Australians

by Thomas Keneally

  Despite abiding hunger, by the end of the Antipodean winter of 1789 the camp of Sydney Cove had taken on the look of a permanent town. Two barracks were finished, two storehouses, and the large brick house the governor occupied. Many male and female convicts had brick huts. But the brick-makers were not always the servants of civilization. Because of ongoing turbulent behaviour at night, and a conviction in the camp that the brickfield convicts, who were camped a little way west of town, came down to the men’s and women’s area to steal property, a Jewish Cockney convict named John Harris, a Mercury returnee, came to Captain Collins and asked him whether a night guard might be established, a patrol of reputable convicts.

  This was an early example of the New South Wales conundrum, the overthrow of Phillip’s early intention that the positions of the free and the condemned should not become blurred. The convicts began to take on an official importance in the great open air experiment of Sydney that they could not have achieved in Newgate or on the hulks. In a criminal kingdom, a clever and reputable man like Harris ended in a position akin to that of police chief. So, without a free police force to keep order, a night watch of eight convicts was initiated at Harris’s suggestion. Collins wrote about this paradox. ‘It was to have been wished, that a watch established for the preservation of public and private property had been formed of free people, and that necessity had not compelled us . . . to appoint them from a body of men in whose eyes, it could not be denied, the property of individuals had never before been sacred. But there was not any choice.’

  For the purpose of night watch patrols, the settlement was divided into four districts, and three men patrolled each. The night watch was soon guarding the chief settlement not only from the nocturnal evil of convicts, but from marines also. When one of the night watch stopped a marine in the convicts’ compound, Ross viewed it as an insult, and Phillip was forced, wearily, to ensure it did not happen again.

  John Harris’s night guard would ensure, Collins recorded, that by comparison with Sydney Cove, ‘many streets in London were not so well guarded’.

  A SECOND FLEET

  In 1789 aging Viscount Sydney had resigned from the Home Office. His replacement, and Nepean’s new superior, was the 29-year-old William Grenville. Grenville, soon to be Lord Grenville, was an enemy of slavery and a campaigner for the emancipation of Catholics from the legal disadvantages which had kept them out of civic life. A future prime minister, he was subject to the same political pressures as Sydney had been, and wrote to the Lords Commissioners of the Treasury in early July 1789, telling them, ‘His Majesty has therefore been pleased to signify to me his Royal Commands that 1000 of the said convicts should forthwith be sent to New South Wales.’ The dispatch of this thousand was exclusive of the women already on Lady Juliana.

  The Navy Board immediately called for tenders from merchants to supply ships and stores. William Richards, who had so competently and thoughtfully outfitted the First Fleet and the Lady Juliana, bid again, but the successful contractor was this time the largest slave transportation company in Britain— Camden, Calvert and King. It is on the face of it a curious decision for an abolitionist to make. Perhaps Grenville wished to do away with laxities in the Home Office. If as a means of turning a new and more efficient page he gave his ministerial consent to the Navy Board’s choice of Camden, Calvert and King, he would come to regret it.

  In August the charter-parties for a second fleet of ships were signed by the navy commissioners and the London representative of Camden, Calvert and King. The contractors were to be paid a sum of £17 7 shillings and sixpence for each convict embarked, somewhat less than Richards had quoted. Five pounds would be paid to the contractors once the cabins and bulkheads had been fitted, and £10 when the stores had been loaded and the ships were ready to receive convicts. The remainder was to be paid when a certificate was received in London from the commissary in New South Wales confirming that the stores had been delivered. There was no money held back pending the delivery in good condition in Sydney Cove of the convicts themselves.

  The Australian legend that the British dumped convicts in Australia was enhanced and very nearly justified by the horrors which would characterise this core section of the second flotilla—just as the Lady Juliana helped generate the concept that women’s ships were floating brothels.

  The War Ministry had been thinking about New South Wales too and decided that the marines who had travelled on the First Fleet would be gradually replaced. During the summer of 1789, from England, Scotland and Ireland, three hundred men were recruited for a new corps, and the first hundred privates and NCOs, along with two captains, three lieutenants, an ensign and a surgeon’s mate would travel on the transports of the Second Fleet. The new unit, the 102nd Regiment of Foot, would be more commonly called the New South Wales Corps, but they were also referred to, whether ironically or otherwise, as the Botany Bay Rangers.

  Three transports, Neptune, Scarborough and Surprize, were readied at Deptford for the journey. In the meantime a store ship had been sent from Spithead, bound for Sydney Cove, six weeks after the female convicts in the Lady Juliana. The ship in question was a naval frigate of 879 tons (897 tonnes), the HMS Guardian, and it left Britain richly burdened with the supplies for which Phillip had asked, and with twenty-five ‘artificers’, convicts with trades, for whom Phillip had also pleaded. In the crew was fourteen-year-old Thomas Pitt, a cousin of the prime minister. With all it carried, and with its small corps of talented convicts, the Guardian represented a secure future for the people of New South Wales. Sadly, it would collide with an iceberg south-east of Africa.

  ANTIPODEAN ADAM

  Salvation could not indefinitely come from outside New South Wales. One of the iconic figures of redemption from within would be the young Cornish convict, James Ruse. As the clerks who had drawn up the lists for the First Fleet had not hesitated before including people who had already served the greater part of their sentence, Ruse, who had been sentenced to seven years transportation to Africa in 1782 for burglariously entering a house in Launceston, had spent five years on the depressing and brutal hulk Dunkirk, moored off Plymouth, before being loaded on the Scarborough. Without verification that Ruse’s sentence had expired, Phillip nonetheless knew enough about him from his supervisory work at the government farm in Sydney Cove to decide to embark on an experiment with him, and turn him into New South Wales’s first yeoman. Ruse had told Tench, who admired him: ‘I was bred a husbandman, near Launcester [Launceston] in Cornwall,’ and in 1789, when he claimed his sentence had expired (it had), Phillip gave him a conditional grant of thirty acres and convict help to clear it in the promising area known as the Crescent on the riverbank near Parramatta/Rose Hill. Phillip also authorised the issue to Ruse of necessary tools and seed for planting. Full title to the land was withheld until Ruse proved himself the first viable farmer.

  Phillip, surrounded by men who regularly told him New South Wales could not serve as a place for settled agriculture, wanted to test whether it was possible for a skilled farmer to live off the land. Above all, he needed to rebut the nihilist voices, such as that of Major Ross, who hated New South Wales with an almost theological passion. ‘I do not scruple to pronounce that in the whole world there is not a worse country than what we have seen of this. All that is contiguous to us is so very barren and forbidding that the main truth be said, here nature is reversed.’ The perverse behaviour of the convicts confirmed Ross in a sense that he was stuck in an irremediably unregenerate land, a country of contrary, obdurate gods.

  Indeed, it seemed to Ross that New South Wales bore the same motto as Lucifer, the fallen angel—Non Serviam, I shall not serve. The terms ‘will not serve’ and ‘will not answer’ pepper the reflections of many diarists and correspondents, but Ross’s above all. Ross, for example, criticised Phillip’s choice of Sydney Cove for the settlement, declaring it would ‘never answer’.

  In the face of Ross’s negativity, Ruse would symbolise the resourceful agricultura
list and become a living validation of the idea that the Australian earth was, after all, compliantly fruitful. In truth, not even all Ruse’s industry and energy could fully prevail over the recalcitrant, leached-down and grudging earth along the Parramatta River, and he would later move to the more remote floodplain areas along the Hawkesbury north-west of Sydney. At the time he got his land grant, there were others Phillip was willing to free and put to the task of sustaining New South Wales. But that was not to happen until he saw what befell this young Cornishman, and how he set about the task.

  A NEW ARABANOO

  The other experiment which had been in abeyance was the Aboriginal diplomatic experiment which had ended with Arabanoo’s death. Tench says that in making a further capture of natives, Phillip needed, amongst other things, to know ‘whether or not the country possessed any resources, by which life might be prolonged’.

  Reliable Lieutenant Bradley of the Sirius was sent out with two boats to capture natives, a task he found distasteful. Northwards, at Manly Cove, he found a number of natives on the beach, and in the prow of one of the cutters, a seaman held up fish, tempting two robust men, a mature fellow and a young man, into the shallows. ‘They eagerly took the fish,’ wrote Lieutenant Bradley. ‘They were dancing together when the signal was given by me, and the two poor devils were seized and handed into the boat in an instant.’ The two captured happened not to be local natives but two formidable visitors from the south side of Port Jackson. Both of them fought ferociously to get away from the melee of soldiers, sailors and convicts, but they were up against numbers, and soon shackles were on them. The other natives rushed from the bush and gathered on both headlands of the cove, shaking their spears and clubs.

  Bradley wrote, ‘The noise of the men, crying and screaming of the women and children, together with the situation of the two miserable wretches in our possession was really a most distressing scene.’ It was a bad day’s business, Bradley thought, ‘by far the most unpleasant service I was ever ordered to execute’.

  At the governor’s wharf at Sydney Cove, a crowd gathered to see the natives brought ashore, just as they had gathered to see Arabanoo. The boy Nanbaree, who had survived the smallpox and who now lived at the hospital where White had given him the name of Andrew Snape Hamond Douglas White, to honour White’s former naval captain and patron, shouted ‘Colby’ to the older of the two men and ‘Bennelong’ to the younger. He had often told Surgeon White about fabled Colby, who was his uncle. Both men still bristled with resistance.

  Woolawarre Bennelong (this being just one of many alternative spellings of the name) was judged by Tench to be about twenty-six years old, ‘with a bold intrepid countenance, which bespoke defiance and revenge’. He was a man of lively, passionate, sociable, humorous character, and well advanced in ritual knowledge, ritual being the fuel and physics of his world, what kept it in place, what kept it so lovable and abundant. He did not quite have the gravitas and the power of eye to be a full-fledged carradhy, a doctor of high degree, a curer and ritual punishment man. He did not seek solitude or penance. But he was well-liked around the harbour, and southwards too, around the shallow shores of Botany Bay, where people lived who were related to him by marriage, language and the great rituals of corroboree dance and other secret, communal ceremonies. Sometimes, it would be discovered, he fornicated with their women and bravely stood up under a rain of ritual punishment spears, took his scars and was proud of them. He had an ambiguous relationship with his least favourite relatives, the Cameraigal of the north shore of Port Jackson, whose women he nonetheless had a passion for and whose country he was at various times permitted to hunt in, fish in, socialise in, and join in corroboree—those dances which were more than dances, which preserved and sustained and continued the earth made by hero ancestors. Bennelong had a range of names in a society where people carried many names, and some of his others were Boinda, Bundebunda, Wogetrowey.

  Colby was perhaps thirty, more intractable, somewhat shorter but athletic looking, and ‘better fitted for purposes of activity’, observed Tench. They had both survived the smallpox—‘indeed Colby’s face was very thickly imprinted with the marks of it’. Hunter would claim Colby was ‘a chief of the Cadigal’, and his fuller name was Gringerry Kibba Colby. Kibba, or gibba, was Eora for ‘rock’, and would enter the settlers’ English before long—the children of the convicts and the free being commonly accused of ‘chucking gibbers’ at each other. Colby, the rock, behaved like one.

  Both natives were taken up to the governor’s residence. It was the first time Bennelong and Arthur Phillip saw each other eye to eye, a meeting as fateful and defining as that between Cortez and Montezuma, or Pizarro and Atuahalpa. Bennelong and Phillip in particular were mutually enchanted and attracted, and both Bennelong and Colby could see through the deference other white people offered him that Phillip was the supreme elder—Be-anna, Father, as Arabanoo had called him.

  A convict was assigned to each of the men until they should become reconciled to their capture. The means used to detain them were in their way severe—they were tied at night to their keepers by both ankle chain and rope, and slept with them in a locked hut. At this treatment, Colby yielded no gesture of reconciliation. Why should he, when he suspected a great infestation that killed his clan had come from these people? He planned escape. Genial Bennelong, ‘though haughty’, not only got on well with the Europeans but enjoyed the experience of doing so, and was his people’s first enthusiastic anthropologist. Beneath his conviviality was a desire to work out what these people meant and, perhaps, how to appease them and even make them go away.

  After attempting escape many times, Colby managed it on the night of 12 December 1789, while eating supper with Bennelong and their two minders.

  This was bad news for his minder, who received 100 lashes for ‘excessive carelessness and want of attention’. But Phillip still considered Bennelong a family member, if a tethered one. Phillip took him with Nanbaree to the look-out post and signal station on the south head of the harbour. Bennelong still wore his leg shackle and despite it was able to put on a display of strength and accuracy by throwing a spear nearly 90 metres against a strong wind ‘with great force and exactness’. On the way back the boat stopped near Rose Bay, and Bennelong called to a native woman ashore he was very fond of—one of the Cameraigal, named Barangaroo. Barangaroo and other women waded out and talked, were offered jackets, and told Bennelong that Colby was fishing on the other side of the hill, but had been unable to remove the shackle from his leg.

  A captive by night, Bennelong had the freedom of the governor’s house by day. At Phillip’s table, wrote Watkin Tench, Bennelong was quick to make clear how many of his people had died of the smallpox epidemic the previous year— he claimed that one in two had, 50 per cent. Unlike Arabanoo, Tench observed, Bennelong became immediately fond of ‘our viands’ and would drink spirits without reluctance, which Colby and Arabanoo had not done. A deadly appetite was imbued in Bennelong. But for the moment, wine and spirits did not seem to have a more perceptible impact on him than on any of the gentlemen who sat around him. He liked turtle, too, which he had never eaten before, but which the Supply had brought from Lord Howe Island, an uninhabited isle between Sydney and Norfolk Island. ‘He acquired knowledge, both of our manners and language, faster than his predecessor had done.’ He would sing and dance and caper, and talked about all the customs of his country in a mixture of rudimentary English and Eora on his side, and rudimentary Eora and English on Tench’s and Phillip’s. ‘Love and war seemed his favourite pursuits,’ wrote Tench, ‘in both of which he had suffered severely. His head was disfigured by several scars; a spear had passed through his arm and another through his leg; half of one of his thumbs was carried away, and the mark of a wound appeared on the back of his hand.’ But they served as a map of his adventures, and as well as telling the stories of his exploits, an exercise he loved greatly, he was also explaining a concept of blood justice, and preparing the European mi
nd for the idea that they too might need graciously to receive similar wounds for crimes. The plunders and even the occupation of earth by the Europeans violated the land. Bennelong hoped they could be taught that fact. It might have been one of the reasons he stayed so long in Sydney Cove, and risked his soul among the cloud-people.

  ‘But the wound on the back of your hand, Baneelon!’ Tench asked him. ‘How did you get that?’ Bennelong laughed and told Tench it was received in carrying off a lady of the Cameraigal on the north shore of Sydney Harbour, across from Sydney Cove. ‘I was dragging her away; she cried aloud, and stuck her teeth in me.’

  ‘And what did you do then?’

  ‘I knocked her down and beat her till she was insensible, and covered with blood.’

  The story—Tench intending it to be more amusing than it seems to us—is credible despite the presence of that non-Eora word, ‘insensible’. Bennelong frequently asked the governor to accompany him with the marines in order to punish and even obliterate the Cameraigal, with whom he had both passionate connection and passionate grievance. As for the governor, Bennelong exchanged his own honorific, Woolawarre, with him, calling him by that name, and thus being entitled to call himself Governor. The exchange of names was meant to do both parties great honour and convey closeness of soul. Woolawarre could have been a very significant name in other ways too, for it seems to derive from the Eora words for ‘Milky Way’ and ‘depart’—Phillip being one who had departed the stars, and really should return there, to those great swirls of light in the night sky.

  Phillip told former Home Secretary Lord Sydney in a letter that he hoped Bennelong ‘will soon be able to inform us of their customs and manners’. The Europeans certainly got to know of Bennelong’s highest order of recreation: boon-alliey—kissing women. He spoke much of the Cameraigal women, Cameraigalleons, as he called them. They were not so much enemy women, but certainly the women of rivals, and were alluring to Bennelong, especially the woman named Barangaroo, who had him under a spell. This glamour of the foreign and the owned might have led to behaviour appalling in European eyes, but marrying out of their family group was one of the mechanisms by which ancient societies avoided incest.