In 2006, as part of the Sesqui-Centenary of Responsible Government in New South Wales (NSW), Terry Irving published his book Southern Tree of Liberty (Federation Press), a study subsidized by the NSW Government. Irving's account ran counter to the preferred and accepted narratives of emerging 'responsible government' in the 1850s, dominated as they are by an elite-led, British influenced, peaceful transition. Instead Irving took his readers back to the 1830s and forwards, to the streets, meeting places, assembly points, to the publications and flyers and personalities, to protests, rallies and insurrections, all largely forgotten and/or ignored in mainstream Australian histories. Some of this material was later drawn on in the Irving/Cahill Radical Sydney (UNSW Press, 2010), especially Chapters 5-8.
In Irving's pages a rich, vibrant, and powerful radical ferment and culture emerged, a cauldron of ideas about the nature of democracy, one that was not dominated by gentlemanly and propertied elites, one that variously drew on the radical ferments and discourses that not only coursed through British society at the time, but also through continental Europe. It was ferment that had at its centre conceptions of 'radical democracy', conceptions that went far and beyond the 'representative' model that eventually became hegemonic.
In Irving's pages a rich, vibrant, and powerful radical ferment and culture emerged, a cauldron of ideas about the nature of democracy, one that was not dominated by gentlemanly and propertied elites, one that variously drew on the radical ferments and discourses that not only coursed through British society at the time, but also through continental Europe. It was ferment that had at its centre conceptions of 'radical democracy', conceptions that went far and beyond the 'representative' model that eventually became hegemonic.
Irving's study radically challenged traditional accounts of Australian democratic processes, both in its theoretical approach and in the substance of its data-mining. For the organisers of the Sesqui-Centenary, it was problematic as it did not fit the celebratory trajectory and the traditionally featured/honoured 'democratic' players. While the book was reviewed well overseas, in Australia it tended to be either misunderstood/misrepresented, or simply allowed to drop through the black-holes of academia; ignore it and it will go away. In the following essay, Irving revisits the book, its arguments, and its challenges. ~ R.C. November 2014.
* * *
The book was
subsidized by the New South Wales Government as part of its celebration of the
Sesqui-Centenary of Responsible Government in 2006, so perhaps these reviewers
were confused by the state’s imprimatur. But the members of the Committee that
allocated the grants were not. I had written a book that they had not expected.
Instead of celebrating the British statesmen and colonial politicians I wrote
about working people, their grievances and their organizations. Instead of
confining my newspaper reading to the Sydney
Morning Herald and other organs of ruling class ideas I read every issue of
every working class newspaper – many of them never read before for as source
for political analysis. Needless to say my book was not launched by the
Committee, unlike other books in the series.
* * *
'The
Southern Tree of Liberty’: class struggle, popular democracy and representative
government in New South Wales before 1856
Terry Irving
University of Wollongong
[November 2014]
In 2006 The
Federation Press published my book, The
Southern Tree of Liberty – The Democratic Movement in New South Wales before
1856. It received better reviews overseas than in Australia, where some reviewers
persisted in assimilating it to the standard account of a British-influenced,
elite-led, peaceful transition to responsible self-government in 1856. The
‘radicals’ that the book concentrated on were seen as just part of that story,
a tiny group of agitators whom no one took seriously – certainly not the established
historians who wrote those reviews.[i]
The book was
subsidized by the New South Wales Government as part of its celebration of the
Sesqui-Centenary of Responsible Government in 2006, so perhaps these reviewers
were confused by the state’s imprimatur. But the members of the Committee that
allocated the grants were not. I had written a book that they had not expected.
Instead of celebrating the British statesmen and colonial politicians I wrote
about working people, their grievances and their organizations. Instead of
confining my newspaper reading to the Sydney
Morning Herald and other organs of ruling class ideas I read every issue of
every working class newspaper – many of them never read before for as source
for political analysis. Needless to say my book was not launched by the
Committee, unlike other books in the series.
So I am taking
the opportunity in this article to state succinctly what my book, The Southern Tree of Liberty covers and
why it is a radical challenge to accepted views of the coming of
self-government to the Australian colonies. This is even more necessary given
that the book is hard to find in libraries.
In a nutshell, it denies that democracy and
representative government are interchangeable terms; it restores working people
and radical intellectuals to key roles in the story, and it discovers a wave of
rioting that excited a popular rush towards democracy but also a ruling class
determination to prevent it. It argues that the form of representative
government introduced in the 1850s was imprinted with claims and ideas that had
emerged from the struggles of a social movement for popular democracy in the
1830s and 40s.
* * *
At the heart of the book is the clash between
democracy and representative government. At the time, popular democracy, that
is, government controlled from below by working men and women and their allies,
was an idea that wealthy and powerful supporters of representative government
sought to quash. Their anti-democratic alternative was that, although the
people had no right to govern themselves, if they trusted the wealthy and powerful
to govern for them their interests would not be ignored. Well, that was the
claim, as believable then as it is now. This clash of political philosophies
began when the governing classes of the United States, Europe and the British
Empire were fighting against the democratic forces unleashed by the French and
American revolutions. In other words, the practices of representative
governance (regular elections, the independence of the representative from the
electorate, scrutiny of government policy by a ‘loyal’ opposition, etc) that we
equate with democracy were developed in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries
to prevent the triumph of the democratic alternative - popular rule. [ii]
Representative self-government came to the Australia
colonies in the 1850s but it was preceded by twenty years of vigorous debate
and violent conflict in New South Wales. My book is about that pre-history of
representative government, when the working people and radical intellectuals
who supported popular democracy resisted the ‘aristocratic’ schemes of the
propertied classes. There are many studies of the ruling class men in that
colony who supported representative self-government – Wentworth, Cowper,
Parkes, James Macarthur et al – but none of the working people
and radical intellectuals who opposed them and whose proposals they tried to
suppress.
The book is premised on the idea that if so
much effort is put into suppressing something we ought to understand it. How
substantial was the democratic challenge?
Was the fear expressed by ruling class more pretence than real? Did the
democrats have realistic ideas about how popular rule would work? In asking
this last question, incidentally, we need to acknowledge the possibility that
just because representative government developed as a way to head off rule by
the people does not mean that popular democracy could not embrace
representation if it were limited by power exercised outside of and against
parliament. In fact, that was what the radicals in my story tried to do.
Let me start by sketching three men who
appear in the book, each of whom illustrates a way of studying popular
democracy: Johann Lhotsky and the radical tradition; Henry Macdermott and the
making of an alternative public; and Edward Phelan and the threat of violence
against the status quo.
* * *
Dr Johann Lhotsky was one of those radicals (Bert
Evatt was another) who suffer snide acknowledgements and secret scorn by the ruling
class because, despite their upper class backgrounds or their professional
attainments, they side with the people. Lhotsky studied at universities in
Prague, Vienna, Leipzig, Paris, and Jena; he spoke five languages; he wrote his
doctoral thesis on political philosophy in Latin; and he worked as a botanist.
He arrived in Sydney in 1832 on a round-the-world scientific expedition, but he
stayed almost five years. Historians of Australian science record his
explorations of the Australian Alps and the Monaro plains, and the genus of
plants and another of fish named after him, but they do not explain why he was
ostracized and reviled by the colonial elite. To do so we have to recover his
political activities and ideas.
Not long after he arrived he demanded that
land should be granted to working immigrants as well as capitalists, speaking
at one of Australia’s first public meetings called by organized wage earners.
At another meeting he argued for the rights of convicts. He published the first
of a series of short-lived periodicals, the most important of which was The Reformer – a Weekly Periodical for the
People of the Australian Colonies. Aghast, official, educated and
commercial Sydney discovered that in their midst was a foreigner who seemed to
have no respect for the policies or the superior self-regard of British
colonialists. Their racism he scoffed at, predicting that one day the
Aborigines would produce their own Franklins and Washingtons, Byrons and
Shakespeares. But what turned elite amazement into outrage was his belief that
there was no enmity between emancipists and free immigrants and therefore no
justification (as their rulers insisted) for limiting self-government. Worse,
the colony was, he believed, about to experience a conflict between the people
and their rulers.
Lhotsky’s provocations increased. In 1835,
W.C. Wentworth, with the support of wealthy landowners and merchants, formed
the Australian Patriotic Association
to petition for an elected legislature. It is not generally recognized that it
had a radical wing – called the ‘trades union party’ by the conservative press
– made up of shopkeepers, artisans and intellectuals who wanted to make sure
that the franchise was extended to people like themselves. Lhotsky offered them
advice, and a vision of politics that was new to the colony. The Association,
he said, should mobilize the people, not rely on elite lobbying. For this
purpose it should widen its attack beyond the franchise, so as to rectify
injustice and improve the lives of the people. It should campaign to lower the
price of bread, redistribute the lands of the colony, and regulate immigration
to protect wages. At the centre of this popular mobilization there should be a
Directing Committee of one hundred, large enough to become a de facto assembly that would be able to
defy the Government. In this way, the popular will would prevail. What would happen next? A ‘free constitution’
would emerge in this situation, he said, that would liberate the imagination of
the people, enabling them to think of new ways to organize their society.
It was a revolutionary program, similar in its
emphasis on popular sovereignty to the programs promulgated by young idealists
in the clandestine movements for democracy and national liberation that sprang
up in Europe after the defeat of Napoleon. All power to the radical
imagination!
In Sydney, Johann Lhotsky had a secret. He
was one of those revolutionary intellectuals, a gadfly, and he had spent five
years as a political prisoner. The secret remained with him long after his
death, until in the 1960s a Czech historian of science discovered the police
records that revealed Lhotsky’s revolutionary past. As a student, sympathizing
with the dreams of liberty and self-determination of the subject peoples of the
Austro-Hungarian Empire, he joined an underground organization, publishing and
spreading democratic ideas in his travels until he was arrested in 1822, on the
eve of the Verona meeting of the Holy Alliance (of reactionary European
regimes).
Lhotsky brought his ideas and experience of
popular politics to Australia, as did many others, most of them of course from
Britain. They gave their allegiance to a tradition of politics in which
democracy meant popular rule, that is, control from below. As with all
traditions, we can study this one through its language. But politics is more than
a contest of ideas. In liberal societies politics is a sphere of action in
which citizens create publics to counter the state. It is not sufficient that
the most radical of the citizens, the democrats, have ideas about popular rule.
They must have their own vigorous publics to give effect to their struggle for
rule. And while minds and texts may travel across the seas, and across the
social divide between rulers and ruled, publics cannot, because publics are the
product of action. Publics – the spaces, networks, organizations and meetings
in which people share ideas about power - are always formed consciously and
specifically, or else they are pseudo-publics, manipulated entities called
‘public opinion’, fictions serving the purposes of powerful interests seeking
in fact to evade accountability to real publics.
When a conservative newspaper in 1838
ridiculed ‘the public meeting men’ of Sydney, it was clear that a radical
public had come into existence. Taking shape as ‘the trades union party’ in the
Australian Patriotic Association, it was soon augmented by a radical press,
given organizational backbone by the trades societies, and provided with spaces
to meet by the Mechanics Institute and the pubs on the southern and western
fringes of the town. Soon there was a corps of regular speakers, mostly from
the trades societies of the workingmen (as they called themselves) but some
also from higher classes – journalists, lawyers and businessmen. These were
‘the friends of the people’, and none was more admired and energetic in radical
causes than Henry Macdermott.[iii]
Henry Macdermott was a wine merchant who had
arrived in the colony as a soldier. As a young man in Sydney, handsome and
successful, he made the fatal social gaffe of marrying above his station. He
had been a sergeant, a foot soldier; his bride was the daughter of an officer.
At Governor Gipps’s first reception for the colony’s elite, Macdermott attended
with his father in law, but was asked to leave by the Aide-de-camp, the
intimation being that he did not have the education and status required of a
gentleman. But he also had another black mark against his name: he had
supported the proposals of the radicals in the Australian Patriotic
Association. Despite this public humiliation, his subsequent career showed he
was motivated more by principle than pique, for in 1846 he led a group of
radicals to Macquarie Street to cheer Governor Gipps when he opened his last
session of the Legislative Council. By that time the Governor was in continuous
conflict with the pastoralists, against whom the workingmen and radical
intellectuals were also fighting. Between 1838 and his death in 1847,
Macdermott was the most reliable ‘friend’ of the workingmen and the most
courageous defender of democratic principles.
For the workingmen, he exposed the
conservative implications of philanthropy when the elite was organizing charity
for the ‘deserving’ unemployed workers and their families, telling the Bishop
and other worthies that they were hypocrites because their real intention was
to defuse ‘the power of the poor’.[iv]
He chaired or spoke at meetings called by the delegates of the trades against
Government plans for mass immigration, against the use of convicts in the city
when unemployment was high, and for the reform of the land laws to allow small
allotments to be given to working men. He led deputations to the Governor on
their behalf.
His reputation as a democrat was established
at the rigged meetings in 1842 on representative government, at which James
Macarthur and his friends supported a petition to Britain that would have
excluded labourers and tradesmen from representation. At the first meeting,
attended by about 2000, Macdermott countered with a petition (drawn up in
consultation with radicals and trades delegates) that called for ‘popular
representation’. The meeting exploded and had to be adjourned. When it resumed
a week later, the conservatives reneged on a compromise wording for the
petition and on an agreement to support radicals as members of the petition
committee, James Macarthur declaring that ‘he would not serve on the committee
if Macdermott were elected. They [the audience] had to decide whether they
would have the rights of Britons or that vile and bastard democracy which had
led to so many evil results in different parts of the world.’[v]
Forced to reply through the radical press, Macdermott denied that he was ‘a
leveller’, but declared that he would not be deterred from leading popular
action for democracy by ignorant conservative talk about ‘the mob’.[vi]
The more Macdermott was loved by the people the
more he was hated by the powerful. Acquitted in 1841 of a charge of perjury
(over a business deal) a crowd of his supporters escorted him home and
organised a testimonial for him. After he was ostracized in 1842 by the
conservatives his ardent supporters nominated him in three wards at the City
Council elections. He chose Macquarie ward for its many shops and houses of
tradesmen, won, and for the next five years led the push by radicals to control
the city council. He was Mayor in 1846.
His enemies received ample support from the The Sydney
Morning Herald, whose attacks on Macdermott ranged from ridicule of his
proposal that there should be an artisan representative on the board of the
Savings bank to the dangerous insinuation that, as a leader of the mob, he
might be assassinated. Among his enemies none was more virulent than Robert
Lowe, who was notorious for his sneers and provocations. In 1844, Macdermott
was blackballed by the elite who ran the Australian Subscription Library, and
Lowe could not resist the temptation to refer to this in the Legislative
Council. When Macdermott enquired by messenger of Lowe what reason he might
have to slight so gratuitously his character, Lowe insulted Macdermott by
asserting that he felt no need as a gentlemen to respond to questions from
persons of lower rank. Realizing that he might have gone too far, Lowe found a
sympathetic magistrate to whom he declared that he felt his life was in danger,
with the result that Macdermott was bound over to keep the peace. This was
normal behaviour in such situations (as Lowe would have known because, after
threatening a rival lawyer, he was under a court order himself to keep the
peace) but what followed was not. Lowe persuaded the Attorney-General to lay a
criminal charge against Macdermott in the Supreme Court for an alleged breach
of the Legislative Council’s privileges. The radical public was incensed. A
public meeting was organised, the Mutual Protection Association taking the
opportunity not just to defend Macdermott but to deny the legitimacy of the Legislative Council. His supporters
packed the Supreme Court when the case came on and rejoiced when it was thrown
out on a technicality.
Through Macdermott’s history we can see how
an alternative public came into existence, and the risks involved in assuming a
leading role in it. But, we might ask, why were the risks so great? Why did the
elite have to humiliate and persecute Macdermott with such persistence? Why not
just ignore him and his lower class followers? The answer to those questions
can be found in the threatening political context in which the alternative
public was formed.
Edward Phelan made his contribution to
Australian history just once, on New Year’s Day, 1844. On that sweltering day
in Sydney, where about a quarter of wage earners were unemployed, the crowds on
the streets and in the parks were turning from mischief to defiance. Since
lunch-time, drunken revelers had been taunting the police and then rescuing
those arrested. Soldiers had to charge with fixed bayonets to clear the space
outside the Hyde Park convict barracks, where the crowd was encouraging the
prisoners to break out. As the soldiers marched away they were pelted with
stones. Earlier the Governor had been surrounded by women workers demanding
that he honour his promise to end the taking-in of washing by convicts at the
Female Factory. The Governor, a brave man, fronted the crowd and told them to
go home. From the crowd a bitter response came: ‘What should we go to our homes
for; we’ve got nothing to eat!’[vii]
That day there were many arrests, among them, Edward Phelan, who was sentenced
to twelve months in irons on Cockatoo Island. His crime was not called
sedition, but such it was. Outside the convict barracks he had made a speech,
referring to the revolts against British rule in Upper and Lower Canada some
years before, telling the crowd: ‘Although you cheer well, and muster in large
numbers, you ought to go further, and do as the Canadians did!’[viii]
Then Edward Phelan disappears from history, but his brief appearance alerts us
to the significance of revolutionary ideas in this story of popular struggle,
and more broadly to the way historians have banished political violence from
the received ‘nation-building’ account of Australian history.
* * *
In the history of the Australian labour
movement, the great strikes of the 1890s and the formation of Labor parties are
the usual starting points. If the industrial activity of the trades societies
of the 1830s and 40s is mentioned at all, it is to differentiate it from
‘proper’ trade unionism, which is supposed to begin with the struggle for the
eight hour day and the creation of Trades Halls in the 1850s. If the political
action of the trades societies is referred to, it is to label it as immature,
because, unlike the move from industrial to political action in the 1890s, it
failed to lead to the formation of a Labor party. These received views,
however, minimize the extent of trades society activity. In fact, there was a
long history of formal and informal collective activity by workers, and it led
in the 1840s to the involvement of the trade societies in politics. These
trades societies successfully pressured the Government to amend its Master and
Servant bill in 1840; they successfully campaigned in the depression of 1843-4
for government works for the unemployed; they established a political
organisation, the Mutual Protection Association; and in 1846 they were the
first section of colonial society to hold mass meetings against the resumption
of transportation (a movement later hi-jacked by politicians in the liberal
wing of the ruling class, mainly merchants and lawyers). Throughout this
period, and into the 1850s, ‘the delegates of the trades’ met from time to
time, functioning as an informal central leadership for the politicized
workingmen, who were also served by a series of weekly newspapers, one of them
set up by the trades delegates. This history of working class activity is one
of the main subjects of my book.
A second subject is the activity of the
radical intellectuals. The received view is that in the public life of the
1840s and 50s the early radicals are unimportant. The picture that emerges from
the histories is of a small band hanging on to the coat tails of the liberals,
who use their wealth and status to lead the key anti-transportation and
self-government campaigns. Radical ideas, it is said, are copied from of the
British radical scene, and anyway make no impression on the colonial workingmen
because the radical language of class is at odds with the individualistic,
aspirational ethos of colonial experience. In short, the radicals are slightly
loopier liberals, a view reinforced every time Henry Parkes, famously liberal,
is wrongly noted for having radical beginnings.
What the received view overlooks is the
central place of popular democracy in radical politics. From 1838 the colony’s
radical intellectuals grappled with how to make public meetings responsible to
the people. A political wave of public meetings builds up from the late 1830s,
reaching its crest in the early 1850s. My book estimates that in just the years
between 1848 and 1855 there were over a hundred in Sydney. At these meetings,
democrats learnt that the way a public meeting is called, when it is held, how
it is chaired, how the resolutions are drawn up, whether the members of the
deputation are representatives or delegates with a duty to report back to a
further meeting – all these and other practices, the democrats learnt, are just
as important as the issues considered at the meetings. The intellectuals also
practiced mobilisation of the people, running issue-based campaigns, educating and
leading the people by forming political organisations (with limited tenure for
their office-bearers), endorsing candidates and getting out the vote in
elections. This is a history of democracy practiced and understood as popular
sovereignty, not as the precursor to representative elitism, however dressed up
as liberalism it might be.
The third neglected aspect of the 1840s –
neglected also in Australian historical writing more generally – is political
violence. In the 1840s there were 14 street riots, in which three men died and
much public and private property was destroyed. These riots, in which police
stations were favourite targets, had political effects, because they revealed
the animosity between classes and provoked the ruling class into repressive
laws and organization. There were another 14 occasions when political
turbulence was deliberately provoked by agitators, and a further six
spontaneous incidents of actual or potential violence in political settings.
Thus there is a history of turbulent street politics – orderly and disorderly,
of masses as well as menace – that existed at
the same time as self-government was being considered – right up to the
moment when the property-owning classes were drafting the constitution, when
there was also the threat of revolt on the Turon River goldfields. It
emboldened the radical democrats (and also frightened them); it strengthened
the resolve of the conservatives to frame an anti-democratic constitution; and
it persuaded liberals, such as Parkes, to recognize the political and electoral
clout of the democrats, who could not be ignored publicly lest they sought the
backing of tumultuous crowds, even though privately the liberals despised
democratic pandering to the ‘hydra-headed’ mob.
* * *
As well as providing new information about
workingmen’s politics, radical intellectuals, and political violence, The Southern Tree of Liberty argues
against the received understanding of a key moment in our political history. It
has an argument because new
information by itself cannot make substantial headway when the ruling
understanding has been unchallenged for so long – the ruling understanding that
democracy equals representative government, and that only businessmen and
liberals were its progenitors. In John Hirst’s words, typical of the received
understanding about the birth of colonial democracy, ‘There had been no
struggle to educate and elevate the masses and no moment of crisis when their
attachment to new institutions was intense and fixed forever as part of their
identity. Too much came too easily… Manhood suffrage was introduced not by
democrats but by liberals, late converts to democracy...’[ix]
In the ruling argument it is as if public life, using a borrowed template from
Britain, emerged without strain, in an absent-minded moment, and as if the
right to vote was all the democrats wanted.
The argument in my book links support for
popular democracy with the emergence of an alternative public. It seeks to
explain why the liberal heroes of the received understanding were ‘late
converts’ to the need to democratise representative government, and it looks
for the explanation not in something extraneous, an ethos of social
egalitarianism (as in Hirst’s book), but in politics itself, in the working of
public life outside the legislature and newspapers of the elite. It is an
argument about how a social movement for democracy emerged from the particular
way public life developed in the colony.
Whereas many studies of colonial democracy
begin in 1848, or in 1843, The Southern
Tree of Liberty begins in 1833. It does so because public life in New South
Wales took shape in the decade before 1843, when there was no element of
elected representation in government at all. In the midst of all the
politicking in those years, no one was able to stand up before the citizens and
say ‘vote for me’. So the philosophical questions of representation (who were
entitled to vote; whether electorates should be distributed according to
interests or population; whether the representative should be like or unlike
the voters; how often voting should occur; whether voters could recall their
representative, etc) were rarely alluded to; instead, discussion of how
politics should be conducted focused on ensuring transparency and inclusivity
in public meetings.
The introduction in 1843 of a formally
constituted site for deliberation – the partly-elected Legislative Council -
certainly lessened the legitimacy of public meetings. Moreover, elections to it
elevated prominent citizens, thus contributing to social difference, instead of
integrating the people, as agitation in common aimed to do. On the other hand,
the defects of the institution (JD Lang prophetically called it ‘the
Bastard-parliament of New South Wales’)[x]
actually gave representation a bad name. One of the leading radical
intellectuals, WA Duncan, seriously contended that a benign autocratic Governor
would be preferable to representative government while the people lacked
education in citizenship and experience in self-government.
So we have the first step in the argument:
that the context in which support for popular democracy emerged was a public
sphere in which representative government was not automatically privileged in debates about self-government. The
next step considers how the popular and representative traditions of public
life were fused to create a democratic movement. It focuses firstly on the
agitation by the trades delegates, secondly on the model of democratic public
life created by the radical intellectuals, ‘the public meeting men’, and
thirdly on the linkages between mass activity and representation.
As a result of the activity of the trades
delegates a constituency of working men was created for an alternative public.
The activity of the trades delegates had substance, durability, political aims,
and organization. According to the study by Michael Quinlan and his colleagues,
before 1850 there were 560 cases of collective, employment-related activity by
workers, and 102 attempts to form trades societies.[xi]
My research suggests that there were ten or twelve trades societies functioning
in Sydney in any one year in the 1840s, and that they covered about ten per
cent of the city’s tradesmen, mostly in the building trades. Although
membership turnover was high, and societies often had to be re-established,
there was a surprising continuity among their leaders – the ‘delegates of the
trades’. We know they met as delegates in 1833, several times in the early
1840s, in 1846 and 1849, and in 1854 when workers were returning from the gold
fields.
The activity of the delegates of the trades
was as much directed towards the public as it was towards the labour market.
They were impelled to action by government plans to lower wages or by
government neglect of the unemployed. By 1840, when the government failed to
gag the trades societies in a new master and servant act, their political
muscle was clear to all. The onset of the depression, and the indifference of
Gipps and the elected members of the Legislative Council to the plight of the
unemployed, persuaded the delegates that they needed a permanent organization
to protect the trades and reach out to the middle classes. So was born in 1843
the Mutual Protection Association, which in terms of the development of
democratic politics in Australia was much more important than the New South
Wales Pastoralists Association. It published its own weekly newspaper, one of a
line of radical and working-class journals stretching from 1838 to 1858. There
was never a week when a politicized worker could not buy one, sometimes two,
papers advocating his interests.
The importance of the substantial,
continuing, political and organised activity of the trades societies in public
life was that the campaign for popular democracy could be directed towards a
particular social constituency in-the-making; and that support for this kind of
radical democracy was not assembled randomly from individuals with a simple
affinity to it. By the same token, the democracy that they affirmed in their
organizations and proposed for the state was not simply a set of ideas, but a
model of acting democratically. It was the radical intellectuals – ‘the friends
of the people’ – who articulated its principles and embedded it in the alternative
public of the workingmen. Johann Lhotsky, Richard Hipkiss, WA Duncan, James
McEachern, Henry Macdermott, Richard Driver, Edward Hawksley – these were the
most notable radicals – took the idea of the public meeting and used it to
promote the practice of democracy in public.
This democratic practice, constantly defended
from 1835 in the writings and speeches of the ‘public meeting men’, had three
main characteristics. First, the radicals fought for deliberation in public,
that is, in properly advertised and conducted public meetings. This would break
with the custom of taking decisions behind closed doors, in suspicious ‘hole
and corner meetings’, or in a legislative chamber from which the public felt
remote. Public meetings at this time
were very numerous and well-attended, rivaling the official legislature as the
main forum for political debate. Second, if certain members of the audience
were authorized to take further action, they were to be regarded as delegates,
with a responsibility to report back to another meeting. Delegation, not
representation, was the radical idea of governance. Third, when the inevitable
disagreements arose over policies they were to be settled by conciliation and
compromise, in public, not by class legislation favouring the pastoral and
urban business oligarchy. Taken together, these principles promoted an active
engagement by working-class citizens with politics; they restricted elite
manoeuvrings, and opened the door to popular sovereignty among citizens.
Of course the critical question was: could
this radical model be adapted to representative government, or rather could
representative government be adapted to it. There were three ways in which the
radicals came to terms with representation and in so doing made important
innovations in electoral politics in the colony. These innovations are only
visible when the Legislative Councilors and the middle-class liberals are not
the sole occupants of the public stage.
The challenge of representation for the
radicals began in 1842, when the first elections were held in Sydney for the
city’s municipal council. The conservative press, unwittingly revealing the
nature of this challenge, ridiculed the ‘usefulness of public meetings’, and
welcomed representation as a way to move beyond ‘the public of large and
promiscuous assemblies’.[xii]
But then there was an unexpected development. The election campaign, which came
after three years of intense democratic agitation in public meetings, allowed
the trades delegates and radical intellectuals to re-organize their agitational
expertise geographically. From that moment, the city’s six wards became the
focus of political mobilization. Moreover, much to the surprise of the colonial
Tories and the Governor, the colony’s first election was a victory for the
tradesmen and shopkeepers of the city, the voters electing ‘practical men’ and
‘public meeting men’ in preference to ‘gentlemen’. Accordingly the radicals
came to understand that representation could be made to work for them. They
decided that election campaigns would be another avenue to create ‘the people’
through political action, and believed that the popular will thus revealed
could drive the process of representation. This understanding was based on the
innovative adaptation of agitation to the system of electoral wards. Ward-based
agitation as an electoral weapon to mobilize the people really came into its
own between 1848 and 1855 when, in seven of the eight elections to choose
representatives for the seat of Sydney, the radicals selected and brought out
the vote for the successful candidates.
In the meantime, there was a second important
innovation in the democratic approach to representation. Almost fifty years
before the Labor parties began endorsing candidates, the workingmen of Sydney
in 1843 adopted a program for the city council elections, invited candidates to
answer questions at meetings where their adherence to the program could be
measured, and endorsed those whose answers were satisfactory. The body in
charge of this process, the Mutual Protection Association, boasted that every
one of the candidates it endorsed was returned, and that six of the Councilors
were members of the Association. This procedure was foreshadowed in its
Prospectus, which made clear that it was formed in order to intervene in the
public sphere on behalf of the working classes, and to find allies among the
small producers and manufacturers.
The MPA fell apart in 1845 but three years
later, at the next general elections for the Legislative Council, the same
political forces returned to try to defeat Wentworth for the seat of Sydney.
This was when the third innovation occurred: the ‘free election’ model, wrongly
associated with Henry Parkes alone, but clearly built on the MPA’s intervention
and the earlier radical successes in the municipal elections.[xiii]
By ‘free election’ the radicals meant that the election would not be polluted
by the candidate spending his money to buy votes, and consequently that the
vote would be mobilized in terms of principles, not connections and influence.
It also meant that the election committee would take the initiative in seeking
out the candidate on this basis – in effect a form of endorsement. So it was
that the radicals in 1848 sought out Robert Lowe, who agreed to stand, and
successfully got him elected, albeit behind Wentworth. Parkes called this
victory ‘the birthday of Australian democracy’.[xiv]
In radical circles what was understood to have been achieved on this occasion
was a ward-based campaign that mobilized working men through an intensive
series of meetings in local pubs, that was ‘free’ from the influence of the
candidate or other ‘notables’, and that therefore allowed them to imagine a
government in which accountability to the people was achieved through linking
the process of representation to the expression of the popular will in public
meetings and organizations.
In sum: the radicals had assimilated election
campaigns into their model of popular agitation to create ‘the people’; they
had made principles and issues the bases of campaigning in elections; and they
had taken the initiative for finding candidates sympathetic to those principles
and issues. Most importantly, it was a model that worked for them in the
electorate of Sydney, where there was a substantial working-class constituency
after 1851.
* * *
All this happened before the era of political
parties and before the insertion of issues into election campaigns by organized
interest groups. And consider how radical this was. Usually candidates,
especially in the agricultural and pastoral electorates, were powerful men who expected
the voters to trust them because of their wealth, their status, or their
religion. But trust, according to Edward Hawksley, was a term meant to limit
the franchise, to preclude the accountability of representatives, and to
legitimize the idea that representatives had to come from a superior class. He
was right, and today the same deep insight into the limits of political
liberalism is still valid. Against these essentially aristocratic ideas the
democratic ideology proclaimed by the radicals offered voting as a right of all
men (and today we would add ‘and women’), candidates who would be delegates
reporting to their electorates, candidates who would be like rather than unlike
the people (ie not drawn from a superior class), an alliance between the caucus
of progressives in the parliament and the organizations of the people, and
candidates who had experience in those organizations.
The radicals understood what they were
proposing. In 1854, Edward Hawksley wrote in The People’s Advocate that the strategy of the radicals was ‘to
revolutionize Australia’.[xv]
Certainly, in terms of the prevailing model of representation, developed as we
have seen to prevent the introduction of democracy, this idea of popular
democracy was revolutionary. In 1855, Hawksley insisted that ‘what is called
the radical party … is really the only liberal and progressive party.’[xvi]
Certainly, the ‘other’ liberals, the businessmen and professionals who had led
the anti-transportation movement and campaigned for an anti-democratic constitution
in 1853, did not have the depth of experience in public life to match the
democratic political movement created by twenty years of radical agitation and
organization among the working people of the colony.
So, as the election of 1856 approached, when
radical intellectuals and politicised workingmen stepped forth to mobilize the
people in the campaign, to seek out suitable candidates, and to run the
campaign as a defence of democratic principles, they were offering to
revolutionize the ruling practice of politics at that time, the liberal model
of representation, a model in which elections were meant to mobilize
individuals, and the formation of the people, the articulation of a public
interest, was left to the elected representatives. There was, of course, no
chance of the radicals forming an alternative government, but they did have a
vision of government that was different, that was not simply an immature
version of liberal parliamentarism. They imagined a government in which
accountability to the people was achieved through linking the process of
representation to the expression of the popular will in public meetings and
organizations. They had a very clear idea of how representation could be made
to work to ensure popular sovereignty. And within a few years after 1856 the
force of this alternative model was recognized, as the parliaments reformed
their constitutions and introduced land reform to placate the democratic
aspirations of working people. That was how the idea of popular sovereignty,
and its practice in a movement for democracy developing over twenty years,
became a foundational element of Australia’s political life.
[i] The Southern Tree of Liberty – The
Democratic Movement in New South Wales before1856, The Federation Press,
Sydney, 2006. References are omitted here except for direct quotations.
[ii] For a
recent statement of this argument, see Bernard Manin, The Principles of Representative Government, Cambridge University
Press, 1997.
[iii] Australasian Chronicle, 7 June 1842 (for
‘friends of the people’)
[iv] Australasian Chronicle, 6 August 1839
[v] Australasian Chronicle, 1 March 1842
[vi] Australasian Chronicle, 8 March 1842
[vii] Dispatch, 6 January 1844
[viii] Weekly Register, 6 January 1844
[ix] John
Hirst, The Strange Birth of Colonial
Democracy – New South Wales 1848-1884, Allen and Unwin, Sydney, 1988, p.
271.
[x] Colonial Observer, 21 December 1842
[xi] M.
Quinlan, M. Gardner and P. Akers, ‘Reconsidering the Collective Impulse: Formal
Organization and Informal Associations among Workers in the Australian Colonies
1795-1850’, Labour/Le Travail, Fall
2003
[xii] Australian, 19 September 1842; Sydney Morning Herald, 17 September 1842
[xiii] The Elector, published by the radical
committee, is the best source for the ‘free election’ model
[xiv] Parkes
in People’s Advocate, 10 February
1849
[xv] People’s Advocate, 22 April 1854
[xvi] People’s Advocate, 24 February 1855
