Early colonial Australia changed when England started shipping Scottish, Irish and English seditionists to Australia . The Governor's of NSW and the local population had an hysterical and irrational fear of the political prisoners, especially the Irish. The late 1700s had seen the republican uprisings in the United State, France and Ireland, the former two being successful, while the latter was suppressed by the British military. The spilling of republican blood extended to Australia; the first martyr being, Mr Boston's pig.

The Scottish Martyrs

Jacobinism was a rising movement in England, which was seen as threat to the power of the English government. Unable to guarantee convictions of Jacobins in England, Scottish Jacobins were instead chosen to be the example trial, as juries more corrupt in Scotland. Thomas Muir was the first Scottish Martyr trailed. His crime was distributing Thomas Paine's Rights of Man . Muir was sent to Australia for fourteen years. Thomas Palmer helped publish and distribute a pamphlet titled, Address to the People . The pamphlet's main subject was parliamentary reform. Palmer got seven years.

Flush with the success of the convictions of the Muir and Palmer in Scotland, Lord Lauderdale pursued Scottish Jacobins active in England with the intention of having them tried for sedition in the stacked Scottish courts. A National Convention of British Reformers met in 1793; from there Maurice Margot, William Skirving and Joseph Gerrald were all arrested. Margot and Skirving received fourteen years, while Gerrald posted bail. Gerrald was not free for long, he was sent to Australia in 1794.

John Boston

John Boston was an Englishmen; an avowed Republican and Jacobin, who had come out to Australia to keep his good friend Thomas Palmer company. Boston carried a gem with him on the voyage; the colony's only encyclopaedia. Later Boston and Palmer used the book for economic advantage, teaching themselves how to brew beer, make soap and eventually ship building.

When Boston arrived in Australia he had desires of establishing himself as a merchant. This brought him into direct conflict with John MacArthur's Rum Corps, the military unit who controlled the police, judicial system and economy. Boston was further tainted by it having been alleged that on the voyage to Australia that he toasted a glass to the King's damnation.

Boston's livestock, including a pig, was penned near the livestock of Captain Joseph Foveaux of the Rum Corps. One of Boston's best pigs was found in Foveaux's pens and was shot by Marines. At the court hearing for the incident, Lieutenant McKeller denounced Boston as a radical republican who publicly drank to the murder of the King. The pig was also denounced as having no respect for boundaries. Mark McKenna writes;

McKeller also explained that the pig was shot 'not in malice or wantonness' but because it had destroyed the property of Captain Foveaux. 'Fences or fastenings were no security against the levelling practices of this animal, practices which I conclude are carefully and industriously inculcated in every part of the house of its master'.

McKenna identifies the use of the word leveller as indicating that McKeller saw the pig as republican. The term leveller in the English language of the day carried strong republican overtones and meaning. McKenna continues;

In the eyes of Lieutenant McKeller, the insidious pestilence of republicanism was even capable of converting farm animals into an active campaign of subversion. Loyalty to the crown was the framework within which all political activity took place in New South Wales. Any person (or pig) seen to be stepping outside those boundaries was branded as treasonous. The result was the shooting of Australia's first republican martyr - John Boston's pig.

Not much changed in the colonies, even with self-government. Compare the hysteria of the early colony to the "loyalty" meetings Henry Parkes held ninety years later.

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More Reading on Republicanism

• Republicanism
• Pig
• John Boston
• Mark McKenna
• Scottish Martyrs
• The Individualist Streak in Australian Republicanism
• John Boston's Pig
• Political Rationalism
• Australian Republican Identity Politics
• Quotification
• Universalism in Australian Republicanism
• Liberalism, Civic Nationalism and Republicanism
• James Madison on War
• Is Australian Republicanism Radical?
• Copernican paradigm