Compared with a modern supermarket, there was an extraordinary abundance of different foods, so many that it would take several volumes to describe them all: yam daisies grew in the grasslands, the best and biggest plants left to set seed to keep improving the quality of the species, and three kinds of lilly pilly (Syzygium, Eugenia and Acmena spp.), sandpaper fig (Ficus coronata), Port Jackson fig and native raspberry (Rubus parvifolius) flourished in the wet gullies. There were native cherry (Exocarpos cupressiformis), native grape (Cissus spp.), native currant, native orange, native mulberry, kangaroo apple (Solanum spp.) and geebungs (Persoonia spp.), apple berry (Billardiera scandens), wombat berry (Eustrephus latifolius) and sweet morinda (Morinda jasminoides). Don’t be put off by the bitter or tasteless varieties of those you may come across today: those around camp sites and useful waterholes had been carefully selected to be larger, sweeter, and more flavourful. The massive flower stems of the giant flame lily (Doryanthes excelsa) were roasted until tender. The core of starch was extracted from various palms, tree ferns and cycads, using a range of techniques to make them edible, including coating the hands in ‘latex’ from fig tree sap so that any toxins wouldn’t be absorbed through the skin.
There were grains and roots in abundance, too. Pigface (Carpobrotus glaucescens), with its tiny nutritious seeds and sour fleshy leaves, grew on the dunes; bulrush (Typha domingensis), with its thick pollen for making small cakes, grew in the swamps and also had thick starchy white roots to bake. Rock lily (Dendrobium speciosum) stems could be eaten raw, or baked on hot coats. Burrawang (Macrozamia communis) seeds were leached in running water to remove the toxins then ground for flour, as were lomandra seeds. The sweet small roots of ground orchids were baked, as were kurrajong roots. An extraordinary number of species of blossom were soaked for their sweet nectar, which was sometimes fermented. Some are extremely rich in vitamin C, others with other vitamin and minerals.
But the harbour was a food paradise only if you knew what was good and what could kill you. The fruits, roots and grains were unfamiliar to the newcomers, though the intrepid experimenter Surgeon White would try as many new plants as he could find, both for food and medicine. But even as the first settlers came ashore they must have seen what they knew was food: oysters and winkles on the rocks, possibly mussels in the mud, the tracks of crabs in the sand, the scent of cooking fish from the Dharug women’s canoes. The flocks of birds winging through the trees alone would speak of food to any gentleman who had shot for sport, or farm labourer who’d done a bit of poaching. Even to a newcomer, this was a land of food.8
The colony of bitter bread
The ships unloaded the able-bodied men, five women to act as cooks, and the animals. This last was urgent, as the stores of hay and other food had run out, and the animals dying of starvation. Axes bit into the trees to clear enough land to erect the tents and the canvas governor’s house. Once Phillip stepped ashore he became the colony’s governor, as well as captain of the fleet. The blacksmith’s forge was set up, fireplaces were built of stones and the first vegetable garden was hastily planted. On 6 February the women were rowed ashore, and there was a wild party that night – wild in both senses of the phrase, as a storm blew in from the south. Lightning struck a pig and some sheep; the colony was drenched.
At first the convicts were shackled, but it is difficult to cut down trees or dig gardens in chains. They were soon freed, with the more responsible convicts as overseers. Australia was, in effect, a prison without bars. The convicts were free to do everything except go home.
Governor Phillip had expected the marines, under Major Robert Ross, to oversee work parties, act as magistrates and generally help keep order in the colony. But Major Ross made it extremely clear that the very suggestion was an insult. His marines were there only to guard against an attack by the French, or the Indigenous inhabitants. Apart from that, they would keep to their traditional activities: parades and getting drunk at regimental dinners, as well as a bit of huntin’, fishin’ and shootin’, a gentleman’s hobbies of the time. The marines were also assigned male convicts to dig their vegetable gardens, and female convicts to wash their clothes, cook their food and presumably, in a large number of cases, share their beds.
After eight months at sea, many of the women had already established relationships with sailors or marines. The first huts were therefore raised by their lovers, built mostly of the cabbage tree palm that grew tall and straight and was relatively easily felled and hammered, with the palm leaves used for roofing. (Both the wood and palm leaves would start to rot within a year.) The massive central hunk of greenery at the top of each palm could also be boiled to make the ‘hearts of palm’ well known to any English sailor who had eaten supplies from the Pacific. Parties of women were despatched to gather oyster shells to burn to make lime so that stone and lime mortar chimneys could be made, or even stone cottages. Presumably the oysters were eaten first, as all the colonists would have been familiar with the city cries of the oyster sellers, a cheap and popular English street food at the time.
Meanwhile, the first seedlings were shrivelling in the newly dug gardens. Australia’s first European-style vegetable garden was dug, fenced and planted on 29 January 1788, supervised by keen gardener Lieutenant Philip Gidley King. It was small, with beans, peas and ‘small salad’ plants. The first orchard appears to have been planted next to the portable canvas house erected by the now Governor Phillip, with the trees bought at Rio de Janeiro and the Cape of Good Hope, including grapes, apples, figs, oranges and pears. On 11 February, a more extensive garden was dug and planted on what was named Garden Island, hopefully safely away from potential thieves as well as wandering sheep that might prefer cabbages to native grass.
Unfortunately the clear areas of good soil Banks had described weren’t to be seen. Land needed to be cleared to plant anything, and Australian hardwood eucalyptus trees are much tougher to chop than European softwoods. The first colonists soon began to focus on clearing the cabbage trees – easy chopping, but the wood would soon rot.
One notable omission from the many descriptions of planting the gardens is the adding of manure or fertiliser. This was probably because there was none to be had. Back in England every farm had dunghills. Crop rotation was common: land would be cropped for two years, and then left ‘fallow’ for animals to eat the weeds and manure the ground in the third year. Pigs were kept in sties, fed scraps, and produced large amounts of dung for vegetable gardens.
But there were no dunghills yet in Australia, and for the next hundred years most stock would be allowed to roam, kept (more or less) in check by shepherds. The land seemed endless, and building hardwood or stone fences hard work. The hedges that could be used to keep stock enclosed in England took at least five years to grow to a useful size. Using human waste was regarded as a ‘heathenish’ practice – until the 1970s, most human waste would be consigned to creeks, rivers and the sea wherever possible. James Ruse would work out how to compost native grasses mixed with dung to feed the crops in the next three years, but in 1788 there was no fertiliser to be had.
January and February in Sydney are not a good time to plant, especially if you don’t have a hose handy. The ‘salad stuff’ did well, as did the pumpkins, maize, turnips and potatoes, but other crops withered, and the beans and peas didn’t set much of a crop. But this didn’t seem to worry anyone (although violent fluctuations of the weather were a shock: from 109 degrees F in the morning to the cold of a southerly wind in the afternoon; from dry weeks to violent thunderstorms). The colony had enough basic food supplies for two years, and expected a supply ship to follow within a few months. They had plenty of seed, enough for the next three or four years. An immediate planting had been worth trying, even if it came to nothing. The diarists and letter writers of the time assumed that when the seeds were planted at the proper time the crops would flourish in the warmth.
Even though the land at the newly named Sydney Cove wasn’t – and isn’t – as fertile as the riv
er flats of the Hawkesbury River or Parramatta, enriched by tens of thousands of years of flood silt, the natural soil of Sydney Cove is good enough to grow a decent vegetable garden, even without fertilisers and hoses. Back in the 1960s, when my grandmother lived on a long sloping block of land above Quakers Hat Bay in Sydney’s north, she had a small area of what had been untouched bush cleared and terraced by her gardener. Without any fertilising, watering or much weeding, the plants in that new ground grew extremely well. (Magically well, for a small girl entranced at seeing shrivelled seeds and what looked like dead sticks turn into garden.)
European forest soils are often deep and rich, made up on thousands of years of autumn leaves. Once the trees are cleared you can grow many years of crops without adding fertiliser, though doing so will give you a far larger and more reliable harvest. The soil around Sydney Cove is naturally thin, but it can support a few years of annual crops like vegetables or wheat before fertilising is vital. Even through that first late summer and winter of 1788 the fruit trees and vines grew abundantly, and so did autumn plantings of potatoes and maize. Fish and game were plentiful.
Rations were distributed once or twice a week, to be cooked by each convict in their own pannikin around communal fires. There were two styles of cooking them: boiling the crumbling dried peas, flour, cheese, rancid and heavily salted butter (already several years old without refrigeration), and salt pork or beef in one great mess; or boiling up everything except the salt pork or beef, and roasting that over the fire. By our standards – and those of the Dharug, who refused to eat anything but freshly caught meat, fish, or fresh vegetables or bread – the food was disgusting. But that boiled mess wasn’t so far removed from one of the most common country dishes of England, pease pudding: dried peas, sometimes with flour added, flavoured with salt meat, boiled in a cloth or any bit of rag. But it was still a long way from palatable fresh food. Governor Phillip wrote that while the ‘natives’ politely took bread or meat if it was offered to them, they usually threw it away as soon as they left. If offered fresh fish, on the other hand, they ate it.
Bread was made with sour, weevil-infested wheat flour – wonderfully familiar bread, even if it had to be baked in the ashes rather than a bread oven, which the colony still lacked, and was heavy from lack of yeast. Dried yeast had not yet been invented, and if the colony had bread – and beer-making yeast it was likely to have become contaminated with wild yeasts, so that the bread was heavy and bitter. I suspect, however, that the colony wouldn’t get decent yeasts for several years. There is no mention of the convicts making beer, but many complaints that the colony was virtually alcohol-free.
Convicts started work at dawn, but by early afternoon they were free to tend their own gardens on the land each man had been assigned. Phillip’s dream colony was a facsimile of an English village: small cottages where each family grew all their own vegetables and helped in the harvest or ‘gleaned’ the leftover wheat after the main harvest was brought in. With hens and a pig to eat the scraps, most European villagers grew more than ninety per cent of their family’s food, using the dung from the pigs and hens as fertiliser, and wood ash to add potash and keep the soil neutral. (Not that most would have known that was what wood ash did, just that a gentle dusting helped the crops and prevented black spot on their broad beans.) The European poor of the 1780s lived mostly on potatoes, onions, and cabbage, but here they were given free seed for fresh peas, carrots, brussels sprouts and other vegetables. With fish and game for the taking, the colony should soon be if not self-supporting then at least producing sufficient food.
There were the native foods to try, too. With recklessness beyond the call of duty, Surgeon White and Governor Phillip tested and tasted everything that seemed edible, both to ease the scurvy from a lack of fresh fruit and vegetables during the voyage and to supplement the supplies.9 They seem to have relied on the ‘it looks like an apple therefore we can eat it’ technique, possibly one of the most unreliable ways to find edible food known.
Humans have modified their favourite foods over hundreds of years or even millennia, creating red-blushed pears, uniformly red apples, and so on. In Australia, brightly coloured fruit is more likely to be poisonous. Green veg are safer: if they aren’t bitter they may be reasonably safe to eat, although native greens like warrigal spinach are even higher in oxalic acid than English spinach, and should be blanched in water before being eaten in large amounts. As the English method of cooking greens at the time was to boil them in large amounts of water for twenty to thirty minutes until resembling a grey sludge, the colonists were probably reasonably safe from the long-term effects of oxalic acid.
White, Phillip and the other food scouts did, it seems, have the knowledge and sense to avoid unknown seeds, or perhaps, at that stage, they felt they had enough flour for their needs. But more than once they suffered severe stomach trouble and diarrhoea from their experiments.
Within a few months they had come up with a goodly list of native edibles. Lieutenant Collins wrote of cabbage trees:
The Cabbage is at the Top, enclosed in a Fibrous Network, and about this, large Fan-like leaves spring out … Of Fruit Trees we have found a small Fig, and Berries of unknown species, One bears a Nut, which after some preparation, the Natives Eat, but one of the Convicts has been poisoned by it, in its crude State. As to the Shrubs and Plants and Herbs of this Country ’Tis beyond the Power of Botanists to number up their Tribes. Among the useful we have discovered, Balm, Parsley, Samphire, Sorrel, & a kind of Spinnage, but, all indifferent in kind a Shrub bearing a Fruit like a Sloe, and here is a Fruit which tastes exactly like the Currant when green, but these Fruits are scarce.10
This spinach is presumably warrigal greens, which quickly grows into two-metre clumps and one patch will feed several families. The fruits could be any of several hundred that grew in the area.
Captain William Dawes, one of the few officers of the First Fleet to have volunteered for the new colony and a keen linguist, described the new foods: ‘Wigi are berry-like fruits including the tyibung [geebung or Persoonia], burrawang tukuba [probably the native cherry], marrinmara, magar, bomula, mirriburu and twiwaragang.’ He also listed ‘flowers bearing honey in sufficient quantity to render them notorious’ – such as watangal [a banksia], ngurumaradyi, wiyigalung, koamea, warata [waratah], kamarang, burudun and mirrigaylang’.11 Surgeon White also described native raspberries – ‘but they had not that pleasant tartness peculiar to those in Europe’ – and making soup from various wild birds.12
The fresh meat, fish, fruits and vegetables should have been a welcome change from rations. But convicts and officers preferred the familiar food from home.
That first winter of 1788 was a hard one. There hadn’t been time to build huts for everyone. But there were supplies for at least two more years, as well as the local food. However, many of the convicts refused to eat the fresh local greens and fruits, and still suffered from scurvy after the voyage.
The wheat, maize and vegetables had been planted too late to get an autumn harvest, which made the more experienced gardeners nervous. They were used to an English autumn that Keats would soon describe as one of mists and mellow fruitfulness. Australian southern gardeners now know that peas planted in late summer will give a good crop in spring and early summer, as will broad beans and potatoes. But in that first year no one in the colony knew what should be planted when, or how long or extreme the seasons would be. They didn’t even know whether to expect regular rain, like the storms at home, or the kind of seasonal tropical monsoon of ports like Batavia. The future harvests of their whole colony were based on a few days of observation, twenty years before.
They watched the bean flowers open and not set. Much of the wheat and barley seed didn’t even germinate – it had either been too old when it was supplied or damaged by saltwater and humidity during the voyage. Fish, once plentiful, seemed to have vanished. (They hadn’t – the colony simply didn’t know where or how to catch them in winter.) Two bulls and
four cows wandered or were deliberately herded away, and all but one of the sheep died or vanished. The convicts either didn’t work or skimped on the job unless closely watched. Trees were felled but the roots not grubbed from the soil, earth was not dug well for planting, tussock and grass roots were left so they grew again and crowded out the vegetables. They lost or broke the tools to avoid work.
Other shortages also became obvious now, like the fact that there were no blankets or sheets for the hospital. The hospital itself filled with dysentery and scurvy patients again, despite the abundance of fresh greens and fruit. Phillip had threatened the lash to force the convicts to eat the more succulent fruit at Cape Town but now there was no one to supervise the convicts’ diet – or rather, the marines could have, but wouldn’t. One man died of starvation not because he had no food, but because he was hiding his food to sell and buy his passage back to England.
Phillip sent the Sirius back to the Cape of Good Hope for more supplies, and a pound of flour was deducted from each person’s weekly rations to help the stores last until fresh ones arrived. This was not Phillip’s dream colony.
Depression after elation
Let the Land Speak Page 16
