Allen Unwin, 432pp, $37.99 ONE of the virtues of Carol Baxter's An Irresistible Temptation is the insights it provides into the nature of the society and culture that developed out of the world's first experiment of using a penal settlement as the foundation for a new society.
When we consider the successful liberal democratic society that Australia has become, it is often easy to forget the very oddness of the type of society that the British established in Australia in 1788 and that remained largely in place for the next 50 years.
Where else in the world, indeed in human history, can a people trace their origin to a penal colony?
Colonisation has been common in human history from the ancient Greeks and Phoenicians to the Spanish and the British. It has been driven by population pressure, the need to seek commercial outlets, to resettle military veterans, to provide land for the landless and to escape religious persecution.
Only in the case of Australia was a colony established to dump the human debris of a society on a foreign shore.
Colonies have generally attempted to reproduce the social and cultural order of the world that the colonists left behind. In his classic study, Albion's Seed, David Hackett Fischer portrayed the folkways that developed in different regions in 17th and 18th-century North America.
He connected them to specific parts of the British Isles; for example, the Puritan culture of New England was linked to East Anglia and the Cavalier culture of Virginia and the south to the west and south of England.
Moreover, in the American, as in the Greek and Roman worlds, the colonists took their political institutions with them. The American colonies were established under charters issued by the Crown that gave them legal existence.
In Puritan New England the colonists developed their specific form of town government that Alexis de Tocqueville would describe in his Democracy in America, published in the 1830s.
What then of the politics, culture and social values brought to Australia in the years following 1788? If Virginia got a culture rooted in the values of the English landed classes, tempered by the reality of having to make a living out of farming tobacco, and New England inherited the democratic instincts of English independency, how is the culture of Sydney Town to be characterised?
Jane New's story tells us. Born Maria Wilkinson and alias Jane Henry, she was transported to Hobart in 1824. In the same year her mother was sent to Sydney.
They were habitual criminals from the north of England who had turned to theft in the hard years following the Napoleonic Wars. In cultural terms they appear to have been the deracinated products of a society undergoing tumultuous change in the wake of the Industrial Revolution. Their lot was not easy and it is well to be reminded just how savage the English laws were when it came to crimes against property and how these laws were aimed against the potentially disruptive behaviour of the lower orders.
Certainly what Jane brought with her to the colonies was the opportunism and desire for self-advancement that could be obtained through successful crime, a little like the way in which women in developing countries today can climb out of poverty through selling their bodies. But Jane was no prostitute.
She was evidently very attractive and in the strange world of NSW, where a gentleman might be someone who would be considered a mere yeoman in England, she could aspire to be the local equivalent of a courtesan.
The uprooted of the Industrial Revolution were only one element of the order emerging in colonial NSW. There were very few free settlers in the early days; after all, who would travel halfway across the world to live in a small society largely composed of convicts, former convicts and their spawn? There were, of course, those former convicts who had been granted their freedom, the emancipists, whose status was ambiguous, given their criminal past.
And there were the free-born children of convicts and former convicts.
The other component of convict society consisted of the military and the officials required to run the administration, the justice system and the police. This group was, in its own way, a collection as odd as the convicts they had been sent to govern.
Despite their later pretensions, the administrators were hardly sons of the gentry. Rather, they can be understood as a small group of families who took advantage of their circumstances, of their government employment and of the land grants that were there to be taken to advance themselves materially and socially.
One finds among this group of officials of the 1820s many names that would later play an important role in the life of NSW, including the Windeyers and especially the Stephen family.
English political and intellectual history can be considered, at least in part, as the history of a number of families. One thinks of the Cecils, the Russells and the Churchills. And in the intellectual life of 19th and 20th-century England, the Stephen family, including Leslie Stephen and Virginia Woolf, played a leading role.
As one might expect, the Australian branch of the family could hardly play the intellectual role in the colony that their cousins played in England. Rather, their influence was in the law. The colonial Stephens came to Sydney through the patronage of their cousin James Stephen of the Colonial Office and they were able to share out among themselves a number of offices in Sydney and Hobart.
Today, of course, we believe that people should hold office on the basis of merit and we would regard patronage as involving corrupt behaviour. But the 19th century was a different world and the use of patronage was regarded as a legitimate way of recruiting suitable staff.
Even the coming of responsible government and representative institutions in the 1850s did not mean the end of patronage.
In fact, as Hilary Golder has shown in her recent excellent study of the public service in colonial NSW, Politics, Patronage and Public Works, the regime established after 1856 can plausibly be termed a patronage democracy . Elected politicians loved the opportunity to reward people with public sector jobs, especially in the ever-expanding work force required to run the railways. It was not until the 1890s that reforming premier George Reid established a Public Service Board in NSW.
Patronage does not in any way imply corrupt behaviour on the part of a person who has obtained the office in this way. After all, appointees to such offices were meant to be men of good character whose word could be trusted. They were men who could be assumed to behave like gentlemen.
Their word counted in a way a convict's or emancipist's did not. As in any society there was a daily practical issue of deciding exactly who one could trust. In a colony composed of a significant number of rogues and former rogues, and in which there was not much in the way of a settled culture, this was a very important matter.
Baxter describes the extraordinary lengths to which John Stephen went so that he could establish that he was a man of good character. Paradoxically, Stephen did this to make it easier for others to accept his lies. If a gentleman is saying it, then it must be true!
In this way Stephen was able to become a free rider on the presumption that there was a certain group in the colony who could be presumed to be telling the truth and a much larger group who could not be trusted and who could be assumed to be mendacious.
It was considerations such as these that delayed the introduction of trial by jury into the colony until the 1830s. British subjects were entitled to trial by jury and it should have been provided for those who knew how to behave properly.
The problem was that too many of those who were entitled to act as jurors -- that is to say, possessing the requisite property qualifications -- were emancipists and so lacking what was perceived to be the necessary character. The real problem with this division of society into two groups, the trusted and the damned, meant that it was possible for people such as Stephen to exploit their privileged status and get away with it.
The damned were treated harshly by a legal system that was designed to keep them in place.
There were many capital offences and they could be flogged for what seem to us to be rather minor matters. On the other hand, members of the official class could put their hands in the till and apparently escape much in the way of punishment when they were caught. It is interesting to contrast this conception of character with that which was to prevail in the latter part of the century, when the Australian colonists came to view themselves as democrats.
At the later date much emphasis was placed on the role of nature in creating character and as the source of any individual's superior talents. In a good environment, individuals should be able to cultivate their talents and not have them corrupted.
Jane New, convicted thief, is one of the protagonists of Baxter's story.
The other is John Stephen Jr, a member of a respected family and a respectable member of the official class of the colony. In many ways the story is more about Stephen than New. This is partly because there is much more documentation relating to Stephen than New and as a consequence he appears as a much more fully developed figure.
It is also because the story of his moral decline into chicanery and endless self-justification has much more complexity than that of New's relatively simple story of theft, deception and flight.
New's story is in many ways quite straightforward. After arriving in Hobart and being assigned to a local family, she married James New and was permitted to accompany him to Sydney, where she was accused by Frenchwoman Madame Rens of stealing some cloth from her shop.
She was brought to trial and it was apparent that she had some powerful supporters in the colony who were drawn to her by her beauty. These included Stephen who, when he is introduced to us, has already been involved in dubious financial dealings in England, apparently forcing his resignation from the Band of Gentleman Pensioners. On arrival in Sydney he was still able to receive from governor Ralph Darling 2000ha as a reserve grant, a free grant of 1000ha and subsequently a pound stg.
365 a year position as a land commissioner and an pound stg. 800 a year Supreme Court position, pending royal approval. Such were the pickings awaiting the trusted few.
Given that he also had money through his wife, who along with his numerous children he needed to support, one would have thought that all he needed to do was to keep his nose clean and he would be able to live the colonial equivalent of the life of a lord. But, as Baxter demonstrates, he could not evade his significant character flaws.
Baxter's depiction of New's trial and all the subsequent legal proceedings demonstrate just how difficult it was in colonial NSW to establish the truth of any matter.
Everything came down to the statements that the protagonists made and how one was to sort through often contradictory evidence. Rumours and mistruths and calumnies abounded because it was so difficult to disprove them.
This was a small and often very turbulent society full of personality conflicts, of charges and counter-charges.
These conflicts were easily conflated with matters of principle. Governor Darling was a rather rigid old conservative who favoured the official group. His conduct and behaviour was more than personal; it came to be associated with the struggle for emancipist rights.
As David Neal has pointed out in his classic The Rule of Law in a Penal Colony, in the absence of representative institutions such political struggles took place in the courts.
Hence the New case was not just about a beautiful criminal and her infatuated admirer. It was equally about the power of the governor and the struggle for a free legal system.
It was also about the capacity of those running the system to do so in a competent fashion. New was able to get off her charge of theft on a legal technicality; Darling had failed to ratify a change of law for the colony.
That was when the fun started.
Darling confined New to the Parramatta Women's Factory, from where she was whisked away first to Sydney and then to a cottage at Lower Minto. Stephen was clearly involved in all of this and in her eventual escape from the colony.
At this stage New essentially disappears from the story and the final part of the book is about Stephen's ultimately unsuccessful attempts to cover his tracks.
The story holds the reader's interest not because of New but Stephen, his flawed character, travails and ultimate downfall. New, for all her charms, remains a somewhat shadowy figure.
Baxter has written a work that captures the reader and holds attention through a complex series of legal tussles.
This is largely because of her skill as a narrative historian, her capacity to tell a good story. In fact, this book is an excellent example of how telling a good story can illuminate the past. Its focus is very much on the characters of the protagonists, their strengths and their failings, in particular Stephen but also Darling and a cast of minor figures.
Events unfold in a contingent and occasionally haphazard fashion. They are not the expression of some preordained pattern.
History as story has great attractions because this is how most people experience their lives; they must read the characters of people with whom they deal, come to terms with changing circumstances and make use of such resources as they have been given.
These are the fundamental issues of our human existence. Narrative history and biography provide an opportunity for us to explore them.
It is history as narrative, the interaction of human beings as they attempt to resolve problems and deal with each other, that draws so many people to a love of the subject.
Narrative history by its nature must deal with the issue of character. Individuals behave as they do because they confront problems and tasks that test their character. They may be brave, lazy, dishonest, mercurial and so on.
One cannot really write narrative history without making judgments about the character of the protagonists one is discussing or at least revealing their character through descriptions of their actions.
This concern with character has always been a concern of narrative history, as can be seen in the pictures that Thucydides, the first narrative historian, provides us of such figures as Cleon the demagogue or the brilliant but devious Alcibiades. But it is to the Roman historians that we really owe the emphasis on character as a means of understanding the processes of history and of morally judging the actions of its participants.
The Romans tended to see history as the playing out of the character of particular individuals, especially the faults and darker traits that lay waiting to find an outlet. Livy, for example, portrays Hannibal as a great leader of men, courageous and fearless, only to conclude that his virtues were matched by great vices: inhuman cruelty, a perfidy worse than Punic, an utter absence of truthfulness, reverence, fear of the gods, respect for oaths, sense of religion .
Human beings are driven by their virtues and their vices, and circumstances provide the opportunity for individuals to achieve greatness, be it for good or evil.
Most Australian historians are not particularly concerned with the dynamics of character. There is rather a tendency for them to work within a Manichean model in which there are good people who aid the cause of progress and evil ones who inhibit it. This can be seen most readily in the way that they discuss John Howard.
This inability to appreciate the nuances of character has its roots in a determinist model of history, derived originally from Marxism but still thriving even among postmodernists, which cannot allow for personal quirks or the indeterminacy of circumstance. This determinism is matched by a somewhat ferocious moral self-righteousness that judges individuals according to a rigid set ofprinciples. Yet an emphasis on character, both in its individual and collective forms, is found in the work of earlier Australian historians.
One of the best examples is the young Keith Hancock in his 1930 classic, Australia. In this work Hancock focused on what he saw to be the collective national character of the Australians. He examined this character and found it to be wanting; it was young and foolish and lacked an appreciation of how the world really worked.
Hancock's Australians were brash and exuberant, full of good intentions and noble ideas. Their good intentions, however, often led to bad outcomes because they were like high-spirited adolescents who did things without really counting the costs. Australia was essentially a study in collective character and the story of how that character had shaped Australian history.
Australians were not, in Hancock's eyes, bad people. It was just that their virtues became their vices; only when they became more mature would they be able to understand and appreciate their failings.
But it was with Manning Clark that a concern with individual character really became paramount.
Love him or loathe him, Clark was the last great traditional narrative historian of Australia. When he deals with the early days of the colonies, of the convict society of New, he tells a good story and is, at times, magnificent. Unfortunately, it was Clark who also pioneered the Manichean approach to character.
He thundered against those who he did not like and tended to see stirrings of great passion as driving many of his characters.
But, since Clark, narrative history has fallen into disrepair. A recent attempt to provide us with a new history of Australia, volume two of Alan Atkinson's The Europeans in Australia has little in the way of narrative and meanders through a range of themes and issues.
One could almost say that it has lost the plot.
Many contemporary academic historians undoubtedly find narrative history a little too simplistic, too lacking in theory. The narrative approach is too thin.
We need a rich method that allows us to understand the culture. However, if we go back to the tradition of narrative history we discover that masters of the craft such as David Hume and Thomas Babington Macaulay did not only pursue powerful narratives. They included the occasional contextual chapter or passage that set the scene for the story that they were telling.
Even Fernand Braudel, who is credited with popularising a long-term and structural approach to history, wrote the first two parts of his classic The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II to set the context for the narrative of the conflict between Spain and the Ottomans that culminated in that clash of civilisations , the Battle of Lepanto.
In the case of Baxter's story of New, the narrative illuminates the culture of colonial NSW and the strange sort of society that was emerging out of the clash of a penal settlement and a nascent free society. It illustrates the oddness of that society in its depiction of the various people who composed it.
By following the fate of the individuals involved in one significant event, it paints a picture of a lost world in all of its ambiguities and contradictions that would not have been possible if a more structural approach had been taken.
Narrative allows us to depict life as it is being lived. And a good narrative, such as Baxter provides, draws the reader into those lives and that world.
In An Irresistible Temptation Baxter pursues a story. Narrative provides an illumination of the character of its protagonists and a means of understanding the culture, society and politics of a peculiar world. After reading this book, one is left reflecting on the extent to which the values and mores of convict Australia died a natural death with the end of the convict system, and the extent to which it has continued to mould and shape Australia and provide it with important elements of its national identity.
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