4

The Starvation Years

i

PHILLIP AND HIS OFFICERS soon realized that there could be no settlement at Botany Bay.

Everything they had been told about it, even the testimony of Cook’s log, was wrong. They had expected grassland with deep black soil and well-spaced trees, where crops could be planted without clearing; an ample source of building-stone; a protected anchorage.¹

But what Captain Phillip saw from the deck as his ship rounded Point Solander and hauled into Botany Bay on Friday, January 18, 1788, was a flat heath of paperbark scrub and gray-green eucalypts, stretching featurelessly away under the grinding white light of that Australian summer. The dry buzzing monotony of the landscape did not match Cook’s account. The bay was open and unprotected, and the Pacific rollers gave it a violent, persistent swell; the water was shallow, the holding-ground poor.

Supply anchored in the north of the bay, so that she could plainly be seen by ships in the offing. Phillip and some officers, including Lieutenant Philip Gidley King, hoisted out the boats in the afternoon and went looking for water. They made tentative contact with the Aborigines, giving them beads and mirrors. These “trembling” savages, King thought, “seemed quite astonished at the figure we cut in being cloathed. I think it is very easy to conceive the ridiculous figure we must appear to these poor creatures, who were perfectly naked.”²

Over the next two days all the rest of the fleet arrived in Botany Bay. The Aborigines began to assemble in greater numbers on the rock-strewn spits and white beaches. As Sirius sailed past Point Solander, Captain John Hunter watched them flourish their spears at her and cry “Warra, warra!” These words, the first recorded ones spoken by a black to a white in Australia, meant “Go away!”

But the intruders did not go away. Issuing from the ships, they tramped about in their scarlet tunics, looking for water, entangling themselves in scrub and branches. Formal threats were exchanged. With guttural yells of warra, warra! one tribesman “threw his spear wide of us to shew how far they could do execution”; it flew forty yards and stuck quivering in the earth. Another black flung his spear straight at them. A marine answered with a blank cartridge, “when they all ran off with great precipitation.”

But before long the Aborigines were accepting presents from Phillip. They swarmed around the boats, plucking at the whites’ clothes and shouting with amazement and pleasure whenever anyone lifted his hat. The general bonhomie was such that the blacks

ran up to the man who had thrown the lance & made very significant signs of their displeasure at his conduct by pointing all their lances at him & looking at us, intimating that they only waited our orders to kill him. However, we made signs for them to desist & made the culprit a present of some beads & c^a3

Soon the Englishmen ran out of beads and ribbon, but the hesitant contacts went on through the afternoon as more tribesmen gathered on the beach. King gave two Aborigines a taste of wine, which they spat out. Names for things were exchanged. But the great enigma, for the Aborigines, was the sex of the whites. They poked at the marines’ breeches. Finally King ordered one of his men to satisfy their curiosity. The embarrassed marine fumbled at his fly, and the first white cock was flashed on an Australian beach. “They made a great shout of admiration,” King wrote,

and pointing to the shore . . . we saw a great number of Women and Girls, with infant children on their shoulders, make their appearance on the beach—all in puris naturalibus, not so much as a fig-leaf. Those natives who were around the boats made signs for us to go to them & made us understand their persons were at our service. However, I declined.⁴

Instead, he produced his handkerchief and tied it on one of the women “where Eve did the Fig Leaf; the natives then set up another very great shout.”

Thus the acquaintance of black and white on the shores of Botany Bay grew. There was no violence; the convicts were still cooped up in the transports, and the officers and seamen were under strict orders from Governor Phillip (as the commodore now officially became, on landing in New South Wales) not to molest the natives in any way. Of course, they could not be ordered to like them. “Altogether a most stupid insensible set of beings,” concluded Surgeon Arthur Bowes Smyth, after dilating on their “miserable wigwams” and fishy stink.⁵ The blacks, in turn, were consumed with curiosity about the whites. One even scalded his fingers trying to swipe a fish from a cookpot on the beach, for, being totally ignorant of pottery (let alone iron), he had never seen water boiled in a container before. Surgeon White demonstrated his pistol to a group of Aborigines, shooting a hole in a bark shield at several paces. It produced consternation, and to calm them White whistled “the air of Malbrooke, which they appeared highly charmed with, and imitated him with equal pleasure and readiness.” It was the first sign of the astounding powers of mimicry that the Australian Aborigines would show the whites in years to come.⁶

This was all very well, but it was not what the First Fleet had come for, and the colonists had a colony to make. “If we are obliged to settle here,” wrote Lieutenant Ralph Clark after five days in Botany Bay, “there will not a soul be alive in the course of a year.” In the meantime, Phillip had left with Hunter and some marines to explore Port Jackson, a few miles to the north. Its opening had been seen, named but not visited by Cook as he sailed by it in 1770. Phillip returned with the news that this place was a paradise compared to Botany Bay: a harbor with many branching arms in which ships could find shelter from any wind, with plenty of fresh water and fertile soil. He ordered the fleet to make ready for sea again.

But the next morning they were thunderstruck to see, far out on the cloudy horizon, two large and obviously European ships trying to beat in to shore against a stiff breeze. If coincidence, this was incredible; if not, menacing. Were they Dutch men-o’-war, sent to attack the fleet? In the evening the strange ships vanished in the haze, still tacking impotently against the shore wind. Phillip left for Port Jackson the next morning. Whoever the intruders were, he must beat them to the new harbor; to lose that would mean losing the whole expedition.

It was a prudent move, but he need not have worried. The ships were La Boussole and L’Astrolabe, commanded by the French explorer Jean-François de la Pérouse, two and a half years out of Brest on a voyage of Pacific discovery. La Pérouse had been as startled to see an English squadron as Phillip had been to see his, but, as he noted in his log, “All Europeans are countrymen at such a distance from home.” When he dropped his hook in Botany Bay on the morning of January 26, La Pérouse was fairly cordially received by Hunter, who was in a blinding hurry to get the rest of the fleet to Port Jackson. He politely told La Pérouse that he could give him any assistance he wanted—except, of course, for food, stores, sails, ammunition or anything else he needed.

After lunch, Sirius got the fleet under way. There was a light south south-east breeze, which made it as hard for the ships to get out of port as it had been for La Perouse to get in. The departing English now gave the French a spectacular show of fumbling. Friendship rammed Prince of Wales, losing her jib boom. Charlotte nearly ran on the rocks, clawed off and cannoned into Friendship. Lady Penrhyn just avoided ramming her amidships. The blue Pacific air darkened with nautical oaths. However, by 3 p.m. the transports had cleared Botany Bay and were working north; four hours later, while the pinkish-gray glow of evening began to fume delicately upward from the long flat inland horizon, they rounded South Head and stood in for Port Jackson or, as it would presently be called, Sydney Harbor.

ii

“WE . . . HAD the satisfaction of finding the finest harbour in the world, in which a thousand sail of the line may ride with the most perfect security.”⁷ Phillip’s jubilant words to Lord Sydney suggest that he was already looking beyond the convict colony to the day when this harbor would become a strategic outpost for England, filled with the white-sailed emblems of a dominated Pacific. The chosen anchorage had a small stream of fresh water flowing into a sheltered bay, where ships could ride close to the shore in deep water. To honor the man who had sent them there, Phillip called it Sydney Cove.

Pink eucalypts grew thickly along its rock shores, and Phillip marvelled at how stoutly they flourished in mere cracks of the rock, drawing nourishment from the thinnest soil. The work gangs stumbled and cursed among the ferns as the ground heaved beneath their legs, and “the confusion,” David Collins noted, “will not be wondered at when it is considered that each man stepped from the boat literally into a wood.”⁸ Over the next few days, some military order began to emerge. “Business now sat on every brow,” Watkin Tench reported,

and the scene, to an indifferent spectator, at leisure to contemplate it, would have been highly picturesque and amusing. In one place, a party cutting down the woods; a second, setting up a blacksmith’s forge; a third, dragging along a load of stones or provisions; here an officer pitching his marquee, with a detachment of troops parading on one side of him, and a cook’s fire blazing up on the other.⁹

The marines had to watch for runaways. Within a few days some of the prisoners had escaped and struggled through the bush as far as Botany Bay, where La Pérouse’s ships still lay at anchor. They gave the French commander “trouble and embarrassment”¹⁰by begging him to take them on board, but he dismissed them with threats and sent them back to Sydney Cove, where they were flogged. In fact, they had been lucky not to be taken on board. On March 10, 1788, after a six-week sojourn at Botany Bay, La Perouse sailed off into the Pacific and was never heard from again. It took the French thirty years to establish that his ships were wrecked with the loss of all hands on Vanikoro in the New Hebrides.

The presence of the French boats warned Phillip that he must quickly colonize Norfolk Island. It would be a disaster to lose its pines and flax to France; and La Perouse told him that he had already been there, although the surf prevented him landing.¹¹ So Phillip dispatched Supply to Norfolk Island, with twenty-two people on board under the command of Sirius’s second lieutenant, Philip Gidley King. They had six months’ rations and were told to start sowing crops and retting flax immediately. Norfolk Island would be more fertile than the sandy dirt of Sydney Cove, at which the convicts were now scratching.

They had no ploughs or draft animals; it was all hack-and-peck hoe cultivation, and they sowed the first corn on a patch half a mile east of the stream, where the Botanical Gardens of Sydney now stand. Some of the trees they felled were giants, red gums more than twenty-five feet around the trunk, whose root systems had to be dug out and grubbed from the stony earth—an exhausting labor for men whose muscles had gone to suet after months at sea. Some officers had to sleep ashore. “I never slept worse, my dear wife, than I did last night,” the homesick Lieutenant Clark wrote in his journal, “what with the hard cold ground, spiders, ants and every vermin you can think of was crawling over me.”¹²

A fortnight passed before enough tents and huts were ready for the female convicts. On February 6 their disembarkation began, and all through the day the longboats plied between the transports and the cove, carrying their freight of women. Those who had decent clothes had put on all their finery: “Some few among them,” noted Bowes Smyth, heartily glad to have them off his ship, “might be said to be well dressed.” The last of them landed by six in the evening. It was a squally day, and thunderheads were piled up in livid cliffs above the Pacific; as dusk fell, the weather burst. Tents blew away; within minutes the whole encampment was a rain-lashed bog. The women floundered to and fro, draggled as muddy chickens under a pump, pursued by male convicts intent on raping them. One lightning bolt split a tree in the middle of the camp and killed several sheep and a pig beneath it. Meanwhile, most of the sailors on Lady Penrhyn applied to her master, Captain William Sever, for an extra ration of rum “to make merry with upon the women quitting the ship.” Out came the pannikins, down went the rum, and before long the drunken tars went off to join the convicts in pursuit of the women, so that, Bowes remarked, “it is beyond my abilities to give a just description of the scene of debauchery and riot that ensued during the night.” It was the first bush party in Australia, with “some swearing, others quarrelling, others singing—not in the least regarding the tempest, tho’ so violent that the thunder shook the ship exceeding anything I ever before had a conception of.” And as the couples rutted between the rocks, guts burning from the harsh Brazilian aguardiente, their clothes slimy with red clay, the sexual history of colonial Australia may fairly be said to have begun.¹³

Its political history began the next day. Late in the morning, as the sun stood up above the treetops and the drenched ground steamed, the marine band summoned all the colonists on shore to hear the Governor’s Commission read. Phillip stood at a folding table, with his senior colonial officers—Robert Ross the lieutenant-governor, David Collins the judge-advocate, Reverend Richard Johnson the clergyman and John White the surgeon—ranked next to him. Two leather cases on the table held George Ill’s seal and the documents commissioning the colony. With a rattle of drums and a small needling of fifes, the convicts were herded together in a circle around the gentlemen and officers; the soldiers formed a ring outside them. The convicts were ordered to squat. The soldiers remained standing with loaded muskets. This simple choreography summed up the main transactions of power.

Collins read the Royal Instructions giving Phillip, as Governor, the power to administer oaths, appoint officers, convene criminal and civil court and emancipate prisoners—the customary imperial boilerplate. He could raise armies, execute martial law and build “such and so many forts and platforms castles cities boroughs towns and fortifications as you shall judge necessary,” a clause that must have deepened the hungover prisoners’ gloom as Collins recited it.¹⁴

Phillip now harangued the convicts. He would stand no repetition of the last night’s orgy, and any prisoners who tried to get into the women’s tents would be shot. Cattle-duffers and chicken thieves would be hanged, without exceptions. Breeding stock was infinitely precious to the colony. Having watched the felons at work, “he was persuaded nothing but severity would have any effect upon them, to induce them to behave properly in future.” If they did not work, they would not eat. Up to now only one man in three had been working; discipline would fix that, and discipline they would have. Their task, apart from clearing and hoeing the soil, would be building houses: first for the officers, then for the marines and lastly for themselves. God Save the King! The marines fired three volleys and marched the convicts off. Phillip and his officers sat down to a lunch of cold mutton, chatting sociably amid the stuttering whir of the cicadas. Alas, the meat proved to be crawling with maggots, although the sheep had only been butchered the night before. “Nothing will keep 24 hours in this country, I find,” Lieutenant Clark morosely noted.

Now the hard work began, and it soon became clear that the colonists were wretchedly equipped for it. Not only was there a dearth of skilled labor, but tools were short and, Phillip complained, “the worst that ever was seen.”¹⁵ The only good building timber came from the cabbage-tree palms that grew in profusion around the stream at Sydney Cove. They were straight, easy to work and had little natural taper. All were cut down within a year. The huts they became might have been drawn by a child—boxes about 9 by 12 feet, with a hipped roof and two windows like eyes on either side of a doorway, the archetypal cottage-as-face. Their construction was equally simple. Walls were framed with 6-inch-square timber posts, set directly in the ground; vertical studs went between these, three feet apart. Between the roughly rabbeted studs, the carpenters inserted horizontal lengths of sapling whose ends were tapered to fit grooves. The walls, at this stage, looked like crude washboards. Then they were daubed (roughly sealed) on both sides with mud. This method of construction was used in every peasant community in England and Ireland; it was called “wattle-and-daub.” Because, in Sydney, the horizontal wall slats were cut from mimosa saplings, that golden tree of the Australian summer has been known as a “wattle” ever since.¹⁶

The usual roof was reed thatch, gathered from the tidal marshes of Rushcutters’ Bay. It harbored colonies of bugs and spiders, and it leaked. Presently it would be replaced by shingles. But when the winter rains came, the mud washed out of the walls. What the colony needed was brick, and before long some suitable clay was found. One convict, James Bloodworth, had been a brickmaker in England and took charge of manufacture. Convicts ground clay with water in natural depressions in the sandstone, using a log for a pestle; then, in barelegged teams, they squelched and trod it into a homogeneous pug. The bricks were molded, racked, dried and fired. They shrank unequally, and nobody could build level courses with them. For mortar, the only source of lime was burned oyster shells, laboriously gathered by convict women. That supplied just enough for a permanent Government House, a two-storied brick building with a tiled roof, stone quoins and real glass windowpanes—the first true piece of Georgian architecture in Australia, “composed of the common and Attic orders, with a pediment in front,” wrote Thomas Watling, “simple, and without any other embellishment whatever.” All other buildings had to be constructed without mortar and instead were made with a mixture of sheeps’ hair and mud. The rain soon washed it out. No ruins of the earliest convict buildings, therefore, have survived at Sydney Cove.¹⁷

There was even, one may guess, a psychological reason for the poverty of building. Architecture signifies permanence; it announces the desire to stay. No other officers shared Phillip’s dream of a colony of free immigrant settlers. To the convicts, all talk of a national future, or indeed a nation, was a joke. If your one dream was to escape from this Georgian shantytown, why build for the future? “Every person,” wrote Lieutenant-Governor Ross, “who came out with a design of remaining in this country were [sic] now most earnestly wishing to get away from it.”¹⁸ This was the motif of life over the next decade in Sydney, until the Rum Corps gentry—grasping, ruthless and nepotistic, but resolved to make a life for themselves in New South Wales—perceived what there was to be gained and how the gains could be consolidated through the use of slave labor.

Since the First Fleet officers did not expect to stay, their diaries emphasized the exotic, the unique: animals, plants and Aborigines. They wrote very little about the convicts themselves, who had been sent there to be forgotten. Their work, infractions and punishments were all duly logged; but of the convicts as people, the records say little. What did the first man hanged in Sydney, a seventeen-year-old lad of “most vile character” named Thomas Barrett, really mean to say when, stammering and trembling and seeming “very much shocked,” he announced at the foot of the ladder that “he had led a very wicked life”? How much “wickedness” could a boy compress into that small span from his birth to the fatal act of stealing some butter, dried peas and salt pork at Sydney Cove?¹⁹

The Australian blacks interested the First Fleet officers much more, and no account of the new thief-colony in the antipodes could be complete without a chapter or two on its “Indians.” Spartan in bearing, they had a general appeal to men whose education reposed on neoclassical foundations. They were not as attractive as the Tahitians, and they seemed less like that fiction of the liberal European mind, the Noble Savage. They exemplified “hard” as against “soft” primitivism. But certainly the colonists did not wish to exterminate or enslave them, and they seemed at first to pose no threat.

Nevertheless, they were destroyed. Cholera and influenza germs from the ships began the work. By 1789 black corpses were a common sight, huddled in the salt grasses and decomposing in the creamy uterine hollows of the sandstone. These epidemics were not meant to happen; the days of arsenic and the infected trading-blanket were still far off. Governor Phillip’s instructions as to blacks were quite clear: He must “conciliate their affections, enjoining all our subjects to live in amity and kindness with them,” and punish anyone who harmed them. Common sense dictated that: why add tribal warfare to the problems of the colony?²⁰

If at first the officers of the fleet saw the Aborigines through a scrim of Arcadian stereotypes and Rousseauist fancies, this pleasant delusion did not last long. The proper denizens of Arcadia were nymphs, but those of Port Jackson were unlike the welcoming girls of Tahiti. Young aboriginal women provoked mild longings in George Worgan, the surgeon on Sirius. “I can assure you,” he wrote,

there is in some of them a Proportion, a Softness, a roundness and Plumpness in their limbs and bodies . . . that would excite tender & amorous Sensations, even in the frigid Breast of a Philosopher,

Would stop a Druid in his Pious Course,

Nor could Philosophy resist their Force.²¹

Their virtue, or at least their relative immunity to rape, was nonetheless secured by their dirtiness, repellent even by the norms of Georgian hygiene. “What with the stinking Fish-Oil,” Worgan complained,

with which they seem to besmear their Bodies, & this mixed with the Soot which is collected on their Skins from continually setting over the Fires, and then in addition to those sweet Odours, the constant appearance of the Excrementitious Matter of the Nose which is collected on the upper pouting Lip, in rich Clusters of dry Bubbles, and is kept up by fresh Drippings; I say, from all these personal Graces & Embellishments, every Inclination for an Affair of Gallantry, as well as every idea of fond endearing Intercourse, which the nakedness of these Damssels might excite one to, is banished.²²

In the same way Lieutenant Daniel Southwell, mate on Sirius, dreamed of Palladian villas on the shores and islands of “this extraordinary harbour”—“charm’g seats, superb buildings, the grand ruins of stately edifices . . . ’Tis greatly to be wished these appearances were not as delusive as in reality they are.”²³

This was a common complaint. The land was not what it seemed. It looked fertile and lovely, but it proved arid, reluctant, incomprehensible. “Here, a romantic rocky craggy Precipice, over which a little purling Stream makes a Cascade. There, a soft, vivid-green, shady Lawn attracts your eye. Such are the prepossessing Appearances which the country that forms PORT JACKSON presents. . . . [H]appy were it for the Colony, if these appearances were not so delusive.”²⁴ The most vivid complaint about the scenic treachery of Sydney Harbor came from a Scots convict, young Thomas Watling of Dumfries, transported for forging guinea notes on the Bank of Scotland, who arrived on the Royal Admiral in 1792 at the age of thirty. He was a landscape painter, and as the first European artist to live in Australia he soon found how hard it was to depict the sights of Sydney Cove within the conventions of the journeyman picturesque that had formed his training. To be sure, Australia presented itself to the artist or naturalist as “a country of enchantments,” with “numberless beauties” and “Elysian scenery.”²⁵ But Arcadia is underwritten only by leisure and surplus, and the infant colony had neither. Soon Watling found the place offered no respite. The earth was sandy, swampy or full of rocks; fertile topsoil only existed in pockets, and every yard of ground was impenetrably tangled with brush. There were no streams of any size, or lakes or even ponds, and rain simply ran off the meager soil into bogs. Away from the harbor, the bush crushed the eye with its monotony. “The landscape painter,” wrote poor blistered Watling, “may in vain seek here for that beauty which arises from happy-opposed off-scapes” (meaning the beauty of romantic contrast, à la Salvator Rosa). Close up, the country matched the harshness of the penal regime, and Watling lamented

the sterility and miserable state of N. S. Wales. It will be long before ever it can even support itself.—Still that country so famed for charity and liberality of sentiment will I doubt no persevere to continue it.—When I have seen so much wanton cruelty practised on board the English hulks, on poor wretches, without the least colour of justice, what may I not reasonably infer?—French Bastille, nor Spanish Inquisition, could not centre more of horrors.²⁶

Most of all, the young Scot resented being treated worse than the Aborigine, a “barbarian New-Hollander”:

Many of these savages are allowed what is termed a freeman’s ratio of provisions for their idleness. They are bedecked at times with dress which they make away with [at] the first opportunity, preferring the originality of naked nature; and they are treated with the most singular tenderness. This you will suppose is not more than laudable; but is there one spark of humanity exhibited to poor wretches, who are at least denominated Christians? No, they are frequently denied the common necessaries of life!—wrought to death under the oppressive heat of a burning sun; or barbarously afflicted with often little-merited secondary punishment—this may be philosophy, according to the calculation of our rigid dictators; but I think it is the falsest species of it I have ever known or heard of.²⁷

Undoubtedly most of the other convicts felt the same way, although they could not write it down. For eight months and 15,000 miles they had seen nothing except the pitching ocean horizons, the darkness of their prison hold and sometimes a curve of foreign bay. Now they stumbled ashore in a land of inversions where it was high summer in January, where trees kept their leaves but shed their bark, where squat brown birds roared with laughter and thin stinking blacks, painted like pantomime skeletons, mocked them with their freedom. The blacks were an extension of the prison, its outer defense. Take to the bush and they would spear you; they were on the officers’ side, just as the officers were on theirs.

In convict eyes, the tribesmen had only one use: they made tools and weapons and left them lying in the open, unattended, so that they could be stolen and sold to the free sailors who took them back to England as souvenirs. The loss of these fish-spears and clubs “must have been attended with many inconveniences to the owners . . . [as] they were the only means whereby they obtained or could procure their daily subsistence.”²⁸

And so relations between convict and tribesman began badly and soon got worse. In May 1788, a convict who worked on the government farm to the east of the freshwater stream—known by then as the Tank Stream, because the whites had been scraping storage sinks out of the soft rock on its verge—was speared dead in the bush. A week later, two convicts on thatch-cutting detail were found speared and mangled, “the head of one beaten to a jelly.” It was supposed, a seaman noted, “to have been thro’ revenge for taking away one of their canoes.”²⁹ The killers had melted back into their tribe and it was useless to pursue them. “Notwithstanding all our presents,” wrote a woman convict from Port Jackson in November 1788, “the savages still continue to do us all the injury they can, which makes the soldiers’ duty very hard, and much dissatisfaction among the officers. I know not how many of our people have been killed.”³⁰

Revenge was easier dreamed of than exacted, as Phillip forbade punitive expeditions. The officers and marines, with their muskets, were theoretically better-armed than the lora—but the tribesman could throw four spears in the time it took to reload a flintlock. The convicts were not armed at all, and so their efforts at revenge were futile. In March 1789, sixteen of them set off with clubs to beat up the “Indians” for injuring one of their friends; the lora ambushed them, killing one and wounding seven. Not only did Phillip refuse to order a retaliatory attack on the blacks, but he had the eight unharmed survivors flogged with 150 lashes each and placed in leg irons for a year.

Such actions rankled. In the eyes of the British Government, the status of Australian Aborigines in 1788 was higher than it would be for another 150 years, for they had (in theory) the full legal status and so, in law if not in fact, they were superior to the convicts. The convicts resented this most bitterly. Galled by exile, the lowest of the low, they desperately needed to believe in a class inferior to themselves. The Aborigines answered that need. Australian racism began with the convicts, although it did not stay confined to them for long; it was the first Australian trait to percolate upward from the lower class.

But if the convicts hated the blacks, the military detested both—and for similar reasons. When Phillip summarily punished the steward of a marine officer with 50 lashes for giving a convict a gallon of rum in exchange for a pet possum, Arthur Bowes Smyth railed against the governor:

. . . This Government (if a Government it can be called) is a scene of anarchy and confusion; an evident discontent prevails among the different officers throughout the settlement. The marines and sailors are punished with the utmost severity for the most trivial offences, whilst the convicts are pardoned (or at least punished in a very slight manner) for crimes of the blackest die. I do not even except stealing, which the Governor himself . .  assured them would be punished capitally. What may be the result of such a very inconsistent and partial mode of acting, time (and I may venture to say a very short time) will shew.³¹

To the marines, Phillip’s even-handedness was bias. In the famine years of the early settlement convicts were hanged for stealing food—but so, in March 1789, were six marine privates. Why, marines grumbled, should the convicts be flogged with a lighter cat-o’-nine-tails than the dreadful “military cat” used on servicemen? Why should marines and soldiers get the same ration as prisoners? Pinpricks, like the cancellation of a rum allowance to the marines’ wives, became inflammations. Most of all, they resented doing duty as convict supervisors. They had not enlisted as jail wardens, and they felt (not unreasonably) that the government’s failure to send civilians to keep the work gangs in order was one more proof of its incompetence and indifference.

So they hated the place, hated the convicts for bringing them there and despised the Aborigines into the bargain. “I do not scruple to pronounce,” wrote the marine major whom Phillip had made lieutenant-governor, Robert Ross,

that in the whole world there is not a worse country. All that is contiguous to us is so very barren and forbidding that it may with truth be said that here nature is reversed; and if not so, she is nearly worn out. . . . If the minister has a true and just description given him of it he will surely not think of sending any more people here.³²

Ross—“without exception the most disagreeable commanding officer I ever knew,” in the opinion of one of his subordinates—was a choleric, whining martinet who hated Phillip and the colony equally. He would stop at nothing to cast Phillip in a bad light. But most of the colonists, marine or convict, shared his gloom about the future of New South Wales.

iii

THE HATEFUL equalizer was hunger. This first democratic experience in Australia spared no one. It made most of the colonists stupid and some crazy, playing havoc with morale and producing endless displays of petty tyranny.

The First Fleet carried enough food to keep its passengers alive for two years in Australia. The rations issued to sailors, marines and officers each week were:

Beef	4 lb.	Hardtack	7 lb.
Pork	2 lb.	Cheese	12 oz.
Dried peas	2 pints	Butter	6 oz.
Oatmeal	3 pints	Vinegar	1/2 pint

The male convicts got one-third less, while female convicts got two-thirds of the male ration, or slightly less than half the naval standard. On paper, this was not a bad allowance. In practice it meant scurvy, and the meat was mostly bone and gristle.

At Table Bay in South Africa, their last port of call before Australia, some officers had bought livestock for themselves. When these were added to the animals Phillip had bought for the government herd, the colony’s total stock came to 2 bulls and 5 cows, 29 sheep, 19 goats, 74 hogs and sows, 18 turkeys, 35 ducks, 35 geese and 209 chickens. There were also 5 rabbits. All these creatures were guarded with reverential care. As Phillip had put it to the convicts, the life of a breeding animal was worth a man’s. In August 1788, when a sheep fattened for the officers’ dinner on the Prince of Wales’s birthday vanished from its pen, Phillip offered full emancipation to anyone who informed on the thief. None would. Gorgon, the colony’s prize Africander bull, and four of his five cows strayed into the scrub and were lost. Sheep died from bloat, while dingoes and convicts kept poaching the hens.

All ranks ate the same monotonous diet of salt meat and leathery johnnycakes baked on a shovel. Thus, food could not symbolize the proper social demarcation between bond and free. “Our allowance is very scanty,” wrote James Campbell, captain of marines on Lady Penrhyn,

I know not why, or whither it was so intended by administration that the only difference between the allowance of provisions served to the officer & served to the convict, be only half a pint (per day) of vile Rio spirits, so offensive both in taste & smell that he must be fond of drinking indeed that can use it—but such is the fact.³³

Phillip knew that the survival of the colony had to preclude all comforts of status. With surplus food, the officers would start to become aristocracy—but not yet. They all lived for five years on the bleak edge of starvation. The first crops failed and the whole harvest of the second planting—a meager forty bushels—had to be saved for seed. In 1788 the convicts had no draft animals; no plough would be used in Australia until 1803.

Only a third of the prisoners could work—320 men out of the 966 victualled from public stores. More than 50 convicts were too feeble from age and incurable illness to work at all, and many others—slum-raised, utterly ignorant of farming—“would starve if left to themselves.”³⁴ The ideal of each man feeding himself was a mockery in New South Wales.

Some officers had their own vegetable gardens, tended by convicts. The kitchen garden for the public stores was planted, for security, on an island 300 yards out in the harbor; there, it was fairly safe from the prisoners and marines who, desperate for green food, would pull turnip-tops and gobble the leaves before the turnip had grown. But the yield from Garden Island, as it was named, was still poor—just enough for the sick in the hospital tents. The officers guarded their private plots zealously but unsuccessfully. Thus when Lieutenant Clark, who had the use of another islet in the harbor (still known as Clark Island), went to look at his onion bed in February 1790, he found “some Boat had landed since I had been there last and taken away the greatest part . . . It is impossible for any body to attempt to raise any Garden stuff here, before it comes to perfection they will steal it.”³⁵

The colonists found few plants they could eat, and little game. They gathered wild spinach and a liquorice-flavored creeper, Smilax glycophylla, which they called “sweet tea.” A few officers had brought their fowling pieces, but it seemed unwise to use up the colony’s limited stock of gunpowder.

The only reliable source of fresh protein, therefore, was fish. There was some prejudice against it. The ration was 10 pounds of fish issued in place of 2½ pounds of salt beef. King remarked, “If there were more convicts here, they would not submit to having their salt rations stopped where a quantity of fish were caught by them.”³⁶ In Sydney the “Roast Beef of Old England”—even salted and half-rotten—was more prized than any fish.

By October 1788, Phillip still had no idea if relief ships were on their way, and there was only enough food in store to last, if strictly rationed, one more year. Given the eerily long time-lag between England and Sydney, he had to decide. He cut I pound from the weekly flour ration and sent his largest vessel, Sirius, to Cape Town to buy supplies.

Her captain, John Hunter, gambled on taking a longer but faster route, sailing around Cape Horn before the westerlies. Speed was all-important, for his sailors were sickening from scurvy and hunger. Sirius reached Cape Town in three months, instead of the five the western route against the prevailing winds would likely have taken. Hunter loaded, refitted and brought her back to Sydney Cove, laden with wheat, barley and flour, by May 1789. There had been no news of relief ships in Cape Town. But the 56 tons of new flour would last the colony four months, and the seed would plant the allotments around Sydney and at the new farms inland at Rose Hill.

By now, most agricultural hope centered on the governor’s farm at Rose Hill, or Parramatta as the blacks called it, where the soil was deep and rich and the fields ran down to a navigable river. By the end of 1789, this farm had produced Australia’s first agricultural marvel, a 26-pound cabbage; but it was still a long way from keeping the whole settlement in greens. In fact, in the year to come, the idea of progress shrunk to a mockery, for 1789 brought no ships, and as 1790 crept by, the little settlement inexorably sank into the torpor and despair of slow starvation. “God help us. If some ships dont arrive, I dont know what will,” Ralph Clark scrawled in his diary, and Watkin Tench described the mood that now descended over Sydney Cove:

Famine . . . was approaching with giant strides, and gloom and dejection overspread every countenance. Men abandoned themselves to the most desponding reflections, and adopted the most extravagant conjectures.

Still we were on the tiptoe of expectation. If thunder broke at a distance, or a fowling-piece of louder than ordinary report resounded in the woods, “a gun from a ship” was echoed on every side, and nothing but hurry and agitation prevailed.³⁷

Lieutenant Southwell wrote how his eyes, in the evening, had sometimes been deceived “with some fantastic little cloud, which . . . for a little time has deceived impatient imagination into the momentary idea that ’twas a vessel altering her sail or position while steering in for the haven.”³⁸

Supplies were running so low that Phillip decided to take another gamble. He dispatched 281 people—more than a third of the convicts in the colony, guarded by half the battalion of marines—to Norfolk Island in the Sirius, which would then sail on to Canton to load up with desperately needed provisions. The convicts and their guards, Phillip reasoned, would stand a better chance on Norfolk Island, with its fertile soil and abundant fish. The marines disliked the idea—which, as a bonus, enabled Phillip to get rid of his obstreperous bête noire, Major Ross—but they had no choice, and Sirius sailed with her tender, Supply, in March 1790. The Sydney colonists now had no means of communication with the outside world. “The little society that was in the place was broken up,” wrote David Collins, “and every man seemed left to brood in solitary silence over the dreary prospect before him.”³⁹

On April 1, Phillip cut the rations “without distinction” to 4 pounds of flour, 2½ pounds of salt pork and 1½ pounds of rice per week. This was just enough to sustain life but not enough to work on, and so he humanely reduced the convicts’ hours of work to six per day, so that each man could cultivate a private vegetable patch in the afternoon.

Then, on April 5, Supply appeared off South Head. She was alone. As her launch cast off and made for the shore of Sydney Cove, Tench saw her captain “make an extraordinary motion with his hand, which too plainly indicated that something disastrous had happened; and I could not help turning to the Governor . . . and saying, ‘Sir, prepare yourself for bad news.’”⁴⁰

The news was catastrophic. Sirius had struck a reef at Norfolk Island and was a total wreck. All the ships’ crew and company, including the convicts, were saved. But both settlements, at Sydney and Norfolk Island, were now cut off from the world and—except for one 170-ton brig—from one another. Both were failing fast, for Norfolk Island was just as badly off as Sydney.

iv

TWO YEARS BEFORE, when Philip Gidley King and his party of twenty-two colonists glimpsed, from the pitching deck of Supply, the island that would eventually become the worst place in the English-speaking world, what they had seen was not inviting.

Magnificent in scenery, Norfolk Island was also a natural prison, harborless, cliff-bound and girdled with reefs on which the long Pacific swells broke with a ragged, monotonous booming. King had to wait five days in the lee before he could lead a scouting party ashore. They landed at Anson Bay on March 4, 1788. The high pines grew right to the cliff face; King guessed the tallest of them was 160 feet.⁴¹ Their trunks were wreathed in vines. The ship’s surgeon got lost in this maze and spent the night in the forest. In the dark, where phosphorescent fungi gleamed beneath the Gothic vaults of cabbage-trees, he heard nibbling and thought he was surrounded by rabbits. The rabbits were rats.

King found a passage through the reef at Sydney Bay (modern Kingston) and landed the convicts and supplies on March 6. They raised the Union Jack on a sapling. “I took possession of the isle, drinking ‘His Majesty,’ ‘The Queen,’ ‘Prince of Wales,’ ‘Governor Phillip’ and ‘Success to the Colony.’” The ragged chorus of English voices was sucked away by the Pacific air, swallowed in the blue immensity behind the wall of dark pines. Two days later, Supply made sail for the Australian coast, a thousand miles away.

The first crops perished from wind and salt. Rats ate the vegetables; then came cutworms, black caterpillars and bright, screaming, seed-eating Norfolk Island Parrots. The wreck of the Sirius meant new mouths to feed. In March 1790, Norfolk Island had 425 people (200 convicts), but by November 1791 with new arrivals from Sydney, it had 959 (748 convicts). Thereafter, until the first settlement was abandoned in 1806, the population would remain fairly steady at about a thousand people, with one guard to every seven prisoners.

Despite the rich, deep soil, they had, by March 1790, only about fifty acres of land under the hoe. The reef swarmed with red snapper, but the colonists’ two boats—a cutter and a leaky dinghy—could not always brave the pounding surf. What saved all their lives was the mutton-bird, Pterodroma melanopus, which flocked in immense numbers on Mount Pitt, the island’s highest hill. Its flanks were riddled with their nesting tunnels. The mutton-birds arrived on Norfolk Island early in March and stayed until the end of August—almost the length of the Pacific winter. “They are very fine eating, very fat and firm,” wrote Ralph Clark in August 1790, “and I think (though no Connoisseur) as good as any I ever eat.” The Bird of Providence—as the officers called it; the convicts more laconically dubbed it a Pittite—tasted oily and fishy, somewhere between a penguin and a chicken. The birds had never seen men before, and their abundance struck Clark as Biblical:

They generally hovered about the Mount for an hour before they came down, which was as thick as a shower of hail, this account will make the old story of Moses in the Wilderness (Exodus xvi.13) be a little more believ’d, respecting the shower of Quails, everyone here owes their existence to the Mount Pit Birds.⁴²

Once grounded, they were encumbered by their long planing wings, like albatrosses. As quartermaster of public stores, Clark kept a daily tally: More than 170,000 of them were massacred in one three-month span, April to July 1790, an average of nearly four birds per person per day. Some convicts went to brutal lengths to get their eggs:

They catch the birds and them that have no eggs they let go again and them that are with Egg they cut the Egg out of them and then let the poor Bird fly again which is one of the cruelest things which I think I ever heard. I hope that some of them will be caught at this cruel work for the sake of making an example of them.⁴³

Naturally the Birds of Providence could not survive this slaughter. By 1796 they were thinning out, and eight years later they were almost gone. By 1830, no more was heard of Pterodroma melanopus on Norfolk Island.

Meanwhile, the arduous work of clearing and building went on. Hungry men work slowly, so less ground is cleared; which means small crops and more hunger. There was little time or energy left over for the crops the island was meant to produce, pines and flax.

The Norfolk Island pines, however, like the rest of antipodean nature, were deceptive. They turned out to be useless for anything but huts and firewood. Their wood was not resilient enough for spars. It was short-grained, wanting in resin, more like beech than Norway pine; it snapped like a carrot.

That left the flax plant. Phormium tenax, Phillip had optimistically reported to Lord Sydney at the end of 1788, “will supply the settlers with rope and canvas, as well as a considerable part of their cloathing, when they can dress it properly.”⁴⁴ But the Admiralty had sent no flax workers with the First Fleet. Phillip’s sanguine vision of settlers and convicts wearing homespun linen whilst dispatching argosies of sailcloth to England quickly faded. He besought London to send a flax dresser, but it took two years for this expert (a convict superintendent named Andrew Hume) to reach Norfolk Island. In 1791 Hume managed to produce for the Admiralty a couple of square yards of rough Norfolk Island linen—perhaps among the costliest textiles ever woven by man.

Meanwhile, King had an idea. He remembered Banks telling him about the linen woven by the Maoris in New Zealand. Plainly, he needed a Maori; and about a year later, a ship did manage to kidnap two wildly struggling and resentful tribesmen from the Bay of Islands in New Zealand and get them to Norfolk Island. One was a young chief named Woodoo; the other, Tooke, was a priest’s son; both were twenty-four years old and neither had the slightest idea of how to prepare flax, for such menial work was done by women. So Tooke and Woodoo moped haughtily about the settlement, gazing out to sea from the headlands where “almost every evening at the close of day [they] lament their separation by crying or singing a song expressive of their grief, which is at times very affecting.” After six months’ exile on Norfolk, King returned them to New Zealand.⁴⁵

Meanwhile, by trial and error, flax production went on. At its peak, the convict workers (mainly women) were turning out some 100 yards of coarse canvas a month. At that pace, however, it would have taken two years to make the sailcloth for one first-rate ship. Gradually, the project wore down and lapsed. By 1800, the hopes that began with Matra’s descants on the flax plant and Cook’s enthusiasm for the pines were proven a total delusion. The place would produce nothing for England; it would never pay for itself. Its colonists sank, as on the mainland, into a demoralized torpor.

v

AS SOON AS he heard of the wreck of the Sirius, Governor Phillip had inventory taken of the stores at Sydney. It showed that they had only a few months’ grace left, so he cut the rations again. These sad morsels—a third of what they should have been—were doled out daily, to groups of seven people, so that the convicts could not bolt a whole week’s ration at once. Some women prostituted themselves for a few handfuls of weevily flour or a hunk of gristle. Most of the men on the work gangs were already as naked as the Aborigines, having traded off their clothes for food. There was no question of the convicts’ helping one another; Sydney Cove had only distilled the dog-eat-dog misery of the English slums. When one elderly prisoner fell down and died in the food queue in May 1790, Collins’s autopsy showed his stomach was quite empty. He had lost or sold his cooking utensils, and instead of helping him out, his fellow prisoners had demanded a cut of his ration before they would share their cookpot, so that he starved.

Phillip reluctantly stepped up the punishments for food theft, which were already draconic but no longer deterred the starving. In 1790 one man got 300 lashes and 6 months in chains for stealing 20 ounces of potatoes, and another drew 1,000 lashes for taking 3 pounds of the precious tubers. After such treatment, a man would be incapacitated, literally skinned alive. Huge rewards (in food, the only currency that mattered, for there was no money circulating in this jail) were offered to convicts who helped catch food thieves. Thus in May 1790, convict Thomas Yarsley received 60 pounds of flour for catching a man stealing garden vegetables. Such inducements, Watkin Tench remarked, were “more tempting than the ore of Peru or Potosi.”⁴⁶

Hunger, fear, exhaustion and the pervasive sense of abandonment—these destroyed whatever scraps of morale may have been left among the convicts. One of their few surviving letters, from an unknown woman, speaks of “our disconsolate situation in this solitary waste of the creation . . . not to be imagined by any stranger” and revealingly noted, “In short, everyone is so taken up with their own misfortunes that they have no pity to bestow on others.” No wonder that by April 1790 the settlement chaplain, Reverend Richard Johnson, was lamenting the convicts’ apathy to the Divine Word. “Little apparent fruit yet among the Convicts, &c., Oh that they were wise—but alas! nothing seems to alarm or allure them.”⁴⁷

The guards were as apathetic as the convicts. They grew peevish; they could not make up their minds on simple matters; they hallucinated. Lieutenant Southwell felt the torpor of starvation: “I confess myself incompetent . . . being perplexed with a variety of conjectures, but able to conclude nothing.”⁴⁸ Conversation, friendship and curiosity faltered and died, having nothing to sustain them. The spirit of inquiry about the new environment, which had filled several officers’ journals in the first year of settlement, now dwindled; there are only about half as many observations on flora, fauna and “Indians” for 1789-90 as for 1788. Monotony reigned. The classes were now at a simmering distrust of one another, wrote an anonymous male convict lamenting their “Crusoe-like adventures”:

We fear the troops, and they are not contented with seeing those who live better than themselves, nor with us who live worse. . . . [W]e have had so many disappointments about arrivals, &c., that the sullen reserve of superiority has only increased our apprehensions; and some of the most ignorant have no other idea than that they are to be left by the troops and the shipping to perish by themselves!⁴⁹

The signs of status were vanishing. All uniforms were threadbare or ragged. Most of the marines were barefoot; drill, rituals, spit-and-polish were gone. “Nothing more ludicrous can be conceived,” wrote Watkin Tench, “than the expedients of substituting, shifting and patching, which ingenuity devised, to eke out wretchedness and preserve the remains of decency.”⁵⁰

The marines resented Phillip’s order that equal rations be issued to convicts and guards. When the governor turned over his private stock of flour—more than 300 pounds—to the public store, Collins wrote that the gesture “did him immortal honor, in this season of general distress”—as indeed it did.⁵¹ But the marines did not agree. If clothes and rations could not symbolize rank, then actions would; and one may be sure that every curse, kick and blow the marines rained on the exhausted “crawlers” was meant as a reinforcement of superiority, not just an incitement to work. The convict artist Thomas Watling, transported for forgery, summed it up:

Instances of oppression, and mean-souled despotism, are so glaring and frequent, as to banish every hope of generosity and urbanity from such as I am:—for unless we can flatter and cajole the vices and follies of our superiors, with the most abominable servility, nothing is to be expected—and even this conduct, very often . . . meets with its just reward—neglect and contempt.⁵²

To construct a sense of power from the meager social resources of the colony, the top dog had to be capricious—otherwise, the underdog’s servility might be taken as a contract. Watling could neither dignify himself by rebelling, nor protect himself by truckling. This proved utterly demoralizing for genteel convicts who still clung to the belief that they were not “common” criminals. To them, servility—the very condition they had tried to escape with their pathetic embezzlements and forgeries—was indeed “abominable.”

By grit, example and stubborn evenhandedness in the face of hopeless prisoners and near-mutinous marines, Phillip pulled his wretched settlement through these months of crisis. “We shall not starve,” he wrote, “though seven-eighths of the colony deserves nothing better; the present want will be done away by the first ship that arrives.”⁵³

That long-awaited sail was glimpsed on June 3, 1790, a rainy, blustering day. Watkin Tench realized it when he saw, through the doorway of his hovel, “women with children in their arms running to and fro with distracted looks, congratulating each other, and kissing their infants with the most passionate and extravagant looks of fondness.” The ship was Lady Juliana, eleven months out of Plymouth, carrying the first news from home the colonists had received in almost three years:

“Letters! Letters!” was the cry. They were produced, and torn open in trembling agitation. News burst on us like meridian splendour on a blind man. We were overwhelmed with it: public, private, general, and particular. Nor was it until some days had elapsed, that we were able to methodise it, or reduce it into form.⁵⁴

They learned, for the first time, of George Ill’s attack of porphyria, of the trial of Warren Hastings, of George Washington’s inauguration as the first president of the United States. Most amazing of all—and, given their social situation, most ominous—they learned of the French Revolution, “that wonderful and unexpected event,” as Tench called it.

They also learned why no stores had arrived. The Guardian, laden with two years’ worth of food and stores, had struck an iceberg and limped into Cape Town, where she was abandoned. But for that she would have reached Sydney in early March, thus preventing the loss of Sirius. All her stores were lost. Lady Juliana had brought some flour, but it also brought more useless mouths in the form of 222 women convicts.

At least they were in good health. Not so the other prisoners on the Second Fleet. More than a thousand had embarked, but a quarter of them died at sea, and half were landed helplessly ill at Sydney Cove from the three remaining ships, Neptune, Surprize and (making her second voyage to Australia) Scarborough. Some died from the brutality of the ships’ masters, others because they had been too sick to sail.^* The authorities in England had simply used the Second Fleet to rid the hulks and prisons of invalids, dispatching them into oblivion. “The sending out of the disordered and helpless,” Phillip wrote angrily to his superiors in London,

clears the gaols and may ease the parishes from which they are sent; but . . . it is obvious that the settlement, instead of being a colony which will support itself, will, if this practice is continued, remain for years a burthen to the mother-country.⁵⁵

Before his letter reached London, however, the Third Fleet was on its way, carrying 1,864 convicts. One man in ten died, and the survivors were landed in 1791 “so emaciated, so worn away,” in Phillip’s words, that they were utterly unfit to work—more helpless parasites to drag the colony down.

So the ships had come, but brought little change. David Collins wrote to his father and summed up his plight:

I find that I am spending the Prime of my Life at the farthest part of the World, without Credit, without . . . Profit, secluded from my Family, . . . my Connexions, from the World, under constant Apprehensions of being starved . . . All these Considerations induce me . . . to embrace the first Opportunity that offers of escaping from a Country that is nothing better than a Place of banishment for the Outcasts of Society.⁵⁶

In fact, the marines would soon be relieved. The Second Fleet brought two companies of the New South Wales Corps, a new unit tailored for service in Australia. The corps’ officers knew they had to do the administrative work, such as jury duty, that Major Ross and his men objected to; and its enlisted men would guard convicts as well as fight the French—the latter a remote possibility. As soldiers, the Botany Bay Rangers (as they came to be nicknamed) were poor stuff even by the current low standards of the British Army. Most of them were scum, and they found service in New South Wales the best alternative to beggary or crime. Few of the officers were better than the men.⁵⁷

But the impact of the New South Wales Corps on life in early New South Wales was to be out of all proportion to its quality as a force. Between 1791 and 1808 the corps was de facto—if not quite de jure—the most powerful single internal influence on the colony, producing its first ruling clans and even, in 1808, overthrowing the governor.

The arrival of the Second and Third Fleets proved one thing: However bad the colony’s prospects were, at least it had not been abandoned by England. From now on, sails would continue to be seen off the Heads. Some were convict ships, others supply vessels, and yet others were the first harbingers of trade in that remote ocean: sealers, whalers, and merchantmen drawn to the infant colony by the hugely inflated prices the colonists would pay for ordinary goods—3,000 to 4,000 percent on “every little Article of Comfort or Convenience,” Collins noted.⁵⁸

So by the end of 1791 there were signs that Sydney might support itself—although not, as Phillip stressed in his reports to England, on convict labor alone. The prisoners had no incentive to work. They were not so much rebellious as flaccid: “Neither kindness nor severity have any effect, and tho’ I can say the convicts in general behave well, there are many who dread punishment less than they fear labour.” The only hope, Phillip insisted, was a colony “formed by farmers and emigrants who have been used to labour, and who reap the fruits of their own industry.”⁵⁹

But no such sturdy free yeomanry would come to New South Wales. In fact, only twenty free settlers would migrate there before 1800. So Phillip resolved to see if the more deserving and sober Emancipists—convicts whose term of punishment had expired but who wanted to stay on and make a new life in Australia—could be made into yeomen. He would grant them land and the use of tools. If their farms prospered they would “take themselves off the store,” becoming independent of government rations and eventually selling their surplus crops back to the colonial government stores. Such men might set an example and show that transportation could reform.

The first convict to succeed as an independent farmer was Richard Phillimore, who by January 1791 was growing enough grain on Norfolk Island to support himself and two workers. But the father of Australian agriculture, the first man to grub a living from the more stubborn earth of the mainland, was James Ruse, to whom Phillip gave one cleared acre and some raw bush at Parramatta. Ruse had been a farmer in Cornwall. Having no animal manure, he burned off the timber on his little acre and dug in the ashes, which were rich in potash. Lacking ploughhorse and plough, he hoed the ground thoroughly—“not like the Government farms, just scratched over, but properly done,” he proudly told Watkin Tench—and turned the sod over, so that the grass and weeds composted into the soil; then, just before sowing, he turned the earth again. By late summer (February 1791), his wheat and maize were up and he jubilantly told Phillip that he could keep himself in food. By December 1791 he took his wife and child “off the store” as well.

As a reward, Phillip deeded him thirty acres at Parramatta—the first land grant ever made in Australia. The place was named Experiment Farm. By 1819 Ruse had two hundred acres to his name, and although he lost it all by rum or ill luck and ended his days working as overseer for another farmer, the lines carved on his gravestone are full of an understandably biblical pride that shines through the home-made spelling:

My Mother Reread Me Tenderley

With me She Took Much Paines

And when I arived in This Coelney

I sowd the Forst Grain and Now

With My Hevenly Father I hope

For Ever To Remain.

By the end of 1792 all the economic hopes of the colony were centered on Parramatta. No one now struggled with the thin soil of Sydney, and the Tank Stream was a “morass,” so damaged by the settlers that ships could no longer get water from it. But at Parramatta, the farms were slowly extending their frail patchwork into the ancient gray-green chaos of the bush. By October 1792 Phillip had given land grants around Parramatta and the nearby district of Toongabbie to sixty-six people, of whom fifty-three were time-expired convicts. But there were not many men like Ruse among them. Skilled, hardworking Emancipists could save money to pay their way back to England or could work their passage as seamen and carpenters: “Thus will the best people always be carried away,” Phillip ruefully noted.⁶⁰ Four years after landing, most prisoners still could not support themselves and were worked like cattle. An old lag who arrived with the Third Fleet, Henry Hale, gave a vivid picture of labor at Toongabbie:

For nine months there I was on five ounces of flour a day; when weighed out, barely four. . . . In those days we were yoked to draw timber, twenty-five in gang. The sticks were six feet long; six men abreast. We held the stick behind us, and dragged with our hands. One man . . . was put to the drag; it soon did for him. He began on a Thursday and died on a Saturday, as he was dragging a load down Constitution-hill. . . . Men used to carry trees on their shoulders. How they used to die!⁶¹

At Toongabbie, “All the necessary conveniences of life they are strangers to, and suffer everything they could dread. . . . [I]t was not uncommon for seven or eight to die in one day, and very often while at work.” No wonder that the convicts pilfered like ants. Despite a long drought in 1791, the harvest had produced nearly 5,000 bushels of wheat, of which no less than 1,500 bushels—30 percent of the year’s crop—vanished somewhere between the fields and the granary.⁶²

Yet at the end of 1792, a thousand public acres and 516 private were under cultivation, and more than four thousand acres had been set aside for future farming. This, Phillip thought, would be done by Emancipists and members of the New South Wales Corps, all of whom would have the use of convict labor to help them. Such was the germ of the assignment system, the modified form of slavery on which Australia’s early economy would be built.

By now, according to the meticulous bookkeeping of the Colonial Office, the colony of New South Wales—four small red patches, representing Sydney Cove, Norfolk Island, Parramatta and Toongabbie—had cost the government of George III 67,194 pounds, 15 shillings and four-pence three-farthings, or about 3.35 million pounds in modern money.⁶³

What had the Crown got in exchange? Not much, in strategic terms; the hope of supplying England’s East Indian fleet with spars and canvas from Norfolk Island had failed miserably. On the other hand, the fact that the Australian coast had been not only claimed but occupied, however feebly, meant that the French would find it harder to press their territorial claims in the South Pacific. Given the broad nature of the balance of power between England and France—whereby France dominated the continent of Europe, while England, global in its reach, ruled the waves—there was at least a hypothetical strategic role for this colony in the primitive terms of eighteenth-century geopolitics.

As for the convicts, William Pitt’s Tory government claimed to be not displeased by the results. Some critics wanted to know why the felons were not being used on public works in England, as they were in France or Germany; degraded though these creatures may be, their argument went, convict labor had some value, and it was wasted in Australia. Pitt brushed these objections aside in his toplofty way, saying—quite untruthfully—that the main expenses of the colony were a thing of the past, that it was or would shortly become self-supporting and that transportation was by far the cheapest way of getting rid of felons.⁶⁴

So the colony would go on; but it went on without Governor Arthur Phillip. On December 10, 1792, accompanied by his two aboriginal friends, or specimens, Bennelong and Yemmerawannie, he boarded the storeship Atlantic and sailed down the harbor for the last time. He longed for England. Twenty-two years later, retired, bored, an admiral of the Blue living on a pension, still in touch (though desultorily now) with the affairs of the colony he had fathered, he died in Bath.

vi

AS THE LAST decade of the eighteenth century went by, the British Government still thought of Australia and its convict colony in maritime terms. Its settlements were a port and an island; it faced outward to the sea, not inward to the land. It was a base (albeit a feeble one) for trade, refitting and defense, not for internal expansion. The first four governors of New South Wales were all naval officers: Captain Phillip, Captain Hunter, Lieutenant King and Captain William Bligh (of the Bounty).⁶⁵ The convict colony was, in London’s view, a land-based hulk the size of a continent.

But after 1792 it became self-supporting, and that was the work of landsmen—the officers of the New South Wales Corps and their friends. For nearly three years between Phillip’s departure in December 1792 and Hunter’s return in September 1795, the colony was in effect run for the New South Wales Corps by its principal officers, Francis Grose and William Paterson. They set the pattern of private management and slave labor that created the wealth of Australia’s first elite.

Francis Grose (1758?-1814) had fought against the American rebels in the War of Independence. Badly wounded and invalided home to England, he got back to full service pay by helping to raise and recruit the New South Wales Corps. As its commandant, and as lieutenant-governor of New South Wales, Grose took over when Phillip sailed. He promptly set about putting most civil affairs in military hands. He replaced magistrates with corps officers and appointed a thrusting young Scottish lieutenant, John Macarthur, as regimental paymaster and inspector of public works—posts that gave him leverage by controlling the supply of convict labor.

Grose did not forget his own rank and file. He cancelled Phillip’s policy of equal rations for all and gave the troops more food than the convicts. He also let it be known that any member of the New South Wales Corps could have twenty-five acres of free land for the asking. But his crucial decision for the future of Australian farming was to offer 100-acre land grants to corps officers—along with ten convicts, free of charge and maintained at government expense, to work each one. The corps officers, Grose reported to London, were “the only description of settlers on whom reliance can be placed. . . . [T]heir exertions are really astonishing. . . . I shall encourage their pursuit as much as is in my power.”⁶⁶

Under Grose, officers had the economic edge on civilians; they could raise capital by borrowing against their regimental pay, and as a junta they seized a monopoly on most consumer goods arriving in Sydney Harbor. The chief of these was rum, the social anesthetic and real currency of early New South Wales. Colonial Sydney was a drunken society, from top to bottom. Men and women drank with a desperate, addicted, quarrelsome single-mindedness. Every drop of their tipple had to be imported.

Early in 1793 an American trading vessel, the Hope, arrived with 7,500 gallons of rum in her cargo. The goods and stores she carried were badly needed, and the Hope’s hard-nosed skipper not only demanded grossly inflated prices for them but insisted that not a nail, a sack of flour or a yard of cloth would leave his ship unless the colony bought all his rum first. Rather than suffer this gouging, the New South Wales Corps’ officers decided to pass it on. They formed a ring to buy the Hope’s cargo without competition. John Macarthur, as regimental paymaster, fixed the necessary IOUs against the regiment’s funds in England.

This impromptu deal was hugely profitable, and the monopoly of the Rum Corps (as the regiment was presently nicknamed) soon pervaded the colony’s economic life. For years to come, most of the cargo that came to Sydney passed through the hands of the corps and its favored satellites, among whom were several ex-convicts. Much of it was invested in land. Emancipated convicts and free settlers had an equal right to farm. At the beginning of 1794, twenty-two grants of land had been made along the rich plains of the Hawkesbury River, northwest of Sydney. Within a few months there were 70 settlers there, and a year later 400; these included 54 ex-convicts with their dependents. But by 1800, only 8 of those 54 still had farms there—and the Hawkesbury flats were the best farming land within reach of Sydney. In all, out of 274 settlers on granted land in New South Wales in 1795—the great majority, 251 of them, being ex-convicts—only 89 were still farming their own land in 1800.⁶⁷

There were natural reasons for this: flood, fire, drought—the undying, malignant totems of Australian farming. There were cultural ones, too, since so many of the Emancipist farmers were utter novices, not experienced men like James Ruse. But this early tendency to consolidation—which reversed itself in the Emancipists’ favor after 1800⁶⁸—was certainly helped by the officers’ money and access to credit, and by the rum itself. An officer could pick the best land for his grant; he could get the most skilled convicts, the “mechanics” and former agricultural laborers, to work it; he paid for his tools, seed and stock a mere fraction of what Emancipist farmers, due to the Rum Corps monopoly on imports, paid him; and if an ex-convict farmer started wasting his life with booze, some Rum Corps officer would always appear and buy him out.

“The changes we have undergone since the departure of Governor Phillip,” wrote John Macarthur as early as 1793,

are so great and extraordinary that to recite them all might create some suspicion of their truth. From a state of desponding poverty and threatened famine that this settlement should be raised to its present aspect in so short a time is barely credible. As for myself, I have a farm containing nearly 250 acres. . . . [O]f this year’s produce I have sold £400 worth, and I have now remaining in my granaries upwards of 1,800 bushels of corn.⁶⁹

By 1799, New South Wales Corps officers owned 32 percent of the cattle in Australia, 40 percent of the goats, 59 percent of the horses, and 77 percent of the sheep. Grasping, haughty, jealous of their privileges and prerogatives, Macarthur and his friends were on top and meant to stay there; and the official governors who followed Grose and Paterson—Hunter, King, and Bligh—had the utmost difficulty controlling them. They were so powerful, in fact, that on January 26, 1808, the twentieth anniversary of white settlement, they staged a coup d’etat by rebelling against Governor Bligh, deposing him and running New South Wales as a military junta for two years. For this remarkable mutiny, none of the officers was hanged or even seriously punished.

Their junta mentality fostered two assumptions. The first was that none of them—especially not John Macarthur, who organized the rebellion from a prison cell where Bligh had put him—believed that naval governors were ever on their side. The second was that convicts were there to be used, not reformed. Both caused a rapid hardening of attitudes against convicts, the lumpenproletariat of New South Wales. The New South Wales Corps stiffly resisted any effort to criticize, or even inspect, its treatment of the convicts. The emblematic form of this attitude would show itself on Norfolk Island.

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THE ATLANTIC, before taking Phillip away in 1792, had stopped at Norfolk Island on its outward voyage with supplies for its desperate colonists. Those crewmen and marines who went ashore were struck by how bad, under the hand of King, the place had become for its prisoners. When they got to Sydney they talked about it, and a marine named John Easty noted in his diary how “that Iland which was recond the most flourishing of any Hand in the World all most”

now turns out to be A Pore Mersable [miserable] Place and all manners of Cruelties an opresion uesed by the Governor floging and beeting the people to Death that its better for the pore unhappy Creatures to be hanged allmost then to come under the command of such Tyrants and the Govner [King] behaves more like a mad man than a man in trus[t]ed with the Goverment of an Iland . . . Belonging to Great Britain.⁷⁰

King had gone back to England for a brief recuperative spell after the wreck of the Sirius in March 1790, but he returned to Norfolk Island in November 1791, newly married to his cousin, Anna Coombe. He had been promoted to lieutenant-governor of the island and would be its commandant for five years.

The Norfolk Island prisoners were now guarded by the Botany Bay Rangers. The corps rank and file made no effort to keep their distance from the convicts. They became “very intimate with the convicts, living in their huts, eating, drinking and gambling with them, and perpetually enticing the women to leave the men they were married to.”⁷¹ There was friction. Emancipated convicts complained that the soldiers were seducing their wives; and one of these convicts, Dring, the island’s coxswain, beat up a soldier who had repeatedly cuckolded him. King fined the aggrieved husband twenty shillings, which, he hoped, “would convince the soldier that he was not to be insulted with impunity.” It did no such thing; the soldiers felt Dring should have been flogged. During Christmas of 1793, four soldiers were seen heading with a torch for Dring’s farm, intent on burning his corn. When a civilian farmer tried to stop them, one man jabbed the torch full in his face, “which bruised and burnt him very much.”

Even King could not tolerate this. He had the soldier arrested. That evening, two other soldiers got bludgeons and went after Dring. He was found half dead, covered with blood and cuts. His assailants were court-martialled and one of them, Private Downey, was sentenced to receive 100 lashes and to give Dring a conciliatory present: a gallon of rum. At this, to King’s amazement, Dring and a few other Emancipists begged him to forgive the soldiers: They were terrified of reprisals by the corps. They got their wish, on the condition—as King strictly ordered—that the Emancipists and the soldiers should all sit down and drink the gallon of rum together.

Here one might expect the rancor to simmer down, but it did not. Bored, bitter and pugnacious, the redcoats (which they were in name only: King was to report that by night you could not tell from a man’s dress whether he was a soldier, a settler or a convict) kept stalking about, picking fights, muttering darkly against King—whom they despised as a naval officer, an outsider to the corps—and plotting mutiny. In January 1794, King learned from a convict informer that the soldiers had taken an oath “not to suffer any of their comrades to be punished for an offence against a convict any more”; they would rise, kill Dring, and put all the prisoners to death.⁷²

Quelling this, King realized, would be “a very delicate affair”; one did not lightly disarm, on mere suspicion, a whole detachment of soldiers who owed their allegiance to a governor, himself their commanding officer, only two weeks’ sail away on the Australian mainland. Nevertheless, King managed to disarm and arrest the ten suspected mutineers. He hastily formed a civil militia, consisting of forty-four free settlers, all former seamen and marines (no Emancipist, of course, could be trusted with a gun). By a remarkable fluke, a colonial schooner—the first vessel they had seen in nine months—arrived at Norfolk Island two days later, with dispatches from Sydney. The mutineers were shipped to the mainland for trial.

After they reached Sydney Cove, Grose read King’s long report on the incident and was apoplectic with rage. His old wounds, inflicted almost twenty years before by the musket-balls of the American militia, were hurting him badly in the unrelenting summer heat of 1793–94; and now he learned that his naval subordinate had actually armed a civilian militia on Norfolk Island. This was subversion. Grose picked up his pen. “No provocation that a soldier can give,” he wrote to King, “is ever to be admitted as an excuse for the convicts striking a soldier.” No soldier could be tried by a civil judge or magistrate, or even put in the custody of a civilian constable. Most important of all, these constables “are to understand that they are not on any pretence whatever to stop or seize a soldier, although he should be detected in an unlawful act.”⁷³

This remarkable letter was a charter of immunity for the New South Wales Corps. For Grose, the word convict meant both felons under sentence and Emancipists. Since the number of free emigrants was negligible, “convict” in Grose’s eyes included virtually every civilian in the colony. Thus, the civil establishment could no longer touch the military, but the soldiers could do as they pleased, subject only to the restraint of a court-martial conducted by their own officers. Fortunately, King stood his ground against his intemperate governor. He sent his own explanations to the secretary of state in London; they were accepted, and Grose had to withdraw and apologize.

But when King himself became governor, succeeding the aged Captain Hunter in 1800, he installed a tiger from the Rum Corps as commandant of Norfolk Island. He was Major Joseph Foveaux (1765–1846), in whose regime the military contempt for convicts would approach the level of mania.⁷⁴

There is no record of who Joseph Foveaux’s parents were, but his father is said to have been a French cook in the employ of the Earl of Upper Ossory at Ampthill Park, in Bedfordshire. His mother’s name is not recorded. Someone evidently took the trouble (and spent the money) to give him an education and steer him into a regiment, and his rapid promotion within the New South Wales Corps—from captain in 1791 to major in 1796, a most unusual leap for a young man on minor routine duty in an insignificant outpost—suggests a powerful male patron in the background.

From his letters, one can glean little of Foveaux’s tastes and interests except a passion for military correctness. But he seems to have had the mentality of many a later camp commandant; Norfolk Island liberated him, enabling his sadism, which had been restrained by the more public sphere of the mainland, to overflow far from courts and judges, thinly disguised as “necessary rigor.”

Arriving there late in 1800, he found morale had sagged badly in the four years since King had left. The flax manufactory still survived, but it produced nothing exportable. Skilled labor was short, and most buildings were tumbledown. The grindstones were worn out, the saws rusted, and the master carpenter had been suspended for laziness and impertinence. The settlement swarmed with bastard children, some two hundred of them, rather more than a fifth of the total island population, all illiterate and wild. The schoolmaster was in jail for debt and the lone missionary seemed “very unfit for a minister.” Clearly, there was much to do.⁷⁵

Foveaux did not go into detail about his own methods. They survive in an account by his head jailer, a transported highwayman named Robert Jones (alias Robert Buckey, alias George Abrahams), who had got a conditional pardon in or around 1795 from Governor Hunter at King’s instigation but had chosen to stay on Norfolk Island.⁷⁶

“Major Foveaux,” Jones remarked, “was one of them hard and determined men who believe in the lash more than the Bible.” Foveaux was determined to leave solid stone buildings behind him: a jail, a barracks, staff houses. A day’s convict work was breaking five cartloads of stone per man. When the picks and hammers broke, for they were of poor quality, their users were severely flogged. The hours were long and the food bad (“the Pork . . . was so soft that you could put your finger through it, and always rotten”). Prisoners turned out before dawn and, rain or shine, had to put their straw palliasses outside their cells; when it rained, the convicts returning from labor were

turned into their Cells in their wet state with no means of drying their clothes, such were my orders from the Governor; and did any one of them make a complaint they were immediately sent to the triangles and ordered 25 lashes. Any further complaint was an additional 50.⁷⁷

The fate of the refractory convict on Norfolk Island was one of prolonged and hideous torture:

The flogger was a County of Clare man a very powerful man and [he] took great pleasure in inflicting as much bodily punishment as possible, using such expressions as “Another half pound, mate, off the beggar’s ribs.” His face and clothes usually presented an appearance of a mincemeat chopper, being covered in flesh from the victim’s body. Major Foveaux delighted in such an exhibition and would show his satisfaction by smiling as an encouragement to the flogger. He would sometimes order the victim to be brought before him with these words: Hulloa you damn’d scoundrel how do you like it? and order him to put on his coat and immediately go to his work.⁷⁸

One prisoner named Joseph Mansbury had been flogged so often—some 2,000 lashes in three years—that his back appeared

quite bare of flesh, and his collarer [sic] bones were exposed looking very much like two Ivory Polished horns. It was with some difficulty that we could find another place to flog him. Tony [Chandler, the overseer] suggested to me that we had better [do it on] the soles of his feet next time.⁷⁹

A sentence of 200 lashes was called a “feeler”; one did not forget it. All the medical treatment the convict received was a bucket of sea water on his back, an operation known as “getting salty back.” “Many were relieved by death from this treatment,” Jones wrote. “It would be impossible to detail the torture received . . . [from] the commandant, his servants and overseers. One of the favourite . . . punishments was to make the leg irons more small each month so that they would pinch the flesh.” There was also a black isolation cell, and a water pit below the ground where prisoners would be locked, alone, naked, and unable to sleep for fear of drowning, for forty-eight hours at a spell.

There were only two ways out of “the old hell,” as convict slang called the place. One was death; the other—as at Macquarie Harbor and Moreton Bay in decades to come—was by committing an offense that justified sending the convict to Sydney for trial. “Many murders,” Jones wrote, “most of them were committed for the purpose of getting to Sydney, it being their only way of seeing heaven [convict slang for the mainland] again.” Some men, including a convict named Thomas Carpenter whom Jones seems to have befriended, simply expired under the preliminary flogging:

His 250 killed him, died of heart-failure they said. God forgive them, and him too. For he was well liked on the Island. But feeling that he was ill, and thinking that his end was near, he struck his officer, with the hope that he would see his friends (in Sydney) once more, he did so but it was his last time. Considering the purpose for which these poor devils obtain justice their lot is all the worse for the manner in which they chose to obtain it.⁸⁰

Foveaux’s main obstacle on Norfolk Island was its deputy judge-advocate, a dim but decent ex-Etonian lawyer named Thomas Hibbins (1762–1816), who had got the post through the patronage of an old school friend, the Earl of Morton. Hibbins was neither ambitious nor gifted (if he had been, he would hardly have considered such a post), but he did have a certain compassion for the convicts. Since it was his task to interpret the civil and criminal law there—and to decide which cases should be tried in Sydney, there being no criminal court on Norfolk Island—he was often in conflict with Foveaux, who saw him as a felon-loving drunk.

For his part, Hibbins seems to have made no secret of his dislike of the commandant and his methods—methods that Foveaux himself delicately described as “vigorous if not exactly conformable to law.” These had to do with Irish political prisoners, originally transported to Sydney for their part in the rebellion of 1798 and then, after appalling floggings of up to 1,000 lashes each for their supposed complicity in a rising that never took place at Parramatta in 1800, sent to Norfolk Island for life.

The Irish gave signs of mutiny almost as soon as they arrived. Most of the convicts already on Norfolk Island were Irish, too; and the insurgents from Sydney, with their tales of the ’98, must have catalyzed them. On the morning of December 14, 1800, an Irish convict named Henry Grady (whose crime was rape, not sedition) appeared at Foveaux’s quarters “apparently in much agitation.” There would be a rising that night, he blurted; a hundred pikes were already made. Foveaux sent a soldier to look for the pikes, and he found them just where Grady said they were—long, fire-hardened sticks, not tipped with iron, but indubitably weapons of a sort. The ringleaders, Grady claimed, were two “politicals”; John Wolloghan, twenty-four years old, of Munster, and Peter McClean, forty, of Ulster. Wolloghan had been in charge of making the pikes, and McClean had recruited the rebels and given them their oath to kill the English officers and guards.

Foveaux put the two under close arrest and called in Thomas Hibbins, the judge-advocate. Hibbins opined that the men could not be tried for their lives by a panel of officers; and moreover, as there were no statute books on Norfolk Island, he did not know how an indictment could be framed against them. Enraged by this “pedantry,” Foveaux convened his officers to discuss “the fatal consequences that were likely to ensue if such daring & wicked designs were not checked in their earliest appearance.” There was no hesitation; the officers, as terrified of mutiny as Foveaux, unanimously agreed to hang Wolloghan and McClean summarily and without trial. They strung them up that night, by the light of flambeaux. Grady, the informer, got a free pardon. “Encouragement to such people,” Foveaux wrote to King, “is ever well bestowed.”⁸¹

At a perfunctory inquiry some months later, Foveaux was exonerated; in fact, his dispatch in hanging the Irish drew praise, not only from King but from Lord Hobart, the secretary of state for the colonies, and in 1802 he was promoted to lieutenant-colonel. He summed up his own views on the matter in a note to Lord Portland:

The nature of this Place is so widely different from any other part of the World, the prisoners sent here, are of the worse Character & in general only those who have committed some fresh crime since their transportation to Port Jackson, in short most of them are a disgrace to human Nature. . . . [a]fter considering these circumstances, the very little support I receive from the Judge-Advocate and the situation of this Island, your grace will (I am persuaded) perceive that different Examples however vigorous if not exactly conformable to Law are on occasions indispensably necessary.⁸²

Hibbins’s objections counted for nothing. If the Irish in Ireland needed martial law to keep them in order, why should their dregs in Australia be protected by civil statutes? The military must not be hampered with niceties. What it most feared was an alliance against this weak and remote English colony between United Irish prisoners and a French naval force. Thus, one finds Robert Jones, Foveaux’s jailer, quoting a fragment of some official address by his commandant—“His Majesty King George has been pleased to grant to all his subjects complete protection, in out of the way places . . .” Then he scribbles, “What a mockery to issue such a piece of information to chained convicts. Protection when we were the greatest enemy—as my orders were to murder all the prisoners under my care should any foreign nation bear down upon us. Protection be dam’d.”⁸³

He was looking back to a moment in 1804, when a convoy of China traders escorted by a French warship, L’Athenienne, appeared off Norfolk Island. The garrison mistook them for an invasion fleet and prepared to do battle. Redcoats were sent scouring about for broken rum bottles, and the island’s two corroded six-pounders were crammed “with these fragments of glass, which (the Commandant swore) would cut the French to pieces.” Foveaux was not there. He had sailed for England two months before, leaving the island under the command of Captain John Piper. But he had also left standing orders about the Irish with his civilian staff, headed by Jones. Thus, when the ships were sighted, Jones and his chief constable Edward Kimberley herded some sixty-five Irish convicts into the settlement jail, barred the doors, closed the windows so that they could not signal to the French and then piled up masses of Norfolk Island pine brushwood around the walls on a hastily constructed scaffold, thus turning the whole building into a pyre for living men. “The soldiers,” Jones wrote, “were to set fire to the prison upon the signal from me.” If any of the “politicals” escaped being burned alive, they were to be shot. Captain Piper, who was supervising the cannon several miles away, knew nothing of these preparations for a mass burning of the Irish; and providentially, since the ships sailed on, the prisoners escaped the incineration Foveaux had prepared for them.

No record of Foveaux’s sadism, or of the torments he and his men visited on women at Norfolk Island, found its way into the official reports, although it is hard to believe that Governor King had no inkling of what his lieutenant-governor was up to. Foveaux censored all letters. “No person,” Jones noted, “was allowed to write any information about the place or the work done here, they were only to write in reference to the state of our good conduct and friends.” Norfolk Island was a sealed universe and its reputation among the mainland convicts existed only by word of mouth; you could not officially threaten with what did not officially exist. In a society where the line between convictry and freedom was always being crossed—by emancipation or by reconviction—the stories of the convict subculture spread quickly through the lower class, but their rulers did nothing about them.

They felt no need to. Civil law was sketchy; England had not equipped its colony with a normal judicial framework and would not do so until after 1810. The general attitude was that one did not need full civil courts in a jail. Not one judge-advocate appointed by England in these early years was properly trained. The first, David Collins, was a marine officer with no prior experience of the law. The next in office, Richard Dore (1749-1800), was a blundering and cantankerous incompetent, much given to petty graft. His successor, Richard Atkins, was even worse: The drunken fifth son of a baronet, he had run through his legacy, bought and then sold a military commission and skipped from England in order to elude his creditors. Arriving in the colony in 1791, Atkins managed, by assiduous name-dropping and currying of favor with the officials (especially with Governor Hunter), to get himself appointed judge-advocate. His professional conduct was enough to disgust the next governor, Bligh, who called him “the ridicule of the community: sentences of death have been pronounced in moments of intoxication; his determination is weak, his opinion floating and infirm; his knowledge of the law is insignificant and subservient to private inclination.” The measure of his detachment from the interests of the military may perhaps be gauged from the fact that the wife of this pathetic drunk (“She wears the breeches completely,” noted the convict John Grant, who lived for a time in their household) raised two of the six bastard children whom Major George Johnston of the New South Wales Corps had sired on various women.⁸⁴

Such men could not defy the junta. The corps, therefore, was virtually immune from civil law; and military law was exercised by its own officers to protect the interests of their own group. One sees why a Foveaux could flog and kill without restraint on Norfolk Island and yet have no word breathed against him by his brother officers. The question of the “rights” of convicts was barely worth raising in New South Wales between the departure of Arthur Phillip in 1792 and the arrival of Governor Lachlan Macquarie in 1810.

By then, the English colony in Australia had spread and solidified. It was no longer a tiny outpost, racked with hunger and scurvy, clinging to the edge of the continent. Sydney was a fortified town and the country behind it, the Cumberland Plain, was fast becoming a patchwork of cleared, productive fields, self-sufficient and worked with varying degrees of efficiency by convict slave labor. The hoped-for economic importance of Norfolk Island had not materialized. But it had been bound up with the idea that New South Wales was a naval outpost, and that was beginning to change. In the early 1800s, a few last efforts were made to utilize the pines and flax that had been the colony’s naval raison d’être.⁸⁵

Thus in 1802, the government tried the experiment of sending forth to Australia a few batches of convicts in Royal Navy vessels; and rather than waste space on the return voyage—for Navy ships, unlike the contracted ones that carried most of the convicts out, could not fill up with Oriental trade goods on the return run—the Admiralty sent with them drawings for major frame timbers of three classes of ships, to be cut and rough-shaped in New South Wales and brought back to England. The order was partly filled by King, but the practice lapsed. In 1805, King also had a small naval vessel, the Buffalo, rigged with a suit of sails woven from Norfolk Island flax by the women convicts in the Female Factory at Parramatta. She was the only ship to sail under such canvas. Up to 1810, sporadic efforts continued to be made to supply the Royal Navy with Australian timber.⁸⁶ But they were never more than a footnote to the main economic life of the colony, which was shifting decisively to agriculture—to the land and its owners, rather than the sea and its captains. So Norfolk Island, with its dark pinnacles and stands of now strategically useless pines, was allowed to fall into decay. By March 1810, its population had sunk to 117 people, and one of Lachlan Macquarie’s first actions in assuming his governorship of New South Wales was to recall the mild officer who had succeeded Foveaux as commandant, Captain Piper, and order the abandonment of the island. “The impolicy of the original settlement,” the colonial secretary, Lord Liverpool, had told him, “has been fully demonstrated.”⁸⁷

In 1813, the breaking-up began. The frame huts were torn down and burnt (the nails frugally saved), the stone houses demolished, and every last animal except a few pigs that got away was slaughtered, skinned, butchered and packed down in casks of brine. There must be nothing left to catch the eye of a passing ship, no base from which another settlement could be made. They even left behind a dozen dogs to run wild and breed into a hunting pack to discourage visitors from landing. The last salvage from the settlement was loaded into the brig Kangaroo in February 1814, and when she sailed, the island was as empty as it had been before the arrival of Cook. It would stay so for a decade; the new abode of misery was Van Diemen’s Land, far in the south.

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THE ENGLISH invasion of Van Diemen’s Land was by higher imperial standards a muddled and squalid affair. It produced no setpiece battles, no benevolent occupation, no heroes, profits or cultural loot. It merely opened another pit within the antipodean darkness, a small hole in the world about the size of Ireland, which would in due time swallow more than 65,000 men and women convicts—four out of every ten people transported to Australia. How many Tasmanian Aborigines died while the invading whites readied this cavity is not known, because no one knew how many there were to begin with. Probably not very many: The best guess at present is 3,000 to 4,000 people, hunting and gathering in small bands of 30 to 80—a population density roughly equal to that of the Aborigines of coastal New South Wales.⁸⁸

But die they did—shot like kangaroos and poisoned like dogs, ravaged by European diseases and addictions, hunted by laymen and pestered by missionaries, “brought in” from their ancestral territories to languish in camps. It took less than seventy-five years of white settlement to wipe out most of the people who had occupied Tasmania for some thirty thousand years; it was the only true genocide in English colonial history. By the standards of Pol Pot, let alone Josef Stalin or Adolf Hitler, this was a small slaughter. But not to the Tasmanian Aborigines.

Between convict and black, much blood is mingled in the soil of this green, lovely, lugubrious island—so much, in fact, that parts of it seem to be emblematic spots, places where ordinary nature is permanently corrupted by the leaching of history, a salt that nothing can extract from the earth. Except that, in Tasmania, it is hard at first to sense the violence of the implanted culture. Its relics are so modest: an earnestly detailed stone bridge spanning the river at Ross, overseen by a convict mason who once worked for Beau Nash; the squat, authoritarian Doric columns of a Hobart government building. Yet when the first white invaders reached the shores of the Derwent River, the idea that they would last long was much in doubt.

Van Diemen’s Land had been occupied to forestall the French who, to the alarm of New South Wales’s tarpaulin Governor King,⁸⁹ had been nosing about in the ill-charted waters of southeastern Australia. Bass Strait, which separates Van Diemen’s Land from the mainland, was discovered in 1797–98. Its weather was bad and its waters were strewn with islands whose vast colonies of wildlife would support the future seal trade of Australia, but which were a peril to ships—King Island to the west, the Furneaux group in the east, and a nasty prickle of rocks and reefs athwart the strait. But to go through the Bass Strait, avoiding the long southern route below Van Diemen’s Land, clipped weeks off the passage from England to Sydney.

The strategic importance of this sea lane was obvious, and King strongly felt there had to be a settlement to secure it. In January 1802 Lieutenant John Murray, surveying the southern coast in the Lady Nelson, discovered a great bay on the mainland near the head of the strait, which in due course was named Port Phillip Bay: the harbor of modern Melbourne.

The following April, another coastal explorer, Matthew Flinders, was working eastward along the coast when he ran into two westbound French ships at an anchorage near the present site of Adelaide, which he named Encounter Bay. They were Le Géographeand Le Naturaliste, on a cartographic mission for the French Navy under Captain Nicolas Baudin. Baudin’s expedition seems to have had no direct military purpose, despite the Napoleonic Wars. Like Flinders, he was trying to find out whether the western part of Australia was all of a piece with its eastern, British-occupied flank, New South Wales. He had spent more than a month mapping the southern coast of Van Diemen’s Land and had bestowed a number of French names on his rough charts of Terre Napoléon, as he called the south coast of mainland Australia. Baudin and his exhausted, sick crew put into Sydney Harbor in June 1802; he stayed there for several months refitting, and he showed Governor King his survey charts.

King thought he smelled a rat. The mere presence of French ships in these waters was bad enough, but French names tacked on the British coast—albeit an unoccupied, unclaimed one—were worse. The idea of having to share this continent with “Boney,” no matter how large it might be, was intolerable. And when Baudin sailed south again, King was sure he was going to start claiming territory and hoisting the tricolore.

King had already urged London to occupy Port Phillip as soon as possible. Now he sent an armed schooner to shadow Baudin. (It caught up with him at King Island in Bass Strait, where Baudin handed over some escaped convicts who had stowed away in his ship in Sydney.) Since Baudin had been snooping around the D’Entrecasteaux Channel, while intrepid American whalers from the far side of the Pacific had already penetrated the calving grounds of the black whales there and in Storm Bay at the mouth of the Derwent River—thus threatening to seize the fisheries that should have been a British monopoly—King decided to put a settlement on the Derwent.

In August 1803 a little party of forty-nine souls, made up of free settlers and Rum Corps men with twenty-one male and three female convicts, sailed from Port Jackson. Their leader was a twenty-three-year-old lieutenant from Devon, John Bowen (1780-1827), just arrived in the colony on the convict transport Glatton, whom King promoted to the rank of commander in the belief that it would impress foreign sea captains. Armed with minute instructions from King, Bowen sailed up the Derwent estuary and pitched his camp, complete with a pair of 12-pound carronades, at a spot on its eastern shore which he named Risdon. It had a stream of fresh water and a splendid view of the snowy brow of Mount Wellington, but little else to recommend it. Its soil was poor; it was whipped by gales blowing from the 4,000-foot mountain; and the stream itself went dry when the weather did—a familiar event in Australian colonization.

Meanwhile, King’s pleas for a settlement at Port Phillip Bay, protecting Bass Strait from the questing French, had reached London. England’s response was to send a ship to colonize the bay. She was HMS Calcutta, a vessel of the Royal Navy, bearing 308 convicts with a smattering of their wives and children (who were allowed to go out with their husbands as indentured servants), guarded by marines. The expedition was under the command of David Collins, the marine officer who, having served as the first judge-advocate of Phillip’s settlement at Port Jackson, had returned to England and written one of the first and best books on the infant colony, his two-volume Account of the English Colony in New South Wales, 1798-1802. It earned him a public name as an expert on matters Australian, and on the strength of his eight years’ service in Sydney the government asked him to go back as lieutenant-governor of the new colony at Port Phillip. Harassed by his debts—a situation aggravated by a bureaucratic hitch in his emoluments as a marine officer—Collins accepted. As soon as his appointment became known in London, he found himself pursued by Jeremy Bentham, who had just published Panopticon Versus New South Wales. This was a lengthy diatribe against the policy of transportation whose aim was to persuade Lord Pelham to build penitentiaries instead; the model Bentham put forth was his Panopticon, with its circular plan and central watchtower, affording continuous totalitarian inspection of the caged prisoners, which had become his obsessive project. Bentham even wrote to Collins urging him to build a Panopticon in New South Wales, and the two men dined together twice. “I have given him a copy of the Panopticon book,” Bentham reported to his brother, adding that Collins had asked him for “a Draught [sketch] of the Panopticon Plan. . . . I said, I hoped I might—with the book and a little nous, he might be able to do without the draught; [but] the nous, I fear, is lacking.” Despite Bentham’s unjustifiably low view of Collins’s intelligence, he kept lobbying: “Are you serious in your intention of building a prison, and moreover of building it on the central inspection principle?” Just before sailing, Collins brushed him politely off. “I have been lately so occupied . . . as to prevent my waiting on you to receive the Hints for my pursuing the Panopticon System, which you were so good as to prepare for me. Be assured that my Prison shall if possible be a circular one.” Of course, no Panopticon would rise by the shores of Port Phillip Bay. The Calcutta, escorted by the transport Ocean, sailed in April 1803.⁹⁰

The fleet reached Port Phillip in October. The bay proved a miserable disappointment, as bad (or almost) as Botany Bay had seemed to the men of the First Fleet fifteen years before: sandy sterile ground, little water, a persistent hot northerly wind, swarms of biting flies, and great difficulties of access by sea because of the adverse tidal currents. After six months at sea, all hands were yearning for dry land again, but their enthusiasm soon waned. In “Canvas Town,” their encampment on the sand dunes, the shade temperature in Collins’s tent was 102°, and in the sun it reached 132°. It seemed a “barbarous country,” the surveyor George Prideaux Harris wrote to his brother after three months there: nothing but sand, with no water and so few animals that, for meat, he had once been reduced to eating a swan’s carcass fit only for a dunghill. The one recompense was the lobsters, so plentiful that the convicts could catch five hundred in an evening. “Never, surely, was a more barren land,” wrote one prisoner, the counterfeiter James Grove, to his friends in faraway England. “I thought it unlikely to answer to any good purpose.”⁹¹

Everyone else thought so, too. After a couple of weeks camped on the sand hills, the marines were muttering and grumbling their way toward mutiny, and to set an example Collins had a couple of insubordinate privates savagely flogged, one with 700 lashes. Some convicts tried to escape. A former army officer named Lee, transported for forgery, who seemed “quite a pedant, eternally quoting passages from the Greek and Latin authors,” wrote some scurrilous lampoons on Collins which circulated among the tents; he was found out and bolted into the bush, never to be seen again, taking the lieutenant-governor’s fowling piece with him. Groups of four or five men would vanish into the dunes, heading (as they thought) for China.^*92

So there was general relief when dispatches arrived from Governor King in Sydney authorizing Collins to abandon Port Phillip and move his settlement down to the Derwent, to join Bowen’s tiny band. But King also instructed Collins to take a look at Port Dalrymple, at the mouth of the Tamar River on the northern coast of Van Diemen’s Land (the site of modern Launceston) and see if an outpost could be put there to guard the fisheries of Bass Strait from American whalers and sealers. Collins reported that it could not, or not yet, as the river entrance was difficult, and the local blacks seemed very aggressive.⁹³

In any case, the strength of his party was low. So many men were sick that he could not mount enough sentinels; if one more officer went ill, he would not even find the quorum for a court martial. So the prudent course was to join forces with Bowen on the Derwent. A settlement, Collins felt, would be better on the Derwent than on the Tamar: “Its position at the Southern Extremity of Van Dieman’s Land gives it an Advantage over every Harbour yet discovered in the Straits . . . [A]s a Port of Shelter to Ships from Europe, America or India, either for Whaling or other speculation, it will be greatly resorted to.”⁹⁴

So Port Phillip was abandoned. When the settlers reached the Derwent, Collins relieved Bowen of his command and moved the settlement from Risdon to the western shore of the estuary. In a sketch from about 1805, one sees the embryo town of Hobart, named after the secretary of state for the colonies who was the patron of Collins’s expedition. It is a little straggle of tents and huts, with Government House—hardly more than a cottage—on Battery Point, and the huts of the surveyor-general, the surgeon and the chaplain ranged alongside it; casks are stacked up on the dock island, and an ensign flutters from its mast in front of the public store, while the whole scene is dominated by the brooding wall of Mount Wellington, capped with snow. In 1805 it must have looked very frail and ephemeral. But in the green valley folds that ran down to the water, in the copses and meadows that (seen through half-closed eyes) reminded young Bowen of a nobleman’s park, there was at least some reminiscence of the England that most of the colonists would never see again. Nostalgia could cling to this Tasmanian landscape.

Yet life by the Derwent was hard for all the colonists at first, bond or free. The isolation, torpor and semi-starvation of early Sydney repeated themselves in Van Diemen’s Land. “With no ships visiting us,” recalled Collins’s second-in-command, Lieutenant Edward Lord,

the whole settlement was called upon to endure hardships of no ordinary kind. The Governor himself, the officers, and the entire settlement for eighteen months, were without bread, vegetables, tea, sugar, wine, spirits, or beer, or any substitute, except the precarious supply of the wild game of the country.⁹⁵

Memories of this starvation time died hard. Thirty years later a Hobart woman recounted what she had known as a child in the first settlement: coming off the ship and sleeping under a wet blanket, then in the hollow trunk of a tree; being “treated kindly” by curious, not yet persecuted Aborigines, in whose care white infants were sometimes left by their parents; living on “Botany Bay Greens” (boiled seaweed scraped off the rocks), and even wolfing down the “crap” (cindery residue) of whale blubber, shovelled overboard from the roaring try-pots of American whalers in Storm Bay and washed up on the beaches. The same oily gobbets were used to feed the colony’s precious pigs, contaminating the taste of their flesh.⁹⁶

By the winter of 1805 the convicts were down to a ration of 2 pounds 10 ounces of salt pork and 4 pounds of bread a week, a ration that in normal times would scarcely last two days. By 1806 the colony was starving to death. Collins had hoped that supplies would come from Sydney. But in March 1806 the farms along the Hawkesbury River, on which the food supply of Sydney depended, were devastated by flood. The water covered 36,000 acres and destroyed all the standing crops, along with the farmers’ tools, livestock and seed reserves. What remained was not enough for Sydney and Parramatta; and for Hobart, there was nothing. Two years later things had improved a little in Hobart—but not much. “Bring with you as much Flour and Wheat as possible,” wrote an early political transportee to Van Diemen’s Land, the Irish schoolmaster William Maum, to a friend who was about to move to Hobart Town in 1808,

and a sufficiency of corn for whatever Stock you may bring down, bring down about 12 good young Ewes, four or five Sows in pig (if possible) as there are no Boars here—as much poultry as you can get off . .  bring with you Hoes and all other Tools as they are here remarkably scarce. . . . [t]he houses in general are of Lath & plaister and immoderately dear. . . [t]he Gov’ here has it not in his power to fulfil the intentions of Gov’, as he has neither Tradesmen nor Labourers, and nothing in the Stores. . . . Fowls here are of the utmost consequence, their Value being beyond Money.⁹⁷

There was very little of the fellow-feeling that makes privation bearable. Shortages on this Georgian frontier bred stony, grasping men, who robbed one another like jackals snarling over a carcass and cheated the government blind whenever they could. The clerks who ran the government stores were so deep in collusion with the farmers who sold them their produce that a newly appointed chief clerk of the Hobart commissariat declared, in 1816, that not one document or account could be found in its records.⁹⁸

Between the vulpine rapacity of the settlers and the short commons of government, the Derwent colony—along with the smaller one set up in October 1804 at Port Dalrymple on the Tamar, under Lieutenant-Colonel Paterson, to fix an English foothold on Bass Strait—might well have perished. What saved them both was that inoffensive marsupial, the kangaroo.

Kangaroos were plentiful in the bush of Van Diemen’s Land—much more so than they had ever been around Sydney. Every able-bodied man who could use a gun went hunting them, for kangaroo flesh, not bread, was the staff of life. Collins tried to keep the market under strict control. Hunters were obliged to sell the meat to the commissariat store. To convicts and others “on the store,” it was issued free; the usual ration was 8 pounds a week. To settlers living “on their own hands,” its price fluctuated between 6d. and is. 6d. a pound. In one six-month period the settlers ate 15,000 pounds of dressed meat from haunches and tails, representing a slaughter of perhaps a thousand ’roos.⁹⁹

This reliance on hunting brought prompt social results, all of them bad. It installed the gun, rather than the plough, as the totem of survival in Van Diemen’s Land. It favored a mood of opportunism, of social improvidence. Small settlers tended to neglect the long-range pursuits of farming and instead concentrated on killing whatever they could. Before long, the kangaroos around Hobart were hunted out, and men and dogs had to push further into the bush, competing against the Aborigines for game. Thus, the pattern of ambush and murder between white and black began; it would end, in a few decades, with the near-extermination of the Tasmanian Aborigines. Hunger had put guns in the hands of convicts—and this had never been allowed to happen in New South Wales. It soon created a fringe class of armed, uncontrollable bushmen, most of whom regarded Aborigines as vermin. They would go out for days at a stretch with their “mates” and their kangaroo-dogs (half-wild mongrel lurchers, with jaws like mantraps) and bring back whatever they could corner and kill. Very soon these mountain men of Van Diemen’s Land shed whatever vestiges of obedience they might have felt to the System. They became the first bushrangers (see chapter 7). They kept the guns, stole their masters’ dogs and stayed in the bush. Earlier absconders from Sydney and Parramatta had died because they were not armed, but not these kangarooers. When Hobart and Port Dalrymple were tiny and the outlying farms few, they could be controlled to some degree, if only because they had to sell most of their kangaroo meat directly to the government before getting more ammunition. But as settlement pushed outward, farmer and assigned servants started buying the meat and skins directly from the outlaws. And since few settlers had any scruples about cheating their neighbors as long as they were not seen at it, they also “received” the mutton the kangarooers stole from other sheep runs and kept on the good side of the hunters by giving them ammunition, tea and rum. As the stock of sheep and cattle in the colony grew, so the demand for kangaroo meat dropped. But everyone needed kangaroo skins, for shoes, hats, bags, jackets and pants; and in between killing ‘roos, the hunters moved to sheep stealing. They could do this with impunity, unless a settler caught them in the act and shot them. The redcoats could not catch them; they did not know the bush.

So in theory, the founding years of Van Diemen’s Land displayed a rigidly patterned Georgian fabric of rank and power which, in practice, did not survive inspection. It was a façade. The official barriers between military and civilian, bond and free were breached in a score of ways by hunger, shortages, the rub of proximity, the ferocity of the good and the occasional decency of the criminal. “They call it the end of the world—and for vice it is truly so, for here wickedness flourishes unchecked.”¹⁰⁰ So did boredom, a great equalizer. Technique of any kind was rare, technology feeble, and “cultivation” in any but the most rudimentary sense scarcely existed at all. When he wanted some conversation to take his mind off the miseries of his post, Lieutenant-Governor Collins, “a literary and excellent man,” had to turn to the forger James Grove and his family, “passing with him under his roof many no doubt intellectual hours.”¹⁰¹ In return, Grove designed Collins a house; and when the lieutenant-governor died in 1810 of a heart attack at the early age of 54, worn out by the strain of keeping his precarious little colony alive, it was Grove, “his eyes suffused with tears the whole time,” who cut and planed the yellow Huon pine boards for his double coffin, helped place the corpse in it, engraved the silver memorial plate and screwed down the lid. Five weeks later, heartbroken at the loss of the friend and patron who had returned him to respectability on this far edge of the world, Grove himself died. “As sensible, ingenious a man as I ever met with, & highly esteemed and respected by the Gov^r & every officer in the settlement, for his uniform and excellent character”—such had been the judgment of the surveyor Harris on this convict.¹⁰² He was buried near Collins. The friendship of these men was perhaps emblematic, suggesting at its most benevolent, and thus uncommon, level the interdependence between prisoners and masters. Wherever new settlements were made, whatever fields were broken, English settlement in Australia rested on its convicts. As Mary Gilmore would write in 1918 of the prisoners who built Australia:

I was the convict

Sent to hell,

To make in the desert

The living well:

I split the rock;

I felled the tree—

The nation was

Because of me.¹⁰³

We must now look more closely at these reluctant pioneers.