 Exploring Old PapersbyGillian Polack
Ireland and Australia have a special relationship. A few years ago the press made a big thing about it when one of our prime ministers did a PR exercise that was all about pride in his Irish origins. One of my favourite booksellers and I thought this explained why Irish University Press took a grand interest in Australia in the 1960s, but I was wrong, and my bookseller was wrong. The fact that Gaelic Rules football and Australian Rules football are very similar doesn't mean that IUP is obsessive about Australia. The other fact (commonly quoted, though not recently proven)—that forty percent of Australians have Irish ancestry—is only indirectly linked. The real reason for IUP’s apparent love of Australia is shared history of British rule. Why the bookseller (who shall remain nameless, because I know I'll be buying more books from him) and I thought Australia was important in IUP's eyes was because, well, we didn't. We wondered about it, but we didn't actually believe the evidence in front of us. We stood near the counter for ages and admired the Irish volumes he had on sale. They really were spectacular. Acid-free paper. Beautiful to handle. Made to last forever. Obviously a great deal of care and a small fortune had been spent on making luscious archive-quality books. At the time, it was very sad. He was selling these volumes at ridiculous prices. I bought as many as I could afford (which was basically the number I could get for the amount of money I really could afford, doubled) because they were so very dreamy. I couldn’t actually carry my volumes without damaging my neck. The subsequent pain was worth it. So we stood there, while I was working out what I could skip in order to buy more volumes in the series, and we were wondering why on earth the series existed. Why would Ireland want to publish British parliamentary papers about Australia? I’ve seldom seen such beautiful handiwork for such a large number of volumes from a university press, either. The bookseller and I thought they must have bankrupted themselves. He told me what he knew. “They shipped the copies out here and no-one would buy them. They gave it twenty years, I think. It was cheaper at that stage to remainder them than to ship them back to Ireland.” There wasn’t as much information ‘round the nets back then (twenty years ago) and the bookseller didn’t look a gift horse in the mouth by checking his ‘Books in Print’ so our dreams of an Australia-obsessed Irish publisher were left undisturbed. When I finally thought to search the web, today, I found that the series of parliamentary papers was a thousand volumes strong. The Australian section was a tiny part of a much bigger and more splendid project. I didn’t know about them because my historical period is just a tad early (if you buy a huge set of twelfth century British parliamentary papers from someone, then I have a nice harbour bridge to sell you). They turn out to be very important, and a thousand volumes. I know, I said a thousand volumes. I covet every one of those thousand, now I finally know about them. Think of it—late Georgian and Victorian England (for the papers cover the whole nineteenth century) at a time when Britain was governing half the known world. Its papers on the difficult state of its lost American colony, pesky wars, trade, slavery, convicts, home rule. So many topics. So much fabulosity. I was simply very lucky that Australian distribution fell through. The complete set apparently would have set me back nearly $200,000, bought new in Ireland that same year. I’m still interested in the story my bookseller and I spun to account for the volumes. It’s a fine story, about Irish interest in us and care for our needs. The real story is even better. It’s an Irish interest in history and a dedication to making some of the most important source materials from the British nineteenth century readily available. I dearly wish I was one of that mammoth percentage of Australians who can claim Irish ancestry. These are wonderful books and it would be rather fine to be able to say “These are my people—they did this.” I could just repeat “These are wonderful books,” but wouldn’t it be better if I introduced one of them to you? They’re great volumes for browsing. I sit in front of the television and place the book on my lap. These big books stay open where they’re told to (obedience-trained, with medals for good behaviour) so they’re perfect for a cold winter’s night where the brain wants to browse. The last volume I relaxed with is at the top of my stack, so that’s the one I’ll introduce. I’m very methodical, in a random kind of way. The one I was looking at before that had some really interesting information on the ethnic mix of the colonies that made up Australia at that time: we weren’t nearly as Anglo as we like to think. Colonies “Papers relating to colonization and other affairs in Australia 1842-1844.” To locate those dates in my imperfect understanding of Australian history, Melbourne had been ‘founded’ just a few years before but it was still part of the colony of New South Wales (Port Phillip District). Sydney (as I understand it) didn'’t like the sheer size of Port Phillip District and lobbied until—within the dates of these papers—it was scaled back a bit*. It was scaled back to the Murray River, which is the current border between Victoria and NSW. I know Queanbeyan** historical buffs who still claim that Melbourne was governed from Queanbeyan in its early days. Queanbeyan these days is fighting its own battle. Canberra grows and Queanbeyan has become a satellite set of suburbs, though one with local government. Sydney got its comeuppance too, and for a similar reason. Sydney lost the bid for the national capital when Australia was shoved out of the British nest and told to fly. That national capital is Canberra, the same place that’s threatening Queanbeyan’s character and independence. This makes me feel that I live in the Evil Empire. Not in a bad way, let me hasten to add. As Evil Empires go, Canberra is at the entirely delightful end of the spectrum. Anyhow, back to 1842-1844. The Gold Rush had yet to begin. There were bushrangers roaming the plains and Sydney thought itself very important. (Sydney still thinks itself very important.) Australia was still a penal colony, though convict numbers were fewer and free settlers were gaining. We were at the far end of the world from everywhere and we knew it. We didn’t have even a single Australian-composed opera until 1847, after all. All the big decisions regarding the colonies that are now Australia (for US readers—this means that your post-colonial is our colonial and our colonial included telegraph and railroad and gold rush) were made in Britain up to the twentieth century. Well, not all. Most. We sneakily did things on our own when we thought no-one was watching. Those parliamentary papers are very important. They encapsulate what our mother-country wanted from us, how we were supposed to behave, what we were expected to become—all sorts of things. May I say that, in our colonial teens, we were much better-behaved than some of the other colonies at an equivalent stage? Not naming names, at all, but we left home carrying gifts and flowers and on hugging terms with our parents. No revolts. No bloodshed. Hardly even an argument. Not that we’d rub this in anyone’s faces, of course. (I don’t know why our neighbouring countries all think we’re a prissy and preachy bunch of gits.) The very first document in the volume (I got there!) announces itself as a “COPY of a LETTER from the COLONIAL DEPARTMENT, dated the 3d day of June 1842, and of the MINUTE of the TREASURY, on the subject of BILLS drawn by the Governor of New South Wales, on account of the Debt due to that Colony by the Government of New Zealand.” Says it all, really. The debt was 5,354 shillings, for those who keep track of trans-Tasman debt. The appendix to the letter is an extract from the meeting that discussed it all, and this is where things get interesting. Those who held the reins of power are listed as present at the meeting, and they were the Governor, the Major-General (why Gilbert and Sullivan has particular resonance here—we didn't always have the model of a modern major-general, but we certainly had both major-generals and pirates), “His Right Reverend the Lord Bishop of Australia,” the Colonial Secretary and the Colonial Treasurer. Then follows some quite convoluted discussion where the money to pay for essentials is being sought. Debt comes into it, and wool sales and it turns out that distance made the financial side of government a nightmare. Who do you draw bills from, and how? Why didn’t New South Wales (or New Zealand) revolt, given the difficulty of their situation? Some of the answers are in the minutiae of these discussions. The attitude towards Britain and the way the financial issues were resolved help explain a lot. For two whole years the Colony had managed to make ends meet, and, by damn, they were going to continue to do so. Mind you, they pointed out to their British masters, it would be really nice to be paid for the real cost of things after value of the bills were actually taken into account. If I were to explore all the documents in even one of these volumes, you would be reading for many, many hours. I thought, just before I finish off and let you return to the twentieth century, that I should explore New Zealand’s debt. What sort of things (besides the dull and generic) racked up the debt? The Auditor-General of the day (one Wm. Lithgow) provides all the sordid details, in a four page document. New Zealand borrowed to pay the storekeeper (C. Logie), the police magistrate and a host of Assistant Surveyors. It also owed for supplies purchased in Sydney, viz. presents for native chiefs, 4 horses and 6 bullocks, a bunch of legal texts (including four volumes of Blackstone’s—Blackstone's is impossible not to love; one day I need to explain why), two whaleboats, much tobacco and many pipes, 58 dozen ‘wines’ (I assume bottles, but if it was casks then someone had a drinking problem), twelve ‘wood-bottomed chairs,’ twenty-five pounds of putty, forty-eight ‘yards of diaper,’ twenty five yards of bunting and six Unions Jacks, eighteen sword-belts, and an inordinate amount of salt beef. I must remember to tell my friends from that land-across-the-narrow-sea that their country went into debt over twenty-five pounds of putty. I’m focusing on the small things because they’re funnier to write about, but this volume covers such serious matters as the 1843 Depression. How does one solve a Depression when everything is still colonial—ie when the big decisions get made on the other side of the world? One establishes a Select Committee and researches the problem. There are pages and pages of interviews establishing what was wrong and seeking suggestions for what to do about it. There are communications from below. More pages and pages of evidence from an investigation into the circumstances of distressed mechanics and labourers, following a petition. Plus there’s the ‘Annual Emigration Report’ which is more about demand for labour and the cost thereof than fear of strangers from abroad. The great mystery about all this is why the volumes failed to sell in Australia. No, the great mystery is why the Irish University Press embarked on this amazing and enormous project. I’m delighted they did. It's an extraordinary achievement in any decade. From the sixties—with the Troubles ever-present—it’s a truly lovely thing. It’s our shared history. Ireland and Australia and New Zealand and all the other parts of the nineteenth century British sprawl. These documents are endlessly fascinating, and I rather suspect I haven’t even begun to learn the story behind their appearance. *This is bad history. This account is probably more reliable. Not as funny, though, nor as steeped in popular misconceptions. ** Pronouncing Queanbeyan: the pot of honey from local producers says it all “Queen- bee- ann.” The emphasis is on the Queen, which makes political sense, given Australia’s constitution. Books mentioned in this column:
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