George Arthur, Cottage Green, the 'anti-Arthur' press and the historiography

Abstract

<p>Colonel George Arthur's purchase in 1829 of the Cottage Green estate in what is now Battery Point, Hobart, while he was Lieutenant-Governor of Van Diemen's Land, became an issue of some notoriety in the local press in the early 1830s. While Arthur had been previously accused in the press of misusing convict labour and materiel to build roads and other infrastructure that increased the value of his properties in Van Diemen's Land at the expense of higher priority infrastructure works, the allegations about Cottage Green in 1836 were of a more serious nature. Arthur was accused of using his position as Lieutenant-Governor to re-site a significant wharf redevelopment at Sullivan's Cove, and when accused of corruption, to have orchestrated a campaign in the pro-Arthur press in Hobart to mislead the Secretary of State about the nature of the accusations against him. Accused of jobbery and corruption in the construction of the wharves and warehouses by the editors of the <i>True Colonist</i> and the <i>Colonial Times</i>, this article examines the claims made in those newspapers and Arthur's defence of his decisions and demonstrates that Arthur's actions were highly questionable and his defence deliberately misleading. </p>