Best Australian Yarns

by Haynes, Jim

  In spite of any past such embellishments on my behalf when teaching, all the yarns I have included here are factually correct—honest. After all, you just could not invent some of the true stories from our past.

  Allan Peters, who runs a website for the South Australian Police Historical Society, has found some gems among the police archives. During elections in South Australia in the early 1900s, for example, Police Inspector John Kelly received an urgent message to say that the keys of the polling booth at Sliding Rock had been sent to Blinman by mistake.

  Kelly set off into a blinding dust storm and rode 65 kilometres to deliver the keys. He arrived exhausted at the polling booth at six o’clock in the morning on Election Day and opened the booth . . . and not a single person turned up to vote.

  Then there is the story of sixty-year-old Claude McNamara who was shot while waiting for a tram in Redfern, Sydney, when a bullet, fired into the head of a dying dog by a policeman 150 metres away, passed through the animal’s skull, bounced off a pipe and hit poor old Claude in the leg.

  My favourite is the one about the policeman sent to Iron Range on remote Cape York Peninsula to investigate the theft of the temporarily closed police station and its entire contents. The building had been sawn from its stumps and carted away.

  When the officer investigating threatened dire consequences for the town if nothing was returned, one of the thieves sneaked back at night and left a police badge on one of the stumps.

  You just can’t make up yarns like that.

  THE DOGGED CAPTAIN COOK

  Captain Cook encouraged the making and consumption of fruit-based home brew (a jungle juice that might or might not have helped ward off scurvy) and his crew was very often more drunk than sober.

  The London-based Polish–Prussian botanist Johann Forster, who went on Cook’s second voyage, was not a big fan of Captain Cook and his methods. He described the crew of the Resolution as ‘solicitous to get very drunk, though they are commonly solicitous about nothing else’.

  James Cook was not too fond of Forster, either. He had jumped on board the expedition with his son and pet dog when Sir Joseph Banks pulled out. Forster was a friend of the geographer Alexander Dalrymple, who was Cook’s greatest critic. Forster had good connections at court and, travelling on the voyage as a botanist, was paid more than five times what Cook received in wages.

  Not only did the fastidious Prussian disapprove of the crew’s alcohol consumption, he also argued with Cook about where the ship should be going and became dreadfully agitated when Cook sailed deep into the Antarctic to finally prove once and for all that there was no habitable continent south of Terra Australis.

  Forster spent much of the voyage complaining and threatening to report various officers to the king on his return. Cook found him so annoying that he soon ignored him completely, as did most of the crew.

  Captain Cook had the last laugh, however.

  Cook took the Resolution further south than any man had ever been and only turned back when the ice prevented any further southward progress. On his way back from the Antarctic, Cook became seriously ill. There was no fresh food on board, so the second officer ordered that Forster’s pet dog be killed and cooked. Captain Cook ate it in a nice stew and soon recovered his health.

  JH

  FORGERY ON THE HIGH SEAS

  JOHN WHITE

  My favourite account of the voyage of the First Fleet is that written by the surgeon, John White. Here he is telling the remarkable yarn about some convicts forging coins to buy goods when the fleet reached the Portuguese port of Rio de Janiero, in Brazil.

  5th August 1777. Still calm. This morning a boat came alongside, in which were three Portuguese and six slaves, from whom we purchased some oranges, plantains, and bread.

  In trafficking with these people, we discovered that one Thomas Barret, a convict, had, with great ingenuity and address, passed some quarter dollars which he, assisted by two others, had made out of old buckles, buttons belonging to the marines, and pewter spoons, during their passage from Teneriffe.

  The impression, milling, character, in a word, the whole was so inimitably executed that had their metal been a little better the fraud, I am convinced, would have passed undetected. A strict and careful search was made for the apparatus wherewith this was done, but in vain; not the smallest trace or vestige of any thing of the kind was to be found among them.

  How they managed this business without discovery, or how they could effect it at all, is a matter of inexpressible surprise to me, as they never were suffered to come near a fire and a sentinel was constantly placed over their hatchway, which, one would imagine, rendered it impossible for either fire or fused metal to be conveyed into their apartments. Besides, hardly ten minutes ever elapsed, without an officer of some degree or other going down among them.

  The adroitness, therefore, with which they must have managed, in order to complete a business that required so complicated a process, gave me a high opinion of their ingenuity, cunning, caution, and address; and I could not help wishing that these qualities had been employed to more laudable purposes.

  The officers of marines, the master of the ship, and myself fully explained to the injured Portuguese what villains they were who had imposed upon them. We were not without apprehensions that they might entertain an unfavourable opinion of Englishmen in general from the conduct of these rascals; we therefore thought it necessary to acquaint them that the perpetrators of the fraud were felons doomed to transportation, by the laws of their country, for having committed similar offences there.

  HMS SIRIUS SAILS ROUND THE WORLD – A MAN GOES MAD

  By September 1788, things were looking grim in the little colony at Port Jackson. The cattle had wandered away and been lost in June when their keeper, a convict named Corbett, had absconded and attempted to live in the bush with the Aborigines. He eventually returned and was hanged for losing the cattle.

  Governor Phillip realised that the colony was in danger of starving. Few crops had grown from the seed carried on the First Fleet, much of which had spoiled on the voyage. Crops, which were planted out of season in late summer, produced only enough grain for seed.

  With the crop failure, the Governor could see famine in the not-too-distant future and, by September 1788, the situation was desperate, rations were cut and theft of food was a constant problem. Phillip decided to send the Sirius to Cape Town: ‘. . . in order to procure grain and . . . what quantities of flour and provisions she can receive.’

  The stoic Scot, Captain John Hunter, realised that his vessel was in poor shape; ‘much neglected’ was his term. Hunter had already noted that the ship had been poorly prepared and refitted in Britain and had problems with rotten fittings and leaks. He also knew his crew had been on salted rations for over a year and would be prone to scurvy.

  Hunter was a loyal friend to Arthur Phillip and followed his instructions to the letter. He had the ever-reliable Lieutenant Bradley, a teacher from the Royal Naval Academy who had signed on as first mate on the Sirius to further his scientific knowledge.

  Hunter was not a man to question orders.

  Eight guns, with cannon balls and powder, were taken off the Sirius and, reluctantly, her longboat was also left behind. It was decided to follow the southern gales eastward and so, on 2 October 1788, the Sirius, already leaking badly and without a longboat, headed out of Port Jackson and sailed south towards the Antarctic.

  Ten days later, she passed the southern tip of New Zealand and within days scurvy had appeared among the crew and the ship was leaking badly. Passing under Cape Horn, the ship sailed through masses of icebergs and experienced gale force winds, snow, sleet and hail.

  Hunter’s meticulous notes give some idea of the stoic nonchalance of the brave Scottish mariner:

  We now very frequently fell in with high islands of ice. On the 24th, we had fresh gales with hazy and cold weather, and met so many ice islands, that we were frequently obliged to alter our course to avoid them.
On the 25th, we had strong gales with very heavy and frequent squalls: as we were now drawing near Cape Horn . . . we passed one of the largest ice-islands we had seen; we judged it not less than three miles [5 kilometres] in length, and its perpendicular height we supposed to be 350 feet [107 metres].

  The strangeness and danger of such a voyage would prove too much for one man. Third Lieutenant Maxwell became insane as the ship passed under Cape Horn and, while on watch, began cramming on all sail in a gale. Apparently, as ascertained from his ravings, he had decided that he wanted to see if the ship would sail underwater and emerge from hell ‘with the same set of damned rascals she was carrying’.

  Hunter came on deck in his shirt and reefed the sails himself while Maxwell was restrained and confined to his cabin. He never regained his sanity.

  Watkin Tench summarised in his journal on their return that:

  The Sirius had made her passage to the Cape of Good Hope, by the route of Cape Horn, in exactly thirteen weeks. Her highest latitude was 57 degrees 10 minutes south, where the weather proved intolerably cold. Ice, in great quantity, was seen for many days; and in the middle of December water froze in open casks upon deck.

  The first death from scurvy occurred just after Cape Horn and another four men died before Cape Town was reached. By then forty men were too sick to move and another ten worked their watch without the use of at least one limb due to scurvy.

  On sighting Table Mountain, Hunter was anxious to make port as quickly as possible to save as many of the crew as he could:

  The weakly condition of that part of the ship’s company, who were able to do duty upon deck, and the very dejected state of those who were confined to their beds, determined me, if possible, to bring the ship to an anchor before night; as the very idea of being in port, sometimes has an exceeding good effect upon the spirits of people who are reduced low by the scurvy; which was the case with a great many of our ship’s company; and indeed, a considerable number were in the last stage of it.

  On arrival at the Cape, Hunter needed to repair both his ship and his crew. A hospital was set up on shore and the men rested and ate fresh fruit and vegetables for a month until all were well again.

  The trip back was a nightmare. The crew pumped constantly as the overladen ship leaked steadily and a gale arose with mountainous seas, which threatened to blow them onto a lee shore and wreck the ship on the wild west coast or southern tip of Van Diemen’s Land. The sun disappeared for days at a time and the ship was awash as fierce winds and heavy seas bore away her topmasts and even the figurehead of Lord Berwick.

  Hunter was well aware that the ship was in grave danger of striking the shore as he could not rely on his best efforts at calculating their position. His dour, understated journal entry belies the reality of the danger:

  It may not be improper here to observe, that three days had now elapsed without a sight of the sun during the day, or a star during the night, from which we could exactly determine our latitude . . .

  Hunter then casually relates how the ship was caught on a dead lee shore and her destruction seemed imminent:

  . . . we saw the land again, through the haze close under our lee bow, and the sea breaking with prodigious force upon it, it was impossible to weather it . . . the sea running mountain high . . . we knew not what bay, or part of the coast we were upon, nor what dangerous ledges of rocks might be detached some distance from the shore; we had every moment reason to fear that the next might, by the ship striking, launch the whole of us into eternity . . . The ship was at this time half buried in the sea by the press of sail, since she was going through it (for she could not be said to be going over it) at the rate of four knots.

  Lieutenant Bradley noted that the surf breaking on the rocks ‘could not be distinguished from that of the sea which was all breakers to the horizon’.

  All through the storm, with the constant fear of being run aground, the ship continued to leak badly: ‘In this trying situation, the ship being leaky, our pumps during such a night were a distressing tax upon us; as they were kept constantly at work.’

  In his dour fatalistic style, Hunter put their survival down to divine providence, with a little help from skilled navigation and seamanship:

  I do not recollect to have heard of a more wonderful escape. Every thing, which depended upon us, I believe, was done; but it would be the highest presumption and ingratitude to Divine Providence, were we to attribute our preservation wholly to our best endeavours . . .

  On 8 May 1789, the Sirius, having circumnavigated the globe in an unseaworthy condition, limped back into Port Jackson, minus her topmasts and figurehead, with seed grain and four months’ supply of food. It was 219 days since she had left the colony.

  Phillip was relieved and grateful. He invited the ship’s officers to dinner to express his gratitude. Rations were still in force and food scarce, so scarce in fact that the officers were told to bring their own bread rolls to the Governor’s dinner.

  One officer not invited was poor mad Lieutenant Maxwell who was confined in the hospital on his return to Sydney Cove and was later discovered to have buried the seventy guineas his family sent for his care somewhere in the hospital garden, in order that his fortune might grow with a good crop of guineas the next year.

  JH

  MARY BRYANT GOES HOME

  While some of the more simple-minded convicts from the First Fleet attempted to escape overland and met their death in the bush from starvation or fatal encounters with the various Aboriginal tribes, the only sane and practical way to escape was obviously by sea.

  Escape of any kind was highly unlikely to succeed, but life was grim for the first batch of convicts whether they stayed or ran. After all, the whole point of sending convicts to Botany Bay was that the Lord Commissioners of the Treasury knew it was a place ‘from whence it is hardly possible for persons to return without permission’.

  ‘Hardly possible’ perhaps, but not entirely impossible.

  Against all odds, the convict Mary Bryant escaped in 1790 and successfully returned to her home in Cornwall; what’s more, she received a pardon and financial aid from no less a personage than James Boswell, the biographer of Dr Samuel Johnson.

  Unlike the spontaneous or opportunistic escapes that occurred from time to time, the escape of Emanuel William and Mary Bryant, their two children and seven convict companions, was carefully planned and well prepared.

  William was well qualified for the escape attempt. He was a Cornish fisherman sentenced to death, commuted to seven years’ transportation to America, for a smuggling offence (‘resisting revenue officers’) in 1784 at the age of twenty-seven. As the American option had already been lost to Britain when the American War of Independence ended a year earlier, William spent the first half of his sentence on the hulks, where he met Mary Braund, daughter of a mariner and also from Cornwall.

  Mary was described as being ‘marked with smallpox with one knee bent but not lame’. She was 1.6 metres in height with grey eyes, brown hair and a sallow complexion. Her family were associated with the sea and were also noted sheep stealers. Mary was sentenced to death, commuted to transportation, for assaulting and robbing a spinster in company with two other young women when she was aged twenty.

  William and Mary both travelled on the Charlotte with the First Fleet. William was trusted with the supervision of food distribution and Mary gave birth to a daughter during the voyage. She gave her daughter the name of the ship on which she was born, Charlotte.

  William’s privileged position continued in Port Jackson where he was given a hut apart from the other convicts and was made the fisherman for the colony. He was also put in charge of the colony’s small boats.

  One reason for the hut being apart from the other convicts on the eastern side of the Tank Stream was to prevent an easy trade in black market fish developing. However, on 4 February 1789, William was caught selling some of his catch. He was dismissed from his post as fisherman, lost his hut, and received 100 lashes
. Mary was forced to deliver their second child, a son, in the convict camp at The Rocks.

  William continued in a lesser role, maintaining the colony’s small boats and helping with the fishing, as he was the most skilled and capable man for the job. He took extra care to maintain the government cutter, as he had a plan for escape, but he waited until there were no ships in the colony capable of pursuit.

  The escape was extremely well planned. After the boat was overturned in a squall, Bryant restored it to first-class order with new sails, new masts and a complete refit, all at government expense. He and Mary stashed away 45 kilograms of rice, the same of flour and also salt pork, water, tents and tools.

  The Sirius was wrecked at Norfolk Island and the Supply was on its way to Norfolk Island when the Dutch supply ship Waaksamheyd sailed from Port Jackson on 28 March 1791.

  The Waaksamheyd was a ‘snaw brig’, a two-masted merchant ship, which had been chartered from Batavia by Captain Ball who had sailed there in the Supply in April 1790. She arrived in December 1790 with much needed supplies, having lost most of her crew to fever on the way. After difficult negotiations between Phillip and her captain, Detmer Smit, she was then chartered to take the crew of Sirius back to Britain for the statutory court-martial after her loss on the reef on Norfolk Island.

  William Bryant knew he was technically a free man, he had served his time, but Governor Phillip was waiting for the convict indents to arrive; he had no record of which convicts had served their time and which had not.