Introduction
In the nineteenth century, rural New South Wales was occupied by squatters who had negotiated or fought their way into the continent, setting up tracts of land referred to as ‘runs’. They were joined in the 1850s by rural workers, lured to the area by the promise of gold.Footnote 1 Squatters also employed Aboriginal people who inhabited their own geopolitical space consisting of linked sites of significance that were maintained by ceremony, in overlapping areas of ‘country’ connected by trade routes.Footnote 2
Descriptions made by poorer non-Aboriginal people of the spaces they lived in are rare but this gap in information can be overcome by examining the words used in criminal depositions. These are words uttered without thinking, descriptions of the everyday.Footnote 3 They allow us to access directly the spatial occupation of rural New South Wales in the mid-nineteenth century, and constitute a language of colonisation brought into being by the ‘flocks’ of non-Aboriginal people travelling their way along Aboriginal trade routes,Footnote 4 the men and women hulking goods and muttering, with faces ‘like orange peel’.Footnote 5
The records discussed in this article come from the Supreme Court of Criminal Jurisdiction for Armidale, Tamworth, Wee Waa and the Namoi River, and Grafton and the Shoalhaven River. Murrurundi Bench records, the Wee Waa Letter Books and the Western District Letter Book have also been consulted. There are 123 cases from the Supreme Court, comprising all those that were heard from these areas in the 1850s. Depositions consist of pages of evidence given by witnesses and answered by defendants. The lowest number of witnesses in a case was three and the highest was twelve, which means that it is possible to analyse the words of many more people than the number of actual cases. The Bench records for Murrurundi consist of six hundred separate and diverse documents; the letters from the Benches are bound and numbered and concern policing issues in the local area.
The work offered by squatters was casual in nature. A worker contracted for a certain amount of time and to leave before that time was completed was to abscond. Squatters had stores that provided goods for their employees, ‘a pair of boots’, ‘1/4 lb negrohead tobacco’, for example.Footnote 6 At the end of the time contracted for, the money spent at the store would be deducted from the wages owed and the employee would either be kept on or begin looking for work elsewhere.Footnote 7 Gold fields provided some respite from this system, though most people involved in exploiting the Rocky River Goldfield were employees contracted in the town of Sydney.Footnote 8 Piecework was also available but this was generally undertaken by Aboriginal people work. Sheep washing and shearing were seasonal. Boiling down works, where cattle or sheep were rendered down for their tallow, were independently owned and not part of runs, and so formed a separate group of employers, and there were also a number of rural contractors who would engage people for work. In 1856 the publican McCrossin employed a gold digger to strip bark, for example.Footnote 9 As Duncan Waterson has shown, rural New South Wales was a place of movement, with groups of people or individuals travelling for work or, in the case of Aboriginal people, travelling for ceremony or fights.Footnote 10
A great deal of our understanding of rural New South Wales has come from literature and song and from a cultural history derived from the memoirs of the wealthier squatting class. The word ‘flash’, for instance, was not used by ordinary working people in depositions in this period but rather by squatter employers who disliked the look of some of their servants.Footnote 11 From this group it found its way into police records and the New South Wales Police Gazette; and from there, perhaps, through poetry and song, back to the language of the rural Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal people of the early twentieth century.Footnote 12
There is rural New South Wales as imagined, and this contrasts with rural New South Wales as lived. Lived space, as theorised by Henri Lefebvre, is space that ‘overlays physical space, making symbolic use of its objects … it is essentially qualitative, fluid and dynamic’.Footnote 13 When people described their lived space in depositions they emphasised, for example, what they understand the implications of the word ‘house’ to be. But imagined space, in literature and song, may influence lived space. Yuri Lotman, in his description of the lived space of the literary salons of St Petersburg, thus writes of the ‘imagined space’ that those frequenting them invented a notion of the city as surreal and haunted. St Petersburg became associated with the supernatural ‘a place of unusual occurrences, a special kind of urban folklore’.Footnote 14 The history of rural New South Wales is similar, in the sense that stories told about the bush and mateship came in time to dominate the way non-Aboriginal people saw themselves. Court records of the mid-nineteenth century do not entirely negate the imaginative history of rural New South Wales, but they do make it more complex.
Australian historians have emphasised the ‘bush’ and bush culture, using essentially published records, reminiscences, song and poetry. Russel Ward argued that from convict times the new Australian conditions and the ‘bush’ began to be dominated by ‘mateship’ and a collective work ethic.Footnote 15 For Graeme Davidson this entity was a figment of an urban imagination: writers of the Bulletin newspaper created the bush as a reaction against the squalor of the city.Footnote 16 In pursuit of the realities of rural Australia, Richard Waterhouse, considering the whole of the nineteenth century, discovered three primary sets of rural values: one relating to entrepreneurship, which was open to all; a reluctant self-sufficiency or subsistence, with aspiration to entrepreneurship; and a third centring on opposition to authority.Footnote 17 He also identified representations of the bush and these were far wider than those presented in the Bulletin. What was valued, according to Waterhouse, was freedom from public servants, the police and landlords.Footnote 18 Masculinity was investigated by both Angela Woollocott and Robert Hogg – for them, the rural man was captive to a violent masculinity, an imperial man who saw violence as a component of his rural ventures.Footnote 19 In contrast to these approaches, this article explores the language used by rural people themselves and discusses the kind of self that emerges from that language. It derives inspiration from the historical socio-linguistic work of Arja Nurmi, Minna Palander Collin and Minna Devala, analysing word use in historical records. All deal with communicative interaction and social norms. They analyse, for example, how terms of address and lapses into informality in letters or journals can illuminate the character of interpersonal relationships in the eighteenth century.Footnote 20 This article adopts similar approaches but is concerned with words related to objects and spatial relations in mid-nineteenth-century rural New South Wales. How these words were used gives some indication of the way a colonising people felt about themselves and their surroundings.
Arjun Appadurai argues that in all societies commodities travel through ‘regimes of value’ and have their own social life. In societies at war, under stress or undergoing rapid change particular objects become charged with symbolic meanings, and are thus transformed.Footnote 21 An understanding that commodities become charged with meaning suggests that close analysis of the way objects are inadvertently referred to gives us some insight into the sensitivities of the society under study. Rural New South Wales was under the stress of the occupation of Aboriginal country and the conditions created by that violence. It was also a place of significant surveillance of individuals, either by police or informers.
Court records show how conditions of work, and the surveillance structure originating in the convict system, resulted in significant play with names, both those given to and those used by individual and used on the identification brands on horses and cattle. Rural New South Wales was inhabited by men with nicknames, some with notoriety attached. The culture was one of continual movement between workplaces and goldfields. Stopping places were public houses and their surroundings. While money was kept close to the body protection against theft was not a major concern in public houses and, indeed, a kind of laxness and easiness seems to have dominated those places, aided perhaps by illiteracy. The lack of care in public houses is in stark contrast to the situation in early colonial Sydney, where the society was more focused on cash: the comparison puts the rural public house into a dreamlike realm, a world of intoxication and entertainment. For workers it seems to have existed almost outside the economic system. Aboriginal people traversed these same reference points but their own politics were reflected in them, and their camps were both a place of entertainment and one of considerable danger. For non-Aboriginal people the ‘ownership’ of a ‘bedroom’ as a separate part of the hut or house was important, stressing the emergence of highly individualised spaces. While groups of men seem dominant, links between them were impersonal rather than close: the word ‘friend’ is not to be found in the court documents, while the word ‘mate’ was a working term.
This society emerged from the global convict system, the carceral network with its surveillance and its attention to markings and markers.Footnote 22 It might be said to be a product of the reach of that system, of its uncertain edges, and was in turn productive of a particular kind of personhood.Footnote 23 The self that was produced in rural New South Wales was pleasure-oriented, insular and close watching. Rural workers, men and women, were not as grasping as their Sydney predecessors; they were hedonistic almost, without much concern for money once they got to a public house. There is something outside economic relations that creates this state of being, one that rejects the entire system, engendering a refusal to be a cog in that system and to be worked by it.
Names
Names give identity and one can be tracked and traced through a birth name. The Murrurundi Bench records give an indication of the net of policing and recording related to the convict system in the 1840s. This was then extended, initially to embrace ticket of leave or ‘passport’ holders and then absconding bonded servants. Magistrates corresponded with each other to provide detailed descriptions of individuals, including their names, hair and eye colour and distinguishing marks, so that people could be tracked across New South Wales. Bernard Healy of Blandford was sought in 1861 because he was ‘seven months away from his wife, a labourer, went up country on a station above Tamworth, Nobby Station’. He was described as being:
Aged 34
5’10 or 11
Stout
Light brown hair
Beard
Irishman
Powder marks on his hands and face
Vision good.Footnote 24
From 1862 the New South Wales Police Gazette provided lists of named absconding servants. Even in the 1880s there is a reference to ‘suspicious characters’ around Murrurundi: Jack Burley, alias Monks, whose ‘beard sticks straight out from the bottom of his chin, not down, and he has a habit of turning away from people when speaking’,Footnote 25 while in 1899 a Mrs Carter, of Quirindi, was able to trace her wayward husband (though he had committed no offence) through three districts by way of a letter to the Inspector of Police.Footnote 26 There was also a system of informing, to avoid debt or conduct revenge, which could easily ensnare a man trying to hide. In 1844 John Coglan, Ticket of Leave, saw ‘a man lying on a bed’ in the hut of James McDonough. His feigned surprise was contradicted by his statement, ‘I have heard that McDonough has been in the habit of harbouring Daly.’Footnote 27 At Wee Waa the constables assured the magistrates that Henry Romaine was well known throughout the Namoi.Footnote 28
Such a system of surveillance may have been the origin of the enormously widespread use of nicknames in rural Australia and the offhanded and repeated use of them by people giving evidence in court. When a camp of Bigambul Aboriginal people was attacked at night by a group of horsemen in 1848 the victims knew their attackers – ‘Scotchie, alias Alexander McLean, Bill Jones, alias Monday, Jack Reardon, alias Jack the Headman, Slerbie stockman at Chapman and Welshes station and James Mark of Goodar stockholder.’ Despite this detail the Aboriginal informants gave to Richard Bligh, his report of the incident stated that the attackers were ‘persons unknown’.Footnote 29
Three of these men had nicknames and that is how they would usually have been referred to. Status made no difference: the wealthy Reardon and McLean were similar to William Ogilvie, alias ‘Billy the Bull’ on the Clarence.Footnote 30 Nicknames appear frequently in court records. Examples include: The Gentleman Sawyer, Lanky, Bristol Bill, Bothered Jemmy, Nottingham Jack (Murrurundi); The Gambler, Jimmy the Jockey (Wee Waa); Pitt Town Tommy, The Gardener, Dubbo, Black Harry (an ex-convict from Barbados) (Namoi); The Soldier, Spring-Heeled Jack, Jack the Whip, Wee Waa Robby, Jack from Ireland (Tamworth); Scotchy (Armidale); and Scotchie (a different man, Gunnedah).
Such names were applied only to men, both defendants and witnesses. Women, in contrast, were referred to by their birth names. Men’s names were hidden behind nicknames, yet this does not mean the nickname was not widely known. Nicknames could represent claims to notoriety as well as a way of resisting being traced in the records. None of these nicknames are derogatory; some relate the individual to place, some to appearance, and some to proclivities. They are evidence of a particular kind of levelling masculinity.Footnote 31 But not all men had nicknames, so there are hierarchies involved.
Aboriginal people also attained nicknames, evidence of their close working relationships with non-Aboriginal people. Mickey the Priest, an Aboriginal man from northern New South Wales, was a carter at Wee Waa who appears in the diary of the clerk of the court when his cart was burnt.Footnote 32 There were also men with no names, ‘strange men who had come to collect cattle’,Footnote 33 ‘a little man with a red face’, and ‘a man with a rough voice’.Footnote 34
Identification
As well as being subject to state identification and tracing, ordinary people spent considerable time marking the horses and cattle they owned and being aware of the markings used by other owners. Cattle would go missing and months or years later would appear as someone else’s possession through clever manipulation of the brand. Horses also would be seen years after they went missing, were lost, or ran away. People were particularly aware of other’s horses, which were usually referred to as ‘he’ or ‘she’. The issue of disputed possession appears again and again in the court records and thieves are often described as living in specific colonies. ‘Bands of thieves’ lived on the Page River undertaking a ‘contraband trade’. It was hard to ‘criminate’ them.Footnote 35
Despite the brands, cleverly cut out in butchering or altered, the issue of possession was often an indeterminate one. Who was to say that you had not bought the horse or cow in good faith, and that your changes to the brand were legitimate? This defence was extraordinarily difficult to answer if you possessed a receipt you could not read. Informers were required, and so the surveillance around names also incorporated an informal surveillance of possessions. This identification of brands and informing was also undertaken by Aboriginal people.Footnote 36
Stephen Roberts, writing of the 1830s and 1840s, noted that the charge of cattle theft was used by wealthy squatters against their poorer competitors. Cases were manufactured and heard by wealthy squatters.Footnote 37 Such falsification may explain much about the relationship of rural people to the courts but it also produced a culture of marks and marking which endures to this day. The complexity of rural policing is clearly illustrated by the case of John Williams, who was arrested for cattle theft in 1846.
On April 7 last I reported to the Bench that several articles of stolen property had been taken from the court house by the Chief Constable and some of the appropriated to his own use particularly a Mouselle de Laise dress the receiving of which knowing it to be stolen one Ann White is now under committal, but admitted to bail, since that time he [the Chief Constable] has with the assistance of Mc Connachy continually laying frivolous charges against me.Footnote 38
Similar complaints occurred in the 1880s, when a farmer named Juchan was charged with burning down a barn of one of his neighbours. He in turn prosecuted all of the constables involved in the case and extensive efforts were made to establish a defence. The questions that Juchan asked the constables included:
Did you not want me and Billy Moffatt to take one of your sheep to Phillip’s place, kill it and leave the carcass and skin there and you would go for the Cassilis police and bring them over at daylight and have Phillip’s arrested?
Did you not succession me and ask me to give false evidence in the case of horse stealing against Sam Asquith?Footnote 39
Markings demonstrating cattle and horse ownership formed an important part of rural space; animals were closely scrutinised for their brands and for any alteration made to them. Identification, then, was a key component of the occupation of the landscape. No animal or person wandered without being noticed. In part, surveillance arose from circumstance. Rural New South Wales was a space of considerable mobility because all rural work was casual – employees were signed for a particular amount of time and either resigned or let go, or they ‘bolted’ and went to the ‘diggins’.Footnote 40 But the attention given to markings on person or animal derived from the listings and notifications of the convict system. Conversely, the use of nicknames emerged from the desire of people to evade policing based on such markers.
Public houses
The courts repeatedly push us to public houses because these places were overwhelmingly where, throughout the period, criminal cases emerged. It is as if law only existed in the zone around them. Here we find the constables sitting and drinking, as if they were always present, though their services may have been called in later to support a complaint. Stories cross and recross one another, jarring and clearly concocted, but through these stories we can gain some information about what the space in and around public houses looked and felt like.
Publican’s licences show the extensiveness of a public house. At Murrurundi The White Swan proprietor Mildred Ellis, gentlewoman, had five sitting rooms and thirteen bedrooms in 1844.Footnote 41 The Red Cow at Murrurundi had two sitting rooms and five bedrooms in 1858.Footnote 42 The Squatter’s Arms at Murrurundi had four sitting rooms and ten bedrooms in 1858.Footnote 43 A public house in the Petwyn Valley, The Highland Home, had five sitting rooms and five bedrooms.Footnote 44 Angus McLachlan at Kingdon Ponds Creek built a public house, The Burning Mountain Inn, in 1859 with four sitting rooms and six bedrooms.Footnote 45 The small interconnected rooms may mean that public houses mimicked dwelling houses or were derived from them. The ratio of ‘sitting rooms’ to ‘bedrooms’ was quite high, indicating that ‘entertainment’ was of equal priority to accommodation in running the business.
Though the names of public houses were included in applications for licensing they were not generally spoken by their ordinary users. Rather, the surname of the publican identified the public house – ‘Wrightman’s’ or ‘Mr Wrightman’s’ at Murrurundi, ‘McKay’s’ at Murrurundi, ‘McFarlane’s’ on the Namoi, ‘Mr Stitt’s’ at Carlisle Gulley, for example. Wrightman also referred to his public house as ‘my house’, indicating the blurred line between licensed and unlicensed premises. Public houses could engender particular cultures. The Wee Waa Bench were informed in 1856:
The present dividing line between Tamworth and Wee Waa Police districts on the east is formed by the Narraby Creek 27 miles distant from Wee Waa and 130 miles from Tamworth. Within 12 miles on the farther side of this boundary and consequently under the jurisdiction of the Tamworth Bench of magistrates is a public house much frequented and quite beyond the observation of the Constabulary of that district, there is also a number of private residents to whom the distance of the Tamworth Court is felt to be inconvenient. Were this locality brought within the Police District of Wee Waa a considerable loss of time would be saved and a great deal of crime prevented which is now committed with impunity.Footnote 46
The lacunae identified here reveals something of the structure of policing in rural New South Wales; the public house discussed was out of reach and Tamworth court was too far away for proper surveillance, and was represented by the constable as lying effectively outside the policing system.
Depositions give some idea of how the interiors of public houses looked. In 1842 Mrs Burrow’s at Murrurundi had a ‘passage’ and a front door that locked, a ‘room’ in which she could have a ‘free and easy’.Footnote 47 Lewis Cohen at Murrurundi was fined five pounds in 1849 because he did not have the lamp ‘above the door of his public house alight, lit with gas or oil’.Footnote 48 Wrightman’s at Murrurundi had a veranda which one stood ‘under’.Footnote 49 At McCrossin’s in Armidale one went ‘in the veranda’; the Innkeeper at McFarlane’s on the Namoi was ‘walking in the veranda’; while William Stitt, publican at Carlisle Gully, ‘went on to’ his veranda.Footnote 50 Henry O’Neill in 1854 described a ‘paling’ [fence], a garden, a parlour where he cashed a cheque, a writing desk in ‘the bar’ and a room ‘immediately adjoining the bar with three persons in it’.Footnote 51 McFarlane’s on the Namoi had a ‘small parlour’ and ‘a bedroom adjoining’.Footnote 52 The Sea Horse at Boydtown on the south coast in 1851 was in ‘an enclosure’ and had a sitting room with a room opening out of it in which there was a bed. It was on sandy ground and several Aboriginal men and women lived in ‘an old hut’ nearby.Footnote 53 At McCrossin’s in Armidale in 1853 men who stayed slept in ‘an outhouse’.Footnote 54 Mr Cox’s at Murrurundi in 1846 had a kitchen with a table and a ‘kitchen rack’ containing crockery.Footnote 55 McCrossin’s at Armidale had a ‘tap’ room where he spent all his time and a ‘parlour’. A ‘tap room’ also appears in Murrurundi at Carlisle Gully and at Gunnedah in The Union Jack in 1860, where it contained a single table.Footnote 56 Richard Hobbett, who was cook at Cox’s Inn at Tamworth in 1855 (run by two brothers named Cock), had a bedroom attached to the kitchen that he shared with his wife, which contained a ‘Form’ or bench. Cox’s also had a ‘water closet’. By 1856 this kitchen was described as having a ‘dresser’ and a kitchen table. There was a ‘back apartment’ with a lodger and the cook was now a Chinese man, Samuel Haulk.Footnote 57 At Mrs Hustler’s at Kiama in 1859, the servant, Harriet Kent, slept ‘in one of the veranda rooms’ with Elizabeth Hustler, aged seven, but not, she was clear, ‘in the same bed’. She also evidently had a light, the records describing how she ‘put it out’.Footnote 58 The beds were described as ‘two stretchers’. The door opened onto the veranda and ‘there was no fastening to the door’, so she ‘put a box against it to keep it shut’.Footnote 59 McFarlane’s on the Namoi had a ‘candlestick’ in the taproom.Footnote 60
When Elizabeth Hustler went to get her stepfather she did so by ‘knocking on the window’, indicating that the house was locked after closing. References to locking appear in other cases not involving theft. A woman called to Mr Stitt ‘not to fasten the door’ at Carlisle Gully in 1854, and there are references to publicans ‘closing the bar’ and refusing to serve any more drink.Footnote 61 What is notable is the interchange of ‘Mr’ and ‘Mrs’ as descriptors of ownership in most of these public houses, a continuation of a very early practice in the colony where ‘wives’ would run public houses while their husbands worked elsewhere.Footnote 62
Use of rooms in public houses seems unrestricted, with people walking in and out of all of the sitting rooms, though not the bedrooms. Two Border Police were ‘lying on the kitchen floor in their uniform, drunk’ at Mr Cox’s in Murrurundi in 1845.Footnote 63 McFarlane’s Inn on the Namoi had a kitchen that was described as ‘quiet’, although anyone could walk in and out of it.Footnote 64 Lying drunk on a ‘sofa’ in the ‘taproom’ seems to have been a common custom in public houses and this is possibly explained by the use of the words ‘sopha bed’ in a house in 1858.Footnote 65 Emily Sheerhan was sitting ‘on a cask head’ in Stitt’s taproom.Footnote 66 A woman used a ‘bedroom adjoining the kitchen’ at Cox’s public house at Tamworth for the purposes of seducing a man and, it seems, paid a nugget of gold to its inhabitant.Footnote 67 This naming of rooms as ‘bedrooms’ is an indication of the development of particular spaces devoted only to sleeping and the delineation of such separate usage emphasises the emergence of personal spaces in public houses which, as we shall see, was reflected in other dwellings.
The court records throw much light on contemporary etiquette. David Todd of the Border Police was at Wrightson’s Inn in Murrurundi and asked Samuel Ellis, bricklayer, ‘whose glass of brandy was that’, receiving the reply ‘that is mine, I paid for it’. This caused great offence to Todd, who threatened to put Ellis ‘in Limbo’ before the next morning, and to put stolen cattle and horses in his yard. When questioned by Todd in court Ellis stated
I never drank out of your glass previous to you threatening me but sometime afterwards when the prisoner asked me in order to pacify him I did taste his glass.Footnote 68
This is a reference to a much earlier practice in Sydney, where quart pots were shared and people drank out of each other’s glasses.Footnote 69 Todd referred to an earlier civility and how he had been annoyed when Ellis did not reciprocate.
Public houses did not exclude Aboriginal people. Roger, an Aboriginal man, drank at The Rock Inn in 1858 with his employer, Harold Chennier, a drayman; his ‘spears and boomerangs’ were on Chennier’s dray. The Aboriginal Baan Ba Billy had been there earlier.Footnote 70 Billy Cuppy brought three Aboriginal men and ‘their women’ to the kitchen of Mr Munroe’s public house at the Broadwater, Namoi River, in 1855 where they ‘all talked together in their own language’. This preceded a tribal punishment and the perpetrators continually expected other Aboriginal people to come to defend the victim, Peter, who was killed on the kitchen floor.Footnote 71 This public house was part of Aboriginal politics, just as squatters, in lending guns, giving gifts of knives and allowing time for fighting, participated in the Aboriginal political landscape.Footnote 72
Publicans were very exact about the kind of alcohol they had served their customers. When a man and woman decided to stay the night at McCrossin’s he brought them ‘a bottle of wine’ and later he gave the man ‘a glass of brandy’.Footnote 73 A woman called for ‘two glasses of wine’ and later ‘a glass of rum’, subsequently requesting a ‘half pint of spirits’ which she took to her dray at Stitt’s in Carlisle Gully.Footnote 74 This was all reckoned at the end of the stay. David Grover of The Rock Inn on the Namoi related how Thomas Mercer, alias Cox,
Came to my house about 12 noon on Saturday and got refreshment, after dinner he had some grog and then some things out of the store and then asked what he had to pay.Footnote 75
Given such arrangements, publicans had an interest in customers drinking as much as possible, and perhaps asking for a room to sleep in. That many did drink excessively and exchanged their clothes, their horses and other property to pay their debt is clear. Publicans also ‘held money’ for patrons of a public house and gave it out when requested. This form of business, known as ‘knocking down’, has been discussed by Duncan Waterson, who has shown that it operated throughout the nineteenth century.Footnote 76 Mark Gray stated in 1858 that he ‘had been drinking for three weeks at Weston’s Public House in the District of Bligh’.Footnote 77 Such hedonism may have been encouraged by the existence of the squatter’s store, which (as noted) billed against earnings without wages being entirely handed over. Money was of secondary importance. Yet money was also hidden close to the body, tightly held until the public house was reached. There it could be handed over and the entertainment could begin.
Public houses, particularly on the Rocky River Goldfields, were reported in newspapers as being the centre of the emergent democratic politics of the period, and meetings held in them were enthusiastically attended. Publicans were at the forefront of such politics.Footnote 78 The emotional connection between publican and customer in the management of money, apparent in the depositions, shaped such a politics. The publican thus had a considerable amount of economic power, because of the way money was managed, but he also had social power, deriving from the trust placed in him by rural people.
‘Entertainment’ was what occurred in public houses. This seems to refer to the simple act of being there, rather than any organised performances on offer. People made their own amusements: a woman ‘drinking and singing’ in Stitts; a man gambling at Mc Crossin’s, betting on his horse. At Moran’s on the Rocky River George Kallenerg made a bet ‘with a man named Mick’ about putting a candle in his mouth ‘somebody pushed his hand’.Footnote 79 Kenneth Mattheison ‘tossed for cakes’ in Allingham’s public house in Armidale.Footnote 80
Publicans do not mention the kind of food they served and it is rare to find any deponent talking of food but the terms ‘dinner’ for a meal in the middle of the day and ‘supper’ for one taken in the evening, are frequently used in relation to public houses. James Polley ordered ‘supper for five’ at Stitt’s.Footnote 81 In one case where food is mentioned Samuel Ellis, bricklayer, was sitting at a table in a public house eating ‘breaded meat’ when David Todd of the Border Police came into the room with a butcher’s knife.Footnote 82 There were always male ‘cooks’, so the wives who ran the public house did not do the cooking.
Men and women travelling in drays, led by bullocks, stopped and camped on land around public houses. They then slept under the dray or around a fire. Mr Stitt’s public house at Carlisle Gully had four drays loaded with wool camped nearby in June 1854.Footnote 83 A woman was asked ‘to have the kettle boiled’ by the man she travelled with in one of the drays, when he returned ‘the kettle was not boiled nor was there any sign of supper’.Footnote 84 While people may have camped near public houses they could evidently organise their own supplies of food, and sometimes drink: ‘several cases of gin’ were drank from Mr Dangar’s dray in 1855.Footnote 85
There are no references to hunger in depositions, suggesting that food was either in adequate supply, and too unimportant to mention, but what is clear is that everything provided by public houses had to be paid for – all food, all drink, all sleeping spaces. An injured man was even sold the Holloway’s ointment he required at The Golden Fleece on the Namoi in 1853.Footnote 86 That locking and locks were so often mentioned in cases where such a reference had no importance (as opposed to the situation with respect to theft cases, for example, in which a house locked meant a steeper sentence) means that people were indeed locked out of public houses at night unless the publican decided to stay open for a ‘free and easy’.
Huts or ‘houses’
On squatting runs workers gathered together in a small group of huts, from which they left every day to work. A ‘hut keeper’ stayed to cook and look after the huts. These huts contained men, women and children. In the small towns of rural New South Wales huts straggled along the roadside near to a store or public house and ‘towns’ were formed.Footnote 87 Single individuals might own groups of such dwellings. ‘Redmond’s cottages’ in Armidale on Beardy Street in 1859 were owned by Michael Redmond of Jessie Street, a ‘lodging house keeper’; Elizabeth Riley occupied an ‘apartment’ in one of them.Footnote 88
Throughout the period these dwellings were referred to by the people who dwelled in them as ‘house’ as well as ‘hut’, the two terms not, apparently, reflecting any physical differences. The rural labourer could not own his ‘hut’, yet he acted as if he did. The houses were clearly and distinctly divided internally. A ‘bedroom’ we find is simply a ‘skilling’ or attached room on the back of the hut.Footnote 89 George Gordon described his hut as ‘my own house’ in which he had ‘my own room’, in which he and another man slept. He had a ‘kettle’ in which he cooked; there was no centralised cooking area between the huts.Footnote 90 A person living nearby described this dwelling as ‘a hut’.Footnote 91 A hut at Gunnedah was referred to as ‘the Chinaman’s house’.Footnote 92 Joseph Sawyer’s horse was locked in the kitchen at the back of the hut; boards were fastened against the door.Footnote 93 The hut had a fireplace at which the cooking was done.Footnote 94 Accused persons sometimes say ‘my home’, even though the hut was not legally owned by them.Footnote 95 In Armidale, houses were locked at night and people had to request to come in.Footnote 96
The importance of the term ‘bedroom’ as one word, and its distinct usage to describe a place of sleeping within huts, is in contrast to the practice in early colonial Sydney, where, similarly, dwellings contained little actual living space. There, ‘Bed Room’ was two separate words and rooms so designated were also used for socialising.Footnote 97 In rural New South Wales, terms like ‘my’ bedroom and ‘the bedroom’ indicate the evolution of a particular space in which people slept, and there are no references to socialising occurring there. ‘Bedroom’ individualised space and the word ‘my’ was used even where the room was being shared. Bedrooms were also often described as ‘locked’.Footnote 98 This individualising of space is also apparent in the absence of communal cooking facilities – cooking was done in huts. The use of ‘house’ for hut indicates a strong sense of ownership, nominal though it may have been. When people came out of their house, they came out of a space linked in some way to their identity.
Tents at Hanging Rock Diggings had hammocks to sleep in, and in a tent at Rocky River a Chinese man kept his ‘carpet bag’.Footnote 99 Elizabeth Cooper lived in a ‘tent’ with her husband, a sawyer, on Baan Ba station in 1862.Footnote 100 ‘Watch boxes’ were small wooden buildings on wheels, designed to allow shepherds to watch sheep far from the main buildings of the run. The watch boxes appearing before the courts were quite close to the main house, not used for the purpose for which they had been built. Dee Young, a Chinese man, slept in a watch box not far from the kitchen at Goonoo Goonoo run in 1856. It contained blankets and all his possessions yet he slept with his money ‘in his pocket’.Footnote 101 A ‘watchman’ at Moor Creek slept in a watch box with a ‘curtain’. There were other watch boxes nearby.Footnote 102 At Old Maharatta station at Bombala, a watch box located quite close to a hut and was used by a woman ‘who laid down and read’ in it during the day.Footnote 103
It was in huts that we find reversion to older methods of conviviality, the drinking from quart pots, although the fact that such containers were mentioned suggests that the practice was frowned upon my others: ‘she would drink his grog and would drink it out of a tumbler or pint pot or anything she could get’, said Charles Drakefield in 1859 of a woman near Armidale.Footnote 104 A ‘glass full’ of ‘grog – the liquor was brandy’ was drunk out of a ‘cup’ at Wee-ta-wah in 1856. This cup was passed to another man to drink from.Footnote 105 At Wee-ta-wah also, men drank ‘grog’ out of a ‘saucer’ and passed it round.Footnote 106
It is important to note the numbers of men present around any hut during the day. Families were never alone – two or three men were always present, often many more.Footnote 107 In fact, the idea of physical isolation seems foreign to the people of Court depositions, not surprisingly given the density of the population. Rural New South Wales had a population far higher than Sydney in these years.Footnote 108
Those who travelled looking for work were put up at stations. Mark Gray ‘was allowed to sleep in a skillion of the kitchen’. He always, he said, ‘slept with an axe under his pillow’ because he was ‘in dread of fairies’.Footnote 109 People carried their own bedding and blankets with them. When Dee Young left his watch box to go down to the kitchen at Goonoo Goonoo, he made sure to take all of his blankets with him.Footnote 110 In a case from the 1860s, a ‘swag’ is mentioned, which contained blankets and clothing, boots, sugar, tea and soap, together with a ‘strip of handkerchief’ tied round the blankets.Footnote 111 Although one would expect language relating to furniture to be important in accounts, furniture in huts is sparsely mentioned. Francis Foot and his wife had a ‘table’ and ‘a looking glass’.Footnote 112
Language relating to huts does indicate a specific way of describing social life. ‘Directly after breakfast they made up their minds to rest for the remainder of the day’, said a publican of a group of rowdy drinkers in 1854.Footnote 113 Other meals were less specifically described. Amelia Webber was ‘cutting bread and butter’ in the ‘afternoon’.Footnote 114 George Gordon boiled eggs in his kettle over the fireplace in his hut in the ‘evening’ in 1856.Footnote 115 We find the word ‘breakfast’ being used to denote time, ‘before breakfast’ for example, as if there were a specific time to eat.Footnote 116 This is one of the few references to time at all in depositions of rural workers; ‘sundown’ is used once in the period, and the attention to the rhythm of the workday apparent in early colonial Sydney does not seem to have been present in rural New South Wales.Footnote 117 This was perhaps because of the kind of rural contract work undertaken, with its cheques at the end of a contract and its hiatus before more work was obtained. In part, however, an absence of references to a workday rhythm may be explained by the presence of watches. In 1850 Thomas Smith gave a watch to William Thomas in exchange for a horse, indicating an expensive item, while Alexander Mason, a servant, kept a watch in his ‘box’ in 1853, indicating they were locked away. It is striking that Thomas Hart, a shepherd, said in answer to a request ‘what time is it’ in a case from 1855: ‘I cannot tell you as I have left my watch at Salisbury.’ A shepherd was lowly paid, yet Hart possessed a watch and ‘the time’ was asked for by his assailant.Footnote 118 Graeme Davison has stressed the popularity of watches in this period.Footnote 119 If watches were widely used there was perhaps no need to describe the time in terms of the position of the sun, or by reference to meals, in everyday speech. The rural worker’s language did not emphasise the working day or the measurement of work time. Breakfast, in contrast, was important to mention as a marker of time, so we are directed away from work centred ways of seeing the world.
Diggings and Aboriginal camps
Like an oasis, the Rocky River Diggings near Armidale was a landscape of tents. It was also a place of what seems continuous entertainment. A ‘Circus’ was referred to in 1856, which went on all night until six in the morning. There was also a bowling alley and public houses, while opium to be obtained from the Chinese who had their own section of the diggings named ‘the Chinese tents’.Footnote 120 Obtaining opium was done socially, with a visit to a tent to which opium was bought and smoked and then card games were played. The Chinese tents – ‘Hong Kong Chinaman’s’ – were described as ‘big’, indicating they were larger than tents elsewhere. Gambling took place there all night. All of these activities cost money – opium was ‘a few shillings’.Footnote 121 Cash is mentioned on the goldfields more than elsewhere, together with silver dust and gold dust and the goldfields allowed a man to describe himself as a ‘gold digger’. Like public houses, the goldfields were places where liberality of spending combined with alcohol. Armidale in 1859, like Rocky River, had a circus that sold ‘seats’ on forms or benches. ‘Cakes’ and ‘glasses of liquor’ were obtained by ‘tickets for refreshments given out’. In the Circus a ‘play actor shot the dog’ – indicating that the ‘circus’ had elements of a theatre performance.Footnote 122
Another entertainment oasis may have been Aboriginal camps. John Campion paid ten shillings for rum at the ‘Black’s camp’ near Tamworth in 1853.Footnote 123 The Aboriginal camp was one mile from The Rock Inn or ‘Grover’s’ in 1858.Footnote 124 Aboriginal camps located close to squatter settlements appear throughout the records of the courts and they were places of considerable physical danger for Aboriginal people, even though many non-Aboriginal people gave evidence on their behalf. Camps were also to be found on stations, meaning usually that the squatters had set up next to an Aboriginal camp. Aboriginal people were as mobile as rural workers.Footnote 125 Draymen set up their overnight camps next to Aboriginal camps. At Nymbodia in 1857 an Aboriginal camp where drays stopped was shot into and one woman was killed – there was no enquiry held and the incident was only mentioned briefly as an aside in the inquiry into the murder of an Aboriginal servant, Peter.Footnote 126 His employer Peter Shea had demanded an inquiry into Peter’s death, as did Peter Eckford into the killing of Major Walker, his ‘servant’ on the Namoi in 1854. Kitty, an Aboriginal woman, had been severely wounded at the time of the attack on Major Walker and the Aboriginal camp, but there was no inquiry into her injuries.Footnote 127 At Armidale the shooting of an Aboriginal boy by two non-Aboriginal boys while playing with guns resulted in a murder charge that was petitioned against by the town’s wealthier people. The case had been instigated by two friends of the Aboriginal boy’s employer.Footnote 128 Without such non-Aboriginal intervention these cases would not have been heard and casual references to deaths indicates the danger that Aboriginal people lived in.
Aboriginal women were ‘wives’ to white men, or they were referred to as ‘his gin’ or ‘his gins’, meaning there was more than one woman involved; sometimes references to these women will appear suddenly in cases, as if their presence was deemed unnecessary to mention earlier it being so common.Footnote 129 Thomas Gardiner claimed he had an Aboriginal wife, Caroline, but he murdered her and hid her body in a creek under logs.Footnote 130 There were no questions raised over this admission.
Since sleeping Aboriginal camps were the focus of punitive raids by squatters and the Native Police as close to Sydney as Kempsey in the 1860s,Footnote 131 the landscape of rural New South Wales was one of potential violence. These raids rarely appear in criminal records, apart from that on the Bigambul in 1845. The case, which involved the killing of a woman called Bootha (a clan identification), casts light on both the tactics of raiding and the life of the camps. Everything in the camp was burned after the people scattered – this included ‘weapons’, ‘possum fur cloaks’ and ‘gifts’ obtained from the nearby household. Bootha was killed while running away; her face and body were ‘painted’, as if for ceremony.Footnote 132 Raids by squatters were described in their diaries and the language surrounding them was matter of fact. In the 1850s and 1860s camps were raided by squatters because of cattle or sheep theft or to stop ceremonies. The Native Police, whose commanders were military men until 1900, assisted in such actions.Footnote 133 The huge requisition of guns and horses from all rural landholders in the pursuit of the Aboriginal (or in government terms ‘half caste’) Governor brothers in 1900 was centred on the policing of Aboriginal camps, where it was certain the Governors would seek refuge.Footnote 134
The proximity of Aboriginal camps to towns and to houses meant such raids would be heard, but depositions show people sleeping through violent events or contradicting their first version of events or description of assailants. Key witnesses would not be called into Court or interviewed by police.Footnote 135 A ‘Mrs Lewis’ was present at the Aboriginal camp near the time of the raid when Major Walker was killed and was there the next day when he was buried, but she was never asked to give evidence.Footnote 136 Those who sought criminal cases for Aboriginal deaths had great difficulty in being heard, like Peter Shea who was carefully watched when the body of Peter was disinterred, or the Wee Waa magistrates who railed against the Namoi squatters.Footnote 137
Violence, surveillance and intimidation shaped the occupying society. Nicknames, false swearing, bolting, wandering and getting into debt also combined with an expectation of sudden night violence against Aboriginal people.
Money
If ownership of horses or cattle was difficult to prove for the defendant as well as the accuser then money in rural New South Wales was as complex. Court cases contain references to ‘silver’, ‘cheques’, and ‘notes’. How people related to money is often startling. When Michael Shultz bought a pair of blue blankets from ‘Scotchie’, he said ‘I gave him 5/- for them. I paid 4/6 on account of not having enough money.’Footnote 138 ‘Giving’ and ‘paid’ were thus distinguished. The complex relationship of exchange was described by a publican:
I gave you two gallons of rum and a bottle of wine and you gave me a cheque for three pounds six shillings and you gave me some cheese and you took away a piece but you started home with the keg. You came back to my place with your wife and child in the afternoon – you gave us some liquor, you asked for supper and you asked for a bed and you called for a glass of wine and I took a glass and drank health to you and your wife.Footnote 139
In these accounts it is not as if money is central, or the reckoning, as in early Sydney, but the giving and taking itself. The public house, which seems so commercialised in that everything is for money, has a layer of emotional transaction as well. Daniel McFarlane of The Golden Fleece on the Namoi refused rowdy men service on the basis that the cheque they presented, called an ‘order’ by McFarlane, ‘was not considered sterling money’.Footnote 140 This was a far older designation of money as ‘sterling’ or ‘currency’, but it did not seem to matter; there was no dispute over it. McFarlane was taken heed of.
What money exactly was is open to question. In 1855 a Roman Catholic clergyman cut a ten pound note in half and sent half of it to Sydney to pay a bootmaker, locking the other half in a drawer in a writing desk. The man who found it on the racecourse in Armidale and gave it to police was charged with robbery.Footnote 141 According to the Court and the constables, as well as the complainant, cutting the note did not invalidate it at all, nor was it reckoned at five pounds by the court.
Squatters paid in cheques and these in turn were traded. Catherine McKid of Barraba explained how the
Prisoner came to my store and purchased goods to the amount of four pounds for payment he presented a cheque for £11.10 drawn by Jno P Sercold, treasurer A.A. Co. on the Bank of Australasia Sydney, dated 3 November 1854 in favour of James G Thompson or bearer endorsed on the back J Thompson and Thomas Williams Tamworth. I took the cheque in payment and gave him in change six or seven pounds … I sent the cheque down immediately to Messrs D Cohen and Co of Maitland with other cheques and cash. It was returned for having been presented at the bank and pronounced a forgery.Footnote 142
Having cheques in your possession that you could not read was particularly dangerous. Constables were disinclined to look very far for forgers. Neil O’Donnell could not read and kept asking a publican if the cheque he presented was ‘all right’. The publican, Lewis Saloman, who was acting as agent to Phillip Cohen, said that he ‘took the cheque and told O’Donnell to come back for the change next morning’.Footnote 143 O’Donnell made no objection, went away and came back next morning. Accounts of publicans show that they were trusted then, perhaps because they spent so much time recounting exchange or because customers, who could not read, had no choice. Thomas Pauley cashed a cheque for a man in a public house he was drinking with and asked the publican, David Grover, of The Rock Inn what was written on it.Footnote 144 Money was a kind of open circuit and it mixed with intimacy. When William Murphy told a man he had ‘some conversation with’ that he had no money, the man Charles White said he had ‘a trifle of money with me and I would supply him with a little when I left the house’.Footnote 145 Such a sentiment would be unheard of in early colonial Sydney.
In colonial Sydney clothes easily took the place of money and they were exchanged in public houses through a system of cash reckoning that was closely and clearly laid out. There is some evidence of clothes being exchanged in this way in the public houses of rural New South Wales but more often they were used as identifiers. At McCrossin’s public house in Armidale in 1853, the publican, Samuel McCrossin, gave detailed description of the clothes of a man and woman who had come to his house: ‘he was dressed in a tweed coat and a cabbage tree hat … she had on a white bonnet and a shawl’.Footnote 146 More commonly, blankets were described, bought and sold. David Callaghan sold the bundle he brought to The Rock Inn in 1859, ‘I think the blanket was a white one’, said the publican, apropos of nothing.Footnote 147 ‘A white rug’, said young Dennis Reardon, of a traveller’s ‘bundle’ in 1860, also completely unrelated to the discussion.Footnote 148 When blankets were gone from a hut it was presumed that workers had ‘bolted’.Footnote 149 Blankets were crucial for travelling and camping, and accounts suggest they could be coveted. This would mean that those delivered, erratically, by the government to Aboriginal people would have given them considerable purchasing power. The Colonial Secretary continually reminded magistrates that these blankets were ‘on loan’ only and were not to be sold, suggesting they frequently were.Footnote 150 Aboriginal burials mentioned in court accounts include references to a possum skin blanket, not a distributed one.Footnote 151
Trust was not apparent among rural workers at their homes. Money was kept close to the body even if people were in their huts or watch boxes. ‘Two one pound notes and two shillings in silver’ were in a child’s stocking in Thomas Hart’s pocket when he was on the Gostwick road in 1855.Footnote 152 Mahomet Stagee was minding his sheep on the Kentucky run when a man came up on horseback with two other men. They took two cheques from his pockets.Footnote 153 John Campion kept his gold dust in a ‘belt around my body next to my skin’, even when he was sleeping in his hut.Footnote 154 At Hanging Rock Diggings James Mitchell had £80 ‘stowed away in the pocket of my trowsers [sic] in my hammock’.Footnote 155
Francis Foot’s wife, Elizabeth Foot, sat at a table counting ‘her money’ according to the servant, indicating she had money of her own. Women as well as men were brought to the benches for not paying contractors so they evidently had some financial independence.Footnote 156
Manners
As well as the sharing of drink from saucers and cups, there are other indications of how people behaved towards each other. Men working at the washpool, washing sheep, on Wallangra run ‘were in the habit of chaffing one another’, they ‘jawed’ one another while working.Footnote 157 Henry Brady said he began to ‘skylark’ at Wee-ta-wah in 1856, which involved fighting because he ‘hit’ someone and said, ‘he hasn’t hurt me’.Footnote 158 It is in the context of work that we find the word ‘mate’ used with a meaning far from its present-day connotation. ‘Mate’ on the goldfields meant a working partner in a mine – there was no emotional connection expressed. Indeed a mate could ensure your death and still be referred to by the term.Footnote 159 ‘Hut mate’ meant someone you shared a hut with and it was possible to not like someone who was a mate.Footnote 160 There was also some hostility to persons of European background. When Charles Kallenberg was robbed at Moran’s public house on the Rocky River in 1856 he explained he ‘was a foreigner and none of the bystanders attempted to prevent the robbery’.Footnote 161
It is rare to find a deposition without non-Aboriginal women present in some way, as wives of workmen, as owners of public houses or as lone travellers. Mrs Lewis was at an Aboriginal camp and attended an Aboriginal burial by herself in 1855.Footnote 162 Women seem as independent as men in depositions, choosing new partners from the numbers of men that stayed with the family,Footnote 163 travelling to public houses by themselves,Footnote 164 deciding to go to a public house rather than cook supper.Footnote 165 There were consequences from jealous partners who surprised women engaged in sex with other men, who told women to get out because they were found sleeping with another man, or who simply thought that women were doing so, and some of these women were beaten and killed. Even if women did none of the things they were accused of they were portrayed as passionate, impulsive creatures. Passion was evident in assault cases. Elizabeth Williams of the Pages River explained how Mrs Small threw stones at her and called her ‘a convict whore’ and ‘an English cow’ in 1853.Footnote 166 Girl children were regarded as independent, left in charge of houses while their parents were drinking and allowed to walk considerable distances by themselves or travel in company with persons they were not related to.Footnote 167 Girls seem the most sensible of the household, looking after babies and going to the public house to get their parents to go home.
‘Rumour’ was mentioned in some cases. John Riley had ‘heard it rumoured’ that Robert Ashley was suspected of stealing horses.Footnote 168 ‘There are some rumours afloat that a man named Pitt Town Tommy murdered Gardiner’, said Constable Hopper in 1854. ‘There was a rumour among the Blacks that The Gardener had been killed by Pitt Town Tommy, a stockman on Mr Crowden’s station’, said David Ryan, Justice of the Peace for the Namoi.Footnote 169 On the Namoi, Aboriginal people could control information because those in authority used them as a source of news. A magistrate in 1854 wrote
John Callaghan a witness in this case had absconded travelling with a Black Gin and ‘rigged out’ like a Blackfellow, evidently with a view of not appearing in Maitland when wanted. He is supposed to have gone towards the Downs where he has been living for four years with the Wild Blacks.Footnote 170
The Bucknell brothers, squatters, were originally suspected of stealing the squatter Dangar’s cattle because of Aboriginal news in 1857.Footnote 171 This does not mean that Aboriginal people were always successful in managing information or that they dominated its flow through the rural New South Wales, but that they could attempt to influence decision-making through information control. The role of Aboriginal people in gossip networks has been written about by Paul FoxFootnote 172 and depositions further support his point that such gossip was one means of subverting non-Aboriginal power.
The roads and streets
References to darkness in the streets appear in depositions. Constables in Murrurundi had to go out with candles to search for a stolen saddle in 1853.Footnote 173 In the streets of night time Armidale in 1859 people could be distinguished by their voice, ‘there was nothing particular in his voice but I think it was an Irishman’ stated John Riley; ‘a very rough voice’, said Michael Redmond.Footnote 174
People described space in terms of dividing lines. References to ‘palings’, ‘fences’ and ‘front gardens’ in even the most remote huts indicate such structures were important to denote ownership. Measurement is something rural whites excelled at, telling when asked exactly how many yards were between their house and an Aboriginal camp or between houses. ‘Seven hundred and ten yards’,Footnote 175 between their house and the store ‘three to four hundred yards’.Footnote 176 ‘I can judge at five yards distance whether the blow was hard or soft’, said the gold digger Joseph Booth.Footnote 177 Measurement was key in trespass cases, the lifeblood of the Magistrates Benches. At Murrurundi people were charged with trespassing on ‘wasteland’Footnote 178 and such attention also extended to the policing of the streets, not only by constables, but also by people living in the town.
Edward Harris complained in 1846 that he saw a man who was driving cattle in Murrurundi ‘hit an Aboriginal native with the handle of a stockwhip, the Black native gave him no provocation’. This occurred opposite Mrs Wrightman’s Inn and Harris was effectively policing behaviour in the streets by himself.Footnote 179 In April 1843 John Tuckwell was brought before the Murrurundi Bench for Uttering and Circulating Blasphemy by Reverend George Anderson and John Steele, butcher, John Ross, wheelwright and William Connell. They claimed that Tuckwell had said, ‘connection with women in a clean state is to see the happiness of the Millennium’ and ‘God had entered into a pact with Eve and the Devil to induce Adam to sin’. Tuckwell stated that he was a licensed preacher for the sect called the Israelites. Two other people gave evidence that they had heard no blasphemy. John Smith said the preacher often had prayers at his house. The case was dismissed.Footnote 180 Although without legal sanction, these tradesmen were effectively policing the streets themselves.
Absences
Public houses, roads, huts, Aboriginal camps, and goldfields were all linked across an immense empty vacuum. There are very few references to the physical landscape in these depositions. The ‘bush’ does not appear as a place people were in, or went through. At best ‘scrub’ is used to describe areas at the back of houses and ‘lagoons’ as places where clothes were washed.Footnote 181 A measured landscape in yards and miles, with fences and palings is presented. The emptiness itself was not noted or commented on. It was a people-centred mode of thinking.
Conclusion
Rural people’s words were distinctly different from those used in literary descriptions of them. There were no ‘mates’ in mid-nineteenth-century New South Wales in the twentieth century use of the term, and there was no ‘bush’ referred to, no emptiness, nor any reference to loneliness or freedom. The earth was cut, measured and divided. Palings and fences were referred to. Aboriginal people were present in the same delineated space as non-Aboriginal people but this space incorporated their own politics. Aboriginal camps were places of considerable danger and close living meant that punitive raids were regularly heard and seen by non-Aboriginal people.
The closeness and restrictiveness of this rural life derived from the convict system, resistance to which also created a realm of nicknames and notorious identities. Non-Aboriginal people joined Aboriginal political space in the mutual use of public houses and of Aboriginal camps as places of entertainment, alongside the ‘Chinaman’s’ tents on the goldfields and the circus where a dreamlike lack of care prevailed.
When the colour of a blanket is carefully thought of even though it was not stolen or relevant to the discussion at hand, it is possible to state that these were items highly valued, beyond clothes or other personal possessions. When the word ‘bedroom’ was indicative of an emphasis on personal sleeping space, yet those sleeping in that space still keep their money hidden or close to their bodies, it means the space is important to name and an important marker of a person’s understanding of themselves. When the term ‘my house’ was used repeatedly to describe a hut made of bark with lean-to attached, it is indicative of the valuing of house ‘ownership’. There was an emphasis on fences and measurement indicating that designated areas of ownership or occupancy were important to recount. The use of nicknames that were not derogatory, but instead an indication of a person’s predilections, implies that the need to hide one’s real name was very much part of rural life. All of this points to a highly individualised society. But it was not a society that emphasised working life. Workdays were not clearly indicated and their measurement was not an important part of everyday speech. Breakfast was worthy of mention and its importance eclipsed other meals in a society that did not seem hungry or short of food. Publicans had an important relationship to their customers, in that they managed money for them and they seemed highly trusted to look after money well, so much so that people, men and women appeared to forget all about it and were interested in enjoying themselves. In descriptions of the exchange of money for goods in public houses the detail of what was given rather than bought was important to mention. Possibly aided by illiteracy, this created an emotional link between the publican and his customers. There was an emphasis on luxury well suited to the all night bowling alleys and circuses that regularly appeared.
The convict system shaped this society because the surveillance that it involved so easily incorporated those who had never been convicts. Consequently, nicknames were used to avoid the eye of the authorities. Rural life can be said to derive from that convict system. Government registers involved precision, and this was also present among the rural population in the form of the precision with which ownership and personal space were defined. Comparisons may be made with other cultures and some suggestions ventured for causal factors in the constructing of life in rural New South Wales. Outworkers of the early nineteenth century consumed luxuries such as tea, sugar and alcohol in their new relationship to wages and spending.Footnote 182 Most of the people discussed in this article derived from England or Ireland. The people of rural New South Wales, however, did not have family as the core of the economy, and families described in depositions consisted of a man, woman and children rather than the extended household of industrialising England or Ireland.Footnote 183 Rather, a small family would be host to numbers of travelling men and two or three single men were always present in households described in depositions. The presence of these men may have accounted for some of the social freedom shown by women. The absence of work as central to descriptions of daily life in depositions of rural New South Wales does have something in common with Aboriginal people, where hunting and foraging took up a small part of the day; entertainment or ceremony were of more importance and forms of alcohol, though milder than European spirits, were drunk.Footnote 184 Aboriginal people were present in workplaces and in public houses and their ways of living may have had some influence. However, the existence of the sudden, unexpected violence of punitive raids by squatters and Native Police would have shaped the life of all people in rural New South Wales. Many people had seen and heard terrible things.
