Fig. 10. Port Jackson Painter, Aborigines Attacking a Sailor. Port Jackson Coll. 44. © The Trustees of the Natural History Museum, London.
Australia
PART I
How were the antipodes found out? For they were neither seen, not heard of, nor tasted, nor smelled, nor touched.
—Margaret Cavendish, Observations upon Experimental Philosophy (1666)
As we have seen, in A Voyage to Terra Australis 1802–1804 (1814), Flinders makes a strangely qualified promise of the narrative of the novelties of the continent where Britain had chosen to plant its latest colony: “A history of this establishment at the extremity of the globe in a country where the astonished settler sees nothing, not even the grass under his feet, which is not different to whatever had before met his eye, could not but present objects of great interest to the European reader” (Flinders 1814: 1.xcv). Using negatives like planks to bridge the distance between the surprise of the settler and the curiosity of the reader is a technique vindicated by the observations of voyagers to Australia before and after him, who represented novelties as horrid instances of the absence of what might have been expected. William Dampier, the first Englishman to describe Australia, made an irritable list of things that were not to be found on the coast of Shark Bay—water, trees, birds, beasts, even ostrich eggs, were all absent, he complained; and it was not much better on his second visit: “There were no Trees, Shrubs, or Grass to be seen…. I saw there was no Harbour here … a place where there was no shelter…. We searched for Water but could find none, nor any Houses, nor People, for they were all gone” (Dampier 1729: 2.118; 1939: 82, 100). Flinders himself made the same judgment of Keppel Bay when he sailed north from Port Jackson: “No good anchorage was found, nor was there wood or water upon the island worth the attention of a ship” (Flinders 1814: 2.25). Twenty-five years later, Dumont D’Urville saw Raffles Bay in the same mood, reporting, “There is nothing, not even a coconut palm” (Dumont D’Urville 1987: 2.411). On his arrival at the Australian coast almost two hundred years after Dampier, Anthony Trollope found that nothing, exactly nothing, had changed since Dampier’s day: “There were no animals giving meat, no trees giving fruit, no yams, no bread trees, no cocoa-nuts, no bananas” (cited in Walker and Roberts 1988: 11). It was not just that flora and fauna were different—trees so hard they broke axes, animals that looked like giant rats, mammals that laid eggs, foliage with which one “could hold no manner of fellowship” (Barron Field in Carter 1987: 43)—they were utterly untranslatable into the kind of history or narrative of settlement that Flinders believed ought to have been inaugurated when he first set out on his discoveries. Fifty years later, John Mitchel, the Irish political prisoner, confirmed this, “No indigenous plant in all Van Diemen’s Land is identical with any European plant: even the grass is altogether different” (Mitchel 1868: 262). So from a narrative point of view, to recollect the experience of negotiating such a space was to tell the story of something so exotic it was comparable with nothing, destitute of resemblance or analogy within the system of knowledge. From a dietetic angle, a place “so utterly destitute of the means of affording subsistence to either man or beast” (Oxley 1820: 54) provided nothing but a story of starvation and the inevitable onset of scurvy.
When John Oxley found during his second expedition beyond the Blue Mountains that his chronometer had stopped working and, shortly afterwards, that his compass had reversed itself, he says simply, “We knew not which way to turn ourselves.” But when he climbed a hill and saw the ocean his desolation came to an end, and “every difficulty vanished” (252–71). If the empty narrative of a land tedious in its singular barrenness were to be replaced by a history, then something like Oxley’s ocean needed to be manifest: something, that is to say, capable of framing and coordinating one’s position in a waste whose undistinguishable extent embarrassed the resources of brain and tongue. The sheer contingency of immeasurable time and space has to become subject to the will if it is to be known. Paul Carter puts it most succinctly when he says of imperial narrative, “This kind of history … reduces space to a stage [and] pays attention to events unfolding in time alone…. The governor erects a tent here rather than there; the soldier blazes a trail in that direction rather than this…. For these [facts] … unlike the material uncertainties of lived time and space, are durable objects which can be treated as typical, as further evidence of a universal historical process” (Carter 1987: xvi). Flinders’s Australian grass was a phenomenon experienced in the lived time and space of the present moment, for it had no relation to any other; but some kind of necessary connection with other data was needed if a bare fact was to have a meaning and a narrative, so that the unknown might find its place in the scheme of knowledge. A narrative of unrelated facts was not a history but a romance, a cluster of contingent things and events that might just as well not have happened. As we have heard Henry James point out, “The real represents … the things we cannot possibly not know, sooner or later, in one way or another…. The romantic stands, on the other hand, for the things that … we never can directly know” (James 1947: 31). The spectator of history in the making verifies the public disposition, sequence, and importance of immanently intelligible events, teaching the reader an appreciation of the epic and imperial necessity of what is being seen and done. When Alejandro Malaspina arrived in 1793 at Port Jackson this was his function, as David Collins pointed out on his behalf: “It was a pleasure to follow [in the track of Captain Cook], as it left him nothing to attend to, but to remark the accuracy of his observations” (Collins 1798: 1.273). Flinders was claiming something similar for himself when he said that Cook had “reaped the harvest of discovery,” leaving some grains for a gleaner such as himself (Flinders 1814: 1.lxxxiii). The job of the witness was to confirm the truth of an earlier discovery of land entirely new by retracing the sequence of its being known.
At the beginning of his first narrative of the Australian colony, Watkin Tench fancied just such an observer witnessing the early scenes of disembarkation at Sydney Cove: “The scene to an indifferent spectator, at leisure to contemplate it, would have been highly picturesque and amusing” (Tench 1789: 38). That is to say, it would have been representable to a virtual witness, just like an experiment at the Royal Society; but along with all the other missing things noted by Dampier, Dumont d’Urville, Oxley, and Trollope, there was no one occupying that position. The rising structure of historical facts was swamped by misfortunes, generally expressed as the absence of all necessary adjuncts for a worthwhile scene. As Paul Carter affirms, “There was no spectator, no gallery, no surveyor-like comprehension” (Carter 1987: xvi). When Tench finally turned round to observe the lonely predicament of the settlement, haphazardly placed at the margin of trackless forests and impassable stone outcrops, he wrote, “I record with regret that this extended view presented not a single gleam of change, which could encourage hope, or stimulate industry, to attempt its culture” (Tench 1793: 118). All he could see was just more of the same material chaos, “piles of mis-shapen desolation … whose unvarying appearance renders them incapable of affording either novelty or gratification” (26). It was a particular grief to him and all the other settlers who had read Captain Cook’s account of his voyage to Botany Bay that none of the alleged meadows, greenswards, and parcels of fertile soil he mentioned in his journal was found to exist in Botany Bay. The one explorer of the shore who might have been relied upon to provide the organizing principle of settlement—he who first identified the place as agreeable to European sensibilities and answerable to their needs—had in effect absconded from the scene, either because what he saw was no longer visible or because it never had been there in the first place. Were it not for Cook’s accurate charts of the three bays, it was Tench’s opinion that “there would exist the utmost reason to believe, that those who have described the contiguous country, had never seen it” (30); or (like Dampier and the others) that all he had seen was nothing.
David Collins began his Account of the English Colony in New South Wales (1798) by telling his reader in the third person, “It was not a romance that he had to give to the world; nor has he gone out of the track that actual circumstances prepared for him, to furnish food for sickly minds, by fictitious relation of adventures that never happened, but which are by a certain description of readers perused with avidity, and not unfrequently considered as the only passages worthy of notice” (1.vii). The whole enterprise of the Australian colony had begun as a search for knowledge, with Banks collecting specimens and carefully drying them on sheets of paper while his artists drew faithful pictures of them. Natural history was enshrined in the name, Botany Bay, by which Port Jackson was known in England for many years after settlement. The pictures brought home by John White, John Hunter, George Raper, and others showing the strange reptiles, insects, animals, and birds that abounded in the colony, were offered to the public as a treasure trove of visible experimental knowledge. What was more, the region named New South Wales by Cook was soon chosen as the site of a radical departure from previous modes of penal transportation, for instead of convicts being sent to a colony already settled and economically viable, such as Virginia, Bermuda, or the Cape, they were themselves to found it, explore it, till it, build its roads, and make it grow. So two experimental projects were launched simultaneously in Botany Bay, one concerning the ordonnance of species and the other a utopian exercise in the management and reformation of criminals as citizens of a new commonwealth. The Linnaean system of nature and the principles of civil society were to be jointly set upon a new foundation.
But it was evident from the beginning that for an ill-assorted collection of people, bewildered by the strangeness of all the living things they saw and dogged at every step by famine, disease, severe punishment, displacement, and the uncertain susceptibilities of the scorbutic temperament, no inventory of its natural history was likely to be a crystalline addition to taxonomy. Simply in terms of binomial designation there were difficulties. Harold Carter has pointed out that the kangaroo’s genus macropus was settled straight away, but that its species adjective is still in doubt. The ring-tailed possum acquired seven different binomial titles (Carter 1988: 90). Although partly responsible for this confusion, and notwithstanding his disputable estimate of the vegetable resources of Botany Bay, Banks was an inveterate Linnaean and utterly hostile to naturalists such as Buffon and Louis-Jean-Marie Daubenton whose attitudes to events such as extinction and speciation were much more fluid than his own (Lamb 2009). So he encouraged his correspondents to mock this careless thinking as romance. In a letter to Banks, Georg Forster refers to Buffon’s works as “the Romance of Natural-History” (Banks 2007: 1.203), and so does T. A. Mann, “Buffon’s System must be only a romance in Natural Philosophy” (1.175). What they have in mind is his skeptical approach to hard and fast categorizations of species that had been anticipated by Locke and more recently Philibert Commerson, the botanist on Bougainville’s voyage to the Pacific. In his Histoire Naturelle (1758) for instance, Buffon writes, “La Nature marche par des gradations inconnues, & par consèquent elle ne peut pas se préter totalement à ces divisions, puisque’elle passé d’une éspèce à une autre éspèce, & souvent d’un genre à une autre genre, par des nuances imperceptibles; de sorte qu’il se trouve un grand nombre d’éspèces moyennes & des objets mi-partis … qui dérangent necessairement le projet du systeme générale” [Nature advances by invisible gradations, consequently she cannot adhere totally to these divisions because she is moving from one species, and often from one genus, to another by imperceptible degrees, and in such a manner as to exhibit many transitional species and hybrid objects] (Buffon and Daubenton 1758: 1.13). A species for Buffon was like a kangaroo for Banks, always potentially verging on the nondescript. But such descriptive fluidity was no consolation to those who felt they were themselves losing a grip on their coordinates and identities.
As for the land itself, it was no more clearly perceived than any of the other landfalls in the South Seas and the Indian Ocean made by people starved, dehydrated, and sick. There was seldom any unanimity there about what lay in front of the scorbutic eyes of visitors to Pacific islands, so when John Byron discovered giants in Patagonia, or when Jacob Roggeveen exposed what he believed were the lies told by Woodes Rogers and William Dampier about the island of Juan Fernandez, or when Kerguelen not once but twice discovered the edge of the Terra Incognita, the disagreements of experimental observers and the unsteadiness of scorbutic sensoria joined hands in what was generally referred to as romance. And so they did off the coast of Australia. Francois Peron, Baudin’s zoologist, brought this disparity of views up to date when challenging Dampier’s description of Shark Bay, but he was about to make his own contribution to the history of such enigmas in his account of the happy circumstances of Port Jackson, where (he alleged) murder and robbery were unheard of, corporal punishment seldom administered, marriages between the convicts blissful and long-lasting, and their offspring “raised with the greatest care by their parents and … dressed with remarkable cleanliness” (Peron 2014: 169, 171–73). He alleged he was impressed by the results of the whole penological experiment: “Never, perhaps, has there been so conspicuous a specimen of the effect of good laws upon a criminal people, the result of which has been to reform the most abandoned vagabonds, and transmute the most ignominious robbers of Great Britain into honest and peaceable subjects” (idem 1810: vii).
When Peron went on to claim the land from the western part of Bass Strait up to the southern tip of New South Wales as a French discovery, naming it Terre Napoleon, Flinders was incredulous: “How came M. Peron to advance what was so contrary to Truth? Was he a man destitute of all principle?” (Flinders 1814: 1.193). But Flinders himself had reported how strangely that coast had reacted with his eye, so that the looming of a distinct headland would be absorbed into the featureless line of the shore as soon one came abreast of it, and no bearing could be got of it a second time (1.92). Baudin’s journal is replete with examples of his hallucinations, of whales looking like rocks awash, of a fabulous wooded promontory extending far into the sea, of a vast rock that appeared first like a barn and then like a perfectly symmetrical upturned bowl, and of a cape he had named but failed to recognize because it turned out he had never seen it (Baudin 2004: 206, 169, 243, 410). With the exception of Peron, who lied from policy as well as inclination, it was not that these sailors intended to be deceived, or to deceive others, but internal pressures of malnutrition and depression conspired with the sheer novelty of what was witnessed to make accuracy impossible and to render the testimony of discoverers tendentious, impulsive, and extravagant. The colony after all was founded not on a systematic and civic ideal, but on a mistake jointly made by Banks, an eminent natural historian with vast political clout, and Cook, perhaps the most celebrated cartographer of the age.
The question Flinders addressed rhetorically to Peron was one Baudin often had reason to put to the man himself, for although Peron advertised himself as a volatile sentimentalist, prone to freaks and obsessions whose effects on others he found impossible to gauge, it is clear that there was (eventually at least) a strong vein of political calculation in his self-publicity that was ultimately very damaging to the reputation of his own commander. So he provides an important test-case for estimating the degree to which scurvy may overwhelm the precision of science with romance, even without the added pressure of an unknown landscape, and also for measuring how much calculation may enter into the stream of contingent events, either at the moment they occur or later.
In the overture to his own narrative of the voyage, Peron sets out his Linnaean credentials with great éclat. His booty is 100,000 specimens, many important genera, and 2,500 new species, all collected according to “a constant and regular plan … in order to form a general history of the social condition and varied particulars of [New Holland]” (Peron 1810: iv). His narrative however consists of rapid alternations between alarming bulletins of the progress of scurvy among the crew (“The number of our sick increased every hour…. The sick below made the vessel re-echo with their painful cries…. Not one of us is free from it” [260, 281]) and excited observations about a giant squid together with a theory concerning the whiteness of species in the high latitudes, interspersed with hymns to the charming groves of Melaleuca, Thesium, Conchyum, and Evodia he finds growing in Tasmania (182). Baudin noticed that Peron’s behaviour became increasingly deranged, especially in his frequent and potentially fatal disappearances into uncharted places, prompted by his rising passion for collecting shells. Peron came to believe they would reveal the secret of New Holland’s origins as a shallow sea, thrown up into land by some primordial geological event. The astonishing number of his specimens, and the bulging outline of the history they were supposed to tell, may be explained, according to Baudin, by the suddenness of his zoologist’s conversion from the natural history of animals to that of bivalves, mollusks, and gastropods. “From the beginning of our stay in Timor this scientist had plunged headlong, furiously even, into collecting shells, although he had no knowledge in that field. A periwinkle, a nerita, etc., was a treasure to him” (Baudin 2004: 277). Perhaps Peron’s immoderate enthusiasm was a variant of calenture blended with ambition, for by the time the scurvy was at its worst, Baudin reported that his mode of collection had become indiscriminate. Shells were to him what green tints were to the masthead dreamer. Baudin observed, “He has one or two cases of broken shells, for in several places along the shore one can shovel them up” (494). Henri de Freycinet told Flinders that if the French had not wasted their time picking up shells they might have had a legitimate claim to some of Australia’s Southwest Coast (Flinders 1814: 1.193).
Peron’s ambitions for his reputation as a naturalist began, then, in what looks like compulsive compensatory activity, pursued because he felt himself to be dwelling in the shadow of scorbutic death. It is Peron to whom Baudin alludes when in May 1802 he writes in his journal of the first serious visitation of scurvy, and adds, “One of our scientists … was struck down by a most unusual illness. He was seized with a fear of dying and was convinced his career had ended” (Baudin 2004: 399). In this respect, Peron’s delirium was not too remote from the deplorable physical and psychological state of affairs in the colony, which he congratulated so warmly on the penological brilliance of its conception and execution.
In previous chapters, I have been disturbing the cartographical and historical certainties generally associated with the word “situation,” so it might be best to begin the story of scurvy in Australia by outlining the strains the concept and experience of situation come under during the first years of the Port Jackson colony. Its topography is summarized by Tench after he has lost all faith in the charm and reliability of mediated viewpoints:
Let the reader now cast his eye on the relative situation of Port Jackson. He will see it cut off from communication with the northward by Broken Bay, and with the southward by Botany Bay; and what is worse, the whole space of intervening country yet explored (except a narrow strip called the Kangaroo ground) in both directions is so bad as to preclude cultivation. (Tench 1793: 161)
As for relations between the new arrivals and the local population, he found them far from good. From the outset, the convicts were in violent competition with local people for available resources and were fiercely resented on that account. Summing up this miserable state of affairs, Tench says, “I have impartially stated the situation of matters as they stand while I write between the natives and us” (idem 1789: 92).
The situation thus stated is an unhappy alignment of roughly a thousand Europeans, destitute of the means of subsistence except for what they have carried there, with an inaccessible terrain—the south, north, and west were closed off by serious physical obstacles to further exploration and rendered even more impenetrable by a hostile population. Not only was the colony boxed up in this rocky, soggy, and infertile set of bays, each terminating in mangrove swamps, it was dependent for the visible future on imported food and equipment that had to be shipped from the other side of the world, a line of supply that could not have been lengthier or more prone to accidents, as events were to prove. The only real advantage was the anchorage at Port Jackson, a deepwater harbor of considerable strategic value. Governor Arthur Phillip made the best of things in his published account of the foundation of the settlement, but in a letter written to Lord Sydney six months after landing, he confessed, “No country offers less assistance to the first settlers than this does; nor do I think any country could be more disadvantageously placed with respect to support from the mother country, on which for a few years we must entirely depend” (HRA 1914: I, xx, 51).
Since no supply ships reached New South Wales for the next two years, the situation rapidly became what David Collins calls “peculiar.” When the Sirius left to get emergency rations from the Cape, no ships were left in Port Jackson, for the transports had all gone home and the armed tender, Supply, was in Norfolk Island. The colony was in effect stranded, “a circumstance … which forcibly drew our attention to the peculiarity of our situation.” “Most peculiarly situated” were those convicts whose terms of transportation were up but whose papers had not arrived from London, leaving them cast away in a very strange place on an isthmus between bondage and liberty. Meanwhile the food ration had to be cut to a point where people were so weak with hunger and scurvy they could no longer work, a “peculiar situation” (Collins 1798: 1.77, 74, 109). Perhaps Collins was thinking of Lind’s use of the same word when talking of “the peculiar situation of such places … where [scurvy] is found to be a constant endemic disease” (Lind 1753: 188).
Lodged inside these peculiarities, it was difficult to give any account of them. When the Sirius found itself embayed on the Tasmanian coast, the commander John Hunter wrote, “Our situation was such that not a man could have escaped to have told where the rest suffered” (Hunter 1968: 83). Even with a hypothetical survivor the peculiarity of such situations was not readily communicable, for “our situation was now become extremely irksome: we had been oppressed by feelings more distressing than I can find words to express” (131). With all channels of communication blocked, rations successively cut, and mortality levels rising, many in the colony must have felt that their situation was that of Hunter’s crew, only on a larger scale: without a messenger or a message. The most dramatic symptom of their suffocating sense of isolation was madness. Daniel Gordon, charged with theft of clothes and provisions, was the first convict deemed unfit to plead on grounds of insanity, “a wretch who either had not, or affected not to have, a sufficient sense of his situation” (Collins 1798: 1.79). Many more were to follow him into distraction, including officers such as Lieutenant George Maxwell who tried to kill himself in a rowing boat on the headland of the bay, and who planted his guineas in the hospital garden in hopes of a heavy crop the next season (Nagle 1988: 111). Convicts still in their wits nevertheless made desperate plans for escape, sailing in impossibly small craft for destinations they called Timor and Tahiti. In November 1791, twenty-one convicts absconded “with the chimerical idea of walking to China,” prey to the common delusion that northern Australia was joined to the bottom of East Asia (Collins 1798: 1.82). That situations like theirs were not susceptible to reason was evident in the reply given by Henri de Freycinet to Nicolas Baudin when he demanded of his lieutenant why he had beached a tender and left it in a filthy condition: “It was an inevitable consequence of the situation she was in” (Baudin 2004: 473). It recalls what Rousseau says in the Confessions (1782) of shames and misfortunes happening of their own accord: the only explanation of the situation was the situation itself; all other reasons were irrelevant. The painful circularity of situational thinking overwhelmed the crew of the Sirius when they found themselves wrecked on Norfolk Island: “Day after day we talked to one another respecting our situation, as no other subject seemed to occupy the mind of any one of us: We were situated upon an island of only five miles long, three in breadth, three hundred leagues from the nearest part of the coast of New South Wales, deprived of any hope of finding any relief by a change of situation” (Hunter 1968: 124). The magnetic force of a single idea anticipates the obsessive conversations about food among the members of Scott’s expeditions to the South Pole.
Whether they were being forced to labor in the colony or impelled to navigate the unexplored portions of its coastline, everyone caught in the restrictive sameness of this unrecognizable landscape, where one anomaly kept desolate company with another, was acquainted with scurvy and preoccupied with food. Flinders and his crew suffered badly from the disease while exploring the Gulf of Carpentaria, and then succumbed to a worse outbreak while navigating the Great Australian Bight on the way back to Port Jackson. Baudin and his men endured the same torment as they made their way from Shark Bay to Tasmania, and thence to Port Jackson. The First Fleet arrived in 1788 in good health, but scurvy grew into a problem almost as soon as disembarkation was complete. In Botany Bay and Port Jackson, there was a dearth of the antiscorbutic plants that had restored Anson’s sick crews on Juan Fernandez and Tinian. Constitutions already weakened by months at sea with nothing to eat but salt meat, pulse, and biscuit found little or nothing to prevent the onset of scorbutic symptoms once they were on dry land. Supplies of fish were occasionally lavish, but never dependable as a regular supplement for the diet of the whole population. Game, chiefly in the form of kangaroo meat, was much scarcer. Ralph Clark had anticipated a good supply of greens at Botany, but “Botany Bay Greens” was slang for a vile concoction of boiled seaweed. The natural pharmacopoeia of New South Wales was exiguous, consisting of a native currant, leptomeria acida, so scarce it was of no nutritional significance; a creeper, smilax glycophylla, taken as an infusion and said to taste like liquorice; together with a few other edible herbs and greens (Walker and Roberts 1988: 3; Bradley 1969: 135). “We sometimes met with a little wild spinach, parsley, and sorrel,” John Hunter remembered, “but in too small quantities to expect it to be of advantage to the seamen” (Hunter 1968: 49). Among later explorers of the colony, trigonella suavis-sima, a clover-like plant, was reckoned to be a useful remedy, but scurvy remained a problem (Mitchell 1835: 1.378). Tench thought that “the list of esculent vegetables, and wild fruits, is too contemptible to deserve notice” (Tench 1793: 164). William Bradley reported that parties were sent out to collect vegetable food for the sick, but were attacked by Aborigines (Bradley 1969: 114, 118), a scene commemorated by the Port Jackson Painter (Fig. 10). It shows a terrified sailor fleeing from the spears of local tribesman; his hat is on the ground, but his bunch of greens remains tightly clasped under his arm.
Fig. 10. Port Jackson Painter, Aborigines Attacking a Sailor. Port Jackson Coll. 44. © The Trustees of the Natural History Museum, London.
As for prepared antiscorbutics, there were scarcely any. The two Navy ships were carrying essence of malt, portable soup, and dried cabbage, while small quantities of acidic supplements such as oil of vitriol and lime juice were reserved as a cure in extreme cases. On the transports, some care had been taken to deal with scurvy. John White dosed his convicts with oil of tar, sauerkraut, and malt; but once they were ashore, it was impossible to treat the growing number of sick with anything but what the land or sea afforded, which was nowhere near enough. It was ironic that the terrible outbreaks of scurvy in Australia should have occurred in the decade when the disease was being tamed aboard British naval ships by more or less regular doses of lime juice, although it is doubtful that the circumstances of preparation and storage would have ensured sufficient amounts of the right quality, either on the transports or in the colony. Even if they had, there were surgeons on the convict ships who had no faith in citrus as a remedy: One of them wrote, “I have come to the conclusion … that Lemon Juice or any other acid never was, and never can be, either a preventive or cure for Scurvy;—and is a perfectly useless expense to the Service” (Henderson 1835).
There were signs that the regimen of the later transports tried to keep pace with developments in antiscorbutic medicine since Cook, with some atrocious exceptions such as the Neptune in the Second Fleet. Charles Cameron, the surgeon of the Fergusson, sailing from Ireland to Port Jackson in 1828, dealt with a bad outbreak of scurvy by using nitre from gunpowder mixed with lime juice, an innovation pioneered by a surgeon called David Paterson and mentioned by Gilbert Blane with approval (Cameron 1829: 6; Blane 1799: 496; Foxhall 2012: 134). The Select Committee Report on Transportation (RSCHC 1837: Appendix 20, 352) shows that convicts by then were expected to be supplied with the same ration of lime juice that was by then nominally standard in navy vessels: an ounce a day for each person. There was, however, no guarantee of its being shipped or prescribed, as we shall see; and since its efficacy after a long time at sea in extreme weather and temperatures was not to be relied upon, its failure would justify the skepticism of surgeons such as Andrew Henderson. In his surgeon’s report, John Washington Price of the Minerva, a transport badly attacked by scurvy, lists remedies of portable soup and spruce, but doesn’t mention lime juice at all (Price 2000: 140). The only reliable treatment for incipient scurvy on the way to Australia was to take in a good stock of vegetables and fruit at Bermuda, Brazil, or the Cape, but it cost cash or barter: “During our stay we got a little fresh meat, some oranges, limes, pine apples etc.,” wrote Edward Laing, surgeon of the Pitt, “but you may suppose few or none of these fell to the share of the convicts” (Laing in Trotter 1795: 72). No provision was made for the sequel of settlement because never before had it been necessary to supplement the diet of scorbutic sailors and voyagers who had succeeded in making land. There had always been scurvy-grass, sea-celery, bountiful catches of fish, or a decent supply of animal flesh to ensure a speedy return to health. Blane believed that merely putting foot on land was enough, “insomuch as I have known men … in unfrequented islands, recover with very little change of diet” (Blane 1799: 497). But that remedy didn’t work in Australia.
There is evidence that surgeons themselves shared the difficulties of the other visitors and settlers in identifying facts. Although he was punctual in listing the incidence of scurvy during the voyage of the Pitt, Laing seems to have been blind to what forcibly struck Phillip and Tench as a serious outbreak of the disease in the colony. He was apparently convinced the endemic sickness there was dysentery, accompanied by an obstinate rheumatism. In 1852, W. McCrea, surgeon superintendent of the Anna Maria, was so determined to supplant scurvy with dysentery he actually referred to it as a nutritional disease (Staniforth 1996: 119–22). Aching joints were often chosen as the scorbutic symptom easiest to confound with a less opprobrious sickness, such as rheumatism. Bligh had opted for it on the Bounty, and so did John Price on the Minerva (Price 2000: 132). Price agreed with Laing that dysentery was the chief disease ashore, “almost the only species of sickness they know here” (151), despite the fact that a bloody flux was common in the later stages of scurvy, too. As late as 1853, the Phoebe Dunbar arrived in Fremantle with a cargo of convicts all sick of scurvy, sixteen dead and thirty-five dangerously ill, whom the surgeon, John Bowler, had confidently diagnosed as suffering from cholera, perhaps because he didn’t want to be blamed for not having taken on fresh fruit and vegetables in Rio de Janeiro (Weaver 1993: 235–36).
Once in the colony, reports about the availability of food varied wildly. Laing was sure that great relief would be afforded sufferers by the creeper smilax glycophylla and the native currant, despite supplies of both being so meager and perilous to harvest (Trotter 1795: 102). John Turnbull, who visited Port Jackson shortly afterward, wrote, “The colonists have not as yet found any species of vegetables which they could apply to culinary purposes. Nor have the colonists found that the natives were acquainted with any thing of this kind, excepting the fern root” (Turnbull 1805: 3.151). Regarding produce and fruit, Price says they are very plentiful in Hobart, if a little dear, but the potential for farms and gardens on Tasmania was generally judged to be poor, with a soil generally sour and wet. Turnbull reports a blight in the crops around Port Jackson and a terrible flood in the Hawkesbury, resulting in distress and ruin for those raising food (Price 2000: 161; Turnbull 1805: 3.144). Peron mentions the flood, but he adds that the production of food has fulfilled all expectations: “Fruit, potatoes, and vegetables of all kinds are in abundance” (Peron 2014: 347).
So Botany Bay and its environs were exceptional in the annals of scurvy in providing a landfall effectually destitute of antiscorbutics and proving, if any proof were really needed, the truth of Cullen’s claim that land-scurvy and sea-scurvy were the same disease. There were those who construed such a state of affairs as an advantage. Marcus Clarke’s Mr. Pounce thanks God for Tasmania: “This island seems specially adapted by Providence for a convict settlement; for with an admirable climate it carries little indigenous vegetation which will support human life” (Clarke 1899: 242). So from the prisoners’ point of view, things could only get worse. “Soon after landing,” Phillip reported, “scurvy began to rage with a virulence which kept the hospital tents supplied with patients” (Phillip 1790: 58–59). John White, the chief surgeon of the settlement, agreed that the situation was critical: “The sick have increased since our landing to such a degree, that a spot for a general hospital has been marked out” (White 1790: 127). Collins noted that by June 1788 there were 154 people listed sick, three out of every twenty, mostly with scurvy. The scorbutic diathesis (or chronic shortage of ascorbate) of the rest must have hovered close to the critical point of depletion, at which signs begin to show themselves on the body. It was no respecter of rank or station, although the convicts still on their feet, subject to shrinking rations and an unremitting regime of hard labor, would have borne the brunt. A journal entry for September 1790 notes a limited distribution of antiscorbutics, “The Governor has ordered All the free People to be served Oil and Vinager” (Cobley 1963: 289). Tench wrote, “Had it not been for a stray kangaroo … we should have been utter strangers to fresh food. Thus situated, the scurvy began its usual ravages, and extended its baneful influence, more or less, through all descriptions of persons” (Tench 1789: 107). The situation was certainly peculiar in this regard. The colony was nutritionally speaking no better than a becalmed large ship: its inhabitants hemmed in by the sea, bush, mountains, and angry indigenes; its crew and passengers reliant for protein on salt meat, for carbohydrate on ship’s biscuit and a little flour, and for fat on a tiny ration of butter. Vitamins A, B, and C were absent from their diet, apart from what they could pick up from game, fish, and the sparse supplies of greens and berries, pieced out by boiled seaweed (Hughes 1988: 125).
In the Port Jackson Painter’s two pictures of the wounding of Governor Phillip, the amphitheater of trees beyond the beach is represented as an impenetrable barrier to the Europeans, but as the porous habitat of those who menace them (Fig. 11 and Fig. 12). Phillip blamed the diet of salt meat and the damp conditions for the early outbreak of scurvy, yet neither the diet nor the cramped conditions of the colony were going to change. The three supply ships with the fleet landed salt meat, pulse, butter and carbohydrate. The vessels eagerly awaited after the failure of the Guardian, so severely damaged by an iceberg south of the Cape it was left a drifting hulk, were fetching identical cargoes which, on a full ration, worked out at a weekly issue of 7 lb. salt beef or pork, 1 lb. flour, 7 lb. biscuit, 3 pints of peas, and 6 oz. butter. The only reliable method of keeping scurvy at bay was to prepare gardens, plant seeds, and hope that they grew rapidly into edible plants, but the soil available to the first settlers was largely infertile. Yet it is common to meet with very positive descriptions of the available produce in the early colony, of which Francois Peron’s is typically the most fulsome and mendacious. There is no doubt that little or none of this abundance reached convicts working in gangs and that it played no part in the diet of those working in penal settlements. Edward Laing wrote to Thomas Trotter that the newly landed convict “must boil his allowance of greens (if he can get any) with a scrap of pork or beef, which has been four or five years in salt” (Trotter 1795: 89). Writing from Van Diemen’s Land during what was a widespread outbreak of scurvy in the penal settlements more than thirty years later, Dr. Charles Turner begged to state “that the deprivation of nourishment in the supplies of the Colony has operated equally to cause the principal disease, Scurvy, as to retard and in some instances to prevent the cure of it” (HRA 1927: III, vi, 650).
Fig. 11. Port Jackson Painter, Mr. Waterhouse Endeavouring to Break the Spear after Govr Phillips [sic] Was Wounded. Watling Coll. 22. © The Trustees of the Natural History Museum, London.
Fig. 12. Port Jackson Painter, The Governor Making the Best of His Way to the Boat after Being Wounded with the Spear. Watling Coll. 23. © The Trustees of the Natural History Museum, London.
You have read of Captain Cook our late worthy commander,
The great Sir Joseph Banks, and Doctor Solander,
They sailed round the world, were perplexed and teiz’d too,
To find out a place where the King might send thieves to.
—Botany Bay Song
Joseph Banks was a guiltier party to this desperate state of affairs than Cook, for he had seen from the start that Botany Bay offered very little in the way of immediate sustenance. Recollecting his experiences there, he wrote in his journal:
A soil so barren and at the same time intirely void of the helps derived from cultivation could not be supposd to yeild much towards the support of man. We had been so long at sea with but a scanty supply of fresh provisions that we had long usd to eat every thing we could lay our hands upon, fish, flesh, or vegetable … yet we could but now and then procure a dish of bad greens for our own table and never but in the place where the ship was careend [Endeavour River] met with a sufficient quantity to supply the ship. (Banks 1962: 2.113–14)
The trees were so hard, he added, that they spoilt the tools used on them. But when some years later he gave evidence to a Parliamentary Select Committee enquiring into alternatives to Virginia, Bermuda, and the Cape as destinations for convicted felons, his views had grown much more positive: “The Proportion of rich Soil was … sufficient to support a very large Number of People…. The Grass was long and luxuriant, and there were some eatable Vegetables, particularly a Sort of Wild spinage…. There was abundance of Timber and Fuel, sufficient for any Number of Buildings” (RSCHC, xxxvii, 1799: 311; cited by Beaglehole in Banks 1962: 2.113 n. 2). The only possible basis for such a view of the resources of Botany Bay lay in his belief (for it could be nothing more than that) that a good supply of seeds and cuttings would thrive in ground quickly tilled and cultivated by forced labor. Exactly how soon that might occur was for Banks a speculation (he predicted that a year after settlement a rapidly increasingly quantity of vegetables would be available, and he thought it to no purpose to send out large supplies of essence of malt, his preferred antiscorbutic [HRNSW I, part 2, 1783–92, 1892: 232]); but for those actually inhabiting the peculiar situation, it was a desperate gamble that was not paying off. With soil scanty and poor, laborers enfeebled by exhaustion and disease, and with crops meagre and vulnerable to assaults from vermin, drought, tempest, and thieves, there was no chance of supplying everyone with a sufficient amount of fresh food. Two years into the life of the colony, famine was killing those already weakened by scurvy. “It was not hard labour that destroyed them,” Collins noticed, “it was an entire want of strength in the constitution to receive nourishment” (Collins 1798: 1.209)—a judgment supported by Edward Laing who noticed, “food passes through the intestinal canal without any part of it being assimilated” (Laing in Trotter 1795: 1.89).
Even when the Nepean and Hawkesbury Valleys started to come into production in the early 1800s, supplemented by the relatively fertile ground of Rose Hill (later Parramatta), scurvy was still common. In April 1792, Collins reported a dreadful sick list with convicts running mad for no apparent reason. The death toll for that year was 482 men, women, and children (Collins 1798: 204, 246). Though mortality decreased in Port Jackson over the next two years, Collins warned Hobart in 1804 that scurvy had broken out in Tasmania “to an alarming degree” (HRA 1921: III, i, 286). He reported disastrous harvests for New South Wales in 1799 (Collins 1802: 2.142). For the next three decades, scurvy was endemic in Tasmania—at Macquarie Harbour and Port Arthur—and in settlements on the northern coasts—Moreton Bay, Melville Island, and Port Raffles, as well as in rural districts remote from coastal settlements. A brief exchange before the Select Committee of 1837 indicates what a low place it took at that time among the priorities of the British Government compared with the other travails of the colony, and probably always had. Sir Charles Lemon (nomen sine omen) was putting questions to John Russell, formerly the surgeon at Port Arthur:
What is the diet of the convicts at Port Arthur?—It is plentiful in quantity, but it is salt rations. Do they not get fresh meat?—Up to the time I left (1833) they got no fresh meat. Had they plenty of vegetables?—Not up to that period…. The ground was very barren, and there was great difficulty in working it. What was the effect of this sort of diet on the health of the convicts?—It produced a great deal of scurvy among them. (RSCHC 1837: xix, 2.50)
There were no further questions and no recommendations for improvement. It had transpired in the course of questioning that the only fresh meat available at Port Arthur was reserved for guard dogs, to keep them alert and fierce. Saxby Pridmore estimates that scurvy was the greatest cause of sickness in Tasmania for the first four decades of settlement (Pridmore 1983: 277). Detailed descriptions of the outbreaks on Melville Island were given by Dr. John Gold in a letter of advice to the Commandant at Port Raffles, where things were so bad the settlement was abandoned two years after its foundation in 1827 (Gold 1827: 79–80). In 1825 Dr. Charles Turner summed up the causes of the deplorable condition of the people in Tasmania as follows: “Exhaustion from labour in a Tropical Climate and exposure to damp during the rainy season have been of much injury…. No supplies of fresh meat, fish, turtle or kangaroo have been procured, and the growth of vegetables has been unproductive The supply of Lime juice was soon exhausted, as also the less efficacious remedies of mineral acids and Cinchona Bark” (HRA 1927: III, vi). Fifty years after the founding of New South Wales, serious droughts could ruin harvests even in the most fertile areas. “It was estimated that one third of the wheat and flour consumed in the colony was imported in the years 1839 to 1842” (HRA 1924: I, xx, x). This particular event resulted in a collapse of credit, and people desperate for food found it impossible to obtain any without ready cash, a resource limited to the troops and upper echelons of the settlement.
In June 1790, five ships arrived at Port Jackson, including the long-awaited store ship Justinian, which had narrowly avoided disaster on the voyage. The other four transports were in a bad way, especially the Neptune. Out of its human cargo of 530 persons, 163 were dead and 269 sick. The master, Denis Trail, was subsequently to be investigated in England for criminal neglect, but the effect on a colony already reeling from scurvy and starvation was devastating. Out of a total of 1038 new convicts, 273 had perished and almost 500 were too sick to move, the bulk of them scorbutic. For the next three months, the average sick bill at the hospital stood at 400 (Tench 1793: 45; Collins 1798: 1. 119–24; Pearn and O’Carrigan 1983: 15). Although never again was a shipment of convicts to arrive in quite such a pitiable state, it turned out that for propitious weather and good health, the voyage of the First Fleet had been exceptional. After that, the colony was destined to be a net importer, as well as a local producer, of scorbutic personnel. In May 1792, the Queen arrived from Ireland with only 50 out of her cargo of 122 convicts surviving; in October of the same year, 80 convicts were landed sick from the Royal Admiral (Collins 1798: 210, 237). Baudin, commanding the French expedition off the southwestern coast, brought in two ships paralyzed with scurvy in 1802. On his own vessel, the Geographe, an original complement of 126 was reduced to 75, of whom only 6 (some say 4) could keep the deck when he made Port Jackson, where he remained for six months in order to reestablish his crews (Peron 1810: 260–81; Cornell 1965: 48). When Flinders got back to Port Jackson in the Investigator, nine of his crew had died of scurvy, and eleven were put straight into the hospital (Mack 1972: 145–46, 151–55; McCalman 2014: 47–49).
These influxes of scorbutic victims did not stop. There were regular arrivals of ships with high mortality and surviving convicts in a deplorable condition. Of the 1040 male convicts carried to the colony in 1794, 175 died, a ratio of 1 to 6 (Bateson 1959: 43). The Hillsborough sailed from Gravesend in 1798 and lost 95 people by the time she reached Port Jackson, chiefly of jail fever. The Albemarle had 32 deaths, the Admiral Baring 36. Governor King reported “great debility” on the Royal Admiral with 12 dead and 83 sick (Shaw 1966: 113). Although a proportion of these deaths was owing to diseases other than scurvy, this was not the case with ships from Ireland where prisoners, often starving and sick when embarked, were cheated of food and clean air during the voyage and succumbed in large numbers to scurvy. The most scandalous example of brutal treatment was the Britannia, sailing from Cork in 1796 with a sadistic master and a spineless surgeon who declined to object to the cruelties he saw inflicted on the people for whom he was responsible. Already held in appalling conditions in the bowels of the ship, the convicts were suspected of a mutiny and its alleged ringleaders were in effect tortured to death with the lash. Of the 144 male convicts, 10 were dead on arrival, and the rest very ill. After the uprising in 1798, the treatment of Irish convicts was particularly bad. Those on the Hercules and the Atlas II were convinced that that they had been deliberately starved, with 44 deaths on the former and 65 on the latter when they arrived in 1802 (ibid.; Bateson 1959: 142–47; Hughes 1988: 190). The Three Bees landed scorbutic Irish prisoners in 1813, having lost seven dead; the Chapman arrived in 1817 from Cork with twelve dead and a large sick list.
Although deaths from scurvy on the transports gradually decreased, there were some notable spikes. In 1835, the George III sighted the Tasmanian coast having lost twelve prisoners to scurvy, and with a further fifty prostrate. Attempting to make an urgent run to Hobart, she struck a rock near the Actaeon Reefs and sank, with 133 deaths. In 1839, Sir George Gipps reported to Lord Glenelg that of the 330 convicts landed from the Lord Lynedoch, only 89 had escaped the scurvy: 28 were dead, 114 were instantly hospitalized, 23 were permanent invalids, and many of the rest would “feel the effects of the disease for the rest of their lives” (HRA 1914: I, xx, 57; Bateson 1959: 249). Katherine Foxhall’s careful scrutiny of convict transportation reveals that even though the death rate was flatlining, scurvy was actually on the rise in convict ships throughout the 1830s (Foxhall 2012: 122). Even in the 1850s, ships from Ireland bore fatal evidence of neglect and cruelty. The Robert Small and the Phoebe Dunbar reported six and ten fatalities, respectively, but the figures were as unreliable as the diagnoses. It was Bowler, the Phoebe Dunbar’s surgeon, who tried to persuade an enquiry that his patients had died of cholera, but it is clear that scurvy, caused by a combination of a debilitating prison diet before the voyage and short-rationing throughout it, was to blame. An ugly irony attended this vicious lie, for official instructions for an outbreak of ship-borne cholera required that all fruit and vegetables be thrown overboard (Reece 1993: 8–9; Weaver in ibid.: 231–55; Bateson 1959: 341).
Besides its homegrown scurvy, then, Australia had been importing new additions to its stock with every shipment of convicts, aside from scorbutic mariners such as those arriving with Baudin and Flinders, and later with Dumont D’Urville. From the start, it was also an exporter of the disease. The ships of the First Fleet that turned for home in June 1788, having disembarked their passengers, were crewed by sailors who had lived on salt rations for more than a year. Unless they had spent their time in Port Jackson culling the few antiscorbutic plants the land afforded, they had no chance of avoiding scurvy. When the Sirius set off for the Cape to obtain some food, she was carrying “a dozen heartless cabbages & as many young Brocoli plants & those the produce of the Governor’s Garden” (Bradley 1969: 135). Her supply of essence of malt for what it was worth was too small to share among the whole crew, so it was stopped. When they got to the Cape, 40 men were incapable of work, and there was no one on board not scorbutic to some degree (158). John Fowell reported a similar disaster aboard the Supply, sailing back to England via Cape Horn (Fowell 1789: 3). Phillip gave vivid accounts of the return voyages of the transports. On the Alexander, scurvy was rife, the only remedies being porter, spruce beer, and wine. She was sailing in company with the Friendship where the situation was no better. Only six hands were fit for work on the one, and five on the other, so they merged crews and scuttled the Friendship. When they drifted into Batavia no one was capable of handling the vessel. Only four of the original two crews shipped home from there, the rest being dead or too ill. The Scarborough landed fifteen scorbutic hands at Tinian, Anson’s old refuge from scurvy, while the Lady Penrhyn, when she got to Tahiti, had only five men who could go on deck, “the rest of the crew were in a truly deplorable state” (Phillip 1790: 206–69). Hunter heard that the Prince of Wales and the Borrowdale arrived at their first ports of call in as helpless a condition (Hunter 1968: 77).
Conceive of New South Wales if you like as a pump for scurvy—sucking it in, seasoning it, and sending it out again—its taint recirculated and strengthened as if it were the sinister obverse of the seeds received, restored, and dispatched from Edmund Spenser’s Garden of Adonis. I have talked before of the leakage of scurvy through various boundaries and membranes: from the blood vessels to the bone or the skin, from the body to the mind, and the mind to the body; then from the body to the ship, from the ship to the air, air to the sea, and so on. Here the same principle is at work but figured as the circulation of a putrid current between the center of the world and its outermost limit, and (as Tench would say) casting its baneful influence as far as dimensions of the globe allowed. Just such a scorbutic eddy was evident in the difficulties of reconciling Banks’s and Cook’s accounts of their Australian landfall with the reality of Botany Bay endured by the First Fleet. On the Endeavour, they were short of greens and low on ascorbate when they saw it, and Banks was going to develop mouth ulcers and scorbutic nostalgia in the Arafura Sea a few weeks later. Whether this was responsible for the mistakes they made about the fertility of Botany Bay, indulging wistful projections of what they needed rather than making accurate descriptions of what they saw, the outcome was a situation in which incipient scurvy bred the conditions for the production of more when the convicts were landed. The image of a corrupt influence pulsing back and forth through the sea-lanes of the globe is active in the minds of the settlers of the Port Jackson colony, as if they were encircled by an evil tide, piling up its filthy jetsam with each successive fleet. Collins thought scurvy might not have been such a scourge had better food been supplied: then it “would not have met so powerful an ally in its ravages among the emaciated and debilitated objects which the gaols had crowded into transports, and the transports had landed in these settlements” (Collins 1798: 1.206). He was right about the jails, nurseries of scurvy, which was sometimes referred to as the “Millbank disease” after the London prison where diets appeared calculated to produce it; and of which, without careful superintendence, the transports completed the culture. Except for the fresh produce purchased at Bermuda, Rio de Janeiro, or the Cape, the food was always going to be the wrong food, and other remedies for the most part useless.
If the perpetual reinvigoration of a cause within the circle of its own effects is, as Trotter might have said, the genius of scurvy, then its pattern is traceable in many of the ungovernable peculiarities of the situation in Australia. These often suggested a vortex of morbific human atoms, as the drift of debilitated men and women from jail to hulk, hulk to transport, transport to hard labor, and finally from labor to the hospital made up the tale of Collins’s dismal record of settlement. For example, when Sir William Molesworth, chairman of the Select Committee convened in 1837 to assess the first fifty years of the colony, decided to supply Watkin Tench’s desideratum by taking a long view of its short history, this is what he saw: “It would appear … as if the main business of us all were the commission of crime and the punishment of it, as if the whole colony were continually in motion towards several courts of justice” (RSCHC 1837: 1.71). Ralph Clark saw it more as the perpetual motion of crime toward fresh outrages against property: “I think we are in a fine stat we brought nothing but thefs out with use [us] to find nothing but thefs” (Clark 1981: 100). Even the labor of construction wore a troubling appearance of ceaseless blind ferment. The huts of the road gangs, according to one witness, “were like bee-hives, the inhabitants busily pouring in and out, but with this difference, the one works by day, the other by night” (RSCHC 1837, 1.72).
Night work in the colony was generally devoted to other activities. The convict culture of theft was preternaturally strong and getting stronger: “It is impossible for any body to attemp[t] to raise any Gardin stuff for before it comes to perfection the[y] will steal it,” Clark complained (Clark 1981: 11)—a fact Collins gloomily confirmed. At first he thought of devising a plan to prevent it, but then acknowledged that it wouldn’t work. “While there was a vegetable to steal, there were those who would steal it, wholly regardless as to the injustice done” (Collins 1798: 1.111). Trying for some useful critical angle on a situation that was becoming daily more peculiar, with the punishment of theft (reduced rations being a standard sentence) seemingly designed to precipitate more crime and yet more punishment, he turned to the shortage of food as the fundamental cause of the collapse of what was left of the social fabric of the settlement. Had there been enough to eat, he reasoned with himself, “the plea of hunger could not have been advanced as a motive and excuse for thefts” (206), and something might have been done to ease the cascade of prisoners from one form of crime and punishment to another. But Collins knew that shortage of bulk in the convict diet was not the first problem encountered in the early days of the colony, any more than it was at Port Arthur later. Though hunger was certainly a serious issue in Port Jackson after the loss of the Guardian, the chief problem in the beginning was scurvy. People stole not because they didn’t have sufficient food, but because they were craving the right kind, which was why gardens were the main target and why vegetables were the prize. This was the motive for people already being punished for stealing produce to steal more: not from greed or inveterate criminality but from dreams of greens. Their cravings were impelling them toward the nutritive juice, or succus nutritius, of live plants. Even before the great famine of 1845–48, many of the Irish had been transported for this very offence in the famine years of 1800, 1817, and 1822, and they were now locked in a cycle of iterations: starvation, scurvy, theft, punishment, starvation, and so on.
Those who raided gardens were looking for the same relief as Bradley when he collected wild spinach, acid berries, and local samphire. It is even possible to trace a faint correlation between the sort of theft committed and the kind of nutritional deficit it was supplying. A sixth of the colony’s crop of Indian corn was stolen in the summer 1792. The germ of the corn was the only source of vitamin B until the Atlantic landed rice (presumably unpolished) from India in June. The Pitt had arrived in February with nothing but salt meat. Some time between these two dates, there was an outbreak of insanity among the female convicts who were getting sufficient protein and were not forced to labor, so “it was difficult to assign a cause for this disorder” (Collins 1798: 1.204). It was most likely a symptom of pellagra, often called black scurvy for the scabs and scale it raised on the legs and forearms; later to be known in Australia as “barcoo rot” (Furphy 1981: 161). It was caused by depletion of niacin that the thieves, exhibiting the somatic intuition so typical of victims of nutritional disease, knew the germ of the corn would contain. Certainly it was pellagra that afflicted the sail-maker Peter White who had been four days starving in the bush in the winter of 1788 and was suffering the loss of mental focus and motor control typical of a serious niacin deficit. He seemed to Collins to be intoxicated, and to Hunter too: “He … appeared to us to be stupid and … he staggered like a man drunk” (Hunter 1968: 108; Collins 1798: 1.73). He was behaving exactly like the Muselmaenner in Primo Levi’s account of Auschwitz, who also swayed when they sat, plunged when they walked, and became incoherent when they talked, all for want of the same vitamin.
I’ll be judge, I’ll be jury,
Cried wicked old Fury,
I’ll try the whole cause,
And condemn you to death.
—Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland (1865)
Of the many contingencies listed by Collins as responsible for the dire state of the colony—the shipwrecks of the Sirius and the Guardian, the failure and theft of crops, mortality levels that for a while were almost outstripping the numbers of new arrivals, the difficulty of communicating the emergency to officials in London, the exhaustion of the convicts, and the general loss among them of hope and of any principle social cohesion—I mean to place scurvy at the head of them as the first accident that no one had anticipated, and the one whose effects were felt the longest in Australia, long after food was plentiful and the constitutions of most inhabitants were restored to health and robustness.
I will begin by rehearsing those traits of the disease that are going to achieve salience in the colony, although not always identified as specifically scorbutic. By the middle of 1789, Collins was amazed by the frequency of thefts, particularly the robbing of gardens, which he and Clark agreed was a singular injustice done to the gardeners (1.77). Yet Governor Phillip had enough candor to tell Dundas, “I can recollect very few crimes during the last three years but what have been committed to procure the necessaries of life” (HRA 1914: I, i, 373). Collins was able to be more specific. He knew that theft of produce, often immature, while it struck at the one resource that was critical to the colony’s future, was not taken just to satisfy hunger; but he was not quite clear about the motives and passions attending the crimes. He assumed that everyone, convicts too, knew they were in a battle to survive, and that they would understand, like him, how nothing but a common effort of self-preservation would ensure the survival of the maximum number of people. Gradually, he assembled in his journal a dossier of convict depravity that looked to him like a suicidal festival of dishonesty and excess. Undoubtedly, anarchy was strengthened by famine; but the blind and importunate yearning for what might satisfy the craving of a scorbutic body was not in his list. The suspension of moral will that was to lead to subsequent disorder in the community, and what many (including Collins) attributed to an inveterate depravity of mind among its inhabitants, began with the pursuit of greens. Clark himself experienced its first stages on the voyage out, vainly expecting it would be satisfied when he got to Botany. In the report of the Admiralty Committee charged with investigating the outbreaks of scurvy on the ships of George Nares’s expedition to the Arctic, Dr. Buzzard was asked about scorbutic dreams of food: “Would you consider these phenomena as a mental expression, urging the dreamer to the choice of food best suited to his condition?—yes, I should certainly” (RCA 1877: 198). Buzzard had already reported that scorbutic slumber is “accompanied by dreams in which the luxuries of fruits and vegetables are vividly pictured” (196). Bradley, Hunter, and the Port Jackson Painter’s sailor risked their lives trying to lay their hands on acid fruit and esculent plants. Collins wanted to interpret the same impulsive behaviour among the convicts as one more missing thing in the desolate moral landscape of New South Wales, namely “the want of that ingredient, so necessary to society” (Collins 1798: 1.501). He means self-restraint, or the succus socialis, and it is interesting he should identify it as an item deficient in the moral economy of these individuals, just as “vegetable effluvia” are the deficient element in a body fed too long with a sea diet: for one deficiency ushers in the other (Melville ML MS Q 36, 250).
Collins also noted the effects of hunger and forced labor on newly arrived convicts, who “wore in general a most miserable and emaciated appearance, and numbers died daily…. Of those who could handle the hoe or spade by far the greater part carried hunger in their countenances” (Collins 1798: 1.201, 204). He observed in the faces of Norfolk Island prisoners the distinctive sunken eyes and horrid pallor of scurvy, “a very unhealthy and cadaverous appearance” (1.233). It was a unique symptom, that leaden hue and hollow eye, that makes the scorbutic victim so frightful to look at. Bligh saw it in the faces of his companions at Coupang, and they in his. The crews of his two ships were so disfigured by scurvy, Dumont D’Urville recalled, that one of his officers, “seeing the victims being carried up from below … could not recognize his own men, and had to ask them their names.” Buzzard had told the Nares enquiry, confirming Bligh’s account of the phenomenon, “The change of aspect … will be noticed by them of each other, whilst the observer is unconscious he is presenting the same appearance” (Bligh 1937: 227; Dumont D’Urville 1987: 2.347; Blane 1799: 483; RCA 1877: 196). This misrecognition of a general metamorphosis, akin to the “horrid sympathy” experienced by Milton’s Satan when (himself now transformed into a serpent) he watches his legions going through the same change, was typical of scorbutic depressions and excitements alike. The extreme isolation of the scorbutic patient was demonstrated in the faces and emotions of these wasted prisoners: while they ceased to be recognizable as the persons they had formerly been, each individual supposed this to be true of everyone else but him- or herself, removing the basis of any sympathetic and certainly any social community. Their dreams and depressions were as peculiar to each of them as their new situation and the skeletal masks they wore in it, unshareable though common to all. This was “the intense concentration of self in the middle of a heartless immensity,” to borrow a phrase from Moby-Dick (Melville 1972: 525).
In its more exuberant aspect, this isolation manifested itself as Saturnalian energy. Alcohol came to Sydney Cove in 1792—porter was licensed for sale, and 7,597 gallons of spirits were unloaded from an American vessel later the same year. Liquor became “the parent of every irregularity” (Collins 1798: 1.240, 255). Soon it was the preferred form of payment, better than provisions, clothing, or coin; it would buy anything, so people would observe no restraint in trying to get hold of it: “It operated like a mania, there being nothing which they would not risk to obtain it” (327; RSCHC 1812: 5). Once to hand, it promoted every form of excess, including the destruction of all traces of prudence: “Breaking out from the restraint to which they had been subject, [the settlers] conducted themselves with the greatest impropriety, beating their wives, destroying their stock, trampling on and injuring their crops in the ground, and destroying each other’s property” (Collins 1798: 1.240). There is a strict reverse symmetry in the anarchy of these people when viewed as the repudiation of Collins’s visionary scheme for social order. They behaved as if they were intent on eradicating the last atom of “that ingredient, so necessary to society” (consensus, deferred gratification, common purpose, hard work, altruism, etc.) because it appeared to them to have turned to poison. There was nothing in this fantastic land of pain that was desirable except its opposite, supplied in this case by the delirium of drunkenness. Convicts figured the odds until what was rationally eligible became of all things least worthy of choice. Collins was aghast, “They now committed thefts as if they stole from principle” (idem 1802: 2.146). “It is not from me,” averred the soi-disant settler Edmund Gibbon Wakefield, “that you have to learn why a people governed from afar by an absolute power, and continually increasing their territory, must have a continually increasing tendency to rebellion” (Wakefield 1829: 66). It was the lesson already exemplified in the “swing” of Kenelm Digby’s bean plant and in the history of Neville’s The Isle of Pines: “When the inferior Members that should study nothing but obedience, have gotten the power into their hands … then every one of them following their impetuous inclinations, the whole is brought into confusion” (Digby 1669: 211).
Convicts knew of no reason not to risk the life that was already risked, and often lost, in gratifying an urgent and immediate need for food or clothing; and having got the habit of acting impulsively to obtain the things the body demanded, there was no fancy, no matter how improbable or obscene, that was not admitted and indulged when regular holidays from privation and depression were supplied by rum. After all, they were the children of contingency, as Collins had partly recognized. Georg Steller, chronicler of Bering’s expedition, noted that many who recovered from scurvy became addicted to gambling (Steller 1988: 143). The long odds that Collins quoted for the establishment of civil society read to convicts like a catalogue of fatal miseries, so why not welcome chance and risk as your only friends, and be as heedless of the law and its consequences as if there were no one but oneself to witness the folly of what was imagined or the madness of what was done? Collins reported that by 1794 gambling had become a general obsession of the colony (Collins 1798: 359). Locked inside Newgate while pretending to be in Australia, Wakefield imagined with some shrewdness what life was like in Sydney before he ever got there. Among convicts, he said, everyone was involved in the perpetual calculation of odds, “and in this pursuit they show such a degree of acuteness and arrive at such just conclusions, as would be surprising, if one did not consider the excitement of their minds” (quoted in Scheckter 1998: 82). This excitement was the subterfuge of thought and desire, as James calls it, which sustained the contingent romance of Botany Bay.
However, one form of excess was met by another. On Norfolk Island, a convict called Castleton was flogged to death for refusing to work when presumably he did not have a choice (Shaw 1966: 208). At Port Arthur, a surgeon called Scott acknowledged that making scorbutic prisoners work was torture, and Charles Sturt described what it was like to suffer it: “The back muscles of my legs are all contracted, and refuse their office and to attempt to straighten them gives me most intolerable pain” (TSA/CSO1 641–14418, 11 January 1835; Sturt 2002: 313). Edward Evans remembered what it was like to go over snow with scurvy: “I suffered absolute agonies in forcing my way along…. I somehow waddled on ski until one day I fainted to striving to start a march” (Evans 1926: 199). Yet the numbers reduced to strict immobility made it more imperative that those who could still walk, work harder. Marcus Clarke’s hero Rufus Dawes says, “They made me work when I couldn’t stand…. It is wonderful what spirit the cat gives a man. There’s nothing like work to get rid of aching muscles—so they used to tell me” (Clarke 1899: 168). Their labor was necessary to meet an objective Collins saw as “of the first magnitude and importance,” which was “to endeavour speedily, and by every possible exertion, to place [the colony’s] inhabitants in a situation that accident and delay might not affect.” He wanted an end to the devastating plight of being “the sport of contingency” and of dwelling in a peculiar situation: he believed he was planning an intelligible and morally equitable line of conduct that any impartial spectator would understand and approve because the alternative was unthinkable (209, 204, 357).
Collins’s only line of action was to pursue regimes of punishment unparalleled in their cruelty. If thieves were so compulsively criminal as to seem to steal by principle, then they must be flogged according to a stronger principle; “not dreading anything that was not immediately present to their own feelings,” they should endure correction at their nerve endings (Collins 1798: 1.196). Even restrictions such as a bread and water diet (sometimes imposed for as long as three years) or banishment to solitary confinement on a nearby island were, in these circumstances, a death sentence; a fact apparently not understood until they were ended in 1832 (Walker and Roberts 1988: 5). But the use of the lash on scorbutic bodies, already stressed with loss of collagen and pathologically susceptible to all sense impressions, was torture upon torture. White recalls, “Two men … sentenced to receive five hundred lashes each … could not undergo the whole of that punishment, as, like most of the persons in the colony, they were much afflicted with scurvy” (White 1790: 159). Punishments as excessive as these would have been regarded as the equivalent of flogging round the fleet in the navy (generally set at 300 lashes), an ordeal from which the victim was not expected to recover, consequently it was a sentence usually remitted (Rodger 2004: 494). In Australia, the tally went up and up. In October 1788, a man was sentenced to 500 lashes for stealing soap valued at eightpence (White 1790: 216); John Hudson was given 500 for selling his clothes (Clark 1981: 215); a thief who wounded the commissary’s assistant was sentenced to 800 (Collins 1798: 1.473). In 1790, a convict was given 1,000 lashes for stealing 3 lb. of potatoes (Hughes 1988: 101). Joseph Menbury was flogged so often that he lost much of the flesh on his back and shoulders; his collar bones were described as standing out like two horns (114). People were hanged for offences that were plainly not capital—James Bennett, a seventeen-year-old, for stealing goods worth five shillings; James Collington, for stealing food. It was he who said on the gallows something that stuck in Collins’s mind and maybe in his conscience: namely that he stole because he was famished and would rather die than live like that (Collins 1798: 1.200).
This hideous cruelty made no difference, as everyone agreed. George Worgan noted “plenty of floggings, but I believe the Devil’s in them, and can’t be flogged out” (Worgan 2009: 99). Collins admits at the start of his second volume of memoirs that relentless cruelty has brought no improvement in the social sense of the population. A member of the 1837 Report made a hideous joke out of it when he asked, “Would it not be better to burn them alive all at once?” (RSCHC 1837: 88). That joke reverberated with another, told by Tench as he picked out the infernally heroic dimensions of the struggle to settle Australia while narrating his trip to the Hawkesbury River with Phillip, where they made their way up to the top of yet another shapeless stone outcrop: “I must not forget to relate, that to this pile of desolation, on which, like the fallen angel on the top of Niphates, we stood contemplating our nether Eden, his excellency was pleased to give the name of Tench’s Prospect Mount” (Tench 1793: 1.119). If Tench takes Satan’s part in the Australian version of Paradise Lost, the governor God’s, and the convicts Adam’s and Eve’s, then the parallel suggests that the retribution exacted is quite as disproportionate and capricious as God’s punishment for eating the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge, for the new settlers in this upside down Eden were only following the example of their first parents, seizing the food their nature craved in defiance of the law. The three great questions surrounding original sin were applicable here, too, namely whether exile was a just penalty for their disobedience; whether the defence of property-as-food in a state of nature was a viable restriction; and whether the colonization of the earth would ever result in redemption.
The trouble with Collins’s project for social salvation was that it meant dying, as Smollett pointed out in a parallel situation in his novel, Roderick Random (1748). To force people suffering from scurvy into violent exertion was to hasten their death. When Charles Sturt decided to send James Poole, desperately sick with scurvy, back to Adelaide from their base camp at Depot Glen during his expedition of 1844, the man was dead of a burst artery within twenty-four hours (Sturt 2002: 203). Striving to keep the trajectory of the imperial enterprise intact, Collins evolved a plan whose cost was the very outcome it was intended to abridge; and in the end, he had to confess that his was a “visionary speculation,” no different from that which drove the convicts to emigrate to a fantastic China in order to avoid the chain gang. Until quite late, he was playing an involuntary part in the scorbutic push and pull of colonial life, whose outcome was not an equitable division of labor leading to reformation, but the perpetual circuit of misery, sickness, theft, punishment, more misery, sickness, and pain, ending only in death. John Mitchel was not joking when he got to Tasmania and saw the full effects of this systematic degradation, “What a blessing to these creatures, if they had been hanged” (Mitchel 1868: 256). A convict was cited in the 1837 Report as saying, before being sentenced to punishment, “Let a man be what he will when he comes here, he is soon as bad as the rest; a man’s heart is taken from him, and there is given to him the heart of a beast” (71).
Such a transformation was doubtless partly the result of the savage excesses indulged by the convict multitude, but much of it was caused by a system of convict management that deliberately imposed corporal punishments beyond the limits of the law. Tench had been astonished at the powers invested in the governor by the Royal Commission, which embraced cases of property, life, and death effectually unrestrained by precedent and common law. Gubernatorial power was extended by the Marine Mutiny Act to include civilian offenders within the regime of martial law (Tench 1789: 66–68; RSCHC 1812: 7–11). “Colonial Regulations,” as they were called, allowed the governor to order lashes up to 500, but often punishments exceeded this limit (RSCHC 1812: 42, 54). No officer was supposed to order a flogging without recourse to a magistrate or the criminal court, but they seldom did so, especially in the penal settlements. The extension of this arbitrary power explains why corporal punishment not only exceeded the limits of the common law but even the regimen of naval ships insofar as disproportionate sentences were imposed for minor offences such as disobedience, insolence, and pilfering, well outside the scope of mutiny. The governor could at his own discretion expand the criminal court of judicature into a military tribunal in order to make inequitable laws more terrible and punishment more wanton. A boy called John Hudson, for instance, was given fifty lashes for being out of his hut after nine at night (Clark 1981: 183). The returns quoted in the 1837 Report show that the average flogging was by then fifty lashes, but the protocol of each return required it be carefully noted whether the skin broke, how much blood flowed, and what cries came from the victim: “John Orr, Hercules, neglect of duty, 12 lashes. (A boy) cried out very much” (RSCHC 1837: Appendix 1, 68). As for greater penalties, a state of exception was easy to invoke by means of colonial regulation, and of all categories of punishment, that was the one the prisoners most feared.
Jeremy Bentham and Sir Samuel Romilly were appalled when they read Collins’s book. Bentham called it “a disgusting narrative of atrocious crimes and most severe and cruel punishments.” Bentham produced a powerful genealogy of the descent of so-called justice in the colony into “so much lawless violence,” tracing it from its origin “in a country … of itself yielding nothing in the way of sustenance” to the “Nullity of Legislation in New South Wales for want of an Assembly to consent,” and to the “Nullity of Governor’s Ordinances, for want of a Court to try Offences” (Bentham 1803: 39, 24, 20). Nothing, it was evident, comes of nothing. He wrote a memoir to Lord Pelham on the breaches of civil rights committed by the New South Wales government and began to frame an alternative concept of penal servitude based on a system of silence and perpetual surveillance, which he believed would put an end to the excesses of convicts and jailers alike (Currey 2000: 140; RSCHC 1799). However, when it was put into practice at Port Arthur, this innovation proved to be a refinement only of cruelty, transferring the infliction of violence from the body to the mind. Soon after the innovation of solitary confinement in silence was established there, an insane asylum was deemed necessary, too. The part played by the theory and practice of Benthamite penology in the evolution of punishment in Australia would doubtless have shocked Bentham himself, but it pointed to an insidious use of disease both mental and physical in the calculated infliction of physical and psychological trauma.
George Arthur took over from William Sorell as Lt. Governor of Macquarie Harbour on Sarah Island, off the coast of Tasmania, in 1822. James Backhouse describes it as a violent and miserable place of flogging and overwork in wet conditions. Nutritionally, it was a nightmare: the ground peaty and soaked, yielding no grain and few vegetables, with scarcely any livestock, for even goats found it impossible to survive on such terrain. Arthur oversaw the removal of the prison from there to Port Arthur in 1833. Backhouse doesn’t say much about scurvy at Port Macquarie, but he cites a prisoner who said the convicts were worked so hard on short rations that they could not “appease the cravings of exhausted nature,” and a surgeon who reported “that when the men became ill, the tone of their constitution was so low that they were difficult to recover [and] some were affected with scurvy long after leaving the settlement” (Backhouse 1843: 54–55). His visit coincided with the removal to the new location, and when he arrived at Port Arthur, he noted that “cases of scurvy have of late increased,” adding, “no prisoners are now allowed private gardens,” and only those manning boats were allowed to fish; nobody was allowed to hunt (167–68). This suggests that prisoners were allowed garden plots at Macquarie Island, but even had that been the case, it was unlikely that they were productive. Ever since Collins’s day, convicts there had been allowed to scour Sarah Island for “Botany Bay Greens” and for the dried-up fragments of blubber (Herman Melville calls them “fritters”; the convicts called them “crap” [21]) washed ashore from whaleships. Arthur’s reason for a decision to halt the supply of fresh food is hard to fathom since the daily allowance of food—at 1.5 lbs. of flour, 1 lb. of salt beef, or 10 oz. of salt pork, with tea and sugar (MacFie and Bonet 1985: 5), a ration that was halved for those accused of shirking or sentenced to hard labor—was bound to cause scurvy. No surprise then that the disease was instantly observable at Port Arthur, since an embargo had effectually been placed on all forms of its prevention. In November 1834, Backhouse summed up the sequel: “In consequence of the prisoners living on salt meat, and being defectively supplied with vegetables, a large number were suffering from scurvy” (Backhouse 1843: 167, 226). The diet, by this time lacking in both tea and vegetables, was not enough for men on forced labor and explains the rising number of scorbutic patients in the hospital. Backhouse saw nineteen at one time, “as appalling a picture of human wretchedness, as I recollect ever to have witnessed” (226). Yet Arthur claimed in his testimony to the 1837 Select Committee that since 1834 the convicts “have almost wholly supplied themselves with vegetables,” adding a furher untruth: “It is found that the soil produces potatoes and vegetables of all kinds remarkably well” (RSCHC 1937: Appendix 16, 309).
The statistics for 1830–35 paint a picture more dire than this. From seven cases of hospitalized scorbutics in 1830, there were 321 in 1833 and 412 the following year, dropping to 26 after a supply of vegetables was reestablished in 1835, although that seems to have been restricted (at least at first) to those in the hospital. The official rate of mortality for scurvy in 1834 was a single death, but many more were ascribed to a long list of various genera of disease, obviously arranged according to Cullen’s nosology, such as apoplexia, asthma, cerebritis, debilitas, morbus cordis, rheumatismus, and spasma—any of which might plausibly have been cited as a fatal symptom of scurvy (Ross 1995: 41). The technique of widening the spread of scurvy over a multitude of ills was already being specialized on the transports, where diarrhea, dysentery, erysipelas, and, as we have seen, even cholera took the blame for scurvy (Staniforth 1996: 122). Peter MacFie and Marissa Bonet are right to warn readers of this material that there is often a difference between official correspondence and what was actually happening. If out of a population of 887 prisoners in 1834 (Backhouse 1843: 225), there were 412 cases of scurvy diagnosed the same year (and it is plain from Backhouse’s descriptions of the ones he saw in the hospital that they had to be seriously ill to get lodged there), and if the death rate for those on hard labor stood at an average of 48 per 1,000 (Maxwell-Stewart and Bradley 2006: 10), how is it conceivable that only one person died of scurvy in 1834? The official figure for convict mortality as a whole that year was 25 (Kamphuis 2007: 26), but given the carelessness with which deaths were listed and sometimes only conjectured (Backhouse 1843: 49), it seems likely the figure was higher and that fatal cases of scurvy were misreported, either by accident or deliberately. In the official correspondence, everyone, with one exception, seems ready to recognize an outbreak of scurvy and equally willing to explain that a rapid application of remedies such as vinegar and vegetables is putting an end to it. Charles Booth, the captain commandant, was enthusiastic about vinegar, perhaps because he had calculated that it would take six tons of vegetables a month “to supply the prisoners agreeably to the new scale” and that in the present state of the gardens it would be impossible to do that any time soon (TSA/ CSO1–706–15459, 15 April 1834). Eight months later, the surgeon Gavin Casey, another fan of vinegar, wrote that “three fourths of the men exempted [from work] are cases of ‘scurvy’ which is at present very prevalent here, it being with great difficulty that vegetables can be obtained for the use of the Hospital” (TSA/CSO1 735–15912, 9 December 1834). He added, “The scorbutic diathesis [borderline scurvy] is so general among the men that the slightest wound or abrasion assumes this character, and proves extremely tedious.” A few days earlier the colonial secretary wrote disingenuously, “Mr Blackburn, who has lately returned from Port Arthur, informs me that the Scurvy prevails there to a very principal extent! Has this been reported? I have no recollection of having the circumstances brought under my special attention in any way for some months past” (ibid.).
Surgeons were in a difficult position because one of their more important tasks was to curb rates of malingering (Maxwell-Stewart and Bradley 2006: 23). But with no indication that Arthur retreated from his veto of private gardens before 1835, or even then took any effective steps to increase the supply of vegetables, the number of the sick was rising and genuine cures were in short supply. Casey said that in the latter part of 1834 there were 50–70 people coming to the dispensary with scurvy, and he wants to say that an emergency issue of vegetables in the most urgent cases, together with a general application of vinegar, “has subdued in a very considerable degree this tendency” (CSO1 735–15912, 1 January 1835). But it is evident from what he says about scorbutic diathesis that almost all the prisoners, with the exception of the boys at Point Puer, were scorbutic or close to it. J. Scott, another surgeon joining in this improbable conspiracy to declare a temporary state of alleviation, said that labor could now “be extorted from the Prisoners without fear of inflicting torture” (CSO1 641–14418, 12 November 1834). John Burnett put it rather differently when, much earlier in the crisis, he wrote, “There is about a third or a fourth, more or less subject to the scurvy. Some of them seriously ill but who continue to exert themselves” (CSO1 484–10750, 10 November 1831). Exertion was well known to be a torment for those with scurvy, especially once the tendons in the legs were contracted, and no doubt the surgeons were aware of this, no matter how much pressure was placed on them to pretend that they had made these men fit for work. So one is left with Arthur himself, who was perfectly well aware of the consequence of his decisions on the health of the colony, but who evidently felt that extra pain and suffering was not just a risk but a necessary addition to the suite of devices needed to cure a worse disease, for as Backhouse said, “Penal discipline my [sic] be regarded as a medicine for the remedy and removal of moral evil” (Backhouse 1843: Appendix D, xlvii). So in order to expel a moral evil, a physical one was permitted to flourish just below the horizon of official notice or public indignation.
There is a strong possibility that Arthur was beginning to institute a change in the nature of the purgative of moral evil, which up until now had consisted largely of flogging and capital punishment. Occasionally serious re-offending would be punished with isolation and a reduced diet in some inaccessible place, usually an island, but by the time Backhouse visited Port Arthur a shift in emphasis had already taken place. In 1826–28 at Macquarie Harbour, 188 prisoners sentenced to punishment had shared 6,280 lashes, but solitary confinement and the treadmill were beginning to replace flogging as preferred instruments of reformation and were already in use at the Hobart penitentiary. It would be a mistake to think that Arthur had any interest in reformation as such; terror, or what he called “dread,” was the motor of his version of the vicious circle of the convict system, designed as “a natural and unceasing process of classification.” So he operated seven circles in his particular hell, in which every prisoner would find his class. At the bottom were those condemned to scanty rations and work of “the most incessant and galling description the settlement can produce,” working and sleeping in irons (RSCHC 1837: Appendix 1, 55, 60). Arthur calculated the convicts in this class throughout the whole colony numbered more than a quarter of the total, meaning that under his control at Port Arthur, he had roughly three hundred prisoners condemned to arduous labor fed with the slenderest of diets “upon whom I think no punishment appears to have any effect whatsoever” (Appendix 15, 290).
In the next thirty years, the architecture of Port Arthur was to bear witness to the improvements in discipline and surveillance already recommended by Bentham: a block of solitary cells where total silence was enforced; a chapel with pews like stalls occluding vision anywhere but forward to the pulpit; and a mental asylum for those driven mad. For the emphasis lay now on sensory deprivation—dark cells and total silence—reinforced by the older punishment of short rations. Those in solitary confinement received nothing but 12 oz. of flour and a little salt (Backhouse 1843: 51; Rules and Regulations 1868: 65). For his part, Arthur thought this a very cushy number: “They take their food and sleep; and it is astonishing the health they keep in, quite remarkable.” He believed solitary confinement of use only when accompanied by solitary labor, such as the treadmill (RSCHC 1837: Appendix 15, 304).
It has become evident to several commentators on scurvy in prisons that the withdrawal of vegetables from the inmates’ diet was deliberate policy (Foxhall 2012: 133; Harrison 2013: 7–25). The allowance of potatoes had been curtailed at Millbank Prison in London not because of any shortage of the vegetable but because—officially at least—the diet of prisoners was not to be more “full” than that of the poor. So in 1822, a diet of meat and potatoes was exchanged for one of bread, broth, and gruel (Carpenter 1986: 99; Harrison 2013: 15). When almost half the prison’s population started to exhibit scorbutic symptoms, a Parliamentary select committee ordered that the new diet be changed. However, the pressures that had induced the original change remained, for as Mark Harrison points out, “Prison doctors … were charged with managing scorbutic symptoms by dietary manipulation, allowing rations to be kept to the bare minimum compatible with health” (Harrison 2013: 17). That is to say, scorbutic diathesis was the rule. Each prisoner was made to hover on the border between occult scurvy and its manifestation, probably on the assumption that this would have the same dampening effect on the spirits of prisoners as corporal punishment, but without the moral odium. In making this calculation in a system of heavy labor, often undertaken by ironed men working in water and heavy mud, and still subject to corporal punishment, Arthur could not have been less ignorant than his surgeons of the excruciating torture inseparable from even ordinary levels of physical exertion that accompanied cases of incipient scurvy. His experiment in replacing a system of flogging with one of calculated starvation and heavy labor was simply part of the lawless violence of a delinquent governing class, already destitute of any active principle of human community and social good. It was less flamboyant than convict anarchy, but no less excessive.
In naming scurvy “the Millbank Disease” in 1828, Charles Cameron was being more accurate than he knew, for in 1832, the Admiralty copied the Millbank system by reducing rations for convict transports, including lime juice—the same date fresh food was eliminated from the convict diet at Port Arthur and that solitary confinement with restricted rations was integrated into the system of discipline in Van Diemen’s Land and New South Wales (Foxhall 2012: 134; Walter and Roberts 1988: 5). There was nothing accidental about the disappearance of vegetables, potatoes in particular. It was innovation in penological practice, and Arthur was acting in concert with people such as Dr. Hutchinson, the senior physician at Millbank, and Sir James MacGrigor, director of the army medical department, both of whom had denied that there was any serious dietary problem in the prison after potatoes and meat were removed from meals. The Select Committee on Transportation of 1837 restored the ration of lime juice to convict transports, and it was sufficiently alert to what had been happening during Arthur’s tenure to justify his recall in March of the same year.
That committee had been asked to assess the efficacy of punishment in Australia, and to estimate its “Influence on the Moral State of Society in the Penal Colonies” (1.iii). After using the telling image of a flux of perpetual crime and punishment, Sir William Molesworth, said, “The most painful reflection of all must be, that so many capital sentences and the execution of them have not had the effect of preventing crime by way of example” (1.71). The headlong chase after momentary gratification—noted by Collins as being responsible for the spread of sexual license, drunkenness, and addictive gambling—was noted again now, but on a much vaster scale, embracing free settlers and the government of the colony as well as convicts, currencies (creole children), and emancipists (former convicts). Prostitution, concubinage, pederasty, sodomy, and bestiality were rife (although “cases with animals are not common in Sydney” [1.67]); alcohol consumption was six gallons of spirits a year for every man, woman, and child, aside from what was drunk from illicit stills. This addictive culture led to violent extremes of wealth and destitution. Lucky emancipists, now owners of their own labor, were making vast fortunes in property speculation, boasting incomes (by 1837 at least) of between £20,000 and £30,000 (1.14). The officers of the Seventy-third Regiment of Foot (the New South Wales Corps) held the monopoly on all goods entering the colony: food, manufactures, and most important of all, liquor. In an economy operating almost entirely by barter, this meant that in effect they owned all labor in the colony outside the slave economy of government works since it was paid for exclusively in truck (RSCHC 1812: 53). D. D. Heath, a resident magistrate, concluded that New South Wales was not strictly a social union at all because it was so fraught with moral evil. The best that could be hoped from it as a functioning unit, he thought, was that it might become a Tunis of the South Seas, a kind of pirate state (1.261–71). Wakefield had earlier, on the basis of his reading, predicted the same thing, namely that Australia was “peculiarly adapted to become, and at a very early period too, the abode of a Tartar people” (Wakefield 1829: 69). Bligh was not exaggerating when he said that with the mutiny that put him out of his governorship in 1808, organized by the Seventy-third Regiment of Foot to protect their profits of 800%, “the civil power was annihilated” (Bligh 2011: 55).
PART IV
The habit of giving indirect answers, which I certainly found to
be prevalent in Ireland, is not peculiar to the Irish, but may be
induced by certain treatment in any country, or any climate.
—Richard Lovell Edgeworth and Maria Edgeworth, Essay on Irish Bulls (1802)
For those oppressed, like Collins, by the anarchic turbulence of the colony, the last resource was to insist desperately on one last inviolable difference: namely the superlative degeneracy of the Irish. The grounds of such a difference lay in economic, political, temperamental, and medical factors, some of which were known to the administrators of the colony and emphasized by them, and some of which they cared not to know, or could not know. Of those they did, the criminal history of the Irish they were aware of fell into two related parts. The bulk of Irish convicts came from rural districts, not urban centers like the Scots and the English. Their numbers increased directly in proportion to the shortage of food, so the famine years of 1800, 1817, 1822, and especially 1846–48, saw upsurges in the kind of rural crime that Collins now believed to be the worst of all: the theft of produce, livestock, and crops. After 1798, the number of rural offenders from Ireland was augmented by those convicted for sedition and rebellion in the wake of Wolfe Tone’s uprising. Thereafter, a steady stream of Irish political prisoners flowed to Australia, ending only with the cessation of transportation itself in 1865—United Irishmen, Young Irelanders, and lastly Fenians, dovetailing with agrarian insurgent groups such as the White Boys and Ribbon Men. There is no doubt that the atrocious treatment meted out to Irish convicts in the Anne (1800), Atlas II (1801), and Hercules (1801) was owing to the extreme prejudice of their guards, sharpened by the events of 1798, and that the attempted mutinies on the Anne and the Hercules were at least partly owing to the exasperation provoked by abuse and the suffocating conditions in which the prisoners were held. There were several attempted mutinies on transports out of Ireland—Price suspected one was being planned on the Minerva, bringing the first cargo of Irish insurgents. Even before the rebellion, the mere rumour of mutiny led to one of the worst voyages from Ireland to Australia, the Britannia in 1796, with eleven dead of torture and the remainder arriving in an appalling state of health. The first Irish transport, the Queen (1791), arrived with starving prisoners—seven had died and many were sick—complaining that they had been cheated of their rations and living space by a venal crew cramming the hold full of trade goods. Once in New South Wales, Irish convicts, nutritionally speaking, were placed exactly in their former predicament, needing to steal food to survive. They rose up at Castle Hill in 1804. Those who escaped hanging were sent to work coal at Newcastle on starvation diets (Hughes 1988: 195). Peron was convinced the Irish would readily have supported a French invasion of the colony—for him a rare intersection with the truth.
It was to people like these that David Collins was alluding when he spoke of “natural vicious propensities” characteristic of creatures less than human, compared with whom naked savages were enlightened, and now rendered so turbulent and refractory by hunger and disappointment that only the severest punishments could get them to work (Collins 1802: 2.130; Costello 1987: 23). Governor King called the Irish convicts in the Anne “the most desperate and diabolical characters that could be selected” (cited in Bateson 1959: 158). William Sorell said they were among “the most depraved and unprincipled people in the universe” (Shaw 1966: 187). Henderson, surgeon of the Royal Admiral, said they were addicted to melancholy and incurably indolent, a judgment endorsed by Sir William Denison, to which he added that they were unapt for labor and were wanting in intelligence and demeanour (338).
Centuries of prejudice and tyranny had gone into fashioning these stereotypes, but other factors were involved. The stupor and lethargy of scurvy victims is evident here, together with an obsessive tendency to nurture a sensation and to specify its every nuance, which Trotter found so typical of his scorbutics; also a desperate carelessness of consequences—the result of too little hope and too much pain—that could manifest itself either in sullen obduracy or in irrational fits of mental and imaginative energy. Why would the Irish be more likely to succumb to these symptoms than other prisoners? And even if they were, why should their symptoms be regarded as so despicable?
James Poole was a red-headed Irishman and a free man, recruited as Charles Sturt’s lieutenant on his 1844 trek into the Simpson Desert, who soon was immobilized by scurvy. His symptoms were so much more severe than anyone else’s that Sturt thought Poole’s was a more virulent strain of the disease (Sturt 2002: 185). He was one of thousands of Irish in Australia whose sufferings were probably accelerated by hemochromatosis, a condition common among Irish males. A mutation in the C282Y gene is responsible for storage of surplus iron in the blood that overtaxes the body’s supplies of vitamin C. In women carrying the gene, the excess is significantly less damaging because it is shed during menstruation. The effects of hemochromatosis are made worse among the men by the haptoglobin phenotype, which increases the oxidative stress of dealing with surplus iron. With roughly 14% of Irish males carrying the mutated gene, and the phenotype occurring in 41% of the population, their vulnerability to fatal scurvy in a famine like that of 1846–48, where 55% of their source of vitamin C disappeared, was a hundred times greater than in France and fifty times greater than in Germany (Delanghe et al. 2013: 3583–84). During the Great Famine, J. O. Curran used the difference between the numbers of men and women presenting symptoms of scurvy in order to emphasize the unique vulnerability of Irish males to the disease that was inevitably to afflict them in colonial Australia much more severely than any other nationality. He said, “The very small number of females amongst those seen by me in this city is remarkable…. Dr Christison treated 32 males and three females, and this is nearly the ratio of the sexes in the cases sent me from the country. Some practitioners … have never seen scurvy in a female…. The comparative exemption … is hard to explain” (Curran 1847: 116; Quigley forthcoming). It is likely that James Poole was carrying the gene and the phenotype. The melancholy and nostalgia to which the Irish were most prone, including their powerful belief in a China to the north and a nation of white people to the southwest, were exhibitions of the same dramatic and passionate register in which the longings of all victims of scurvy are cast. However, the lack of sympathy that Trotter’s scorbutic sailors were quick to recognize in others was endemic in Australia. Poole’s symptoms attracted only exasperation from his leader. As he was dying, Sturt wrote in his journal, “The whole case is embarrassing as it is lamentable … most painful and embarrassing” (Sturt 2002: 188, 190). The speed at which the Irish succumbed to scurvy was always regarded as dubious—a trick of malingering, a ruse to further a plot, a sign of savagery or stupidity, or immoveable obstinacy.
There was one more characteristic—or scorbutic symptom—for which the Irish were singular, and it was an extravagant or awkward use of words, often derided as Irish “bulls” (“I was a beautiful baby but they changed me”). The impossibility of communicating scorbutic impressions, whether painful or rapturous, has been mentioned before: cravings so powerful they are comparable with no other sensation and therefore unimaginable to those who have never suffered them. When Phillip first encountered “this dreadful scourge” in the colony, he declared, its severity “cannot easily be conceived even by those who have been placed in similar scenes” (Phillip 1790: 206). Many of the Irish coming from rural districts spoke only Erse, a monoglottism the governors and guards alike found to be one more proof of an ignorant and headstrong nation; but like the rest of their unpleasant characteristics, this linguistic isolation was a drawback they could not help or that was compounded by their situation. There were, of course, manifold alterations in the language of the new colony for which the Irish were not responsible, such as rhyming slang, but they could conveniently stand as exemplars of the strains language was under. Under the explosive pressure of contingency, peculiarity, and violence, words could not sustain their freight of a common meaning nor a general currency.
This twist in the tongue was cannily to be improved into a private language by the Irish as they laced what English they had with Erse and tinker’s cant, making their sentiments even more impenetrable to official reason. From the start, convict language had been notable for its vivid vernacular: Clark heard a woman called Elizabeth Barbus invite Meredith, the captain of marines, “to come and kiss her C … for he was nothing but a Lousy Rascall” (Clark 1981: 28). Thomas Reid complained that exposure to such depraved expressions licensed conduct that would contaminate even the most innocent female, leaving them “so absolutely vitiated as scarcely to retain the consciousness of a single virtuous thought” (Reid 1822: 296). On the other hand, Joy Damousi explains that women used this sort of language not just abusively, or even provocatively, but rather as a tonic, to keep their spirits up (Damousi 1997: 20–21; Foxhall 2012: 128). As well as Billingsgate, convicts talked thieves’ cant, “the flash or kiddy language,” of which James Hardy Vaux supplied a vocabulary at the end of his Memoirs (1819). On Norfolk Island, it was noticed that the meanings of words began to be inverted: a bad man was called a good fellow, a pretty woman an ugly whore, and so on (Tench 1793: 207; RSCHC 1837: 1.xvi; Backhouse 1843: 278). This was a linguistic feature of the most ancient language of Irish itinerants called Shelta, or garu cainnt (bad speech), in which a syllable or whole word of Irish would be turned backwards, so that gabhail (taking) became bagail and gap (kiss) turned into pog (Macalister 1937: 172–73, 182).
The refusal to talk intelligible English was everywhere greeted with indignation and outrage by those with an interest in correct forms of speech. A priest called Ullathorne was at one with Thomas Reid when he said convicts perverted language in order “to adapt themselves to the complete subversion of the human heart” (quoted in Shaw 1966: 206). What had begun as instinctive reactions to intolerable conditions had by now become “grafted upon the colony”—not out of consensus, habit, or mutinous intent, but as heterogeneous manifestations of displacement, passion, dissidence, imagination, and (finally) taste (RSCHC 1837: 1.28). Wakefield complained that the newspaper reports of crime and punishment in were given in “low-lived slang and flash”: “The base language of English thieves is becoming the established language of the colony. Terms of slang and flash are used, as a matter of course, everywhere, from the gaols to the Viceroy’s palace” (Wakefield 1829: 106; Hughes 1988: 258). Dumont D’Urville noticed the same thing in Hobart where the public prints were filled with scurrilous epithets (Dumont D’Urville 1987: 503). Reid singled out the superintendent of the Female Factory at Parramatta, Mr. Hutchinson, as someone whose profanities and expletives formed an expert descant to the noisy obscenities his charges: “His own expressions outstripped and completely eclipsed theirs in wickedness and revolting filthiness” (Reid 1822: 273).
I mean to argue that scurvy and its satellite formations provided an edge of creative friction between the evolution of the convict system and what was to end up as the culture of the new colony. That, of course, was not how it was experienced or understood by either side, at first. Collins’s despair as he watched his epic narrative dwindling into an accidental and squalid romance is fully equal in terms of imbecility to the desperation of convicts destitute of any reason for living. As Rufus Dawes is being flogged in order to make him cry out in Marcus Clarke’s convict epic, it is not the tyranny of his torturers to which he yields but the radical peculiarity of his situation, falling into an ecstasy of exasperation with the incoherence of his life, cursing and blaspheming noisily and indiscriminately until his words are nothing more than an agonized glossolalia (Clarke 1899: 284–97). I want to advance the idea that the victim of such a situation might find a way out of it by means of something like the principle of corroboration discussed in the previous chapter, where the spontaneous manifestation of incommunicable passion is answered or echoed by an event or a response that endows it with a degree of Coleridge’s “outness,” what used to be called an objective correlative.
That which Sylvia in For the Term of His Natural Life (1899) calls “the hideous Freemasonry of crime and suffering” (260) found an early home on the stage, popular from the first days of the colony. Almost as soon as they were settled in Sydney Cove, the convicts performed George Farquhar’s The Recruiting Officer (1706), and later Edward Young’s The Revenge (1721), cheering up a despondent pseudocommunity with a little make-believe. A theater was soon built in Sydney, but it is evident from the 1837 Report that the repertoire had coarsened:
Is there a theatre at Sydney?—Yes. Is it well attended?—By a certain class. What class?—The emancipists and convicts. The respectable people do not go there?—Very rarely…. They are quite disgusted, the way the theatre is conducted, in allowing all sorts of people free access to what they term the dress boxes…. What kind of dramatic exhibitions are there?—Inferior to the very lowest description that you meet with in provincial towns in Britain. You do not think that the theatre at Sydney is an exhibition at all calculated to refine or improve the people?—The very reverse. (RSCHC 1837: 1.108)
An audience of prostitutes and emancipists, already proof against barbarous corporal punishment that had been originally justified as exemplary, but by now had been supplanted by more occult forms of torture, is at least consistent in expelling from their amusements any exemplary theme or purpose. Presumably the witness in this exchange means that they were enjoying the illegitimate theater of pantomimes, harlequinades, melodramas, and music hall that had already worn Australian dress on the English stage with performances of William Moncrieff’s Van Diemen’s Land! Or, Settlers and Natives, first shown in 1830: “an intirely new Serio-Comical, Operatical, Melo Dramatical, Pantomimical, Characteristical, Satirical, Tasmanian, Australian Extravaganza” (Worrall, 2007: 175–78). Two characters in it, Howe and Wildgoose, use flash language: “Wait till the old man is safe in his dab … draw his barking irons unbetty the lock … [and] snap the swag” (187). Talking flash, cant, or Gypsy French had already been common in harlequinades such as John Thurmond’s Harlequin Sheppard, where the great prison-breaker’s feats are commemorated: “He broke thro’ all Rubbs in the Whitt, / And chiv’d his Darbies in twain; / But fileing of a Rumbo Ken, / My Boman is snabbled again” (Thurmond 1774: 20). The plot and the language look forward to the celebrated elegy of a bushranger, “Waltzing Matilda,” where the colloquial vigour of convict speech—a blend of Aboriginal names for natural phenomena and flash—shames the strained pastoral of Robert Southey’s Botany Bay Eclogues (1794) and of Therese Huber’s early novel, Adventures on a Journey to New Holland (1801).
The welcome given to a dissident jargon of cant and rhyming slang, whether in conversation or on the stage, was in the first place a refusal of the decencies of life in whose name and defense the convicts were being made to suffer. When they started hiding or inverting the meanings of words, they demonstrated that there was no principle of difference left, whether moral, lexical, legal, or existential. They demanded from all modes of representation, whether a performance or a sentence, the very opposite of what Collins expected from an imperial history of settlement. If he relied on the necessary and inevitable articulation of facts within settled structures of space and time—the staged epic of the history of settlement—they called for the recognition of “disconnected and uncontrolled experience … disengaged, disembroiled, disencumbered, exempt from the conditions that usually attach to it … [namely] the inconvenience of a related, a measurable state, a state subject to all our vulgar communities” (James 1947: 33–34). They wanted either to probe the extent of the unintelligibility of their misery or to enjoy the exuberance of an upside down world where Harlequin drinks tea from a cauldron and keeps his coals in an eggcup, and where Punch, having been transported to the Antipodes, sings in nothing but scrambled syllables: “Riberi, biberi, bino, / Faddledy, diddledy, faddledy, daddledy, / Robbery, bobbery, ribery, bibery, / Faddledy, daddledy, dino”—invoking the same world as theirs, the antipodes of reason, language, and law, a fantastic and peculiar situation where the inventive thief escapes from his enemies with his greens under his arm and lives happily ever after (Dibdin 1779: 10; Heller-Roazen 2013: 37). Even if the outcome should end less comically in death, as it does in “Waltzing Matilda” and the history of Ned Kelly, it is evident that the medium of fiction and nonsense is satisfying in itself. According to the terms of the Licensing Act of 1741, harlequinades shown in Britain had been forbidden to use articulate dialogue, the lowest class of drama being condemned by law to nonsense only. But now the tables were turned, and what had been forbidden is transformed as if by magic into the freest of free expression, linguistic kindred of the obscenities of Billingsgate and the back-to-front formations of Shelta.
When James Backhouse visited Norfolk Island and contemplated the damage done to the law by the unlimited mendacity of those who were supposed to be brought to acknowledge both its force and utility, he wrote, “Where the standard [of truth] is properly maintained, [perjured oaths] are useless, yea being yea, and nay, nay” (Backhouse 1843: 272). But that standard had already been harmed by its guardians—not just by Mr. Hutchinson with his bad language, but by all the people serving Arthur’s system of applied nutritional disease and calling it something else, such as dysentery or rheumatism. They might have thought there was a floor or limit to this sort of deception, but the convicts knew better. So many boundaries had been transgressed in human relations that a new standard of values had been established. Backhouse himself admitted that the last sanction of the law had been rendered useless by transportation, which, “under its present system of penal discipline, is, in our opinion, more to be dreaded than death itself” (Appendix F, lxi). On Norfolk Island, it was now true that good men were the bad ones and that “this Island, beautiful by nature and comparable to the Garden of Eden, is rendered, not only a moral wilderness, but a place of torment to these men … by their conduct to one another” (267). Of course he meant the convicts themselves, but there was a level beneath that including many more than them.
Although the bulk of convicts were transported for felonies, a good proportion of educated convicts were forgers. Reid, surgeon on the Neptune in 1817, said that 41 of 121 convicts being transported were guilty of forgery. Dr. Halloran, who was the first person to teach classics in the colony, had been sent there for forgery; so had Captain Fitch, formerly of the Royal Navy; likewise Thomas Watling, one of the most skilled of the early artists, who arrived in 1792 on the Royal Admiral (RSCHC 1837: 1.3, 21). Manifold, a character in Van Diemen’s Land!, “was sent here for being a little too literary … the bankers don’t like plagiarism” (Worrall 2007: 181). Joseph Lycett, whose Views in Australia (1824) provided the first successful pictorial publicity of the colony (or what he called without any trace of irony the “ocular demonstration of the benign effects of a paternal Government upon those rude and distant regions” [Lycett 1824: Dedication]), was transported for forgery in 1814. Like Watling, who turned again to forgery as soon as he got back to England, Lycett couldn’t resist the temptation of committing the crime even before the end of his term, passing forged government paper in Sydney in 1815 and bills of exchange when once more he was back in England in 1822. Tench complained that men came out with letters of recommendation that they had forged themselves, or had paid others to forge for them (Tench 1793: 207). Edmund Gibbon Wakefield, who laid out the city of Adelaide before heading for New Zealand to found two further cities, entered the spirit of things when he expounded his theory of Australian settlement in A Letter from Sydney (1829), penned in Newgate Prison. “I am standing with my head downwards, as it were, almost under your feet,” he lied, at the same time as proving his eligibility for the monde renversee of the new colony, where truth and lies had effectually changed places (Wakefield 1829: 30). Even before the first ships had landed, Thomas Barret had assembled a group of counterfeiters on the Alexander who minted Brazilian quarter dollars so cleverly John White was compelled to admire their “ingenuity, cunning, caution and address” (White 1790: 45). White also mentions a man called Daily who filed some genuine gold into a mixture of other ores and earth, and swore it was dust from a mine he had discovered (211).
Forgeries and counterfeits play a part in the peculiar romance of Botany Bay because of the special obstacles encountered there by people who made a living by passing illicit copies of coins and financial instruments. At the outset, everything in the settlement had to be substantially what it was, intact, unrepresentable in any other medium, resembling nothing that had been known before, and therefore impossible or at least difficult to represent. The convicts’ exclusive susceptibility to impressions immediately present to their feelings, reacting instantly to the radical novelty of the natural history of the land in which they found themselves, ensured a degree of originality in their sensations that was curiously sharpened by official policy. There were strong reasons why everything had to be as it was, and not another thing. Food, equipment, and clothing were distributed without reference to the amount of labor performed in order to wear it, or to any standard of desert or exchange. Until you were free, you were “on the store” and entitled to the same ration as everyone else unless it was forfeited as a punishment. Barter was forbidden among convicts; and even if it hadn’t been, the illicit exchange of blankets and food was restricted by necessity and hunger. Until sex became the chief commodity and liquor the medium by which it was obtained, nothing masqueraded as the sign of goods or value. Flinders pointed out that literally nothing was the measure of the natural novelties of the place; likewise food and labor, the two prime articles generated by the colony according to Collins’s scheme of development, were for several years incommensurable and had no price, owing to the fact that the government set the price of wheat and had the monopoly on labor. To prevent them from becoming commodities was part of the government plan, but it was distorted by events beyond official control. The food ration was subject to sudden contractions in efforts to stave off mass starvation; meanwhile convicts, not working for wages, did all they could not to work productively unless they were to be paid in goods and liquor on the private and very unequal market that was being developed by the New South Wales Corps (Wakefield 1829: 24, 37). So faith in these two essential articles of existence was shaken, and there was no substitute to make up the shortfall because there was no productive economy that was not dominated by the military monopoly. The great paradox of the colony even after it solved these problems was the absence of money. Ten thousand pounds’ worth of silver sent to New South Wales disappeared instantly. The wealthy could assemble a sufficient number of government receipts to exchange for Treasury notes, but even these were paid out not in cash but goods and stock; meanwhile, the poor went to market with their genitals or their muscles because copper money could buy nothing (RSCHC 1812: 43, 33, 57). “You may roll in plenty, without possessing anything of exchangeable value,” Wakefield pointed out (Wakefield 1829: 19). These were the contradictions William Bligh was trying to iron out, with widespread prostitution on the one hand and profits of 800% from manufactured goods on the other, when a conspiracy of rich men and wealthy officers organized the mutiny that cost him his command, the second of his career (Bligh 2011: 72).
There was a strict correlation between the peculiar situation of property and the decay, or at least the innovations, in language. If there was no settled measure of value with regard to things, there was none with respect to the meanings attached to words. They could mean whatever you wanted them to; or, as Humpty Dumpty stated in his own antipodal situation, you could mean whatever you said; but, since there was no consensus about what words stood for, you could not say what you meant. That is to say, there was no conventional system of representation in either the circulation of goods or in the communication of sentiments. As theft supplanted exchange, and monopoly a fair market, so nonsense supplanted speech. For a few critical years, there was nothing therefore that might be copied or represented as a public or consensual sign of value. Tench came to hear of the counterfeit letters of introduction because there was no culture of polite exchange to disguise the presentation of false ones. The man who pretended to have discovered gold was exposed because there was as yet no use for the metal, never mind a market in it; the fake Brazilian quarter dollars belonged to a cash economy that was still to come about. Nevertheless, the inhabitants were preparing for a time when the products of imagination might begin to circulate. Tench “found the convicts particularly happy in fertility of invention and exaggerated descriptions” (Tench 1793: 6). George Arthur mentioned in his testimony to the Committee on Transportation that many of the letters sent home by the convicts consisted of falsehoods. He said a convict on a road gang wrote to his wife in England that he was earning £60 a year and was in comfortable circumstances, when really he was in irons on a road gang (RSCHC 1837: Appendix 15, 287). In the colony, everything was tinged with romance to the degree that there was no generally acknowledged principle of authenticity to guide the hand of a correspondent or a forger who wished to copy something and pass it on as genuine. There was no identity, no reputation or character to usurp; there was not much to remember and no reason for hope. As everything was subject to contingency, phenomena were disconnected and disengaged and, as James puts it, measureless. People tried pretending that circumstances in Sydney were parallel with those in London, such as Quintus Servinton, the hero of one of the earliest colonial novels and a convicted forger, but to attempt a representation of anything not colonial was inevitably a mockery, like the grotesque mass marriages encouraged by Governor Phillip and so enthusiastically witnessed by Peron, most of which were soon renounced by the newlyweds.
Watling and Lycett were in an odd position. Not only was there no object worth imitating, whatever they produced was not their own property and could not be sold. Among the early convict community, a signature was valueless. It was thought a great effrontery in Watling that he wanted to put his name to his own pictures, and John White, the assigned owner of his labor, forbade him to do so. In any case, he had portrayed things so strange and unparalleled that no one, either in the colony or back in Britain where they were sent, was in a position to make a judgment about their fidelity. Creatures such as the potoroo, a marsupial cross between a kangaroo and a rat, or the two-headed lizard (leaf-tailed gecko), or the red-necked avocet with its long wry bill, might just as well have been imagined. There was no standard or norm by which to measure—in one sense, a golden opportunity for a forger insofar as he could paint or invent what he pleased, and equally a disaster inasmuch as his product had no relation to any other and therefore was not current. The artist was driven (or liberated) into absolute originality, his skill no longer measurable by likeness but solely by the force of the image acting as an image. Whether they wanted to or not, these artists were obliged to explore a new aesthetic of primitivism where, as Banks said of Maori carving, the design is like nothing but itself (Banks 1962: 2.24).
Paul Carter is right to suggest that the closest a European genre comes to this kind of exercise is mid-seventeenth century still life, where attention is commanded not by imitation or allegorical significance but by the powerful and immediate illusion of presence from which the human is excluded. In the art of the First Fleet, a curious kind of confusion is the result: ocean views show sculpted waves; rocks shimmer like water; human figures coil like tree-branches; and tree-bark looks like skin. The French artists on Baudin’s expedition were not convict labor. Apart from commemorating Peron’s fantastic assemblage of shells, Charles-Alexandre Lesueur and Nicolas-Martin Petit could pursue their own interests. Neither had shipped as artists—they were rated as assistant gunners on the Geographe—but with the defections of the official artists in Mauritius, they advanced to that position, producing remarkable watercolors, pastels, and drawings of indigenes. Lesueur’s work has the delicacy of tone and the intricacy of detail that Paul Carter compares with the best Dutch artists; while Petit’s ethnographic work, such as his pastel and charcoal sketch of the Aborigine Morore, is astonishing for its physiognomic mobility, oscillating in this portrait between symptoms of bewilderment, anxiety, and truculence. Petit, was an ingenious mimic and prestidigitator, capable of inveigling his subjects into the poses and expressions he found most dramatic, spending much less time than his British counterparts on ethnographic details such as tools, scarification, and body painting, and evidently enjoying what he was doing, unlike Watling. Some of his Tasmanian profiles, perhaps at his own instigation, seem to emerge from an Antipodean commedia dell’arte—the figure often amused and grinning, sometimes overflowing into caricature (Bonnemains, Forsyth, and Smith 1988: 147).
Common to the British and French pictorial records of Australia is a fascination with novelty, an involuntary originality that incorporates effects I have referred to in other contexts as ellipsis or dazzle. While rather less evident in the work of the French, this fluent alternation between opposite qualities and moods seems to lodge not just in the objects depicted but also in the sensibility of the artist. Having at some length suggested how the convict system contributed to the inversion of hierarchies and the rapid alternation between opposite impulses and emotions, I want briefly to generalize this tendency in the whole experience of the early experience of Australia before returning to its exemplication in the art of the First Fleet. In The Road to Botany Bay (1987), Paul Carter identified an ecstatic state of mind frequent among the early surveyors of inland Australia, whose fatigue of body and eye could erupt into delight as they identified features of the landscape that were simply not there—hills or lakes—or that certainly existed, but for them alone (Carter 1987: 82). Empiricist commitment to rendering an exact report of things consorted with an attachment to details that either had no scientific value or whose importance was reoriented by the emphatic force of the sensations accompanying them. For instance, Thomas Mitchell begins the account of his three expeditions by announcing that “the sole merit [the author] claims is that of having faithfully described what he attentively observed.” When circumstances disturb the author and his eye, the scene shifts from proofs of experimental accuracy to the throes of private agitation. Shortly before he reports that scurvy has broken out among his party, Mitchell begins, “The scene which followed I cannot satisfactorily describe, or represent, although I shall never forget it.” It consists of a group of Aborigines, dancing in a ring with furious precision while moving backward, all by way of demonstrating their anger with these white men who fired a gun to frighten them. Mitchell’s description of this dance of defiance-by-retreat is a heap of broken phrases: “crouching and leaping to a war-song … their hideous, crouching, measured gestures, and low jumps, all to the tune of a wild song, and the fiendish glare of their countenances … all eyes and teeth … thus these savages slowly retired along the river bank, all the while dancing in a circle” (Mitchell 1835: 1.iii; 245–46). When John Oxley explored the Lachlan River some years earlier he was discomfitted not by the natives but by the unreadable features of the land, “so extremely singular, that a conjecture on the subject is hardly hazarded before it is overturned; and every thing seems to run counter to the ordinary course of nature in other countries” (Oxley 1820: 81). Charles Sturt was badly scurvied during his expedition to the Simpson Desert, where he was longing for rain so that some vegetation (sow thistles or rhagodia) might spring up and vary their diet. The symptoms of his shattered condition are evident in the obsessive and repetitive entries he made in his journal, dramatic illustrations of the egotistical particularity of the victim Trotter noted in the later stages of the disease: “There is no hope of rain…. I am beyond measure provoked at being unable to ride…. As I have said before there is no hope of rain…. There is not at the present moment the slightest indication of Rain…. As I believe I have already observed yesterday was unbearably hot…. I am sorry to say that I have all but lost the use of my limbs…. Today has been insufferably hot…. I regret to say that I have all but lost the use of my limbs” (Sturt 2002: 304–11).
Now I shall try to link these scorbutic disturbances of the eye, tongue, and temperament with aspects of the work of the anonymous artist (or artists [Rosenthal, forthcoming]), known only as the Port Jackson Painter, for he more than any other offers a sublime reconciliation of the consternation of Mitchell’s failed description of eyes and teeth on the one hand, and the purely hallucinatory glow of things and human figures occupying space whose lack of coordinates has rendered it peculiar and incommunicable. Bernard Smith believes that the Port Jackson Painter was a naval man and not a convict. His most likely candidate is Henry Brewer, an older seaman who came out with Phillip as his steward, was listed as a midshipman on the Sirius, and ended up as acting provost marshall until shortly before he died in 1796 (Smith and Wheeler 1988: 220–24). He appears as the partner of Duckling, a female convict, in Wertenbaker’s play, Our Country’s Good (2015). Trained as an architect and as a naval draughtsman, Brewer had a framework for visual notation that can remain primitive and perfunctory when the scene is populated by multiple figures, but which grows considerably in subtlety and power when he embarks on isolated individuals or portraits. Whoever he was (or they were) the Port Jackson Painter worked closely with the forger Thomas Watling and George Raper (likewise a midshipman on the Sirius), copying some of their pictures and perhaps learning new skills in drawing, particularly from Watling, who had run an art school in Dumfries. From the start, the Port Jackson Painter’s work was distinctive in its treatment of Australian subject matter; for besides pictures of animals and birds (which Bernard Smith regards as his best work), he was drawn to a kind of ethnographic sketching that differed in key respects from the work of Watling and, as it turned out, Petit, although it had something important in common with Lycett’s and Westall’s.
Both Watling and Petit were trained artists, and they posed their subjects as if for a studio portrait—Watling’s often in three-quarter view, with the eyes seldom directly meeting the viewer’s. Petit’s are either in three-quarter view or profile. Some small attention is paid to body painting and scarring, but the emphasis falls on the face as specimen (Watling) or as an opportunity for sympathetic humor (Petit). The question of context and local custom (fishing, healing, cookery, revenge) is ignored, and even in the portraits where the emotions of the Aboriginal sitters are on display, as in the blend of contrary emotions in Morore (Petit’s finest portrait) or in Watling’s picture of the Aboriginal chief Wearrung in an aggressive mood, attention is concentrated on the exactness of the unfamiliar shape of the head and the unusual angles of the lips and jaw. Watling wrote of another attempt at Wearrung’s head, “The likeness is very strong indeed … [a] pretty good resemblance” (Smith and Wheeler 1988: 65). But it wasn’t one upon which Watling piqued himself, for he thought his subjects “extremely ill-featured,” destitute of moral virtue and prey to the worst emotions: “Irascibility, ferocity, cunning, treachery, revenge, filth and immodesty are strikingly their dark characteristics,” he wrote (Watling 1793: 11; cited in Clendinnen 2005: 249–50). Possibly Watling’s attitude to the people was influenced by the humiliating position in which he felt placed, as a convict artist assigned to John White, told what to draw and with no financial interest in the result. His performances, he told his aunt, “are, in consequence, such as may be expected from a genius in bondage to a very mercenary and sordid person” (Watling 1793: 20). But it is also possible that he found his skill as a copier/forger worth nothing not simply because he couldn’t sell what he produced, but because he found the original so unlovely and farouche.
Petit exhibits none of this impatience, but evidently he felt Aboriginal humanity had to be called out by means of amusing tricks, otherwise it would remain invisible. He is free from this constraint only when he is drawing things, such as boats and huts. His masterpiece, highly valued by himself judging by the numbers of copies he made, is of a bark windbreak entitled Aboriginal Dwelling (Bonnemains, Forsyth, and Smith 1988: 123; Fig. 13 and Plate 4). A structure apparently dilapidated from its conception, its purpose so uncertain and casual, might bear comparison with Dutch genre pieces of tumbledown wayside inns on sandy roads were it not that it asserts itself so strongly as what it is and nothing else. Lesueur’s attempt at the same thing ends up with strangely humanoid forms of tree stumps, one appearing to warm its branches at a fire and another in what Rabelais would call a “divaricating posture,” as if he were determined to find some kind of resemblance to domesticity and sexuality (ibid.; Fig. 14). Flinders described an enigma similar to Petit’s in the north, made of stones and bark: “Of the intention of setting up these stones under a shed, no person could form a reasonable conjecture; the first idea was, that it had some relation to the dead, and we dug underneath to satisfy our curiosity; but nothing was found” (Flinders 1814: 2.172). Flinders’s artist, William Westall, drew a picture of it, not as fine as Petit’s; but on the other hand, his portrait entitled Port Jackson: A Native comes close to the mixture of pathos and menace in the Port Jackson painter’s pictures of Bolladeree and Nga-na-nga-na (Westall 1962: illus. 36; Fig. 15).
Lycett’s work is divided between landscape and ethnographic illustration. Although he advertises his Views as “absolute fac-similes of scenes and places,” they are intended to attract new settlers to a terrain that is at least potentially recognizable, for it is accompanied by a map of the Port Jackson hinterland distinguished by labels such as “rich land,” “good valleys,” “fine open country” (Lycett 1824: ii). The commentary on views of houses such as Captain Piper’s Naval Villa read like a real estate advertisement; and the landmarks such as the Nepean River, Beckett’s Falls, and the Wingeecarrabee River could be anywhere; as John Crowley says, “perfectly conventional in the repertoire of European landscape appreciation” (Crowley 2011: 225). But occasionally—in his picture of Cape Pillar, for instance—he produces a dazzle-picture, in this case of a vast beehive shape sliced away at the side to reveal narrow vertical pillars arranged on such a different axis from the lateral bands of the beehive that the eye is excited by the elliptical tension (Fig. 16). His Aboriginal figures, lithe silhouettes, are engaged in the landscape: fishing, hunting, or fighting Europeans (Fig. 17 and Plate 5). They have the same athletic thin black bodies we see in the work of the Port Jackson Painter, exhibiting the shocking vividness of shape and tonality for which Banks blamed Dampier when he wrote in his journal, “We stood in with the land near enough to discern 5 people who appeard through our glasses to be enormously black: so far did the prejudices which we had built on Dampiers account influence us that we fancied we could see their Colour when we could scarce distinguish whether or not they were men” (Banks 1962: 2.50). Dampier was not to blame. Such collisions between black and other colors, especially white, recall some of Hodges’s finest work among icebergs: the unearthly sheen of Ice Island emphasized by the inky sea and most astonishing of all the explosive shards of black and white comprising The Island of South Georgia (Fig. 18 and Fig. 19). The Port Jackson Painter’s black silhouettes are as sharply outlined; like Hodges’s iceberg, they look as if they had been cut out of different fabric, or appliqued. An Irish bull of the Edgeworths catches the dazzle effect when for want of more adequate language pure white is cited as a “beautiful black” (Edgeworth and Edgeworth 1802: 93): Here is something like beautiful white.
Fig. 13. Nicolas-Martin Petit, Aboriginal Dwelling. No. 18013. Courtesy of the Muséum d’histoire naturell, Le Havre. See also Plate 4.
Fig. 14. Charles-Alexandre Lesueur, Aborigines’ Huts on Peron Peninsula. 1807, hand-colored etching. Courtesy of the National Gallery of Australia, Canberra. The Wordsworth Collection, purchased 2010.
Fig. 15. William Westall, Port Jackson, A Native. No. 2098456. Courtesy of the National Library of Australia.
With one notable exception, the Port Jackson Painter is not interested in objects that have no use, nor in the limitations of representational decorum defined by studio techniques. His Aboriginal groups are always situated in a landscape that establishes some intimate relation between land, water, and sky. By means of spears, throwing sticks, fizzgigs, boomerangs, canoes, paddles, threads, and axes, human beings negotiate the various elements around them in order to eat and travel, to maintain health and make war. That these people are unrecognizable silhouettes mainly in profile, bearing some faint resemblance to ancient Greek or Etruscan figures on kraters and urns, emphasizes their distance from the viewer and their proximity to a terrain intractably foreign. The diagrammatic arrangement of these pieces leaves no room for a vanishing point or its correlate, a spectator whose eye makes a property of the scene. Here are three men climbing trees, curvilinear shapes on a light ground; here is a woman curing her child of a stomachache (Fig. 20, Fig. 21, and Plate 6). Any attempt at lifelike detailing would be out of keeping with the internal éclat of each composition, which is the Port Jackson Painter’s homage to an environment and a social organization that is evidently active and productive, but not in a way he understands.
Fig. 17. Joseph Lycett, Aborigines Spearing Fish. No. 2962715. Courtesy of the National Gallery of Australia. See also Plate 5.
How deeply he is engaged with what he doesn’t understand is evident in the morphology of the rocks in the remarkable painting, Grotto Point in the Entrance of Port Jackson (Fig. 22 and Plate 7). Here, there are no natives in the picture, so the strangeness of the natural forms has free rein. He gives full value to the opulent scallopings of the rock in the foreground and to the coils, twists, and laminations of the sea-carved sandstone above. The kind of painful detailing with which Raper represents the waves of the ocean, crisping them into solid shapes, is transferred by the Port Jackson Painter to the sandstone, but with the opposite effect. Instead of immobilizing liquid, he liquefies what is solid. The striations of the more distant cliffs, like the lavish shapes of those closer in, are reflected in the ripples of the sea below and mimicked by the ropes of vegetation above. The compositional brilliance of Grotto Point accomplishes likewise the very opposite of Watling’s careful notation of strange countenances because it dazzles the viewer’s eye instead of concentrating it on a definite object. In this respect, it is very different from Petit’s bark windbreak, insofar as the Frenchman’s contemplative rendition of what Felix Vallotton called the décor of ruin is here supplanted by the activity of the rock and vegetation; they vibrate with energy and won’t stand still.
Fig. 18. William Hodges, Ice Island. SAFE/PXD 11, f. 27a. Courtesy of the Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales.
Fig. 19. William Hodges, Island of South Georgia. SAFE/PXD 11, f. 33. Courtesy of the Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales.
Fig. 20. Port Jackson Painter, Method of Climbing Trees. Watling Coll. 75. © The Trustees of the Natural History Museum, London.
When the Port Jackson Painter places Europeans alongside the Aborigines, the dazzle is reduced to a diagrammatic opposition between unaligned movements or shapes. In the two pictures showing the wounding of Governor Phillip, I have already pointed out how the stick figures of the Aborigines move freely in and out of the fringe of bush, while the Europeans find safety in retreating to the much more narrow confines of a longboat. In Aborigines Attacking a Sailor, the dramatic opposition between the European running for his life and the natives holding their ground is reinforced by eye-play, with the sailor’s glance cast longingly from the left hand of the picture at his hat, which has fallen off. On the right, three bright eyes and three missiles are focused entirely on him. The viewer meets the sailor’s eyes along the same axis as the hat, a piece of property now as alien as the hats, caps, and shoes washed up on Crusoe’s island. The center of urgency is the satchel of greens underneath his arm, attracting and impelling all the movement of the piece: they are what he has risked his life for, and what will save it. Mssrs. White, Harris, and Laing is a painting partly commemorating Edward Laing, surgeon of the New South Wales Corps who wrote the highly esteemed letter to Thomas Trotter, printed in the second edition of his Observations on Scurvy, concerning scurvy in the new colony. He is one of three Europeans at the center of the picture, each carrying fowling pieces, with a platoon of marines away to the right, standing stiffly like toy soldiers. Apart from the sole Aborigine who is sitting meditatively on a log in the right foreground, all the vitality of the scene is concentrated in the Aboriginal bodies lying underneath the tree at the left, disposed in groups of twos and threes, each entwined with or folded into another. The easy blend of figures seems partly sexual and partly maternal, or familial, and stands in sharp contrast with the attitudes and the business of the men in red (Fig. 23).
Fig. 21. Port Jackson Painter, Aboriginal Woman Curing Her Child. Watling Coll. 62. © The Trustees of the Natural History Museum, London. See also Plate 6.
Fig. 22. Port Jackson Painter, Grotto Point in the Entrance of Port Jackson. Watling Coll. 7. © The Trustees of the Natural History Museum, London. See also Plate 7.
In the field of portraiture, the Port Jackson Painter is divided between two compositional modes, the anthropological and something harder to characterize and much more elliptical. In 1791, a series of skirmishes occurred after Bolladeree, an enterprising local fisherman who traded with the settlement, found his new canoe stove in, for which he took revenge by spearing a convict. The issue was not resolved until Bolladeree died of a fever later that year, mourned by Baneelon and Colebee (Clendinnen 2005: 212–16). The Port Jackson Painter did a number of pictures of Aborigines covered in funeral paint (“moobee”) in attendance at Bolladeree’s burial in Governor Phillip’s garden, including Colebee and Barangaroo, Baneelon’s wife. With the exception of Barangaroo’s, these are profiles exhibiting red and white ochre over the brows and cheeks, and a mosaic of colors across the shoulders and breast. The faces are clumsily or at least perfunctorily executed, especially that of Barangaroo, who was reckoned to be an extraordinarily attractive woman (224)—they are merely frames for the “moobee” mourning. Like the landscape pictures of fishing, stabbing, hunting, cooking, and embracing, the human figure is less important, or certainly no more important, than the situation in which he or she is found, whether it is actively traversing a scene or bearing the ceremonial signatures of grief.
Fig. 23. Port Jackson Painter, Mssrs. White, Harris, and Laing. Watling Coll. 25. © The Trustees of the Natural History Museum, London.
All that has changed in the profile of Gna-na-gna-na, tentatively identified as Baneelon’s brother-in-law Gnunga-Gnunga (Smith and Wheeler 1988: 20; Collins 1798: 1.299; Fig. 24). The astonishing confidence of the brush that fetches in the musculature of the neck and left shoulder is consistent with the assured emphasis of the turn of the nose and the swell of the lips, reinforced by the rivetting glance sent from the orb of the single visible eye. The artist catches an expression whose power arises from a coalition of pure surprise and undistracted concentration, as if the subject were simultaneously reacting to and radiating some sort of threat. This is a mixture already evident in the earlier picture, Woman Curing a Child (Fig. 21), where the woman’s staring eyes and spread arms and thighs express concentration and distraction in equal measure as she wields the string that connects her gums to the child’s stomach in order that she might bleed from her own body the pain afflicting her infant. The formal signatures of emotion diagrammatically represented in “moobee” ornaments have here been transferred to the angles and features of actual bodies and faces, all alive to the call of a phenomenon in front of them. A transitional example is entitled, The Manner in which the Natives of New South Wales Ornament Themselves, a profile of a chief called Goo-roo-dar (Fig. 25). The angle of the mouth, lips, and eye focus a glance as pointed as the barbed spear in his hand. The same alertness of the glance is evident in A Native Carrying a Water-basket, so sharp it prevents the head from serving as any other purpose, anthropological or pictorial.
Fig. 24. Port Jackson Painter, Portrait of Gna-na-gna-na. Watling Coll. 60. © The Trustees of the Natural History Museum, London.
The Port Jackson Painter drops a hint about his second mode of portraiture in the title, Ben-nel-long When Angry after Botany Bay Colebee Was Wounded. Collins documented the circumstances of Baneelong’s anger in a reference to his presence at a scene of ritual vengeance taken on Colebee. After gazing at the unequal and shocking violence, apparently impassively, he did what he was often prone to do, and ran wild: “On a sudden, he chose to be in a rage at something or other, and threw a spear among the soldiers, which, dreadfully took effect on one of them, entering at his back and coming out at the belly, close to the navel…. Mr Smith the provost-marshal … brought him away, boiling with the most savage rage” (Collins 1802: 2.68). Sturt was to notice the same coexistence of aloofness and violent excitement in his favorite guide Toonda, who had the eye of a Roman patrician but would chew a blanket in his rage (Sturt 2002: 42). Techniques of coloring are being tried out by the Port Jackson Painter in the Ben-nel-long (Baneelong) picture that are to be perfected in the portraits of Gna-na-gna-na and Balloderree (Boladeree). The hair is carefully built up as a framework for the eyes, with a dark pigment providing the underlay of strands, curls, and tiny ornaments of bone, while a rich brown on top gives it body. The eyes are emphasized by the white hairband above and the stripe of white ochre over the bridge of the nose; and emphasized again by the brightness of the whites. The lips, faintly outlined in pink, carry the affective freight of the glance, which is not beamed to the right, as in the profiles, but straight at the viewer. The anger is directed there, nowhere else.
Fig. 25. Port Jackson Painter, The Manner in which the Natives of New South Wales Ornament Themselves: Goo-roo-da. Watling Coll. 57. © The Trustees of the Natural History Museum, London.
These techniques arrive at a most startling conjunction in the picture of Balloderree, who is also staring out of the picture at the viewer with a concentrated force not dissipated by the scale, attitude, or ornaments of the figure (Fig. 26 and Plate 8). It is as if Gna-na-gna-na had turned to face us, for the muscles of the neck are rendered with the same confidence and the face is animated by two emotions, comprising something like surprise or apprehension together held in the sort of pause that precedes sudden and aggressive movement. The medusa-like halo of hair, made of black flourishes on a brown ground, combines with the fine hatching of the beard to emphasize the key features of the eyes, nose, and lips. The depth of the eyes is emphasized by the black circles around the carefully mottled irises, counterbalanced by the protrusion of the lips, delicately insisted upon by the lightened color of the lower one and by the deep crimson line where it meets the upper.
Fig. 26. Port Jackson Painter, Portrait of Balloderree. Watling Coll. 58. © The Trustees of the Natural History Museum, London. See also Plate 8.
By the time the Port Jackson Painter finished the portrait of Balloderree, he would have known that the young man had witnessed a savage attack upon his own wife by Baneelon, who justified his rage by saying she was the child of his enemy. Balloderree had not intervened, any more than Baneelon did when witnessing the terrible beating of Colebee, although very troubled by an event none of the Europeans could understand. However, when Balloderree’s canoe was wrecked by convicts, he was enraged and announced to Govenor Phillip his intention to avenge his loss, even if it meant killing the governor himself. Phillip soothed him by having the perpetrators flogged in front of him, but Balloderree still speared a convict, although not fatally, as payback for the canoe; whereupon he became a kind of outlaw until he fell sick. He was cared for by Baneelon, at whose request Balloderree was lodged in John White’s hospital (at that point filled with over four hundred scorbutic invalids). And at his death, Baneelon was chief mourner. So it is a tangled tale that fits none of the models of native romance that were later to be produced by authors such as George Barrington in Australia and Alfred Domett in New Zealand. It is a collection of contingent events provoked by passions ranging from insensate rage to the tenderest concern, with no intelligible link between any of them except perhaps the consequences of the vengeance taken for the damaged canoe. The title of the narrative of either of the two portraits could be, “Anything Might Happen.”
So what did the Port Jackson Painter see in those eyes that searched his own? Well, rising emotions with no visible cause, unless the Painter saw himself as providing one. Perhaps the reason he wanted to give shape and coloring to the enigma of Balloderree, the man so active in pursuit of revenge and yet so tolerant of a nearly fatal attack on his wife, lay adjacent to the dying hero in White’s hospital. They were the scorbutics, some of whom would recover to form the stem of what Collins called “a people regardless of the future and not dreading anything that was not immediately present to their own feelings,” a judgment that might be applied equally to the convicts and the Aborigines they were displacing (Collins 1798: 1.196). The scorbutic romance that shaped the colony was notable for experiences that were disconnected and uncontrolled, especially after alcohol drove the settlers to beat their womenfolk and destroy their own stock and crops for no reason at all (240). However, the Port Jackson Painter is not making an allegory out of the countenance of Bolladerree and using it to represent what it was like to be a settler in Botany Bay. His absorption is a strangely tense equilibrium of opposite impulses that is owing to no likeness or referent at all, but solely to the present fact of what life in that place happens to be: standing still to be hurt, or to witness hurt; or running wild in sudden defiance of such violence, or yielding to a reverie that is inexpressible because there is no messenger and no message, just the extraordinary peculiarity of the situation.
In his section on the metamorphosis commodities, Marx wrote of the form needed to reconcile the contradiction of their movements, when “one body [is] constantly falling towards another and at the same time constantly flying away from it.” He concluded that “the ellipse is a form of motion within which this contradiction is both realised and resolved” (Marx 1978: 198). The same contradiction is evident in these two pictures of Bolladerree and Gna-na-gna-na, where the figure, held in the pause of what could be apprehension, surprise, or anger, is suspended between two contrary movements—forward to touch or wound, or backward to avoid a threat or a puzzle. The Port Jackson Painter has dealt with this paradox in the form of a pictorial ellipse, where both options are present and buoyant, but not yet taken up. Mitchell observed the same ellipse in the terrifying, circling dance of aggressive retreat performed by the Aborigines he had tried to frighten with a gunshot. Collins observed one of the two foci of the Botany Bay ellipse in the conduct of prisoners whose social germ had been extirpated. Bentham and Bligh located its counterpart in the lawless violence of a delinquent governing class. It is heard in the guarded nonsense of flash talk and bulls, generally turning on the co-presence of identity and its opposite: “When I first saw you I thought it was you, but now I see it is your brother” (Edgeworth and Edgeworth 1802: 227). It was inaugurated in Ballance’s upside-down advice to Plume in The Recruiting Officer, regarding the right way to treat Sylvia: “Be modishly ungrateful, because she has been unfashionably kind, and use her worse than you would any Body else, because you can’t use her so well as she deserves” (Farquhar 1721: 1.85). The Port Jackson Painter recognized the same ellipse even in the landscape as it vibrated into shapes and reflections that placed the maximum strain on volume, line, consistency, and figure, generating the kind of dazzle that bursts out of Georg Forster’s Ice Islands with Ice Blink and is carefully secreted beneath the sunlit pastoral of William Hodges’s Pickersgill Harbour. Between these visual ellipses and the efforts of Tench, Flinders, and others to write of Australian somethings by reference to nothings, a formal resemblance exists that I shall try to explore further in the next chapter.
