Australians

by Thomas Keneally

  Surgeon Bowes Smyth of the Penrhyn recorded that the women were reduced to ‘plundering the sailors . . . of their necessary cloths and cutting them up for some purpose of their own’. The two leaders in this plunder were Anne Colpitts, a Durham woman whose own child, John, died on the voyage, and Sarah Burdo, a young dressmaker guilty of having stolen from a Londoner who rejected her sexual advances. Both convict women would later be midwives in the colony. Because of their ‘less exquisite feelings’, wrote Bowes Smyth, ‘the lower class of women have more easy and favourable births than those who live in affluence’.

  Above decks was a babble of complaint from animals. In the fleet, said another surgeon, George Worgan, ‘each ship is like another Noah’s Ark’. Pet dogs roamed the decks. There were Captain Phillip’s greyhounds and horses on Sirius, Reverend Johnson’s kittens on the store ship Golden Grove, as well as on every ship a number of newly purchased sheep, pigs, cattle, goats, turkeys, geese, ducks, chickens, rabbits and pigeons penned in various structures on every deck. Rural convicts and children took comfort from tending animals as they had learned to do from an early age.

  After leaving Cape Town, and sniffing the westerlies below Africa, Phillip divided the flotilla into two divisions, the first to be led by the little Supply, to which Phillip now transferred. This leading group included the Alexander, the Friendship and the Scarborough, which were now able to crowd on all the sail they had and travel as fast as they liked. On the convict decks it must have been miserable, with the setting in of the sub-Antarctic cold and the heaving seas of the Roaring Forties. Chief Surgeon White, visiting other ships by longboat, found signs of scurvy amongst the women, and ordered them dosed with essence of malt and good wine. Hail and snow came down, and officers like Clark were forced to wear a flannel waistcoat, two pairs of stockings and to keep their greatcoats on continuously. The convicts generally had only their light clothing and their one blanket, and welcomed what crowded warmth they could generate. Ahead, amidst the squalls, lay the south end of the island named Van Diemen’s Land, and its perilous coasts.

  The first division led by Supply sighted Van Diemen’s Land’s south-western shores on 5 January. It was summer in the southern hemisphere, but it did not feel like it, and on the high ground that could be glimpsed lay patches of snow. Then, less than two days after the first division worked its way around South East Cape, Sirius, with the help of its signal guns to attract the attention of other masters, and a large blackboard with the course chalked on it and hung over its stern, led the second division round and headed north. Thus the second division of transports and store ships was much closer behind than Arthur Phillip would have expected. The fleet was now on the last leg towards fabled Botany Bay, using the charts made by Cook as their guarantee of safe arrival.

  MEETING EORA

  The convicts, soldiers and wives on Supply, Scarborough, Friendship and Alexander, the faster vessels, knew they were close to the promised bay of transportation on 16 January in the new year, 1788. All was proceeding normally, yet was tinged with the edginess of near-arrival in a landscape up to then viewed and weighed by a mere handful of Europeans. The many beaches and bays they sailed past were marked by bold headlands and backed by blue mountain ranges with which, as it happened, the infant son of the watching convict, Susannah Holmes, would as an adult become familiar. To what extent did Susannah, holding the baby begotten by her convict paramour Henry Kable, hope for or dread the place? To what extent did Robert Sideway, who had stolen boxes from a coach, a ‘Mercury’ who might have lived the rest of his life in Nova Scotia, discern this coast as liveable?

  Though Prime Minister Pitt and Lord Sydney had authorised Phillip to look at this target coast as a vacancy, the people who had lived here since the last ice age had created their known earth, and whose ancestors had been in the interior regions for millennia longer still, had seen the scatter of ships and were sending reports overland, clan to clan, of the astounding phenomenon.

  Eighteen thousand years ago, the coast Phillip was approaching had been a region of cold steppes and sub-alpine woodland. Peaks higher than 1900 metres had glaciers descending them. Now, for the uneasy watchers ashore on this January day of 1788, ice existed only in tribal memory. The coastline had stabilised in its present form about 7000 years Before the Present, when the glaciers melted. Innumerable camping places, stone quarries, burial grounds and sacred sites had been flooded. But in compensation, the coast had began to mature and develop, providing sandstone plateaux, mangrove swamps and lagoons, caves and beaches, all known, all named. Bushland and forest covered most of the hinterland. This, their home, was the south-eastern coast of what would prove to be a southern continent, of which the Aboriginal population, in that last undisrupted week in January, stood at perhaps 750 000 to one million.

  The Eora, the language grouping living in the Botany Bay area, were able to track small, stingless native bees to their caches of honey in hollow trees. Apart from nourishing marsupials, lizards, snakes, fish and shellfish were plentiful, but sharks and stingrays, universal clan totems of coastal people, were taboo. ‘The Indians, probably from having felt the effects of their voracious fury testified the utmost horror on seeing these terrible fish,’ said one officer. But one did not devour one’s totem animal, whether bird, mammal, fish or serpent.

  As sweet as life might have been on that coast for hunter-gatherers, the conditions for the development of a sedentary life did not exist. Perhaps only one of the grasses which formed the basis for sedentary farming elsewhere grew here, and the only semi-domesticated animal was the native dog or dingo, which hung around the people’s campfires and helped them harry kangaroos, wallabies and smaller game in return for meat at the evening camp site.

  For the people who now saw the phantasms of the fleet pass by, this coast was the centre of the real world. They would have been astounded that there were, somewhere else, in remote, northern, unholy mists, members of their own species who considered this country a netherworld, a legislated form of hell. Until now, they had not had any reason to think their horizons were about to collapse in upon them.

  Captain Cook, who had come this way only once, had made the names he gave to the land’s geographic features both bywords for great distance, and also a form of taming: he had reduced the coast to size with European tags. So there were comforting reference points for Phillip and his officers to look for. The officers took professional joy in seeing them come up. King wrote, ‘An eminence on the land . . . bore at this time W ½ S 4 leagues which we take for a mountain resembling a hat which Captain Cook takes notice of.’ The feature in question was Hatt Hill. Red Point was nine miles (14.5 kilometres) north of this, and then the southern point of Cook’s Botany Bay, Cape Solander, named in honour of Sir Joseph Banks’s Swedish colleague, came into view.

  The Supply hauled in for the harbour at a quarter past two in the afternoon of 19 January and anchored in the northern arm of the bay, so that the three closest convict transports following, Alexander, Scarborough and the little Friendship, would be able to see them from the entrance and thus be guided in.

  How could the place not fail to disappoint the travellers’ long-sustained expectation? No one on the Supply made exuberant statements about it. It lay there in its sultry afternoon light, not much elevation to it, despite all the great sandstone cliffs and headlands they had passed further south. It was in part a landscape of shallow hills, eucalypt trees and grass-trees, cabbage-tree palms spread as in a park, with the grass soon to be called kangaroo grass growing between the trees. Otherwise, it was a country of low, indiscriminate earth, open ground in many places, with rank grass: the sort of country that promised there would be lagoons and swamps just behind the shore. Its sand beaches shone with ambiguous welcome in the afternoon sun.

  As the Supply watched the earth, the inheritors of the earth watched the Supply. The Gweagal (Fire clan) of the Eora language group occupied the south shore of the bay and wondered why, after many years, the sky ha
d ruptured again and the phenomenon of a craft as large as an island had returned. The Bediagal on the north side of Botany Bay were galvanised by the same question. Both clans called the newcomers Beeriwangal, People of the Clouds. Old men and women began to sing songs of expulsion, and the young repaired spears with animal gut and yellow gum which held the enchanted points of stone or bone in place, and tested throwing sticks for solidity. A young Bediagal carradhy, a man of high degree and preternatural physical courage, Pemulwuy, if not actually present, was sent a message that the manifestation was back. Mothers and aunts counselled children to be wary. The last time one of these phantasms had appeared, it had taken a month to expel the dead-white ghosts who had come ashore.

  Arthur Phillip knew that Cook had not received an open welcome in Botany Bay eighteen years before. Phillip’s task was harder—he did not need merely to be an investigator here. He was meant to make a penal town somewhere in this bay, and continue to live with the ‘Indians’. The instructions on this matter had been attached to his commission from the Crown and read: ‘You are to endeavour by every means to open an intercourse with the natives, and to conciliate their affections, enjoining all our subjects to live in amity and kindness with them.’ Murders, assault and theft committed on and against the natives were to be punished.

  At three o’clock the boats were hoisted out from the Supply and Arthur Phillip, Lieutenant King, Lieutenant Johnson and the young astronomer William Dawes headed towards the north side of the bay, ‘and just looked at the face of the country, which is as Mr Cook remarks very much like the moors in England, except that there’s a great deal of very good grass and some small timber trees’. Phillip and his men intended to search the shores of the famous bay for fresh water. A reliable young convict, James Ruse, who had stolen two watches and stood trial on the edge of his native Cornish moors at Bodmin, had been moved to the Supply and would always claim he was the first ashore, wading in with Lieutenant Johnston riding, scarlet and glittering, on his back.

  For the Eora speakers watching the landing ghosts—red was a colour of peril and war and struggling with spirits.

  They noticed, too, as the Europeans drew in towards land that Phillip was missing the very tooth the coastal Aboriginals removed from young men at initiation, an elder sitting on the initiate’s shoulder and hammering away with stone pounder and chisel. This compelled their serious attention. Phillip was a dead ancestor improperly returned.

  The natives immediately rose to their feet and called to the newcomers ‘in a menacing tone and at the same time brandishing their spears or lances’. The usual rituals of arrival took place. Phillip showed them some beads, and ordered one of the seamen to tie them to the stem of a beached canoe. Then Phillip, as a founding act of goodwill, walked towards the natives alone and unarmed. A male native advanced and made signs that he should lay the gifts on the ground. The native, understandably edgy and trembling to be addressing the dead, came forward and took them, and then he and others came near enough to be given looking glasses and other wonders.

  Then and in days to come the Eora tried to satisfy these ghosts and cloud-creatures by directing them to water in the hope that, their thirst satisfied, they would leave. Phillip himself was thinking of going. This bay, with its shallow anchorages, unpredictable winds and its doubtful capacity to support an ill-supplied penal settlement, worried him. Because of the fluky winds, the other ships of the first division had still not been able to join Supply in Botany Bay.

  It was early the next morning that the Alexander, Scarborough and Friendship came round Point Solander, the first bulk of the convicts reaching the place of their sentence according to legislation and orders-in-council. On Friendship, the marine lieutenant Ralph Clark noted a great many natives on the point. When the Friendship anchored at last, a boat crew from the Supply brought aboard some mown grass from the new land, but Clark wrote, ‘I cannot say from the appearance of the shore that I will like it.’

  We do not know what speculations occurred on the convict deck, but convicts were let up for exercise, and to help catch fish. January is good fishing time in New South Wales, and many specimens were reeled in. A crowd of gentlemen and sailors went into an inlet on the south-west side of the bay and further confused the Eora speakers when they ‘ate salt beef and in a glass of porter drank the healths of our friends in England’.

  There was a great shift of meaning in operation on those first evenings of British permanency on the east coast of New South Wales. Thereafter, in the wider world, Botany Bay, renowned until then for the exotic, the furthest reach of human investigation and endeavour, famous for both botanic and zoologic conundra, would slowly become a name of scorn. As the English poet Robert Southey would—with mock grandiloquence—write during a pleasant evening with William Wordsworth:

  Therefore, old George, by George we pray

  Of thee forthwith to extend thy sway

  Over the great botanic bay.

  For the Gweagal and Bediagal clans of the Eora language group, a similar shift was in progress. The pallid, disturbing ghosts were abounding. One day: one ship, one floating island, one population of ghosts with mysterious outer skins. The next morning: four islands and four populations of strangers. And on the following morning of 20 January, when Captain Hunter on the Sirius led the second group of transports around Point Solander, there were eleven of these floating phenomena with their huge and inhuman wings, and infestations of some sort of unquiet returned souls aboard. Some Gweagal and Bediagal, related by marriage, assembled on the southern point of the bay and yelled, ‘Werre! Werre!’ across the water. This was their first, undeniable message to the people of the fleet. ‘Get out! Begone! Clear away.’

  But the officers did not imagine themselves trespassers, and the private marines and, especially, the convicts would have found such a self-description ridiculous.

  A more poetic European vision had entered Botany Bay on the just-arrived transport Charlotte, in the person of the pleasant young captain of marines, Watkin Tench. Captain Tench was in his late twenties, the son of a successful and well-connected Chester boarding-school proprietor. During the American war he had been a prisoner in Maryland for three months. Like Collins and other officers, he had volunteered for service on this fleet to get off half-pay. In his striving, often elegant and curious-minded journal, Tench wrote of the arrival of this second division of ships. ‘“Heavily in clouds came on the day” which ushered in our arrival. To us it was “a great, an important day”. Though I hope the foundation, not the fall, of an empire will be dated from it.’

  This sanguine and charming young Englishman celebrated the fact that even though the fleet had not been supplied with portable soup, wheat or pickled vegetables, and a small supply of essence of malt had been the only anti-scurvy remedy on board, an extraordinary number of people had survived the voyage of what had been, for the second division of ships, exactly thirty-six weeks since leaving Portsmouth, very nearly to the hour. ‘The wind was now fair,’ young Watkin wrote, ‘the sky serene, though a little hazy, and the temperature of the air delightfully pleasant: joy sparkled in every countenance and congratulations issued from every mouth. Ithaca itself was scarcely more longed for by Ulysses, than Botany Bay.’

  John Hunter, too, liked the black mould of some of the earth he saw ashore, and the tall eucalypt trees. Due to the Eora people’s fire-stick farming there was less undergrowth crowding the landscape than would later become common.

  By contrast, if joy characterised the face of Watkin’s commander, the Scot Major Ross, lieutenant-governor of the colony, it would not be evident for very long. Ross’s abhorrence for the country set in quickly and profoundly, while on the six ships in which the majority of the convicts were contained, we do not know which emotions were displayed.

  Nevertheless, the boisterousness of the convict women and most of the men still kept aboard their vessels, looking out at the land from the deck or through open scuttles, soon echoed around the bay. To some of
the felons the country seemed enormous enough to offer room for escape, and those who did not understand the fact that wildernesses were to provide the walls here already planned decamping. Wild elation, dread and depression competed for voice amongst them. Some—despite Tench’s sanguine view of their health—were doomed to take cots in the hospital tents Surgeons White and Balmain were erecting ashore.

  The wives of marines and their children also looked at the long dun foreshores of the bay with some surmise. They came from the same class as many of the convicts, and shared with them a capacity for stubborn acceptance which would serve them well.

  The Europeans, however, were confused. Lieutenant Bradley, Hunter’s second-in-command, said that on the one hand boat crews ‘amused themselves with dressing the natives with paper and other whimsical things to entertain them’. But the next day, after a landing party began clearing brush from a run of water on the south side of the bay, altering a location where for ritual and ceremonial reasons ferns and grass-trees had been permitted to proliferate, the natives became ‘displeased and wanted them to be gone’.

  On 22 January, when a seine net was hauled in and the natives saw the quantity of fish the sailors were dragging onshore with it, they ‘were much astonished which they expressed by a loud and long shout’. They took some of the fish away, as a matter of right in their eyes, but as a form of primitive pilferage as far as the British were concerned. The next day the natives struck the thieving fishers with spear shafts, took fish ‘and ran off with them sensible that what they had done was wrong’, wrote Lieutenant Bradley. In fact Lieutenant King had earlier discharged a musket loaded merely with powder, and perhaps they melted away to avoid that thunder. Now and later the material possessions of the Botany Bay people seemed so slight, and their presence so intermittent, that the officers chose to believe that they had not yet left the state of innocence and childlikeness beyond which issues of title to fish, fowl, animals and land became important. Phillip noted that ‘What they wanted most was the greatcoats and clothing, but hats was more particularised by them, their admiration of which they expressed in very loud shouts whenever one of us pulled our hat off.’