Abstract
Thomas Mitchell had many skills when he arrived in New South Wales in 1827, those of a surveyor, geologist, geographer, explorer, naturalist, botanist and anthropologist; though it was his expertise as a surveyor that qualified him for appointment as Deputy Surveyor General. Mitchell acknowledged this in a letter to his patron, Sir George Murray, and commented that it was his long experience in ‘an art which owes its perfection to War’ that qualified him for his new appointment.1 Mitchell and other British army officers had proved themselves resilient under adversity, and had developed the ability to ‘rough it’ in the Australian environment, similar in some respects to that of the Iberian Peninsula. Both officers and men alike had learnt the art of adapting themselves to new and unexpected conditions and tasks. The skills Peninsular War veterans put to use in the Australian colonies were a consequence of their previous experience in Spain and Portugal. Of the variety of these skills, more than half were directly involved with British colonisation of Australia. These were technical skills and mainly related to land and mapping: exploring, surveying, map making, draughting, town planning, engineering, building fortifications and road making. Among other things, maps were an aid in managing a population, especially one where a great number were convicts or ex-convicts.
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Notes
Richard Glover, Peninsular Preparation: The Reform of the British Army 1795–1809, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1963, p. 20.
Simon Winchester, The Map That Changed the World: The Tale of William Smith and the Birth of a Science, London: Viking, 2001, p. 58.
J. Oppenheimer, ‘Survey and Settlement: New South Wales 1825–1836’, The Push from the Bush 21, 1985, p. 29.
Denis Wood and John Fels, The Power of Maps, London: Routledge, 1993, p. 11.
Michael Glover, Wellington’s Army in the Peninsula, 1808–1814, Newton Abbot UK: David & Charles, 1977, p. 133.
Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, London; New York: Verso, 1991, p. 173.
Andro Linklater, Measuring America, New York: 2002, p. 175.
J. H. Andrews, A Paper Landscape, Oxford, 1975, p. 148 quoted in Mary Hamer, ‘Putting Ireland on the Map’, Textual Practice 3, No. 2, 1989. p. 191.
Major General Don Julian Sanchez was a retired regular soldier who recruited guerrillas. These guerrillas later went into the Spanish army. George Hennell and Michael Glover, A Gentleman Volunteer: The Letters of George Hennell from the Peninsular War, 1812–1813, London: Heinemann, 1979, p. 160.
Light kept his diary in Spanish. For a record of Light’s services in the Peninsular War, possibly compiled by Sir Benjamin D’Urban, see Appendix in M. P. Mayo, The Life and Letters of Col. William Light, Adelaide: F. W. Preece, 1937, p. 197.
William Light and David Elder, William Light’s Brief Journal and Australian Diaries, Adelaide: Wakefield Press, 1984. p. 14.
Ibid.
Mark Urban, The Man Who Broke Napoleon’s Codes, New York: Harper Collins, 2001. p. 100.
William C. Foster, Sir Thomas Livingston Mitchell and His World, 1792–1855: Surveyor General of New South Wales 1828–1855, Sydney: Institution of Surveyors NSW Incorporated, 1985, p. 20.
Alan E. J. Andrews (ed.), Stapylton with Major Mitchell’s Australia Felix Expedition, 1836, Hobart: 1986, p. 140.
Rory Muir, Salamanca, 1812, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2001, p. 71.
T. C. Sargent, ‘Thomas Livingston Mitchell and Wyld’s Atlas of the Peninsular War, 1808–1814’, Cartography 13, No. 4, 1984. p. 253.
Michael Roe, 1830–50, in A New History of Australia, Frank Crowley (ed.) Melbourne: 1977, p. 100.
Clem Sargent, The Colonial Garrison 1817–1824: The 48th Foot, the Northamptonshire Regiment, in the Colony of New South Wales, TCS Publications, Canberra, 1996, p. 8.
K. Jobst, A Pioneer Family of Queensland: Lieutenant Colonel George Barney, Captain John Edward Barney, Mrs Elise Barney, 1835–1865, Brisbane: CopyRight Publishing, 1997, p. 15.
Ibid., pp. 15–16.
Ibid., p. 25.
Ibid., p. 31.
Ibid., p. 36.
T. C. Sargent, ‘Barrosa’, Sabretache: The Journal of the Military Historical Society of Australia, Volume xxiii, No. 4, 1982, p. 3.
T. L. Mitchell, Three Expeditions into the Interior of Eastern Australia, London: 1839. Volume ii, p. 179 quoted in T. C. Sargent, Some Peninsular Names in Australia Felix, Melbourne: The Military Historical Society of Australia, 1968, p. 4.
C. Horsfell to Goderich 4 January 1833, CO 384/33, quoted in O. MacDonagh, A Pattern of Government Growth 1800–60, London, 1961, p. 92. MacDonagh provided the example of a naval lieutenant, but the position applied equally to army officers on half pay.
T. C. Sargent, ‘The British Garrison in Australia 1788–1841: The Commissariat’, Sabretache: The Journal of the Military Historical Society of Australia, Volume xli, June 2000, p. 19.
Ibid., p. 18.
Ibid., p. 17.
Commissary-General Sir Randolph Routh ‘Observations on Commissariat Field Service’, London 1845, p. 67 quoted in G. T. W. B. Boyes, The Diaries and Letters of G. T. W. B. Boyes, Volume 1, 1820–1832 P. Chapman (ed.), Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1985, p. 42.
Michael Glover, The Peninsular War 1807–1814, Classic Military History, London: Penguin Books, 1974, p. 29.
S. G. P. Ward, Wellington’s Headquarters, London, 1957, p. 82 quoted in Ibid., p. 29.
Ibid.
Judith Keene, ‘Surviving the Peninsular War in Australia: Juan De Arrieta’, Journal of the Royal Australian Historical Society 85, No. 1, 1999, p. 37.
S. G. P. Ward, ‘The Peninsular Commissary’, Journal of the Society for Army Historical Research, 75, 1997, p. 234.
Ibid., p. 235.
Ibid., p. 239.
A. Horton, entry for William Lithgow in D. Pike (ed.), Australian Dictionary of Biography, Vol. 1, 1966, pp. 119–20.
Richard L. Blanco, ‘The Development of British Military Medicine, 1793–1814’, Military Affairs 38, No. 1, 1974.
Ibid., p. 7.
A combination of malaria and varying degrees of typhus, typhoid and dysentery. Robert Feifel, ‘What Happened at Walcheren: The Primary Sources’, Bulletin of History of Medicine, 42, 1968, pp. 62–72, quoted in Ibid., p. 8.
Ibid., p. 8.
Ibid., p. 9.
Ibid., p. 9.
A. J. Proust (ed.), A Social and Cultural History of Medicine in New South Wales: The Southern Tablelands and Cooma Monaro, Canberra, 1999, p. 289.
Ibid., p. 35.
Ibid., p. 44.
N. J. B. Plomley, ‘Some Notes of the Life of Doctor Henry Gratton Douglass’, The Medical Journal of Australia, 22, 1961, p. 802.
K. Macarthur Brown, ‘Doctor Douglass and Medical Sociology’, The Medical Journal of Australia No. 21, 1943, p. 462.
Obituary Hon. James Mitchell M. L. C., Sydney Morning Herald, 3 February 1869, p. 4.
See Charles Smith, Dr. James Mitchell, Newcastle History Monographs: No. 1. Newcastle: Newcastle Public Library (in association with the Newcastle and Hunter District Historical Society), 1966.
M. Ackroyd, L. Brockliss, Michael Moss, K. Retford and J. Stevenson, Advancing with the Army: Medicine, the Professions, and Social Mobility in the British Isles, 1790–1850, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006, p. 166.
Ibid., p. 222.
Ibid., p. 17.
Ibid., p. 37.
Alan Atkinson, ‘Time and Space in 1838’, Push from the Bush, No. 9, 1981, p. 9.
D. A. Roberts, ‘“a Sort of Inland Norfolk Island”? Isolation, Coercion and Resistance on the Wellington Valley Convict Station 1823–26’, Journal of Australian Colonial History 2, No. 1, 2000, p. 58.
Commonwealth of Australia, Historical Records of Australia, Vol. x, Series I, Sydney, 1917, p. 543.
Ibid., p. 544.
Ibid., p. 627.
Department of Public Works Queensland Government, History of the Commissariat Store, Brisbane, 2001, p. 6.
Brian H. Fletcher, Ralph Darling: A Governor Maligned, Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1984, p. 15.
Ibid., p. 16.
Ibid., p. 89.
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© 2011 Christine Wright
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Wright, C. (2011). ‘an art which owes its perfection to War’: Skills of Veterans. In: Wellington’s Men in Australia. War, Culture and Society, 1750–1850. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230306035_6
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