The Wentworths: Father and Son

By John Ritchie, Carlton: Miegunyah Press, 1997, 311 pages, hardback, $39.95. Reviewed by Philip Bull in the September 2001 issue.

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It is a rare pleasure to read such an elegant, well-presented, and intellectually stimulating work as this evocative study of the life of one of the major figures in early New South Wales. It is a life, but, as the title records a study of a father and a son. The ambiguities of the father's life, and the role which he delicately negotiated in the new colony, created the ambience wherein the son found his own destiny. The son's self establishment legitimated for the father much of what had been equivocal in his own life, both socially and morally. D'Arcy Wentworth, the father, was born 'a tiny twig on one of the farthermost branches' of the English and Irish Fitzwilliam family. His life cannot be understood without reference to his distant, strained, but ever-significant relationship to his kinsman, the fourth (or, more commonly, according to the British peerage, the second) Earl Fitzwilliam. Nor can the colonial dimension of his life be separated from his vision of his eldest son's future. Between these two polar stars, both impalpable in their different ways, John Ritchie brilliantly traces the complex, turbulent and vulnerable career of his subject.

Born in Ireland and qualifying there as a doctor, D'Arcy Wentworth went as a young man to London where he narrowly escaped conviction four times on nine separate charges of highway robbery. In 1789, wisely re-activating an earlier aspiration to emigrate, he sailed to the infant settlement of New South Wales. In that colony, however, acquittals did not constitute a clean bill of health. While technically a free settler, a question mark was always to hang over Wentworth's status in colonial society. Ritchie, never seduced by his subject, analyses subtly, delicately and with penetrating thoroughness the balance of virtues and vices which enabled Wentworth to survive and prosper in the colony as doctor; government official; investor and most crucially of all, landowner. Never the hero, Wentworth behaved with decency where he could do so without risking his own fragile position, but without courage when the consequences may have put him on the wrong side of authority. In identifying with the growing category of emancipated convicts, he carved out for himself a distinctive position in colonial society, one out of which his son was able to create a powerful political focus.

This biography provides all the usual pleasures of the genre. There is expectation, the constant quest for understanding of actions and motives and the sense of a life engaging with its fortunes and vicissitudes. Whether it is the Ireland of Wentworth's birth; the England which before or after his voluntary exile shaped so much of his life; or the Australia in which he was laying some of the foundations, Ritchie's understanding, sensitivity and sureness of touch provides a powerful context, which is based upon meticulous and thorough research. The subtleties of Poynings' Law, which required Irish MPs to secure Privy Council permission to introduce bills not at Westminster, but in the Irish parliament in Dublin (p 7), escapes his astute eye, but very little else does. The reader is provided in each case with what is needed to understand the nuances of Wentworth's engagement with his circumstances and with the people whom he encounters. There are no cardboard cut-out figures in Ritchie's book and no demons.

It is surprising that two crude and persistent errors escaped Richie's and his publisher's notice. St Philip's Church in Sydney appears as 'St Phillip's' (pp 126,141, 210, 238), conjuring up the unlikely image of sainthood for the colony's founder. A recurring grammatical error (pp4, 29, 93, 222) is the misuse of the adjective 'Reverend' as a title, as in the 'Reverend Marsden' rather than the Reverend Samuel Marsden, or just Marsden.

This book is not only a biography of a significant early pioneer, but also a vivid and evocative portrait of the first forty years of British settlement. Successive governors grace its pages, their dilemmas elucidated, their contradictions explored, and their vulnerability detailed. Closely engaging with six of them was this passionate man, considerate of the three women with whom he cohabited in the colony but avoiding marriage with any of them, devoted to the ten children he had by two of them, and amassing land and wealth in order to make himself less vulnerable, and his eldest son, William Charles Wentworth, impregnable. Ritchie suggests that it was the son who set out to 're-create the Britannia of the Fitzwilliams on the shores of Port Jackson' (p 239). Possibly this inadequately acknowledges that the father was an Irish Fitzwilliam, with a childhood and youth in which he had learnt to negotiate the more difficult terrain of Irish social life, better equipping him, perhaps, for a world of colonial 'exclusives' and 'emancipists'. Whether or not this was so, the story of his survival and triumphs is a remarkable one.

Citation

• Philip Bull. 'Review: The Wentworths: Father and Son by John Ritchie' [online]. Network Review of Books (Perth, Australian Public Intellectual Network), September 2001. Availability: <please cite the web address here> ISSN 1833-0932. [accessed 10 September 2010].

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