Down Under (8 page)

That isn’t to say that Australia had never felt a European footprint. From the early seventeenth century onwards mariners occasionally fetched up on its northern or western shores, often after running aground. These early visitors left a few names on maps – Cape Leeuwin, the Dampier Archipelago, the Abrolhos Islands – but saw no reason to linger in such a barren void and moved on. They knew there was something there – possibly a biggish island like New Guinea, possibly a mass of smaller islands like the East Indies – and they called this amorphous entity New Holland, but none equated it with the long-sought southern continent.

Because of the random and casual nature of these visits, no one knows when Australia first fell under a European gaze. The earliest recorded visit was in 1606, when a party of Dutch sailors under a Willem Jansz, or Janszoon, stepped briefly ashore in the far north (and as hastily retreated under a hail of Aboriginal spears), but it is evident that others had been there earlier still. A pair of Portuguese cannons, dating from no later than 1525, were
found in 1916 at a place called Carronade Island on the north-west coast. Whoever left them would have been among the first Europeans to stray this far from home, but of this epochal visit not a thing is known. Even more intriguing is a map, drawn by a Portuguese hand and dating from roughly the same period, that shows not only a large land mass where Australia stands, but an apparent familiarity with the jogs and indentations of Australia’s east coast – something supposedly not seen by outsiders for another two and a half centuries.

So when in April 1770 Lieutenant James Cook and his crew aboard HMS
Endeavour
sighted the south-east corner of Australia and followed the coast 1,800 miles north to Cape York, it wasn’t so much a discovery as a confirmation.

Though Cook’s voyage was unquestionably heroic, its first purpose was mundane. He had been sent halfway around the world, to Tahiti, to measure a transit of Venus across the sun. Combined with measurements taken at the same time elsewhere, this would permit astronomers to calculate the distance of the earth from the sun. It wasn’t an especially complicated procedure but it was important to get it right. An attempt during the last transit eight years earlier had failed, and the next one wasn’t due for another 105 years. Happily for science and for Cook, the skies stayed clear and the measurements were taken without setback or complication.

Cook was now free to go off and fulfil the second part of his assignment – to explore the lands of the South Seas and bring home anything that looked scientifically interesting. To this end, he had with him a brilliant and wealthy young botanist named Joseph Banks. To say that Banks was a dedicated collector is to indulge in the
drollest understatement. In the course of the
Endeavour’s
three-year voyage, he gathered up some 30,000 specimens, including at least 1,400 plants never seen before – at a stroke increasing the world’s stock of known plants by about a quarter. Banks brought back so many items that the Natural History Museum in London has whole drawers full of objects that, 220 years later, await cataloguing. The same voyage also made the first successful circumnavigation of New Zealand, confirming that it was not part of the fabled southern continent, as Tasman had optimistically concluded, but two islands. By any measure, it had been a good voyage and we can assume an air of satisfaction as the
Endeavour
turned at last for home.

So when, on 19 April 1770, three weeks out from New Zealand, Lieutenant Zachary Hicks cried ‘Land ahoy!’ at the sight of what turned out to be the extreme south-east tip of Australia, the
Endeavour
and its crew were already on something of a roll. Cook named the spot Point Hicks (it’s now called Cape Everard) and turned the ship north.

The land they found was not only larger than had been supposed but more promising. For the whole of its length, the east coast was lusher, better watered and more congenially provisioned with harbours and anchorages than anything that had been reported elsewhere in New Holland. It presented, Cook recorded, a ‘very agreeable and promising aspect . . . with hills, ridges, plains and valleys, with some grass but for the most part . . . covered with wood’. This was nothing like the barren and savage wastes that others had met.

For four months they headed up the coast. They stopped at a place Cook named Botany Bay, ran disastrously aground on the Great Barrier Reef, and finally, after making some urgent repairs, rounded the northernmost
tip of the continent at Cape York. On the evening of 21 August, almost as an afterthought, he stepped ashore at a place he called Possession Island, planted a flag and claimed the east coast for Great Britain.

It was a remarkable achievement for a man who had been born a labourer’s son in inland Yorkshire, hadn’t been to sea until he was eighteen, and had joined the Navy only thirteen years before at the advanced age of twenty-seven. He would return twice more to the Pacific on even greater voyages – on the next he would sail 70,000 miles – before being murdered (and possibly eaten himself) by natives on a beach in Hawaii in 1779. Cook was a brilliant navigator and a conscientious observer, but he made one critical mistake on his first voyage: he took Australia’s wet season for its dry one, and concluded that the country was more hospitable than it was.

The significance of this misapprehension became evident when Britain lost its American colonies, and, deciding it needed a new place to send its less desirable subjects, plumped for Australia. Remarkably, the decision was taken without any attempt at reconnoitring. When Captain Arthur Phillip at the head of a squadron of eleven ships – known reverentially ever after as the First Fleet – set sail from Portsmouth in May 1787, he and the 1,500-odd people in his care were heading off to start a colony in a preposterously remote, virtually unknown place that had been visited just once, briefly, seventeen years before and had not seen a European face since.

Never before had so many people been moved such a great distance at such expense – and all to be incarcerated. By modern standards (by any standards really), their punishments were ludicrously disproportionate. Most were small-time thieves. Britain wasn’t trying to rid itself of a
body of dangerous criminals so much as thin out an underclass. The bulk were being sent to the ends of the earth for stealing trifles. One famously luckless soul had been caught taking twelve cucumber plants. Another had unwisely pocketed a book called
A Summary Account of the Flourishing State of the Island of Tobago.
Most of the crimes smacked either of desperation or of temptation unsuccessfully resisted.

Generally, the term of transportation was seven years, but since there was no provision for their return and few could hope to raise the fare, passage to Australia was effectively a life sentence. But then this was an unforgiving age. By the late eighteenth century Britain’s statute books were plump with capital offences; you could be hanged for any of 200 acts, including, notably, ‘impersonating an Egyptian’. In such circumstances, transportation was quite a merciful alternative.

The voyage from Portsmouth took 252 days – eight months – and covered 15,000 miles of open sea (more than would seem strictly necessary, but they crossed the Atlantic in both directions to catch favourable winds). When they arrived at Botany Bay, they found it wasn’t quite the kindly refuge they had been led to expect. Its exposed position made it a dangerous anchorage, and a foray ashore found nothing but sandflies and marsh. ‘Of the natural meadows which Mr Cook mentions near Botany Bay, we can give no account,’ wrote a puzzled member of the party. Cook’s descriptions had made it sound almost like an English country estate – a place where one might play a little croquet and enjoy a picnic on the lawn. Clearly he had seen it in a different season.

As they stood surveying their unhappy situation, there happened one of those coincidences in which Australian
history abounds. On the eastern horizon two ships appeared and joined them in the bay. They were in the command of an amiable Frenchman, Count Jean-François de La Pérouse, who was leading a two-year journey of exploration around the Pacific. Had La Pérouse been just a little faster, he could have claimed Australia for France and saved the country 200 years of English cooking. Instead, he accepted his unlucky timing with the grace that marked the age. La Pérouse’s expression when it was explained to him that Phillip and his crew had just sailed 15,000 miles to make a prison for people who had stolen lace and ribbons, some cucumber plants and a book on Tobago, must have been one of the great looks in history, but alas there is no record of it. In any case, after an uneventful rest at Botany Bay, he departed, never to be seen again. Soon afterwards his two ships and all aboard were lost in a storm off the New Hebrides.

Meanwhile, Phillip, seeking a more amenable location, sailed up the coast to another inlet, which Cook had noted but not explored, and ventured through the sandstone heads that form its mouth. There he discovered one of the great harbours of the world. At the point where Circular Quay now stands, he anchored his ships and started a city. It was 26 January 1788. The date would live for ever as Australia Day.

Among the many small and interesting mysteries of Australia in its early days is where so many of its names come from. It was Cook who called the eastern coast New South Wales, and no one now has any idea why. Did he mean to signify that this would be a new Wales of the South or merely a new version of South Wales? If the latter, why just South Wales and not the whole of it? No one can say. What is certain is that he had no known
connection to that verdant principality, southerly or otherwise.

Sydney likewise is a curious appellation. Phillip intended the name only to apply to the cove. He meant for the town to be known as Albion, but that name never took. We know for whom Sydney was named: Thomas Townshend, first Baron Sydney, who was Home and Colonial Secretary and therefore Phillip’s immediate master. What we don’t know is why Townshend, when he was ennobled, chose Sydney as his title. The reason died with him, and the title didn’t last much longer; it was extinct by 1890. The harbour itself was called Port Jackson (it is officially still so known) after an admiralty judge, one George Jackson, who later abandoned his birth name in order to secure an inheritance from an eccentric relation and finished his life as Duckett.

Of the roughly one thousand people who shuffled ashore, about 700 were prisoners and the rest were marines and officers, officers’ families and the governor and his staff. The exact numbers of each are not known,
^*4
but it hardly matters. They were all prisoners now.

They were, to put it mildly, a curious lot. The complement included a boy of nine and a woman of eighty-two – hardly the sort of people you would invite to help you through an ordeal. Though it had been noted in London that certain skills would be desirable in such a remote situation, no one had actually acted on that observation. The party included no one proficient in the natural sciences,
no master of husbandry, not a soul who had the faintest understanding of growing crops in hostile climes. The prisoners were in nearly every practical respect woeful. Among the 700 there was just one experienced fisherman and no more than five people with a working knowledge of the building trade. Phillip was by all accounts a kindly man of even temper and natural honesty, but his situation was hopeless. Confronted with a land full of plants he had never seen and knew nothing about, he recorded in despair: ‘I am without one botanist, or even an intelligent gardener.’

Gamely, they made the best of things: they had no choice. Parties were sent into the countryside to see what they could find (essentially nothing); a government farm was set up on ground overlooking the harbour where the Botanic Gardens now stand; and attempts were made to establish friendly relations with the natives. The ‘Indians’, as they were at first generally called, were bewilderingly unpredictable. Generally friendly, they would none the less opportunistically attack settlers who ventured out of camp to fish or forage. In the first year, seventeen colonists were picked off in this way and scores more wounded, including Governor Phillip himself, who approached an Aborigine at Manly Cove in an attempt to converse and, to his consternation, had a spear thrust into his shoulder and out the back. (He recovered.)

Nearly everything was against them. They had no waterproof clothes to keep out the rain and no mortar to make buildings; no ploughs with which to till fields and no draught animals to pull the ploughs that they didn’t have. The ground everywhere seemed cursed with an ‘unconquerable sterility’. Such crops as managed to push through the soil were, more often than not, stolen under cover of
darkness – by marines as often as by prisoners. For years, both groups would want not just for food but for nearly every basic commodity one could name: shoes, blankets, tobacco, nails, paper, ink, groundsheets, saddlery – whatever, in short, required manufacture. The soldiers did their best to evaluate their resources, but most had little idea of what they were looking for when they went after it, or at when they found it. The historian Glen McLaren quotes one report from a soldier sent to the Hunter River valley to see what might be there. ‘The soil is black,’ the soldier wrote hopefully, ‘but mixed with a sort of sand or marly substance. Fish also are plenty, and I suppose, from their leaping, are of the trout kind.’

Development was further set back by the need to rely on prisoners, who clearly lacked any basis for devotion beyond self-interest. The cannier ones soon learned to lie their way to softer duties. One fellow named Hutchinson, coming across some scientific apparatus that had been packed away in one of the holds, persuaded his superiors that he knew all there was to know about dyestuffs, and spent months conducting elaborate experiments with beakers and scales, until it gradually became apparent that he didn’t have the faintest idea what he was doing. When they couldn’t fool their masters the prisoners could often fool their fellows. For years there existed an illicit commerce in which newly arrived convicts were sold maps showing them how to walk to China. Up to sixty at a time fled their captivity in the belief that that magically accommodating land lay just the other side of a vaguely distant river.