Leviathan: The Unauthorised Biography of Sydney by John Birmingham

Author:John Birmingham [Birmingham, John]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: History, General, Social History
ISBN: 9781741666670
Google: nskr_GmoPDQC
Amazon: B00559RMYI
Publisher: Random House
Published: 1999-01-01T11:00:00+00:00

Mr Oakes, – You will inform the persons who sent you here with the warrant you have now shewn me, and given me a copy of, that I never will submit to the horrid tyranny that is attempted until I am forced; that I consider it with scorn and contempt, as I do the persons who have directed it to be executed.

For good measure Macarthur told the Oakes that if he came back, ‘to come well armed’ because he would not submit ‘till blood was shed’. He was fibbing, as it turned out. Atkins quickly, probably drunkenly, and no doubt gleefully, fired off another warrant and Macarthur was arrested and hauled before the magistrates a day later, without spilling a drop of his increasingly blue blood. The bench, which included George Johnston, committed him for trial in the next criminal court in January 1808.

John Macarthur celebrated Christmas 1807 by laying plans to counterattack on a number of fronts. The criminal court consisted almost entirely of officers from his former regiment, whom he knew he could rely on. Unfortunately the presiding judge was Richard Atkins, who could also be relied on, but not in a good way. Macarthur had to neutralise his old foe, rally the troops and somehow craft a defence with a semblance of credibility to a possible charge of high treason. Atkins was easily dealt with. The rum-sodden old joke had run up a mountain of bad debts in the colony, circulating worthless promissory notes and creating a legion of enemies besides Macarthur. One of these creditors sold Macarthur a fifteen year old note for £82, including interest, which Macarthur then took around to the judge’s house on Bridge Street. There, banging on the door and dancing around the garden, noisily but fruitlessly demanding satisfaction of this debt, he established grounds for challenging Atkins’s place on the bench due to his bias. (Of course everyone already knew Atkins was biased against him – this was a guy who had once said Macarthur was ‘a Toad in a Hole feeding on his own Poison’ and accused him of stalking around ‘like Sin and Death seeking whom he may devour’ – but it’s the form of these things that is important.)

Knowing only too well that the trial was to be as much a political struggle as a legal dispute, Macarthur tended to his allies as well his enemies. This meant not only the officers who were to sit in judgment on his case, but also the members of the mercantile class who felt themselves hard done by under Bligh’s administration. The Governor made no secret of his preference for the small landholders; ‘plain sensible farming men’ he called them, ‘of moderate expectation’. Just as he made no secret of his disdain for the wealthy traders and merchants who sought unfair advantage over these landholders, telling Sir Joseph Banks that, given a chance, ‘those who consider themselves of the superior class’ would have made the modest settlers their vassals in no time.

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