Читать книгу Australian History For Dummies - Alex McDermott - Страница 93

When three ex-convict entrepreneurs (Lord, Kable and James Underwood) sent Bligh a (relatively mild) protest letter, he jailed them. Bligh declared the letter insulting.

Then Bligh started threatening Sydney residents with eviction, because he wished to do with the town layout what he was trying to do with the economy — push it back to Phillip’s period. Bligh didn’t like the colonial mess he was being confronted with, and he certainly didn’t like the sprawling, mercantile shanty metropolis of Sydney that had just grown up without, as he put it, ‘any particular design’.

The mess that was Sydney was actually the source of the colony’s greatest strength. No strictly military area of the settlement, no ex-convicts ghetto and no free settlers area existed, and only one convict jail to restrict convicts to was established. On the land and in the town, convicts lived with settlers, both free and emancipated.

Bligh launched a campaign against colonial disorder. He had ‘plans which I had formed for the improvement of the town’, and put the fear in people badly by telling them colonial leases may have no legal meaning.

In trying to implement his reforms, Bligh wasn’t helped by his own language and demeanour. He reacted badly to being questioned or disagreed with. When someone brought up the laws of England, he exploded: ‘Damn your laws of England! Don’t talk to me of your laws of England: I will make laws for this colony, and every wretch of you … shall be governed by them; or there [pointing to the jail] is your habitation!’