AUSTRALIA DAY REBELLION – 26 JANUARY 1808.
Sunday, January 25th, 2009‘New South Wales had now proved to be the grave-yard of the ambitions of both [Governor] Hunter and [Governor] King…[Joseph] Banks knew that both Hunter and King had failed to repel the attacks of the officers and rum traffickers and that the new governor must be a man of sterner fibre’. H.V. Evatt, Rum Rebellion 1968.
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‘It is from their attachment to their government, from the sense of the deep stake they have in such a glorious institution, which gives your army and your navy, and infuses into both that liberal obedience without which your army and your navy would be a base rabble’. Edmund Burke, British Parliamentarian.
1808 – 26 January, Sydney: On the 20th anniversary of Britain’s ‘original aggression’, the invasion of New Holland and the raising of the Union Jack at Sydney Cove by Governor Arthur Phillip RN Major George Johnston, Commanding Officer of the New South Wales ‘Rum’ Corps, marched on Government House and arrested that ‘man of sterner fibre’ Governor William Bligh RN of HMS Bounty fame or infamy.
The previous day – 25 January 1808 – ex-officer Mr. John Macarthur, the teetotaller who put the rum into the New South Wales ‘Rum’ Corps, appeared in court to answer a charge of uttering; ‘false, scandalous, libellous, wicked seditious, unlawful words’ designed to bring Governor William Bligh RN into ‘disrespect, hatred and contempt’.