Category Archives: military

by | 12 March 2024 · 9:22 am

Bypassing the Reichstag in World War I

From The Weimar Years: Rise and Fall 1918–1933, by Frank McDonough (Bloomsbury, 2023), Kindle pp. 18-23:

At the start of the First World War, Imperial Germany was not a parliamentary democracy, but nor was it an autocracy. It had a constitution, a national parliament, and independent states which controlled the local budgets of each region. The national parliament consisted of the Reichstag directly elected by the German people and an upper unelected chamber known as the Federal Council (Bundesrat), with representatives from the 26 individual princely states. Voting in elections for the Reichstag was confined to all males aged 25 and over and based on a constituency-based, first-past-the-post system. Neither the Bundesrat nor the Reichstag had the power to draft legislation but were expected to approve it. Even so, more people were entitled to vote in German parliamentary elections in 1914 than was the case in Britain.

Despite the Reichstag’s lack of political power, German national elections were hotly contested….

The power and influence of the military was stronger than that of any of the political parties. It was often described as a ‘state within a state’. The Emperor Kaiser Wilhelm II, the eldest grandson of Queen Victoria, had been in power since 1888. He had the final say on policy, controlled the armed forces, appointed the German Chancellor and the cabinet ministers and was able to veto decisions taken by the Bundesrat and the Reichstag. The German Empire’s governing system, dominated by the Kaiser, was called an ‘autocratic state’ (Obrigkeitsstaat). On the outbreak of war on 4 August 1914, the German Emperor told the assembled members of the Reichstag: ‘I no longer recognise parties. I know only Germans.’ He then asked the Reichstag members to endorse an Enabling Act which suspended elections and Reichstag meetings and afforded him unlimited powers. Under Article 68 of the then German constitution, the Army seized wide-ranging executive powers, which included a strict censorship of the press.

Kaiser Wilhelm decided to finance the war not by raising taxation, but by creating Loan Banknotes (Darlehenskassenscheine), issuing three-month Treasury Bills and printing money. The idea was for these loans to be paid back in the event of Germany winning the war, capturing territory, and imposing reparations on the defeated powers. It was only in 1916 that new taxes were belatedly introduced on business, but not on incomes. Only 13.9 per cent of Germany’s war costs came from direct taxation, compared to 18.2 per cent for Britain. During the war, the amount of money in circulation rose from 7.4 million to 44.4 million marks, which inevitably led to high inflation.

The Germans prided themselves on the superiority of their armed forces and the strength of their economy. In 1914, Germany possessed the most powerful and dynamic economy on the European continent, which had experienced 50 years of uninterrupted growth. Germany produced two-thirds of Europe’s output of steel, half its coal production, and 20 per cent more electrical energy than Britain, France and Italy put together. It had a population of 67 million, which had grown from 25 million in 1800. It was also Europe’s leader in modern industries such as chemicals and pharmaceuticals. In agriculture, it produced a third of the world’s output of potatoes.

…

Germany in the period from 1916 to 1918 has been correctly described as a ‘Silent Dictatorship’. Censorship over newspapers was tightened; at the same time, Hindenburg ordered the systematic economic exploitation of German-occupied areas in France, Belgium and in East Central Europe, under the Hindenburg Programme of August 1916, which aimed to double industrial production by increasing the output of munitions, explosives, weapons, artillery, and ammunition. On 1 November 1916 Hindenburg and Ludendorff founded the Supreme War Office (Kriegsamt), under General Wilhelm Groener, to create a command economy ruled by the army. Compulsory military service was introduced for everyone aged 16 to 60, and businesses not related to the war economy were closed down. More alarmingly, compulsory hard labour was imposed on prisoners of war in labour camps, often under appalling conditions. Under the ‘Silent Dictatorship’, Germany pursued its war aims in a ruthless manner. At the beginning of 1917, the Imperial Navy (Kaiserliche Marine) adopted unrestricted submarine warfare in the Atlantic to disrupt British and French supplies arriving from the USA. This proved counterproductive and provoked the Americans, led by President Woodrow Wilson, to enter the war on the Allied side in April 1917.

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by | 1 March 2024 · 5:30 pm

Australia’s Currency Lads and Lasses

From In For The Long Haul: First Fleet Voyage & Colonial Australia: The Convicts’ Perspective, by Annegret Hall (ESH Publication, 2018), Kindle pp. 443-445:

The younger Rope family members were typical of the new generation of free colonialists, commonly known as the ‘currency lads and lasses’. This was the expression used in the colony to describe those who were Australian born with emancipist or convict parentage. This generation grew up in an adult society in which free immigrants often made slights and barbs about their origins – they were ‘the offspring of thieves’ and ‘good for nothings’. But the spirit and energy of this new breed had its admirers. Surgeon Peter Miller Cunningham was optimistic about the ‘currency youth’.

Our colonial-born brethren are best known here by the name of Currency, in contradistinction to Sterling, or those born in the mother-country. … Our Currency lads and lasses are a fine interesting race, and do honour to the country whence they originated. … The Currency youths are warmly attached to their country, which they deem unsurpassable, and few ever visit England without hailing the day of their return as the most delightful in their lives….

The currency lads and lasses were also referred to as Corn Stalks because they were taller than their British counterparts the Sterlings, and they had a distinct way of talking. The children of exclusives saw themselves as the pure bloods of the colony and, if they came from large estates, as the Pure Merinos. Among the colony’s youth, the currency lads stood together and if one was attacked the ‘whole hive sally to his aid’. Interestingly, drunkenness was much less common among the currency youth than their parents or the adult population as a whole.

Most had at least one convict or ex-convict parent but, to the surprise of their elite contemporaries, they were generally law-abiding. Work was plentiful in the colony, and many had respectable well-paid jobs. In fact, there were far fewer temptations for youth to commit crime in the colony than in the overcrowded and underemployed British cities. Australia had shown itself to be a land of promise for the parents of the currency youth, and so it would be for them. Toby Ryan, as the son of a convict father, reflected on this in his book Reminiscences.

Many of the early Australians sprang from the well-behaved emancipists and military men, who settled down at once, uncontaminated by drink, disease, or other enervating diseases; the result was fine men and women. Of course, hard work and wholesome food were partly the means of raising so fine a race…. Their red cheeks showed the bloom of health and beauty, and they required no artificial means to make them representable. They moved with agility, and were straight and well-formed, showing that their ancestors came from a good stock.

For most emancipists and their children Australia was their home, and they had no intention of returning to the Mother Country. They formed a strong political block that sought to ensure lawful access to all levels in Australian society. In 1821 the emancipists sent a petition to King George IV requesting the removal of any impediments to legal representation and rights. Some members of the community, and particularly the exclusives, government officials, and even governors, consistently discriminated against them. Their work opportunities were improving, but they now feared that the rapid increase in new free immigrants arriving would slow their acceptance into Australian society.

Equal opportunity remained a hot issue in the colony.

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by | 27 February 2024 · 10:27 am

Macquarie’s Egalitarianism in NSW

From In For The Long Haul: First Fleet Voyage & Colonial Australia: The Convicts’ Perspective, by Annegret Hall (ESH Publication, 2018), Kindle pp. 382-385:

The appointment of Lachlan Macquarie as governor in January 1810 brought much needed stability and efficiency to the colonial administration. With William Bligh’s reputation reinstated, the settlers had hoped that Macquarie would follow a similar policy of assisting small farmers to increase food production in the colony. However, although Macquarie gave assurances of his support for this policy, his actions by no means matched those of the Bligh administration. The governor’s first priority was to try and heal the serious rifts still in the community, and he avoided overt favouritism, initially at least, to any particular sector. In his hands, the colony’s overall economy began to recover from the mishaps of the rebel administration.

Nevertheless, Macquarie made it clear that grain production was a priority for the government, and the free and emancipist settlers quickly understood this. Most importantly, with the removal of the New South Wales Corps from the marketplace, the financial rewards to farmers who cultivated large crops rose sharply. Fair-trading became the norm and grain prices were stable and predictable. Macquarie made sure the government civil servants and the court officials treated everyone equally, independent of their social status or occupation. His policies eventually enabled people from all sectors of the community to be promoted into important positions in the administration, and he insisted that emancipists in the community be given the same social and business opportunities as free settlers.

It was not long before Lachlan Macquarie realised that some ‘better members of society’ were excluding emancipists who had become successful through hard work and entrepreneurship from legitimate recognition in the colony. Such unjustified discrimination clashed with his Scottish and military upbringing, and he was determined that it be stamped out. As early as April 1810, Macquarie appointed the emancipist farmer-industrialist Andrew Thompson as a Justice of the Peace and Magistrate in the Hawkesbury District. Thompson was the first ex-convict to become a Magistrate, and Simeon Lord, another emancipist, was the second. Lord was appointed as Magistrate on the Sydney court benches. These appointments were strongly criticised by wealthy free settlers and civil officers, who argued such men had no place in respectable society, and that granting them positions of power would corrupt the social order. Macquarie believed these criticisms were made by people who had only recently achieved social standing in the colony and did not want this diluted by nouveau-riche emancipists.

Reverend Marsden was one of the most outspoken opponents of Macquarie’s encouragement for widespread social equality. Marsden’s views on the importance of social distinctions were in stark contrast to those of the governor, and he became a persistent critic of all aspects of the Macquarie administration. When Marsden refused to join a trustee board of which Andrew Thompson and Simeon Lord were members, Macquarie considered it an act of civil disobedience. Like Bligh, Macquarie was a military man who had little tolerance for dissent. He was hostile to those opposing his egalitarian efforts, maintaining that equality was essential to the harmony of such a diverse community.

Andrew Thompson gained wide acceptance in the community for his courage, honesty and fairness as a magistrate, and became a regular dinner guest at Government House. Unfortunately his health deteriorated rapidly following his heroic rescues in the Hawkesbury floods and he died in October 1810 at the age of 37. He was one of the colony’s wealthiest settlers with an estate worth in excess of £20,000 (over £2 million today). Thompson, who was unmarried, bequeathed a quarter of his estate to Governor Macquarie for recognising his abilities, and a quarter to his friend and fellow emancipist-magistrate Simeon Lord. The remaining half was to be equally divided between his brother, and four nephews and nieces in Scotland. Bizarrely, they never accepted the inheritance – perhaps believing that benefiting from a transported criminal’s honest earnings would taint their good name. Their refusal to benefit from Thompson’s estate is a telling example of 19th century propriety and prejudice, befitting a Charles Dickens tale. Andrew Thompson had been an honest, industrious and successful young man, of whom any family would have been proud if they had known of his achievements and good deeds.

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by | 26 February 2024 · 8:24 am

Captain Bligh’s Foes and Fans

From In For The Long Haul: First Fleet Voyage & Colonial Australia: The Convicts’ Perspective, by Annegret Hall (ESH Publication, 2018), Kindle pp. 365, 377-381:

In one sense, the life of Bligh is a tragedy, but a tragedy in the grand manner. He was the victim of two mutinies, one at sea, the other on land. In neither case was he the victim of his own tyranny. The objective of the Bounty mutineers was immediate return to the Lotus Land of Tahiti. In the case of Bligh’s New South Wales administration, the thought of forcible rebellion was probably suggested by the fact of the prior Bounty mutiny. It is only a child who would reason that, because there were two mutinies against Bligh, he must have been guilty of conduct justifying both.

…

William Bligh was a blunt opinionated man who vigorously opposed anyone who disagreed with him. He had little time for the fripperies and subtleties of society; he lived by simple rules and expected others to do so as well. Despite the colony’s small size and isolation, it had strict social protocols and etiquettes, and the veteran mariner’s language and brusque manners probably shocked upper-class sensitivities. For people who knew him well, Bligh’s social crassness was more than offset by his courage, his honesty, and a generosity to those he thought deserved it. Few leaders, then or today, could rise above the indignities and pressure he had been subjected to, and fought so strongly for what he believed in. In a very real sense Australia’s egalitarian society and fair judicial system survived because of Bligh’s determined spirit. He had fought against entrenched opposition and won.

…

The minor penalties imposed on [Rum Rebellion leaders] Johnston and Foveaux are unlikely to have satisfied William Bligh. While the courts had clearly vindicated him and his government, the sentences imposed on the rebels were unusually light. From all accounts, Bligh shrugged off his disappointment and moved on. In 1812, Bligh was promoted to Rear Admiral of the Blue, and in 1814 to Vice-Admiral of the Blue. In 1812, he was invited to give advice to the Parliamentary Select Committee on Transportation, and a year later was granted a full government pension. Vice-Admiral Bligh died on 7 Dec 1817, aged 63.

What can be said about the contribution of this controversial man to the fledgling colony? The Hawkesbury settlers regarded him as a person of courage and honour; a heroic fighter against what they saw as a corrupt system. He was considered ‘one of them’, who had fought for their cause and had been arrested as a consequence. Portrayals of Bligh’s character vary greatly in contemporary history, ranging from a fractious troublemaker to inspirational leader. But all assessments agree that Bligh’s actions were always honest. He strived to do the right thing by the colonialists who battled the hardest, however, he appeared unable, or unwilling, to rally the entire colony to his causes. Bligh either lacked, or undervalued, the political and diplomatic skills needed to convince the businessmen that his goals would lead to a successful prosperous colony. His blunt edicts were uncompromising, and this outraged the trading community who expected some give and take in government transactions – in any case, since Hunter’s time they were accustomed to get what they wanted. Bligh’s rigid no-compromising reforms came as a real shock, and those most effected believed they had no option but to fight against them.

In modern times, the support or damnation of the Bligh governorship seems to be divided along ideological lines. One right-wing opinion is that the rebellion ‘was caused not by rum but by the code of honour, which set out how gentlemen should behave. Governor William Blight was overthrown by the powerful people of Sydney because he was no gentleman’. Those in the opposite corner, claim that Bligh’s battles with Macarthur and the Corps were to protect the underprivileged, and to preserve democracy and equality. Overall, the latter camp appears to have many more historical facts on their side.

The commonly cited negative traits of Bligh are difficult to reconcile with our knowledge that he was a devoted family man and was considered something of a hero by most of the small farmers. Some settlers named their newborn sons after him and the use of ‘William Bligh’ or ‘Bligh’ as forenames for boys born in that era are evidence of this admiration. One example of this is William Bligh Turnbull, who was born in 1809 in Windsor, and is the ancestor of a former Prime Minister of Australia, Malcolm Bligh Turnbull.

…

The earliest writings damning Bligh were written by the colony’s educated elite who supported his overthrow. The written opinions of the illiterate emancipists went largely unrecorded, but the few surviving letters and petitions show their determined support and admiration. Probably the most learned and detailed analysis of William Bligh’s governorship is that of the socialist politician, lawyer and historian, H.V. Evatt. In his book Rum Rebellion Evatt reveals that he is an unapologetic admirer of Bligh. This is not surprising. Knowledge of Evatt’s own character, and his fierce battles in the Australian Labor Party and Australian Parliament, leads one to suspect that he and Bligh would have been the very best of friends, had their lives coincided.

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by | 23 February 2024 · 5:23 am

Misrule of the NSW “Rum Corps”

From In For The Long Haul: First Fleet Voyage & Colonial Australia: The Convicts’ Perspective, by Annegret Hall (ESH Publication, 2018), Kindle pp. 261-264:

Within a month of Governor Arthur Phillip’s departure the colonial administration regretted the absence of his steading hand. The new Lt. Governor, the 35-year-old affable and indolent Major Francis Grose of the NSW Corps, was in the colony ten months before taking up the reigns in December 1792. He quickly bowed to the demands of the NSW Corps for radical changes to the civil administration. It was not long before he gave the Corps absolute legal authority over all civil and military matters.

Between 1790 and 1791, Francis Grose had been responsible for recruiting the NSW Corps regiment in Britain and had profited from the selling officers’ commissions. The Corps was not an attractive career choice for ambitious soldiers, and the men he signed on had invariably been rejected by established regiments, or were too old for active military duty, or were past criminals, deserters or mutineers. Since the primary role of the regiment would be to police a small remote colony, it was of little or no interest to professional soldiers looking for active service. These men preferred the famous army regiments based in exotic India, where there were opportunities to become wealthy in the employ of the East India Company. In short, the NSW Corps was not considered distinguished enough for serious soldiers. However, not all Corps recruits were interested in becoming soldiers. Some realised that the NSW Corps offered an ambitious man real opportunities for rapid advancement and wealth, and indeed, this turned out to be the case.

Judge Advocate David Collins thought the way the NSW Corps had been recruited was ‘disgusting’ because the sorts of men attracted did not have the best interests of the settlement at heart. In order to provide a ‘counterpoise to the vices and crimes’ Collins expected them to be chosen from the ‘best characters’, rather than men exhibiting a ‘catalogue of our most imported vices’.

…

The day Grose took over the governorship of the colony, he abolished the civilian courts and transferred their magistrates to the authority of Captain Joseph Foveaux, the senior Corps officer at Parramatta. In effect this gave Corps officers legal authority over all civil and military matters. There is no evidence that Judge Advocate Collins vocally opposed these changes, but his diary entries show that he was definitely against them.

Next, Grose abolished the equal-rations-for-all policy of Phillip and replaced it with two rations. Free people, watchmen and overseers would receive a larger ration than convicts. But emancipists, who were now officially free citizens, would get the same ration as convicts. Grose had in a few days reimposed the privileges of the English class system on the young colony. He did this on the grounds that it would restore a better sense of order and rank in the settlement, and that the previous government had been overly generous to the convicts.

With his next action Grose did not attempt to hide behind the guise of good governance. In the same week Phillip departed he permitted the sale of alcohol to convicts – this had been prohibited to avoid drunkenness and disorder in the small fragile colony. Grose’s decision went further than making alcohol available, it allowed the Corps to pay for produce or convict labour in rum. The consequences of this were immediate and tragic. Collins observed that ‘the peaceful retreats of industry were for a time the seats of inebriety and consequent disorder’.

Worse was to come. Grose appointed the most opportunistic officer in the Corps, Lt. John Macarthur, as Inspector of Public Works in charge of superintendents, storekeepers, overseers and convicts at Parramatta and Toongabbie. He and other Corps officers aggressively sought to acquire the farm animals given to the emancipist settlers by Phillip. Grose thought emancipists incapable of farming and claimed their only ambition was to save enough money to return to England. The false rumour was circulated that the gifted animals were being killed and sold as meat – Grose decided that they needed to be “rescued” by the Corps. In reality, the Corps officers saw this as a way of acquiring the livestock at a low price and paying for it with rum. It is uncertain just how many sheep were purchased for two gallons of rum per head, though Registrar Atkins records that Corps Captain Foveaux in Parramatta acquired most of the livestock in the district.

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by | 21 February 2024 · 2:01 am

From Convict to Emancipist to Settler

From In For The Long Haul: First Fleet Voyage & Colonial Australia: The Convicts’ Perspective, by Annegret Hall (ESH Publication, 2018), Kindle pp. 229-231:

In March 1791, Governor Phillip issued the first colonial grants of land in the Rose Hill district to emancipists. The granting of land to ex-convicts – known as emancipists – was of special significance to the settlement. It was the first official action confirming that this was not a penal colony. The British government had understood that the most compelling inducement for ex-convicts to remain in New South Wales was the ownership of land. A land grant not only gave them an investment in the future, but it encouraged law-abiding participation in the colony’s life and, most importantly, the farmed land contributed to food production. Without such an incentive, the Home Office believed emancipists would return to England and resume a life of crime. Governor Phillip’s commission also gave him authority to discharge convicts from servitude and to issue land grants to those ‘who shall from their good conduct and a disposition to industry, be deserving of favour’. A single man was to be granted 30 acres of land, a married man 50 acres, with an additional 10 acres for each child.

The emancipist James Ruse, the marines Robert Webb and William Reid, and ex-superintendent of convicts, Philip Schaffer, were the first men to receive land grants. Ruse received 30 acres and the marines 60 acres each. Schafer was a German who had found his command of the English language inadequate to perform his duties, and he preferred to settle as a farmer rather than return to Europe. As an ex-superintendent his entitlement for a land grant was 140 acres.

The land grant to James Ruse is worthy of special mention, as he was the first convict in the colony to receive one. When his term expired in August 1789 Ruse asked for his release and a land grant to become a farmer. Although Phillip was unable to verify his sentence length, he decided to help Ruse in order to ascertain how quickly an industrious man could support himself as a settler. With this in mind, in November 1789, Phillip ordered a hut to be built for Ruse on the 30-acre Experiment Farm near Rose Hill.

By February 1791 Ruse was self-sufficient and no longer needed government rations. Because of this, he was given the title deed to the land. Ruse’s success led Phillip to seek other energetic men and families in the Rose Hill area who could become productive and eventually go off-rations. Even prior to receiving the official sentencing records in July 1791, Phillip planned to let other convicts, who claimed their term had expired, become independent settlers.

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by | 17 February 2024 · 1:22 pm

Australia’s Second Fleet of Convicts

From In For The Long Haul: First Fleet Voyage & Colonial Australia: The Convicts’ Perspective, by Annegret Hall (ESH Publication, 2018), Kindle pp. 214-216:

By evening, the Lady Juliana had safely anchored inside Port Jackson, and soon the much-needed food supplies, plus almost three-years of news and letters, were off loaded. The cargo included clothing for marines, medicine, sails and cordage, wine, blankets, bedding for the hospital, tools and agricultural equipment. There were also textiles for convict clothing. After years of stinting and salvaging, it would be possible to make new clothing. The old clothing would not be thrown away; it was be used for other purposes and children’s clothes.

The choppy harbour water prevented the female convicts on the Lady Juliana from disembarking until June 6th [1790]. Two days prior to this, the Royal Birthday had been a double celebration. The settlement had its first full ration for many months and news of King George III’s improved health was an added reason to celebrate. For the starving colony this was a joyous day, and, with news that other ships would soon follow, there was renewed optimism in the settlement. In keeping with the tradition for the King’s birthday, the governor pardoned gaoled prisoners and those with corporal punishment pending. Samuel Day, Anthony’s friend, who had been punished for attacking Aborigines, was freed from his fetters.

Regrettably, the food provisions from the Lady Juliana proved much less than expected, and the ship’s contingent had added more mouths to feed. It quickly became evident that the new food supplies would not support the colony for long, and only 1½ lb of flour was added to the weekly rations. This was disappointing, but better than nothing. On June 9th, all work was suspended so that residents could attend a commemorative church service in which Reverend Johnson gave prayers for King George’s further recovery from illness.

A week later, the outpost at South Head signalled the arrival of another ship. It was the cargo ship Justinian and, excitingly, its cargo comprised only foodstuffs. Phillip promptly announced that a full ration would now be issued, and the normal working hours for convicts were to be restored. The last three transport ships of the Second Fleet, the Neptune, the Surprize and the Scarborough arrived at the end of June. Apart from the Lady Juliana, on which only three women had died, the convicts aboard the Second Fleet ships had been treated terribly. Of the 1095 convicts (1006 male and 89 female) embarked on the Second Fleet in Portsmouth, 256 males and 11 females had died. This was a death rate of 24%, compared to a 2% death rate on the First Fleet. Convicts even died while being rowed ashore in Sydney; 486 convicts landed sick, and of those 124 later died. The treatment of convicts on the privately run Second Fleet was the worst recorded in the history of transportation to Australia.

David Collins was disgusted at the condition of the convicts and wrote ‘both the living and the dead exhibiting more horrid spectacles than had ever been witnessed in this country’. Watkin Tench demanded that the English government act immediately to prevent any reoccurrence, stating ‘No doubt can be entertained that a humane and liberal government will interpose its authority to prevent the repetition of such flagitious conduct’.

[Governor] Phillip was appalled at the scenes of misery aboard the Second Fleet ships and protested strongly to the masters. He informed them that he would report officially to the Home Office in London about their treatment of convicts. He wrote that the main reason for the high death rate was the gross neglect of prisoners’ welfare by the private contractors, who were being paid for the number of convicts embarking, not for the number delivered alive. The ship’s contractors had previously been involved in slave transportation to America and this was abundantly evident. The transports were overcrowded with convicts chained together and rarely allowed on deck to exercise. Although the ships carried adequate food supplies, convict rations had been kept small so that the excess food could be sold in ports for profit.

Absurdly, the officers responsible for guarding the convicts had no authority over a ship’s master and could not intervene even when they saw convicts being mistreated. Phillip was furious at these reports and tried to have the ships’ owners prosecuted. When his report on the Second Fleet’s mortality rates finally reached England, the public was made aware of the horrors of the voyage. The master of the Neptune was charged with wilful murder but was acquitted. However, the damning reports submitted to the Home Office brought a swift response from the British government, and later fleets were more closely scrutinised.

The arrival of Second Fleet convicts caused immediate problems for the colony. The hundreds of sick men placed a strain on the small hospital and medical resources. The ships also landed 100 convicts who, because of old age or chronic illness, could not work. Phillip later complained to the Home Office that the hulks and gaols in England seem to have retained the healthy prisoners and transported the sick. If this practise were to continue, the colony would be a burden to the mother country for years.

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by | 15 February 2024 · 4:56 pm

Australia’s “Foundational Orgy” Myth

From In For The Long Haul: First Fleet Voyage & Colonial Australia: The Convicts’ Perspective, by Annegret Hall (ESH Publication, 2018), Kindle pp. 155-157:

Paradoxically that first stormy night ashore for the females, February 6th, has been depicted in some early historical narratives as a drunken orgy. There is little evidence to support this description. There is no doubt that some males welcomed the females ashore, presumably, while the marine guards were sheltering in their tents from the storm. Whether these were convicts, marines or seamen, or some of each, is not known. A gathering took place and little else is reliably recorded.

A gathering took place and little else is reliably recorded. Surgeon Smyth, safe aboard the Lady Penrhyn in the harbour, later wrote about the female convicts on their first stormy night ashore.

…

Since Smyth was on his ship in the harbour, his account must have been second-hand scuttlebutt and is likely to be highly exaggerated. Nevertheless, some modern-day descriptions of this party, based on his diary entry, refer to it as a drunken orgy with convict couples rolling around in Sydney Cove’s red mud. Such accounts are bogus as there is no evidence of such behaviour, and no red mud exists anywhere near the cove. Moreover, the convict men had no access to alcohol. There were drunken sailors aboard Surgeon Smyth’s ship because they had been given extra grog to celebrate the offloading of the convicts. Significantly, no other diarist, except the remotely located Smyth, mentions bad behaviour that night. If anything as licentious as this had happened in the settlement, Ralph Clark would have recorded it. Clark’s diary entry on February 7th, details the storm and the farm animals ‘Kild six Sheep 2 Labms and one Pigg belonging to Major Ross’ but there is no mention of female misdemeanours on that day, or for several days thereafter.

Historian Grace Karskens, writing about the night of February 6th, claims ‘the orgy never happened’ and debunks the orgy myth:

… it turns out that the orgy story dates, not from 1788, but from 1963, when the historian Manning Clark included it as ‘a drunken spree’ fuelled by ‘extra rations of rum’ in his Short History of Australia. After he re-read the sources properly, he quickly recanted. But it was too late, the story was out. …… And with every retelling it just got raunchier. Robert Hughes was the originator of the modern version of the legend, for in The Fatal Shore (1987) he sites the action in the Rocks, with the lightning of a ferocious Sydney storm revealing couples bestially ‘rutting’ in the ‘red clay’ (there is no red clay in Sydney Cove). And in Hughes’s version the sex wasn’t consensual: ‘the women floundered to and fro, draggled as muddy chickens under a pump, pursued by male convicts intent on raping them’.

Karskens points out that the Zoologist Tim Flannery retells the orgy myth in his book The Birth of Sydney and Peter FitzSimons gives it another spin in the Sydney Magazine in 2005. Many histories of Sydney and early colonial Australia routinely include the orgy story. It has even been re-enacted for television as the documentary drama The Floating Brothel, and as a collection of comically shaking tents at the Botanic Gardens in Tony Robertson Explores Australia.

The “foundational orgy” claim has no credibility, and it is absurdly unjust to label women as promiscuous sluts and men as rapists, when there is no written evidence of non-consensual sex. Only one aspect of that stormy night is certain: those who met up were celebrating their first taste of freedom in months and had probably sought out each other’s company. This would have been a natural thing to do. It is demeaning and absurdly high-handed to assume that the convicts were disrespectful of each other, or that they were unaware of social norms.

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by | 14 February 2024 · 6:11 am

First Fleet Commander & Governor

From In For The Long Haul: First Fleet Voyage & Colonial Australia: The Convicts’ Perspective, by Annegret Hall (ESH Publication, 2018), Kindle pp. 72-75:

In early September 1786, Captain Arthur Phillip was officially commissioned to become the governor of the colony in New South Wales. This would prove to be an excellent choice; Phillip was a veteran mariner with vision and humility and had enlightened views on equality. Support for Phillip’s appointment had not been unanimous. On 3 Sep 1787, Lord Howe wrote to Lord Sydney ‘I cannot say the little knowledge I have of Captain Philips [sic] would have led me to select him for a service of this complicated nature’. Arthur Phillip is certainly not the focus of this story but his importance to the ultimate success of the First Fleet and the New South Wales settlement cannot be overstated. Because of this, a short overview of his career is warranted.

Excellent biographies of Arthur Phillip’s life have been published. Michael Pembroke writes ‘He was a man with a good head, a good heart, lots of pluck, and plenty of common sense. To those qualities he brought an uncommon amount of integrity, intelligence and persistence’. As an experienced sea captain, Phillip appreciated the dangers of the voyage ahead and from his time as a farmer he knew that establishing a new settlement would be challenging. He had progressed through the ranks of the Royal Navy from Ordinary Seaman to Post Captain mostly by merit and had held numerous important commands during his long naval career.

Like the great maritime navigator and explorer James Cook, Arthur Phillip had risen to some eminence from quite unprivileged beginnings.

…

In April 1787, Captain Phillip received details of his commission as Governor of New South Wales. They included the authority to establish a new settlement at Botany Bay. Somewhat controversially Phillip was ordered to govern the colony alone, without a council. Much later, during the establishment of the settlement, some officers questioned the extent of the powers granted to Phillip. Arthur Bowes Smyth, the Fleet Surgeon, observed that Phillip’s commission was ‘a more unlimited one than was ever before granted to any Governor under the British Crown’. This concern was understandable. Although the governor was subject to the rule of British law, he had been given the power to appoint justices and officers of the law, to raise an army, to erect fortifications and to exercise sovereign naval powers. Phillip also had full authority to pardon and reprieve, either absolutely or conditionally, according to the seriousness of the crimes, and, most importantly, to make land grants to emancipated convicts. Matters of particular concern for Phillip with his commission were the rights and official status of transportees. He had been appalled by the slavery he had seen in South America and Africa, and he was determined that New South Wales not be another convict slave colony.

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by | 6 February 2024 · 7:02 am

Rooting Out Nazis in 1946 Germany

From 1946: The Making of the Modern World, by Victor Sebestyen (Knopf Doubleday, 2015), Kindle pp. 236-238:

The Spruchkammer tribunals were mocked for a good reason. They served mainly to whitewash suspect characters who needed certificates of good character, notoriously labelled Persilschein – after the washing powder Persil – to show they were ‘whiter than white, with all brown [Nazi] stains removed.’ The initial problem was to find anyone in the legal profession who was not themselves compromised – 90 per cent of German lawyers had been Nazi Party members. In Hamburg at the end of the war, every judge was a member of either the Party or an affiliated organisation. It was a dilemma that would never be resolved. So Nazi judges tried cases of Nazi crimes – including those jurists who had sent people to the gallows for ‘crimes’ that, until Hitler came to power, had not been offences, such as sexual relations between Jews and Christians. In the American zone not a single judge was removed from the bench after the war.

The majority of the police were Nazis, too, which ought to have prevented their involvement in such cases, but did not. Kurt Schumacher, the leader of the SDP, had been assigned a five-man police guard by the British Occupation forces, who had assured him that the police force had been ‘cleared of Nazis’. But on 15 May 1946 he angrily wrote to British officials to say that, after overhearing his bodyguards chatting, he found that four out of the five had been in the SS. He was also profoundly shocked to learn that the British had just appointed a notorious SS man, Lieutenant-Colonel Adolf Shult, as head of the police in the British zone. An Allied Control Commission report to the British Foreign Office explained: ‘It is fairly clear that if the denazification of the police is carried to extremes there would be no police force left. With conditions…[in Germany] as they are it would perhaps seem that the essential thing is to have a reliable police force and this cannot be achieved without some sense of security…The need is…[to] terminate the process of denazification at some stage for these reasons…We will surely still need the police as an instrument of military government.’ In an apparently seamless transition, many senior officers kept their jobs, among them Wilhelm Hauser, Chief of Police in the Rhineland-Palatinate, who, when he was an SS officer in Byelorussia, had been responsible for countless wartime atrocities.

No German institution was entirely ‘cleansed’. Brown stains remained everywhere. More than three-quarters of university professors had been Party members, and even those who briefly lost their jobs were reinstated. Dr Hans Preuss, Dean of the Theology Department at one of Germany’s foremost universities, Erlangen, in Nuremberg, was a fervent Nazi who, in the 1930s had organised the burning of books in the university’s library written by Jews or Marxists. Preuss was sacked in the summer of 1945 but got his job back the following year. Around two-thirds of Germany’s teachers had been Nazis, and at the gymnasia, the best secondary schools, the figure was higher. Thousands had been fired in the three or four months after the end of the war. In 1946, 90 per cent of them were reinstated. The British poet Stephen Spender, then a civil servant, who had been despatched early in the year to report on education in the British Occupation zone, could see why. Visiting a school in Hamburg, he asked the children what they were studying. ‘Latin and biology,’ they said. ‘Nothing else?’ I asked. ‘No, sir. You see the history, geography, English and mathematics teachers have all been fired.’

Many of the clergy, regardless of denomination, had also been Party members. After the sacking of numerous German civil servants, the Lutheran Bishop of Württemberg, Theophil Wurm, preached that they had suffered too much and were the victims ‘of extremely skilful propaganda…[most] had joined the Party thinking of the public welfare. They did not identify themselves with the regime.’ He was perhaps also thinking of himself. He had joined the Nazi Party in 1933, arguing that he had done so ‘in good faith…believing it could produce a religious revival,’ though he later began to oppose the regime and was removed from his bishopric. The American Religious Affairs Division of the Occupation reported to Clay that it knew of 351 active clergy in the American sector. Of these, only three were defrocked. In the summer of 1946 the Catholic Archbishop of Freiburg, Conrad Gröber, nicknamed ‘Brown Conrad’ because of his fervent support for the Nazis, issued a pastoral letter to his flock in which he blamed the rise of Hitler on ‘secularism’, neatly absolving the Church and the people from responsibility for what had happened over the last dozen years.

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