by Jan Morris
Some of these creatures sound alarming. Watch out for the Tiger Snake, which has enough toxin in it to kill 6,000 mice.1 Beware the nephila spider, whose web can be strong enough to snare a small bird, or worse still the Sydney funnel-web spider, which lives only in these parts, and is one of the most venomous arachnids on earth. An awful fish, the goblinfish, swims the Sydney waters, carrying poison in its spines. And the terrible star of all Sydney creatures is undoubtedly the shark, which is surrounded by legend, fear and wry humour. Frequently pieces of human limbs have been discovered in the bellies of sharks, or regurgitated from them, and more than one murder case has been linked to a shark’s digestion. A Maginot Line of permanent nets, stretched across twenty-three beaches, protects Sydney from this monster, but still the most persuasive of Sydney injunctions is the one in many languages, accompanied by a grisly picture, warning people that there may be sharks about.
For the most part, though, it is a kindly enough strangeness that informs the Sydney setting. Very few people are really vomited by sharks. You are extremely unlikely to be stung by the goblinfish, or to feel in yourself the twitching of muscles, the profuse flow of sweat, tears and saliva that shows the funnel-web has got you. Sydney Harbour’s allegory is just: it really is a haven, for people as for ships.
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We are told that natives of Australia have been living in the region of the harbour for 20,000 years, but no literate person is known to have set eyes on the Sydney Heads, the sea-entrance, until 1770. In that year Lieutenant James Cook, Royal Navy, accompanied by the scientist Joseph Banks and Daniel Solander the Swedish botanist, brought HMS Endeavour to this coast, made the acquaintance of its native tribespeople, and called it New South Wales.1 He spent a week ashore at a large inlet some ten miles south of Sydney Harbour, and that he called Botany Bay.2 When he sailed on to the north he passed the Heads and, noting that there appeared to be a safe anchorage within, named it Port Jackson.3 However he was doubtless in a hurry to get home after many months at sea, and did not enter the haven.
It was accordingly Botany Bay, rather than Sydney Harbour, that the British Government had in mind when, seventeen years later, it dispatched a fleet to colonize New South Wales in the name of the Crown. No European had been there in the meantime, and Cook was dead by then; but it had been decided that this arcane far corner of the world would be a suitable site for a penal settlement. The American colonies having lately been lost, the West African colonies being generally more lethal than even villains deserved, a new dumping-ground was needed for Britain’s felons. The prison hulks of the Thames and Medway were hideously over-crowded, and there were thousands of miscellaneously convicted criminals, rebels, layabouts and ne’er-dowells that the British Establishment wished only to be rid of. Botany Bay was far away, relatively temperate and might one day prove strategically or commercially useful; that it was already occupied by its native people was no handicap, in the political morality of the time; for a start 775 luckless misfits, 582 males, 193 females, average age twenty-seven, were packed into six chartered transports and sent to the Antipodes.1
Many of them were habitual offenders, though their crimes were mostly trivial. Their sentences were for seven years, fourteen years, or life, but good behaviour might earn them tickets-of-leave before the expiry of their sentences, giving them limited freedom within the settlement, and the right to a grant of land. They might indeed be pardoned altogether at Government’s discretion, but for the vast majority transportation to Botany Bay meant perpetual exile – very few would ever accumulate enough cash to buy a passage home. The convicts were accompanied by a couple of hundred marines, with twenty-seven wives and twenty-five children, and by miscellaneous livestock.2 With the transports sailed two small warships and three ships carrying supplies.3 The route took the First Fleet of Australian history via Rio de Janeiro and the Cape of Good Hope – 13,950 miles in all – and never before had so many people travelled so far together.
For most of the convicts, never having heard of Captain Cook, let alone read his reports (for they were almost all illiterate), it must have been like sailing to the moon. It is hard to imagine a more violent contrast, between departure-point and destination. In England Jane Austen was at work, the Marylebone Cricket Club had lately codified the rules of cricket and the House of Commons was considering a motion for the abolition of slavery. In New South Wales the cicadas chafed, the parrots squawked and Aborigines speaking unknown tongues hunted inconceivable marsupials. Cowering in their creaking ships, often in chains, the prisoners of the First Fleet went all unknowing from one to the other.
Thus it was that on 21 January 1788 the first Europeans passed through the Sydney Heads. The First Fleet’s commander, Captain Arthur Phillip, RN, was also to be Governor of the colony, and he had very soon decided that Botany Bay was not after all the right place for a settlement, being wan of vegetation and short of fresh water. Instead he took a party of three boats northwards along the coast to investigate Port Jackson, and spent two days exploring its waters.
We have a contemporary description of him in a boat – ‘his face shrivelled, and his aquiline nose under a large cocked hat, gathered up in a heap, his chin between his knees’ – and so perhaps we may imagine him as his boat-crews of sailors and Marines rowed up the harbour towards a historic landfall. I suppose that after all those months at sea any coast looked pleasant, and Port Jackson was certainly more welcoming than Botany Bay. Even so, with its low and featureless shores covered all over with dense green, its rocks, as somebody said at the time, like bones that have had the fur rubbed off them, it must have looked desolate and monotonous enough. Here and there a park-like effect gladdened the English eye – the tribespeople regularly burnt brushwood, to make hunting easier – but for the most part the bush was thick and forbidding. A few naked black people stared impassively as they passed, standing with fishing-spears on rocks, or hunched over cooking-fires in flimsy bark canoes. There were flashes of strange birds, no doubt, and perhaps glimpses of grey wallabies. Otherwise, only the rocks, the water and the changeless bush: to one of my own temperament Sydney Harbour in 1788 would have offered a discouraging spectacle.1
Not, however, to the naval eye. As he was later to report, Phillip realized this to be ‘one of the finest harbours in the world, in which a thousand sail of the line might ride in perfect security’. Persevering well past Bradley’s Head, almost to the mouth of the Parramatta River at the western end of the harbour, presently the boat-crews found a place where fresh water ran into an anchorage down a gentle declivity in the bush – ‘a small snug cove on the southern side’, is how Captain Watkin Tench of the Marines described it. They called this V-shaped inlet Sydney cove, after the Home Secretary, Thomas Townshend, first Baron Sydney of Chislehurst;2 and on its banks on 26 January 1788, they ran up the Union Flag and founded a city. They intended to call it Albion, but somehow or other it became known as Sydney too.
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No great city, not even Rome which was founded by wolf’s sucklings, has had more unlikely beginnings, and the first years of Sydney were predictably tough and lonely. The merchantmen of the fleet soon sailed away, three to China to pick up tea, five to England in ballast, leaving only one storeship and the two little naval vessels. The convicts were set to work building – houses for the officers, huts for themselves – but there were few skilled craftsmen among them, and at first mud, reeds, wattles and unseasoned wood were their only materials, together with lime made from crushed mussel shells. The soil was poor. The fauna was unnerving. The natives, belonging to a tribe called the Iora, proved largely incomprehensible. A second fleet-load of convicts, arriving in 1790, discharged a horrifying complement of dead and dying, and for a time it seemed that everybody might starve – a convict was given 1,000 lashes for stealing three pounds of potatoes, and dinner guests at the Governor’s table had to bring their own victuals. The whole colony was in a state of dejection, and there were moments when even the most sanguine of Phillip’s
officers thought it might be better to give up. It was the poorest country in the world, wrote Lieutenant Ralph Clark of the Marines. Nature there was nearly worn out, wrote Major Robert Ross. There was hardly anything to see but rocks, reported the Reverend Richard Johnson, chaplain to the colony, and hardly anything to eat but rats. The first suicide soon occurred: an aged perjurer named Dorothy Handland, said to be the oldest person in the colony, hanged herself from a gum tree.
Yet Phillip himself was convinced that one day this miserable settlement might outgrow its origins to become a free British nation on the other side of the earth. Bolstered by this conviction he held things together until he went home in 1792, and by the turn of the century the worst was over. The place was still generally known in England as Botany Bay, as the penal colony always would be, but in fact the city of Sydney had taken root. It was no longer the only Australian settlement – it had founded its own subsidiary penal colony on Norfolk Island, a thousand miles out in the Pacific. Nor was it now utterly isolated in the world at large, because trading ships had begun to find their way there in the wake of the transports. A third convict fleet from England had raised the population to rather more than 7,000, including some 500 free citizens, and around the cove a proper town had arisen, built by now largely of brick and the local reddish-brown sandstone. The rivulet that had first attracted Phillip to the site had been channelled into small reservoirs and named the Tank Stream, and a stone bridge had been built across it; this formed a rough boundary between more disreputable quarters on the west side of the cove, more respectable on the east – a social demarcation which was to linger for a century and more.
A bumpy sandstone outcrop formed the western arm of the cove. Along its edge ran a track called Sergeant-Major’s Row, and in lines above stood the huts the prisoners had built for themselves, single-room houses put together of mud, wood and thatch in the old English way, with small gardens and lines of washing. There were a few more sizeable houses up there too, and a hospital of single-storey buildings, one of them brought out in prefabricated parts from England. Not far away were the gallows, and the stocks, and the barracks of the New South Wales Corps, which had by now replaced the Marines as a garrison and police force. On the promontory at the end stood a signal tower, a simple observatory and a gun embrasure. At night a beacon fire burnt for the guidance of ships.
On the other side of the cove, the bourgeois side, lived the Establishment. There were no quays then, ships anchoring offshore, but to the east of the Tank Stream a jetty protruded, announcing the portals of Sydney officialdom. On the slope immediately behind it the Governor occupied a two-storeyed white house with a veranda, looking over a garden to the water and picturesquely supplied with tame wallabies; nearby were substantial houses for his chief officials. The Superintendent of Convicts lived there ex officio, and the Garrison Commander, and the Chaplain, and the Surveyor General, and to the east, over a low ridge, gamely struggled a Government Farm, where the first attempts had been made to grow European vegetables in an uncongenial soil.
Beside the bridge a guardhouse protected one half of the town from the other. Near it was the Government Lumber Yard, where convicts worked at saws and forges, and beyond it the settlement straggled away to the south, meandered through by mud roads. A pair of windmills crowned the higher ground behind the waterfront, together with the tower of Sydney’s only church: it was named St Phillip’s, with two Ls, in honour of the first Governor.1 On the northern side of the harbour there were a few houses, too, and from them tracks went off to the infant farming settlements already established on the Hawkesbury River, twenty miles to the north. To the west the first proper road in Australia, shaded by thick foliage, led to the ancillary village of Parramatta, where the Government had a second experimental farm, and the Governor a second Government House. By now there were about a thousand head of cattle in the settlement, together with 6,000 sheep and 4,000 pigs, and several thousand acres had been sown with wheat, corn and barley.
Pictures of the time make Sydney look quite elegant and well-ordered, with ships on the stocks at the Government shipyard on the cove, neat rows of cottages, boats scurrying here and there, the hospital spanking and Government House gracious above its gardens. Decorous natives generally appeared in these scenes, and sometimes well-dressed stockmen drove cattle down pretty lanes. However all this was largely artistic convention, and was often heightened when, far away from the discomforts of Sydney Cove, on-the-spot sketches were turned into engravings. In reality those buildings were rickety, amateurish, riddled by white ants and spongy with wet rot. Government House was horribly damp, besides being plagued by vile and unexplained smells from its foundations, while the hospital on the ridge, which looks so commendable in the pictures, was appallingly filthy and overcrowded. Sydney was a prisons, but a kind of open prison; the only gaol was a primitive lock-up, and the convicts were still left to house themselves as best they could. Their home-made cottages were generally no more than hovels, often simultaneously serving as ad hoc taverns and brothels; many of the more feckless transportees lived in caves among the rocks, in seashore crannies or even in holes in trees. The bush around was still like a sombre green cage. Convicts who ran away into it generally returned disoriented, and no European had ever crossed the Blue Mountains, only thirty miles to the west.
Besides, we must add to our mind’s picture the truly extraordinary features of everyday life in Sydney, c. 1800, which seldom show in the watercolours: tatterdemalion gangs of male convicts clanking about in irons, incorrigible female prisoners screeching ribaldry and obscenities, soldiers everywhere with high hats and enormous fixed bayonets, petty offenders sitting in the stocks, sex-starved sailors raunching around the grog-shops and Aborigines wandering stark naked or in cast-off English finery. Wallabies and chickens strayed here and there, caged cockatoos screeched, and in the public cemetery pigs and goats scavenged among the graves, the pigs sometimes interrupting themselves to eat the goats. Hundreds of ragged homeless children mooched through the streets; on the island called Pinchgut, off the cove, swung the skeletonic remains of a hanged Irishman, as a memento mori for the rest.1
The convicts formed an extremely rough and ready proletariat. Many of them had no idea where they were, and some thought that China lay just beyond the Blue Mountains. Governor John Hunter, in the 1790s, said of them that ‘a more wicked, abandoned and irreligious set of people had never been brought together in any part of the worlds’‚ and they were kept under control largely by the use of the cat-o’-nine-tails, with which a quarter of a million strokes were administered in an average year. If they remained intractable they could be sent off to still worse punishment on Norfolk Island, the end of the road. The soldiery, their guards, were hardly more reassuring than the felons. The rankers were brutal riff-raff, the officers, scoured one assumes from regiments not anxious to retain their services, soon congealed into a rapacious clique of opportunists, and grabbed a near-monopoly of the colony’s commerce. The local Aborigines were already being debased with alcohol, mockery, abuse and condescension, besides being decimated by smallpox and other diseases. There were virtually no machines, and few draft animals; almost every labour had to be done by hand, with the help of the flogger’s whip.
It is easy to conjure up the look of early Sydney. Probably no city has ever been so meticulously pictured from the day of its foundation, by naval and military officers professionally trained to sketch and map, and by variously gifted amateurs. The atmosphere, though, is quite another things, and perhaps we can never quite conceive what it was like to live in such a place, where the gentry were gaolers, where the people were prisoners, where the natives were like creatures out of another age, and where the terrible sound of the scourge was heard so often above the cries of the birds, the parade-ground shouts and the wind through the gum trees all around.1
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All changed in the Victorian century, as further British colonies were founded one by one elsewhere in Australia, and P
hillip’s dream was fulfilled. There was a slight coup d’état in 1808 – the so-called Rum Rebellion, when Governor William Bligh of Bounty fame was deposed in a military putsch. Order however was soon restored and Sydney became a thrusting enclave of capitalism in the south. A civilian establishment took over from the military. A thriving sea-trade developed. The merino sheep, imported from Spain, gave the colony a profitable commodity. A Governor of artistic leanings, Lachlan Macquarie, gave it some sense of style. Penal transportation to New South Wales was ended in 1840; by then about 83,000 convicts had been shipped in, but they were almost balanced by some 70,000 free Britons given Government-subsidized passages in the cause of imperial development. Soon both categories would be outnumbered by native-born Europeans. The illimitable bush still hemmed in the town – when his parishioners left church after evensong, the vicar of St Thomas, North Sydney, once remarked, their hurricane lamps disappeared into the empty valleys ‘like stars into infinity’ – but there was a road across the Blue Mountains now, and the town had a well-populated hinterland. No longer were these alien people fumbling their way through the strangeness of climate, fauna and flora; a generation had grown up that felt at home with the land, and knew the tricks of survival.
In 1856 Sydney became the capital of the self-governing Colony of New South Wales. Its economy was distinctly of the boom-and-bust variety, and in size and wealth it was rivalled by Melbourne to the south, but still, as the imperial century proceeded towards its apogee, and Victoria the Queen–Empress towards her Golden Jubilee, the former penal settlement matured into a proper imperial outpost, peer to Toronto and Singapore, Durban and Madras. The poor indigenes had all but disappeared; the British had made a city in their own image. In the second half of the century Sydney’s population increased by about 100,000 in every decade. By the 1880s, the centenary decade, it was approaching 400,000, and the city Government moved into a new Town Hall proper to its responsibilities, a mile or so to the south of the cove. This was almost excessively municipal, extravagantly towered and housing a terrific organ, and beside it stood a hardly less diocesan Anglican Cathedral, with three towers and much stained glass. Here was the nexus, functional and symbolical, of High Victorian Sydney.
