In 1786, the British government decided to found an experimental colony in the lands of unsuspecting groups of Aboriginal people on the other side of the globe. It was to be a simple agrarian colony, peopled by convicted felons and run by a governor and a handful of officers. Urban development and the ills it brought were to be strictly avoided. Yet this strange venture inadvertently created Australia’s oldest, largest and best-known city, Sydney, and eventually one of the world’s most urbanised nations. This book tells the marvellously contrary, endlessly energetic story of the making of Sydney in those early years. It is a story about transformations, of peoples and landscapes. Not just one transformation—from a beautiful cove and valley to a thriving city—but the way that the early camp became a town, and how the town continued to be transformed by succeeding and conflicting visions of governors and people. But this is also a story about continuities: persistent habits, and threads and echoes, ways of thinking and doing transplanted, and passed on, cycles of seasons and generations and shipping, the rivers and creeks flowing on, the bushland growing back. I am fascinated by this interplay of transformation and continuity—what slips away, and what holds fast? What is forgotten and what is remembered?
To begin, let us briefly scan Sydney from either end of its two centuries. Early twenty-first-century Sydney rejoices in the status of a ‘global’ city, linked more closely to the network of great cities around the world by business, tourism, spin and the internet than to other cities in Australia.1 The city works hard on its image of glamour and modernity, luxury and fun, spectacle and the good life. Its modern built environment is characterised by the glossy high-rise centre, vast low-density suburbs, the ever-expanding ribbons of highways and tunnels and the shiny new landscapes of leisure, tourism and consumption. Yet, if you visit the still-twisted streets of the Rocks, the city’s earliest neighbourhood, you will see that Sydney had its origins as a preindustrial town. Early Sydney was crooked, intimate, compact. It was a walking town, reckoned by eye and worked by wind, water and muscles. Its houses, most innocent of ‘architecture’, faced the waters and served easily as shops and pubs, warehouses and counting houses, and the rooms had not evolved particular functions. The town’s pleasures were lively, rough, exciting, cruel; they had no ‘higher’ purpose than enjoyment. Its people—governors and governed, masters and servants, black and white—encountered and confronted one another face to face, in the same geographic space. This first Sydney was shaped largely by people whose cultures and world views had not yet been reforged by the ‘fidget wheels’ of clocks and time-discipline, by steam and machines, by polite architecture, by ideas about self-discipline and self-improvement, or by notions of respectability which dictated where one lived and did not live.2
This book encompasses the two transformations which occurred between 1788 and around the mid-1820s. The first was from the Aboriginal landscape to an organic preindustrial town, which included Aboriginal people; the second, partial and contested, saw the preindustrial town remodelled as a more aesthetic, rectilinear, polite and self-conscious city, a project most energetically promoted by Governor Lachlan Macquarie and his wife Elizabeth. Since the growth of the town was also tied to the farming, grazing, timbergetting and town-building of the rural hinterland, this book breaks with the tradition of focusing solely on that small urban core clustered in the Tank Stream valley, and ranges out over the Cumberland Plain to the rivers and the Blue Mountains. This geographical scope allows us to explore the origins of Australian rural life and culture, as well as the way convicts made their own use of the bush as foragers, absconders, travellers, hunters and bushrangers. It also allows a proper account of the long war of Law and resistance on the Cumberland Plain fought by Aboriginal people.
Writing the history of a city as a whole is underpinned by a great conundrum: while we can talk of ‘the city’ as one place—which indeed it is—it is also a different place to different people. There can be no such thing as one narrative of the city. For cities do not emerge by building alone, or by the unchallenged decrees of authority, by plans and regulations. They do not consist solely of transport systems or street grids or a series of architectural styles marching steadily over the decades. They emerge from kaleidoscopic complexity, from all these things, but more importantly from the dialogues and struggles which drove them. Different groups vied for control of urban culture, spaces and places, and for economic and social dominance, all within overarching environmental imperatives. Different people had divergent visions for this place, and themselves in it. They imagined different futures.
The structure of this book reflects this: each cluster of chapters explores the experiences and interactions of distinct groups of people. To begin with, we must know something of the human and physical landscape upon which the town was grafted. So the first cluster of chapters deals with Sydney’s deep time history, the evolution of its landscapes and ecologies, and the arrivals and first encounters of Aboriginal and European settlers. The Sydney region was the country of about thirty distinct groups of Aboriginal people whose ancestors had very likely arrived in the region at least 40 000 years earlier. The year 1788 was a momentous one, but it did not neatly sever the past from the future. After all, the British were nourished by the same fish and fruits as the Eora, the coastal Aboriginal people, they used the same paths, and their most prized landscapes, the open woodlands, had been created by Aboriginal fire regimes. The rivers both demarcated and linked Aboriginal peoples: now they also shaped the white settlers’ movements, boundaries and settlements.
The second cluster of chapters tracks the emergence of the town and the rural hinterland mainly through the dialogue and negotiations between authority (the governors and officers) and people (mostly convicts and soldiers). I argue that this place was not made by governors and elite settlers alone, but by ordinary men and women, white and black. It was shaped by the sinuous ‘desire lines’ made by walking feet as much as the straight lines plotted on maps; by the independent movements and appropriations of people, as much as official directives and grants. This story concludes at the end of the ‘age of Macquarie’, because the 1820s and 1830s ushered in yet another transformation: Sydney was again refashioned by the rise of a modern bureaucracy, by harsher convict regimes and by rising concerns with respectability, at times reaching the point of obsession. Increasing working-class immigration, much of it from the north of England, brought radical Chartist ideas and campaigns. After the late 1820s, then, Sydney society and culture became more divided, and this was reflected in urban patterns too, with the rise of the first suburbs.
To return to early Sydney, to reconstruct it, we must recover the factors and conditions the settlers had to contend with. In this book, the environment— topography, geologies, soils, climate, ecologies—is not simply a backdrop of ‘scenery’ or ‘ambience’. As in James Boyce’s Van Diemen’s Land, the particular environments the settlers encountered are crucial in understanding their experience, and the sort of settlement that emerged; they are not peripheral or incidental, but core historical factors. The third cluster of chapters explores the contrasting ways in which educated colonists, convicts and women responded to the local Sydney environments: what they made of them, how they experienced them. These stories are fundamentally shaped by social standing, education and gender, yet there were shared experiences and legends too. And while the Sydney environment is traditionally described as ‘hostile’ and ‘barren’, a place that failed to nurture the colony, this is not the way the settlers saw it; or not for very long. Their environmental responses were far more complex, encompassing delight and wonder as well as bewilderment and disappointment, opportunity, freedom and nefarious activities, covetousness and a growing sense of at-homeness. There were many ways to see nature in early Sydney.
In the last cluster of chapters we return to the story of Aboriginal encounters with the Berewalgal, as they called the pale strangers who suddenly appeared in their country, the role of Aboriginal people in making early Sydney, and the war they fought in defence of country between 1788 and 1816. I offer a brief account of the aftermath of the invasion which sketches out the impacts of hardening ideas about race, rising respectability and expanding suburbs and industries upon Aboriginal people who had already survived invasion, dispossession and smallpox. On the plain and near the coast, Aboriginal people came to live ‘between’ the lines of the Europeans’ cadastral grids and boundaries, in areas not yet taken, or not wanted, making other histories in places which were hidden from view.3
Bernard Smith, in his 1974 tribute to the great collector Rex Nan Kivell, urged Australians to seek ‘a more balanced, a more archaeological, a more humanist view of our history’. By ‘archaeological’ he wasn’t talking about digging things up. He was appealing for an understanding of past and present which goes deep, which plumbs the depths and breadths of human experience. He wanted us to respond not just to words, but to material things—art and artefacts—and not simply intellectually, but sensuously and emotionally too.4
This book will I hope open the sorts of vistas and begin the sorts of conversations Bernard Smith was talking about. We need to know what early Sydney was like in this holistic sense. So, besides ecology and geology, the literature and research I have used here range beyond the standard historical sources to include archaeology and prehistory, geography, art, architecture, material culture and natural history. To avoid ‘washing out the wholeness’, I have sought to read these works together and to anchor actions, events and objects as precisely as I can in place and time.5 This approach has thrown new light on many of the old stories about Sydney, and it reveals the early town as a human place, a place of movement and possibility, rather than an aggregation of structures and spaces, or the untrammelled imposition of orders and plans.
Another purpose of this deep contextualisation or ‘ground truthing’, as sociologists like to call it, is to escape the tyranny of the ‘pendulum’ view of history. The patterns of much of the historiography of early Sydney go like this: if the ‘gaol town’ wasn’t miserable and brutal, it must have been benign and happy. If female convicts were not ‘damned whores’ they must have been ‘good family women’. If Macquarie was not the wise, visionary ‘father of Australia’, he must have been a spendthrift tyrant. But by exploring the town and country in a more holistic way, with a sense of ‘thereness’, we may see the people of early Sydney as human beings rather than as a cavalcade of heroes and villains—though of course there were both. We may grasp the extraordinary predicaments in which people—from governors to bushrangers—found themselves. We may observe the way the mechanics of authority frayed at the edge of empire, the strategies governors had to devise to maintain some order, to make the colony work, and the realities of the complex interplay of authority, geography, imperial directives and colonial conditions. We can better assess the true political and social meanings of architecture and ‘public’ works. This book thus offers a reassessment of the roles and contributions of the first five governors, Arthur Phillip, John Hunter, Philip Gidley King, William Bligh and Lachlan Macquarie. Which of them followed their official instructions to the letter? Which of them, seeing what needed to be done, postponed, ignored or even subverted their instructions for the sake of economic development, good order and fairness, or burgeoning civic pride?
As well as a real city, there also exists what I like to think of as a city of stories, of words, ideas and imagination. Sydney was founded on them, they were as important as brick and stone, timber and earth. The people who sailed into Port Jackson in 1788 carried confident expectations about the new land with them. One of these stories promised a land of boundless, fertile meadows. Another was about the indigenous people, who were few, weak, passive, did not ‘really’ possess the land and therefore would present no resistance to the settlers. The new arrivals were supremely confident because their stories came from impeccable sources: the illustrious James Cook and the great Joseph Banks! Significantly, these expectations also underpinned the official plans for the colony: to establish a subsistence agricultural colony, with the convicts providing the labour. As for the Aborigines, since they had no ‘right’ to the land, they were not a ‘conquered’ people. Phillip and the officers believed they had only to point out the moral and peaceful nature of their project, and then use the comforts of civilisation to persuade Aboriginal people to give up their savage ways and become part of British society.
Invariably, the stories were wrong, or irrelevant. The ‘meadows’ at first proved chimerical and settlers felt utterly betrayed. The Aborigines were strong and numerous, and they were also fierce warriors who not only refused to come near the English camp, but attacked and killed those unprotected by guns. The failure of those foundational stories often caused anger, bewilderment, frustration, and powerful new narratives of disappointment and betrayal. It is always hard to experience the world as we expect it to be dissolving into patternless chaos, and to find ourselves thrust into that uncomfortable realm of doubt and discovery, of having to learn anew.
But that is what happened. Soon, new stories emerged. While they raised flags, cleared, built and sowed their first crops, the literate among them were also writing first histories for eager audiences back Home. Their output was extraordinary: the birth of Sydney must be one of the best-documented settlement projects ever. They also used their writing to make sense of the place and the people, and the self-consciously historic enterprise upon which they had embarked. It wasn’t straightforward—they struggled mightily with how to tell it, as we all do.
They had to think about their audience too, as good writers do, and strove to make the story fit into a plot and narrative people at home would understand. In writing this book I was struck over and over again by the significance of this: the self-consciousness of their writing, from Phillip’s reports to the letters written by convicts. The narratives are moulded around the kinds of things readers were keen to hear about: is Botany Bay a very wicked place? What is the environment like? Is it topsy-turvy? Could you make money out of it? Tell us about the native people, are they very strange, exotic and savage? Are they cannibals? We must have this lens of audience always in mind as we too pore over their narratives, which became our historical sources.
Other stories blossomed: convicts told tales about going to China in order to escape, or rather to escape punishment when they were caught. They passed on rumours about wild cattle and great rivers and mysterious inland settlements they heard from Aborigines, and governors did not know whether to believe or ridicule them. As the decades passed, the colonists learned about the new land, let the climate sink into their bones a bit, and began to tell true stories of their own, stories about the new country, its capriciousness, its wonderful healthfulness, its sheer beauty, tales of rich river flats to the west where the soil would grow anything. Some of these became legends with wide currency: the loss of the first cattle and the way they were found once more, a fat, sleek, wild herd; the miraculous fecundity of women, proof that the environment was nourishing and beneficial. But local knowledge did not necessarily unseat some of those old tales rebounding from the ‘old’ country, especially the ones about passive Aborigines and degraded convicts. They were powerful, and useful, and they held fast. Neither did the home-grown stories necessarily remain in public knowledge. In later decades they were often eclipsed by new anxieties about origins, and worth, thrown back over early Sydney: tales of a population drowning in rum, of women who were whores one and all, of governors as all-powerful tyrants, and horrific tales of convict life which portrayed transportation as nothing more than brutal and agonising slavery.
This book takes these marvellous, labyrinthine, interleaved stories seriously, from those foundational expectations, to recovered legends of country, to some of the common tales about the early town we hold dear today. They are artefacts too, with histories and provenances, holograms of their time. They tell us something about how people were thinking, what they were expecting and hoping for, what they were planning. They quite literally shaped voyages and actions, street-plans, buildings and gardens. But this book is a history, not a study of texts, or a fictionalised account. It seeks to contextualise the stories, to look carefully at their sources, ask why they were told, and to triangulate them with human experience and real places and outcomes. What happened when the plan to make subsistence farmers out of convicts was actually implemented? What became of the original insistence that the colony be isolated, free of commerce, consumer goods, and alcohol? The ideas, the plans, the theories only tell half the story—the drama lies in the doing, the encounters, the collisions, the gap between expectation and experience.
I think it’s important to tell the smaller-scale life-stories too: the stories of notable, extraordinary and legendary people, as well as a few ratbags. Thus these pages are also peopled by Bennelong, Barangaroo, Arthur Phillip, James Ruse and Elizabeth Parry, William and Mary Bryant, Margaret Catchpole and Mary Reibey, John Grant, George Caley, George Bruce and Moowattin, Francis Greenway, Elizabeth Macarthur, William Bligh, Lachlan and Elizabeth Macquarie, Bungaree, Mahroot, and many more. Individuals did make history in early Sydney, but what they did was bound up with the way they saw the world, their stories, the cultural ‘webs of their own making’, as well as by elements far beyond their control.6 Many of these people already have stories and legends told about them; these too are re-explored.
Early Sydney was not just any town, but an unusual one, established by banished convicts, their guards and their governors. So the dynamics and strategies of banishment, forced labour and punishment are germane to this history. But they are not the only narratives, for there were other, rather more glorious, visions for the colony back in England, and, still more significantly, a magnificent mismatch between the plans of the British government and those of the people they sent to Botany Bay. Military officers, along with many convicts and soldiers, considered this colony like any other: a place to make their fortunes, or at least a better life, rather than a place of banishment, isolation and subsistence. Other convicts, and a few soldiers as well, spent all their time in the colony trying to work out how to escape it. Once landed, too, Arthur Phillip and his successors found they could not keep convicts, or anyone else, fixed and controlled in one spot. The ‘absence of walls and warders’ meant that movement, exploration and encounters occurred out of official sight and control. The consequences were both liberating and tragic.7
For many decades, though, the history of this extraordinary town and its rural hinterland was eclipsed by the long, looming shadow of the ‘gaol town’, perhaps reaching its literary apotheosis in Robert Hughes’ The Fatal Shore. Early Sydney was so often portrayed as a place of exile, misery and starvation, stamped by the iron fist of authority and ruled by the lash and the noose. It was exceptional, peculiar and perverse, and had little to do with patterns of ‘normal’ urban development, so why study it as such? Indeed, the whole convict period was often treated as separate from ‘legitimate’ Australian history, a kind of dark, crude ‘before’ period: before Macquarie, before gold, before democracy, before freedom of the press, before ‘real’ economic development, before free immigrants ‘normalised’ the colony and set it on its ‘proper’ historical path.8
Interestingly, the question that drove a lot of the earlier Sydney histories as a result was this: how could such a hideous place have been transformed into a beautiful and flourishing city, the birthplace of a nation? The search was on for the colony’s ‘saviour’, for the historical turning point between ‘convict’ and ‘free’. While Lachlan Macquarie, as the ‘father of Australia’, still reigns as the most popular contender, interestingly the latest version of the ‘rescue’ model is a gendered one.9 The 2006 film The Floating Brothel is subtitled ‘The Extraordinary Tale of the Lady Juliana and the Unlikely Founding Mothers of Modern Australia’. The film’s historical plot portrays Sydney on the brink of extinction, disappearing into a pit of perversion, when, just in the nick of time, the Lady Juliana women sail into Sydney Harbour and save it. It’s a sort of happily-ever-after story which, like the legend of Governor Macquarie, morphs into a tale of national destiny: in ‘saving’ Sydney, these women in fact founded the nation.
In this book, nobody ‘saved’ the colony. The seeds of its survival and shape were already there. They grew vigorously and were nurtured, manipulated, harangued, coaxed and exploited by governors as well as the people—men and women, black and white, free and unfree. They were all makers of Sydney.
In 1827 it was said that most Europeans, ‘if asked to describe Australia’, would ‘think only of ropes, gibbets, arson, burglary, kangaroos, George Barrington and Governor Macquarie’.10 These responses have been rather long-lived. In 1990 a large proportion of visitors to Old Sydney Town (a painstakingly reconstructed model of early Sydney built near Gosford in the 1970s, now sadly closed), said they associated the early colonial period with ‘convicts and floggings’. Re-enacted floggings were among the most popular of Old Sydney Town’s live performances.11 Yet Old Sydney Town had itself emerged out of the same surge of interest in national identity, history and heritage that ended thirteen decades of embarrassed silence and shame over Australia’s convict legacy. In an astonishing reversal, the convicts were resurrected and embraced. Having one or more in your family is now a badge of honour, and most revered of all are those who arrived on the First Fleet.12 It is strange, then, that even though convicts are acknowledged as pioneers of the nation and the founders of families, the stereotypes of convicts—comical figures dragging ball-and-chain shackles, demonised criminals, degraded victims of gruesome punishment— still dominate and fascinate.
These stereotypes have so little to do with life in early Sydney. To begin with, convict men and women did not live in prisons, but in huts and houses which they built themselves or rented from others. They wore their own clothes, not pyjamas with broad arrows on them. They were consumers, interested in domestic comfort, familiar foods and fashionable clothing, and were determined to have them. Some of the energetic emancipists became wealthy traders, landholders and ship-owners. Convicts in the early period were not summarily chained and lashed unless they committed more crimes and had been tried in a court of law. (That said, governors found it so difficult to keep order in the penal colony without walls that the punishments were extremely severe for those unlucky enough to get caught.) Since the colony depended upon their labour, the convicts largely called the tune, insisting on task-work which left them time to themselves, to do as they chose. Women ensured the colony’s survival by making families and fostering community and social networks, as well as through their economic contribution as workers, landladies, shopkeepers and entrepreneurs. Both men and women enjoyed the pleasures of preindustrial popular culture— gambling, drinking and fighting—and used them to resist authority. Convicts made their own distinct neighbourhoods in places like the Rocks—a recognisable community had emerged there by the earliest years of the nineteenth century.13
If towns emerge from the entangled strands of building, sustainable economic development, emerging families and communities, shared expectations, cultural outlooks and practices and a common knowledge of place, then the first Sydney was in large part created by convict and ex-convict men and women. The Colony tells this foundational story. It tracks the ongoing struggle between people and authority for control of the town, but also the confluences and accommodations in this ‘dialogue of townscape’, this dance of deference and obligation.14 I also want to convey something of what it was like to live and work in early Sydney: which were the favoured places, the places scarred by evil, the places which were dangerous and wild; and how it was that property, even secured with nothing more than simple occupation, or ‘naked possession’, became so sacred it fuelled a rebellion.15
Readers may be surprised to find that nearly half this book deals with the Aboriginal people of the Sydney region, and their relations with the Europeans. This might at first seem out of proportion. I assure you it is not: it reflects historical reality. Aboriginal people far outnumbered Europeans in these years. Their early attempts to conciliate and negotiate with the invaders, and their eventual decision to leave them to their own devices at Sydney Cove/Warrane, meant that the beachhead there survived. The founding of the city, and the settlements and towns on the Cumberland Plain, was also predicated on Aboriginal dispossession.
In this book the narratives of town-building, rural settlement and environmental responses are encircled by histories of the Aboriginal people of Sydney. Of all the rich and gripping stories of what happened in the Sydney region after 1788, these are the most astonishing and the most poignant. It is time to shake off the idea that Sydney was a ‘white’ city, that Aboriginal people simply faded out of the picture and off the ‘stage of history’: it is simply untrue. The time has come, too, to recognise that Aboriginal people became urban people very quickly. But they did so in remarkable ways in these early years—by devising new ways to live which were nevertheless compatible with traditional lifeways and their own Law. Again we find those great themes, transformation and continuity, entangled. This story also challenges the common but false and corrosive assumption that Aborigines have no valid place in cities, that cities are by default ‘white’ space.16 They have been in Sydney-town almost as long as white settlers.
The breaking of the ‘great Australian silence’ about Aboriginal history and dispossession led eventually to a sea change of interest and research in urban Aboriginal history and cross-cultural relations.17 Perhaps the most extraordinary and successful of these works are Inga Clendinnen’s history Dancing with Strangers and Kate Grenville’s novel The Secret River. I want to briefly discuss these works because both have at their heart the quest to understand the nature of race relations in the early colony in an intimate, human way. Both allow us to talk about different ways of ‘doing’ history, especially history so long drowned out by the ‘white noise of history making’, history that seemed lost, irrecoverable.18
In Dancing with Strangers Clendinnen turns an anthropological eye upon the relationships between the Australians (as she decided to call the Eora and other Aboriginal people) and the British officers, and focuses largely on what happened in and around the town of Sydney in the early years. Clendinnen does not flinch from the tragic and brutal outcomes of the invasion, but the overarching message of Dancing with Strangers is this: Australia’s race relations did not begin with racism and violence, but a remarkable ‘springtime of trust’:
There were no pitched battles between residents and incomers, but instead rather touching performances of mutual goodwill and gift-giving . . .
. . . each initially viewed the other as objects not of threat, but of curiosity and amusement; through those early encounters each came to recognise the other as fellow-humans, fully participant in a shared humanity.19
If violence and racism stained Australia’s history later, she says, it was not through the actions or intentions of Governor Phillip and the officers. Yet all their efforts came to nothing: the experiment ended in failure. The ‘springtime’ was tragically brief.
Kate Grenville says she wanted to know what happened between settlers and Aboriginal people, and specifically what her own great-great-great-grandfather Solomon Wiseman ‘might have done when he crossed paths with Aboriginal people’. But while Clendinnen had her shelf of officers’ journals, Grenville says she had only folders full of bits and bobs, piles of unconnected notes, dull dusty documents written in pompous, arcane language. She decided to write a novel instead of a history, and was thus free, as she charmingly and cheerfully puts it, to ‘pillage history’.20 Her story, set on the isolated reaches of the Hawkesbury River, was spun out of conflicts and atrocities which happened in other places, at other times. So Grenville argues that The Secret River, while fiction, nevertheless has historical validity, because these things ‘really happened’. In fact, fiction is a way to ‘make history real’.21 The story tracks her imaginary settlers’ relations with Aboriginal people as they spiral from grudging tolerance and cautious friendships into atrocities, poisonings and gruesome massacres. That racial conflict in this particular part of the Hawkesbury had been over for some years when Grenville’s settlers arrive in 1813 doesn’t matter, and neither does the fact that the dramatic poisoning scene is anachronistic. This is a story about all settlers, and settler psyche, in all places, throughout the colonial period.
In The Colony I want to continue Clendinnen’s and Grenville’s project of re-examining and rethinking early colonial race relations, but I have taken a broader and longer view. I move beyond relations between officers and Eora in Sydney in those first years to explore those between different social groups and Aborigines in the period up to about 1840. In the rural hinterland, the stories are not about fictional settlers in one particular place, but real settlers in the many different places where the war on the Cumberland Plain was really fought. This approach has led to rather different conclusions. Those seemingly benign early official encounters, the ‘dancing’, curiosity and amusement, were underwritten by the threat of violence and guns after all. We cannot quarantine the early years from the rest of Australian history, nor quite so easily exonerate the British officers in the way they wanted us to. The experiment did not fail. Despite the disasters that befell them, Aboriginal people successfully made a place for themselves in Sydney for at least four decades.
I believe that it is possible to write of settlers without having to fictionalise them, and of Aborigines without caricaturing them.22 Frontier violence, along with frontier accommodation and intimacy, really happened on the Cumberland Plain—it is a strange strategy, then, to borrow and stitch from other places and times. But these real events must be contextualised, considered and told in one another’s light, for they have their own integrity. While there are overarching patterns as the settlers pushed further into Aboriginal land, the violence was also often contingent, dependent on place and season and the webs of relationships settlers and Aboriginal people had made with one another. So one story will not do for all after all. Time, place and chronology are essential to a genuine understanding of what happened. That said, some events and patterns remain obscure, hidden by silences and omissions. When the details get sketchy, when I am spinning thin threads of interpretation between scanty sources, I will tell you.23
It is important to note that The Colony is not an Aboriginal history of Sydney. That book still needs to be written. Much of the story of what happened in the Sydney region after the early colonial period has been retrieved, patiently pieced together by historians and archaeologists, Indigenous and non-Indigenous. But much more of this ‘middle ground’ history still needs to be recovered and acknowledged; the story remains, and remains to be told.24
The noted American urban historian and architect, Dolores Hayden, writes of place as having an ‘overload of possible meanings’. Nevertheless, ‘it is place’s very same assault on all the ways of knowing (sight, sound, smell, touch, and taste) that makes it powerful as a source of memory, as a weave where one strand ties in another’. We are back with Bernard Smith’s words about a ‘deeper history’, and his plea for a more fully rounded, more sensual and therefore more human understanding of our past. Hayden insists that place ‘needs to be at the heart of urban landscape history, not at the margins’.25
Novelists often say they are inspired by a ‘sense of place’ in Sydney—or perhaps that should be places. ‘Place is the chalice in which the story and people grow’, novelist Gabrielle Lord told The (Sydney) Magazine in 2007. But by place they also mean what happened in them, the history of the places. Lord gave some examples:
In the Rocks, when I see the stone in the Argyle Street cutting, I think of the tremendous violence of those convicts’ lives. Or in Rushcutters Bay [the setting for her novel The Whipping Boy], I think of the first murders of Aborigines in the colony. Sydney is stunningly beautiful but humans have shadows as well as brightness.26
But as Inga Clendinnen argued in her vehement critique of Grenville’s novel, you cannot divine history simply through present-day ‘empathy’ with place, by the way it makes you feel. Places and the stories that cling to them can be delicious, or poignant, or inspire a sense of unease, but they can also be seductively misleading. The men who hacked out the now dark, damp and sinister Argyle Cut in the 1840s were relicts of the final days of the convict system. Perhaps they experienced ‘tremendous violence’ in that harsher period; but most of the convicts of the Rocks did not. They lived there in family groups, or as lodgers, in houses and they made a community there. Rushcutters Bay was not the site of the first murders of Aborigines. This story, though widely believed, seems to have been confused with killings of convict rushcutters by Aborigines in 1788, which happened not at Rushcutters Bay but ‘up the harbour’, probably in Darling Harbour.27 So, while there are kernels of truth in these foggy tales, places, like stories, need to be taken seriously, they need to be researched as well as visited and experienced; they need history.
At the same time, like novelists, I am keenly and constantly aware that the people of whom I write experienced Sydney emotionally and sensually, as well as intellectually and practically, that they occupied and acted in real places, which you can visit, and that some physical traces of the early town and the rural hinterland still exist. While we cannot ‘post ourselves back in time’, it is nevertheless important to return to places.28 Often there remain fragments and reminders, the ‘real things from the real past’, insights you can only grasp by seeing the lie of the land. In some places we can still climb the hills they climbed, gaze over vistas which entranced them, or the landscapes they created. We can still see pictures they painted, the very brushstrokes, read their letters, touch the walls they built, feel the smoothness of their blue-and-white china and iridescent shell fish-hooks, or the weight of a heavy iron hoe. We can still taste sweet tea and wild spinach and saltspray, and feel the texture of bladey grass and rushes and kangaroo grass between our fingers. So this narrative is often anchored in real places and set about with things, reminding readers that these lives were lived in real geographic locations. Where places have been destroyed, where mental geographies have been lost, it seeks to retrace them and recover their meanings and histories.29
Perhaps my interest in locating history, especially in what seem to be ordinary, everyday places, also stems from the place where I grew up. In western Sydney, where plain, brave, self-certain, relentless new suburbs inundated the paddocks and bushland in the 1950s and 1960s, we were literally surrounded by evidence of the past. There was an old, abandoned farm at the end of our unfinished street— you could wander inside the sandstone cottage; the barns and stables were still full of tools, harnesses and horseshoes. There were reminders of later histories and land-uses too: fibro farmhouses, set back from the roads in open paddocks of long, dry grasses, their families long gone, their bare and empty rooms painted pink or blue, birds nesting high up in the corners. In a bushland gully reserve spared from development, a little creek fringed with maidenhair ferns curved around a brown beach where a great sandstone overhang provided cool shade, or shelter and a soft sand bed.
But for us these were places without memory, whether environmental, Aboriginal or settler histories. Not even foggy legends clung to these clear, bright spaces. They seemed flat, one-dimensional, they were places in transition: they only had a present and future. Cleared blocks, paling fences and an army of skeletal timber house frames overlaid the older patterns, the air was full of frantic hammering and sawing, and the sealed roads, concrete kerbs and gutters surged further forward each year. Yet it had been anything but a blank canvas. I still remember the shock of realising later that the creek was very likely the living-place of Aboriginal people, as I had childishly imagined it to be; of discovering the name of the settler who probably built the sandstone cottage; that a terrible war raged between blacks and whites over this seemingly bland, everyday landscape; that hundreds of Irish convict rebels marched down our local roads and were slaughtered by a few well-drilled soldiers. At school we learned a suitably sanitised version of the old ballad ‘The Wild Colonial Boy’, utterly unaware that our suburbs had been among the haunts of the original hero of this ballad, Bold Jack Donohoe, the most famous of the early bushrangers.
These days, ‘places in the heart’, places with emotional, social and cultural significance, are recognised by heritage bodies like the National Trust as just as important as the brick, stone and mortar of old buildings.30 But it is also important to consider ‘place’ not as a neutral, non-contested, vaguely comforting notion (‘there’s no place like home’) but as territorial. Places were contested. People competed to own, to exploit and control places, make homes or refuges in them. They often fought and expelled others in order to do so, and there were competing claims to legitimate occupation.
The struggle for country is most obviously seen in the long war on the Cumberland Plain, when Aboriginal people resisted the invading foragers, farmers and graziers and tried to drive them out. In the aftermath they came to accommodations with the white people in order to survive. Peter Read has explored the legacy of this struggle in terms of place and belonging, the ways the same country can be held as heartland by both Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal people today.31 There were also early attempts to separate free settlers from ex-convicts, creating zones and regions closely associated with different social groups, divergent cultures and reputations for respectability or roughness. Territoriality and the politics of space underpinned the zones of early Sydney town too, from Phillip’s tripartite division into civil, military and convict districts, to Bligh’s abortive attempt to wrest back urban spaces for the crown. Lachlan and Elizabeth Macquarie’s determined attempts to both control the urban convict population and to refashion Sydney as a place fit for genteel people were strongly challenged by Sydney’s convict and working people. The Macquaries never quite achieved the transformation they so desired.
Perhaps it’s also the rate and scale of change through suburbanisation and commercial and industrial development, the same processes I saw as a child, which drive my interest in the relict places, the places where things happened, places people used or loved or avoided or neglected. These are ‘storied lands’, replete with meanings so dense, so rich, so poignant, so ancient, so modern; yet so often invisible. Ordinary places and landscapes are still often assumed to be tabula rasa, as if there is nothing there, no histories, no human meaning.32 Developers, planners, politicians and Sydney’s wider community still act as though the remnant bushland, the old farming land, the rusty, dilapidated industrial areas are blank canvases, simply waiting to be inscribed with new develop ment. It is strange, too, that the ‘local’ so often runs a poor third to ‘national’ and ‘state’ in both history and heritage assessment, when it is often the local, the familiar, the visceral, the intimate that matters most to city and suburban people.33
This book seeks to weave a path between past and present places, to excavate the meanings they held for past as well as present generations, to foster an historical consciousness of place. I believe it is possible, indeed essential, to recover those layered meanings. How else can we really grasp the ways in which generations of people interacted with this place? How they fought it, destroyed it, learned from it, transformed it, defended it, grew into it? How else can we understand what dispossession meant, what it still means? How else can we really understand the origins and lineaments of our city?