A Far Distant Land: A saga of British survival in an unforgiving new world (The Australian Historical Saga Series Book 1)

by David Field

  When Rachel learned that Elizabeth was in effect making forward withdrawals on future profits, she demanded to know why and insisted that similar amounts should be credited to George’s account in London, to defray his mounting expenses over there. Daniel was often on the point of either tearing out his own hair in sheer frustration and worry, or walking out of the partnership that was his only means of survival.

  The court-martial, when it was finally convened, turned out to be the judicial equivalent of a draw. The judges were clearly not impressed by the grossly exaggerated claims of Bligh that George and Macarthur had conspired to ruin the colony economically, to the point at which George could justify taking over as dictator, but neither did they accept that George had been left with no alternative once the governor began using the force of the law for his own personal ends. Their private opinion, exchanged during meal breaks, was that New South Wales was well rid of all three of them, but the final — official — ruling was that George was to be cashiered out of a regiment that no longer existed, but allowed to return to the colony as a civilian. Since this was all that he wanted to do anyway, he was more than satisfied with the outcome, but was deeply distressed when informed that Macarthur was to face trial for treason if he ever set foot back in the colony.

  Back in the colony itself, their only knowledge of what was transpiring at the other end of the globe came via the despatches and other communications unloaded regularly from the Parramatta and by early in 1814 everyone was at their wits’ end. Rachel seemed to have aged twenty years since George’s departure and Martha’s hair was now more white than black, despite her frequent resort to the latest product imported from London designed to reverse, or delay, the process. George Junior was threatening to throw in the towel if any more of the cattle out at the cow pasture were speared by natives, while Elizabeth Macarthur was searching desperately for another manager at Camden who was interested in sheep rather than either the money that could be siphoned off unlawfully, or her presence in his bed.

  It was therefore a welcome break from all the trials and tribulations of holding it all together when Daniel found himself in the back office at Haberfield with Martha. The Parramatta had landed again that morning and he had been able to leave the supervision of its first unload in the capable, and now experienced, hands of Tom Laycock.

  Suddenly they became aware of a coach careering up the front drive and its door being opened to the sound of a woman screaming. They hastily rose and rushed through to the front of the house, where Mary had opened the door and almost been flattened by a hysterical Roseanna as she rushed in.

  ‘Come quickly — now! Oh please, help me! You’ve got to help me, please!’

  Martha rushed forward, grasped Roseanna by the shoulders and shook her sharply. ‘What is it? What’s happened?’

  ‘It’s Mother — she’s lying in the sitting room — I think she’s dead!’

  The one-mile coach ride between the properties seemed like ten miles and Daniel was out of the carriage and through the front door of Annandale House before it had even come to a halt. The children were gathered in a forlorn-looking cluster near the open door to the sitting room and Daniel brushed past them and ran in. Rachel was lying slumped in an easy chair, head back, legs straight out in front of her, a peaceful smile on her face.

  Martha rushed in behind him. ‘Is she dead?’

  ‘Dead drunk. It looks as if she knocked back an entire bottle of gin.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘No idea — but this might give us a clue.’

  There was a letter lying in the folds of Rachel’s skirts and Daniel picked it up and scanned it quickly, then gave a loud yell of joy. ‘It’s George — he’s coming home on the next vessel! He’s a free man and a civilian!’

  25

  ‘I can’t believe this is all happening,’ Daniel said for the tenth time that day, as he selected another glass of the champagne being brought round on trays by Sarah and Lucy, whose bulging apron confirmed that her marriage to Edward Tolhurst was proving fruitful.

  ‘So you keep saying,’ Martha replied as she shook her head at the proffered tray, ‘but it’s happening nevertheless and the least you can do is to look happy for them.’

  Two months earlier, George had been rowed ashore from the Parramatta to a large welcoming party of Johnstons and Bradburys, led by Rachel, whose shrieks of joy as she threw herself at him could be heard all over the harbour. An hour later, as the coaches had delivered them all to the front door at Annandale, where the servants of both households had lined up outside to welcome the master home, George had stood surveying his front gardens for the first time in five years and thanking Daniel profusely for all his hard work in keeping things together in his absence.

  ‘The thanks are all mine,’ Daniel said as he followed George’s gaze. ‘Without your generous offer all those years ago, I’d now be facing the same dilemma as all the other men in the Corps — whether to go or stay. I’ve employed Tom Laycock at the Institute, by the way — I hope you don’t mind, but he was a general store manager before he became a marine.’

  ‘You must be a mind-reader,’ George replied. ‘He’s going to be very useful for what I’ve been planning while gazing forlornly at the never-ending ocean. There’ll have to be a few changes around the place, while John’s still stuck in London.’

  ‘Care to enlighten me, if it’s going to involve me in more work?’ Daniel asked.

  ‘All in good time, Daniel. There’s something very important I need you for first.’

  The formal written invitations to the wedding of George and Rachel fell like artillery shells onto the doorsteps of those who were invited. The shocks had been less for Daniel and Martha, since they had been informed weeks beforehand that despite their many years and seven children, together — eight, if you counted Roseanna — George and Rachel had never been married.

  They had only found out then because Rachel wanted Martha for her matron of honour, while Daniel was George’s obvious best man. The Reverend Walker, newly arrived in the colony and anxious to become better known among his new flock, had sought the special licence of a totally indifferent governor to solemnise the proceedings in the drawing room at Annandale House.

  After the ceremony, they had all transferred to the sitting room, where Daniel and Martha were now mingling with the other very select invitees. The governor, predictably, had declined on the ground of pressure of work brought on by the need to restore the colony after years of misrule, while other leading citizens had politely invented other excuses in their embarrassment at learning that for the best part of twenty years they had welcomed into their lives and homes a couple with seven children between them who had been living in sin.

  Sadly, the most insulting refusal to attend had come from Elizabeth Macarthur, whose husband John had travelled to London in order to support George at his court-martial and who was now seemingly destined to remain there, afraid to return and face a treason trial. Not only had Elizabeth regarded it as gross disloyalty on George’s part to return without him, but she had insisted on terminating the partnership with George and Daniel in order to claim John’s portion of the capital due to him on the dissolution, which he urgently required for his continued sojourn in London.

  From the bitter aftermath of what amounted to the closure of the Institute had, however, come some encouraging initiatives for the ongoing prosperity of those left to clean up the commercial wreckage. After several long evenings in intense debate over many wine decanters, George and Daniel had formed a new partnership. The lease on the Institute had been transferred, without any opposition from their notional landlord the governor, to an organisation calling itself the ‘Colonial Theatre’, which consisted of Martha and Rachel with ongoing dramatic ambitions and their first production was well into the planning stage.

  After it had been agreed that the back room in Haberfield House was more than adequate as a head office for the partnership, they had all sat down and debated how to arr
ange for the retail distribution of the goods returning on the Parramatta after its regular deliveries of Johnston beef to London. It had been Martha who had pointed out the absence in the town of any general store in which colonists could acquire hardware items such as household implements, shovels, ropes, cutlery and hand tools. The mention of ‘hardware’ had triggered a new line of thought in Daniel’s mind and Tom Laycock had been delighted to be invited to resume his old trade as the manager of the proud new store in what had been the original wooden Governor’s House on the quayside, which now proudly advertised above its entrance that it belonged to ‘Johnston and Bradbury.’

  ‘I wasn’t being gloomy,’ Daniel protested. ‘Quite the opposite, in fact. I was just reflecting on how much life has changed for us all in twenty-six years. I was watching you standing next to Rachel and remembering the first time you were lined up alongside each other, waiting to leave the Lady Penrhyn.’

  ‘Don’t remind me,’ Martha replied with a shudder. ‘I must have smelt like a chicken run after a rainstorm. But while it’s been all rosy for us since then, do you think we’ve really succeeded in establishing anything worthwhile out here?’

  ‘Funny you should ask that,’ Daniel said. ‘Let’s go outside for a moment — I want to show you something.’

  ‘I’ve seen it all afore, guv’nor,’ Martha joked in her Cockney harlot voice. ‘Them’s all the same really — when yer’ve seen one, yer’ve seen ’em all, ’cept some’s bigger than uvvers.’

  ‘I’m serious,’ Daniel insisted, as he led Martha by the hand through the French windows that had lately been installed to allow access to the rear garden that sloped down towards the harbour with an unbroken view of the distant township.

  Daniel pointed with his outstretched arm at the just visible former Institute building. ‘Take a look at your new theatre — the old Institute warehouse. Then look slightly to the right, where you can see the start of the Rocks area. That places the Colonial Theatre on a site just to the left of the Rocks, correct?’

  ‘Correct,’ Martha confirmed as she squinted into the distance.

  ‘Can you remember something else that was located precisely there, before the old Commissary Store was constructed?’

  ‘No — what?’ she replied, genuinely puzzled.

  ‘Well, it was the site of a large cooking tent that was the work station of the first forty women to be disembarked from the Lady Penrhyn. Your new theatre is standing exactly where you once baked loaves for the prisoners.’

  Martha broke into a smile. ‘Where Mary Murphy first offered you her dumplings!’

  ‘Twenty-six years ago, what is now a rapidly growing township was a shingly beach dotted around with tents, on which people condemned to lengthy terms of imprisonment were set to work under the raw elements, using unfamiliar tools and exposed to hostile natives, snakes, mosquitos and storms. Now we have a settled community with shops, churches — even public houses. We have another one out at Parramatta and growing communities all along the Hawkesbury. All those original convicts are now free men and women with families and futures.’

  ‘“Oh brave new world, that has such people in it,”’ Martha quipped.

  ‘Pardon?’

  ‘Elizabeth Macarthur’s not the only one who can quote Shakespeare. And I take back what I said about you being in a gloomy mood. Calls for a celebration.’

  ‘We’re in the middle of one, surely?’ Daniel asked.

  Martha leaned across and kissed him on the cheek. ‘I was referring to the celebration that Mary Murphy has planned for you when she gets you home.’

  ***

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  A NOTE TO THE READER

  Dear Reader,

  By the middle years of the eighteenth century, the English gaols were bulging at the seams, grossly overcrowded to an inhumane degree that not even the brutal regime of those times could tolerate. There was a need to relieve the pressure and some genius in Whitehall lit upon the idea of warehousing, far away somewhere, the worst of those who had just escaped the death penalty by having it ‘commuted’ to a lengthy prison term. The first option — America — ceased to be available after 1776, but fortunately Captain James Cook had by then discharged his commission to discover the fabled southern land of Terra Australis, a mere eight months away by sea.

  On 13th May 1787, the ‘First Fleet’ of eleven ships set sail from Portsmouth and most of those on board survived rough seas, cholera and starvation rations to make landfall at ‘Sydney Cove’ in late January of the following year. They were a contrasting mixture of convicts (743 men, women and children, some of them born during the crossing) and those who had guarded them during the voyage — marines, some with their wives in tow, but many of them single men drafted into uniform by adversities of their own. It was a one-way trip for them all and they stepped ashore from one living hell to another.

  They had been uprooted from the lives with which they were familiar and transported into an alien world on the other side of the globe. They were decanted onto a shingle beach in blistering heat, scowled at by unwelcoming natives who had been there ahead of them for thousands of years and who knew how to survive in this unforgiving terrain. The newcomers were under orders to establish a new colony under the English crown, armed only with hand tools and an instinct to remain alive.

  Their first crops failed, their few animals fell victim to native spears and there was insufficient fresh water. Even those who were not manacled in work parties constructing the first few huts that might protect them from the occasional wild storm, the incessant insects and the venomous snakes, could hardly feel other than rejected, unwanted by the softer society they had left behind, most of them for good.

  The result was that they somehow clung to each other in their mutual misery, companions in exile and dependent upon each other for their very survival. Those who knew only how to live outside society continued to do so, while those who found comfort in the company of fellow human beings and sought solace in companionship, set about finding it. Apart from the inevitable convict liaisons there were also other hands reaching out across the class divide, forming relationships that back in ‘the mother country’ would have been unthinkable.

  Modern Australia is the heir to many of these liaisons, the ultimate beneficiary of those first few boatloads who scrambled up the shingle of Port Arthur. We will never know precisely how they survived and prospered, but this first novel in the series is my conjecture as to what it must have been like.

  Many of the characters encountered in the chapters you have just read actually led more or less the lives described. Major George Johnston and his common-law wife Rachel Julian, who met on board the Lady Penrhyn, the various governors with their brief grip on power, John Macarthur and his wife Elizabeth — even James Ruse, the pioneer agriculturalist whose name is preserved in a contemporary highway west of modern-day Parramatta.

  Only Daniel and Martha are fictitious, but I like to think that their experience was by no means unique. Unlikely liaisons were formed in the cauldron of those early colonial years and many of the Australian families of today can proudly trace their ancestry back to the ‘battlers’ who formed the first community of New South Wales. The subsequent fortunes of the Bradbury dynasty are charted in the novels that follow in this series and hopefully I have tweaked your interest sufficiently for you to wish to learn what happens to Daniel and Martha’s firstborn, Matthew, in the next volume in the series, Eye For An Eye.

  I’d love to receive feedback on this first novel, whether in the form of a review on Amazon or Goodreads. Or, of course, you can try the more personal approach on my website and my Facebook page: DavidFieldAuthor.

  Happy reading!

  David

  davidfieldauthor.com

  MORE BOOKS BY DAVID FIELD

  The Australian Saga Series:

  The Tudor Saga Series:<
br />
  Tudor Dawn

  The King's Commoner

  Justice For The Cardinal

  An Uneasy Crown

  The Queen In Waiting

  The Heart of a King

  Rachel & Jack Enright Series:

  The Gaslight Stalker

  The Night Caller

  The Prodigal Sister

  The Slum Reaper

  The Posing Playwright

  The Mercy Killings

  The Jubilee Plot

  The Lost Boys

  Carlyle & West Victorian Mystery Series:

  Interviewing The Dead

  Death Comes But Twice

  Confronting the Invisible

  Death Among The Nightingales

  Published by Sapere Books.

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  Copyright © David Field, 2021

  David Field has asserted his right to be identified as the author of this work.

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  No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in any retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publishers.

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, organisations, places and events, other than those clearly in the public domain, are either the product of the author’s imagination, or are used fictitiously.

  Any resemblances to actual persons, living or dead, events or locales are purely coincidental.