Australians

by Thomas Keneally

  Between nine and midnight on the evening of the day the Waaksamheyd departed Sydney, the Bryant party, some of whom were rostered on for fishing that night, stole the government boat and crept down-harbour past the light at the look-out station where Sergeant Scott and his men were obliviously posted. They met with gratitude and exhilaration the pulse of the Pacific racing in through the Heads. The laughter, the curses, the cries of triumph which must have characterised that sturdy cutter as the Bryants and their friends went to meet the moonless night would in coming weeks be imagined and sucked on by those without the skill or endurance to match these escapees. This boatload should have been self-doomed, but it worked with an exemplary degree of cooperation and made its way to Koepang in Timor, part of the Dutch East Indies, achieving the (then) second longest open-boat journey in the world’s history.

  The Bryants were escaping a colony in which, despite what the Supply and the Dutch snow had brought in from Batavia, the ration was, shortly after their departure, reduced again. Though officially at 3 pounds of rice, flour and pork each, it was reduced by a pound in each case to 2 pounds of be-weeviled rice, 2 pounds of reasonable flour and 2 pounds of pork—ill-flavoured, rusty and smoked—the same amount of salt, or else lean beef with bone was measured in as part of the ration. Hunger would again have the effect of driving people to raid gardens, and to make small thefts. In another sense the absent Bryant had a lasting effect on the scrawny, misbegotten society of New South Wales. It was reported to Phillip that Bryant had frequently been heard expressing what was a common sentiment on the subject amongst convicts—that he did not consider his marriage in this country as binding. It was a marriage for the sake of the alternative world in which fortune had placed him, but he asserted to other convicts that it would not bind him should he return to reality, the established and accustomed earth. Phillip, hearing of Bryant’s attitudes after his escape, saw how dangerous this concept was to his community, to all the business of inheritance and ordered life of which monogamy was the keystone. Phillip issued an order that no time-served convict could leave behind in the colony any wife and children who could not support themselves.

  ‘This order was designed as a check on the erroneous opinion which was formed of the efficacy of Mr Johnson’s nuptial benediction.’ Here was another instance of Arthur Phillip declaring that New South Wales was not virtual reality, it was their world, and the contracts made here bound people to the same pieties as contracts made anywhere. Thus, he intended to centre his people’s lives in the colony. In so doing, he was making the first families of a non-Aboriginal Australia.

  The following year, the by then famous or notorious William Bligh, restored to normal naval command after the mutiny on the Bounty, and promoted to post-captain, called again at Koepang and heard the tale of the Bryant party’s voyage from the Dutch officials who were still talking about it.

  The escape party had explained themselves to the Dutch Governor of Timor, Timotheus Wanjon, as survivors from the wreck of a whaler named Neptune in the Torres Strait, and claimed ‘that the captain and the rest of the crew probably will follow in another boat’. This was a credible enough scenario. ‘The governor,’ one of the escapees, Martin, wrote, ‘behaved extremely well to us, filled our bellies and clothed double with every[thing] that was wore on the island.’

  Koepang proved a delightful place, favoured for recuperation by those who had suffered fevers in Batavia, and a welcome landfall for Mary and the others. Adding a further dimension to the stylishness of their escape, Bryant and his party drew bills on the British government and so were supplied with everything they needed by the administration.

  A THIRD FLEET

  Already a large third flotilla, the Third Fleet, had been authorised by Whitehall. The contract was made in November 1790, and nine ships would sail on 27 March 1791. For the overall contract, Camden, Calvert and King were to be paid up to £44 658 13 shillings and ninepence, but they had plans beyond that—six of the Third Fleet transports were also chartered to trade in Bombay cotton on the company’s account after they had discharged their duty of convict transportation. The other ships of the group would go whaling off New South Wales and in the Southern Ocean. Camden, Calvert and King’s ships carried about £30 000 in coin aboard, to lay the foundations of monetary exchange in New South Wales.

  The government and its bureaucracies such as the Navy Board, having made such an outrageously inappropriate contract, seemed content or even anxious that the disaster of the Second Fleet should go unreported in London. But via the Second Fleet ships returning, a letter from a literate unnamed female convict from the Lady Juliana would make its eloquent way into the London Chronicle of 4 August 1791. The woman convict reflected on having seen the victims of Camden, Calvert and King and their officers brought ashore. ‘Oh, if you had but seen the shocking sight of the poor creatures that came out of the three ships, it would make your heart bleed. They were almost dead, very few could stand, and they were obliged to fling them as you would goods, and hoist them out of the ships, they were so feeble . . . The governor was very angry and scolded the captains a good deal, and I heard, intended to write to London about it, for I heard him say it was murdering them.’ The writer expressed gratitude to the good agent of the Lady Juliana—Lieutenant Edgar. For on Juliana only three women and one child had died on the voyage.

  Sailors who returned to England on the Neptune and the other transports eventually swore statements condemning the behaviour of Captain Trail, though it was ultimately for the murder of a seaman that Trail was tried at the Old Bailey Admiralty sessions in 1792, long after the Third Fleet had already been sent.

  Neither the Navy Board nor the Home Office welcomed the attention the trial attracted. Why scare off tenderers for the transport of convicts? In the end the charges failed, the judge mysteriously discounting the evidence and directing the jury to bring in a not-guilty verdict.

  Subsequently, the Attorney-General produced a report for the King (in July 1792) which attributed the ‘unusual mortality’ in the Second Fleet to the ‘tonnage of the ship being less than was capable of containing for so long so large a number of persons without hazard of their lives’. If this was so, if the tonnage of the Neptune had been fraudulently exaggerated as a way of overcharging government, then no one paid for it, the Navy Board simply wanting the whole embarrassment to vanish. Trail, a mass murderer, would return with impunity to the Royal Navy and serve as a master to Lord Nelson. As for Camden, Calvert and King, after putting together the third convict flotilla, the company would thereafter never be used again.

  The chief scandal of this Third Fleet would prove to be the short rations for the Irish convicts on the Queen. A receipt for these Irish, dated 11 April 1791, was signed by the naval agent and given to the mayor and sheriff of the City of Cork, Sir Henry Browne Hayes, a United Irishman nationalist who would himself one day be sent to New South Wales for abducting an heiress. The Queen’s indent list, however, would be left behind and, echoing earlier oversights, would not reach Sydney until eight years after the convicts had arrived. A future governor of New South Wales, John Hunter of the Sirius, complained of the manner of transportation from Ireland as ‘so extremely careless and irregular’. For many Irish convicts of Queen, their time would expire and they would not be in a position to prove it.

  A little before Queen left Cork, the nine ships of the Third Fleet proper sailed from England in two divisions: a great number of ships were on the interminable seas making for Sydney Cove. The Mary Ann was well ahead with her 150 English female convicts, nine of whom would die at sea. She did not call in anywhere but the Cape Verde Islands for fresh supplies, and that ensured a brisk passage. The converted frigate, HMS Gorgon, the store ship which also carried 29 male convicts selected for their trades, would lose only one male.

  Separated at sea, Atlantic, Salamander and the aged William and Anne all met up at Rio, and then made the journey to Port Jackson without stopping at the Cape. At least a dozen of th
e men Surgeon James Thompson had been required to take on the Atlantic were so weak at boarding that they were unable to climb the ship’s side and needed to be lifted up in a chair. Thompson had taken many pragmatic steps on diet and exercise time on deck to prevent scurvy developing. So that while only nine men had to go from the Atlantic to the hospital in Sydney Cove, the smaller William and Anne would land a great number of convicts who were very ill on arrival. Its master, Captain Bunker, was ultimately fined for assaulting and beating some of the Irish members of the New South Wales Corps during the passage, so the conditions for the more lowly prisoners must have been harsh indeed. The men who took the job of agent aboard these ships were sometimes older men, cat’s paws for the captains. The agent on Queen, Lieutenant Blow, would later be reprimanded by the Navy Board for his lack of interest in the convicts’ welfare. The second mate, who would later claim he was working on behalf of the captain, Richard Owen, ordered that the leaden weights used to calculate rations be scraped by one of the Irish convicts, who was rewarded with adequate food. The 4-pound (1.8 kilo) weight had 6 ounces (170 grams) scratched out of its base, the 2-pound (900 gram) weight almost 3 ounces (85 grams). The convicts were also cheated by the use of a 4-pound weight in place of a 5-pound weight, and a 3-pound for a 4-pound.

  Abel Tasman, the navigator who went further than anyone wanted, with his second wife Joanna, who would outlive him and remarry, and their daughter in 1637. (‘Portrait of Abel Tasman, his wife and daughter’, 1637, by Jacob Gerritsz Cuyp, oil on canvas. National Library of Australia, nla.pic-an2282370)

  Tasman’s crew meet and collect the fauna, the black swan, off Rottnest (Rattenest) Island. The ‘rats’ were in fact marsupials—quokkas. (Detail from ‘Swartte Swaane drift op het Eyland Rotternest’, 1726 by Johannes van Keulen, engraving. National Library of Australia, nla.pic-an5598203)

  New Guinea has a neighbour, one with coastal mountains beyond which Greco-Roman bowmen hunt dragons and lions, and serpents lie. (‘Novae Guineae forma & situs’, 1593 by Cornelius de Jode. National Library of Australia, map-rm 00389-s5001)

  Left: William Dampier, the urbane pirate, poor commander, excellent harvester of new words and literary star, seen here endowed with appropriate sensibility and global reach by an artist of a later generation. (‘William Dampier’, ca 1850 by William Charles Thomas Dobson, oil on canvas. National Library of Australia, nla.pic-an2272869) Right: Cook, unreadable as the Sphinx. A junior officer from Yorkshire with no powerful friends except the sextant and chronometer with which he transformed the earth. (‘Portrait of Captain James Cook’ by John Webber. Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa, 1960-0013-1)

  The young Banks, rich, sociable and avid, in graphic contrast with the apparently dour Cook. Almost too tall for any below-decks space on the Endeavour, he was able to expand the limits of the natural sciences so thoroughly that Linnaeus suggested the new land be named Banksia to honour the botanic bonanza Banks and his associates found on Australia’s east coast. (‘Sir Joseph Banks’, 1773 by Benjamin West. Lincolnshire County Council, Usher Gallery, Lincoln UK/The Bridegeman Art Library/photolibrary.com)

  In a passageway off a courtyard, East End girls prepare to take a lustful client in suit and breeches upstairs and roll him for his possessions. For such co-operative muggings, a number of young women were transported to Australia. (‘Catching an Elephant’, 1812 by Thomas Rowlandson. Guildhall Library, City of London/The Bridgeman Art Library/ photolibrary.com)

  The ‘kid’ passes the booty to the ‘pal’, while their associate distracts an innocent, who by his neckerchief and stick and flat hat may be a country visitor, with posters in a printer’s window. (‘A Transfer of Property’, ca 1830. Mary Evans Picture Library/photolibrary.com)

  Left: Prisoners about to embark for New South Wales, Van Diemen’s Land (or Bermuda, which also took convicts). Though prisoners were often depicted as savage, gross and simian, the convicts in this illustration are wistful and identifiably like normal folk. (‘Adieu, Adieu my native land’, undated handcoloured lithograph. Allport Library and Museum of Fine Arts, State Library of Tasmania AUTAS001124067836) Right: The young Lieutenant Phillip in 1764, secretive, ambitious, but lacking connections. Yearning for a command, he was at this time married to the considerably older and wealthier Margaret Denison, a union which would not last. She probably paid for this portrait. (‘Captain Arthur Phillip RN’, 1764 by G. James, oil painting. Dixson Gallery, State Library of New South Wales DG 233)

  Sydney in April 1788, a map made by an unknown convict. Many of the First Fleet ships and their love-sick sailors still remain to create fist-fights ashore. European-style agriculture is marked here, but uncaptured by this map of an ordered place lies the immensity beyond and the fear within. (‘Sketch and description of the settlement at Sydney Cove Port Jackson in the County of Cumberland taken by a transported convict on 16th April 1788, which was not quite 3 months after Commodore Phillips’s landing there’, 1789 attributed to Francis Fowkes. National Library of Australia, nla.map-nk 276)

  Phillip speared in punishment by a Broken Bay Aborigine at Collins Cove, Manly. The whale on which the Eora have been feasting lies partly submerged as the discipline is attended to. This is the work of the convict artist know as the Port Jackson Painter, who may have been Harry Brewer, a middle-aged midshipman, shipmate of Phillip’s and provost-marshal. (‘The Governor making the best of his way to the boat after being wounded with the spear sticking in his shoulder’, ca 1790 by a ‘Port Jackson Painter’. The Watling Collection, Drawing 23 © The Natural History Museum, London)

  The sole image of Pemulwuy, the Aboriginal leader most resistant of invasion. A carradhy, a man of sacred practice and binder and looser of sins and curses, here he is fishing about 1804. His name is rendered ‘Pimbloy’ by the artist. ‘The resemblance is thought to be striking by those who have seen him’, wrote James Grant, captain of the naval vessel Lady Nelson. (‘Pimbloy: Native of New Holland in a canoe of that country’, 1804 by Samuel John Neele, engraving from ‘The Narrative of a Voyage of Discovery Performed in HM Vessel Lady Nelson, 1803-1804’ by James Grant. National Library of Australia)

  Bennelong and clansmen on their way to Sydney Cove to enquire into Phillip’s health after his spearing. (‘Ban nel lang meeting the Governor by appointment after he was wounded by Willemaring in September 1790’, ca 1790 by a ‘Port Jackson Painter’. The Watling Collection, Drawing 40 © The Natural History Museum, London)

  An Eora boy is initiated by straddling an elder’s shoulders while having a tooth excised with a stone chisel. (‘Yoo-long erah-ba-diang’, J Neagle, engraving, 1 of a series of 8 plates showing Aboriginal men performing various ceremonies in ‘An account of the English colony of New South Wales’ by David Collins, 1798. National Library of Australia, nla.pic-an14340273-7)

  Left: Rendered by the invaluable Port Jackson Painter, Bennelong is portrayed in an angry state after Colby’s wounding in a ritual battle between Eora clans. Bennelong and Colby would change sides, dependent on who had died or been injured, or who was guilty of abducting women. The ritual lettings of blood resulting from these conflicts were limited by long-established custom. (‘Native name Ban-nel-lang, as painted when angry after Botany Bay Colebee was wounded’ by a ‘Port Jackson Painter’, ca 1790. The Watling Collection , Drawing 41© The Natural History Museum, London) Right: Oui-Ré-Kine (Worogan), a relative of Bennelong’s, sketched in 1802 by Nicholas-Martin Petit of Nicolas Baudin’s French expedition. The scarrings on her upper arms and breast bespeak unguessed at female ritual. (‘Oui-Ré-Kine’ by Barthelemy Roger after Nicolas-Martin Petit, engraving from ‘Atlas’, plate XXI ‘Voyage de decouvertes aux terres Australes’ by Francois Peron, 1811. National Library of Australia)

  Phillip’s party on the Hawkesbury in March 1788. Note the apparent dance to the middle right in this coloured drawing by Lieutenant Bradley. Phillip was disappointed by the sandstone escarpments of Pittwater and the lower Hawkesbury. (Detail from ‘Broken Bay, New South Wales,
March 1788’ in ‘A Voyage of New South Wales’, 1802 by William Bradley, watercolour. Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales, ML Safe 1/14 opp. p.90)

  John Nicol, an obscure seaman who, like others, begot children on convict women. But unlike them, he kept a journal in which he confesses that as a young purser he had fallen in love with the rural Second Fleet convict Sarah Whitelam as he struck her county-jail chains off. They had a child, but more pragmatic than Nicol, Whitelam married a First Fleet convict named Walsh the day after Nicol’s ship, the notorious Lady Juliana, left Sydney. (‘John Nicol’, frontispiece from ‘The Life and Adventures of John Nicol, Mariner’, 1822. National Library of Australia)

  Mary Putland, about 1805. A young widow and Governor Bligh’s valiant daughter, in 1808 she defied the officers and men who had come to depose and perhaps execute her father. (‘Mary Putland (nee Bligh)’, ca 1805 by unknown artist, watercolour. Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales MIN 399)

  As at the Wexford Vinegar Hill in 1798, the United Irish fought and lost the antipodean Vinegar Hill in 1804. Major Johnston’s victory, the first for the eminent Rum Corps, was helped by the fact that he seized the Irish leaders who came to parley. But it does seem that less than three dozen troops defeated over 250 rebels. (‘Convict uprising at Castle Hill’, 1804, watercolour. National Library of Australia, nla.pic-an-5577479)