“Behold,there is a New Man born!”

Abstract

Contemporary accounts of the first generation of white men born in Australia seemed to describe them as physically superior to their British counterparts. Social and economic historians provide evidence that they were indeed taller and explain the phenomenon in terms of diet and living standards. This article suggests that contemporary observations also reflected the eighteenth-century British concerns that “civilized” life in Britain threatened the essential nature of men. Popular medical literature highlighted the problems, emigration was promoted as the solution, and men’s personal writings reveal that they understood and acted on these messages. The physical superiority of Australia’s firstborn white men was not unexpected. But the short-lived optimism around these “new” men highlights ongoing tensions between men and modernity.

Keywords

Australia Britain bodies civilization

“Currency” was the term applied in the early Australian colonies to Australian-born Britons, as opposed to the “Sterling” Brits born at home: labels supposedly first applied by a “facetious paymaster” at a time when the pound currency was devalued against the pound sterling. Though currency highlighted the convict origins of many of this first generation of whites born in New South Wales, it did not detract from the favorable comments made of them. The men, the “currency lads,” were particularly praised. Ship’s surgeon Peter Cunningham ([1827] 1966, 53–54) described them as “tall and slender” with an “open manly simplicity of character” and the openness of their features was seen as a sign of their sobriety and honesty. Similar compliments had been made by Royal Commissioner John Thomas Bigge (1822, 81) who found the currency lads “capable of undergoing more fatigue” than “native Europeans.” Such sentiments were echoed almost verbatim by Alexander Marjoribanks (1847, 217) in his published account of travels in New South Wales. There was no similar praise for “currency lasses.” Once the honesty and fertility of the first “native-born” white women were acknowledged, they earned little admiration: they were “of a mild-tempered, modest disposition, possessing much simplicity of character; and, like all children of nature, credulous, and easily led into error” (Cunningham [1827] 1966, 56; Karskens 2009, 324). In 1950, historian CE Carrington (1950, 357) summarized these accounts of currency lads as having marked them “as a new physical type” and following the contemporary sources he did not include the currency lasses in this new type.

The deeply gendered nature of the contemporary accounts suggests that commentators in the early Australian colonies thought that better diet, sufficient food, a favorable climate, and opportunities for honest work were not the only reasons for the observed improvement in men’s physical, and often moral, fitness.¹ This article argues that the physical superiority of the first generation of native-born white Australians was a hoped for, even expected, result of moving men from a civilizing and industrializing Britain to the wild, open spaces of the antipodes. Commentators’ descriptions of currency lads reflected the eighteenth-century British conceptions of men’s essential nature as active and the perception that “civilized” life threatened that nature: conceptions and perceptions that were not held of women. As this article explains, such descriptions were informed by an understanding of how men’s bodies responded to their environment and this understanding was articulated in a range of public discussions including newspaper editorials and parliamentary enquiries. The shared elements of these discussions were particularly evident in popular medical literature: incessant injunctions for “balance” in health, work, and leisure; an identification of the city with the evils of civilization; and a nostalgic yearning for the dignified physical activity that only laboring on one’s own land could supply. Underlying all the discussion was a conflation of individual well-being with the health of the nation and a widely shared belief that both physical and moral health were visible on the surface of the body in complexion, muscle tone, flesh, and so forth. As this article shows, men’s own published and unpublished writings reveal not only their understanding of these ideas but also the extent to which they acted on them.

In the context of concern about civilization and manly health, emigration to the Australian colonies could be offered as an alleviation of British men’s anxieties. Reports of Australia, in both literature promoting emigration and men’s personal writings, explicitly described the conditions in the colonies as a solution to threats to men’s health. It is not so surprising, then, that the physically robust currency lads could be seen as proof of the ultimate benefits of the colonies for men’s bodies. But, as this article concludes, it is also the nature of emigration—in which men take their cultural baggage and material trappings of civilization with them—that explains why this particular perception of currency lads was held for only a short time.

Civilization and Enfeebled Men: A National Concern

To begin with, I would like to clarify my use of the term “civilization.” I use civilization in the sense that Jean Starobinski (1993, 3–5) describes as having gained acceptance by the end of the eighteenth century: a unifying concept that drew together diverse social changes such as improvements in comfort, advances in education, politer manners, cultivation of the arts and sciences, growth of commerce and industry, and the acquisition of material goods and luxuries, in a way that established an antithesis between civilization and a hypothetical primordial state called nature or savagery or barbarism. Civilization’s critics identified a further point on the continuum from savagery through civilization, to an overly civilized state of effeminacy, the result of a surrender to luxury, as undesirable as barbarism. Roussean concepts of “natural man” and “noble savage” are just two, though influential, manifestations of these concerns.

The nexus of luxury, effeminacy, and the nation at the end of the eighteenth century has been well covered in historical literature.² Also well served by historians is the plight of the working classes in the first half of the nineteenth century covered first in Edwin Chadwick’s (1842, 370) report on the sanitary condition of the laboring population of Great Britain. What has not been explained is the switch by contemporary commentators from concern about upper-class bodies (those who could afford luxuries) to laboring bodies (those employed in the manufacture of luxuries), but the male bodies of both groups were described as “enfeebled and effeminated” (Chadwick 1842, 186). This leads me to treat civilization as a marker of material progress that was perceived to have detrimental effects for both those men enjoying its benefits and those men providing them, not to mention the growing numbers of men that were subject to both. Therefore, my use of the term civilization carries all the different components of the changing material world between about 1750 and 1850, although I acknowledge that this use does not do justice to the significance of the term civilization as a concept at the heart not only of imperialism but of western conceptualizations of history itself.³

The tenor of debates about luxury, effeminacy, and the nation was captured in repeated defenses of the “English People” by The Times. It declared in 1803, for example, that “The Nation of Shopkeepers is not yet, like Athens, Rome, or Carthage, so sunk in luxury, so degenerated by wealth and commerce, or so lost in a false sense of their own security, as to surrender their country and themselves to the first nation of robbers and murderers that chose to invade them” (October 31, 1803). In its continued denials, The Times revealed the pressing problem at the heart of the debate and the overarching anxiety about the eventual, perhaps inevitable, outcome if a solution was not found: Britain needed men able to fight its ongoing wars with France and expand its empire but the effects of civilization that undermined individual men’s physical capacity might see Britain destroyed like previous empires. Thirty years later, in a decade of peace and long after the discourse of luxury, effeminacy, and the nation appeared to have run its course, the 1833 Factories Inquiry Commission expressed a surprisingly similar fear “By the present system of labor the physical energies of the main portion of the people of this country are destroyed; and I am afraid, if the thing continues much longer, we shall be so enfeebled and effeminated that we shall fall an easy prey to some stronger neighbour … ” (House of Commons Parliamentary Papers [HCPP] 1833 (519), 28).

Evidence collected in Edwin Chadwick’s report used similar language and was similarly unequivocal about the ultimate consequence of unhealthy men—the destruction of the “chief strength of the nation” and the degeneration of the British race. Second-generation manufacturing laborers were “generally inferior in stature to their parents.” Weavers, “though not originally a large race,” had “become still more diminutive under the noxious influences to which they are subject.” Dr Mitchell explained that “the whole race of them is rapidly descending to the size of Liliputians” and this meant “fewer recruits of the proper strength and stature for military service” (Chadwick 1842, 185, 186). Men’s bodies were as much a national as a personal concern.

Civilization and Men in Australian Historiography

Height—height for age, rate of growth, the age at which final height is reached, and final adult height—is taken by economic historians to be a reflection of a nation’s public health. And despite debate among these historians as to timing, regional variation, and ultimate causes of what they observe, the evidence does show definite socioeconomic differences, irregular patterns of growth and some decline in heights in England during the second half of the eighteenth and early decades of the nineteenth centuries (Floud, Wachter, and Gregory 1990; Nicholas and Steckel 1991; Harris et al. 2010). The sources used by these anthropometric historians include military recruitment records, seamen’s tickets, and documentation of convicts transported to British colonies, including Australia (Harris et al. 2010; Humphries and Leunig 2007; Nicholas and Steckel 1991). The height of Australian convicts in comparison to the British groups from which they came is the basis of one of those historical debates: for example, Bryan Gandevia’s study of boys transported to Australia around 1840 that found them to be of short stature, even by contemporary British standards, has been disputed by Stephen Nicholas who found them to be as tall as the British workers left behind (Gandevia 1977, 92; Nicholas 1988, 9, 79). Whatever is the comparative height of the transported convicts, the available data do appear to show that their native-born Australian children were significantly taller. Gandevia (1977) allowed for a “predominantly environmental influence” for this observation because the differences in height between children of Australian and migrant (mostly British) parents were smaller than the differences between British and Australian children.

Anthropometric evidence, therefore, supports contemporary descriptions of the currency lads as taller and it further suggests that Australians were still taller than their British counterparts at the beginning of the twentieth century (Gandevia 1977, 94; The British-Australasian, July 28, 1921, 4; Rees 2013).⁴ Yet by the second half of the nineteenth century, praise for currency lads had been replaced by fears about the degeneration of “Australian” men that echoed British debates of the earlier period. Taking notice of a continuing cultural narrative about the debilitating effects of civilization on men helps us understand the change in rhetoric despite the seemingly unchanged empirical evidence on height. There has been, however, little discussion of the anxieties around civilization and its effects on men in Australian historiography—in marked contrast to extensive explorations of this theme in the historiography of masculinities and sexuality in Britain⁵ or the direct tackling of the subject in America by Gail Bederman (1995). Manning Clark noted it in 1962 quoting an article in The Times which spoke of the colony’s potential to “produce apparently miraculous effects among a people who came from a society worn with age and decrepitude, or debilitated by the indolence and apathy of modern luxury and refinement” (October 2, 1807). Clark ([1962] 1999, 203) dismissed the observation, proposing rather that it was “the possibility of material advancement rather than any interest in the possibility of a society of men liberated from the effeteness and decadence of the old world” which encouraged British settlement. This is the approach most often taken in subsequent histories that emphasize economic, political, and social factors over intellectual and cultural influences on colonialism in Australia.

Historians, and at least one novelist, who have considered native-born white Australians and used the term currency lads to describe them have done so to recover that initial confidence through tales of exploration, sporting and political prowess and a seemingly “Australian” disregard for authority (O’Shaughnessy, Inson, and Ward 1968; Yeldham 1998; Molony 2000; Bonnell 2001; Hocking 2004). Historians of health and medicine in Australia have tended to focus on changing health management policies and practices aboard ships and among convicts; on the lack of autochthonous diseases; and on the introduction of European diseases and their effects on indigenous populations (Hagger 1979; Pearn and O’Carrigan 1983; Pearn 1988; Haines and Shlomowitz 2003; Anderson 2007; Brasier 2010; Foxhall 2011). FB Smith’s history of illness in colonial Australia repeats the claims that native-born whites were physically more robust than their British-born counterparts but does not enquire further (Smith 2011, 16, 13). When we do find interrogation of the implications of climate and nature on human bodies, it is in histories of the colonization of the northern or ‘tropical’ areas of the Australian continent in the second half of the nineteenth century. These histories reveal conceptions of race and racial suitability for the natural environment, which were only beginning to emerge earlier in the century (Bashford 2000; Harrison 2002; Anderson 2005).

Libby Robin, in How a Continent Created a Nation, does ask what part the physical environment played in developing a “distinctive national identity” influencing both culture and scientific thinking. Because this work focuses on the period since Federation, it does not query perceptions of the environment’s impact on the human body in the early nineteenth century (Robin 2007). Few historians of Australia have adopted the approach taken by Joyce Chaplin (2001, 10) who claims that by neglecting contemporary theories of nature we get the impression that the early modern English “understood their place in the new world in terms divorced from the natural world, as if the intellectual history of early America had to do only with politics and religion.” Nor have they explored, as Jan Golinksi does, how enlightenment thinkers acknowledged the influence of the natural environment on the development of civilization that they understood both socially and individually “humans were subject to their physical nature” (2007, 8). A notable exception is Shino Konishi (2012) who has recently revealed the role of both intellectual ideas and popular imagination in the earliest European descriptions of Indigenous Australians. This article takes a similar approach, exploring how the discourse of anxiety about the effects of civilization on men’s bodies informed popular medical literature, how this message was echoed by men themselves in their personal writings, and how this shaped their descriptions of the first native-born white Australians.

Civilization’s Harm to Men’s Health and the Solution of “Balance”

The problems facing men’s constitutions and advice on solutions were expansively articulated by physicians working on physiological research, religious spokesmen caring for the souls of their congregations, philosophers pondering concepts such as free will and responsibility, and the doctors who specifically treated the mentally disturbed, who all participated in debates about the nature of man. Distilled in, sometimes distorted by, travelling medical shows, public lectures, pamphlets, and the products of quacks, these concerns reached a broad audience.⁶ Chief among the popular medical literature was Physician William Buchan’s Domestic Medicine, which Charles E. Rosenberg says was found everywhere in not only British but also American homes before the civil war. The majority of general guides to health and healing—and there were many of them—were modeled in some specific or general way on Buchan’s book (Rosenberg 2003, 7).

Buchan (1839, 97) was clear about the physical and moral consequences for men of civilization—it undermined “the very design of his creation”—as well as the “balance” required to maintain health. His book, like Thomas John Graham’s for “the unprofessional reader” and John Theobald’s adoption of a plainness of “stile,” was explicitly aimed at a general audience. (Graham 1826, vii; Theobald 1760, preface). Some, like William Pinnock’s (1820) A Catechism of Medicine employed the question-and-answer format often used in religious instruction so that the book could be read by parents to children, and perhaps by masters to servants, as well as for personal use. At least one “penny journal” was devoted to health (The Oracle of Health ([1834] 1835), A Penny Journal of Medical Instruction and Amusement). Pinnock’s Catechism was representative of the gamut of concerns in these texts. It covered treatment of diseases but it emphasized the preservation of health and extension of life claiming that a weak constitution was caused by intemperance in eating or drinking, unwholesome food or air, lack of cleanliness, excessive labor or sloth, the sudden transition from heat to cold, and indulgence of the passions. A man’s constitution could, therefore, be strengthened by “balance”: for Pinnock (1820, 13, 37–40, 52) this was a temperate climate, moderate exercise, and restraint in food and drink, “together with a prudent regulation of the passions”: “all extremes,” he wrote, “are unfriendly to health and longevity.”

In his discussion of popular medical texts, Steve Shapin talks about “the golden mean,” the balance, discussed in so much of the advice and remarks on how stable that advice was over time (Rosenberg 2003, 24–27). This emphasis and stability may reflect the continued underpinning of this medical literature by humoral theory—even in the face of newer understandings of physiology. Humoral theory saw bodily fluids—phlegm, yellow bile, black bile and blood—as central to the functioning of the human body. Because heat, cold, dryness and moisture affected the course of the humors from the stomach, through the blood stream to the brain, there was a direct connection between passions and cognition, physiology and psychology, individual and environment. By the seventeenth century the circulation of the blood was properly understood and humors began to lose theoretical credibility but in practice the theory continued to sustain medicine well into the nineteenth century (Arikha 2007, xvii-xxi; Temkin 1973). Even new explications of the nervous system presumed a necessary balance for which temperance and moderation were required and many disorders of madness and insanity were thought to respond to fresh air, exercise and diet; “remedies adapted to the restoration of their general health” (Prichard [1835] 1837).⁷ Pearkes’ aim of a “state of perfect equilibrium” was, therefore, part of a broader theoretical merging of humoral doctrines with modern assumptions about the nervous and vascular systems that still sought balance (Arikha 2007, 243).

Height, according to anthropometric historians, is a net outcome of a similar “balancing act” of nutritional inputs and the energy demands of work, disease, and climate (Oxley 2003, 623–24). Tall men had presumably got the balance right. But in the popular medical literature what did balance and harmony actually mean? Was it avoiding excess in both “continual thought” and “perpetual action,” or was it avoiding the extremes of both “voluptuousness” and “abstinence” (Buchan 1784, 61; Sinclair 1818, 464)? Was it merely a matter of physiology, of equalizing perspiration and urine (Sinclair 1818, 238; Pearkes 1819, 88–89)? Or a matter of regulation where apportioning the day regularly to meals, exercise, sleep, and labor would ensure good health and excellent spirits (Sinclair 1831, 49)? The meaning of “exercise” was equally ambiguous: the one word could encompass dancing, farm labor, and the sorts of gymnastic activities that prepared men for military battle. Such ambiguity made it difficult for men to follow the prescriptions of popular medical literature, as we shall shortly see. Seemingly less ambiguous was the role of climate in health, although here, too, balance was the goal. Travel in, or a move to, a warmer or dryer climate was invariably advocated by the medical profession for conditions like consumption (Sinclair 1818, 451). A temperate, that is a “balanced,” climate was the ideal and this ideal was uniformly emphasized in literature promoting emigration to the early Australian colonies, as we shall also shortly see.

The Regenerative Potential of Rural Living in Rhetoric and Evidence

Among the many problems that Buchan felt undermined the nature of men was the inclination of so many to “crowd into great towns.” His anxieties ranged from unwholesome air to lack of exercise in sedentary occupations in trade, professional, and manufacturing jobs (1784, 60). Cities were also the source of those luxuries, and temptations that led so often to maladies such as gout. “[W]hen I behold a fashionable table set out in all its magnificence,” said an “elegant writer” in The Oracle of Health, “I fancy that I see gouts and dropsies, fevers and lethargies, with other innumerable distempers, lying in ambuscade among the dishes” (November 26, 43). A simple, healthier diet seemed harder to achieve, however, in the presence of tea, coffee, chocolate, sugar, and tobacco, which were both physically addictive and consumed in new culturally significant, usually urban, sites; they were part of the “revolution of sociability” which accompanied the “industrious revolution” (Berg 2004, 98). Yet men’s ill-health and unhappiness was widely understood to be the “natural result of wealth, luxury, and indulgence.”⁸

Buchan was particularly blunt about men who neglected exercise: “[w]eak and effeminate, they languish for a few years, and soon drop into an untimely grave” (1784, 53, 60). At particular risk were “studious” men who not only ignored exercise but allowed an excess of “intense thinking” to become a “vice.” Such men were prone to gout, stone and gravel, cirrhosis livers, consumption, headaches, sore eyes, dropsy, fevers and, “the most afflicting of all,” hypochondria (Buchan 1784, 61–64). The Oracle of Health agreed: for “Desk Diseases” it recommended sea bathing and healthy bowels (December 17, 1834, February 18, 1835). But, as the Oracle told its readers, it was not only “desk” jobs that threatened men’s constitution: most of the occupations found in the towns of the early nineteenth century came with specific health consequences. Importantly, these were the occupations of the lower classes for whom indulgence and indolence was never going to be a problem. Tailors suffered indigestion, afflictions of the bowels, and curvature of the spine; bakers were prone to stomach disorders, coughs, and rheumatism; chimney sweepers were subject to skin cancer, eye inflammations, and lung damage; house painters experienced colic, palsy, headache and bowel complaints; house servants were affected by disorders of the digestive system and head; plumbers were short lived because of lead poisoning; cotton and silk spinners experienced lung disease and indigestion; cooks and confectioners endured disordered digestion, headache and irritable temper; and footmen on their feet all day collected water in their scrotum (October 22, 1834, November 19, 1834, November 26, 1834, December 3, 1834, December 10, 1834). These “adverse circumstances” not only made men “short-lived,” it also made them, according to Edwin Chadwick (1842, 370), “improvident, reckless, and intemperate”—cities destroyed men’s morality as well as their health.

The unsurprising antithesis to the evils of places like London was the countryside and its wholesome air, fresh foods, and opportunities for exercise. But Britain’s rural areas also invoked something deeper—a nostalgic longing for attachment to land that only cultivating it yourself could provide, and this was an increasingly rare experience for men as enclosure policies begun in the seventeenth century continued. As Buchan (1784, 86–87) highlighted, planting, sowing, and weeding both exercised every part of the body and revived the spirits and any man in sedentary employment “should cultivate a piece of ground with his own hands” in his leisure hours. Chadwick’s (1842, 275) report was similar in its assessment: it lamented the lack of open spaces and public walks that would give laborers a chance for healthy recreation and a way to avoid the “ale-houses and skittle-alleys.” All the talk of recreational outdoor exercise, however, did not remove the deep-seated conviction that making one’s living from the land was the most physically and morally healthy exercise. Where cultural prejudice existed against manual work, it did not extend to farmers who derived “independence” from their labor. The authors of popular medical literature recommended all manner of games and activities in lieu of the agricultural labor that urbanizing populations had seemingly lost—even dancing was described as conferring “great firmness,” “a manly confidence,” a “manly assurance,” and “physical and mental poise”⁹—but it remained difficult to imagine substitutes for the labor offered by farming. For all of Buchan’s advocacy of gardens, therefore, he and other medical authors could not fully overcome a perception that “those who live by the culture of the ground” were the most healthy and happiest “part of mankind.” And Buchan (1784, 49, 90–91) felt that emigration—the “great increase of inhabitants in infant colonies”—was proof of this efficacy.

This regenerative potential of land for men also informed various philanthropic proposals and attempts to reform the poor laws in Britain. A man with a small allotment of land was considered to be “generally better behaved than those who [had] not that Interest in the Soil” (HCPP Appendices, 1830–1831, 591–593). The best suggestion, then, for “ameliorating the state of the poor,” correspondents told the editor of The Times, “will be to let them small farms at low rents” so that the “whine of the pauper” might be replaced “by the nobler graces of manly and rational contentment.” In this way, a cottage and an allotment of land might achieve “the regeneration of the labouring class” (August 13, 1817, October 4, 1817, December 14, 1830).¹⁰ The same rhetoric of the regeneration was used for criminals: James Mario Matra’s 1783 “Proposal for Establishing a Settlement in New South Wales” suggested that convicts with a few acres of land might become useful and moral subjects of society, and home secretary Lord Sydney hoped that convicts would be the peasants of a country of their own (Mackaness [1943] 1976, 46; Atkinson 1997, 58). The rhetoric was continued by Alexander Maconochie, the superintendent of the penal settlement on Norfolk Island in 1840: he, like Matra and Sydney and other well-intentioned men before him, was “in haste to lay out his new garden of Eden, or, rather like Prometheus, to commence his fabrication of a new man” (Edinburgh Review 1847, 238).

Here, again, anthropometric evidence supports contemporary observations. The effects of urbanization are held to be the main explanation for irregular growth patterns during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries: gains that might have been anticipated in the early stage of industrialization, with its corresponding increase in real wages, were eroded by the effects of city living (Floud, Wachter, and Gregory 1990, 327). Regional patterns in height show a definite rural advantage (Nicholas and Steckel 1991, 944, 955). This was made very clear in a study of 1840’s Admiralty seamen’s tickets which concluded that, on average, about a twentieth of an inch was added to a man’s final height for every kilometre that he was born away from the center of London (Humphries and Leunig 2007, 20). Historians doing such studies cannot say how much of these differences in height was due to disease, environment, crowded living conditions, harsh working conditions, income irregularity or deficient food supplies (Nicholas and Steckel 1991, 950), but they concur that short stature was “very much a big city phenomenon” (Humphries and Leunig 2007, 19).

Men’s Personal Responses to Health Problems and Solutions

Popular medical literature explained to men the debilitating effects of civilization and offered solutions. It is difficult to talk about the reception of such texts, but we can say with some confidence that this literature was widely read. Rosenberg observed that “[i]t is no accident that so many popular health books survive in shabby condition, with recipes written on the flyleaves or expanded with newspaper clippings recording cures for arthritis, consumption, or liver ailments. These books were not just read; they were used” (Rosenberg 2003, 2). Moreover, we are able to observe echoes of these texts, and responses to them, in men’s personal writings: their journals and letters referred to their health almost as often as they referred to the weather. Politician William Windham’s diaries reveal his disposition to melancholy and preoccupation with his health (Windham 1866). When parliamentarian Thomas Walpole experienced his first “miserable fit” of gout, he confided in medical author John Sinclair (Sinclair 1831, 122). Gentleman farmer John Grainger faithfully recorded the weather and his health over ten years of diary entries but was often constrained by gout to recording only “The same” for days at a time (Grainger [1787] 1797, April & September 26).

Men did try to follow the advice of medical literature. They acknowledged that being sedentary was a problem: the poet Byron preferred fencing and boxing, not only for his chest, arms, and “wind” but also to ward off the “ennuyé ” to which he was prone (Porter 2004, 455); Historian William Hutton thought both the mind and body “were designed for action” and he was a prodigious walker (Hutton 1816, 223, 283–84, 286); and naval captain Matthew Flinders advised his brother Samuel that if his disease was a consequence of “sedentary habits, moderate exercise [was] the way to cure it” (Brunton 2002, 162). Men regularly expressed their aim for self-control and moderation. “I must practice self-denial,” wrote the Reverend S Tillbrook, “mortify the flesh, drink little, move about more, and in short … never commit excess of any kind” (Butler 1896, 291). Many men were prepared to take all necessary steps to good health and happiness, as cotton merchant Absalom Watkin summarized in his diary, “I propose to do all I can to improve my health. I will take as much exercise as I can. Keep as cheerful as I can. Avoid long continued thought on any one subject. Sometimes omit study for a week altogether. Avoid too much feeling. Restrain passion” (Goffin 1993, 74). And Thomas Carlyle was one sedentary man of letters who tried to relieve his anxieties by moving back to the country. “I must live in the country,” he wrote, “and work with my muscles more, and with my mind less.” In this way, he would no longer be “a pining piping wretch” but would once again be “a whole man” (quoted in Clarke 1991, 36–37). Few men, however, felt their efforts rewarded with the health and happiness they were trying to achieve. Windham was just one who rebuked themselves for “careless intemperance” and expressed self-doubt in their reflections (Windham 1866, 4, 6, 52, 82, 23–24, 155, 303). Despite the amplitude and diversity of advice for health, the ambiguity of the notion of “balance” seemed more a recipe for failure than success.

These are literate men, the men on whose behalf Buchan was worried about indulgence and inactivity. How the urban and industrial workers, for whom Chadwick was concerned, thought about their health or responded to the advice of popular medical texts is far harder to ascertain. But we do know that the trickle of free immigrants to the Australian colonies into the 1820s became a torrent in the 1830s. We also know that more British emigrants chose newer Australian destinations in preference to older American colonies in the late 1830s and early 1840s and those that did head to America preferred the wilder rural states to settled coastal regions. And despite the widely advertised need for agricultural workers in the Australian colonies and the buoyant economic conditions in Britain, a surprising proportion of these emigrants were industrial workers. Charlotte Erickson’s conclusion is that many migrants to America (and the data are very similar for Australia) were those “unwilling to make the social and psychological adaptations that pervasive changes in the English economy were demanding.” (Erickson 1994, 34–59; Doust 2004, 26, 60–7761, 131)

The Regenerative Potential of the Australian Colonies Seemingly Realized in Currency Lads

Playing into this social and psychological resistance, the literature promoting emigration to the Australian colonies heavily emphasized the key ingredients for health and longevity—temperate climate, lack of luxuries and opportunities for labor on your own land. The anonymous author of Twenty Years Experience in Australia, collated, quoted from, and summarized the previous paeans to Australia’s climate: “[t]he state of the weather and atmosphere,” it reported, “were truly delicious and exhilarating … it was enjoyment to live in such a climate (1839, 26-27, 30); in fact the “health of the inhabitants” was itself evidence of the “salubrity of the seasons” (Butler 1843, 111–12). Lack of luxuries was posed almost as a test of suitability, in that men who were not prepared to go without them were told they were not “fit” for “an infant community” and “had better return to England at once” (Busby 1832, 32). And the opportunity for men to labor on their own land was explicitly linked to their manliness: “in the colonies, in a new world, and in a new life, a man may till his own land, and work in his own fields with his own hands” and in so doing, he “finds that he is become of value as a MAN” (Rowcroft [1843] 1845, xi–xii). Lieutenant-Governor George Arthur of Van Diemen’s Land felt that this applied to all men: in a letter to Viscount Goderich in the Colonial Office in 1833, he reported that while “town-bred convicts” like weavers “who have breathed the air of an unhealthy factory” would have as an “enfeebled frame” as the “educated man or gentlemen,” both would “become robust in the interior”¹¹ (HCPP 1834 [82], 55).

And immigrants themselves seemed to agree on all counts. Of the climate, Thomas Henty claimed that it gave him three times his usual appetite, Robert Hoddle thought it promoted “natural vigor” and thus longevity, and John Hunter felt it made the constitutions of both humans and animals more “prolific” than in any other part of the world (Henty 1836; Hoddle [1822] 1827, 30–31; Hunter [1968] 1793, 138). Health was cited by many men as the motivation for moving to the Australian colonies including barrister Edward Landor (1847, 9); businessman William Lawrence; manufacturer Robert Morehead; physician Anthony Brownless; architect John Verge; merchant George Angas;¹² and public servant Edward Deas Thomson who was offered a job in Demerara but accepted a position in New South Wales for less money, because he felt the climate to be healthier (Foster 1978, 17–18). The benefits of a lack of luxuries and opportunities for exercise were also reported. Naval officer Daniel Southwell told his mother that his “little Fits of Indisposition” were “getting better Every Day” and he hoped “in Time” to be “more hearty and robust” than he could have hoped. David Waugh felt himself becoming similarly “tough”: he was on horseback from seven in the morning to eleven at night with nothing to eat but he “did not feel at all tired next morning.” George Wyndham, on a farm in New South Wales, mentioned only one day of illness in ten years of diary recordings, while his brothers and nephews in Sussex grew fat, lazy and unwell (Southwell [1787] 1790; Waugh [1834]1859; Wyndham [1830] 1840, [1827] 1853). And when Missionaries James Backhouse and George Washington Walker reported on the condition of convicts in Van Diemen’s Land for Lieutenant-Governor Arthur they cited climate, labor, abstinence and a “spare diet” as reasons for the good health of the prisoners (HCPP 1834 [82], 12). What convicts themselves made of this is difficult to ascertain but convicts Richard Taylor and Simon Brown described their experiences in the colonies in similarly positive terms as emigrants (Frost and Maxwell-Stewart 2001, 174–75).

The good health, high spirits, and distinct lack of ennui in the writings of men in the colonies was in marked contrast to their relatives, colleagues, and associates at home and the notion that a removal from civilization was the basis for this difference was often explicitly stated. Brothers George and Robert Dixon provided an explanation for this that would have been recognized by authors and readers of popular medical literature. Though they were “obliged to work very hard” they found “more satisfaction & peace of mind than [they] ever experienced in [their] life” through the “pleasure” of working on their own land (Dixon [1821] 1823). And the further from cities and civilization, the better many men felt. “Encamped” at Moores Flats, the Colonial Treasurer was heard to declare that “he had found so much benefit from the change of climate, he would give up half his salary to breathe the pure air of the Interior” (Hoddle [1822] 1827, 94). It was not simply wholesome country air that made such a difference: as settler John Webster described, it was “this life in the wilderness,” this “primitive sort of life” that they enjoyed and “the further from town” it was “the better” they liked it (Webster 1908, 58, 74, 101). The anonymous author of A Month in the Bush of Australia summed up what the colonies could offer British men: an “almost total relief from the restraint of civilized life” (Anon 1838, 39, 19, 36).

It is not surprising that the authors of literature promoting emigration should paint a rosy picture of health. These authors were in the business of persuading men to move to Australia and they would benefit from claiming for themselves and others “excellent health and spirits” and not “a moment’s illness” (Demarr 1893, 210; Smillie 1838, 19; Rowcroft [1843] 1845, 535; Anon 1838, 39). But similar accounts, as cited in this article, were given by less prejudiced men in their published and unpublished letters and journals. Whether men were actually healthier in the Australian colonies is an interesting question in itself and projects like “Founders and Survivors: Australian Life Courses in Historical Context 1803-1920” will shed light on the matter (http://foundersandsurvivors.org/project). For this article, however, what is significant is the widespread self-reporting by men that this was the case.

This good health was seen on the bodies of men in accordance with long-held European perceptions that outward appearance indicated the presence of both physical health and moral virtue (Brewer 1986, 21; Jordanova 1993, 124). This perception meant that the effects of luxuries or vices or sedentary occupations or grinding factory work would all be seen on the body and in the face. We have seen how fat and lameness were associated with indolence, and a “diminutive” stature with the afflictions of the laboring poor. In contrast the white men born in New South Wales were described as “tall and slender” indicating their temperance and vitality (Cunningham [1827] 1966, 54). While commentators observed the benefits for convicts and settlers alike of daily labor and isolation from luxury, truly regenerative effects were perceived most clearly in the currency lads, Australia’s “sons of the soil” (Sydney Herald, February 21, 1842).

No Escape from Civilization and its Consequences for Men

Despite the idyllic promises of emigration literature, civilization was quickly established in the Australian colonies. The first fleets brought livestock, financial capital, and trading connections along with their naval and military personnel and cargoes of convicts. By the early 1790s, former convicts were themselves using convict labor and a handful quickly became the principle managers of capital in Sydney. As early as 1800 Surgeon John Washington Price described Sydney as “The Metropolis of a future Empire” (Atkinson 1997, 208–10, 277; Price 1798-1800). By the 1840s, when men with “speculation in their eyes” (Haygarth 1848) walked the streets of Sydney, Australia was heavily urbanized in comparison to Britain and America.¹³ By mid-century, free settlers demanding self-government tried to distance themselves from the convict element of the colonial population and called for an end to transportation.¹⁴

The use and meaning of the term currency lad changed during this historical trajectory toward political independence. A search of early Australian newspapers find the term currency lad to be common from the early 1820s, but its appearance declined rapidly in the mid-1850s and there were only three instances of its use in the 1860s. Horses, trading ships, and licensed houses often carried currency lad as a name, and it was adopted by a short-lived weekly journal in 1832.¹⁵ It was used as a mark of approval—often as a toast at dinners¹⁶—and used competitively in reports on boxing matches, cricket games, and boat races.¹⁷ Over time, however, currency lads moved from describing “the rising generation” (Colonial Times, August 6, 1833) of the colonies to become a political label associated with republican ideals and calls for self-government. The supposedly superior physical attributes of the currency lads to those of British men were forgotten. When historian David Headon describes Daniel Deniehy as a currency lad in his article on Deniehy’s republican vision for Australia, he is referring to both his birth in Sydney and his political ideals but not his physical constitution, appearance, manner, or virtues (Headon 1993, 136–45).

The original optimism did not entirely disappear. When The Argus celebrated “The Centenary of Australian Settlement,” it began with the way in which climate contributed to “healthfully developed bodily structure” and repeating the familiar maxims that Australian men were “taller and slenderer” than their “British forefather[s]” (January 26, 1888). And farm schemes in the second decade of the twentieth century offered up Australia, once again, as a place to send the male youth of Britain’s towns and cities to improve British stock. Thomas Sedgewick, organizer of one such scheme, wrote to the Department of External Affairs in Australia of “vast hordes of wasted boy life” in industrial Britain whose only hope lay in colonial farm apprenticeships. “It was pronounced,” say historians Elspeth Grant and Paul Senduziuk, “that these boys needed to be rescued from their degenerative urban environment and that the ‘wide open spaces’ of the Dominions and physical nature of agricultural labour would regenerate their lives” (Grant and Senduziuk 2010, 75, 78, 83, 167–68). In 1936 Percy Reginald Stephenson was still hopeful that “A new nation, a new human type, [was] being formed in Australia” (Stephenson 1936, 11).

During the second half of the nineteenth century, however, confidence in the new “Australian” man was damaged by fears very similar to those described in this article in Britain earlier in the century (Garton 1998, 88–89). The urban poor were described in language that echoed Chadwick’s: in an 1861 lecture based on evidence before a select committee of the Legislative Assembly, Reverend W. Cuthbertson claimed that the effects of unemployment were seen “upon the physical constitution” of the poor, in the “stunted and withered forms of the parents, while the children grew up incapable of the strong work that would be required of them in this colony.” This subject, he continued, “was the very question of questions … It was what would be called in England a national question, a question as to the state of the nation.” Cuthbertson was incredulous that in a heaven-blessed country like Australia with its “millions of acres lying idle” that there were “thousands wanting employment.” His first remedy was, unsurprisingly, to “enable every man who desired, to get some land and a homestead of his own” (Cuthbertson 1861).

Here, again, anthropometric data from army enlistment records for the period 1860 to 1920 supports contemporary observations: it shows the same urban disadvantage as data from the English studies a hundred years earlier and both rural and urban heights appear to have declined after 1860 and not regained their fifty-year earlier peak by 1920. Further analysis of the remarkably high numbers of rejected World War I volunteers reveals failure to meet minimum height requirements was one reason for rejection along with poor eyesight, chest diseases or deformity, hernias, dental problems, feet deformities, varicose veins, and poor physique (Whitwell, de Souza, and Nicholas 1997, 407; Pilger 1992, 11, 12, 14). Emigration may have been portrayed as “escape” but white men brought their civilization and its consequences to Australia. When those consequences undermined national interests, as when fit men were needed to fight wars, the rhetoric of anxiety was remarkably similar to that seen in Britain a hundred years earlier.

The perceived effects of urbanization on men’s bodies illustrate what Christopher E. Forth terms the “double logic of civilization”—“a process that promotes and supports the interests of males while threatening to undermine those interests by eroding the corporeal foundations of male privilege” (Forth 2008, 5). While men profited from the material progress of civilization, civilization undermined the physicality of their manliness. A solution to this dilemma was envisaged as possible in the Australian colonies where men might find “civilization with its advantages, but without its evils and vices” (Anon 1839, 126). But the paradox of men and modernity meant that Thomas Carlyle’s expectation of the birth of “a new Man’ on the “boundless Plains and Prairies” of Britain’s colonies was never destined for success (Carlyle 1847, 382).

Footnotes

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: The author was financially supported in the research and writing of this article by an Australian Research Council Postgraduate Award and an ANU Research School of Social Sciences Postgraduate Fellowship.

Notes

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