4.
EARLY EUROPEANS IN AUSTRALIA
Europeans first saw Australia in 1606 – as far as we know. The Dutchman Abel Tasman bumped into Tasmania in 1642, and was astonished to discover that it was named after him. No, just kidding. That came later. The English adventurer and pirate William Dampier landed in the north-west of Australia in 1688. But Captain James Cook gets the guernsey as the man who seriously explored the area and claimed ownership of it for the Poms, in 1770. With him was Sir Joseph Banks, who had the job of recording the unique plants and animals.
The British government eventually decided to send convicts to Australia, to get rid of them. It must have seemed like sending them to Mars. The first load of about seven hundred and fifty prisoners arrived in Sydney Cove on 26 January 1788, in a group of vessels known as the First Fleet, under the command of Governor Arthur Phillip.
Others soon followed, but the first European settlers were ‘locked in’ by the Blue Mountains until 1813, when explorers Blaxland, Wentworth and Lawson found a way through the mountains and onto the plains beyond the Great Dividing Range. When they saw the vast grasslands that they thought were crying out for a few million sheep and cattle, they felt as if they’d won the lottery, and in a sense they had.
Gradually, Europeans battled their way through and around Australia by land and sea. A lot of them expected to find an inland ocean, because they’d noticed big rivers flowing off towards the middle of Australia.
Many explorers became household names.
They crossed Australia from south to north and (almost) back again, in 1860–1861. These idiots had no idea what they were doing, taking everything with them except elephants and mobile phones. They paid an awful price, with virtually everyone in the expedition dying – some because their rescue party gave up and left just a couple of hours before the haggard explorers staggered into the meeting place.
These two friends spent some time in 1795 and 1796 exploring the coastline near Sydney. They used a tiny boat called Tom Thumb. In 1798, in a leaky vessel called Norfolk, they did a lap of Van Diemen’s Land, proving that it was an island. Before that, people thought it was joined to the mainland.
In 1801–1803, Flinders and a navy crew circumnavigated Australia. For the first time, Europeans had a good picture of what the continent looked like.
William Bligh was already a famous man before he became Governor of New South Wales in 1805. He had been captain of a ship called Bounty, and he was hated and feared by many of his sailors. In 1789, they mutinied and chucked him and eighteen of his buddies into a little rowboat, waving them goodbye, expecting them to die of starvation, thirst, exposure, or sheer boredom. Well, Bligh might have been a bastard, but he was one of the greatest European sailors in history and he sailed that little rowboat 5,823 kilometres, from Tonga to Timor, to safety. As Governor of New South Wales, however, he continued to be controversial and set some kind of record by being the subject of a second mutiny, when a group called the Rum Corps, soldiers who thought they ran New South Wales, objected to Bligh’s telling them what to do. They rebelled against him in 1808. There’s a story that Bligh hid under the bed when they came to Government House to get him, but it’s hard to believe that of a man who might have been irritating but was certainly brave.
His home, Elizabeth Farm, at Parramatta in Sydney, is the oldest building in Australia – built in 1793. Macarthur is credited with having started the sheep industry in Australia, and having brought merino sheep here from Spain. The merinos took to Australia with as much enthusiasm as did rabbits, blackberries, and visitors to the Sydney Olympics. For the next hundred and fifty years, much of Australia’s wealth came from merinos.
Macarthur was good buddies with the soldiers in the Rum Corps, and his fights with Bligh were a major cause of the 1808 mutiny.
I thought I’d better mention my great-great-great-great-uncle, who was an early clergyman and magistrate, a deadly enemy of John Macarthur, and famous for having no sense of humour. He was known as the Hanging Parson – a priest who sentenced men to death on Friday, prayed for them at church on Sunday, and executed them on Monday. Nice one, Uncle Sam.
He gets the credit for having discovered the first gold in Australia – near Bathurst, in 1851. His find started a wild rush for gold that dramatically changed the history, geography and economy of Australia.
The six individual states agreed to get together and, by an act of Federation in 1901, become one nation, called the Commonwealth of Australia. Much of the work for this was done by Parkes, a dominating and sometimes disliked figure, who died five years before Federation, but who had a powerful vision for Australia and a powerful effect on this country’s direction.
He was Australia’s first Prime Minister. He believed in the idea of a federated country, but he wanted it to be an all-white one. After two years he left the job to become a judge on the High Court.
Deakin was Australia’s second Prime Minister. A highly intelligent and idealistic man, he had a great love of his country and a desire to serve its people. He was the kind of person who might have given politicians a good name, had there been a few more like him. Which there weren’t.