Australians

by Thomas Keneally

  After his plain speech to the convicts, the governor retired to a cold collation in a large tent set to one side.

  ISLAND OF INNOCENCE

  On 12 February Lieutenant King came to Phillip’s tented mansion to take the oath as superintendent and commanding officer of Norfolk Island. The coming settlement on that island was designed for the moment to be a haven for relative innocents—a thirteen to fourteen year old felon named John Hudson was slated for Norfolk Island too, a late attempt to separate him from bad influences. King was ‘immediately to proceed with the cultivation of the flax plant, which you will find growing spontaneously on the island’. He was also to secure the island ‘and prevent it being occupied by the subjects of any other European power’.

  King had gone aboard the Lady Penrhyn in the earliest days of February to ask Surgeon Bowes Smyth about suitable women to take to Norfolk Island. Amongst those whose attitude Bowes Smyth praised to King was Ann Innett, a mature Worcestershire woman, a former mantua-maker. In the future she would become King’s housekeeper and lover.

  Two weeks of storms kept Supply off the Norfolk Island coast. But when he landed, King was enthusiastic about what he saw while exploring the central valley and the pine-clad hills with his surgeon, Thomas Jamison. No natives inhabited the lovely island—its later record for drowning and shipwrecks might explain why even the Polynesians had avoided it. King’s charges, once ashore, pitched tents on open ground on the south side of the island where there was a gap in the reef in the area he named Sydney Bay and, soon, Kingstown. He settled down to manage the community along the lines determined by Phillip as if it were a large farm and the convicts his farmhands. They split sawed pines to build storerooms and shelters. They sowed the ground. And it all seemed to go better here. Could this become the penal utopia?

  Thomas Jamison, an Englishman who had attended Trinity College Dublin and whom Lieutenant Clark called ‘a cunning villain’, formed an association with Elizabeth Colley of Lady Penrhyn, and produced two illegitimate sons for whom he would provide. But there was also the idyll: one of the young women, Olivia Gascoigne, would soon marry Nathaniel Lucas, a carpenter and cloth thief, by whom she would have thirteen colonial children.

  As fresh gales combed the great pines of the island and thunderheads hung low, King was delighted to find turtles on a sandy beach on the eastern side of the island. On 3 March, however, John Jay, one of the Supply’s quartermasters, insisted on trying to catch a turtle in the surf ‘altho’ desired to desist’, and drowned. He would not be the last to suffer death in Norfolk Island’s turbulent surf.

  Later in the month, indeed on St Patrick’s Day, King recorded that he had found by experiment, soaking and drying ‘. . . that the flax plant which Captain Cook takes notice . . . in no manner resembles the flax of Europe’. The finished product was useless.

  The lash made its entry into Norfolk Island like the entry of the serpent into Eden. A fourteen-year-old (Charles McClennan) tried to steal rum out of the surgeon’s tent and was punished with three dozen lashes. Hail destroyed corn, barley and wheat, and grubs all the potatoes. The sawyers were poisoned by trying out some native beans, and Charles McClennan (also McLellan) was again given lashes for uttering some very seditious and threatening words.

  What exchanges occurred between King and his housekeeper, the convict Ann Innett, in his primitive cottage of pine-wood go unrecorded, but it became a connection of some moment, and he would be willing to raise and educate its fruits, which would turn out to be two sons.

  THE FOOD QUESTION

  On landing, Phillip had implemented his radical plan to provide full rations from the two years of supplies the ships had brought. Convicts were to receive an equal share to men and officers—7 pounds (3.2 kilos) of salt beef or 4 pounds (1.8 kilos) of pork, 3 pints (1.7 litres) of dried peas, 7 pounds of flour, 6 ounces (170 grams) of butter, half a pound (227 grams) of rice or, if it were not available, an extra pound (454 grams) of flour. Females, whether marines’ wives or fallen creatures, received two-thirds of the male ration. Phillip had no doubt at all that those rations needed to be protected from bullies and thieves by the sanction of death.

  Talkative Major Robbie Ross, and many in the military, thought it appalling to give a lazy or malingering convict the same ration as an industrious one, or as one of His Majesty’s marines or, for that matter, as the governor himself. He complained that the convicts were unduly ‘sustained by the humanity (I might have said folly)’ of the government. His vision was that, within bounds, personal industriousness should be encouraged by imposed hunger, and application rewarded with extra rations.

  But Phillip knew that chaos and a wild unofficial market in food would result from an inequity in rations. He was also aware from long naval experience of inspecting opened barrels of rations that the contents were never as copious in reality as they were on paper. The weight of beef and pork was enhanced in many cases by bone and fluid, and the meat, so mummified that sailors and convicts called it ‘mahogany’, shrank to a much lower weight when the convicts took it to the communal coppers near the women’s camp to be cooked. The butter was inevitably rancid and the weight of flour and rice included plentiful weevils. Phillip also knew that rations would soon need to be reduced unless the hinterland and the harbour proved unexpectedly to be bountiful sources of food. Indeed, the first reduction of 12 pounds (5.4 kilos) per every 100 pounds (45.4 kilos) of beef, and 8 pounds (3.6 kilos) in every 100 pounds of pork would be ordered within seven weeks.

  Phillip’s opening threat about food-stealing was based on a sense that hunger could bring everything undone. A minor ineptitude on the part of Lord Sydney or Evan Nepean or their bureaucrats, or some disaster overtaking a store ship at sea, could lead to a scene of white cadavers amongst the eucalypts, and even of that most feared and unclean phenomenon, cannibalism.

  Punishment meted out that February had much to do with food. One Thomas Hill had forcibly taken a quantity of bread from a weaker convict. It must have been a mere morsel for him to have been spared the gallows, but the crime shows that for many in Sydney Cove hunger was already biting, not least because it was almost impossible for Phillip to prevent convicts trading or gambling their rations, and being left voracious for days on end. Hill was sentenced to be kept in irons for one week and fed on bread and water on the little sandstone knob of an island off the eastern end of Sydney Cove. A breeches-maker from Dorset who had as his founding criminal offence stolen a silver watch, Hill became the first man to occupy that rock which would acquire the name Pinchgut.

  A West Country fisherman-cum-smuggler named William Bryant was put in charge of fishing in the harbour, and a black market in fish seems to have begun early in Sydney Cove. Of necessity, Phillip blessed him for his skills and his ability to fish the tides. However, the fishing, together with hunting undertaken by Phillip’s official convict-huntsman, the Irishman John McEntire, began early to impact upon the food supply of the native people and generate resentment.

  In Sydney Cove that February, four young men with robust appetites were caught with stolen butter, pease and pork from the tented storehouse. Thomas Barrett, the young man first condemned to death at thirteen and who had managed to counterfeit coins aboard the Charlotte now faced the death penalty for a third time under the terms laid down by Arthur Phillip. Henry Lovell, a London ivory-turner in his mid twenties, and Joseph Hall, another graduate of the ship Mercury, also appeared before Judge-Advocate Collins and his bench of officers. The judicial panel condemned them all to hang.

  John Ryan, a London silk-weaver, the fourth man involved, also faced the bench. He was sentenced to 300 lashes, being adjudged more a receiver than thief.

  Sydney Cove was now to achieve its first executions ‘in terrorem, testimony to the Majesty of the Law, a Dreadful and Awful Example to Others’. At five in the afternoon of a late February day, with the summer sun falling down the sky behind them, the marine garrison marched to the place of punishment, probably a Port Jacks
on fig-tree like the one beneath which the Reverend Johnson had given his first sermons, between the men’s and women’s camp on the western side of Sydney Cove. All the convict population was compulsorily gathered to see this demonstration. Barrett asked to speak to one of the convicts, a Mercury crony, Robert Sideway, who on the Friendship had incurred a flogging and chaining. This request was granted and a confidential hugger-mugger passed between them. Then Barrett requested the chance to talk with one of the women but was refused, and mounted his ladder under the tree, as did Lovell and Hall, the nooses hanging level with their necks. But as all three men stood there, Major Ross was approached by a sentry who came running from the governor’s tent with a 24-hour stay of execution for Lovell and Hall. They came down their ladders and it was time for the final rites for Barrett. ‘The Reverend Mr Johnson prayed very fervently with the culprit before he was turned off, and performed every office appertaining to his function with great decorum.’ Barrett, of ‘a most vile nature’, expressed not the least signs of fear until he mounted the ladder, ‘and then he turned very pale and seemed very much shocked’.

  He was not the day’s only victim. A young convict named James Freeman, sixteen when he was sentenced to death at Hartford and reprieved in 1784, had been given the task of being the penal colony’s hangman. Earlier in February 1788 he too had been sentenced to death for stealing flour from another convict, but there was evidence that he stumbled on the flour cached in the woods. Governor Phillip pardoned him on condition he become the public executioner. Freeman hated his work and believed it would make him a pariah, and in the case of Barrett, he delayed fixing the rope and taking Barrett’s ladder away for so long that Major Ross threatened to have the marines shoot him. Phillip’s old clerk and now the provost-marshal, Harry Brewer, said Surgeon Worgan ‘was under the disagreeable necessity of mounting the ladder himself in order to fix the halter’.

  Having called on the convicts all to take warning from his fate, Barrett was ‘turned off ’ at last by the convict Freeman. The First Fleet children saw Barrett asphyxiate and piss his pants and were thereby educated in the broad power of authority. What the Cadigal, drawn by the sound of drums and observing from the bush, thought of this strange ritual would be recorded later. They were astonished and appalled. Strangulation was not one of their punishments. They measured retribution in the more calculable currency of blood.

  Throughout the century, surgeons and physicians, helped by robust beadles and porters, had stolen the bodies of the hanged from Tyburn Hill and the newer scaffold outside Newgate. But in New South Wales, science had not advanced enough to threaten the eternal rest of Barrett. Overnight a thunderous downpour fell on his grave as convicts darted from camp site to camp site with a petition to the great central presence, Phillip, who would find himself presented the next morning with a written appeal from the mass of the felons begging that the sentences of Lovell and Hall be commuted. The people who signed it knew well enough that the court system was a lottery, that the condemned had probably been worked at by hefty marines and temporary constable convicts before they confessed, guilty as they may well have been.

  Phillip let the preparatory rites go ahead. Prim Ralph Clark, leading a guard, collected the two men from Harry Brewer’s keeping and marched them to the execution site. Johnson prayed with them as they mounted the ladder and Freeman prepared the nooses. But then the judge-advocate, David Collins, arrived with a commutation of sentence. Lovell was to go to Norfolk Island for life, and Hall to be stuck indefinitely on Pinchgut.

  With the beginning of ration reductions, a level of hunger and a great yearning for the lost delicacies of Britain became the lot of all the settlement. Despite the best efforts of William Bryant and John McEntire, fresh meat from marsupials like the kangaroo and wallaby and fresh fish from Port Jackson were in inadequate supply, and much of what was caught went to the hospital. Men and women began to remember with passionate fondness the food pedlars of the English towns, the sellers of watercress, asparagus and chestnuts, cakes, mutton and pork pies and steaming sausages, oysters, fish and fruits in season. How richly they must have talked about the horse-drawn early-breakfast stalls which would set up on some corner or by the approaches of a bridge and sell scalding tea and coffee and hot, fresh bread soaked in butter, all for a halfpenny. The people of Sydney Cove had wronged the cities which had presented them with such delights, and now they were being punished in a shire where the salt of their meat was outweighed only by that of their tears.

  A SOLDIER’S TRIAL, AND MARRIAGES

  As much as Lieutenant Ralph Clark expected to be bringing down judgment on the heads of the convicts, he was in fact first summoned to a tent near the marines lines to sit on a court martial to hear relatively minor charges against marines. The most interesting case had to do with sexual conflict between a soldier and a convict. Private Bramwell had struck a convict woman, Elizabeth Needham, ‘an infamous hussy’, according to Lieutenant Clark. She had once tried to shoplift stockings from a West End business and confuse a fashionable hosier, and had already been married when sent to Newgate. Aboard Lady Penrhyn, she had become Private Bramwell’s lover for part of her time at sea, but when Bramwell asked her to accompany him into the woods behind the camp, she would not go. Since the male convicts had been landed, and she had been free of shipboard coercion, she had met with a convict named William Snailhorn, and she intended to marry him.

  ‘Good God,’ wrote Clark, ‘what a scene of whoredom is going on there in the women’s camp—no sooner has one man gone in with a woman than another goes in with her.’ Yet was it all as random and profoundly immoral as he thought? Ashore, there was more future for Elizabeth Needham in Snailhorn than in an authoritarian, woman-beating marine. The marriage between Snailhorn and Needham would endure and produce three native sons.

  Bramwell was sentenced to 200 lashes for assaulting Needham. Thus, a marine disappointed in lust was the first non-convict in Sydney Cove to feel the lash on his back. He received 100 strokes on the parade ground at the steel triangle to which he was strapped, and after that was sent to hospital to recover. It was all according to Sydney’s and Phillip’s plan that convicts and the free be equal before the law.

  Impending partnerships were in the air, and so were the ends of partnerships. Virtually as soon as the store ship Golden Grove anchored in Botany Bay, the Reverend Johnson had been rowed across to the Lady Penrhyn to christen a newborn child named Joshua Bentley. Perhaps, with hindsight, Joshua could be counted the first white Australian. His mother, Mary Moulton, tried at Shrewsbury in March 1785 for burglary with a value of 61 shillings, had been sentenced to transportation for seven years. By the time she left England on the Lady Penrhyn, she had already served four years, she was twenty-two, and had become the lover of the sailor Joshua Bentley.

  Little Joshua’s parents must have known, like Mary Brenham and her sailor, and Sarah Bellamy and hers, that separation was inevitable, since the Lady Penrhyn was to return to England via China as soon as it was expeditious for the ship to leave. Some shipboard partners were ready for the separation, but some were bound to each other by desperate love.

  On the colony’s second Sunday, however, everyone but the sailors was ashore—and indeed, some of them were too, illicitly. The Reverend Johnson held service before the mustered convicts and marines on the east side of the cove ‘under a great tree’.

  That Sunday is momentous in so far as Reverend Johnson, son of a wealthy Yorkshire farmer, was what came to be called ‘Low Church’. He brought Low Church sentiments to Australia, and they remained. He was a member of the Eclectic Society, a movement of evangelical priests and laymen who were influenced by John Wesley, but not to the extent that they abandoned the Established Church and became openly Methodist. Their social program, however, included a desire to reform prisons and to end slavery, and Johnson stood in reaction to a system in which vicars received ‘livings’, including land, and were often known for the quality of their ‘hospitable tab
les’ rather than their hours of prayer.

  Before coming to New South Wales, Johnson had gone down to one of the Woolwich hulks run by Duncan Campbell, and found it worse than his imaginings of hell. If there had been any reforming zeal about prisons in Johnson when he was first appointed, meeting the profane convicts ended it. When he first preached from the quarterdeck aboard the fleet in Portsmouth to convicts who had been brought up from below, he tried to interest them in the major theological debates of the day, questions of the nature of free will and grace which lay at the centre of his own consciousness but which made pickpockets laugh. An unsympathetic and agnostic Phillip requested him to begin with and stick to practical moral subjects.

  So, in the tale of the First Fleet, Johnson has always held the place of irrelevant and unworldly ninny. But he was respected as a spiritual adviser by the godly Lieutenant Dawes and others. Now, after service read according to the rite of the Anglican Church, children were christened, fruits of the penal experiment and the nine-month voyage. The daughter of Private Bacon and his wife, Jane, was christened alongside the infants of bondage: John Matthew, son of Catherine Prior, West Country highway robber; and Joseph Downey, child of the adolescent felon Sarah Bellamy. Both latter children were sickly from the voyage and suffering in the high summer heat, which might explain their mothers’ touching desire to see them baptised. Both would die that month, Sarah’s little Joe Downey first, on 29 February—as far as we know the first European child to be received into Sydney’s soil.