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# Australia’s rebel heritage of poetry and song
- URL: https://redflag.org.au/article/node-5222/
- Published: 2016-04-08T08:57:47.000Z
- Updated: 2024-03-28T02:10:38.000Z
- Author: Mark Gregory
- Tags: Culture and Reviews, #Import 2025-10-13 13:40

> *Old England’s in a dreadful state* 
> 
> *Wherever we may go;*
> 
> *Thousands of honest working-men*
> 
> *Are brought to grief and woe.*
> 
> *There never was such sad distress*
> 
> *In England before;*
> 
> *Then why should not the rich begin* 
> 
> *To help the starving poor.*
> 
> *What will become of England*
> 
> *If things go on this way;* 
> 
> *Thousands of honest working men* 
> 
> *Are starving day by day!*
> 
> *They cannot get employment,*
> 
> *For bread their children crave,* 
> 
> *And hundreds they have died of want* 
> 
> *And now lie in the grave.*
> 
> *In many a humble dwelling*
> 
> *Distress does nosw prevail,*
> 
> *For there’s many a family starving*
> 
> *In England and in Wales;*
> 
> *In a land where there is plenty*
> 
> *Of wealth and golden store,*
> 
> *I think it’s time there’s something done*
> 
> *To help the starving poor.*
> 
> *We read that the Welsh miners*
> 
> *Are in dreadful state,*
> 
> *No food nor clothing scarce have they,* 
> 
> *No fire in the grate; And many hundred families*
> 
> *To the workhouse they have gone* 
> 
> *For shelter for their little ones* 
> 
> *From this cold winter storm.*
> 
> *Some have money plenty.*
> 
> *And still they crave for more.* 
> 
> *They will not lend a helping hand*
> 
> *To assist the starving poor;*
> 
> *They pass him by just like a dog.*
> 
> *And on him cast a frown.*
> 
> *That’s the way the working men*
> 
> *Of England are kept down.*
> 
> *There’s great distress in Lancashire,* 
> 
> *For many miles around;*
> 
> *The masters they’ve done all they can* 
> 
> *To crush them to the ground.*
> 
> *Their money is so powerful,*
> 
> *And it destruction buys,*
> 
> *Thank God it cannot purchase life,* 
> 
> *Or none but poor would die.*
> 
> *Let us hope our rulers will*
> 
> *Assist the starving poor.*
> 
> *And set the wheel of trade in motion*
> 
> *Which has been done before.*
> 
> *There is plenty of land in England.*
> 
> *Preserved for the game,*
> 
> *And if they would cultivate it,* 
> 
> *The trade would mend again.*
> 
> – HP Such, machine printer and publisher, Union Street, Boro’

Ballads like this one published in Borough, London, by the famous printer HP Such, had been sold on the streets of the towns and cities from which convicts were transported to Australia from the First Fleet onwards. This street literature was hawked for less than a penny and was sung, or “chaunted” by the seller to a large audience, many of them income poor.

HP Such’s ballad provides us with a sample of the early industrial working class’ emotional and political understanding of the rising empire. Poor wages and famine conditions are contrasted with the wealthy ruling class’ refusal to help: “Hundreds they have died of want and now lie in the grave”. There is famine in Lancashire and “the masters they’ve done all they can to crush them to the ground”. The Welsh miners “are in dreadful state, no food nor clothing scarce have they, no fire in the grate”.

The haughty rulers made the laws that allowed them to enclose the common land as their own – “there is plenty of land in England preserved for the game” – land stolen from towns and villages, resulting in the impoverishment of the poor and the enrichment of the new owners.

Highlighted in the ballad is class war, “war on the workers” writ large. We can clearly see this kind of vernacular verse as agitation for change. The philosophical approach of the composer is clear enough – an exploited community under deadly attack is contemplating what is to be done.

“In a land where there is plenty of wealth and golden store, I think it’s time there’s something done to help the starving poor.” We can find in these ballads assumed rights that are considered more important to the culture than the plethora of laws passed by the rich to protect their ill-gotten wealth.

These assumed rights found expression in food riots involving confiscation and redistribution to the community, in community support for the poaching of game, in the Luddite machine-breaking to preserve employment and in working class song and poetry. Included among the assumed rights are those that Irish rebels claimed through generations of attempts at national liberation, again accompanied by a wealth of song and poetry.

Archives of such vernacular verse are today available online, but two published collections stand out.

In 2000, the Australian folklorist, historian and publisher Hugh Anderson released *Farewell to judges and juries* – a selection of 140 such “broadside ballads” that related to transportation to the new colony. They document the lives and times of many of the men and women who became the British empire’s forced labour for the first 50 years of the colony.

They are invaluable documents that enable us to understand something of the horror of being exiled to the other side of the globe, never to return or meet family and friends again. They are a voice from below that contends with the vast official documentation of the colonial prison regime.

Another collection of such street ballads, titled *A book of scattered leaves*, was published in the United States by collector James Hepburn, who selected 120 street ballads that dealt with poverty, famine and the working and living conditions of men and women in the towns and cities of 19th century England.

The ancient continent where the convicts were exiled had long been a land of vibrant poetry and song, which constituted the ceremonial lives of the Indigenous custodians. Unbroken generations of multilingual Aborigines were brought up in language and ceremonial culture – as all humans had been in the thousands of years before the written word. Not that this vibrant artistic and self-sufficient civilisation meant much to the invaders, whose mission was imperial conquest and theft under the classical guise of delivering civilisation to the ungodly – a quest that would create for British rulers the world’s most extensive empire to that point.

**Convicts’ concern**

It should come as no surprise that an early example of convict poetry, “The exile of Erin”, was published in the *Sydney Gazette* in 1828, posted to the editor from the agricultural penal settlement at the foot of the Blue Mountains, “the plains of Emu”, as the emotional ballad has it.

Early Australian newspapers are full of song and poetry, much of it composed by their local readers. I have based much of my research on discoveries I have made by delving into this archive and drawing on more than 150 newspaper titles. In the process I have discovered hidden material, now published in my PhD thesis titled “Australian working songs and poems – a rebel heritage”.

The Irish convict Francis MacNamara, a coal miner transported to Botany Bay in 1832, soon gained fame among his fellow prisoners for his extempore verse. He reflects on the convict system under which he experienced the most brutal punishment, including a secondary transportation to Port Arthur. Not surprisingly, his poetry speaks of tyranny and injustice.

One of his early compositions is “Labouring with the hoe”, which undoubtedly alludes to his experience of being assigned to John Jones on arrival. He details the injustice of his own transportation and forcefully proclaims the nature of his punishment in chains as akin to slavery.

*Despised rejected and oppressed*

*In tattered rags I’m clad*

*What anguish fills my aching breast*

*And drives me almost mad*

*When I hear the settler’s threatening voice*

*Say Arise to labour go!*

*Take scourging convict for your choice*

*Or work the labouring hoe*

*Growing weary from compulsive toil* 

*Beneath the noontide sun*

*While drops of sweat bedew the soil* 

*My task remains undone*

*I’m flogged for wilful negligence*

*Or the tyrant calls it so*

*Oh what a doleful recompense*

*For labouring with the hoe …*

*You generous sons of Erin’s isle* 

*Whose heart for glory burns*

*Pity a wretched exile*

*Who his long-lost country mourns*

*Restore me heaven to liberty*

*Whilst I lie here below*

*Untie this clue of bondage*

*And release me from the hoe!*

His most famous and longest verse was “A convict’s tour to hell” – a hilarious description of all the tyrants he met in the prison system ending up in hell … a place where convicts were not allowed:

*You prisoners all of New South Wales,*

*Who frequent watch houses and gaols*

*A story to you I will tell*

*‘* *Tis of a convict’s tour to hell.*

The first person the poet meets on his way to hell is the ferryman Charon, who gladly rows him across for free on account of his prestige. The second is the recently departed Pope, who is in charge of “Limbo, or the Middle State”. He won’t allow the poet to stay, saying:

*This place was made for Priests and Popes*

*’Tis a world of our own invention*

*But friend I’ve not the least intention*

*To admit such a foolish elf*

*Who scarce knows how to bless himself …*

*Frank then bid the Pope farewell*

*And hurried to that place called Hell*

Moving on to “that place called hell”, Frank catches the attention of the devil

*When the Devil came, pray what’s your will?*

*Alas cried the Poet I’ve come to dwell*

*With you and share your fate in Hell*

*Says Satan that can’t be, I’m sure*

*For I detest and hate the poor*

*And none shall in my kingdom stand*

*Except the grandees of the land.*

The devil urges the poet to take a tour of hell before he moves off to heaven

*Hark do you hear this dreadful yelling*

*It issues from Doctor Wardell’s dwelling*

*And all those fiery seats and chairs*

*Are fitted up for Dukes and Mayors*

*And nobles of Judicial orders*

*Barristers, Lawyers and Recorders*

*Here I beheld legions of traitors*

*Hangmen gaolers and flagellators*

*Commandants, Constables and Spies*

*Informers and Overseers likewise*

*In flames of brimstone they were toiling*

Doctor Wardell is the famous Sydney lawyer who is commemorated with a marble plaque in St James Church on the South Wall. Oddly enough, the English convict John Jenkins, who was hanged for the murder of Wardell, is in heaven, as the poet discovers when he finally meets St Peter:

*Cried Peter, where’s your certificate*

*Or if you have not one to show*

*Pray who in Heaven do you know?*

*Well I know Brave Donohue*

*Young Troy and Jenkins too*

*And many others whom floggers mangled*

*And lastly were by Jack Ketch strangled*

*Peter, says Jesus, let Frank in*

*For he is thoroughly purged from sin*

*And although in convict’s habit dressed*

*Here he shall be a welcome guest.*

Feted as he is in heaven, the poet finally wakes up to find his adventure was but a dream. It’s hard not to imagine the sheer pleasure convicts would have enjoyed on hearing this great poem, and hear it we know they did, since they memorised it or parts of it well enough for 19th century collectors to copy it down and piece it together.

It was not published until 1890, slipped in as it were with a scurrilous verse by the poet Henry Kendall. Today we have what is considered to be the original handwritten version of this masterpiece dating from 1839, which now resides in the Mitchell Library in Sydney.

We also have a growing understanding that the early working class can be better understood when attention is paid to the wealth of popular poetry and songs that reveal the concerns and passions that accompany their development.