Social class in early Maitland
All societies have class divisions, some based on birth and some on money. The divisions influence lives: one’s position within the hierarchy can greatly influence one’s prospects. In Australia, class is arguably of less significance these days than in most other countries, but it was certainly important in the nineteenth century. It was not easy in those days to escape one’s class origins, something that applied in the Maitland area as it did elsewhere.
The upper echelon
At the top of the class structure in the lower Hunter in the early years of European settlement were the well born and those with money and connections. From the 1820s these people made up a landed gentry whose wealth or connections with the Governor and the bureaucracy in Sydney saw them obtain large grants of land along with convicts to clear and work their estates.
Among the holders of grants in the Maitland area were retired military officers Edward Close, Francis Allman and Val Blomfield. Other grantees were John Brown, Thomas McDougall and Standish Harris. These and their like made up the local elite. They guarded their positions carefully, and in effect they defined the class structure and the positions of individuals within it.
Some were magistrates who had great power over their convict employees ꟷ including the ability to impose harsh physical punishments on any who attempted to escape, refused to work as directed or behaved insolently ─ something that could be defined by the magistrate land-owners to their own advantage. They mixed socially only with their own kind and looked down on those they regarded as their inferiors (which was everybody else).
The only people they would have recognised as worthy would have been the members of the tiny professional class in West Maitland, East Maitland and Morpeth. By about 1840 this group was made up of a few doctors, chemists, solicitors, bankers, accountants, teachers and ministers of religion.
The middle classes
Next came other free people like businessmen in the town (bakers, builders, cabinet-makers, publicans, retailers and others) and the small farmers like the former non-commissioned army officers who between 1829 and 1836 were granted plots at Veterans Flat in recognition of their efforts in the Napoleonic wars. From the late 1830s there were English yeoman farmers and Scottish crofters in the Maitland area as well: they gradually replaced the convicts as the workforces on the large estates. Some became tenant farmers and some came to own their own small farms hewn out of the estates.
The lower classes
Currency (Australian-born) ‘lads and lasses’, usually the children of convicts and working in urban occupations, came next. Having convict parentage, they were little respected by the gentry.
Further down the hierarchy were the emancipists, technically free but tainted by their criminal pasts which were never forgotten by the elite members of the community. Those who flouted their wealth, made more money than the gentry, affected airs and graces and acted beyond their stations (as did ‘Gentleman’ John Smith, one of the original convict farmers at Wallis Plains), were much denigrated by the ruling class. Smith, indeed, was despised, probably as much for his financial success as for the sycophancy he used to achieve it.
Serving convicts were lower still, according to the elite there to be punished and to serve their masters on the estates. The first convict farmers of Wallis Plains were thought incapable of making proper use of their holdings: to many of the elite it had been a mistake to give them small plots of land to work as semi-subsistence farms. Female convicts were generally considered ‘depraved’ and ‘damned whores’.
At the bottom of the social pile were the Wonnarua people, including those of racially mixed parentage born of European fathers and Indigenous mothers. By the 1840s the Indigenous people of the area were much diminished in number, thanks largely to introduced diseases and the violence perpetrated by Europeans. Their communities had been marginalised and scattered and, as individuals or small groups living on the edges of European society, they were becoming increasingly separated from their traditional ways of life and from their Country.
Their skills and their labour, while useful to the settlers, were little appreciated. They were looked down upon by the vast majority of the Europeans whatever the positions of those Europeans in the social hierarchy. At the very best they were patronised.
References
Keys, Chas, ‘Our past: the very obvious pecking order in Maitland in the 1800s’, Our Past, Maitland Mercury, 7 February 2021.
Wood, W. Allan, Dawn in the Valley: the story of settlement in the Hunter River Valley to 1833, Wentworth Books, Sydney, 1972.
