A Commonwealth of Thieves

by Thomas Keneally

  When he landed in Sydney in September 1795, Bennelong made a splash and settled down again at his house at Tubowgulle. But his young wife, Karubarabulu, who had taken up with another man in his absence, disdained him. He found himself fully accepted neither by the new administration in Sydney Cove nor by his own people, and in two years had become “so fond of drinking that he lost no opportunity of being intoxicated.” He suffered further serious ritual wounds, perhaps as a result of the violence liquor evoked from him. As late as 1805 he was engaged in combat with Colby over Karubarabulu. By the time he died at Kissing Point on the Parramatta River in 1813, the Sydney Gazette, New South Wales's first newspaper, wrote, “Of this veteran champion of the native tribe little favourable can be said. His voyage to and benevolent treatment in Britain produced no change whatever in his manners and inclinations, which were naturally barbarous and ferocious.” But his name lives on in modern Australia, not least because the Sydney Opera House stands on Tubowgulle, Bennelong Point.

  That good friend of Bennelong's Watkin Tench, the genial diarist, would be engaged in the long war against France, spending six months as a prisoner of war, then typically publishing a book, Letters from France, about the experience. Exchanged with a French officer, he served the rest of the war in the Channel fleet, rising to the rank of major-general by the time Napoleon fell. On half-pay for three years, he returned to the active list as commander of the Plymouth Division, retiring as a lieutenant-general in 1821. He and his wife had no children but adopted those of Mrs. Tench's sister. His Narrative of the Expedition to Botany Bay and A Complete Account of the Settlement at Port Jackson were published in 1789 and 1793. One can imagine him during his times ashore as the sort of charming, good-natured, cultivated fellow who would bring the light and warmth of his character to Jane Austen–esque drawing rooms.

  Captain Philip Gidley King would be governor of New South Wales from 1800, and thus faced the great problem of the monopolist traffickers in liquor, generally members of the New South Wales or Rum Corps. D'Arcy Wentworth, back from Norfolk Island, had entered that market also. King has been described as being “rather over-excited at the time of the Irish conspiracy in 1804,” and indeed, having received many transported United Irishmen from the rebellion in Ireland of 1798, he treated them with a provocative brutality over a number of years and suppressed their uprising in 1804 with a ferocity of hangings and floggings which will always stand to his shame. Not that he did not pay with his own health, for he returned to England in 1808 very ill, and died soon thereafter. His sons by Ann Innett and his wife and all but one of his four daughters lived to adulthood and many married into colonial families, including the Macarthur family.

  Ann Innett herself would marry the emancipist farmer Richard Robertson, supposed horse-thief, and be granted 30 acres of the Northern Boundary farms in 1794. In 1804, as governor, King would grant her an absolute pardon. She later ran a butchery with her husband, continuing to manage it after he left for England, sailing off herself for the near-forgotten homeland in March 1820. If the Reverend Johnson had hoped for a more piety-respecting administration under Major Grose, he was disappointed. “I can't pass over this business,” wrote Grose, “without observing that Mr. Johnson is one of the people called Methodists, [and] is a very troublesome, discontented character.” In 1793 Johnson received 100 acres at Kissing Point on the Parramatta River in return for relinquishing his claim to a glebe, that is, a church-farm. Though he made a reputation as an orchardist, he did not return to England as a wealthy colonist when he left New South Wales in late 1800. A monument was ultimately erected to him in St. Mary Aldermary, London, stating that he was a former rector there and had died in 1827, aged seventy-four years. Mary Johnson lived until 1831.

  John and Elizabeth Macarthur, who had travelled in squalid, loud, and smelly cubbyholes to reach New South Wales, would begin to be rewarded for their troubles with grants of land and favours from Major Grose. Macarthur would build a fortune not only out of land and trade but through his development of world-beating Australian fleeces from his merino flocks at the Cow Pastures south-west of Sydney. Litigious and rebellious, he would involve himself in the overthrow of Governor Bligh and would perforce leave the colony for some years to avoid the legal consequences of that rebellion, trusting his affairs to his capable wife. Macarthur would live until 1835 and be survived by Elizabeth, and by sons prominent in early New South Wales politics.

  Ralph Clark, having returned to England with considerable joy even though placed on half-pay, was soon back on active service against the French. His beloved Betsy Alicia died in 1794 giving birth to a stillborn child. In the same year his son, a midshipman, was serving with Ralph on a British warship in the West Indies and perished below of yellow fever the same day Ralph Clark himself was shot dead on deck by a French sniper. His only remaining family were the convict Mary Brenham and her daughter, Alicia, christened in Sydney on 16 December 1791.

  Major George Johnston, paramour of the Cockney Esther Abrahams, ruthlessly suppressed the uprising of United Irishmen in New South Wales in 1804, and survived the opprobrium of having overthrown Bligh, though he had to face a court-martial in England and be deprived of his rank. In 1814, he regularised his marriage to Esther. He enjoyed great success as a farmer and grazier in New South Wales, and he and his wife are buried together in a family vault designed by the convict architect Francis Greenway.

  After his bitter exile on Norfolk Island, D'Arcy Wentworth returned to Sydney in 1796 and would ultimately rise to become principal surgeon of the Civil Medical Department in 1809. He was appointed a justice of the peace and would sit on the Governor's Court. A commissioner of the first turnpike road to Parramatta, he was also treasurer of the police fund, which received three-quarters of colonial revenue. Governor Bligh had him arrested in 1808 for misusing the labour of sick convicts for his private advantage. Wentworth was understandably sympathetic to the rebels, such as Macarthur and Johnston, who overthrew Bligh that year.

  He involved himself in victualling and clothing patients in colonial hospitals, and in 1810, in conjunction with two other businessmen, he contracted to build Sydney Hospital for Governor Macquarie in return for a monopoly on the rum trade. Wentworth claimed to have lost money due to the expense of building this two-hundred-person hospital, but his trade in rum and other interests would make him perhaps the richest man in the colony. In 1816 he would help establish the Bank of New South Wales, of which he was the original director and the second largest shareholder. Wentworth's brushes with the Old Bailey, and his alliance with the convict woman Catherine Crowley, tended to somewhat isolate him in his fine house on the road to Parramatta, yet when he emerged for social events he was much beloved by fashionable Sydney. Dying at his estate, Homebush, in 1827, he was described in the Sydney Monitor as “a lover of freedom; a consistent steady friend of the people; a kind and liberal master; a just and humane magistrate; a steady friend and an honest man.” His son with the turned-in eye would ride his father's horses to victory in the races at Hyde Park—a barracks square near the source of the Tank Stream—and would be, with two other settlers, the first of the Britons to cross the Blue Mountains and see the illimitable inner plain. As a colonial statesman, William Charles Wentworth saw Australia not as a potential American-style republic, as some of his contemporaries did, but “a new Britannia in another world.” A Tory to the extent many New South Wales democrats would mock, he was a leader in achieving constitutional government in New South Wales.

  AS FOR NEW SOUTH WALES itself, in his 1814 Voyage to Terra Australis, the navigator Lieutenant Matthew Flinders, dying of consumption, wrote, “Had I permitted myself any innovation upon the original term Terra Australis, it would have been to convert it into Australia.” This latter name crept into use. The children of convicts and settlers found it easier to say they were Australians rather than New South Welshmen. William Charles Wentworth son of D'Arcy Wentworth and Catherine Crowley, advocated the use of the name “Aust
ralia” in his Statistical Account of the colony, and another early settlement child, Phillip Parker King of the Royal Navy, son of Philip Gidley King, used the term in his maps which the Admiralty published the same year, 1826.

  A confusing range of opinions would be uttered in Britain and in New South Wales about the children of Australia, the issue of the first free or convict settlers. It was assumed by many that they would be criminal spawn, abandoned by their “unnatural parents” or raised amidst scenes of criminal activity and daily debauchery. In fact the colonial experience and later research shows that they emerged “as a remarkably honest, sober, industrious and law-abiding group of men and women.” By comparison with British society, the family life of early New South Wales children would be stable and sturdy. In New South Wales the child labour, hunger, and vicious treatment which characterised the factories of Great Britain were missing, and although convict families sometimes lacked funds, they sought to apprentice their children to stay their hands from the youthful follies that had seen their parents transported in the first place. “The family links among these skilled workers,” writes one expert, “were strengthened by the marriage of sons and daughters of men who had been convicted together in Britain, or had arrived on the same ships, had served in the Royal Marines or New South Wales Corps, or who had worked at similar or allied trades in Sydney or Parramatta.” Former convicts actively sought apprenticeships for their sons, often with government concerns in the Sydney dockyards and lumber yards. Firms such as Kable and Underwood, and Simeon Lord's enterprises, also trained colonial youths in a range of crafts. “Apprenticeship in the colony, therefore, had none of the connotations of exploited child labour.”

  The native-born New South Welsh folk of that first generation, also known as Currency children or cornstalks, would be the first Europeans to escape the limits of the Sydney basin, the Cumberland Plain, and begin to occupy land north and south of Sydney and west of the Blue Mountains. All the interracial incomprehensions and savageries would be played out again, as Australian wealth abounded, and the law, the King James Bible, the songs and plaints of Britain and Ireland reached corners of deepest wilderness beyond the wildest imaginings of their creators.

  AS FOR OPPONENTS OF THE Sydney experiment, Jeremy Bentham was to prove tenacious. Throughout the 1790s, he sought information on how much per head “the Botany Bay scheme” was costing. He had some success lobbying for the adoption of his panoption prison plan, and would continue to collect information about the ineffectuality of penal colonies. Throughout his career he decried transportation as a poor punishment because it was so uncertain, since no one knew beforehand how much or how little pain was going to be inflicted by the experience on the offender. Death might in practice be occasioned by scurvy or drowning, while for another convict, transportation might be a favour. When criminals had been sent to America, Bentham argued, they entered an established society with its civic and moral virtues. In New South Wales, they were the society. There were not enough people to supervise them, or to impose order and discipline from above. Pointing to Collins's journal, Bentham argued that it did not give evidence of the reformation of humans by transportation to New South Wales.

  Bentham was given enough ammunition to persuade Prime Minister Pitt to inspect a model of the panopticon, and Cabinet authorised him to proceed with the work. But the project met savage opposition from citizens and business interests in every neighbourhood in which Bentham proposed to build it. New South Wales won for the time being. It was too distant to infringe on the amenity of any British district except its own.

  Bentham himself was eventually told by the Home Office that New South Wales was successful enough to relieve the kingdom of any need for his panopticon, and this caused him in 1802 to publish an impassioned tract, Panopticon Versus New South Wales. For the next thirty years, a number of parliamentarians would attack transportation using Bentham's arguments. Bentham also found a disciple in the charming evangelical activist William Wilberforce, who would oppose transportation on philosophic grounds—for one thing, its kinship with slavery. It did have such a kinship, and native Australian patriots and liberals would be the ones who, ultimately, put an end to it. But only a few of the felons of our story would live to see that day.

  ARTHUR PHILLIP'S ESTRANGED WIFE, Margaret, had died by the time he returned to Britain, but in her will she had released him from all obligations he had acquired during their relationship, so that he did not need to repay debts on the New Forest estate. As he defended and explained his administration to officials in Whitehall, spoke to Lord Hawkesbury at the Board of Trade, and to Sir Joseph Banks, he became by July “convinced by those I have consulted that the complaint I labour under may in time require assistance which cannot be found in a distant part of the world.” So he asked the Secretary of State and the King for permission to resign his governorship permanently. By October, his resignation had been accepted and he was back on half-pay. But early the next year, he received a spacious pension of £500 per year in honour of his New South Wales service. Phillip now had adequate resources to take a residence in Bath, consult specialists, and begin to take the Bath waters.

  His health improved and he offered himself to the service again. He began to visit and then married Isabella Whitehead, the forty-five-year-old daughter of a wealthy northern cotton- and linen-weaving merchant. Though Phillip had shown a tendency to “marry up,” his relationship with Isabella was a happy one, possibly not blurred by excessive passion or sexual appetite. Passion seemed reserved still for possible government appointments, and for glory as an administrator or a warrior. He was still bedevilled by a sense that he lacked connections, important friends who felt that he must be advanced.

  Under Major Grose, he learned to his distaste, liquor had been used as a vehicle of exchange by powerful interests in the New South Wales Corps at Sydney and Parramatta, and the ewes and goats, crops, and even land of some of his emancipated convict farmers were sold in return for spirits. In 1796 he complained to Banks that news from New South Wales was that individuals, including officers of the corps, were making fortunes at the expense of the Crown.

  In 1799 Philip Gidley King was appointed to take over governorship of the colony, and Phillip advised his friend that he should expel those officers and officials “who had been the principal means of ruining the colony.” Serving officers should not be granted land, and the Irish convicts should be separated from the rest, lest they infect the whole at this time of rebellion in Ireland.

  Phillip continued to suffer galling reminders that he was just another competent captain. In February 1796, he went down by coach along the rutted, icy highways from London to Portsmouth to take command of the Atlas, but found that by a bureaucratic mix-up the command had been given to someone else. The following month, however, he was appointed captain of the Alexander and later in the year of the Swiftshore, a seventy-four- gun battleship. In 1797, a number of naval mutinies broke out, one at Spithead, one at the Nore, the work of men engorged by American and French revolutionary ideas. As Admiral Collingwood complained, the problem was the work of sailors who discussed constitutional issues and belonged to “corresponding societies,” organisations which passed on revolutionary material to each other.

  Phillip dealt with any mutinous infection aboard the Swiftshore as he had dealt with New South Wales—with decision, adaptability, the weight of law, and dispassion—and Lord St. Vincent of the Admiralty declared the Swiftshore “in the most excellent order and fit for any service.” The Swiftshore helped Nelson blockade Cádiz, but then Phillip was sent north to guard against an imminent Spanish-French invasion which did not develop. Soon Phillip was ashore again, once more the replaceable element.

  Later in the year, he was sent to take over the Blenheim, a ninety-gunner, a ship seen by the Admiralty as being in spiritual and physical dis-repair, with many of its crew ill and given to revolution. At the age of nearly sixty, though seemingly well-recovered from the renal problems which ha
d plagued him in New South Wales, he was brought ashore and in 1797 made Commander of the Hampshire Sea Fencibles, a home-defence unit raised to man the Martello towers along the coast of England and to resist a French invasion. Next he was put to work inspecting the ships and hospitals where French and Spanish prisoners of war were confined. By force of seniority, he rose to be Rear Admiral of the Blue in January 1799. As a brief peace was arrived at in 1802, he was employed as an inspector into the Impress Service, the process by which men were coerced into the Royal Navy. He made no remarks in his report about the justice of such procedures, but he did suggest a central register of exemptions to save individuals in essential community services from the infamous gangs, and various methods to end corruption, the paying of bribes, and so on.

  In 1803, when the war began again, he became Inspector of the Sea Fencibles throughout the entire nation. He recommended that single men should not be free from impressment at this dangerous time, and that the Sea Fencibles be reduced to allow men to be freed for naval service. He travelled the coastal roads of England, Wales, and Scotland, an aging man who had not yet had his due from destiny and who was acutely aware of that fact.

  He therefore asked Nepean to convey to the Lord Commissioners “that in case an enemy should attempt to land on that part of the coast where I may be . . . their Lordships are pleased to authorise me to take the command of such armed vessels, gunboats and Sea Fencibles as may be there for the defence of the coast.” Thus he cherished the daydream that his flag might be hoisted on an armed vessel or atop a tower standing between the French and the British heartland, and that his name might become a byword for grit, endurance, and good organisation. Nepean, however, chastised him for the idea: “Applications upon subjects unconnected with the duty on which he is employed ought not to be received or transmitted by him.”