The Fatal Shore

by Robert Hughes

  King had already urged London to occupy Port Phillip as soon as possible. Now he sent an armed schooner to shadow Baudin. (It caught up with him at King Island in Bass Strait, where Baudin handed over some escaped convicts who had stowed away in his ship in Sydney.) Since Baudin had been snooping around the D’Entrecasteaux Channel, while intrepid American whalers from the far side of the Pacific had already penetrated the calving grounds of the black whales there and in Storm Bay at the mouth of the Derwent River—thus threatening to seize the fisheries that should have been a British monopoly—King decided to put a settlement on the Derwent.

  In August 1803 a little party of forty-nine souls, made up of free settlers and Rum Corps men with twenty-one male and three female convicts, sailed from Port Jackson. Their leader was a twenty-three-year-old lieutenant from Devon, John Bowen (1780–1827), just arrived in the colony on the convict transport Glatton, whom King promoted to the rank of commander in the belief that it would impress foreign sea captains. Armed with minute instructions from King, Bowen sailed up the Derwent estuary and pitched his camp, complete with a pair of 12-pound carronades, at a spot on its eastern shore which he named Risdon. It had a stream of fresh water and a splendid view of the snowy brow of Mount Wellington, but little else to recommend it. Its soil was poor; it was whipped by gales blowing from the 4,000-foot mountain; and the stream itself went dry when the weather did—a familiar event in Australian colonization.

  Meanwhile, King’s pleas for a settlement at Port Phillip Bay, protecting Bass Strait from the questing French, had reached London. England’s response was to send a ship to colonize the bay. She was HMS Calcutta, a vessel of the Royal Navy, bearing 308 convicts with a smattering of their wives and children (who were allowed to go out with their husbands as indentured servants), guarded by marines. The expedition was under the command of David Collins, the marine officer who, having served as the first judge-advocate of Phillip’s settlement at Port Jackson, had returned to England and written one of the first and best books on the infant colony, his two-volume Account of the English Colony in New South Wales, 1798–1802. It earned him a public name as an expert on matters Australian, and on the strength of his eight years’ service in Sydney the government asked him to go back as lieutenant-governor of the new colony at Port Phillip. Harassed by his debts—a situation aggravated by a bureaucratic hitch in his emoluments as a marine officer—Collins accepted. As soon as his appointment became known in London, he found himself pursued by Jeremy Bentham, who had just published Panopticon Versus New South Wales. This was a lengthy diatribe against the policy of transportation whose aim was to persuade Lord Pelham to build penitentiaries instead; the model Bentham put forth was his Panopticon, with its circular plan and central watchtower, affording continuous totalitarian inspection of the caged prisoners, which had become his obsessive project. Bentham even wrote to Collins urging him to build a Panopticon in New South Wales, and the two men dined together twice. “I have given him a copy of the Panopticon book,” Bentham reported to his brother, adding that Collins had asked him for “a Draught [sketch] of the Panopticon Plan.… I said, I hoped I might—with the book and a little nous, he might be able to do without the draught; [but] the nous, I fear, is lacking.” Despite Bentham’s unjustifiably low view of Collins’s intelligence, he kept lobbying: “Are you serious in your intention of building a prison, and moreover of building it on the central inspection principle?” Just before sailing, Collins brushed him politely off. “I have been lately so occupied … as to prevent my waiting on you to receive the Hints for my pursuing the Panopticon System, which you were so good as to prepare for me. Be assured that my Prison shall if possible be a circular one.” Of course, no Panopticon would rise by the shores of Port Phillip Bay. The Calcutta, escorted by the transport Ocean, sailed in April 1803.90

  The fleet reached Port Phillip in October. The bay proved a miserable disappointment, as bad (or almost) as Botany Bay had seemed to the men of the First Fleet fifteen years before: sandy sterile ground, little water, a persistent hot northerly wind, swarms of biting flies, and great difficulties of access by sea because of the adverse tidal currents. After six months at sea, all hands were yearning for dry land again, but their enthusiasm soon waned. In “Canvas Town,” their encampment on the sand dunes, the shade temperature in Collins’s tent was 102°, and in the sun it reached 132°. It seemed a “barbarous country,” the surveyor George Prideaux Harris wrote to his brother after three months there: nothing but sand, with no water and so few animals that, for meat, he had once been reduced to eating a swan’s carcass fit only for a dunghill. The one recompense was the lobsters, so plentiful that the convicts could catch five hundred in an evening. “Never, surely, was a more barren land,” wrote one prisoner, the counterfeiter James Grove, to his friends in faraway England. “I thought it unlikely to answer to any good purpose.”91

  Everyone else thought so, too. After a couple of weeks camped on the sand hills, the marines were muttering and grumbling their way toward mutiny, and to set an example Collins had a couple of insubordinate privates savagely flogged, one with 700 lashes. Some convicts tried to escape. A former army officer named Lee, transported for forgery, who seemed “quite a pedant, eternally quoting passages from the Greek and Latin authors,” wrote some scurrilous lampoons on Collins which circulated among the tents; he was found out and bolted into the bush, never to be seen again, taking the lieutenant-governor’s fowling piece with him. Groups of four or five men would vanish into the dunes, heading (as they thought) for China.* 92

  So there was general relief when dispatches arrived from Governor King in Sydney authorizing Collins to abandon Port Phillip and move his settlement down to the Derwent, to join Bowen’s tiny band. But King also instructed Collins to take a look at Port Dalrymple, at the mouth of the Tamar River on the northern coast of Van Diemen’s Land (the site of modern Launceston) and see if an outpost could be put there to guard the fisheries of Bass Strait from American whalers and sealers. Collins reported that it could not, or not yet, as the river entrance was difficult, and the local blacks seemed very aggressive.93

  In any case, the strength of his party was low. So many men were sick that he could not mount enough sentinels; if one more officer went ill, he would not even find the quorum for a court martial. So the prudent course was to join forces with Bowen on the Derwent. A settlement, Collins felt, would be better on the Derwent than on the Tamar: “Its position at the Southern Extremity of Van Dieman’s Land gives it an Advantage over every Harbour yet discovered in the Straits … [A]s a Port of Shelter to Ships from Europe, America or India, either for Whaling or other speculation, it will be greatly resorted to.”94

  So Port Phillip was abandoned. When the settlers reached the Derwent, Collins relieved Bowen of his command and moved the settlement from Risdon to the western shore of the estuary. In a sketch from about 1805, one sees the embryo town of Hobart, named after the secretary of state for the colonies who was the patron of Collins’s expedition. It is a little straggle of tents and huts, with Government House—hardly more than a cottage—on Battery Point, and the huts of the surveyor-general, the surgeon and the chaplain ranged alongside it; casks are stacked up on the dock island, and an ensign flutters from its mast in front of the public store, while the whole scene is dominated by the brooding wall of Mount Wellington, capped with snow. In 1805 it must have looked very frail and ephemeral. But in the green valley folds that ran down to the water, in the copses and meadows that (seen through half-closed eyes) reminded young Bowen of a nobleman’s park, there was at least some reminiscence of the England that most of the colonists would never see again. Nostalgia could cling to this Tasmanian landscape.

  Yet life by the Derwent was hard for all the colonists at first, bond or free. The isolation, torpor and semi-starvation of early Sydney repeated themselves in Van Diemen’s Land. “With no ships visiting us,” recalled Collins’s second-in-command, Lieutenant Edward Lord,

  the whole sett
lement was called upon to endure hardships of no ordinary kind. The Governor himself, the officers, and the entire settlement for eighteen months, were without bread, vegetables, tea, sugar, wine, spirits, or beer, or any substitute, except the precarious supply of the wild game of the country.95

  Memories of this starvation time died hard. Thirty years later a Hobart woman recounted what she had known as a child in the first settlement: coming off the ship and sleeping under a wet blanket, then in the hollow trunk of a tree; being “treated kindly” by curious, not yet persecuted Aborigines, in whose care white infants were sometimes left by their parents; living on “Botany Bay Greens” (boiled seaweed scraped off the rocks), and even wolfing down the “crap” (cindery residue) of whale blubber, shovelled overboard from the roaring try-pots of American whalers in Storm Bay and washed up on the beaches. The same oily gobbets were used to feed the colony’s precious pigs, contaminating the taste of their flesh.96

  By the winter of 1805 the convicts were down to a ration of 2 pounds 10 ounces of salt pork and 4 pounds of bread a week, a ration that in normal times would scarcely last two days. By 1806 the colony was starving to death. Collins had hoped that supplies would come from Sydney. But in March 1806 the farms along the Hawkesbury River, on which the food supply of Sydney depended, were devastated by flood. The water covered 36,000 acres and destroyed all the standing crops, along with the farmers’ tools, livestock and seed reserves. What remained was not enough for Sydney and Parramatta; and for Hobart, there was nothing. Two years later things had improved a little in Hobart—but not much. “Bring with you as much Flour and Wheat as possible,” wrote an early political transportee to Van Diemen’s Land, the Irish schoolmaster William Maum, to a friend who was about to move to Hobart Town in 1808,

  and a sufficiency of corn for whatever Stock you may bring down, bring down about 12 good young Ewes, four or five Sows in pig (if possible) as there are no Boars here—as much poultry as you can get off … bring with you Hoes and all other Tools as they are here remarkably scarce.… [t]he houses in general are of Lath & plaister and immoderately dear … [t]he Govr here has it not in his power to fulfil the intentions of Govt, as he has neither Tradesmen nor Labourers, and nothing in the Stores.… Fowls here are of the utmost consequence, their Value being beyond Money.97

  There was very little of the fellow-feeling that makes privation bearable. Shortages on this Georgian frontier bred stony, grasping men, who robbed one another like jackals snarling over a carcass and cheated the government blind whenever they could. The clerks who ran the government stores were so deep in collusion with the farmers who sold them their produce that a newly appointed chief clerk of the Hobart commissariat declared, in 1816, that not one document or account could be found in its records.98

  Between the vulpine rapacity of the settlers and the short commons of government, the Derwent colony—along with the smaller one set up in October 1804 at Port Dalrymple on the Tamar, under Lieutenant-Colonel Paterson, to fix an English foothold on Bass Strait—might well have perished. What saved them both was that inoffensive marsupial, the kangaroo.

  Kangaroos were plentiful in the bush of Van Diemen’s Land—much more so than they had ever been around Sydney. Every able-bodied man who could use a gun went hunting them, for kangaroo flesh, not bread, was the staff of life. Collins tried to keep the market under strict control. Hunters were obliged to sell the meat to the commissariat store. To convicts and others “on the store,” it was issued free; the usual ration was 8 pounds a week. To settlers living “on their own hands,” its price fluctuated between 6d. and 1s. 6d. a pound. In one six-month period the settlers ate 15,000 pounds of dressed meat from haunches and tails, representing a slaughter of perhaps a thousand ’roos.99

  This reliance on hunting brought prompt social results, all of them bad. It installed the gun, rather than the plough, as the totem of survival in Van Diemen’s Land. It favored a mood of opportunism, of social improvidence. Small settlers tended to neglect the long-range pursuits of farming and instead concentrated on killing whatever they could. Before long, the kangaroos around Hobart were hunted out, and men and dogs had to push further into the bush, competing against the Aborigines for game. Thus, the pattern of ambush and murder between white and black began; it would end, in a few decades, with the near-extermination of the Tasmanian Aborigines. Hunger had put guns in the hands of convicts—and this had never been allowed to happen in New South Wales. It soon created a fringe class of armed, uncontrollable bushmen, most of whom regarded Aborigines as vermin. They would go out for days at a stretch with their “mates” and their kangaroo-dogs (half-wild mongrel lurchers, with jaws like mantraps) and bring back whatever they could corner and kill. Very soon these mountain men of Van Diemen’s Land shed whatever vestiges of obedience they might have felt to the System. They became the first bushrangers (see chapter 7). They kept the guns, stole their masters’ dogs and stayed in the bush. Earlier absconders from Sydney and Parramatta had died because they were not armed, but not these kangarooers. When Hobart and Port Dalrymple were tiny and the outlying farms few, they could be controlled to some degree, if only because they had to sell most of their kangaroo meat directly to the government before getting more ammunition. But as settlement pushed outward, farmer and assigned servants started buying the meat and skins directly from the outlaws. And since few settlers had any scruples about cheating their neighbors as long as they were not seen at it, they also “received” the mutton the kangarooers stole from other sheep runs and kept on the good side of the hunters by giving them ammunition, tea and rum. As the stock of sheep and cattle in the colony grew, so the demand for kangaroo meat dropped. But everyone needed kangaroo skins, for shoes, hats, bags, jackets and pants; and in between killing ’roos, the hunters moved to sheep stealing. They could do this with impunity, unless a settler caught them in the act and shot them. The redcoats could not catch them; they did not know the bush.

  So in theory, the founding years of Van Diemen’s Land displayed a rigidly patterned Georgian fabric of rank and power which, in practice, did not survive inspection. It was a façade. The official barriers between military and civilian, bond and free were breached in a score of ways by hunger, shortages, the rub of proximity, the ferocity of the good and the occasional decency of the criminal. “They call it the end of the world—and for vice it is truly so, for here wickedness flourishes unchecked.”100 So did boredom, a great equalizer. Technique of any kind was rare, technology feeble, and “cultivation” in any but the most rudimentary sense scarcely existed at all. When he wanted some conversation to take his mind off the miseries of his post, Lieutenant-Governor Collins, “a literary and excellent man,” had to turn to the forger James Grove and his family, “passing with him under his roof many no doubt intellectual hours.”101 In return, Grove designed Collins a house; and when the lieutenant-governor died in 1810 of a heart attack at the early age of 54, worn out by the strain of keeping his precarious little colony alive, it was Grove, “his eyes suffused with tears the whole time,” who cut and planed the yellow Huon pine boards for his double coffin, helped place the corpse in it, engraved the silver memorial plate and screwed down the lid. Five weeks later, heartbroken at the loss of the friend and patron who had returned him to respectability on this far edge of the world, Grove himself died. “As sensible, ingenious a man as I ever met with, & highly esteemed and respected by the Govr & every officer in the settlement, for his uniform and excellent character”—such had been the judgment of the surveyor Harris on this convict.102 He was buried near Collins. The friendship of these men was perhaps emblematic, suggesting at its most benevolent, and thus uncommon, level the interdependence between prisoners and masters. Wherever new settlements were made, whatever fields were broken, English settlement in Australia rested on its convicts. As Mary Gilmore would write in 1918 of the prisoners who built Australia:

  I was the convict

  Sent to hell,

  To make in the desert

/>   The living well:

  I split the rock;

  I felled the tree—

  The nation was

  Because of me.103

  We must now look more closely at these reluctant pioneers.

  * For the voyage of the Second Fleet, see chapter 5.

  * For the peculiar phenomenon of the “China Travellers,” see chapter 7.

  5

  The Voyage

  i

  “IT IS THEREFORE ordered and adjudged by this Court, that you be transported upon the seas, beyond the seas, to such place as His Majesty, by the advice of His Privy Council, shall think fit to direct and appoint, for the term of your natural life.” Or seven years, or fourteen—in any case, the shock of sentencing was dreadful. In law, seven years’ banishment meant what it said; but what man could be certain of returning to England at the end of it? For many people, the sentence of transportation—whatever its announced length—must have seemed like a one-way trip over the edge of the world.

  A man could bear it with dignity in the dock, but despair followed soon after. Anguish shows in the few surviving letters, like this one from a Lancashire weaver named Thomas Holden, who in the course of struggling for his rights as an early trade-unionist was convicted in 1812 of “administering an illegal oath” to one Isaac Crompton in Bolton, Lancashire. It seems probable that Holden was a Luddite. He was also happily married. “Dear Wife,” he wrote from a cell in Lancaster Castle,

  Its with sorrow that I have to acquaint you that I this day receiv’d my Tryal and has receiv’d the hard sentance of Seven Years Transportation beyond the seas.… If I was for any Time in prison I would try and content myself but to be sent from my Native Country perhaps never to see it again distresses me beyond comprehension and will Terminate with my life.… [T]o part with my dear Wife & Child, Parents and Friends, to be no more, cut off in the Bloom of my Youth without doing the least wrong to any person on earth—O my hard fate, may God have mercy on me.… Your affec. Husband until Death.1