Foundations of freedom of the press in Australia. .

ON THE EVENING of September 20, 1826, two privates in the 57th Regiment stationed in Sydney, Joseph Sudds and Patrick Thompson, stole some calico from a shop in York Street, around the corner from their barracks situated at what is now Wynyard Square. They expected to be caught and sentenced to transportation, which appeared to them to be preferable to the rigours of military discipline.

Lieutenant General Ralph Darling, Governor of New South Wales--or, as his commission described his office, Captain General and Governor in Chief--concerned with the maintenance of the discipline of his force over this and similar incidents, including a soldier's self-mutilation with a view to discharge, determined to make an example of Sudds and Thompson. Such behaviour reinforced Darling's opinion, also prevalent in London, that transportation to Australia had lost its deterrent effect and its role as punishment.

Darling set aside the two soldiers' convictions and sentences by a Court of Quarter Sessions, which had ordered them to be transported to a penal settlement for seven years, and directed that they would serve on a chain gang on the public roads of the state for the entire period of their sentence and thereafter would return to their corps.

At 11 a.m. on Wednesday, November 22, 1826, the two prisoners were brought before the garrison assembled on the parade ground of the barracks. They were stripped naked, dressed in the yellow and grey clothes of a convict, and each was then encased in a specially designed set of chains, with an iron collar with spikes that prevented lying down, and wrist and leg manacles, weighing some fourteen pounds in total. Thus burdened they shuffled from the parade ground with four drummers beating out the "Rogues March".

Perhaps nothing more would have been heard of this affair but for one unfortunate circumstance. Sudds was critically ill, to the knowledge of his wardens but unknown to Darling. He died five days later on November 27. Darling had a public relations crisis on his hands. An incident of this character could permanently damage his career, as he well knew, and as testified by both the volume and obsequious content of his correspondence with London on the subject. One source of hostile information for his superiors in London was the strident reportage and exploitation of the incident by the then new independent newspapers of the colony.

Only three years before, William Charles Wentworth and Robert Wardell, the first two barristers admitted as such by the Supreme Court of New South Wales, had commenced publication of the Australian, which joined the official Sydney Gazette. A year later the Monitor began publication under the direction of Edward Smith Hall.

Wardell was a highly competent barrister, who had been passed over for Saxe Bannister as Attorney-General. If Darling had had him as principal law officer, the history I am about to recount would probably have never happened. Wentworth, locally born, and already emerging as the leader of the emancipists, had met Wardell in London in 1819 where Wardell was already an editor, of the Statesman evening newspaper. They travelled to Australia together in 1824, accompanied by a printing press. Their approach was clearly stated in their first editorial: "A free press is the most legitimate, and, at the same time, the most powerful weapon that can be employed to annihilate influence, frustrate the designs of tyranny, and restrain the arm of oppression."