Australians

by Thomas Keneally

  Before the birth, Barangaroo had visions of being delivered of her baby in Phillip’s house, and had already asked him about it. Phillip thought it a mere touching request. But it would give her child a claim on Government House as his place of birth, and seemed to carry with it, apart from genuine affection and reverence, a new strategy—if the ghosts could not be made to disappear, the Eora should try to outclaim and out-title them. Barangaroo thus avoided the hospital, where Phillip wanted to send her, for the obvious reason that it was full of mawm, the bad spirits of the dead. In the event, the birth seemed to occur suddenly, and did not take place at Government House. The child was a girl, named Dil-boong.

  Then, soon after, at the end of 1791, Barangaroo died. The causes were unknown but might have been the result of either post-childbirth complications or marital contest, the latter seeming for once the less likely. Bennelong and Barangaroo were always fighting, but Tench said, like a good Georgian man, that ‘she was a scold, and a vixen, and nobody pitied her . . . the women often artfully studied to irritate and inflame the passions of the men, although sensible that the consequence will alight on themselves’. When Barangaroo was dying, the desperate Bennelong summoned the great carradhy, Willemerring, the wounder of Phillip. When he did not arrive in time to save her, Bennelong would seek him out and spear him in the thigh. Indeed, in Barangaroo’s honour, or more accurately to adjust the world to her death, many spears were thrown by Bennelong and her Cameraigal relatives, for death was always the result of some sorcery.

  In intense grieving, Bennelong asked Phillip, Surgeon White and Lieutenant David Collins to witness his wife’s cremation. He cleared the ground where the funeral pyre was to be built by digging out the earth to about 13 centimetres below the surface. Then a mound of sticks, bushes and branches was made about one metre high. Barangaroo’s body, wrapped in an old English blanket, was laid on top of this with her head facing north. Bennelong stacked logs on the body and the fire was lit. The English spectators left before the body was totally consumed.

  With Watkin Tench gone, David Collins and Lieutenant Dawes and Phillip himself remained as the chief observers of the natives. Collins and others were aware that aside from British-Eora conflict, the old ritual battles of the Eora continued. There had been a confrontation between the Sydney and Botany Bay natives in April 1791 over the uttering of the name of a dead man. The natives knew that the uttered name could summon down havoc from the spiritual realm onto the physical earth. After a death, the deceased became ‘a nameless one’, said Collins. Mourners often warned Collins and other officers not to use the names of the dead.

  An incident occurred in May 1792 which gave the Europeans a further bewildered insight into the rigidity of native law, which matched at least the rigidity of their own—but through a different set of balances. A woman named Noorooing came into town to tell the white settlers of the ritual killing of a south Botany Bay native, Yellaway, who had abducted her. She was clearly not an unwilling abductee, since she threw ashes on herself in sadness and refused all food, and other Aborigines explained that she was go-lahng, in a state of ritual mourning and fasting. But soon after, Noorooing herself, travelling in the bush near Sydney Cove, met and attacked a little girl related to the murderer of Yellaway. She beat the little girl so cruelly that the child was brought into town almost dead, with six or seven deep cuts in her throat and one ear cut to the bone. She died a few days later.

  The English were not sympathetic to Noorooing, but other Aborigines explained to them ‘that she had done no more than what custom obliged her to . . . The little victim of her revenge was, from her quiet, tractable manners, much beloved in the town; and what is a singular trait of the inhumanity of this proceeding, she had every day since Yellaway’s death requested that Noorooing should be fed at the officer’s hut, where she herself resided.’ In some way that the Europeans could not understand, the blood debt had been fully settled by the little girl’s death.

  Meanwhile, because of white settlement at Parramatta, and the area known as Toongabbie to the north-west of Rose Hill, many of the local Burramattagal clan were pushed west into the country of the Bidjigal. Here the warrior Pemulwuy of the Bediagal from the north shore of Botany Bay began to cooperate with the Bidjigal. If Bennelong had come to some accommodation with the accumulating waves of Europeans or ghosts, Pemulwuy had not. Near Prospect Hill, west of Parramatta, in May 1792, seven native men and two women stole clothing and corn, and a convict worker on the farm fired at a man preparing to throw his spear. The party fled, abandoning nets containing corn, blankets and spears. The natives took a fast revenge. A convict employed on well-digging on a farm near Prospect Hill walked to Parramatta to collect his clothing ration. On the way back he was attacked, his head was cut in several places and his teeth were smashed out. His dead body gaped with wounds from spears.

  So here was the contrast. Bennelong was victualled from the store—he took the rations as recompense for damage done to his people. Pemulwuy, who was involved in the murder of the convict, would not deign to receive that sort of compensation. He would not take Phillip’s appeasing flour, or any other gift.

  AN END TO FLEETS

  The age of convict fleets had ended, because transportation by regularly dispatched individual convict transports had begun. Though there would be many more disgraceful ships, the British government had retreated shamefaced from its dalliance with Camden, Calvert and King. It was as an individual transport that a large ship named the Pitt, 775 tons (790 tonnes), had sailed on 17 July 1791 carrying nearly four hundred male and female prisoners. The owner of the Pitt, George Mackenzie Macaulay, was an alderman of the city of London and one of the Scots merchants of Blackheath—he was what the East India Company called a ‘husband’; that is, a contractor who regularly chartered his ships to the East India Company business, and was reputable.

  Yet the suffering of the transported remained intense. Pitt had originally embarked nearly 450 prisoners, but a complaint about overcrowding was made to the Commissioners of the Navy, and as a result of an inspection it was decided that she could not accommodate more than 410 convicts on the two-level benches which made up the sleeping quarters. On the gun deck, below the quarterdeck, three separate coops in front of the main cabin were set apart for the women’s quarters. The fifty-eight women aboard would therefore have better ventilated spaces, though they were equally as crammed as those of the men below.

  Smallpox struck the prison deck soon after the Pitt’s departure from Yarmouth Roads, and even before the Cape Verde Islands there were fifteen deaths amongst the prisoners. In the doldrums off Africa, the prisoners developed ulcers on their bodies from lack of Vitamin B and showed symptoms of scurvy. A fever struck, killing twenty-seven people—sailors, soldiers and their families—in a fortnight. The crew was left so short-handed that some of the convicts with maritime experience had to be brought up from the prison deck to help sail the vessel.

  By the time Pitt arrived at Port Jackson in February 1792, a further twenty male and nine female prisoners had died, and one hundred and twenty of the men were landed sick. The hospital was again required to deal with a huge medical emergency. So though Macaulay’s ship did not replicate quite the horrors of the Second Fleet, it was still a ship of disgrace. The ship’s officers, including the master, Edward Manning, set up a store ashore to sell goods they had brought out at their own expense. Collins wrote, ‘The high price at which everything was sold, the avidity with which all descriptions of people grasped at what was purchased was extraordinary.’

  The Pitt had brought for the commissary store mainly salt beef, enough to extend the provisions of the settlement for forty days, and the ship was employed by Phillip to take a proportion of the supplies on to Norfolk Island.

  Also aboard the vessel had travelled Major Francis Grose, on his way to assume command of the New South Wales Corps. He would be Phillip’s new lieutenant-governor, and came from a rather more privileged background than Phillip. His fathe
r was a renowned antiquary, and his grandfather a jeweller who had enjoyed the privilege of having George II as a client. He had a much more genial nature than Robbie Ross—if anything he would become over time too accommodating to the desires of the officers of his corps for land and wealth. Grose, like the majority of officers, had campaigned as a youth during the American Revolutionary War, fighting in the summer of 1778 at Monmouth Courthouse in New Jersey, a battle site at which the heat may well have killed as many men as were shot, though he was amongst the latter. After nearly six years on half-pay, he was delighted to be appointed lieutenant-governor and chief recruiter of the New South Wales Corps—the sort of task with which he had some familiarity.

  Having landed in Sydney with his young family, and inspected his garrison, Major Grose was enthused by what he saw in Phillip’s Sydney Cove and Parramatta. ‘I find there is neither the scarcity that was represented to me, nor the barren sands I was taught to imagine I should see; the whole place is a garden, on which fruit and vegetables of every description grow in the greatest luxuriance . . . Could we once be supplied with cattle, I do not believe we should have occasion to trouble Old England again. I live in as good a house as I desire; and the farm of my predecessor, which has been given to me, produces a sufficiency of everything for my family. The climate, though very hot, is not unwholesome, we have plenty of fish, and there is good shooting.’ There was at last, in Grose’s picture, the promise of a settled colony and a habitable place.

  Even though Grose saw Sydney Cove in such positive light, it was a hot season, and those male convicts of Pitt who had been passed as healthy on landing were put to work cultivating and clearing public ground beyond Parramatta. They found it hard under that hammer of the February sun, in New South Wales’s most humid month. Many of them began to join their prison-deck mates in hospital. The advent of full and more justly distributed rations could not save some. The record of burials, chiefly of newcomers, during that late summer is sobering. On 16 February 1792, four convicts were buried, and six the next day, and a further six on 20 February. Five were buried at Parramatta on the next day, a further two the next day, on 23 February a further six, on 25 February a further four. And on 1, 3, 5, 6 and 7 March the burials continued. On 8 March there were five male deaths, and on the following Friday, two more and that of a child, Margaret Tambleton. The regular multiple burials of men continued throughout March.

  Yet the vigour of the settlement had affirmed itself for Phillip when in late February he issued fifty-two further land grants to former convicts, chiefly in the Parramatta-Prospect Hill area, all—of course—without reference to any interested Eora or Dharug parties. Nonetheless, the governor wrote to the third Secretary of State he had had to deal with, Henry Dundas, a former Edinburgh lawyer, older than Grenville and a veteran of government that, ‘What I feared from the kind of settlers I have been obliged to accept has happened in several instances.’ The convict settlers in some cases had grown tired ‘of a life so different to that from which they have been brought up’ and abandoned their grants or sold their livestock to acquire from ships and from stores like that set up by the master of Pitt ‘articles from which they do not reap any real benefit’. He regretted, too, that twenty-two time-expired men and nine women intended to go home on the Pitt. ‘Thus will the best people always be carried away, for those who cannot be received on board the ships as seamen or carpenters pay for their passage.’ Even so, it was a minority of convict settlers who had either left without seeking a land grant or had lost or given up their land in this way, and a number of ex-convict farmers by this time had convicts working for them and being supported by them.

  SYDNEY’S PARSON

  In the Sydney area and along the Parramatta River, the burials continued, but the man who conducted them was thinking of the children of convicts and their education as well. By this time, in early 1792, the Reverend Johnson’s house was crowded with often orphaned native children, while Mrs Johnson herself was ‘far gone with child’, and domestic life was under pressure. Johnson was still engaged with a struggle against Phillip’s indifference to religion as anything more than a form of social regulation. The foundations of a church had been laid at Parramatta the previous spring, but before it was finished it was converted into a gaol for secondary punishment, and then into a granary. Phillip had at one stage put aside 400 acres (162 hectares) for church use as a glebe, but did not give Johnson any help to cultivate it. ‘What, sir,’ Johnson asked one of his London friends, ‘are 400 or 4000 acres full of large green trees unless some convicts be allowed to cultivate it?’

  He was still holding services at a boat house on the foreshores of Sydney Cove, and in the open, or in any shelter indoors or out he could find in Parramatta or Toongabbie. ‘The last time I preached at Sydney was in the open air,’ he admitted with reasonable pride, but also some resentment. He was troubled by migraine, and often dreaded the coming of Sunday and the glaring Sabbath sun.

  On the day he wrote his plaint he had to bury another six convicts. Death in such numbers must also have been a form of stress on a soul whose resources were limited.

  THE DEVIL WITH THE CHILDREN

  When the three Dutch vessels Captain Edwards had hired in Batavia reached Table Bay off Cape Town in March 1792, carrying amongst others the Bounty mutineers, Mary Bryant and the other Sydney escapees, they found that HMS Gorgon with Major Ross and other marines, including Watkin Tench, aboard, was already moored in the roads. Edwards decided to send aboard her the ten remaining Bounty mutineers ‘and the convict deserters from Port Jackson’: Mary, her four-year-old, Charlotte, and four other survivors. Will Bryant had died of fever, and so had their young son. The little girl was in a bad way, and, so too, were some of the marines’ children. ‘I confess that I had never looked at these people, without pity and astonishment,’ declared Watkin of Mary and the other escapees. ‘They had miscarried in a heroic struggle for liberty; after having combated every hardship, and conquered every difficulty . . . and I could not but reflect with admiration at the strange combination of circumstances which had again brought us together, to baffle human foresight, and confound human speculation.’

  The Gorgon left Table Bay for England in early April. None of the children aboard were well, even after spending so much time in a shore camp in Cape Town being nursed and fed healthily for the continuation of their long voyage. Corporal Samuel Bacon and his wife, Jane, had already lost one child on the first evening out from Cape Town: ‘It was ill on shore.’ A little over two weeks later, the other of the twins of Corporal Bacon died. Clark wrote a few days later, ‘This hot weather is playing the Devil with the children—down here it is as hot as Hell—I wish to God we had got twenty degrees the other side of the line [the Equator].’

  Edward Divan, son of Sergeant Divan, quartermaster in Captain Campbell’s company, born aboard the Charlotte on the way out to New South Wales, saw both his younger brothers, Dennis and Mark, committed to the sea from the broiling deck of Gorgon. Then Sergeant Andrew Gilbourn’s child perished. ‘I am very sorry for poor little John—he was a fine child,’ wrote Clark. William Mapp, the child of Private James Mapp and the late Susan Creswell, a convict, died a few days later, just as Clark was committing to his journal his hope, if ‘this little good breeze continues, that we will be . . . in the same side of the world that my Betsy is in before 12 o’clock at night’.

  Mary Bryant heard the weeping and keening of women from the crowded troop quarters, not much preferable to the ones she occupied, where the atmosphere must have been funereal. These lost children had all gone into the making of the great Sydney experiment, and were victims of a most peculiar imperial enterprise.

  With so many barely consoled women howling close by, their children worn out by the distance between Sydney and London, Mary must have known Charlotte, who had been through more than any other child aboard, was unlikely to survive. But even though genial Captain Parker allowed Mary and Charlotte regularly on deck, she understood t
hat Charlotte was under the axe of the same dietary exhaustion and fevers as the other children.

  ‘Last night,’ wrote Clark on May’s first Sabbath, ‘the child belonging to Mary Broad [Bryant], the convict woman who went away in the fishing boat from Port Jackson last year, died about four o’clock, [we] committed the body to the deep, latitude 5°25 North.’ The ship was surrounded by sharks, which had learned that a regular supply of flesh trailed from this vessel, the child of a marine having died only two days before Charlotte.

  The Gorgon arrived at Portsmouth on 18 June 1792. Transportation was arranged at once to take Mary and the other escapees to London. A magistrate committed them to Newgate but ‘declared he never experienced so disagreeable a task as being obliged to commit them to prison, and assured them that, as far as lay in his power, he would assist them’. As grim as the wards of Newgate were, the escapees all declared that they would sooner suffer death than return to Botany Bay, according to a contemporary broadsheet.

  James Boswell, famed companion of Dr Samuel Johnson, generous by nature and with a taste for handsome and robust girls of the lower orders, appealed repeatedly to the Home Secretary, Dundas, a friend of his, and to Undersecretary Evan Nepean for a pardon for Mary and the others. He collected 17 guineas as a subscription for Mary to purchase comforts in prison, and enquired into the nature of her family in the West Country by consulting Reverend William Johnson Temple, his ‘old and most intimate friend’ down in Devon. The Reverend Temple reported that the Broads were ‘eminent for sheep stealing’.

  On 2 May 1793, the Home Secretary advised the Sheriff of Middlesex that Mary Bryant had received an unconditional pardon. Released from Newgate, she remained in London, seemingly at Boswell’s expense, until the following October. Amongst Boswell’s papers is a record headed ‘Mary’s Money’, which lists amounts paid out for her lodgings and for a bonnet, a gown, shoes and a prayer book.