"The media's role should be to subject governments to the rigorous scrutiny it will always seek to avoid," Fred Chaney, former Aboriginal Affairs Minister, said in an address to the Journalism Educator's Association annual conference in Perth last December.
The role of newspaper proprietors and editors as scrutineers of government policy and action had its roots in the early days of Australia when several editors/proprietors were thrown into gaol in the 1820s for vigorously scrutinising government through the pages of their newspapers.
In the late 1820s Edward Smith Hall, the proprietor and editor of the Monitor, was gaoled for seditious and criminal libel after speaking out continuously against the New South Wales Government. Governor Darling warned Hall that his outspokenness and dogged persistence in criticising his Government would not be tolerated and "deliberately courted martyrdom" (Historical Records of Australia, series 1, X111, pp183 -194).
The Australian's A.E. Hayes was also effectively gagged by the government of the day when he was gaoled for seditious libel for "having declared that the Governor, on account of his ignorance and disregard for the law, was not a fit person to rule over a British colony" (Cryle, 1997, 22).
In later years other newspaper proprietors and editors fought for freedom of the press in a climate of suppression when such strategies as prohibitive recognisances against libel and strict licensing laws saw newspapers fold.( See William Nairne Clark's Swan River Guardian).
But it was the early days of the press in Van Diemen's Land where the battle for a free and uncensored press in Australia had its origins.
In the island colony three newspaper proprietors - Andrew Bent, Henry Melville and Gilbert Robertson - fought to uphold the freedom of the press under the repressive regime of Colonel George Arthur and gave the Fourth Estate in Australia three of its first martyrs.
While George Howe, the proprietor of Australia's first newspaper, the Sydney Gazette, is known as the "father of the Australian press" it can be argued that Andrew Bent, proprietor of the Hobart Town Gazette, deserves the title historian John West bestowed upon him - the "father of Australian journalists" (West, 1852 p.108 and Woodberry, 1972, p18).
It is certainly true that it was through Andrew Bent's effort that freedom of the press was established in this country. As the "father of journalists" Bent was responsible for the introduction of three principles which today are accepted as never to be challenged: private ownership of the press, the expression of opinion in the form of editorials and the establishment of correspondent's pages through the letters to the editor (Woodberry, 1972, p18). It was indeed Bent's stand against Arthur that precipitated interest and concern with the principle of freedom of the press in Australia.
Andrew Bent's Hobart Town Gazette and Southern Reporter, established in 1816, was the third newspaper in Van Diemen's Land (the Derwent Star and the Van Diemen's Land Intelligencer were both published before 1816 but only ran for a few months). The first edition of the Hobart Town Gazette was published on 11 May 1816 when Bent was still a convict. George Howe had a far more cordial relationship with the Government in the running of the Sydney Gazette than did Bent at the Hobart Town Gazette, due in part to the fact that Bent's newspaper was the first to function as journalism and not merely as an adjunct to official news and reports.
The question should be asked whether Bent was a martyr to the cause of the free press or a proprietor using the power of the press to forward personal issues and to address personal grievances? It cannot be denied that he was dogged in his criticism of Arthur, who was highly sensitive to criticism, but Bent, as an emancipated convict in a penal colony where the power of the authorities was all encompassing, was in a tenuous position. By voicing his opposition to Arthur's regime he ran the risk of having his ticket-of-leave revoked at any time. He was publishing his criticisms of the Government at considerable risk to his freedom.
Bent arrived in Van Diemen's Land in 1812 aged 22 after receiving a life sentence for breaking and entering. Within four years he had established the Hobart Town Gazette while still a convict and received a small subsidy under an arrangement with Governor Davey by which his Gazette was the official organ for the publication of Government notices. The newspaper remained entirely Bent's own property, but with a Government-appointed editor to oversee the publication of the Government notices. Bent wrote of those early struggles:
Our type was so limited that we could not compose at once more than is contained in one of our present-sized columns. There was no printing ink in the colony, but what we were necessitated to manufacture in the best possible manner for ourselves, and common Chinese paper, no more than half the size of foolscap, and of which two sheets were consequently obliged to be pasted together for each gazette, cost two guineas sterling per ream! (HTG, January 6, 1825). In 1824 there were still only two newspapers in Australia - the Sydney Gazette, which was still closer in control to the Government, and Bent's Gazette. In May of that year Bent dismissed the Government-appointed editor and replaced him with Evan Henry Thomas. A week later Colonel George Arthur arrived in the penal colony. Bent was unaware of Arthur's antipathy to the press and did not know then that Arthur was so opposed to a free press that he had previously refused permission to one of his closest supporters to create a newspaper in Honduras (Giblin, 1939 p629).
Arthur immediately made it clear that Van Diemen's Land was a penal colony first and foremost and that he had little regard for the increasing number of free settlers. Despite the risks of speaking out against the Government, the Letters to the Editor column in the Gazette began to take on a political tone. Gone were the recipes for snake bites and typhoid cures and the tips on growing wheat in the antipodean soil and in their place were letters critical of the new regime. A settler who wrote an indiscreet letter to the editor could lose title to land, see the allocation of convict servants withdrawn, discover important mail had disappeared, find supplies to the Government store rejected - in effect he/she could be ruined. As Henry Melville later wrote:
Scarcely is there a single settler in the Island, who is not dependent upon His Excellency's will and pleasure, either for his grant, or his decision in some dispute about boundary lines - (Melville, 1835 p46). Letters critical of the Government flooded into the Gazette office and Bent, despite his tenuous position as a recently emancipated convict, continued to publish them. Arthur, incensed at the thinly veiled criticisms of his regime, was determined to gag the press. In June 1824 he publicly proclaimed the Hobart Town Gazette as Government property. Bent immediately sent his editor to Sydney to seek redress. Months later Thomas returned, "big with glory" (Miller 1952 p227). Arthur had no legal right to pirate the Gazette. The tone of Bent's editorial on October 8 was one of triumphant rectitude: "even yet the sling of an outraged 'weak one' when brandished against the Gideonite of tyranny, must be, Laus deo, irresistible" (HTG, 8 October, 1824).
The newspaper remained in Bent's hands and the editorials and letters continued their anti-Arthur sentiment. Behind the scenes Arthur was planning to gag the press. In April 1825 he was negotiating for the purchase of the newspaper plant of the newly established Launceston newspaper The Tasmanian and Port Dalrymple Advertiser. The irony was that the owner, George Terry Howe, son of George Howe of the Sydney Gazette, was supported in the establishment of the Tasmanian by none other than Andrew Bent who acted as his Hobart Town agent. Bent knew that Howe was planning on relocating his press and newspaper to Hobart Town and supported the move "in the hope that a cause of the freedom of the press might be strengthened" (Miller, 1952, p71). What he didn't know was of Arthur's involvement. Meanwhile Bent's newspaper continued its attacks on Arthur's administration:
It is much better that a few supine, ignorant and extravagantly-hired Public Officers should be galled for their misconduct than that a whole community should be crushed, enslaved and subjugated (HTG, 20 May, 1825).
On June 25, 1825 Arthur played his trump card - two separate editions of the Hobart Town Gazette appeared before the public - Bent's Gazette and another with identical masthead and volume number which was filled with pro-Arthur sentiment and declared to be the "official organ" of the Colonial Government. An anti-Arthur letter, which had earlier been published by Bent under the pen-name "A Colonist", was boldly reprinted in Arthur's Gazette with every "no" turned into a "yes" and every "unsatisfactory" into "satisfactory" (Miller, 1952 p248).
Bent, incensed that he had been betrayed by a man he had supported, branded Howe a "pirate" who conspired to ruin him. He published a scathing attack regarding Arthur's alleged misdeeds whilst governor of Honduras which led to the following correspondence between Governor Arthur and his Attorney General:
Seeing that he (Bent) has continued week after week to insert in the Gazette, both in the leading article and under various signatures, the grossest falsehoods, and is systematically endeavouring to degrade the public functionaries of this Island, and to scandalise the government, I can no longer hesitate in desiring you to prosecute forthwith the various libels which have appeared in the Hobart Town Gazette - reflecting either upon the Government or the Governments officers (HRA 111, V6 p238).
Bent was sued for libel for the "Gideonite of tyranny" editorial and the Honduras editorials. The public saw the suit as a persecution of the champion of the free press by a tyrannical governor and a public meeting was called by "Friends of the Liberty of the Press" which raised 250 pounds for Bent. The first trial was abandoned and another held in April 1826 before a military jury of seven officers, all in the pay of the Government, not surprisingly found Bent guilty and he was sentenced to six months' imprisonment and fined 518 pounds (Colonial Times, 23 April, 1826).
Word of the imprisonment of a newspaper proprietor in the Australian colonies for libel brought against him by the governor reached the London newspapers. The concept of the freedom of the press was by no means an accepted principle in England and was being fought out there in a series of clashes between newspapers and authorities. The London New Monthly reported:
The printer of the Hobart Town Gazette, which the government seems anxious to suppress, has been found guilty of libel. The list of special jury is amusing in a colony where there are men to be found in a civil life equal to any that sat on that occasion . . . The matter charged as libellous would not have been thought so in the Mother Country (April, 1826).
A year later Arthur had found other ways of gagging the press - in September 1827 an Act was passed to regulate the printing and publishing of newspapers and the prevention of blasphemous and seditious libels" (HTG September, 1827). The Act required a licence to print or publish a newspaper and that if the licensee published any matter tending to bring into contempt or hatred the Royal Family, the Government or the constitution of the United Kingdom or of Van Diemen's Land, the licence could be cancelled at once. As well each licensee was required to enter into a recognisance with surety of 400 pounds and also three guarantors, each with surety of 400 pounds that no libel would be printed. The icing on the suppression-of-the-free-press cake was another Act imposing a stamp duty of three pence per copy. Naturally Bent was refused a licence to print.
A protest signed by 50 leading citizens claimed that the restrictions on the press were "needless, unconstitutional and debasing - an insult to the colony, and contrary to the implied engagements of the Crown when emigration was invited". In the meantime Bent was struggling financially to keep control of his newspaper, which he had renamed the Colonial Times. To add insult to injury Arthur decreed that convicts could not be employed in printing houses, forcing Bent to dismiss his editor, the convict novelist Henry Savery. What really galled Bent was that convicts were employed in the Government press. Arthur's actions were nothing short of persecution. Bent lost his battle to keep the Colonial Times but kept his printing press and established a monthly news magazine The Colonial Advocate and Tasmanian Monthly Review in March 1828, thus avoiding the newspaper licence.
The settler's petition supporting Bent and freedom of the press, after being rejected by Arthur, was sent to the Home Government and in December 1828 news was received supporting the colonists and annulling both Acts (Melville, 1835 p70). But it was too late for Bent's Colonial Times.
With Bent effectively sidelined for six years Arthur turned a blind eye to the weekly attacks from other publications, but his patience reached its limit when the wild and headstrong journalist, editor and proprietor of the True Colonist , Gilbert Robertson, hit a raw nerve.
By the 1830s the public was under no illusions to the regime of Arthur - cronyism was rife. His nephew, Chief Police Magistrate Captain Matthew Forster, and Colonial Secretary John "Warming Pan" Montagu, were hated and feared and much resented for their blatant misuse of convict labour and public materials. Montagu was derisively called "Warming-Pan" because he was always ready to turn his hand to profitable enterprises using government labour and supplies (Goodrick, 1975 p142). Arthur's cronyism and the relationship between Arthur's nephews and the editor of The Tasmanian - Robert Lathrop Murray - became the subject of much copy in Robertson's True Colonist (True Colonist, 1834-1844).
Murray was regarded as a turncoat, known to his enemies as "old Scapenoose" (Woodberry, 1972, p143). It had been his anonymous letters, published ten years before in Bent's correspondent's pages opposing Arthur, that had in part landed Bent in goal. Murray had been then unswerving in his criticism of Arthur's piracy of Bent's Gazette and of his attempt to control the press, but in the latter part of Arthur's governorship Murray had come full circle and now indulged in adulation of Arthur and sycophantic support of his nephews (Miller, 1952, p24).
Robertson, a Creole brought up on his Scotch father's plantations in British Guyana, arrived in Van Diemen's Land in the mid 1820s to take up the position of superintendent of the government farm at New Town. He soon became interested in the press and at various times edited newspapers in opposition to Arthur. In 1834 he established the True Colonist and Van Diemen's Land Dispatch and Agricultural and Commercial Advertiser. The True Colonist became a political voice in vigorous opposition to Arthur and it must be said that moderation was not high on Robertson's news agenda.
In February Robertson was charged with three counts of libel: one that he had made the assertion that Arthur had made a correction of a clerical error after the enrolment of a grant of land - the imputation being that if he corrected clerical mistakes he could make other alterations; two that he had claimed that hay from the Government Farm (which Robertson once supervised) was for his own use - with the suggestion of larceny; and the third libellous comments regarding T.W. Rowlands, an Arthur supporter.
Robertson was swiftly found guilty and sentenced to 13 months in gaol. While he was incarcerated he was tried and found guilty on another count of libel against "Warming Pan" Montagu (True Colonist, 23 January, 1835). Robertson conducted his own defence though the pages of his newspaper. When sentencing Robertson to a further year in the fetid Hobart Town gaol Attorney General Gellibrand made the heated claim that a press such as Robertson's "was like a firebrand in the hand of a madman" and that his articles were "a pest even to Botany Bay" (Colonial Times, 14 July, 1835).
Andrew Bent remained steadfast to his principles of a free press. Despite being on the brink of financial ruin, with costs and fines of 1,500 pounds, and having served three terms of imprisonment, he was still determined to fight for the principles of a free press. When no one would print Robertson's newspaper after his imprisonment Bent agreed to print the True Colonist. Robertson wrote of his gratitude to Bent:
when we experienced some difficulty in getting our Journal printed at any office, our "Tasmanian Franklin" immediately threw open gratuitously the use of his office, type and press to us, merely upon paying our workmen the amount of their wages (True Colonist, 27 March, 1835).
Robertson was soon to find himself keeping company in gaol with the highly regarded author, journalist, newspaper proprietor and editor Henry Melville. Trumped up charges against innocent men and women who were perceived as enemies of the Government were not uncommon during Arthur's regime. Daily, spurious cases were brought before the courts against innocent and respectable citizens by corrupt convict constables who pocketed half of the fines imposed. Within this environment of corruption the Robert Bryan case is particularly distasteful.
Robertson avowed in the True Colonist: "They may hang Robert Bryan, and imprison all the Editors in the Colony, but they may rest assured that justice will overtake them" (True Colonist 13 November, 1835).
The trial of Robert Bryan was no ordinary trial of a settler who had run foul of the authorities. Robert was the nephew of the influential and wealthy Irishman William Bryan who had arrived in the colony in 1824 and was appointed to the magistracy. After a falling out with the Police Magistrate he resigned his position and not long afterwards Arthur refused Bryan's application for a land grant. When he was publicly critical of Arthur's administration his convict labour was withdrawn at harvest time. (Robson,1983 pp298-302).
Bryan charged Arthur and his nephew, Chief Police Constable Forster, with misuse of government property and labour and made it known that he had sent his complaints back to the Home Government. Bryan also fell out with the local constabulary known colloquially as "Arthur's felon police" (Colonial Times, 15 September, 1835). The stage was set for retribution - Bryan was charged with cattle duffing, a popular "trumped-up" charge of the day. After being found guilty and fined he left the colony to return to Britain to make complaints personally to his influential contacts in the Home Government and it was while he was on this mission that Arthur extracted his revenge - seeing to it that Bryan's young nephew, Robert, was charged with the capital offence of cattle stealing.
The Crown case was based on the evidence of three convict constables who had been "planted" amongst the convict work party assigned to Bryan's property and who claimed to have witnessed Robert Bryan junior driving cattle onto his property.
Such was the Lieutenant Governor's interest in a case of cattle stealing that he travelled to Launceston in his personal carriage with, as his travelling companion, none other than Chief Justice Pedder who was presiding over the case (Colonial Times, 3 November, 1835). Arthur also made sure that his three influential nephews daily attended the trial. Lengthy reports of the trial were published in the Colonial Times, the Cornwall Chronicle, the Hobart Town Courier, and the True Colonist.
Arthur was still using military juries despite the direction from the Secretary of State for the Colonies that civil juries should be instituted. Henry Melville reported in the Colonial Times that the jury was "packed by Colonel Arthur" (30 October, 1835) and accused the constables of being "perjurers" and the foreman of the jury of being "a miserable quibbler when on oath". Robert Bryan was found guilty of the capital offence of cattle stealing. Under British law, although a sentence of death was recorded, convicted cattle stealers were no longer hanged, but in Bryan's case Pedder ordered that the death sentence be carried out.
A concerned citizen, who knew the statements of the convict constables to be false, took out a complaint of wilful and corrupt perjury against the constables, but Chief Justice Pedder refused to act on the information. Several persons of influence, who were in court throughout the trial, signed a document stating that from the evidence they had heard they "verily believed the prisoner innocent" (Melville, 1862 p51). Several other prominent citizens, upon reading the newspaper reports of the trial, signed another petition which was sent to the Home Government.
Melville gave a scathing appraisal of the whole proceedings in the Colonial Times (3 November, 1835):
This prosecution was in every sense of the word a "prosecution of the Government", how got up none but those concerned can tell. We ask why was it that the Governor left Launceston as soon as Mr Bryan was found guilty - was it that the authorities might communicate through the Secretary of State, to Mr W. Bryan that his nephew was found guilty of felony in Botany Bay? Such has been the fate of Mr Robert Bryan; reader, you may tomorrow be charged with an unnatural crime, felony or murder - and are there not hundreds ready to swear you guilty for half a crown - nay, for a glass of rum?
The Judges of the Supreme Court immediately ordered a warrant be served on Melville and he was brought before the court and found guilty of contempt of court and sentenced to 12 months gaol, fined 200 pounds and ordered to find sureties of 500 pounds. The unprecedented severe sentence for contempt of court was aimed at financially destroying Melville who found himself incarcerated in the goal in Hobart Town while Robert Bryan waited in a condemned cell at the Launceston gaol for his death sentence to be carried out.
With two newspaper proprietors incarcerated in the Hobart gaol a visiting American sea captain observed: "In all America, there was only (ever) one Editor of a newspaper incarcerated in gaol, and he was there for telling a 'parcel of lies'" (Goodrick, 1978 p191). The Colonial Times countered that in Van Diemen's Land "there were two editors, two publishers and two printers in gaol for telling the truth!". Melville told his readers that "in these times of terror the safest place is the goal!" (Colonial Times, 6 November, 1835). Melville spent his time in prison writing a commentary on prison discipline as well as completing a critical and descriptive account of Arthur's administration, A History of the Island of Van Diemen's Land from 1824 to 1835 which was published in 1835 without outside interference or censorship or fear of imprisonment, to great interest.
Journalism and freedom of the press finally triumphed - in December Arthur released Robertson and Melville, after spending a miserable Christmas in the "unwholesome dungeon", was released in January 1836 - possibly due to pressure from the Home Government.
With Arthur's recall in 1836 the anti-Arthur press could not contain themselves. Robertson's True Colonist "called upon every resource of type to announce the happy fact" (23 May 1836). Arthur's recall signalled an end to an oppressive period in the history of the press in Australia.
His attempt to gag the press was deliberate, calculated and relentless. While Governor Sir John Franklin and subsequent Van Diemen's Land governors were often harshly criticised in the Tasmanian press never again did a governor endeavour to destroy the free press and deny the citizens the only public forum for comment available to them.
References:
Cryle, Denis, Disreputable Profession:
Journalists and Journalism in Colonial Australia
(1997), Brisbane: Central Queensland University
Press.
Giblin, R.W.,(1939) The Early History of Tasmania.
Goodrick, Joan ( 1978) Tales of Old Van Diemen's Land, Adelaide: Rigby. Historical Records of Australia, Series 1, X111, 1947.
Melville, Henry, (1835) A History of Van Diemen's
Land, George Mackaness (Ed) Sydney: Sydney Review
Publications.
Miller, Morris, M. (1952), Pressmen and
Governors, Sydney: Sydney University Press.
Robson, Lloyd,(1983) A History of Tasmania,
Melbourne: Oxford University Press.
West, John (1852) A History of Tasmania, Launceston: Henry Dowling.
Woodberry, Joan (1972), Andrew Bent, Hobart: Fullers Bookshop.
Tasmanian Historical Research Association Journal, 111, Volume 6. The Colonial Times The Hobart Town Gazette The New London Monthly The True Colonist
Paper given to the Journalims Educators Association National Conference, Perth, WA, December 2001.
Nicola Goc is Lecturer Journalism and Media Studies, School of English, Journalism and European Languages, University of Tasmania.
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