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In which we find out that researching the life of a man who didn’t keep a diary is hard work
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James Squire was a very busy man indeed. He was a convict, brewer, publican, property tycoon, farmer, husband, father, de facto partner, copper and man who got really pissy at people cutting down trees on his land. So maybe it’s not really that surprising that he didn’t have much time to keep a diary like any number of other people in the early years of Sydney Cove.
As a result we don’t have much from Squire in his own words. There’s only his evidence from a government enquiry, where he talks about his beer-making, and the public notices he placed in the Sydney Gazette (which is how we know about his aversion to people lopping down his trees).
This means we have to rely on Squire doing things that others found interesting enough to write about. Fortunately, he did enough of those things – good and bad – that people took notice. Most of these occur after he’s a free man and the Sydney Gazette sees fit to mention his name as often as it can; though, curiously, the paper never carries a single ad for his brewery and pub. Before then, the man pops up on the historical radar much less frequently.
Which does make sense, you have to admit. Remember, these days we have that beer brand that makes it seem like Squire was a really big deal, a super-cool guy who cut a swathe through Sydney Cove and rubbed shoulders with the high and mighty. Now, we all know about James Squire so it’s easy to make the mistake that it was always the case. But for so much of his life Squire was really a nobody, just one more person eking out a living in an English town, one more body crammed below the deck of a convict ship, one more criminal getting whipped for breaking the rules.
It would have been great for someone in a time-travelling DeLorean to turn up in the colony of Sydney, point to James Squire and say “hey, that guy is going to be really well-known in about 200 years, you should start writing down everything he does”. But there are no reports of Marty McFly turning up in 1788, so no one thought to take any notes of those early years. And really, who could blame them? The guy was just a chicken thief – as if he was going to amount to anything. On top of this, the colonists were too busy trying to stay alive to worry about keeping copious notes on some prisoner who largely seemed to be keeping his head down and not making waves.
And so we have a life with gaps in it. Gaps which people have filled in by either taking educated guesses or sometimes seemingly adopting the not-very-helpful-at-all approach of “making shit up”. What’s the difference? Well, the former involves taking two known moments in history and drawing a line of best fit between the two which seems reasonable. The latter is where you take a frigging crazy leap based on little or no evidence and come to a conclusion that causes the sober-minded researcher or reader to say “hey, that sounds like it could be bullshit”.
I’m probably going to be as guilty of that as anyone on the former but will do my best to flag when I’m taking an educated guess. And when it comes to things that are historically correct, I’ll also try and point out where that information comes from. I’ll also flag when evidence is a bit sketchy and when someone else’s claim made my bullshit detector go off.
Speaking of bullshit, I aimed to avoid the “making shit up” route altogether. Because, what would be the point of that? I don’t buy a book of history expecting the author to engage in flights of fancy and I’m sure you don’t either.
When it comes to writing about a period in history, there is never one single story. Now that may seem strange to you; after all, history is a collection of things that happened, how can you get more than one story out of that? Well, if that’s how history was told then we’d only have one book about World War II. But we don’t have one book – we have hundreds. Maybe even thousands. The further we get from that war the more books seem to get written about it. We even end up with books touting themselves as a “new history” of the war.
Writing about history makes me think of a mixing desk in a recording studio. The desk is made up of a series of channels, each with a separate part of the song – vocals, guitar, bass, drums, backing vocals, flute (if it’s a prog rock song) – recorded on it. All the parts of the song are there but by sliding one channel up and another one down (sometimes down to zero so it disappears in the mix – goodbye, flute) the producer of the recording can make different versions of the song.
It’s the same with writing history – the writer has all the moments that make up the event on separate channels and it’s up them to choose which ones to bring up in the mix and which to push to the background. Which ones seem to be significant, defining moments and which ones just get added because they’re kind of amusing (early tip: wait to see what Squire’s horse was called).
As well as Squire’s own story, I’ve chosen to bring forward the stories of some other convicts and Aboriginal people in Sydney Cove. Sometimes that’s because they play a part in Squire’s life and other times because I simply find their story interesting. Also, I think it’s important not to view Squire in isolation but to look at what else was happening around him. Sometimes, when you pull the focus back, you see things others have missed.