Elizabeth Macarthur

by Michelle Scott Tucker

  Lieutenant Ball had also chartered the Waaksaamheyd while he was in Batavia and in December the Dutch ship arrived bearing mainly rice, with a small quantity of beef, pork and flour.24 The Waakzaamheid brought news of the outside world too. Elizabeth noted to Bridget that:

  In the dispatches of the Dutch Schelander to Govr Phillip is mention’d something of a Spanish War, having been declared against England in May 1790. The particulars are not well explain’d, or perhaps I should say not well understood, as the Letter is written in Dutch; and no one here understands enough of the language to transcribe it correctly.25

  In a colony established and run by His Majesty’s armed forces the patchy news only served to create anxiety and frustration. Though far from the arenas of Britain’s battles, ‘we longed,’ wrote Tench ‘to contribute to her glory, and to share her triumphs’.26 At least one battlefront was, however, right on their doorstep.

  On 7 September 1790, as many as two hundred Aboriginal people gathered about twelve sea miles away at Manly beach to feast on the carcass of a whale. Among the crowd were men known to the colonists, including Bennelong. When Governor Phillip heard about it, and having not seen or been visited by his Aboriginal associates for months, he hastened down the harbour to meet with them. Leaving his crew and muskets in the boat, Phillip walked up the beach with ‘his hands and arms open’.27 Bennelong greeted Phillip warmly and the two conversed for some time. Before long though, the British noticed that armed warriors were gradually closing in around them. The Governor quietly proposed ‘retiring to the boat by degrees’.28 In the to and fro of Phillip’s gradual farewell the Governor advanced, with empty hands spread, towards one of Bennelong’s colleagues, a stranger to Phillip.

  Elizabeth was not a witness to what happened next but she described it at length to Bridget. The stranger ‘snatch’d up a spear from the ground, and poiz’d it to throw’. Phillip continued to advance but ‘the native discharg’d the spear with all his force at the Govr., it enter’d above his Collar bone, and came out at his back nine inches from the entrance; taking an Oblique direction.’29 Phillip’s horrified officers managed to break off the shaft of the weapon and, in the midst of more flying spears, bundled him into the boat for the two-hour trip back to Sydney Cove. Once home, Phillip prudently delayed the extraction until he had ‘caus’d some papers to be arranged—lest the consequence might prove fatal’.30 Happily, though, the spear was found to have touched nothing vital and Phillip healed within a few weeks. Bennelong, Elizabeth explained to Bridget, ‘came many times to see the Govr. during his confinement, and expressed great sorrow, but the reason why the mischief was done could not be learnt’.31

  The colonists tended to believe that the stranger, in their eyes an irrational savage, had simply panicked, that the whole thing was a terrible accident. But it is now thought that Phillip was subjected to a ritual spearing to settle a number of grievances, wrongs and slights accumulated against the British. Speared at virtually point-blank range, surrounded by seasoned Aboriginal warriors known for their hunting skill and accuracy, Phillip could easily have been killed if that had been the intention. But he—and only he—was wounded just once while other spears rattled harmlessly past. He was the unwitting recipient of Aboriginal justice.

  After the spearing, the relationship between the two societies shifted once more. Elizabeth told Bridget that following Phillip’s recovery ‘the natives visit us every day, more or less; Men, Women and Children they come with great confidence, without spears or any other offensive Weapon a great many have taken up their abode entirely among us’.32 Elizabeth was not speaking in generalities—at least some of those ‘Men, Women and Children’ became visitors to Elizabeth’s home. One young woman, Daringa, brought her new-born baby, wrapped in soft bark, for Elizabeth to see. ‘I order’d something for the poor Woman to Eat and had her taken proper care of for some little while…she has since been regular in her visits. The Child thrives remarkably well and I discover a softness and gentleness of Manners in Daringa truly interesting.’33 Here Elizabeth reveals her practical kindness and an open attitude to the strangeness of the Aboriginal people. We also get a rare glimpse of Elizabeth ordering the anonymous household servants.

  Elizabeth’s kindness, though, had its limits and she maintained a clear social divide. ‘We do not in general encourage them to come to our houses,’ Elizabeth wrote, because ‘there are some offensive circumstances, which makes their company by no means desirable.’34 Elizabeth writes pompously that ‘their Language (if it may be so call’d) is now understood’ but then a paragraph or so later discusses how ‘I thought their dialect pleasing; some of their names I think much so,’ and she goes on to make a list.35 She also applied her keen eye to the working habits of the women who visited, describing their fishing activities in some detail. And she was quick to note the women’s subordinate role. ‘The Women appear to be under very great subjection, and are employed in the most Laborious part of their Work. They fish, and also make the Lines and Hooks and indeed seem very little otherways than slaves to their husbands.’36

  Elizabeth’s tone to Bridget may have been lofty but in practice she was not quite so condescending. At the governor’s table Elizabeth and John dined alongside their Aboriginal acquaintances. On one particular day they and Governor Phillip ate with Nanbaree, an adolescent orphaned by smallpox and living with Surgeon White, and were waited upon by the boy’s slightly older kinsman, Imeerawanyee. Nanbaree issued stern instructions to his kinsman about when to replace the dirty plates with clean ones, especially with a lady present. Imeerawanyee performed his role cheerfully for all the guests—except Nanbaree, who he affected to ignore. In the face of Nanbaree’s embarrassed rage Imeerawanyee only laughed, while continuing to serve the others. Tench relates this story in his account of the colony. In line with the social etiquette of the day, he quite properly never mentions his friend Mrs Macarthur in the body of the work but he includes her in a footnote to his droll anecdote. Tench leaves John out of the story completely, noting only that the lady was ‘Mrs McArthur, wife of an officer of the garrison’.37

  Not all the interactions between the Eora and the colonists were so friendly. In mid-December Governor Phillip’s convict gamekeeper, John McIntyre, was speared by Pemulwuy, a warrior from Botany Bay. Where the spearhead used to injure Governor Phillip was smooth and sharp, McIntyre was felled by a weapon cruelly barbed, designed to cause massive injury as it went in, and further injury and infection if it were removed. McIntyre, ‘an uncommonly robust, muscular man’ took weeks to die.38 The gamekeeper was not highly regarded and many suspected he’d brought his fate upon himself, but Governor Phillip could not afford to let the matter rest.39 The spearing situation, with some seventeen British now killed or wounded since the arrival of the First Fleet, had become untenable. He had to silence the fears and mutterings of his officers and impress upon both the convicts and the Eora people the strength of British law. Within days of McIntyre’s spearing, Phillip ordered up a punitive expedition of marines and soldiers against the clans from Botany Bay. Tench describes the expeditions (in the end there were two) at some length and his ironic tone lends an element of farce to the proceedings. No Aboriginal warriors, skilled in hunting and bushcraft, were ever going to be ambushed by fifty British redcoats smashing through the scrub. Not one Eora person was arrested or harmed. Honour appeased, and justice seen to have been done, Phillip could let the matter rest. For now.

  Late in the year of 1790 John Macarthur was again ‘attack’d by a severe illness’, just as he had been aboard the Scarborough only months earlier.40 Elizabeth gave up her botanical studies and piano lessons to nurse him. By December he was recovered, and in January the Macarthurs ‘were remov’d into a more convenient House’.41 By then, though, the heat had begun to oppress them all. Elizabeth’s first summer in the colony was particularly hot. Lieutenant Dawes kept meticulous records of the temperature—up to six daily observations of temperature, barometric pressure, winds and wea
ther42—and his records correspond with Elizabeth’s complaints. The summer months ‘have been hotter than I can describe, indeed insufferably so’ wrote Elizabeth to Bridget.43 The air shimmered with heat and the pungent scent of eucalyptus; the glare off the harbour was blinding. Usually raucous birds sat silent in the branches, beaks open, gasping. When the scorching northerly winds came, ‘as if from a heated oven’, Elizabeth and her family were forced to shut themselves up in their home completely.44 If she mopped the dirt floor with water, it would usually stay hard and cool. But even after sunset the heat barely abated, leading to restless sleepless nights in the stuffy hut. The northerlies were ‘generally succeeded by a Thunder Storm, so severe and awful,’ wrote Elizabeth, that ‘I am not yet enough used to it, to be quite unmoved, it is so different from the Thunder we have in England, I cannot help being a little Cowardly’.45 Despite the thunderstorms, the colony had little rain and as a result ‘our Gardens produce nothing, all is burnt up’.46 Elizabeth claimed to have seen no more than a week’s rain since her arrival and Tench recorded it as no more than twenty-four hours’ worth.47 The Macarthurs had yet to attempt anything in the way of farming, but Tench reported that the colony’s farms ‘were in wretched condition’.48 In late February the heat was so intense that bats and birds fell dead from the sky.49

  During this heatwave a small, familiar brig sailed up the otherwise empty harbour. It was the Supply, returned from Norfolk Island—a tiny but strategically positioned dot in the ocean some 1670 kilometres northeast of Sydney. Mere weeks after the arrival of the First Fleet in 1788, Phillip had dispatched a group of convicts and marines to establish an outpost there. Two years later Phillip’s second-in-command, Captain Hunter, sailed to Norfolk Island in the Sirius, to deliver much-anticipated supplies. But Hunter wrecked the Sirius on a reef just off the coast of Norfolk Island and he and his crew had been stranded there ever since. In January 1791 Phillip finally sent the Supply, now the colony’s only ship, to Norfolk Island, ‘to bring hither the Syrius ship’s Company, and learn the state of affairs at that place,’ wrote Elizabeth to Bridget.50

  When Hunter and his crew had left New South Wales a year earlier, before the arrival of the Second Fleet, the fear of starvation had been very real. But by the time of their return in early 1791, the colonists, or at least the officers, were eating more than just their weekly ration of dried meat, flour and rice from the storehouse. Elizabeth wrote to her mother about eating grapes and melons from the governor ‘as fine as any I ever tasted’.51 Apple, orange and fig trees that were planted in the very first days of the colony had begun to bear fruit too.52 A sweet tea made from native sarsaparilla (Smilax glyciphylla) was considered to have many healthy properties and, according to Tench ‘was drank universally’.53 The colonists, with practice, learned to hunt kangaroos with greyhounds.54 Sometimes the joeys discovered in a female’s pouch were rescued and raised as pets.55 Tench noted that he often ate snakes and ‘always found them palatable and nutritive, though it was difficult to stew them to a tender state’.56 Fish were never abundant, although from time to time a shoal would enter the harbour and for a few days there would be plenty.57 Cockle Bay (now Darling Harbour) was named for good reason, the harbour supplied oysters as well, and eels were plentiful along the river that flowed past Rose Hill and into the head of the harbour. Surgeon White declared emu to taste like beef and made an ‘excellent soup’ from crow and cockatoo.58 The settlement at Sydney Cove was not without livestock: pigs, goats, sheep and poultry were prized as breeding stock but many were slaughtered to assuage short-term hunger. The starvation days of the colony were past, although the food situation of the settlement was still far from secure.

  Captain John Hunter joined Elizabeth’s circle of friends. He also managed, during his brief visit to Sydney, to attend an Eora corroboree. Phillip went too, as did several other white men, but not Elizabeth. Hunter described as extraordinary the wide-legged dancing where the men moved ‘their knees in a trembling and very surprising manner’.59 At least some of Hunter’s party gave the dance a good-natured try themselves but none could do it. When Hunter and his officers sailed in the Dutch Waakzaamheid for England in March, Hunter’s departure ‘was regretted by every one who shared the pleasure of his society’.60 Elizabeth wrote a long letter to her friend Bridget, mainly about Norfolk Island, which speaks again to Elizabeth’s loneliness and boredom. She wrote that her ‘spirits are at this time low very low’ because ‘tomorrow we lose some valuable members of our small society, and some very good friends. In so small a Society we sensibly feel the loss of every Member more particularly those that are endear’d to us by acts of kindness and friendship.’61 Yet Elizabeth took pains to reassure her friend that ‘I never was more sincerely happy than at this time, it is true I have some wishes unaccomplished…but when I consider this is not a state of perfection, I am Abundantly Content’.62 Another, shorter and more deliberately cheerful letter was written to her mother, but even there Elizabeth hints at her ongoing concern about infant Edward. ‘He has become very amusing to me. He prattles a little, but is backward with his Tongue, as he has always been in every other respect.’

  The colony was now three years old and it continued to teeter on the edge of failure. Emancipist James Ruse had been working an inland allotment called Experiment Farm near Rose Hill, and in early 1791 he declared that his crops were doing well enough to render his family self-sufficient. It was just as well because in April Phillip was forced to reduce the colonists’ rations again, just when people’s gardens were at their lowest ebb, exhausted by the long drought. The government’s corn crop was meagre and the stores carried from Batavia with so much trouble and expense by the Waakzaamheid were deeply inferior. ‘The rice was found to be full of weevils; the pork was ill-f lavoured, rusty, and smoked; and the beef was lean, and, by being cured with spices, truly unpalatable,’ reported Phillip’s deputy judge advocate (and bureaucratic mainstay) David Collins.63

  Yet again everyone’s hopes were pinned on assistance from England, and the future of the settlement seemed far from sure. Elizabeth reflected this uncertainty in her letters. ‘If the British Government think fit to continue the Colony…’ she wrote to Bridget, and in a letter to her mother she implied that the Macarthurs’ return to England would occur as soon as John gained a promotion ‘in which event our thoughts will be in some measure turned again towards “old England”’. Elizabeth’s logic here is far from clear but her longing for her family is obvious. ‘I have yet great hopes of seeing my Grandfather once more.’64 New South Wales, as far as the Macarthurs were concerned, was simply a career stepping stone.

  In June John and Elizabeth moved to Rose Hill with the rest of Captain Nepean’s Company—just in time to celebrate the King’s birthday and the governor’s renaming of the Rose Hill settlement as Parramatta. It was the first place to be given a name by Europeans that was based on an Aboriginal name.65 By July David Collins reported, without any trace of irony, that in addition to the barracks and the governor’s residence, the township of Parramatta boasted eight huts.66 Although Elizabeth had long harboured a desire to visit the inland settlement, where most of the convicts were posted and where all the ‘Works and Farming schemes are carried on’,67 she soon decided that the advantage lay with Sydney and that ‘it will be the most desirable place for an Officer’s family for years’.68 She saw the Macarthur family’s future as lying firmly beyond the confines of New South Wales. ‘Parramatta may have advantages, particularly to such as wish to cultivate the Land, but officers have so little encouragement in this respect, that few will in future attempt it, as evident impediments are thrown in the way to check their undertaking it.’69 Elizabeth was right about the impediments. Governor Phillip was legally allowed to grant land to private soldiers, and to emancipated convicts, but he had no authority to issue grants to the officers.

  Elizabeth had no sooner moved to Parramatta when the Third Fleet transports began to arrive. The Mary Ann carried 141 female convicts, s
ix children, and one free woman. All were healthy and spoke well of the treatment they had received. The ship also carried some clothing and a small amount of very welcome stores. Mary Ann sailed into the harbour alone, but her captain reported that another nine transports were following, collectively carrying almost two thousand male convicts as well as their military guards. The colonists also discovered that from now on the British government planned to dispatch two embarkations every year, sending convicts and provisions each time. And more good news was to come—in the form of rain. The drought broke, and 116 bushels of wheat were sown at Parramatta.70 The spectre of starvation began to retreat.

  No fewer than twelve ships arrived throughout that spring, including a cargo of grain from Bengal and a transport with livestock from the northwest coast of America. The settlement at Sydney Cove seemed filled with strangers. Although the livestock was welcome, the American captain was a disappointment: he carried no private letters, or a single newspaper and, ‘having been but a few weeks from Greenland before he sailed for this country, he was destitute of any kind of information’.71 In late September HMS Gorgon also arrived from England. Elizabeth and her friends in New South Wales had been looking out for her for more than a year. Gorgon carried livestock, trees, seeds and stores, including the remains of the stores from the now-abandoned Guardian. Of far more value to Elizabeth, though, Gorgon also carried a small group of officers’ wives. Elizabeth finally had some ladies to talk to.

  7

  A Change in Fortune

  …our little circle has been of late quite brilliant.