Let the Land Speak

by Jackie French

After the euphoria of surviving the voyage and the miracle of finding a perfect harbour, depression set in with the cold weather. The diarists and letters of that first winter reveal more from what they don’t say than what they do. There are no more accounts of ‘a grand day’s sport’ as they shoot ducks, no rhapsodies about the beauty of the harbour. But equally there are no descriptions of blistered hands from cutting timber or grubbing out tree roots. The marines were soldiers of the king, not manual labourers.

  Fights broke out among the marines, even murders. Lieutenant-Governor Major Ross – bitter at being a subordinate officer to the governor, angry that he had been forced to leave his wife behind (he had, however, brought his young son with him, giving him an officer’s rank, pay and rations) – fomented even more trouble, writing bitter letters to be taken back to England when the First Fleet ships returned from their supply mission.

  This wretched country would never support a settlement, stated Ross. It would be cheaper to feed convicts on turtle soup and venison back in London than send them to Port Jackson. He remained adamant that no marine under his command would demean himself by manual work, or even supervise it. Ross seems to have deliberately painted the blackest possible picture of the colony at a time when it still had plenty of supplies, his purpose perhaps to have Phillip or even the whole colony recalled.

  But there is another possible interpretation of Ross’s ranting and much of the convicts’ ‘laziness’ as well – shock and depression.

  One of the major symptoms of depression is lethargy, an inability to work, a feeling that there is no point to anything. Sydney Cove was a town of mud and squalor, on the very edge of the known world with a vast unknown void at their backs. The little they knew of the rest of the country was even worse than Port Jackson – sandy soil, no harbours or fresh water. It might have been hard that first winter to see any future, either for the colony or themselves. Depression, like hysteria, can be contagious, especially in a small, closed and totally isolated community. Sydney Town was all these.

  Things improved both physically and mentally with the colony’s first spring. Far better farming land was found upriver at Rose Hill (later Parramatta): good rich loam. Fruit trees didn’t just spring to life but grew at an astonishing rate. The vegetable gardens that had been well tended, like the one at the hospital and those of the officers, gave wonderful crops, especially of potatoes, cabbage and corn. It seemed that the land could be lavish, and food grown all through the year, unlike during England’s brief growing season. The colony’s hens had produced chicks that were giving eggs now too, and there were more oysters and wild spinach than anyone could gather. Phillip said the crops of maize were as good as any in the world.

  But the convicts and marines refused to eat maize flour – they wanted wheat flour, the flour they had known all their lives. This is not the act of people who are genuinely hungry, but it could be a symptom of desperation and displacement. They wanted to be home, they craved the familiar. Most would never see home again. So they had tantrums about the bread.

  Spring brings plenty again

  By September of the colony’s first year Captain Phillip wrote to Banks in England: ‘Vegetables of all kinds are in plenty in my garden and I believe very few want them but from their own neglect.’13 Strawberries, pumpkins and melons did particularly well.

  Captain Watkin Tench was a marine and one of the few who seemed genuinely fascinated by the new land, his vivid journal later becoming a bestselling book about his colonial adventures. He also recognised that, given manure, the soil of the colony would grow vegetables all year round unlike England, where crops freeze and rot in frozen winter soil.14 The early gardens gave their owners massive potatoes, giant cabbages, radishes, turnips, beans, peas, tomatoes, endive, melons, cucumbers, pumpkins, strawberries, rhubarb, spinach and more. Fruit trees grew so quickly that the settlers were stunned: by the colony’s second summer, apples, oranges, figs, grapes, pomegranates and possibly others were bearing fruit, although there would only have been a few on each tree. Lieutenant Collins refers to his gardening efforts as a hobby. This, too, is telling: the food situation can scarcely have been worrying if he refers to growing vegetables as ‘an amusement’.

  There was meat from kangaroos, parrots, wallabies and emus, even though game was getting scarcer due to the increased population in the area, and powder for the muskets was in short supply too. The colony ate crows, ducks, swans and probably wild eggs as well.

  In fact, the colonists were eating better than most of them ever had before and were healthier, too. Surgeon White saw a steadily improving state of health, with improved fertility and lower death rates, very little scurvy (presumably still an issue for those who refused native fruits and wouldn’t eat vegetables) and no sign of deficiency diseases like pellagra.15

  The officers and Phillip ate far better than the convicts. They were given a third more in rations and still had their own stores of far fresher food that they had bought at Cape Town, and fresh meat they’d either shot themselves or had their convict shooters bring in. White’s book is dotted with references to the new meats, from swan to duck and emu. White refers to both roasts and broths, so some of the women may have been good cooks, especially as so many had been servants. In June 1788, to celebrate the king’s birthday, the officers had eaten pork, mutton, duck, fowl and drank Madeira and porter.

  The officers also had convicts assigned to them to build their huts, and dig and tend their gardens. The cabbage tree huts would soon rot; their roofs would leak, and their chimneys crumble. But for now, with an abundance of food and alcohol from home, as well as the new fruits and game animals, they were comfortable.

  Crooks not cooks

  The male convicts probably were in the worst position, as far as food went. They were still in ragged tents, too, crowded into an area of about two square kilometres, surrounded by unknown bush. The food in English prisons was gruel, a thin slop that was both cheap and could be eaten by people whose teeth were crumbling or who had none, like many convicts. While servant women would have been taught to cook, the London poor, as a whole, didn’t cook at all. Fuel was prohibitively expensive, and they didn’t have pans to cook with or access to kitchens.

  Instead the London poor ate the eighteenth-century version of takeaway from food vendors who cooked on small coke fires, either on the pavement or in barrels: gruel made from stewed potatoes, turnips or even swedes in the north, thickened with flour and with only enough meat to add flavour. If you had a little more money you might buy bread to sop in your gruel; a few more pence bought you a roast potato, which was a luxury that warmed your fingers as well as your belly when you ate it. Other vendors sold oysters, winkles, jellied eel, mussels and roast chestnuts.

  The convicts of the First Fleet all had a pannikin to cook with, and knives, as well as a spade, shovel, felling axe, three hoes and a hatchet each. But this would have been the first experience of having to cook for most of the men. Most of the convict women had been assigned to the officers, or had made their own arrangements with the remaining sailors. Worse, there was no safe place to store your weekly rations in this colony of thieves. They had to be hidden. One convict made up his entire week’s ration into eighteen cakes that he ate at one sitting – and died vomiting and stinking the next day. These were people who had lived hand to mouth. The habit of gorging on ration day, leaving nothing for the rest of the week, eventually led to Phillip ordering that the rations be given out twice a week, and then daily.

  Huddling on the edge of an unknown land

  This was not just a new land. For those used to city streets it was a terrifying openness, especially after eight months of darkness and confinement at sea. Even those who had known the countryside would find this land strange: the trees were the wrong colour and shape, the sky a hard clear blue, the storms like a hammer of God descending with lightning that seemed to wrench the earth apart. Even the stars were wrong.

  As a child I wondered about the terrace hous
e huddles of ‘old Sydney’. Collins’s drawings of Sydney in 1791 show the small houses uncomfortably close together, despite the fact that land and space were things the colonists had in plenty. But it was a strange land, unknown – no wonder they clung together, huts crammed close to their neighbours. It wasn’t just that this was how houses had been back in London and villages. The proximity meant you could hear your neighbour snore or yell at his pig, you could smell his dungheap and wood smoke, and hear the mutter of voices on either side, almost drowning out the eerie sounds of this new land, the harsh buzz of cicadas, the chortling of kookaburras, the shrieks and arguments of possums in the night.

  Even the stench of sewage may have been comforting, because it was familiar. Already the formerly pristine Tank Stream was muddied. Once the Dharug women had swept its banks free of animal droppings each day. Maintaining fresh water was one of the great duties for those who cared for the land, with lore and ritual to keep it safe. But no lore, or law, protected the water now.

  Isolation

  In November the last of the convict transports sailed back to England. The colony now only had two small ships – the Supply and the Sirius – to send for more stores, or take passengers to the smaller colony that had also been established at Norfolk Island in March.

  This too would have added to the malaise of the colony. Those two small ships might take a few dozen passengers each to England, India or Batavia. But if the French attacked there was no way now to send all the colonists to safety. And the French knew of the colony – coincidentally, French ships had been at Botany Bay at the same time as the First Fleet. The French ships had in fact been wrecked on their journey home, but the colonists did not know this. A more real threat was from the Dharug. Four convicts had already been killed in isolated incidents, and others were wounded when they attacked Dharug women or refused to share their catches of fish, an enormous affront in a culture where food was always shared.

  There is one glaring omission in all that had been done to found a colony: there had been no formal meetings with the native people, no bartering for the right to use the land, despite explicit orders from England that formal negotiations should be made. Even more extraordinarily, no one seems to have tried to find out from the locals more about their land. Were there any major rivers nearby? And what, exactly, was safe to eat? A short exchange with the locals might have saved Phillip and Surgeon White some extremely uncomfortable days and nights as their bodies tried to purge toxic fruits.

  Phillip’s method of fostering good relations seems bizarre. In December the marines had captured an Indigenous man so that he might be an ambassador to his people to communicate the colony’s good intentions.

  His name was (partly) Arabanoo; as a respected Cammeraygal elder he almost certainly had a far more complex name, but it seems that the colonials caught a few of the syllables and latched onto them, so he has remained Arabanoo to history. Captain John Hunter wrote, ‘The terror this poor wretch suffered can better be conceived than expressed; he believed he was to be immediately murdered.’

  He was forcibly bathed, to see if any of his colour would wash off, had his hair cut and his beard shaved off and was forcibly clothed. An iron handcuff was put about his wrist with a rope attached. It tells a lot about both Dharug culture and Arabanoo, as an individual, that he accepted the bathing and the clothing, thinking they were gifts. Initially, according to Watkin Tench, who had been responsible for scrubbing him, he called his manacle an ornament and seemed pleased with it until ‘his delight changed to rage and hatred when he discovered its use’. Here was a man who expected strangers to act well towards him, as most of the Dharug had acted towards the intruders, allowing them to build huts, pollute their water, spear their game and take their fish. He didn’t even recognise the chains of his prison.

  That first day, Arabanoo was given bread and meat and alcohol – he spat out the grog – and locked up for the night. He was kept locked up for three months. He ate enormously, but almost solely of fresh food – eight large fish for breakfast, about four kilos’ worth, and perhaps three kangaroo rats and a kilo of fish at midday. He would always offer children the best of his food if they appeared while he was eating.16

  He was unfailingly courteous, friendly – and desperately lonely. Phillip led him down to the harbour, like a dog on the lead, to talk to his countrymen. They seemed to ask why he didn’t escape. Arabanoo pointed to his shackle. After that it seems that the Dharug wouldn’t talk to him. Were they contemptuous of a warrior taken prisoner by such scrawny white men? Or did Arabanoo discourage them, perhaps thinking that they might be taken prisoner too? There were no witnesses who understood either the man or his culture to write accounts of what did happen, only officers who seem to have regarded Arabanoo with amused and affectionate contempt as a childlike primitive; the pleasure he took in the company of children seeming to reinforce this. And the violence between the Dharug and the convicts continued.

  The spring and summer of 1788–1789 had brought more good vegetable crops and catches of fish, but there was no sign of the expected supply ship. Six marines were hanged for stealing food from the government stores, and the colony had its rations cut by a third. But this did not mean hunger, simply a greater reliance on home-grown or foraged food.

  Autumn brought good harvests of potatoes, cabbages and maize, but not wheat. Maize is hardier, and stores better, too – you can twist the tops of each maize stem downwards and let the cobs dry in their husks on the plant, harvesting them as you need them, or toss the cobs into a rat-proof shed. Much of Mesoamerican cuisine is based on maize, from burritos to posole; maize had already been taken up by southern Italian farmers and turned into polenta dishes; and in the USA there were hundreds of variations of grits and cornbread. But at Sydney Cove the colonists wanted real bread: bread made from wheat flour. And the store of wheat flour was running out.

  Bread mattered. In these carbohydrate-conscious days most of us eat two to four thin slices of bread a day at most, and usually far less. The convicts would have been used to eating a whole loaf per day, or even two if it could be obtained, with cheese or butter from the stores, or the drippings from their ration of salt beef or pork held over the fire so that fat ran onto their bread, or dipped into their gruel.

  A meal was unthinkable without bread. Bread was food. Just as in Japan the traditional greeting of ‘Have you eaten?’ translates as ‘Have you had rice today?’, ‘bread’ stood for all food. This extreme identification of bread with food explains part of the myth of colonial starvation. From the spring of 1789, when the flour ration was changed to maize rather than wheat, until the colony finally had good silos in which to store its wheat and flour in about 1820, a lack of bread was synonymous with extreme deprivation, even if there were plenty of other carbohydrates like potatoes or maize.

  ‘Real’ food was wheat bread with meat, butter and cheese; not fish, not corn bread. Vegetables were side dishes, garnishes. Back in Europe, the starving French crowds were crying for bread (and their queen was infamously telling them to eat brioche instead). Bread was life.

  If the colonists had been truly hungry they’d have eaten their maize, either as cornbread damper or cooked up in their gruel. It wasn’t hunger that nibbled at the colony now, but depression.

  And then depression became nightmare.

  The plague around them

  From April 1879, all around the harbour the Dharug began to die, bodies lining the shores and floating in the harbour. The little fishing canoes with the laughing children vanished. Those who didn’t die, fled.

  Surgeon White diagnosed smallpox, one of the most contagious of diseases. The colony cared for the ill Dharug, but only a boy and a girl, Nanberry and Baroong, survived the illness, and were adopted into the colony. The colony must have spent that autumn and all winter waiting for the smallpox to strike them too.

  It didn’t, and two hundred years later I wonder if it wasn’t indeed a severe variant of cowpox. The symptoms would fit
, and it would explain why no colonists – not even the children who had played with Arabanoo, who also died in the plague – were infected. Cowpox is spread by physical contact with cows, but also by rats. Europeans have a high resistance, but the populations of Australia did not. The only colonist who died or even grew ill was a Native American sailor.

  But the colonists were not to know that. Even if they had, it might have been of little comfort. A smallpox plague that had mysteriously left the colony untouched might as eerily strike them all.

  And still the expected supply ship didn’t appear.

  By August 1789 the colony was in a strange, almost paranoid, mental state. Collins writes as though the land itself was trying to destroy them:

  As every circumstance became of importance that might in its tendency forward or retard the day whereon the colony was to be pronounced independent of the mother-country for provisions, it was soon observed with concern, that hitherto by far a greater proportion of males than females had been produced by the animals we had brought for the purpose of breeding. This, in any other situation, might not have been so nicely remarked; but here, where a country was to be stocked, a litter of twelve pigs whereof three only were females became a subject of conversation and inquiry. Out of seven kids which had been produced in the last month, one only was a female; and many similar instances had before occurred, but no particular notice was attracted until their frequency rendered them remarkable. This circumstance excited an anxious care in every one for the preservation of such females as might be produced; and at the moment now spoken of no person entertained an idea of slaughtering one of that sort; indeed males were so abundant that fortunately there was no occasion.17

  And yet the crops were doing well. Collins wrote again in September 1789: ‘At Rose Hill, where the corn promised well, an Emu had been killed, which stood seven feet high, was a female, and when opened was found to contain exactly fifty eggs.’18