The Making of Martin Sparrow
Page 43
He watched them walk from the cover of the trees onto the grassland, far off figures shimmering in the haze, their substance seemingly devoid of rigour. Trembling, rootless things, misshapen in his eyes, as they walked on, in that red-tinged sea of flaxen grass.
He watched until the sun sank from sight and the colours dimmed and the sojourners were but fading specks in the greyness, departing his country, lost to all definition.
Of his people he knew that once, not long ago, there was only themselves and others like them, and the edged world was theirs alone. They were one and indivisible with their beginnings, with then and now, with earth and stone and tree and all living things, and with the dead and the roots affixed to their bones, and with their spirits, abiding.
He stood and turned about and walked away, ahead of the dark-ness fast coming. He took to the familiar heath, the ancient track, swift now, the fading light slipping from his heels.
AFTERWORD
The Making of Martin Sparrow is a work of fiction in which the documented past provides points of departure into an imagined world. To paraphrase Henry James, what the historian wants is more documents than he or she can use, but what the novelist wants is more liberties than he or she can take.
Still, these points of departure may be of interest to readers so I will list a selection of them here:
The setting for much of this story is the ‘wilderness’ west of the Hawkesbury River, notably the ‘Branch country’. The Branch was a contemporary name for what we now call the Colo River. The triggering event for the tale is the great flood of March 1806. Reports of the flood appeared in the colony’s newspaper, The Sydney Gazette and New South Wales Advertiser of 23 March and 30 March 1806. The devastation visited upon the crops caused great alarm in Sydney Town, as the Hawkesbury River flats (‘the bottoms’) were the breadbasket of the colony.
On the subject of agriculture and farming, I single out one documentary treasure in particular, a booklet called The New South Wales Pocket Almanack and Colonial Remembrancer 1806, compiled and published by George Howe, the editor of the Sydney Gazette. The Pocket Almanack includes a great deal of seasonal information on subsistence and market gardening, grain growing and livestock breeding. The Almanack also includes a record called ‘The Chronological Cycles’, a table of ‘high water’ at Sydney for ‘every day of the moon’s age’, with an estimate of the time lag for the high water on the Parramatta River and the upper reaches of the Hawkesbury, where we find the garrison-cum-village that I have called Prominence. There is also a ‘Table of Months’, which includes the time of the sun’s rising and setting on the first day of each month, and the phases of the moon for each day of the month.
Other contemporary sources indicate how the winds and the tides regulated movement on the river. Like the seasons, they had their own incessant rhythms governing everyday life. And like leeches and ticks, they are prerequisites for a credible river setting.
In addition to weather, winds and tides, the economic life of the convict colony was notably shaped by the absence of a sterling paper currency. A barter economy filled the void, with various commodities operating as a medium of exchange – wheat and spirits, corn and swine flesh, American dollars, IOUs or notes issued with a scrawl of a quill and accepted at considerable discount to sterling.
Illicit distilling figured mightily in this chaotic scene because imported spirits – bought by the barrel and sold by the bottle – retailed at exorbitant prices. This was because labour, which was in short supply, demanded payment or part payment in grog. So ‘bang-head’ made in the bush was the best return available on grain at hand – the most reward for the least work. Just how illicit spirits figured as both a medium of exchange and a profitable sideline in this economy summons a work that predates the concerns of history in more recent times, for even the best recent accounts seem to miss the presence of the economic in the social. For the barter economy and the pre-eminence of wheat and grog as currency and commodity in the convict colony, see D.R. Hainsworth, The Sydney Traders: Simeon Lord and his contemporaries, 1788–1821 (Cassell Australia, Melbourne, 1972). Hainsworth should be read in tandem with R.H. Parker, ‘Bookkeeping Barter and Current Cash Equivalents in Early New South Wales’ (ABACUS, volume 18, number 2, 1982, pp. 139–151).
Women, too, were commodities, and the occasional sale of a wife was not always controversial because the transaction was a pre-industrial custom from Britain that had been carried to the colonies, though not without some change and contest. A wife sale at the Hawkesbury River settlement in 1811 was well documented because the local magistrates intervened, incensed at the violation of ‘all laws human and divine’, a case of new middle-class values pressed upon the common folk. On that occasion, a woman was led by her husband into the streets of Windsor with a rope around her neck, publicly exposed for sale and duly sold for £16 and several yards of cloth. Both the divesting husband and the wife were punished quite severely. The sale is reported in a supplement of the Sydney Gazette of 14 September 1811, and there is a fascinating essay on this subject, written by Erin Ihde: ‘“So gross a violation of decency”: A note on wife sales in colonial Australia’ in the Journal of the Royal Australian Historical Society (volume 84, number 1, June 1998, pp. 26–37). For the background, the custom in Britain, readers may wish to consult a long essay by E.P. Thompson in his Customs in Common (Merlin Press, London, 1991, pp. 404–466).
A related theme – the femes soles – is briefly discussed in a social history of the early Hawkesbury community, Jan Barkley-Jack’s Hawkesbury Settlement Revealed, 1793–1802 (Rosenburg Publishing, Kenthurst, 2009).
It is Thompson, by the way, who confirms the prevalence of wife selling among certain occupational groups, such as bargees and tinkers or travellers, soldiers, sailors and sealers, occupations marked by a high degree of mobility.
The sealers who figure here are privy to a method of curing the fur seal of its hard, coarse hair without damaging the soft fur, thus finishing the product in a matchless state for sale in Europe. The historical discovery of that curing process is attributed to Thomas Chapman of ‘the Borough, Southwark’ whose patent was breached, sometime after 1798, by ‘large manufacturing interests who combined to entice away his workmen’. One may assume the details of this supposedly profitable cure might well have spread further – one of those liberties welcomed by Henry James. Chapman’s sad case is summarised in John Alexander Ferguson, Bibliography of Australia, Volume 1, 1784–1830 (Angus & Robertson, Sydney, 1941, p. 279).
As we now know, the Hawkesbury River and its tributaries were contested terrain. The fraught relations between the first generation of colonists and the Indigenous people are well known, albeit the record covers but a tiny fraction of the horrors. The Sydney Gazette reported frequently on the ‘barbarities’ committed by the ‘Branch blacks’, but was less forthcoming on the punitive responses, though not entirely silent. The struggle for the rich country on the flanks of the Hawkesbury, and for the river itself, went on for many years, culminating in 1805 when the warrior the settlers called ‘Branch Jack’, the chief aggressor according to the Gazette, was finally shot and killed in the course of an attack on a grain boat. The best, brief account of the dynamics of the warfare along the river is to be found in Grace Karskens’ splendid volume The Colony: A history of early Sydney (Allen & Unwin, Sydney, 2009, pp. 460–74, 481–491). For a case study of one murderous encounter, readers may refer to Lyn Stewart, Blood Revenge: Murder on the Hawkesbury, 1799 (Rosenberg Publishing, Kenthurst, 2015).
The governor’s concession, ‘no more settlements on the lower Hawkesbury’, was Philip Gidley King’s promise to the ‘natives from that part of the river’, a promise made in June 1804, to no avail. King refers to his concession in a letter home to Lord Hobart, Secretary of State for War and the Colonies, dated 20 December 1804. The letter can be found in Historical Records of Australia (ed. Frederick Watson, series I, volume V [1804–6], pp.166–67).
Governor King’s
feeble gesture was never enforced with any conviction that I know of. But it was a gesture nonetheless, a vice-regal gesture, and it probably generated heated discussion among the settlers around the question of what choices were available to them to mitigate the brutality of wholesale dispossession. Historians have differed sharply about how this brutality should be judged. They differ on the proper relation between history and morality. The best way into this debate in my view is Inga Clendinen’s riposte to John Hirst in ‘The History Question: Who owns the past?’ (Quarterly Essay, number 23, Black Inc., Melbourne, 2006). ‘It is only by establishing the span of choices open to these men that we can hope to understand why individuals made the choices they did,’ she wrote. The point is, there were people, settlers, men and women, who tried to have amicable relations with the true proprietors of the soil. They should be remembered, this precious few, for facing up to their part in a gross transgression and celebrated for having the humility to know they could learn something from Aboriginal people – something of their practical knowledge or their spirituality, or both.
Freemasonry has a presence here for precisely this reason. It’s a presence which is greater than its cameo moment in the novel might at first suggest. Masonry figured as part of the radical Enlightenment and its ethics were something of a challenge to the established order, in both the metropolitan centres of Europe and occasionally in the colonies. Its notions of a ‘brotherhood of man’ and a ‘new conviviality’ unaffected by class or even colour were disturbing to say the least, even if they were more honoured in the breach than the observance. For further reading on this subject see Margaret C. Jacob, Living the Enlightenment: Freemasonry and politics in eighteenth-century Europe (Oxford University Press, New York, 1991).
The tales of an inland haven, a sanctuary from the military despotism of the colony or the rigours of pioneering, were part of convict folklore. But what these tales can tell us is disputed among historians. One sceptical view can be found in Paul Carter’s The Road to Botany Bay (Faber, London, 1987). Carter argues that the escape myths about an inland sanctuary were a rhetorical ploy to throw the authorities off the scent. That they concealed rather than revealed a plot to travel, since the real plot was escape along the coast, by means of a boat. That, or a life of bushranging on the remote fringes of the colony. The whole thing a pea and thimble deception.
David Levell’s Tour to Hell: Convict Australia’s great escape myths (University of Queensland Press, 2008) is another reading. Levell has mustered more than enough evidence to show that the stories of a haven inspired some men, and perhaps some women, to head inland, aiming not for the fringes of settlement but for the far beyond. The fable gave hope and purpose to their flight into unknown country, and it posed a serious problem for the authorities – the military, the constabulary and the vice-regal establishment.
The mountainous country west of the Hawkesbury was all but unknown to the acquisitive invaders – and much of it is still largely unknown to non-Indigenous Australians today – being sufficiently harsh and inaccessible to defy the designs of commercial tourism. My understanding of this hinterland – the mountain fastness to the north-west of Sydney – is grounded in a reading of historical and geographical sources as well as my own treks into that country, camping on the river sands and sleeping in the caves. Broadly, it is the magnificent country now encompassed in the Wollemi National Park and the Gardens of Stone National Park, a combined landscape of nearly 5200 square kilometres.
The gorge that figures so prominently in the narrative is, indeed, the Colo Gorge, a spectacular formation flanked by huge sandstone cliffs and forested by fiercely clinging eucalypts, and other trees such as coachwoods and turpentines. From the grandeur of the topography to the shelter of the sandstone caves and the strangeness of the creature sounds at night, these elements and more are vital to what someone usefully called ‘the hallucination of presence’.
One final word, an observation on an Old English word. Too often these days we misuse the term ‘wilderness’ as it was misused back then, as a first cousin to Terra nullius, not stopping to consider how the mountainous hinterland west of Sydney was not a wilderness but, on the contrary, a peopled landscape, a much revered and well-worked terrain, where practical knowledge was based on generations of close observation and deep respect for the spirit of the country. The people of that hinterland were, in 1806, still sovereign in their retreats, unmet, as yet, by the creeping floodtide of white settlement.
Looking back, we might see the outcome clearly, but then as now the future was hidden in a fog.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Writing a work of fiction is a solitary and mysterious business and I am grateful to dear friends and colleagues who were ever so patient and supportive all the way.
Special thanks are due to my literary agent, Mary Cunnane, for her vital interventions, her sage advice and friendship throughout the course of this venture.
I also want to thank David McKnight, with whom I trekked and camped in the gorge country that figures so prominently in this story.
Gathering atmosphere on the water was important too. In that regard I would like to thank Grant Williams for the opportunity to sail with him on the Hawkesbury River and to follow the historic coastal route to Sydney Harbour in a 25–30 knot breeze and a sizeable swell, under full sail. The historic sense of the journey was much enhanced by our vessel – a nineteen-foot couta boat, solid timber, gaff-rigged, built in 1935.
My thanks must also go to Meredith Rose, for her vital counsel during the project’s early days. My editor, Johannes Jakob, has been a brilliant adviser and I greatly appreciate both his knowledge and his dedication to the task. I must also thank Ben Ball, whose faith in the project has been sustaining from the outset.
Finally, to Suzanne Rickard, my beloved companion in literature and life, my heartfelt thanks.
About the Author
Peter Cochrane is a widely published historian and writer based in Sydney. He is best known for his book Colonial Ambition: Foundations of Australian Democracy, which won the inaugural Prime Minister’s Prize for Australian History and the Age Book of the Year in 2007. His first venture into fiction was the novella Governor Bligh and the Short Man. He is a Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities.
Also by Peter Cochrane
NON-FICTION
Industrialization and Dependence: Australia’s road to economic development
Simpson and the Donkey: The making of a legend
Remarkable Occurences (editor, co-author)
Tobruk 1941
Australians at War
The Western Front 1916–1918
Colonial Ambition: Foundations of Australian democracy
FICTION
Governor Bligh and the Short Man
VIKING
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Penguin Books is part of the Penguin Random House group of companies
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First published by Penguin Random House Australia Pty Ltd, 2018
Text copyright © Peter Cochrane, 2018
The moral right of the author has been asserted.
All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.
Cover design by Alex Ross © Penguin Random House Australia Pty Ltd
Cover photographs: landscape © Ben Pearse Photography; figure by H. Armstrong Roberts/
ClassicStock/Getty Images; jug by EJ-J/Getty Images; texture by Shutterstock.
ISBN: 978-1-742-53785-6
penguin.com.au
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