Australians

by Thomas Keneally

  On 29 January 1788, when Phillip landed at Spring Cove just inside North Head, twelve natives crowded round the boats, anxious to inspect the newcomers, these owners of fabulous beasts and floating islands. It was the first contact between the races within Port Jackson. The sailors mixed with the native men who were ‘quite sociable, dancing, and otherwise amusing them’, but the native women were kept well away by their menfolk. The whites could not persuade any of the natives to return with them to the settlement at Sydney Cove. John Hunter found these Port Jackson inhabitants a ‘very lively and inquisitive race’, straight, thin, small-limbed and well-made.

  ADAM DELVES

  In the ideal settlement as envisaged by Phillip, the convict male was to work for the government from seven in the morning until three in the afternoon, with a half-day on Saturdays, and then have time to grow vegetables or pursue some other useful task in his spare time thereafter. By 30 January, the first work party of convicts was put to breaking ground for a government garden and farm on the slope of the east side of the cove and just over the hill, in what became known as Farm Cove. As tools were handed out by the conscientious and always stressed storekeeper, Andrew Miller, the male convicts, directed amongst others by Phillip’s manservant, Henry Dodd, showed very little enthusiasm. The first breaking of sod by some anonymous shoveller in the hastily cleared earth of Sydney Cove was unattended by ceremony, or by competition to be the first to sink the shovel, or by any sense of self-congratulation that on this immense shore they few were the first European delvers. The London convicts immediately proved themselves to be the worst workers. Even men as likeable as James Ruse became their enemy once put in a supervisory role. A freed slave, John Cesor or Black Caesar, born in Madagascar, hugely built, was considered one of the few good labourers. Otherwise, the phrase ‘Kiss my arse!’ was a current and popular one in Sydney Cove—it appears in the early records of the judge-advocate’s court in the mouth of a West Country convict named Sam Barsby.

  That first slovenly attempt at making a government garden was an early instance in which the realities of the new society were forced upon Phillip. The earth proved rocky, full of lumps of sandstone. Officers, however, and the occasional convict stonemason, thought that the yellowish sandstone was comparable to Portland stone and very suitable for working. But in the bush around no one could find limestone deposits for cement.

  The lime trees, the lemons, the oranges, the figs and grapes which had been picked up in the Cape were slowly planted in the government farm, but marsupial rats devoured them eagerly during Phillip’s uneasy nights. His sleep beneath the canvas of his temporary residence was restless, since he suffered from renal pain. He also ran into resistance from the officers in a matter amazing for not having been sorted out in England. ‘The officers who composed the detachment are not only few in number,’ Phillip would write to Lord Sydney, ‘but most of them have declined any interference with the convicts, except when they are employed for their own particular service.’ So increasingly Phillip was obliged to put some of the more trustworthy convicts in supervisory roles; young, good-looking, well-liked Henry Kable, for example, became a superintendent for the women prisoners who were still to be landed.

  In the tents placed for the sick on the west side of the cove, beneath the rocky, bush-embowered sandstone ledges, Surgeon White admitted with some concern that, after the preventive medical success of the fleet, the numbers of sick were increasing. Scurvy, dormant on the ships, suddenly seemed to manifest itself in some of the convicts, and dysentery as well. In that late January heat Surgeon White’s sicker patients sat on blankets in the sun and raised their mouths to bite off the air of this place beyond places. White complained that ‘not a comfort or convenience could be got’ for the sick in those first days.

  Lest the Royal Navy sailors on the Sirius (who would be returning to Britain soon enough) begin to eat into public stores, Phillip appointed for their use an island not far from the public farm—Garden Island, as it came to be known—on which to grow vegetables for the crew’s consumption. Soon Ralph Clark would start using another island in Port Jackson as a vegetable garden, and despite its relative distance down-harbour from Sydney Cove, it would sometimes be plundered by boat crews, and by hungry convicts who could swim long distances.

  Phillip gave no priority to building a prison stockade in Sydney Cove. It had always been the plan that the environs would serve as walls to a great outdoor prison. The First Fleet convicts were in the ultimate panopticon, a prison in which all inmates could be readily observed and monitored from a central point, where strangeness hemmed them in, and the sky aimed its huge blank blue eye at them. And yet from the day of landing onwards, a number of prisoners walked the 11 kilometres along a native track down to Botany Bay to bespeak the Frenchmen, and to plead political asylum or offer services as sailors or, when the women were at last landed, sea-wives.

  Lieutenant Bradley, a teacher from the naval academy at Portsmouth, had been out surveying the shoreline of Port Jackson, and found on the north side twelve miles (19 kilometres) of snug coves, and—as in Sydney Cove—good depths of water and freshwater streams entering many of the harbour’s inlets. At his task, he became aware that the northern shore of Port Jackson, and the southern shore too, carried a considerable population of Eora, ‘Indians . . . painted very whimsically with pipe clay and red ochre’. He came to notice that all the women they met had two joints at the little finger on the left hand missing. ‘It was supposed by some to be the pledge of the marriage ceremony, or of their having children.’ Most of the men had lost a front incisor tooth and were highly scarred on the chest. Their spears were twelve to sixteen feet (3.7 to 4.9 metres) in length, and they walked very upright.

  The term ‘Eora’, which the Europeans came to use as the name for the Aboriginal people of the area, may have been merely a sample phrase from their language. It may have been the local language’s word for ‘here’ or ‘the people about here’. In any event, the language the ‘Eora’ spoke, like the approximately 250 languages spoken on the continent of Australia in 1788, tended to use the blade of the tongue against teeth and hard palate to create a far greater range of consonants than in English. Australian languages often had six corresponding nasal sounds, where English just has ‘m’ and ‘n’. Transliteration of Aboriginal personal and place names into English would always be chancy and remains so. The sibilants, such as ‘s’ and ‘sh’, however, were totally absent in Australian languages. Later, Phillip’s officers would chuckle at a visiting native’s incapacity to say ‘candle-snuffer’. Aboriginal words showed case, tense and mood by the addition of meaningful segments, which created very long words, and very long names. Woolawarre Boinda Bundebunda Wogetrowey Bennelong, for example, was the name of the native who would later attract the officers’ amusement over the candle-snuffer. Known as Bennelong, he would continue to attract the Europeans’ attention, for a variety of reasons.

  HONOURING BACCHUS AND GEORGE

  Now society in New South Wales really began. The convict women came up from the prison decks to be landed on 6 February. On Lady Penrhyn, young Surgeon Bowes Smyth was happy to see them taken off in the ship’s longboats, beginning at five o’clock in the morning. Those with goods, portmanteaux or duffel bags full of clothing, decorations and hats which had been carried in the hold were handed their property and toted or wore it ashore, in combination with their aging penal clothes. ‘Some few among them,’ said Bowes Smyth, ‘might be said to be well-dressed.’

  How silent the ships must have suddenly seemed to the sailors, as if a soul had gone out of them. The women were landed on the western side of Sydney Cove where bedraggled canvas and huts of wattle and bark delineated their camp. The last of them landed at six o’clock on what would prove to be a typical summer evening, still and hot, but promising a southerly squall. ‘The men convicts got to them very soon after they landed,’ said Bowes Smyth. And no sooner had the last of the women disembarked than a number of suddenly l
onely sailors from the transports also came ashore, bringing grog with them, and the marines were unable or unwilling to keep the women separate from them. The Lady Penrhyn’s crew in particular joined in one mass outdoor party, Sydney’s first fête of hedonism.

  ‘It is beyond my abilities to give a just description of the scene of debauchery and riot which continued through the night,’ wrote Bowes Smyth, whose reliability as a witness is sometimes criticised for his jumping to conclusions about what he claimed to witness from the deck of Penrhyn. The evening had turned humid and thunderous, and once the rain began it made an assessment of events ashore a little more dubious still. There was lightning, the sentinel in front of Major Ross’s marquee being so intimidated that he abandoned his post. While the night proceeded, one potent stroke of lightning would kill six sheep, two lambs and a pig, all belonging to Major Ross.

  The great Sydney bacchanal went on despite the thunderstorm which so unsettled Ross’s sentry. Fists were raised to God’s lightning, and in the name of the Tawny Prince and in defiance of British justice; the downpour was cursed and challenged, and survival and utter displacement were celebrated in lunges and caresses. ‘The scene which presented itself at the time, and during the greater part of the night, beggars every description,’ wrote Bowes Smyth.

  It is hard to put this idea of wild drinking and orgy together with what we know of at least some of the women. There is little doubt either that some of them were by dark safely with mentors. The forceful young Cockney Jewish convict Esther Abrahams was the passion of 23-year-old Lieutenant George Johnston, a Scot severely wounded by the French as a fifteen-year-old in 1780, but who had now returned to manhood’s bloom. The alliance between the Scot and the Jewish girl would ultimately lead to marriage. At the time Lieutenant Johnston became interested in her, when he came aboard the Lady Penrhyn in the Thames, she had already given birth to a daughter in Newgate and brought her on board with her. Surely Esther, that night in Sydney, and her daughter, Roseanna, were somehow under Johnston’s protection.

  Surely, too, Margaret Dawson of the Lady Penrhyn, a seventeen-year-old Lancashire girl who had stolen clothing and jewellery to the death-earning value of £22 18 shillings from her master and taken it away with her on the Liverpool- Norfolk coach, joined her lover, Assistant Surgeon Balmain, a 26-year-old Scot whose estate, many years later, she would inherit. But though there were numerous similar cases, the generality of convict women and girls were, willy-nilly, participants in this event which so shocked Arthur Bowes Smyth. Surgeon Bowes Smyth was an evangelical Christian, and so might have been easier to surprise than some, though he had been surgeon on Penrhyn for the past ten months and should have been beyond surprising.

  There were certainly grounds for a riotous, desperate party of some sort. The women had been on their ships a deranging nine months. They had arrived inextricably in this outlandish and humid summer place; this was the unfamiliar and inscrutable region that would contain their bones. They would be buried in sandstone-strewn earth amongst the angular and tortuous eucalyptus trees. Their frenzy was that of people ejected from the known world and making a rough if brutal bed in the unknown one. Antipodean licentiousness had its beginning here and, almost certainly, Antipodean rape.

  ‘While they were on board ship,’ wrote the calmer, though still outraged Watkin Tench, ‘the two sexes had been kept most rigorously apart.’ (This was not a correct perception.) ‘But, when landed, their separation became impracticable and would have been, perhaps, wrong. Licentiousness was the unavoidable consequence and their old habits of depravity were beginning to recur. What was to be attempted? To prevent their intercourse was impossible, and to palliate its evils only remained. Marriage was recommended.’

  That was the voice of the Enlightenment, not of the fervent. Social good might arise from a regulated mingling of the sexes, and licentiousness was to be abhorred not so much as an abomination in God’s eyes but as a threat to reason and good order.

  The orgy prevailed until the dripping, thundery small hours of 7 February, but by noon that same day civic formalities took hold. All the marine officers, their metal gorgets glistening at their throats, took post before their companies, which marched off the allocated, rough-hewn parade ground to adjoining ground cleared for the occasion, ‘whereon the convicts were assembled to hear His Majesty’s commission read’.

  Bowes Smyth and Collins describe a scene which could be seen as Python-esque if one abstracted the symbols and rituals from their potency and from the inherent beliefs of its more significant participants. Phillip, having dressed in full uniform of post-captain and wearing his British and Portuguese awards on his breast, emerged from his palazzo of canvas and proceeded to the ceremonial ground at the head of the cove. Upon arrival, he took off his hat and ‘complimented’ the marine officers, and the marines lowered their colours to him and paid him respect as governor. The marines then formed a circle around the whole of the convicts, men and women, who were ordered to sit down like so many schoolchildren on the ground. A camp table had been set up with two red leather cases laid on it—the commissions and letters-patent, ready to be unsealed and intoned by Judge-Advocate Captain Collins.

  As Phillip stood by, Captain Collins read aloud the documents signed by King George and his Cabinet members which empowered Phillip in New South Wales. Waves of august language rose and perched like birds in the trees: George III by the Grace of God, King of Britain, France and Ireland ‘to our trusty and well-beloved Arthur Phillip, Esquire’. Never had a more exceptional claim of territory been uttered than in this commission declaimed amongst the eucalypts and cabbage-tree palms, and heard without comprehension by the no doubt observant Cadigal and Wangal clans of the area. Arthur Phillip was to be Captain-General and Governor-in-Chief over New South Wales, which was an area declared to run from the northern extremity of the coast, Cape York, to the southern extremity of South East Cape; that is, from 10° south to 43° south, or the southern hemisphere equivalent of from the Tagus River in Portugal to Trondheim in Norway. The claim also extended to all the country inland westward as far as 135° east. Whatever was out there, 2400 kilometres or more west of Sydney Cove, a distance greater than London to Moscow, the Crown claimed it. A massive stretch of earth had been mysteriously transformed. It had become, for the first time, estate and realm.

  The claim, however, did not run all the way to what would prove to be the west coast of Australia. Phillip knew well enough that the fact it did not go further than 135° east made room for the claims of other nations, especially the Dutch, who had made many landings in what is now called Western Australia. Even though the Dutch despised it as a desert coast and had not yet claimed it, their sensitivities had to be respected. And, to the north, the Portuguese had a longstanding claim on Timor, with which George III and his ministers saw no reason to quarrel, particularly given England’s friendly relationships with Portugal. Just the same, it was a massive claim as it stood, close to three-fifths of what would later prove to be a continent of almost 8 million square kilometres, and it was uttered in front of humble, debased and ragtag company, amidst canvas, wattle-and-daub and eucalypts.

  The name ‘Australia’—Southland—was not mentioned. In 1569 and 1570 respectively, Mercator and Ortellius had used the terms continens australis and australia continens. Discovering Vanuatu in 1606, Pedro Fernandez de Quiros had posited a southern continent named Austrialia del Espiritu Santo and Austrialia Incognita. Throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries the terms Australia and Australis appeared on maps as an ill-defined given. Cook, finding this eastern coast in 1770, thought of it as part of New Holland but did not know if it was a continent or an archipelago stretching away to the west. So he named this east coast New Wales and New South Wales. As a result, in Phillip’s commission, the name New South Wales was used, not Australia—the latter name would not then have had international meaning. But the terms New Holland, Botany Bay and New South Wales soon became interchangeable in the mind of the
British public.

  Arthur Phillip was, by the commissions and letters-patent, to have the power to appoint officials and administer oaths—he would administer one to Collins before that gentleman began his work as judge-advocate. As governor, he had power to pardon and reprieve, punish offenders and to make land grants to civilians. He was empowered also to create a criminal court, a civil court, an admiralty court and so on.

  The commission read, the marines fired three volleys to seal this extraordinary advent of authority. The light did not change and the air held its humidity, and somewhere in the huge harbour, native women fished from the insecure platforms of their bark canoes, and a vast, mute electric-blue sky hung sceptically over the giant claims of the British. Wise gods would have laid odds that this exercise could not succeed.

  The volleys fired off, Phillip spoke to his charges—Bowes Smyth used the word ‘harangued’. There was no exhilaration to what he said. He was not in the mood for eloquence, and perhaps suffered from a certain post-landing depression and the onset of the gritty task. So he offered them no golden promise. He spoke more like a new captain appointed to cut an unruly crew down to size. He told them he had observed them to see how they were disposed. By now, he knew that many among them were incorrigible and he said that he was persuaded that nothing but severity would have any effect on them. If they attempted to get into women’s tents of a night, the soldiers had orders to fire upon them. (This would prove an unenforceable threat.) He had observed that they had been very idle—not more than two hundred out of six hundred of them were at work. Phillip told his people that labour in Sydney Cove would not be as severe as that of a husbandman in England who had a wife and family to provide for. They would never be worked beyond their abilities, but every individual should contribute his share ‘to render himself and community at large happy and comfortable as soon as the nature of the settlement will admit of ’. In England stealing poultry was not punished with death, he said; but here that sort of loss could not be borne and it was of extreme consequence to the settlement that chickens and livestock be preserved for breeding. Stealing the most trifling item of stock or provisions therefore would be punished with death. This severity, he said, was contrary to his humanity and feelings for his fellow creatures, but justice demanded such rigid execution of the laws, and if they stole food, the convicts might implicitly rely on justice taking place. This extraordinary executive decision by Phillip would ultimately scythe down a number of those felons presently sitting and listening to him.