Australians

by Thomas Keneally

  Phillip, by contrast, feared too much enterprise would make the penal community of New South Wales hard to control, and that barter would develop in spirits, for which the convicts were crazy. The shops set up in Parramatta and Sydney for the sale of private goods out of the Royal Admiral were permitted to sell porter, but they were found to be selling spirits as well, with deplorable results. ‘Several of the settlers, breaking out from the restraints to which they had been subject, conducted themselves with the greatest impropriety, beating their wives, destroying their stock, trampling on and injuring their crops in the ground, and destroying each other’s property.’ In New South Wales, all the rage of exile and want was unleashed by liquor, but the officers of the New South Wales Corps could sniff not a social crisis but an opportunity.

  Sir Joseph Banks would later say that ‘Governor Phillip . . . was so ill when he left Sydney as to feel little hope of recovery.’ In dreaming of his return to England, Phillip must sometimes have imagined death coming from his exhaustion and chronic ailments, but at other, more energetic times envisaged perhaps further military service arising from conflict with republican France. Being in such a remote place as New South Wales at such a crucial time could be itself a torment. Yet he hoped he had done enough not simply to satisfy his masters, but to validate his own honour as an officer, to honour the demands of his culture, and to put its mark on the shore of New South Wales. Indeed, he would leave certain traditions indelibly implanted behind him—an insistence on the supremacy of law, an enlightened authoritarianism rather than republican rights, and a sense of community which the cynics would not have thought possible. Authority and equality were the two trees Phillip planted in Sydney Cove, and perhaps too the tree of grudging co-operative endeavour, into which the convicts were forced by circumstance. He had never invoked happiness, but he had invoked cohesion and its benefits.

  So now Phillip had decided. Despite the rationing problems, whose end he saw in sight if the government and private farms were successful, he would sail home on the Atlantic, due to leave Sydney in December 1792. For by the time Phillip packed his papers and assembled his samples, he had imposed on this version of the previously unknown earth the European template. There were three and a half thousand acres (1418 hectares) under grant to various time-expired criminals and others. Over one thousand acres (405 hectares) were in cultivation on public land at Sydney Cove and Farm Cove, Parramatta and Toongabbie.

  As well, livestock now grazed on land-grant farms, and stock belonging to the public was kept at Parramatta. Though it would later be argued that Australia’s ancient, leached, thin soil was not suited to hard-hoofed European animals, such questions did not exist for Phillip. Livestock stood for a European imperative more profound than theology. The new place should be graced by such identifiable, biblical and fruitful beasts.

  There were a number of reasons the Sydney enterprise seemed now, and despite all, in a promising condition. One was that the British government was still confronted with an epidemic of crime, and a growth of unrest and rebellious sentiment amongst Methodist radicals and Scottish and Irish seditionists. But Phillip’s own stubborn certainties had a lot to do with the experiment’s success-cum-survival as well. His insistence on equity in rationing must have been a new experience for many convicts used to the corrupt systems of supply in prison and on board the hulks. His lack of skilled freemen elevated some convicts to civic positions as superintendents, overseers and settlers, and imbued a new sense of opportunity and potential influence. Only in New South Wales did land come to the convict who completed his time, and with it the sense of social order which accompanies ownership. ‘A striking proof of what some settlers had themselves declared,’ said David Collins, ‘on its being hinted to them that they had not always been so diligent when labouring for the whole, “We are now working for ourselves.” ’ Phillip had created a system of punishment and reward which, as repugnant as some of its elements might be to us, reliably provided for the convict and soldier-settler.

  In his last days in Sydney, soldiers, convicts and servants carried Phillip’s baggage down from his two-storey Government House, past its garden and the edge of public farmland, to the government wharf on the east side of Sydney Cove. When Phillip himself came down on 10 December, finally ready for departure, full of unrecorded impulses and thoughts, unsure of his future but fairly sure of the survival of New South Wales’s curious society, the red-coated New South Wales Corps under Major Grose presented arms. They dipped their colours and did him honour.

  Phillip must have hoped that, leaving a place so little understood by the world at large, he would have a chance to advance towards greater responsibility and higher glory. But in fact it was with the children of his convict, free and military settlers, whom he was pleased to wave off, that his name would achieve its immortality. Though greater formal honours awaited him, his chief remembrance would be in this cove, in this harbour, and in the continent beyond. And even so his abiding presence in the history of Australia would be more akin to that of a great totem beast than that of breathing flesh. He would not glisten for the children of this and other generations, he would not glow with the amiability or deeds of a Washington, a Jefferson, a Lafayette. He did not seek or achieve civic affection. He would forever be a colourless secular saint, the apostle of the deities Cook and Banks. Yet he would also be lodged not only in our imaginations, but in our calculations of the meaning of the continent and the society.

  Thus the New South Wales Corps, which would acquire a questionable reputation, earned or not, correctly saluted Phillip as he passed in his clouds of gravity.

  SPIRITING AWAY

  One of the most intense fears of the natives was, and would remain, that figures like Phillip would attract men and women out of their accustomed circuits and spirit them away from the Eora world. And it was happening now with Bennelong and the young man Yemmerrawanne, ‘two men who were much attached to his [Phillip’s] person; and who withstood at the moment of their departure the united distress of their wives, and the dismal lamentations of their friends, to accompany him to England’. They knew no map for where they were going, and only that it was outer, and that it was a region of incomprehensible darkness. The risk for Bennelong that he might finish by belonging to neither world was one he bore relatively lightly on this high summer day as he sniffed the aroma of the eucalypts, tinged with smoke from western bushfires, and went aboard the Atlantic. It is likely that many of his people thought he was under an enchantment and thus vitiated forever. Some might have thought also that Abaroo’s ultimate rejection of Yemmerrawanne as a suitor could have added to that handsome youth’s readiness to travel with his kinsman Bennelong.

  With Phillip aboard, early on 11 December 1792, the Atlantic dropped down-harbour in semi-darkness. It seems Mrs Brooks was travelling on the ship, but not Harry Brewer, who had found in New South Wales as provost-marshal the only post the world was willing to give him. The desert interior of the continent sent a summer south-westerly to send Phillip out of Eora land. Past the Cameraigal headlands of the north shore they sailed, towards a last sight of the beach at Manly where he had taken the chief wound of his incumbency. The principal offi cers of the settlement, on board to honour Phillip, now bid him goodbye and returned to Sydney Cove.

  The marine private and diarist, John Easty, shared Phillip’s journey home. He agreed with Phillip that as they left New South Wales, the state of the colony seemed far better than at any time since the settlement was made. Easty mentioned regular ships, good crops of corn and a summer harvest of wheat for cutting. The country was still everywhere covered with wood, and it was with great trouble and fatigue that it could be cleared, he thought. Yet convicts lived in brick huts now because of the good clays of the Sydney Basin. Still, there was ‘not a place dedicated to divine worship amidst all the work—a thing much to be lamented by a serious mind’.

  The voyage proved uneventful, though Phillip’s estranged wife, Margaret, had died by the ti
me he returned to Britain. In her will she had released him from all obligations he had acquired during their relationship. So he devoted himself to defending and explaining his administration to offi cials in Whitehall, and asked the Secretary of State and the King for permission to resign his governorship permanently on the grounds of ill health. Early the next year, he received a spacious annual pension of £500 to honour his New South Wales service. Phillip now had adequate resources to take a residence in Bath, consult specialists, and take the Bath waters.

  His health improved, and he offered himself to the service again. He began to visit, and then married, Isabella Whitehead, the 45-year-old daughter of a wealthy northern cotton- and linen-weaving merchant. He would soon begin to regularly criticise the way things had gone in New South Wales since his departure.

  Bennelong and Yemmerrawanne, meanwhile, had stepped ashore with Phillip at Falmouth towards the end of May 1793, to catch the London stagecoach. It was their turn to enter a mystery.

  CHAPTER 9

  AFTER PHILLIP

  Left to govern New South Wales, Francis Grose was not himself a rapacious man, but seems to have been easily influenced by his officers and let them use the colony and its commerce in a manner Phillip would not have approved of. While Phillip had believed in a primitive commonwealth, where soldiers and convicts drew the same rations from the stores, and where convict labour at the government farms would sustain the colony, Grose thought it better to create a private sector consisting of his offi cers, his men and other colonial offi cials, in addition to some former convicts and a handful of free settlers. Without authorisation, he granted Other Ranks members of the New South Wales Corps twenty-fi ve acres (c 10 hectares) each, offered land grants in the Sydney Basin to his offi cers, and awarded the use and rationing of ten convict labourers to each officer. Part of his motivation, he argued, was that he was plagued with ex-convict settlers who wanted to sell their land and livestock and return to England. Though their sheep flocks came from the government flock Phillip had issued to them, if he wanted that flock and its offspring to survive, he had to sell them as well since their wider holdings would ensure the ongoing strength of the sheep population.

  When the Rhode Island ship Hope appeared in Sydney, Grose was also willing to allow the sale of a quantity of the spirits it carried to civil and military offi cers. That was a significant decision and one which would in the end beget revolution. As the barrels of spirit were hoisted from the hold of Hope, the liquor business began in New South Wales, with liquor becoming not merely a quencher of spiritual bewilderments in the rag-tag population, but also a standard of exchange and a ticket to power.

  Captain Collins recorded that, illegal though it was, the convicts preferred receiving liquor as payment for their labours to any article of provisions or clothing. In changing the convict hours of labour to a morning shift of 5 a.m. until 9 a.m. and then an afternoon shift from 4 p.m. until sunset, it was almost as if Grose were clearing the middle of the day for convicts to do business or tend their gardens. He was certainly creating boozing time. To men and women of small crimes but great, mind-scarring passages to Australia, the numbing power of spirits was much desired, and a string of liquor deaths was soon recorded.

  Thomas Daveney, a free man whom Phillip had made overseer of the government farm at Toongabbie and called ‘a most useful man’, now lived on his own land in Toongabbie, granted to him by Lieutenant-Governor Grose. There he drank himself to death in July 1795 with half a gallon of Cape brandy.

  Eleanor McCabe, a First Fleet convict, boarded a boat to Parramatta with her infant and her husband, Charles Williams, alias Christopher Magee, who had land near Rose Hill. With them was a woman named Green. When the boat overturned near Breakfast Point on the river—it was believed because of the drunkenness of all adult parties—both women and the infant were drowned. The eloquent and philosophic Magee, who was a gambling partner of James Ruse and who harboured American republican tendencies, buried his wife and daughter in front of his house, and was seen sitting in his doorway with a bottle of rum in his hand, drinking one glass and pouring another on Eleanor’s grave until it was emptied, ‘prefacing every libation by declaring how well she’d loved it during her life’.

  The colonial love affair with dram drinking had been set going, and it seemed that demons were released into the air. Spirits killed ‘a stout healthy young woman’, Martha Todd, by inflicting her with fatal gastritis. James Hatfield, a time-expired convict, came from Parramatta to consult the clerks about his coming land grant, drank too deep of the American spirits and died similarly. Another death from intoxication was that of John Richards at the area near Parramatta named the Ponds, a man with a grant of thirty acres, a First Fleeter and former Shropshire burglar. It was as if some were seeking suicide by liquor.

  As the offi cers lawlessy sold and traded liquor around the colony, Grose uttered warnings already unrealistic, counselling the officers that ‘it might be relied upon, that if it ever appeared that a convict was possessed of any of the liquor . . . the conduct of those who had thought proper to abuse what was designed as an accommodation to the officers of the garrison would not be passed over unnoticed’.

  Convicts found release also in gambling. John Lewis, an elderly convict, had the distinction in early 1794 of being the first man killed in Australia for a gambling debt—having boasted that he carried much money secreted into his clothes, he was found murdered and his body thrown into a ravine, where dingos had mauled it. It was believed that a card player to whom he owed money was guilty, but the suspicion was never proven. Convicts gambled so recklessly that some, after losing their provisions, money and spare clothing on games of cribbage and all-fours, were left ‘standing in the middle of their associates as naked, and as indifferent about it, as the unconscious natives of the country’.

  More significant than the individual deaths from drinking, and indeed the loss to offi cers of land former convicts sold them in return for liquor, was the reality that Grose had created a junta, and went so far in legalising it as to begin to substitute his military officers for civil magistrates Phillip had appointed during his later administration.

  Because of Grose’s casual manners, the rumour got around the convicts that he was not empowered to carry out the death sentence. John Crowe, a sailor aged fourteen when sentenced at the Hertford Assizes for burglary in the summer of 1787, had arrived on the Second Fleet and worked three years on public projects before he was locked up in the Parramatta guardhouse for some offence. He escaped down the river to Sydney, and stole some food from huts before swimming out to the American ship Fairy. The American sailors, their notions of freedom already established and given form by Jefferson’s Bill of Rights, were always a recourse for the escaping Australian convict. But any ship served as a chance for the desperate. When in 1793 the British Bellona was to leave Sydney, two time-expired convicts were allowed to sail on her, but Grose ordered the vessel ‘smoked’, and so controlled fires were set between decks which brought four other convicts choking and gagging out of their hiding places aboard.

  When Crowe was discovered on Fairy, he was taken ashore and locked in the black hole of the Sydney guardhouse. Again he escaped, and committed further burglaries in Parramatta. In December 1793, at the age of twenty-one, he was hanged to show that indeed the lieutenant-governor did have that power, and Collins wrote of this cautionary death that ‘there did not exist in the colony at this time a fitter object for example than John Crowe’.

  Yet even some of Grose’s soldiers wanted to get out. In August 1793 a number of them planned to seize a government longboat and sail it to the Dutch East Indies, as the Bryants had. One of them, Roberts, a drummer, was court-martialled and received 225 of his 300-lash punishment, and while ‘smarting under the severity’ gave up the names of his confederates. Two of the group, a corporal and a private, plundered other soldiers’ ammunition pouches and took to the bush. The Parramatta game-killers, convict shooters of kangaroos and
wallabies, were sent out to hunt them down, but whenever the two raided a farm they would tell the farmer to let everyone know they would not be taken alive. This mystified good Captain Collins who said that Grose provided his soldiers with comforts, had done away with the equal rations Phillip had so rigorously imposed on everyone, including himself, and ‘had indulged them with women’.

  The two were captured, and since Grose forbore to have them charged with a capital offence, the corporal was sentenced to 500 lashes, and the private to 800 in an attempt to make them content again with their posting.

  Phillip had earlier asked the British government to send to New South Wales free settlers who were intelligent, honest and good at farming. Early in Grose’s lieutenant-governorship, a store vessel, the above-mentioned Bellona, had arrived from England with so many supplies the storehouses could not contain them all, and provisions and flour were stacked in tiers in front of the store buildings. It also brought, along with seventeen healthy women convicts, the fi rst free settlers to leaven the mass of haphazard convict farming.

  Thomas Rose was a middle-aged farmer from Blandford, on board with his wife and four children. They had endured a rough journey in their berths below, for the timbers of Bellona seeped with water, and in rough weather admitted it in spurts. Rose was seen by the Sydney authorities as the natural leader of the free-settler group, which included Edward Powell, a farmer from Lancaster, and three other farmers who once had been crew members of the First Fleet’s Sirius, and so in some sense must have liked the place and now returned to it. They had all been offered assisted passages, a sign of the way future immigration to Australia might work.

  This group of perhaps more symbolic than substantial importance was rowed along the Parramatta River to choose land, and settled some eleven kilometres west of Sydney behind a screen of mangroves in an area which was thereafter known as Liberty Plains, near present-day Homebush. Here Rose was awarded 80 acres (32.4 hectares), and later a further 120 (48.6 hectares). The choice is puzzling, since Liberty Plains was a low-lying area of swamps and lagoons, and its tidal sediments held no nutrients. Maybe Rose was over-influenced by Major Grose in the matter. But soon he repented and moved with his family further west to the farmlands around Prospect Hill, and then to the richer alluvial country along the Hawkesbury River at Wilberforce.