Sydney's brush with Bonaparte.(History)

IT WAS NAPOLEON, stupid! Well, it would be nice to be so, confident about the events of 200 years ago, but it s hard to associate the stocky man with the triangular hat and hand on his heart with the suburban sprawl, maze of highways, housing estates and new shopping centres that is Sydney's Hills district today. The limited evidence, however, suggests that the tentacles of revolutionary France spread this far in stirring up the Castle Hill rebellion of 1804. It was Australia's biggest civic disturbance, comparable in numbers with Eureka but immensely more serious in both intent and in the proportion of the population that was involved. The non-Aboriginal Australian population in 1804 was about 7000, compared to nearly a million in Eureka's 1854.

The events of the revolt proper are relatively simple and straightforward, the murky background anything but. Castle Hill, about thirty kilometres north-west of Sydney Cove, was the site of a government farm in the early 1800s. The Government Agricultural Establishment, as it was known, had some of the better soil in the Sydney region. A big government farm was thought at the time the best way to combat the recurring food shortages in the infant colony, which the struggling private farms could not overcome.

Convicts formed the main workforce at Castle Hill, often under ex-convict overseers. They tended to be those considered "unruly" or "refractory", but not serious re-offenders. In as far as farm drudgery and prison could offer a good life at all, things weren't bad compared to life in British jails at the time. The climate was mostly comfortable, the air clean, the food usually ample, if plain. There is no record of specific complaints.

Rumours of a convict uprising had been frequent for the previous three years and festered again during January and February 1804. Then on the night of March 4 the cry went out that "the croppies are coming". More than 200 convicts broke out after a deliberately lit fare began in a hut, diverting the guards. Crying "Death or liberty!", they marched south across the half-cleared bush towards Parramatta. They seemed to expect the large convict workforce there and in Sydney and other friends of the cause to rise in response. Once in charge of the colony, the rebels would seize ships in the harbour to take them home.

As they moved, they split temporarily into armed bands, which recruited--often at gunpoint--other convicts working on local farms and took any weapons and ammunition they could find. The convict army may have numbered as many as 500 at its peak. They amassed more than a hundred muskets and a few pistols and swords, but many more were armed with pikes (sharpened wooden stakes, steel or knife-tipped where possible, in the French revolutionary mould), sticks, clubs, hay forks, axe handles and the like.

Things hardly ever went right with the grand plan. The risings in Parramatta and Sydney just did not happen, for unknown reasons. In Sydney, the captain of the HMS Calcutta (the naval transport that had established the colony in Port Phillip a few months earlier) turned its guns shorewards, which probably had some deterrent effect.

The government had some foreknowledge from an informant as well as the buzz of rumours, but there had been so many rumours and false alarms that at first it did not take it seriously. But once Governor Phillip Gidley King heard of the actual escape, he despatched a force of army and volunteer militia and declared martial law from Parramatta westwards.