There were other manifestations of Phillip’s egalitarian benevolence. In England, before his departure, he had written that ‘the Laws of this Country will, of course, be introduced in New South Wales’. There was a remarkable, if unorthodox, instance of this in July 1788 when he convened the first sitting of the civil court. He did so to enable two convicts, Henry and Susannah Kable, to sue a ship’s captain for the theft of their personal property during the voyage. But even under English law, convicts had no right to sue. As the jurist William Blackstone graphically described it, they were ‘civilly dead, unable to sue, unable to be a witness and unable to hold property and make contracts’. Phillip assuredly knew this, but the formal records of sentence relating to each convict had not been delivered to him before the fleet sailed from Portsmouth. In the absence of documentary proof of their obvious convict status, Phillip chose to ignore the reality. He clearly believed that Henry and Susannah Kable should have the opportunity of redressing the wrong that had been done to them. He appointed the chaplain (Johnson) and the surgeon (White) to sit with the judgeadvocate (Collins) as members of the court and allowed the action to proceed. In due course the property of Henry and Susannah Kable was restored to them and their rights against the dishonest ship’s captain historically vindicated.
Curiously, Phillip’s generous reaction to Susannah Kable had a direct connection with that of Sydney. For Sydney had shown compassion towards the very same convict woman before the fleet’s departure. She had been brought from Norwich Gaol to Plymouth with her baby son to board one of the transports. At Plymouth the ship’s captain refused to allow the baby on board. The Norwich gaoler, Mr Simpson, who had accompanied Susannah and her baby from Norwich, was so affected that he left the tearful mother behind and travelled post haste all the way from the west of England to London with the child in his lap. In London he proceeded to Whitehall where he waited for Sydney and engaged him on the steps of the Home Office. Sydney was understandably disconcerted, but so moved that he promptly announced that the child should be restored to its mother. At the same time he commended Simpson for his spirit and humanity. Naturally, the London newspapers delighted in the story, as did their readers. In fact, so many of the public were moved that £20 was raised in donations for the maintenance and welfare of mother and child in the colony. The goods purchased with these donations, and subsequently stolen by the ship’s captain, then became the subject of the colony’s first civil action.
Phillip’s fair mindedness and sense of equality were singular but he did not abandon entirely all pretensions to Georgian gentility and personal aggrandisement. On 15 May 1788 he commenced the construction of a suitable Governor’s residence to replace the pre-fabricated canvas tent which served as his first home and was neither wind- nor waterproof. The building’s copper foundation plaque, duly inscribed and laid in the southeastern corner, referred to Phillip landing with the first ‘settlers’ not with convicts. When completed in the following year, the new residence displayed a number of emblematic Georgian architectural features that reflected the era but which were incongruous in their raw physical setting. The building was a square two-storey pilastered structure with a pared-down Palladian style, central pedimented breakfront, glass windows and the only set of stairs in the colony. There were even quoins and a roundel. A disgruntled few thought it a folie de grandeur constructed with an eye to posterity. Like the symbolism of Albion, however, it was a conscious transplantation of English cultural tradition and a symbol of authority. But its use would not be exclusive to Phillip and in due course he would share its kitchen with kangaroos and its dining room with Aboriginal guests.
Another early transplantation of English cultural tradition was the first town plan, created in July 1788. The central feature of Phillip’s ‘Albion’ was a triumphal avenue 200 feet wide, running northeast toward the harbour’s entrance. The planned avenue led to an expansive public square that was proposed for the waterfront, around which there were to be no commercial buildings. From there, one would look back and along the grand avenue. The whole concept radiated a formality and grandeur not unlike Greenwich itself, with its stately square beside the Thames. In truth, however, it was a dream, a flight of fancy, and was soon put to one side. Phillip was too pragmatic, and the exigencies of the settlement too pressing, to allow this original town plan to represent anything more than a passing vision. Although it remains Phillip’s earliest telltale aspiration for the nascent settlement, the plan never left paper and the name of Albion went with it.
The greater priority was the cultivation of the land. Not only did the subsistence of the settlement depend on it but successful agricultural development was the core of the social experiment. Phillip could not have achieved this without Henry Dodd. This little-known man was the only one in the colony with substantial rural experience and a serious claim to agricultural proficiency. Phillip had known him during his days at Lyndhurst in Hampshire where Dodd was one of the farm servants. It is not clear how he and Phillip remained in contact following Phillip’s separation from Charlott or when they were reunited. But Dodd sailed with Phillip on the Sirius as his personal servant and was a member of the official party. Watkin Tench said that he was a member of Phillip’s household.
In November 1788 Phillip sent Dodd to Rose Hill, at the headwaters of the harbour, with a hundred convicts and a detachment of marines. At Sydney Cove, with its weathered sandstone and nutrient-poor soils, agriculture never really extended beyond kitchen gardens. The colony’s survival depended on grain farming and the broad-scale planting of wheat, oats, corn, maize and barley. This only became achievable when the rich dark loams at Rose Hill were discovered and cultivated under Dodd’s dedicated supervision. This was the colony’s turning point. Phillip visited Dodd at Rose Hill, even sleeping humbly on the floor of his hut. Henry Dodd excelled himself, commanded the respect of everyone and laid the foundations for the colony’s agricultural subsistence. Collins wrote that he ‘acquired an ascendancy over the convicts, which he preserved without being hated by them’. By February 1790, Phillip was able to report with satisfaction that the corn produced by the convicts under the direction of ‘this very industrious man … was exceedingly good’.
The agricultural subsistence to which Dodd so substantially contributed eventually enabled Phillip to issue convict land grants. These land grants represented the first steps away from public farming and towards the intended new society – an idealistic rural society where ex-convicts became settlers working their 30-acre grants, cultivating their lots and improving their lives. The hoped-for transformation of ‘villains into villagers’ was the dream of Phillip’s powerful and visionary supporters watching in England. It is no wonder that they saw the experiment in New South Wales as a subject ‘affording the political philosopher new material for calculation, on a subject so interesting, so important to the civilised world’. A mere convict dumping ground was never envisioned. It was neither Sydney’s ambition nor Phillip’s intention. It was not the way in which Phillip saw himself as serving the cause of humanity.
Developing cordial relations with the Aborigines was another way in which Phillip saw himself as serving the cause of humanity. His instructions required him to ‘conciliate the affections’ of the Aborigines, to encourage everyone to ‘live in amity and kindness with them’ and to punish all who should ‘wantonly destroy them, or give them any unnecessary interruption in the exercise of their several occupations’. All of this Phillip embraced, while at the same time demonstrating that well-intended but innocently superior loftiness of the age. He nurtured the hope that he might ‘cultivate an acquaintance with them, without their having an idea of our great superiority over them, that their confidence and friendship might be more firmly fixed’. Unlike Cook, Phillip did not let fly with shot, at least at the beginning. And his approach was more gentle than that of Lapérouse, who regarded the Aborigines as malevolent savages to be avoided.
But Phillip and his officers were contradictory. T
hey genuinely wished to be friends but could not see that they were invaders. They were enlightened, tolerant and chivalrous, in accordance with the spirit of the age, but they viewed the Aborigines through the lens of prevailing European preconceptions. Their instructions were to achieve amity and kindness not to pillage or harm. But they appropriated Aboriginal lands and ruined Aboriginal hunting and fishing grounds. There was no generalised racist terror. That would only come later, after Phillip’s time, when commerce, greed and land ownership took root and a prevailing sentiment of hostility towards the Aborigines emerged.
To Phillip’s dismay the early promise of peaceful co-existence with the Aborigines did not bear fruit. In the first few days at Botany Bay, seamen and marines had danced and jigged on the beach with the curious and good-natured ‘natives’, as they referred to them. Some called them ‘indians’. Phillip walked forward with open arms and forbade any shooting. He handed out gifts – beads and mirrors and bright cloths. But the Eora stayed away from the settlement at Sydney Cove. They had good reason to be wary, watching from a distance as their fish and oysters were depleted, their trees cut down and their land transformed. After almost a year of disappointment, Phillip adopted a new strategy. He desperately wanted the Eora to appreciate the kindness and peaceful intentions that the British brought with them and the advantages of civilised life that they offered. And he hoped to learn about Aboriginal culture and language. In December 1788, he chose to take an Aboriginal man forcibly from Manly Cove. This man was Arabanoo. A few months later, when some convicts formed vigilante groups seeking reprisals for occasional Aboriginal attacks, Phillip took great exception to their conduct, knowing how such brutality would undo his good intentions. Wishing to demonstrate his bona fides to the Aborigines, he had the perpetrators publicly whipped and put in chains. Some convicts who had received spear wounds were allowed to recover. Then they were also whipped. But rather than being impressed, Watkin Tench said that Arabanoo displayed ‘symptoms of disgust and terror’.
A greater terror was the arrival of the smallpox. It was Phillip’s first real calamity in New South Wales. It descended like a cloud on the Aboriginal population in April, May and June 1789 and carried off at least half of its members living around the harbour, although not a single European was affected. The disease was well known in western Europe and was regarded as the most dreadful scourge of the human species. It decimated Native Americans when it was carried across the Atlantic by settlers and slaves. And it probably attacked more people in Georgian England than any other disease. But there had been no sign of it on the voyage or during the fifteen months of settlement. The first disturbing reports of the presence of the disease came to Phillip in April when men went down the harbour and found in the coves and inlets dead and dying Aborigines huddled among the rocks and lying on the beaches.
When Phillip learned of an Aboriginal family lying sick in a nearby cove, he took a boat and personally attended on the family with Arabanoo and a surgeon. They witnessed a scene of despair. The man was stretched out on the ground before a few burning sticks. The boy was trying to cool himself, pouring water on his head from a shell; nearby was the dead body of a female child and a little further away the corpse of a woman. Arabanoo was overcome and would not leave until he had buried the child. He did not see the mother’s corpse and Phillip did not show it to him. Phillip brought the elderly man and boy to the hospital where they were placed in a separate hut. He had ‘hopes that being cured and sent away with the many little necessaries we could give them would be the means of reconciling them to live near us’. The man died within hours but the boy recovered. White the surgeon adopted him, allowing him to live in his home. A few days later two more sick and diseased Aborigines were collected in Phillip’s boat and brought to the hospital. Only one survived, a fourteen-year-old girl. When she recovered, she was also taken in, this time by the chaplain’s wife, Mrs Johnson. Later, when Arabanoo himself became sick and died on 18 May, Phillip was deeply affected, attending his funeral and having him buried in his own garden.
The presence of the disease was perplexing and unfathomable and Phillip could not account for it. Some Francophobes blamed Lapérouse’s men but their suspicion was baseless as the French ships had left in March of the previous year. Watkin Tench wondered about the smallpox virus that surgeons usually kept in vials secured in their medicine chests. But he dismissed the idea that it might have been the cause and there is no support for the speculation that any vials were unaccounted for. The calamity was a humanitarian disaster and a setback in Phillip’s quest for peaceful co-existence with the Aborigines. He was deeply concerned but confident that the British were not to blame. And he may well have been justified. The English and the French were not the only voyagers to the Australian continent in the late eighteenth century. Recent opinion suggests that the virus may have originated with Macassan fishermen and been transported overland. They came seeking trepang and traded with the Aborigines.
By the time spring arrived, the smallpox had receded and perceptible signs of Aboriginal life reappeared around the harbour. Phillip continued his quest for engagement with the Aborigines. In November 1789 he chose once again to kidnap two more men at Manly Cove. One of the captured men was Bennelong, who was clever, gregarious and open to being civilised. Phillip took a deep personal interest in Bennelong’s welfare, believing that he represented the longed-for breakthrough. Soon Bennelong and Phillip could be seen walking together and making little trips to South Head by boat. Bennelong used an Aboriginal term of endearment for Phillip which meant ‘father’ and he referred to himself as ‘son’. But then after six months, Bennelong disappeared. And still the Eora stayed away. Phillip wistfully, and perhaps insightfully, wrote to Sir Joseph Banks saying that ‘nothing will make these people amends for the loss of their liberty’. It was not until September that a resolution occurred, and then only after a premeditated act of retribution.
On 7 September 1790, without warning or provocation, an Aboriginal man standing in a throng at Manly Cove launched his weapon at Phillip. The shaft of the spear was not less than twelve feet long. Its head was a single wooden barb without any jagged bone or broken oyster shell fixed to it. Bennelong was in the throng and may have been responsible for what occurred. For it was he who had laid the spear in front of the assailant, pointing to him and calling his name. The assailant was between twenty and 30 yards from where Philip stood. With considerable dexterity, he flicked the spear upwards with his foot, fixed it to his throwing stick and thew it violently towards Phillip. The spear entered just above Phillip’s right clavicle and exited near the third thoracic vertebra, high up on his back. It protruded ‘about three inches just behind the shoulder blade and close to the back bone’.
Collins and the midshipman Henry Waterhouse were with Phillip. Collins turned and ran towards the beach, calling the crew to bring up the muskets. Waterhouse concluded that ‘the Governor was killed’. But Phillip struggled for the boats, holding the shaft of the spear in both hands, unsuccessfully trying to keep the end of the shaft up. The shaft was too long, however, and its end kept striking the ground, stopping him short. Phillip called out to Waterhouse, begging him to haul the spear out. Waterhouse complied but made a hash of it and must have caused Phillip considerable further pain. At first he started to pull but realised that he was only drawing the single barbed head back into the flesh. Then he tried to break the shaft, bending it down. Having no success, he then bent it upwards. But still he could not break the hardwood shaft. Adrenalin must have then taken over. Another spear whistled towards him, grazing his right hand. In his own words ‘it frightened me a good deal and I believe added to my exertions, for the next sudden jerk I gave it [the shaft] broke short off’. Spears were then flying thick.
With the help of a seaman, Waterhouse lifted Phillip into one of the boats. He was very faint. Shock must surely have begun to set in. The crew rowed for two hours while Phillip’s wound bled a good deal. Waterhouse held Phillip in his
arms. He said that Phillip was ‘perfectly collected but conscious that a few hours must fix the period of his existence’. Phillip was taken to his house where he expected to die. He insisted that Balmain, one of the assistant surgeons, tell him candidly how many hours he had to settle his affairs. He warned Balmain not to deceive him as he was not afraid to meet his fate. ‘Let it be whatever it would,’ he said. Phillip was justified in feeling pessimistic but the place of entry of the spear may explain his good fortune. It must have gone through the fleshy part above the mid-clavicle. The trapezius muscle would have been savagely ripped and torn at the point of entry. But if the trajectory of the spear were slightly downwards, it is conceivable that the head of the spear could have passed through Phillip and emerged from his back without causing injury to any major anatomical structures.
It was still necessary of course for a surgeon to remove the shaft, to treat any shock, to reduce the pain and, most important of all, to prevent infection. Fortunately, spear and arrow wounds have a long history. Homer’s anatomically accurate descriptions of removing spears and cutting out arrows in the Iliad had provided the basis for the practices used by military surgeons for thousands of years. Balmain had received a classical medical education at Edinburgh University and whether or not he read Homer, he would have followed the timehonoured practice of bathing and dressing Phillip’s wound with tepid water and red wine. Spirit of turpentine and aloes may also have been used. When the wound was cleaned, a soft lint bandage would have been applied to the entry point on Phillip’s shoulder, perhaps over a compress soaked in warm wine. For pain relief, if it were necessary, Phillip would have been given laudanum, an alcohol extract from opium, and perhaps a draught of red wine. For shock, if there were any signs, little could be done other than to keep the patient warm, comfortable and calm. In Phillip’s case, his wound healed well. Waterhouse said that ‘in six weeks he was able to get about again’.
Arthur Phillip Page 19
