The Fatal Shore

by Robert Hughes

  Undoubtedly most of the other convicts felt the same way, although they could not write it down. For eight months and 15,000 miles they had seen nothing except the pitching ocean horizons, the darkness of their prison hold and sometimes a curve of foreign bay. Now they stumbled ashore in a land of inversions where it was high summer in January, where trees kept their leaves but shed their bark, where squat brown birds roared with laughter and thin stinking blacks, painted like pantomime skeletons, mocked them with their freedom. The blacks were an extension of the prison, its outer defense. Take to the bush and they would spear you; they were on the officers’ side, just as the officers were on theirs.

  In convict eyes, the tribesmen had only one use: they made tools and weapons and left them lying in the open, unattended, so that they could be stolen and sold to the free sailors who took them back to England as souvenirs. The loss of these fish-spears and clubs “must have been attended with many inconveniences to the owners … [as] they were the only means whereby they obtained or could procure their daily subsistence.”28

  And so relations between convict and tribesman began badly and soon got worse. In May 1788, a convict who worked on the government farm to the east of the freshwater stream—known by then as the Tank Stream, because the whites had been scraping storage sinks out of the soft rock on its verge—was speared dead in the bush. A week later, two convicts on thatch-cutting detail were found speared and mangled, “the head of one beaten to a jelly.” It was supposed, a seaman noted, “to have been thro’ revenge for taking away one of their canoes.”29 The killers had melted back into their tribe and it was useless to pursue them. “Notwithstanding all our presents,” wrote a woman convict from Port Jackson in November 1788, “the savages still continue to do us all the injury they can, which makes the soldiers’ duty very hard, and much dissatisfaction among the officers. I know not how many of our people have been killed.”30

  Revenge was easier dreamed of than exacted, as Phillip forbade punitive expeditions. The officers and marines, with their muskets, were theoretically better-armed than the Iora—but the tribesman could throw four spears in the time it took to reload a flintlock. The convicts were not armed at all, and so their efforts at revenge were futile. In March 1789, sixteen of them set off with clubs to beat up the “Indians” for injuring one of their friends; the Iora ambushed them, killing one and wounding seven. Not only did Phillip refuse to order a retaliatory attack on the blacks, but he had the eight unharmed survivors flogged with 150 lashes each and placed in leg irons for a year.

  Such actions rankled. In the eyes of the British Government, the status of Australian Aborigines in 1788 was higher than it would be for another 150 years, for they had (in theory) the full legal status and so, in law if not in fact, they were superior to the convicts. The convicts resented this most bitterly. Galled by exile, the lowest of the low, they desperately needed to believe in a class inferior to themselves. The Aborigines answered that need. Australian racism began with the convicts, although it did not stay confined to them for long; it was the first Australian trait to percolate upward from the lower class.

  But if the convicts hated the blacks, the military detested both—and for similar reasons. When Phillip summarily punished the steward of a marine officer with 50 lashes for giving a convict a gallon of rum in exchange for a pet possum, Arthur Bowes Smyth railed against the governor:

  … This Government (if a Government it can be called) is a scene of anarchy and confusion; an evident discontent prevails among the different officers throughout the settlement. The marines and sailors are punished with the utmost severity for the most trivial offences, whilst the convicts are pardoned (or at least punished in a very slight manner) for crimes of the blackest die. I do not even except stealing, which the Governor himself … assured them would be punished capitally. What may be the result of such a very inconsistent and partial mode of acting, time (and I may venture to say a very short time) will shew.31

  To the marines, Phillip’s even-handedness was bias. In the famine years of the early settlement convicts were hanged for stealing food—but so, in March 1789, were six marine privates. Why, marines grumbled, should the convicts be flogged with a lighter cat-o’-nine-tails than the dreadful “military cat” used on servicemen? Why should marines and soldiers get the same ration as prisoners? Pinpricks, like the cancellation of a rum allowance to the marines’ wives, became inflammations. Most of all, they resented doing duty as convict supervisors. They had not enlisted as jail wardens, and they felt (not unreasonably) that the government’s failure to send civilians to keep the work gangs in order was one more proof of its incompetence and indifference.

  So they hated the place, hated the convicts for bringing them there and despised the Aborigines into the bargain. “I do not scruple to pronounce,” wrote the marine major whom Phillip had made lieutenant-governor, Robert Ross,

  that in the whole world there is not a worse country. All that is contiguous to us is so very barren and forbidding that it may with truth be said that here nature is reversed; and if not so, she is nearly worn out.… If the minister has a true and just description given him of it he will surely not think of sending any more people here.32

  Ross—“without exception the most disagreeable commanding officer I ever knew,” in the opinion of one of his subordinates—was a choleric, whining martinet who hated Phillip and the colony equally. He would stop at nothing to cast Phillip in a bad light. But most of the colonists, marine or convict, shared his gloom about the future of New South Wales.

  iii

  THE HATEFUL equalizer was hunger. This first democratic experience in Australia spared no one. It made most of the colonists stupid and some crazy, playing havoc with morale and producing endless displays of petty tyranny.

  The First Fleet carried enough food to keep its passengers alive for two years in Australia. The rations issued to sailors, marines and officers each week were:

  The male convicts got one-third less, while female convicts got two-thirds of the male ration, or slightly less than half the naval standard. On paper, this was not a bad allowance. In practice it meant scurvy, and the meat was mostly bone and gristle.

  At Table Bay in South Africa, their last port of call before Australia, some officers had bought livestock for themselves. When these were added to the animals Phillip had bought for the government herd, the colony’s total stock came to 2 bulls and 5 cows, 29 sheep, 19 goats, 74 hogs and sows, 18 turkeys, 35 ducks, 35 geese and 209 chickens. There were also 5 rabbits. All these creatures were guarded with reverential care. As Phillip had put it to the convicts, the life of a breeding animal was worth a man’s. In August 1788, when a sheep fattened for the officers’ dinner on the Prince of Wales’s birthday vanished from its pen, Phillip offered full emancipation to anyone who informed on the thief. None would. Gorgon, the colony’s prize Africander bull, and four of his five cows strayed into the scrub and were lost. Sheep died from bloat, while dingoes and convicts kept poaching the hens.

  All ranks ate the same monotonous diet of salt meat and leathery johnnycakes baked on a shovel. Thus, food could not symbolize the proper social demarcation between bond and free. “Our allowance is very scanty,” wrote James Campbell, captain of marines on Lady Penrhyn,

  I know not why, or whither it was so intended by administration that the only difference between the allowance of provisions served to the officer & served to the convict, be only half a pint (per day) of vile Rio spirits, so offensive both in taste & smell that he must be fond of drinking indeed that can use it—but such is the fact.33

  Phillip knew that the survival of the colony had to preclude all comforts of status. With surplus food, the officers would start to become aristocracy—but not yet. They all lived for five years on the bleak edge of starvation. The first crops failed and the whole harvest of the second planting—a meager forty bushels—had to be saved for seed. In 1788 the convicts had no draft animals; no plough would be used in Australia until 18
03.

  Only a third of the prisoners could work—320 men out of the 966 victualled from public stores. More than 50 convicts were too feeble from age and incurable illness to work at all, and many others—slum-raised, utterly ignorant of farming—“would starve if left to themselves.”34 The ideal of each man feeding himself was a mockery in New South Wales.

  Some officers had their own vegetable gardens, tended by convicts. The kitchen garden for the public stores was planted, for security, on an island 300 yards out in the harbor; there, it was fairly safe from the prisoners and marines who, desperate for green food, would pull turnip-tops and gobble the leaves before the turnip had grown. But the yield from Garden Island, as it was named, was still poor—just enough for the sick in the hospital tents. The officers guarded their private plots zealously but unsuccessfully. Thus when Lieutenant Clark, who had the use of another islet in the harbor (still known as Clark Island), went to look at his onion bed in February 1790, he found “some Boat had landed since I had been there last and taken away the greatest part … It is impossible for any body to attempt to raise any Garden stuff here, before it comes to perfection they will steal it.”35

  The colonists found few plants they could eat, and little game. They gathered wild spinach and a liquorice-flavored creeper, Smilax glycophylla, which they called “sweet tea.” A few officers had brought their fowling pieces, but it seemed unwise to use up the colony’s limited stock of gunpowder.

  The only reliable source of fresh protein, therefore, was fish. There was some prejudice against it. The ration was 10 pounds of fish issued in place of 2½ pounds of salt beef. King remarked, “If there were more convicts here, they would not submit to having their salt rations stopped where a quantity of fish were caught by them.”36 In Sydney the “Roast Beef of Old England”—even salted and half-rotten—was more prized than any fish.

  By October 1788, Phillip still had no idea if relief ships were on their way, and there was only enough food in store to last, if strictly rationed, one more year. Given the eerily long time-lag between England and Sydney, he had to decide. He cut 1 pound from the weekly flour ration and sent his largest vessel, Sirius, to Cape Town to buy supplies.

  Her captain, John Hunter, gambled on taking a longer but faster route, sailing around Cape Horn before the westerlies. Speed was all-important, for his sailors were sickening from scurvy and hunger. Sirius reached Cape Town in three months, instead of the five the western route against the prevailing winds would likely have taken. Hunter loaded, refitted and brought her back to Sydney Cove, laden with wheat, barley and flour, by May 1789. There had been no news of relief ships in Cape Town. But the 56 tons of new flour would last the colony four months, and the seed would plant the allotments around Sydney and at the new farms inland at Rose Hill.

  By now, most agricultural hope centered on the governor’s farm at Rose Hill, or Parramatta as the blacks called it, where the soil was deep and rich and the fields ran down to a navigable river. By the end of 1789, this farm had produced Australia’s first agricultural marvel, a 26-pound cabbage; but it was still a long way from keeping the whole settlement in greens. In fact, in the year to come, the idea of progress shrunk to a mockery, for 1789 brought no ships, and as 1790 crept by, the little settlement inexorably sank into the torpor and despair of slow starvation. “God help us. If some ships dont arrive, I dont know what will,” Ralph Clark scrawled in his diary, and Watkin Tench described the mood that now descended over Sydney Cove:

  Famine … was approaching with giant strides, and gloom and dejection overspread every countenance. Men abandoned themselves to the most desponding reflections, and adopted the most extravagant conjectures.

  Still we were on the tiptoe of expectation. If thunder broke at a distance, or a fowling-piece of louder than ordinary report resounded in the woods, “a gun from a ship” was echoed on every side, and nothing but hurry and agitation prevailed.37

  Lieutenant Southwell wrote how his eyes, in the evening, had sometimes been deceived “with some fantastic little cloud, which … for a little time has deceived impatient imagination into the momentary idea that ’twas a vessel altering her sail or position while steering in for the haven.”38

  Supplies were running so low that Phillip decided to take another gamble. He dispatched 281 people—more than a third of the convicts in the colony, guarded by half the battalion of marines—to Norfolk Island in the Sirius, which would then sail on to Canton to load up with desperately needed provisions. The convicts and their guards, Phillip reasoned, would stand a better chance on Norfolk Island, with its fertile soil and abundant fish. The marines disliked the idea—which, as a bonus, enabled Phillip to get rid of his obstreperous bête noire, Major Ross—but they had no choice, and Sirius sailed with her tender, Supply, in March 1790. The Sydney colonists now had no means of communication with the outside world. “The little society that was in the place was broken up,” wrote David Collins, “and every man seemed left to brood in solitary silence over the dreary prospect before him.”39

  On April 1, Phillip cut the rations “without distinction” to 4 pounds of flour, 2½ pounds of salt pork and 1½ pounds of rice per week. This was just enough to sustain life but not enough to work on, and so he humanely reduced the convicts’ hours of work to six per day, so that each man could cultivate a private vegetable patch in the afternoon.

  Then, on April 5, Supply appeared off South Head. She was alone. As her launch cast off and made for the shore of Sydney Cove, Tench saw her captain “make an extraordinary motion with his hand, which too plainly indicated that something disastrous had happened; and I could not help turning to the Governor … and saying, ‘Sir, prepare yourself for bad news.’ ”40

  The news was catastrophic. Sirius had struck a reef at Norfolk Island and was a total wreck. All the ships’ crew and company, including the convicts, were saved. But both settlements, at Sydney and Norfolk Island, were now cut off from the world and—except for one 170-ton brig—from one another. Both were failing fast, for Norfolk Island was just as badly off as Sydney.

  iv

  Two YEARS BEFORE, when Philip Gidley King and his party of twenty-two colonists glimpsed, from the pitching deck of Supply, the island that would eventually become the worst place in the English-speaking world, what they had seen was not inviting.

  Magnificent in scenery, Norfolk Island was also a natural prison, harborless, cliff-bound and girdled with reefs on which the long Pacific swells broke with a ragged, monotonous booming. King had to wait five days in the lee before he could lead a scouting party ashore. They landed at Anson Bay on March 4, 1788. The high pines grew right to the cliff face; King guessed the tallest of them was 160 feet.41 Their trunks were wreathed in vines. The ship’s surgeon got lost in this maze and spent the night in the forest. In the dark, where phosphorescent fungi gleamed beneath the Gothic vaults of cabbage-trees, he heard nibbling and thought he was surrounded by rabbits. The rabbits were rats.

  King found a passage through the reef at Sydney Bay (modern Kingston) and landed the convicts and supplies on March 6. They raised the Union Jack on a sapling. “I took possession of the isle, drinking ‘His Majesty,’ ‘The Queen,’ ‘Prince of Wales,’ ‘Governor Phillip’ and ‘Success to the Colony.’ ” The ragged chorus of English voices was sucked away by the Pacific air, swallowed in the blue immensity behind the wall of dark pines. Two days later, Supply made sail for the Australian coast, a thousand miles away.

  The first crops perished from wind and salt. Rats ate the vegetables; then came cutworms, black caterpillars and bright, screaming, seed-eating Norfolk Island Parrots. The wreck of the Sirius meant new mouths to feed. In March 1790, Norfolk Island had 425 people (200 convicts), but by November 1791 with new arrivals from Sydney, it had 959 (748 convicts). Thereafter, until the first settlement was abandoned in 1806, the population would remain fairly steady at about a thousand people, with one guard to every seven prisoners.

  Despite the rich, deep soil, they had,
by March 1790, only about fifty acres of land under the hoe. The reef swarmed with red snapper, but the colonists’ two boats—a cutter and a leaky dinghy—could not always brave the pounding surf. What saved all their lives was the mutton-bird, Pterodroma melanopus, which flocked in immense numbers on Mount Pitt, the island’s highest hill. Its flanks were riddled with their nesting tunnels. The mutton-birds arrived on Norfolk Island early in March and stayed until the end of August—almost the length of the Pacific winter. “They are very fine eating, very fat and firm,” wrote Ralph Clark in August 1790, “and I think (though no Connoisseur) as good as any I ever eat.” The Bird of Providence—as the officers called it; the convicts more laconically dubbed it a Pittite—tasted oily and fishy, somewhere between a penguin and a chicken. The birds had never seen men before, and their abundance struck Clark as Biblical:

  They generally hovered about the Mount for an hour before they came down, which was as thick as a shower of hail, this account will make the old story of Moses in the Wilderness (Exodus xvi.13) be a little more believ’d, respecting the shower of Quails, everyone here owes their existence to the Mount Pit Birds.42

  Once grounded, they were encumbered by their long planing wings, like albatrosses. As quartermaster of public stores, Clark kept a daily tally: More than 170,000 of them were massacred in one three-month span, April to July 1790, an average of nearly four birds per person per day. Some convicts went to brutal lengths to get their eggs: