by David Malouf
Australia began as an experiment in human engineering. We should not allow the brutalities of the age in which it took place to obscure the fact that among the many mixed motives for the founding of the colony there were some that were progressive and idealistic. The eighteenth century was as troubled as we are by the nature of criminality, and in dealing with it the need to balance deterrence, or as they would have called it, terror, with the opportunity to reform. Botany Bay was not just a dumping ground for unwanted criminals. It was also an experiment in reformation, in using the rejects of one society to create another.
What seems astonishing when we look about at the world we live in here, this clean and orderly place with its high level of affluence and ease, its concern for rights and every sort of freedom, these cities in which a high level of civility is simply taken for granted and barely remarked upon, is that it should have emerged from a world that was at the beginning so un-free, so brutal and disorderly. It did so because these rejects of society of whom so little might have been expected made it happen. Out of their insistence that they were not to be so easily written off.
Charles Darwin, who was not always a sympathetic observer of the Australian scene, has two things to tell us of the colony as he first saw it in 1836, not quite fifty years from the beginning. ‘Here,’ he writes in his Journal of the Voyage of the HMS Beagle, ‘in less promising country, scores of years have affected many times more than the same number of centuries has done in South America.’
That is a tribute to the pace of development in Australia, and also, no doubt, to British efficiency and moral fibre as opposed to Spanish and Portuguese fecklessness. But he has something else to say as well. ‘As a means,’ he tells us, ‘of making men honest – of converting vagabonds the most useless in one hemisphere into active citizens in another, and giving birth to a new and splendid country – and a grand centre of civilisation – it has succeeded to a degree perhaps unparalleled in history.’
When we think of our beginning, we are inclined to emphasise what is sensational in it, the many horrors, and this is understandable. They were real, and indignation at injustice does credit to us – so does a passionate sympathy for its victims. Fellow-feeling for the weak and for those who fail, out of bad luck or bad judgement or ordinary human hopelessness, is one of our strongest national characteristics and has its beginning here. Our attitude to welfare, for instance, and to those who need it, is very different from the way these things are seen in some other places.
But victims, and sensational brutality and misery, are easy to imagine and identify with. What is harder to think our way into is ordinariness, the day-to-day routine of lives that, however brutal they may have been by our standards, were unremarkable except in the astonishing capacity of those who lived them (and we need to think hard about what this must have meant to individual men and women) to endure, but even more, to change; to take hold of the opportunities offered by a second chance in a new place.
Eighteenth-century playwrights and novelists often made their hero a criminal, a highwayman or confidence trickster or thief. Gay’s Beggar’s Opera, Defoe’s Colonel Jack and Captain Singleton, Fielding’s Mr Jonathan Wild, all play with the interesting and subversive notion that the qualities that go to the making of a successful criminal – entrepreneurial egotism, an eye for the main chance and for the weakness of others – may be the same qualities that in other circumstances make a politician or businessman. Botany Bay in some ways puts this cheeky proposition to the proof.
John Locke claimed that men join a civil society or commonwealth ‘for mutual protection of their lives, liberty and estates, which I call’, he says, ‘by the general name of property’. Now, if it is the need to protect property that makes men join together and become citizens, mightn’t it be possible to make citizens out of vagabonds, as Darwin calls them, by giving them property, that is, land, but in a place so far off that they would not be tempted to return; a place where possession of property would lead them to settle, even when their term of exile was up? Land, that real yet mystical commodity of measured dirt that can raise a man (or as it happened, a woman) from a mere nothing to an individual of status and power, and eventually, since this is what land usually ensured in the days before universal suffrage, the right to vote and have a voice in the making of the laws.
It was the promise of land, fifty acres for a man, thirty more for his wife, and thirty for each child, that was the new element in this experiment and a defining one in our history, not least because of the conflict it involved with the original owners. That is another story, another and darker history interwoven with our more triumphal one, and the conflict over land that is at the centre of it is not just about occupation and ownership; it is also about what land means. For Aboriginal people land is the foundation of spiritual being. For Europeans it represents security and status, or it is a source of wealth.
The desire of ordinary men and women to become property owners was the making of this country. To own a piece of Australia, even if it was only a quarter-acre block, became the Australian dream. The desperation that lay behind it, the determination of poor men and women to grasp what was offered and raise themselves out of landless poverty into a new class, was the source of a materialism that is still one of our most obvious characteristics.
It has taken us 200 years to see that there might be another and more inward way of possessing a place, and that in this, as in so much else, the people we dispossessed had been there before us. But the fact is that for those convicts who did succeed, all this was a fairy tale come true. Samuel Terry, for instance, was transported in 1801 for stealing 400 pairs of stockings – he seems always to have done things on a large scale. He served his seven years, and when he died in 1838 owned 19,000 acres, more than some of the greatest lords in England.
Of course, opportunity, however great, was also limited. Not everyone ended up as a merchant prince. But when all the savageries have been taken into account – and the disruption and pain of leaving loved ones and a life, however unsettled, that in their mind, and in their hearts too, was home – transportation worked for most of these men and women. To suggest otherwise is to deny the extent to which so many of them did change and become the active citizens who made our world. And there must have been some among them – Simeon Lord and Mary Reibey, for instance, or Esther Abrahams – for whom Botany Bay was not just the underside of the world but the realisation of that dream of radical English thinkers in the seventeenth century, the world turned upside down. Esther Abrahams, who was transported in the First Fleet for theft, set up with, and later married, Major George Johnston, and was for a time the First Lady of the colony.
It is the poet Mary Gilmore who has given us our most memorable statement of all this. The convict in her poem ‘Old Botany Bay’ gives a voice to many thousands who have no other voice in our history.
I’m old
Botany Bay;
Stiff in the joints
Little to say.
I am he
Who paved the way
That you might walk
At your ease today.
I was the conscript
Sent to hell
To make in the desert
The living well.
I bore the heat,
I blazed the track –
Furrowed and bloody
Upon my back.
I split the rock;
I felled the tree;
The nation was –
Because of me!
Old Botany Bay
Taking the sun
From day to day …
Shame on the mouth
That would deny
The knotted hands
That set us high!
I would want to add that it wasn’t just muscle and dumb endurance that these people brought, and which we enjoy the fruits of, but also native wit, inventiveness, imagination, and most of all the amazing human capacity to re-imagine and remake themselves.
/> One surprising detail leaps out of the various accounts we have of the First Fleet voyage. It is this: on the night of 2 January 1788, some of the convicts on one of the ships, the Scarborough, as their contribution to the possibilities of diversion and simple enjoyment in the place they were coming to – and in defiance, it seems, of the misery of cramped conditions and whatever terror they may have felt at their imminent arrival on a fatal shore – got up a dramatic entertainment, some sort of play.
So, smuggled in on one of those eleven ships, along with their cargo of criminal rejects and all the necessary objects for settling a new place – the handsaws and framesaws, the steel spade and iron shovel, and three hoes and an axe and tomahawk for each man, and woollen drawers and worsted stockings for the men and linsey-woolsey petticoats and caps for the women, and Lieutenant George Worgan’s piano, and the rights and obligations that, in being argued back and forth between authority and its many subjects, would make the new place they were coming to so different from the one they left – was the spirit of make-believe, of theatre, of play. And along with it, an audience’s delight, and practiced skill no doubt, in watching and listening.
The fact is that the whole of a culture is present, in all its complexity, in small things as well as large. What arrived here with those eleven ships was the European and specifically English culture of the late Enlightenment, in all its richness and contradiction, however simple the original settlement may have seemed. From the moment of first landing, a dense, little new world began to grow up here.
Out of the interaction of Europeans with a new form of nature that put to the test all their traditional assumptions about farming methods and how to deal with weather and soil.
Out of the interaction of authority with the mass of convicts around questions of right and obligation, force and consent – these were open questions in some ways because the status of convicts was different here from that of convicts At Home.
Out of the interaction between men and women in a place where women were freer than men (they did not have to perform government labour for their food), and freer than women were at home – a good many of these women became independent traders and land holders.
Out of the interaction between all these newcomers and those, the original possessors, who were already on the ground.
Before long, and well within the first two decades, all the amenities of an advanced society had been conjured up. Craftsmen of every sort – furniture- and cabinet-makers and long-case clock-makers – had got to work using Home designs but local woods; only some of them are known to us by name. John Oatley is one. He made the turret clock that can still be seen in the tympanum of Francis Greenway’s Hyde Park Barracks.
Then there were the brass-founders and tinsmiths, the pottery makers like Samuel Skinner, whose wife, Mary, took over the business when he died; and quality silversmiths, many of them Irish and most of them transported for forgery, a common crime in that profession.
John Austin and Ferdinand Meurant, for example, were both transported from Dublin in 1802 and pardoned two years later, Meurant, it is alleged, for knocking £50 off the price of a necklace he made for Governor King’s wife. Austin, in a nice colonial irony, went on to become an engraver for the newly established Bank of New South Wales.
All these many artisans and makers of fine goods were convicts. They got conditional pardons quickly because the colony needed their skills.
There is something very moving, something we can feel close to, in all this. It speaks of inventiveness and industry beyond the level of mere making do; of a determination to create a world here that would be the old world in all its diversity, but in a new form – new because in these new conditions the old world would not fit. But what is newest of all is the opportunity that was offered to those who might have believed that, in being transported, all future opportunity had been closed to them. In the more relaxed conditions of this new world even convicts had a kind of power they could never have exercised at home. The System had holes – air holes through which a man could catch a second breath and through which a new form of society could be breathed into existence, a society that was rough perhaps, but full as well of the raw energy that comes with opportunity. If I settle on this occasion on just one of this little new world’s many recreations, it is because it seems to me to look forward more evocatively than most to the future, and in a particular way.
In January 1796, just eight years from the beginning, a playhouse was established, a local habitation for that spirit of theatre smuggled in on the Scarborough.
It was a real theatre. Georgian in design, with a pit, a gallery and boxes. Entrance to the boxes cost five shillings, to the pit two and six, to the gallery a shilling, and those who had no ready cash could pay in kind; that is, in meat, flour or spirits. It was a convict enterprise of the colony’s baker, Robert Sidaway, and seems to have established itself (this too might tell us something about the kind of society we were to become) rather more easily than the first church. The Reverend Johnson had to build that for himself, and his first Christmas service in 1793 drew only thirty-five worshippers. Sidaway’s theatre, presumably, did better than that.
An audience is a mysterious phenomenon and subject to mysterious and unpredictable forces. Made up of individuals who shift their attention and their sympathies from moment to moment, under the influence of strong emotion or an appeal to their imagination or their sense of humour, but under the influence as well of a sharpened critical sense in the matter of watching and listening, it is a little society of its own, reconstituted at each performance inside the larger one, and for the most part beyond its control. Not a mob but a cohesive unity with its own interests and loyalties, but unpredictable, and therefore dangerous. And this must have been especially true of this audience, composed as it was of convicts and their guards but in convict hands. Fascinating to wonder how far such an audience might constitute the beginnings here of an integrated community, one in which, given the differences – of status as between convicts and guards, bound and free, of origin, English and Irish, of education, religion, fortune – a various crowd could nonetheless become one.
On 8 April 1800, Shakespeare’s Henry IV Part One was played. It must have had a special appeal, a special relevance for this audience – one wonders how the authorities allowed it: political rebellion presented as a falling out between thieves; a tavern underworld of sublime exuberance, where a light-hearted attitude is taken to highway robbery and the picking of pockets; a Lord Chief Justice openly insulted; every sort of high principle roundly mocked. Old hands might have recognised, in the improvised play in which Falstaff and Prince Hal alternately plead for mercy to the King, a version of the mock trials that had been one of their chief entertainments in Newgate, a training-ground for first offenders in how to defend themselves in front of the ‘beak’. (And Shakespeare’s scene may have had just such occasions as its reference.)
The play’s language must have been a particular delight, with its thieves’ cant so like the convicts’ own ‘kiddy’ language. And how comically liberating to see lordly authority taken out of the realm of the distantly sacred and brought up close – as they must have seen it every day in the streets of Sydney, in the form of Lieutenant-Governor King for example – blustering, wrangling, breaking out in the same bad language as themselves.
An extraordinary achievement so early in the piece, this alternative stage for action, this exercise in audience-making, society-shaping in the spirit of play. But risky. Dangerous.
Governor King must have thought so anyway. In one of those about-turns that are so common a feature of our history, when all that seems given is abruptly taken back, in September 1800, when his own authority was confirmed, the Governor closed the playhouse and had it razed to the ground.
2
A Complex Fate
Writing more than a century ago, when Americans had not yet settled the question of their ‘identity’ or discovered for themselves an independent ro
le in the world, and when Made in America had not yet become a mark of imperial authority, Henry James spoke of the ‘complex fate’ of those who are children both of the old world and the new, and of the ‘responsibility it entails for fighting against the superstitious valuation of Europe’. What James was concerned with was how, in the face of all that Europe represents in terms of achievement and influence, we are to find a proper value, neither brashly above nor cringingly below its real one, for what belongs to the new world; for what is local but also recent, since part of what is ‘superstitious’ in our valuation of Europe has to do with the reverential awe we may feel in the presence of mere age. We speak of these places we belong to as new worlds, but what they really are is the old world translated: but translated, with all that implies of re-interpretation and change, not simply transported.
Our ways of thinking and feeling and doing had been developed, and tested, over many centuries before we brought them to this new place and gave them a different turn of meaning, different associations, a different shape and weight and colour on new ground.
But the relationship to ‘Europe’ is only one part of our complex relationship, here, with an anterior world and the intimidating weight of the past. There is also, for us, the example, like a shadow history to be reflected or avoided, of the United States itself.
Australia and the United States are variations, though very different in tone and constitution, on the same original. This means that we share qualities that will always lead us to make comparisons with our American predecessor, forms of social and political thinking that are peculiar enough to keep us close, however we may deviate in practice, and rare enough to be worth noting.
Australia and the United States derive their legal systems from the English Common Law – that is, a system based on precedent rather than principle. Each case, as it comes up, is referred back to a previous one, and a judgement arrived at by comparing the two. This preference for the particular over the general has affected more than just the workings of the law. It has kept thinking in both our societies close to example and fact; made it pragmatic and wary of abstractions, and if this has remained stronger in our intellectual life than in the American, it is because we missed the influence of Continental Europe that came early to the United States with successive waves of migration in the nineteenth century and especially with the exodus of so many European intellectuals to America between the World Wars. It was an influence we did not feel until the middle 1950s.
