The Fatal Shore

by Robert Hughes

  They catch the birds and them that have no eggs they let go again and them that are with Egg they cut the Egg out of them and then let the poor Bird fly again which is one of the cruelest things which I think I ever heard. I hope that some of them will be caught at this cruel work for the sake of making an example of them.43

  Naturally the Birds of Providence could not survive this slaughter. By 1796 they were thinning out, and eight years later they were almost gone. By 1830, no more was heard of Pterodroma melanopus on Norfolk Island.

  Meanwhile, the arduous work of clearing and building went on. Hungry men work slowly, so less ground is cleared; which means small crops and more hunger. There was little time or energy left over for the crops the island was meant to produce, pines and flax.

  The Norfolk Island pines, however, like the rest of antipodean nature, were deceptive. They turned out to be useless for anything but huts and firewood. Their wood was not resilient enough for spars. It was short-grained, wanting in resin, more like beech than Norway pine; it snapped like a carrot.

  That left the flax plant. Phormium tenax, Phillip had optimistically reported to Lord Sydney at the end of 1788, “will supply the settlers with rope and canvas, as well as a considerable part of their cloathing, when they can dress it properly.”44 But the Admiralty had sent no flax workers with the First Fleet. Phillip’s sanguine vision of settlers and convicts wearing homespun linen whilst dispatching argosies of sailcloth to England quickly faded. He besought London to send a flax dresser, but it took two years for this expert (a convict superintendent named Andrew Hume) to reach Norfolk Island. In 1791 Hume managed to produce for the Admiralty a couple of square yards of rough Norfolk Island linen—perhaps among the costliest textiles ever woven by man.

  Meanwhile, King had an idea. He remembered Banks telling him about the linen woven by the Maoris in New Zealand. Plainly, he needed a Maori; and about a year later, a ship did manage to kidnap two wildly struggling and resentful tribesmen from the Bay of Islands in New Zealand and get them to Norfolk Island. One was a young chief named Woodoo; the other, Tooke, was a priest’s son; both were twenty-four years old and neither had the slightest idea of how to prepare flax, for such menial work was done by women. So Tooke and Woodoo moped haughtily about the settlement, gazing out to sea from the headlands where “almost every evening at the close of day [they] lament their separation by crying or singing a song expressive of their grief, which is at times very affecting.” After six months’ exile on Norfolk, King returned them to New Zealand.45

  Meanwhile, by trial and error, flax production went on. At its peak, the convict workers (mainly women) were turning out some 100 yards of coarse canvas a month. At that pace, however, it would have taken two years to make the sailcloth for one first-rate ship. Gradually, the project wore down and lapsed. By 1800, the hopes that began with Matra’s descants on the flax plant and Cook’s enthusiasm for the pines were proven a total delusion. The place would produce nothing for England; it would never pay for itself. Its colonists sank, as on the mainland, into a demoralized torpor.

  v

  As SOON AS he heard of the wreck of the Sirius, Governor Phillip had inventory taken of the stores at Sydney. It showed that they had only a few months’ grace left, so he cut the rations again. These sad morsels—a third of what they should have been—were doled out daily, to groups of seven people, so that the convicts could not bolt a whole week’s ration at once. Some women prostituted themselves for a few handfuls of weevily flour or a hunk of gristle. Most of the men on the work gangs were already as naked as the Aborigines, having traded off their clothes for food. There was no question of the convicts’ helping one another; Sydney Cove had only distilled the dog-eat-dog misery of the English slums. When one elderly prisoner fell down and died in the food queue in May 1790, Collins’s autopsy showed his stomach was quite empty. He had lost or sold his cooking utensils, and instead of helping him out, his fellow prisoners had demanded a cut of his ration before they would share their cookpot, so that he starved.

  Phillip reluctantly stepped up the punishments for food theft, which were already draconic but no longer deterred the starving. In 1790 one man got 300 lashes and 6 months in chains for stealing 20 ounces of potatoes, and another drew 1,000 lashes for taking 3 pounds of the precious tubers. After such treatment, a man would be incapacitated, literally skinned alive. Huge rewards (in food, the only currency that mattered, for there was no money circulating in this jail) were offered to convicts who helped catch food thieves. Thus in May 1790, convict Thomas Yarsley received 60 pounds of flour for catching a man stealing garden vegetables. Such inducements, Watkin Tench remarked, were “more tempting than the ore of Peru or Potosi.”46

  Hunger, fear, exhaustion and the pervasive sense of abandonment—these destroyed whatever scraps of morale may have been left among the convicts. One of their few surviving letters, from an unknown woman, speaks of “our disconsolate situation in this solitary waste of the creation … not to be imagined by any stranger” and revealingly noted, “In short, everyone is so taken up with their own misfortunes that they have no pity to bestow on others.” No wonder that by April 1790 the settlement chaplain, Reverend Richard Johnson, was lamenting the convicts’ apathy to the Divine Word. “Little apparent fruit yet among the Convicts, &c., Oh that they were wise—but alas! nothing seems to alarm or allure them.”47

  The guards were as apathetic as the convicts. They grew peevish; they could not make up their minds on simple matters; they hallucinated. Lieutenant Southwell felt the torpor of starvation: “I confess myself incompetent … being perplexed with a variety of conjectures, but able to conclude nothing.”48 Conversation, friendship and curiosity faltered and died, having nothing to sustain them. The spirit of inquiry about the new environment, which had filled several officers’ journals in the first year of settlement, now dwindled; there are only about half as many observations on flora, fauna and “Indians” for 1789–90 as for 1788. Monotony reigned. The classes were now at a simmering distrust of one another, wrote an anonymous male convict lamenting their “Crusoe-like adventures”:

  We fear the troops, and they are not contented with seeing those who live better than themselves, nor with us who live worse.… [W]e have had so many disappointments about arrivals, &c, that the sullen reserve of superiority has only increased our apprehensions; and some of the most ignorant have no other idea than that they are to be left by the troops and the shipping to perish by themselves!49

  The signs of status were vanishing. All uniforms were threadbare or ragged. Most of the marines were barefoot; drill, rituals, spit-and-polish were gone. “Nothing more ludicrous can be conceived,” wrote Watkin Tench, “than the expedients of substituting, shifting and patching, which ingenuity devised, to eke out wretchedness and preserve the remains of decency.”50

  The marines resented Phillip’s order that equal rations be issued to convicts and guards. When the governor turned over his private stock of flour—more than 300 pounds—to the public store, Collins wrote that the gesture “did him immortal honor, in this season of general distress”—as indeed it did.51 But the marines did not agree. If clothes and rations could not symbolize rank, then actions would; and one may be sure that every curse, kick and blow the marines rained on the exhausted “crawlers” was meant as a reinforcement of superiority, not just an incitement to work. The convict artist Thomas Watling, transported for forgery, summed it up:

  Instances of oppression, and mean-souled despotism, are so glaring and frequent, as to banish every hope of generosity and urbanity from such as I am:—for unless we can flatter and cajole the vices and follies of our superiors, with the most abominable servility, nothing is to be expected—and even this conduct, very often … meets with its just reward—neglect and contempt.52

  To construct a sense of power from the meager social resources of the colony, the top dog had to be capricious—otherwise, the underdog’s servility might be taken as a contract. Watling could neit
her dignify himself by rebelling, nor protect himself by truckling. This proved utterly demoralizing for genteel convicts who still clung to the belief that they were not “common” criminals. To them, servility—the very condition they had tried to escape with their pathetic embezzlements and forgeries—was indeed “abominable.”

  By grit, example and stubborn evenhandedness in the face of hopeless prisoners and near-mutinous marines, Phillip pulled his wretched settlement through these months of crisis. “We shall not starve,” he wrote, “though seven-eighths of the colony deserves nothing better; the present want will be done away by the first ship that arrives.”53

  That long-awaited sail was glimpsed on June 3, 1790, a rainy, blustering day. Watkin Tench realized it when he saw, through the doorway of his hovel, “women with children in their arms running to and fro with distracted looks, congratulating each other, and kissing their infants with the most passionate and extravagant looks of fondness.” The ship was Lady Juliana, eleven months out of Plymouth, carrying the first news from home the colonists had received in almost three years:

  “Letters! Letters!” was the cry. They were produced, and torn open in trembling agitation. News burst on us like meridian splendour on a blind man. We were overwhelmed with it: public, private, general, and particular. Nor was it until some days had elapsed, that we were able to methodise it, or reduce it into form.54

  They learned, for the first time, of George Ill’s attack of porphyria, of the trial of Warren Hastings, of George Washington’s inauguration as the first president of the United States. Most amazing of all—and, given their social situation, most ominous—they learned of the French Revolution, “that wonderful and unexpected event,” as Tench called it.

  They also learned why no stores had arrived. The Guardian, laden with two years’ worth of food and stores, had struck an iceberg and limped into Cape Town, where she was abandoned. But for that she would have reached Sydney in early March, thus preventing the loss of Sirius. All her stores were lost. Lady Juliana had brought some flour, but it also brought more useless mouths in the form of 222 women convicts.

  At least they were in good health. Not so the other prisoners on the Second Fleet. More than a thousand had embarked, but a quarter of them died at sea, and half were landed helplessly ill at Sydney Cove from the three remaining ships, Neptune, Surprize and (making her second voyage to Australia) Scarborough. Some died from the brutality of the ships’ masters, others because they had been too sick to sail.* The authorities in England had simply used the Second Fleet to rid the hulks and prisons of invalids, dispatching them into oblivion. “The sending out of the disordered and helpless,” Phillip wrote angrily to his superiors in London,

  clears the gaols and may ease the parishes from which they are sent; but … it is obvious that the settlement, instead of being a colony which will support itself, will, if this practice is continued, remain for years a burthen to the mother-country.55

  Before his letter reached London, however, the Third Fleet was on its way, carrying 1,864 convicts. One man in ten died, and the survivors were landed in 1791 “so emaciated, so worn away,” in Phillip’s words, that they were utterly unfit to work—more helpless parasites to drag the colony down.

  So the ships had come, but brought little change. David Collins wrote to his father and summed up his plight:

  I find that I am spending the Prime of my Life at the farthest part of the World, without Credit, without … Profit, secluded from my Family,… my Connexions, from the World, under constant Apprehensions of being starved … All these Considerations induce me … to embrace the first Opportunity that offers of escaping from a Country that is nothing better than a Place of banishment for the Outcasts of Society.56

  In fact, the marines would soon be relieved. The Second Fleet brought two companies of the New South Wales Corps, a new unit tailored for service in Australia. The corps’ officers knew they had to do the administrative work, such as jury duty, that Major Ross and his men objected to; and its enlisted men would guard convicts as well as fight the French—the latter a remote possibility. As soldiers, the Botany Bay Rangers (as they came to be nicknamed) were poor stuff even by the current low standards of the British Army. Most of them were scum, and they found service in New South Wales the best alternative to beggary or crime. Few of the officers were better than the men.57

  But the impact of the New South Wales Corps on life in early New South Wales was to be out of all proportion to its quality as a force. Between 1791 and 1808 the corps was de facto—if not quite de jure—the most powerful single internal influence on the colony, producing its first ruling clans and even, in 1808, overthrowing the governor.

  The arrival of the Second and Third Fleets proved one thing: However bad the colony’s prospects were, at least it had not been abandoned by England. From now on, sails would continue to be seen off the Heads. Some were convict ships, others supply vessels, and yet others were the first harbingers of trade in that remote ocean: sealers, whalers, and merchantmen drawn to the infant colony by the hugely inflated prices the colonists would pay for ordinary goods—3,000 to 4,000 percent on “every little Article of Comfort or Convenience,” Collins noted.58

  So by the end of 1791 there were signs that Sydney might support itself—although not, as Phillip stressed in his reports to England, on convict labor alone. The prisoners had no incentive to work. They were not so much rebellious as flaccid: “Neither kindness nor severity have any effect, and tho’ I can say the convicts in general behave well, there are many who dread punishment less than they fear labour.” The only hope, Phillip insisted, was a colony “formed by farmers and emigrants who have been used to labour, and who reap the fruits of their own industry.”59

  But no such sturdy free yeomanry would come to New South Wales. In fact, only twenty free settlers would migrate there before 1800. So Phillip resolved to see if the more deserving and sober Emancipists—convicts whose term of punishment had expired but who wanted to stay on and make a new life in Australia—could be made into yeomen. He would grant them land and the use of tools. If their farms prospered they would “take themselves off the store,” becoming independent of government rations and eventually selling their surplus crops back to the colonial government stores. Such men might set an example and show that transportation could reform.

  The first convict to succeed as an independent farmer was Richard Phillimore, who by January 1791 was growing enough grain on Norfolk Island to support himself and two workers. But the father of Australian agriculture, the first man to grub a living from the more stubborn earth of the mainland, was James Ruse, to whom Phillip gave one cleared acre and some raw bush at Parramatta. Ruse had been a farmer in Cornwall. Having no animal manure, he burned off the timber on his little acre and dug in the ashes, which were rich in potash. Lacking ploughhorse and plough, he hoed the ground thoroughly—“not like the Government farms, just scratched over, but properly done,” he proudly told Watkin Tench—and turned the sod over, so that the grass and weeds composted into the soil; then, just before sowing, he turned the earth again. By late summer (February 1791), his wheat and maize were up and he jubilantly told Phillip that he could keep himself in food. By December 1791 he took his wife and child “off the store” as well.

  As a reward, Phillip deeded him thirty acres at Parramatta—the first land grant ever made in Australia. The place was named Experiment Farm. By 1819 Ruse had two hundred acres to his name, and although he lost it all by rum or ill luck and ended his days working as overseer for another farmer, the lines carved on his gravestone are full of an understandably biblical pride that shines through the home-made spelling:

  My Mother Reread Me Tenderley

  With me She Took Much Paines

  And when I arived in This Coelney

  I sowd the Forst Grain and Now

  With My Hevenly Father I hope

  For Ever To Remain.

  By the end of 1792 all the economic hopes of the colony were
centered on Parramatta. No one now struggled with the thin soil of Sydney, and the Tank Stream was a “morass,” so damaged by the settlers that ships could no longer get water from it. But at Parramatta, the farms were slowly extending their frail patchwork into the ancient gray-green chaos of the bush. By October 1792 Phillip had given land grants around Parramatta and the nearby district of Toongabbie to sixty-six people, of whom fifty-three were time-expired convicts. But there were not many men like Ruse among them. Skilled, hardworking Emancipists could save money to pay their way back to England or could work their passage as seamen and carpenters: “Thus will the best people always be carried away,” Phillip ruefully noted.60 Four years after landing, most prisoners still could not support themselves and were worked like cattle. An old lag who arrived with the Third Fleet, Henry Hale, gave a vivid picture of labor at Toongabbie:

  For nine months there I was on five ounces of flour a day; when weighed out, barely four.… In those days we were yoked to draw timber, twenty-five in gang. The sticks were six feet long; six men abreast. We held the stick behind us, and dragged with our hands. One man … was put to the drag; it soon did for him. He began on a Thursday and died on a Saturday, as he was dragging a load down Constitution-hill.… Men used to carry trees on their shoulders. How they used to die!61

  At Toongabbie, “All the necessary conveniences of life they are strangers to, and suffer everything they could dread.… [I]t was not uncommon for seven or eight to die in one day, and very often while at work.” No wonder that the convicts pilfered like ants. Despite a long drought in 1791, the harvest had produced nearly 5,000 bushels of wheat, of which no less than 1,500 bushels—30 percent of the year’s crop—vanished somewhere between the fields and the granary.62

  Yet at the end of 1792, a thousand public acres and 516 private were under cultivation, and more than four thousand acres had been set aside for future farming. This, Phillip thought, would be done by Emancipists and members of the New South Wales Corps, all of whom would have the use of convict labor to help them. Such was the germ of the assignment system, the modified form of slavery on which Australia’s early economy would be built.