A Commonwealth of Thieves

by Thomas Keneally

  In December 1791, as the Gorgon lay in Sydney Cove ready to return the marines to Britain, offers were made to the non-commissioned officers and privates to stay in the country as settlers or to enter into the New South Wales Corps. Such offers could only have derived from a British government with a sense of population pressure. Three corporals, a drummer, and 59 privates accepted grants of land on Norfolk Island or at Parramatta, as Rose Hill was by now officially named. The rest wanted to return—indeed, of those who stayed, Tench thought the behaviour of the majority of them could be ascribed to “infatuated affection to female convicts, whose characters and habits of life, I am sorry to say, promise from a connection neither honour nor tranquillity.” As for tranquillity, only the parties to the relationships could say anything, but it is a matter of record that many of the remaining soldiers and their women were founders of enduring Antipodean stock.

  Before packing to leave on Gorgon, in the summer of 1791–92, Tench made a reconnaissance around Prospect Hill and the ponds along the Parramatta River. Looking at the settlements with the eyes of a man about to depart forever, Tench gave a report of mixed skill and ineptitude on the part of convict and other farmers, and of New South Wales as something less than a bountiful garden. Its tough and plentiful flora might seem to promise a form of Eden, but here in the Sydney basin it all grew from an ancient, leached, and worn-down earth that demanded great skill and determination from those who would profit from it.

  For its natural fertility, Tench admired the Parramatta farm of the former sailor and highway robber John Ramsay. Ramsay had settled there with his wife, Mary Leary, from the Second Fleet. Like Ruse's wife, Elizabeth Perry, Mary Leary might have been unjustly transported, and was a woman with an unresolved and burning grievance against her mistress, the wife of a London attorney. She claimed that the woman not only docked her pay but sold used garments to her for exorbitant prices. When the lawyer saw some of his wife's clothing on Leary, his wife swore under oath that she had never “sold her any one thing in my life.” On the farm in New South Wales, Leary probably enlisted her husband's belief in her innocence. No doubt, at their rough-hewn table, she reiterated the extremely credible tale to Captain Tench. Tench thought Ramsay “deserves a good spot, for he is a civil, sober, industrious man. Besides his corn land, he has a well-laid-out little garden, in which I found him and his wife busily at work. He praised her industry to me; and said he did not doubt of succeeding.”

  By contrast Tench found Joseph Bishop, former fisherman and convict, had planted a little maize “in so slovenly a style, as to promise a very poor crop.” To survive here as a farmer, thought Tench, a man “must exert more than ordinary activity. The attorney's clerk, Matthew Evering-ham, I also thought out of his province, and likely to return, like Bishop, when victualling from the stores ceased, to drag a timber or brick cart for his maintenance…. I dare believe he finds cultivating his own land not half so heavy a task, as he formerly found that of stringing together volumes of tautology to encumber, or convey away that of his neighbour.”

  It would turn out that Everingham, son of an earl, whose crime was to have acquired legal textbooks under false pretences, and his wife, Elizabeth Rymes, Spitalfields bed-linen thief from the Second Fleet, would succeed, however touch-and-go it might have seemed in that early summer of 1791, and would give birth and habitation to nine small “cornstalks” or Currency children, as native-born New South Welshmen came to be called.

  Later in his last New South Wales summer, Tench would visit Phillip Schaeffer's farm on the Parramatta River. Schaeffer had served as a lieutenant in the Hesse-Hanau Regiment in the American War, and he and Tench had the bond of having been fellows in arms. Herr Schaeffer had proved ineffective as a superintendent of convict farm work, but Phillip liked him as a fellow German-speaker, and had given him a land grant and five convicts to work for him. Although his maize was “mean” and his wheat “thin and poor,” he had 900 vines planted—the only other vines in the country being in the garden of Phillip's second Government House in Parramatta. He told Tench that his father had owned a small estate on the banks of the Rhine, and that he himself had loved from an early age working in the vineyard. Tench found that Schaeffer spoke very realistically about his prospects. Sometimes he nearly despaired and had often weighed up whether to relinquish the farm.

  Directly across the river from Schaeffer's 140 acres lay the more modest but “very eligible” farm of Christopher Magee, a neighbour of the initial farmer, James Ruse. Magee—alias Charles Williams—had been a farm labourer in England for eight years and had worked in America, and although sentenced in 1784 at the Old Bailey, had soon after his landing been made a convict overseer on the government farm. Though he entertained some revolutionary ideas, he was described by David Collins as having “extraordinary propriety of conduct.” His wife, a former hawker and—if some of the evidence at her trial can be believed—prostitute, worked with him on the farm. “I asked by what means he had been able to accomplish so much? He answered, ‘By industry and by hiring all the convicts I could get to work in their leisure hours.’” His greatest problem was that he needed to bear all the water he used half a mile from the river, for having sunk a well he found the water from it brackish.

  Magee's idyll on the Parramatta River was fragile, for after Tench had left the colony, Magee's young wife, Eleanor McCabe, drowned in the river, and Collins would record that Magee subsequently gave himself over “to idleness and dissipation.”

  Tench's reconnaissance before departure showed that the Parramatta River area did not speak well for the fertility of eastern Australia. It was in Australian terms a short river which did not descend from any great elevation. North and south along the coast lay mighty and often turbulent rivers which created fertile floodplains, but these went unvisited for now, and the merely middling fertility of the land around Sydney and Parramatta made success fragile.

  Before leaving Parramatta for the last time, Watkin went to visit Barrington. The tall Irishman approached six feet, was slender, and his gait and manner bespoke “liveliness and activity. Of that elegance and fashion, with which my imagination had decked him … I could distinguish no trace. Great allowance should, however, be made for depression and unavoidable deficiency of dress.” Tench admired his strong cast of character, his penetrating eye, his prominent forehead. “His whole demeanour is humble, not servile…. Since his arrival here, his conduct has been irreproachable … his knowledge of men, particularly that part of them into whose morals, manners and behaviour, he is ordered especially to inspect, eminently fitting him for the office.” And here Tench went on to a refined reflection. “I cannot quit him without bearing my testimony that his talents promise to be directed, in future, to make reparation to society for the offences he has heretofore committed against it.” This was a mirror of what Barrington had promised at his trial, that his colonial reformation would be held up as an example of an internationally famous criminal being reduced to good order by the convict transportation system.

  Sydney, where Tench had spent the bulk of his time in New South Wales, was by the turn of 1791–92, as Tench said good-bye, the lesser village to Parramatta. In Sydney lived 1,259 persons, with 1,625 in Parramatta and its farming areas, and 1,172 at Norfolk Island. He concluded there were just in excess of 4,000 European people perilously surviving the Sydney experiment. He would leave the colony with fond remembrance, but no desire to return.

  The always composed Phillip did not record his feelings in losing both such friends as Watkin and such enemies as Major Ross and Captain Campbell. But Major Ross was delighted to march the marines aboard the Gorgon on 13 December. His now pre-adolescent son, Lieutenant John Ross, was in their ranks. Ross had only the week before found reason to fight a duel with Captain Hill of the New South Wales Corps, from which though both fired two shots, both came away unhurt. Back home, Ross would be made a recruiting officer and then get plenty of action about His Majesty's warships during the long war with
Revolutionary and Napoleonic France, and would be last heard of serving in the East Indies aboard the Sceptre about 1808.

  Gorgon dropped down the harbour three days after the marines marched aboard, and vanished back to the known world the next day. Sergeant Scott and his family were returning to England on Gorgon, but a company of marines remained behind waiting for the arrival of the remainder of the New South Wales Corps.

  The Gorgon on departure carried not only returning soldiers, but was to an extent an Australian ark: “our barque was now crowded with kangaroos, opossums, and every curiosity which that country produced,” including plants and birds and the other antediluvian mysteries of New South Wales.

  BY THE TIME THE Gorgon left Sydney, the twenty-month-old voyager Emmanuel Bryant had died in the Dutch East India Company prison ship moored off Batavia, where Mary Bryant and her two infants were kept prisoner. Will had already been moved ashore into the Dutch East India Company's hospital, where he too died, no doubt raving about the British excise men and their vileness. Captain Edwards, avenger of Bligh, was in the meantime in good lodgings in the elegant Dutch quarter of Batavia, organising passages for himself, his prisoners, and the Pandora's company on three Dutch ships to go home by way of the Cape.

  When the arrangements were concluded, Mary and her daughter, Charlotte, were put aboard the Horssen with two of the Bryant group. The others went aboard a ship called the Hoornwey. As they traversed Sunda Strait, James Cox either fell or jumped overboard from the Horssen. He had been Will Bryant's closest conspirator outside Mary. John Simms and William Martin, two members of the party, were sickening and would die before the Cape. It did not appear that Captain Edwards, on his way home for the pro forma courtmartial for the loss of Pandora, considered the death rate of the Bryant party abnormal, or that it was untoward that they should pay so heavily for their skilled escape.

  twenty-seven

  THROUGH HIS GIFTS OF IRON hatchets to a number of selected Aboriginals, including Bennelong, Phillip might have unwittingly created a new elite—the Mogogal, the hatchet men. But even ownership of a hatchet did not give Bennelong psychological dominance over his wife, Barangaroo Daringah, something of a woman warrior. She carried two scars from spear wounds received in the give-and-take of inter-clan relations. The spear that caused one of them had passed right through her thigh. She was forceful and good-looking. “She is very straight and exceedingly well-made,” wrote Phillip. “Her features are good, and she goes entirely naked, yet there is such an air of innocence about her that clothing scarcely appears necessary.” The septum of her nose had also been pierced—an uncommon feature with Port Jackson women.

  Tench had described Yuringa, Colby's wife, as “meek and feminine,” but Barangaroo by contrast as “fierce and unsubmissive.” She seemed slightly older than Bennelong and had two children of a former husband, both of whom were dead, possibly from the smallpox. Now she was about to give birth again and Phillip noticed that she, like other Aboriginal mothers, planned to wrap up her new baby in the soft bark of the tea-tree.

  Before the birth, Barangaroo had visions of being delivered of her baby in Phillip's house, and had already asked him about it. Phillip thought it a mere touching request. But it would give her child a claim on Government House as his place of birth, and seemed to carry with it, apart from genuine affection and reverence, a new strategy—if the ghosts could not be made to disappear, the Eora should try to outclaim and out-title them. Barangaroo thus avoided the hospital, where Phillip wanted to send her, for the obvious reason that it was full of mawm, the bad spirits of the dead. In the event, the birth occurred suddenly and did not, in fact, take place at Government House. The child was a girl named Dilboong.

  Soon after, at the end of 1791, Barangaroo died. The cause of death was unknown, but might have been post-childbirth complications or perhaps marital contest, the latter seeming for once the least likely of factors. Bennelong and Barangaroo were always fighting, but Tench said, like a good Georgian man, that “she was a scold, and a vixen, and nobody pitied her … the women often artfully studied to irritate and inflame the passions of the men, although sensible that the consequence will alight on themselves.” As Barangaroo lay dying, the desperate Bennelong summoned the great carradhyWillemering, the wounder of Phillip. When he did not arrive in time to save her, Bennelong would seek him out and spear him in the thigh. Indeed, in Barangaroo's honour, or more accurately to adjust the world to her death, many spears were thrown by Bennelong and her Cameraigal relatives, for death was always the result of some sorcery. The idea that punishment for death was owed to some malign influence, and that spirits needed to be avenged before they could go to the sky, lay solemnly upon a passionate husband like Bennelong.

  In intense grieving, he asked Phillip, Surgeon White, and Lieutenant David Collins to witness his wife's cremation. He cleared the ground where the funeral pyre was to be built by digging out the earth to about five inches below the surface. Then a mound of sticks, bushes, and branches was made about three feet high. Barangaroo's body, wrapped in an old English blanket, was laid on top of this with her head facing north. Bennelong stacked logs on the body and the fire was lit. The English spectators left before the body was totally consumed.

  After the ceremony, Bennelong seemed cheerful and talked about finding a nurse amongst the white women for his daughter, who still needed breast-feeding. Dilboong, the child, was suckled by a convict woman, Midshipman Southwell noting that some of the Eora women “gladly forego the dear pleasure of nurturing their own brats, and leave them in perfect security to the care of several of the convict women, who are suitably rewarded by the governor.”

  With Watkin Tench gone, David Collins and Lieutenant Dawes and Phillip himself remained as the chief observers of the natives. Collins retained an exhaustive interest in native society and recorded what he saw in detail and without any deliberate cultural malice. He was also perceptive when it came to shifts in the relationship between the Europeans and the Aboriginals. Since the period of peace-making in late 1791, when stolen goods were returned to the natives, there had been no “interruption by acts of hostility,” he wrote. “Several of their young people continue to reside among us, and the different houses in the town were frequently visited by their relations.”

  But Collins was aware that aside from British-Eora conflict, the old ritual battles of the Eora continued. There had been a confrontation between the Sydney and Botany Bay natives in April 1791 over the uttering of the name of a dead man. The natives knew that the uttered name could summon havoc from the spiritual realm onto the physical earth, and mourners often warned officers not to use the names of the dead. After a death, the deceased became “a nameless one,” said Collins.

  A corroboree dancerite was held at night that summer at “the head of the stream” on a rise to the south-east of Government House. During it a Gweagal man from southern Botany Bay, who had earlier been involved in beating a Cadigal, was suddenly attacked. Colby thrust his spear at the man and another native struck two heavy blows to his back with his club. Wounded and bleeding, the unarmed man rose to his feet and let himself be upbraided by Colby and his ally. Bennelong came up and wiped the blood from his wounds with grass. That evening David Collins saw the Gweagal man with a ligature fastened tightly round his head, for it “certainly required something to alleviate the pain he must have endured.” According to the practice of the country, said Collins, the victim did not wash the blood off.

  An incident occurred in May 1792 which gave the whites a further bewildered insight into the rigidity of native law. A woman named Noorooing came into town to tell the whites of the ritual killing of a south Botany Bay native, Yellaway, who had abducted her. She was clearly not an unwilling abductee, since she threw ashes on herself in sadness and refused all food, and other Aboriginals explained that she was go-lahng, in a state of ritual mourning and fasting. Soon after, Noorooing, travelling in the bush near Sydney Cove, met and attacked a little girl relate
d to the murderer of Yellaway. She beat the little girl so cruelly that the child was brought into town almost dead, with six or seven deep gashes in her throat and one ear cut to the bone. She died a few days later.

  The English were not sympathetic to Noorooing, but other Aboriginals explained to them “that she had done no more than what custom obliged her to…. The little victim of her revenge was, from her quiet, tractable manners, much beloved in the town; and what is a singular trait of the inhumanity of this proceeding, she had every day since Yellaway's death requested that Noorooing should be fed at the officer's hut, where she herself resided.” The native who had committed the murder for which his little kinswoman suffered escaped apparently unpunished. In some way that the Europeans could not understand, the blood debt had been fully settled by the girl's death.

  Colby's wife, Yuringa, like Barangaroo, would die soon after child-birth. In recent times, Yuringa had visited Mrs. Macarthur in the Macarthur hut made from cabbage tree posts framed with wattle and daub, and Mrs. Macarthur had observed the mantle made of soft bark in which the child was wrapped. At Yuringa's burial, the British onlookers were horrified to see Colby place the baby with its dead mother in a shallow grave. Colby looked down on his wife and his child and threw a large, murderous stone on the corpse and the living infant, and the grave was instantly filled in. “The whole business was so momentary, that our people had not time or presence of mind sufficient to prevent it; and on speaking about it to Colby, he, so far from thinking it inhuman, justified the extraordinary act by assuring us that as no woman could be found to nurse the child it would die a much worse death than that to which he had put it.”