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Mateship
A Very Australian History
By Nick Dyrenfurth Scribe Publications Pty Ltd
Copyright © 2015 Nick Dyrenfurth
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-925113-53-2
CHAPTER 1
CONVICTS
is mateship un-australian? As I've shown, the term 'mate' possesses Old World origins. Likewise, mateship's cultural roots clearly drew sustenance from northern soils. John Carroll insists that Australia's mateship ethic, including the preference of working-class males for male company, was imported from Britain and Ireland. These established character traits were only reinforced by an experience of working-class life similar to that of home. But Carroll overlooks the fact that, in pre-1788 Britain, a mate could be any kind of friend. The term mate didn't exclude women or heterosocial relationships — it was even applied to betrothed partners and spouses; but neither did mateship entail a heightened form of friendship. A couplet from Shakespeare's 1594 poem 'The Rape of Lucrece' shows early mateship's inclusive qualities through its praise of Collatine's wife:
What priceless wealth the heavens had him lent, In the possession of his beauteous mate ...
Pre-Australian mateship also transcended divisions of class and status. Kings and paupers alike could lay claim to sharing a mateship. When the Bishop of Worcester delivered a sermon for King Edward VI in 1535, he used the term in this neutral way, imploring the king's subjects 'to make a continual prayer unto God ... to grant our king's grace such a mate as may knit his heart and hers'.
Even when 'mate' became a favoured antipodean salutation during the early-to-mid-19th century, the word retained its former meaning in the mother country. The phrase 'me and my mate' was a common form of identification among the lower classes of London according to John Camden Hotten, a 19th-century lexicographer, and was variously applied to include one's 'friend, partner or companion' of either sex. A play penned by Lord Byron during 1821 used gender-blind mateship in reference to the effeminate Assyrian emperor-king Sardanapalus:
The she-king,
That less than woman,
is even now upon
The waters with his female mates ...
Notably, 'mate' also referred to animals, and specifically to animals engaged in reproduction. This meaning — of a sexual coupling — would implicitly underpin future Australian visions of mateship.
In colonial Australia, mateship at once drew upon and deviated from its origins. The words 'mate' and 'mateship' changed from naming a casual association to describing a significant, even spiritual, male-to-male relationship. Why? As with many assumed national character traits, the answer lies with the 165,000 convicts dispatched 12,000 miles across the oceans to New South Wales between 1788 and 1868. In their pre- antipodean lives, the English among these outcasts, a high proportion of whom hailed from urban areas, likely used 'mate' as slang in the terms outlined above. The popular culture of the common people, particularly the dialect of Cockney London, was literally transported to Australia. Likewise, a version of 'mate' prevailed on the seas, as both a nautical title and egalitarian salutation between male sailors. Those convicts, English and Irish, who managed to survive the perilous eight-month voyage would have been washed by these rhetorical currents on board their floating prisons. Thus, by 1826, The Sydney Gazette and New South Wales Advertiser, the first newspaper published in the colony, had noted the practice of assigned convicts calling each other 'mate' — and the peculiar convention of 'mate' being used as a greeting to strangers.
That Australian mateship became a cultural phenomenon was due to a mix of nature and nurture. An extraordinarily unequal gender balance was a crucial formative influence. For more than 50 years after the arrival of the first fleet, Australia was a highly masculine land, what Henry Lawson later described as 'no place for a woman'. Numerically speaking, of the 579 unwilling passengers aboard Captain Arthur Phillip's First Fleet, men outnumbered women by three to one. Between 1787 and 1800, 5,195 male convicts, compared with 1,440 women, disembarked at Botany Bay. Women comprised just a quarter of the population for much of the early 19th century, and were concentrated in and around Sydney and Hobart.
The potential for 'sexual disorder' flowing from this gender imbalance so concerned authorities that, a year before the First Fleet set sail, Captain Phillip briefly considered and rejected Lord Sydney's idea of kidnapping Tahitian women in order to sexually service soldiers and potentially provide marriage partners. In the absence of womenfolk, hard-living single males congregated in what historian Frank Bongiorno calls 'little republics', providing Australian masculinity with a 'complexion still recognisable today'.
Masculine public culture grew apace. In the absence of formal amusements, gambling and drinking became wildly popular pastimes among both convicts and captors, as did testosterone-filled sporting contests such as cockfighting, bare-knuckle prize fighting, and horse racing. This isn't to argue that such a culture didn't similarly develop in other settler societies, notably New Zealand — but, in Australia, it acquired a particularly pungent masculine odour.
As the settlement grew, the ratio of male to female convicts reached a peak of almost six to one, with a higher ratio in the country districts, where male labour was most keenly sought. In the eastern colonies, it's estimated that, of the 130,000 convicts transported up until the cessation of transportation in 1853, only 16 per cent were women. The marines and, later, soldiers sent to guard the convicts were mainly unaccompanied single men. So were the free settlers who arrived from the early 19th century to take up hitherto unimaginable opportunities to live on the land. The various schemes of assisted migration saw 8,000 arrive during the 1820s, another 30,000 in the 1830s, and a further 80,000 in the following decade.
This gender imbalance had practical effects. As Frank Bongiorno notes, for antipodean men — and especially convict men with few skills and little or no capital — the chances of finding a wife were slim. Perhaps three-quarters of all men who arrived during the early colonial era never married. Most of those who missed out were convicts and their ticket-of-leave (paroled) brethren.
Later, the eastern-Australian gold discoveries of the 1850s acted to further skew the gender balance. The otherwise diverse immigrants — source countries included China, Germany, Italy, the United States, Scandinavia, and Poland — tended to be both male and single. By 1860, as the rushes petered out, there were still 140 males to every 100 females. It wasn't until the economic boom that brought further waves of immigrants during the 1880s, and the non-Indigenous population passed the two-million mark, that a reasonable demographic balance was struck between the sexes. Even then, in 1891, there remained many more white men than women in Australia — 1,704,039 compared with 1,470,353 — and males continued greatly to outnumber females in the rural backblocks. In 1900, there were still 110 men to each 100 women.
There isn't the space here to explore the important debate over the relative power, or lack thereof, of convict or even colonial women. Suffice to say that masculine demography surely influenced the way Australians came to think of themselves. As De Tocqueville famously noted of New World America: 'The entire man is, so to speak, to be seen in the cradle of the child. The growth of nations presents something analogous to this: they all bear some marks of their origin; and the circumstances which accompanied their birth and contributed to their rise affect the whole term of their being.'
Beyond demographics, the harsh circumstances of Australia's penal settlement fostered a distinctive masculine ethos of solidarity among its subjects. The famous Convict Oath allegedly sworn between felons, which first appeared in written form in Price Warung's 1892 story 'The Liberation of the First Three', thus begins:
Hand to hand
On Earth, in Hell,
Sick or Well
On Sea on Land
On the Square, ever.
The open-air prison administered by the governor and military was egalitarian by brutal default. Bereft of substantive civil or economic rights, convicts were forced to rely on each other in a foreign world. These levelling qualities are undeniable, even if one accepts the arguments of the 'normalisers' of the convict system, who argue that it was not simply geared towards the perpetuation of a punitive penal society.
Gaolers weren't the only source of convict anxiety. British tools of work carried by the First Fleet came to grief in the alien environment of Botany Bay. Crops failed, and imported stock perished. Rations barely deserved their name, though they were evenly distributed with little respect for rank or title. Crime was rife, from drunkenness to petty theft to murder, and the authorities had responded by extending the criminal code to make even the most minor transgression a capital offence. Flogging, confinement, chain-gang work, or secondary punishment at hellish places such as Port Arthur were methods intended to prevent recidivism among convicts.
In the context of shared privation and oppression, being a convict mate implied a relationship that transcended average friendship. Whether they were locked below decks in rotting hulks on the Thames or chained together breaking rocks and making roads, convicts were inexorably drawn to each other. Just two weeks after the 26 January 1788 landing at Sydney Cove, governor Arthur Phillip, in an address to the entire colony, rebuked the convict population for their profligacy of manners.
Indeed, for historian Russel Ward, a convict-derived ethos of matey anti-authoritarianism embedded itself in the Australian psyche from the beginning. Convicts resisted their gaolers by diverse means. While only two major rebellions took place, at Castle Hill and Norfolk Island, there were frequent disturbances at so-called 'female factories', and convicts thumbed their noses at authorities by refusing to work, stealing, absconding, and engaging in other activities such as gambling and drinking. A few thousand convicts were political prisoners — working-class machine breakers, unionists, peasant rioters, and Chartists — whose rebel ways were merely an extension of their radical British lives.
Of course, I don't want to romanticise convict solidarity. Certainly, in its earliest appearances, boasting a 'mate' feted rule-breaking rather than brotherhood. W.C. Wentworth, Australia's most prominent 'currency lad' (a child of the first generation to be born in Australia) used the expression in this sense in his 1823 epic poem, 'Australasia':
The wonted brook,
where with some truant mate,
I lov'd to plunge
The convicts are unlikely progenitors of mateship in other respects. Rough-hewn egalitarianism was at best derived from the code of 'honour among thieves'. As Tom Inglis Moore points out, convict mateship was very much a form of 'proto-mateship' or a 'fellowship in vice', and thus a dramatic departure from the Aristotelian belief that friendship was a virtuous state that required acts of goodness between friends.
In early Australia, the obligations of mateship were honoured more in the breach than observance. The system often worked to create inequalities and dissension among its subjects. Convicts survived by thieving, pimping, and gambling — activities that hardly expressed deep-seated feelings of loyalty or equality. Gangs of bushrangers represented the organised extremes of such behaviour.
If fidelity did exist between convicts, it was probably instilled by a distrust of one's fellows and a shared fear of authority — mateship seems to have been dictated mainly by self-interest and intimidation. 'Men betraying their companions or accepting authority over them, are often called "dogs",' remarked convict John Mortlock, 'and sometimes have their noses bitten off — the morsel being termed "a mouthful of a dog's nose".'
Betraying one's mates was an all-too-common occurrence. The widely assumed mateship feeling among convicts was matched by a strong tradition of spying and informing, colloquially known ever since as 'dobbing'. This phenomenon was particularly widespread in mid-19th-century Van Diemen's Land (Tasmania), where governor George Arthur made assiduous efforts to undermine convict solidarity with rewards of shortened sentences, tickets of leave, and offers of employment as overseers and constables.
The inconsistencies of convict mateship are obvious. Yet it's quite another thing to argue, as Humphrey McQueen did in A New Britannia, that lumpen-bourgeois convicts 'were largely professional criminals who believed in nothing so much as individual enterprise'. It scarcely requires saying that these men and women never claimed to be infallible.
The dubious nature of convict mateship was a recurring theme among the chroniclers of early colonial life. Scottish naval surgeon and author Peter Cunningham, who made some five trips to New South Wales between 1819 and 1828, noted how there was no honour among mates in his 1827 book, Two Years in New South Wales. Late colonial literature, such as Marcus Clarke's fictional chronicle of convict life, For the Term of His Natural Life, made no attempt to gloss over the tenuous bonds between felons, despite its sensitivity towards the brutalities of convictism. One further example may suffice — the Convict Oath ostensibly 'quoted' above by Price Warung was lost on his story's protagonists, three veteran convicts, who, by the sequel's conclusion, have proceeded to kill one another.
Until relatively recently, few Australians were keen to claim affinity with our first mates. The criminal records of these men and women were often a matter of familial shame; the so-called convict stain was regarded as a national embarrassment. Even in the late 1950s, Russel Ward could write that his fellow citizens displayed a 'certain queasiness' when recalling Australia's 'founding fathers'. In any case, convicts hardly boasted of practising a noble creed, or put pen to paper extolling its virtues. There was certainly no rigorous ideal of mateship among the convicts. What would become known as the Australian Legend was disseminated via folklore and popular speech, while remaining largely unreflected in formal literature.
Factors other than criminality may help explain Australians' reticence as regards their origins, and further complicate mateship's stereotypical casting. Robert Hughes's epic account of convict life, The Fatal Shore, makes the case that, among the chain gangs and outer penal settlements, a great many of the original mates were compelled to widen their sexual repertoire beyond that of heterosexuality. This is the case even if it is accepted that such mates didn't display a homosexual identity, and that mateship didn't necessarily stem from the considerable amount of homosexuality in early white Australian history.
In reality, 'taking a helpmate', as one observer angrily described same-sex relations, took pragmatic account of the colony's gender maths. Norfolk Island and Van Diemen's Land were particularly noted for the prevalence of sodomy. Such practices continued in the male-dominated world of the pioneering outback. Not that homosexual mateship was boasted of — rather, it was concealed, much like the practice of taking Indigenous women as sexual partners. In Ward's words, 'bushmen naturally denied this "soft" side of their nature by protesting, perhaps too much, their masculinity'.
Given the contradictory qualities of mateship exhibited by the convict population, what explanations can be given for the later elevation of a humble term of endearment to mythical status? Human beings are arguably hardwired to romanticise the past. This is a tendency exacerbated in tiny Australia because we have long desired that our nation assume a level of global significance. Perhaps, too, what passed for mateship expressed something of the sense of loss that exile from the Old World brought to its victims, satisfying the emotional need for belonging. When Peter Cunningham enthused about the 'fine interesting race' developing in the Antipodes, he sensed the impact of exile on the male populace: 'There is no event capable of awakening such deep-seated emotion on the human breast, as that of separating for ever from the place of our nativity'.
Another loss, mostly unlamented by convicts and later toilers, was the absence of an established church. As would become apparent later in the century, mateship's quasi-religious status in the bush owed much to this emotional vacuum. Australian men, so it was thought, placed their faith in their mates — and might even sacrifice themselves, Christ-like, rather than avail themselves of the metaphysical comforts provided by colonial God-botherers.
New World mateship might also be understood as a rudimentary form of politics. Only through the existence of fraternal, if self-interested, networks could convicts empower themselves against their keepers. Convicts, emancipists, and later native-born Australians arguably forged a unique linguistic community, in which mateship was a key element. 'Perhaps the worst trait in the character of the convict population', wrote one agitated observer in 1848, 'is the ill-feeling they display to all except their own class. A spirit of freemasonry exists amongst them to a great extent.' By addressing each other as mate, in addition to the impertinence of labelling their supposed social betters as such, ordinary Australians asserted that the wealthy and powerful were no better than commoners. That tendency was exacerbated in the case of Irish-born convicts, who tended to be imbued with a thoroughgoing dislike of English authority.
Rhetorical egalitarianism was further refined by emancipists and Australian-born currency lads, men prone to assert that Australia, as 'the prisoners' country', ironically belonged to them rather than wealthy immigrants or 'new chums'. The strength of this belief meant Australian egalitarianism henceforth became akin to an upside-down phenomenon, lamented by some critics as Australia's tall-poppy syndrome. In journalist Craig McGregor's words, wealthy citizens have always felt 'under some pressure to be accepted by ordinary working Australians rather than the other way round'. Even today, billionaire mining magnates hailing from establishment families cloak themselves in the rhetorical garb of mateship, as much as they do the hi-vis vests of ordinary workers.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Mateship by Nick Dyrenfurth. Copyright © 2015 Nick Dyrenfurth. Excerpted by permission of Scribe Publications Pty Ltd.
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