On the evening of 26 January 1808 — twenty years to the day after Phillips camp at Warrane — the New South Wales Corps marched up Bridge Street to the first Government House and took the governor. That house sat where the Museum of Sydney now stands, not in the Domain pile Blore finished in the 1840s. Major George Johnston assumed the government; John Macarthur had sharpened the crisis. William Bligh was arrested. Military-backed administrations ran the colony until Lachlan Macquarie took office on 1 January 1810.
The nickname Rum Rebellion is later journalism. Nobody in 1808 printed those two words on a handbill. The Corps’ spirits trade earned it Rum Corps after the fact; the fight on the day was land, rum as currency, courts, and who gave orders in a small town. It remains the only successful military overthrow of a government in Australia. The yarn that Bligh was dragged from under a bed is Corps propaganda. Keep the First Government House picture as a site picture. Do not caption it as the sandstone house in the Gardens.
No comments:
Post a Comment