So far there have been two cultures in Australia – one Aboriginal and the other European. Like the Americans, Australia was probably first colonized by Homo sapiens, as distinct from his antecedents, during the last ice age. Carbon tests have established the presence of such a man on the mainland of Australia at least fifty thousand years ago. The same tests have shown that a physically modern man probably was not active in Tasmania until much later.
The reason for this is simple. At the time when the Aborigines first colonized Australia, there was probably an ice barrier – which effectively barred human occupation – across the southeastern part of the continent where the Snowy Mountains now stand. During the passage of time between the coming of the Aborigine more than fifty thousand years ago and the coming of the white man in 1788, the changes in the appearance of Australia were caused probably more by changes in climate than by human activity. For apart from fire, the stone implements he used for hunting and food gathering, and the rock paintings on which he portrayed his vision of the world, the Aborigine handed on to posterity few other memorials of his encounter with the weird and harsh land his people had occupied since time immemorial.
Some time in the last ice age there was a revolution in climate during which the ice receded from the southern part of the continent, thus making possible man’s colonization of the islands in Bass Strait and Tasmania. Those who survived the revolution in climate developed a culture but not a civilization of their own. Their numbers remained few: on the mainland there were at least three hundred thousand, and in Tasmania between four and seven thousand. While the inhabitants of most of Asia and of the islands from Sumatra to the Moluccas and Timor gradually progressed from a hunter-gatherer society to civilization, the Aborigines retained their primitive Stone Age culture.
The absence of suitable seed-bearing plants and animals suitable for domestication probably were the main causes of this changelessness, though their cosmology also contributed to it. So they lacked the material strength to resist an invader.
Not that they were called upon to defend themselves. As other peoples made the transition from a primitive culture to civilization, chance protected the Aborigines from such an invader. By the second millennium BC, people who had made the step forward to civilization began to migrate towards the continent. The Malays began their first invasion of the Indonesian Archipelago probably two thousand years before the birth of Christ, but they did not reach Australia. In the first century of the Christian era the Hindu-Buddhist people from southern India began to colonize the islands of Indonesia in search of gold, spices, and converts to their religion. Their expansion farther east or south of Lombok was arrested, not by the absence of any incentive, but by the crisis in the mother country caused by the Muslims, who invaded northern India in the fifteenth century and destroyed the Hindu states in Indonesia during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Similar causes interrupted Chinese settlement of the islands, which began in the ninth century. By the early fifteenth century Chinese were trading with Sumatra, Java, Timor, and Macassar in the Celebes. The Chinese interest in the trepang and the bird of paradise, which commanded high prices in Peking, had caused them to use the Bugis seamen from Macassar as carriers. The exhaustion of the trepang fishing-beds close to Macassar sent the Bugis in time as far afield as the northern coast of Australia, to which they gave the name Marege, or ‘land of the trepang’.
In 1432 a palace revolution in Peking brought to power a group opposed to foreign trade and discovery. This ended Chinese expansion in the South Seas till the nineteenth century. For a time Muslim merchants from the western coast of India and from the Persian port of Ormuz inherited the trade – and with it the role of civilizer formerly exercised by the Hindu and the Chinese – till their expansion to the east and the unknown south was halted by the arrival of the European at the beginning of the sixteenth century.
In this way the expansion of all three – Hindu, Chinese, and Muslim – petered out just as they came to that invisible line on the map between Timor and the Moluccas where civilization ended and primitive societies began. So chance probably prevented the coming of civilization to Australia two or three centuries before the arrival of the European. The history of Asian colonization in the area, however, influenced the European. The Hindus invented the story of islands of gold to the south and east of Java; it was while searching for these islands of gold that the European bumped into the north coast of Australia. The material weakness of the Hindu, Chinese, and Muslim kingdoms in Indonesia made possible the coming of the European. All three invented stories to deter their seamen from sailing into the unknown seas to the south and south-east of Java because their ships, their navigation instruments and their ideas on the shape of the world confined their sailors to the role of coast-huggers. Improvements in shipbuilding, aids to navigation and cartography at the end of the fifteenth and the beginning of the sixteenth centuries enabled the European to scoff at such stories as the products of superstition, ignorance, and material weakness. While the Hindu had been deterred by the fear of being sucked into the maelstrom of Pausengi, the Chinese by stories of the kingdom of women and great holes in the ocean, and the Muslims by reports of the kingdom of anti-Christ, the European was driven on by an overwhelming confidence in his powers as well as the same greed for material gain and the same religious zeal that had motivated the Hindu, the Chinese and the Muslim.
Like the Asian, the European was attracted by the wealth of the Spice Islands, as well as by that promise of ‘infinite merit’ for those who converted infidels and pagans to the true religion. From the beginning, too, the European was influenced by the hope of finding the unknown southland that beguiled geographers and seamen from the time of the Greeks until the eighteenth century, with a brief interval during the early Christian period when the apologists for the church took their ideas on the shape of the earth from the accounts in the Old Testament. But the wealth of the Spice Islands was the substance beside which ideas of unknown southlands were but pale shadows. By 1520 the European had discovered two sea routes to this wealth of the east; the first was by the west coast of Africa, around the Cape of Good Hope, up the east coast of Africa to Malindi, east to the Gujarati coast of India, and then to Malacca, Jakarta and the Spice Islands; the second, which was discovered by Magellan and del Cano on their immortal voyage of 1519–21, was across the Atlantic, down the east coast of South America, through the Straights of Magellan, and then by the northern route across the Pacific to the Philippines or the Spice Islands. All those who searched for the unknown southland by attempting to sail west after passing through the Straits of Magellan were driven north by the great swell of the South Seas, prevailing winds, and the absence of islands. So fate, or the nature of things, preserved the east coast of Australia from both the ravages and the gifts of a conqueror for more than two hundred and fifty years after Magellan’s black eyes wept when his ship, the Vittoria, first swept on to the Pacific.
From 1515 to 1607 the sailors of Catholic Christendom searched spasmodically for the mythical islands of gold to the south or east of Java, and for the unknown southland. The Portuguese sent expeditions from Malacca, Jakarta and the Moluccas in the course of which, according to their national historians, they discovered Australia. But despite the proud boast of the poet Camoens that, if there had been other lands in that area, the Portuguese would have discovered them, there is no conclusive evidence that their sailors saw any part of the Australian coast. In the second half of the sixteenth century several Spaniards in New Spain, spurred by dreams of gold and the missionary high-mindedness that was the finest flower of the Catholic reformation in Spain, dispatched expeditions from Callao, Peru, to search for the unknown southland. Mendaña sailed in 1567 and again in 1595. Quiros, with Torres as his second in command, sailed in 1606 as far as the New Hebrides. From there Torres sailed for Manila via the Moluccas and passed through the strait that bears his name, but in his letter describing the voyage he made no reference to seeing land to the south. From the people on the south-western coast of New Guinea, who were Mohammedans, he heard that Dutch ships had sailed into the strait. So in 1607 Mohammedans, Catholics and Protestants had come to the northern gateway to Australia. It was, however, the limit of Mohammedan expansion and the limit, at least temporarily, of the Catholic contribution to the quest for the unknown southland. Though their ultimate goal had eluded them, the ideals that had inspired them probably influenced their remotest posterity. In their zeal to stamp out the ‘horrid sect of Mafomade’ the Portuguese committed actions that gave the Europeans a reputation for perfidy, barbarity and cruelty with the inhabitants of the islands of Indonesia. Quiros, with his ideal of a land dedicated to the Holy Spirit, showed that not all those who were driven to search for a southland were the servants of Mammon. So in time some of the inhabitants of that land looked to him for spiritual comfort and refreshment in an otherwise materialist age. But in the early seventeenth century it looked as though the future of civilization in the South Seas lay with the Protestants.
Like the Portuguese and the Spaniards, the Dutch searched the South Seas for the islands of gold and the unknown southland. The first Dutch ship had arrived in Jakarta in 1596. In 1606 Captain Willem Jansz in the ship Duyfken sailed east from Banda to look for the islands of gold, passed along the south coast of New Guinea and across Torres Strait until he reached the west coast of Cape York Peninsula at Cape Keer-weer, and then returned, finding, as a later account put it, that ‘there was no good to be done there!’ It was probably the first description by a European of his attitude towards Australia. Seventeen years later, in 1623, Dutch seamen again sailed into the Gulf of Carpentaria in search of uncommonly large profits in gold, spices and souls for their Calvinist Jehovah, but found to their chagrin a land of ‘exceedingly black barbarian savages’.
In the meantime Dutch sailors had also bumped into the west coast of the continent. While following the new sailing directions for ships on the voyage from the Cape of Good Hope to Java in 1616, Dirk Hartog came on an island off the entrance to Shark Bay on the west coast of Australia. Between 1616 and 1640 other Dutch sailors touched on parts of the same west coast. One of them, Peter Nuyts, was blown so far off course that he reached the islands of Peter and Paul, at the eastern end of the Great Australian Bight. In 1642 the council of the Dutch East India Company decided that the time was ripe for the discovery of the remaining unknown part of the terrestrial globe situated in the south, especially since they believed that it contained many fertile regions, many rich mines of metals, and other treasures.
As commander of the expedition they chose Abel Tasman, a seasoned seaman in the service of the company, who was not endowed by nature with the talents to fulfil tasks that were probably beyond the reach of even the giants of this world. The company wanted many things, and they wanted them in a hurry. Tasman made two voyages, in 1642–43 and 1644. On the first he discovered what is known now as Tasmania, which he named Van Diemen’s Land, and the west coasts of the two islands of New Zealand, which he named Staten Landt. On the second he charted the coast of Australia from Cape York Peninsula west to Willem’s River in the centre of the west coast. By the end of Tasman’s voyages, then, the Dutch had charts of the coast of Australia from Cape York west and south to the east end of the Great Australian Bight and the southern part of Tasmania. They had hoped to hit upon silver or gold mines to the solace of the general shareholders and the signal honour of the first discoverers, but had instead met with naked, beach-roving wretches, destitute of rice, excessively poor, and of a very malignant nature. ‘He who makes it his business to find out what the land produces, must walk over it.’ Or so the members of the council in Batavia thought in 1644, for it could hardly be supposed, they argued, that no profit of any kind should be obtainable in so vast a country. But that discovery they were prepared to leave to others, while they, impatient as ever for ‘uncommonly large profit’, began to look elsewhere for a land with some rich mines.
Forty years later, an English vagabond with a perceptive eye and a warm heart, William Dampier, anchored his ship at Shark Bay. Like the Dutch, he recoiled in horror. The land was dry, sandy and destitute of water, and there were no trees that bore fruit or berries. As for the inhabitants, they were ‘the miserablest people in the world’, because ‘setting aside their humane shape, they differ but little from brutes’. Dampier made these observations after his first voyage in 1688 and after his return visit to the west coast in 1698. He popularized his views of New Holland and the Aborigines in his books, which influenced English literature on primitive people in the South Seas until the myth of the ‘noble savage’ in the second half of the eighteenth century metamorphosed ‘the miserablest people in the world’ into a people who had discovered the secrets of human happiness.
This revolution in thinking was given fresh impetus with the voyage of Capt. James Cook. In 1768 the English Admiralty instructed Cook to observe the transit of Venus at Tahiti and then search for the unknown southland. During the voyage Cook and his officers discovered the noble savage at Tahiti, circumnavigated the north and south islands of New Zealand, and then, by chance, chose to return to England via the east coast of New Holland, Java, and the Cape of Good Hope. By such throws of chance must the historian explain the coming of the white man to Australia. Cook landed at Botany Bay, near Sydney, in April 1770, and three times more on the east coast before taking possession of the country at Possession Island for George III under the name of New South Wales. This eastern side he found was not that ‘barren and Miserable Country that Dampier and others have described the Western Side to be … In this Extensive Country it can never be doubted but what most sorts of Grain, Fruits, Roots &ca of every kind would flourish here … and here are Provender for more Cattle at all seasons of the year than can be brought into this Country.’
As for the natives of New Holland, he wrote:
They may appear to some to be the most wretched people upon the earth: but in reality they are far more happier than we Europeans: being wholy unacquainted not only with the superfluous but the necessary Conveniences so much sought after in Europe, they are happy in not knowing the use of them. They live in a Tranquillity which is not disturbed by the Inequality of Condition: The Earth and sea of their own accord furnishes them with all things necessary for life; they covet not Magnificent Houses, Household stuff &ca they live in a warm and fine Climate and enjoy a very wholesome Air: so that they have very little need of Clothing and this they seem to be fully sensible of for many to whome we gave Cloth &ca to, left it carelessly upon the Sea beach and in the woods as a thing they had no manner of use for. In short they seem’d to set not value upon anything we gave them nor would they ever part with any thing of their own for any one article we could offer them this in my opinion argues that they think themselves provided with all the necessarys of Life and that they have no superfluities.
But when Cook returned to London in 1771 the coffee-house wits and the mockers ridiculed his enthusiasm for the noble savage. Dr Johnson pontificated to Boswell on the advantages of civilization over primitive societies. Cook, with more modesty, reported to the Admirality his failure to find a southland, adding characteristically that perhaps it did not exist. The Admirality was not so sure. They sent him again in 1774 with two ships, the Resolution and the Adventure, to renew the search. After enduring incredible hardships in high latitudes in the South Seas, where land and sea were condemned to remain under eternal ice and snow, Cook returned to England in 1776, convinced that the unknown southland of the geographers did not exist. In that year it looked as though the only result of all the human effort and anguish by Hindus, Chinese, Muslims, Catholics, Protestants, and men of enlightenment such as Cook had been to prove that the stories of islands of gold were a lie, that the unknown southland did not exist, and that the known southland was either a barren waste or a land that excited the imagination but not the greed of those searching for wealth.
Three years later, in 1779, Sir Joseph Banks, who had travelled with Cook on the Endeavour on the first voyage, told a committee of the British House of Commons that the government should found a colony at Botany Bay. Ironically enough, what moved Banks had not crossed the minds of any of the geographers, navigators, seamen, statesmen, or publicists who had dreamt of transplanting civilization to the South Seas. Banks recommended a thief colony as a solution to the problem of what to do with the people sentenced to transportation from the British Isles. From 1717 to 1776 the British government had sold such convicts to shipping contractors, who transported them to the southern colonies in North America, where they were sold to the planters as workers. The revolt of the colonies in 1776 ended this method of transportation. The British government, with the arrogance and complacency of most privileged classes, used such temporary expedients as the prison hulks until, they believed, the Americans would be brought to their knees. But by 1783, with the acknowledged independence of the United States of America, they were looking for a place to send convicts sentenced to transportation.
Compared with the other problems confronting the Pitt government, the convict question was as a gnat is to an elephant. There was the consequence of defeat in America, the problem of the government of the occupied parts of India, the debts of the Prince of Wales, the agitation against slavery, and the groundswell of that upheaval in Europe that to some contained the promise of better things for mankind and to others represented a cancer at the heart of civilization. Alarming reports of convict riots in the hulks and fears of contagious diseases spreading over the countryside from overcrowded gaols prodded the Pitt government into making a decision on the convict question. Lord Sydney, who held the seals at the Home Office, announced in August 1786 that His Majesty had thought it advisable to fix upon Botany Bay as a place for convicts under sentence of transportation. He instructed the Admiralty to provide a proper number of vessels to convey 750 convicts to Botany Bay together with such provisions, necessaries, and implements for agriculture as might be necessary for their use in the new land.
The wits in London mocked at the idea of a colony of thieves. Members of the government, they argued, had grown giddy by being carried to a great elevation and had conceived the mad scheme of a land of thieves. One man in Scotland, reduced to the deepest woe when told of the expense of the proposal, described it as the most absurd, prodigal, and impracticable vision that ever intoxicated the mind of man. Some convicts groaned at the prospect of perpetual exile and arbitrary government in a barbarous country where their lives would be made bitter with hard labour. A self-styled writer for the sober part of the community believed the Botany Bay settlement would enhance the comforts and add to the lights of polished society and tend to the general happiness of mankind and the glory of that Being who had preserved the discovery for their own generation. Others with more modesty accepted Botany Bay as a solution to overcrowding in the gaols, or contemplated greedily the benefits to the British homeland of increased Asiatic commerce. The more imaginative let their minds wander over a society in which thieves had flourished and become respectable.
As first governor of the colony, the British government appointed Arthur Phillip, a retired naval officer of mixed English and German descent who was living on half pay as a farmer in the south of England. He was just forty-eight when he was commissioned in 1786. He had served with distinction, though not with brilliance, in both the English and the Portuguese navies. He was in many ways a fine flower of the eighteenth century, a common-sense man with a contempt for the consolations of religion but, at the same time, a belief in the established church as a means to promote the subordination of the lower orders in society. The members of the upper classes, he believed, should cultivate the Roman virtues of self-discipline, self-mastery, and endurance. Phillip’s face, as it has survived in the portraits, suggests that, like other worshippers at the shrine of ‘cool reason’, he was also driven by darker passions, though the dignity of his bearing and the high-mindedness that informed his every action provided eloquent testimony both to the nobility of his mind and to his success in sublimating such passions.
He was appointed Captain-General and Governor-in-Chief in and over the territory called New South Wales, from Cape York to latitude forty-three degrees thirty-nine minutes south and westward as far as the one hundred and thirty-fifth degree of east longitude, including all the islands adjacent in the Pacific Ocean.
He was instructed to found the settlement at Botany Bay; to proceed to the cultivation of the land, distributing the convicts for that purpose in such manner as might be best calculated for procuring supplies of grain and ground provisions; to explore the coast; to open an intercourse with the natives, and to cultivate their affections, enjoining all his subjects to live in amity and kindness with them; to enforce a due observance of religion and good order among the inhabitants; to procure women from the islands to offset the great disproportion of female convicts to males; to emancipate and discharge from their servitude any of the convicts who from their good conduct and disposition to industry were deserving of favour, and to grant every such male thirty acres of land, with twenty acres more if married and ten for each of his children resident in the colony, together with victuals from the public stores for twelve months and such tools, seed, cattle, sheep, hogs, and so on as could be spared from the general stock of the settlement. To assist him in the administration of affairs there was to be a criminal court, presided over by a judge advocate and six military officers, and a civil court, consisting of the judge advocate and two officers appointed by the governor. It was a government designed to ensure law and order and subordination by terror, a government designed for men living in servitude rather than for free men.
The other military and civil officers shared in varying degrees the ability and high-mindedness of the governor. They shared his common sense and his disdain for the consolations of religion, while sharing his view that the Protestant religion and British institutions were the finest achievements of the wit of man for the promotion of liberty and a high material civilization. These features distinguished the Protestant states of Europe from the Catholic states, which in their eyes were enslaved by arbitrary despotisms and a superstitious and idolatrous religion. So they mocked their religion in private as a false mythology, while in public they supported it for its social utility.
Understandably enough, this view was not shared by the first chaplain of the colony, the Reverend Richard Johnson, a product of the evangelical revival in England who had been educated at Magdalene College, Cambridge. The unbelievers had scoffed at it as a ‘nest of Methodists’ and a place that caused tea-leaves rather than the dregs of alcoholic beverages to float on the waters of the river Cam. Johnson was the first of a group of parsons through whose work evangelical Christianity dominated the religious life of Protestant Christianity in Australia throughout the whole of the nineteenth century. It was a religion with an obvious social usefulness in a convict society, for it preached in favour of subordination and against drunkenness, whoring, and gambling.
By such labours the evangelical parson became in the eyes of those in authority the natural moral policeman of society. But the parson also believed in his God, and so spent his life in torment partly because those in power approved of his moral functions but were indifferent to his religious aspirations, partly because of his failure to communicate the Word to his charges. The evangelical parsons spent their days in anguish, publicly attributing the failure of their mission to the depravity of their charges, while in the privacy of their chambers lacerating themselves for their unworthiness to serve the Lord. Their work as moral policemen so identified them in the eyes of the world with a particular social order that their charge to all to receive the gifts of divine love seemed arrant hypocrisy. The price they paid for serving the material interests of the English governing classes was to be branded as civil servants in cassocks by all who did not share their faith.
Seven hundred and fifty-odd convicts embarked in the first fleet for Botany Bay. They had all been sentenced to transportation for their crimes, a punishment that consisted of exile for seven years, fourteen years, or life – and forced labour. The aims of the punishment were to deter from crime, to reform the convicts, and to provide labour for the colonies. At the end of the eighteenth century the criminal law in England, Scotland and Ireland was a draconian and bloody instrument to defend life and property in a society in which extreme inequality and the degrading poverty of the masses caused crime to flourish. Over one hundred and sixty offences were punishable by death. In London, Edinburgh, Glasgow and Dublin a section of the working class obtained its living by crime. The class of thieves in London at the end of the eighteenth century was composed of men and women with an aversion to labour, who, according to an observer, were reduced by their idleness to indulge in gambling and scenes of debauchery and dissipation. In addition, he added, there were ‘spendthrifts, rakes, giddy young men … in the pursuit of criminal pleasures. Profligate, loose, and dissolute characters, vitiated themselves and in the daily practice of seducing others to intemperance, lewdness, debauchery, gambling and excess … strolling minstrels, ballad singers, showmen, trumpeters, and gipsies.’ Chaplain Johnson said of the first convicts that they indulged themselves in mere sloth and idleness, engaged in the most profane and unclean conversation, and committed abominations it would defile his pen to describe.
At least one-third of the women were prostitutes who reduced the men they had solicited to a drunken stupor, picked their pockets, and handed over the night’s takings to the pimp. ‘My Lord,’ Sarah Sophia Ann Brown said in her defence in 1788, ‘I live in Mrs Foy’s house, as a girl, an unfortunate girl …’ The men at times attributed their fall to drink. When Francis Flexmore was indicted in London in 1788 for stealing two pairs of plated shoe buckles, he pleaded that he was very much in liquor at the time. He was transported for seven years. Some pleaded destitution as their excuse. When Christian Klencke was indicted in London in 1788 for burglariously breaking and entering a dwelling-house, he pleaded he was in great distress and could not get any victuals, and seeing these things he had a temptation to help himself to them. He was transported for seven years. The great majority of convicts, however, probably were professional criminals or men and women with such a deep aversion to labour that they earned their living by preying on their fellow men. In addition there was a group of casual criminals – that is, those goaded into crime by want, a group of middle-class criminals sentenced for such crimes as forgery or embezzlement, and a group from the army and navy who were sentenced for offences against their codes.
Early in the new year of 1787 the civil and military officers, the convicts, and a contingent of marines assembled at Portsmouth. To ship them to Botany Bay the Home Office contracted with shipowners to provide transports, while the Admiralty provided store ships and a naval supply ship, the Sirius. In the beginning there was indescribable chaos: food supplies were inadequate, there was no clothing for the women convicts, no ammunition for the guns on the ships, no medical supplies, and no grog for the marines. By patience and hard work Phillip and the officers obtained most of the necessaries of life and some of its consolations, including the grog, before sailing day.
Early in the morning of Sunday, 13 May 1787, the first fleet sailed down the English Channel and out on to the high seas. On that day the shutters of the shops went up for the first time since the convicts had arrived early in the New Year, while a clergyman on shore went down on his knees to ask the forgiveness of God for all of them. On the ships the convicts showed no signs of distress on the occasion of their exile from their native land. The clergyman Johnson wanted to pour his soul out before his Lord, while Phillip fussed and fretted over his charges. His mind was still sustained by the vision that had first come to him in the dark days at Portsmouth before departure, when he had written that since he would not wish convicts to lay the foundations of an empire, they should remain separated from the garrison and other settlers, because there could be no slavery in a free land and consequently no slaves. Yet, at Rio de Janeiro, which they reached on 7 August, they heard and saw how the labour of convicts could be used to lay the material foundations of a civilization in the New World. On the night they sailed from their next port of call, the serious-minded again pondered over their relationship with civilization; as they saw it they were then leaving behind them the lands of civilization and sailing towards a land of savages, and, as though to imprint the thought more sharply on their minds, they bespoke a ship marked ‘London’.
By 20 January 1788, all the ships were safely anchored in Botany Bay. That day the hopes of even the most sanguine were dashed by the waterless and drought-stricken environment that surrounded them. They looked in vain for those grassy meadows Cook and fellow-travellers had assured them were only awaiting the hand of human industry to bring forth an abundant harvest. Phillip and a small party of officers sailed north in a small boat and found to their delight ‘the finest harbour in the world’, in which a thousand ships of the line could ride in perfect safety. He christened one of its small inlets Sydney Cove, after happily rejecting another suggestion that it should be called Albion. He decided there and then to move the settlement from Botany Bay to Sydney Cove, in Port Jackson. On 26 January the convict transports moved into their new home as a handful of Aborigines on the shore set up a horrid howl and indicated by angry gestures with sticks and stones that the white man was not wanted. That night, after the convicts were landed, the British flag was unfurled at Sydney Cove, shots were fired, and toasts were drunk. It has been celebrated ever since as the day on which European civilization in Australia began.
On the night of 6 February the convict women were landed. Extra rations of rum were also issued, and soon there developed a drunken spree that ended only when the revellers were drenched by a violent rainstorm. The next day the convicts were marched to a clearing where, to the accompaniment of a regimental band, they heard Phillip sworn in as Captain-General and Governor-in-Chief in and over the territory of New South Wales, and heard the judge advocate read the long and rather dreary commission to Phillip. They heard him swear on the Bible, in which he did not believe, that he would not attempt to restore Charles Edward Stuart to the throne of Great Britain, not knowing then that a week or so earlier the said Charles Stuart had died of alcoholic poisoning in Rome. Then, as though to add to the sufferings of men with a hangover during a hot, sticky day in Sydney, Phillip harangued them on the evils of promiscuity, counselled marriage as a fit and proper state for human beings, and threatened to put a charge of buck-shot into the backside of any convict who wandered into the women’s quarters during the night.
The men were set to work to till the soil, to build the huts, and put up the tents. The Reverend Richard Johnson gathered all who were willing under a great tree, probably on the first Sunday, to offer up thanks to the Lord for His great mercies. A week later he celebrated Holy Communion in an officer’s tent, and another officer, Ralph Clark, whose heart was hot within him, asked to keep the table on which the Lord’s Supper was first celebrated in the colony. Within a few weeks convicts had stolen food so shamelessly that Phillip decided to have them flogged as a warning to both European and Aborigine of his determination to defend property. When floggings failed to deter, Phillip agreed to use the last sanction of the law and launched one of the thieves into eternity. The white man had come to Australia.