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William Bland (1789-1868)
Letters to Charles Buller, Junior, Esq., M.P., from the Australian Patriotic Association. 1849
RCIN 1026281
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The Australian Patriotic Association was a political party founded in 1835 to encourage immigration to Australia and to advocate for the introduction of responsible government in New South Wales. The Association was led by the newspaper publisher William Wentworth, the surgeon Sir John Jamison and William Bland, a doctor and former convict.
Bland was transported to Australia in 1814 after killing a man in a duel but quickly earned his freedom, receiving a full pardon in January 1815. He soon became involved in politics and advocated for the rights of ‘Emancipists’, people whose sentences had lapsed or who had been granted a partial or full pardon, in the face of a conservative opposition known as the ‘Exclusives’ who continued to view them as criminals.
Between 1839 and 1841, Bland wrote a series of letters addressed to the reformist politician and lawyer Charles Buller (1806-48) on behalf of the Patriotic Association advocating for increased self-government in New South Wales. Such a government, he argued, ought to reflect the wishes of the colony and that both landowning Emancipists and Exclusives should be involved in choosing their representatives. The Association was largely successful in its aims and dissolved in 1842 following the passing of an Act of Parliament creating a new constitution for New South Wales. The first elections took place the following year and Bland was chosen to represent Sydney in the colony's expanded Legislative Council.
This book contains Bland’s letters of 1839-41 as well as an additional letter of 1847 addressed to Sir Charles Fitzroy, Governor-General of New South Wales, requesting that free immigration from Britain be encouraged in order to settle the colony’s interior.
Bland dedicated the book to Wentworth, who, on the establishment of the Association in 1835, vocally supported free immigration and self-government. However, by the end of the 1840s, he had abandoned such causes and had become a leading member of what was known as the ‘squattocracy’, a group of wealthy landowners who laid claim to vast areas of land in New South Wales and who opposed free immigration in favour of the introduction of indentured labourers from India, China and the Pacific. In 1853, Wentworth chaired a committee to review the New South Wales constitution and attempted to restrict voting rights to the wealthiest in society. These views made him incredibly unpopular within the colony and led to his newspaper, The Australian, disassociating itself with him. In 1854, it was reported in the Sydney newspaper The Empire that Wentworth was jeered by crowds as he boarded his ship on leaving Australia to retire to his Dorset estate. -
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