Leviathan

by John Birmingham

  There was a bushfire brigade launch down there, on standby at the mouth of Bonnet Bay. Deputy Captain Peter Carter, who had felt the rapid increase in wind speed, watched a seven-metre tall wall of flame accelerate through bushland he and mate Scott Ireland had recently hosed down. Around three-thirty they saw the fire make the jump. The burning sparks arced over eight hundred metres to land in the dry brush. A spot fire burst into life. It was about the size, Carter thought, of a family car. Then whooomph! Within seconds it had detonated into a furious blaze as big as three football fields, and the whole hill beneath Woronora Crescent was alight.

  Spot fires had broken out elsewhere in Como as well. As Carter and Ireland watched the start of the Glen Reserve holocaust, about two kilometres away hot ash and smoke were rising from behind the Jannali High School. This outbreak quickly spiralled out of control and engulfed twenty houses and the Como West Public School. Called to Woronora Crescent by a radio message for urgent assistance, Detective Sergeant Beresford saw a huge fireball come barrelling up from the valley below to roar over a couple of police vehicles and ignite trees on the other side of the road. At one minute to four the main body of the fire leapt right over the massive cliff face and fell on the undefended street. It took out the church down near Bindea Street first. A fire-fighter named Reid who had driven about three hundred metres along Lincoln Crescent saw that the houses at numbers 36 and 38 were going up. He travelled another fifty metres to park outside number 19. Monstrous liquid rivers of flame were pouring over the ridge line at eighty kilometres an hour and the sky was a blanket of fire three metres above him. Visibility shrank to less than two metres and spot fires ignited three houses in a row. Home owners and fire-fighters extinguished them, but then number 27 exploded in a massive roiling plume which could not be doused.

  Up at 39, Richard Dickin had watched the deteriorating situation with alarm. When he saw the geyser of flame, maybe sixty metres high, which burst over the crest of the hill to incinerate the church down the street, he told his wife Mary and the two girls to get ready. They were out of there. Their house, which Richard had spent some time preparing just in case, was one of the sturdier homes in a street which still contained numerous fibro cottages from the postwar boom. It was a brick dwelling of two storeys on a strong base of Hawkesbury sandstone. It was solid, much loved and kept in immaculate condition. It would not last more than a few more minutes. Suddenly the windows blew out of neighbour David Kelk’s place. Kelk, who had put considerable energy into his own precautions, rushed from the house, which was instantly filled with smoke and hot ash, to find all of the trees in his garden alight, along with his eaves and fibro fence. It was an awesome sight, but nothing compared to Dickin’s house. That was an inferno. Driven back by the blistering heat, Kelk was quickly found by a couple of fire-fighters and ushered away with his wife.

  Inside 39 the family and their two dogs piled into the car for a quick escape. As the garage door opened however, they were confronted by the savage cremation of the front of their house which David Kelk had just seen. Aute at the top of the drive had gone up and the furious torrent of fire blasting up from the reserve was driven right into their faces by the wind. Richard Dickin hurriedly shut the door and they fled back into the house, sheltering inside the bathroom. Knowing they couldn’t stay there, Dickin went to search for an escape route through the back yard. While he was away fire burst from Catherine’s bedroom. Mary, Catherine and Kylie ran from the house to follow Richard who had been forced into the pool by the intense heat. Everything that could burn was afire; trees, bushes, the house, the fencing and a pergola in the back yard. Mary, the girls and their pets ran, terrified, to the pergola where the dogs suddenly burst into flame. Richard screamed at them to get in the pool and they sprinted over, diving in and swimming for the deep end. Only Catherine and Kylie made it to Richard. As they yelled for help Mary floated a few metres away, dead from smoke inhalation.

  Fire had cursed the mysterious southern land in European imagination long before it did so in any European’s experience. Thousands of years before Dutchman Dirck Hartog nailed a plate to a tree on the western coast of Australia, a Greek author named Theopomus had written confidently of a continent on the far side of the world ‘which in greatness is infinite and unmeasurable’. He pictured a utopia of green meadows and pastures, tended by mighty beasts and gigantic men, of numerous cities governed by civilized laws and ordinances. Pliny the Elder and Pomponius Mela of Rome had no doubt this place was as thickly peopled as the Mediterranean and the rest of Europe, but they were convinced no conversation would ever take place between north and south because of the tropic seas which, wrote Pliny, are ‘burnt and cremated by flames, scorched by the near sun’. To Mela they were an impossible barrier, a burning zone.

  Fantastic reports from Carthaginian sailors who braved the West African coast as far south as Sierra Leone in 500 BC lent credence to these alarums. Hanno’s crew told of ugly, wild men, incredibly strong and covered with coarse black hair, calling themselves ‘gorillas’; of entire lands consumed by unceasing fire; a world rendered unfit for human life by the terrible heat. The Atlantic Ocean, shrouded by heavy fogs and dust storms, was christened the Sea of Darkness while ‘scorching winds from the Sahara confirmed the opinion that the Tropics were an eternal barrier to human travel’.

  Greek and Roman knowledge of the wider world shrivelled at the hot touch of these winds, dying out long before the equator. The furthest reach of the European mind in its first flowering was Sri Lanka, and even that was but lightly brushed and deeply misunderstood. In a map drawn by Ptolemy in the second century AD the Asian land mass continues south-east for thousands of kilometres before turning west, back towards Africa, which it rejoins. Ptolemy thus made the Indian Ocean a land-locked sea – like the Mediterranean minus the Straits of Gibraltar. Its southern waters lapped at the shores of Terra Incognita, the unknown land, at around about the same point where westerly winds pile the big breakers up against the white beaches of south-western Australia.

  It wasn’t until Hartog and his countrymen started bumping into West Australia in the early 1600s that Europe began to seriously consider the strategic and economic implications of a vast, uncontested land in the southern reaches of the world. The dead grey hand of the Church had smothered intellectual inquiry during the Dark Ages, consigning the work of Ptolemy and his peers to the forbidden realms of heresy. Imperial Rome had sought out distant lands and bent them to its will by force of arms. Holy Rome denied such places could even exist and bent everyone to its delusions by a reign of terror. The Bible had nothing to say about the antipodes or its inhabitants. They lay outside God’s great scheme and thus they did not exist.

  While Ptolemy was either reviled or forgotten, Pliny’s bedtime stories fared a little better as harmless popular tales. The wastes of southern Africa served as a useful sort of allegorical tool, an imagined hell on earth with which to frighten the faithful into submission. There, where the Pope’s word meant nothing, abominations were not just commonplace, they were the rule. People ‘lived on the milk of dog-headed apes’. Others had four heads each, or just one eye in the centre of their foreheads, or giant feet under which they could take shade from the relentless punishing heat. It was a Godforsaken wasteland of inversion and madness. Much later even Dante took the cue, emerging from ‘the horrid circles of hell’, he finds himself ‘in the Antipodes, exactly opposite Jerusalem’.

  It took greed, a force as powerful as religious oppression, to break the Church’s shackles. From 1615 captains of the Dutch East India Company’s vessels had orders to sail a fixed course, east from the Cape of Good Hope until they found themselves below the Sunda Strait, where they were to steer north for the company’s factories in Batavia. The company had calculated this route as the most likely to exploit prevailing winds and currents, but in the early seventeenth century it could not yet provide its sailors with the means to fix their positions with any real accuracy and at any rate the winds and curr
ents were liable to shift on a whim. The result was an increasing number of lost and confused Dutchmen ploughing along the western coast of Australia, the unknown land which Ptolemy had mapped out millennia before.

  The sick, sand-blasted wilderness they found seemed to bear out the ancients’ warnings. It looked utterly desolate. Then Abel Tasman’s epic voyage around the southern coast, Tasmania, New Zealand, Tonga, Fiji and New Guinea raised the prospect that New Holland, as it was becoming known, might produce something more useful than lonesome despair. There might even be two continents there: the wasteland in the west and a more temperate and fertile sister in the east. Alexander Dalrymple, an eighteenth-century Scottish geographer and first hydrographer of the British Admiralty, thought the land might stretch across thousands of miles, through a full 100© of longitude, making it bigger than the whole civilized part of Asia, from Turkey to the eastern extremity of China. Dalrymple was a passionate advocate of the idea of a huge, populous Great South Land, so rich that the merest scraps from its table would be ‘sufficient to maintain the power, dominion, and sovereignty of Britain, by employing all its manufactures and ships’. Sir George Young echoed the sentiment, writing that the variety of climates sure to be found in such a great continent would provide Britain with ‘almost all the different Productions of the known World’ in just one united land. Even Joseph Banks, who had first-hand knowledge of Australia’s less than ideal conditions, thought a land ‘which was larger than the Whole of Europe’ would furnish all manner of spices, crops and precious metals. Even so Banks was not the naive optimist those who followed him to Sydney Harbour later thought. He said it was the most barren country he had ever seen and although he recommended settlement at Botany Bay, with its plentiful supplies of fish, its fresh water and good soil ‘capable of producing any kind of grain’, he tempered his enthusiasm with advice that any colonists would need to carry at least a year’s supplies to provide for themselves.

  It turned out to be sound advice. When the First Fleet dropped anchor in Botany Bay in the first days of 1788, their initial joy at having made the dangerous passage without severe loss of life soon curdled into disappointment that the fine meadows and babbling streams of Banks’s and Cook’s journals seemed to be a chimera. The earlier navigators had arrived during a particularly wet week in autumn, while the First Fleet, long delayed in Portsmouth, dropped anchor during the hottest, driest part of a very hot, dry year. On 19 January, with only the Supply, Scarborough, Alexander and Friendship in the bay, Governor Phillip took a small boat about ten kilometres up a river which drained into the northwest of the bay and found ‘the country low and boggy with no appearance of fresh water’. They retreated to try their luck with another inlet in the south-west, rowing ashore for a lunch of salt beef and porter at which they drank the health of absent friends before trekking inland. This time Phillip and his men found just ‘one little rivulet of fresh water’. These were the first hard lessons in a re-education which would take more than two hundred years. They were not in England any more and could not look at this land through a glass tinted by life in a cold, wet climate. When Phillip took some marines ashore to begin clearing ground, to rip up the grasses and hack down the trees which held the thin soils in place, the natives, with whom they’d had good dealings so far, turned ugly. Perhaps they understood, even if intuitively, the dire results of the white man’s behaviour.

  Surgeon John White, who wrote that the safe arrival of all the ships on 20 January ‘was a sight truly pleasant, and at which every heart must rejoice’, soon complained that their anchorage didn’t deserve any of the praises ‘bestowed on it by the much-lamented Cook’. It was ‘sandy, poor, and swampy, and but very indifferently supplied with water’. Of Cook’s fine meadows, White could see none, though he assured his readers he ‘took some pains to find them’. Hunter surveyed the bay for anchorages, finding a few of good depth but exposed to the easterly winds which blew straight in, setting up ‘a prodigious sea’. And those few places which were sheltered from the rough swell were too shallow to be of much use.

  That evening Arthur Bowes Smyth, a surgeon on the Lady Penrhyn, dragged a fishing net around the north side with some success. But after just a short time in the country he was sanguine. This might seem a fertile spot, he suggested, with ‘great numbers of very large and lofty trees reaching almost to the water’s edge’, and with the space between those trees seemingly covered by grass; but closer inspection revealed the grass to be ‘long and coarse, the trees very large and in general hollow, and the wood itself’ to be fit for nothing but the fire. The soil which supported this poor verdure was really nothing but sand, teeming with huge black and red ants which were inclined to inflict a painful bite on the curious and unwary. By the time the mullet and bream which Bowes Smyth had hauled up were finished and the last bones picked from his shipmates’ teeth, Phillip had concluded that Botany Bay was unsuitable for settlement and was planning to move north to Port Jackson where, despite their initial disillusionment, the English were once again quickly charmed and just as quickly misled by appearances.

  John Hunter, who had joined the little boats of Phillip’s exploratory mission, thought the northern harbour very unappealing at first. Peering in past high rugged cliffs he could see the big ocean waves which tossed them about so roughly go rolling away to break on the far shore, completely unimpeded. But when they rowed through the heads and saw the water turn south into a deep, calm, well-protected shelter, he was mollified. Dozens of little bays and inlets, all safe from the depredations of the high seas, wound away as far as he could see, while the land rising up from them appeared ‘superior in every respect to that around Botany Bay’. Phillip could envision a thousand of His Majesty’s ships arrayed there in perfect safety. John White’s first impression was even more hyperbolic. He described it as the finest and most extensive harbour in the universe, a port which could provide safe anchorage not just for every British ship of the line but ‘for all the navies of Europe’.

  The safety offered within its enfolding arms impressed a number of diarists, not least those who left Botany Bay with the fleet’s rear guard and almost came to grief within sight of their destination. Poor lonely Ralph Clark, who was so underwhelmed by their first landfall he thought the whole colony would be dead within a year if they stayed there, was almost dead within the day. Wallowing in vicious seas and contrary winds, his vessel, the Friendship, nearly ran onto rocks at the mouth of the bay before actually crashing into the Prince of Wales, then the Charlotte. Screams and shouts rose above the howl of the wind, the roar of wild surf and the sick-sounding crack of timber as booms were snapped off, sails torn and the carved woodwork on the Charlotte’s stern pulverised. Clark confessed himself terrified and almost certain of drowning. After considering the barren prospects on dry land and such a close shave on the waters of Botany Bay, he found himself not surprisingly ‘much charmed’ with the secure, untroubled anchorage in Port Jackson. Safely ensconced he wrote to his wife Alicia, saying he had kissed her picture and read his Bible lesson for the day, as always, before dining alone and, no doubt, reflecting on the Lord’s good grace in sparing him. So taken was he with his first impressions of Sydney Cove he told Alicia he would not wish to return home, if only she and their son were with him. He also remarked, offhand, that the few small tents which had been erected on shore looked very pretty amongst the trees.

  Behind Clark’s relieved appreciation of the city’s first nightfall we can spy a vision of an empty, pristine land which would affect European understanding of Australia in practical, poetic and often destructive ways for the next 200 years. As the Bicentennial History explains, the British were self-consciously going about ‘the great business of creation itself’. God had ‘wrought cosmos out of primordial chaos’ and a rough band of criminals and jailers scrambling out of their fetid wooden boats might just do the same. White men’s eyes saw no evidence of Aboriginal tillage and husbandry and thus the cove and all the continent behind it seemed
‘a Virgin Mould, undisturbed since the Creation’. The flimsy tents pitched at the edge of primordial woods, alive with weird, even monstrous life forms; the cries of unfamiliar birds; the strange fierce light of day; the cold alien stars at night, they all spoke to Clark and his contemporaries of a new Eden and a celebration of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment spirit, the belief that the story of man was one of improvement and progress. Phillip himself best expressed it when stealing a rare moment from the demands of his work to ponder its meaning. There were few things more pleasing to the Governor than contemplating ‘order and useful arrangement arising gradually out of tumult and confusion’. And nowhere was the satisfaction more felt than on a distant ‘savage coast’ where a civilized people were struggling to lodge themselves.

  The wild appearance of the land entirely untouched by cultivation, the close and perplexed growing of trees, interrupted now and then by barren spots, bare rocks, or spaces overgrown with weeds, flowers, flowering shrubs, or underwood, scattered or intermingled in the most promiscuous manner, are the first objects that present themselves; afterwards, the irregular placing of the first tents which are pitched, or huts which are erected for immediate accommodation, wherever chance presents a spot tolerably free from obstacles, or more easily cleared than the rest, with the bustle of various hands busily employed in a number of the most incongruous works, increases rather than diminishes the disorder, and produces a confusion of effect, which for a long time appears inextricable, and seems to threaten an endless continuance of perplexity. But by degrees large spaces are opened, plans are formed, lines marked, and a prospect at least of future regularity is clearly discerned, and is made the more striking by the recollection of former confusion.