The Shadows of the Gentlemen

Before Victoria there was Van Dieman’s Land. Tasmania’s colonial-era history is an essential precursor to Western District colonial history. Many squatters, investors and merchants who set up in the Port Phillip District originally arrived from Van Diemen’s Land, as did many of their workers and servants. “Vandemonians” of varied social backgrounds began arriving on the southern mainland of Australia from 1834 and this migration continued throughout the 1840s and into the early 1850s. In this narrative, the lives of three transported convict forebears were shaped by their time in Van Dieman’s Land.
James Lowndes was the first of Lionel’s forebears on his maternal side to arrive in Australia. James is Lionel’s great-great-grandfather on his maternal side. James did not come by choice. His convict transport ship, the “Commodore Hayes” reached Van Diemen’s Land, now known as Tasmania, in 1823 from England, more than two hundred years ago. He was a convicted felon, found guilty of theft. As part of his punishment, he was transported to Van Diemen’s Land. His journey was part of a larger human transmigration system, organised and regulated by the British government. The Crown deemed that James Lowndes should go to Van Dieman’s Land, and so he was sent.
James arrived in Tasmania as a prisoner during a time of intense conflict and dispossession. The mid-1820s marked some of the most violent years of frontier conflict. The colony was under the governance of George Arthur, the Lieutenant-Governor, who introduced several changes that made the already harsh conditions for convicts even more severe. As the chief representative of the Crown in Van Diemen’s Land, Lieutenant-Governor Arthur’s repressive measures significantly impacted the lives of the convicts he governed.
This was the time of the “Black War”. Lieutenant Governor George Arthur declared martial law in 1828, which gave a much freer rein to settlers in the war on First Nations peoples. Martial Law was in effect for three years. It is important to acknowledge that Tasmania’s First Nations never ceded sovereignty over their lands, though perhaps “sovereignty” is not the precise term. States and monarchs possess sovereignty. Aboriginal nations were distinct polities, but they were not states in the conventional sense. There were no kings in Australia; the concept of sovereign statehood was introduced by the British.
The first peoples of Tasmania had virtually everything taken from them, and while the harsh colonial treatment of convicts should not be denied, the injustice that befell Australia’s First Nations peoples in colonial times was of a different order. There is a direct line from what happened to First Nations people in Tasmania to the violence which subsequently unfolded in the Western District and which then spread to other parts of Australia. For any retrospective investigation into this tragedy, it is important to focus on “The Gentlemen in the Country,” the agents of the British state.
The term “The Gentlemen in the Country” is derived from a quote by Commissioner of Crown Lands, Captain Foster Fyans, in his correspondence from September 1840. Fyans was writing to Superintendent Charles La Trobe, who had recently been appointed as the Superintendent of the Port Phillip District in 1839. Captain Fyans had held the position of Police Magistrate for Geelong since 1837, overseeing a vast area including the Western District from Geelong to Portland. In early 1840, he was appointed Commissioner of Crown Lands for the Portland Bay District.
The British law and order regime on the frontiers of the Western District is revealed in Fyans’ correspondence with La Trobe. Fyans was using the term “The Gentlemen in the Country” with reference to the squatters. When referring to the investigation and capture of Aboriginal men for trial, Fyans wrote: “It is a difficult thing to apprehend natives, with great risk of life on both sides. On the Grange, and many parts of the country, it would be impossible to take them; and in my opinion, the only plan to bring them to a fit and proper state is to insist on the gentlemen in the country to protect their property, and to deal with such useless savages on the spot.”
We should consider the extent to which Captain Fyans was advocating for pastoralists to take the lives of First Nations people. At the very least, Fyans’ comments are an admission of warfare in parts of the Western District. One of the characteristics of a state is that it has a monopoly on the use of legitimized violence within the territory over which it claims sovereignty. Foster Fyans, the Commissioner of Crown Lands, was in effect the chief security official of the Crown in the Western District. He was suggesting to Charles La Trobe, the chief administrator of the British government in Port Phillip, that squatters should employ violence against those of the Indigenous population that resisted British colonial rule, or, as he puts it, “to deal with such useless savages on the spot”. This correspondence supports the view that during the early colonial period, at the time of the killings, squatters were seen by senior officials in the Port Phillip District as being the agents of the Crown, in the context of a war against First Nations people. Like most genocides in the modern period, genocide where it occurred in Australia was largely a state sponsored affair.
The line between state officials and squatters was at times quite blurred. Many officials were also squatters, and many squatters were designated as magistrates in their local districts. Fyans himself was also a squatter. In 1838 he issued his squatting license to himself, effectively. Prominent squatters were perceived as gentlemen, a status that set them apart from the majority of other Europeans in the colony, who were primarily considered part of the lower orders. These lower orders comprised the bulk of the servants and laborers of the Western District, including former convicts and assisted immigrants from Britain and Ireland.
To ensure the success of pastoralism, British gentlemen needed to deploy capital and to ensure that a compliant subaltern workforce was available. The term “subaltern” refers to social groups who are outside the dominant power structures of both the colony and the colonial homeland. Functionally and structurally, this group forms an underclass. Additionally, large expanses of land were essential for pastoralists and broad-acre agriculturalists. A market for tradeable commodities was necessary to meet the demands of the British state and its corporations. Building on experience gained in Van Dieman’s Land and New South Wales, innovative solutions were found in the Western District, allowing the system of squatter pastoralism to flourish.
Centered on pastoralism, the colonization process led to the dispossession of First Nations people in numerous districts of Australia. In several places the impact of this was genocidal, including in the Southwest of Victoria. In looking through the archive, it seems the colonial authorities in Australia quickly concluded that Indigenous dispossession was part and parcel of pastoral expansion. A challenge for Australian colonial governments revolved around how best to frame local policies in ways that might align them with the emerging humanitarian trends in British politics that increasingly placed a priority on the need for humane management and protection programs with respect to Aboriginal people. The political and social pressure for such policies seems to have been greater in Britian than in Australia. At least in some influential British circles, there was some disquiet when confronted with news of the cavalier treatment meted out to Indigenous people in Australia.
Servants are in a unique position to observe. They see what happens, but their social position renders them largely invisible to the decision makers, except perhaps for those occasions when things go wrong. Masters hold the discretion to determine the truth when servants speak. Often it is convenient for the masters to discount the testimony of servants, or to simply spin it to their own advantage. During Australia’s early settlement, members of the underclass, the people who did the manual work for the gentry, were not regarded as worthy representatives of the British state. This status was generally reserved for British gentlemen. A former convict might pass for a gentleman in time, but such instances of upward class acceptance were the exception. Members of the upper class tended to divide over the degree to which emancipists could be accepted in their society.
It is because James Lowndes and his wife Ann Higgins were convicts that we should perhaps acknowledge the traumatic impact of colonialism. Obviously, this is evident for First Nations people. But trauma also had an impact on the European men and women transported to Van Diemen’s Land. The extent to which trauma persists in families down the generations is an intriguing and unresolved question. However, the legacy of intergenerational trauma due to colonization is evident in the family stories of Lionel and Patricia.