John White (1756/7–1832)
Much of this book is based on Surgeon White’s Journal of a Voyage to New South Wales (1790). According to his journal, he severely disliked Australia, describing it as ‘… a country and place so forbidding and so hateful as only to merit execration and curses’.
Surgeon White was an extraordinary man, conscious of his status as a gentleman, pompous enough to fight a duel (before this book begins) with his Assistant Surgeon Balmain, probably because Balmain didn’t show him enough respect, and a superb and dedicated scientist, botanist and zoologist. As Surgeon-General to the First Fleet and the settlement at Port Jackson, his advanced ideas on diet and medical care meant that many of those weak and starved wretches survived a remarkable journey across the world. No other ship or fleet in the next fifty years would achieve as much.
Surgeon White worked desperately to save each new influx of convicts to arrive in Sydney Town dying from disease, starvation and the terrible conditions of the Second Fleet and subsequent contingents from England. He acknowledged Rachel’s son, Andrew, as his child, supported him and his mother after he returned to England in 1794 and sent for Andrew to join him there when the boy was seven.
In 1796 he resigned from his job as a naval surgeon rather than be posted back to the colony — despite having Rachel, Andrew and Nanberry to go back to. But it is worth remembering that this man had lived through the worst years of the colony, including the time when perhaps nine out of ten of the Aboriginal people in the area died of what he thought was smallpox.
His failure to help more than two of them and the appalling death rate of the convicts unloaded from the ships must have made his job a form of helpless Hell. He did admit in later years that the colony might have become a far better place than the prison hole he remembered.
John White worked as a surgeon at Sheerness from 1799 and then at Chatham Dockyard from 1803. He married twice — his first wife died — and he had two daughters, or two daughters and another son (there are conflicting records). He retired on a half-pension in 1820 of £91 5s a year. He died at Worthing on 20 February 1832 aged seventy-five.
Did Surgeon White have a possum?
When I began to write this book I was sure that Surgeon White had a pet possum. But as I looked through the letters and diaries written at the time, I couldn’t find a pet possum anywhere.
Where did I get the idea?
I don’t know. Possibly from the stories my mother had told me about that time. Some legend passed on from her mother, and her mother’s mother, back through generations of women who had passed on stories of our family — and an old family diary, from the early days in the colony, and often malicious gossip about prominent figures they had known too.
Surgeon White wrote two books mostly about the wildlife of the colony, particularly the birds he deeply loved and whose study he obviously found a comfort after the horror of his work. There were references to possums in White’s writings: ‘o’possums’ he had tried and failed to tame. By June 1798 he certainly was very familiar with ‘o’possums’ and compared other new animals to them. He knew they had a pouch with teats in which to carry their young.
In one of his references to possums Surgeon White wrote that he had often tried to breed them in England, and had bought many and had others given to him by friends. He certainly studied them in detail, but also admitted how little he knew.
Rachel Turner (1762–1838)
Rachel Turner was one of the first people to ever be defended in an English court of law. In this book she believes that she was the very first person to ever be defended, by the young and enthusiastic Mr Garrow.
But although Mr Garrow’s defence of his clients would change the way English — and Australian and American — trials were held, the first few times he tried to defend his clients the judges were so furious at what they saw as contempt of court that he did his clients more harm than good.
Although almost certainly innocent, Rachel Turner was found guilty; her sentence of death was changed to seven years’ transportation to celebrate the declaration that King George III was sane again. She was truly an incredible woman, transcending the deprivations of her early life to become one of the wealthiest women — and possibly the most loved — in the colony, successful far beyond her dreams. Ironically, she became far wealthier than she would have been if Surgeon White had married her, and almost certainly had a far more fulfilled life, living in her grand house by her beautiful river, helping to make the new colony successful, and beloved and admired by many people.
Andrew Douglas (Douglass) White (1793–1837)
Andrew White is probably Australia’s first Australian-born returned soldier, a man who became a hero of Waterloo, and, at last, came home. He was accepted by Surgeon White’s new family in England, and became one of the first students at the new Chatham House boarding school, graduating as an engineer, serving at the Battle of Waterloo and then probably working on siege fortifications in the Lowlands — either Belgium or Holland — before coming back to Australia, the land he seems to have regarded as home, and to his mother.
Almost every man who survived that nightmare battle against Napoleon and the French army under Marshal Ney seems to have been regarded as a hero, but if Andrew White worked as an engineer or sapper, supervising the digging of tunnels to get closer to the enemy, or to protect the English and their allies from shot and cavalry attacks, then he almost certainly was heroic. In the phrase of the time, ‘A Waterloo veteran could ask a drink of any man in England, and never have to pay.’ Any veteran of Waterloo was treated with the same respect in Australia. It is hard to convey to a modern audience how much the men who survived Waterloo were venerated and given special privileges, both official and unofficial. I suspect Andrew Douglas(s) White’s life deserves a book of its own. I now have far too much information about it to record here.
Andrew sailed back to England in July 1824. He returned to Australia for good in 1833. He married Mary Anne Mackenzie in 1835.
Andrew White stayed in the Royal Engineers even once he had come to Australia, till he retired on half-pay and became a magistrate. There is no record of any children. On the other hand, I may simply not have found the record or it may have been lost or never officially recorded.
I did find a record that the daughter of an Andrew White who lived at the same time and the same place had married a man named Weir (coincidentally the maiden name of my mother-in-law). I continue to look for more evidence of what actually happened to Andrew after he came back to Australia. Records from that time are incomplete, inaccurate and often very difficult to track down. It would be yet another of the many coincidences that I found while writing this book to discover that I am distantly related to Andrew, Surgeon White, Rachel Turner and even Nanberry, by marriage.
Andrew, like his mother, had a most extraordinary life. Even with the help and recognition of his father, he would still have had the stigma of being the illegitimate son of a convict, and from Australia. He rose from his humble beginnings to become an engineer, an officer, a hero, and — I hope, though have no evidence — finally happy and fulfilled back home.
Nanberry (–1821)
(Nanbree, Nanberry Buckenau, Nanbaree and other variations of spelling also exist, but almost certainly refer to the same young man, although he is probably not the Nunberri who sailed on the Blanche on the Shoalhaven River.)
Most accounts of Indigenous Australians in the early colony focus on Bennelong, a man who in many ways had a tragic life, stranded between two cultures and at times earning contempt from both.
Nanberry has been almost forgotten, possibly because he was intelligent, good-natured and hard-working. Loud-mouthed drunks may often get noticed, while intelligent young men may not.
Nanberry was adopted by Surgeon White when he was about nine or ten, but he may have been younger, as Aboriginal boys would have been taller and more muscular than the half-starved colonial children Surgeon White was used to.
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sp; It must have been a terrifying time for the small boy; no wonder that he turned to his protector and decided to ‘become English’. Perhaps nine out of ten of the Aboriginal people around Sydney Harbour died. All, or at least most, of the others fled inland, away from the disease — the only thing they could do in the face of such a savage death rate. Nanberry must have felt his old world had died too. Surgeon White had saved him from death, possibly starvation, and had given him a home and status as his own son.
White gave Nanberry the name ‘Andrew Douglass Keble White’ when he adopted him, but the boy seems to have insisted on using the name Nanberry or Nanberry Buckenau, even though he used his adoptive father’s surname till his death. (He stopped using Balloonderry’s name after his friend’s death.)
Nanberry appears to have been a brilliant linguist, quickly learning English — and English customs — and being used as the colony’s official translator, an impressive job for so young a boy. At one stage it seemed that he might even have forgotten his own language, having used English for so long instead.
The examples of what we might regard as rudeness from the adult warriors towards him need to be seen from their point of view. I doubt that the important men and women of our day would like to be told what to do by a nine-year-old boy, especially one who appeared to ignore or even have contempt for our culture.
Nanberry seems to have decided to stay English until after White went back to England, possibly leaving him with no protector in the colony, and certainly without the man who had treated him in many ways as a son. Suddenly, with almost no warning, White was gone from Nanberry’s life. I think it’s no coincidence that it was about that time he decided to be initiated as a Cadigal warrior, probably near what is now the Sydney Botanic Gardens.
But even when he lived with Surgeon White he still became ‘brothers’ with Balloonderry, a young man some years older than him, and he twice warned Balloonderry about attempts to capture him or attack his comrades.
It has been difficult to trace much of Nanberry’s life, not just because most of the time he seemed to be quietly working and so didn’t appear in letters or newspapers, but because he was known by the name White as well as Nanberry (with the various spelling variations) and possibly other names that he took and used at times after he formally became a warrior. At the time of his death Nanberry was still using the surname White, as well as Nanberry.
Nanberry died in 1821, cause unknown. The Reverend Charles Winton, Minister of the Field of Mars (now more or less the Sydney suburb of Ryde) from 1826 to 1828, referred to him as a chief. But this title was meaningless to the Cadigal, and possibly just meant that the English settlers felt Nanberry was a respected man, looked up to by his people.
Nanberry requested that he be buried in the same grave as Bennelong. This was possibly because Bennelong, too, was a friend of James Squire and it was a place where Nanberry knew his body would be buried with respect. Despite Bennelong’s earlier contempt for Nanberry the two men later became friends or at least colleagues in rituals and clan payback wars.
Another Aboriginal man, known as Bidgee Bidgee, also asked to be buried at the same site in later years, but there seem to be no records to indicate whether he was. James Squire died in 1822.
The words in this book that are said to be on Nanberry’s and Bennelong’s grave may not have existed — there is only one reference to them and by the 1880s there seems to have been no actual marker to show where the grave was. The wooden plaques that may have existed could have rotted, or been removed — or perhaps were never there.
There is a photograph in the Mitchell Library of a grave that is said to contain Bennelong, his wife, and ‘Nanbarry’ (sic). The grave is somewhere in Ryde. It was well-marked after Nanberry died. A stone and plaque in Cleves Park, Ryde is said to mark the site of Bennelong’s grave, but it is now known that the actual gravesite is elsewhere, though nearby. The location is still a secret. Wherever it is, it is probably Nanberry’s grave too.
I’ve tried to track shipping and other records to find the ships Nanberry sailed on, but in many cases the records of ships’ crews and sailing times and details are either not available, or were never made at the time. There were also at least two sailors called White, on different ships at the same time.
Once again, colonial records are sketchy, and often inaccurate.
Nanberry wasn’t the first Indigenous man to go to sea — that was the man known by the white colony as ‘Bundle’ or ‘Bondel’, who was also an orphan and accompanied Captain William Hill of the New South Wales Corps to Norfolk Island in March 1791 on the Supply.
By about 1810 there were several Indigenous men who worked as sailors, on fishing boats or whaling and sealing boats, or on ships that took those astounding voyages across the ocean in such tiny (to our eyes) sailing boats. They braved the storms and freak waves of the Southern Ocean and the mountainous seas by the Cape, sailed past ice floes and through the doldrums, where you could die of thirst when there was no wind to fill your sails. They were respected and valued crew members and were paid regular wages and given regular rations, on the same basis as white sailors. Native Americans and African Americans were also known to be crew members on many ships (often American) that landed in Australia or whaled or caught seals in Australian waters.
A few factors relating to Nanberry’s time as a sailor, however, do seem fairly certain. On 30 October 1793, Nanberry sailed as part of the crew of HMS Reliance to Norfolk Island. He is listed as part of the crew on HMS Brilliant in 1800 — the same ship that took his foster brother Andrew to England or at least to Cape Town, where he may have transferred to another ship. I doubt that the two young men being on the same ship was a coincidence — it was a very long way to send a seven-year-old child, especially back then, without someone to protect him. Who better than his foster brother, an experienced sailor?
In 1802 Nanberry sailed with the explorer Matthew Flinders on HMS Investigator, in the attempt to circumnavigate and map the whole of the Australian coast. Nanberry returned to Sydney, though, in the ship Nelson when the Investigator began to leak badly. Flinders referred to him as ‘a good-natured lad’.
The places where Nanberry’s name doesn’t appear are, however, as interesting as those where it does. He doesn’t seem to be on any list of ‘natives’ who were given charity blankets or who lined up to get a tobacco ration. He wasn’t ever taken before a magistrate and accused of drunkenness. He’s not in the records for either committing any crime or as being the victim of crime. Nor was he a police tracker, nor given a grant of land or a fishing boat, one of Governor Macquarie’s attempts to defuse increasing Aboriginal anger and homelessness. Nanberry’s name is not on the list that Governor Macquarie had made of all the ‘natives’ who promised in future to be friendly to the English.
There are records of him participating in battles with other warriors with whom he had close family ties. Including a battle where he and Bennelong speared a man called Cogy — ‘the leader of the Cowpastures’. Nanberry also speared and killed a man named Colinjong. I think the life I’ve portrayed in this book is probably the most accurate one — that he worked as a sailor and, in between voyages, joined up with his clan, taking part in their battles.
In other words, Nanberry seems to have lived an independent, successful and hopefully happy life both as a Cadigal, in the bush away from the colony, and as a member of the English community.
While there is no record of his marriage, it is unlikely there would be, as most ‘native’ marriages weren’t recorded. (Nor were a great many ‘white’ ones.) There is a record of a Sophy Buckenau, who was born about 1806, and was living at Kissing Point with her daughter, where Nanberry is known to have stayed. As she wouldn’t have used the name ‘Nanberry’ or ‘White’ after his death she may have used the other name by which he was known. But that is still supposition.
In one of the amazing coincidences that occurred while I was writing this book (new information appeared at the most u
nlikely times and places), I met a young woman at a history conference who told me that Nanberry was one of her ancestors. She promised to ask her uncle to contact me with more details, but at the time of writing this I haven’t heard from him.
If Nanberry is now known to be someone’s ancestor, he would need to have had a wife, the sort of formal relationship where the father was known as well as the mother. The little we know of Nanberry doesn’t indicate a man who wouldn’t feel responsible for his children.
I suspect that if Nanberry knew of his descendants now, he would be proud. He was a man who seems to have kept his own heritage while successfully being part of the colonial world too: an extraordinary achievement by a remarkable man.
Wollarawarre Bennelong (1764–1813)
The discussions about the true character of the man known as Bennelong are too long to have here. (He actually had a much longer and more complex name, and titles used only on certain occasions.) Bennelong was often violent, especially to women, and a boaster. But he was also a man of resourcefulness, courage, curiosity, incredible kindness and extreme endurance. He was far more complex than the white observers — and possibly his own people — of the time gave him credit for. The truth about who this man was is, I think, one of the cases where we need to say, ‘I don’t know.’
Bennelong appears to have become addicted to alcohol after his return from England, possibly because of pain from wounds and a deeper personal pain.
Even from his first imprisonment in the colony he was portrayed by almost all the diarists and letter writers as a boaster and even a buffoon. But he showed extreme kindness and dedication to Balloonderry, and managed to survive physically and mentally a voyage to England where he was pretty much displayed as a curiosity. In short, he deserves far more than a few paragraphs of summary.
Bennelong died in 1813, long before Nanberry, and was buried in the orange orchard belonging to a brewer called James Squire, who had befriended him, and been granted land on the north shore of the Parramatta River in 1795. It was said that Bennelong often camped there. Bennelong’s death is usually attributed to his many wounds from arguments and fights, as well as to alcoholism.
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