The Fatal Shore

by Robert Hughes

  Finally, and most of all, I thank my beloved wife, Victoria Hughes, whose faith and levelheadedness kept me going through years of research and writing, and never for a minute let me down; this is her book too.

  Maps

  1

  The Harbor and the Exiles

  i

  IN 1787, the twenty-eighth year of the reign of King George III, the British Government sent a fleet to colonize Australia.

  Never had a colony been founded so far from its parent state, or in such ignorance of the land it occupied. There had been no reconnaissance. In 1770 Captain James Cook had made landfall on the unexplored east coast of this utterly enigmatic continent, stopped for a short while at a place named Botany Bay and gone north again. Since then, no ship had called: not a word, not an observation, for seventeen years, each one of which was exactly like the thousands that had preceded it, locked in its historical immensity of blue heat, bush, sandstone and the measured booming of glassy Pacific rollers.

  Now this coast was to witness a new colonial experiment, never tried before, not repeated since. An unexplored continent would become a jail. The space around it, the very air and sea, the whole transparent labyrinth of the South Pacific, would become a wall 14,000 miles thick.

  The late eighteenth century abounded in schemes of social goodness thrown off by its burgeoning sense of revolution. But here, the process was to be reversed: not Utopia, but Dystopia; not Rousseau’s natural man moving in moral grace amid free social contracts, but man coerced, exiled, deracinated, in chains. Other parts of the Pacific, especially Tahiti, might seem to confirm Rousseau. But the intellectual patrons of Australia, in its first colonial years, were Hobbes and Sade.

  In their most sanguine moments, the authorities hoped that it would eventually swallow a whole class—the “criminal class,” whose existence was one of the prime sociological beliefs of late Georgian and early Victorian England. Australia was settled to defend English property not from the frog-eating invader across the Channel but from the marauder within. English lawmakers wished not only to get rid of the “criminal class” but if possible to forget about it. Australia was a cloaca, invisible, its contents filthy and unnameable. Jeremy Bentham, inveighing against the “thief-colony” in 1812, argued that transportation

  was indeed a measure of experiment … but the subject-matter of experiment was, in this case, a peculiarly commodious one; a set of animae viles, a sort of excrementitious mass, that could be projected, and accordingly was projected—projected, and as it should seem purposely—as far out of sight as possible.1

  To most Englishmen this place seemed not just a mutant society but another planet—an exiled world, summed up in its popular name, “Botany Bay.” It was remote and anomalous to its white creators. It was strange but close, as the unconscious to the conscious mind. There was as yet no such thing as “Australian” history or culture. For its first forty years, everything that happened in the thief-colony was English. In the whole period of convict transportation, the Crown shipped more than 160,000 men, women and children (due to defects in the records, the true number will never be precisely known) in bondage to Australia.2 This was the largest forced exile of citizens at the behest of a European government in pre-modern history. Nothing in earlier penology compares with it. In Australia, England drew the sketch for our own century’s vaster and more terrible fresco of repression, the Gulag. No other country had such a birth, and its pangs may be said to have begun on the afternoon of January 26, 1788, when a fleet of eleven vessels carrying 1,030 people, including 548 male and 188 female convicts, under the command of Captain Arthur Phillip in his flagship Sirius, entered Port Jackson or, as it would presently be called, Sydney Harbor.

  ii

  ONE MAY LIKEN this moment to the breaking open of a capsule. Upon the harbor the ships were now entering, European history had left no mark at all. Until the swollen sails and curvetting bows of the British fleet came round South Head, there were no dates. The Aborigines and the fauna around them had possessed the landscape since time immemorial, and no other human eye had seen them. Now the protective glass of distance broke, in an instant, never to be restored.

  To imagine the place, one should begin at North Head, the upper mandible of the harbor. Here, Australia stops; its plates of sandstone break off like a biscuit whose crumbs, the size of cottages, lie jumbled 250 feet below, at the surging ultramarine rim of the Pacific. A ragged wall of creamy-brown sandstone, fretted by the incessant wind, runs north to a glazed horizon. To the east, the Pacific begins its 7,000-mile arc toward South America. Long swells grind into the cliff in a boiling white lather, flinging veils of water a hundred feet into the air. At the meetings of its ancient planes of rock, sea and sky—mass, energy and light—one can grasp why the Aborigines called North Head Boree, “the enduring one.”

  The sandstone is the bone and root of the coast. On top of the cliff, the soil is thin and the scrub sparse. There are banksia bushes, with their sawtooth-edge leaves and dried seed-cones like multiple, jabbering mouths. Against this austere gray-green, the occasional red or blue scribble of a flower looks startling. But further back to the west, the sandstone ledges dip down into the harbor, separating it into scores of inlets. In 1788 these sheltered coves were densely wooded. The largest trees were eucalypts: red gums, angophoras, scribbly gums and a dozen others. Until the late eighteenth century no European had ever seen a eucalypt, and very strange they must have looked, with their strings of hanging, half-shed bark, their smooth wrinkling joints (like armpits, elbows or crotches), their fluent gesticulations and haze of perennial foliage. Not evergreens, but evergrays: the soft, spatially deceitful background color of the Australian bush, monotonous-looking at first sight but rippling with nuance to the acclimatized eye.

  In the gullies, where streams of water slid from pool to pool leaving beards of rusty algae on their sandstone lips, giant cabbage-tree palms grew, their damp shade supporting a host of ferns and mosses. Yellow sprays of mimosa flashed in the sun along the ridges, and there were stands of blackboy trees, their dry spear of a stalk shooting up from a drooping hackle of fronds.

  Most of the ground was sandy and thin, but parts of the harbor foreshores held, to the relief of Captain John Hunter, Phillip’s second-in-command,

  tolerable land … which may be cultivated without waiting for its being cleared of wood; for the trees stand very wide of one another, and have no underwood; in short, the woods … resemble a deer park, as much as if they had been intended for such a purpose.3

  The comparison of the harbor landscape with an English park is one of the more common, if startling, descriptive resources of First Fleet diarists. Partly it came from their habit of resorting to familiar European stereotypes to deal with the unfamiliar appearance of things Australian; thus it took at least two decades for colonial watercolorists to get the gum trees right, so that they did not look like English oaks or elms.4 Partly, no doubt, it arose from the simple fact that any land looks like Eden after months at sea. But it also had a basis in fact, since the landscape was often burned by aboriginal hunters; their firesticks kept the big trees isolated and promoted the growth of grass.

  So there was a mingled note of relief and aesthetic pleasure in Arthur Bowes Smyth’s journal entry for January 26, 1788, as his transport Lady Penrhyn glided up the harbor, past the dangerous reef with outlying rocks that would later be called the Sow and Pigs, past the tilting, wind-gnarled, peach-colored sandstone ledges of Vaucluse and Parsley Bay, toward the wide, light-flushed notch of water now spanned by the Sydney Harbor Bridge:

  The finest terras’s, lawns and grottos, with distinct plantations of the tallest and most stately trees I ever saw in any nobleman’s ground in England, cannot excel in beauty those wh. Nature now presented to our view. The singing of the various birds among the trees, and the flight of the numerous parraquets, lorrequets, cockatoos, and maccaws, made all around appear like an enchantment; the stupendous rocks from the summit of the hills an
d down to the very water’s edge hang’g over in a most awful way from above, and form’g the most commodious quays by the water, beggard all description.5

  He was wrong about macaws, which do not exist in Australia. But the density and range of bird life along the harbor was still amazing. Several dozen kinds of parrot thronged the harbor bush: Galahs, bald-eyed Corellas, pink Leadbeater’s Cockatoos, black Funereal Cockatoos, down through the rainbow-colored lorikeets and rosellas to the tiny, seed-eating budgerigars which, when disturbed, flew up in green clouds so dense that they cast long rippling shadows on the ground. The Sulphur-Crested Cockatoos, Cacatua galerita, were the most spectacular—big birds with hoarse squalling voices, chalk-white plumage (dusted with yellow under the wedge-shaped tail), beaks the color of slate, obsidian eyes, and an insouciant lick of yellow feathers curling back from the head. When excited, they would flirt their crests erect into nimbi of golden spokes like Aztec headdresses. These raucous dandies assembled in flocks of hundreds which, settling on a dead gum tree, would cover its silvery limbs in what seemed to be a thick blooming of white flowers; until, at the moment of alarm, the blossoms would re-form into birds and return screeching into the sky.

  The Galahs, smaller cockatoos, had gray backs, white crests and fronts of the most delicate, intense dusty pink, like the center of a Bourbon rose; so that a flock of them passing against the opaline horizon would seem to change color—pink flicking to gray and back to pink again—as it changed direction, uttering small grating cries like the creak of rusty hinges.

  The exuberance of bird life around the harbor was balanced by the stillness and secrecy of the ground. Nothing about Australian animals was obvious. Many of them were camouflaged fossils, throwbacks that crept, slid, waddled or bounded through the dry brush. In them, the legends of antipodean inversion seemed to be made harmless flesh. Their remote ancestors had evolved in isolation ever since the Australian continent broke off from Antarctica, about 40 million years ago.6

  One of these creatures, a small macropod called a wallaby, had already been shot and collected by Sir Joseph Banks far north of Sydney Harbor, as the Endeavour lay beached and holed among the coral mazes of the Great Barrier Reef in June 1770. It was skinned and taken to England, where it was stuffed by a London taxidermist and given to the great animal painter George Stubbs to have its portrait made. “Called by the natives Kangooroo,” Captain Cook noted in his journal, it moved “by hoping or jumping 7 or 8 feet at each hop upon its hind legs only.… The skin is cover’d with a short hairy fur of a dark Mouse or Grey Colour. Excepting the head and ears which I thought something like a Hare’s, it bears no sort of resemblance to any European animal I ever saw.”7 When Phillip arrived in Sydney Harbor, the one certain thing he knew about the language of the “Indians” was that they called this creature a kangaroo. But because their language bore no resemblance to that of the tribe Cook had encountered so far to the north, the Sydney Aborigines assumed that “kangaroo” was the white intruders’ word for the ordinary familiar animal they themselves had always known as a patagarang.

  Half a dozen kinds of patagarang lived around the harbor, nibbling its wiry grass and appearing silently, like fawn wraiths, among the guttered shelves of the fern-gullies. The silvery-coated Eastern Gray kangaroo, Macropus giganteus, moved in flocks of dozens; “the noise they make,” a colonial diarist was to note, “is a faint bleat, querulous, but not easy to describe.” Other species ranged down in size from the timid rock-wallabies to the tiny, ratlike Potoroo.

  The kangaroos were not the only oddities of this landscape. Koalas clambered through the gum-tree branches or sprawled sedately in the comfortable forks munching their bunches of leaves. These were not the winsome, cuddly teddy bears of the Qantas commercial, but slow, irritable, aldermanic creatures with furry ears and a boot-heel nose, which ate two pounds of fresh gum leaves a day and, when captured, scratched furiously and drenched the offending hand with eucalyptus-scented piss. Indeed they were not bears at all (any more than the moon-spotted “native cat” was a cat, or the bandy-rumped Tasmanian Wolf a canine) but nocturnal marsupials with no clear relationship to any other animal, living or fossil. After sundown, their trees were filled with the thumping, scrabbling and chittering of other nocturnals—fat brushtailed possums, ringtails and sugar-gliders, which had wide furry airfoils slung between their fore and hind feet and parachuted from tree to tree in wobbly swoops. Like true Arcadians, these creatures lived by sucking sweet nectar from bush flowers.

  The oldest and most bizarre of the mammals were, however, the platypus and the echidna. Both were exceedingly primitive, stuck at an intermediate point of evolution between reptiles and mammals. They were monotremes: the same orifice served them interchangeably for mating, excretion and egg-laying. The echidna, or spiny anteater, looked vaguely like a European hedgehog, but the resemblance was not even quill-deep: its elegant yellow-and-brown spines were actually a kind of fur, though of the most formalized sort. It laid eggs like a bird but carried them about in a pouch under its belly. It was very shortsighted but had an acute sense of smell and could sniff out the ants’ odor of formic acid through yards of air or inches of sun-hardened earth. It had a beak rather than jaws—an open tube from which a whip of pink, sticky tongue almost as long as its body would shoot into the ants’ nest. When threatened, the echidna would curl into a ball of bristles or put its head down and start to dig with its prodigiously strong claws, burying itself within moments.

  The platypus, on the other hand, was an amphibian: the sole survivor of its prehistoric family, the Ornithorhynchidae or bird-beaked mammals. It had a bill and webbed feet like a duck, a tail like a beaver and exquisitely glossy, oil-rich fur. Like a tiny seal, it had a generous layer of fat under the skin, for it was too primitive to regulate its own body temperature. In a tunnel burrowed in the mud of a creek bank, the female platypus would lay a clutch of leathery, ancient-looking eggs and suckle her young when they hatched—not with teats, but through enlarged pores on her belly which she scratched until milk oozed forth. Most of a platypus’s life had to be spent foraging on the streambed for worms and insects, since it ate rather more than its own weight in food a day and had a metabolic rate like a blast furnace. Hold one of these frantic little fossils (avoiding the hind legs, which carry a poison spur, like many “cute” things in Australia) and it seems to be all heart, pumping and quivering.

  Wombats—lumbering, eighty-pound marsupials resembling squat, blunt-skulled bears—dug their meandering catacombs beneath the soil; bandicoots peeked from holes; the landscape was alive, but secretively so. Here in the Australian bush one needed to look, and look again, before glimpsing the gray koala camouflaged against the fleshy gray burl of its gum tree. The voices of the animals tended to be out of all proportion to their size, Just as space was drained of perspective by the random, flickering transparency of the trees, so it was hard to guess where sounds originated. The throbbing croak of the cicada on a branch ten feet away might seem to be coming from all around. It was hard to sneak up on these creatures of the harbor shores. The bush, baked tawny and bronze by the summer heat, its ground surface mantled in a crackling skin of dry gum leaves, grasses and fallen strips of eucalyptus bark, was like a stretched drum, a delicate resonator that informed every animal of each approach.

  There was little sense of menace in this parliament of creatures. The only large meat-eating animal was the dingo, the “native dog” imported to Australia long ago by migrating Aborigines. Even the dragon of the bush, a carrion-eating monitor lizard known as a goanna, would rush up a tree when approached and cling there, its throat puffed out in soundless alarm, until the intruder went away. The only universal predator was man.

  iii

  A STATIC CULTURE, frozen by its immemorial primitivism, unchanged in an unchanging landscape—such until quite recently was, and for many people still is, the common idea of the Australian Aborigines. It grows from several roots: myths about the Noble Savage, misreadings of aboriginal te
chnology, traditional racism and ignorance of Australian prehistory. It is, in fact, quite false; but in the experience of white city-dwellers there is little to contradict it. Nobody can guess how Sydney Harbor began to unfold itself to its white prisoners on January 26, 1788, just by subtracting the poultice of brick, steel and tar from its headlands, pulling down the Harbor Bridge and the Opera House and populating the beaches with black stick figures waving spears. The changes have been too radical for that. Yet the effort to perceive the landscape and its people as they were is worth making, for it bears on one of the chief myths of early colonial history as understood and taught up to about 1960. This was the idea, promulgated by the early settlers and inherited from the nineteenth century, that the First Fleet sailed into an “empty” continent, speckled with primitive animals and hardly less primitive men, so that the “fittest” inevitably triumphed. Thus the destruction of the Australian Aborigines was rationalized as natural law. “Nothing can stay the dying away of the Aboriginal race, which Providence has only allowed to hold the land until replaced by a finer race,” remarked a settler in 1849.8

  But the first white Australian settlers were so conspicuously unfit for survival in the new land that they lived on the edge of starvation in the midst of what seemed natural abundance to the Aborigines. They had practically no idea of what they could eat or how to get it. Most of the First Fleet convicts had not moved ten miles from their place of birth and had never seen the sea before they were clapped in irons and thrust on the transports. They were as lost in Australia as an Aborigine would have been in a London “rookery.” The tribesmen they encountered were so well adapted to their landscape that their standard of nutrition was probably higher than that of most Europeans in 1788. To the whites, convict and officer alike, Sydney Harbor was the end of the earth. But to the Aborigines it was the center. The landscape and its elusive resources, not yet named by the whites, stood between the two cultures, showing each group its utter unlikeness to the other.