A Commonwealth of Thieves

by Thomas Keneally

  It does not seem to have been a dodge to save rations when that month Phillip granted Elizabeth Perry, the possibly innocent wife of James Ruse, an absolute remission of her term of imprisonment. She was already supported by the industry of her husband, who also supplied his two convict labourers independently of the public store. Capacity to be off the rations and the Ruses' continuing good conduct were the reasons assigned in the document which gave her back the rights and privileges of a free woman.

  But the governor felt the need to refine the regulations for that increasing minority of convicts whose sentences of transportation had expired. Having finished their time, “many of them seemed to have forgotten that they were still amenable to the regulations of the colony, and appeared to have shaken off, with the yoke of bondage, all restraints and dependence whatsoever.” For example, Benjamin Ingram, a man who had been sentenced for stealing a 1-shilling handkerchief in 1784 and whose sentence had now expired, was tried for breaking into the cottage of a female convict and packing up her belongings for removal. He was found guilty, sentenced to death, and was permitted to ascend the ladder under the infamous fig tree before he was informed that he had been pardoned on condition of transportation to Norfolk Island for the remainder of his life. Norfolk Island had been at the beginning a sanctuary for the less corrupted, but had grown to be, at least in part, a catchment for those who offended notably on the mainland. While waiting to go to the island, Ingram told Collins and other officials he was “frequently distressed for food.” This “depraved man” would eventually be returned to the main-land and would commit suicide while in prison charged with yet another burglary.

  The food supplies from Atlantic and Britannia, deficient as they were, could not prevent some remarkable acts of food theft. In September all hands were busy bringing in the Indian corn, and even though the seed crop was steeped in tubs of urine to keep it from being pilfered, “some of the convicts cannot refrain from stealing and eating it.” In a letter to Dundas on 2 October, Phillip wrote of the persistent need for so many articles of food and industry amongst a population which had not eaten amply for four years. They needed iron cooking pots nearly as much as they needed provisions, he said, and all the cross-cut saws, axes, and various tools of husbandry were in short supply or disrepair. Further hunger was inevitable. He went through the sort of weary figures he had been remitting to London since the start: “There remains at present in this colony, of rice and flour and bread, sufficient for 96 days at 2 pounds of flour and 5 pounds of rice per man for seven days, salt [meat] provisions sufficient for 70 days on a full ration, and of pease and dholl, sufficient for 156 days at 3 pounds per week for each man.” But the last year's crop of maize, he said, injecting a soupçon of hope, was nearly 5,000 bushels, despite the drought. “Six hundred and ninety-five bushels reserved for seed and other purposes, and not less than 1500 bushels were stolen from the grounds, notwithstanding every possible precaution.” Salt meat provisions for New South Wales, he counselled, should only be acquired from Europe—since those from other sources, such as India, were appalling.

  Phillip himself remained a victim of the rations and an earth which was only gradually being persuaded to submit to European expectations. The newly arrived son of one of his merchant friends wrote of the governor at this stage that his health “now is very bad. He fatigues himself so much he fairly knocks himself up and won't rest till he is not able to walk.”

  In October 1792, Phillip was still awaiting explicit approval from England for his return home. He was anxious to be relieved, and there had never been any idea that he, the uncondemned, would choose to remain indefinitely in this temperate, beguiling, but harsh garden. He was enlivened when on 7 October, the largest ship to enter Port Jackson up to that hour, the 914-ton Royal Admiral, arrived with a large cargo of convicts. The ship also brought one of the last detachments of the New South Wales Corps, an agricultural expert, a master miller, and a master carpenter, along with its 289 male and forty-seven female convicts. The ship, owed by a London “husband” who frequently contracted his ships to the East India Company, Thomas Larkins, was the antithesis of some of the appallingly run transports of the past few years. The Royal Admiral had embarked considerably fewer convicts than the overcrowded Pitt, whose men had died in such numbers throughout the New South Wales autumn. The naval agent for Royal Admiral was the former surgeon of the notorious but healthy Lady Juliana, Richard Alley, and the master and the ship's surgeon collaborated well with him in matters of convict health. The Royal Admiral had made a very fast passage of 130 days from Torbay,even though she had spent twenty-one of those days in Simon's Bay at the Cape. Then, south of Africa, with the roaring forties in her sails, she had made over 3,000 miles in just sixteen days. “She brought in with her a fever, which had much abated by the extreme attention paid by Captain Bond and his officers to cleanliness,” Collins recorded. The officers had also supplied the prisoners “with comforts and necessities beyond what were allowed for their use during the voyage.” The master and officers were speculators nonetheless—they had freighted out over £4,000 worth of their own goods to sell ashore.

  These days, the governor judged it necessary to send most newly arrived convicts straight up the river to Parramatta where work was to be done, since Sydney possessed “all the evils and allurements of a seaport of some standing.” Phillip felt there would be difficulties in removing prisoners from Sydney once they settled in there. Even within a penal universe, under conditions of hunger, Sydney was already taking on what it would never lose—the allure of a city of pleasures and vices.

  One arrival on Royal Admiral, this one significant only in retrospect, was Mary Haydock, thirteen when put aboard the transport, and now assigned as nursemaid to the family of Major Grose. She had been convicted of stealing a horse, but her crime seems to have been the Georgian equivalent of joy-riding. She had already been courted on Royal Admiral by a young agent of the East India Company, an Irishman, Thomas Reibey, who was making his way to India via Port Jackson. He would ultimately return and marry her, and the Reibeys would become wealthy, beginning their mercantile career as civilian associates of the emergent trading force of the New South Wales Corps.

  The newly arrived officers of the Corps were quick to sense the advantages of the place and dealt with their state of want by themselves chartering the Britannia to travel to Cape Town and Rio for supplies, including boots for the soldiers. Phillip was not easy about it, since it was an interruption to the duty the Britannia had in relation to collecting her cargo under East India Company charter. The officers also expected land grants, but Phillip feared that in giving them any, he would “increase the number of those who do not labour for the public, and lessen those who are to furnish the colony with the necessaries of life.” Phillip feared too much enterprise would make the penal community of New South Wales hard to control, and that barter would develop in spirits, for which the convicts were crazy. The shops set up in Parramatta and Sydney for the sale of private goods out of the Royal Admiral were permitted to sell porter, but they were found to be selling spirits as well, with deplorable results. “Several of the settlers, breaking out from the restraints to which they had been subject, conducted themselves with the greatest impropriety, beating their wives, destroying their stock, trampling on and injuring their crops in the ground, and destroying each other's property.” In New South Wales, all the rage of exile and want was unleashed by liquor, but the officers of the New South Wales Corps could sniff not a social crisis, but an opportunity.

  Almost as a passing distraction, the little Kitty arrived, the last ship of that year, carrying ten male and thirty female convicts and various supplies. On the Kitty too came 870 ounces of silver in dollars to pay the wages of superintendents. Fifteen Quaker families who had made a proposal to be settled in New South Wales were also to have made their passage on Kitty and other ships, but the plan to leaven the convict mass of New South Wales fell through, perhaps because it demanded that
500 acres be allotted to each of the Quaker settlers.

  SIR JOSEPH BANKS WOULD LATER say that “Governor Phillip … was so ill when he left Sydney as to feel little hope of recovery.” In dreaming of his return to England, Phillip must sometimes have imagined death coming from his exhaustion and chronic ailments, but at other, more energetic times, might have mused on the chance of military service arising from conflict with republican France. Being in such a remote place as New South Wales at such a crucial time could itself be a torment. Yet he hoped he had done enough not simply to satisfy his masters, but to validate his own honour as an officer, to recognise the demands of his culture, and to put its mark on the shore of New South Wales. Indeed, he would leave certain traditions indelibly implanted behind him—an insistence on the supremacy of law, an enlightened authoritarianism rather than republican rights, and a sense of community which the cynics would not have thought possible. Authority and equality were the two trees which Phillip planted in Sydney Cove, and perhaps too the tree of grudging cooperative endeavour, into which the convicts were forced by circumstance. He had never invoked happiness, but he had invoked cohesion and its benefits, and that tree too would grow to become a sense of commonwealth, from which, however, Bennelong and the clans he loved and hated would be excluded.

  So now, despite merely ambiguous permission from Dundas, Phillip had decided. Regardless of the rationing problems, whose end he saw in sight if the government and private farms were successful, he would sail home on the Atlantic, due to leave Sydney in December 1792. By the time Phillip packed his papers and assembled his samples, he had imposed on this version of the previously unknown earth the European template. There were 3,470 acres under grant to various time-expired criminals and others. Some 417 acres were in private cultivation, but the timber had been cleared from 100 more, and 1,012 acres were in cultivation on public land at Sydney Cove and Farm Cove, Parramatta and Toongabbie. There was a good crop of corn and a summer harvest of wheat for cutting.

  “A striking proof of what some settlers had themselves declared,” said David Collins, “on its being hinted to them that they had not always been so diligent when labouring for the whole, ‘We are now working for ourselves.’”

  As well as livestock on farms under cultivation, the stock belonging to the public was kept at Parramatta and consisted of three bulls, two bull calves, fifteen cows, three calves, five stallions, six mares, 105 sheep, and 43 hogs. The governor gave each of the married convict settlers, and each settler from the marines and from the Sirius, one ewe for breeding purposes. Though it would later be argued that Australia's ancient, leached, thin soil was not well-suited to hard-hoofed European animals, such questions did not exist for Phillip. Livestock stood for a European imperative more profound than theology. The new place should be graced by such identifiable, biblical, and fruitful beasts. But convicts now lived in brick huts because of the good clays of the Sydney basin. Gradually, but relentlessly, the strange southland was adapted to European needs and ways.

  There were a number of reasons the Sydney experiment seemed now,and despite all, in a promising condition. One was that the home government was still confronted with an epidemic of crime, and a growth of unrest and rebellious sentiment amongst Methodist radicals and Scottish and Irish seditionists. Thus New South Wales needed to be remembered and supplied. But Phillip's own stubborn certainties had a lot to do with the experiment's success-cum-survival as well. His insistence on equity in rationing must have been a new experience for many convicts used to the corrupt systems of supply in prison and hulk. His decision to elevate convicts to civic positions as superintendents, overseers, and settlers imbued in them a new sense of opportunity and potential influence. Only in New South Wales did land come to the convict who completed his time, and with it the sense of social order which accompanied ownership. Phillip had created a system of punishment and reward which, as repugnant as some of its elements might be to modern sensibilities, reliably delivered for the convict and soldier-settler.

  IN HIS LAST DAYS in Sydney, soldiers, convicts, and servants carried Phillip's baggage down from his two-storey Government House past its garden and the edge of public farmland to the government wharf on the east side of Sydney Cove. When Phillip himself came down on 11 December, dressed for departure, full of unrecorded impulses and thoughts, unsure of his future but fairly sure of the survival of New South Wales's curious society, the red-coated New South Wales Corps under Major Grose presented arms. They dipped their colours and did him honour. Grose, whom Phillip got on with, would take over the management of New South Wales until the next governor arrived. (It would turn out to be John Hunter, former captain of Sirius, Phillip's Scots friend. )

  Phillip must have hoped that, leaving a place so little understood by the world at large that it would always seem to others to be out of the known universe, he would have a chance to advance towards greater responsibility and higher glory. But in fact it was with the children of his convict, free, and military settlers, whom he was pleased to wave off, that his name would achieve its immortality. Though greater formal honours awaited him, his chief remembrance would be in this cove, in this harbour, and in the continent beyond. And even so, his abiding presence in the imagination would be more akin to that of a great totem than that of breathing flesh. He would not glisten for the children of this and other generations, he would not glow with the amiability or deeds of a Washington, a Jefferson, a Lafayette. He did not seek or achieve civic affection. He would forever be a colourless secular saint, the apostle of the deities Cook and Banks. He would be lodged not in our imaginations, but rather in our calculations of the meaning of the continent and its society forever. Yet his spirit, pragmatic and thorough, is still visible in Australia.

  Thus the New South Wales Corps, which would acquire a questionable reputation, earned or not, saluted Phillip as he passed in his clouds of gravity.

  ONE OF THE MOST INTENSE fears of the natives was, and would remain, that figures like Phillip would attract men and women out of their accustomed circuits and spirit them away from this world which for the Eora was the centre of things, the sole habitable universe. And it was happening with Bennelong and Yemmerrawanne, “two men who were much attached to his person; and who withstood at the moment of their departure the united distress of their wives, and the dismal lamentations of their friends, to accompany him to England.” They knew no map for where they were going, only that it was outer, at an unspeakable distance, and that it was a region of incomprehensible darkness. Bennelong's interest in Phillip would lead him profoundly away, and the risk that he could belong to neither world was one he bore relatively lightly on this high summer day as he sniffed the aroma of the eucalypts, tinged with smoke from western bushfires, and went aboard the Atlantic. It is likely that many of his people thought he was under an enchantment and thus vitiated forever. Some might have thought also that Abaroo's ultimate rejection of Yemmerrawanne as a suitor could have added to that handsome youth's readiness to travel with his kinsman Bennelong.

  Early the next morning the Atlantic dropped down-harbour in semidarkness, past the now familiar sandstone headlands and dun bush, and took Phillip away from New South Wales, forever. The desert interior of the continent conjured a summer south-westerly to send him out of Eora land, past the Cameraigal headlands of the north shore towards a last sight of the beach at Manly, where he had taken the chief wound of his incumbency. As he left it, the state of the colony seemed far better than at any time since the settlement was made.

  At Christmas, “Phillip gave every mess a joint of fresh pork and some pumpkin and half a pint of spirits to each man to celebrate the redeemer's natal day.” In January, off Cape Horn, “there were a great many islands of ice,” and many squalls, but rapid progress. They made Rio in February in time for Easty to express disapproval of the “grand and magnificent” Romish behaviour of candles, and statues of heads of patriarchs, and the Virgins at crossroads which people appealed to, “instead of looking
to Jesus Christ as a complete Saviour of the world.”

  They celebrated the crossing of the Equator with the normal ceremonies, Bennelong and Yemmerrawanne being alarmed to see Neptune appear over the side of the ship. Within days, “David Thompson fell overboard and drowned, Private Jackson died of a violent purging”: two men who had survived strange waters to die in more accustomed ones. Finally, Bennelong and Yemmerrawanne stepped ashore with Phillip at Falmouth towards the end of May 1793, to catch the London stagecoach. It was their turn to enter a mystery.

  epilogue

  SOME OF PHILLIP'S CONVICTS, a minority, would return to Britain, a few by escape, some on their own resources, a small number as crew members. Elizabeth Barnsley, for example, Lady Juliana's Queen of Sheba, would first be reunited with her husband when he arrived as a result of his stealing a trunk off the Wiltshire, Bath, and Bristol coach loading at Holborn. For a time the couple found themselves on Norfolk Island, and Thomas, once his time was up, travelled back to Sydney to raise money by gambling, musical performance, or trading for the cause of taking his family back to England. He succeeded, since soon after Elizabeth and their two children joined Thomas in Parramatta in 1794, the flamboyant pair disappeared from the New South Wales record, returned to Britain.

  Characteristic of many others, however, were Bloodworth the brickmaker and Sarah Bellamy. In 1790, Sarah became James Bloodworth's common-law wife, marriage being impossible because it was well known he was married in England. Bloodworth was the architect in the construction of the two-storey, six-room building which became the governor's house, and a range of other public buildings. In December 1790 Phillip pardoned four selected convicts, of whom James Bloodworth was one. But return to England was not possible until his full term expired. The next year he was appointed building superintendent of New South Wales with an excellent salary of £50 per year, and Phillip praised the “pain he had taken to teach the art of brick-making and brick-laying, and his conduct was exemplary.” With some help from Harry Brewer, he built a soldiers' barracks, a clock tower, and houses for the surveyor general and judge-advocate.