and Mackinnon, Melbourne, 1865, p. 7. 39 Argus, 24 October 1864.

40 F.K. Crowley, ‘Aspects of the Constitutional Conflicts between the Two Houses of the Victorian Legislature; 1864-1868’, M. A. thesis, University of Melbourne, 1947, pp. 12, 33-4, where he reproduces a list of the bills rejected by the Council from VPLA, 1869, vol. 2; Dean H. Jaensch, ‘Political Representation in Colonial South Australia, 1857-1901’, Ph.D. thesis, University of Adelaide, 1973, ch. 3. G. W. Rusden, History of Australia, 3 vols, 2nd edn, Melville, Mullen and Slade, Melbourne, 1897, vol. 3, ch. 18, and Henry Gyles Turner, A History of the Colony of Victoria, 2 vols, Longmans, London, 1904, vol. 2, ch. 5 present lengthy accounts of the constitutional crisis from a conservative standpoint; and see n. 51 for further references. 41 Bartlett, ‘Political Organisation’, p. 29. 42 The opposition comment appeared in she Age, 23 January 1866, and is quoted in Johnson, ‘Groups’, p. 264. 43 Higinbotham quoted in the Age, 15 December 1865. The constitutional pro-

visions are discussed by Zelman Cowen, ‘A Century of Constitutional Development in Victoria, 1856-1956’, in his Sir John Latham and Other Papers, OUP, Melbourne, 1965, pp. 105-68.

44 Bagehot’s comments appear in The English Constitution, OUP, London, 1928 edn, p. 86. Higinbotham criticized the Council in Victorian Hansard, vol. 11, pp. 1188-93 (18 July 1865).

45 Age, 11 July 1865, 8 January 1866; the formation of the Liberal Reform Association is discussed in Johnson, ‘Groups’, pp. 722-4. 46 Higinbotham, Speech Addressed to the Electors of Brighton, p. 7. 47 Argus, 25 September 1865; VPD, vol. 2, p.21 (12 April 1866), vol. 5, p. 90 (9 October 1867); Age, 7 April 1866. 48 Judges Rights — Correspondence between the Government and the Judges of the Supreme Court, and Further Correspondence, VPLA, 1864-6, vol. 2; Morris, Memoir, ch. 13; Cowen, ‘A Century of Constitutional Government’, pp. 148-52; Age, 14-16 December 1864, 14-15 July, 7 August 1865.

49 Stevenson et al. v. The Queen (1865), 2 Wyatt, Webb and a’Beckett Reports 162; Age, 15-16 September 1865. I have drawn here on Paul Finn, Law and Government in Colonial Australia, OUP, Melbourne, 1987, chs 4, 6; Alastair Davidson, The Judiciary and Politics in New South Wales and Victoria

NOTES 229 1856-1901, Monash Occasional Papers in Politics no. 1, 1988, chs 3-5, and the same author’s The Invisible State, CUP (forthcoming), chs 5-6.

50 Crowley, ‘Aspects’, pp. 57-64; Finn, Law and Government, pp. 158-9. 51 The relevant despatches, dated 24 November, 23 December 1865 and 26 January 1866, were printed in Correspondence Respecting the Non-Enactment of the Appropriation Act in Victoria 1865, in HCP, 1866, vol. 50, pp. 63-108. The annotations appear on the despatches of 27 July, 17 August, 23 December 1865, CO 309/73 (AJCP). The imperial aspects of the constitutional crisis are treated by Alpheus Todd, Parliamentary Government in the British Colonies, Longmans Green, London, 1880, pp. 103-22, and A.B. Keith, Responsible Gov-

ernment in the Dominions, OUP, Oxford, 1912, vol. 2, pp. 599-605. Gavan Patrick McCormack, ‘Victorian Governors and Responsible Government, 1854-1892’, M.A. thesis, University of Melbourne, 1962 gives the fullest account. Dorothy P. Clarke, ‘The Colonial Office and the Constitutional Crisis in Victoria, 1865-68’, Historical Studies, vol. 5 (1951-3), pp. 160-71, and Bruce

Knox, ‘Imperial Consequences of Constitutional Problems in New South Wales and Victoria, 1865-1870’, zbid., vol. 21 (1984-5), pp. 515-33, both write

from the point of view of the Colonial Office. 52 Sir Charles Darling to Edward Cardwell, 25 March 1865 (AJCP CO 309/71). 53 Letter from Higinbotham and Michie to the Governor, 30 January 1865 (AJCP CO 309/71). Higinbotham reiterated the distinction in a speech on the adjudication of the United States claim, VPD, vol. 16, pp. 235-8 (5 June 1873). See

Morris, Memoir, ch. 10; Ernest Scott, ‘The Shenandoah Incident’, VHM,

vol. 11 (1926), pp. 55-75; Cyril Pearl, Rebel Down Under: When the ‘Shenandoah’ Shook Melbourne, Heinemann, Melbourne, 1970; K. H. Bailey, ‘Self-Government in Australia 1860-1900’, in Ernest Scott (ed.), Cambridge History of the British Empire, CUP, Cambridge, vol. VII, part I, 1933, pp. 408-10.

54 Resignation of His Ministers — Minute for His Excellency the Governor, VPLA, 1866, vol. 1, and Report of the Committee, VPD, vol. 2, pp. 28-9 (17

April 1866). Rusden, History, vol. 3, p.229 speculates on Higinbotham’s

discomfort. 55 VPD, vol. 2, pp. 235-41 (2 May 1866), reproduced in Morris Memoir, ch. 15. 56 VPD, vol. 2, pp. 280-309 (8 May 1866); Age, Argus, 8 May 1866. 57. VPD, vol. 4, p. 1676 (1 August 1867), vol. 5, pp.9, 13, 142-5 (18 September, 22 October 1867).

58 Manners Sutton reported his steps in despatches dated 27 July, 27 August, 27 September, 26 October, HCP, 1867-8, vol. 48, pp. 2-49. In a subsequent despatch sent on 1 February 1868 (ibid., pp. 50-1), the Secretary of State allowed that unless they proposed a clear and unmistakable violation, the Governor should accept the advice of his responsible Ministers to bring a bill into parliament.

59 L.T. Hergenhan (ed.), A Colonial City: High and Low Life. Selected Journalism of Marcus Clarke, UQP, 1972, p. 12. See John Milner, The Cruise of HMS Galatea, W.H. Allen, London, 1869 and Brian McKinlay, The First Royal Tour 1867-1868, Rigby, Adelaide, 1970.

60 Upon the death of Sir Charles Darling in 1870 the Victorian parliament conferred a pension of £1000 p.a. on his wife with £5000 for the education of her children.

61 The episode with a’Beckett is reported in Rusden, History vol. 3, p. 259;

Dilke’s comment appears in Greater Britain: A Record of Travel in

English-Speaking Countries During 1866 and 1867, 2 vols, Macmillan, London,

1868, vol. 2, p.51. 62 VPD, vol. 6, pp. 71-82 (2 June 1868).

230 A COLONIAL LIBERALISM 63 Higinbotham’s comment about Manners Sutton appears in VPD, vol. 17, p. 1439 (9 September 1873), and Gray’s characterization of the Australian emigrés is

in a letter to an unnamed correspondent, 1 June 1868 (ML ms. Ag 26). See generally C.C. Eldridge, England’s Mission: The Imperial Idea in the Age of Gladstone and Disraeli 1868-1880, Macmillan, London, 1973, who quotes Gladstone on pp. 40-1; Trevor R. Reese, The History of the Royal Commonwealth Society 1868-1968, OUP, London, 1968, and C.S. Blackton, “The Cannon Street Episode: An Aspect of Anglo-Australian Relations’, Historical Studies, vol. 13 (1967-9), pp. 520-32.

64 VPD, vol. 9, pp. 2123-41, 2343-50 (2, 24 November 1869), and a speech by

Higinbotham to the Loyal Liberal Reform Association, quoted by McCormack, ‘Victorian Governors’, p. 191.

65 Higinbotham described Queen Victoria thus in a letter to Henry Parkes, 27 April 1872, Parkes Papers (ML ms. A 988/293-306).

66 Higinbotham to Parkes, loc. cit., and quoted by Rusden, History, vol. 3, p. 277; his final lament is in VPD, vol. 22, p. 1263 (12 October 1875). 67 Australasian, 17 May 1873. 68 VPD, vol. 3, pp. 25-7 (18 January 1867), vol. 9, pp. 2037-40 (26 October 1869), vol. 11, pp. 417-9 (6 December 1870), vol. 19, pp. 1337-9 (16 September 1874). 69 Report from the Select Committee upon Mr Sands’ Case, VPLA, 1867, vol. 2 deals with the testimonial fund scandal, and other cases are discussed in Bart-

lett, ‘Political Organisation’, parts 2, 6, and Johnson, ‘Groups’, ch. 11. The quotations were given in the principal libel suit, Alexander v. Jones, reported in Argus, 5-9 March 1869. 70 The principal source for the allegations against Jones is Report from the Select Committee on Complaint, VPLA, 1869, vol. 2. Jones’s career is traced in Margaret Kiddle, Men of Yesterday: A Social History of the Western District of Victoria 1834-1890, MUP, 1961, pp. 251-62; Weston Bate, Lucky City: The First Generation at Ballarat 1851-1901, MUP, 1978, pp. 137~44, and ADB, vol. 4, pp. 488-9. Higinbotham’s major speeches on the Jones case appear in VPD, vol. 7, pp. 202-3, 214-6, 353-6, 461-6 (11 March, 6, 20 April 1869); vol. 9, pp. 2529-33 (9 December 1869). The proceedings of the Supreme Court in the Glass case were reported in Papers Relating to Privilege, VPLA, 1869, vol. 4, no. 48, pp. 123-36, and Higinbotham’s major speeches are in VPD, vol. 7, pp. 610-2, 669-70, 780-8 (28 April, 4, 19 May 1869); see also Cowen, ‘A Century’, pp. 115-6. Clarke’s remark is in Hergenhan (ed.), A Colonial City, p. 61. The final comment appears in VPD, vol. 17, p. 1443 (9 September 1873). 71 Turner, History, vol. 2, pp. 137-9; Bright, ‘George Higinbotham’, pp. 461-4; Morris, Memoir, ch. 22. 72 VPD, vol. 6, p. 1116 (28 September 1868), vol. 9, p. 2138 (2 November 1869), vol. 17, pp. 1270, 1438-43 (27 August, 9 September 1873), vol. 18, pp. 38, 223 (21 May, 4 June 1874), vol. 19, p. 817 (5 August 1874). 73 Dow, George Higinbotham, pp. 190-1; Higinbotham in VPD, vol. 17, p. 1439 (9 September 1873), vol. 19, pp. 864-5 (11 August 1874); G. P. Smith in VPD, vol. 22, p. 1069 (22 September 1875); Berry in VPD, vol. 19, p. 858 (11 August 1874); Age, 13 January 1876. 74 Argus, 4 November 1875, 25 January 1876 (quoted in Morris, Memoir, p. 197). 75 Australasian, 11 April 1874. 76 VPD, vol. 17, p. 1443 (9 September 1873). CHAPTER 3

1 Age, 25 February 1860. 2 Age, 7 March 1866.

NOTES 231 3 Age, 19 March, 16 May, 13 June, 8 August, 18 December 1865; Robert A. Johnson, “Groups in the Victorian Legislative Assembly 1861-1870’, Ph.D. thesis, La Trobe University, 1975, pp. 439-40, 627-9. 4 Victorian Hansard, vol. 4, pp. 567-9, 587-96 (16-17 December 1858); Age, 13, 15, 21 September, 26-8, 30 October, 25, 30 November 1865, 19 January 1866; R. v. Syme (1865), Two Victorian Law Reports 167. See generally C. E. Sayers, David Syme: A Life, Cheshire, Melbourne, 1965, ch. 10.

5 The story of Syme and his window appeared in Bulletin, 27 February 1908. 6 VPD, vol. 3, pp. 703-20, 753-78 (2 April 1867); Age, 5 April 1867. 7 Report from the Select Committee on Complaint, VPLA, 1867, vol. 2; VPD, vol. 4, pp. 1527-47 (17 July 1867); Age, 18 July 1867. 8 Higinbotham in VPD, vol. 1, pp. 286, 364 (16, 20 March 1866). 9 Syme’s memoir of his early years breaks off shortly after his arrival in Australia; it is reproduced in Ambrose Pratt, David Syme: The Father of Protection in Australia, Ward Lock, London, 1908, pp. 4-44. 10 The constituency was Haddington and the date was 1841. Syme states that the Conservative candidate won by a single vote but the actual margin was five votes; Dod’s Electoral Facts, 1853, p. 134.

11. Edmund Gosse, Father and Son: A Study of Two Temperaments, Heinemann, London, 1907; Thomas Carlyle, Reminiscences (ed. J. A. Froude), Longmans Green, London, 1881; Robert Louis Stevenson, Weir of Hermiston, Chatto and Windus, London, 1896, and ‘Stormy Nights’, in Collected Poems (ed. Janet Adam Smith), 2nd edn, Hart-Davis, London, 1971, p. 86. 12 Biographical details are drawn chiefly from Syme’s memoir in Pratt, David Syme, supplemented by Sayers, David Syme, chs 1-2. For the Evangelical Union, see Andrew L. Drummond and James Bulloch, The Scottish Church 1688-1843: The Age of the Moderates, Saint Andrews Press, Edinburgh, 1973, ch. 10 and the same authors’ The Church in Victorian Scotland 1843—1874, Saint Andrews Press, Edinburgh, 1975, ch. 2. 13. On the Scottish intellectual background see George Elder Davie, The Democratic Intellect: Scotland and Her Universities in the Nineteenth Century, Edinburgh University Press, 1961, esp. part 4.

14 David Syme to Annie Syme, 1 September 1876, Syme Papers (SLV ms. 9751/310).

15 Syme’s memoir breaks off at this point; Sayers, David Syme, pp. 11-15 gives further details about the disputed claim. Stephen Knight has exhumed some outstanding examples of goldfields crime writing in Dead Witness: Best Australian Mystery Stories, Penguin, Ringwood, 1989. 16 David and Annie Syme’s marriage certificate and other family papers (SLV ms. 9751/1292, 1666-8).

17 The papers of Ebenezer Syme (SLV ms. Box 132) consist chiefly of journal entries and lecture notes; see also Sayers, David Syme, ch. 2 and Sayers’ entry in the ADB, vol. 6, pp. 236-7.

18 Gordon S. Haight (ed.), The George Eliot Letters, Yale University Press, New Haven, vol. 1, 1954, p.354; vol. 2, 1954, p.50; Gordon S. Haight, George Eliot and John Chapman, with Chapman’s Diaries, 2nd edn, Archon Books, Hamden, Conn., 1969, pp. 165, 214. See also David Elder, Ebenezer Syme and the ‘Westminster Review’, Age, Melbourne, 1966 (held in the Age library).

19 The George Eliot Letters, vol. 2, pp. 93, 95. Syme’s review of The Three Colonies of Australia is in Westminster Review, vol. 3, no. 1 (January 1853), pp. 284-5; see Coral Lansbury, Arcady in Australia: The Evocation of Australia in Nineteenth-Century English Literature, MUP, 1970, ch. 5. 20 Sayers, David Syme, ch. 3.

232 A COLONIAL LIBERALISM

21 The fortunes of the co-operative were recounted by M. K. Armstrong, a compositor who helped form it and later the proprietor of the Kyneton Guardian,

in an obituary of Syme published in his paper on 10 February 1908. As ‘Caustic’, David Blair denounced his former employer in The Anatomy of the Argus, Hough and Co., Melbourne, 1854. 22 Sayers, David Syme, ch. 3 23. Ibid.; Age, 7 June 1856.

24 A memorandum of partnership was signed by both and dated 26 February 1856, more than three months before Ebenezer bought the Age (SLV ms. 9751/621), and the first public reference to ‘the firm of E. and D. Syme’ appeared in the Age on 27 September 1856. In a subsequent statement David claimed that he drew salary for only four months prior to 1860 (SLV ms. 9751/1106) but the accounts for these years do not provide details of drawings.

25 The articles of partnership were agreed on 28 November 1860 (SLV ms. 9751/656). I have also drawn on a detailed balance sheet for the second half ~ of 1865, the only such record for the decade, and a statement of the capital account from 1860 to 1870 (SLV ms. 9751/1107-8). The Argus profits from 1867 to 1872 are given in a letter from its proprietor, L. M. Mackinnon, to J. S. Johnston, 16 May 1873, Johnston Papers (University of Melbourne Archives). The structure of newspaper publishing is discussed in Lucy Brown, Victorian News and Newspapers, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1985, chs 1-2; Alan J. Lee, The Origins of the Popular Press in England, 1855-1914, Croom Helm, London, 1976, chs 2-4; and R. B. Walker, The Newspaper Press in New South Wales, 1803-1920, SUP, 1976.

26 Jane Syme to David Syme, 24 October 1865, 25 September 1867 (SLV ms. 9751/25,28).

27 Jane Syme to David Syme, 24 October 1867, 23 February 1869, 16 July 1873 (SLV ms. 9751/29,38,78); Jane Syme to Annie Syme, 22 April 1869, 1 October 1870 (SLV ms. 9751/39,295).

28 Jane Syme to David Syme, 12 May 1871 (SLV ms. 9751/59); David Syme to Jane Syme, 22 April 1873 (SLV ms. 9751/542); Jane Syme to Annie Syme, 2 September 1874 (SLV ms. 9751/301).

29 Articles of co-partnership, 30 December 1871 (SLV ms. 9751/661); William Syme to David Syme, 6 May 1872 (SLV ms. 9751/109). 30 Machinery register (SLV ms. 9751/702); David Syme to Jane Syme, 9 October 1873 (SLV ms. 9751/542). The expense of cables is discussed in detail in letters by Mackinnon to Johnston, 16 May 1871, 18 February 1873 (University of Melbourne Archives). The financial statement for 1876 (SLV ms. 9751/1111) and the dispute it caused are the subject of a legal opinion given by Thomas a’Beckett, 24 May 1876 (SLV ms. 9751/ 670). Walker, The Newspaper Press, ch. 17 and K. S. Inglis, ‘The Imperial Connection: Telegraphic Communication between England and Australia, 1872-1902’, in A. F. Madden and W. H. Morris Jones (eds), Australia and Britain: Studies in a Changing Relationship, SUP, 1980, pp. 21-38 deal with the cable link.

31. David Syme assured his nephews of his bona fides by a letter written on 29 May 1876, the same day he broke his silence with their mother and told her he wished to ‘discuss matters of mutual benefit’ (SLV ms. 9751/542-3). His intentions are revealed in the statement he put before a’Beckett. David Syme to Annie Syme, 1, 29 September 1876 (SLV ms. 9751/310, 318). 32 Agreement between David Syme, William Syme and others, and memorandum, 6 August 1877 (SLV ms. 9751/333, 676); Joseph Syme to David Syme, 17 July, 5 September 1877, David Syme to Joseph Syme, 17 October 1877 (SLV ms. 9751/ 123, 126, 543). 33. W. T. Stead, “The Future of Journalism’, Contemporary Review, vol. 50 (1886),

p. 678, quoted in Brian Harrison, ‘Press and Pressure Group in Modern

NOTES 233 Britain’, in Joanne Shattock and Michael Wolff (eds), The Victorian Periodical

Press, Leicester University Press, 1982, p.270; Age, 15 February 1908; Ebenezer’s journal (SLV ms. Box 132/2), quoted in Sayers, David Syme, p. 18. The religious analogy is traced by Elizabeth L. Eisenstein, The Printing Revolution in Early Modern Europe, CUP, Cambridge, 1983, p. 94.

34 The urban nature of the newspaper is suggested by H.J. Dyos and Michael Wolff (eds), The Victorian City: Images and Realities, Routledge and Kegan Paul, London, 1973, vol. 2, pp. 899-900, and I have drawn generally on Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, Verso, London, 1983, and Ernest Gellner, Plough, Sword and Book: The Structure of Human History, Collins Harvill, London, 1988. 35 I take this characterization of the public and counter-public spheres from Terry Eagleton, The Function of Criticism, Verso, London, 1984, esp. pp. 9-17, 36; and have drawn also on George Boyce et al. (eds), Newspaper History from the Seventeenth Century to the Present, Constable, London, 1978. O’Connor’s boast appeared in the Northern Star, 4 July 1846, quoted in Y. V. Kovalev (ed.), An Anthology of Chartist Literature, Moscow, 1956, p. 124. 36 ~=The distinction between liberal and radical journalism is made by Geoffrey R. Bartlett, ‘Political Organisation and Society in Victoria, 1864-1883’, Ph.D. thesis, ANU, 1964, pp. 80-3; Syme’s declaration comes from Pratt, David Syme, p. 313, and the same formulation appears in Age, 30 June 1877 and a letter to Joseph Syme, 30 July 1890 (SLV ms. 9751/545). In 1931 F. W. Eggleston claimed that ‘it is now well-known’ that Syme’s methods were copied by British newspaper proprietors such as Northcliffe, but he gives no evidence for the claim; F. H. Sugden and F. W. Eggleston, George Swinbume: A Biography, Angus and Robertson, Sydney, 1931, pp. 254-5. 37. For the scandal of the matrimonial advertisement, see Cole Turnley, Cole of the Book Arcade: A Pictorial Biography of E. W. Cole, Cole Publications, Melbourne, 1974, ch. 9. 38 Syme’s letterbooks (SLV ms. 9751/542-6); George Cockerill, Scribblers and Statesmen, Melbourne, n.d., p. 58. 39 Syme to unnamed correspondent, n.d. in Pratt, David Syme, pp. 299-301. 40 There are entries for all these members of the Age staff, except Henry Smith (see obituaries in Age and Argus, 13 September 1875) and O’Hea (see Pratt, David Syme, p. 300) in the ADB. See also Sayers, David Syme, ch. 17. Lurline Stuart has written of James Smith: The Making of a Colonial Culture, Allen

and Unwin, Sydney, 1989. Circulation figures come from L.F.

Whitfield, ‘ “The Age” on Public Affairs from 1861 to 1881’, M.A. thesis, University of Melbourne, 1950, p. 7.

41 This account of settler capitalism draws on Philip Ehrensaft and Warwick Armstrong, ‘The Formation of Dominion Capitalism: Economic Truncation and Class Structure’, in Allan Muscovitch and Glen Drover (eds), Inequality: Essays on the Political Economy of Social Welfare, University of Toronto Press, 1981, pp. 99-155, and Donald Denoon, Settler Capitalism: The Dynamics

of Dependent Development in the Southern Hemisphere, OUP, Oxford, 1983.

42 Age, 20, 21 March, 7 December 1860. The statistics are drawn from Dorothy Cloher, ‘The Emergence of Urban Victoria 1834-1891’, Ph.D. thesis, Monash University, 1976, p. 240.

43 Ronald Robinson, ‘The Excentric Idea of Imperialism, With or Without Empire’, in Wolfgang Mommsen and Jurgen Osterhammel (eds), Impertalism and After: Continuities and Discontinuities, Allen and Unwin, London, 1986, pp. 267-89. 44 Donald Winch, Classical Political Economy and the Colonies, Bell, London, 1965; Bernard Semmel, The Rise of Free Trade Imperialism: Classical Political

234 A COLONIAL LIBERALISM

Economy and the Empire of Free Trade Imperialism 1750-1850, CUP, Cambridge, 1970.

45 The various editions of Principles of Political Economy are collated in John M. Robson (ed.), Collected Works of John Stuart Mill, University of Toronto Press, 1963-1986, vol. 3, pp. 918-21. See also Mill to J. E. Cairnes, 4 February 1865 and to Henry Soden, 2 May 1865, Collected Works, vol. 16, pp. 989, 1043; Mill to Charles Gavan Duffy, 20 October 1866, in Hugh S.R. Elhiott (ed.), The Letters of John Stuart Mill, Longmans Green, London, 1910, vol. 2, p.67; Mill to Archibald Michie, 7 December 1868, Collected Works, vol. 16 pp. 1515-16. For Australian uses of Mill, see Crauford D. W. Goodwin, Economic Enquiry in Australia, Duke University Press, Durham, N. C., 1966, . 23-6.

46 The first clear denunciation of political economy is found in the Age, 24 February 1860. The eight notebooks are undated but internal evidence suggests they were written in the 1860s and early 1870s (SLV ms. 9751/555-62). Syme’s

publications on the subject are discussed in J. A. La Nauze, Political Economy in Australia: Historical Studies, MUP, 1949, ch. 4, and there is further discussion of their intellectual context in Gerard M. Koot, “T. E. Cliffe Leslie, Irish Social Reform, and the Origins of the English Historical School of Economics’, History of Political Economy, vol. 7 (1975), pp. 312-36. 47 Notebook (SLV ms. 9751/562); ‘On the Method of Political Economy’, Westminster Review, n.s. vol. 40, no. 1 (July 1871), pp. 206-18; ‘On the Increment in the Value of Land in Melbourne’, Melbourne Review, vol. 4, no. 15 (July 1879), pp. 221-36. The turn from deductive to comparative and historical methods is discussed in Stefan Collini et al, That Noble Science of Politics: A Study in Nineteenth-Century Intellectual History, CUP, Cambridge, 1983, chs 7-8.

48 ‘On the Method’, pp. 217-8; notebook (SLV ms. 9751/566); Outlines of an Industrial Science, Henry S. King, London, 1876 ch. 6.

49 Outlines, pp. 24, 82, 94, 159, 182-3, 185; ‘The Land Question in England’, Westminster Review, n.s. vol. 38, no. 2 (October 1870), p. 246. See also ‘Restrictions on Trade from a Colonial Point of View’, Fortnightly Review, n.s., vol. 13 (April 1873), pp. 447-64. 50 La Nauze, Political Economy, considers the impact of Syme’s writings. His chagrin was expressed to Frederic Harrison, 16 April 1879 (SLV ms. 9751/543). Grey’s speech, Hansard, vol. 216, pp. 2003-4 (15 May 1873) is quoted in Peter Burroughs, ‘Liberal, Paternalist or Cassandra? Earl Grey as a Critic of Colonial Self-government’, Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, vol. 18 (1990), p. 41.

51 Charles Thatcher, ‘Hurrah for Australian’, in Thatcher’s Colonial Minstrel, Charlwood, Melbourne, 1859; Age, 11 August 1859, 6 March 1860. I have been helped here by David Goodman, ‘Gold Fields/Golden Fields: The Language of Agrarianism and the Victorian Gold Rush’, Australian Historical Studies, vol. 23 (1988-9), pp. 19-41. 52 There is a substantial literature on the pastoral occupation of eastern Australia in the first half of the nineteenth century; see especially Ken Buckley, ‘Gipps and the Graziers of New South Wales, 1841-6’, Historical Studies, vol. 6 (19535), pp. 396-412, vol. 7 (1955-7), pp. 178-93, and Philip McMichael, Settlers and the Agrarian Question: Foundations of Capitalism in Colonial Australia, CUP, Cambridge, 1984. 53 Geoffrey Serle, The Golden Age: A History of the Colony of Victoria 18511861, MUP, 1963, chs 9, 10; Age, 29 August 1860, condemned the ‘outrage on the public peace’. 54 Age, 26 February, 1 August 1861, 31 July 1862.

NOTES 235 55 For the Nicholson Act, see Serle, The Golden Age, ch. 10, and J. M. Powell, The Public Lands of Australia Felix: Settlement and Land Appraisal in Victoria 1834-91 with Special Reference to the Western Plains, OUP, Melbourne, 1970, ch. 3.

56 For the Duffy Act, see Powell, Public Lands, ch. 4; Margaret Kiddle, Men of Yesterday: A Social History of the Western District of Victoria, 1834-1890,

MUP, 1961, ch.12; Charles Gavan Duffy, My Life in Two Hemispheres, Fisher Unwin, London, 1898, vol. 2, pp. 228-36, and the Age, 23, 24, 31 July, 3 September 1862. The Age complained of the withdrawal of advertising on 10 April 1862 and the matter was debated at length in Victorian Hansard, vol. 8, pp. 1047-51 (7 May 1862). 57 For the Grant Acts, see Powell, Public Lands, ch. 5; Janet Crosbie Curtis, ‘A Study of Land Settlement under the Grant Act’, M.A. thesis, University of Melbourne, 1971; and Age, 17 January, 12 June 1865. 58 N.G. Butlin, Jnvestment in Australian Economic Development 1861-1900, 2nd edn, Department of Economic History, Research School of Social Sciences, ANU, 1972, ch.2 analyses the transformation of the pastoral industry; Age, 21 February 1874. 59 There are different views of agricultural settlement. Most general and regional studies stress hardship and failure; Charles Fahey, ‘Wealth and Social Mobility in Bendigo and North Central Victoria, 1879-1901’, Ph.D. thesis, University of Melbourne, 1981 suggested that those who survived the initial struggle could enjoy modest prosperity, while Marilyn Lake, ‘Helpmeet, Slave, Housewife: Women in Rural Families 1870-1930’, in Patricia Grimshaw et al. (eds), Fam-

ilies in Colonial Australia, Allen and Unwin, Sydney, 1985, pp. 173-85 emphasizes the cost for women and children. There is a balanced assessment in Tony Dingle, The Victorians: Settling, Fairfax, Syme and Weldon Associates,

Melbourne, 1984, ch.4, and M. Williams, ‘More and Smaller Is Better: Australian Rural Settlement 1788-1914’, in J. M. Powell and M. Williams (eds),

Australian Space, Australian Time: Geographical Perspectives, OUP, Melbourne, 1975, pp. 61-103 provides a useful overview.

60 Higinbotham in VPD, vol. 8, p. 985 (9 June 1859), vol. 17, pp. 2049-53 (28 October 1873); he cited Mill to support his position in vol. 21, pp. 531-5 (30 June 1875). For Syme, see “The Land Question in England’, and ‘On the Increment in the Value of Land in Melbourne’. Their support for the Land Tenure League is noted in Henry Mayer, Marx, Engels and Australia, Cheshire, Melbourne, 1964, p. 28. 61 Pratt, David Syme, p. 59; see also, La Nauze, Political Economy, p. 118. 62 The protectionist agitation is discussed by W. T. Charles, “The Victorian Protectionist Movement’, VH™M, vol. 14 (1931-2), pp. 7-23, and Serle, The Golden Age, pp. 289-92, who both suggest that the irresolution of the Age might be explained by differences between David and Ebenezer. The latter was more faithful to free trade orthodoxy, but David’s own ambiguities persisted after his brother’s death. The issue was first broached in the Age on 24 March 1859 and the argument for ‘incidental protection’ appeared on 4 June 1859; speculative discussion was deprecated on 2 August 1859. 63 Age, 29 November 1864, 24 February, 9 March 1865; see also Whitfield, ‘ ““The Age” on Public Affairs’, pp. 88-90.

64 Age, 7, 21 September, 8, 29 November 1864. 65 Grant quoted in Argus, 19 September 1864; Jones in VPD, vol. 2, p. 270 (3 May 1866); see also Age, 20, 23 January, 28 February, 4, 6 March 1865. The imperial aspect is discussed by Edward Porritt, The Fiscal and Diplomatic Freedom of the British Oversea Dominions, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1922, and J.

236 A COLONIAL LIBERALISM A. La Nauze, ‘Australian Tariffs and Imperial Control’, Economic Record, vol. 24 (1948), pp. 218-34. 66 Syme’s protectionist credo is set out most fully in ‘Restrictions on Trade from

A Colonial Point of View’; his arguments were rehearsed in the Age, 14

October 1865. 67 Higinbotham in VPD, vol. 3, pp. 443-7 (27 February 1867), vol. 21, pp. 795800 (22 July 1875), vol. 22, p. 1059 (22 September 1875).

68 The history of the Victorian tariff is set out in G. D. Patterson, The Tariff in the Australian Colonies 1856-1900, Cheshire, Melbourne, 1968, ch. 5.

69 The argument for the efficacy of the Victorian tariff is put by W. A. Sinclair, “The Tariff and Manufacturing Employment in Victoria, 1860-1900’, Economic Record, vol. 31 (1955), pp. 100-4, and ‘The Tariff and Economic Growth in Pre-Federation Victoria’, Economic Record, vol. 47 (1971), pp. 77-92. More sceptical assessments are advanced in N. G. Butlin, ‘Colonial Socialism in Australia, 1860-1900’, in H.G.J. Aitken (ed.), The State and Economic Growth, ~ Social Science Research Council, New York, 1959, pp. 26-78; Patterson, The Tariff, chs 1,5; A. R. Hall, The Stock Exchange of Melbourne and the Victorian Economy 1852-1900, ANU Press, 1968, ch. 3; T. G. Parsons, ‘Some Aspects of the Development of Manufacturing in Melbourne, 1870 to 1890’, Ph.D. thesis, Monash University, 1970, and G. J. R. Linge, Industrial Awakening: A Geography of Australian Manufacturing, 1788 to 1890, ANU Press, 1979, ch. 8. The employment statistic is taken from Linge, p. 744. 70 The statistics are drawn from Lance Edwin Davis and Robert A. Huttenback, Mammon and the Pursuit of Empire: The Political Economy of British Imperialism 1860-1912, CUP, Cambridge, 1986, ch. 4 and Andrew Wells, ‘A Marxist

Reappraisal of Australian Capitalism: The Rise of Anglo-Colonial Finance Capital in New South Wales and Victoria, 1830-1890’, Ph.D. thesis, ANU, 1985, ch. 9.

71 Butlin, Investment in Australian Economic Development 1861-1900, esp. chs 1, 6.

72 Argus, 31 March, 5, 16 June, 18, 22-6 September 1857; see also B. W. Reaves, ‘A Social Study of the Lower Orders in Melbourne during the Gold Rush’, M.A. thesis, University of Melbourne, 1964, ch. 4, and M. J. Howard, ‘Unemployment in Victoria Before 1900’, M.A. thesis, University of Melbourne, 1982, part 2, ch. 3. 73 H.G. Turner, A History of the Colony of Victoria, 2 vols, Longmans, London, 1904, vol. 2, pp. 100-1; Argus, 8 April 1858; Age, 7 December 1864, 16 October 1866, 4 August 1869. See generally T. A. Coghlan, Labour and Industry in Australia, OUP, Oxford, 1918, vol. 2, pp. 733-5. 74 _¥.G. Castles, The Working Class and Welfare: Reflections on the Political Development of the Welfare State in Australia and New Zealand, 1890-1980, Allen and Unwin, Sydney, 1985, p.102. The argument is developed by J. B. Hirst, “Keeping Colonial History Colonial: The Hartz Thesis Revisited’, Historical Studies, vol. 21 (1984-5), pp. 85-104, and Stuart Macintyre, Winners and Losers: The Pursuit of Social Justice in Australian History, Allen and Unwin, Sydney, 1985, esp. chs 3-5. 75 Higinbotham in Argus, 18 February, 4 June 1857; VPD, vol. 3, pp. 443-7 (27 February 1867), vol. 16, pp. 918-20 (31 July 1873). The Age, 4-5 June 1870 defended assisted migration of single females; cf. Higinbotham in VPD, vol. 10, pp. 708-14 (2 June 1870). See generally Richard Broome, The Victorians: Arnving, Fairfax, Syme and Weldon Associates, Melbouren, 1984, pp. 95-6, and Wray Vamplew (ed.) Australians: Historical Statistics, Fairfax, Syme and Weldon Associates, Sydney, 1987, p. 4.

76 Syme, Outlines of an Industrial Science, p. 42. The fullest account is by W.

E. Murphy, History of the Eight Hours’? Movement, vol. 1, Spectator

NOTES 237 Publishing Company, Melbourne, vol. 2, J. T. Picken, Melbourne, 1900; see

also Helen Hughes, “The Eight Hour Day and the Development of the Labour Movement in Victoria in the Eighteen Fifties’, Historical Studies, vol. 9 (1959-61), pp. 396-412, and K.S. Inglis, The Australian Colonists: An Exploration of Social History 1788-1870, MUP, 1970, ch. 8. 77 Argus, 3 September 1858; Jones in VPD, vol. 4, p. 1690 (6 August 1867). 78 The phrase comes from Geoffrey Serle, The Rush To Be Rich: A History of the Colony of Victoria 1883-1889, MUP, 1971, p. 1, and is supported by Hall, Stock Exchange, ch. 3.

79 For Syme’s early pronouncement on the success of selection and protection, see esp. Age, 4-8 July, 8 August 1865. I have explored the genre of colonial history as the celebration of progress in “The Writing of Australian History’,

in D.H. Borchardt and Victor Crittenden (eds), Australians: A Guide to Sources, Fairfax, Syme and Weldon Associates, Sydney, 1987, esp. p. 9. 80 Facts and Figures, 28 September 1857; W.H. Archer, The Progress of Victoria: A Statistical Essay, Government Printer, Melbourne, 1861, 1867, 1873. The

Victorian statistics were praised by Sir Charles Dilke in Greater Britain: A Record of Travel in English-Speaking Countries During 1866 and 1867, 2 vols, Macmillan, London, 1868, vol. 2, pp. 25-6, and there is a fine study of Archer by Margot Beever, “W. A. Archer: Civil Servant’, M.A. thesis, University of Melbourne, 1971.

81 Theodore M. Porter, The Rise of Statistical Thinking 1820-1900, Princeton University Press, Princeton, N. J., 1986. 82 Age, 13 November 1865. See J. Cecil le Souef, ‘Acclimatisation in Victoria’, VHM, vol. 36 (1965), pp. 8-29, and L.R. Gillbank, ‘The Acclimatisation Society of Victoria’, VHJ, vol. 51 (1980), pp. 255-70.

CHAPTER 4

1 Review of William Stebbing (ed.), Charles Henry Pearson: Fellow of Oriel College and Education Minister in Victoria, Longmans, London, 1900, in Daily Chronicle, 28 May 1900. 2 Wray Vamplew (ed.), Australians: Historical Statistics, Fairfax, Syme and Wel-

don Associates, Sydney, 1987, ch.25; Walter Phillips, ‘Statistics on Churchgoing and Sunday School Attendance in Victoria 1851-1901’, Australian Historical Statistics, no. 5 (May 1982), pp. 27-40.

3 I have drawn particularly on Alasdair MacIntyre, Secularization and Moral Change, OUP, London, 1967; Owen Chadwick, The Secularization of the European Mind in the Nineteenth Century, CUP, Cambridge, 1975, and Alan D. Gilbert, The Making of Post-Christian Britain: A History of the Secularization of Modern Society, Longmans, London, 1980. 4 John Tregenza, Professor of Democracy: The Life of Charles Henry Pearson 1830-1894. Oxford Don and Australian Radical, MUP, 1968, pp. 7-8 quotes

from ‘A Short Account of the Last Days of Isabella’, written by Pearson’s mother. Pearson’s “The Story of My Life’ was written during his last two years; the original is in the Bodleian Library, an edited version appears in Stebbing (ed.), Pearson; the quotations are from pp. 12, 28, 31.

5 Ibid., pp. 45, 83. 6 The confidence is in a letter to Sir Henry Acland, n.d. [September 1855], quoted in John Tregenza, ‘The Life and Times of C. H. Pearson, 1830-1894’, Ph.D. thesis, ANU, 1959, p. 64.

7 The preference for the heir and the doubts about the future are expressed in an undated manuscript, Pearson Papers (SLV ms. 7153) and formed the basis of a lecture reported in the Age, 6 June 1888. The generational continuities of

238 A COLONIAL LIBERALISM

the Clapham Sect are set out by Noel Annan, Leslie Stephen: The Godless Victorian, 2nd edn, Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1984, pp. 157-62. 8 ‘Edwic’, The Real Place in History of Jesus and Paul, the author, Melbourne, 1868 (this edition reprints the earlier pamphlets and includes the Discourse in Defence of Mental Freedom), pp. iii, xviii, xxii, 174; Cole Turnley, Cole of the Book Arcade: A Pictorial Biography of E. W. Cole, Cole Publications, Melbourne, 1974; ADB, vol. 3, pp. 438-40; J. A. Froude, Oceana, Or England and Her Colonies, Longmans, London, 1886, p. 99. 9 Rusden, ‘Labour and Capital’, Melbourne Review, vol. 1 (1876), p. 82; ADB, vol. 6, pp. 73-4. This strand of thought is discussed in Crauford D. Goodwin,

‘Evolution Theory in Australian Social Thought’, Journal of the History of Ideas, vol. 25 (1964), p. 399, and see also Ann Mozley, ‘Evolution and the Climate of Opinion in Australia, 1840-76’, Victorian Studies, vol. 10 (1966-7), pp. 411-30. For the Eclectic Association and Sunday Free Discussion Society, see F. B. Smith, ‘Religion and Freethought in Melbourne, 1870 to 1890’, M.A.

thesis, University of Melbourne, 1960, ch.5 and J.S. Gregory, Church and State: Changing Government Policies towards Religion in Australia; With Particular Reference to Victoria Since Separation, Cassell, Melbourne, 1973, ch. 3.

10 Pre-Historic Man: A Lecture Delivered at the Princess Theatre... by the Reverend J. E. Bromby, D. D., Stilwell and Knight, Melbourne, 1869; Science and the Bible: A Lecture by the Right Rev. Chas Perry, D. D., Lord Bishop of Melbourne, Samuel Mullen, Melbourne, 1869; Bromby Diary 9 August, 20 September 1869 (Melbourne Grammar School); ADB, vol. 3, pp. 241-3; Gregory, Church and State, pp. 112-14; Mozley, ‘Evolution’, pp. 427-8. 11 Age, 11 April 1882, Argus, 20 March, 11 April 1882; Edith C. Rickards, Bishop Moorhouse of Melbourne and Manchester, John Murray, London, 1920, ch. 11; Smith, ‘Religion and Freethought’, pp. 227-30. 12 Clarke, ‘Civilization Without Delusion’, Victorian Review, vol. 1, no. 1 (November 1879), pp. 65-75. See generally Brian Elliott, Marcus Clarke, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1958, ch. 11 and Joan E. Poole, ‘Marcus Clarke: Christianity is Dead’, Australian Literary Studies, vol. 6 (1973), pp. 128-42. 13. Civilization Without Delusion, F. F. Bailliere, Melbourne, 1880.

14. The religious debate of the 1880s is discussed by Smith, ‘Religion and Freethought’, ch. 6; Jill Roe, ‘Challenge and Response: Religious Life in Melbourne, 1876-86’, Journal of Religious History, vol. 5 (1968-9), pp. 149-66, and ‘A Decade of Assessment: Being a Study in the Intellectual Life of the City of Melbourne between 1876 and 1886’, M.A. thesis, ANU, ch. 1; Geoffrey Serle, The Rush to Be Rich: A History of the Colony of Victoria 1883-1889, MUP, 1971, ch. 4. 15 Science and Religion, Or the Relations of Modern Science with the Christian Churches: A Lecture by George Higinbotham, Samuel Mullen, Melbourne, 1883.

16 Parkes in Empire, 13 October 1851, quoted by A. W. Martin, Henry Parkes: A Biography, MUP, 1980, pp. 105-6; C.R. Badger, The Reverend Charles Strong and the Australian Church, Abacada Press, Melbourne, 1971, chs 4-5. 17 For Higinbotham’s ‘fearless freedom’, see his Address Delivered in Connection with the Opening of the New Unitarian Church, George Robertson, Melbourne, 1889, p.10; Pearson’s lecture reported in Age, 6 June 1888; David Syme, The Soul: A Study and an Argument, Macmillan, London, 1903, esp. pp. 204-6.

18 Richard Ely, ‘Secularisation and the Sacred in Australian History’, Historical Studies, vol. 19 (1980-81), pp. 533-66.

19 VPD, vol. 8, pp. 1785-8 (25 August 1869). 20 Rickards, Bishop Moorhouse, p. 90. H.R. Jackson argues in Churches and People in Australia and New Zealand 1860-1930, Allen and Unwin, Sydney, 1987,

NOTES 239 ch. 4 that sectarianism was weak in the Australian colonies until the 1860s (as does Mark Lyons, ‘Aspects of Sectarianism in New South Wales, circa 1865 to 1880’, Ph.D. thesis, ANU, 1972, for that colony), but it was apparent in Melbourne from the 1840s. 21. Patrick O’Farrell, The Catholic Church and Community in Australia: A H1story, Nelson, Melbourne, 1977, esp. ch. 4.

22 Deakin to Christopher Crisp, 23 August 1880, Crisp Papers (NLA ms. 743/269), quoted in Jill Roe, Beyond Belief: Theosophy in Australia 1879-1939, NSWUP, 1986, pp. 33-4; Age, 23 November 1864, 25 January 1868. See gen-

erally Margaret M. Pawsey, The Popish Plot: Culture Clashes in Victoria 1860-1863, Studies in the Christian Movement, St. Patrick’s College, Manly, NSW, 1983, and Geoffrey R. Bartlett, ‘Political Organisation and Society in Victoria, 1864-1883’, Ph.D. thesis, ANU, 1964, pt 3. 23 A.G. Austin, Australian Education 1788-1900: Church, State and Public Education in Colonial Australia, Pitman, Melbourne, 1961, ch. 4; Norman G. Curry, ‘The Work of the Denominational and National Boards of Education in Victoria, 1850-1862’, M. Ed. thesis, University of Melbourne, 1965. 24 Curry, “The Work’, p. 35. 25 P.J. Pledger, ‘The Board of Education: A Critical Study of the Work of the Board of Education between 1862 and 1872’, M. Ed. thesis, University of Melbourne, 1958; Margaret Pawsey, ‘Uncommon Common Schools: An Analysis of the Common Schools Act of 1862 and its Social Context’, Ph.D. thesis, Monash University, 1981. 26 Argus, 12 February 1857, 5 January, 6 February 1858. 27 Higinbotham, Self-education: A Lecture Delivered at the Brighton Mechanics’ Institute, Blundell and Ford, Melbourne, 1862; Pearson in Age, 27 June 1882, quoted in Stephen Murray-Smith and Anthony John Dare, The Tech: A Centenary History of the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology, Hyland House, Melbourne, 1987, p. 20. See generally Michael Roe, Quest for Authority in Eastern Australia 1835-1851, MUP, 1965, pt 3 and George Nadel, Australia’s Colonial Culture: Ideas, Men and Institutions in Mid-Nineteenth Century

Eastern Australia, Cheshire, Melbourne, 1957. 28 Higinbotham’s address to the Brighton electors, 11 May 1861, quoted in E. E. Morris, A Memoir of George Higginbotham: An Australian Politican and Chief Justice of Victoria, Macmillan, London, 1895, p. 57; Victorian Hansard, vol. 8, pp. 1181-2 (22 May 1862). 29 Polding quoted in Ronald Fogarty, Catholic Education in Australia 1806-1950, MUP, 1959, vol. 1, p. 191; Perry in R. de Q. Robin, Charles Perry, Bishop of Melbourne: The Challenges of a Colonial Episcopate 1847-1876, UWAP, 1967, p. 101.

30 Morris, Memoir, ch. 17; Gwyneth M. Dow, George Higinbotham: Church and State, Pitman, Melbourne, 1964; Report of the Royal Commission on the Operation of the System of Public Education, VPP, 1867, vol. 4. 31 Blair appears as Titus Oates in the anti-Catholic agitation of the early 1860s described by Pawsey, The Popish Plot; for the Fenian scare, see Keith Amos, The Fenians in Australia 1865-1880, NSWUP, 1988, esp. ch. 2; Age, 28 January, 17 March 1868.

32 VPD, vol. 4, pp. 899-90 (7 May 1867); on Anglican opposition, see Dow, George Higinbotham, ch. 5. 33. VPD, vol. 4, pp. 1169-83, 1195 (30 May, 4 June 1867); Age, 28 May, 1 June 1867. Higinbotham’s subsequent position appears in VPD, vol. 8, pp. 1817-29 (31 August 1869), Argus, 10 March 1871, and is discussed in Dow, George Higinbotham, chs 7-8. 34. Goold’s Pastoral Admonition was reprinted in the Age and Argus, 24 June 1872.

240 A COLONIAL LIBERALISM

35 The pragmatic interpretation is that of Denis Grundy, ‘Secular, Compulsory and Free’: The Education Act of 1872, MUP, 1972, and also ‘Politics and Education Reform, Victoria, 1866-72’, Australian and New Zealand History of Education Society Journal, vol. 3, no. 1 (1974), pp. 11-28. The various meanings

of secular are analysed by Richard Ely, “The Background to the “Secular Instruction’”” Provisions in Australia and New Zealand’, ibid., vol. 5, no. 2 (1976), pp. 33-56. The minister was J. W. Stephen and his second reading speech is in VPD, vol. 15, pp. 1343-55 (12 September 1872). 36 Ballarat Courier, 18 May 1875. The best general account of the late-nineteenth century state school is that of R. J. W. Selleck, ‘State Education and Culture’, Australian Cultural History, no. 1 (1982), pp. 29-42. 37. Vamplew (ed.), Australian Historical Statistics, pp. 331, 334. 38 Stebbing (ed.), Pearson, p. 122. 39 Tregenza, Professor of Democracy, p. 238; John McIntyre in VPD, vol. 29, p.

_ 1750 (12 November 1878). 40 Christopher Harvie, The Lights of Liberalism: University Liberals and the Challenge of Democracy 1860-86, Allen and Unwin, London, 1976 and Chris-

topher Kent, Brains and Numbers: Elitism, Comtism and Democracy in Mid-Victorian Britain, University of Toronto Press, 1978. The personal details come from Pearson, ‘Story of My Life’.

41 Robert Lowe, Speeches and Letters on Reform, Bush, London, 1867; C. H. Pearson, ‘On the Working of Australian Institutions’, in G. C. Brodrick et al., Essays on Reform, Macmillan, London, 1867, pp. 191-216. 42 This account is based on ‘Story of My Life’, supplemented by Tregenza, Professor of Democracy, chs 1-3 and additional detail in ‘The Life and Times of C. H. Pearson’. The quotations come from Stebbing (ed.), Pearson, pp. 29, 44, 71, 76-7, 102, 118~9, 140, 188-9; Charles Henry Pearson, Reviews and Critical Essays (ed. Herbert A. Strong), Methuen, London, 1896, p. 13, and Arthur and Eleanor Mildred Sidgwick, Henry Sidgwick: A Memoir, Macmillan, London, 1906, p. 247.

43 Edith’s reminiscence is in Stebbing (ed.), Pearson, ch. 13; Tregenza, Professor of Democracy, p. 62.

44 Proceedings ... of the Inauguration of the University of Melbourne, Government Printer, Melbourne, 1855; Ernest Scott, A History of the University of Melbourne, MUP, 1936; Geoffrey Blainey, A Centenary History of the University of Melbourne, MUP, 1957, and W. J. Gardner, Colonial Cap and Gown: Studies in the Mid-Victorian Universities of Australasia, University of Canterbury, Christchurch, 1979. 45 Blainey, A Centenary History, ch. 5; Tregenza, Professor of Democracy, ch. 5; Pearson to Charles Eliot Norton, 10 August 1874, Pearson Papers (SLV ms. 7170).

46 I draw here on the work of Marjorie Theobald, ‘ ‘Mere Accomplishments”? Melbourne’s Early Ladies’ Schools Reconsidered’, History of Education Review, vol. 13, no. 2 (1984), pp. 15-28; ‘The PLC Mystique: Reflections on the Reform of Female Education in Nineteenth Century Australia’, Australian His-

torical Studies, vol. 23 (1988-9), pp. 241-59, and ‘Women and Schools in Colonial Victoria, 1840-1910’, Ph.D thesis, Monash University, 1985. 47 The Higher Culture of Women, Samuel Mullen, Melbourne, 1875. Pearson’s views are developed in his essay ‘On Some Historical Aspects of Family Life’, in Josephine Butler (ed.), Woman’s Work and Woman’s Culture, Macmillan, London, 1869, pp. 152-85. Again I am guided by Theobald.

48 This account of Pearson’s resignation is based on letters between Tait and Pearson, 15, 17 March 1877, Pearson Papers (SLV ms. 5717); see also Kathleen

Fitzpatrick, PLC Melbourne: The First Century, 1875-1975, PLC, Burwood, 1975, ch. 3 and Tregenza, Professor of Democracy, chs 6-7.

NOTES 241 49 The attack on Pearson comes from VPD, vol. 29, pp. 1749-50 (12 November 1878). His account of what happened at PLC is difficult to reconcile with the correspondence; VPD, vol. 29, pp. 1755-6 (12 November 1878). Age, 5 November 1875; Pearson, ‘Story of My Life’, p.122; Pearson to Norton, 10 August 1874; “The Land Question in Australia’, Nation, 30 September 1875.

50 Pearson, “The Working of Australian Institutions’, p. 199; Political Opinions on Some Subjects of the Day, Fergusson and Moore, Melbourne, 1877. Syme soon abandoned the scheme of annual elections (Age, 18 February 1878) and Tregenza, Professor of Democracy, pp. 113-9 discusses Pearson’s remaining differences with him.

51 VPD, vol. 29, pp. 1722, 1905, 1920 (7, 19 November 1878); Walter Murdoch, Afred Deakin: A Sketch, Constable, London, 1923, pp. 56-7; Age, 27 February 1877; Pearson quoted in Stebbing (ed.), Pearson, p.212, and ‘Democracy in Victoria’, Fortnightly Review, vol. 31 (1879), esp pp. 703-4. See generally Tregenza, Professor of Democracy, chs 6-7. 52 Age, 1, 4, 14 June 1877. 53 Pearson in evidence to a subsequent Royal Commission on Education, VPP, 1884, vol. 3, q. 11077, quoted in Tregenza, Professor of Democracy, p. 134; VPD, vol. 28, pp. 354-5 (1 August 1878); Pearson, Report on the State of Public Education in Victoria, Government Printer, Melbourne, 1878, p. 39. 54 Pearson, Report, and The Ontario School System, Samuel Mullen, Melbourne, 1886. I draw here on Bruce Curtis, Building the Educational State: Canada West, 1836-1871, Falmer Press, Lewes, East Sussex, 1988 and R. D. Giddney and D. A. Lawr, ‘Bureaucracy vs. Community? The Origins of Bureaucratic Procedure in the Upper Canadian School System’, Journal of Social History, vol. 13 (1979-80), pp. 438-57. 55 Higinbotham in VPD, vol. 23, pp. 1971-3 (20 January 1876); see Austin, Australian Education, pp. 230-1 and Gregory, Church and State, pp. 172-3, 275-7. Pearson in VPD, vol. 29, pp. 1559-63 (20 November 1878), vol. 37, pp. 28-31 (4 August 1881) and “The Education Question’, Victorian Review, vol. 3 (1880), pp. 141-55. 56 Pearson, Report, pp. 12-13; ‘Story of My Life’, p. 51. 57 R.M. Ogilvie, Latin and Greek: A History of the Influence of the Classics on English Life from 1600 to 1918, Routledge and Kegan Paul, London, 1964; Frank M. Turner, The Greek Heritage in Victorian Britain, Yale University Press, 1981, and Richard Jenkyns, The Victorians and Ancient Greece, Basil Blackwell, Oxford, 1980.

58 Pearson, ‘On the Working of Australian Institutions’, p. 214; Report, p. 94; Henry Sidgwick, ‘The Theory of Classical Education’, in F. W. Farrar (ed.), Essays on a Liberal Education, Macmillan, London, 1867, pp. 81-143. 59 Matthew Arnold, Culture and Anarchy, Smith, Elder, London, 1869; ‘Story of My Life’, p. 40; Report, pp. 9, 59-61; PLC annual report quoted in Tregenza, ‘The Life and Times of C.H. Pearson’. p. 266; F.J. Gladman, The School

Method (1877), quoted in R.J. W. Selleck, ‘F.J. Gladman — Trainer of Teachers’, in C. Turney (ed.), Pioneers of Australian Education, vol. 2, SUP, 1972, p. 100.

60 VPD, vol. 29, p. 1294 (19 November 1878); see also vol. 30, p. 500 (14 August 1879), where David Gaunson alleged that Berry had tried to prevent Pearson’s candidature; Tregenza, Professor of Democracy, pp. 132-40. 61 Higinbotham reported in the Argus, 10 March 1871.

62 The fullest accounts of the second constitutional crisis are given by J. E. Parnaby, “The Economic and Political Development of Victoria, 1877-1881’,

Ph.D. thesis, University of Melbourne, 1951 and Bartlett, ‘Political Organization’.

242 A COLONIAL LIBERALISM 63 The despatches are quoted in W. G. McMinn, A Constitutional History of Aus-

tralia, OUP, Melbourne, 1979, p.85 and G.P. McCormack, ‘Victorian Governors and Responsible Government, 1854-1892’, M.A. thesis, University of Melbourne, 1962, p. 220; see also Geoffrey Serle, ‘New Light on the Colonial Office: Sir George Bowen and the Victorian Constitutional Crises’, Historical Studies, vol. 13 (1967-9), pp. 533-8.

64 VPD, vol. 28, pp. 348-57 (1 August 1878), vol. 29, pp. 1717-31 (7 November 1878); Alfred Deakin, The Crisis in Victorian Politics, 1879-1881: A Personal

Retrospect (ed. J. A. La Nauze and R.M. Crawford), MUP, 1957, p. 21; Tregenza, Professor of Democracy, ch. 9.

65 Age, 13 October, 7 November, 6 December 1879; Argus, 20 November 1879 and Syme to Berry, 20 November 1879 (SLV ms. 9751/543); VPD, vol. 32, pp. 2254-5 (11 December 1879); Deakin, The Crisis. Ambrose Pratt, David Syme: The Father of Protection in Australia, Ward Lock, London, 1908, embroiders Syme’s dissatisfaction with Berry.

66 VPD, vol. 34, pp. 63-72 (31 August 1880); The History of the Victorian Em-

bassy, Melbourne Punch, Melbourne, 1879, and Marguerite Mahood, ‘Australian Political Caricature, 1788-1901’, Ph.D. thesis, University of Melbourne, 1970, pp. 134-5.

67 Wages books, Syme Papers (SLV ms. 9751/1134); Pearson’s confession is quoted by Tregenza, Professor of Democracy, p. 182. 68 Bromby Diary, 6 December, 7 May, 13 August 1872; VPD, vol. 22, pp. 1312-20 (24 November 1875), vol. 34, pp. 301-5 (16 September 1880); Report, pp. 129-

31; Blainey, Centenary History, ch.9; J. A. Hone, “The Movement for the Higher Education of Women in the Later Nineteenth Century’, M.A. thesis, Monash University, 1965; Ailsa Zainu’ddin, “The Admission of Women to the University of Melbourne, 1869-1903’, in Stephen Murray-Smith (ed.), Melbourne Studies in Education 1973, MUP, 1973, pp. 50-106. 69 Address of the Trustees of the Melbourne Public Library, Melbourne, 1859, p. 3; Address of the Trustees to Sir Henry Barkly, Melbourne, 1861, p. 2; Report of the Trustees of the Public Library, Museum and National Gallery of Victoria, Mason, Firth and McCutcheon, Melbourne, 1871, p. 21, quoted in David Mc-

Villy, ‘A History of the State Library of Victoria, 1853-1974’, M.A. thesis, Monash University, 1975, pp. 17, 20. Higgins quoted in John Rickard, H. B. Higgins: The Rebel as Judge, Allen and Unwin, Sydney, 1984, p. 44. 70 R.T.M. Pescott, W. R. Guilfoyle, 1840-1912: The Master of Landscaping, OUP, Melbourne, 1974, ch. 4 and J. M. Powell, ‘A Baron Under Seige: Von Mueller and the Press in the 1870s’, VHJ, vol. 50 (1979), pp. 18-35. 71 Higinbotham in Argus, 9 May 1887; Pearson in Argus, 21 September 1889, quoted in Serle, The Rush To Be Rich, p. 173; the Age use of the double standard, 1 October 1883. For the institutes see Alison Head, ‘Mechanics Institutes in Early Victoria’, B.A. thesis, University of Melbourne, 1979; the Age’s criticism of the Library appeared on 27 January 1879.

72 For Higinbotham’s attempts to secure Sunday opening, see VPD, vol. 19, pp. 1709-12 (15 October 1874) and vol. 21, pp. 96-7 (1 June 1875); Pearson defended the trustees’ action in vol. 43, pp. 74-9 (4 July 1883). See Tregenza, Professor of Democracy, pp. 175-82; ‘The Life and Times of C.H. Pearson’, p. 466, and Smith, ‘Religion and Freethought’, ch. 5. 73 O’Loghlen reported his approach to Higinbotham in VPD, vol. 37, pp. 477-8, 582-3 (25 October, 2 November 1881); see Serle, The Rush To Be Rich, pp. 17-18, 154-5.

74 VPD, vol. 60, pp. 730-1 (25 July 1889); see Serle, The Rush To Be Rich, pp. 154-5 and Tregenza, Professor of Democracy, pp. 211-4.

75 National Life and Character: A Forecast, Macmillan, London, 1893, pp. 291, 363. Maurice Macmillan raised the problem of the title in a letter to Pearson,

NOTES 243 15 November 1892 (SLV ms. 7397). The earlier thoughts on religion are in the Papers (SLV ms. 7153).

CHAPTER 5 1 ‘Melbourne and Her Civilization, As They Strike an Englishman’, in Australian Essays, William Inglis, Melbourne, 1886, p. 5.

2 Charles Wentworth Dilke, Greater Britain: A Record of Travel in EnglishSpeaking Countries during 1866 and 1867, 2 vols, Macmillan, London, 1868; Anthony Trollope, Australia and New Zealand, 2 vols, Chapman and Hall, London, 1873, vol. 2, p. 387.

3 J. A. Froude, Oceana: Or England and Her Colonies, Longmans, London, —- 1886, pp. 88, 94, 137; “Tasma’ [Jessie Couvreur], Uncle Piper of Piper’s Hill, Trubner, London, 1889; Ada Cambridge, Thirty Years in Australia, Methuen, London, 1903, p. 188; Fergus Hume, The Mystery of a Hansom Cab, Kemp and Boyce, Melbourne, 1886; George Sala, The Life and Adventures of George Augustus Sala, Cassell, London, 3rd edn, 1895, vol. 2, pp. 423-4. For accounts of these and other aspects of ‘Marvellous Melbourne’, see Geoffrey Serle, The Rush To Be Rich: A History of the Colony of Victoria 1883-1889, MUP, 1971, ch. 9 and Graeme Davison, The Rise and Fall of Marvellous Melbourne, MUP, 1978, ch. 10.

4 Serle, The Rush To Be Rich, chs 2, 8; A.R. Hall, The Stock Exchange of Melbourne and the Victorian Economy 1852-1900, ANU Press, 1968, ch. 4. I use the official population statistics for 1881 and 1891; J. W. McCarty, ‘Australian Capital Cities in the Nineteenth Century’, in J. W. McCarty and C. B. Schedvin (eds), Australian Capital Cities, SUP, 1978, pp. 9-25 calculate slightly reduced figures.

5 N.G. Butlin, Investment in Australian Economic Development 1861-1900, 2nd edn, Department of Economic History, Research School of Social Sciences, ANU, 1972, ch. 2 suggests that the shift of investment from the rural export industries to urban construction and services created a fundamental disequilibrium in the Australian economy during the 1880s; Hall, Stock Exchange, argues that the urban investment was productive, at least until the end of the decade.

6 The opening of the Trades Hall Council chamber is reported in Argus, 8 March 1884, and there is a description of the chamber in John Norton (ed.), The History of Capital and Labour, Oceanic Publishing, Sydney, 1888, pp. 136-7. Deakin’s account is in The Crisis in Victorian Politics, 1879-1881: A Personal Retrospect (ed. J. A. La Nauze and R. M. Crawford), MUP, 1957, p. 22.

7 VPD, vol. 16, p. 327 (12 June 1873). 8 David Syme, Representative Government in England: Its Faults and Failures, Kegan Paul, London, 1881, pp. 130, 215, 219. Syme acknowledged Pearson’s assistance in a letter to him, 7 April 1881, Pearson Papers. 9 J. D.B. Miller, ‘David Syme and Elective Ministries’, Historical Studies, vol. 6 (1953-5), pp. 1-15; Deakin diaries, Deakin Papers (NLA ms. 1540/2/2-9). 10 Deakin in VPD, vol. 72, p. 1378 (5 September 1893), quoted in Davison, Rise and Fall, p.119, who in ch. 5 provides the best account of this topic; p. 127 records Syme’s opposition. On Pearson, see J. M. Tregenza, “The Life and Times of C.H. Pearson, 1830-1894’, Ph.D. thesis, ANU, 1959, pp. 342, 352. See also Peter Loveday, “Patronage and Politics in New South Wales, 18561870’, Public Administration, vol. 18 (1959), pp. 341-58, and Margot Beever, ‘W.H. Archer: Civil Servant’, M. A. thesis, University of Melbourne, 1971. 11. There are references to the dismissal of Thomas Higinbotham in VPD, vol. 27, pp. 2057, 2095 (12 February 1878), vol. 28, pp. 862-5 (4 September 1878),

244 A COLONIAL LIBERALISM

and Argus, 23 January, 1, 13 February 1878. The circumstances of his death are given in Argus, 6 September 1880, and George’s obituary, which appeared in the Minutes of Proceedings of the Institute of Civil Engineers, is reproduced in Edward E. Morris, A Memoir of George Higinbotham: An Australian Politican and Chief Justice of Victoria, Macmillan, London, 1895, pp. 270-2. O’Loghlen revealed that Higinbotham had rejected an invitation to become a judge in VPD, vol. 29, pp. 2053-4 (27 November 1878). See generally R. L. Wettenhall, Railway Management and Politics in Victoria 1856-1906, Royal Institute of Public Administration, Canberra, 1961, chs 1-2. 12 Higinbotham to Service, 15 July 1880 (SLV); Toy v. Musgrove (1888) 14 Victorian Law Reports 349; Pearson in VPD, vol. 57, p. 194 (27 June 1888), quoted in Serle, The Rush To Be Rich, p. 301. See K. H. Bailey, ‘Self-Gov-

ernment in Australia, 1860-1900’, in Ernest Scott (ed.), The Cambridge History of the British Empire, CUP, Cambridge, vol. VII, Pt I, 1933, pp.

397-9 and Zelman Cowen, ‘A Century of Constitutional Development in Victoria, 1856-1956’, in Sir John Latham and Other Papers, OUP, Melbourne, 1965, pp. 118-24. 13. The correspondence was published in the Age, 16 February 1889, and is contained in despatches to the Colonial Office (AJCP CO 309/132). See Morris, Memorr, ch. 20 and Gavan Patrick McCormack, ‘Victorian Governors and Responsible Government, 1854-1892’, M.A. thesis, University of Melbourne, 1962, ch. 10.

14 Higinbotham in VPD, vol. 16, p. 1069 (13 August 1873); Sir Frank Gavan Duffy’s ‘A Dream of Fair Judges’ first appeared in Summons in June 1892 and is reproduced in Arthur Dean, A Multitude of Counsellors: A History of the Bar of Victoria, Cheshire, Melbourne, 1968, p. 310. Further information on

Higinbotham as a judge is given in Morris, Memoir, ch. 24; John Leonard Forde, The Story of the Bar of Victoria, Whitcombe and Tombs, Melbourne, n.d., and J. A. Gurner, Life’s Panorama, Lothian, Melbourne, 1930, pp. 263-7. Higinbotham’s resentment of the verse is recounted in a letter from J. V. Barry to Vance Palmer, 22 September 1942, Palmer Papers (NLA ms. 1057/1/230).

15 Higinbotham in VPD, vol. 7, p. 785 (19 May 1869), vol. 18, p. 504 (24 June 1874) and in his address to parliament, 16 December 1890, on completion of his codification, in Morris, Memozr, ch. 28. I draw here again on Alastair Davidson, The Judiciary and Politics in New South Wales and Victoria 1856-1901, Monash Occasional Papers in Politics no. 1, 1988.

16 Rev. John Ewing, Worldliness and Unworldliness, Melbourne, 1888, p. 19, quoted in Andrew Lemon, “The Young Man From Home: James Balfour

(1830-1913), M.A. thesis, University of Melbourne, 1978, p. 85; L. T. Hergenhan (ed.), A Colonial City: High and Low Life. Selected Journalism of Marcus Clarke, UQP, 1972, p. 331. 17 Financial statements, Syme Papers (SLV ms. 9751/1140-9) and sale documents

(ms. 9751/687); Syme to David Munro, 26 January 1888 (ms. 9751/545). Higinbotham’s sale of the Brighton property is noted by Margaret Glass, “Thomas Bent, The Survivor: A Study of the Business and Political Activities of a Landbooming Premier’, Ph.D. thesis, University of Melbourne, 1990, p. 104. Pearson to Arthur Giles Pullen, 10 January 1882, Pearson Papers (SLV ms. 7448), Pearson to Deakin, 21 December 1893, Deakin Papers (NLA ms. 1540/1/205) and William Stebbing (ed.) Charles Henry Pearson: Fellow of Oriel and Education Minister in Victoria, Longmans, London, 1900, pp. 288-9. 18 The circumstances of Higinbotham’s appointment are given in Morris, Memoir,

pp. 282-4, and the criticism was reported in Australasian, 12 May 1888. Deakin’s diary for 1888 (NLA ms. 1540/2/8) records a number of meetings with Higinbotham on the issue. See also Serle, The Rush To Be Rich, pp. 285-7, Graeme Davison et al. (eds), Australians 1888, Fairfax, Syme and Weldon As-

NOTES 245 sociates, Sydney, 1987, ch. 1, and Maya V. Tucker, ‘Centennial Celebrations 1888’, Australia 1888, no. 7 (April 1981), pp. 11-25. 19 Wettenhall, Railway Management, ch. 3 is more critical of the expansion than M. A. Venn, “The “Octopus Act” and Empire Building in the Victorian Railways during the Land Boom’, M. A. prelim. thesis, University of Melbourne, 1973. Financial reports are from the annual Reports of the Commissioners. For the Age campaign against Speight and the libel case, see Ambrose Pratt, David Syme: The Father of Protection in Australia, Ward Lock, London, 1908, ch. 10 and C. E. Sayers, David Syme: A Life, Cheshire, Melbourne, 1965, ch. 19. Documents and correspondence concerning the case are in the Syme Papers (SLV ms. 9751/546).

20 VPD, vol. 90, pp. 3847-50, 3971-3 (15, 20 December 1898), vol. 91, pp. 27-38, 43-5 (27-8 June 1899). Syme’s letter appeared in the Age, 19 December 1898. Land Selection at Mount Macedon Commission, Report and Evidence, VPP, 1899-1900, vol. 4; Sayers, David Syme, pp. 246-9. The findings of the Commission were criticized at length in Kyneton Guardian, 7-13 June 1899.

The Syme Papers include extensive correspondence from Syme’s agent at Mount Macedon but not, unfortunately, Syme’s letters to the agent (esp. SLV ms. 9751/836-63). 21. The depression is treated in Butlin, Jnvestment in Australian Economic Development, ch. 6; Hall, Stock Exchange, ch. 4, and E. A. Boehm, Prosperity and Depression in Australia 1887-1897, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1971. Deakin’s career at the Bar can be traced through his diaries for 1892 and 1893; Pearson conveyed his surprise in a letter, 29 March 1893, Deakin Papers (NLA ms. 1540/4166-7).

22 Higinbotham in VPD, vol. 17, p. 1361 (3 September 1873); his letter to the Trades Hall Council appears in Morris, Memoir, p. 285.

23 Age, 14, 26-31 August, 8 October 1890; Deakin and Pearson in VPD, vol. 64, | pp. 1359, 1368, 1536 (2, 10 September 1890), and Pearson in the London Speaker, quoted in Tregenza, “The Life and Times of C. H. Pearson’, p. 579. Higinbotham interviewed in British Australasian, 11 January 1893. 24 Brian Fitzpatrick, The Australian People 1788-1945, MUP, 1946, p. 217. 25. These lines of historical revision are suggested by Jenny Lee and Charles Fahey, ‘A Boom for Whom? Some Developments in the Australian Labour Market, 1870-1891’, Labour History, no. 50 (May 1986), pp. 1-27; Humphrey McQ-

ueen, A New Britannia: An Argument Concerning the Social Origins of Australian Radicalism and Nationalism, Penguin, Ringwood, 1972, and Michael Roe, Nine Australian Progressives: Vitalism in Bourgeois Social Thought 18801960, UQP, 1984. 26 John Stuart Mill, Autobiography (ed. Jack Stillinger), OUP, London, 1971, chs 5-6; Sheldon Rothblatt, The Revolution of the Dons: Cambridge and Society in Victorian England, Faber, London, 1968, pp. 97-8.

27 Syme discusses his spiritualist experiments in a letter in Pratt, David Syme, pp. 293-8; Pearson his in Stebbing (ed.), Charles Henry Pearson, pp. 132-3. 28 Higinbotham quoted in Serle, The Rush To Be Rich, p. 146; see F. B. Smith, ‘Religion and Freethought in Melbourne, 1870 to 1890’, M. A. thesis, University of Melbourne, 1960, ch. 5. The atmosphere of religious ferment in the 1880s is evoked vividly in Jill Roe, Beyond Belief: Theosophy in Australia 18791939, NSWUP, 1986, ch. 2.

29 [Alfred Deakin] A New Pilgrim’s Progress: Purporting To Be Given by John Bunyan Through an Impressionist Writing Medium, W.H. Terry, Melbourne, 1877, p. 258; The Lyceum Leader, E. Purton, Melbourne, 1877. See Smith, ‘Re-

ligion and Freethought’, ch. 3; Roe, Beyond Belief, p.119; Al Gabay, “The Seance in the Melbourne of the 1870s: Experience and Meanings’, Joxrnal of Religious History, vol. 13 (1984), pp. 192-212, and “The Private Writings of

246 A COLONIAL LIBERALISM Alfred Deakin’, Historical Studies, vol. 22 (1986-7), pp. 525-46. 30 Higgins, unpublished memoir, pp. 60, 65; diary, 21 December 1873 (translated by Higgins in 1926), 25 August 1876, 26 January 1878, Higgins Papers (NLA ms. 1057/1/284), and The Future of Greek Language and Letters: An Address Delivered Before the Classical Association in Melbourne on the 17th October, 1922, Melbourne, n.d., p. 16. See John Rickard, H. B. Higgins: The Rebel as Judge, Allen and Unwin, Sydney, 1984, esp. chs 1-3. 31 Higgins memoir, pp. 63, 68; Deakin to Higgins, 10 November 1891, Deakin Papers (NLA ms. 1540/8/14); Age, 15 November 1894; VPD, vol. 91, pp. 20911, 228-9 (5 July 1899); Richard Ely, Unto God and Caesar: Religious Issues in the Emerging Commonwealth 1891-1906, MUP, 1976. 32 VPD, vol. 89, pp. 2043-50 (5 October 1898); R. J. W. Selleck, ‘State Education

and Culture’, Australian Cultural History, no. 1 (1982), pp. 29-42; C.H. Spence, The Laws We Live Under, Government Printing Office, Adelaide, . 1880, and Susan Magarey, Unbridling the Tongues of Women: A Biography of Catherine Helen Spence, Hale and Iremonger, Sydney, 1985, ch. 5; Walter Murdoch, The Australian Citizen: An Elementary Account of Civic Rights and Duties, Whitcombe and Tombs, n.d. [1912], p. 238.

33. Morris, Memoir, pp. 275-7; Serle, The Rush To Be Rich, pp. 160-6; Ann M. Mitchell, ‘Temperance and the Liquor Question in Later Nineteenth Century Victoria’, M. A. thesis, University of Melbourne, 1966.

34 Age, 21 May 1872; Higinbotham in Argus, 23 February 1858; VPD, vol. 11, pp. 458-61 (7 December 1870); vol. 17, pp. 1349-61 (3 September 1873). The

Melbourne Punch, 22 November, 13 December 1866, lampooned

Higinbotham’s prosecution of the lottery organizers. 35 Pearson in VPD, vol. 38, pp. 839-41 (23 November 1881); Pearson to Henry Bradshaw, 14 July 1883, quoted in Tregenza, “The Life and Times of C. H.

Pearson’, pp. 467-8; Pearson to Deakin, n.d., Deakin Papers (NLA ms. 1540/4165).

36 = Pratt, David Syme, p. xiv. 37. Stebbing (ed.), Charles Henry Pearson, pp. 208, 270; Deakin’s memoir of Syme, Syme Papers (SLV ms. 9751/1644); Argus, 20 January 1857, 20 March 1881; Thomas Bentnall, My Memories: Being the Reminiscences of a Nonagenerian, Robertson and Mullen, Melbourne, 1938, p. 75; Morris, Memoir, p. 308; Age, 30, 31 May 1869. 38 Gurner, Life’s Panorama, pp. 265-6; Joseph Syme to David Syme, 2 July 1888, 7 November 1890; David Syme to Joseph Syme, 23 July 1890, Syme Papers (SLV Ms. 9751/167, 236, 545).

39 David Syme to Herbert Syme, 14 April, 2 June 1887, 23 March 1891, Syme Papers (SLV ms. 9751/347, 545).

40 An extensive correspondence from Pearson to his daughters is in the Pearson Papers. Direct evidence for the Higinbotham sons is very scanty. The elder of them was George Robert (b. 1865), who went from school to Dookie Agricultural College and thence to the Western Australian gold fields and West Africa, where he died in 1900; the younger was Arthur Edward (b. 1869) who became a legal official in Burma and, according to descendants of the family, was estranged from his family.

41 Margaret Higinbotham can be glimpsed in the diary of her neighbour, Thomas Anne Ward Cole (SLV ms. 10570/1474-83). David Syme to Annie Syme, 1, 29 September 1876 and n.d. (SLV ms 9751/310, 318, 325); Annie Syme to Geoffrey Syme, 5 February 1905, quoted in Sayers, David Syme, pp. 215-6.

42 John Tregenza, Professor of Democracy: The Life of Charles Henry Pearson 1830-1894. Oxford Don and Australian Radical, MUP, 1968, pp. 60-2, 123, 182-3, 202; Edith Pearson, diary 1883-1891, Pearson Papers (SLV ms. 7106);

NOTES 24/ Stebbing (ed.), Charles Henry Pearson, esp. pp. 259-60. 43 National Life and Character: A Forecast, Macmillan, London, 1893, p- 293. 44 Lee Holcombe, Wives and Property: Reform of the Married Women’s Property Law in Nineteenth-Century England, Martin Robertson, Oxford, 1983, pp. 98-103; Argus, 2 October 1858.

45 Pearson in VPD, vol. 44, pp. 945-7 (5 September 1883), vol. 61, p. 1785 (9 October 1889); Age, 12 August 1887. See Helen McCallum, ‘William Shiels and Divorce Law Reform in Victoria 1883-1890’, B. A. thesis, ANU, 1970; Charles D. Gibson, ‘Divorce Law Reform in Victoria, 1883-1893’, B. A. thesis, University of Melbourne, 1971; Margaret James, ‘Political Liberalism and the Oppression of Women’, Australia 1888, no. 4 (May 1980), pp. 28-36; Tess Maloney, ‘A Consideration of the Divorce Legislation in Colonial Victoria and the Divorce Petitions in 1861 and 1891’, ibid., no. 13 (November 1984), pp. 60-70; Tregenza, Professor of Democracy, pp. 217-8, and Serle, The Rush To Be Rich, pp. 305-7. 46 Higinbotham in VPD, vol. 7, pp. 20-1 (16 February 1869), vol. 11, pp. 115-6, 218-20 (8, 16 November 1870). 47 VPD), vol. 16, pp. 952-4 (5 August 1873). In 1865 Higinbotham had supported an amendment to the electoral law that closed the franchise to female ratepayers on the grounds that while he thought females were entitled to the vote, ‘the privilege should not have been conferred on them inadvertently’; Victorian Hansard, vol. 11, p. 416 (1 March 1865). 48 Mitchell, “Temperance and the Liquor Question’, ch. 4; Anthea Hyslop, “‘Tem-

perance, Christianity and Feminism: The Woman’s Christian Temperance Union of Victoria, 1887-97’, Historical Studies, vol. 17 (1976-7), pp. 27-49. I draw here on Judith Allen, “The Feminisms of the Early Women’s Movement, 1850-1920’, Refractory Girl, no. 17 (March 1979), pp. 10-16. 49 Higinbotham’s speech appeared in Australasian, 21 May 1877, and is reprinted in Morris, Memoir, pp. 277-81. See S. L. Hately, “The Queen’s Fund, Melbourne, 1887-1900’, Melbourne Historical Journal, no. 11 (1972), pp. 11-41, and Richard Kennedy, Charity Warfare: The Charity Organisation Society in Colonial Melbourne, Hyland House, Melbourne, 1985, esp. chs 4, 5.

50 Leeper quoted in J. Ann Hone, ‘The Movement for the Higher Education of Women in Melbourne in the Later Nineteenth Century’, M.A. thesis, Monash University, 1965, p. 153; Lyndsay Gardiner, Janet Clarke Hall 1886-1986, Hyland House, Melbourne, 1986, chs 1-2; Argus, 3 September 1892.

51 Judith Biddington, “The Role of Women in the Victorian Education Department 1872-1925’, M.A. thesis, University of Melbourne, 1977, pp. 43-63; R. J. W. Selleck, ‘Mary Helena Stark: The Troubles of a Nineteenth-Century State School Teacher’, in Stephen Murray-Smith (ed.), Melbourne Studies in Education, MUP, 1983, pp. 141-60, and Lesley Scholes, ‘Education and the Women’s Movement in Victoria, 1875-1914’, Ph.D. thesis, University of Melbourne, 1984, ch. 5.

52 Higinbotham in Argus, 2 October 1858; Pearson, Reviews and Critical Essays (ed. H. A. Strong), Methuen, London, 1896, p. 100. 53 Mill quoted in Katherine O’Donovan, Sexual Divisions in Law, Weidenfeld and Nicolson, London, 1985, p. 8; Pearson, “Thoughts and Aphorisms’, Pearson Papers (SLV ms. 7153); Higinbotham in Argus, 25 June 1858, quoted in Morris, Memoir, p. 56. 54 Deakin quoted in Walter Murdoch, Alfred Deakin: A Sketch, Constable, London, 1923, p.6 and J. A. La Nauze, Alfred Deakin: A Biography, MUP, 1965, vol. 1, pp. 52-3. See generally Carole Pateman and Elizabeth Gross (eds), Feminist Challenges: Social and Political Theory, Allen and Unwin, Sydney, 1986. 55 Higinbotham in Age, 12 July 1887; Pearson in VPD, vol. 49, pp. 1526-7 (20 October 1885), quoted in Serle, The Rush To Be Rich, p. 222.

248 A COLONIAL LIBERALISM

56 Deakin and Pearson in VPD, vol. 39, pp. 447-68, 547 (31 May, 6 June 1882); Age, 5 June 1882; interview with Higinbotham in British Australasian, 11 January 1893; Higgins memoir, pp. 86-7, Higgins Papers (NLA ms. 1057/3) and Rickard, H. B. Higgins, pp. 64-5. 57 Pearson, Reviews and Critical Essays, pp. 220, 236; Higinbotham in Age, 29 January 1866. 58 H.A. Strong made the observation about Pearson in the preface to Reviews and Critical Essays, p.2; the call for restlessness is in the Age, 3 September 1877.

59 Journal of Stanley Leighton, 1868, vol. 2, pp. 7-9 (NLA ms. 360); VPD, vol. 10, pp. 689-92 (2 June 1870), vol. 45, pp. 230-6 (24 June 1884). 60 Age, 24 March 1886, quoted in Serle, The Rush To Be Rich, p. 207, who gives the best account of this topic in ch. 6. See also Higinbotham’s speech in favour of annexation in Australasian, 21 July 1883, and Tregenza, Professor of Democracy, pp. 188-90. For Australian attempts to control Chinese immigration, see Charles A. Price, The Great White Walls Are Built: Restrictive Immigration to North America and Australasia 1836-1888, ANU Press, Canberra, 1974, ch. 7.

61 Higinbotham to Christopher Crisp, 12 January 1892, Crisp Papers (NLA ms. 743/169), and reported in the Age, 12 July 1887 and British Australian, 11 January 1893.

62 Argus, 16 January, 28 October 1858. Higinbotham’s views are discussed, but not attributed, by Bain Attwood, The Making of the Aborigines, Allen and Unwin, Sydney, 1989, ch. 4. 63 VPD, vol. 53, pp. 2912-3 (15 December 1886), vol. 61, pp. 1525-6 (25 September 1889), vol. 64, pp. 1711-9 (23 September 1890); see generally Attwood, The

Making and Janet F. Critchett, ‘A History of Framlingham and Lake Condah Aboriginal Stations, 1860-1918’, M.A. thesis, University of Melbourne, 1980, chs 2-3. Age, 26 September 1896, quoted in Andrew Markus, Fear and Hatred: Purifying Australia and California 1850-1901, Hale and Iremonger, Sydney, 1979, p. 257; D. J. Mulvaney and J. H. Calaby, ‘So Much That Is New’: Baldwin Spencer 1860-1929, A Biography, MUP, 1985, p. 191; G.S. Reid and Martyn Forrest, Australia’s Commonwealth Parliament: Ten Perspectives, MUP, 1989, pp. 97-8. 64 E.H. Sugden and F. W. Eggleston, George Swinburne: A Biography, Angus and Robertson, Sydney, 1931, pp. 53, 254; Warren G. Osmond, Frederic Eggleston, An Intellectual in Australian Politics, Allen and Unwin, Sydney, 1985, p.51; Rohan Rivett, Australian Citizen: Herbert Brookes 1867-1963, MUP, 1965, ch. 14.

65 VPD, vol. 71, pp. 3784-8 (10 January 1893). 66 Jim Davidson, The Sydney-Melbourne Book, Allen and Unwin, Sydney, 1986, p. 20. Apart from his introduction and the contributions of Vincent Buckley, John Docker and Bernard Smith to this book, other characterizations of the Melbourne intellectual tradition are given by Manning Clark, ‘Faith’, in Peter Coleman (ed.), Australian Civilization, Cheshire, Melbourne, 1962, pp. 78-88, and John Docker, Australian Cultural Elites: Intellectual Traditions in Sydney and Melbourne, Angus and Robertson, Sydney, 1974. 67 The Archives of the Boobooks are in the University of Melbourne Archives.

CHAPTER 6

1 William Stebbing (ed.), Charles Henry Pearson: Fellow of Oriel College and Education Minister in Victoria, Longmans, London, 1900, pp. 290, 292, 303; Testimonial in Pearson Papers (SLV ms 7173); Edith Pearson’s diary, 18 December

NOTES 249 1890, Pearson Papers (SLV ms 7106). 2 Deakin to Pearson, 14 December 1892, 18 March 1893, Pearson Papers (SLV ms 7321, 7322) Syme to Pearson, 28 March 1893, Syme Papers (SLV ms 9751/546); Pearson to Deakin, 21 December 1893, Deakin Papers (NLA ms 1540/4170); Stebbing (ed.), Charles Henry Pearson, p. 309; John Tregenza, Professor of De-

mocracy: The Life of Charles Henry Pearson, 1830-1894. Oxford Don and

Australian Radical, MUP, 1968, ch. 12. 3 Memorial to Lord Rosebery on behalf of Edith Pearson, Pearson Papers (SLV

ms 7378); Edith Pearson to Deakin, 6 May 1907, Deakin Papers (NLA ms 1540/4178).

4 Edith Pearson to Deakin, n.d. (NLA ms 1540/4176); Deakin in Daily Chronicle, 28 May 1900, Age, 7 July 1900; Strong to Edith Pearson, 10 July [1894?], Pearson Papers (NLA ms 7493).

5 Argus, 2 January 1893; Edward E. Morris, A Memoir of George Higinbotham: An Australian Politician and Chief Justice of Victoria, Macmillan, London, 1895, pp. 306-11, 326. 6 Bulletin, 7 January 1893; Australian Women’s Sphere, June 1902; Morris, Memoir, Xx.

7 Charles Reade to Gwyn Dow, 30 June, 19 July 1964; obituary of Reade, Corowa Free Press, 21 February 1969. 8 VPD, vol. 6, p.20 (28 April 1868); see also Journal of Stanley Leighton, 1868, vol. 2, p.5 (NLA ms 360). 9 Declaration and statement of assets for estate of David Syme, Syme Papers (SLV ms 9751/1278); Mrs C.J. Dennis to C. E. Sayers, 11 May 1964, Syme Papers (SLV ms 9751/1656).

INDEX

a’Beckett, T.T., 54 as voice of David Syme, 6-7, 9, Aborigines, 18-19, 88, 211-13 85-6 Acclimatization Society, 13, 114 and women’s rights, 202 Adams, Francis, 169 see also land reform; protection, Adams, John Quincy, 163 tariff; Syme, David and Aborigines, 213 Alfred, H.R. H. Prince, 53, 137 ad hominen character, 66-7 Archer, William Henry, 113, 114, 115 anti-classicism, 156 Argus, 2, 25-36, 53, 147

Age agriculture, 101-2

campaign against Victorian contempt of parliament, 68

Railways, 182-3, 198 in first constitutional crisis, 44-5,

causes, 46—/7, 87-8, 113, 152, 195, 67

210 in second constitutional crisis, 160

circulation and finances, 77, 79, 81, finances, 79

87, 181 and Higinbotham, 45

and coalitions of 1880s, 174 and Pearson, 151

in first constitutional crisis, 44—5 and Ebenezer Syme, 76 in second constitutional crisis, 64, see also Wilson, Edward

150, 158, 160-1 Arnold, Matthew, 127, 140, 156

contempt of parliament, 67-9 Aspinall, Butler Cole, 22, 23 contributors, 86-7; see also Deakin, | Australian Church, 189

Alfred; Pearson, Charles Australian Secular Association, 189

criticizes Higinbotham, 34, 63,

68-9 Babington, George Gisborne, 117

criticizes Deakin, 219-20 Bagehot, Walter, 44, 173

establishment, 76-7 Ballarat, 60, 61, 74, 171

format, 84 —5, 165 Ballarat Education League and and Insh Home Rule, 208 Registration Society, 140

legal actions, 67, 183 ballot, 29

and maritime strike, 185-6 Baptist Church, 119, 136

ownership, 76-7, 78-9, 82, 181 Barry, John Vincent, 2 250

INDEX 251

Barry, (Sir) Redmond, 45-6, 147, conservatism

156, 162, 163-4, 165 in Britain, 12

Batman, John, 19 in colonial setting, 12-14, 18-19, Bendigo, 20, 77, 171 64—5, 151-2 Bent, Thomas, 63 in Victorian politics, 34, 37, 39, Berry, (Sir) Graham, 14, 64, 150, 158, 44-5, 67, 172, 215

159-62, 171, 172, 173-4 Constitution, Victorian, 28, 42-4,

Besant, Annie, 190 47-8, 50, 59, 160-1, 178

Bible in State Schools League, 167 Constitutional Association, 39

‘Black Wednesday’, 159, 160, constitutions, colonial, 27

176 Cooke, Henry, 76

Blackburn, Maurice, 2, 214 Cooke, John, 76

Blair, David, 77, 86, 137

‘Blythswood’, 181, 222 Darling, Sir Charles, 46, 48-9, 50-2,

Board for the Protection of 53, 105, 171

Aborigines, 213 Darling, Lady, 51, 52, 53 Boobooks, 217 Deakin, Alfred, 6, 17, 184, 191 Brighton Free Library, 165 and Aborigines, 213

Brighton Mechanics’ Institute, 165 anti-Catholicism, 131

Bromby, Eliza, 162-3 contributor to Age, 87 Bromby, John, 122, 136, 162, 203 and femininity, 207

Brookes, Herbert, 216, 217 and Higinbotham, 4, 24, 171-2

Bryce, James, 143 on Irish Home Rule, 208 Bulletin (Sydney), 197, 220 and maritime strike, 185-6 nationalism, 9, 210

California, 74 and Pearson, 4, 115, 151, 219-20

Cambridge, Ada, 170 political career, 6-7, 161, 172, 174 Canada, 154 spiritualism, 188-90 Cardwell, Edward, 105 and Syme, 6-7, 174, 183, 197 Carey, Henry, 91, 92 at University, 147 Carlyle, Thomas, 71, 73 Deakin, Catherine, 148

Castlemaine, 158, 171 Dicey, A. V., 143

Central Elections Committee, 39 Dickens, Charles, 21

Chapman, Henry Samuel, 22 Diggers’ Advocate, 76

Chapman, John, 75-6 Dilke, (Sir) Charles, 54, 113, 169 Charity Organization Society, 205 Disorderly Meetings Act, 99

Chartism, 75, 84, 144, 151, 156 divorce law reform, 201-2 Church of England, 37, 117, 119, Don, Charles Jardine, 19, 109

128, 133, 135 Douglass, Ben, 171

Church Missionary College, 117 Dow, Gwynneth, 63, 221

civics, 192-3 Dow, J. L., 87 Civil Service Act, 175 Duffy, Charles Gavan, 12-13, 14, 35, Clapham Sect, 117, 118-19, 142 37, 40, 52, 100, 130, 139, 163

Clarke, The Lady, 205 Duffy, Frank Gavan, 178-9, 208 Clarke, Marcus, 53, 61, 123-4, 180-1 Duffy, Harriet, 163 classicism, 154-6, 191 Duffy, John Gavan, 147, 163 Cliffe Leslie, T. E., 92, 95

Cole, E. W., 85, 119-21, 165 Eastern Market, 32, 67, 99

Colonial Office, 27-8, 48-9, 50, 51, Eclectic Association, 121 53, 55, 57, 58, 105, 111, 160~1, education, Victoria, 132-41, 152-8,

177-8, 202 205-6 Colonial Society, 56 Education Act (1872), 138-9, 153, Common Schools Act, 135, 136 154, 166, 167

Congregationalist Church, 79, 119, Eggleston, Frederic, 176, 215-16, 217

136 eight-hour day, 111-12

252 A COLONIAL LIBERALISM

Eliot, George, 75-6 and Syme, 6

Embling, Thomas, 77 at University of Melbourne, 4, 147

Emerald Hill Mechanics’ Institute, Higinbotham, Alice, 220-1

150 Higinbotham, Edith, see Morris, Edith

Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 188-9, 190 Higinbotham, Edward, 221 Eureka rebellion, 22-3, 26, 74, 77 Higinbotham, George

Evangelical Union, 72 accidents, 197

anti-sabbatarianism, 66

Fawkner, John Pascoe, 19, 221 antipathy to mobs, 32-4 femininity, 24-5, 148-9, 207 antipathy to party politics, 30-1,

feminism, 2034 39-40, 65, 174

Fiji, 210 character, 20-1, 24—5, 197-8, 204 Fink, Theodore, 147 children, 199, 220-1

Fitzpatrick, Brian, 187 on colonial circumstances, 12

Foster, John Fitzgerald Leslie, 12, 28 on Deakin, 4, 211

Framlingham, 213 death, 220 Francis, J.G., 139 early life, 20-2

Free Trade League, 45, 67, 105 early politics, 26-36, 40

Freeman, E.A., 145 editor of Argus, 25-6, 35-6

Froude, J. A., 121, 170 and education, 133-8, 140-1 and federation, 210, 211

Geelong Advertiser, 87 financial circumstances, 21, 36, 181 General Registration Society, 39 in first constitutional crisis, 41-55 Gillies, Duncan, 172, 219 on second constitutional crisis, Gladstone, William Ewart, 56, 129 158, 176

Glass, Hugh, 60-1 imperial honours, 15, 58-9

goldrush, 18-19, 23, 74-5, 89 imperial relations, 55-8, 177-8,

Goold, Bishop, 139 208-9

Gosse, Edmund, 71 International Exhibition, 182 Gourlay, John, 75 judge, 172, 177-80, 197-8, 205 Gradgrind, Thomas, 113 land reform, 100, 102

Grant, James, 40, 62, 77, 78, 100-1, legal career, 23, 35-4

105 and maritime strike, 185-6 Gray, Moses Wilson, 32, 33, 56, 172 marriage, 20, 23, 199 Greeley, Horace, 76 on Pearson, 218 Grey, Lord, 96 oratory, 61-2, 66 Grote, George, 155 protection, 106,

religion, 25, 124-6, 128-9, 154,

Haines, W.C., 34, 35, 37, 133 188-9

Hargreaves, Edward, 69 reputation, 1-5, 9-10, 24-5, 45, 54,

Harpur, Charles, 125 63, 150, 216, 220 Harrison, James, 87 and rights of labour, 109-12 Hartz, Louis, 13 Royal Commission on Education, Hawthorn Grammar School, 162 136-8

Heales, Richard, 36, 39, 40, 189 and Syme, 7-8, 68-9 Hearn, William Edward, 147 temperance advocate, 194-5

Higgins, Henry Bournes withdrawal from politics, 63-4,

and Aborigines, 213 158, 172

and class, 9 women’s rights, 201-5

and Deakin, 4, 191 Higinbotham, George (son), 221 and Higinbotham, 3 Higinbotham Margaret (ree

on Irish Home Rule, 208 Foreman), 20, 23, 199, 220

in politics, 185 Higinbotham, Maude, 221 religion, 190-1 Horne, Richard Hengist, 10

Public Library, 164 Higinbotham, Thomas, 23, 36, 176-7

INDEX 253

Hume, Fergus, 170 lineages, 1-10, 214-17 Huxley, T.H., 219 and nationalism, 207-11

and religion, 127-8, 133, 188

immigration, assisted, 110-11 utilitananism, 114, 165-6 International Exhibition, 182 in Victorian politics, 36-7, 44-5,

Ireland, Richard, 22, 23, 37, 40 59, 64, 105, 139, 150, 158~—9, 161,

Irish in Victoria, 21, 35, 37, 128, 172, 174

129-31, 137-8, 208 and women, 201-7 Irving, M.H., 162 Loch, Sir Henry, 183

Irvine, (Sir) William, 215 List, Friedrich, 91, 92

Isaacs, (Sir) Isaac, 185 Loch, Lady, 204 Lowe, Robert, 139-40, 143, 149 Jenks, Edward, 13 Lowell, James Russell, 83

112, 130 54, 59

Jones, Charles Edwin, 60-1, 67, 105, Loyal Liberal Reform Association,

journalism, 21-2, 25-6, 35-6 see also Liberal Reform Association King’s College, London, 117, 143, 145 © McCoy, Frederick, 165

Kingston, C.C., 202 McCulloch, (Sir) James, 40, 42, 47,

| 50, 51, 53, 54, 58-9, 136, 137, 138

Land Convention, 31-2, 39, 88, 99, McEwan, James, 78

100 Mackinnon, David, 214

land reform, 31-2, 97-102, 150, 161 Macpherson, John, 54

Nicholson Act, 100 Maloney, William, 214 Duffy Act, 40, 100 Manifold family, 100 Grant Acts, 100-1, 113 Mann, Chief Justice, 2

Land Tenure Reform League, 102 maritime strike, 1890, 185-6

Lang, John Dunmore, 137 masculinity, 24-5, 34, 94, 96-7, 110, Latham, (Sir) John, 215, 217 112, 126, 134, 196—8, 207

Leader, 68, 79, 87 Maurice, F.D., 117

Leeper, Alexander, 205 Mayhew, Henry, 21 legal profession, 21-3, 179 Melbourne

Legislative Assembly, 34, 37-8, 41-2, in 1850s, 17-20 43-5, 47, 49-50, 53, 56-7, 59, 61, in 1880s, 169-71, 180-1

68-9, 159-61 depression, 184

Legislative Council, 32, 34, 41-2, intellectual tradition, 216-17 43-5, 47, 49-50, 52-3, 56-7, 59, 62, suburbs, 20, 170-1

100-1, 104-5, 158-61 Melbourne Botanical Gardens, 164-5,

Levey, George, 86 170 Liberal Debating Society, 121 Melbourne Club, 23, 49, 176

Liberal Reform Association, 45, 49 Melbourne Grammar School, 122,

see also Loyal Liberal Reform 136, 155, 162

Association Melbourne Public Library, Museum

liberalism and Gallery, 19, 120, 155, 156, Bntish, 5, 11, 26-7, 33, 83-4, 163-4, 165-6

115-16, 143-4, 156, 194, 206 Melbourne Punch, 18, 161

civic culture, 133-4, 140-1, 153-4, Melbourne Review, 124

157, 192-3 Menzies, Robert Gordon, 216

and class, 111-12, 186 Michie, Archibald, 22, 23, 40, 45 in colonial setting, 10-14, 31, 64-5, Mill, John Stuart, 10, 76, 85, 91-2,

108-9, 150, 193 187-8, 194, 195

constituency, 88, 90-1, 96-7, Milton, John, 192

108—9, 111, 180 Molesworth, Robert, 46

economic, 88, 90-1, 96-7, 108-9, Moorhouse, Bishop, 122, 124, 130

111, 180 Morison, James, 72-3

254 A COLONIAL LIBERALISM

Morning Chronicle, 21, 22, 87 and federation, 210 Morris, Edith, 205, 220 financial circumstances, 181-2, 219 Mornis, E. E., 162, 205, 209, 220 first period in Australia, 145

Morrison, Alexander, 162 headmaster, 148-50

Mornson, Ernest, 210 on Higinbotham, 3, 150-1

Mount Macedon, 183 imperial relations, 15, 160-1, 177,

Munro, James, 219 208 Murdoch, Walter, 192-3, 217 last years, 218-19

Murray, John, 213 and maritime strike, 185-6

Murray Smith, Robert, 151 marriage, 146, 200-1 National Life and Character, National Reform and Protection 167-8, 201

League, 159, 161, 173 ostracism, 151-2 League, 167 religion, 116-19, 127, 167, 188-9, 219 New Guinea, 210 Royal Commission on Education, National Scriptural Education and Public Library, 165-6

New South Wales, 15, 27, 28, 41, 96, 152-8

107, 110, 134, 146, 202 and Syme, 6, 151, 158, 162, 218-19

New York Tribune, 76 temperance advocate, 195-6 New Zealand, 14, 83, 204 travels, 143-4 Newman, Cardinal, 130 and University of Melbourne,

Nicholson, William, 36 146-8, 162~3

women’s rights, 201-3, 205-7

O’Connor, Feargus, 84 Pearson, Edith, 3-4, 146, 181-2, O’Dowd, Bernard, 2, 190, 214, 217 200—1, 204-5, 218-20

O’Hea, J. W., 86 Pearson, Isabella, 117

O’Loghlen, (Sir) Bryan, 166 Permissive Bill Association, 195 O’Shanassy, W.C., 35, 37, 40, 100, Perry, Bishop, 122, 135

130, 133, 136 Pius IX, Pope, 130, 131 Owens, J. D., 77 Polding, Bishop, 135

Presbyterian Church, 70-2, 119, 126,

Palk, James, 80, 82 136, 180 Palmer, Nettie, 1-3, 191, 214 Presbyterian Ladies College, 148-50, Palmer, Vance, 2-3 157, 163

Parkes, (Sir) Henry, 15, 125, 202 press, role of, 66-7, 83-6 Parliament House, 19, 32, 37-8, 99, Price, Colonel Tom, 186

155, 218 Princess Theatre, 150

Parnell, Charles, 208 protection, tariff, 7, 42, 45, 48, 88,

pastoralism, 88-9 102~—7, 159, 161, 172

Patterson, James, 219 Protection League, 45, 159

payment of members of parliament, Public Service Board, 175

59-60, 159-60 public works, 110

Peacock, (Sir) Alexander, 215 Purrumbete, 100 Pearson, Charles Henry

and censorship, 165 Queen’s Fund, 204-5

character, 9, 144, 196, 197 Queensland, 202, 210 in second constitutional crisis, Quick, John, 147 158-62

on colonial circumstances, 13, Rae, Thomas, 78

143-4, 208-9 railways, 19

contributor to Age, 87, 150-1, 162, see also Victorian Railways

181, 211, 218-19 Reade, Charles, 221 on Deakin, 4, 185 Redmond brothers, 208

early life, 117-18, 142-3 Reform League, 158-9

Essays on Reform, 143-4 religion, 115

INDEX 255

crisis of belief, 115-16, 122-8, Strong, H. A., 220

188-91 suffrage, 29, 31, 39

moral reform, 61, 196, 204 Sunday Free Discussion Society, sectarianism, 35, 100, 129-31, 135, 121-2, 189

137, 154 Sunday Liberation Society, 166

state aid, 128 Supple, Gerald, 86

in state schools, 134-8, 154, 166-7 Supreme Court, 45-8, 61, 177-8, 215

Renan, Ernest, 121, 128 Sutherland, Alexander, 147

Robinson, A. B., 87 Sutherland, George, 147

Robinson, Arthur, 217 Sutton, Sir George Manners, 52-3,

Rogers, (Sir) Fredric, 48-9, 53, 57 55, 58

Roman Catholic Church, 35, 115, Swedenborg, Emanuel, 190 119, 129-31, 133, 135, 136-7, 166-7 Swinburne, George, 215

‘Rosenheim’, 183-4 Sydney Morning Herald, 35-6 Royal Commission on Education Syme, Annabella (Annie, nee (Higinbotham), 136-8 Johnson), 75, 80, 82, 199-200 Royal Commission on Education Syme, David, 181, 198 (Pearson), 152-8 character, 67-8, 74-5, 86, 196—7 Rugby School, 117, 155 children, 198-9, 222 Rusden, H. K., 121-2 in first constitutional crisis, 66-7 in second constitutional crisis, sabbatarianism, 166 158-62

Sala, George Augustus, 170 contempt of parliament, 68-9

Sargood, F.T., 182 and Deakin, 6-7, 191

Schuler, G. F. H., 87 early life, 69-72, 74-5

Scotch College, 136, 148, 155 Father of Protection, 102-3, 161

Scots Church Literary Association, and federation, 211

125 financial circumstances, 75, 78, 79,

Scripture Education League, 191 82, 181

Service, James, 161, 172, 176, 183 on W.E. Hearn, 147

settler capitalism, 88-9 on land reform, 95-100, 102

Shenandoah, 49 legal actions, 67, 183 Shiels, William, 147, 201-2, 216, 218, marriage, 75, 199-200

219 ownership of Age, 181, 198

Sidgwick, Henry, 145, 156, 219 and Pearson, 218-19

Sidney, Samuel, 76 political economy, 92-7

Sinclaire, Frederick, 217 on representative government,

Sladen, Charles, 53 173—4

Smith, George Paton, 68, 86, 152 religion, 70-1, 72-3, 116, 127, 188

Smith, Henry, 86 reputation, 5-7, 9, 10, 158, 161-2, South Australia, 14, 27, 41, 110, 145, 215, 217

202 and rights of labour, 109-112

Speight, Richard, 183 utilitarianism, 114 Spence, Catherine Helen, 192 see also Age

Spencer, (Sir) Walter Baldwin, 213 Syme, Ebenezer, 20, 70, 72, 75-6,

spiritualism, 198-90 77-8, 83, 86

squatters, 31, 60, 98-9, 100 Syme, George (father of David),

statistician, colonial, 114 69-72

Stawell, (Sir) William, 28, 47, 178 Syme, George (brother of David), 70,

Stead, W.T., 83 72,75

Stebbing, William, 219 Syme, George (son of Ebenezer), 75,

Stephen, (Sir) Alfred, 202 80, 81

Stephen, Leslie, 118, 143, 219 Syme, Herbert, 75, 198-9 Stevenson, Robert Louis, 71 Syme, James, 70, 72, 75 Strong, Charles, 126, 127, 189, 203 Syme, Jane (nee Rowan), 75, 78-83

256 A COLONIAL LIBERALISM

Syme, Jean, 72, 75 University of St Andrew’s, 70 Syme, Joseph Cowen, 75, 81, 82,

181, 198 Victoria, H.R. H. Queen, 204

Syme, Margaret, 70, 72, 75 Victorian Alliance for the Suppression Syme, William Holland, 75, 80, 81, 82 of the Liquor Traffic, 195 Victonan Association, 39

Tait, George, 149, 150 Victorian Association of Progressive

Tariff Reform League, 103 Spiritualists, 189-90 “Tasma’ (Jessie Couvreur), 170 Victorian Club, 23

Tasmania, 27 Victorian Railways, 19, 113, 176,

temperance, 194-5, 204 182-3

Thackeray, William Makepeace, 21,22 Victorian Review, 123, 124

The Times (London), 56 Victorian Women’s Suffrage Society,

Tocqueville, Alexis de, 12 203, 220

Tocsin, 220 von Mueller, Ferdinand, 164-5 Toy v. Musgrove, 177, 179

Trades Hall Council, Melbourne, 3, Wakefield, Edward Gibbon, 91

33, 171-2, 185 Warung, Price, 220

215 190

Tregenza, John, 142 Wesley College, 136

Trinity College Dublin, 21, 147, 155, Wesleyan Church, 119, 120, 136,

Trinity College, University of Westgarth, William, 14

Melbourne, 205 Westminster Review, 75-6, 187

Trollope, Anthony, 169 Wilson, Edward, 13, 25-6, 29-30,

Tunnecliffe, Tom, 2 35-6, 56-7, 114

Turner, (Sir) George, 215 Windeyer, (Sir) William, 202

Turner, Henry Gyles, 109 Windsor, A. L., 87

Woman’s Christian Temperance

unemployment, 109 Union, 204

Unitarian Church, 189 women’s rights

United States, 21, 49, 76, 95, 145, charity, 204-5

154, 204 divorce, 201-2

University of Aberdeen, 70 education, 148—50, 162-3,

University of Adelaide, 148 205

University of Cambridge, 145, 155 employment, 205-6

University of Glasgow, 70 property, 202

University of Heidelberg, 73 suffrage, 203-4 146~—8, 158, 162-3, 220 wowserism, 196

University of Melbourne, 4, 19, Wood, John Dennistoun, 67 University of Oxford, 116, 117-18, Wrixon, (Sir) Henry, 215, 216

142, 144, 155 Woolley, John, 134