bunyip aristocracy - Dan Deniehy's Bunyip Aristocracy Speech, Colonial Peerage

An unsuccessful local attempt in Australia to create an upper house elected from an order of hereditary baronets for the government of New South Wales in 1853. The proposal was associated with W C Wentworth, and was designed to counter the ‘spirit of democracy’ unleashed by the gold rushes, and to stabilize society with the granting of self-government. The name was first used with witty cynicism in a political speech in 1853.

The term Bunyip aristocracy was first coined in 1853 by Daniel Deniehy who made a speech lambasting the attempt by William Wentworth to establish a titled aristocracy in New South Wales government.

Deniehy made speeches opposing the new self titled Australian aristocracy in the Victorian theatre and on the soapbox at Circular Quay.

In response to Wentworth's proposal to create an hereditary peerage in New South Wales, Deniehy's satirical comments included: "Here, we all know the common water mole was transferred into the duck-billed platypus, and in some distant emulation of this degeneration, I suppose we are to be favoured with a "bunyip aristocracy." (The bunyip is an Ancestral Being of Aboriginal Dreaming.) Deniehy's ridicule caused the idea to be dropped.

Among those singled out in his speech by Deniehy was James MacArthur (1798-1867), the son of John MacArthur, who had been nominated to the New South Wales Legislative Council in 1839 and was later (1859) elected to the New South Wales Legislative Assembly (the lower house was only created in 1856):

Next came the native aristocrat James MacArthur, he would he supposed, aspire to the coronet of an earl, he would call him the Earl of Camden, and he suggests for his coat of arms a field vert, the heraldic term for green, and emblazoned on this field should be a rum keg of a New South Wales order of chivalry.

The strong popular support for Deniehy's views caused the abandonment of the proposal he was responding to.

'Bunyip aristocracy' is now an offensive term or an insult used to refer to those Australians who consider themselves to be aristocrats.

Dan Deniehy's Bunyip Aristocracy Speech

Note: Deniehy had a habit of writing speeches and articles that addressed himself in the third person

Mr. Deniehy seconded the resolution [that this meeting pledges itself to resist, by every constitutional means in its power, the formation of a second chamber which is not based on popular suffrage]. Why he had been selected to speak to the present resolution he knew not, save that as a native of the colony he might naturally be expected to feel something like real interest, and to speak with something like real feeling on a question connected with the political institutions of the country.

He protested against the present daring and unheard-of attempt to tamper with a fundamental popular right - that of having a voice in the nomination of men who were to make, or control the making of, laws binding on the community - laws perpetually shifting and changing the nature of the whole social economy of a given state, and frequently operating in the subtlest forms on the very dearest interests of the citizen - on his domestic, his moral, perhaps his religious relations.

The name of Mr. Wentworth had frequently been mentioned there that day, and that on one or two occasions with an unwise tenderness, a squeamish reluctance to speak plain, English , and call certain nasty doings of Mr. Wentworth by the usual homely appellatives, simply because they were Mr. Wentworth's.

He had listened from boyhood upwards to grey tradition, Mr. Wentworth's demagogic Areopagitas - his speeches for the liberty of unlicensed printing regime of Darling;

The subsequent political conduct-rather the systemic political principles of Mr. Wentworth - had been such as would have been sufficient to cancel the value of even a century of action.

But his was a qualified respect at best, and in all presumed assimilations of the political hypotheses of our colonial Constitution-makers with the Constitution of Great Britain, he warned them not be seduced by mere words and phrases-sheer 'talkee talkee.' Relatively, it was not only an admirable example of slowly growing and gradually elaborated political experience, applied, set in action, but it was also eminent and exemplary as a long history, still evolving, of political philosophy.

Circumstances entirely alter cases, and he would warn them to be seduced by no mere vague association exhaled from the use of venerable phrases, that had, what phrases now-a-days seldom could boast, genuine meanings attached to them.

And having the right to frame, to embody, to shape it as we would, with no great stubborn facts to work upon as in England, there was nothing but the elective principle and the inalienable freedom of every colonist upon which to work out the whole organisation and body of our political institution.

But because it was the good pleasure of Mr. Wentworth and the respectable tail of that puissant Legislative body, whose serpentine movements were so ridiculous, we were not to form our own Constitution, but instead of this we were to have an Upper House and a Constitution cast upon us, upon a pattern which should suit the taste and propriety of political oligarchs who treated the people at large as if they were cattle to be bought and sold in the market;

And being in a figurative humour, he might endeavour to make some of the proposed nobility to pass before the stage of our imagination, as the ghost of Banquo walked along in the vision of Macbeth, so that we might have a fair view of these Harlequin aristocrats, these Botany Bay magnificos (laughter), these Australian mandarins.

Let them walk across the stage in all the pomp and circumstances of hereditary titles.

Next came the native aristocrat Mr. James Macarthur, he would he supposed, aspire to the coronet of an earl, he would call him the Earl of Camden, and he suggests for his coat of arms a field vert, the heraldic term for green-(great cheers and laughter)-and emblazoned on this field should be a rum keg of a New South Wales order of chivalry.

Another friend who claimed a colonial title was George Robert Nichols, the hereditary Grand Chancellor of all the Australias.

But, though their weakness was ridiculous, he could assure them that these pygmies might do a great deal of mischief. They would bring contempt on a country whose interest he was sure they all had at heart, until even the poor Irishman in the streets of Dublin would fling his jibe at the Botany Bay aristocrats.

They had antiquity of birth, but these he would defy any naturalist properly to classify them.

He trusted that this was only the beginning of a more extended movement, and from its auspicious commencement he augured the happiest results.

He took it as no term of reproach, when he saw that there was such a keen sensibility on the subject of their political sights - that the instant the liberties of their country were threatened, they could assemble, and with one voice, declare their determined and undying opposition.

But he would remind them that this was not a selfish consideration, there were wider interests at stake.

And also, looking at the gradually increasing pressure of political parties at home, they must prepare to open their arms and receive the fugitives from England, Scotland, and Ireland, who would hasten to gain a security and a competence, that appeared to be denied them in their own country.

The interests of these countless thousands were involved in their decision on this occasion, and they looked, and were entitled to look, for a heritage befitting the dignity of free men.

But it is to yours to offer them a land, where man is rewarded for his labour, and where the law no more recognises the supremacy of a class, than it recognises the predominance of a religion. Wherever man's skill is eminent, wherever glorious manhood asserts its elevation, there is an aristocracy that confers honour on the land that possesses it.

That is an aristocracy that will grow and expand under free institutions, and bless the land where it flourishes.

In no country had the attempt been successfully made to manufacture an aristocracy pro re nata.

The aristocracy of England was founded on the sword. But he should like to know how Wentworth and his clique had conquered the inhabitants of New South Wales - except in the artful dodgery of doctoring up a Franchise Bill.

If we were to be blessed with an aristocracy he would rather it should not resemble that of William the Bastard but of Jack the Strapper.

But he trespassed too long on their time and would only seek in conclusion, but to record two things.

Let them, with prophetic eye, behold the troops of weary pilgrims, from foreign despotism, which would, ere long, be floating to their shores, and let them now - give the most earnest assurance, that such men as composed the Wentworth clique, were not the representations of the spirit, the intelligence, of the freemen of New South Wales.

Colonial Peerage

A Committee, consisting of Messrs.