mass of urban criminals being transported from London.
In sending William Bligh out to Australia, and in instructing him to crack down on various ad hoc practices that had sprung up in the absence of any workable instructions or assistance coming from Britain, the powers that be were working with a set of mistaken assumptions:
They didn’t expect a society to have so quickly and spontaneously grown out of the dregs that had been deported. But it had.
They didn’t expect it to be so modern, or so mercantile, or to consist of anything other than convicts and self-sufficient yeoman (peasant-like farmers). But it was and it did.
They fully expected it to be a moral cesspit, thanks largely to both ingrained attitudes about the moral depravity of the criminal underclass, and to the bad press the colony had been given by the Evangelicals — Reverends Johnson and Marsden, and missionaries who’d arrived in NSW in the 1790s. But it wasn’t.
Bligh gets down to business
In came Bligh. He knew he’d been chosen by Sir Joseph Banks as the man to bring an unruly and disobedient colony back into line, and that if some serious kicking of heads was in order, those back in the Colonial Office would be fine with that.
Bligh was not the sort of individual to be disconcerted when reality didn’t conform to what he insisted it ought to be. To his grim satisfaction, he found no shortage of felons and ex-felons on the make, with men and women (both free and unfree) involved in ‘dubious’ enterprises such as trading and buying and selling. So Bligh got to work.
One of main problems Bligh focused on was the favourite form of incentive payment and extra wage: Rum. He attacked the distillation and rum retailing industry, which the officers had already left and was by this time dominated by soldiers and ex-convicts. The inhabitants of Sydney, who at this point made up more than half of NSW’s total population, were livid; the main populace, made up of convicts, ex-convicts and soldiers, particularly so.
Not content, Bligh then went further. He declared that some who had leases and property rights in the township would have to be evicted to fit in with his new town plans. At the same time, Bligh made it clear that he despised the NSW Corps soldiers, claiming they were no better than the convicts and, because many of them were ex-convicts themselves, couldn’t be trusted. Then he finished it nicely by calling them ‘wretches’, ‘tremendous buggers’ and ‘villains’.
Removing rum as payment
Bligh began by outlawing the use of both rum and promissory notes as mediums of exchange. Rum was still the usual form of payment for many workers and traders. Promissory notes were IOUs that passed from one hand to another and could be traded in and redeemed by the individuals who had first released them.
If rum and promissory notes could be replaced as forms of exchange, well and good, but Bligh didn’t replace them, he just outlawed them. No established business owner in the colony could do business without these forms of pseudo-currency. Without them, the wheels of commerce and daily life would grind to a halt.
Quashing all dissension and threatening eviction
When three ex-convict entrepreneurs (Lord, Kable and James Underwood) sent Bligh a (relatively mild) protest letter, he jailed them. Bligh declared the letter insulting.
Then Bligh started threatening Sydney residents with eviction, because he wished to do with the town layout what he was trying to do with the economy — push it back to Phillip’s period. Bligh didn’t like the colonial mess he was being confronted with, and he certainly didn’t like the sprawling, mercantile shanty metropolis of Sydney that had just grown up without, as he put it, ‘any particular design’.
Bligh launched a campaign against colonial disorder. He had ‘plans which I had formed for the improvement of the town’, and put the fear in people badly by telling them colonial leases may have no legal meaning.
Bligh’s end
It’s hard to find a historian who doesn’t take sides on Bligh, on whether he was either:
A noble but misunderstood, valiant governor trying his best to get rid of that pernicious officer trade cartel, and help out the little guy
A serial buffoon given to violent threats and outbursts who managed the almost impossible — uniting all the warring factions and overcoming the seething animosities that Sydney was riven with, by bringing everyone (soldiers, ex-cons, officers, traders, house owners and renters) together against him
Either way, it’s impossible to ignore the one really big event of his tenure, and the only violent overthrow of established government in Australia’s history — known (since the 1850s) as the Rum Rebellion.
Soldiers and common populace join forces
The 20th anniversary of NSW’s first settlement (26 January 1808) saw the majority of the population uniting as one — to arrest their own governor! At the desperate urging of ex-officer John Macarthur (who had just escaped from being jailed by Bligh), Major George Johnston led his detachment of the NSW Corps to Government House where Bligh lived. After a few hours of searching and ransacking the house high and low, the marines found and arrested Bligh.
That
