Chapter 3
Second Arrivals and First Colonials
In This Chapter
Surveying the east coast of ‘New Holland’ with Cook
Choosing New South Wales to start a convict settlement
Getting there with Phillip
Staying alive once there — just
Encountering hardship in the new land
If you take a casual glance at a map of the world you’d be pretty hard pressed to find two regions that are further away from each other, and less directly related, than Britain and Australia. One’s southern hemisphere, the other’s northern. One is a continent, the other an island. One has crummy weather, the other has Bondi (you get the drift). And yet, after the Indigenous Australians (who arrived millennia previously), it was the British who were the first people to take enough of an interest in Australia to decide to establish a colony here late in the 18th century.
Britain established maritime dominance in most of the seas of the world in the second half of the 18th century, with the Pacific being the ‘last frontier’ to explore for new trade and supplies. The British also had a couple of men who proved to be outstandingly good at not only exploring the region but also, in the case of one of them at least, pushing for a colony to be established there. Captain James Cook was the explorer, while Sir Joseph Banks, his botanist on the first exploring voyage, pulled strings with powerful men once back in Britain to help convince people to plant a colony on the coast of New South Wales.
The British, when they did establish a colony in Australia, decided to begin the settlement with convicted criminals as first settlers. In the first years of the colony, the new settlers encountered all kinds of problems, made worse by global events.
In this chapter, I cover Britain’s ‘discovery’ of Australia, the reasons behind their eventual decision to establish a settlement here, and what happened in the initial years of the colony.
‘Discovering’ the Great Southern Land
By 1763 the British had gained supremacy of the ocean, except for one final frontier (bom, bom, boom): The Pacific Ocean.
Ideas about a great southern land mass in this ocean had been circulating for millennia. In ancient times, Ptolemy had surmised that there had to be some big land mass down there to counterbalance Europe and Asia, and stop the planet going all topsy-turvy and flipping over. Throughout the 17th century, more solid evidence started emerging, largely thanks to the reports from the mostly Dutch explorers in the region (refer to Chapter 2 for more on these explorers and traders). It was time for Britain to make its mark.
For this daring task, two men were chosen: James Cook and Joseph Banks. Between them, they managed to chart the east coast of Australia, and have some lovely fun documenting all the weird and wonderful new flora and fauna they encountered along the way.
Finding the right men for the job
Two men from each side of the track. This part of the story belongs to Englishmen James Cook and Joseph Banks: One born in rural obscurity as a son of a labourer in Yorkshire; the other born the son of a gentleman and parliamentarian of significant wealth. One would end his life being clubbed to death on a beach in Hawaii (this would be Cook); the other as a Privy Council member and Royal Society President, dividing his time between Bath and Soho Square (big hello to Banks). (See the sidebar ‘The original odd couple: Cook and Banks’ for more on this unlikely duo.)
Between them, Cook and Banks managed to not only put Australia on the map in the most literal sense (even if it was still being called New Holland; see Chapter 5 for more on how the continent’s name was changed to Australia), but also helped ensure that the first European settlement of the Australian continent was begun. The founding of the modern nation of Australia begins with these two men — and the British Royal Society.
In 1768, the Royal Society (a learned society originally set up by Royal Charter a century before for the advancement of scientific knowledge, and of which Banks was a member) managed to persuade the British Admiralty to send an expedition to observe the transit of Venus on the Pacific Island of Tahiti (the weather forecast for England that year being overcast with rain).
By this time, Cook was a lieutenant in the Royal Navy and he was selected to command the expedition. The Royal Society suggested Banks, ‘Gentleman of large fortune . . . well versed in natural history’, along with his ‘suite’, could accompany Lieutenant Cook on the voyage. Banks’s suite was a cast of eight — naturalists, artists and servants — there to help him pick, pluck, catch and collect as many new zoological and botanical specimens as possible, and draw, describe and preserve them as well.
As well as observing the transit of Venus, however, the British Admiralty also gave Cook a set of secret instructions to follow: Cook had been given the job of establishing once and for all if the ‘Unknown Southern Land’, or ‘Terra Australis Incognita’ was anything more than a pipe dream. If it was there, and Cook found it, he was told claiming it for Britain mightn’t be a bad idea.
Setting (British) eyes on New South Wales
After observing the transit of Venus in Tahiti, Cook sailed south and then west expectantly, but what he found was just more Pacific Ocean. Charting New Zealand, he sailed further again, finding nothing until encountering the bottom south-east corner of what was known as New Holland — where Victoria and New South Wales meet each other today. This was disappointing, all things considered, but at least there was a nice lot of charting to do. Just as he’d done in New Zealand, Tahiti, Newfoundland and Nova Scotia, Cook set about surveying the coastline he was passing. Banks, meanwhile, gathered new and previously unknown zoological specimens everywhere they stopped, surely feeling a lot like a kid who’d just been let loose in a completely untouched (to European eyes, at least) lolly shop.
Banks didn’t think much of the land, though. He’d later change his tune significantly, but at the time he said it was without doubt ‘in every respect the most barren country I have seen’. The soil was sandy, the grass thin and the water scarce. Although he’d had the time of his life catching and picking specimens, he didn’t think the place was particularly good to settle in or trade with. The most he could allow was that, perhaps, if they were lucky, a group of people ‘who should have the misfortune of being shipwreckd [sic]’ might be able to support themselves.
Cook, having sailed up the Pacific coast of Australia in the Endeavour, reached the top of the east coast in August 1770. He claimed possession of the entire coast and planted the flag on the rather unimaginatively titled Possession Island (at the top of modern-day Cape York in far-north Queensland). Later on, noting it down in his journal, he racked his brain for a good name for the coast he’d just claimed (without asking any of the indigenous Australians that he’d encountered along the way what they thought of the idea, obviously). He first tried New Wales and then must have said to himself at last, ‘here’s just the thing’, and wrote down New South Wales.
On Cook’s return to Britain from this first great voyage (he would go on two more before his voyaging ended abruptly in Hawaii) he was promoted to captain.
The Brits are Coming!
New South Wales (NSW), which had been charted and claimed by Cook, turned out to be the right place at the right time. By the time Banks returned from the voyage of discovery, Britain was facing a few international and logistical issues that made founding a new colony a much more attractive proposition. A few years after his return, Banks (along with a few others) piped up with the novel idea of making NSW a new British settlement and, after a few Parliamentary Committees debated the issue, it was indeed chosen.
Quick! New settlement required
Britain didn’t decide to settle in a region as far-flung as NSW just because Cook had claimed possession of it. Those pesky commoners, those pesky Americans, and those pesky French, Spanish and Dutch all factored into the thinking.
Turing to crime in the 18th century
Along with a population boom, Britain in the 18th century experienced a period of rapid transformation — one that would produce a great deal more prosperity for more people but which also uprooted a lot of people from their traditional lives and livelihoods.
A series of Enclosure Acts shifted people off the land, which led to the breakdown of traditional rural order in the 18th century. Before this, agriculture in Britain used to be mostly communal — each farmer would use a strip in three different fields to grow crops and would graze cattle on the common. This communal style was good for everybody but inefficient. No big improvements in agricultural production could be made until the communal fields were amalgamated into one big plot, which is what the Enclosure Acts did in the 17th and 18th centuries. While enclosure created lots more work (all the enclosing for starters — with fences and hedges — and the intense cultivation that followed), it drove out the smallholders from their traditional claims and people began moving from the country to the cities.
Many people moved into cities such as Birmingham, Liverpool, Manchester and London, where there were plenty of job opportunities and, with no police force, plenty of crime opportunities too. As the town populations burgeoned so too did the criminal underworld.
Losing America and a terrible outbreak of peace
Britain had sent convicts to American colonies during the 18th century. When the American War of Independence (1775–1783) deprived Britain of its American colonies, one of the things that was lost was a handy place to send convicted criminals. Felons had been sent from Britain as bonded labour for decades, at a time of rapid demographic increase. Now convicts continued to be sentenced to ‘transportation across the seas’, but there was nowhere to transport them to. A stop-gap measure was housing them in prison hulks (old ships refitted for the purpose of holding prisoners) moored on the River Thames, and putting them to public work in chain gangs.
A few problems arose with this system. Firstly, the authorities had always thought that transportation should send convicts far away to some largely unknown place overseas, and now this option was gone. Secondly, in the course of the 18th century the British people had become used to getting rid of felons in such a fashion, and had a real problem with the sight of men chained up in gangs in public. Other countries in Europe had followed this route, and it was seen as a sort of continental ‘despotism’. Thirdly, pretty soon they were running out of hulks!
But the twist here is that the system coped all right with losing the American colonies, just so long as there were a nice couple of wars bubbling along to keep would-be crims pleasantly occupied fighting in the British army or navy. If it wasn’t the Americans, there was always the French, and if no-one else was around then you could always pick on the Dutch. But in 1782 a terrible spectre arose: Peace. By 1784 and 1785 returned soldiers and seamen were being demobbed (stood down from the armed services) and coming back into the country via the southern ports of England. As they did so, an explosion in crime occurred.
Getting access to vital resources
In the second half of the 18th century, Britain managed to get herself tangled up in conflicts with all the other major global powers — France, Spain and Holland. These protracted conflicts made Britain vulnerable as it ran short of vital commodities controlled by enemy nations. Without flax plants and pine trees, Britain was going to have difficulty getting new masts, spars, canvas and cordage, and without these, it would have great difficulty maintaining the powerbase it had fought so hard to win.
Pushing for a settlement in NSW
After leading the voyage that discovered the east coast of Australia in 1770, Cook led two more exploratory voyages around the world. His journeying came to an abrupt end in Hawaii in 1779 when some seriously irritated natives clubbed him to death.
Banks meanwhile, settled back into a comfortable and sedentary existence in Soho, London — perhaps getting a little too comfortable, as gout would plague his later years. On good terms with everyone from the King downwards, he became a prime mover, shaker and patron behind establishing a settlement in NSW some years after he’d been there himself.
Completely reversing his earlier negative opinion (refer to the section ‘Setting (British) eyes on New South Wales’ earlier in this chapter), Banks confidently predicted to the Beauchamp Committee in 1779 that nothing could be easier than establishing a colony near Botany Bay in NSW. This area had enough rich soil ‘to support a very large Number of People’, the grass long and luxuriant, the country well supplied with water. Equip two or three hundred people with ‘all kinds of tools for labouring the Earth, and building Houses’, then a year on, ‘with a moderate Portion of Industry, they might, undoubtedly, maintain themselves without any Assistance from England’.
In 1785 Banks repeated this advice to another committee, strongly recommending Botany Bay for penal settlement, saying NSW was ‘in every way adapted to the purpose’. ‘But what about the natives?’ someone wondered. Wouldn’t they be difficult? Not at all, assured Banks jovially. They were ‘extremely cowardly’, and would ‘soon abandon the country to the new comers’.
Sounds so wonderfully simple, doesn’t it? Take livestock and tools, add crop seeds, mix well with humans, stir for 12 months, and voila — instant colony. Reality would prove to be very far removed from such rosy predictions.
Picking a winner: NSW it is!
After the crime explosion in Britain in 1784 and 1785, and the resulting urgent need to get rid of convicts, Banks was pushing for NSW to be established as the settlement to send them to.
However, many other possibilities existed — the Falkland Islands, Newfoundland, Nova Scotia, the West Indies, the East Indies, the Malay archipelago and South Africa were all mentioned in public debate and were taken more or less seriously. Britain ended up choosing the NSW coast, which these days we tend to assume was natural, even inevitable, but at the time it was an odd choice. Certainly, it was satisfyingly remote — not many escapees paddling their way back to Britain in a hurry — but there was such a thing as too remote for a penal settlement. Ideally you wanted a port of call on an already existing major trade route. Extremely isolated exile wasn’t preferred from the start, the presumption being that after convicts had served their time, they should be able to catch a ship home.
The proposed Botany Bay colony was outside any established shipping routes, and not a region with great existing trade, meaning that transportation costs would be very high. Although the influence of Banks can’t be denied, what other factors led the British Government to choose NSW? Here the plot thickens. This is an area that sustains a healthy amount of strong disagreement amongst historians, but some clear factors emerge.
NSW was near vital raw materials for maintaining a global navy. Britain had found out the hard way in recent wars that if shut off from crucial supplies from Europe their vaunted navy ran the risk of disintegration. Flax plants were needed to make sails, ropes and cords, while long straight timber, preferably pine, was needed to replace masts. Cook had reported spruce pines of ‘vast size’ on Norfolk Island, not far from the NSW coast: ‘Here . . . masts for the largest ships may be had’. Flax plants were also seen growing in abundance.
Access to all the tea in China could be made less volatile. In the 1780s trade with the Chinese port of Canton increased dramatically, with the importation of tea tripling in two years alone. But getting there was tricky. The French had established themselves in Indochina (modern-day Vietnam and surrounding areas), and the Dutch held the East Indies (modern-day Indonesia). While the British had signed a treaty that gave them a right to sail through Dutch waters, they worried that in the event of war both regions would become highly dangerous to move through. So an alternative route, one that went from India southwards, below Australia and then up the east coast, sailing between the New South Wales coastline and Norfolk Island, could be a handy Plan B.
The British East India Company’s monopoly was looking likely to end. For most of the 18th century this company had enjoyed a monopoly over all trade that went back to Britain from India and the entire region that lay beyond as they came to exercise an often regal-type power in that part of the world. For trading companies and shipping agencies not directly aligned with the company, this monopoly was a profound disincentive for moving operations into the Pacific. The monopoly was widely expected to be terminated in the early 1790s, however, allowing a rush of new trading shipping interest in.
The French were still an enemy to be feared. The French and British had an animosity that went back centuries (Joan of Arc, anyone?) but in the second half of the 18th century Britain and France were locked in an intense battle for global supremacy that often sparked wars. The British Ambassador in Paris in the summer of 1785 reported worrying rumours that the French scientific expedition about to set off under La Perouse was going to be instructed to establish a convict settlement in New Zealand to take advantage of the pines reputed to be there. Interest in the Pacific and New Holland as a strategic resource was on the rise in the other major player in world affairs.
So why not kill a multiple amount of birds with one big convict stone? Convicts were intended as a stop-gap measure to help establish a key British strategic post in the Pacific. Plenty of other reasons could be put forward to establish settlement in NSW, but plenty of good reasons also to keep quiet about it. The British had no wish, after all, to needlessly provoke or alarm the Dutch and French, or to offend British East India Company sensitivities (the company had been largely shut out of the decision-making for the new settlement, and was already viewing it suspiciously). Much easier, then, to talk only of offloading unwanted convicts on a coastline that was declared to be land belonging to no-one (see the sidebar ‘Claiming the “terra nullius”’).
In 1786 George III declared to the House of Commons that his government and prime minister would soon transport ‘a number of convicts’ to Botany Bay in order to relieve ‘the crowded state of the gaols’.
Settling Botany Bay
After selecting the site came the settling. Organising and equipping a party to settle a colony in a part of the world that had been seen once some 15 years previously meant a lot of planning and preparation had to be done. Aside from getting there, the British had the question of exactly who they would take as first settlers. One suggestion was to send American colonists who had stayed loyal to Britain in the American War of Independence. In the end, they went with convicted criminals (for reasons explained in the preceding section). Exactly what sort of people these convicted criminals were, however, is another matter.
Getting there with the First Fleet
The actual getting to NSW and the initial settling in was remarkably trouble-free, thanks in large part to the expedition’s leader, Captain Arthur Phillip, carefully overseeing preparations. The government responded seriously to his demands that this long voyage, bigger than any large-scale journey and relocation ever before attempted, should be fitted out properly. When the ships of what we now call the ‘First Fleet’ finally got underway in May 1787, no-one could say it was a slap-dash affair.
The ships were of good quality and sturdy. Fresh provisions were laid in during the weeks prior to the fleet’s departure. No callous disregard for convicts’ welfare was shown, with one observer going so far as to complain that the weekly rations were superior to what ordinary sailors would generally receive. The convicts themselves were selected on the basis of good health (and possibly youth). As many mechanics and farm hands as could be found were strategically selected by the government.
Largely due to these meticulous preparations, out of the 1,403 people who left Portsmouth, only 69 died (or deserted) in the course of the long voyage. Given that ships on long voyages at this time could often lose up to a quarter or even half of their crew, this was no mean feat. In January 1788, some 1,023 settlers disembarked, including 751 convicts and their children and 252 marines and their families.
The Bay, contrary to Banks’s suavely confident predictions (see the ‘Pushing for a settlement in NSW’ section earlier in this chapter for more about these speculations), was not suitable for settlement — the bay was too open and the land without good fresh water — and they soon relocated to Sydney Cove, in Port Jackson, where modern-day Sydney now stands.
The human material: Who were these people?
The First Fleet had arrived in NSW. So far so good. But now the hard work began. What sort of material did Captain Phillip have to work with here? Well. The human material wasn’t great, actually. While convicts arriving in early NSW were a mixed bag — there were first-time offenders, ‘fall guys’, people in regular work, from the country and from Ireland (who were often transported for nothing much at all) — the main core of the convicts were career crims.
Most of the convicts under Phillip’s charge, and the bulk of convicts for the subsequent decades, were predominantly from urban areas, and many were from the criminal subculture. Through the 18th century, people had moved (or been moved) off the land and away from the traditional rural order, and many had drifted into the major cities. As the town populations burgeoned, so too did the criminal underworld, and among Phillip’s founding settlers were card-carrying members of it. More than half the criminals transported for the next 80 years came from cities, with nearly a third before 1819 coming from London.
Many of the convicts were literate criminals, such as forgers and embezzlers. Others were petty thieves (more than 80 per cent of convicts overall were transported for some kind of theft), burglars, horse-, cattle- and sheep-stealers (many were members of professional gangs), shoplifters, pickpockets and (the real convict royals) the occasional highwayman. Largely, the convicts were either professional thieves, living off their wits and enjoying their gains while they could, or itinerant tramps and wanderers, notoriously ‘improvident’, pugnacious, restless, big fans of egalitarianism (no differences between thieves) and with a love of independence (no bosses thanks).
In summer, these career criminals tramped around the countryside, haunting fairs, market days and race meetings, stealing chickens from gardens and sleeping under hedges. They were often drunk, and would have been prime candidates for any Gamblers Anonymous meeting. Although the line ‘honour among thieves’ was regularly trotted out, they tended to show little mutual trust, thieving from each other, dobbing each other in with the authorities after a fight or an argument, and frequently turning witness for the Crown in a trial and giving evidence against associates. If you think they probably weren’t ideal material to start a colony with, after the first couple of months Phillip would have emphatically agreed.
A negative character reference didn’t particularly distinguish the convicts from most of the other people who had accompanied them out to NSW — namely, the marines and soldiers. People sometimes make the mistake of thinking of these two groups as occupying rigidly differentiated categories. The opposite was usually the case. Today’s soldier was tomorrow’s crim: Today, you’re a soldier defending His Majesty’s best interests in a pitched battle on Bunker Hill; tomorrow, you’re demobbed in Portsmouth with little money and no livelihood, and happen to walk past a shop stocked with expensive linen and calicos and spy that the wares are invitingly unattended and unsupervised. Before you know it, you’re bound for Botany Bay, old son.
Holding Out at Sydney
Once the First Fleet had arrived in what would become Sydney, Captain Phillip tried to get the convicts to work, which didn’t go too well. Taken out of 18th-century London criminal subculture, dumped down in an alien wilderness, and expected to toil each day to establish crops and a settlement wasn’t their idea of smart living. They wandered off whenever they could, threw away tools into the bush, and generally behaved like grumpy contestants on an episode of Big Brother.
The assumption on the part of Lord Sydney in the Colonial Office in London had been that the convicts’ main punishment was exile — that once they’d been transported and had arrived in NSW, they’d be ‘free on the ground’. ‘Not on your life!’ said Arthur Phillip (or something similar). ‘You can see how little they do as servants of the Crown. Can you imagine what a disaster it would be if they were left to their own devices?’ So he insisted that the convicts should work on public farms under guard, and he continued to coerce, cajole and browbeat them. Neither of these two moves met with much success.
Using convicts as guards
Phillip had his problems getting convicts to work in the new settlement at Sydney, but the convicts weren’t the only troublesome bunch. Phillip’s other big problem was the officers and soldier marines.
The soldiers refused to guard the convicts, insisting it wasn’t their job as they weren’t prison wardens. The ensuing discussion must have been something like the following: ‘You’re kidding?’(from Arthur Phillip). ‘Can’t you at least keep an eye on them? Encourage them to till the soil a little more enthusiastically?’ ‘Nope’, (delivered flatly, from the soldiers). ‘We’re officers and soldiers. We’re here to protect you from foreign attack, or put down uprisings. Anything else is most definitively Not Our Problem.’
So Phillip was forced to appoint convicts as overseers, which made for a strange situation (prisoners guarding prisoners), but was nothing compared to when Phillip was forced by necessity to make convicts nightwatchmen and constables. This meant, of course, that soon enough you had convict constables arresting marines doing wrong. The officers flipped, but Phillip’s sympathy was, shall I say, not greatly discernible.
Phillip wrote to Britain with complaints — the convicts wouldn’t farm and the soldiers wouldn’t guard — and asked that Britain start sending out free settlers, arguing he could provide each settler with convicts as labourers. From his comfortable digs in Soho Square, Sir Joseph Banks (the botanist who had sailed with Cook and had pushed for the settlement of NSW in the first place) thought this was a terrific thing to do. He urged the government to send out free families, and to give them land grants, ten convicts and four years’ support. Both Phillip and Banks were ignored, however, and the plan went nowhere. As time went on, it became more and more clear that the people sent out on the First Fleet would be the kind of material the new colony had to work with. The colony would sink or swim with these most dubious elements of Georgian Britain.
Issuing ultimatums (and being ignored)
With no free settlers forthcoming from Britain, Phillip had to try to make the most of the convicts and marines he was stuck with in NSW. To do this, he tried threats, issuing the convicts with an ultimatum: No work, no eat. Rations would be given only to those who put in. The convicts called his bluff. ‘What?’ they said (or something similar).‘You’re going to just let us all starve, are you? The government is just going to send us out here, to the other side of the world, and leave us to die?’
The convicts who arrived on the First Fleet weren’t left to die — the Governor couldn’t let that happen to convict settlers he’d been charged with looking after (and the convicts knew it) — but starvation became a real threat. In 1789 a British ship en route to the colony with supplies struck an iceberg and sank. The great risks involved with establishing a settlement in a remote part of the world with no pre-existing shipping or trade routes became more and more apparent with each passing day as famine loomed. By early 1790, the colony’s supplies had dwindled alarmingly.
Soldiering on regardless
In addition to the difficulties with the criminals and the marines, the ground Phillip was trying to grow crops on proved to be largely barren and infertile. But Phillip showed his mettle, and his genius for combining real fairness with great toughness. A man who’d been living on and commanding ships for much of his life, he was used to the world of rough equality that prevailed on ships. This world was often brutal, but on the ship everyone knew they had no-one else to rely on outside their fellow crew, whatever their rank may be. This same logic applied now and Phillip followed it ruthlessly.
Phillip declared that all rations would be divided equally, no matter if you were free or felon. The officers, again, were outraged, but Phillip, again, ignored them. Then he showed the same impartiality with executions. Stealing provisions was made a capital offence, and in the year of their arrival he’d shown this by hanging convicts who stole supplies, but he then followed it up in 1789 by hanging soldiers who were caught running a scam of pilfering the main store. No-one could be under any illusions now as to how things stood.
New Colony Blues
The first two years of settlement were no picnic, and 1790 wasn’t much better. The Second Fleet, which arrived in June 1790, wasn’t able to do much to help NSW out of near-starvation, because many of the new arrivals were on death’s door by the time they arrived. Meanwhile the Indigenous Australians had to deal with an invasion of overwhelming numbers into their country.
Second Fleet horrors
By the time the Second Fleet arrived in June 1790, a quarter of the settlement had died. But the fleet itself, while carrying supplies, brought with them a human disaster. While the First Fleet had been well planned and supervised, the second was a story of neglect, brutality and deliberate starvation. The job of transporting the convicts had been given to private contractors, whose usual cargo was African slaves. Slaves fared slightly better, however, because with slaves came the incentive for those in charge to keep as many as possible alive to sell at the other end of the journey. Here, however, no such rule applied and the more that died, the easier the contractors’ job got.
Of the 750 convicts who actually made it to NSW, 500 were hospital cases, and the half-starved colony set to work putting up emergency hospital tents. When news got back to London, a scandal erupted, and a trial of the contractors was held (the contractors got off). The outcry meant that even though convicts were being transported out of sight, they weren’t completely out of mind. In future, more rigorous regulations and official supervision would ensure the vast majority transported arrived alive and in reasonable health.
Courting disaster with the interlopers
The local Eora and Darug people had pragmatically tried to adjust to the invasion, as fear and curiosity mingled on either side of the massive cultural divide. To begin with at least, relations were more cordial than hostile. Many of the marine officers were fascinated with these people from a completely ‘new’ and previously unknown culture. The Indigenous Australians mostly got along with the officers — the young warrior men especially.
With convicts, however, relations between black and white quickly soured. Quite early on — in May 1788 — two young convicts, William Okey and Samuel Davis, were killed while cutting grass at a place now known as Rushcutters Bay to make a thatch roof for the Store House. The killings were gruesome enough — the bodies described as ‘jellied’ — and while their clothes and provisions were untouched, their rush-cutting tools were taken. The exact cause of the death of these two was difficult to establish, but the settlement’s surgeon, John White, suspected that ‘from the civility shown on all occasions to the officers by the natives, whenever any of them were met, I am strongly inclined to think that they must have been provoked and injured by the convicts’. Phillip thought likewise.
Indigenous–convict relations continued to degenerate. Aboriginal Australians, prizing warrior prowess and with a keen eye for status and prestige, largely enjoyed the company of First Fleet officers, who were for their part more curious and respectful than hostile. Convicts and Aborigines, however, despised each other. Mutual distrust reigned, and thefts, rape and payback killings began to increase.
But the convicts themselves weren’t the great fracturing event. A year after the killings at Rushcutter Bay, a smallpox epidemic struck the settlement. Most of the white settlers had already established immunity to the disease, but the effect on Indigenous Australians was devastating. Some 50 per cent of Aborigines in the Sydney region died as a consequence.
This, as much as the Rushcutters Bay deaths, was to be the tragic signature tune for the encounter between British and Indigenous societies as settlement spread outward. However many Aborigines died as a result of direct conflict with the white invaders and targeted killings — and plenty did — the impact of epidemic diseases, to which they had no established immunity, was far more devastating. Combined with the effect of a brand new intoxicant — alcohol — the consequences of white settlement were profound.
Then the rest of the world goes bung
While things had been going badly at Sydney, in the rest of the world the situation was changing rapidly and not for the better, particularly for the new colony.
The great hope of Norfolk Island — that it would provide vital supplies for Britain’s navy and maritime trade — fell through. The great tall pines that Cook had originally admired proved to be no good as masts. And the flax plant proved to be the wrong type for making cords and sails.
War broke out in Europe in the aftermath of the 1789 French Revolution. The Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars lasted from the early 1790s until Napoleon’s final defeat at Waterloo in 1815. Britain’s energies and attention began to be drawn inexorably into this great conflict, with action seen across the most of the northern hemisphere. Exactly how a bunch of convicts on the other side of the planet were faring started slipping down the list of Things to Be Worried About. But things would change once that war was over — see Chapter 5 to read about what happened when the British started paying attention again (which wasn’t necessarily a good thing).
A new decision was finally made in 1793 on the trade monopoly of the British East India Company: Instead of being terminated, the monopoly was renewed for another 20 years, lasting until 1813. The hope of Sydney being parked on the side of a burgeoning new trade region seemed to be dashed.
Instead of being a source of vital strategic supplies, on a new shipping route where trade was burgeoning, the colony was now marooned on the other side of the world, unable to grow its own food, in the middle of a no-go trade zone, and Britain was preoccupied. And Phillip was going home.
The convicts, intended to be a stopgap measure to be used to establish a key British strategic post, were now the whole purpose of the colony. Interesting times promised to ensue.