A First Place

by David Malouf

  There is another mode of Australian writing in the 1890s, but it has barely survived. We see it in Tasma’s Uncle Piper of Piper’s Hill and in Rosa Praed’s novels of political life in Brisbane (or Leichhardt Town as she calls it) in the years after the declaration of the new state.

  Praed’s novels have a good dash of melodrama, but can be emotionally complex and are very convincing in their observation of provincial – that is, colonial – snobbery and pretension. She is good on landscape, the lush mountain ranges and rainforests of south-east Queensland, and on Aboriginal life and conditions (not much of that in The Bulletin writers), but was dismissed out of hand by Australian critics, as if no form of middle-class life in Australia was worth writing about because the thing itself was derivative and ‘English’.

  In fact that was not at all how the English themselves saw it. Life as it was lived in Melbourne and Sydney was, from an English point of view, a very poor and degraded imitation. Altogether too ‘free’. Too lacking in nuance and refinement. Too strenuous and pushing – or to use Darwin’s word, ‘ambitious’. Which is another way of saying that Australians had already, in British eyes, begun to create their own version of ‘Englishness’, which would in time move further and further from the original.

  To the extent that the imitation was a ‘bad’ one, it had already, even if it had not been recognised as such, and most of all by those who were living it, gone its own way and become a variant. Something new and like nothing but itself.

  Homeland

  Because we find it so difficult to imagine any history but the one we have actually experienced, and because what we know and find ordinary seems less attractive than what might have been, we tend to undervalue what was handed to us – by accident as it were, but fatefully – when we were founded in 1788 by the British rather than one of the other European powers of the time that might have done so. I say ‘might have’ as if this were a real possibility, but it is doubtful in fact whether anyone but the British, at that point in the eighteenth century, possessed the administrative capacity, or the naval capacity either, to organise a colonising venture on so large a scale and to a place whose conditions of climate and soil were so completely unknown. What is pretty well certain is that no other European power possessed the capacity to maintain and service such a colony.

  The First Fleet was a sizeable small armada, as we see from the models of the eleven vessels at the Museum of Sydney. Any suggestion that it was carelessly got up is a myth, and a foolish one, created by historians for whom nothing the British did in the case of Australia could ever be good. As Alan Frost shows very convincingly in his Botany Bay Mirages, this was the most ambitious, but also, in the event, the most successful colonising venture ever undertaken by a European power.

  European nations in the eighteenth century were obsessed with trade, and with that natural outcome of trade, empire. What was needed to ensure both was almost continuous warfare. If we include the role played by the French navy in the American War of Independence, Great Britain and France fought five wars between 1701 and 1815, in continental Europe, India, North America and at sea, till Britain realised that it was at sea that she must finally prevail.

  But the eighteenth century was also interested in other forms of conquest: the conquest of time and the conquest of space; and Australia, while it was founded on the needs of trade, really grew out of this second interest. It was a product of mind, in its active form as discovery, rather than a by-product simply of empire. John Harrison, the inventor of the chronometer, Cook and a whole line of French and English geographers and cartographers, intellectual rivals rather than enemies – these were our true founding fathers. It was the mystery of how time and space might be linked and made one that drew Wallis and Carteret, and Cook and Bougainville and La Pérouse and d’Entrecasteaux, to venture so boldly across space and then so meticulously, day after day, to chart and place their discoveries at this or that ‘minute’ of distance from the great dome at Greenwich.

  The French first laid claim to the western part of New Holland in 1772, and by one of those quirks of fate, La Pérouse, with his ships La Boussole and L’Astrolabe (wonderfully eighteenth-century and appropriate, those names), appeared at the entrance to Botany Bay just as the First Fleet was preparing to move on to Port Jackson.

  Fifteen years later, Nicolas Baudin, in the Geographe and the Naturaliste, was mapping the south coast of South Australia in one direction while Flinders was mapping it from the other; their point of meeting, in April 1802, is commemorated in ‘Encounter’ Bay. In the account of Baudin’s voyage by François Péron, what we know now as South Australia is called Terre de Napoléon.

  As late as 1819 a French Council of Ministers appointed a committee to investigate the possibility of establishing a penal colony near what is now Albany in Western Australia. When, in December 1826, the British sent a party of convicts, under Major Edmund Lockyer, to found their own settlement at King George’s Sound, it was a move hastily made to counter a suspected French move in the same direction; as earlier it had been French interest after d’Entrecasteaux’s charting of the Derwent that had led to the founding of Hobart. The French have had this much of a part in our early history that they were indirectly responsible for the settlement of two out of the seven states.

  But the French, for all the size and experience of their navy, had trouble with supply; and we can imagine, from what very nearly happened in the case of Botany Bay, how quickly a small and isolated French settlement in the place might have gone under. And its history, of course, if it had not, would have been that of metropolitan France: a revolution in 1789, with the sort of internal divisions and violence that plagued d’Entrecasteaux’s expedition in 1793; two major coups in ’94 and ’99; a fifteen-year dictatorship under Napoleon, a restoration of the Bourbons in 1815, two more revolutions in 1830 and 1848, then another dictatorship under yet another Napoleon from 1852, then another bloody rising in the Paris Commune of 1870.

  Compare this with the quiet evolution of New South Wales from penal settlement in 1788 to a colony with its own Legislative Assembly in 1855.

  As for other possibilities, Darwin’s comparison of New South Wales with the colonies in South America in 1836, together with what we know of their subsequent history, gives us a good notion of where we might be after the sort of administrative disorder and military coups we would have imported from Portugal or Spain.

  Aboriginal people have no reason to rejoice that it was a British invasion and displacement that destroyed their way of life and savagely reduced their numbers, but when we look at what happened to the Caribs, or in Guatemala and Brazil, one wonders if they would have had less to endure under an occupation by the Spanish or Portuguese.

  Britain at the end of the eighteenth century was a mercantile power, its lifeblood trade – a nation of shopkeepers Napoleon would call it; interested only in markets, the sea-routes that served them, and the ports of supply that kept those sea-routes open. Overseas territories, great tracts of land that needed to be maintained and serviced, and with populations that had to be controlled, were more trouble than they were worth.

  Of course the loss of the American colonies was a blow to British pride, and the war, especially when the French joined it, had been expensive and very nearly fatal. But the revolution itself was inevitable – wasn’t it only to be expected that the same spirit of dissent and love of liberty that had led men to escape the tyranny of Church and Crown on one occasion would make them want to escape again? From the British Government’s point of view, the loss of the American colonies could be tolerated, and might even be welcome, so long as the French could be kept from Canada. What mattered was that the American market should be retained.

  So why a new settlement, and so far off? Why the Pacific?

  In the 1770s, Cook had put the continent we call Australia on the world map, and in two ways: once, as we all know, in his first voyage in 1770, by charting its east coast and claiming possession of it in
the name of the King; more importantly, in his second voyage in 1772, by establishing a passage to the Pacific – a westerly passage through the Southern Ocean, and in the zone of the Roaring Forties – that was faster than any other and, from the British point of view, safer: it could still operate if Britain’s enemies, especially France, threatened the other routes; by drawing Holland, for example, which held both Trincomalee (Ceylon) and the Cape, into a hostile alliance. What was needed to make this new route viable was a safe harbour in the south, a station that could provide port facilities but also fresh fruit and vegetables against scurvy on the long haul to India. A place too that would in time offer as many as possible of the civilised amenities to those who would be stationed there.

  The strongest reason for the establishment of a settlement on the east coast of Australia was to protect the East India Company. The convicts are a separate story. Sydney was first and foremost to be a port, like Penang; and that perhaps was all it was to be, though Phillip, because he was large-minded and saw more, had ambitions. This is why so little attempt was made in the first twenty years to penetrate the hinterland or to open up the surrounding country, and none at first to occupy the rest of the continent. The whole life of the place had to do with the sea, not the land. All its early governors were naval officers.

  Our beginnings are sometimes spoken of as ‘accidental’. The old jibe continues to be repeated that Botany Bay was founded in a fit of absent-mindedness by the Pitt Administration. But this surely is denied by the size of the First Fleet, the trouble that was taken in getting it up, and, as Alan Frost has shown, the cost per convict involved in that first act of transportation, which for a responsible Administration would hardly have been economical if all they had in hand was the getting out of the country of a few hundred ‘undesirables’. These convicts must have had something more to contribute than mouths to be fed and bodies to be housed, and they did of course. They had their labour.

  The fact is that the colony in New South Wales was founded, not simply acquired – even Canada was acquired – and it is one of the first colonies; one of the earliest and oldest, not at all late. Perhaps this is why, for all its geographical distance from Britain, or perhaps in defiance of that distance, it has always been keen to present itself as the closest in affection, and was till recently, along with New Zealand, the most enduring in its reluctance to break away. And of course it was no disadvantage to the fledgling colony of the 1780s that Britain was the richest power of the day.

  Economically vibrant, technologically advanced to a degree almost unimaginable in other parts of Europe, Britain also had a political system whose efficiency and stability was the guarantee of the rest.

  A century earlier, the Civil War of 1641–49 had settled the conflict between King and Parliament on the parliamentary side, and what that bloody conflict had left unresolved was finished at last, in 1688, in a Bloodless Revolution that barred the Crown to any but Protestants, forbade a standing army in peacetime, and guaranteed yearly Parliaments, free elections, and (on paper at least, though in practice one or another of them was sometimes compromised or withdrawn) freedom of religion, opinion and conscience. By the end of the seventeenth century a set of political institutions had been established that continues to this day, and is the one, with some changes, that has granted political stability – the non-violent transfer of power from one administration to the next – for 300 years in the United Kingdom, more than 200 in the United States, and 150 here.

  The system we inherited in 1788, and which became officially our own with the institution of representative government in 1855, was the British two-party system of oppositional government, the Westminster system with its guarantee of a separation of powers between the executive and the judiciary, and an independent and responsible Civil Service with its own culture of dedication to the public good. All this, together with the long and varied discourse that had argued and sustained it, was transported to New South Wales along with the rest: British Low Church puritanism and fear of the body and its pleasures – but also British drunkenness; British pragmatism and distrust of theory; British philistinism and dislike of anything showy, theatrical, arty or ‘too serious’; British good sense and the British sense of humour – all there for us to deal with and develop in our own way, or after due consideration to reject.

  The extent to which the early colony was maintained, even in wartime, and grew, can be seen in the astonishment with which Nicolas Baudin, who spent three months in Sydney in 1802, writes of ‘the immense work that the English have done during the twelve years they have been at Port Jackson. It is … difficult to conceive how they have so speedily attained to the state of splendour and comfort in which they now find themselves.’

  This ‘splendour and comfort’, as Baudin calls it, had been achieved at a cost – the sweat and blood of the men, the convicts of the First and later fleets, who made the roads and built the barracks and warehouses and wharves he so much admired.

  What is not so often recalled is that there was an alternative to this; and the British Government’s decision that the colony should be established on the labour of convicts rather than the labour of slaves is one of the great determining factors of our world and of its moral and spiritual tone even today.

  When the possibility of a new settlement in the Pacific was mooted in the 1780s, the slavery question had been at issue in Britain for almost a century. The list of public figures who had spoken out against it is both long and prestigious: Baxter, Richard Steele, Pope, Sterne, Dr Johnson, Cowper among the writers, but also Paley, Wakefield, Josiah Wedgwood, Adam Smith.

  In 1772, Lord Mansfield had brought down the watershed judgement that a slave, as soon as he set foot on British soil, was free. From that moment slavery within the British Isles was illegal, though not in such British territories as the West Indies, where, to Jamaica alone, over 600,000 Africans were brought between 1700 and 1775. It was not until 1807 that a bill was finally enacted in the British Parliament that no vessel ‘should clear out for slaves from any port within the British dominions after May 1807’ and that no slave be landed in the colonies after March 1808. But the first motion on the subject, that ‘the slave trade is contrary to the laws of God and the rights of man’ was moved as early as 1776 (by David Hartley, son of the philosopher, Coleridge’s friend), and by 1788 a committee of the Privy Council had been set up to consider the trade in all its respects. There was no possibility, when the establishment of the new settlement was being debated in the early eighties, that it could be founded on slave labour, and since the chance of attracting free labour to such a remote area of the globe was minimal, that left only convicts, and as we know, a good many convicts, held in overcrowded jails and in the hulks, were readily available.

  In being spared the institution of slavery we were saved many things; most of all the enduring social and moral stigma of being descendants of a world in which some of us had suffered the injustice and physical degradation of being chattel slaves and others the spiritual degradation of having been their owners and keepers. The ‘convict stain’ as we came to call it, and which was for a long time deeply felt, was one that was bound to fade – the child of a convict is born free. It might even, in time, be redefined as a mark of distinction. The stain of slavery is ineradicable, and on both sides.

  In rejecting ‘the institution’ we were saved from having our world shaped by slavery: by laws made first to establish and then to abolish it, and by a whole apparatus of equivocations and bad faith that would have made a mockery of all those aspirations to egalitarianism that we regard as the best of what we are. We have never had to equivocate in the use of the word ‘liberty’, in such phrases as ‘liberty of opinion’ or ‘liberty of conscience’, to justify the official existence among us of those who do not have the most essential liberty of all, the ownership of their own bodies.

  Americans enshrined the word in their Constitution, and earlier still in the Declaration, both noble documents – we hav
e nothing to equal them; but as Thoreau points out in On the Duty of Civil Disobedience, ‘one sixth of the population of the nation that has undertaken to be the refuge of liberty are slaves’. At the time when he was writing this, in 1848, the most valuable single item of the United States economy was not agriculture, or minerals or manufactured goods, but chattel slaves.

  Our history here has been, by most standards, unviolent, and there are no doubt many reasons for this. One is that prohibition of 1688 against a standing army in peacetime, which has offered no opportunity here to an elite officer corps with a five-star general at its head to intervene in the political life of the country and save us from ‘democratic chatter’ and the divisiveness of parliaments. No military coups, no tanks in the street. Another is the formalisation of the sort of violent factionalism that characterised English political life in the seventeenth century as ‘Her Majesty’s Government’ and ‘Her Majesty’s Loyal Opposition’. But another, surely, was that early avoidance of institutionalised slavery.

  Violence is essential to the maintenance of slavery, and, where slavery has become entrenched in the economic and social structure of a state, is essential also to its removal, as we see in the case of the Civil War in America and the long history of bloody rebellions and massacres in the West Indies and Brazil. States where slavery once existed continue to have a higher level of violence than places where it did not.

  One Australian state, Queensland, did attempt to create a plantation society here, on the model of the American South. A bill of the Queensland Parliament in 1862, just three years after Separation and at the very mid-point of the American Civil War, licensed the importation into the state of ‘Kanakas’ as three-year indentured labourers, and over the next forty years some 60,000 were brought in from the Pacific Islands, many of them kidnapped or ‘black-birded’.