Globalisation 1802
Photographs, digital art and words Nick Sidle
Photograph – Now abandoned sheep station, Piltimitiappa Ruin, Dare’s Hill, North Mount Lofty Ranges, South Australia
Joseph Butler, Matthew Elkins, John Ahern, Michael Bryan, George Hall his wife and Mary Smith Hall and family, Pemulwuy, Dr Charles Throsby. These are the names of some of the key individuals in a very important issue of globalisation. Just because a word is new or has taken on a new meaning and use, does not mean that the idea it represents is anything that has not been around for as long as people. Language changes, the fundamentals of human experience less so. What does ‘Globalisation’ really mean? Multi-national companies operating across national boundaries? International travel? The replacement of existing cultures and ways of living by ideas and practices from outside that come from an economically more dominant country? All these things of course and more, it is a very complex issue, just as it was a very complex issue in 1802 when every one of these questions and definitions applied in the dramas played out by the people whose names appear in the list and many others like them.
Digital art – London c.1800
Digital art – Transport ship England to Australia c.1800
1802 was a ‘big’ year. Just into a new century there was a feeling in Europe of expansion and looking forward. The latest in fashions, including the daring new cut of frock coats, could be seen on the streets and the new hits from the world of music spread as fast as the printing presses of the music publishers could keep up with the demand for sheet music. Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata began to take the world by storm and ensure that, over a century later, grade exams in piano proficiency would never be the same again. With it, an invaluable foundation stone had also been laid for the Classic Compilations CD industry and playlists, but technological limitations meant that no-one realised this at the time. At least, it did ensure that in that year the top spot did not go to an artificially created group or social media phenomenon. Britain generously returned Malacca and the Cape Colony to the Dutch, unfortunately overlooking the real original owners again (a tradition of the period) but made up for these losses by gaining control of central India through the Treaty of Bassein. On the economic front, in London the West India Dock was built to help exploit the financial potential of the expanding colonies. The French forcefully suppressed a slave revolt in Santo Domingo setting a rather unfortunate tone for industrial relations and practices in the new age. The slave trade, one of the worst crimes against humanity, still had decades to run. In science, John Dalton hit on the idea of viewing chemistry from the principles of atomic theory, immediately creating the first generation who never fully realised the true meaning of this concept and laying the foundation for the periodic table of the elements, later invented in Russia by Dimitri Mendeleev, which made this misunderstanding systematic, a tradition soundly continued and preserved ever since. In Germany, the naturalist Gottfried Treviranus came up with a rather good re-branding scheme to increase the public profile and image of his subject by launching the word Biology. Unfortunately, as an early practitioner of this sort of public relations exercise, inexperience led him to fail to develop the opportunity for a nice logo. From Britain, John Truter and William Somerville were off exploring Bechuanaland, which was possibly seen as a rather unnecessary indulgence by the locals who already thought they had a pretty good idea where everything was, but which generated great excitement back in London.
Digital art – London c.1800
On the social front, law and order and Irish nationalism were hot issues so few changes there were coming anytime soon. Major rebellions had occurred in Ireland, then totally under British control, and the penal system was suffering from the loss of North America as a rather convenient place to send convicts to. Fortunately, enterprise had identified somewhere new to take those labelled as truly undesirable by society. This was even further away and even nastier in the conditions that awaited those sent when they arrived, somewhere that would come to be known as Australia.Joseph Butler was not one of life’s great successes. Born in Bermondsey, London around 1776, by 1797 when he was twenty-one, his leading scheme to support himself was based on the theft of lead sheeting from an outhouse. To help him in this were his accomplices, John Docker and James Stevens and they removed three sheets of lead, possibly on the basis of one each. Unfortunately, not only was he not enough of a success in life not to have to steal, he was also sufficiently
Digital art
unskilled as a thief to get caught. James Stevens helped the authorities, presumably in return for a lighter punishment but, at the Kingston Quarter Sessions on 3rd October 1797 along with John Docker, Joseph Butler was sentenced to seven years transportation to Australia. It took till 1802 to put him on a ship, the Perseus, which sailed from Spithead on the 12th February, arriving in New South Wales on the 4th August the same year. His descendants live there to this day. He was only one of hundreds of convicts to arrive that year, another, on the same ship, was Matthew Elkins also sentenced to seven years in 1797. He too has descendants still in New South Wales.
Digital art – Convict transport ship leaving England c.1800
Not everyone to arrive was transported for acts of theft or similar crimes. In 1802 three transports, The Atlas I, Atlas II, and Hercules all sailed with those convicted for their parts in the Irish rebellion of 1798. General convicts were also sent from Ireland as well. John Ahern and Michael Bryan were both transported on the Atlas I. In case there is any doubt about conditions on the transports, apart from deaths from disease which were far from uncommon, the records for that voyage also list a Matthias Ahern who did not live to see landfall. The entry is that he died from flogging, although for what transgression is not shown.
Engraving – Central Criminal Court ‘The Old Bailey’, London c.1800
Digital art – Convict transport fleet c.1800
Digital art – Convicts arriving in Australia c.1800
Apart from those sentenced to go to, from the European perspective, the new land of Australia, some chose to try and start a new life there. Settlers also arrived on the distant shores carried by ships in the same fleets as the convicts and presumably looking for something better than where they were coming from. Amongst these are recorded the names of George Hall and his wife and Mary Smith Hall and family who reached New South Wales on the Coromandel, also in 1802. Another hopeful was Charles Throsby, a naval surgeon, who arrived in Australia in the same year at the age of 31. His appointment was to be part of the medical establishment for the settlement at Newcastle. No, his ship was not way off course, the newly arrived settlers had a habit of giving places the name of somewhere back in England to make them feel more at home. That for exactly the same reasons in reverse this made the people already living there feel far less at home was, like so much else, overlooked. Throsby later retired to Liverpool, still in Australia, after all where else is there the Liverpool Range of mountains, a feature only noticeable for their absence in Merseyside. Throsby did well for himself, carving out a career not only in medicine but also taking in exploration, farming and government. A stock station, Throsby Park on the Wingiecarribee River near Moss Vale, still bears his name.
Digital art – London c.1800
Digital art – English ship arrived in Australia c.1800
Such were the diverse backgrounds and stories of the new arrivals. What such accounts of course do not address are the lives and experiences of those who were already living there, the native Australians, the Aboriginal Peoples. Academic sources consider them to have inhabited the land for at least 100,000 years before the arrival of the Europeans. Aboriginal belief thinks of them as always having been part of the land, to have been there from the beginning, the Dreamtime. They had and still have a rich, deep and sophisticated culture but when it
Digital art – Native Australians c.1800
was seen that they did not have chiefs, kings, property or land ownership as western societies recognised them, the new authorities declared that Australia was ‘terra nullius’, no man’s land belonging to no one and without occupying people already there. This meant that it was quite alright to take whatever you wanted. Beyond such taking there was also a deadly giving as
Digital art – European settlers, Australia c.1800
well. The new arrivals brought diseases, especially smallpox, against which the native Australians had very little immunity and thousands died. The traditional ways of life, of living in tribes linked to areas but not within rigid boundaries and living successfully off what the land had to offer, were increasingly threatened and then wiped out. Early moderately friendly relations rapidly deteriorated as the settlers and convicts changed the landscape, cut down trees, enclosed land and drove off those already living there. Frictions escalated into violence and violence brought reprisals, often of great
Digital art – Convicts fencing off land c.1800
brutality. The further settlers moved into the interior, something which happened increasingly as convicts were granted land once their sentence was over and land rights were also given to civil and military officers and settlers, the worse the confrontations became. The Aboriginal Peoples did not simply fade away, there was an organised resistance. One famous leader was Pemulwuy who fought a successful guerrilla war for many years. Once, he was wanted for killing the first New South
Digital art – Native Australian resistance c.1800
Wales Governor’s gamekeeper with a spear. A less appropriate concept to introduce into the setting of native Australia than a gamekeeper would be hard to imagine, a real clash of cultures was taking place. Of course, the governor, Governor Phillip, was expecting only English concepts to immediately apply. Any challenge to the principal of reserving game rights for the privileged, rights to be enforced by gamekeepers, was in England a very serious offence that could even lead to transportation to Australia, an interesting circular argument not without irony. On more than one occasion, Pemulwuy was shot and wounded but he always recovered, and a legend grew that he could not be killed by the white man’s guns. It was a legend he could not live up to though and on the 2nd of June 1802 he fell, shot and killed following an incident in which four white men had been fatally wounded by Aborigines near Parramatta. His head was removed and sent to a Sir Joseph Banks in London for his collection. Pemulwuy’s loss was a great blow to the indigenous Australian cause although his son did continue the struggle. The odds were, however, unequal and appalling treatment of Aboriginal Peoples escalated and continued well into the 20th Century. Only in the last years of the 1990’s was there a first tangible effort to try and address some of what had happened. Land rights began to be recognised and even restored. The concept of ‘terra nullius’ was disowned. A respect for Aboriginal culture grew and efforts were begun to try and make Australia in the 21st Century somewhere with a place for all its citizens. 200 plus years of wrongs cannot be put right
Digital art – Fire burning, traditional Native Australian land management practice
overnight and there are many real questions and difficulties to be resolved, as well as the issue of whether respect means an equal right to assimilate into the now dominant culture or live in an alternative way, but a process of genuine reconciliation may have begun. Central to this is a recognition of the core issues. The ‘Sydney Morning Herald’ of 22nd July 2000 carried reports of the Australian Government’s response to consideration of its fulfilment of its obligations under the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights. The head of the human rights committee had directly expressed the opinion that Australia had in the past been in contravention of the declaration with respect to its treatment of Aboriginal Peoples and urged the country to do more to repair the damage that had been done. These were statements which caused real controversy in Australia. The problem is that in isolation the principle is easy to view, but after so long, the practice is another matter. Sometimes, restoring Aboriginal land rights means moving existing users from somewhere they have worked for generations. Whilst there is financial compensation this cannot fully make up for the loss of a home and way of life even though this will be far less traumatic than the displacement of the first occupants all those years ago. Adjustments are hard to make and can never satisfy everyone. All credit must be given to what has been achieved and all hope must be for the most equitable and successful outcome for the issues still to be resolved. The sad fact is that the question of land and other rights should never have been allowed to reach the point it did. Partly, this is of course looking back with modern ideas and concepts, thinking that they should have applied to a period in the past. This is an easy thing to do but dangerous, attitudes evolve and arise from historical contexts. They are not total absolutes which remain fixed throughout all years. In the case of what happened to the Australian Aboriginal Peoples however, this is not what is being done. A report in 1837 by a
Photograph – Houses of Parliament, Westminster, London
Engraving – Parliament in session, House of Commons c.1800
House of Commons Select Committee of the British Government on Aborigines (clearly there was already a real recognition that there was an issue) contains a quote which shows that most of the modern day concerns now finally being addressed were just as real then. “If we are ever to make atonement to the remnant of this people, it will require no slight attention, and no ordinary sacrifices on our part to compensate for the evil association we have inflicted.” Such attitudes were never translated by the colonial administration into effective action on the ground, but the question had been raised and was already acknowledged and yet stood unanswered and not addressed for almost two hundred years.
Digital art – London c.1800
Digital art – Native Australian resistance c.1800
The issue of globalisation has to be given more than a simplistic reflex response. Globalisation itself is an abstract concept and an inevitable one. Travel, communications, inventions and ideas cannot help but affect all areas as they develop and spread. The question is, affect how and the spread of what. Globalisation of human rights and cultural respect can only be for good. Globalisation of activity and opportunity can also have much to offer, providing it is equal opportunity and is not built on exploitation. Justice for all is an ideal that globalisation must try and embody. Globalisation that benefits a few at the expense of the majority and may even threaten the future of the environment for all cannot be allowed or justified. That is the model of globalisation that lay behind the events of 1802 and the years that followed. It must have been possible to learn something in two hundred years. Many who use the term ‘globalisation’ as an issue for complaint today are thinking it is a shame when they see identical fast food restaurants in the western model streets of all the places they visit. Even if this is an issue, it simply cannot compare with seeing your whole world turned almost overnight into an open air prison and enclosed farming site with no access left for you, and the feelings that those events generate have to be magnified many times if you have had to watch the land you have been at one with and tried to respect fundamentally changed, often degraded and have its own future threatened.
Digital art
First published 2002, reproduced with minor changes 2025
Province Foundation Monument
Photograph – Province Foundation Monument, Adelaide
The Province Foundation Monument in Glenelg, Adelaide commemorates the establishment of South Australia. It brings into sharp relief how the same event can be experienced so differently according to who you are. The monument is capped by a sailing ship of the period. To the founders of South Australia these ships had brought progress, opportunity and adventure, they had given so much. To the Native Australians they represented loss, invasion and irreparable change, they had taken away so much. To the convicts that many carried perhaps for them the feelings were mixed. Immediate prospects were harsh but for some and their descendants, that did eventually change. Native Australians too have made successful lives for themselves into the modern era but for the Native Australian peoples, the arrival of colonisation was a hardship that was the greatest of all.
Photographs – Province Foundation Monument, Adelaide
“This story presents really well what happened in Australia through the invasion that took place, how this affected the land, its people and its animals who had all lived harmoniously together over centuries before the colonial arrival, respecting the balance of nature and the need to protect and preserve this. Without this balance, and an understanding of the need to care for all the living things from the smallest to the largest, the original people knew the consequences would be catastrophic for future generations. The new people fenced the animals and the people in, in a place where previously there had been no fences. Now, we have the national parks, which I am proud to be part of today, trying to reinstate the presence of the original peoples of the country, bring back some of their practices in managing the land which have such value today and in the process righting some of the wrongs of the past.
This article makes a really good case for the need to treat people and animals in the same way – with respect and care as we occupy the same space. This story makes me think of the dingo, a parallel story to what happened to the people – it was fenced out and shot. Now we need to make sure we are entering a new world where we all work together and can remove at least some of the barriers that were put in place such a long time ago.”
Don Rowlands OAM, Ranger in Charge Munga-Thirri National Park, Queensland, Australia, and Wangkangurru Elder
Digital art – Dingo, Canis lupus dingo
Photographs, digital art and text ©Nick Sidle, all rights reserved