Australians

by Thomas Keneally

  Sophie de Montollin, the wife of the superintendent of Port Phillip and governor-to-be of the ultimate colony of Victoria, had grown up in an environment of privilege as the daughter of a Swiss Councillor of State. She had met earnest young La Trobe when he arrived in Switzerland after travelling across the prairies with his famous American friend, the writer Washington Irving. His own book, The Rambler in North America, had just been published. Though an Englishman, Charles La Trobe had spent a great deal of time in Switzerland, and was probably educated there before becoming a mountaineer and a tutor to ‘good’ families. He was brave, intelligent and pious—a devout Moravian Methodist whose family had campaigned passionately against slavery. In 1835, though not wealthy, he must have seemed a good, reliable fellow to Sophie.

  He was offered the superintendency of the Port Phillip area because he had acted successfully as a rapporteur for the British government in determining how West Indian slaves could best be equipped for freedom. He was to have the overall management of the aggressive gentlemen who wished to occupy Port Phillip by mutual arrangement and without administrative claptrap. Sophie de Montollin settled with a will into the La Trobe hut in Port Phillip. Her husband was more tentative in his decisions—especially since he had to answer to a new governor, Gipps, in Sydney, and to the Colonial Office, and to deal with determined graziers. He was lord of a process he could not control.

  THE COLONY OF THE SAINTS

  The dominant spirits of South Australia were ambitious middle-class townsmen, often radical both in politics and religion. South Australia was their great gamble both in terms of real estate and Utopian hope. Hindmarsh, the first governor, as a fifteen-year-old had been the only officer to survive on the quarterdeck of the renowned Bellerophen at the Battle of the Nile in 1798. Some South Australian Company commissioners would come to wish it were otherwise. He had been promoted by Nelson himself on the victory and had lost an eye like his hero. Hindmarsh subsequently had a dogged rather than a dazzling naval career, and now he was still dogged, and not necessarily a complete captive of the capitalist mysticism of the leading settlers. With the best will in the world, however, it would be hard for a governor to know where his administrative power ended and the economic and commercial powers of the commissioners began. Before leaving London, Hindmarsh met and was charmed by Edward Wakefield, and thus, man to man, approved of his system. But an immigration agent, after meeting Hindmarsh, declared that South Australia would have ‘a little quarterdeck government’, narrow and hidebound. Hindmarsh was probably not the right person to deal with the hoped-for forthright, upright, Protestant settlers of South Australia. And to him, the place was a posting, not the thorough destiny it represented for the settlers. He knew its relative imperial value. ‘Pray, where is South Australia?’ one of the younger princes asked during the House of Lords debate on the South Australian bill. ‘Somewhere near Botany Bay,’ replied the Lord Chancellor.

  Hindmarsh arrived on the Buffalo, disgruntled, and concerned for his family of three daughters, a wife and a son. One observer wrote, ‘They have no place where they can walk or breathe unpolluted air. The bulwarks of the Buffalo are six foot [1.8 metres] high. On both sides of the main deck are rows of filthy hogs, kept in pens, generally in a horrid state of dirt and uncleanliness.’ In landing, Mrs Hindmarsh’s piano fell into the sea: culture was drowned.

  By the time he arrived in South Australia Hindmarsh had already come into conflict with the commissioners of the South Australian colonisation scheme. He quarrelled with Surveyor-General Colonel Light over the site of the capital of the colony. He also argued with Resident Commissioner Fisher. He suspended Robert Gouger and other public officers, and the commissioners complained of him to the Secretary of State for the Colonies.

  Despite the squabbling, on 28 December 1836 the province of South Australia was proclaimed in the earlier manner of Western Australia, by a huge gum tree on a grassy plain studded with peppermint gums and melaleucas, near the sand dunes of Holdfast Bay and at the mouth of Patawalonga Creek (near today’s Glenelg). The governor’s private secretary read the proclamation, a flag was hoisted, a party of marines fired a feu de joie, and a cold collation followed in the open air. The governor went about shaking hands with the colonists and congratulating them on having such a fine country. Then he mounted a chair and offered a toast to the King. The Adelaide hills sat behind the gathering of new settlers, the yellow kangaroo grass ran amidst trees all the way to their peaks. The natives of this rich coastal area looked on openly.

  The settlers, whether at Holdfast Bay or at Kangaroo Island where some others had landed, were meeting the full-blown summer reality of the place—the heat and the insects. ‘I can recollect perfectly well,’ one South Australian entrepreneur remembered, ‘the disconcerted and dismal look with which most of the first party regarded, from the deck of the ship, the dried and scorched appearance of the plains, which, to their English ideas, betokened little short of barrenness.’

  The local tribe, the Kaurna, seemed friendly. One of them, Panartatja, was taken out to a ship and dressed up in European clothes and would be dubbed Jimmy Rodney. Because of its dryness, South Australia might have had fewer than thirty thousand indigenes, but the number is merely an informed guess. They interested Hindmarsh, who wrote of them, ‘Instead of being the ugly, stupid race the New Hollanders are generally supposed to be, these are intelligent, handsome and active people, being far better looking than the majority of Africans. The women exhibited a considerable degree of modesty.’

  Now the first-comers were camped, like eastern convicts long before them, under canvas amidst scorched summer grasses, awaiting the delineation of their capital by the surveyor, Colonel William Light.

  Light was the son of a Portuguese Eurasian mother and an East India Company adventurer father, and had lived the early part of his childhood in Penang. He had fought in forty engagements in the Peninsular War without being wounded, and had reconnoitred the French lines by pretending to ride forward in the manner of a man severely injured. In the 1820s, he fought with the Spanish liberals against King Ferdinand and was badly wounded, and in the same period he and his mother were swindled out of their Penang property and wealth. At the time of his appointment he was suffering from tuberculosis. His relationship with his beautiful English wife had soured and they had separated. In South Australia he cohabited with a woman named Maria Gandy, an arrangement which meant that the founding settlers avoided him socially.

  The work load laid down for Light by the governor and commissioners would have killed him, had tuberculosis not claimed him in any case. He was to find, first, a commodious harbour, safe and accessible at all seasons of the year. Second, a considerable tract of fertile land immediately adjoining. Third, an abundant supply of fresh water. And so on, ending with tenth, a site for a gaol. One thing in which Hindmarsh and the commissioners were enlightened was in the instruction that Light would ‘make the streets [of the colony’s capital] of ample width, and arrange them with reference to the convenience of the inhabitants and the beauty and salubrity of the city; and you will make the necessary reserves for squares, public walks, and quays’.

  So Light was required, within a few months, to examine all the good harbours on 2400 kilometres of coast, found the first town and as many secondary ones as he had leisure for, and complete a complicated survey of about 40 500 hectares of country sections. All this in unexplored country, in the midst of a heatwave, amongst natives already alienated by the riffraff of whaling and sealing gangs, who had stolen their women away to Kangaroo Island.

  Hindmarsh was angry that the location of the capital had been left to Colonel Light. He wanted it to be either right across Spencer’s Gulf (near present-day Port Lincoln) or at Encounter Bay, near the mouth of the river which would become known as the Murray. By the time Light found the little river called the Port Adelaide River and the harbour upstream and the attractive Adelaide Plains, the first settlers were already there, pitching their tents. Heat
and flies and mosquitoes were their lot. A 13-centimetre centipede scared the new colonial secretary, Robert Gouger in his tent. Mrs Gouger was six months pregnant and found the huge temperature range—between 41 and 10 degrees Centigrade—hard to deal with. Just the same, George Stevenson, the first editor of the South Australian Gazette and Colonial Register, noted in the diary he kept with his wife: ‘We are all delighted with the aspect of the country and the rich soil of the Holdfast Plains. Mount Lofty and the hills before us are wooded to the very summits . . . on the plain there are numerous splendid trees of the eucalyptus species. The banksia rosa marinafolia was in great beauty. I have seen the Pickaway Plains of Ohio and traversed the prairie of Illinois and Indiana, but the best of them are not to be compared with the richness of the Holdfast Plains.’

  Now Light’s surveying equipment was applied to a landscape that had been subject to other and different readings over four millennia. In fierce and characteristic heat, with the breath of the Australian interior blowing on him, the city was laid out, a metropolis of imagination and fire whose limits were ‘the enchanted hills’, the Mount Lofty Ranges. In this landscape there were no geologic complications to distract Colonel Light. Many of the streets had a 30-metre width. A minimum width was 20 metres. But the terraces were broader still.

  THE MAIDEN OF AUSTRALIND

  Plans for a second Wakefieldian settlement followed the proclamation of South Australia. Under the aegis of the Western Australian Company, settlers were to take up land south of Perth, previously part of Thomas Peel’s allotment. The new settlement, subject to the authority of the governor of Western Australia, was to be named Australind, to honour the hope that its produce would become the basis for trade with India.

  Louisa Clifton was a young gentlewoman of devout Quaker family who had been chiefly familiar with her parents’ house at Wandsworth, just outside London. Her highly respected father, Marshall Clifton, seemed to seek no life beyond that of the capital, where he had served as secretary of the Admiralty Victualling Board. But he came home as early as 1839 engorged with a new enthusiasm. He was to be Chief Resident Commissioner of the Western Australian Company. Louisa read the company prospectus on Australind. ‘It is hardly possible to conceive a finer situation for a Town.’ It was a region of plentiful fish and exotic native birds, said the prospectus, including the famous black swan. It told the intending emigrant that land had been set aside for a college, pleasure gardens, hospital and observatory—which all implied that the town would quickly become a version of the world he was leaving.

  The Clifton family was related to Quaker reformers such as Elizabeth Fry, and to Edward Gibbon Wakefield, the systematic colonisation man, himself. If the move to Western Australia frightened Mrs Clifton as much as it inspired her husband, it also, with good reason, alarmed the wide-browed, lustrous-eyed, handsome girl Louisa. Though pursued by a suitor in England, Louisa wrote, ‘I chose Australia; dearest Mamma’s bitter tears have decided my wishes.’ Her suitor seemed shamefully relieved to see her off and gave her a packet of seeds.

  A week before the Cliftons’ ship left London, however, Lieutenant Grey arrived from Western Australia to say that the land intended for the settlement had been resumed by government. Grey also declared that the area was a veritable Sahara in any case. In early 1840 the emigrants set sail into this vacancy of promise, and after an average passage on a ship named Parkfield, landed and made contact with Western Australian surveyors at Port Leschenault, 165 kilometres south of Perth, who quickly came to the conclusion, by talking to the newcomers, that the whole effort was amateurish and unrealistic.

  In the first place, ‘Papa’s’ agent, sent ahead, had gone mad. But even so Louisa’s vigour of soul let her be cheered by the pretty aspect of the inlet and the shoreline. From here Mr Clifton set off with others to survey the new site of Australind, about 12 kilometres to the north of present-day Bunbury, and Louisa fulfilled the Christian duty of visiting the man who had become deranged. ‘He was lying nearly naked, dirty beyond anything, on a mattress in the corner of his tent.’ The poor man told Louisa that he wouldn’t like his wife, who had already landed, to stay in this country. At last the Parkfield carried them down from Port Leschenault to their encampment site. Mrs Clifton and Louisa were both charmed to see the neatly pitched tents and the beautifully wooded riverbanks.

  Still the women did not land, though within a few days the young men were off ashore on a kangaroo hunt with Governor Stirling. At last, the women came ashore into the camp and Parkfield sailed away, and Louisa and her mother and sister became tent-dwellers. Louisa was revived by camp life. ‘An immense fire of branches was soon lighted on the level ground a little distance below our tent, water boiled, and tea made, and having fortunately got up our plate chest containing knives and forks, teacups etc., we sat down to a welcome repast, and with more comfort than we could have imagined possible. I wish you could have seen the interior of our new abode, some sitting on the ground, others sitting on our mattresses rolled up; I making tea on a gun case seated on a hassock in the midst. By degrees all the young men collected to this centre of comfort and sociability.’ Memories of the solid comfort of a fully equipped London house were not permitted to cheapen the edge or resolve of life here and now. Louisa had brought with her a chest of clean linen and patterns and books and found that they had been all dampened, and she was compelled to turn the lot out onto Western Australia’s harsh ground to be dried in the sun.

  When a party of male settlers visited the camp, she was not impressed by what Australia had done to them. ‘Colonial Society! How little captivating or refined it is!’ One of the visitors was ‘vulgar and unprepossessing, young, rough, and of course in dress, to English eyes anything but a gentleman. The want of gentlemanly dress is an additional friction to “taste”. A very stupid dinner. I felt low spirited and requiring to be drawn out rather than to exert myself in conversation.’ It must have been bewildering and disappointing for a woman sustaining a ladylike life under canvas to discover the limitations of potential colonial husbands. Verbal sniping between men and women was common in the camp, but Louisa was determined not to let her standards slip and sink to the level of waspishness. Her brother, Gervase, had been very offended by a Miss Spencer’s unkind treatment and ‘unladylike conduct’. Had they been Englishmen or Englishwomen on a grand tour of Europe, Louisa could not have set her fellow settlers higher standards.

  Her father began to clear woods, or, more accurately, ‘set some Indians to clear’. At last, at the end of May 1841, the first public building, the storehouse, was finished and on a day of streaming rain, forty settlers were entertained in it, with the head carpenter and the thatcher prominent amongst them. Kangaroo soup, kangaroo pies and steaks, pork, beef, pease pudding and suet puddings were served. Soon thereafter, a year after the founding of the colony, the Cliftons received a party of visitors who included a Mr Eliot, Louisa’s future husband as it turned out, in their new habitation. ‘As the whole roof had not been thatched, the rain dripped through the canvas thrown over the aperture and the table and plates wetted and it obliged all the ladies to sit high up the table, so that poor Robert was left at the bottom with the children, Miss S., and our stupid young men.’

  Yet in this scatter of tents and half-finished huts, ‘I was in hopes that I had obtained the first contribution to our Australind museum in the form of some skins of beautiful birds that he [Mr Eliot] begged me to accept . . . He is a very droll person and I cannot quite understand him; truly and thoroughly amiable in the best and highest sense, and gentlemanly in every feeling.’

  Sheets of water came through their roof still, and Louisa and her sister, Ellen, slept habitually in wet beds. ‘But I found it acceptable nevertheless, being dead tired . . . No future settlers can suffer what we do; for when others come they will find things made for them and our experience available . . . Friends in England should be made acquainted with this Australian coast in this season . . . I feel horrified to think of people bli
ndly coming out at any time of year, to be exposed to such awful weather as this.’

  Louisa was speaking of the Western Australian winter, when a desert-like cold prevailed at night and all the year’s rain fell in fiercely concentrated bouts. At last, the Cliftons’ house of thin planks, with a rush thatching and a floor composed of a layer of bricks packed close and tight upon the sand, was finished. The news that her English suitor did not intend to follow Louisa to the colony made her declare that she was finished with men for good. The situation of two Aborigines brought before her father for theft evoked her best, but unavailing, feelings of Quaker compassion. ‘Some of them will be sent, I fear, to Rottnest [gaol] . . . but being deprived of liberty and independence so dear to wild man, they soon die of broken hearts . . . When will justice appear upon earth? Not I fear while white man who professes Christianity falls so far short of acting up to its first principles.’ In 1843 the Western Australian Company ceased to operate and its Australind holdings: land and any company equipment. Most emigrants had to go elsewhere—the labourers to look for work. Marshall Clifton lived on in the area on an Admiralty pension.

  Louisa also stayed, having married George Eliot in June 1842, and began an honourable career in the hinterland as a settler’s wife, the mother of young colonials, and an exponent of kangaroo cuisine.

  CHAPTER 19

  MYALL CREEK . . . AND BEYOND

  In the 1820s outposts like Bathurst, to the west of the Blue Mountains in New South Wales, had barely more than a hundred settlers, and the dream of the surrounding Wiradjuri was that they might be driven off forever. The leader of Aboriginal resistance in the area was a man named Windradyne (also dubbed by the white settlers ‘Saturday’). The Wiradjuri had been affronted by the destruction of native game, and did not understand why shepherds and pastoral foremen were so aggrieved when, in compensation, the tribespeople slaughtered livestock.