Sport and Colonialism in 19th Century Australasia - LA84 Foundation

they also had a duty to display the forms of British civilisation
and, if in doing so they were able to exercise a degree of
social control over the lower strata of society, they would
serve the colony's interests as well as their own. The gaming
and betting practices of the gentry went virtually unchallenged,
but the same cannot be said of the practices of the convicts
and the poorer sections of colonial society.
Voices were raised against the practices of the lower orders.
Governor Bligh and the clergymen Samuel Marsden and Rowland
Hassel registered their complaints, though their objections were
based less on moral considerations than on gambling's alleged
promotion of idleness and the undermining of any spirit of industriousness.
Occasionally letters to the Sydney Gazette con-
demned labourers and convicts for gaming and even chastised
children for playing marbles. Such opinions were expressions
of the dominant morality of middle-class, urban, industrial
Britain. 31
Nor did Macquarie disagree with this view. His encouragement
of horse racing was not designed to cultivate a spirit of
adventure and gambling. Rather it was intended to channel the
existing gambling inclinations into an activity which would perform
an annual safety-valve function. The release of the gambling
energies on an annual event, to take place under his watchful
eye and control during a week of celebration and public
holidays, might perhaps have enabled the convicts and the labouring
classes to go about their work for the rest of the year industriously,
and free from the urge to game or bet in search of
the unearned wealth.
If such was Macquarie's intention, there is little evidence
of success for this policy. The horse racing of the gentlemen
was pursued with vigour, and the gambling instincts of the lower
orders continued to find outlets for their expression in both
gaming and betting. The expression of urban industrial middleclass
values by the holders of colonial authority could be
little more than empty rhetoric when those same holders of
authority sponsored the imposition of a pre-modern society, and
provided patronage for an ever increasing range of gaming and
betting practices. Those practices in the early Australian
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