The Guugu Yimithirr retreated. Later an old man came up, carrying a lance without a point. Cook believed this was a sign of peace. The Guugu Yimithirr left their spears against a tree, and the Endeavour’s crew returned the spears of theirs that they had taken.
There were no more battles. But the Guugu Yimithirr refused to go aboard the Endeavour again. The peaceful contact had become the second skirmish in what would become a long, slow war.
Two hundred years later, we can see how the two groups misunderstood each other. The Guugu Yimithirr shared their food. They would have believed the English acted like enemies when they refused to share the turtles. Fire was a traditional weapon against enemies. Cook admitted in his diary that the ship had more turtles than they needed – the British simply objected to the Guugu Yimithirr taking ‘their’ property. And those on the Endeavour believed that all that they could take was theirs.
It took seven weeks to repair the ship. The crew stocked it with fish, stingray, turtle, shellfish, shark and greens like the wild ‘kale’. Bad weather kept them at Endeavour River for another two weeks after the repairs were complete, leaving them time to contemplate what was to come. The passage to the north was full of rocks, reefs and shoals and islands. Could they find their way through without disaster? The master suggested they should go back the way they’d come. If they went on they might be trapped, unable to turn round, or wrecked again.
Cook refused. If they turned back they’d have to beat into the strong wind from the south. Even with the new stocks from the Endeavour River they had only three months’ food. If they went back through the territory where they had been unable to find food, water or safe harbour, they would starve or die of thirst. Cook could only hope there would be a way ahead through the reef.
He ordered the ship to head out to sea, away from the coast and the reef. This would mean he could do no more mapping, but at least they might survive. It didn’t work. The wind drove the ship back onto the reef then dropped, leaving them stranded among the waves that could dash them against the rocks and coral.
At least the sea inside the reef was calm. They sailed back, inside the reef, then north. Slowly they wound their way through the rocks and islands. Was Torres Strait really there? Or would they have to try to take their roughly repaired ship all the way around New Guinea to get to Batavia? Finally, on Tuesday, 21 August, they were at the most northerly part of the continent. Cook named it York Cape.
Now they could sail westward. Torres Strait did exist, after all. Cook had also proved that New Holland was separate from New Guinea. He had mapped a new coast, and proved that a valuable strait and shortcut between the Indian and Pacific oceans existed. They were now within a few days’ sail of Batavia and what they assumed was safety. It was time to claim the rest of the land he’d mapped for the king. Cook wrote later: ‘I now once More hoisted English Colours, and in the Name of His Majesty King George the Third took possession of the whole Eastern coast from the above Lat. down to this place by the Name of New South Wales, together with all the Bays, Harbours, Rivers, and Islands.’
Once again, the ceremony mattered most to those who performed it. Cook must have known that his maps claimed the land he called New South Wales more firmly for Britain than flying the flag had done. Any ship that sailed this way would have to use English maps – and, in doing so, admit the English claim.
A mapmaker had won a country.
Death and triumph
The shipyards of Batavia repaired the Endeavour, but the crew weren’t safe yet. Also known as the ‘the white man’s graveyard’, Batavia was a Dutch creation of fetid swamps and polluted water, rife with diseases like typhoid and dysentery.
In the end, disease from Batavia’s squalid water would kill a third of the Endeavour’s crew. They had survived the soaring waves of the Southern Ocean, the gales of New Zealand and the teeth of the Great Barrier Reef. They could not survive the man-made filth of Batavia. Jonathon Monkhouse, the boy who had saved the ship, was one of those who died on the voyage home, the polluted water the Endeavour had taken on board continuing to kill so many of the crew that it might have become a ghost ship, with too few crew to sail her. But the ship, Cook, Banks and the goat made it home.
The goat, in particular, was a heroine. She died the year after the voyage, in April 1772, only two days after parliament had voted to give her a state pension. A poem in Latin by the celebrated Dr Samuel Johnson and inscribed on her silver collar was her epitaph:
Perpetua ambita bis terra praemia lactis
Haec habet altrici capra secunda Jovis.
Or:
In fame scarce second to the nurse of Jove,
This goat, who twice the world had traversed round,
Deserving both her master’s care and love,
Ease and perpetual pasture now has found.5
* * *
Terra nullius
Nearly two hundred years later, the legal basis for Cook’s claim - terra nullius, or an uninhabited country - would be challenged in the Australian courts. In the controversial 1971 Gove land rights case, Justice Blackburn ruled that there was no such thing as native title in Australian law. In 1992, Torres Strait Islander Eddie Mabo fought for and won recognition of his people’s traditional right to their island, the High Court of Australia issuing a judgment that was a direct overturning of terra nullius.
But the concept - and the legality of the British acquisition of the land - is still controversial. Did terra nullius really mean ‘uninhabited’, or ‘not subject to civilised rule’? The Indigenous nations of the time were arguably as civilised as British society, with its hangings, child labour, poverty, social inequities, female repression and abduction of sailors. Britain at the time was not a democracy. Few men could vote, and no women, and their Parliament was restricted in its powers. The Indigenous people lived lives of more comfort, health, security and leisure than most Britons.
They did not, however, have muskets - their cultures were more generous than confrontational. In the end, the muskets would rule. Perhaps this is the most honest summary: the British fought for the land against a people who often didn’t realise their land was being taken - or even that that anyone could ‘own’ land in the European fashion - until it was too late. The British won.
* * *
Cook’s log and Banks’s diary were combined and published. In it Cook gave a promising account of Australia:
… this Eastern side is not the barren and miserable country that Dampier and others have described the western side to be … In this Extensive Country it can never be doubted but what most sorts of Grain, Fruit, roots, etc., of every kind would flourish here were they once brought hither, planted and Cultivated by the hands of Industry; and here are Provender for more Cattle, at all seasons of the Year, than can ever be brought into the Country.
Cook was finally made captain, and his second voyage (1772–75) was possibly an even greater achievement than his first, finally disposing of the myth of the Great South Land. He crossed and recrossed the Antarctic Circle and the Pacific in long methodical sweeps from Antarctica on one side to Polynesia on the other using New Zealand as his base, coming within sight of the great banks of ice that edge the most southerly continent. This voyage brought him far more personal fame, as Joseph Banks had been given most of the public recognition for the discoveries of the first voyage.
Cook was persuaded to take what would be his final voyage in 1777. This was as secret an expedition as his first: supposedly to go to Tahiti, but then to head north to Alaska to find a passage in the northwest linking the Pacific and Atlantic oceans. (In these days of engines it is hard to appreciate how reliant ships were on the wind and currents, forcing them to take long routes that we would now wonder at.) Cook landed at Australia once more, at Van Diemen’s Land, to rest the crew after the gales of the Southern Ocean and to restock with firewood, fresh water and grass for the stock. He left three pigs behind so that they would breed up and feed any other crews that might nee
d stores. Luckily the pigs either died or were eaten before they could become feral: Tasmania was spared – for the moment – a feral pig problem. But the pigs Cook had left behind at Endeavour River are still breeding and devastating the land.
Cook did not find a northwest passage. When he met his end at Hawai’i in 1779 he was already exhausted and ill from too much journeying. Once again misunderstanding the local culture, he was clubbed to death in the surf as he tried to lead his crew to take hostage the king of Hawai’i, Kalani’pu’u, after the theft of a rowboat. Cook’s body slid under the bloodstained water and then was dragged away by the Hawaiians.6 The British officers demanded that his body be given back for burial. Only a slice of his thigh was returned, and then other parts wrapped in a feathered cape, recognisable only by the scar on the captain’s hands.
Cook would go discovering no more.
The public was fascinated by Cook’s voyage, Banks’s discoveries and the goat. But no one seemed to think it worthwhile to go back to New South Wales. It might be possible to grow grains and fruits on the east coast of New South Wales, but why should anyone bother taking them across the world on a voyage that would take about nine months? The west coast could have been useful to the Dutch as a supply port, but the east was too far away. Charts to a worthless land were worth nothing.
In 1772, just two years after Cook’s ‘discovery’, on yet another failed voyage to find the non-existent Terra Australis, Louis François de Saint Allouarn claimed the west coast of Australia, this time for the French. But neither France nor Britain really cared.
CHAPTER 7
The colony that didn’t starve
Sydney Harbour, 1963
We clamber across the rocks just after dawn. The world is empty apart from us, two ten-year-old girls, and a fisherman further down the beach, his dog nosing at a dead seagull. We snack as we go, bashing oyster shells with rocks and eating the briny flesh, nibbling shreds of seaweeds, sucking the nectar from flowers dotted in the crevices. In the cool light before adults wake up and the world of rules begins, it is a place of plenty.
At school we have been learning that the first colony starved here, near the cove once called Tumbalong, ‘the place where food is found’. (These days it’s Darling Harbour. Food is still found in abundance, though now you have to hand over money for ice-cream, sushi and nasi goreng, unless you are a seagull foraging in the garbage bins.)
That early starvation has been described over and over again in school history books, novels and television dramatisations. But the two of us wonder how could the first colony have starved when here, almost two hundred years later, the harbour is still rich in sweet, salty oysters and tough winkles? The old men with thin fags and grey stubble fishing from the rocks or casting into the waves along the beach almost invariably have a bag of fish, and sometimes – if we look admiringly enough – they give us a couple to ‘take back to cook for your breakfast, love’.
We were lucky not to catch salmonella, or at least get heavy metal poisoning – the 1960s harbour was a soup of industrial and household pollution. But I still remember the tiny bushes that decades later I’d learn bore edible fruits, the ground covers that gave edible seed for ‘breads’ to be cooked on hot rocks, and the fat-leafed plant we now call warrigal greens that can spread to a three-metre patch even in a drought and give enough veg to feed a clan.
It was a world of food. How could a colony have starved in a ‘living larder’, tended and planted over many generations to provide food no matter what extremes of weather? And if the colony didn’t starve, why has the myth persisted?
The base in the south
Australia’s first colony began only because of a complete misunderstanding of the site it was being sent to.
Australia had been known, and rejected, by the various colonial powers for centuries. But now it was in the right place at the right time – and so was its newly discovered fresh water, grass and presumed safe harbour of Botany Bay.
Britain had been at war with France and Holland, and further war seemed likely. The British urgently needed a new base in the south to supply their ships for both war and trade, in case they were no longer able to restock their ships at the Dutch-controlled Cape of Good Hope in Africa, or Dutch-controlled Batavia.
The problem was where to put it. Gambia? Too hot and barren. Das Voltas Bay in South West Africa, now Namibia? The scouting party said it was rocky, hot and without fresh water. But Sir Joseph Banks – who had seen the place that Cook named Botany Bay for a few days more than a decade before – said that it was the perfect spot for a colony, with plenty of grass, fertile soil, fresh water, a good sheltered harbour, and strong, straight timber not just for houses but for ships’ masts.
Botany Bay had none of these. Admittedly, Banks probably saw it at its most lush, with greenery and a few springs of fresh water. But even a wet year can’t make a poor harbour stormproof, nor make twisted trees into good straight timber or turn the springs Banks saw into a stream big enough to irrigate crops. Botany Bay was also too far away for a scouting party to go and check on conditions. James Cook might have given a much more sober assessment of Botany Bay, particularly its dangerous winds and treacherous sandbanks. But Cook was dead, and what Banks lacked in skill, knowledge and humility he made up for in enthusiasm and political influence. The First Fleet would sail an eight-month voyage on the word of well-connected but incompetent amateur botanist.
Supplying a new land
To give Banks his due, he did help ensure that the colony would be well supplied, personally drawing up lists of seeds, fruit trees and tools. Only parts of those lists survive, but they still show evidence of intelligent planning. Banks may have misjudged the vegetation, but he had noticed that the weather was hot and planned the fruit and vegetable lists accordingly.
The varieties of vegetable seeds, for example, were specified. Green savoy cabbage as well as york cabbage; one for fast cropping, the other for storage. Long orange carrot was probably a recent introduction from the Netherlands, where the vegetable growers had been breeding improved varieties; most carrots before this were white or pale yellow. ‘Prickly cucumber’ may have been apple cucumber, a heat-hardy variety grown in both South Africa and India at that time. ‘Speckled kidney beans’ may be the hardy ‘Freckles’ variety, good both fresh and dried, and excellent survivors in hot, dry climates. They might also have been runner beans, as these have a speckled seed and are extremely hardy. Banks may have chosen either variety because they did well in the hot, dry conditions of Cape Town and so, presumably, would flourish in New South Wales.
Among the seeds listed to be carried by one of the First Fleet ships, the Sirius, was ‘white beet’, useful both as sugar beet and for animal forage. Dwarf marrow peas would have been good both fresh and dried to make the staple pease pudding, boiled in its cloth with a little ham or bacon. Banks listed both ‘cabbage lettuce’, a sturdy hearting variety, and cos, named for the Mediterranean island and, again, a heat-hardy variety. There was ‘white broccoli’ as well as cauliflower, and twenty-six bushels of ‘Best onion seed’ – enough to sow onion seed for several years to feed the entire colony. Potatoes, rhubarb seed, hemp, flax and tobacco seed were recommended, and presumably much more besides in the lists that have vanished over the years.
There was also wheat, barley, buckwheat and oats, and pasture seeds: many hundreds of bushels with an extremely wide range. The Sirius alone carried 274 bushels of vegetable seeds, and well as plants of artichoke, horseradish, grapes, figs, strawberries, and many others, stored in wooden barrels, canvas bags, sacks and casks.
The cargo was divided between the First Fleet ships, so if one sank nothing irreplaceable would be lost. If the amounts of seed were similar to the Sirius’s twenty-six bushels of onion seeds, they were carrying enough to ensure that crops could be sown for several years, even if they failed to produce new seeds. Most vegetable seed is viable for at least five years, and sometimes decades, if stored properly, although an eigh
t month sea voyage in small ships ‘stored properly’ makes that a big ‘if’.
Banks also chose fruit trees that would suit both hot and cold climates, with an emphasis on the ones known to do well in Rio de Janeiro, where more fruit trees were taken on board. There were bananas, coffee and cocoa plants, which presumably failed, or more likely died in the chill of the Southern Ocean during the voyage, as there’s no record of them fruiting. While bananas and even coffee may fruit as far south as Sydney, no one who knew anything about cocoa plants would have recommended them for a climate so far from the equator. Banks recommended shaddocks, as well – a good choice, heat-hardy giant citrus fruits like overgrown grapefruit. The expedition’s Lieutenant David Collins also mentions ‘Indigo, Coffee, Ginger, Castor Nut, Oranges, Lemons, & Limes, Firs & Oaks’. At least one of the varieties of ‘lemon’ was probably citronelle, or what’s now known as ‘bush lemon’: thorny, drought resistant, but used extensively in the early colony as a prickly hedge to keep stock out of orchards or vegetable plots. Some trees were seedlings; most probably grated; others taken as cuttings.1
It would be difficult to convince free settlers to head across the world to an unknown land, therefore the colonists would be convicts. The tale in my school history books was that England needed a place to house the convicts they could no longer send to newly independent America. But it would have been cheaper to keep prisoners in English jails, or even the old ships on the Thames, than send them across the world with enough equipment to build a colony. It was only much later, when the colony was self supporting, and convicts were housed and fed by the landowners they were assigned to, that shipping criminals here became a relatively cheap option.
The school history books – and our wish to romanticise our ancestors – also say that most had been guilty of petty crimes like stealing a loaf of bread, or a handkerchief; that these were poor innocents, jailed for poverty and desperation. They weren’t; most had already been convicted before. Their crimes look minor because the magistrates and judges were sometimes compassionate men. A theft of goods worth more than a guinea meant death by hanging, so if the magistrates believed there was a chance of rehabilitation they would convict for stealing only a part of what had been stolen, or young men and boys were sent to the navy away from the English slums, smog-ridden, filthy and crowded, ruled by the leaders of criminal gangs and filled with an underclass of wretches who rarely lived to twenty. Children were often born with foetal alcohol syndrome, physically and mentally impaired, the babies fed gin instead of milk to keep them quiet – and gin was cheaper. It was cheaper than bread, too, and eased both physical and mental pain.
Let the Land Speak Page 14