by Tim Flannery
The son of a Jew from Frankfurt who had migrated to England, Phillip was fifty when he sailed with the First Fleet and was often ill. Despite being a compassionate and just man, the difficulties he laboured under meant that he sometimes failed to live up to his ideals. He was assisted in his duties by the judge advocate, David Collins, a strikingly handsome officer of the marines with no legal training but with a ‘most cheerful disposition’. That disposition was to be sorely tested by his time in New South Wales. Spiritual guidance to the colony was provided by the Reverend Richard Johnson, one of a handful of First Fleeters to be accompanied by his wife. They seem to have been a lacklustre pair. Medical matters were supervised by the surgeon John White, an Irishman of uneven temper, who despite the burden of his office managed to document the flora and fauna of the new land.
The First Fleet sailed under the protection of the marines, at whose head stood the cantankerous and treacherous Captain Robert Ross. In March 1788 he placed most of his subordinates (including Lieutenant Watkin Tench) under arrest over a trivial matter, and technically they remained so until they returned to England. It is in these second ranks of command within the service that we find the truly luminous minds in the colony. To me, Tench stands out above them all, for he was able to take an overarching view of the settlement that encompassed both black and white. His friend William Dawes was perhaps the most morally upright man in the colony. Poor Ralph Clark took months to adjust to life in Sydney Cove, but even he left us intriguing insights into the new colony.
On the other side of the invasion stood the Eora. The names of many remain unknown to us, for the smallpox epidemic of 1789 carried them off before much could be learned of them. Bennelong stands out, however, as a great warrior and as a bridge between the colonists and his own people. Arabanoo, who preceded him in living among the colonists, was a gentler soul, while Colbee seems to have been an important traditional leader. Those who stood aloof from the settlers, such as the resistance fighter Pemulwy, are also less well known, but deserve recognition for the role they played in battling the invasion of their land.
Nowhere, perhaps, are the colony’s peculiar characteristics as plainly evident as in the city’s first newspaper, the Sydney Gazette. First published in 1803, the broadsheet was the megaphone of government. Don’t look in its pages for dissenters’ voices or incisive political analysis, for the Gazette was fiercely censored, and with each new administration it subtly changed its style. Some governors, however, seem to have tolerated gossip, tidbits and humour, and the paper is leavened with both intentional and accidental comedy. A careful reading of the Gazette reveals much about Sydney. Through it we learn details of its street-scape, changing architecture, its crimes and its social preoccupations.
Even the convict camp of this early period possessed a few articles of refinement. The printing press that produced the Sydney Gazette arrived with the First Fleet, as did a pianoforte. It belonged to surgeon’s second mate and later naval surgeon George Worgan, who upon departing the colony in 1792 passed it on to Elizabeth Macarthur. In Mrs Macarthur we find a remarkable woman, for in this wilderness she educated her children, managed a farm, and formed a magnet for the educated souls who clung to civilisation in this most testing of places.
During these years the inhabitants of Sydney often lived in fear of a revolt by such hardened types as the Irish Defenders. But when it came the revolt sprang not from the felons but from within the group ostensibly dedicated to preserve order: the New South Wales Corps. The Rum Corps, as everybody called this junta, thrived by monopolising trade, especially in ardent spirits, which then acted as the colony’s currency. In January 1808 the Corps overthrew Governor Bligh, whose ill-fated trip on the Bounty must have acted as a rehearsal for his undoing in Sydney. Bligh was left a bitter man by his experiences in Sydney, quipping that half of the residents had been transported—and that the other half should have been.
With the arrival of Governor Macquarie in 1810 some semblance of order was restored and the city began to move away from its military roots. Despite his reputation as a reformer Macquarie was not above using grog monopolies for his own ends, and Sydney’s new hospital was built on the profits from a monopoly on rum imports granted by the governor. Under Macquarie the Gazette began publishing exhortations to its readers to enter the state of matrimony, whereas earlier the paper had carried advertisements by elderly love-seekers that seemed to lampoon wedded bliss. Regularity and morality were the order of the day under Macquarie as lists of official street names and diverse proclamations filled the paper.
It is important to remember just how tiny Sydney was during this time. As late as 1800 there were fewer than 5000 Europeans in all of New South Wales, while by 1810 the population of Sydney was only 10,000, rising to just 30,000 by 1820. It was during Macquarie’s reign that prosperous ex-convicts (known as emancipists to the chagrin of Wilberforce and other anti-slavery campaigners) began to be looked upon as respectable members of society. By the 1830s, horrifying traditionalists like James Mudie, they started to play important roles in the life of the colony. After the first decades of multicultural mixing, Sydney became ever more British. From the 1830s onwards visitors increasingly commented on the quintessentially English character of the settlement. For some, it was only when they sat down to a meal including tropical fruits or kangaroo that they realised they were not in England. The more astute, however, realised that something was amiss when they heard street calls and music that had been popular in London a quarter of a century earlier.
The truth is that the colony had become an awful parody of England, a parody that was predicated upon convictism—the issue of whether you had left your country for your country’s good, or had come to New South Wales for your own reasons. It was the yardstick against which all social standing was measured, thus all social status in the colony was defined in terms of the convict present. The problem was that as the city grew it became impossible to know who was an ex-convict and who was not. In this crazy society the most extreme social niceties were of the utmost importance in keeping one from ‘convict pollution’. It was simply not possible, for example, to approach someone in the street and address them, even if you had been introduced in polite society the night before. ‘Upon my life, I don’t know you, sir!’ was the bellowed response to such a threatened breakdown of the precarious social order.
The height of this absurd society came with the publication in 1837 of James Mudie’s Felonry of New South Wales. In the preface to his privately published and scandalous work Mudie coined his term ‘felonry’. Like gentry and yeomanry, felonry was meant to denote a class of persons, but Mudie made it clear that this class distinction was immutable. Once a member of Mudie’s felonry, you could never become anything else.
The transportation of convicts to Sydney ceased in 1840, but the threat of renewal continued until 1850, when this sick society was finally smashed apart by the discovery of gold. The old animosities were buried under an avalanche of immigration, and not even the slightest pretence at punishment could be kept up in sending convicts to a land of Ophir. The rush of the 1850s totally changed Sydney. Eyewitness accounts of the city reveal what appears to have been an almost instantaneous change, from a city of prisoners with an oppressive administration to a metropolis somewhat similar to the one we know today. Gold was not an unalloyed blessing, however, for it also brought competitors. Melbourne rose almost overnight on the banks of the Yarra, and for decades it was a larger, richer and more important place than its northern neighbour.
This stage of colonial development coincided with increasing degradation of the Sydney environment and the arrival of inconveniences unknown to earlier settlers. Among the most distressing of these new irritants were the winds known as ‘brickfielders’. These dust-filled gales resulted from the denudation of the Sydney region. (There was, at this time, not a single tree in Hyde Park.) The bare ground seemed to increase the intensity of the windstorm and allowed it to carry grit and dust in eno
rmous volume. As if the brickfielders were not enough, Sydney summers were now heralded by squadrons of flies and mosquitoes. The Australian bush fly is a hairy and irritating creature that breeds in offal and faeces, and both food sources then abounded in the city. The mosquito, previously uncommon, doubtless benefited from poor drainage; and these factors, along with a disrupted ecosystem, allowed the pests to proliferate and disrupt every outdoor activity in a way unimaginable to Sydney’s inhabitants in both 1788 and 1988. Like the pestilential snakes of an earlier age, their rise bespoke a sick ecosystem. Sydney’s society was also beginning to show signs of strain. Young men were gathering in public places and irritating passers-by. Soon they would transform themselves into larrikin gangs known as ‘pushes’ and begin threatening lives.
The first visitor of consequence to come to Sydney and speak of it with nothing but admiration was perhaps Anthony Trollope. In his widely read book the prominent author represented Sydney as a distinctive, beautiful and cultured city capable of rivalling any in Europe. Trollope went into raptures over the harbour, and his words changed the nature of Sydney’s visitors from predominantly scientists and administrators, to tourists.
Sydney’s first century encompassed its infancy. Its dependence upon London, the unselfconsciousness of many of its early chroniclers and its embryonic physical state are all concordant with this notion. Puberty came in the 1880s, for by then the city had left childhood behind and had taken on, in general outline, its adult form. Sydney had grown into a city of 400,000 people. It was no longer an isolated European outpost at the ends of the earth. The city’s second century may be thought of as its teenaged phase, for mixed together are sparks of genius, jejune gestures and downright destructiveness. From the Sydney Push with its bohemian ambitions to the push of the developer’s bulldozers, the century has a loutish feel about it.
At the dawn of Sydney’s third century what trends can we detect? I think I see an overweight adult, drowning in its excrement and suffocating in its own lard, for the city has now grown so large that the quality of life of its inhabitants is suffering. Anyone who must take to the roads or trains in peak hour will know what I am talking about. Anyone who has watched the last bandicoots and penguins dwindle, who has seen green space after green space disappear under housing, and who has seen the summer air thicken ever more with smog, knows of the theft of life that comes with each new phase of growth. The tragedy is, you see, that the best things Sydney has to offer—its weather, beaches and parks—are free. They’re not making them any more, yet each year there are more and more people who want a piece of them.
This book is an exploration of what makes Sydney special. It’s a search for the origin of that unique mix that gave birth to the city, for an understanding of the natural world upon which it was grafted. In assembling this anthology I have tried to let those who were on the spot during the moments of Sydney’s infancy tell us how it was, and I’ve included reports from the city’s distinguished visitors, everyone from François Peron to Charles Darwin, from the Spaniard Francisco Xavier de Viana to the Frenchman Hyacinthe de Bougainville. I’ve also tried to tell the story of what happened to early Sydney’s favourite sons and daughters such as Watkin Tench, Bennelong, Phillip, Collins, Bungaree and others. Above all, my eye has been drawn to accounts that record the irrepressible life of the city. Near the end of The Birth of Sydney is a yarn by Mark Twain. In it he relates a tall story concerning a shark, a sharp businessman and a wool stockpile that he reputedly heard while visiting Sydney in 1895.6 Yet at the core of Twain’s fable lies a kernel of truth—that curious fabrication of myth from fragile history that lives at the heart of all great cities. The history of Sydney, to borrow Twain’s marvellous words, ‘does not read like history, but like the most beautiful lies. And all of a fresh new sort, no mouldy old stale ones. It is full of surprises, and adventures, and incongruities, and contradictions, and incredibilities; but they are all true, they all happened.’
This Extraordinary Continent
1999
DRUNKEN CAMELS WERE the bane of the Burke and Wills expedition. They consumed prodigious quantities of rum, better used perhaps to soothe the pillows of the doomed explorers. The only female member of Ernest Favenc’s expedition to Queensland’s Gulf Country in 1882–83 never got to publish her remarkable story of endurance in the face of sickness, death and privation. Her journal lies all but forgotten in the archive of Sydney’s Mitchell Library, the list of baby clothes at the back suggesting she was pregnant for at least part of the journey. In February 1869 G. W. Goyder, surveyor-general of South Australia and martinet, was dispatched to survey and found the settlement of Darwin. He was watched by the Larrakia people who, when they decided it was safe to contact the strangers, held a corroboree, giving pitch and word perfect renditions of ‘John Brown’s Body’, ‘The Glory, Hallelujah’, and ‘The Old Virginia Shore’. This ‘white-fella corroboree’ had been traded from the Woolna people, who memorised the tunes while lying prone in the wet grass at night, spying on surveyors who were working near the Adelaide River. Who, in this instance, were the explorers?
It’s an illustration of just how rich the stories of Australian exploration are that neither the Larrakia’s corroboree nor Burke’s camels made it into this book. In assembling these accounts I had wanted to offer the reader the experience of being a fly on the wall at exemplary moments in Australia’s history. To be there, looking over Governor Phillip’s shoulder as he chooses the location for the infant settlement of Sydney; to accompany John McDouall Stuart in his moment of triumph at reaching the centre of the continent; and to join the young William Wills as he lies alone, dying of starvation on a full stomach, at Cooper Creek. But then I discovered that the records of Australia’s explorers offer so much more. In them, the unexpected is commonplace. So much that is new and extraordinary, both trivial and profound, crowds in on the reader. Events, glimpsed across the barriers of time, language and environmental alienation, continue to puzzle weeks later. One finds humanity at its extreme; acts of unimaginable cruelty are juxtaposed with those of compassion and self-sacrifice. George Evans played games with frightened Aboriginal children to cheer them up. Other explorers were murderers.
Why were the explorers there? What made them do it? The answers are as varied as the explorers themselves. Some were simply obeying orders. Others had set out in search of new grazing land, illusory cities or imaginary seas. Some were careful calculators of risk, while others played a terrifying sport of brinkmanship with their own lives. Some were looking for lost comrades, while a few were made explorers by fate, having set out to do something completely different.
For all its wonder, Australia’s exploration history has been bowdlerised, debased and made insipid for generations of Australians by those with particular political and social agendas. In my last year of primary school I fidgeted whenever stern Miss Conway raised the topic of the explorers. A map of Australia would be produced, across which ran a confusion of dotted, dashed and coloured lines. I was bored because I did not know the country the map represented. The men were just names, their journeys snail trails across paper. No attempt was made to bring exploring to life, perhaps because the inconvenient details about Aborigines and barren wastes would have simply got in the way of the main message: that the Europeans had triumphed. Somehow, those lines granted possession of a continent. And in that message, all of the subtlety, the excitement and wonder of exploration was lost.
Perhaps it is the very realisation that exploration was a sort of conquest that has caused it to fall so far out of favour with many contemporary Australians. It is now commonly thought of as a kind of abomination—the penetration of a fragile continent by ruthless, rough-handed, pale-skinned men who probed, desecrated and killed in their quest for personal vainglory. Yet as I read the words of the men and women, black and white, who carried the endeavour, I find that this is as far from the true heart of Australian exploration as were the deadly boring history lessons of my childhood.<
br />
For me, Australian exploration is a very different thing. It is heroic, for nowhere else did explorers face such obdurate country; and it depended on black people far more than on white. In the end it was a failure, for few discovered the fertile soil and abundant water they so yearned for. Yet it has enriched us immeasurably, for it turned the lens on that most fascinating other—a whole continent as it was on the day of European arrival. A continent that, through vast transformations, was to become my home.
With one notable exception, all of the accounts included here are by eyewitnesses. Some were written on the moment, by the light of a candle after a punishing day’s work, in unbearable heat or flooding rain, or with the author unable to sit because of massing ants. Only those who know the total exhaustion that such work brings can understand the sheer effort of will needed to write in such circumstances. Other narratives are reminiscences, made fragrant by the smoky atmosphere of Victorian reading rooms or beery hotels. There are precious few accounts by female explorers, and even fewer were ever published, but they are often luminous and fresh and different. For once we see the Aboriginal child, wandering lost and frightened as his parents are held at gunpoint. For once we get the whole-body fear, the loss of nerve that all explorers must have experienced at times of crisis. And we get to hear about the barely edible hairy beef, the loathing at not having washed in a week. Creaghe, Pink and Davidson are names to watch out for.
Australian exploration does not lack light relief. Figures like John Lhotsky and William Wall can be thought of as the comic explorers whose exploits are more suited to a Gilbert and Sullivan opera than the hard grind of exploration. Mark Twain said that Australian history was like so many beautiful lies, but it all actually happened. There is no fiction in this book except for one outrageous hoax, published as a factual adventure in 1899 by the pseudonymous Louis de Rougemont, who claimed, among other things, to have found the lost explorer Gibson. He describes new kinds of animals, discovers gold and marries an Aboriginal wife during his bizarre mind-travels. His is the pastiche jewel deliberately threaded on the necklace, so that the genuine diamonds can shine all the more brightly.