A Strange Radical

Abstract

John Morgan was one of the group of able and loquacious news paper editors who kept the political pot on the boil in Van Diemen's Land throughout the twenty years preceding self-government. He was an odd, unsettled character, despite his holding a commission on half pay from the Royal Marines and acquiring extensive land grants in both Western Australia and Van Diemen's Land. He had started life in the Australian colonies in great style as Government Storekeeper at Swan River and later as Police Magistrate, Deputy Chairman of Quarter Sessions, Commissioner for the Court of Requests and Coroner for the District of Richmond in Van Diemen's Land. But things went wrong. He issued stores at Swan River against promissory notes during 1834 when there was no currency available yet the people calling at his storehouse were starving for lack of supplies. The credit notes were not honoured by the settlers and never recognised by the British Treasury, which held the storekeeper responsible for the stores used. Morgan entered into a long and complicated evasion of the liabilities,1 being obsessed with the need to avoid a showdown with the officials of the Treasury until 1855 when he sacrificed his accrued half-pay due to him as an officer of the Royal Marines, and he emerged once more into respectable life. In the eleven years between his release from debt and his death he seems to have settled down to being a rather stuffy, self-satisfied con servative, in direct contrast with his previous career. Driven out of the society of those he envied during his years of disgrace, he had acted with a high-handed idealism which was startingly radical for his day and situation. There seems to be little doubt that his political attitudes rested very firmly upon his social standing at the time. Though his ideas altered very little from his days in Canada and England to those in Van Diemen's Land, his sense of personal injustice and insecurity drove him into an active position in the colony. This had the dual effect of pushing him towards practical lengths to which his idealism would not have led him and to a gradual disgust with the democracy and radicalism which were his early ideals. In 1824 Morgan fancied himself to be a Whig. He was a hater of British Tory power; he criticised the ultra-Tories on every occasion possible. This did not mean that he was very dissatisfied with politics in Britain. In fact, he was serenely and uncritically confident that British law and British political institutions closely approached the ideal. Tory power was evil, but its effect was only a delaying one and ideal govern ment was certain to be first achieved in Britain which would serve as