A Far Distant Land: A saga of British survival in an unforgiving new world (The Australian Historical Saga Series Book 1)

by David Field

  Macarthur pressed his point. ‘There’s no Mint established here and unless we have some very expert forgers amongst the convicts, there’ll be no banknotes either. The entire economy of this new society on which the governor has set his sights will be based on promissory notes, with no solid coinage or gold to back them up. All banking will be done in London and in the meantime we’ll need a medium of exchange out here, for lesser men with no accounts in England. I propose to make rum that medium of exchange.’

  ‘But won’t it deteriorate, over time?’ Daniel objected.

  ‘Of course it will — either that or it’ll be consumed. But by then it will have served its purpose. You don’t keep your coins for ever, do you? You exchange them for other things that you need and then you consume those things. For example, when you were back in England, you’d buy yourself a fine meal for a shilling, then eat it. Out here, by the same process, you’ll be able to acquire an agreed measure of grog for a week’s work on someone’s land, then exchange it for the food that your family needs. The farmer from who you buy that food then exchanges the rum for more seed or livestock and so on. Unless you actually consume the rum, you don’t lose any of your capital and so it doesn’t matter whether or not it goes off, because you never intend to drink it.’

  ‘But at that rate,’ Daniel said, ‘the system you’re suggesting could be established using anything as the means of exchange — wheat, for example, or chickens.’

  ‘Yes,’ Macarthur conceded, ‘but the beauty of rum is that some people actually do want to drink it, particularly convicts. I’ll pay them in rum, once they cease to be convicts, and I’ll get all my work done for nothing.’

  ‘But the governor pays their wages at the moment,’ Daniel pointed out. ‘At least, he gives the convicts an allowance from the Commissary Store.’

  ‘A Commissary Store, let me remind you, that grows emptier by the week,’ Macarthur countered. ‘And as I just pointed out, over time these men who are now convicts will be looking for gainful employment, in a land that has no coinage or banknotes.’

  ‘So you’ll pay them in rum?’ Daniel concluded.

  ‘Once I get a regular supply of it up and running, certainly,’ Macarthur replied.

  ‘Can you produce enough of it, with the sugar you have available?’ Daniel asked.

  ‘Obviously not, once the system’s fully operational,’ Macarthur conceded. ‘But from my India days I seem to recall that they do a nice line in the stuff and I can import it by the boatload, provided that I get a monopoly on the import.’

  George had been looking uncomfortable as the dialogue between Macarthur and Daniel had continued and now he felt obliged to make an important point. ‘I should, by rights, be reporting all this to the governor. I’m still his adjutant, despite Paterson trying to nudge me out of the way, and I’m sure his Excellency would not be amused to learn that you intend to set up an entire national economy based on “spirituous liquor”, as he’s fond of calling it, although he enjoys the odd tot himself.’

  ‘Go ahead,’ Macarthur smirked, ‘but you’ll find that whatever he orders will be quietly undermined by Grose or Paterson.’

  ‘Paterson’s still on Norfolk Island, surely?’ George countered.

  ‘Indeed he is,’ Macarthur agreed, ‘but he’s been demoted and is furious that the governor’s replaced him in the top office with his old friend King. Paterson’s threatening to come back to Sydney and cause trouble, so I took the precaution of dealing directly with Grose himself.’

  ‘You have Grose in your pocket?’ George asked in disbelief.

  Macarthur smiled unpleasantly. ‘It was, I believe, Shakespeare who reminded us that “Misery doth acquaint a man with strange bedfellows”. My theatre-loving wife is forever citing the phrases of our beloved Bard and that one’s always stuck in my mind. Grose is like every career soldier — he’s anxious to line his pockets before he takes his retirement pension and I’ve succeeded in bringing him into the scheme with a one quarter share of whatever we import. We begin with grog, then move on to sheep. Grose has all but persuaded the governor to give me some acreage up on the higher ground that’s eminently suitable for sheep, but useless for growing crops.’

  ‘So if I report all this, Grose will cover you if the governor tries to stop it?’

  ‘The governor’s lost his grip, surely you’ve realised that, since you deal with him daily? He’s simply awaiting his recall papers and by the time they come through, the system will be fully operational. Whoever his replacement is will find that he can’t stop the big ball rolling. I’ve already prevailed upon Grose to persuade his friends in high places in London to delay any replacement.’

  ‘Why are you telling us all this and risking being reported?’ Daniel asked.

  ‘Because, Lieutenant, you and the captain here will all be part of this little community of ours before much longer and I’d rather that you be in on the arrangement than have to waste time deceiving you on a daily basis. As you will already have deduced, complaints upwards through the military chain will finish up on Grose’s desk and his response will be to silence you, either by demotion on a trumped-up charge, or — dare I say it — with a little accident while out on patrol.’

  ‘And from what I deduced over dinner,’ Daniel replied with an accusing glare at George, ‘my part in all this will be to keep the natives out of your hair.’

  ‘I had no idea about the grog, I swear,’ George told him, ‘although I was aware of the plan to import sheep, since the governor’s approved it.’

  ‘When will the sheep be installed?’ Daniel asked Macarthur, ‘and will I be required to act as Shepherd-in-Chief, to guard your flock from the natives?’

  ‘Regular but spasmodic patrols will be enough,’ Macarthur replied, ‘just so that the natives don’t know where we are, or when we’re likely to show up. As for the sheep, I need to await a suitable vessel whose captain can do the round trip — preferably with the governor’s knowledge and consent. Once we get up and running, we can charter vessels of our own to bring the rum from India and the sheep from Scotland or somewhere.’

  ‘This is all going to take a few years,’ George commented.

  Macarthur smiled. ‘Indeed it will, by which time you’ll have a new lieutenant for your garrison here, while John Macarthur will be the wealthiest farmer in New South Wales.’

  14

  By the end of 1792, when Governor Phillip finally took his long-awaited departure back to England on the Atlantic, everything was going to plan. Grose had stepped up from lieutenant-governor to administrator of the colony and immediately began a policy of establishing the Corps as the supreme authority within New South Wales. He abolished the civil court system and replaced it with a military magistracy under the control of Captain Joseph Foveaux. He also bought the loyalty of the officers and men of the Corps by giving them generous land grants and supplying them with convict labour.

  The convicts were fed, housed and clothed from a rapidly denuding Commissary Store and when their terms of imprisonment were nearing an end, Grose ‘graciously’ commuted those sentences with tickets of leave that made them free men. But with no money with which to buy a passage home and many of them encumbered with wives, mistresses and children that they had not possessed when they first came out, they were obliged to seek employment on the large farms that were springing up in the west, run in the main by entrepreneurs such as John Macarthur who opted to remain in uniform, thereby continuing to draw military pay while putting their official duties in second place to their farming activities. Macarthur paid his free labourers exclusively in rum and sold the first year’s crop of lambs to the Parramatta Commissary Store for which he had overall responsibility anyway.

  Daniel, George, Rachel and Martha were by then installed in houses inside the Parramatta Barracks complex, although George had been granted some land to the south-west, half way between Parramatta and Botany Bay, in addition to other tracts of land further out, one of which he diplomatically
named ‘Bankstown’, after one of those influential men in London who might be tempted to question the grant. He had acquired a few cattle, which he purchased from the Commissary in exchange for some of Macarthur’s rum. He then arranged for a hut to be constructed on the Bankstown property, which he filled with convict farm labourers and dignified with the name of ‘George’s Hall’. It was well supplied with water from the adjacent Prospect Creek and guarded by a detachment of marines on permanent detail and under the notional supervision of First Lieutenant Daniel Bradbury.

  This was not the only area of the country for which Daniel had responsibility, since his suspicions had been correct and George had allocated to him the ‘external patrol’ side of the Parramatta Barracks’ daily activities. Every day Daniel was responsible for ensuring that groups of heavily armed marines were sent out into the surrounding countryside to flush out any native camps from which predatory raids could be conducted on the rapidly expanding flocks of sheep and herds of cattle. He rarely led these patrols himself and only showed his face among the natives when they appeared to be demonstrating their reluctance to move on when instructed by marines with fixed bayonets. Then, he would walk amongst the small clusters of native huts, calling out ‘Friend’, until someone reacted. That ‘someone’ was usually the leader of the particular clan encamped where they were not welcome and Daniel soon learned that the outstretched palm of friendship worked more effectively than the threatened bayonet, particularly if that outstretched palm contained an item of worn convict clothing, or a jar of rum from Macarthur’s still.

  The only time Daniel wandered further afield was when he was sent to the north-west, in order to explore the possibility of opening new agricultural ventures in the land that lay between Parramatta and the Hawkesbury River. It had been known for some time that the river which in the west had been named ‘Nepean’ and which encircled the western expansion of Sydney, was the same river that was known, further north, as the Hawkesbury and that the entire colony was therefore ringed by a freshwater source. Farms began to spring up in settlements known as Windsor, Castle Hill and Toongabbie and where possible they were worked by convict labour under the supervision of men of the New South Wales Corps who were also their proprietors and were happy to pay their labourers in rum once their convict terms expired. They obtained the rum from Macarthur in exchange for some of the produce from their land, which in turn Macarthur fed to the labourers on his own rapidly expanding sheep farm.

  Rachel and Martha had settled down reasonably comfortably to barracks life and were relieved to be living behind brick walls rather than in wooden huts. Their children appeared to be thriving and there was a child community of sorts within the barracks which Daniel all but commanded, given John Macarthur’s daily excursions to his nearby sheep enterprise, with its own convict hut, which he had named ‘Elizabeth Farm’, not that the lady after whom it was named seemed keen to visit it.

  Elizabeth Macarthur had taken immediately to Martha, although she had no idea of her background, or indeed of Rachel’s. She had assumed that, being officer’s wives like herself, they were from a ‘certain position’ in society and her snobbery gleamed out like the glass jewellery she always wore to formal dinners at the Barracks. When first introduced to Martha over drinks in the ‘Officer’s Reading Room’ (her own term for the collection of cracked leather armchairs in which off-duty officers like George, John and Daniel could skim in a desultory manner through London newspapers at least a year old), Elizabeth had immediately announced her life-long love of the theatre and had demanded to know which plays were Martha’s favourites.

  Faking a lengthy and languid trip through her pretended vast memory of the productions in which she had appeared, which in fact gave her time to think quickly, Martha replied, in a wonderful imitation of a slightly bored doyen of the footlights, ‘Probably the Restoration Comedies — particularly the works of Mr. Congreve. Of course, one always aspires to play Lady Macbeth, or perhaps even Ophelia, but such opportunities are rarely afforded to one in Drury Lane. However, I must own that it has been a relief to come out here, where the crowds are not always waiting outside the stage door and gentlemen of quite the wrong sort are not always inviting one out to dinner.’

  ‘I thought you were overdoing it a little,’ Daniel laughed as he recalled the conversation. They were sitting with George and Rachel in the front room of their half of the large brick house, divided into two separate residences, each with two rooms and with a communicating internal door between the two front rooms, for ease of access between the two families when the weather was too inclement to permit a short trip outside.

  ‘I enjoyed myself,’ Martha admitted, ‘and I think that I succeeded in fooling her.’

  ‘She thoroughly deserved it anyway, pompous old crow that she is,’ Rachel responded. Rachel’s first few conversations with Elizabeth had been barely civil, as the two proud women mentally prowled round each other like sniffing dogs. It was one of those instant dislikes of which people are capable without being able to explain why, but Rachel was convinced that Elizabeth was trying to put her in her place. Elizabeth was clearly jealous of Rachel’s friendship with Martha, who Elizabeth believed to be a successful former London actress and was setting out to prove that she was a ‘step above’ Rachel. Elizabeth had quizzed her almost incessantly about her origins, no doubt alerted by her dark features to the possibility that she might be Jewish and Rachel had announced that prior to marrying George, her name had been ‘Juliano’ and that her ancestry was Spanish and possibly of the nobility.

  ‘It really is quite tragic when noble persons are reduced to positions of such wretchedness that they are obliged to marry into even the respectable professions,’ Elizabeth had cooed cattily, to which Rachel had retorted, with a face set like a fire iron, ‘Yes, but at least they have the consolation of pure blood in their ancestry, which I find is a very competent antidote to the boredom of public service, or the lack of inherent intellect which one finds in so many of the service wives with whom one is obliged to converse.’

  They had now been there for a year and there was no news of any replacement governor. The reason why Grose had paid them all a visit had been to appoint John Macarthur officially as his Superintendent of Public Works and Paymaster for the entire New South Wales Corps. However, Macarthur had not been promoted in rank and he and Daniel were still at first lieutenant level, neither having precedence over the other. But Grose had left them in no doubt that he required Daniel to do the real soldiering, leaving Macarthur to promote his several and various business schemes. The colony was rapidly reverting to what it had been at the very beginning — a hierarchy of officers presiding over a prison regime in which convicts were employed as cheap labour, while the senior officers took every opportunity to benefit financially, sexually and socially.

  This was all put under threat when Grose returned to England in December 1794 due to ill health and William Paterson returned from Norfolk Island to assume temporary command of the colony in the absence of any incoming governor. Everyone knew that Major Paterson, as he had now become in order to outrank George, would not be in charge forever and nobody knew that more clearly than Paterson himself, with the result that he tried to put paid to the rapidly burgeoning monopoly that his officers out west were virtually controlling without any assistance from him. Not only was he not benefitting from it personally, but Paterson was acutely aware that one day in the immediate future he would have to explain the state of the colony to a new governor. He forbade the almost exclusive use of sugar and grain for distillation in the many ‘sly grog’ huts that the marines were blatantly operating and let it be known that any officer discovered to have imported cheap rum from anywhere would be court-martialled.

  Then news came, via the Batavia, which delivered over five hundred new ‘free’ settlers in January 1795, that a new governor would be arriving later that year. His name was John Hunter and despatches sent to Paterson by the governor-elect and shared by Paterson with
George Johnston, also advised those in Sydney that Hunter’s orders were to develop New South Wales into a fully functional English colony and reduce the number of convicts to a minimum. Every encouragement was to be given to the free settlers who were now arriving on every boat; they were to be given land grants and they were to be encouraged to establish businesses, particularly of a farming or trading nature. The one glimmer of light was a ‘whisper’ from ‘an influential source’ that Hunter had expressed a wish to have Captain George Johnston as his aide-de-camp.

  They all met around the main table in the Officers’ Mess inside the barracks, to discuss how they were to best position themselves to withstand this challenge to their growing commercial dominance of the settlement and in particular the now almost universal use of distilled liquor and principally rum, as a form of currency. To make matters worse, several wet seasons had reduced the sugar cane and grain harvests.

  ‘As I see it,’ Macarthur said, ‘we need to increase the supply of rum threefold, so that we have a stranglehold on the entire economy before Hunter even gets here. I’m led to believe that it may still be cheaply obtained in India. Paterson will of course wash his hands of the whole business if he finds out, but George will be on hand to advise that doddering old fool Hunter that the colony’s more easily governed this way and that the economic expansion that London’s demanding cannot occur without a common currency. Having a ready supply of rum will be like being in charge of the Royal Mint back home.’

  ‘Easier said than done,’ George observed sadly. ‘We can hardly commission a ship to India without risking a court martial. It would need to be done surreptitiously, by someone who can’t be linked back to us in any way. Can anyone think of such a man?’

  ‘Why does it have to be a man?’ Daniel asked. The other two looked at him in surprise, as he explained. ‘We need someone to pretend to be someone they aren’t — or at least, someone unconnected with the marines in any way. No one would suspect a woman of being a marine officer and I happen to be married to the best actress we have in the colony.’