Let the Land Speak

by Jackie French

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  The Dharug could also have supplied meat, and fish. (Dharug men would soon become the colony’s major source of fish.) But at the time of greatest shortages the Dharug population had been drastically thinned by the mystery plague of April 1798, and by the survivors leaving the area. Nor did the colony have much to trade with; they badly needed more tools like axes and knives themselves. Ironically, the Dharug may have helped feed the colony with fish and game if they’d been asked, expecting nothing more than similar help in the future if they needed it, or if the colony had a surplus of things the Dharug might want, like cobs of maize.

  No one seems to have thought to ask.

  Sails on the horizon

  So throughout May 1790, the colony waited: for attack, for starvation for those who would or could only eat rations, or for a ship, whichever came first. The lookout at South Head watched for sails on the horizon – essential, as any supply ship would head to Botany Bay, where the colony was supposed to have been located. A ship from England might miss the new colony entirely, sailing away without realising that they had moved up the coast. A flagpole was erected so that the lookout could signal as soon as a sail was seen, and everyone in the colony now continually glanced towards it, waiting for the first flicker of a flag.

  Finally, on 3 June 1790 the flag flapped in the wind. Lady Juliana glided through the Heads.

  The Lady Juliana was no store ship – she carried about 220 women convicts. They had not been carefully selected as the ones on the First Fleet were. Many were too old and feeble to do much work, but others were young and healthy, and all had been fed and given regular sunlight on deck on the voyage. But she brought even more important news. The colony had not been forgotten. A supply ship, the Guardian, had been sent soon after the First Fleet, but had been wrecked on an iceberg off the Cape of Good Hope. The Lady Juliana brought some of the supplies that had been saved from the wreck.

  She also brought the news that a Second Fleet would arrive any day – she had outsailed the others. They would bring another thousand convicts. The Second Fleet also had a supply ship bringing extra food. Immediately the rations were restored to the full amount, even though there were extra mouths to feed. Once again the drum beat out for the convicts to start work every morning and afternoon.

  At last the longed-for ships arrived between 20 and 28 June 1790, the convict transports Scarborough, Neptune and Surprize, and the store ship Justinian. But these ships brought death, not life.

  The waiting officers had seen war, death and hardship, but they had never seen a sight like this. The convicts had to be carried up to the deck, most too weak to even stagger, their eyes blinded by the sunlight, their skin festering. Others died on the deck as they were brought into the sunlight or as they were rowed to shore or crawled onto land on their hands and knees, unable to rise. The stench was unbelievable.

  Two hundred and sixty-seven people had died on the way out, twenty-six per cent of the total. The convicts were so starved that many chose to remain chained to a dead and rotting companion in order to get the dead man’s food rations. On the Neptune the convicts had been deliberately starved to death – the ship’s master, Donald Traill, a sadist and possibly insane, had been paid per passenger, and the more who died meant more stores for him to sell. Convicts on the Scarborough had been given their allocated rations but been kept below decks because of an early attempted mutiny. The months of darkness left them temporarily crippled and blinded.

  Even as the ships came through the Heads more people died. Their bodies were thrown over the side, so for weeks the corpses washed up on the beaches. Of the surviving 759 convicts, 488 were ill from dysentery, scurvy and fever. The colony’s Reverend Johnstone would later write of indescribable misery, the convicts wretched, naked, dirty and covered in lice, many unable to stand or even move their hands or feet. He also wrote of the compassion and generosity of the former thieves of Sydney Town, trying to help the dying.

  Yes, there is starvation in our colonial history, but it was a result of human greed, and at sea, not on land. The contractors had stolen most of the food that the convicts should have received. As soon as the ships anchored they opened their stores to sell the stolen rations at the highest prices those in the desperate colony were able to pay. It was morally repugnant – but no legal crime had been committed, not even theft, because the supplies had been their own. Despite public outcry when the story was told in England and a public enquiry, no charges were laid (and the same contractors were given the right to supply the Third Fleet). Phillip was powerless and the goods were soon sold.

  In October the Supply finally returned from Batavia with the ship Waaksamheyd, bringing further stores. There would still be many times when the colony was forced to buy food for convict rations from overseas, and when they were short of wheat flour, mostly because of lack of storage facilities, and foods like butter or cheese. But the fear of starvation was over.

  By now, too, the ex-burglar James Ruse had shown that the colony could grow wheat. Ruse had been granted one clear acre and more bushland at Rose Hill (now Parramatta) in 1789. By 1790 he had a harvest of one and a half acres of wheat, and half an acre of maize was producing excellent crops. Ruse used as much manure as possible but also made his own compost – farm and garden waste piled up until it rotted into rich soil, as well as turning over the grass when he dug so it too rotted into the soil. He also dug well and deeply, even though he had no horse or plough, and added wood ash, high in potash. In these days of small backyards this may seem a large amount for one man to achieve, but for several years my vegetable patch was about two acres, tended by myself, without a plough. It produced not just enough food for myself and my young son but also a surplus to sell. A neighbour in her late seventies cultivated a similar area, also selling the surplus.

  Ruse would soon be granted thirty acres. It’s likely that now the trauma of jail, transportation and relocation had worn off, many if not most of the convicts did in fact create Phillip’s dream: build their own small house, plant their gardens, milk their goat, and have many children. But this assumption is based only on the family records of those who have traced their ancestors back to First Fleet arrivals. It’s biased towards convicts who were successful enough to marry and have children who survived. As the descendent of three convicts (one was later pardoned when the real criminal confessed, but preferred to stay in Australia), I admit my bias here. All three went on to have prosperous and fulfilled lives, and I am grateful to the magistrates who commuted their sentences to transportation.

  The colony’s real hunger had lasted, at most, eight weeks. It had resulted in no cases of starvation, or even malnutrition, pellagra or scurvy (and Surgeon White was experienced enough to diagnose any of these).28 It was the threat of starvation that was most terrifying, born of a real fear of abandonment and having to live forever on what the land could produce, instead of the safe, familiar supplies from England.

  This is not to say that the next few years were easy. Even if the colony did not starve, its early years were nightmarish, the living conditions squalid, the rations foul. Nearly five hundred people died in the winter of 1792 – not from starvation at the colony but because of the hell ships of the Second Fleet. Bodies were buried in haste, and so shallowly that dingos and goannas dug up the corpses. The colony stank of death.

  In May 1792 the weekly rations had to be reduced once more: a pound and a half of flour, two pounds of maize and four pounds of pork per person per week, with women and children receiving less. But by now the colony’s gardens were providing well. The officers of the New South Wales Corps had also seen how the Second and Third Fleet captains had made a fortune selling stores. They formed a syndicate to hire a ship to bring stores for their own use and for sale. This too would ensure that the colony was well fed; it was also the basis for the vast fortunes many of the New South Wales Corps would make, both by granting themselves a monopoly to sell food and alcohol, as well as illegally granting the
mselves – and their descendants – vast areas of land.

  From now on supply ships arrived more regularly. Despite periods of flood and drought, the colony’s fertility stunned the new settlers. The colony was becoming a land of small farms and rich acres. At Rose Hill/Parramatta each house along the village’s only street had its own luxuriant vegetable garden, enough to feed a household. The huts and tents of Sydney Town became a town: small, neat houses with good gardens in some areas, with flourishing crops of maize, beans, peas, cabbages, lettuces, melons, turnips and green vegetables, just as Phillip had dreamed, with slums, prostitutes, shanty pubs and half-naked children begging in the street down by ‘The Rocks’ at the harbour. The Dharug men turned fishermen and sold their catch to the colony; presumably the colonial fishermen eventually got the bright idea to follow the Dharug and find where the fish were biting. Until the late twentieth century, anyone casting a line into Sydney Harbour from rocks, beach or ferry wharf could expect to catch dinner.

  The first free settlers arrived on the Bellona in January 1793. They didn’t have to pay for the voyage – all free settlers were allowed free passage till 1818, and given complimentary land, tools, convict labour and provisions for them and their convicts for a year. These voluntary settlers joined the growing number of convicts who had served their sentences and been given twenty-five-acre (ten-hectare) farms.

  From now on the colony’s main food problem would be the sudden irregular arrival of more convicts to feed (often weak and starving from the harsh treatment on board ship and needing rations from the government stores) combined with Hawkesbury floods and the lack of silos to store the crops.

  By 1820 Sydney was a town of plentiful, cheap food with Saturday markets where people could buy everything from eggs to artichokes. In New South Wales, the poor did not have to live on gruel and hot potatoes as they did in London, and even the poorest person could afford to eat meat and butter every day. Fruits like oranges, lemons, guavas, pineapples, peaches, apricots and grapes that only the rich ate in Britain were so plentiful they could be fed to pigs and hens. Chooks and milk goats roamed the streets and had to be fenced out of gardens and orchards. Butter was expensive (more colonists had goats than cows, and goat’s milk isn’t suitable to make into butter as the cream doesn’t separate) as was cheese, though the cheese from Bathurst was said to be especially good. Eggs were expensive to buy, but most households had their own hens. Sugarcane was grown around Port Macquarie, as well as imported from Mauritius and Java. Visiting the Sydney fruit and vegetable markets around Christmas 1820, you would find oranges, lemons, citrons, grapes, peaches, nectarines, apricots, rhubarb, figs, olives, loquats, granadillas, early apples, plums, cherries, mulberries, raspberries, strawberries, pomegranates, rockmelons, watermelons, preserved peaches, quinces, pears, peach cider, potatoes, cabbages, broccoli, asparagus, lettuces, onions and beans. (In Sydney, Christmas is too early for corn and pumpkins, two of the main foods in the colony.) In 1820 – as it had been for tens of thousands of years – Sydney Cove was a land of plenty.

  The seductive starvation myth

  So how has the myth of the starving colony taken such a firm grip on our history?

  Partly, I suspect, it’s because starving convicts make good drama, whether in novels, plays or TV shows. Fiction is accessible to more people than the primary sources that actually describe conditions at the time. It’s joined other myths that make our nation’s past more romantic: innocent men and women convicted for nothing more than stealing a loaf of bread to feed their children; convicts shipped across the world just to get rid of them; a disastrously planned First Fleet that landed without enough food or tools. Once myths have taken root, they are hard to dislodge.

  The myth of the starving colony was also deliberately begun by Major Ross in his first letters back to England. But those were sent at the end of 1788, when the colony still had sufficient stores for two years, plenty of fish and game, and the diarists were writing optimistic accounts of their gardens. Major Ross was a troublemaker, resentful and obdurate. Whether he deliberately lied or not, his account can’t be relied upon.

  There are also the firsthand accounts of the time of real shortages, written by other officers like Watkin Tench. These speak of the fear of starvation in that short period in 1790, not of starvation itself. Tench describes the parade ground looking ‘as if’ the numbers had been thinned by starvation and the almost paranoid diligence with which the stores were guarded. But no marine did starve. This describes the colony’s state of mind, not the state of their stomachs or health. The colony’s terror that they might starve has been interpreted as actual starvation.

  This is illustrated by one of surgeon John White’s letters to a friend that was published in England. In it he describes how ‘Hope is no more … all the grain of every kind which we have been able to raise in two years and three months would not support us two weeks … the people … who have not had one ounce of fresh animal food since first in the country.’

  Surgeon White was a man of deep integrity. But ‘not one ounce of fresh animal food’, when he had described eating so many of the native species? (White would not have counted fish, eels, mussels and oysters as animal food.) His letter grossly exaggerates the grain supply – the wheat had failed, but there was plenty of maize and potatoes. But when he said ‘hope is no more’ he was probably despairingly accurate.

  There is also another aspect to the picture painted by those early writers. The diaries and letters that survive from those years are primarily written by the marines. The reduction in rations affected them deeply, but not because they went hungry.

  During the voyage and until the stores were severely depleted, the marines received as much as two-thirds more food than the convicts. Part of the marines’ wages until the Crimean War, more than half a century in the future, were a daily allowance of bread, meat and alcohol. The amounts were set out as a condition of service and were more than one man would be expected to eat. They could be used to feed dependents or sold for profit. Each marine was responsible for cooking – or selling – his own rations.

  When Governor Phillip insisted that all in the colony receive the same rations, he effectively drastically cut the marines’ wages, insulting their dignity and their military tradition. While non-commissioned officers could bring their wives with them, the other officers and enlisted men might not see wives or families for many years. Nor were there decent prospects in the colony for earning more money to make up for it. War in those days was an opportunity to earn ‘prize money’ if you won, and be granted land as a reward for service or an education for your children. But the orders from England were clear: officers were not to be granted land. A convict or ex-convict got land, but not the men who felt themselves to be the convicts’ superiors.

  This edict would be ignored as soon as Governor Phillip was recalled to London, but in those first three years it caused a deep resentment. Consciously or unconsciously, these men were not unbiased witnesses.

  A more able officer than Major Ross might have negotiated higher wages for his men, in lieu of the lost rations. A more well-intentioned, less cantankerous officer would also have allowed his men to oversee the convicts, instead of most of them doing little except form their parades and wait around to defend the colony from attack.

  But the main reason the myth has persisted, or even grown more dramatic in the past fifty years, is the vastly different experience of the land then and now. It is easy for anyone standing at the edge of Sydney Harbour today to assume that without supermarkets – or supply ships – you would starve. The kangaroos, wallabies, bettongs, bandicoots and other game have gone, leaving only the possums, which have done well in suburban gardens. The sea around much of Sydney is a dead zone, with few fish or other creatures, and the rocks of the harbour are bare.

  But mostly the myth has persisted, and grown, because our society is increasingly dislocated from the growing or harvesting of the food we eat. Few people today have wandered th
e Australian bush or seaside, gathering more than enough food to survive on as they walk. Much of the bush accessible to city bushwalkers has been dramatically simplified, and its food potential reduced, due to overgrazing by European animals, stock like cattle, sheep and horses, or feral rabbit, deer and goats, as well as repeated bushfires – not the firestick farming of the Dharug, but hot, out of control flames as well as repeated ‘control burning’ with little understanding of what, or how much, needs to be burnt. The bush that most Australians see now is no longer a living larder.

  Nor are we a peasant society anymore, used to growing our own food. Many gardeners grow vegetables, but they assume they need to buy fertilisers and watering systems to do so. (You don’t.) Foods like pasta, rice and chicken are so cheap that it’s a rare gardening cook who feeds their family purely on homegrown produce. Yet it’s not only possible to do so, it was actually a common experience two hundred years ago, and there are those in Australia who still manage it.

  Tumbalong, or Darling Harbour, is indeed a place of food. But the tumult of ice-cream parlours, sushi bars and pasta palaces blinds us to the abundance there once was, when the women cooked the fish in their canoes and with every step you took the land offered you food: fresh, healthy, but also social. Plaiting fish traps with the other women in the shade of a tree while the kids gathered freshwater mussels – the laughter as well as the indigenous food has vanished from that generous land below the concrete of Darling Harbour.