Australians

by Thomas Keneally

  As part of his British training, Bennelong was required to appear at the governor’s table in trousers and a red kersey jacket. On Sundays he wore a suit of buff yellow nankeen from China. Tench observed with patronage but with genuine affection too that he was not the least awkward in eating or in performing actions of bowing, drinking healths and returning thanks. He would raise his glass and drink a toast to ‘the King’, a term which Bennelong associated ever after with a glass of wine.

  There were perhaps two dozen or more clans which participated with Bennelong in the common language of the Sydney area. From the south head of Port Jackson to Sydney Cove, and southwards towards Botany Bay, the people were called Cadi and the tribe were Cadigal, and Colby was an important man amongst that group. (The ending gal meant country.) On the south side of the harbour from Sydney Cove westwards, the tribe were the Wangal, of whom Bennelong was a member. On the opposite, northern, shore of the Parramatta River from the Wangal was the tribe called the Wallumettagal. Then, on the broader reaches of northern Port Jackson were the Cameraigal, and at Manly the Gayimai, whom Colby and Bennelong had been visiting when captured. These neat divisions merely scratch the surface of the complexity of clans and families and geography. At particular times they all visited each others’ territory, and were connected by favours, gestures, swapped names, marriage, ceremonies and ritual knowledge of how to sustain their shared earth.

  By April 1790, the shackle was removed from Bennelong’s ankle. Arthur Phillip demonstrated his trust, as he could never do with a convict, by letting Bennelong wear a short sword and belt, Bennelong being ‘not a little pleased at this mark of confidence’. Indeed, Phillip seems to have been endlessly indulgent to the fellow. Bennelong’s allowance was received each week from the commissary stores by the governor’s steward, the Frenchman Bernard de Maliez, ‘but the ration of a week was insufficient to have kept him for a day’. The deficiency was made up with fish and Indian corn. For if he were hungry, Bennelong became furious or melancholy.

  He was also in love and always had a woman to pursue. On 3 May, he pretended illness, and awakening the servant, the Frenchman Maliez, who lay in the room with him, ‘very artfully’ begged to be taken downstairs. Bennelong ‘no sooner found himself in a back-yard, than he nimbly leaped over a slight paling, and bid us adieu’. Collins was a little affronted that the governor’s every indulgence had not prevented Bennelong’s decamping. But Bennelong had agendas beyond Collins’s imagining, including the necessity of performing ceremonials that were pending, of reporting his experiences of the Europeans, and of moving upon Barangaroo, whom Colby was courting.

  John Hunter, hearing of Bennelong’s escape, made the joke of the season by saying Bennelong had taken ‘French leave’ from Maliez. When boat crews, sent around to look for Bennelong, called his name in various coves and bays of Port Jackson, the native women merely laughed and mimicked them.

  The British were meanwhile finding there was no comfort for them in the hinterland Bennelong was so anxious to embrace again. Lieutenant Dawes travelled west but was defeated by the great bush-entangled precipices of the Blue Mountains. And a former slave, Black Caesar, who had previously proved himself a competent agricultural labourer, ‘a notorious convict and native of Madagascar’ delivered himself up to the officer at Rose Hill on the last day of the year. He had managed to stay free only since 22 December, when he escaped in a canoe from Garden Island. He had a musket with him and was able to drive Aborigines away from their campfires and eat what they had been cooking. He had also robbed from gardens in Sydney and Rose Hill. When he lost the musket he found it impossible to subsist and was attacked by the natives and received various wounds. Though he would remain an enthusiastic escapee, he was incarnate proof of the uninhabitable nature of the hinterland.

  FAMINE

  With a sigh of relief but some concern for his charges, in March 1790 Phillip eventually consigned Ross from Parramatta to the command of Norfolk Island, since Lieutenant King had been pleading a need to return to England, and Phillip thought of him as the most reliable man to send to Whitehall with a true account of the poverty of the penal colony.

  For the inhabitants of Sydney Cove, the ration at the time Ross was sent to Norfolk provided daily about 1800 calories (7.54 kilojoules) and 56 grams of protein, a minimum for survival. Tench, passing the provision store, saw a man who emerged with ‘a wild haggard countenance having received his daily pittance to carry home . . . I ordered him to be carried to the hospital where, when he arrived, he was found dead . . . On opening the body, the cause of death was pronounced to be inanition.’ Both soldiers and convicts found they were not able to fulfil tasks. The clothing store was near empty and some convicts lived in tatters and rags. In their camp the women were resourceful with the needles and yarn Phillip had distributed, but many a guard was mounted in which the majority of soldiers lacked shoes. Intense hunger and depression bred a thousand desperate little thefts.

  In this emergency, Phillip ‘from a motive that did him immortal honour’, released to the general stores the 3 hundredweight (152 kilos) of flour which was his personal store, ‘wishing that if a convict complained, he might see that want was not unfelt even at Government House’.

  Things were better at Norfolk, and Phillip decided to dispatch around 350 convicts on the Sirius and Supply to the island with Major Ross and Lieutenant Clark. Amongst those travelling to Norfolk were John Hudson, the chimneysweep. On the way out of Sydney Harbour, the bulky Sirius got itself in an awkward situation near the rocks of North Head, as it had earlier off southern Tasmania, and Hunter again just managed by clever seamanship to avoid disaster and a huge accompanying death toll.

  John Hunter and Sirius had never been to Norfolk Island before, and at a second attempt to land supplies at treacherous Sydney Bay on the south side of the island, despite Hunter’s best efforts, and a complicated series of manoeuvres with sails and helm, Sirius was blown stern-first howling and creaking onto the reef, where the surf began to batter her to pieces. Sailors began cutting away the masts and rigging and throwing them over the side in the hope that the loss of weight might refloat her: ‘In less than ten minutes the masts were all over the side, the ship an entire wreck,’ wrote a midshipman. Provisions were brought up from the hold and stacked on the gun deck. If necessary, some of them could be floated ashore. Sailors were tied to ropes and hauled ashore through the surf.

  Male convicts already landed volunteered to swim to the wreck as the sea subsided, and liberate the livestock. Having done so, they also raided the ship’s cellar. Ross would issue a proclamation against those who ‘in a most scandalous and infamous manner, robbed and plundered’ items from the wreck. He declared martial law, fearing the pressure placed on resources not only by the newcomers but also by Sirius’s crew, who would be stuck on Norfolk Island for ten months.

  Little Supply survived and left with Lieutenant King, the outgoing commandant, also carrying to Sydney his convict mistress, Ann Innett, and their two small sons, Norfolk and Sydney, whom King intended to rear as his own, as a gentleman should.

  In April 1790, a cheerful phenomenon occurred which Hunter, stuck on the island in a small hut, considered an act of divine intervention. Thousands of birds of a species of ground-nesting petrel arrived on the hills of the island, and continued to land each night for four months. ‘A little before sunset the air was thick with them as gnats are on a fine summer’s evening in England,’ noted Ralph Clark in wonder. They were mutton birds, and nested in particular on Mount Pitt, where they dug their nests like rabbit warrens. Settlers, free and bond, would climb the hill at night with lit pine-knots to search for the birds, who returned at evening to their burrows. Hunter, too, as Sirius began to break apart on the rocks, went on such excursions. The parties would arrive soon after dusk, light small fires to attract the attention of the birds, ‘and they drop down out of the air as fast as the people can take them up and kill them’. Unfortunately for the species, the mutton bird did not
easily rise from flat ground. Its eggs in their burrows were also easily plundered.

  Throughout mid 1790, 170 000 birds were slaughtered, and their feathers must have blown hither and thither on the island and coated the surrounding sea. ‘They had a strong, fishy taste,’ said Hunter. ‘But our keen appetites relished them very well; the eggs were excellent.’ As on the mainland, people also boiled and ate the head of the cabbage-tree palm. The phenomenon of the birds coincided, however, with a plague of caterpillars and grubs that damaged the crops.

  Ross tried a new way to encourage convicts to overcome food shortages, setting up on Norfolk Island his own kind of ‘agrarian commonwealth’. He gave allocations of land to groups of convicts, perhaps six at a time, who were jointly responsible for growing what they needed. Thus the convicts would become their own motivators and regulators, and gang up on those who shirked their duties. Ross offered monetary and other prizes to those who put up for sale the most pork, fowls and corn. Felons were thus exposed to the reforming impact of land of their own.

  Captain Hunter, who observed the scheme at work, thought that in reality convicts were driven by it to steal from each other’s gardens. Under the Ross system, too, the birth of every piglet was to be reported to the deputy commissary and the death of every sow was to be followed by an enquiry. If the cause of the death was found to be an accident or a disease, the government would make up the loss, but if not, the convicts given the care of the pig as a group ‘were to be considered responsible and were to be punished as criminals’. Deluded or not, Ross offered his charges the allurements of a far more intense co-operativism than Phillip had in Sydney.

  On the mainland, Phillip did not know that the store ship the British government had sent, the Guardian, had some months past met icebergs at 42 degrees 15 minutes south, a longitude generally too far north for them. Two boats had been lowered from the Guardian to harvest lumps of ice to serve as water for the ship’s cargo of livestock. By the time the boats got back to the ship with their iceblocks, visibility had diminished. Guardian crept along, its captain looking for a safe passage through, but a semi-submerged ice spur raked open the ship’s keel. She tore free, but her rudder was left stuck in the ice. Water flooded into her hull.

  Captain Riou fothered his ship; wrapped up the hull in a bandage of two layers of sail. After hours at the pump, some men found the liquor store and drank themselves into a stupor as a means of facing death. The day after the accident, Riou gave those who chose, including the specialist artisan convicts Phillip had asked the government to send, permission to give up the ship and take to the sea in the boats. Most of the seamen left, but the convict artificers stayed aboard the Guardian. It would turn out that theirs was the right choice. Only fifteen of those who took to the boats would survive.

  Had the Guardian been able to continue to Sydney, it would have arrived in March 1790 and saved Phillip from the further reductions to the rations made in April 1790. By that time, weekly, 2½ pounds (1.2 kilos) of flour, 2 pounds (900 grams) of pork and 2 of rice were the limit for each British soul in New South Wales. Because of the energy needed to fish and hunt, an extra measure of rations was set aside for gamekeepers and fishermen. At the cooking fires in the men’s and women’s camps, prisoners looked covetously at each other’s share, and in the marines’ huts wives asked their husbands how they were expected to keep children healthy on a few flapjacks a week, insect-infected rice and pork that shrank to half its weight as the brine cooked out. In late April it became apparent that the pork in the storehouse would last only until 26 August at the current low rate of consumption, and the beef similarly.

  JULIANA: THE FACE OF SHAME

  In the same December Guardian hit its iceberg, the leisurely women’s convict ship Lady Juliana was lying in Rio, and Mrs Barnsley was accompanied ashore by officers to do her shopping. Neither Lieutenant Edgar nor Captain Aitken seemed to have cramped her entrepreneurialism. Nor did they prevent those convict girls who accommodated Spanish gentlemen aboard. The former London madam, Elizabeth Sully, who had run a lodging house at 45 Cable Street, East London, and three of her girls had been sentenced for robbing clients, and now were involved with other former prostitutes in building up funds for their time in New South Wales. After leaving St Jago in the Cape Verde Islands, the Lady Juliana was accompanied for some distance by two Yankee slavers making for the Gambia, sailors being rowed over to the Juliana for evening recreation.

  Naturally, not all convict women were involved in the prostitution—for one thing, Sarah Whitelam, rural beloved of the steward, John Nicol, was by then heavily pregnant. It may have been that Nicol, Surgeon Alley, Captain Aitken and Lieutenant Edgar were in some way facilitators and profiteers of the flesh trade on Juliana, and it is hard to see how they could have been opposed to it. But events would soon show that there were more disreputable forms of exploitation than this.

  The Juliana suffered its own emergency in port. ‘While we lay at the Cape,’ said Nicol, ‘we had a narrow escape from destruction by fire. The carpenter allowed the pitch-pot to boil over upon the deck, and the flames rose in an amazing manner. The shrieks of the women were dreadful, and the confusion they made running about drove everyone stupid.’ With the Guardian careened and ultimately abandoned on the shore, the women were entitled to feel the vulnerability of their vessel.

  Five surviving agricultural work superintendents and some supplies from Guardian were put on the Lady Juliana. One of the superintendents was a former Hessian officer who had served George III in North America, Philip Schaeffer, who came aboard with his ten-year-old daughter and some vine cuttings which had survived the collision with the iceberg.

  All twenty-five of the convict artificers of Guardian would need eventually to be delivered to Sydney Cove too. Some of them would be more than willing to join the sexually amiable Lady Juliana, but they would need to wait for later British vessels. They were considered by their captain worthy of pardoning, but first their transportation had to be completed.

  Back in the Thames, in the squally autumn and cold early winter of 1789, following the departure of the Lady Juliana and the Guardian, a great crime was in the making. Prisoners from Newgate were being gradually accommodated aboard the newly contracted vessels at Deptford—Surprize, Scarborough and Neptune. Neptune was the largest of the three, 809 tons (825 tonnes) with a crew of 83. It was first commanded by Thomas Gilbert who had captained the Charlotte in the First Fleet and whose book, Journal of a Voyage from Port Jackson, New South Wales to Canton in 1788, was about to be published in London to considerable interest. The Scarborough, which had already made the journey once, was half the size of the Neptune. The 400-ton (408-tonne) Surprize was the smallest of the three and a very poor sailer, and commanded by Donald Trail, a former master to Bligh. Trail had recently commanded one of the Camden, Calvert and King slave ships.

  On 15 October 1789 the ships were ordered to move out of the docks to embark soldiers of the New South Wales Corps and convicts in the river. The soldiers were accommodated in the gun rooms, forecastles and steerage areas of the ships, around the convict decks. The rumour was that some of these fellows were less than prime soldiery, ruffians recruited from the Savoy military prison. Many of this new regiment, particularly some of the young officers, tolerated the inconvenience of being sent so far abroad because they hoped for power, influence and riches from New South Wales. Some, like a scapegrace lieutenant, Anthony Fenn Kemp, who had wasted a fortune of £2 million, were escaping creditors.

  Almost all the convicts taken aboard in the river had been confined for some years. Some came directly from Newgate, but the Neptune prisoners came as well from the Justitia and Censor hulks in the Thames. They were a sullen and angry cargo, but well-cowed and already weakened or weakening.

  There had been a rough criterion this time for selecting those who went aboard—the idea was to remove the convicts who had been in the hulks the longest time. But that meant they were prisoners who in many cases had served
years of their sentences. In committing them to the eighteenth-century equivalent of deep space, the desire to clear out the gaols and hulks seemed to be the primary motive, but it must have occurred to more than a few clerks and officials that it would also ensure that those prisoners serving seven- or fourteen-year sentences were unlikely to return from New South Wales. Thus they must have added names to the lists with the eugenic purpose of locating bad blood permanently in New South Wales without asking too closely what the implications might be for society there. New South Wales was to be the great oubliette, in which convicts could be deposited and forgotten by British society at large.

  On Neptune, even between Plymouth and Portsmouth, where the men were racked by catarrh and congestive disorders, a number of the convicts had already died, but there was general and unquestioned agreement that it was due to the physical condition in which they had arrived from the hulks and prisons. There were other signs of indifference to convict welfare, however, early on. Either Trail or Shapcote, the naval agent, ordered many of the convicts’ chests thrown overboard with their possessions in them. Men and women who had thought to dress better and more warmly while at sea were reduced to the basic ration of convict dress—striped jacket and petticoat, navy shoes, inadequate blankets.

  By early December 1789, Undersecretary Evan Nepean had become anxious about reports of the conditions on board the Second Fleet, and told the naval agent that he was to ‘examine minutely into the manner of confining the convicts, as it has been represented that they are ironed in such a manner as must ultimately tend to their destruction’. Secretary of State Grenville sent Governor Phillip an ominous dispatch urging him to disembark the prisoners as early as possible when they arrived, ‘as from the length of the passage from hence and the nature of their food, there is every reason to expect that many of them will be reduced to so debilitated a state that immediate relief will be found expedient’. It is a letter which reflects some culpability, and indifference to Phillip’s problems by the Home Secretary.