TASMANIA - HISTORICAL SKETCH  4 ...

Atlas Page 100
By James Smith

The colony had been founded fifty years when it received the gratifying intelligence of the abolition of transportation, and both events were commemorated on August 10th, 1853, by public rejoicings and by religious services in the churches from all participation in which, however, every officer in the government service was excluded, by a petulant exercise of authority on the part of Sir William Denison. But while this served to increase the unpopularity of the governor, it did not lessen the enthusiasm with which the colonists celebrated the commencement of a new chapter in their history. And to break the more effectually with such of the associations of the past as were painful in the present, there was a general understanding that the old name of Van Diemen’s Land should be allowed to fall into disuse, and that that of the Dutch navigator who had discovered the island should be bestowed upon it, with the addition of two letters for the sake of euphony. Henceforth it was to be known as Tasmania, and the judicious change was formally sanctioned by legislative enactment a short time afterwards.

But although the island was thus dissevered from all that could remind it of a state of things which had been forced upon it by the unwise and injurious legislation and jurisprudence of the mother country during the lapse of half a century, it could not free itself for a considerable time from the pernicious consequences of the old penal system. The convict element in the population continued to be a source of danger and annoyance, a focus of crime, disorder, and depravity in the midst of a peaceful, orderly, law-abiding, and industrious population. And when some of the more hardened of the criminals escaped from confinement and deliberately embraced a career of rapine and violence in the bush, they hesitated at the commission of no atrocity in the prosecution of their predatory designs. One of these outlaws named John Whelan, who underwent capital punishment in June, 1855, confessed to the perpetration of five murders, the motive in each instance being the plunder of his victim, although the proceeds of the robbery were in two or three cases quite insignificant. Sometimes a gang of desperadoes would seize a whale-boat or a small sailing vessel, lay in a small stock of provisions, and run across the straits to Victoria; and landing unobserved upon some little frequented portion of the coast, would make a dash inland, and being well-armed, would extort a considerable amount of booty from the occupants of lonely farm-houses or of squatter’s homesteads. Ticket-of-leave men would quit the island in the same clandestine way, and on reaching Port Phillip would set off for the goldfields, where they would embark in a career of depredation and violence, which was occasionally terminated quite summarily, by a well-aimed ball from the revolver of a vigilant digger whose tent was about to be robbed.

At the beginning of the year 1855, Sir William Denison was transferred from the Governorship of Tasmania to that of New South Wales, much to the satisfaction of the great majority of the inhabitants of the former colony; and he was succeeded by Sir Henry Edward Fox Young, who had previously been Governor of South Australia. Everything seemed prosperous aid happy in the colony confided to his charge. The revenue was flourishing, there was a considerable arrival of immigrants from England, several discoveries of coal had been made in the island, and there was a large demand for Tasmanian timber in Victoria, both for building and for mining purposes. All interests were thriving, and the well-to-do islanders gave a striking proof of their generosity and their patriotism by raising and remitting to London the sum of twenty-five thousand pounds as their contribution to the fund which was being instituted for the relief of the widows and orphans of those who perished in the Crimean War.

In the same year the Legislative Council, which was already in articulo mortis, exposed itself to a good deal of popular odium by its arbitrary proceedings in connection with what became known as the "Hampton Case." That body, erroneously concluding that it possessed the same powers and privileges as the House of Commons, had instituted an inquiry into the administration of the penal department, and had summoned D. Hampton, the comptroller-general of that department, to attend and give evidence. This he refused to do. The Speaker issued his warrant for the arrest of the recalcitrant functionary, who, fortified by the opinion of the law officers of the Crown, firmly resisted its execution and served a writ of habeas corpus both upon the Speaker and the sergeant-at-arms. The Council then applied to the governor to authorise the police to apprehend Dr. Hampton, but Sir H. E. F. Young solved the difficulty in a very different manner. He went down to the Council, curtly informed that body that the Speaker’s warrant was illegal and was calculated to establish the supremacy of tyranny over law, and prorogued the Council. When the matter was carried into the Supreme Court that tribunal decided in favour of Dr. Hampton, and its decision was subsequently upheld by the Privy Council. The iniquities of the penal department were such as to demand a searching investigation, and to justify the severest reprobation; but the Legislative Council erred by arrogating to itself a power of interfering with the liberty of the subject which had not been conferred upon it by law or usage; while its injudicious method of procedure enabled Dr. Hampton, whose chief anxiety was not to be coerced into making disclosures damnatory of the department, to figure as a champion of personal freedom, imperilled by an act of arbitrary authority.

By an act of the Imperial Parliament which received the royal assent upon May 1, 1855, a Constitution was bestowed upon Tasmania. Two Houses, both of them elective, the council consisting of fifteen, and the assembly of thirty members, were created and invested with all the legislative and administrative powers and functions enjoyed by the august body which had called them into existence. These included the imposition and expenditure of the necessary taxation, the absolute control of the crown lands of the colony, and the management of public affairs by a responsible Ministry, selected from, and removable by the representatives of the people. The position of the governor in this new order of things resembled that of Her Majesty the Queen in Great Britain. He became the ceremonial head of the community, and the only visible link between the Crown and its self-governing subjects in the garden island of the south. The old Legislative Council, after having passed an electoral Act to give due effect to the provisions of the Imperial statute, was dismissed by Sir Henry Young in a valedictory address containing an accurate definition of the new relations which would subsist thenceforward between himself and his constitutional advisers: —"Emancipated from political and party controversies, impeded neither by feeble nor timid advisers, nor surrounded by those who conceive their possession of ‘ office to be against his inclination, the governor," said he, "may expect his official functions as well as his personal influence to be strengthened by exclusive devotion to those higher objects which are special to no one political party, but common to all, as conducing to the moral and material progress and improvement of the whole colony." It was not until September, 1856, that the first general election took place, and the first responsible government was formed in Tasmania. The Cabinet comprised five officials: Mr. W. T. N. Champ as premier, Mr. T. D. Chapman as treasurer, Mr. F. Smith as attorney-general, Mr. J. W. Rogers as solicitor-general, and Mr. H. F. Anstey as minister of land and works; irrespective of Mr. W. E. Nairn, who held no portfolio. Mr. Justice Howe was elected president of the Legislative Council, and Captain Fenton Speaker of the Legislative Assembly. Financial difficulties, occasioned by a sudden decline in the prosperity of the colony, followed by a conflict between the two Chambers on the subject of the right claimed by the lower one to impose and collect duties by a mere resolution of a majority of the members of the Assembly only, led to the resignation of the first ministry after a four months’ tenure of office while its successor was displaced after having been in power for eight weeks only. In this early stage of the constitutional history of the colony, its politicians resembled a boy who has just been presented with a curious mechanical toy, which he takes to pieces for the pleasure of reconstructing it; but they soon applied themselves to the more serious business of earnest legislation. Measures were passed for the promotion of higher education; for enabling country towns and districts to form themselves into rural municipalities; for facilitating the settlement of population on the land, and for bringing the northern and southern portions of the island into telegraphic communication with each other. A new Government House was erected on a picturesque knoll overlooking the Derwent, and the old abode in Macquarie street was vacated in 1858. At the close of 1861, Sir Henry Young’s Government terminated, and he and Lady Young quitted Tasmania amidst general expressions of respect and regret from the inhabitants of the island.

He was succeeded by Lieutenant-Colonel Thomas Gore Browne, C.B., who had previously been governor of St. Helena and New Zealand; appointments bestowed upon him in recognition of his brilliant military services in India and Afghanistan. Brave as a lion, simple in manners as a child, with a natural bonhomie that was inexpressibly winsome, a transparent sincerity of purpose that was stamped upon his kindly countenance, and a perfect integrity of character that was conspicuous in every action of his life, Colonel Gore Browne was one to whom the lines of the American poet were strictly applicable: —

"None knew him but to love him,
None named him but to praise."

And Mrs. Browne was his counterpart in nature and disposition; but whereas most of her husband’s life had been spent, like Othello’s, in the camp and on the field of action, the earlier days of her own had been passed in the midst of the best society in Edinburgh, at the most intellectual period in the history of the Northern Athens; and she brought to the fulfilment of her duties as the queen of society in Tasmania, the combined influences of refined mental culture, grace and urbanity of manner, elegant tastes, and a singularly sweet and sympathetic temperament. They were both exceptionally well-qualified for the position they occupied, and they succeeded, to a considerable extent at least, in forming and shaping the somewhat heterogeneous and discordant elements of Tasmanian society; so that Government House became a neutral ground upon which people who were bitterly opposed to each other in politics could meet on terms of amity, and a social centre from which radiated examples of amenity and courtesy, and intelligent conversation and refined amusement, which were imitated and reproduced in their turn in other social circles outside.

Questions of finance largely engaged the attendance of the parliament and people of Tasmania during the years 1862 and 1863; but at the same time a great deal was done to further develop the interior of the country, by the construction of roads, tramways and bridges, and to bring the outlying districts into communication with the chief markets of the island. At one time, too, the tempting possibility presented itself of Hobart Town eventually becoming one of the greatest commercial entrepots in Australia, and of its growing into a second Singapore. Mr. Charles Meredith, the treasurer of an administration formed in 1863, submitted a financial scheme for the abolition of all customs duties excepting those on fermented liquors and tobacco, the liberation of the shipping from harbour dues and wharfage rates, and the imposition of an income and property tax of five and one-half per cent. This bold and statesman-like proposition, which was calculated if carried into effect to raise Tasmania to a position of premier importance, and to cause its southern capital, with its magnificent harbour and its fine geographical situation as regards the islands of New Zealand, to become as populous and prosperous as the towns in the Middle Ages, was unfortunately negatived by the Assembly, and, on a dissolution, by the country; and the colony missed the tide which, taken at the flood, might have led it on to fortune. The owners of real estate, most of which had been acquired from the Crown at rates ranged from an average of five shillings and tenpence farthing per acre in 1838, and one pound twelve shillings and threepence three farthings per acre in 1850, were not sagacious enough to perceive that the small contribution demanded from them would be returned to them a hundredfold by the augmented values of their property which would certainly result from the prosperity consequent on the adoption of such a fiscal policy and those whose incomes were derived from other sources were equally wanting in farsightedness and sagacity.

The year 1865 was marked by the passage of a measure of great practical value and permanent utility. This was an act based upon that which Mr. —afterwards Sir —Richard Torrens had introduced into South Australia, for simplifying, expediting, and cheapening the transfer, encumbrance, and release of real estate, so as to make it almost as marketable a commodity as chattel property. Owing to the attractions presented by two or three of the colonies on the mainland, a portion of the flower of the population annually drifted across the Straits in search of the wider and more varied fields of enterprise which presented themselves in the larger communities of continental Australia; and those who were thus drawn away were precisely such as the island could least afford to spare —the young the adventurous, and the energetic. By way of counteracting these losses, an Act was passed in 1867 by which heads of families paying their own passages from Europe were entitled to receive land orders of the value of eighteen pounds for each person over fifteen years of age, and of nine pounds sterling for each child more than one and less than fifteen years of age. But the great distance of Tasmania from the old world, and the length of time occupied by the passage, as compared with the short run across the Atlantic to the United States or Canada, and the liberal inducements held out to immigrants in both countries, operated to the disadvantage of the island colony in bidding for the superabundant population of Europe. A reservation of fifty thousand acres was at the same time set apart in the beautiful county of Devon, for settlement under certain conditions by officers wishing to retire from the Indian service and end their days in a colony where they could enjoy scenery as charming as that of the mother country, combined with a temperate and salubrious climate and agreeable society. Many responded to the invitation, but it may be doubted whether the inducements which Tasmania offers as a place of residence to those who have been enervated or invalided by a lengthy sojourn in tropical climates, are sufficiently known and appreciated beyond its own limits even now.

On January 7th, 1868, His Royal Highness the Duke of Edinburgh paid his promised visit to the island in the "Galatea," which reached her anchorage in the Derwent early in the afternoon. Half the population of the island must have been present in Hobart Town on the day following, when the public reception of the Duke by the Governor, Ministry, and Legislature of Tasmania took place. Old colonists, who had seen the young Queen on her way to be crowned in Westminster Abbey thirty years before, garlanded the doors of their wayside cottages with English roses, in remembrance of her to whom her people’s hearts had turned, on that auspicious occasion, as "the expectancy and rose of the fair State"; while others brought forth and exhibited early engravings or little statues of Her Majesty, carefully preserved through all the vicissitudes of time and change; and a younger generation, born in Tasmania, gazed with interest and curiosity on the features of the first member of the Royal Family who had set his foot upon their native island, and who was all the more warmly greeted because he wore the uniform of that branch of the Imperial service which is justly dear to the countrymen of Nelson, Collingwood, and Franklin in every part of the British Empire.

With the close of the year 1869 terminated Colonel Gore Browne’s official connection with the colony, and no governor ever quitted Tasmania amidst such general manifestations of warm regard and sincere respect on the part of all classes of the community, to whom, also, his amiable and accomplished wife had endeared herself no less by the sweetness of her disposition and tie urbanity of her manners than by the active and sympathetic interest she had uniformly exhibited in every benevolent institution and in every philanthropic movement designed or calculated to relieve the necessities of the poor, to alleviate the sufferings of the afflicted, and to soften the lot of those who were exposed to "sorrow, need, sickness, or any other infirmity." Colonel Gore Browne was knighted on his return to England, and was succeeded by Mr. Charles Du Cane, whose wife was a daughter of the late Lord Lyndhurst, one of the greatest lawyers and most eloquent orators of his time. The new governor was sworn in on January 4th, 1869, and his first year of office was marked by several memorable incidents. A submarine cable was laid across the Strait, and messages of congratulation were flashed through it on May 1st to four of the colonies on the mainland, and were answered in a spirit of reciprocity. A commencement was made with the railway system of the colony; and the western line, from Launceston to Perth, Longford, Westbury, Deloraine, and Formby, projected as far back as 1862, and of which the Duke of Edinburgh had turned the first sod in 1868, was now being actively proceeded with. In August, 1869, Tasmania lost one of its ablest statesmen and most patriotic and popular citizens by the death of Sir Richard Dry. The son of an early settler, from whom he inherited an ample fortune, the deceased gentleman had been enabled to devote much of his time to the political service of his fellow-colonists; and he was even more liberal of his means. He was one of six non-official members of the old Legislative Council who raised the cry of "No taxation without representation," and who resigned their seats rather than acquiesce in the imposition of improper burdens on the people, the augmentation of an alarming debt, or the improper expenditure of the public money. He was afterwards one of the foremost members of the Anti-Transportation League, was unanimously chosen Speaker of the Legislative Council in 1851, was knighted on his visit to England in 1860, became premier in 1866, and filled that office at the time of his death. A public funeral was awarded to his remains, which were laid to rest in Hagley Church which had been erected at his expense, and to which a handsome chancel was added by public subscription, "as a permanent memorial of the affection and respect" entertained for him by his fellow-colonists.

In 1870 a flying squadron, composed of six ships of war, anchored in the Derwent; and in the same year the Imperial Government, believing that the time had arrived when the Australian colonies were strong enough to run alone, withdrew her garrisons from the whole of Australasia, and Tasmania cheerfully accepted the responsibilities of self-defence which had thus been cast upon her. Volunteer forces were promptly organised in the chief centres of population, and civilians were not slow in proving their aptitude for military drill and discipline.

As the census for this year, which showed the population of the island to be nearly one hundred thousand, indicated that a necessity had arisen for a redistribution of electoral power, the Constitution Act was amended by a slight increase in the number of members, and by lowering the franchise for both Houses so as to restore the qualification to many persons who had lost it by the mere depreciation which had taken place in the value of their freehold or leasehold property.

A contract was signed in 1870 for a main line of railway to be constructed from Launceston to Hobart; and in the year following the western line was opened for traffic by the governor between Launceston and Deloraine, and a tramway from Kimberley to Latrobe, at the mouth of the Mersey, nearly completed the communication between Deloraine and the sea. Serious difficulties arose, however, in connection with the second of these railways. In their anxiety to ensure its formation, the landowners in the district had not only borne the expense of the survey but had subscribed a sum of fifty thousand pounds sterling towards the cost of the line. Even then the Government declined to guarantee the interest on the loan to be raised for its construction, unless the people of the country through which it was to pass would consent to the imposition of a special rate upon their property, to the extent of thirty two thousand five hundred pounds, as security for the repayment of such interest. The line was made; it proved to be quite unremunerative; the Government sued the company for thirty-six thousand pounds of unpaid interest; and eventually agreed to take over the line; to write off the sum of forty-eight thousand pounds, which the arrears of interest now amounted to; and to charge the district fifteen thousand pounds per annum as its contribution towards the interest.

But in the meantime the railway from Launceston to Hobart Town had been undertaken, and was to be executed and maintained at the cost of the whole body of taxpayers; and when the railway rate came to be collected it was found that a strong determination existed not to pay it. Legal proceedings were instituted and threatened, and sixty-five of the local magistracy petitioned the governor for their suspension until Parliament could be appealed to; and as an unfavourable answer was returned to this request, twenty-six of the memorialists threw up their commissions. Then ensued an extraordinary state of things. Distress warrants to the number of one thousand two hundred were issued, and, wherever practicable, enforced. It was a conflict between the law and the determination of a local community.

Much chattel property was seized and conveyed to Launceston; and such was the exasperation of those who had been deprived of it, that they organised themselves into bands for its rescue, and were so menacing in their riotous demonstrations that it was found necessary to withdraw the rural police from their ordinary patrols, and to swear in special constables for the protection of the terrified townspeople, who saw their fences broken down, their windows smashed, and their doors battered in by an angry and turbulent mob. Many of the defaulters in the country succeeded in barring out the bailiffs, who hesitated to execute the distress warrants entrusted to them when they found a powerful mastiff, with a bad temper and a good set of teeth, jealously guarding the premises against the approach of all strangers. The inexpediency of maintaining such a conflict between a weak central authority, and a powerful local resistance animated by a feeling of resentment against what was looked upon as an act of injustice was recognised by the government; and an Act was passed in the following year, absolving the land owners of the district from the obligation of raising a special rate to be used for railway purposes. The contest between the settlers and the government conclusively proved the difficulty as well as the inexpediency attendant upon any attempt to levy a special local tax not common to the rest of the taxpaying community. But the experiment conveyed its lesson to those who tried it, and the governing power perhaps drew a practical moral from its untoward mistake.

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