A Commonwealth of Thieves

by Thomas Keneally

  The next morning, after their last breakfast on the ships, the remaining male convicts, except those who were too sick to walk, gathered up their clothing and bedding and were taken ashore. How strange to leave the familiar convict deck where they had been for so long, the narrow bed space, the penal womb, to be reborn ashore. Not that they were reborn entirely, since they brought their habits of mind and the Tawny Prince, the deity of the London canting crews, with them.

  The talkers of cant, and the country fellows as well, had the urgent business of clearing ground and building themselves shelters, for there were no tenements or even tents for them. Whitehall had decided that it would be good exercise for them to have to construct their own habitations. Under instruction from country felons, they began putting together structures of wattle and daub—plaited panels of branches providing the walls and the cracks being filled in with daubed clay, of which there was a plentiful supply on the foreshore of Sydney Cove. Longboats were regularly sent to the north side of Port Jackson in quest of tall straight trunks of cabbage tree, which were used for the corner poles of huts. Roofs were of bark, thatch of cabbage tree fronds, or rushes plastered over with clay, or else with a limited supply of canvas from Sirius, which all made, said Collins, “a very good hovel.” There were sundry economic but flimsy structures standing within a few days. Many, however, would be destroyed on 2 February in a characteristically violent Sydney thunderstorm.

  As for any dream of log cabins, those cutting the tall trees found the timber incorrigible—resistant to adze and plane, knotty, and with a mind of its own, a wood indifferent to European purposes. Hunter had hoped to use local eucalypts for repairs to Sirius, but found them unsuitable. “We were here in the middle of a wood in which were trees from the size of a man's arm to 28-feet in circumference, but they were either so very crooked, so rent or so rotten in the heart that we could scarcely get one sound or serviceable in a dozen.” Surgeon White, who had sufficient patients to attend to, would have time to declare of this wood that “repeated trials have only served to convince me that immediately on immersion it sinks to the bottom like a stone.” Clearly, it was not amenable.

  Something else momentous but without ceremony occurred: public stock, including one bull, four cows, one bull-calf, one stallion, three mares, and three colts, largely acquired in Cape Town, was landed on the east side of the cove. A range of Western Europe's useful beasts was herded for the first time on this shore, the cattle under the care of a convict named Edward Corbett. The Eora had not presented themselves in any numbers at Sydney Cove yet, but to those natives who observed the inlet, these must have seemed drastically new items in zoology.

  On 29 January 1788, when Phillip landed at Spring Cove just inside North Head, twelve natives crowded round the boats, anxious to inspect the newcomers, these owners of fabulous beasts and floating islands. It was the first contact between the races within Port Jackson. The sailors mixed with the native men, who were “quite sociable, dancing, and otherwise amusing,” but who kept their women well away. The whites could not persuade any of the natives to return with them to the settlement at Sydney Cove, but John Hunter found the Port Jackson inhabitants a “very lively and inquisitive race,” straight, thin, well-made, small-limbed, active and very curious.

  Phillip was anxious to get the male convicts to work as soon as possible. In his ideal settlement, the convicts would work for the government from seven in the morning until three in the afternoon, with a half-day on Saturdays, and then have spare time to grow vegetables or pursue some other useful task thereafter. By 30 January, the first official work party of convicts was put to breaking ground for a garden and farm on the slope of the east side of the cove and just over the hill, in what became known as Farm Cove. As the tools were handed out by the conscientious and always stressed storekeeper, Andrew Miller, the convicts, directed amongst others by Phillip's manservant, Henry Dodd, showed little enthusiasm. The first breaking of sod by some anonymous shoveller in Sydney Cove was unattended by ceremony nor by wry comments on the fact that the earth furthest from Europe was being broken by Europe's lowest, most reviled hands. The urban convicts immediately proved themselves to be the worst, resistant to the cries of Dodd and the convict supervisors to put their bodies into what was to them the alien task of digging and farming. One convict supervisor was a young farmer named James Ruse, who had stolen two watches and stood trial on the edge of his native Cornish moors at Bodmin. But even men as likeable as James Ruse became the enemy to the other convicts once they were put in a supervisory role. The phrase “Kiss my arse!” was a popular one in Sydney Cove—it appears in the records of the judge-advocate's court as standard badinage, and may well have been uttered that penultimate January day in Farm Cove.

  Even so, that first slovenly attempt at making a government garden had been a moment much looked forward to by Arthur Phillip, and was significant in that it was an early instance in which the realities of the new society were forced upon him. The earth proved rocky, full of lumps of sandstone. Officers, and the occasional convict stonemason, thought that the yellowish sandstone was comparable to Portland stone and suitable for working. But in the bush around the cove there were no limestone deposits for cement.

  The lime trees, the lemons, the oranges, the figs and grapes which had been picked up in the Cape were slowly planted out in the government farm, but marsupial rats emerged at night and devoured them. Phillip's sleep beneath the canvas of his temporary residence was restless, since he suffered from these truths as much as from the chronic renal pain familiar to many of those subjected to the traditional salt-rich seagoing diet.

  “The officers who composed the detachment are not only few in number,” Phillip would write to Lord Sydney, “but most of them have declined any interference with the convicts, except when they are employed for their own particular service.” He had imagined them willingly taking at least a monitoring and encouraging role in the work of convicts, but the officers believed “that they were not sent out to do more than the duties of soldiers.” So Phillip was obliged to put trustworthy convicts, such as the young, good-looking, well-liked Henry Kable, into supervisory roles. Kable would become a superintendent of the women prisoners.

  The chief stickler on such issues remained Major Robbie Ross, commander of marines and lieutenant-governor. If he looked on Port Jackson and Sydney Cove and environs with a far more jaundiced eye than other officers, it was partly because he still found Phillip so annoyingly secretive about his intentions. Ross seemed lieutenant-governor in name only, and indeed, if Phillip died, he was according to the Orders-in-Council to be succeeded not by Ross but by Captain Hunter.

  Ross was not such a by-the-book fellow, however, when it came to his personal life, and on Captain Shea's death soon after landing he made his own son, John Ross, a child just about to turn ten, a volunteer lieutenant, a rank he hoped would be confirmed ultimately by the Admiralty with appropriate back-pay benefits.

  By contrast with feverish Major Ross, one historian has compared Phillip as a figure to the shark, a totemic animal of most coastal or island Pacific peoples, a master of life and bestower of death, inscrutable but reliable in all instincts, an enforcer of nature's rules, ruthlessly just to the level of blood sacrifice, and secretive by very necessity. Phillip was as mysterious a creature to Ross as he was to the convicts.

  In the tents placed for the sick on the west side of the cove, beneath the rocky, bush-embowered sandstone ledges, Surgeon White admitted with some concern that, after the preventive medical success of the fleet, the numbers of sick were increasing. Scurvy, dormant on the ships, suddenly manifested itself in some of the convicts now that they had landed, and dysentery as well. This phenomenon of voyagers becoming ill when ashore after long journeys had been commonly noted. In that late January heat Surgeon White's sicker patients sat out on blankets in the sun and raised their mouths to bite off the air. White complained that “not a comfort or convenience could be got” for the sick in thos
e first days, and his frustration was compounded by a quarrel with his querulous young Scottish assistant, William Balmain, a long-standing temperamental conflict that had begun with a professional argument in Portsmouth months before.

  Lest the sailors on the two naval vessels—Sirius and Supply—begin to eat into the public stores not yet landed, and in preparation for any future travels, Phillip appointed for the use of Sirius an island not far from the public farm, a “Garden Island” as it soon became known, on which to grow vegetables for the crew's consumption. Soon Ralph Clark would start using another island, Clark Island, in Port Jackson, as a vegetable garden, and despite its relative distance down-harbour from Sydney Cove, it would sometimes be plundered by boat crews, and by hungry convicts swimming out there.

  There was no priority to build a prison stockade in Sydney Cove. It had always been the plan that the environs would serve as walls to a great outdoor prison. The strange hinterland would be the chief guard and overseer. The First Fleet convicts were in the ultimate panopticon, where strangeness hemmed them in, and the sky aimed its huge blank blue eye at them. And yet from the day of landing onwards, a number of male prisoners walked the seven miles along a native track down to Botany Bay to bespeak the Frenchmen, and to plead political asylum or offer services as sailors.

  Lieutenant Bradley, the teacher from the Naval Academy at Portsmouth, had been out surveying the shoreline of Port Jackson, and found on the north side twelve miles of snug coves and—as in Sydney Cove—good depths of water and freshwater streams entering many of the harbour's inlets. At his task, working in sounding from a longboat, he became aware that the northern shore of Port Jackson, and the southern shore too, down-harbour, carried a considerable population of Eora, “Indians … painted very whimsically with pipe clay and red ochre.” He came to notice that all the women they met had two joints at the little finger on the left hand missing. “It was supposed by some to be the pledge on the marriage ceremony, or of their having children.” Most of the men had lost a front incisor tooth and were highly scarred. Their spears were twelve to sixteen feet in length, and they walked very upright.

  In between making his own observations, on 1 February Governor Phillip took his friend King aside by the door of his canvas house to discuss in detail the sending of a few people and some livestock in the Supply to settle Norfolk Island, the landfall 1,000 miles out in the Pacific which Cook had found and whose pines and flax plants seemed to offer the resource both of masts and of flax— “strategic commodities” as one historian would call them, as crucial as oil would be to later states. The recent problems of the Royal Navy in acquiring masts and canvas from the Baltic, and under the French blockade of the American colonies during the recent revolution in America, might be solved by Norfolk Island. Thus a potentially exciting opportunity to adjust the balance of the navy's resources seemed to lie ahead for young Mr. King.

  But Phillip asked King, before he went away, to slip down south to Botany Bay and visit the illustrious Frenchman La Pérouse. The excursion was no doubt partly a spying expedition. Phillip wanted King to fool La Pérouse about the scale of the supplies the British in Sydney Cove possessed by offering him “whatever he might have occasion for.”

  So at three o'clock in the morning of 2 February, King and the astronomer, Dawes, set out by longboat with some marines for Botany Bay. King would report that they were received aboard the French flagship by the Comte with the greatest politeness. After King had delivered Phillip's message, La Pérouse sent his thanks to the governor and made the same formal offers of help, La Pérouse playing the game Phillip had set up by saying exaggeratedly that he would be in France in fifteen months time and had three years' stores aboard, and so would be happy to oblige Mr. Phillip with anything he might want. He reported that a number of the male convicts had already visited and offered to serve aboard the French ships, or had pleaded for asylum, but that he had dismissed them all with threats and a day's provisions to get them back to Sydney Cove. If convict women, once landed at Sydney Cove, should present themselves, they would be treated in the same manner. Indeed, La Pérouse would write that “les déserteurs nous causèrent d'beaucoup d'ennui et d'embarras [the deserters caused us a lot of trouble and embarrassment].”

  Yet a French-born convict named Peter Paris went missing and was hidden by sympathetic Frenchmen in La Pérouse's vessels. Having disappeared from Sydney Cove in February 1788, he would later be lost in the New Hebrides (Vanuatu) with La Pérouse himself and all the other members of the French expedition.

  Before that happened, however, Monsieur de Clonnard, the captain of the Astrolabe, made a return visit to Sydney Cove and again told Collins and others he was frequently visited by convicts. Abbé Monges, a scientific priest, accompanied de Clonnard on the visit, and Clark entertained the abbé by letting him look at the butterflies and other insects he was collecting for his wife, Betsy Alicia.

  The stiff politeness between English and French had never been so remotely played out as here, in Warrane, Sydney Cove. The same could be said of the death in Botany Bay of the Franciscan friar-cum-scientist, Fr. Receveur, who would be buried on the foreshore and whose grave would be periodically tended by the British.

  But basically, Phillip wanted the French gone, so that British New South Wales could establish itself in isolation.

  eight

  AND NOW SOCIETY IN New South Wales really began. The convict women came up from the prison decks to be landed on 6 February. On Lady Penrhyn, Surgeon Bowes Smyth was happy to see them taken off in the ship's longboats, beginning at five o'clock in the morning. Those with goods, portmanteaux, or duffel bags full of clothing, decorations, and hats, which had been carried in the holds, were handed their property and toted or wore it ashore, in combination with their well-worn penal clothes. “Some few among them,” said Bowes Smyth, “might be said to be well dressed.”

  How silent the ships must have suddenly seemed to the sailors, as if the life had gone out of them. The women were landed on the western side of Sydney Cove, where bedraggled canvas and some huts of wattle and bark delineated their camp. The last of them landed at six o'clock on what would prove to be a typical summer evening, still and hot, but promising a southerly squall. “The men convicts got to them very soon after they landed,” said Bowes Smyth. At the same time a number of suddenly lonely sailors from the transports also came ashore, bringing grog with them, and the marines were unable or unwilling to keep the women separate. Lady Penrhyn's crew, in particular, joined in one mass outdoor party, Sydney's first fëte of hedonism.

  “It is beyond my abilities to give a just description of the scene of debauchery and riot which continued through the night,” wrote Bowes Smyth. The evening had turned humid and thunderous, the sentinel in front of Major Ross's marquee being so intimidated by lightning that he abandoned his post and ran in to join the gentlemen Major Ross and Lieutenant Clark as they were eating a wild duck Clark had shot that day. While the night proceeded, one potent stroke of lightning would kill six sheep, two lambs, and a pig, all belonging to Major Ross.

  The great Sydney bacchanalia went on despite the thunderstorm. Fists were raised to God's lightning; in the name of the Tawny Prince and in defiance of British justice, the downpour was cursed and challenged, and survival and utter displacement were celebrated in lunges and caresses. “The scene which presented itself at the time, and during the greater part of the night, beggars every description. Some swearing, others quarrelling, others singing, not in the least regarding the tempest, though so great that the thunder shook the ship….”

  There is little doubt either that some women were by dark safely with mentors. The forceful young Cockney Jewish convict Esther Abrahams was the passion of twenty-three-year-old Lieutenant George Johnston, a Scot severely wounded by the French as a fifteen-year-old in 1780 but now returned to manhood's bloom. The alliance between Scot and Jewish girl would ultimately lead to marriage. Jewish immigrants had begun arriving in England from Eastern
Europe and Tsarist pogroms from the seventeenth century onwards, and settled in such London areas as Wapping and Spitalfields. Esther had been aged about twenty at the time of her seven years transportation for stealing lace to the value of 50 shillings, and at the time Lieutenant Johnston became interested in her, she had already given birth to a daughter in Newgate and brought her on board the Lady Penrhyn.

  Margaret Dawson from the Lady Penrhyn, a seventeen-year-old Lancashire girl who had stolen clothing and jewellery to the death-earning value of 22 pounds 18 shillings from her master and taken it away with her on the Liverpool coach, joined her lover, Assistant Surgeon Balmain, a twenty-six-year-old Scot. Dawson must have been very pretty, since the Old Bailey trial documents explicitly note her youth and beauty as reasons for her being saved from the scaffold.

  There were grounds for a riotous, desperate party of some sort. The women had been on their ships a deranging eight months. Their sentences were now terminal—they had arrived inextricably in this outlandish and humid summer place. They would be buried in sandstone-strewn earth in this unfamiliar and inscrutable region amongst the angular and tortuous eucalyptus trees. Their frenzy was that of people ejected from the known world and making a rough, brutal bed in the unknown one.