The Life and Crimes of William Astley

Many of the biographical particulars of William Astley—author, swindler, and impresario of the Federal People’s Convention of 1896—are obscure. Some basic inaccuracies—including his year of birth, 1855—were for years erroneously stated by profile writers. They also commonly repeated the assertion that, at the age of twenty-one, Astley was editor of the Richmond Guardian; a not impossible attainment, but something unlikely and unproved, and which may be set aside as one of his fictions.

The earliest occasion Astley demonstrably steps into the public eye is in 1880 as a self-described Sunday school teacher in Launceston seeking “contributions” from the public for his labours. How many citizens amiably contributed is unknown. On May 9, 1881, the Examiner reported Astley’s arrest at a boarding house in Hobart, “just after his return from St David’s Cathedral”; he was charged with embezzling £60. The case plodded through the courts, delayed repeatedly by Astley’s avowals of illness, and his prostration, on one occasion, by “hystero-epilepsy”. He was eventually sentenced to two years in prison. In 1885, the Tasmanian records Detective O’Donnell of Geelong arresting William Astley, “thirty-one, describing himself as a journalist … not long come from Tasmania”. He was charged with embezzling the sum of £1 15s; the detective contended that the defalcations actually totalled £400. Two years later, the Geelong Advertiser recorded “a respectably-attired and gentlemanly” William Astley being charged with obtaining £10 0s 6d by false pretences. Astley’s intricate rationalisation of the sequence of events, combined with repayment of the sum, occasioned withdrawal of the charge.

In the late 1880s—in a natural development?—Astley advanced from fraud to what amounted to historical forgeries, in authoring densely plotted, carefully painted convict-era dramas, under the pseudonym of Price Warung. He claimed with some flourish that his tales were based on his exhaustive historical research. Historians have exploded these pretensions. They are better seen as second wind of the dubious “Mine is a Sad Yet True Story” literature of the mid-nineteenth century and earlier, which according to Anne Conlon consisted of “at least thirty narratives purporting to recount the experiences of convicts transported to New South Wales”. Up to half of these are fictional, including, above all else, the “Recollections of 13 years residence in Norfolk Island and Tasmania”, supposedly written in 1823, but in fact “a work of fiction actually produced about 1850 or an even later date”. This would be rich meat for Warung in composing his gothic fantasia about Norfolk Island, Tales of the Isle of Death. He embroidered horrors: a hangman, tasked to hang twenty people, exhausted his supply of rope. He invented them: no female convict was ever branded W for “whore”; no convict was ever hanged for interrupting a commandant’s nap. He defamed Charles Sturt as a parade-ground bully, when in truth Sturt “earned the respect and liking of his men by his courtesy and care for their well-being”. There was hanging and branding and bullying in convict society. But Astley’s travesty history ignored that society’s strange conglomerate of force and freedom; the potential many-sidedness of any given phenomenon of it; and the unexpectedly high state of morale among convicts and ex-convicts, which so chafed Commissioner Bigge, and which was evinced by their prolific fertility. “The early colonial period of 1788–1822 was not a time of incarceration and terror,” writes Grace Karskens, the historian of convict Sydney; the Hawkesbury River, where emancipee farmers crowded, was “for a time … a sort of Cockaigne”. Astley was a key fashioner of the “broad arrow melodrama” which acutely misrepresented the first generation of settlement.

But Astley’s tales had no merely sensational purpose. By conjuring with inversions—where criminals are victims, and law enforcers the criminals—his tales vented the rancour and pain of bohemia of late-nineteenth-century Australia. They were the uncompromised elite of the creative world, the refuse of the commercial world, on the margin of the common junctures of the community; the pitched opposite, that is, of the philistine, prosperous and integrated population. Astley’s bohemia had its own political end. Just as the “Mine is a Sad Yet True Story” literature was in part aimed at terminating transportation, Astley wrote with the larger political purpose of discrediting his contemporary society by sullying its origins. Thus Astley’s purpose in Tales of the Old Regime neatly cohered with the task of any historical evangelist of the “state-nation”, such as the Commonwealth of Australia. This task will be distinct from the ideologist of the “nation-state”. In the case of the nation-state, the task is to recover, revive and even reinvent a heroic past. But the state-nation has no past—heroic or otherwise—simply a noble future which will commence with its birth. But that future may be impeded by the histories of the particularist entities that are to be dissolved into one. It would be useful, then, if that past was denigrated and scandalised; and left as a pre-history, an ancien régime, the bad old days before the bright birth. Astley served the coming state-nation by providing a negative Australian Legend, which would fix an image of the loathsomeness of Old Sydney Town, and which was to be hotly radiated by the Bulletin, and re-echoed in the twentieth-century fiction and history of key popularisers such as J.H.M. Abbott, Brian Penton, Cyril Pearl and Robert Hughes.

Astley’s political artistry might have expired in obscurity but for bohemia’s percolation of journalism, and the less predictable fin de siècle frolic of bohemia and Society with a capital S—and the key intercession of J.F. Archibald. Essentially an artist without talent, but who could recognise talent in others, it was Archibald who would usher Astley into publication. And it was presumably Archibald who connected Astley to his boon companion of the Athenaeum Club, Edmund Barton.

The first fruit of the liaison of Astley and Barton was the self-styled “People’s [Constitutional] Convention of Bathurst” in November 1896. This promotional event was conceived and directed by Warung, who “shaped the Convention’s structure, its central concerns, motto, even its tone”. In a consultation with Barton, who was both “manipulative and collusive”, Astley drafted a great collection of municipal dignitaries, dusted by an assortment of notables, including a yellow-press muckraker, an emollient cardinal, a United States consul, a son-in-law of George Higinbotham, and a son of Charles Gavan Duffy. They also included Barton, Richard O’Connor and George Reid. Was the resulting Convention a “huge success”? Or did this assemblage of “People” do little apart from network, and congratulate the press on covering them? Certainly, the press gave the Convention extensive coverage, and that was success enough; the event has worked its way into the commemorative history of Federation. But another misfortune of money did cast a shadow over its proceedings. On November 19, 1896, Astley appeared on two charges of obtaining £15 by false pretences. But his defence by William Crick was skilled, Crick’s legal fees were paid by John Norton, the plaintiff was not only a political opponent but mentally unstable, and the jury found Astley not guilty.

Astley appeared to withdraw from politics in 1897. In June of that year he attempted to extort the proprietors of Angus & Robertson over its supposed sale on its own account of books properly belonging to the Public Library. But George Robertson had previously encountered Astley, and sought a “character reference” from a source in Melbourne. In reply came a two-word telegram: “Done time”. Robertson repulsed Warung’s invitation to treat, and the bookseller was vindicated by a report of a parliamentary select committee. At about the same time Astley had more success with David Scott Mitchell, successfully defrauding him of £125 for non-existent Australiana.

Astley returned to politics in 1898 to direct Barton’s referendum publicity. He was the media veteran to supersede the amateurish, even ludicrous, efforts of the circle of lawyers who had previously directed Federationist publicity. In the election Astley took charge of producing the Clarion Call for the seats of Woollahra (4000 copies), Waverley (5000 copies) and, most importantly, Sydney-King (6000 copies), where Barton had chosen to challenge Reid. His efforts were not rewarded in any of those seats, but they may have been more useful in Barton’s subsequent and successful contest of Hastings Macleay.

With victory, Warung did not abandon Federation, but his activity took a more specifically literary turn. He penned a poem of welcome to the Earl of Hopetoun, and wrote a pamphlet urging Bathurst as the national capital. And then he faded from the scene, dying some years later of tertiary syphilis.

He was never a person of the front stage, but would be one of influence. Astley represented the intersection of bohemian alienation and political upheaval. More aggressively, a critic might infer kindredness between the fraudulence of Astley and a falsity in the federal cause. Yet a defender could counter with figures of stainless propriety in that cause, such as Edward Dowling—president of the Australasian Federation League, teetotaller, Congregationalist churchman, advocate of worker education and member of the Aboriginal Protection Board—whose conscientious, factual and balanced annual reports to the League remain a solace to the historian.

That one publicist of the Federation movement could manifest alienation so grossly as Astley was, perhaps, no more than a piece of bad luck. But it was, undeniably, embarrassing to the Federationist movement that this talented blackguard, this “sad rogue”, as A.G. Stephens called him, assumed so senior a role in the campaign. Unsurprisingly, Robert Garran urged Nettie and Vance Palmer to close their ears to ugly rumour when they were proposing to adopt Astley as an Australianist “prophet of new day”. The Palmers got it the wrong way round. Astley faced not so much the future as the past; a mythologist rather than a prophet, the composer of an anti-history as a vent for alienation, who gratified Federationists with tales about a past of which they had little interest or understanding.

Associate Professor William Coleman is Reader in the College of Business and Economics at the Australian National University. This is an edited excerpt from his recently published book Their Fiery Cross of Union: A Retelling of the Creation of the Australian Federation, 1889–1914 (Connor Court).