The Politics of Grievance is an Australian history thesis which examines three milestones in the evolution of our liberal democratic nation - the events around an 1819 petition claiming both political rights and good capitalist freedoms for the young colony, the ‘Dinnerist Crisis’ of 1825, and the Sudds Thompson Case of 1826.
Along the way it offers some healthy revisionist history. William Wentworth was not the author of a book which bears his name. The colony was not divided into ‘emancipists and exclusives’. That tiresome man Chief Justice Francis Forbes was an oath breaker, behaved rather deviously in the Sudds Thompson Case, and possibly acted improperly or illegally in a particular land deal.
And how much do we know of our history when we get both 'terra nullius' and 'exclusives and emancipists' wrong?
From the Introduction
Taking three episodes in colonial New South Wales from 1819 until early 1827 this study examines men and political disputation in our new society. Individuals and ideas make history. The politics of the period were dominated by traditional ideas held by abrasive personalities. Ideas of Left versus Right political conflict borrowed from the seating arrangements in a French hall do not fit our story. Across this period not all colonists were convinced that a collectivist and punitive administration was inadequate for governing the colony, and when the possibility of some concessions was admitted the forms these future changes would take were contested. The ideas around these matters were sometimes put in colonial terms, sometimes posed as imperial arguments, and usually expressed in language of grievance. [READ MORE]
Chapter One: Exclusionists and Confusionists
The cultural revolution of the 1960s and 1970s brought in new ways of doing history. The dominant old left colonial history was easy history. It was dramatic, and morally uplifting. Two forces opposed each other – while somewhere off centre the aboriginal population was dying of disease and mistreatment. On one side of a settler conflict were the snobbish and hierarchical ‘exclusives’, on the other the lower class and politically sound ‘emancipists’. One selfishly sought to conserve and add to their granted estates, and exclude the ex-convicts who surrounded them from any share in power. The ‘exclusives’ were losers, and despite the drama of the conflict, the victory of liberalism was so predictable that a certain boredom entered the pages.
Late twentieth century academics sought more than convict chains, yellow metal, and old left interpretations. They went shopping in the busy international market place for bad ideas. As well as caftans and beads, they bought home convict protest, gender relations, ethnographic history, massacres, postmodern anthropology, masculinism, otherness, textual analysis, theories of language, environmentalism, queer history, and second-hand herstories/histories. But their bright packaging concealed the fact that they were using old ingredients from, the now despised, earlier narrative histories. In spite of a professed distaste for the old stories, it was assumed that basic elements of the older chronicles were correct. [READ MORE]
Chapter 6: The beginning of the Dinnerist Crisis
Chapter 7: Personal vituperation and constitutional reform
Footnotes have been deleted for internet publication.
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