The views of the convicts who were exiled to this savage coast weren’t sought and aren’t recorded but many of the officers wrestled with their creative mission. Incapable of dealing with the land on its own terms, all perceived it through a prism of past experience and inherited taste. Hunter thought the woods resembled a deer park which could be quickly stripped of wood and put under the plough. Arthur Bowes Smyth gazed around to find lawns, grottoes and plantations of tall stately trees as fine as any ‘nobleman’s grounds in England’. Bowes Smyth went on to trill his enchantment with the flights of ‘parraquets, lorrequets, cockatoos, and maccaws’ and his awe at the stupendous rocks hanging over the water’s edge. He admitted he could not do justice to the beauty and usefulness of the many ‘commodious quays by the water’.
The references to gardens were not completely whimsical. At the time English aesthetics were being reworked in a confrontation between landscape designers and the philosophers from whom they drew their inspiration. Some of the tensions and sensitivities this produced can be found in the First Fleet writings, albeit in a less calculated fashion. If Hunter and Bowes Smyth were not personally familiar with deer parks and noblemen’s grounds, they were certainly mindful of the work of men like Lancelot ‘Capability’ Brown, a hugely popular and influential landscaper who favoured improving on nature’s disorganised forms to impart a sense of tranquillity with simple, almost formal arrangements of ‘a small number of natural elements – a grove of trees, a pond, the slight curve of a hill’. At the end of the eighteenth century Brown’s school, very much a product of the Enlightenment, was challenged by the Picturesque movement whose champions, such as Sir Uvedale Price, preferred the riots of nature. Price’s gardens were described as ‘wild, dramatic, and unkempt’. The Picturesque movement, just one strand of the nineteenth century’s emerging Romantic reaction against the Age of Reason, celebrated nature in all her ‘horrid graces’. Intimations of this revolution can be found in the reactions of men like Hunter, Bowes Smyth and his fellow surgeon George Worgan. The latter found within the harbour ‘a variety of Romantic views, all thrown together into sweet confusion by the careless hand of Nature … Here a romantic, rocky, craggy Precipice over which, a little swirling stream makes a cascade. There a soft vivid-green, shady Lawn attracts your eye.’ Lieutenant Southwell from the Sirius wrote that nothing could ‘be conceived more picturesque’ than the landscape of Sydney.
The land on all sides is high, and cover’d with an exuber’n of trees; towards the water, craggy rocks and vast declivity are everywhere to be seen. The scene is beautifully height’ed by a number of small islands that are dispers’d here and there on which may be seen chrm’g seats, superb buildings, the grand ruins of stately edifices … at intervals the view being pr’ty agreebly interrupted by the intervention of some proud eminence, or lost in the labyrynth of the inchanting glens that so abound in this fascinating scenery.
The harbour’s Picturesque characteristics were all there – its ‘roughness, sudden variation and contrast’ – but the awful truth was sinking in too: the implications of surviving in such a primitive, unpredictable environment. As taken as he was with the scenery, Southwell finished by warning that: ‘Tis greatly to be wished these appearances were not so delusive as in reality they are’. The virgin land, it transpired, was not a fertile young maiden but a withered old crone. Major Ross, the marines’ cheerless commandant, wrote to London that it was the worst country in the world and it would be cheaper ‘to feed the convicts on turtle and venison at the London Tavern than be at the expence of sending them here’. For a truly melancholy sketch, however, we turn inevitably to Ralph Clark. Having written Alicia that first optimistic report of his new home, he followed it in July of 1788 with a letter in which those high hopes thudded back to earth with a plume of parched red dust. Like Hunter, Ralph also thought it ‘the poorest country in the world’, and its inhabitants the most miserable set of wretches under the sun.
There is neather [sic] river or Spring in the country that we have been able to find … all the fresh water comes out of swamps which the country abounds with … the country is overrun with large trees not one Acre of clear ground to be seen … the Thunder and Lightning is the most Terrible I ever herd [sic], it is the opinion of every body here that the Government will remove the Settlement to some other place for if it remains here this country will not be able to maintain its self in 100 years …
Alicia’s husband and his fellow colonists had been rudely disavowed of their first generous impressions within days of arriving at Sydney Cove. The new-born settlement was quickly forced to grapple with two serious challenges to its survival – Australia’s barren soils and its weird violent weather. The former were a result of the continent’s slumber through great stretches of geological time. Without the calamitous tectonic disruptions which chewed up the crusts of other lands, Australian rocks tended to sit and bake under the sun for billions of years at a time. They were worn away very slowly by wind and water, their precious constituent minerals leached from the ground by time’s plunder. In the Sydney basin this was exacerbated because the sandstone bed laid down so many hundreds of millions of years before was never going to break down into anything fertile. The potatoes and cabbages which Phillip ordered planted with all despatch either flourished for a short time before weakening and dying or simply died straightaway. With scurvy and dysentery spreading through the population, the Governor established small plantations of ginger, oranges, lemons and limes, all to no avail. There was little in the thin, swampy ground for their roots to fasten onto. The rich deposits of elements which made the soils of England so fruitful – the thick potage of nitrogen and phosphorus, the abundance of potassium, calcium, magnesium and sulphur – were missing from the sucking mud banks of Sydney Cove.
The parsimony of the soil reached beyond the wavelets lapping at the harbour’s edge. Without a generous transfer of nutrients from the land to coastal and esturine waters, any hopes of supplementing a diet of salt provisions with fresh seafood proved as illusory as had hopes of establishing little English market gardens on shore. The transplanted subjects of mad King George saw vast stretches of unexploited coastline and unexplored harbour and could not help thinking of their fertile traditional fishing grounds in the North Sea and English Channel. But after initially amazing the Iora with the power of their nets, the white men soon found this source of nutriment petering out too. During the day the Sirius worked up and down the harbour with a large net, dragging it clean. Tench was sent out at night with a small fishing party, and despite working till after dawn and scouring dozens of bays and inlets, he barely returned with enough fish to replace the energy expended in catching them. More plentiful were the delicately flavoured oysters which could be plucked in their hundreds from the branches of mangrove trees and small rocks at the harbour’s edge. However, as their shells could be ground up and fired for limestone, which the settlement lacked, the oysters’ best days – like the Iora’s – were behind them.
Even had the ground at Sydney Cove been more fertile, like the floodplains of the Hawkesbury River or the Hunter Valley where the colonists did eventually turn over sods of good brown earth, it may have made little difference in those early days. The fleet arrived at the height of summer, with the best growing months missed because of delays in leaving Portsmouth. Then, in 1789, with a storeship carrying sorely needed rations from England wrecked near the the Cape of Good Hope, and with the Lady Juliana, the first ship of the disastrous Second Fleet already under sail, drought descended and any colonists who thought they had the measure of this hard barren land were in for one of those unpleasant shocks their new home seemed so adept at providing. Temperatures climbed and milky white skin blistered and burned as El Niño turned it on for the newcomers, warning them that a strange powerful force drove the weather on this side of the globe.
It was as though Pliny’s tales of mythical burning waters contained a metaphorical truth. Europeans who understood weather
in terms of four reliable unvarying seasons were unprepared for the chaotic conditions of life in the southern Pacific. Here the weather was as much a plaything of chance and probability, of the vagaries of huge drifting bodies of warm sea water, as it was of the planet’s regular tilting towards and away from the sun. Since this haphazard routine emerged into public consciousness as El Niño after the monstrous drought of 1982–3 it has often been referred to as an abnormal weather pattern. But there is nothing abnormal about El Niño. It has followed the same rough disordered pattern for thousands of years and is as much a part of life on the Pacific Rim as monsoons and vulcanism. However, it is only in the last fifteen years or so that we have come to understand it in anything more than a fragmentary fashion.
Cook and Banks viewed Botany Bay through a different prism in the autumn of 1770. The lush pastures they observed must have compared favourably with the dying fields of an English autumn. Here it seems the warm Pacific breeze promised to keep the savageries of winter at bay. Unfortunately they knew nothing of El Niño or its related Southern Oscillation. The land they saw had not suffered a severe El Niño event since 1716 – an unusually long interval – and they were seeing it at its best. Neither they nor anybody on the convict ships which followed was equipped to understand the phenomenon.
Indeed, although the first evidence of El Niño seems to have been recorded in Peru in 1525 by the expedition of the Spanish conquistador Francisco Pizarro, more than four hundred years would pass before Jacob Bjerknes, a Norwegian meteorologist working at the University of California, had the data and technology to piece the story together. Bjerknes was standing on the shoulders of a British scientist, Sir Gilbert Walker who, as head of the Indian Meteorological Service in 1904, had been handed the task of working out some way of predicting monsoons, after their failure in 1899 had led to famine on the subcontinent. In the course of his research Walker discovered a link between changes in ocean temperature and rainfall in South America. This in turn seemed to be connected to air pressure readings taken at Darwin and Tahiti. Walker’s numbers seemed to indicate that as pressure rose at Tahiti it fell in the Northern Territory. He called this seesawing the Southern Oscillation and wondered at what seemed to be a weird link between these barometric changes, Australian droughts, the Asian monsoon season and mild Canadian winters. In the days before satellites, electronic ocean buoys and supercomputers Sir Gilbert was widely thought of as a crank. The idea that bushfires in New South Wales and famine in India might be related to the failure of Peruvian fishing grounds was a mad suggestion, as preposterous to all right-thinking scientists in the early twentieth century as had been Ptolemy’s map to the Church in the Dark Ages. Unable to prove his theory, Walker remained convinced he would be vindicated when high atmosphere wind patterns could be routinely measured. Fifty years later Bjerknes had the wherewithal to do just that and to draw a connection between ocean temperatures, air pressure, rainfall and wind patterns. More than just a connection in fact, they were all components of the same system, the El Niño Southern Oscillation effect or ENSO.
When ENSO is not having its evil way with Australian farmers, a satellite image of the Pacific Ocean will show a huge area of warm water in the west, washing up against Indonesia; a cold tongue of nutrient-rich waters in the east, and the same trade winds which pressed hard against the canvas of HMS Endeavour blowing strong and true from east to west. These are thought of as ‘normal’ conditions. Roughly two years out of seven, however, the pattern reverses itself and all hell breaks loose.
What happens is this. Normally the waters at the equator are warmed by the sun and moist air rises from them, cooler air is then sucked in from the subtropics in its place. The Coriolis effect, that force generated by the earth’s rotation which makes water spin down the sink differently depending on whether you are north or south of the equator, kicks in. Above the equator it sends this mass of air east. Below the equator it moves west, giving rise to the trade winds. So steady and powerful are these winds they push the warm water on the surface of the Pacific Ocean left, actually piling it up against Indonesia so that the sea level is about fifty centimetres higher there. The water warms even further as it travels through the tropics, the air above it becoming saturated with moisture which rises higher and higher, only to fall on South East Asia during the yearly monsoons. The damp, warm, rising air strengthens the westerly drive of the trade winds. Its power projects way into the upper atmosphere where it shapes the flow of the jet stream, much as a rock in a fast-moving river distorts the waters which have to rush around it. The tracks of great storms are determined by the contours of this flow, the weather patterns for a huge portion of the globe riding upon its anguine, sinuous forms.
Back east meanwhile, off the coast of South America, cold water wells up from the depths to replace those warm streams which headed west. Rich in nutrients, these colder seas support abundant bird and fish life and, not incidentally, the fishermen of Peru. For years at a time they haul up nets straining with anchovies destined for the world’s pizzas and pet food tins. But every now and then, around Christmas time, the nets come up empty. The warmer waves have not migrated west. They lap against the edge of the boats, which drift around on a huge bath of tepid sea water. El Niño, the Christ Child, has arrived. The gusting trade winds slacken then turn. All of that warm water heaped up on the coast of Indonesia comes rolling back across the Pacific, taking with it the moist rising air. The jet streams buckle and deform. Twelve thousand metres above sea level new highways are blasted through the atmosphere, jet streams strong enough to shoot across Central America and on across the Atlantic, strong enough to decapitate big roiling thunderheads on the east coast of the US before they can mutate into hurricanes. Monsoonal rains which would have irrigated Asia’s rice paddies and Australian wheat fields now fall uselessly in mid-Pacific. Coral reefs off the Galapagos Islands die back in balmy, arid shallows. Tens of millions of boobies, cormorants and pelicans starve to death off Ecuador. Seal pups in California perish as storms flood their beaches. Malaria, dengue fever, and encephalitis spread as mosquitoes breed in stagnant pools in Sri Lanka. And in Australia farmers load their guns to cull dying stock as bushfires rage at the edge of Sydney.
Why? Because nothing lasts forever. The exchange of heat between air and water which is the engine of our weather has been described as a dance, but with one partner waltzing quietly whilst the other madly tangos. ‘Ocean temperatures drive winds; winds drive ocean currents; ocean currents redistribute heat over sea surfaces; and the new pattern of ocean temperatures drives new winds.’ But air and water never find a balance ‘because the ocean moves heat around far more slowly than the atmosphere’. So El Niño is not an abnormal event. Rather it is commonplace, mundane even, except for those who have to live with it.
Tim Flannery’s popular study of Australian ecology, The Future Eaters, describes the pattern of adaptations forced on the continent’s plants and animals by the harsh reign of El Niño as ‘parsimony born of resource poverty’. Nomadism became endemic, with birds, marsupials and early humans all chasing the rains across the country. Unable to follow them, Australia’s plants responded by growing short rigid leaves and small internodes and remaining relatively small in size. In turn animals adapted to these thin pickings by becoming ‘energy misers’ – sitting still, like the koala, for great stretches of time, dozing through the heat of the day and paring back reproduction rates. Unprepared for such tight margins of existence, the plants in Governor Phillip’s garden scarfed up all the nutrients from the poor sandy soil, then withered and died. The livestock the English had brought with them found the local weeds a poor substitute for the lush grasses of home. They either turned up their hooves from starvation or hovered on the edge of it, unable to produce enough dung to fertilise their masters’ little plantations.
The strange wiry plants of the harbour also proved useless for shelter. The fleet had brought a small supply of building materials from England – some bricks and lime, lots
of nails and a surfeit of window glass – in the expectation of using local materials to supplement them. But Sydney’s timber proved no better than the soil and water, Surgeon White complaining that it was fit for little but burning. In a familiar refrain he thought it the worst ‘that any country or climate ever produced’. Planks cut from those few trees which looked promising quickly warped and turned brittle when sawn and exposed to the sun. Removing the trees was still hard, frustrating work. Blackbutt and red gum soared up to forty metres above the floor of the valley which climbed away from the mouth of the fresh-water stream Phillip had discovered. Without machinery or dynamite a dozen men could take a week to dig out their trunks and roots. An axeman standing at their base would often find the uppermost branches obscured by clumps of swamp mahogany and bangalay. Below them acacias, yellow tea-tree and paperbarks struggled for a foothold alongside Port Jackson figs and cabbage tree palms. This last tree at least proved useful, with a trunk which could be split into serviceable logs and planks, soft as they were. It was best woven in between tougher timber then smeared over with mud and clay to keep out the wind, a method of hovel building tracing its roots as far back as the Iron Age. Convicts also wove the palm’s fronds into hats to keep the blistering southern sun off their heads, and the camp’s hogs weren’t averse to snacking on its pith. Rushes from the mud flats and the stalks of the blackboy were initially lashed together and thrown onto the crossbeams of the crude little huts for thatching. Later the she-oak was found to provide good roofing shingles and the women were set to whittling out thousands of them.
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