by Jan Morris
The earlier annals of this city, all the same, were full of boldly self-reliant women, ever since the days of Mary Reibey and the Girl from Botany Bay. Many of the earlier female convicts were desperate people. They were desperate in anger and sorrow, one imagines, when one remembers the scores of babies who died on the voyages out, or hears for example (in 1838) the voice of poor Ann Mackintosh, terribly drunk, smothering her own child to death while crying to anyone who would listen, to life itself one feels, ‘you shan’t have my pretty dear, no, you shan’t have my pretty dear …’ But they were also desperate in defiance. The officers of the First Fleet seem to have agreed that the women convicts were more intractable, foul-mouthed and lascivious than the men. A fifth of them were probably prostitutes, it has been academically estimated; in 1802 an Irish political prisoner writing home to his sister said: ‘In this country there is Eleven Hundred women I cannot count Twenty out of that number to be virtuous. The remainder support themselves through the means of Ludeness.’ But at least one is left with an impression of spirited independence, and some of the early Sydney women transcended their vile circumstances to be remembered ever after.
Jolly Grace Lynch, for example, seems to have been the life and soul of the Parramatta Female Factory, a combination workshop, lying-in hospital, old-age home, refuge, reform-school and prison for the early women convicts. In this depressing place Ms Lynch proved utterly irrepressible. We see her, coming across a chimney-sweep in the factory kitchen instantly throwing her arms around him and kissing him, covering herself with soot and sending the other inmates into screams of laughter. We hear her letting loose a flood of ‘dreadful Oaths’ when her skimpy dinner is laid before her. Who she was, why she was there, where she came from history does not tell us, but it recalls her with a smile.
Then there was Ann Smithy who arrived in Sydney with the First Fleet at the age of thirty (she had allegedly stolen a pewter pot). She was evidently an old lag, and she was certainly no wimp. On the voyage out she told everyone that as soon as she could she would abscond, and hardly had she landed than she did so. Like Peter Morris, she was gone within a few days. She was never recaptured, but tantalizing clues about her fate have reached us. In 1790 a piece of linen found near Parramatta was supposed to be part of her petticoat. In 1798 fishermen sheltering in a cove at Port Stephens, about 100 miles north of Sydney, were told of a white woman living with Aborigines. And in 1803, when a whaler was attacked by pirates somewhere off Alaska, among those killed was a woman said to be named Ann Smith, and to have come originally from Sydney.
Many another woman tried with less success to escape her circumstances. We read of a poor soul called Elizabeth Power, illiterate, probably alcoholic, married for twenty years to an ex-convict, who walked out on her violent husband one day in the 1820s, taking with her £500 he had just earned from the sale of cattle. She planned to get away to Tasmania, where her married daughter lived, but everything went wrong. Friends let her down. She kept getting drunk. Crooked policemen relieved her of the £500. She was caught by her husband, ran away again, was caught again, was beaten, laid a complaint against the police for taking the money, and finally it seems accepted her destiny with a certain wry dignity. According to her husband he found her having a glass of rum and ginger-beer with a neighbour at a pub, and as he walked by she stretched out her hand and said: ‘Shake hands old man and kiss me, everything is all right.’1
A more lurid figure was Angelica Hallett, who attached herself in the 1840s to the well-known local artist Samuel Elyard. Elyard was a chronic depressive, and he claimed that Angelica, having dismissed his doctors, brewed for him a medicine of her own which not only made him curiously befuddled and excited, but also persuaded him to marry her. She threatened that unless he signed over his property to her, she would have him committed to a lunatic asylum, and she eventually drove him to madness. Worse, however, was to come. Abandoning Elyard, the appalling Angelica now stunned Sydney by revealing that she had all along been the mistress of the Governor himself, Sir Charles Augustus FitzRoy, whose dear wife had lately been dashed to her death against that tree in Parramatta. Sensation! FitzRoy found himself pilloried as an immoral hypocrite, and for a decade and more the name of Angelica Hallett sent horrid frissons through respectable Sydney society.2
Every Sydney decade has produced its memorable ladies, In the 1820s a resourceful Irishwoman known as ‘Pig Mary’ lived by extracting lumps of offal from the swamp by the slaughterhouse at the head of Darling Harbour, and selling them from door to door. In the 1830s some of the old women of the Rocks were said to be so rum-soaked that when they lit their pipes blue flames flickered from their lips. In the 1850s, reported an English visitor, when young women of Sydney went walking ‘yon hear the tinkle of their bunches of charms and nuggets, as if they carried bells on their fingers and rings on their toes’. In the 1880s teams of women cricketers played in the Domain, wearing peaked caps and long striped skirts, and Grace Fairley Robinson, defying the opinion of the Dean of the University Medical School that ‘she would be better employed if she got a nice frock and a nice man’, graduated as a Bachelor of Medicine. In the 1890s Ms Val van Tassell, ‘the only lady aeronaut in the southern hemisphere’, having parachuted out of a balloon over Bondi beach, landed safely in the middle of a cricket match at Coogee. In the 1920s two women were among the most powerful bosses of Sydney’s organized crime, rivals in the drug trade and in the management of prostitution in Darlinghurst:1 if one can judge from the police photographs they were a tough pair indeed – Kathleen Leigh from Ireland wears a fetching silk scarf and looks murderous, Latilda Devine from London wears a cloche hat and buckle shoes and looks speciously humble. In the 1930s six women pilots took their biplanes into the air to greet Amy Johnson at the end of a record-breaking flight from England. In the 1950s Mary Gilmore, poet, teacher, political activist, folklorist, feminist, Dame of the British Empire, reached the climax of her career as one of Sydney’s most celebrated citizens, with streets, schools, scholarships and awards named for her, and a portrait in the State Art Gallery by William Dobell which, like Queen Victoria on the Customs House, memorably demonstrates the Sydney sneer (she was ninety-two when it was painted, and said it ‘captured something of her ancestry’).
Sydney remains rich in women of forceful character. Occasionally one still notices the old feminine inflection – listen at a café table, and the baritone demand for a beer will end in a downward cadence, the soprano asking for a white wine will rise. By now though it is a dying habit, and seems to me purely dialectal, rather than sociological. Today Sydney women seem as emancipated as women anywhere else in the western world, and indeed the city has perhaps more than its fair quota of decisive if not pugnacious ladies, ladies of society, ladies of the TV screen, business executives and academics. They are often wonderfully adept at the monologic system of converse, and sometimes resort to a particularly penetrating timbre of voice, once daringly described by John Douglas Pringle as ‘a strident saw-like whine’.1 They can be very impressive, and they can be unfortunately lofty, like the wife of the politician who, looking around for a waiter after a gala performance at the Opera House, peremptorily handed her empty glass to the conductor.
I found myself recently at a school reunion at the former Fort School, above the Rocks, where a crowd of old girls were greeting one another as old girls do. How admirable they were, I thought! How nice to each other, how kind to me, how homely, how full of smiles, how breezily be-flowered of dress and carefully permed of hair, how jolly, how open and assured!2 They looked likely to live for ever, so free of stress they seemed, and indeed one hears of some truly splendid veterans in Sydney – the ninety-year-old woman who, during the First World War, addressed a letter to ‘Any Wounded French Soldier’, and who has been corresponding faithfully from that day to this with Monsieur Georges Temel; the seventy-nine-year-old ballet dancer who appears in the Australian Ballet’s productions, and who made her debut in classical ballet when she was sixty-thr
ee; the celebrated actress who, besides appearing regularly in stage plays, offers a popular cabaret act at the age of ninety-one.
But then many of the younger women are formidable too. No incorrigible transportee could cock a snook at destiny more effectively than some of the strapping girls one sees, in stubby shorts and shirts, cleaning the streets of Sydney; and one of the most impressive people I know in this city is the woman pilot who flies, in tandem with her husband, the Aquatic Air seaplane services up the coast to Newcastle – immensely competent, dapper and good-looking, to be seen at the seaplane jetty between flights, her blonde hair pinned up with a blue ribbon, simultaneously joking, drinking tea, checking the log and smoking a cigarette, like an image of Australian Womanhood in a propaganda poster.
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Originals, male and female, have always been a well-recognized Sydney minority. The great mass of the Sydney population is probably as conformist as any other, but it likes to think of itself as a society of individualists, and has always cherished its exceptions. I suppose the convict system, which tried to reduce all its subjects to numbers, engendered a backlash which has never died.
Affectionate tribute is still paid for instance to William King, the Flying Pieman, who came to Sydney as a free schoolmaster in 1829 but became a seller of hot pies and a virtuoso walker – he walked from Sydney to Parramatta and back twice a day for six consecutive days, he walked 1,634 miles in five weeks and four days, he pulled a woman in a gig for half a mile, he picked up 1,000 corn-cobs set a yard apart in less than an hour, and he performed various esoteric feats of pedestrianism while carrying goats, dogs, cats, rats and mice. William Bland, a convict surgeon who became the most fashionable physician in Sydney in the 1830s, is fondly remembered for his famous flying machine, a kind of airship called the Amotic Machine (sic); it never actually flew, but was to be propelled originally by manpower, later by steam, and was supposed to be capable of carrying five tons of cargo from London to Australia in five days. In one of the official publications of the Royal Botanic Gardens a large photograph honours William James Chidley, one of the most peculiar of all the peculiar public speakers who have mounted their soapboxes in the Domain; for many years in the early part of this century he was always to be found there, dressed in a white Roman tunic, declaiming wild ideas on sex and healthy living, and periodically detained either on suspicion of lunacy, or on charges of indecent language and offensive behaviour.
Sanctioned by such illustrious examples, oddballs still seem to be erally tolerated in Sydney, and numerous eccentrics of one kind d another wander the Circular Quay, or sprawl magnanimously on the Hyde Park benches. Quirks and anomalies abound, and there is thing wrong with showing off in this city. One often sees people in street, old as well as young, rich and poor, blatantly soliciting the public amazement. When I first came to Sydney there was a local celebrity whose life and reputation gloriously exemplified these atudes. In her time Bea Miles, who died in 1973, was certainly one of the city’s favourite identities. She had been expensively educated bbotsleigh Church of England School for Girls), but had made herself into a walking emblem of bloody-mindedness in the heroic tradition of the early convicts. A burly woman of genial countenance, by private means, she stood for everything free, disrespectful and entertaining, and detested, as she said, all ‘priggery, caddery, obbery and smuggery’. Everyone knew her. She was usually dressed in an old cotton dress, a sun-visor and men’s black shoes, carried satchel containing books by fellow spirits like Swift and H. L. Hencken, and was often found declaiming Shakespeare by heart in the Domain. Sometimes she was seen diving into the ocean with a knife in her mouths looking for sharks. For years this magnificent original maintained a personal feud against bus-conductors (too officious) and -drivers (too arrogant): sometimes she spent all day riding pro around on buses, chivvying bus-conductors but greeting admirers everywhere, and once she hailed a taxi and told the driver to ke her the 2,600-odd miles to Perth – which he did.
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There is a café at the opulent suburb of Double Bay (‘Double Pay’ to the wags) which Sydneysiders from Central Europe frequent. I like to go there too, to observe in his fulfilment a minority figure who was not so long ago called The New Australian – the first-generation immigrant, that is, from a country other than Britain. On the terrace at the Cosmopolitan the New Australians are no longer new, and have clearly prospered since they first came to Sydney thirty or forty years ago. Their children are absolute Australians by now, but they themselves behave just as though they are in their distant capitals of long ago. Here four men with coats slung over their shoulders smoke small cigars and passionately argue about politics – generally in still heavily accented English, sometimes in Ruritanian. Here a couple of leathery ladles, furred and proudly diamonded, sit in lofty silence over aperitifs. There is a smell of coffee and continental cigarettes. A few solitary men with signet rings read papers that ought to be called something like Y Sblygod, but are really Sydney Morning Heralds.
Yet there in the winter sunshine they all look complacently at home, and they are indeed essential to the Sydney idiom. I engaged a couple of them in conversation once. They were Hungarians, who had come to Sydney half a lifetime before out of a shambled Europe, had astutely enriched themselves and lived happily ever after. When I remarked that they seemed very fortunate people, they heartily agreed: they were extremely fortunate, Sydney was incomparably beautiful, and Australia was without question the Best Country in the World.1
Thirty years ago the New Australian was still an exotic and possibly a threat, even though in those days the immigrants all came from Europe. When the Sydney Municipal Board took to advertising itself in the various languages of its tax-paying citizenry – MESTSKA RADA SYDNEY, or SYDNEY VAVOSI TANBACS – old-school Sydneysiders thought the worst had happened. After all, I was told at the time, some of the immigrants had come from ‘the kind of country you take pills for’. Yet in fact foreigners had always played important roles in the development of Sydney – beginning with the half-German Phillip himself. Phillip’s Surveyor General, Augustus Alt, was a native of the Duchy of Hesse (and liked to call himself Baron), and his Superintendent of Convicts was a Rhinelander named Phillip Schaffer, who went on to start a thriving vineyard and was thus the Father of the Australian Wine Industry.
There were foreigners among the First Fleet convicts, too. Scooped out of the London underworld, their lives took a queer turn indeed when they found themselves shackled and confined on the other side of the world. There were two Swedes, two Frenchmen, a Norwegian, an Indian, a pair of unfortunates classified as ‘probably Scandinavian’ and ‘probably Dutch’, and at least twelve black men of various provenances. One of these, Black Caesar from Madagascar, was among those who never did knuckle under to authority. Transported for seven years for theft, he was twenty-three when he arrived in Australia, and he remained defiant until the day he died. He stole things, he ran away, he robbed Aborigines and white settlers alike. Whether in chains or in solitary confinement, he never gave in. Nothings he proudly declared, could ‘make him better’. Finally he led a band of absconding toughs into the bush and became the first of Australia’s bushrangers: and so, free to the end despite everything, contemptuous still of all officialdom, he was shot dead by another convict, in 1790, there being a reward on his head of five gallons of rum.
Another famous black man was Billy Blue, a favourite character of Macquarie’s Sydney. He is variously said to have arrived in Sydney in 1810 on board an American ship, or to have been transported as a convict from England in 1796, but then much about him was equivocal, for he was an enthusiastic liar. Macquarie, who employed him as a boatman, or perhaps a water bailiff, or perhaps in the Government stores, found him as entertaining as everybody else did, and gave him eighty acres of land on the north shore, almost immediately opposite Sydney Cove. This made Blue’s fortune. He started a ferry service across the harbour, and on the strength of it, like his exact contemporary the ferry captain Corn
elius Vanderbilt in New York, was known to everyone as the Commodore – later the Old Commodore. He was a great clown. Sometimes he made his passengers row the ferry-boat themselves, just for fun, and even in his prosperity he was a shameless beggar – he habitually carried a sack over his shoulder to accommodate the takings. Nobody knew how old he was, but he himself claimed to be seventy when he married, and he was popularly thought to be a centenarian when he died. Blue’s Point is named for him, and there is a pub up the road from his ferry-station called the Old Commodore still.
Americans have frequented Sydney since the eighteenth century. They had just acquired a nationality of their own then, had seen their owe penal colonies absorbed into the freest of Republics, and were perhaps given a certain schadenfreude, or alternatively a certain fellow-feeling, by the spectacle of the transportees. They also very soon saw chances to be grasped. American trading ships were among the first to find their way to Sydney, and Americans were prominent in Sydney’s early whaling and sealing industries – who but New Englanders would have called an inlet in Sydney Harbour Chowder Bay? They have made themselves at home in Sydney ever since, and the countless Americans living in the city now are almost undetectable. The author Paul Theroux once wrote that only in Australia – perhaps only in Sydney, I would guess – could Americans abroad convincingly submerge their nationality in another, and American women especially seem easily assimilated into the civic style, cheerfully putting on weight and developing opinions well beyond the conventional perimeters.