| Four companies of Marines landed with the first Europeans to settle in Australia, and twenty five regiments of British infantry served in the colonies between 1790 and 1870. Other small units, of engineers, artillery, and most of all, mounted police, played parts in developing the colonies' roads and buildings or in protecting their inhabitants from internal or external threats. Men of the Royal Marines were to continue to serve in Australia after 1870, until 1913 stationed aboard Royal Naval vessels based at Sydney.
For most of these men -perhaps 20,000 in
all- a posting to Australia was an unwelcome
one, and their stay in what were for most of the period convict colonies was often uneventful and tedious. Not one regiment won in Australia any sort of military glory, and many considered that their
reputations as disciplined military units were tarnished by their association with
felons, even as guards.
Not one regiment won battle honors with which to decorate its colours, and their regimental histories (still largely based on their members' performance in action) devote little space to their sojourn in Van Diemen's Land or at Moreton Bay. Nor have Australian historians paid much attention to what have often been seen as red-coated robots, birds of passage of little relevance to the story of the colonies' early years.
A British officer wrote in the 1820s of 'the remote garrison' of Sydney. The garrison of Australia was indeed remote. Australia was until the 1840s the
most distant of Britain's colonies, but its military lodgers were remote in other senses-especially socially, from the colonies' convict (and many of their free) inhabitants. They are also remote in time from ourselves, largely ignored by all but a few military historians.
And yet the troops sent to garrison the Australian colonies participated in the great struggle at the heart of the European conquest of this continent. In buttressing the forces of order and at times ensuring the literal survival of white settlement, British troops helped to determine the civilisation which would replace the culture of the Australian Aborigines. They fought in one of the most prolonged frontier wars in the history of the British empire, and for the first half of their stay were probably more frequently in action than the garrison of any other colony besides that of southern Africa.
The soldiers themselves were disinclined to consider their skirmishes with Aborigines or hunts for bushrangers as war. Their experience in the
Australian bush certainly differed from the war which many had previously
encountered on the battlefields of Spain, or even in the dramatic
confrontations with the native armies of Africa or India; Colonel Godfrey Mundy
remarked that there was 'no colony ... where British troops have been so
thoroughly without opportunities of distinction'.
For the British army, dazzled as it was by notions of martial glory, probably did not heed the lessons of its
fights on the Australian frontier: that war, and especially war waged against
primitive peoples, is nasty and decidedly lacking in glory. This should not,
however, diminish our interest in the British soldier in Australia, for these
rather squalid skirmishes and the soldiers' service as gaolers, represent the
beginnings of European military history in Australia.
Despite their involvements in conflicts with bushrangers or Aborigines, the soldiers who arrived aboard convict ships were every bit as much prisoners as those they guarded. Many had enlisted from hunger or want (which had forced many convicts to commit the crimes leading to their transportation) and they were fed as poorly and punished as
fiercely -the military cat o' nine tails was heavier than the one used on convicts. Soldiers were unable to obtain a ticket-of-leave and settle in a land which promised prosperity; most, in fact, went on to serve in India for up to ten years, and few returned home in good health after their twenty-year overseas tour.
But soldiers did settle in Australia, perhaps several thousand by the time the last soldiers left in 1870. Most were discharged after ten or twenty years service, while a few hundred simply deserted. Their story, and that of the generations which followed, mostly remains untold, emerging mainly in family histories compiled with much labour and little known outside of genealogical societies. Despite the relatively small number of military settlers, many thousands of Australians can claim a British soldier among their ancestors.
This book is intended to introduce Australian readers to the soldiers who were stationed in the colonies which became their nation. It tells the soldiers' story briefly and with many omissions-gaps in our understanding which will I hope shortly be filled. It attempts to describe what the soldiers did, particularly during their involvement in what have for too long been the hidden conflicts of colonial Australia, and will I hope help Australians to understand how the temporary exiles of the remote garrison lived and looked and perhaps too to imagine how they felt. |
