Australians

by Thomas Keneally

  One day the Eora people indicated by very plain signs that they wanted to know the gender of the men rowing towards them. (No women had yet come ashore.) King wrote, ‘I ordered one of the people to undeceive them in this particular when they gave a great shout of admiration.’ The Eora had wondered whether beneath their carapaces of cloth the cloud-people were male or female. And as they showed themselves male, they might leave, the Eora surmised, if their desires were sated. ‘Pointing to the shore, which was but ten yards from us, we saw a great number of women and girls with infant children on their shoulders make their appearance on the beach, all in puris naturalibus, pas même la feuille de figeur [that is, totally naked].’ The natives made it clear by their urgings that the men in the longboats could make free with the women onshore. ‘I declined this mark of their hospitality,’ said King. He urged a particular young woman to put her baby down and wade out to his boat, where she ‘suffered me to apply the handkerchief where Eve did the fig leaf ’.

  Elders and tribesmen would have been confused when the British refused this perfectly good opportunity to exercise their sexual organs, to sate themselves, and then withdraw to sea at last. As for the Aboriginal women, these figures to whom they offered themselves were more virtual than real. Since the great sexual sins of Aboriginal society were to have sex within forbidden blood limits, a dalliance with such phantasms had no moral or tribal meaning.

  So the inducements so far offered by the Eora—water, threat, the offer of sex—had not worked, and the ghosts remained in distressing proximity.

  BOTANY BAY BLUES

  Even Watkin Tench soon shared the general discontent about the fleet’s long-anticipated landfall. ‘Of the natural meadows which Mr Cook mentions near Botany Bay, we can give no account.’ Surgeon White’s final judgment would be: ‘Botany Bay I own does not, in my opinion, by any means merit the commendations bestowed on it by the much lamented Cook.’

  It took Phillip just three days and a few insomniac nights to decide that he would renounce Botany Bay, the most famous inlet in the outer world. He determined to explore the far less famous inlets north along the coast, named in turn by Cook as Port Jackson and Broken Bay. By 22 January, three longboats were prepared with three days provisions for scouting up the coast. Arthur Phillip, Captain Hunter, David Collins, Lieutenant Bradley and a small party of marines were spread throughout the three open boats. Putting out of the bay by dark on Monday morning, they found there was only a gentle swell as light came up on the open, aquamarine Tasman Sea. Sandstone cliffs interspersed with beaches and headlands marked the way north. On the cliffs, several parties of Aboriginals cried out to the three open boats as they proceeded along the coast, ‘Werre! Werre! Werre!’ That afternoon, Phillip entered the heads of Port Jackson, a dimple on Cook’s map of this coastline, named to honour the then Judge-Advocate of the Admiralty. It had not been entered by Cook as he made his way up the coast in 1770. The great sandstone cliffs near the entrance decreased in size to become the weathered south head, whereas the north side displayed perpendicular heights.

  Phillip’s boats ran around the southern head, up the middle of the tide rushing in from the Pacific. They found themselves in a wide, bright blue bowl of sparkling water. It stretched away on the north and west but particularly on the south side. The foreshores were heights of sandstone thickly covered with dun green forest, interspersed with yellow beaches. Phillip was already enthused, and the general sobriety of his prose would be swept aside when he later told Lord Sydney, ‘We got into Port Jackson early in the afternoon, and had the satisfaction of finding the finest harbour in the world, in which a thousand sail of the line may ride in the most perfect security.’

  Such absolutes: ‘the finest harbour in the world’; ‘perfect security’; ‘a thousand sail.’ The same number of sail Helen had launched in the Trojan Wars. This exuberant sentiment would stand out unapologetically in the midst of Phillip’s dutiful official-ese, and it underpinned his decisiveness in declaring this, and not the great Cook’s Botany Bay, as the destined place.

  The expedition circled to one of the northside bays of this huge, unexpected harbour, which Phillip then or later named Manly Cove, as a tribute to the general style and demeanour of natives who appeared on the beaches that afternoon. Then, in the evening, they headed southwards down the harbour and landed at a place within the southern headland, naming it Camp Cove, since they pitched tents there. They were the very first people from the northern world to take their rest in Port Jackson.

  At four o’clock in the morning, that keen taskmaster Arthur Phillip had them on their oars again, with one boat in the lead sounding the way from one bay of Port Jackson to another.

  They found that the broad sweep of Port Jackson ran away pleasingly southwards, with much better soundings than Botany Bay. By late afternoon they reached a cove some eleven kilometres inside the harbour of Port Jackson. This place gave excellent soundings close to shore—its good anchorages had been gouged out by a vanished glacier. The party landed on the west side of this inlet, under bushy platforms of rock. They walked around to the head of the cove where the ground was level. Again, there were scattered large eucalypts, cabbage-tree palms and low undergrowth, but more elevation and an utterly less swampy air than at Botany Bay. A good stream densely lined with ferns flowed down the centre of the land and disgorged in the cove. It ran pristinely and plentifully even then, at the height of summer. The ridge on the eastern side struck Phillip and others as a potential site for a public farm. And there were no natives screaming, ‘Werre’. An American, Nagle, a boat-master, a captured former Yankee privateer, remained aboard fishing while the gentlemen made their reconnaissance, and pulled up a good bream. Returning, the governor and his party were in good form; Phillip was very pleased with this cove. He saw the bream and asked who had caught it—it lay silver in the stern like a good sign. He told Nagle to remember that he was the first white man to catch a fish ‘in Sydney Cove’.

  Perhaps the decision to name the cove to honour the Home Secretary was really as instantaneous as that. Sydney was an English corruption of the French St Denis, but there was no piety in Phillip’s choice. A politician was perhaps less likely to forget a place named to honour him, a place whose deterioration might become a reflection on him. Indeed, Phillip had at first intended to name the township he envisaged building in the cove Albion, an ancient name for England, imbued with a certain holiness. But highfaluting Albion would never quite stick, and the convicts and soldiers would quickly come to use the name Sydney Cove, or Sydney Town, or simply Sydney, for their penal municipality.

  It already had a long-established Eora name—Warrane. It belonged to a group of Eora speakers named the Cadigal (the Grass-tree clan), and their absence on the day Phillip landed indicated that it was chiefly a place to be visited for ceremonial purposes. Indeed, this whole region of vivid blue skies and water, sandstone headlands and ridges covered in vegetation, sandy bays and ocean beaches backed by marshland, tidal lagoons and mangrove swamps made all the Eora a people united by salt water and a bounty of protein from the sea, from Port Jackson, lying inside its heads, Boree and Burrawara, to Kamay (Botany Bay), and to the hinterland bush.

  But their good fortune had passed. For longer than any other population of Homo sapiens, and excepting the Makassan contacts in the far north, the ancestors of the Aboriginals had been genetically and culturally cocooned from the rest of the species. Phillip’s sailors, soldiers and convicts, already preparing to depart Botany Bay for the more promising Port Jackson, were walking incubators for viruses and bacteria barely before seen on this coast. These micro-organisms too were looking for new landfalls.

  WARRANE-BOUND

  At first light the next morning, 24 January, when on Supply the stock was being watered, and everyone was exhilarated at news of the coming move, the watches on the ships saw two ships just off the coast, trying to work their way into Botany Bay. Amongst the officers visiting each other for breakfast, there were a
number of wild surmises. Were they ships from England with a general pardon for all prisoners? Supply ships? A white pennant soon confirmed that they comprised the expedition of the Comte de la Pérouse, who had set out from France nearly three years earlier to explore the Pacific, and who had preposterously turned up just as the British were ending their brief dalliance with Botany Bay.

  By the time he appeared off Botany Bay, the comte’s two ships, La Boussole and L’Astrolabe, had doubled Cape Horn, discovered a number of previously uncharted islands, surveyed the coast of Korea, and proved Sakhalin to be an island. Heading south again into the Pacific La Pérouse lost a shore party in Samoa when natives killed his second-in-command and eleven others. A French monk-scientist, Father Receveur, one of two priests on the ships, was fatally ill from wounds received in the Samoan imbroglio, and would ultimately go to his grave on the shores of Botany Bay.

  A ferocious north-easter would keep La Pérouse waiting two days to enter the port safely, and tested the seamanship of John Hunter on Supply and the other ships’ masters as they tacked out from beneath La Pérouse’s shadow. Did he too want to make a claim on this enormous coastline? On the convict decks, the hope had already formed that perhaps these two French ships a little way down the coast offered a means of escape.

  As La Pérouse finally entered Botany Bay, the Sirius, with Phillip once more aboard, was departing. ‘The two commanders had barely time to exchange civilities; and it must naturally have created some surprise in M. de la Pérouse to find our fleet abandoning the harbour at the very time he was preparing to anchor in it,’ wrote Tench.

  Before leaving Botany Bay, a number of marines and reliable convicts had been transferred to the Supply, so that as soon as it came to anchor in Sydney Cove, work parties could be sent ashore. Others spent the first night in the ships, but the next day, 26 January, there were scenes of unprecedented activity in bright sunlight in the little inlet. In one place, said Tench, was a party cutting down the woods, while elsewhere a group set up a blacksmith’s forge. Soldiers pitched officers’ marquees on the west side of the stream, while a detachment of troops paraded, and cooks lit fires on the western side of the cove. Sydney Cove faced north, and the general delineation of the future town was created by its geography. The officers and military were stationed around the banks of the stream. Some ground to the west was to be allotted to officers to grow corn for their animals.

  Major Robbie Ross, commander of marines and lieutenant-governor, brought his edginess ashore. He looked on Sydney Cove and its environs with a far more jaundiced eye than other officers. It might have been in part because he had found Phillip so annoyingly secretive about his intentions regarding rations for troops and convicts, the conditions under which rations would be issued, and even on the issue of whether the marines were to be a garrison or prison guards. Ross was feverishly worried about his family in Britain, whom he described as ‘very small, tho’ numerous’. That was one of the reasons why, upon Captain Shea’s death soon after landing, in the corrupt traditions of the army, he made his own son, John Ross, a child just about to turn ten, a volunteer lieutenant, a rank he hoped would be confirmed by the Admiralty with appropriate back-pay benefits.

  The other fact was that he hated the place on sight. It looked to him an unyielding place, and he wondered if it were un-redeemed, a place which showed by its heathen strangeness that the Saviour’s sacrificial blood, which had certainly rescued his native Scotland, had not washed this far south.

  On the very point of the west side of Sydney Cove, Lieutenant William Dawes intended to set up his astronomical instruments for an unprecedented long-term study of the southern sky. He called the place Point Maskelyne (though it now bears his own name), to honour the Astronomer Royal. On that west side too, on level ground beneath the sandstone rock ledges, Surgeon White’s marquee-hospital was to be set up, near what Phillip had already assigned as the convict women’s camp, the men’s camp being closer to the military. The good stream which divided the cove would come to be known before any great passage of time as the Tank Stream, since reservoir tanks would be sunk along its banks to preserve its waters against drought.

  THE PASSAGE

  On the eastern side of the cove the ground was more open and suited for a public farm and the residences of the governor and his officials. Arthur Phillip’s portable canvas house, provided by Messrs Smith of St George’s Field, was accordingly erected there, about fifty metres from the water, and a number of tents for trustworthy convicts and those considered not terminally corrupted were put up there too.

  In a matter of mere days Sydney Cove would be altered, in Phillip’s mind, and to an extent on the ground, from a garden of nomads to a municipality. To celebrate that shift, in the afternoon of 26 January most of the crew of the Supply assembled at the point where they had first landed in the morning, on the western side of Sydney Cove. The first flagstaff had been fashioned from a sappy pole of eucalyptus and, the British flag being run up, the governor and the officers drank the health of His Majesty and the royal family, then drank success to the new colony while the marines broke the bright sky with several volleys. After this rite, something of greatest significance to the watching Eora happened—many of the white spirits slept ashore, and the night became theirs as well.

  If the Gweagal and Bediagal of Botany Bay had been delighted to see the ships depart, they must have been equally confused when they were replaced by the French vessels; and via the well-trodden overland track between Warrane and Botany Bay came news from visiting members of the Cadigal clan to the north that the original ships had merely gone on to infest Warrane, that choice inlet in the great harbour only 11 kilometres to the north.

  On that first day, 26 January, the governor found the time to sign a warrant giving his old friend, that ancient midshipman Harry Brewer, a new identity as provost-marshal of the colony. So New South Wales began its long career as a place where men of no description could achieve a label, a post, a self-definition.

  CHAPTER 5

  ENQUIRIES ASHORE

  The disembarkation of the bulk of the troops and some male convicts occurred on 27 January, on feet unsteady after such a long period aboard. After their last breakfast on the ships, all the male convicts, except those who were too sick to walk, gathered up their clothing and bedding and were taken ashore. How strange to leave the convict deck on which most of them, not having landed at Botany Bay, had been for so long, their narrow bed space, their penal womb, and to be reborn ashore. The talkers of cant, and the country fellows (‘Johnny Raws’) as well, had the urgent business of clearing ground and building themselves shelters, for there were no tenements or even tents for them. Whitehall had decided that it would be good exercise for the men to construct their own habitations. Under instruction from country felons like James Ruse, they began putting together structures of wattle and daub— plaited panels of branches providing the walls, the cracks being filled in with daubed clay, of which there was a plentiful supply on the foreshore of Sydney Cove. Longboats were regularly sent to the north side of Port Jackson in quest of tall straight trunks of cabbage tree (Livistona australis) which were used for the corner poles of huts. Roofs were of thatch of cabbage-tree fronds or rushes or bark plastered over with clay, which all made, said Collins, ‘a very good hovel’. There were many economic but flimsy structures standing within a few days. Many, however, would be destroyed on 2 February in a characteristically violent Sydney thunderstorm. But for now, wattle and daub was all they had, other than some dockyard canvas sent ashore from Sirius.

  Those felons sent to cut the tall trees found the timber incorrigible—resistant to adze and plane, knotty and with a mind of its own, a wood indifferent to European purposes. Surgeon White, who had sufficient patients to attend to, would take time to declare of this wood that ‘repeated trials have only served to convince me that immediately on immersion it sinks to the bottom like a stone’.

  Meanwhile, on the basis of a few days tentative explor
ation in the bush around Sydney Cove, a cultivated young midshipman, Daniel Southwell, declared that there was nothing deserving of the name of fruit. And with some injustice he declared that the country’s quadrupeds were scarcely to be classed above vermin. But he was also resourceful enough to discover that there were many ‘salutary shrubs’, that balm could be milked from trees, and that a native spinach, parsley and sort of broad bean grew. Many of the productions of the country, he said, were aromatic, and had medicinal properties, and could be used as fomenta, poultices on sores. A young surgeon, an Irishman named Denis Considen, a graduate of Trinity College, Dublin, also found various gums and leaves suitable for brewing a form of native tea.

  Something else momentous but without ceremony occurred: public stock, largely acquired in Cape Town, was landed on the east side of the cove— including one bull, four cows, one bull-calf, one stallion, three mares and three colts. A range of Western Europe’s useful beasts was herded for the first time on this shore, the cattle under the care of a convict named Edward Corbett. As the Eora possessed a Dreaming, so in a sense did the British—a dreaming of harsh-hoofed livestock. For the first time, cattle kicked up the dust of an inadequately super-soiled continent. The Eora had not presented themselves in any numbers at Sydney Cove/Warrane yet, but to those natives looking on, the bestiary of the cloud-people must have seemed puzzling.