Australians

by Thomas Keneally

  After the baptisms, five convict couples were edifyingly married by the Reverend Johnson. Ralph Clark said that he was sure some of the people getting married that day had spouses in England. But had Phillip known some of them were married elsewhere, he would probably not have stood in the way of these new alliances. For the betrothed were in a new earth under a new heaven. Their British marriages were of no help in moderating their behaviour here. As Tench had observed, ‘Marriage was recommended.’

  One of the couples married that day was the young Norwich Castle pair whose destiny had so affected the English public: Henry Kable and Susannah Holmes. This union, between two marginal people in a place forgotten by God, would be an abiding tree, the sort of alliance both Johnson and Phillip required—marriage as a moral rudder. It is in a sense a pity they were not the first order of business that day, for they would have brought great honour to the role of Antipodean Adam and Eve. In another age, those trying to validate the penal experiment would have drawn on the example of Henry and Susannah.

  A further couple to bespeak Parson Johnson that day were as exceptional as the Kables. They already had a child between them. Or at least Mary Braund or Broad, a handsome Cornish girl in her early twenties, had given birth to a daughter whom she named Charlotte, the same name as the transport she and her new husband, Will Bryant, had travelled on, and it was presumed Charlotte was Will’s child. Mary had been guilty, along with two other girls, of ambushing a Plymouth spinster and robbing her of a silk bonnet and goods to the value of £11 11 shillings. As they stood before the Exeter Assizes on 20 March 1786, all three girls were sentenced to hang. Their sentences were reduced to seven years transportation.

  On the dreadful Dunkirk hulk, Mary had met Will Bryant, the Cornish fisherman about 27 years of age, convicted exactly two years earlier than Mary at the Launceston Assizes for ‘resisting the revenue officers who attempted to seize some smuggled property he had’. He was sentenced to seven years transportation as well, so that he had served over four years in the Dunkirk at the time he was put aboard the convict transport Charlotte. Smuggling, Will’s crime, was considered respectable and valid, particularly in Cornwall. Anyone there who had anything to do with the sea was involved in illegal import. Fishermen down-loaded tax-free wine, brandy and tea from French ships, or from British ones nearing port whose captains wanted to avoid paying tax, and brought the goods ashore, where the distribution networks ran deep inland. Good tables of squires and bishops could not be supplied without men like Bryant. In eastern counties like Sussex, smuggling wool out of England without paying tax on it was a common seafaring activity, and bitterness over the excise men, the customs police, would come close to causing civil rebellion. Perhaps the excise officers who took Bryant were lucky or numerous or both, for it was not considered a grave sin to kill ‘these cruel narks’ who wanted to impose their excise on goods from France.

  The Bryant who married on 10 February in Sydney Cove was a man in whom a native independence and a dark sense of having been used hard were at work. They created in him a determination to return to the known world, and he was very frank, even with Mary, that he did not see a New South Wales marriage as binding should he escape. Yet, uttering her vows before Johnson on the very edge of things, Mary would come to pay a phenomenal price of loyalty to her spouse.

  The sailors felt they were being cut out of the nuptial equation. None of them was permitted to marry his convict maid. They were banned in the women’s camp. The male convicts were happy to see the rule enforced against those sailors who had lorded over them at sea and who had been able to attract or buy sea-wives with promises of rations and protection. The very day after the weddings, a carpenter and a boy belonging to the Prince of Wales were caught in the women’s tents. They were drummed out with a marine fifer and drummer playing the ‘Rogue’s March’ and the boy was mockingly dressed in petticoats. It seemed, though, that the authorities were better at keeping the population of sailors away from the women’s camp than keeping the male convicts out.

  Yet there was purer, more admirable and tragic love. A sailor named John Fisher, from the Penrhyn, gave way to his longing to see his convict woman, Catherine Hart, and their infant son, John. Catherine Hart had been nineteen when tried at the Old Bailey in 1784 for some undistinguished act of theft. The prosecutor/victim addressed the judge in these terms about the goods Hart had stolen: ‘My Lord, I value them at 30 shillings in order to save her life, because the wretch’s life is of no value to me.’ The seaman Fisher swam ashore a number of nights to see his lover and child, and died at Sydney Cove on 25 March 1788 of chest infection and dysentery, Surgeon Bowes Smyth attributing his death to his ‘imprudence’ in swimming ashore naked. ‘He would lie about with her in the woods all night in the dews.’

  The women of Sydney Cove would often be as extremely practical about marriage as Phillip would have wanted them to be. For, after John Fisher died, Catherine became the lover of marine Lieutenant Robert Kellow, who would leave her with two of his children when he departed the colony.

  AU REVOIR, MONSIEUR LE COMTE

  As soon as the British ships left Botany Bay, the French built on its north side a palisade fortification to enable new longboats to be constructed in safety. ‘This precaution was necessary,’ wrote La Pérouse, ‘against the Indians of New Holland, who tho’ very weak and few in number, like all savages are extremely mischievous . . . for they even threw darts at us immediately after receiving our presents and our caresses.’

  Expecting conflict, La Pérouse was not disappointed. In an ill-defined event on the shores of Kamay—Botany Bay—a number of Cadigal, Bediagal and Gweagal natives were shot and wounded in a confrontation. ‘We also have the mortification to learn,’ wrote Collins, ‘that M. de la Pérouse had been compelled to fire upon the natives at Botany Bay, where they frequently annoyed his people who were employed on shore.’ Though this brought a general deterioration in the relationship between the natives and all Europeans, ‘we were however firstly convinced that nothing short of the greatest necessity could have induced M. de la Pérouse to take such a step’.

  Whatever native mischief la Pérouse experienced, it was notable that the new settlers in Warrane—Sydney Cove—seemed to require no fortification, nor was the judicious Phillip tempted to erect any. Some wisdom told him that a new society could not be created from within a state of siege. Not that the people in Sydney Cove had been pestered by natives, who seemed to stay away from the area in the early weeks.

  A French waiter named Peter Parris who had been sentenced in Exeter for burglary would soon become the colony’s first successful escapee, after talking French seamen into smuggling him aboard one of La Pérouse’s vessels. But after the French left Botany Bay he would be lost in the New Hebrides (Vanuatu) with La Pérouse himself and all the other members of the two French crews.

  Before that happened, however, Monsieur de Clonard, the captain of the Astrolabe, made a visit to Sydney Cove and told Collins and others that he was frequently visited by convicts. Abbé Monges, a scientific priest, accompanied Clonard on the visit and Clark entertained him by letting him look at the butterflies and other insects he was collecting for his wife.

  The courtly hostility between the English and French had never been so remotely played out as here, in Warrane, Sydney Cove.

  FINDING AN AMBASSADOR

  On the second Saturday of February, two natives came down to the Sydney Cove camp, to within a small distance of the governor’s canvas house. They were ‘both men pretty much advanced in life’ and bore long spears. The governor, determined to be courteous, put on his coat and went out to meet them with a number of officers, and gave one of them a hatchet ‘and bound some red bunting about their heads with some yellow tinfoil’. The two visitors sat beneath a tree but refused to go any further into the new town. One of them spent the time sharpening the point of his spear with an oyster shell, perhaps in the hope of showing the force he had to hand and thus moderating the behavio
ur of the newcomers.

  A black African boy from one of the ships came up to look at these elders and they opened his shirt and examined his chest, and by signs begged for a lock of his hair. Surgeon Bowes Smyth cut off a tress. For whatever reason, they put the boy’s hair aside in a wreath of grass, and were quite willing to let Bowes Smyth take some of their own. Perhaps they intended to work some ritual of expulsion by using the boy’s hair. Perhaps they thought he was one of them, lost.

  Whatever their purpose, one could be sure it was unlikely to be idle, and worthy of a better response than bunting and tinfoil. In fact Phillip would soon hear rumours that some of his people had been involved in the rape and plunder of natives, and ultimately in murder, though there was no direct evidence of any of this. Almost certainly the two elders had come, amongst other motives, to observe the people who were so casual in violating the world set up by the hero ancestors, the beings who created the local environment of each clan and language group in the great period of generation known as the Dreaming.

  Other contacts made early in that remarkable month of February 1788 seemed to confirm the idea that the natives were very interested in the new people, but were distressed by their unauthorised taking of fish and game. A pernicious trade in native souvenirs had also started between the convicts on land, and even some of the marines, and the sailors of the transports. The sailors knew they would soon be departing and were willing to buy stolen spears, throwing sticks and native nets as mementos. By contrast, Surgeon Bowes Smyth from the Lady Penrhyn admired the subtleties of the native artefacts, particularly the lances with the bone of stingray at one end and oyster shell at the other, and acquired one in return for a looking glass, each side being happy with the transaction.

  The women’s hand fishing lines, if stolen, were particularly difficult for the natives to replace, being arduously spun from the inner bark of the currajong tree. Women would roll long strips of the bark on the inside of their thighs, twisting it together to make the lines. They used the sap of the red bloodwood tree (Eucalyptus gummifera) to prevent the line from fraying. They also used bark fibre to make two-ply fishing nets—carrahjun maugromaa, a net to catch fish in—and net bags, in which they carried their fishing lines and other possessions, and hung from their necks or foreheads.

  Burra, fish hooks, made either of hardwood or of the spiral vortex of shells, were also stolen. The Eora forebears had fished with hooks and handlines and the multi-point spears the Europeans called fizz-gigs—from the Spanish fisga, harpoon—for at least two millennia. The men used canoes chiefly to cross from one bay to another, but always fished in the shallows. One European declared that a native had been seen to catch more than twenty fish in an afternoon by standing up in his canoe and striking at fish with his fizz-gig. These were made of the flowering stem of the grass-tree, or of wattle acacia, the four barbs fastened in place by gum. The wooden prongs were sharpened with fire and headed with animal-bone points, sharp fishbones or teeth, or viciously sharp stingray spurs.

  Collins says that at convict musters and morning military parades, every person in the colony had been forbidden by Phillip’s order from depriving the natives of their spears, adhesive yellow gum, or other articles. But there were obvious violations, and the bad conduct of a particular boat crew led to a landing party in one of the coves in the lower part of the harbour being driven off with spears.

  Tit-for-tat, a game the natives played with the same vigour as the Europeans, was now established. A party of Aboriginal men, perhaps sixteen or eighteen, landed on the garden island of the Sirius and carried off a shovel, spade and pick-axe. One of the sailors there picked up a musket and got a shot away. A wounded native dropped the pick-axe. Was the attempt to take this item away straight theft, was it the unknowing and accustomed picking up of whatever lay in nature, or was it an attempt at an adjustment of the books? It was, in any case, interpreted on the newcomers’ side only as predictable native thievery. Captain Collins lamented, ‘To such circumstances as these must be attributed the termination of that good understanding that had hitherto subsisted between us and them, and which Governor Phillip laboured to improve wherever he had the opportunity.’ Collins was fair enough to acknowledge that the loss of their fishing lines and other implements must have created ‘many inconveniences’ for the Eora.

  By the end of February 1788, the indigenous people began to shun the settlement. But contact between the two races was a daily occurrence on the water. The natives were scared of the red-coated marines, the two hundred men of the four companies. ‘From the first, they carefully avoided a soldier, or any person wearing a red coat,’ wrote an observer. The natives called the musket the gerubber or gerebar; that is, firestick. Obviously they had had demonstrations of its power.

  Yet the disintegration of these intrusive white souls might sometimes have seemed almost certain to some native observers, as well as to Phillip and Ross.

  As the Antipodean spring came on and the harvest proved bad, Phillip decided that his principal city should be developed some distance inland from Sydney Cove, because of the better farming land away from the coast, and because Rose Hill, as the new settlement would be called, ‘was beyond the reach of enemy naval bombardment’. This reference was to a grievance Major Ross had held against him during the previous months in Sydney Cove, and had complained to the Home Secretary about—that the marines had no point, or stronghold, where they could muster and resist civil unrest or enemy attack. Phillip had thus sent part of the garrison, under Ross, and a number of male and female convicts up the Parramatta River to begin a new settlement at Rose Hill (or Parramatta).

  Later, the governor accompanied the surveyor-general, Augustus Alt, to Rose Hill to mark out the town. Alt was a soldier with an expertise in surveying, more aged than Phillip, but like him a man raised in a German household. Phillip and Alt were able to converse in German as they worked at this pleasant task of making a British town.

  Phillip was also determined to end ‘this state of petty warfare and endless uncertainty’ between the races. He intended to kidnap one or more natives and retain them as hostages-cum-language teachers-cum-diplomats in Sydney Cove. He explained the reasons for such an abduction to Lord Sydney: ‘It was absolutely necessary that we should attain their language, or teach them ours, that the means of redress might be pointed out to them, if they are injured, and to reconcile them by showing the many advantages they would enjoy by mixing with us.’

  On 30 December 1788, Phillip sent two boats down the harbour under the command of Lieutenant Ball of the Supply and Lieutenant George Johnston of the marines with orders to seize some of the natives. At Manly Cove ‘several Indians’ were seen standing on the beach, ‘who were enticed by courteous behaviour and a few presents to enter into conversation’. Two men who waded out to the boats to talk were seized in the shallows, and the rest fled, but the yells of the two who had been taken quickly brought them back with many others, some of whom were armed with their long spears. One of the captured natives got away. The other captive, a slighter young man, was tumbled into one of the boats.

  There was an immediate counter-attack on the boats—the natives ‘threw spears, stones, firebrands, and whatever else presented itself, at the boats, nor did they retreat, agreeable to their former custom, until many muskets were fired over them’.

  The male native they had fastened by ropes to the thwarts of the boat ‘set up the most piercing and lamentable cries of distress’. His arrival at Sydney Cove was a sensation, women and children and off-duty marines milling about him. Most people in the Cove had not seen a native at close quarters for many months. Like everyone else, Tench rushed down from his hut to assess the hostage. He appeared to be about thirty years old, not tall but robustly made, ‘and of a countenance which, under happier circumstances, I thought would display manliness and sensibility’. He was very agitated and the crowds who pressed up round him did not help calm him. Every attempt was made to reassure him as he was escorted to
the governor’s newly a-building brick house, where someone touched the small bell which hung over the vice-regal door and the man started with horror. In a soft, musical voice, the native wondered at all he saw, not least at people hanging out the first-floor window, which he attributed to some men walking on others’ shoulders.

  That lunchtime, calmer now, intensely observed by Arthur Phillip, he dined at a side table at the governor’s, ‘and ate heartily of fish and ducks, which he first cooled’. He drank nothing but water, and on being shown that he should not wipe his hands on the chair he sat on, he used a towel ‘with great cleanliness and decency’. The gentlemen observed that his front incisor tooth had been removed at initiation. They would note later that, like his fellows, he was able to rest one-legged and motionless, especially during journeys and hunting, with his other leg bent and the foot notched comfortably above the standing knee. Phillip watched him with less flippancy than the crowd who had accompanied him to the governor’s house. As part of the potential peace-making between Phillip and the young man, his hair was close cut and combed and his beard shaved. He seemed pleased with his shorn hair, full of vermin as it had been, which he proceeded to eat, and only the ‘disgusted abhorrence of the Europeans made him leave off ’. He was now immersed in a tub of water and soap and Watkin Tench had the honour to perform part of the scrub.

  Despite the young man’s accommodating nature, he resisted telling people his name, and the governor first named him Manly, after the cove he came from. To prevent his escape, a handcuff with a rope attached to it was fastened round his left wrist, and at first it seemed to delight him, since he called it ben-gad-ee (ornament). In the Government House yard, he cooked his supper of fish himself that night. A convict was selected to sleep in the same hut with him and to be his companion, or as Tench inevitably wrote, ‘his keeper’, wherever he went.