Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
WILD COLONIAL BOYS
When Governor Phillip went back to England in 1792 due to fail-
ing health, Francis Grose took over. Grose granted land to of-
ficers of the New South Wales Corps, nicknamed the Rum Corps.
With so much money, land and cheap labour in their hands, this
military leadership made huge profits at the expense of small
farmers. They began paying for labour and local products in rum.
Meeting little resistance (everyone was drunk), they managed to
upset, defy, outmanoeuvre and outlast three governors, the last of
which was William Bligh, the famed captain of the mutinous ship
HMAV
Bounty
. In 1808 the Rum Corps, in cahoots with powerful
agriculturalist John Macarthur, ousted Bligh from power in what
became known as the Rum Rebellion.
Early His-
tory Online
Dictionary of Sydney Project
The Rum Rebellion was the final straw for the British govern-
ment - in 1809 it decided to punish its unruly child. Lieutenant
Colonel Lachlan Macquarie was dispatched with his own regi-
ment and ordered the New South Wales Corps to return to Lon-
don to get their knuckles rapped. Having broken the stranglehold
of the Rum Corps, Governor Macquarie began laying the ground-
work for social reforms.
Until 1803, when a second penal outpost was established in Van Diemen's Land (today's
Tasmania), Sydney was still the only European settlement in Australia. Inroads into the
vast interior of the continent were only made in the ensuing 40 years.
In 1851 the discovery of large gold deposits near Bathurst, 200km west of Sydney,
sparked Australia's first gold rush. Another massive find in the southern colony of Victoria
shortly afterwards reduced Sydney to secondary size and importance to Melbourne. Mel-
bourne's ascendency lasted from the 1850s until the economic depression of the 1890s,
when Sydney swung back into national favour…and so the Sydney-Melbourne rivalry
began.
