Lecture 7 additional material
Broadside ballads and
the uses of literacy in early colonial Australia

by Ian Syson

1. It is often assumed in Australian (literary) historiography that the uses of literacy in early colonial Australia had a minimal literary dimension. For example,

• Geoffrey Serle, From Deserts Prophets Come: The Creative Spirit in Australia, 1788-1972 , Melbourne, 1973 suggests that there �is little to remark in the first half-century after the foundation at Port Jackson'.
• Frederick T. Macartney, A Historical Outline of Australian Literature , Sydney, 1957 typically represents the origins of Australian poetry as being only those works that achieved publication. Consequently he identifies only five practising poets prior to 1842.

2. The few recognised poetic effusions are presumed to bear little relation to overtly political movements and ideas.

3. It is often assumed that the cultural/political relations in the immediate post-invasion period can be simply reduced to the literate culture holding power, whereas the bearers of oral culture (Aborigines and illiterate convicts) are the dispossessed and the oppressed. While it is generally the case that there is a directly proportional relation between degrees of literacy and power, there are also crucial exceptions.

EG John Grant, a highly literate convict transported in 1803, was responsible and punished for the mediation of widespread and sometimes articulate discontent within the white community and the consequent kinds of collective organisation that were starting to take shape.

Grant's writings point to a sizeable and disaffected colonial intelligentsia of mixed political affiliations varying from liberal to radical to Irish nationalist. They also gestures towards � in some cases making vital contact with � the archivally mute British and Irish working class convicts.

However, if John Grant has suggested an unrest of a classed nature it is difficult to produce a great deal of its concrete documentary evidence.

Where are the early examples of the australian working class's own particular cultural form: the broadside ballad?

What's a broadside?

The earliest surviving indigenous ballads date from the 1830s. Prior to that there are no 'australian ballads' written from australian perspectives. And in a sense this is strange because as Cliff Hanna points out

the settlement of Australia occurred at a crucial point in the evolution of the British ballad. Initially, broadsides were the province of the upper, literate class; the publishing activity that commenced at the end of the eighteenth century [ie around the time of the invasion of australia] was aimed at the lower, urban class, which produced much of our early population.

The broadside ballad developed in Britain as a means of getting information and entertainment out to a proletarian audiences very quickly.

• Sometimes political;
• sometimes not;
• usually entertaining;
• often scurrilous;
• often written before the event.

The ballads and songs that tell of the convicts' experience in Australia, are a form particular to the period of transition from oral to oral/literate forms in the history of British working class culture. The broadside ballad is a form which had a place in both oral and literate cultures.

Many of them tell of the common experience of suffering, hardship and struggle endured by most people living under a system that served the interests of the British ruling class.

Some of these ballads, like �Botany Bay, A New Song' (c.1790), also profess to tell of the convicts' awareness of the class implications of their status as convicts.

Let us drink a good health to our schemers above,
Who at length have contrived from this land to remove
Thieves, robbers and villains, they'll send them away,
To become a new people at Botany Bay.

Some men they say have talents and trades to get bread,
Yet they sponge on mankind to be cloathed [sic] and fed,
They'll spend all they get, and turn night into day,
Now I'd have all such sots sent to Botany Bay.

There's gay powder'd coxcombs and proud dressy tops,
Who with very small fortunes set up in great shops,
They'll run into debt with design ne'er to pay,
They should all be transported to Botany Bay.

The song goes on to underline the hypocrisy of a system that has condemned �minor' criminals to transportation while �major' criminals like corrupt �tradesmen', �monopolizers', �whore-masters' and company, who are all �Maintain'd by the sweat of a labouring few', keep their place in British society.

Another ballad, �The Transport's Lamentation', also recognises the class antagonisms in Britain being at the root of the transportation system:

The rich have no temptation but all things at their command
It is for health or pleasure they leave their native land
But great distress & want of work, starvation & disease
Makes inmates for the prisons & transports for the seas

However if there are many working class-conscious ballads produced in Britain through the establishment of the penal colony in New South Wales, it is difficult to find the same produced within the colony in its early years. In the two ballads discussed already, the point of view is firmly established in Britain; and such is the case in all of the republished Botany Bay broadsides and transportation ballads.

Where were the australian ballads?

There are a number of factors that contribute to the difficulty of answering this question. The first of these is that the working class broadside culture, so evident in Britain in the same period, is almost totally absent in the colony.

This is partly due to the monopolisation of available printing technology by the state and the fact that paper is almost as scarce as food in the colony.

According to Elizabeth Webby:

The British government was sufficiently conscious of the spirit of the age to send a printing press to Australia with the First Fleet. Initially, however, no-one could operate it. The first surviving Australian imprints � broadside instructions to watchmen and constables � date from 1796. The first book, printed in Sydney in 1802, was also made up of government orders.

It was not until 1818 that a �general literary work [was] to be printed in Australia, Thomas Wells' Michael Howe, the Last and the Worst of the of the Bushrangers of Van Diemen's Land '.

Moreover �it seems clear that virtually all the literary works published in early Australia were produced at their authors' expense'. The kind of dynamic role that the politically attuned broadside had in modifying and intervening in British oral working class culture was absent in the early colonies � largely because of the lack of,

• first, a large radical and moneyed reformist culture with easy access to printing facilities and,
• second, the kind of freedom (albeit limited) of distribution available in Britain.

Another difficulty arises from the general problem pertaining to the research of all oral cultures: sheer lack of documentation is an immense hurdle.

Because of this lack it is difficult to identify any �authentic' literary transcriptions of immediate post-invasion oral culture, especially because the conditions of production have disappeared and the surviving transcriptions (if any) have been altered to fit changed economic and social experiences.

Even when we find letters attributed to proletarian writers it is important to be attentive to the possibility of their being written by someone else acting as an agent.

The following passage from John Manifold's Who Wrote the Ballads (1964) is an explanation of the political reasons for the lack of a dualistic oral/literate common culture:

even in the absence of documentation, it is clear that colonial conditions, convict discipline, and the total lack of opportunity either for ballad-printer or ballad-hawker, would bear hard on those who were accustomed to buying their ballads at any street corner; and the same conditions would correspondingly favour those who were already accustomed to clandestinity and concealment and to singing in a whisper behind the overseer's back.

The potential for the development of a politically critical broadside culture, which would have represented a threat to the stability of what is in essence a military dictatorship, is displaced into the continuation of almost exclusively oral forms of transmission.

Manifold is also attuned to the way in which the overall lack of documentation of working class culture �gives undue prominence to the thin trickle of polite culture at the other end of the social scale'. Geoffrey Ingleton makes a similar point.

It is one of the regrets of modern Australian historians that very few narratives were written by the early uneducated convicts, and that only an occasional contemporary letter or journal has survived . . . The information provided by the official or ruling class is, however, so voluminous, that it has tended to dominate and distort the correct judgement of events.

If the first two difficulties of researching working class literary culture of the early colony relate to issues of limited colonial access to printing and writing technology and to the consequent absence of a substantial classed archive, another difficulty might well lie in the absence of a substantial working class culture.

Another reason for the lack of an immediate indigenous ballad tradition is offered by Manifold:

The fact is that the earliest dateable Australian Ballads are of the 1830s, or perhaps the last years of the 1820s. From 1788 to 1828 (taking that date for pure symmetry) there were no �Australian Ballads'; being wise after the event, we may say that there was no �Australian Volk ' to make them.

The point being made is that the

convicts who came ashore from the First, Second, Third Fleets and other shipments, and the free settlers who trickled out in a parallel stream, had only one thing in common: they were exiles, foreigners, strangers in the land.

The purported diversity of the national/linguistic, cultural and political backgrounds of the first white Australians was such that they could not form a common culture in the immediate post-invasion society.

Rather, this society was made up of �sub-communities in the incoherent mass', each of which through oral transmission �kept their own songs alive'. Manifold goes on to argue that, for various reasons, the English, Welsh and Scottish communities �lost' their song culture and that the �decisive strain in the breeding of Australian balladry was the Irish'.

Accordingly, the determining factors in the making of the indigenous and oral/literate Australian ballad tradition were the following ingredients:

• a language rapidly becoming common
• a common hatred of The System
• a common habit of clandestinity in singing �the treason-songs�
• and of picking them up by ear rather than from print'.

Indeed, the continued survival of Irish songs is related to the fact that many of them were, prior to being brought to Australia, politically oppositional to British imperialism. The existence in Australia of the imperialism to which they referred meant that these songs, and their tunes which could operate as vehicles for new and locally specific words, had a colonial relevance.

While Manifold's argument offers a useful analysis, there is one issue which must be taken up.

Given that there seem to be few extant written records � written by proletarian convicts, especially � of any form of politically oppositional cultural practices, what must be the position adopted by the critic who wants to come to terms with the nature of political and cultural opposition in the period?

There is a sense in which Manifold wants to avoid this question by constructing a picture of a dormant opposition hamstrung by linguistic and cultural chaos:

Revolutionists like Thomas Muir were isolated among convicted footpads and swindlers. Sheer differences of language would have made it hard for the Glasgow Martyrs to fraternise with their colleagues from Tolpuddle or with the Moonlighters from County Cavan.

For a start, Manifold's hypothesis is refuted by E.P Thompson's detailed analysis in The Making of the English Working Class (1968) of the way in which links were made between the different �language-groups' in Britain.

It is surprising that Manifold has not made more of the one point of commonality he finds in the first white Australians: their status as exiles. It is also surprising that he is privileging cultural chaos over economic factors in the determination of the make-up of post-invasion culture.

As Eric Fry points out in Rebels and Radicals (1983), most of the convicts

were part of a British working class forged in turmoil as the mills and factories of the industrial revolution sprang up beside the landed estates and commerce of the already capitalist cities. There was no place, even as the lowest wage earner, for many of the conquered Irish, dispossessed yeomen and workless craftsmen � the redundant poor. Some starved, some stole, all suffered. A punitive legal system was used to protect property and suppress disorder; those who infringed it might be transported to Australia to be rid of them, to deter others and to provide a tied labour force to build a new colony.

And while certain cultural differences can be inferred from Fry's description of the make-up of the convicts, the commonality of the economic position into which they were forced needs stressing.

While geographical displacement, and a consequent cultural chaos within the ranks of the displaced, would have affected all newcomers � especially in regard to loss of familiar community and the difficulty of coping with a different climate and topography � exile affects some more than others. To be exiled from a society in which one has a degree of power is a very different matter from being shifted from one state of relative powerlessness to another.

The working class convicts already knew a state of psychological exile in that they were necessarily alienated in early capitalist industrial Britain and Ireland � alienation being the condition of the working class and one of the raw materials of its culture.

Indeed, there is evidence to suggest that some convicts were in fact pleased about the prospect of �leaving old England'. For example, Watkin Tench, in A Narrative of the Expedition to Botany Bay , first published in 1789, and republished as Sydney's First Four Years , records the following:

By ten o'clock 13th May, 1787, we had got clear of the Isle of Wight, at which time . . . I strolled down among the convicts, to observe their sentiments at this juncture. A very few excepted, their countenances indicated a high degree of satisfaction, though in some, the pang of being severed, perhaps forever, from their native land, could not be wholly suppressed.

The convict John Slater's letter to his wife in England in 1819 conveys a sense of adventure experienced by those on board the transport ship Larkers .

We arrived here on the 21st of November, 1817, and in the midst of anxiety, every heart was elate with the news, anxious once more to set foot on shore, and to learn in what manner the prisoners were likely to be disposed of, each man sedulous for his own welfare.

In Inventing Australia: Images and Identity 1688-1980 (1981), Richard White also points to the possibility that while some of the

letters written by convicts ... revealed a strong sense of exile [they] were not necessarily representative of convict feelings since they were generally written by literate men, whose writing home, and having someone there to write to, would naturally have stimulated their thoughts of exile.

Another example of this lack of sentiment for lost communities can also be read into the ballad, �Farewell to Your Judges and Juries' (1815), which also refuses the idea that leaving England or being sent to Australia are in themselves the source of despair.

To go to a strange country don't grieve me,
Nor leaving old England behind,
It's all for the sake of my Polly, love,
And leaving my parents behind.

Given that literary forms of the period often concentrate on themes of exile or displacement, the task in tracing a working class ballad tradition of the period involves discriminating between those mournful plaints for Britain or Ireland as home and those which contextualise physical exile in a framework that accounts for other kinds of alienation � like being more alienated through having a �log on one's toes' than through spatial exile.

This said, the point which hardly needs to be made is that indigenous oppositional literary productions of the period need to be found and then analysed.

Manifold's implicit separation of �polite' literate culture that has been handed down and �common' oral culture that has been lost is a useful starting point.

This dualistic conceptualisation of colonial culture fails to bring out a third category: that which has been alluded to above, especially in relation to John Grant, and which might be called �polite' radical, existing in dynamic tension with the other two. The historical occlusion of this culture is in part a function of its very nature. For example,

Robinson (1744-1826) made his public [i.e. polite] contribution to Australian literature by writing a series of pedestrian birthday odes; privately [i.e. in a more radical vein], he wrote some of those pipes [short poetic pasquinades] which satirized and threatened the leadership of the early colony.

An example of his public writings is �Ode: For the Queen's Birthday, 1813' � a �polite' if not sycophantic verse constructed in Heroic couplets, which, as , is �full of patriotic loyalty, praise of freedom, and hopes for Albion or Britannia'.

... THESE are THY Trophies, TIME! and they shall raise
A lasting Monument to BRITAIN'S Praise:

And Hist'ry's faithful Page shall fondly dwell,
And future Bards in Strains sublimer tell,
That TRUTH and LOYALTY, by WISDOM led,
Bade AUSTRALASIA raise her drooping Head,
Gave to the PEOPLE'S Wish a Chief approv'd
A MAN they honour'd � and a FRIEND they lov'd.

This poem stands in contrast, if only in terms of blind loyalty to the state, with the ballad, �The Old Viceroy',

Our gallant Governor has gone,
Across the rolling sea,
To tell the King on England's throne,
What merry men are we.

CHORUS:

Macquarie was the prince of men!
Australia's pride and Joy!
We ne'er shall see his like again;
Here's to the old Viceroy!

Some Governors have heads, I think;
But some have none at all:
Cheer up, my lads; push around the drink,
And drown care in Bengal.

CHORUS:

Macquarie was the prince of men! &c.

What care we for the skill to scan
The bright stars overhead?
Give us for Governor the man
Who rules and is obey'd.

CHORUS:

Macquarie was the prince of men! &c.

Freeman and convict, man and boy,
Are all agreed! I'll wager,
They'd sell their last slop shirt to buy
A ticket for the Major.

CHORUS:

Macquarie was the prince of men! &c.

Here's to Sir Thomas's release,
The old Viceroy's return:
And fourteen years beyond the seas
For thee, Frederick Goulburn.

First, although written by a member of the polite radical culture it is constructed in conventional ballad form. A hypothetical question is of the extent to which the poem's chorus entered the common culture to be reproduced and modified in, for example, the many variants of �The Wild Colonial Boy'. The following excerpts are offered for comparison:

�Twas of a wild colonial boy, Jack Doolan was his name.
He was his mother's pride and joy that lived in Castlemaine....

... He was his mother's only hope, his father's only joy,
But a terror to Australia was the wild colonial boy....

... He was his mother's hope and pride and his father's diamond joy.
And dearly did they love their son ...

... He was his father's only hope,
His mother's pride and Joy
And dearly did his parents love
The Wild colonial boy....

Although being very different in the kind of character upon which they focus � a �benign' Governor and a bushranger respectively � they do, however, share remarkable similarities in rhythm, rhyme, variations in use of the phrase, �pride and joy', and, perhaps to a lesser extent, grammatical and narrative structure. Taking Radic's variant as the basis for comparison with the Chorus, the first two lines of each describe the value of the narrative object to particular valuing subjects. In regard to narrative structure both set up a situation which mourns the permanent and detrimental loss of the narrative object for the valuing subjects in its transportation (displacement) from either Australia to Britain or vice versa. As suggested this is a hypothetical analysis the point of which lies in its intimation of a link between the radical literate and oral cultures. John Ritchie, in his Lachlan Macquarie: A Biography (1986), supports this hypothesis in pointing out that well after the departure of Governor Macquarie �The Old Viceroy' was �sung by emancipists in taverns and circulating among the native-born; its chorus was becoming known to convicts'.

A more concrete analysis, and one which allows us to draw in the concept of working class literature, is available if we place �The Old Viceroy' in its social and political context. Superficially, the narrator of the poem appears merely to be railing against one Governor and longing for the return of another � this could be read as a mere extension of the adulation of Macquarie in the Queen's Birthday Ode. Even allowing for a degree of irony produced by the somewhat hyperbolic language of the first stanza and Chorus and by the non-radical desire to have a Governor �Who rules and is obey'd', the poem does not appear to stand as a mediation of radical opposition.

However, the period of transition from Macquarie to Brisbane in 1821 and through to the end of Brisbane's Governorship in 1825 is also the period in which the Bigge Commission's recommendations were being implemented. In Convict Society and its Enemies: A History of Early New South Wales (1983), J.B. Hirst suggests that the reforms implemented were especially aimed against the convicts, emancipists and poorer free immigrants, and in the interests of the �large landholders'.

The system of convict labour developed in the first 35 years of the colony had come to include concessions for, and to some extent won by, the convicts. Connell and Irving point out that the structure of convict society

made resistance through open organisation extremely unlikely. But there was another order of resistance, just below the level that would attract major penal sanctions, that was very widespread. The convicts replied to coercion with the classic response of forced labour, the slow-down.

Through methods like the slow-down concessions were �wrung' out of the system. They were centred upon the principle of �free time' by which it was understood that the convicts had a right to go where and do what they liked, within limits, during certain hours. The convict John Slater wrote:

�Government men work from daylight until three o'clock, excepting an hour for breakfast, and the rest of the day is for the prisoner to employ himself as he may think proper'. This in turn led to the development of a system of task work where the convicts were set weekly or daily tasks, the completion of which signalled �free time' in which the convicts had the right to work for wages. In 1816 this wage was �set at £10 per annum the amount to be paid to a convict who regularly devoted his own time (i.e., after 3:00 pm) to his master's service'. Hirst goes on to point out that,

Commissioner Bigge thought it was anomalous for convicted felons undergoing punishment to be receiving any wages at all and he recommended that the practice be abandoned. In 1823 Governor Brisbane ... implemented the recommendation by repealing Macquarie's 1816 wage order and in doing so he also freed masters from the obligation to supply the same rations as were issued to convicts in government service.... The abolition of the wage also meant that after 35 years the last vestiges of the convict's �own time' disappeared.

Given this kind of historical background to the poem it becomes clearer how it can be read as an example of oppositional cultural practice. Moreover, it is a poem that speaks for the hitherto partially proletarianised convicts, recording, however obliquely, the first major defeat for the proto-organised Australian working class. �The Old Viceroy' is a mediation of, among other things, a popular proto-proletarian disquietude.

That Hadgraft cannot with any certainty attribute the poem to Robinson is a measure of the way in which radical or critical poetry was written and disseminated surreptitiously. The name given to much of the writing produced from this condition is the �Pipe'. According to John V. Byrnes, Pipes �contained three main elements ... �

1. the attack on the autocratic Governor:
2. the scurrilous abuse of the Governor's supporters;
3. and a strong anti-clerical attitude'. 52

M.H. Ellis in his Lachlan Macquarie (1947) describes the way in which Pipes were distributed, how they got their name, and their political effect on the colonial authorities:

The use of pipes was a not uncommon feature of the social hostilities of New South Wales.

Damped by overnight dew, in a conspicuous place, somebody would discover a neat roll or �pipe' of paper. Inside it a few doggerel verses, such as small boys write on fences or on less cleanly places, would be found inscribed. These would reflect on the honour and integrity, perhaps even on the beauty and chastity, of a distinguished victim.

Twentieth-century minds find it difficult to believe that any adult person ever took a �pipe' seriously; but pipes appeared to drive those in Colonial authority in Regency days into a very insanity of alarm and rage. The anguished cries of �sedition' which Governor King raised when made the subject of a pipe have echoed down through a hundred and fifty years of history. 53

Opposed to Ellis, it appears to me quite easy to see why military dictators appointed by the British ruling class would see such a threat in Pipes like the following partially transcribed anonymous �Anticipation or, A Birthday Ode' (c.1802-03) � not because they in themselves represented in themselves a severe threat but because they made silenced discontent manifest �

One of the problems in understanding Australia's working class literary history, is that one important slice of it does not exist in archival or documentary form. It has disappeared.

It is our job as literary critics to read documents from that time in sensitive and sophisticated ways in order to appreciate the classed nature of early colonial writing-- to articulate that silenced discontent.