It was some time, however, before the tents Ralph Clark found so fetching were replaced with more permanent shelters. In fact their influence on the form of the city persists. When Phillip swept his arm around the curve of the bay, saying he wanted the convicts and marines settled on the rocky western banks while he and the officers would take the gentler, more open slopes to the east of the stream, he fixed a division between class, power and wealth which has survived to this day, with disastrous consequences for the environs of western Sydney and the lives of those born into its hardest stations. The tracks tramped into the earth between the little clutches of tents and humpies eventually became the skeleton streets around which the body of the young city would grow. The rock-and root-strewn path which made its way from the convicts’ bedraggled encampment, past the marines’ infinitely tidier parade square and tents, alongside the bank of the stream and then out to a desolate brick pit about a kilometre or two back from the harbour, eventually became George Street. Another trail, which veered off to the left, across a little wooden bridge over the stream to the more salubrious officers’ marquees and the Governor’s house, in time became Bridge Street.
Phillip gave the convicts enough leisure time to grow their own vegetables and build their own shelters, were they so inclined. Some weren’t of course. Long after the first hospital had been erected, Surgeon Arndell’s servant, Samuel Chinery, was still bunking down in a hollow tree nearby. Another couple of old lags named Owen and Turner lived under a rock at Millers Point. (They were well suited as flatmates – Turner had gone down for thieving, Owen for receiving.) By way of contrast, a fellow thief, James Tenchal – alias Tenninghill – took advantage of the Governor’s ruling and by April of 1790 was the proud owner of a one-room home with a lockable door. It didn’t stop William Chaaf, an unreformed burglar, from trying his hand though. Chaaf, who had been hired to thatch Tenchal’s roof, crawled in through an incomplete section with mischief on his mind. Through his trial we learn a little of convict domestic architecture: Tenchal’s windows had wooden shutters, fixed by a bolt; the straw thatching was laced to the rafters; the floor was tramped earth, and the only furniture was a table, a bed and a couple of chests. Most of the little huts were also built with hearths and chimneys, but so prone were they to catching fire that regulations were quickly passed to curb their use. Although all of the early convict dwellings were pulled down to make way for commercial development as soon as the city’s economy took off, this simple style of lower-class dwelling survived until quite recently. My old friend Pat Bell, who kicked around Paddington in the 1960s, told me of visiting two-or three-room shacks in that suburb in which the floors were still just stamped earth.
Phillip’s own house was a prefab unit shipped out with the fleet and thrown up in a week. It was the finest structure in the land, but that wasn’t saying much. Constructed of wood and canvas, its best feature was that it didn’t collapse in the first storm like many of the camp’s bark lean-tos and mud huts. Like James Tenchal, Phillip dreamt of solid walls and a stout door, but being governor he had the wherewithal to make it happen much sooner and on a slightly grander scale. In May of 1788, while Phillip hunched over his first official despatch to Lord Sydney – complaining of a pain in his side from sleeping on the ground, the colony’s lack of any botanical experts, the need for more females to be sent out for the men, and the inability of his canvas house to protect him from the wind and rain – a team of convicts set to work on the first permanent governor’s residence. The bricks and lime brought from England were supplemented by clay bricks fired at a pit back up in the hinterland, near what would later become Central Station. Phillip’s house was modest: two storeys built along stolid Georgian lines, with very little ornamentation. Although there was an abundance of rich sandstone available for building, the lack of lime for mortar restricted its use. Indeed most of the early buildings were set close to the ground with thick walls because of this. Phillip’s house was a simple symmetrical arrangement with three bays gazing over his struggling garden beds down to the Cove. The centre bay was topped by a pediment, the front door by a semi-circular fanlight. (You can walk through a ghost structure of the house in the forecourt of the Museum of Sydney.) Although the view to the water from its ‘most exalted station’ is now partly blocked by a hotel and office block, it doesn’t take too great a leap to imagine the gulf between this first Government House and the sorry hovels of the lower orders.
Separated by more than 200 years and insulated by the comforts of the digital age, it is difficult for us to comprehend the burden shouldered by the men who raised that first substantial home. The clay which provided bricks for the house may have lain only a kilometre or so inland but it was a very different kilometre from the smooth graded roads you would take today. Sydney’s furrowed brow has been smoothed by time. The land over which the convicts scrambled was infinitely more precipitous and disjointed, piled up with ragged broken ridge lines and steep hills, shot through with deep valleys and abrupt cliffs. All movement was by foot; the only power that which came from the bent backs and straining muscles of the men. And with dysentery, scurvy and starvation stalking the colony, even the strongest backs could not bend that far. Muscles fluttered and grew weak. Shoes rotted and fell away from swollen feet which struggled for purchase on stony ground. There were no beasts to pull the carts from the brick pits, so the men themselves were harnessed. A dozen of them would drag carts laden with hundreds of bricks to and from the brick fields five times a day. The terrain was so rugged that thousands of bricks were broken and pulverised during the trip. As the colony grew this sight became more common, not less. In 1793 David Collins described hundreds of men so yoked, hauling great loads of timber and stone around the town’s many building sites.
Famine and disease sapped the energy of the settlement for these works during the first years. In the few months before work commenced on Phillip’s house, hundreds had fallen ill and taken to their cots and tents. Everyone left standing was assigned to scrounging for food or building a large timber hospital. However, these early troubles actually turned out to be something of a left-handed gift because when the bulk of the Second Fleet arrived that hospital became the centre of colonial activity. By then, June of 1790, Phillip had split his command, sending one detachment to colonise Norfolk Island and another up river to establish a farm on the relatively fertile alluvial plains at Parramatta, or Rose Hill as it was first known. Unlike Sydney, which simply grew up around the contours of the first tents and the local topography, Rose Hill was planned. Phillip laid out a wide central street, running west from the riverbank to a small cottage he built as a second governor’s residence. Large free-standing huts were run up on either side of the thoroughfare, each separated from its neighbour by up to eighteen metres. Phillip was mindful of the immediate dangers of fire spreading through the satellite township, but he also had one eye to the future by leaving plenty of room for uncluttered development. He had drawn up similarly ambitious plans for Sydney Cove but, anticipating two centuries of unplanned, untrammelled growth, these died a lingering death over the next twenty years, taking another governor, William Bligh, down with them.
When the Lady Juliana rolled through the heads in June, the population of Sydney Cove was much diminished by these developments. Over 200 convicts and marines had sailed for Norfolk. Hundreds more were wrestling with the vagaries of the local soil and climate on farms up the Parramatta River. The harbourside town was a quiet place, where sickly administrators bent over their papers, brick-makers tended their kilns and a few sawyers their tools. The camp, according to George Worgan, had a ‘villatick’ appearance. Many tents and humpies remained, especially among the boulders above the white beaches of the western headland, but they were outnumbered by thatched huts with little gardens struggling along behind wobbly picket fences. The tenor of the town was grim. Real hunger pinched at the guts of everyone from the Governor down. Thin rations were cut and cut again. Depression and lassitude, the bound
ary riders of starvation, were given free rein in the minds and journals of the officers. In March 1790, after Sirius and Supply left for Norfolk Island, Collins wrote:
the whole settlement appeared as if famine had already thinned it of half its numbers. The little society that was in the place was broken up, and every man seemed left to brood in solitary silence over the dreary prospect before him.
For the usually cheery Watkin Tench they were ‘days of despair’ when ‘the hearts of men sunk’. Glowering storm clouds, fat with cold rain hung low in the sky, occasionally bursting over the hamlet, destroying huts, washing out the foundations of larger buildings, and ‘filling up every trench and cavity which had been dug about the settlement’. A small boy fell into a flooded clay pit and drowned. Starving thieves braved execution to steal melons and pumpkins from ruined gardens. In April, just a few days after yet another reduction in the rations and working hours, the Supply returned with news that the Sirius had been wrecked.
All hopes rested on the horizon, but no relief appeared over the next two months. One young man wrote home describing poor wretches gazing ardently out to sea whilst starving mothers wept ‘upon the infants at the breast’. Little surprise then that when the signal flags for a strange ship where hoisted in the afternoon of 3 June women ran into the streets with babies in their arms ‘congratulating each other and kissing their infants with the most passionate and extravagant marks of fondness’. Marines wrung each others hand’s, unable to speak, tears streaming down their faces. The news first burst on Watkin Tench ‘like meridian splendor on a blind man’.
The colony had not been forgotten, just dreadfully unlucky. A supply ship called the Guardian had struck an iceberg off South Africa the previous December and been forced to return to the Cape. It was a great loss. The ship had been hauling tonnes of flour and meat, along with livestock, clothing, medical supplies, fruit trees and farming equipment. Twenty-five convict farmers and tradesmen had been aboard the Guardian with seven overseers. Two were drowned, more were missing and the balance had been detained at the Cape. Juliana brought some of the stores salvaged from the wreck but she also arrived with nearly 250 female convicts and news of another 1000 convicts on the way. Collins was mortified to find ‘a cargo so unnecessary and unprofitable’ as the women dumped on the colony. But the stores they brought alleviated some the town’s suffering and the women were to prove much easier to assimilate than the Second Fleeters who followed them.
Unlike the First Fleet, which rode well under the firm hand of Phillip, the second suffered from uncertain lines of command and slipshod organisation. The voyage of the Juliana, which left well before the rest of the fleet, had been overseen by William Richards, the same contractor who had outfitted the First. Unfortunately for the bulk of the Second Fleet convicts, the capable Richards was replaced as contractor by the slave traders Camden, Calvert and King, who were more concerned with turning a profit on the voyage than delivering healthy prisoners. Their charges were shackled in heavy irons, confined below decks, and fed a diet almost totally lacking in vitamin C and calcium. Fist fights and pistol duels erupted between the ships’ captains and the officers of the New South Wales Corps, who had been embarked with the convicts.
By the time the transports Surprize, Neptune and Scarborough dropped anchor in Port Jackson, nearly one third of their passengers were dead and most of the survivors were sick; men, women and children unable to walk or even stand, hoisted from stinking beds and flung over the side of the ships like baggage. Some fainted at the first breath of fresh air, others died. The Reverend Richard Johnson described them lying on the shore, many unable to stir, some dragging themselves up the banks on their hands and knees, some carried on the backs of others. They were wretched scarecrow characters, with hollow cheeks, dark sunken eyes and sticks for limbs, covered in sores and ulcers and caked-on layers of excrement. Corpses, tossed from the transports on the very last leg of the voyage, bobbed up and down the length of the harbour, their obscene, bloated forms washing up on the foreshores to balloon out and burst as putrescent gasses rumbled inside them. At night, above the moans of the dying, dingoes could be heard tearing apart bodies hastily consigned to a mass grave dug near the present site of Wynyard Station. Tents reappeared around the Rocks as the hospital filled to capacity and beyond. Surgeon White’s medical staff, themselves hard-pressed to survive just a few weeks earlier, now had 500 potential deathbeds to attend. Rampant scurvy was the least of their worries, with fever, violent diarrhoea and possibly typhoid to contend with. Wine, oatmeal and vinegar were the best medicines on offer at first as groups of relatively healthy First Fleet convicts were sent into the woods to search for acid berries, native spinach, sarsparilla and cabbage tree leaves.
Sydney’s population had jumped from 591 in April to 1715 by July. Even if the newcomers had been in good shape, her sinews would have torn trying to accommodate such growth. Elizabeth Macarthur, who arrived with the Second Fleet, thought the place completely wretched when she disembarked.
The filthy ships in the Cove, the rude lines of sodden barracks, the tents that held the sick sagging in the downpour along the water front; the night fires in the region of the Rocks, a sink of evil already and more like a gypsy encampment than part of a town … the stumps and fallen trees, and the boggy tracks wending their way around rock and precipice; the oozy Tank Stream spreading itself over the sand by the head of the Cove …
This was not a settlement equipped to cope with an invasion of the living dead. Phillip sent most of the healthy Second Fleeters – which largely meant Richards’ Juliana women – out to the newly established village at Rose Hill. Another consignment was shipped off to Norfolk Island in August. As the sick lists grew shorter, through death or recovery, the city’s greatest crisis since its foundation gradually ebbed back to manageable proportions.
One of the more pressing problems was water. The arrival of the Second Fleet coincided with the climatic chaos of yet another El Niño event. Elizabeth Macarthur wrote that December and January had been hotter than she could describe, infinitely worse than the fiercest summer day back home. Breezes brought no relief, only hellish hot gales which forced everyone to shut themselves up inside their makeshift cottages, trying ‘to the utmost of our power to exclude every breath of air’. She had seen little rain since arriving and the soil of her garden was completely ‘burnt up’. In March 1791, with the colony still struggling to accommodate its population explosion, Phillip wrote to England that rain had been so scarce since the Juliana arrived that most of the springs in the harbour had dried up. The little stream which divided the settlement at the Cove was ‘much diminished’, although still sufficient for cooking. The weather was only partly to blame. Land clearing by the English had shattered the frail architecture of sandstone and vegetation which delivered the rill of sweet spring water from its catchment around the heights of Hyde Park and down through the valley now covered by Pitt and George Streets. Fringed by acacias, wild spinach, flowers and ferns, it meandered for nearly two kilometres around ‘shelving rocks and pearly white sand beds’. Phillip had imposed an eighteenth century green ban on clearing scrub within fifteen metres of the banks but the decline had begun and the fall was inevitable. It is best summarised by PR Stephensen in his history of the harbour.
In that spongy topsoil and in the porous sandstone subsoil were natural storages of fresh water that the removal of the trees and shrubs and smaller plants would quickly deplete. Soil erosion was not understood by the pioneers, who, bred in the lore of damp islands, believed that ‘springs’ of fresh water were perennial. Nor could they understand that the clearing of the trees and the ‘underbrush’ and the cultivation with spades and hoes of the shallow topsoil, would cause that topsoil to be washed away by heavy showers of rain, leaving the sandstone subsoil exposed. So British settlement in the Vale of Sydney quickly destroyed the ‘spring’ of fresh water and the fertility of the soil, two of the principal features that had caused Governor Phillip to de
cide to form the settlement there.
The settlers tried to augment their precarious water supply even as they so efficiently destroyed it. Phillip had a paling fence erected alongside the stream to prevent hungry stock from eating the shrubs on the banks and befouling the water. He then had deep tanks cut into the sandstone to catch and hold thousands of litres of water, as insurance against the droughts and baffling tricks of the local weather. These engineering works, which gave the Tank Stream its name, sufficed for a time. But they filled with silt and sand as erosion denuded the parched and exposed landscape beyond the paling fence. When Phillip left the colony at the end of 1792, worn down by his burdens, power ebbed away from the governor’s mansion, drawn to the twin poles of the officer class and the port’s emerging trade barons who, more often than not, were one and the same.
The rambunctious, two-fisted rogues of the newly formed New South Wales Corps who had arrived with the survivors of the Second Fleet disembarked at Sydney Cove, squinted in the harsh unfamiliar light and, as their dark-adapted eyes slowly adjusted, they saw laid out before them an opportunity for plunder unmatched in the Empire. Here lay a world for the taking. Its indolent, backward indigenes could offer no resistance. They fled when anyone pointed a shovel at them, let alone a musket. Malaspina was right. Their fields would be laid waste, their huts overrun, their women violated and their lives snatched away. And when they were gone, those fields would be tended by a limitless workforce of state-supplied white slaves. You could say that when Phillip’s ship sailed into the sea mists, bound for England in December of 1792, that all of the New South Wales Corps’ Christmases were about to come at once.
With no real check on their power or appetites, the corps was pretty much free to do as it pleased; and it pleased more than a few of them to build their homes on the verdant slopes of the Tank Stream, to catch the breezes and views and give their livestock easy access to water and food. Hungry pigs and goats quickly broke through those fences which hadn’t been torn down by their owners, stripped the banks of foliage and polluted the town’s water supply with their prodigious output of faeces and urine. In addition to brazenly disobeying the orders Phillip had given to protect the water supply, the corps also flouted his town planning directions. Just before leaving, Phillip had drawn a line between the head of Woolloomooloo Bay, to the east of the cove, and Cockle Bay (which we know as Darling Harbour) to the west. Within this area, which constitutes most of the modern city’s CBD, no land was to be granted or leased and all housing was to remain the property of the Crown. By this order Phillip hoped to ensure the orderly development of what would become one of the leading cities of the world. Unfortunately, the corps had as much respect for his claim on this land as they did for the Iora’s. Under his immediate successors, Major Grose and Colonel Paterson, the degradation of the Tank Stream proceeded in tandem with the alienation of public land in the centre of the town.
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