A Commonwealth of Thieves

by Thomas Keneally

  The upshot was, as Phillip admitted to Nepean, that he had no record of the time for which convicts were sentenced, or the dates of their convictions. “Some of them, by their own account, have little more than a year to remain,” he wrote, “and, I'm told, will apply for permission to return to England, or to go to India, in such ships as may be willing to receive them.” But if they decided to remain on the basis of land being granted them, the government would need to support them for at least two years, and it was probable that one half of them would need support even after that period. “If, when the time for which they are sentenced expires, the most abandoned and useless were permitted to go to China, in any ship that may stop here, it would be a great advantage to the settlement.” But that was as close to daydream as Phillip could permit himself to come, for the most abandoned and useless were unlikely to get employment on a visiting vessel.

  As the last transports vanished, the sense of isolation which would bedevil New South Wales became entrenched. In many cases it was doubtless expressed by those women ashore who had borne children and who saw their fathers, aloft in rigging, waving futilely (or with some cynical relief) as the transports receded down-harbour for the Heads. Captain Tench was sensitive to the feelings occasioned by the departure, the “anxiety to communicate to our friends an account of our situation,” which only the departing ships could relieve with the letters and reports they carried. Similarly, he wrote understatedly, “It was impossible to behold without emotion the departure of the ships.” But the naval vessels Supply and Sirius, which were on station at Port Jackson, remained..

  The convicts' experience of the world of authority, of the prisons and the hulks, made the idea they would be abandoned in their little huts on this abominably distant foreshore not unlikely to their minds. They did not know, and neither did Arthur Phillip, that one of the factors guaranteeing their future was that the criminal arts had not been diminished in Britain by their removal, that the gaols and hulks were newly, densely crowded. The government, which had thought of Phillip's fleet as perhaps the final answer to overcrowding, now knew it was but a partial relief. The inhabitants of New South Wales—or as the British press still referred to it, Botany Bay—did not know that their strange new domicile would figure more permanently in the plans of the Home Office.

  On the three convict transports going home, but not by China—Alexander, Friendship, and Prince of Wales—the crews suffered from the symptoms of scurvy and diarrhoea, especially of the kind called bloody flux. Surgeons like White had been assiduous in preaching their gospel of fruit and vegetables, but often the sailors, and even the convicts they had left behind in Sydney Cove, preferred their rough, salted food to any form of fruit, which after years of salt overload they found too acidic for their taste. And in any case, Sydney, unlike Rio, did not abound in obviously succulent native fruit. Scurvy sapped the strength of the crew of the Alexander and the Friendship to such an extent on their journey back to England that the Friendship had to be scuttled in the Straits of Macassar on 28 October, and her survivors transferred to the Alexander. It would be 28 May 1789 before the Alexander arrived off the Isle of Wight. The Prince of Wales had gone home by way of Cape Horn and reached Rio with its crew in great distress, but got home at Deptford a little earlier than Alexander on 30 April 1789.

  These journeys undermined the assumption that scurvy could somehow be held at bay when it came to a long journey out to New South Wales, a sojourn in Sydney, and a return.

  THE EARTH SEEMED TO PHILLIP resistant to kindly gestures. The first crop that year came from the mere ten to fifteen acres of wheat the convict supervisors had been able to persuade their fellows to plant in Phillip's government farm, and some further acres of corn. Much of the planting had failed to germinate and the crop promised to produce only enough for seed. Phillip calmly attributed the disaster to the seeds' having been overheated on the long journey from England and having been planted under a severe Australian summer sun.

  Aware of coming famine after the crop's poor showing, Phillip approached his friend John Hunter and told him he had decided to send Hunter's cranky converted frigate, Sirius, to Cape Town “in order to procure grain and at the same time what quantity of flour and provisions she can receive.” He wanted Hunter to leave behind his guns, powder, shot, and other impedimenta to enable the Sirius to make as much speed and have as much deck space for supplies as possible.

  At the time, Hunter was using an old convict on the task of caulking the ship. The fellow was making a bad job of it, but Hunter was unable to use his carpenter since that gentleman was ashore working non-stop for Phillip, building public and private structures. Captain Hunter was, however, a seaman since childhood, and showed all the alacrity and contempt of low grievance that was the mark of a good officer. The Sirius quickly prepared and set out on its emergency mission on 2 October. Because of the wind directions around the south of the earth below 40 degrees, Hunter intended to sail east to Cape Town by way of Cape Horn, and then return to Sydney from the west. That is, he meant to sail around the world, on a track south of 40 degrees, a most gallant undertaking. He and Phillip, at dead of night, when renal pain and discomfort woke the governor in his bed, and dreams of past Sirius near-misses woke Hunter in his, must have wondered whether Sirius would survive such a circum-global shaking of its timbers.

  The departure of Sirius left only the tiny Supply in Port Jackson, in the harbour which had recently teemed with ships. There must have been hope in the Eora clans that now the great ships had gone, the interlopers might wither. Many of them already showed harrowed faces to the blank bush of the hinter land or the dazzle of Port Jackson. Every year in New South Wales, Collins would later tell his father, a man aged two years. The disintegration of these intrusive white souls might sometimes have seemed almost certain to some native observers, as well as to Phillip and Ross.

  But as the Antipodean spring came on, Phillip had plans to spread his hold on the earth, and prepared to send part of the garrison and a number of male and female convicts up the Parramatta River, to the extension of Port Jackson which he had explored the previous spring, to begin a new settlement at Rose Hill, or what would be called, in ordinary daily usage, Parramatta. He was pleased to appoint Major Ross the commandant of this inland settlement fifteen miles from Sydney Cove, and he seems also to have recognised that this major of marines would be competent when less irritated by the presence of a governor who did not treat him like a peer. Secretly, Phillip had decided that Rose Hill would be the place of his principal city, because it was surrounded by good farming land and “was beyond the reach of enemy naval bombardment,” a reference to a grievance Ross had held against him during the previous months in Sydney and had complained to the Home Secretary about—that the marines had no point, or stronghold, where they could muster and resist civil unrest or enemy attack.

  Ross and a garrison of twenty marines occupied the open ground by the banks of the Parramatta below Rose Hill, and Governor Phillip and the Surveyor General, Augustus Alt, accompanied by further marines and convicts, travelled to Rose Hill and marked out the town. Alt was a mature soldier with an expertise in surveying, more aged than Phillip, but like him a man raised in a German household. Phillip and Alt were able to converse in German as they worked at this pleasant task of city-making on the banks of the Parramatta. There, Phillip hoped, harvests might rise to feed his felons and his soldiers.

  MUTUAL SMALL CONFLICTS BETWEEN the Eora and the settlers continued. On Thursday 21 August, two canoes landed Eora people on the west side of the cove. Some of them distracted an officer with talk while others speared a goat. Grabbing the dead goat, the party decamped. They were pursued in a boat but the chase was given up. In Lieutenant Bradley's terms, “It was too late, either to recover the goat or discover the thief.” There is no doubting Bradley's sincerity in defining the incident as the work of a thief.

  As Bradley and the other gentlemen of New South Wales well knew, the Enclosure Acts in Brita
in had established a system in which the ordinary peasant's access to game on common ground, even to a rabbit for his pot, had vanished. The landlords of large estates were endowed with fishing and game rights which once were more commonly held. Many poachers would be sent to Botany Bay for entering enclosed land and taking, or trying to take, game or fish. Yet when birds and animals were shot in the woods about Sydney Cove, often to the great excitement of White and Tench, the enthusiastic naturalists, or fish taken from the harbour, it was done without any enquiry as to pre-existing rights, and the natives' stealing of a goat seemed as culpable an act to Bradley as the stealing of game under the Enclosure Acts.

  Some commentators wish to attribute this failure of perception to malice, but it seems more a failure of cultural imagination. Many of the officers, including Phillip, were the sort of men who fancied themselves as well informed on the matter of savages as it was possible to be, and genuinely desired to behave with good will. Phillip recently had written to Nepean a letter (which had gone off with the returning transports) asking for government aid to supply clothing for the natives, which he believed they would accept gratefully. The failure to see any native claim on land and water and animals was a sad lapse of empathy which would blight the settlement's present and future, and produce victims on both sides of the divide, many more—in the end—on the side of the Eora.

  Nevertheless, Phillip was determined to end “this state of petty warfare and endless uncertainty” between the races. He intended to kidnap one or more natives and retain them as hostages–cum–language teachers– cum–diplomats in Sydney Cove. He knew and seems to have accepted this would bring things to a head, either by inflaming the natives to vengeance or, preferably, by creating a dialogue. Arthur Phillip explained the reasons for such an abduction to Lord Sydney: “It was absolutely necessary that we should attain their language, or teach them ours, that the means of redress might be pointed out to them, if they are injured, and to reconcile them by showing the many advantages they would enjoy by mixing with us.”

  On 30 December, Phillip sent two boats down the harbour under the command of Lieutenant Ball of the Supply and Lieutenant George Johnston of the marines with orders to seize some of the natives. At Manly Cove “several Indians” were seen standing on the beach, “who were enticed by courteous behaviour and a few presents to enter into conversation.” Two men who waded out to the boats were seized in the shallows, and the rest fled, but the yells of the two who had been taken quickly brought them back with many others, some of whom were armed with their long spears. One of the captured natives dragged the sailor who had hold of him into deeper water so the sailor had to let him go, and the native got away. The other captive, a slighter young native, was tumbled into one of the boats.

  There was an immediate counterattack on the boats—the natives “threw spears, stones, firebrands, and whatever else presented itself, at the boats, nor did they retreat, agreeable to their former custom, until many muskets were fired over them.” The male native they had fastened by ropes to the thwarts of the boat “set up the most piercing and lamentable cries of distress.” He seemed to believe that he would be immediately murdered.

  His arrival at Sydney Cove was a sensation, women and children and off-duty marines milling about him. Most people in the Cove had not seen a native at close quarters for a year. Like everyone else, Tench rushed down from his hut to assess the hostage. He appeared to be about thirty years old, not tall but robustly made, “and of a countenance which, under happier circumstances, I thought would display manliness and sensibility.” He was very agitated and the crowds who pressed round him did not calm him. Every attempt was made to reassure him as he was escorted to the governor's brick house, now finished adequately enough for Arthur Phillip to live there. Someone touched the small bell which hung over the vice-regal door and the man started with horror. In a soft, musical voice, the native wondered at all he saw, not least at people hanging out the first-floor window, which he attributed to some men walking on others' shoulders. That lunchtime, calmer now, intensely observed by Arthur Phillip and fed by Mrs. Deborah Brooks, wife of Sirius's bosun, he dined at a side table at the governor's, “and ate heartily of fish and ducks, which he first cooled.” He drank nothing but water, and on being shown that he should not wipe his hands on the chair he sat on, he used a towel “with great cleanliness and decency.” It was observed that his front incisor tooth was missing, and it was later learned by the governor that it had been removed at initiation.

  Phillip watched the Aborigine with less flippancy than the crowd who had accompanied him to the governor's house. As part of the potential peace-making between Phillip and the young man, his hair was close cut and combed and his beard shaved—though he did not submit to any of this until he saw the same work done on a sailor or convict. He seemed to be delighted with his shorn hair, full of vermin as it was, which he proceeded to eat, and only the “disgusted abhorrence of the Europeans made him leave off.” He was now immersed in a tub of water and soap and Watkin Tench had the honour to perform part of the scrub.

  Despite the young man's accommodating nature, he resisted telling people his name, and the governor therefore called him Manly, after the cove he came from. He seemed to belong to the Manly people named the Gayimai, but like all Eora speakers was known by other clans and shared various reciprocal hunting, fishing, and ceremonial rights with them. To prevent his escape, a handcuff with a rope attached to it was fastened round his left wrist, and at first it seemed to delight him, since he called it ben-gad-ee (ornament). In the Government House yard, he cooked his supper of fish himself that night, throwing it undressed onto the fire, then rubbing off the scales after cooking, peeling the outside with his teeth, and eating it, and only later gutting it and laying the entrails on the fire to cook. An unnamed convict was selected to sleep in the same hut with him and to be his companion, or as Tench inevitably wrote, “his keeper.”

  The next morning, as a cure for his depression, he was led across the stream and past the parade ground through the men's and women's camps to the observatory and introduced to Dawes, the young astronomer, who like Collins had a scholarly interest in the natives and would soon start putting together a dictionary of Eora now that contact had been reinitiated. The purpose of this excursion was to amuse and instruct the native, not to parade him for mockery. But the camp housed men and women to whom all of life was a mock, and so there must have been hoots and catcalls.

  The native could see across the water to the north side, where on a sandstone cliff-face a great rock-pecking depiction of a sperm whale had been made by people ritually and tribally connected to him. Spotting also the smoke of a fire lit by his fellows in the northern distance, “he looked earnestly at it, and sighing deeply two or three times, uttered the word Gw-eè-un [fire].” Although depressed and despairing, he consumed eight fish for breakfast, each weighing about a pound. Then he turned his back to the fire and thought hard, but lying so close that at last the fabric of the shirt he had been given caught flame, and he had to be saved.

  This young man of subtle and soulful features fascinated Phillip. On New Year's Day, Manly, as he was still called, dined heartily on fish and roast pork while sitting on a chest near a window, out of which, when he was finished eating, “he would have thrown his plate, had he not been prevented.” A band was playing in the next room, and after the cloth was removed one of the company sang in a soft and superior style. Stretching out on his chest, and putting his hat over his head, the native hostage fell asleep.

  Phillip ordered now that he be taken back to Manly Cove for a visit, so that his people could see he had not been hurt. A longboat carrying armed marines conveyed him close to shore so that he could speak to natives on the beach, or those who edgily waded close. He chatted to his people with a good humour which even survived the return to Sydney. Some of his kinsmen urged him to escape, but he pointed to an iron fetter on his leg. He told them he was kept at Warrane, Sydney Cove.

&n
bsp; He was taken back to Manly again two days later, but no natives came near the beach this time, so that he and his keeper were let ashore to enable him to place a present of three birds, shot on the way down-harbour by members of the boat crew, into a bark basket left on the beach. He returned to the longboat without having heard a word of acceptance or rejection. Either his clan considered him vitiated by his contact with the Europeans, or else they were frightened that he was placed on the shore as a bait to attract them, and that they would end up in his position.

  Perhaps he realised he would never be an intimate of his people again, and he released his real name, or at least one of his names, to his captors. It was Arabanoo. The fleet's children, still impressed by his novelty, would flock around him, and he treated them with great sensitivity— “if he was eating, [he] offered them the choicest morsels.” He does not seem to have had a volatile disposition and to have been wistful and gentle by nature.

  Since everyone, including Phillip, was enchanted by him, his continued presence at Government House almost became its own point. The fact was he did not learn English quickly, at least not to the point where he could make Phillip any wiser on the grievances of the natives.

  Though he was an honoured courtier and ambassador during the day, every night Arabanoo was locked in with his convict. As he became aware that his rations would be regularly supplied, he ate less voraciously than he had on his first return from Manly, when he had eaten a supper of two kangaroo rats, “each the size of a moderate rabbit, and in addition not less than three pounds of fish.”