statisticians, or‘statists’—may be ultimately traceable to the recurrent tyre-
kicking by Great Britain of her doubtful colonial asset.^27
3.4.2Authoritarianism
Perhaps the authoritarianismwith which societal technology is implicitly
laden was instilled by the parade-ground character of original European settle-
ment. Given the poverty of communications, for itsfirst thirty-five years the
governors of NSW, unlike North American governors, ruled as might an
absolute monarch, and with a mercantilist apparatus. Thus, Edward Shann—
surely the most eloquent critic of Australian exceptionalism—wrote that more
of Australia than the crooked streets of Sydney can be traced to the period’s
military rule.
Shann’s command society vision of thefirst generation of European settle-
ment has been challenged. NSW, it has been said, was a‘convict colony’rather
than a penal colony (Hirst 2009b); one which barely had a prison as such for
itsfirst thirtyfive years, and in which there reigned the rule of law, not the rule
of man. Yet its texture was highly authoritarian, as the rule of law sanctioned
one man to make the rules. Governor Macquarie could ordain thirty-one
lashes for any deserting (free) seaman (Quinlan 1998). Furthermore,‘The
state had no compunction in separating mother and child’(Belcher 1999,
p. 17), and‘the minutest details of civil life’were controlled by the state
(Hartwell 1955, p. 51). NSW exhibited the aspect of a military station quite
beyondliteralbarrackwalls;until1825,everyfreepersonwasrequiredtopresent
themselves at an appointed place and time for each‘population muster’.
But Shann’s stress on Australia’s early command society might also be
faulted on the grounds that this authoritarianism actually fostered liberalism,
by way of provoking a reaction: it was theancien régimeof Old Sydney Town
that provided a foil to a nascent liberalism.‘A government official in your
eyes’, it was complained to W. C. Wentworth, ‘is a tool of power, the
unblessed offspring of tyrannous rule’(Roe 1965, p. 78). By contrast, to the
busy bourgeois of the convict-free colonies to the south, a government official
was, from an early date, something else entirely.L’État, c’est nous.^28
An entirely different objection to tracing Australia’s engrossment by social
machinery to its early command society will press that the early command
society expired after two generations. Australia, in this objection, was
(^27) ‘Victoria has almost from her very birth been at the head of all countries in statistics, and the
Year-Book of the Government statist and other productions of his office are as nearly as perfect as
such works can be 28 ’(Dilke 1890, vol. 1, p. 187).
Thus Grant (1975) has noted the contrast between nineteenth-century Victoria’s
intelligentsia and the oppositional role commonly attributed to such formations. Victoria’s
intelligentsia was not resisting‘society’, it was shaping it.
William O. Coleman