A Nation Begins

Sneering is one of the methods that many contemporary writers and historians use to express their opinion about the settlement of Australia. It’s now almost a cult-habit—a form of self-loathing. They dig and scratch at the historical records, mull over what someone meant while writing a late-night entry in their journal; scour our nations’ early documents for “incriminating” evidence and seek out the opinions of contemporary fellow travellers in a sort of mutual flagellation society, quite oblivious to what our actual national story might be. They endlessly quote each other in an ever-expanding circle of structured, ideological confusion. It must have been like that in Stalin’s USSR.

But is there a change in the air? Grace Karskens’s new book The Colony is a finely written account of the foundation of the colony of New South Wales, from the arrival of the First Fleet through to the early part of the nineteenth century. This book may—just may—be the first sign of a mellowing of the stringent Marxist approach to the study of our past that has succeeded in destroying so much public confidence, interest and enjoyment in Australia’s history. It is a handsomely produced book, which according to the author took ten years to write.

Grace Karskens, who teaches Australian History at the University of New South Wales, has set about to break down the colonial experience into fragments, then endeavoured to re-assemble these various parts. Clearly defined are the “establishment” in the form of the governors, military officers, soldiers and government officials. These are followed by some identified convicts, then the Aboriginal people of Port Jackson, Botany Bay and the Nepean and Hawkesbury rivers. Later arrivals, the free settlers, form another group.

To these she has added the natural history of the region, with her vividly described notions of the once-wild landscape. Finally comes her experience in archaeological “digs”, in the best-known of which, the Sydney Rocks Cumberland–Gloucester Streets Project (1994–1999), a wonderful part of the city’s history was revealed in the foundations of the old cottages that once lurked under the shadow now cast by the Sydney Harbour Bridge.

In all, this book is a multi-faceted examination of the landscape, flora and fauna, and the beliefs and customs of two distinct races of people who found themselves occupying the same small speck of a vast, mysterious continent. At their encounter on January 26, 1788, both peoples had a lot to learn.

Whether Karskens has succeeded in combining these disparate aspects—the colonial experience from the point of view of the white officials, the convicts and the later settlers—or the original black occupiers—is questionable. Perhaps they will always be separate stories, impossible to reconcile without taking sides with one group or another. Karskens certainly favours the black experience. Fortunately she confines her favour to specific chapters, thereby giving the British arrivals, and particularly the convicts, a reasonably fair crack of the whip, which is a refreshing change.

The documentary evidence of Australia’s beginnings, like a pack of cards, has been shuffled and re-shuffled so often that it would be surprising if any new material should surface, and certainly not many revelations appear in this book. Instead you get the sense of an unfolding story, and it is in this regard that the book shines:

By October [1788] there were still neat rows of tents running down to the west side of the Tank Stream, though huts seem to have replaced tents on the Rocks and in the east. The first hanging in Australia was from a tree between the men’s and the women’s tents—the hanging site probably became the site of the future gaol, where a luxury hotel now stands in George Street.

An interesting aspect of the early-prisoner situation, as Karskens points out, is the convicts’ refusal to undertake regular government work. They agreed to do certain “tasks” and when these were done, insisted on the freedom to conduct their own efforts, for their own benefit. This included building their individual huts, gardening, hunting and “free-lancing” to soldiers and officers. She says:

Much of the everyday urban landscape—buildings, paths, movements—was shaped by the tastes and habits of the convicts. And their houses had multiple meanings: they could be sites of honest work, families, independence from the stores and “progress”. But they were also spaces where people made their own lives, places where stolen goods could be stashed or sold, robberies planned and liquor illegally distilled.

It is easy to forget that the first few years at Sydney Cove wasn’t the “ball and chain” portrait so often painted, but a more relaxed, if not disorganised collection of mostly wander-at-large criminals and soldiers held together by a retired naval officer named Arthur Phillip. They had all lobbed into an unknown and uncharted bay and begun to try to establish some form of a society based upon the culture they had brought with them. Watching their arrival and their subsequent encampment, from high vantage points, were black-skinned people from another, uncommunicative, world. Karskens tells us:

After a brief, early visit from two elders in February 1788, the Eora [the Aboriginal group of southern Port Jackson] avoided the settlement at Warrane [Sydney Cove] almost completely. In the surrounding country the British seemed to only ever encounter them “by Accident”, and in small groups, even though they knew the Eora were numerous. There was something odd and unnerving about it.

Instead of a rant about dispossession, and the ins and outs of eighteenth-century laws on discovery, conquest and occupation, Karskens elects to follow the Rousseauvian myth of the noble savage, to get the reader past the really awkward bits on British occupation. Chapter Two is an interesting unfolding of something of what is known of the Aboriginal groups that surrounded Governor Phillip on his arrival, whom he was to get to know during the early years of settlement. The appearance of these groups or clans must have startled Phillip and his officers:

Gradually it dawned on the First Fleet officers that they had not encountered one people, but a constellation of peoples, each with their own country, distinctive weapons and tools, and ways of dressing and ornamenting their hair and bodies, all instantly recognisable. The Botany Bay people gummed their hair so that it looked to the Europeans like ‘the thrums of a mop’, while other Eora groups had wavy, matted hair. On the coast people decorated their hair with the teeth of animals, while inland people glued in the ‘tails of small animals’.

There is an illustration on page 364 of a sailor or convict being chased by three spear-wielding Aboriginal men. He is carrying what appears to be a bundle of small cuttings from a shrub. Grace Karskens explains this painting as depicting a white man being caught gathering the leaves of Smilax glycophylla, from which the convicts brewed “sweet tea”, a liquorice-flavoured refreshment that was so sweet it needed no sugar. Whether the use of this herb was a convict discovery (if so they were darn quick off the mark), or something picked up from the local clan, is unclear.

Just who these Aboriginal clans were that Arthur Phillip and his band encountered in 1788 is not explained, other than the standard, simplistic, sanitised claim that they had “occupied the land for 40,000 years”. A more robust picture is needed.

A quick glance back to Manning Clark’s A History of Australia (1978 edition) finds at the start of Volume One the following:

Civilisation did not begin in Australia until the last quarter of the eighteenth century. The early inhabitants of the continent created cultures, but not civilisations. The first of these were the Negrito people—short, dark-skinned, curly-haired and broad-nosed—who were forced to move from their hunting grounds in south-east Asia by the movement into those areas by people of higher material culture, at a time when Tasmania, Australia and New Guinea formed part of the land mass of Asia.

Later another people arrived—the Murrayians, who were related to the Ainu of Japan and either destroyed the Negritos or drove them into the valleys behind Cairns, and south to what is now Tasmania, the islands of Bass Strait and Kangaroo Island.

Then, in turn, the Murrayians were challenged and displaced by the Carpentarians, a people    probably related to the Vedda of Ceylon, who settled in the northern portion of Australia after driving the Murrayians southwards in their turn.

Invasion and settlement of peoples on the Australian continent was nothing new. It stopped with the rise of the sea level 11,000 years ago. For political reasons it is rarely discussed.

Moving on three years, and the establishment of Parramatta by Governor Phillip, we get the first whiff of a sneer. We learn of the model village of Milton Abbas in Dorset, where Phillip had farmed before he accepted the governorship of the proposed convict colony of Botany Bay, which formed the basis of his plan for Parramatta. We are told:

The model appears to have been adopted in other places around the globe where control of the workers or slaves was vital …

An anonymous soldier writing home in the early years described Parramatta as Phillip’s ‘country seat’. He was right on the mark. Phillip was clearly creating an antipodean version of the modern fashionable English gentleman’s estate, complete with Government House set in parklands of the Domain, the neat rows of workers’ huts leading up to the gates, and the farmed fields beyond.

What is Karskens objecting to? Was it the Georgian architecture? The big feature of Aboriginal firestick farming was that it created “park lands” for hunting.

Any reading of Arthur Phillip and his conduct during the difficult establishment of Sydney and Parramatta during his four years as Governor of New South Wales would find the above quotation slightly odd and at variance with the Historical Records of New South Wales. Phillip was establishing a colony at almost the furthermost possible distance from England. He was trying to create, from scratch, both Sydney and Parramatta. He had chosen the latest “model” village planning. Why would he not? He was the governor. He had to live somewhere. He was an Englishman, for heaven’s sake!

It is about here in the book, as the story moves away from Sydney Cove, that the geography begins to perplex the non-Sydney reader. With no contemporary maps in the book, there is no way of knowing actually where on the “Cumberland Plain” the story is unfolding. Where on earth are Toongabbie, Rose Hill, Harris Park, Castle Hill, Green Hills, Newington and Cockle Bay? A reader unfamiliar with Sydney might as well be imagining “The coast of Coromandel where the early pumpkins blow”.

On the rich, sheltered soils of Toongabbie creek, 500 men felled the enormous turpentines, coachwood, lillypilly and scented satinwood of the rainforest brush. Some of the trees were reported to be 100 feet tall and 9 yards in diameter.

The convicts piled branches around logs not wanted for building and set them alight sending billows of smoke into the skies. They hoed the ground and planted turnips to prepare the soil for future crops of maize.”

Just when you are getting really cross with the writer about Sydney locations, you get a paragraph like this and attention returns:

The settlers called it Green Hills, probably for the gently rounded hills that over-look the flats. They are still green, the road still bobs up and down above the place where Ruse [the colony’s first farmer] and his band settled. Today this area is called Pitt Town Bottoms, and it is the only place in Australia where you can still see the early colonial farming landscape that evolved from those first farms, though the main crop [at present] is turf for suburban gardens. Now it’s the new battleground, as local people try to defend their town and country from suburban development.

Of the convicts’ first years, Karskens tell us that instead of

ensuring a simple life of hard, honest toil, the colonial earth made possible a lifestyle far more to the people’s liking; luxuriant returns for minimal labour, freedom from tyranny, time for drinking and socialising and the pleasures of popular culture. It was just the sort of community the British government had sought to avoid.”

Within ten years the first signs of “global warming” appeared in paradise. Then, sensibly, it would have been known as a dry summer and a wet autumn. On the Hawkesbury, the river level rose fifty feet—the second-highest on record.

The creeks and ponds dried out, the wheat and maize shrivelled, pastures turned to straw and the ‘whole country has been a blaze of fire’.

This drought broke dramatically in 1799 by floodwaters roaring into the basin of the Hawkesbury-Nepean valley. Horrified settlers discovered the true import of the valley’s        topography: as the waters tore down ‘as from mountains of solid rock, filled all the low grounds and the various branches of the river’. The local Aboriginal people must have wondered why anyone would want to build a camp on a flood plain.

As Karskens’s story moves from white to black perspective a different tone and technique evolve. Annoyingly, the officials, convicts, soldiers and settlers are referred to, in the local Aboriginal dialect, as the Berewalgal; Sydney Cove as Warrane. Familiar names in English take on the Eora equivalent and become confusing in the process. It is a pointless and confusing gesture, like the nonsense of the “welcome to country” statement our politically-correct politicians now like to use at just about every official function they address.

Once in Berewalgal mode we find the Berewalgal felling trees for building, the Berewalgal gouging clay for bricks and tiles, the Berewalgal cutting rushes for thatching. And the Berewalgal taking spears for their trouble. Initial conflict generally appears to be caused by misunderstandings between people of two entirely different cultures, unable or unwilling to communicate.

Governor Arthur Phillip endeavoured to learn Aboriginal words and his efforts to befriend the Aborigines are well known. Unfortunately he was unable to control his convict charges or the soldiers who were meant to guard them. Karskens refers to the possible enmity between convicts and the Aboriginal tribe of Sydney Cove, starting with Phillip’s special treatment of some Aboriginal men and the building of a house, next to his, for their benefit.

In Chapter Thirteen, “War on the Cumberland Plain”, we arrive at the points of serious conflict. Under the heading “The Wheel of Colonisation”, we hear from the colony’s Judge Advocate, David Collins. Karskens says:

Collins concluded in his first narrative in 1796 with the happy news that ‘after many untoward circumstances, and a considerable lapse of time, that friendly intercourse with the natives, which had been so earnestly desired, was at length established’. Yet at precisely that time, settlers and Aborigines were at war, torturing, killing and mangling one another out on the Hawkesbury.

As in the recent portrayals of the conflict in Tasmania, Karskens opts for the “war” premise, as an all-encompassing, organised uprising, as opposed to the view that the conflict was a combination of outrages committed by random groups of whites and blacks, at random times and at random locations. Elevating the conflict to the status of “war” is a political, rather than historical, conclusion.

Indeed, in judging the actions of those involved in the settlement of Sydney (it was never originally meant to be the whole continent) in terms of today’s corseted sense of moral superiority, we tend to lose sight of who these Georgian men and women were, and of the society from which they came. Today’s writers and historians tend to forget that their equivalent intellectual predecessors of 220 years ago also had their sense of values and morals in which they strongly believed. Judging past actions with today’s values is a tactic of the smug and lazy.

Manning Clark, embroidering a bit from Collins in 1789, has a different viewpoint:

they believed in the moral and beneficent role of their civilization, in its contribution to human progress and to the reduction of superstition and ignorance, they believed in the progress of the human race but not its perfectibility; they believed with quiet optimism that they were advancing towards a unique era in the history of mankind, in which improvement in science, liberal ideas in politics and religion, the abolition of the slave trade and the genius of commerce would bring peace, plenty and freedom in their train, and gradually spread European civilization over the whole world.

Ouch!

There is a feeling, at times, that Grace Karskens relies too much on the writing of other researchers and historians of the Sydney region—they are endlessly quoted by surname only—as though we should know who on earth some of them are. But when she is working from her own material The Colony comes alive with fresh insights. The book is well worth reading, even though at times the reader needs to avoid some puddles and potholes along the way. A more detailed index would help.

John Izzard wrote on Under the Influence: A History of Alcohol in Australia, by Ross Fitzgerald and Trevor L. Jordan, in the December issue. He is also a frequent contributor to Quadrant Online.