Let the Land Speak

by Jackie French

  Storing food, however, was another matter. Potatoes can be stored over winter in the ground in Sydney, or on racks. Maize can be dried and stored in its husk. Wheat is more difficult to store – and the colony still demanded its wheat bread. Collins wrote in October 1789: ‘Our enemies the rats, who worked unseen, and attacked us where we were most vulnerable … Eight casks of flour were at one time found wholly destroyed … they rioted upon the Indian corn which was growing, and did considerable mischief.’19

  The rats may have been bush rats, but there had also been time for ship rats to have come ashore with the stores and bred to plague numbers. The convicts were still gorging on their rations as soon as they were handed out. Collins again, in November 1789:

  It was soon observed, that of the provisions issued at this ration on the Saturday the major part of the convicts had none left on the Tuesday night; it was therefore ordered, that the provisions should be served in future on the Saturdays and Wednesdays. By these means, the days which would otherwise pass in hunger, or in thieving from the few who were more provident, would be divided, and the people themselves be more able to perform the labour which was required from them. Overseers and married men were not included in this order.20

  There was still food in plenty. The gardens and farms had produced crops and also, presumably, viable seed to keep planting indefinitely. But they had now been here for almost two years, with no sign of a supply ship or any contact from England.

  Terror and depression, not starvation

  The rations were reduced again. But there is no indication yet that this reduction would cause physical hardship – doubtless there was plenty of non-rationed food. As Collins wrote, it was a precautionary move:

  The ration … was … reduced to two thirds of every species, spirits excepted, which continued as usual. This measure was calculated to guard against accidents; and the necessity of it was obvious to everyone, from the great uncertainty as to the time when a supply might arrive from England, and from the losses which had been and still were occasioned by rats in the provision store.21

  Their farms were producing now. The fish catch was good. The wheat crop was moderate, the oat crop poor, but the barley and ‘Indian corn’ good. And yet … still no sign of a sail from England.

  By March 1790 it was obvious that the colonists would have to be more self-reliant. Many of the convicts had neither built themselves a hut nor dug a garden. Governor Phillip distributed the dwellings and gardens among those who had none. No more hens or pigs were to be eaten.

  The governor also decided on the ultimate nanny state: the rations would be distributed daily. The official working hours were also reduced, so that convicts could work their own gardens. But there is no hint at this stage that the working hours had been reduced because the workers were starving. Instead it was a desperate measure to get the idle to work, to become self-supporting, to finally get their soft hands dirty and blistered. For the first time, the marines were also expected to get out there and work, supervising the convicts on fishing parties, using private boats owned by the officers.

  And still there was no ship from England.

  On 19 March 1790, the Sirius was wrecked unloading supplies on Norfolk Island. Now the tiny Supply was the only ship left and Phillip sent it to Batavia to buy more food. It would take six months to get there and back. The colony was now totally isolated and had no way to send supplies to their colony at Norfolk Island either.

  Food was continually guarded against theft. Convict William Lane was sentenced to two thousand lashes for stealing biscuit, Thomas Halford the same for stealing three pounds of potatoes and William Parr got five hundred lashes for stealing a pumpkin. A fisherman was given a hundred lashes for keeping some of the catch. A rumour went around the camp that the marines were going to sail off in the Supply, leaving the convicts to starve alone.

  That too indicates the mental state of the colony: suspicion, isolation, desperation. It is even possible that the rumour was true. While Phillip would have had too much integrity to abandon his post, the same could not be said for many of the officers. This was, after all, the same era when the officers of His Majesty’s Ship Bounty mutinied against their captain, stole the ship, picked up Polynesian women and sailed off to Pitcairn Island. It is not beyond belief that the officers at Sydney Cove might have mutinied and sailed the ship from a colony they believed doomed, or insupportable, if things grew worse.

  The two previous winters before had seen a sharp reduction in the amount of fish caught. Now, in autumn, it looked like this would happen again. Lieutenant Collins, March 1790:

  On the 7th, about four hundred weight of fish being brought up, it was issued agreeable to the order; and could the like quantity have been brought in daily, some saving might have been made at the store, which would have repaid the labour that was employed to obtain it. But the quantity taken during this month, after the 7th, was not often much more than equal to supplying the people employed in the boats with one pound of fish per man, which was allowed them in addition to their ration.22

  Nor was much advantage obtained by employing people to shoot for the public: at the end of the month only three small kangaroos had been brought in. The convicts who were employed in this service, three in number, were considered as good marksmen, and were allowed a ration of flour instead of their salt provisions, the better to enable them to sustain the labour and fatigue of traversing the woods of this country.

  And yet the colony still had large reserves of food – the private stores held by the governor and the officers. We have no way of knowing how much flour and other goods the officers had (it is telling that none of those who kept diaries ever complain about being hungry themselves), but we do know how much the governor had in his private store, even after more than a year. Collins, April 1790:

  The Governor, from a motive that did him immortal honour, in this season of general distress, gave up three hundred weight of flour which was his Excellency’s private property, declaring that he wished not to see anything more at his table than the ration which was received in common from the public store, without any distinction of persons; and to this resolution he rigidly adhered, wishing that if a convict complained, he might see that want was not unfelt even at Government House.23

  That ‘immortal honour’ does tend to imply that other officers, too, still had large reserves of stores.

  This period from May to June 1790 is the only time food was really short in the colony, when men risked their lives to steal it and workers like the convict shooters needed larger rations to enable them to do their jobs. But even then the food intake was adequate by modern standards.

  Starvation on 10,000 kilojoules per day

  Eight weeks is about the time most of us stick to a diet, and for those eight weeks in 1790 the rations had more kilojoules than a nutritionist might advise a dieter to eat today, especially as the rations could so easily be supplemented by oysters, wild spinach, vegetables and whatever fish and fruits had been harvested the day before.

  According to Collins:

  On the 20th of the month, the following was the ration issued from the public store to each man for seven days, or to seven people for one day: flour, 2½ pounds, rice, 2 pounds, pork, 2 pounds. The peas were all expended. Was this a ration for a labouring man? The two pounds of pork, when boiled, from the length of time it had been in store shrunk away to nothing; and when divided among seven people for their day’s sustenance, barely afforded three or four morsels to each.24

  By modern standards, this might still mean an adequate allowance of energy. A man needs about 10,000 kilojoules per day to maintain his weight. That two and a half pounds of flour had about 20,000 kilojoules, about 10,000 kilojoules in the pork and 12,000 in the rice, a total of 42,000 kilojoules weekly, or 6000 a day. Those rations were supplemented with fish, vegetables, including energy-rich potatoes and maize, and as many shellfish as they wanted to gather. One oyster is 250 kilojoules, and it’s hard to stop at on
e. Sixteen oysters a day, which would take five minutes to harvest from the rocks, would give an extra 4000 kilojoules.

  But were they eating their vegetables, oysters, winkles and mussels?

  There was plenty of food for the hungry – if they chose to supplement their diet with what was around them. Those too depressed or traumatised to seek out food or grow it would indeed have been hungry in those eight weeks. But they certainly would not have starved, nor is there evidence they did.

  Instead there is the evidence of what didn’t happen. There are no records of scurvy. If the population of Sydney Cove had been eating only the official rations they would have had a major deficiency in vitamin C. The absence of scurvy means that they were, indeed, eating the produce of the land.

  What those two months were filled with was genuine terror at the idea of starvation. It was a displacement activity: you focus on one fear rather than admit to the other, deeper ones. Medical supplies were almost gone, tools broken, blankets few, clothes in tatters, the marines barefoot, their huts made of cabbage tree beginning to slump and rot were grim. But they must have wondered if they had been forgotten, if a small colony could survive with no ships, isolated from the world.

  In a letter back home the Reverend Johnstone spoke in bitter desolation. ‘Tis now about two years and three months since we first arrived at this distant country. All this while we have been, as it were, buried alive.’25

  The colony was also facing winter. Our winter garden, in a climate colder than Sydney’s, produces more than enough food to sustain a family all through the cool weather. But the colonists would not yet have grown used to the security of winter vegetables. Winter is not a growing season in northern Europe. They expected the supply of fish to decrease again, and the hens may have stopped laying. (Today’s hens are bred to lay year round; the colony’s birds would have been more seasonal layers programmed to lay a large number in spring, but few or none in the colder, darker days of June and July.)

  Sydney Cove was a village of mud and tatters, on the edge of a mostly unknown continent. From Cook’s first landing, the British had established their foothold with firearms. But that required gunpowder and it too was in short supply, nor does it keep forever, especially if not kept in dry conditions. While poachers in England knew how to catch animals without firearms, there is no reference to the colonists laying snares or digging traps at that stage, until colonial boys were taught by their young Indigenous companions how to trap bandicoots in the tussocks. Instead the colony seems to have relied on the gentleman’s method of shooting game, which needed gunpowder. They did not have enough domestic stock yet to provide meat, nor the skills to hunt it once the gunpowder was gone. The colony lacked four great staples of 1790s European life: wheat bread, salted meat, a safe store of food to see them through winter, and the feeling of being part of the world of men.

  Tench gave the most vivid description of the despairing colony:

  Our impatience of news from Europe strongly marked the commencement of the year. We had now been two years in the country, and thirty-two months from England, in which long period no supplies, except what had been procured at the Cape of Good Hope by the ‘Sirius’, had reached us. From intelligence of our friends and connections we had been entirely cut off, no communication whatever having passed with our native country since the 13th of May 1787, the day of our departure from Portsmouth. Famine besides was approaching with gigantic strides, and gloom and dejection overspread every countenance. Men abandoned themselves to the most desponding reflections, and adopted the most extravagant conjectures.26

  ‘Famine besides was approaching’: it was not already there. The colony had children – from later accounts, often with little or no care from their parents, left to wander and even sleep in the streets. It would have been easy to steal a child’s ration, yet there is no account of malnourished children.

  Nor do starved women easily become pregnant, then carry their children to term and have them survive. About forty-six babies and children arrived in 1788. There were 161 women of child-bearing age in the colony who gave birth to eighty-three babies, when prolonged breast feeding was a reasonably effective contraceptive – a woman feeding her child rarely got pregnant until the child was eating a large amount of solid food instead of mostly breastmilk. Twenty-five babies or children had died – a large number for today, but not when about 50 per cent of babies born in London didn’t survive, especially given the hardship the mothers and babies had experienced in their long voyage from England. The lack of contagious childhood disease may have helped this high survival rate (for the time). But equally, the high birth rate and child survival rate indicates that they were reasonably well fed.

  Nor are there accounts of deaths from starvation, pellagra or scurvy during this time. Only one man died from lack of food: he’d had his pannikin stolen and was forced to give up most of his rations to barter the use of others’ cooking gear. (Potatoes, maize, warrigal greens and other available foods needed to be cooked. The only easily available kilojoule-dense food he might have eaten raw was oysters, and he’d have needed carbohydrates to survive on.) In fact the colony was, at last, seriously trying to become self-sufficient, boiling its own salt, and spinning fishing line in a way taught to them by the Dharug people.

  Collins’s words tell of a food-fixated colony. But they also imply that the colony was indeed producing a lot of food:

  The Governor’s garden had been the object of frequent depredation; scarcely a night passed that it was not robbed, notwithstanding that many received vegetables from it by his Excellency’s order. Two convicts had been taken up, who confessed that within the space of a month they had robbed it seven or eight times, and that they had killed a hog belonging to an officer.27

  It is a good garden that can keep producing enough for thieves to raid it many times.

  Ignorance among plenty

  One of the most striking aspects of the colony’s extreme uncertainty about the source of their food is that although the governor and some officers like Tench, Dawes and Surgeon White had questioned Arabanoo and the colony’s next prisoner/ambassador, Bennelong, about language and terrain, they don’t seem to have asked them, ‘What can we eat and how can we find it?’ The two adopted children, Nanberry and Baroong, could also have been questioned about indigenous foods. And perhaps the colonists did ask questions but got no answers apart from the names of certain foods the colonists had already found were edible. We only know what the men put in their diaries, books and letters, and a lack of information might not have seemed worth putting down. Or perhaps they just didn’t like the answers. The colonists would have been used to English orchard trees and bushes that gave their harvest over a few weeks. Many of the native fruits of the area have a longer season, but without that ‘all at once’ abundance. Other foodstuffs, like murrnong roots and native grains may just have seemed not worth the gathering. To those used to harvesting fields of wheat once a year and reaping enough to last until the next harvest, the Indigenous way of harvesting food as needed and storing little was so unfamiliar that the abundance of the land around them was unrecognisable.

  Both Arabanoo and Bennelong may have refused to answer questions about native fruits and vegetables. Arabanoo was a respected elder and, while gentle and tolerant, did expect the colonists to allow him the dignity of his position. Bennelong was a Wangal warrior, with possibly less respect in his community than Arabanoo and all the more insistence on being accorded respect. Warriors did not gather berries, dig for roots except for medicine or ceremonies, or at that stage fish with nets in the harbour. (Although Indigenous men would soon take to fishing with nets once they discovered the colonists’ eagerness for fish, and their relatively poor fishing skills.)

  Possibly, even probably, Bennelong and Arabanoo would have laughed or refused to show they understood when asked about finding vegetable foods. Men fished with spears – women and children did everything else.

  It seemed that the only per
son in the colony who had bothered to ask Indigenous women about food was surveyor and engineer William Dawes. Fifteen-year-old Dharug girl Patyegarang shared Dawes’s hut and taught him her language. It’s likely that as well as teaching him the words for various foods she also showed him which ones to eat. But Dawes was a bit of a renegade and unpopular with almost everyone in the colony: a scientist, he was genuinely fascinated with the study of Indigenous culture, and wanted to become a colonial farmer. Dawes had already quarrelled with Phillip after buying flour from a convict: Philip said that trade in rations was illegal; Dawes maintained that the flour was ‘earned’, and so could be traded. Later in 1790, when Dharug man Pemulwuy speared one of the official ‘shooters’, John MacIntyre, in retaliation for his attacks on the Dharug people, Dawes refused to join the expedition to hunt Pemulwuy. Dawes said publicly that he thought MacIntyre was at fault. Finally the Reverend Johnstone persuaded Dawes to join the (unsuccessful) manhunt. But when they returned Dawes expressed his regret at taking part, nor would he apologise. Phillip would later order Dawes sent back to England in 1791, despite his great wish to stay in the colony.

  William Dawes and Patyegarang presumably ate extremely well, with a combination of English vegetables and indigenous game, fruits and other foods. But from all accounts no one asked for Patyegarang’s help in feeding the colony. One whale lured to shore would have fed them for weeks, but then, gentlemen did not eat whale meat. (It would take a major propaganda campaign – and hunger – in World War 2 to get the British public to eat whale.) Nor did officers live so openly with ‘natives’ when there were white women available. (Patyegarang’s age might bother us now, but by the standards of both her culture and Dawes’s, she was an adult.)

  * * *

  A man of compassion

  After unwillingly leaving New South Wales, William Dawes became governor of a colony at Sierra Leone, not altogether successfully. A strong and active opponent of the slave trade, his last years were spent founding schools for slave children in Antigua and as correspondent for the Missionary Society. He died in relative poverty in Antigua in 1836, but with great apparent fulfilment, leaving behind his second wife, Grace, his clergyman son and his daughter. His fascinating study of indigenous foods and language, however, would be mostly ignored for nearly two centuries.