From the Edge

by Mark Mckenna

  Campbell returned to Calcutta shortly after Hamilton’s death, having sold most of the Hunter’s shipment for a handsome profit and purchasing harbour-frontage in preparation for his return as a merchant on a more permanent basis. In Calcutta, from late 1798 until August 1799, he continued to trade in ‘wines and goods of every description’ with William and John Clark. Before Campbell returned permanently to Sydney, the Clarks entered a new partnership with another Scot, Allan Maclean, a firm that was still trading when Campbell left Calcutta for his new life in Australia in early 1800. Two months later, William Clark’s death was reported in the Calcutta press: ‘30 April, William Clark, died in Calcutta, aged 32, buried in the South Park Burial Ground’, today one of the oldest cemeteries in the city.43

  Whether Clark died from one of the countless tropical diseases that killed thousands of Europeans in late-eighteenth-century Calcutta or from some other cause long related to his ordeal in Australia is difficult to know. During these years it was not uncommon for European residents of the city to ‘gather together in the cold season just to congratulate each other on having survived’.44 Perhaps Clark had decided that he would never again return to New South Wales. Perhaps he walked himself not only to Sydney but also out of the entire country forever. Like Hamilton, yet unlike every other person who died as a result of the Sydney Cove’s misadventure, Clark died under the weight of his memories and still bearing the physical scars from his trial in the wilderness, the last of the ship’s leading men to fall.

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  William Clark never published any further account of his experience in New South Wales. His brother John probably inherited his precious journal, which likely remained with William until his death, along with his other possessions. In 1802, John Clark returned to England and filed his will before travelling north to his birthplace in Campbeltown where he died a wealthy man on 21 June 1804. He left a substantial inheritance to his ‘nephew’ William Clark, whom he encouraged to sail to Calcutta as soon as he turned eighteen, and there establish himself as a merchant as his uncles had done before him. In the days after John Clark’s death his relatives searched his house looking for his will. They claimed to have found it in a ‘small travelling portmanteau which had arrived with the deceased but a very few days before from London and in which he frequently kept his papers of moment and consignment’. He had apparently crossed out several sections of his will, which they testified had indeed been made in his hand and not in one of their own. Regardless of their intentions, the ‘Bengal merchant’ John Clark had accumulated enough riches to keep most of his extended family members financially secure for the rest of their lives.45

  When I visited Campbeltown in late 2014, I held a faint hope that the contents of John Clark’s portmanteau (including the Holy Grail—William Clark’s journal) might be found somewhere in a local archive or in a forgotten trunk of family memorabilia kept by one of his descendants. I combed local libraries, museums and historical societies and the state archives in Glasgow. I published the story of the wreck in local newspapers to alert as many people as possible to my search. Silence. But I did come away with the unforgettable memory of Clark’s homeland: the bare, windswept, impossibly green hills of Kintyre and Arran and their run of tight-knit towns huddled on the north-east edge of the Atlantic. Of the world that existed in the late eighteenth century, little remained save the simple, elegantly carved, medieval Celtic cross that stood in the town’s main street. I left Scotland mindful of the courage and sheer gumption displayed by Clark and Hamilton in journeying so far from their homeland. The steps they took to advance their wealth and knowledge, and the cultural differences they encountered, were far greater than anything we could possibly experience today. Theirs was truly a journey into the unknown.

  In years of searching, my most remarkable find was not in Scotland but in the Mitchell Library in Sydney, when on little more than a hunch, I requested a box entitled ‘collection of pamphlets consisting mainly of Australian biographies’. Apparently, somewhere in this collection there was a cutting relating to Captain Gavin Hamilton. It proved to be far more than a mere biographical reference. In the very bottom of the box I found a large envelope with the handwritten title: ‘Captain Gavan Hamilton and the Campbell’s of the Wharf and Duntroon’. Inside was a batch of correspondence from the first decade of the twentieth century that brought me closer to Hamilton than I had ever expected to come.

  The most surprising document in the collection was a letter written on 18 April 1910 by John Hamilton of ‘The Pound’, Heathcote, Victoria to Captain JH Watson, vice-president of the Australian Historical Society. Responding to Watson’s article in a Sydney newspaper on the wreck of the Sydney Cove and the burial of Gavin Hamilton, John Hamilton offered a rare glimpse into his family history. His father was ‘Captain Peter Hamilton, mariner and shipowner at Port Glasgow 1840’, who was born in ‘1796’ on the ‘Isle of Arran’. Peter was Gavin Hamilton’s nephew. With his parents and young family, nine in all, he left Scotland in October 1841 bound for Port Phillip on the barque Welcome, captained by the 19-year-old Henry Morris. He had promised the ship’s owner that he would watch over Morris and be sure that ‘everything was right on the way’. Everything did go smoothly until the ship tried to enter Port Phillip Bay on 13 February 1842 but was forced back due to strong northerly winds. When the Welcome finally managed to reach The Heads on 22 February, the ship was buffeted by gale-force winds and storms off Cape Nelson. Moments after Peter Hamilton left instructions with two men at the wheel and walked forward along the deck, a large wave ‘smashed 16 feet of the bulwarks’ and swept him overboard. He was never seen again. The waters of Bass Strait had claimed two members of the Hamilton family. Peter lost his life only a few days’ sail from where his uncle was shipwrecked forty-four years earlier. After relating the tragic tale of his father’s death, John Hamilton then turned to the story of the Sydney Cove, offering a remarkable summary of the correspondence his ancestors in Arran had received from his great-uncle Gavin Hamilton in the 1790s:

  This statement I am going to give you about Gavin Hamilton is what I heard from my mother & eldest brother who are both dead now. My mother was born in 1806 & died in her 94th year … The last letter my Grandfather received from Gavan was from India saying you need not expect me home for some years yet as I am about to sail with a full cargo to a new & distant land but he did not say where the land was. He had been away for 6 years then trading somewhere. The next word we had from India was that Gavan & his ship had never reached the port of destination, she had become a total wreck & all hands lost, it did not say where she was lost. As my grandfather heard he had some property out at Bengal he wrote out to see about it. The word he got [from] home was that his papers had all been lost in the wreck & they could not do anything about it …46

  These few words of family oral history conjured another world, one in which lands still remained ‘unknown’ and in which time, distance and communication were imagined on a completely different scale. A world where Gavin Hamilton could think of sailing to an unnamed ‘distant land’ and write Shackleton-like to his family: ‘do not expect me home for some years’. Robert Campbell or William Clark undoubtedly wrote from Calcutta with news of the loss of the ship although it is possible that Hamilton had also written to his family from Sydney. In a later letter to Watson, penned in 1910, John Hamilton implied that such correspondence existed: ‘My sister wrote home to our cousins at Arran to see if their mother (my aunt who died a few years ago aged 86) must have destroyed all the letters. I also think the same as you do that we shall not learn anything further’.47 Old letters—the stuff of history—consume too much space for the living. But Gavin Hamilton’s story lived on in another way. When the old Sydney Burial Ground on George Street was closed in the late 1860s, Hamilton’s was the only ‘legible headstone’ left standing. The graverobbers and stray pigs that had disturbed so many other graves in the cemetery over the years appeared to have accorded him unusual resp
ect. In the same envelope in which I found John Hamilton’s letter was another letter to Watson from F Campbell of Yarralumla, the grandson of Robert Campbell. Written in June 1910, it told the story of how Hamilton’s grave was moved to Rookwood.

  [Hamilton’s gravestone] was placed there by the late Hon. John Campbell of Campbell’s Wharf (Campbell & Co.) some fifty years or more ago, who also took care the bones were conveyed carefully from the site of the present Town Hall to the necropolis at Rookwood. In regard to the possible existence of any authentic diary of these heroic sailors sufferings, I should under the circumstances have very grave doubts.48

  After his return to Sydney in 1800, Robert Campbell established himself as one of the colony’s most successful merchants and squatters. As part compensation for the loss of one of his ships, he eventually received an extremely generous grant of over four thousand acres (1600 hectares) of land near Queanbeyan, which he named Duntroon. Throughout his later life, Campbell told the story of the wreck of the Sydney Cove to his family and friends on countless occasions. Long after he died, the details of the story in the oral history of the family blurred. Hamilton became Clark. He was both captain of the ship and the man who led the surviving walkers to Sydney where he died a hero’s death, ‘laid up by his sufferings’. But the depth of the Campbell family’s debt to Hamilton was amply illustrated by the poignant story of Robert’s eldest son, John, who had listened to his father tell the story so many times as he grew up, personally accompanying Hamilton’s remains for reburial in Rookwood Cemetery. In both families the saga of the Sydney Cove became an origin story that explained their presence in Australia. In 1997, the bicentenary of the wreck of the Sydney Cove, Hamilton’s descendants gathered on Preservation Island to commemorate the event. The survival of the story in national memory was another matter.49

  The names that were eternally marked on the map of the Furneaux Islands after the wreck of the Sydney Cove—Clarke Island, Preservation Island, Hamilton’s Road, Armstrong’s Channel and Rum Island—were not eligible to be the names of the nation’s discoverers. From the moment George Bass returned in the Reliance after establishing the existence of Bass Strait, his tiny vessel was ‘consecrated’ by the colonists in Sydney. As the French naturalist and historian Francois Peron astutely observed after his time in the colony, Bass’s vessel was ‘preserved in [Sydney] harbour, with a sort of religious veneration: some snuff boxes have been made out of its keel, of which the possessors are both proud and jealous; and the governor himself thought he could not make a more acceptable present to our chief than a piece of the wood of this sloop, encased in a large silver tooth-pick box; round which were engraved the principle particulars of the discovery of [Bass] straits’. In a convict colony desperate to establish respectability and a more honourable founding history than the one thrown ashore by the miscreants of Great Britain, the story of the Sydney Cove was of little use save as an accidental usher to far more worthy events. Yet if Bass and Flinders knew the country at all, it was largely from the deck of their ships as they mapped the periphery of an unknown land. They only made the occasional foray inland and their judgement of what they saw was swift. As Hunter said of Bass’s journey in early 1798, he made ‘several excursions into the interior of the country’ on his way back to Port Jackson, and ‘found in general a barren, unpromising country, with very few exceptions, and were it even better, the want of harbours would render it less valuable’. Clark knew the coastal lands of southern New South Wales far more intimately than Bass and Flinders. The land they found bare, he found fertile. Every inch of the coastal country they had surveyed through the eyes of a telescope, he had traversed on foot. The country was indelibly imprinted on his soul.50

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  Throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the wreck of the Sydney Cove and William Clark’s epic trek appeared briefly in general histories of maritime exploration and occasionally in the Australian and British press. The Lascars were almost always reduced to minor bit players or denigrated for their lack of ‘initiative’, while the ‘Aborigines’ appeared more often than not as sources of hindrance rather than help.51 At other times, they were maligned for having ‘either harried the exhausted men or carelessly [thrown] them the remains of [their] savage meals’.52 These heroic renditions often involved what appear in retrospect as diversionary spats over the ‘first white [man] to set foot on the soil of Victoria’, ‘the first to set foot on Bass Strait soil’ or mistaken claims that the Sydney Cove was the ‘first wreck of a British vessel in Australian waters’.53

  In the early twentieth century, one newspaper account suggested that the shipwreck survivors did not qualify as true discoverers. Clark’s party apparently did little more than test the ground for more worthy characters such as George Bass, who was really ‘the first white man to tread the shores of the Southern Province’.54 In 1947, a memorial was erected at Coalcliff to mark the 150th anniversary of Clark’s discovery of coal, and another in 1997 at Tathra on the New South Wales south coast, to commemorate the bicentenary of ‘17 brave sailors’ ‘desperate walk to safety’.55 In a futile attempt to invest the walkers with nobility, the maverick historian Isaac Selby wrote a 5-act play in 1956 entitled The Pilgrims of New Holland. Fortunately, Selby’s wooden script was never performed.56 No matter how hard they tried, whether by harping on the first white man theme, the beginning of the sealing industry, the discovery of Bass Strait or returning again to the discovery of coal, the tellers could not deny that the story had passed ‘utterly out of the memory of men’.57 Not until January 1977, when a team of Launceston divers found the remains of the Sydney Cove at the very moment interest in Australian history was booming, was the wreck and surrounding area legislated as an ‘historic site’. Diver Ken Atherton found the ship ‘sitting in a sand bar in about 6 metres of water … all that was showing was two or three planks of wood, the rudder and the rudder stock’.58 After delicate excavations of the wreck in the 1990s, which eventually resulted in artefacts from the Sydney Cove forming the basis of a permanent exhibition at Launceston’s Queen Victoria Museum, excavations of land sites on Preservation Island in the 2000s, and the ongoing research and publications of maritime archaeologist Mike Nash over more than two decades, the story of the Sydney Cove was finally lifted from relative obscurity to greater prominence.59 The Scout Associations of Victoria and New South Wales staged a re-enactment of the walk for its bicentenary in 1997. When they reached Sydney they placed artefacts from the wreck of the Sydney Cove with the remains of Gavin Hamilton in Rookwood Cemetery.60 And in 2012, Sydney Harbour Foreshore Authority sponsored a creative ‘Bollywood’ interpretation of the ship’s voyage ‘as told though the eyes of an 11-year-old Indian-Australian girl’.61 The story was gaining greater traction in local communities and slowly becoming more inclusive. Yet the most difficult part of the story to grasp—the exchanges between Clark’s party and the Aboriginal people they met during their long walk north—remains the source of its greatest significance and mystery.

  Relics from the Sydney Cove in storage, Queen Victoria Museum, Launceston, Tasmania, 2013

  Contemplating the artefacts from the Sydney Cove that rest behind glass in the Queen Victoria Museum at Launceston—Indian leather shoes, clay pipes, an hourglass, the broken mouthpiece of a flute, exquisite Chinese porcelain, stray pieces of the ship’s timbers smoothed and sculpted into corporeal stillness after two centuries lying on the ocean floor, bottles of ‘pale ale’ with the Campbell & Clark imprint still visible on their wax seals—each object painstakingly labelled, numbered, catalogued and memorialised, it is possible to see how we create history through material remains far more readily than we do through the telling of stories alone.

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  To exhume the great drama at the heart of the story of the wreck of the Sydney Cove is to grapple with the central, elusive drama of Australian history itself: the encounter between Aboriginal people and the strangers who came across the seas to claim their lands.
Through the eyes of William Clark we glimpse the different coastal territories and cultures of Aboriginal people to the south of Sydney, and through the Lascars, shadows though they may be on the pages of Clark’s journal, we witness how ‘subject’ peoples were forcibly swept up by the British Empire’s relentless pursuit of knowledge and wealth. And in the months-long struggle between Clark, Thompson and the carpenter over how to ‘handle’ Aboriginal people, we find the embodiment of the ongoing dilemma of British colonisation: how should ‘we’ deal with ‘them’? Should we try and understand Aboriginal people? Should we recognise and respect their cultural difference, or should we ask them to speak, work, pray and think like ‘us’?

  The story of Clark’s walk along the coast is one of strangers who pass through vast areas of the country and leave Aboriginal cultures intact. Nearly all the party’s contact with Aboriginal people was peaceful. If not for the generosity of those they met along the way, all seventeen walkers would have perished long before they reached Sydney. There was in fact very little conflict. It is overwhelmingly a story of cooperation and hope. Perhaps now, after more than two centuries, we finally have the eyes for what took place on the beaches of New South Wales in 1797.