The coup of 1808 and the rule of law.

AUSTRALIA DAY this year marks the bicentenary of the only military coup in Australian history. Popularly, but inaccurately, known as the "Rum Rebellion", the Coup of 1808 played a crucial role in establishing a firm foundation for the rule of law in this nation. On an anniversary such as this, it is appropriate to pause and consider how and why it was that our ancestors created the institutions which we take for granted and which explain the longterm stability and prosperity that so few nations have been able to achieve.

Just before sunset on January 26, 1808, the twentieth anniversary of the arrival of the First Fleet, over 300 soldiers of the New South Wales Corps, the 102nd Regiment of the British army, expressly created to protect the new colony, gathered on the parade ground in front of their barracks, of which the last remnant is now Wynyard Square. The officers of the Corps had reinforced their regimental esprit de corps at a rare full-dress dinner at the barracks two nights before the coup. The next day they decided to arrest and depose Governor William Bligh, fourth governor of New South Wales, who already had one mutiny on his record.

The soldiers were led in formation from the parade ground by their commander, Major George Johnston, with drawn sword in one hand and the other arm in a sling, an injury caused when he fell out of his carriage on the way home after the regimental dinner (one of Sydney's first drink driving accidents).

Guns loaded, bayonets fixed, sweltering in their scarlet woollen coats, with banners flying and the regimental band playing "The British Grenadiers", the column marched down High Street, since renamed George Street, across the new stone bridge spanning the Tank Stream and up Bridge Street to Government House where the Museum of Sydney is now, at the base of Governor Phillip Tower.

This was all for show, no doubt designed to impress and perhaps to intimidate the general populace. Bligh's personal guard had already been suborned and the two naval vessels under his command were out of port. There was no possibility of resistance nor, as Bligh was taken by surprise, of escape. He was kept under house arrest for a year and it was another year before Governor Lachlan Macquarie arrived with his own 73rd Regiment to enforce the removal of the New South Wales Corps.

ONE OF THE OLDEST and most debated questions of political philosophy is the identification of the circumstances when resistance to established authority is permissible. Whether or not that was so in Sydney two hundred years ago has divided contemporaries and historians. Personal values and beliefs often influence the interpretation of the past, and the role of the New South Wales Corps has not been immune to such influences.

At the risk of over-simplification, the history of the Coup of 1808 has been written in two distinct ways. Each emphasises one or other of two sets of facts, selected from the limited pile of contemporary records as if they were iron filings into which a magnet had been dipped, so that some facts gather at one pole and different facts at the other pole, with little in between. The differences in interpretation are as divergent as the north and south poles of a magnet.