Australians

by Thomas Keneally

  Phillip, meeting Barrington, found him sober-minded, as if transportation had had an impact on his legendary flamboyance. He was sent to work at Toongabbie, west of Sydney, where he shared a hut with lower-class convicts and an Aboriginal woman. They no doubt found sharing their table with him a great privilege and novelty, and pressed him for stories of his glittering career. But Barrington’s seriousness, perhaps partly depression, together with his ‘irreproachable conduct’ saw him quickly appointed a superintendent of convicts and ultimately a member of the Parramatta night watch. Barrington found there a life not utterly lacking in pleasure: ‘having had several young native dogs given to me, from time to time, I take great delight in kangaroo hunting, it is not only an agreeable exercise, but produces a dish for the table, nearly as good as mutton and in the present dearth of livestock is not an unacceptable present’.

  He must have been aware of the irony by which publishers in London were profiting in his name. It added to the bitterness of his bread.

  GENTLEMAN GO, GENTLEMAN STAY

  By the Third Fleet, Governor Phillip received from Secretary of State Grenville a grudging permission to leave the colony: ‘I cannot, therefore, refrain from expressing my earnest hope . . . that you may be able, without material inconvenience, to continue in your government for a short time longer.’

  It was intended that the bulk of the marine garrison, now relieved by the purpose-recruited New South Wales Corps, should return to England on the Gorgon. In deciding what to do in his own case, Judge-Advocate Collins was caught between his dislike of the newly arrived Captain Nepean of the New South Wales Corps and his detestation of the departing Major Ross. Said Collins of Ross: ‘With him I would not sail were wealth and honours to attend me when I landed.’ And despite his loving correspondence with his wife Maria, he was in an association with Ann Yeates, alias Nancy, a young milliner from Lady Penrhyn, who had borne him two sons.

  Collins reflected that though the masters of the Third Fleet ships knew they could have brought out a further thousand tons of provisions, instead they had loaded up with copper, iron, steel and cordage for sale at Bombay ‘on account of their owners’. Dependent for his survival, like all the other European inhabitants of New South Wales, on this strange balance of beneficence and greed in shipping merchants, he decided that he would seek permission to go home at ‘the first opportunity that offers of escaping from a country that is nothing better than a place of banishment for the outcasts of society’.

  FINDING CHINA

  Speaking their own language, and bound together in many cases by secret oaths and compacts, the Irish who had come into Port Jackson on Queen on 26 September 1791 presented particular problems. The officers in New South Wales would have the opportunity to nod as ruefully as any Anglo-Irish magistrate on Irish soil at the Gaelic wrong-headedness of Irish convict refusal to behave like Englishmen, and to speak English. Irish was still the first language of over 80 per cent of Irish hearths, and now it was heard, to the discomfort of the officers and officials, in the fringes of the bushland of New South Wales.

  What were they plotting, these strange souls? What was behind their frequent, secret laughter?

  One thing about them was the ready—some would say gullible—comfort they took in millennial fantasies. A new century was nearing and there were omens—the French revolution, before that the American—foretelling a successful uprising in their home country. Tom Paine was singing of the rights of the humble and the humble of the Queen were aware of it. At the dawn of the new century, the justice of Christ might reverse the order of the world, putting the first last, and the last first. In Sydney and Parramatta there developed amongst the Irish like a fever ‘the chimerical idea’ of finding China from New South Wales, the idea that it was beyond the mountains and the Hawkesbury to the north-west of Sydney Cove. In terms of the Enlightenment it was a preposterous idea. In terms of their extreme yearning it made perfect sense. Somewhere on earth there must exist a veil the Irish could penetrate, beyond which they would reassume old powers and have their remembered spaciousness restored to them. Their ignorance of strict geography was astounding but understandable—the schooling of Irish Catholics was contrary to the penal laws of Britain—so they made up a geography of hope from fragments of information, convinced that New South Wales was part of the same unknown zone as China. They drew their compasses on pieces of paper, with the arrows fixed on north, a practice which would be laughed at by their betters. Yet the Defenders and other secret societies, influenced by Freemasonry, knew there was an inherent importance and a power in the representation of the compass. The north was potent, even if invoked merely on paper, and the Irish convicts, eating bitter rations by the campfires of Sydney and Parramatta, had caught the belief that not too many days walk northwards from the Parramatta River and Port Jackson, a habitable kingdom lay awaiting them.

  One sight of the dense bush around Parramatta and Sydney was enough to make many delay their Chinese pilgrimage. The strangeness of the natives, matched by the strangeness of the forests, the tangles of ungodly acacias and melaleucas, the spiteful sharpness of narrow-leaved shrubs determined to survive fire and drought, and the feeling of godlessness and lack of familiar presences in the place had been for three years sufficient to stop most convicts walking away, and promised to be effective well into the future. Yet on 1 November—All Saints Day—twenty male Irish convicts and one pregnant female in Parramatta took a week’s provisions, tomahawks and knives, and set out into the bush to find China. A few days later, sailors in a boat belonging to the Albemarle transport met the pregnant Irish woman down-harbour. She had been separated from her group for three days. The woman’s husband was also later found and gave the same ‘absurd account of their design’ to officials in Sydney. Thus the proposition of Irish stupidity made its entry onto the Australian stage.

  Other men were captured to the north near Broken Bay, and despite their suffering, attempted escape again a few days later. Thirteen of those who first absconded ‘were brought in, in a state of deplorable wretchedness, naked, and nearly worn out with hunger’. They had tried to live by sucking the flowering shrubs for their nectar and by eating the wild purple berries which grow on sandstone headlands around Sydney.

  Phillip ordered the convicts at Parramatta to be assembled, and told them that if they went missing he would send out parties looking for them with orders to fire on sight, and if they were captured alive he would chain them together with only bread and water during the rest of their term of transportation. The declaration did not staunch the magnitude of Irish hopes. Typically, Watkin Tench visited the convicts who had made the dash for China—it was he who called them ‘the Chinese Travellers’. Four of them lay in hospital, variously wounded by the natives. He asked them if they really supposed it possible to reach China, and they informed him that they had been told that at a considerable distance to the north lay a large river, ‘which separated this country from the back part of China’. When they crossed this Jordan, they would find themselves among a copper-coloured people who would treat them generously. On the third day of their wanderings towards this hoped-for place, one of their party had died of fatigue, and another was butchered by natives. They had reached Broken Bay and the Hawkesbury River, where the wide entrance and estuary stopped them from going further.

  Though a great proportion of the Irish were of farming backgrounds or had agricultural experience, Hunter would later describe them as ‘dissatisfied with their situation here’, and ‘extremely insolent, refractory, and turbulent’. For the Irish combined their dream of China with a keen sense of their small quota of rights. The convicts of Queen at Parramatta were the first, for example, to stage an organised public protest. It was held outside the newly built Government House in Parramatta in the humidity of December 1791 and demanded that the issue of rations be changed back from weekly to daily. There was a certain justice in this. A weak or sickly person might be deprived of a week’s rations by a bully in one s
woop, but if the ration was issued daily, the weak could appeal to the strong to prevent any further, large-scale ration-snatching.

  *

  There was a pregnant Irish girl named Catherine Devereaux aboard Queen who did not seek China but stuck close to camp for the sake of her unborn child, which when born was christened James, taking his father’s—the Queen’s cook’s—name: Kelly. James Kelly would reach young manhood under the tutelage of two entrepreneurial former convicts, Henry Kable and James Underwood, and in Van Diemen’s Land would become a whaling, sealing and shipping tycoon of some renown.

  MERCANTILE DREAMS

  Despite a few nods towards mercantilism in the founding of Sydney, it was not a trading post, and Phillip did not want it yet to be one. The Third Fleet transport, Britannia, however, going off to whale, returned with seven spermaceti whales in November 1791, having hunted in company with William and Anne, which had caught only one whale on its own account. Though the master of the Mary Ann had been as far southwards as 45 degrees without seeing a single whale, the Matilda stayed off Jervis Bay, south of Sydney, and saw a great many whales, but was unable to chase them because of the weather. The initial performance of the South Seas whale fishery seemed mediocre.

  William Richards Jr, who had dispatched the First Fleet, had commercial dreams for the far-off colony he had never seen, and remained in touch with New South Wales through his Botany Bay agent, Zachariah Clarke, who was now the commissary of stores in New South Wales. A visionary eccentric, Richards hoped to reclaim the convict-handling business, and combine it with other forms of trade between the south-west Pacific and Britain. He was willing to receive a land grant and to live permanently in New South Wales as Sydney’s shipping magnate. Outraged by stories of the Second Fleet, the devoutly Christian Richards sought the twin beacons of utility: a settled, regular, low-yield market in the conscientious transportation of convicts, and on the other side, high-yield trading with India and China and what he may have been convinced would be an increasing traffic of whalers.

  His ideas, an accurate depiction of the future of New South Wales though they were, were not well received. In a year or two he would become bankrupt due to other contracts gone bad, and some of his children would be left to consider New South Wales as an option for free settlement. But far more than anyone else in the penal equation, Richards had desired New South Wales. Not many did. Even Tench would write, ‘If only a receptacle for convicts be intended, this place stands unequalled . . . when viewed in a commercial light, I fear its insignificance will not appear very striking.’ He would leave New South Wales, it seemed, with fond remembrance but no desire to return.

  In December 1791, as the Gorgon lay in Sydney Cove ready to return the marines to Britain, offers were made to the non-commissioned officers and privates to stay in the country as settlers or to enter into the New South Wales Corps. Three corporals, a drummer and 59 privates accepted grants of land on Norfolk Island or at Parramatta, as Rose Hill was by now officially named. The rest wanted to return—indeed, of those who stayed, Tench thought the behaviour of the majority of them could be ascribed to ‘infatuated affection to female convicts, whose characters and habits of life, I am sorry to say, promise from a connection neither honour nor tranquillity’. As for tranquillity, only the parties to the relationships could say anything, but it is a matter of record that many of these remaining soldiers and their women were founders of enduring Antipodean stock.

  Before packing to leave on Gorgon, in the summer of 1791-92, Tench made a reconnaissance around Prospect Hill, south of Parramatta, and the ponds along the Parramatta River. Looking at the settlements with the eyes of a man about to depart forever, Tench gave a report of mixed skill and ineptitude on the part of convict and other farmers, and of New South Wales as something less than a bountiful garden. Its tough and plentiful flora might seem to promise a form of Eden, but in the Sydney Basin it all grew from an ancient, leached and worn-down earth that demanded great skill and determination from those who would profit from it.

  For its natural fertility, Tench admired the Parramatta farm of the former sailor and highway robber, John Ramsay. Ramsay had settled there with his wife, Mary Leary, from the Second Fleet. Like Ruse’s wife, Elizabeth Perry, Mary Leary might have been unjustly transported, and was a woman with an unresolved and burning grievance against her mistress, the wife of a London attorney. When the lawyer saw some of his wife’s clothing on Leary, his wife swore under oath that she had never ‘sold her any one thing in my life’. On the farm in New South Wales, Leary probably enlisted her husband’s belief in her innocence. No doubt, at their rough-hewn table, she reiterated the extremely credible tale to Captain Tench himself. Tench thought Ramsay ‘deserves a good spot, for he is a civil, sober, industrious man. Besides his corn land, he has a well-laid-out little garden, in which I found him and his wife busily at work. He praised her industry to me; and said he did not doubt of succeeding.’ By contrast, Tench found Joseph Bishop, former fisherman and convict, had planted a little maize ‘in so slovenly a style, as to promise a very poor crop’. To survive as a farmer, thought Tench, a man ‘must exert more than ordinary activity. The attorney’s clerk, Matthew Everingham, I also thought out of his province, and likely to return, like Bishop, when victualling from the stores ceased, to drag a timber or brick cart for his maintenance . . . I dare believe he finds cultivating his own land not half so heavy a task, as he formerly found that of stringing together volumes of tautology to encumber, or convey away that of his neighbour.’

  And so Tench’s rural rides went. On 7 December, Tench visited the German settler Philip Schaeffer’s farm on the river and approved of his vine plantings. Schaeffer had served as a lieutenant in the Hesse-Hanau Regiment, sponsored by George III, in the American war. Amongst the Americans the Hessians had a reputation for savagery, but Schaeffer and Tench had the bond of having been fellows in arms.

  Directly across the river from Schaeffer’s 140 acres (57 hectares) lay the more modest but ‘very eligible’ farm of Christopher Magee, neighbour and crony of the initial farmer, James Ruse. Magee’s idyll on the Parramatta River would ultimately prove fragile. Overall, Tench’s reconnaissance before departure showed that the Parramatta River area did not speak overly well for the fertility of eastern Australia.

  Sydney, where Tench had spent the bulk of his time in New South Wales, was by the turn of 1791-92 the lesser village to Parramatta. In Sydney lived 1259 persons, with 1625 in Parramatta and its farming areas, and 1172 at Norfolk Island. There were just in excess of 4000 European New South Wales people perilously surviving the Sydney experiment.

  Robbie Ross was delighted to march the marines aboard the Gorgon on 13 December. His now adolescent son, Lieutenant John Ross, was in their ranks. Ross himself had only the week before found reason to fight a duel with Captain Hill of the New South Wales Corps, from which, though both fired two shots, both came away unhurt.

  Gorgon dropped down the harbour three days after the marines marched aboard, and vanished back in the direction of the known world the next day. A company of marines remained behind in Sydney Cove, waiting for the arrival of the remainder of the New South Wales Corps.

  The Gorgon on departure was to an extent not a European but an Australian ark: ‘our barque was now crowded with kangaroos, opossums, and every curiosity which that country produced’, noted the departing Sergeant Scott, including plants and birds and the other antediluvian mysteries of New South Wales.

  By the time the Gorgon left Sydney, the twenty-month-old voyager Emmanuel Bryant had died in the Dutch East India Company prison ship moored off Batavia, where Mary Bryant and her two infants were kept prisoner after being picked up by the authoritarian Captain Edwards of the wrecked HMS Pandora in Koepang. Captain Edwards, who had been sent to the Pacific to find the mutineers of HMS Bounty, had recaptured the escapees in Koepang. He was in the meantime in good lodgings in the elegant Dutch quarter of Batavia, organising passages for himself, his prisoners and t
he Pandora’s company on three Dutch ships to go home by way of the Cape.

  Mary Bryant was on her way to becoming the first person tried for return from transportation to New South Wales.

  BARANGAROO GIVES BIRTH

  Through his gifts of iron hatchets to a number of selected Sydney Aboriginals, including Bennelong, Phillip might have unwittingly created a new elite— the Mogogal, the hatchet men. But even ownership of a hatchet did not give Bennelong psychological dominance over his wife Barangaroo Daringah, something of a woman-warrior. She carried two scars from spear wounds received in the give-and-take of inter-clan relations. The spear that caused one of them had passed right through her thigh. She was forceful and good-looking. ‘She is very straight and exceedingly well-made,’ wrote Phillip. ‘Her features are good, and she goes entirely naked, yet there is such an air of innocence about her that clothing scarcely appears necessary.’ The septum of her nose had been pierced—an uncommon feature with Port Jackson women.

  Tench had described Yuringa, Colby’s wife, as ‘meek and feminine’, but Barangaroo by contrast as ‘fierce and unsubmissive’. She seemed slightly older than Bennelong and had two children of a former husband, both of whom were dead, possibly from smallpox. Now she was about to give birth again and Phillip noticed that she, like other Aboriginal mothers, planned to wrap her new baby in the soft bark of the tea-tree.