The Three Colonies of Australia/Part 1/Chapter 3
CHAPTER III.
GOVERNOR PHILLIP TO GOVERNOR KING.
1788 to 1806.
ON the 26th January the English fleet, having been brought round, anchored in deep water close along the shore of Sydney Cove, so called after Lord Sydney, one of the lords of the Admiralty. A formal disembarkation took place—a detachment of marines and blue jackets leaping from their boats into the shades of a primæval forest. After hoisting British colours "near where the colonnade in Bridge-street now stands," the proclamation and commission constituting the colony were read, a salute of small arms was fired, and the career of the province of New South Wales commenced. The whole party landed amounted to one thousand and thirty souls, who encamped under tents, and under and within hollow trees, "in a country resembling the more woody parts of a deer park in England." Such were the accidents of the foundation, and such the founders, of our colonial empire in Australia.
No sooner had the convict colonists been disembarked, and the erection of the necessary buildings commenced, than the want of a sufficient body of artificers was experienced. The ships furnished sixteen, and the prisoners twelve, carpenters; and by a piece of unexpected good fortune, which caused much rejoicing, "an experienced bricklayer was discovered among the convicts. He was at once placed at the head of a party of labourers, with orders to construct a number of brick huts: in the meantime the governor occupied a tent."
This first example is a fair specimen of the manner in which the penal discipline in the colony was conducted for a long series of years. A useful man was placed in authority, and allowed a variety of indulgences, quite irrespective of his moral qualities. The greatest ruffians became overseers, and occupied places of trust. Men of no use—mere drudges—were treated worse than beasts of burden.
In the month of May the entire live stock of the colony, public and private, consisted of—2 bulls, 5 cows, 1 horse, 3 mares, 3 colts, 29 sheep, 19 goats, 74 pigs, 5 rabbits, 18 turkeys, 29 geese, 35 ducks, 210 fowls. The cattle were of the Cape breed, humpy on the shoulders, and long-horned—a fact which it afterwards became of consequence to remember. In the ensuing month it is recorded as a public calamity that two bulls and four cows wandered away from the pickpocket herdsman who had them in charge, and were lost in the woods. In the sequel it was shown that the cattle were better colonists than their owners.
The entrance to Port Jackson, as already partly described, is through projecting capes, or two heads, which conceal and shelter the far extent of the harbour. A channel, about two miles in breadth, opens a land-locked harbour, about fifteen miles in length, of irregular form, the shores jagged with inlets, coves, and creeks, which, when the first adventurers landed, were covered to the water's edge with the finest timber. At the western extremity a current of fresh water mingling with the sea tide gave signs of the winding Paramatta River, navigable for vessels of small burden for eighteen miles.
The settlement was planted on the banks of an inlet or "cove," about half a mile in length, and a quarter in breadth, which received a considerable stream of fresh water at the upper end.
The native blacks, who then swarmed along the whole coast from Botany Bay, and far beyond in either direction, came to meet the white strangers naked, armed with the shield, the spear, and the boomerang, which the settlers at first took for a wooden sword.
From the circumstance of the aborigines not being subject to the authority of any sort of government except that of the strongest man, from the imperfection of their arms, and their mental incapacity for combination, their communications and skirmishes with the white intruders do not occupy that place in the history of the colony which is filled by the Bed Indian tribes in the history of North America, or the semi-civilised Peruvians and Mexicans in that of Spanish South America.
On the 7th February, 1788, the king's commission for the government of the "territory of New South Wales and its dependencies" was read. By this instrument the colony was declared "to extend from the northern extremity of the coast called Cape York, in the latitude of 10° 37′, to the southern extremity of South Cape, in the latitude of 43° 39′, including all adjacent islands within those latitudes, and inland to the westward as far as the 135th degree of east longitude." At the same time were read the letters patent issued under the 27th George III., cap. 56, for establishing courts of civil and criminal judicature in the colony. Under these the governor—or, in his absence, the lieutenant-governor—was authorised, whenever, and only when, he saw fit, to summon a court of criminal jurisdiction, which was to be a court of record, and to consist of the judge-advocate, and six such officers of the sea or land service as the governor should nominate by presents under hand and seal. This court was empowered to inquire into and punish all crimes of whatever nature; the punishment to be inflicted according to the laws of England, as nearly as might be, considering and allowing for the circumstances and situations of the settlement and its inhabitants; the charge to be reduced to writing; witnesses to be examined upon oath; the sentence of the court to be determined by the opinion of the majority; but the punishment not to be inflicted unless five members of the court concurred, until the king's pleasure should be known; the provost-marshal to cause the judgment under the governor's warrant.
In this court the judge-advocate was president (there was no provision that he should be a man of legal education); he was also to frame and exhibit the charge against the prisoner, to have a vote in the court, and to be sworn like members of it. The military officers were to appear in the insignia of duty—sash and sword; they had the right to examine witnesses as well as the judge-advocate; he alone centred in his person the offices of prosecutor, judge, and jury.
There was also a civil court, consisting of the judge-advocate and two inhabitants of the settlement, who were to be appointed by the governor, "empowered to decide, in a summary manner, all pleas of lands, houses, debts, contracts, and all personal pleas, with authority to summon parties, upon complaint being made, to examine the matter of such complaint by the oath of witnesses, and to issue warrants of execution under the hand and seal of the judge-advocate." From this court an appeal might be made to the governor, and from him (where the property exceeded the value of three hundred pounds) to the king in council. To this court was likewise given authority to grant probates of wills, and administration of the personal estates of intestate persons dying within the settlement.
A vice-admiralty court was also established for the trial of offences committed on the high seas. The governor was captain-general and vice-admiral, with authority to hold general courts-martial, to confirm and set aside sentences.
Powers equal to those of the first governor of New South Wales, if held, have never been exercised by any other official in the British dominions. He could sentence to five hundred lashes, fine five hundred pounds, regulate customs and trade, fix prices and wages, remit capital as well as other sentences, bestow grants of land, and create a monopoly of any article of necessity. All the labour in the colony was at his disposal; all the land, all the stores, all the places of honour and profit; and virtually all the justice, as the case of Governor Bligh afterwards proved. The governor's subjects consisted of his subordinates, officers—for, as captain-general, the commandant of the troops was under his orders—of the few who resorted to New South Wales to trade (whose profits were at his disposal), and the convicts—outcasts without civil rights. The distance from England, the few means of communication, the indifference of the English public to the fate of the inhabitants of a penal or any other colony, rendered the governor, so far as the control of law extended, actually irresponsible. As there was no law, so there was no publicity and no public opinion to restrain the exercise of the despotism which was the only possible government in such a penal settlement.
The chief officers were naval and military, of the old school; not the school of Cook and Keppel, Nelson and Collingwood, Wolfe and Cornwallis, but of that school which, by its tyranny, its abuse of power, its neglect of common honesty, of common decency, and common humanity in the treatment, the wages, the clothing, and the food of sailors, created the alarming mutinies of Portsmouth and the Nore.[1]
The powers vested in the governor were exercised without the restraining influence of council or law adviser until 1822.[2]
Amazement and horror overcome us when we look back on the early days of New South Wales. Under the absolute government described, the settlers were crowded together on a narrow space a promontory cleared of a dense forest. The soil was a barren sand; every yard required for cultivation had to be gained by removing enormous trees of a hardness that tried the temper of the best axes, wielded in skilled hands. On one side was an unknown shore and a shipless sea; on the other, an apparently limitless country, inhabited by savages, in which not a step could be taken without danger of being totally lost; a country which produced no wild fruit or root fit for the sustenance of man; and, with the exception of a wandering kangaroo, or a shy, swift emu, no game of any size fit for food.
The want of enterprise which marked the early career of the colonists, and left them so long in ignorance of the rich districts on which, after a long interval, the colony became self-supporting, cannot but be attributed to the form of government and to the moral blight caused by the composition of the society. The mass of the community were slaves—slaves without the contented spirit of negroes or Russian serfs, for they had been born in a free country, and could not learn to submit and be happy, even if, in the matter of food and lodging, they had been well provided, instead of being burned with heat, perished with cold, and always half starved. They were slaves, too, labouring hard, but scarcely producing anything.
The long voyage was a bad preparation for useful labour. The convicts were heaped on board ship without selection, the vilest and most venial criminals chained together. No classification of degrees of crime, or for the purposes of useful labour, was attempted. The overseers were prisoners selected by favouritism, or for their bodily strength; and the work was divided between personal service on the officers, handicraft, and mere drudgery.
One chaplain of the Church of England enjoyed a salary for preaching occasionally to an ignorant uninstructed multitude, of whom one-third were Irish Roman Catholics, transported for political or agrarian offences. Religious teaching, the bedside prayer, the solemn call to repentance, were seldom heard in that miserable Gomorrah. Far from all civilising, humanising influences, in such society the finest natures became brutalised into tyrants, while the criminals under their command dragged on a miserable existence or rebelled with all the dogged ruffianism of despair. Although the chief records of the early days of the colony are drawn from the writings and reports of officials, who were naturally inclined to put the best face on a system of which they were the paid instruments, and whose eyes, ears, consciences were seared by constant contact with misery and tyranny, yet there is more than enough testimony of the cruel and stupid despotism which prevailed.
We learn from the journals of Howard, and the reports of the parliamentary inquiries instituted through his influence, how frightful were the abuses practised on tried and untried prisoners at the close of the eighteenth century in England, where the gaols were visited by numerous individuals of various ranks, where the common-law rights of the subject had been established, where what was considered in those clays a free press flourished, where, from Sabbath to Sabbath, Christian ministers assembled and led Christian congregations to prayer and praise, where a parliament held its sittings whose orators made Europe resound with their denunciations of tyranny, and where laws were administered by incorruptible, independent judges. We may more easily imagine how in New South Wales, where there was no law but the law of the lash, tyranny became chronic, and cruelty spread through the whole body corporate of the colony.
A singular succession of serious, pitiable, ludicrous, and disgraceful incidents, mark the history of the settlement, from the day of proclaiming the king's commission to the end of the year 1800, which has been minutely recorded by Collins. At one time "a person named Smith, on his way to India, professing some knowledge of agriculture," is engaged by the government, and created a peace-officer at Rosehill, the site of the future town of Paramatta, the said Smith being apparently the only freeman with any claims to the kind of knowledge on which the subsistence of the colony was likely to depend. At another time one Bryant, a Devonshire prisoner, employed in his calling of a fisherman, is detected in secreting and selling large quantities of fish, and is severely punished; but, "being too useful a person to part with, and send to the Brick Cart," he is retained to fish for the settlement. This man afterwards escaped with his family and a party of other prisoners in an open boat to the Island of Timor; he was there captured by a man-of-war, and carried to Batavia, where he died. His wife was conveyed to England, tried, and confined in Newgate until the term of her original sentence expired.
Then we find convicts, "when little more than two years had elapsed," claiming their discharge on the ground that the time of their sentence had expired, which was possible, as it would date from the day of their sentences. When, in answer to these claims, inquiries are made for the documents containing the particulars, "it is found that they have been left in England, and that, therefore, it is impossible to affirm or deny the claims." Consequently, the prisoners are told they must wait for an answer to a despatch to be sent by the first opportunity to England, a period of two or three years. One of the prisoners, not very well pleased with the prospect of such delay, expresses himself disrespectfully of the lieutenant-governor in the presence of the governor. Thereupon he is seized, tried by a criminal court, found guilty, and sentenced to receive six hundred lashes, and wear irons for the space of six months. About the same time a soldier having been found guilty of a horrible criminal assault on a female child, his sentence is commuted to banishment for life to the auxiliary agricultural settlement of Norfolk Island.
These are but a few gems of the judicial system by which New South Wales was ruled for nearly the first quarter of a century of its existence.
In 1790, the third year of colonisation, four ships arrived filled with convicts, of whom the greater number were in a dying state: two hundred and sixty-one had died at sea; two hundred were brought on shore in the last stage of exhaustion, from scurvy, dysentery, fever, bad food, and foul air. In order to save the parties in charge trouble, the men had been chained together in rows, and confined below nearly throughout the voyage. On board one of the ships, the Neptune, several of the prisoners had died in irons; their companions concealed their deaths in order to share the extra allowance of provisions, and so slight was the supervision, that the horrible fact was not discovered until betrayed by the offensiveness of putrefaction.
Many years elapsed before a system was adopted by which the preservation of the health of prisoners and troops became the interest as well as the duty of the surgeon in charge. At that time the more and the sooner prisoners died the more profitable the transaction was to the contractor; so they commonly died like rotten sheep.
Those were the days in which transportation really was a punishment almost as terrible as death. New South Wales was then an awful over-sea gaol, offering no prospect of advancement or liberation; where the will of a prisoner-turnkey was law, where death was the punishment of the most trifling crimes, and a reproachful look was punished with the lash.
A few days before the four ships landed one thousand male and two hundred and fifty female convicts, the arrival of one storeship, the Justinian, saved the whole colony from perishing of famine. The Guardian, laden with a great supply of provisions, stores, and live stock, under the command of Riou, "the gallant good Riou," of Campbell's "Battle of Copenhagen," had struck on an iceberg, and, after almost all the cargo had been thrown overboard, was with difficulty carried into the Cape of Good Hope. For weeks before the arrival of the Justinian, the whole settlement had been put on short allowance, The governor, says Collins, had thrown his store, 300 lbs. of flour, into the common stock. The weekly allowance of each prisoner had been reduced to 2 lbs. of salt pork, 2½ lbs. of flour, and 2 lbs. of rice. "Labour stood suspended for want of energy to proceed; the countenances of the people plainly bespoke the hardships they underwent." "Garden-robbing became prevalent; the most severe measures were employed to repress the crime caused by, and yet increasing, the effects of the scarcity, but in vain. A man caught by the clergyman stealing potatoes was sentenced to three hundred lashes, to have his rations of flour stopped for six months, and to be chained for that period to two others caught robbing the governor's garden; but this and many similar punishments produced no more effect than the clemency of the governor, who remitted three hundred out of four hundred lashes to which one man was sentenced. The proverb that "hunger will break through stone walls," was exemplified night and day.
"So great was the villany of the people, or the necessity of the times, that a prisoner lying at the hospital from the effects of punishment, part of which he had received, contrived to get his irons off one leg, and in that state was caught robbing a farm;" but the historian reports that at Rosehill, where they had vegetables in abundance, no thefts were committed.
The Justinian, which brought relief from this state of destitution, was driven off Sydney Heads when within hail: it was for some hours doubtful whether she would not strike and become a total wreck on the reefs of Broken Bay. Had that event occurred, and the twelve hundred and fifty additional convicts safely made the port, death by starvation, or in a struggle for food, must have been the fate of the whole settlement.
Could it be wondered if, under such a system of despotism, without discipline in the colony, and in the face of such neglect at home, the descendants of these men had grown fiercely disloyal and anti-British? But yet it is not so. The Australians are a loyal, order-loving, law-obeying race, as they have recently proved more than once. Even gold-digging has not corrupted their honest hearts.
It was not until five years after Governor Phillip's landing that a temporary church was erected, and divine service performed on the 25th August, 1793.
The founders of New England—themselves tyrannical and intolerant, although flying from tyranny and intolerance—did not let a week elapse without making permanent arrangements for religious worship and education, which endure to this day, and have spread their humanising influences all over the wide empire of the American republic. In New South Wales, under the rule of a sovereign which some, disparaging the present, are accustomed to glorify as the reign of a specially Christian king, the penalties of lash, the pillory, the gallows, were administered as freely as teaching and preaching were neglected.
It sounds strangely in this age to hear that "the clergyman complaining of non-attendance at divine service," which was generally performed in the open air, alike unsheltered from wind and rain, as from the fervour of the summer's sun, "it was ordered that three pounds of flour should be deducted from the ration of each overseer, and two pounds from each labouring convict who should not attend prayers once on each Sunday, unless some reasonable excuse for absence should be assigned."
In 1791 (April) we find Mr. Schaffer, a German, arriving from England as a superintendent of convicts; but on discovery that as he spoke no English he was unable to discharge his duties, he retired, and accepted a grant of land of 140 acres at Rosehill. One cannot help feeling curious to know under whose patronage and for what services a German, not speaking English, was sent as superintendent of convicts at the antipodes. Is it possible that Miss Burney's friend, Madame Schwellenberg, could have had anything to do with this little appointment?
At the same time James Ruse received a grant of a similar quantity of land as a reward for being the first settler who declared he was able to support himself on a farm he had occupied fifteen months, and to dispense with an allowance from the government stores.
These incidents, with the arrival, in two detachments, of a regiment raised for the purpose of serving in the colony, under the title of the New South Wales Corps, are the most remarkable events during the latter years of the reign of Governor Phillip, who resigned his office to Lieutenant-Governor Grose,[3] and returned to England on the 11th December, 1792.
At that date there were sixty-seven settlers, holding under grant three thousand four hundred and seventy acres, of which four hundred and seventeen acres were in cultivation, and a hundred more cleared. We have no means of ascertaining where all these grants were situated, but the greater part is now occupied as building land, and was miserably barren for agricultural purposes, although covered with gigantic gumtrees.
This summary of the cultivation by free or freedmen settlers is interesting, because it marks the first step towards rendering the colony self-supporting. These settlers were, if they required, victualled and clothed from the public store for eighteen months from the time of their going on their grants, furnished with tools and implements of husbandry, grain to sow their grounds, such stock as could be spared from the public, and, at the discretion of the governor, the use of as many convicts as they would undertake to clothe, feed, and employ. Every free or freed man had a hut erected on his farm at public expense.
On ground of ordinary fertility, with settlers of average industry, these terms would have insured early independence; but the greater part of the district was and is as barren as the sea-shore, and the majority of the settlers who were not idle were perfectly ignorant of agriculture. The difficulties of cutting down and removing the forest were so great that, without the use of compulsory convict labour for a quarter of a century, the Sydney district never could have been cleared.
During this period the government was obliged to carry on cultivation as well as it could on public account, although with indifferent success. A principle as old as the first step the first tribes made toward civilisation—which, however, many statesmen and economists even now appear not to understand—was forcibly illustrated in the answer of a settler, reproached with not having worked so well for the joint-stock account as he did on his own grant of land—"We are working for ourselves now."
The following were the prices of agricultural stock and produce at the close of 1792: Flour, 9d. per lb.; potatoes, 3d. per lb.; sheep (the Cape breed), £10 10s. each; milk goats, £8 8s.; breeding sows, £7 7s. to £10 10s.; laying fowls, 10s.; tea, 8s. to 16s. per lb.; sugar, 1s. 6d. per lb.; spirits, 12s. to 20s. per gallon; porter, 1s. per quart.
At these famine prices the mortality among the convict population was fearful. Between the 1st January and the 31st December, 1792, there died two persons of the civil department, six soldiers, four hundred and eighteen male convicts, eighteen female convicts, and seventy-nine children.
Governor Phillip took with him to England two of the aborigines, with whom, throughout the period of his government, he had endeavoured to promote a good understanding—a task involving great difficulties, arising from the brutality of the convicts and the untameable nature of the savages. The tribes that swarmed round Port Jackson and Botany Bay have, with one exception, all died out; the character and customs of those who survive in less settled districts remain unchanged, or at any rate not more changed than the fox chained in a courtyard, or a pheasant reared in an aviary.
In September, 1795, Governor Hunter arrived, superseded Lieutenant- Governor Grose, and remained the usual term of five years. His difficulties were less formidable than those of Governor Phillip, which were not extravagantly rewarded by a retiring pension of £500. His office was no sinecure. He had had a large body of convict colonists under his command who would not work, who would drink, and who were therefore dependent for subsistence on supplies imported from England and India. By every ship that left the harbour there was an attempt, generally successful, to escape, on the part of convicts; fifty were taken from one ship at a time "when the loss of the labour of one man was important." It was no wonder that all who could, endeavoured to fly from a colony where the population was annually put on short allowance of food, and very often in danger of actual starvation.
At this period, and for more than twenty years, spirits were the ordinary currency of the colony. Almost all extra work was paid for in spirits, and it was thought quite proper to stimulate the diligence of prisoners, in unloading a vessel laden with government stores, by giving half a pint of spirits to each. Among free and bond, drunkenness was a prevailing vice. The tyranny of the prisoner-overseers was so great that the best-inclined convicts were goaded to recklessness and crime. Criminal assaults on women were so common that "the poor unfortunate victims were designated by a title expressive of the insults they had received."
The whole population, on the arrival of Captain Hunter, with the exception of one hundred and seventy-nine, were dependent on the public stores for rations, many of the exceptions being reputed thieves, presumed to subsist on plunder from stores and gardens.
The most favourable feature of this epoch was the extension of cultivation by settlers along the rich alluvial land on the banks of the River Hawkesbury, one of the first districts which seemed to yield a fair return to industry.
Newcastle.—From a Sketch by J. A. Jackson, Esq.
Among the events of this five years may be noted the use of a printing-press, the discovery of the lost herd of cattle, and the foundation of a settlement, called Newcastle, on the Coal or Hunter's River.
A printing-press had been sent out with the first fleet, but no printers. All public and private announcements were made in manuscript, or by the bellman, until Governor Hunter discovered a printer among his convict subjects, and established a government gazette. In this age of newspapers, it seems incredible that a number of officers and gentlemen should have been satisfied for so many years without something in the shape of a newspaper; but the colony was divided into slavedrivers and slaves, who were equally content to spend their time in feeding pigs and getting drunk.
The reports of the natives led the governor to send out as scouts men employed as hunters, to collect fresh provisions for public use; and they discovered, feeding on rich pastures on the other side of the River Nepean, still known as Cow Pastures, a herd of sixty cattle, the produce of the five cows and two bulls lost in 1788.
To realise this sight, so pleasant to the eyes of men condemned to perpetual rations of salt meat, rarely varied by fresh pork, the governor himself set out on an expedition, and tracked and viewed the herd with great delight. An old bull, fiercely and obstinately charging, was slaughtered in self-defence; he proved to be of the humpy-shouldered Cape breed of the lost stock, which left no doubt of the identity of the herd, and dispelled the notion of indigenous cattle. The party made a delicious meal, and a few pounds were carried back thirty-eight miles, over a rough road, to Paramatta, the rest being left to the native dogs and hawks, with deep regret, "as meat, fresh or salt, had long been a rarity with the poor sick in the hospital." Many an Australian within the last ten years, galloping through Cow Pastures to purchase the finest cattle at 2 a head to boil down for tallow, has been reminded of the time when a bit of bull beef, that a well-bred dog would now reject, was a luxury to a governor and his suite!
These wild cattle were preserved, and increased greatly, dividing into "mobs," each under the charge of a victorious bull, until the general increase of stock diminished their value. Many were consumed by surrounding small settlers, and the rest, being fierce and a nuisance, were destroyed by order of the government, when beef ceased to be a luxury.
About the time these wild herds were discovered, three miserable cows of the Indian breed sold for 189, and two years afterwards two colonial ships were employed eight months in bringing 51 cows, 3 bulls, and 90 sheep from the Cape, at a cost exceeding the highest price ever paid for the finest short-horns.
Governor Hunter, with the best intentions and an excusable ignorance of the laws of political economy, more than once endeavoured to fix the wages of labour, by a convention of employers, and mutual agreement not to outbid each other. Harvest wages were settled at 10s. a day; but we find, from frequent proclamations, that the rule of supply and demand prevailed, and labourers when much needed obtained "exorbitant terms," although a reward and indemnity were offered to informers.
At this period officers were allowed the use of ten prisoners for agricultural and three for domestic services, and so on in a diminishing scale to every description of settler down to the emancipist, who was allowed the use of one prisoner to assist in tilling his grant. All these servants were fed and clothed by the crown.
In 1797 the first school building was erected for the benefit of three hundred children, and the chaplain, the Rev. Mr. Johnson, began to catechise them after the service on each Sunday.
That instruction was much needed among all classes there can be no doubt; for on one occasion the sails of the public mill, by which the corn of the settlers was gratuitously ground, were stolen in the absence of the miller. On another, with a superstition worthy of the middle ages, the authorities compelled a soldier suspected of murdering his comrade to handle the dead body, in order to see whether it would bleed, and so accuse him.
In 1798 a great Irish expedition in search of China took place. We laugh at it, yet it was not more foolish than many expeditions and theories patronised in the nineteenth century. It is also memorable for the foundation of the first brick church, built on the model of the stables of a citizen's mansion, with clock-tower.
A return made in this year shows 6,270 acres in crop with wheat or maize, a much larger quantity of arable land in proportion to the population than is now cultivated in any of the Australian colonies. Among the more industrious settlers, George Barrington, the celebrated pickpocket, figures as the owner of twenty acres of wheat, thirteen sheep, fifty-five goats, and two mares. He was a constable.
In the following year the colony was again threatened with famine, partly owing to the deficiency of live stock, and partly to the incurable barrenness of the Sydney district.
In 1800 Captain Hunter was superseded by Captain King.
Under Governor King the Female Orphan School was founded, and the first issue of copper coin took place. The Sydney Gazette and New South Wales Advertiser, the first Australian paper, was founded by a prisoner, George Howe, and published by authority in 1803. An insurrection of prisoners, two hundred and fifty strong, armed with muskets, broke out at Castlehill, on the 4th March, 1804, and was defeated in fifteen minutes by Major Johnstone, of the New South Wales Corps, with twenty-four men. Sixty-seven insurgents fell on the field; ten were tried and five hung.
A penal settlement was formed in Van Diemen's Land by Captain Collins. In the first instance he proceeded to Port Phillip, hut unfortunately landed on the eastern arm, where there was a deficiency of water; and being, as most military men are, a bad colonist, he abandoned it and proceeded to the Derwent. Had he made his way to the Yarra Yarra River the probability is that Sydney would have become the second settlement; and, with the profusion of white slave labour then available applied on the fine agricultural land of Port Phillip, by this time a population of several millions would have been established there.
1806 was signalised by the great flood on the River Hawkesbury, on the banks of which the principal grain cultivation of the colony was carried on. The Hawkesbury, in ordinary periods, winds in a strangely tortuous course through a deep valley, between the precipitous banks above which, on the occurrence of heavy rains, it rises as much as thirty feet in a very few hours. These floods are not periodical. Until 1806 none of importance had occurred, and people had settled down on the rich "interval" land, the deposit of former overflowings. Crops, houses, and many colonists, were all swept away in one night. Famine was the immediate result. The two-pound loaf rose to 5s.; wheat fetched 80s. a bushel, and every vegetable in proportion. A serious flood had occurred in 1801, but this far exceeded it. It is difficult to teach caution in such matters.
This great flood on the Hawkesbury caused eventually a complete rearrangement of the cultivation and occupation of that district.
Calamities, according to popular prejudice, seldom come single. It was certainly the casein New South Wales in 1806, for the clock-tower fell, and Governor Bligh arrived. Captain King resigned his command on the 13th of March.
RECOLLECTIONS OF PRISONERS.
On the Hawkesbury and its tributaries the first successful agricultural colonists were planted, and there dwelt, in 1845, a few representatives of the first fleeters. These settlers, whose recollections[4] do not exactly tally with, although they confirm, the history transmitted to us by Collins, are all in comfortable circumstances some positively wealthy. Among the last was Mr. Smith, who always spoke his mind to high and low. He had been free almost ever since he arrived in the colony, and had never been "in trouble."
"He was an old man, with a large-featured, handsome, military sort of face, of a red-brown complexion, shaved clean. His dress consisted of a red flannel shirt, with a black bandana, tied sailor-fashion, exposing his strong neck, and a pair of fustian trousers. Out of compliment to the lady he once put on a blue coat with gilt buttons, but, being evidently uncomfortable, consented to take it off again. He refused to see the lady until he learned that it was ' the Mrs. Chisholm;' being usually rough to those he did not respect."
A Dr. ———, who had the reputation among the prisoner population of never having spared any man in his anger, or any woman in his lust, during the old flogging days, met Mr. Smith, face to face, coming out of the bank in Sydney; and holding out his hand said, " Come, shake hands, Mr. Smith, and let bygones be bygones: I am glad to see you looking so well." Smith, putting his hands behind him, answered, (t I suppose, because I have got a velvet waistcoat, and money in the bank, you want to shake hands; but no! Dr. ———, it would take a second resurrection to save such as thee." The doctor slunk away.
Mr. Joseph Smith.
"Macdonald's River, County of Hunter, 3rd Oct., 1845
"I arrived in the colony fifty-six years since; it was Governor Phillip's time, and I was fourteen years old; there were only eight houses in the colony then. I know that myself and eighteen others laid in a hollow tree for seventeen weeks, and cooked out of a kettle with a wooden bottom: we used to stick it in a hole in the ground, and make a fire round it. I was seven years in service (bond), and then started working for a living wherever I could get it. There was plenty of hardship then: I have often taken grass, and pounded it, and made soup from a native dog. I would eat anything then. For seventeen weeks I had only five ounces of flour a day. We never got a full ration except when the ship was in harbour. The motto was 'Kill them, or work them, their provision will be in store.' Many a time have I been yoked like a bullock with twenty or thirty others to drag along timber. About eight hundred died in six months at a place called Toongabbie, or Constitution-hill. I knew a man so weak, he was thrown into the grave, when he said, 'Don't cover me up; I'm not dead; for God's sake don't cover me up!' The overseer answered, 'D—— your eyes, you'll die to-night, and we shall have the trouble to come back again!' The man recovered; his name is James Glasshouse, and he is now alive at Richmond.
"They used to have a large hole for the dead; once a day men were sent down to collect the corpses of prisoners, and throw them in without any ceremony or service. The native dogs used to come down at night and fight and howl in packs, gnawing the poor dead bodies.
"The governor would order the lash at the rate of five hundred, six hundred, or eight hundred; and if the men could have stood it they would have had more. I knew a man hung there and then for stealing a few biscuits, and another for stealing a duck frock.[5] A man was condemned—no time—take him to the tree, and hang him. The overseers were allowed to flog the men in the fields. Often have men been taken from the gang, had fifty, and sent back to work. Any man would have committed murder for a month's provisions: I would have committed three (murders) for a week's provisions! I was chained seven weeks on my back for being out getting greens, wild herbs. The Rev. —— used to come it tightly to force some confession. Men were obliged to tell lies to prevent their bowels from being cut out by the lash.
"Old ——(an overseer) killed three men in a fortnight at the saw by overwork. We used to be taken in large parties to raise a tree; when the body or the tree was raised, he (old ——) would call some of the men away—then more; the men were bent double—they could not bear it—they fell—the tree on one or two, killed on the spot. 'Take him away; put him in the ground!' There was no more about it.
"After seven years I got my liberty, and then started working about for a living where I could get it. I stowed myself away on board the Barrington, bound for Norfolk Island, with eighteen others; it was not a penal settlement then. Governor King was there. I had food plenty. I was overseer of the governor's garden. Afterwards I went to live with old D'Arcy Wentworth,[6] and a better master never lived in the world. Little Billy,[7] the great lawyer, has often been carried in my arms.
"Old D'Arcy wanted me to take charge of Home-Bush[8] property, but I took to the river (Hawkesbury), worked up and down till I saved money to buy old Brown's farm at Pitt Town. No man worked harder than I have done. I have by me about one thousand pounds ready cash. I have given that farm of forty acres to my son Joseph, and three other farms, and about five hundred head of cattle; and about the same to my other son. I have also got 80 acres 30 acres, 50, 75,—beside my house, and some fine cattle. We are never without a chest ot tea in the house; we use two in the year. I have paid £40 for a chest of tea in this colony. Tea is a great comfort."
Mrs. Smith's Statement.
Henry Hale.
Well's Creek, Hawkesbury River, 4th Oct., 1845.
- ↑ Portsmouth, May; the Nore, June, 1797.
- ↑ The Charter of Justice was not formally promulgated until the 17th May, 1824.
- ↑ Major Grose was a son of the celebrated antiquary.
- ↑ Extracted from the MSS., Voluntary Statements of the People of New South Wales, collected by Mrs. Chisholm.
- ↑ J. Bennet, a youth 17 years of age, was convicted and immediately executed for stealing to the value of 5s. out of a tent Collins, p. 27, History of New South Wales.
- ↑ He came out as a political exile for having been concerned in Irish treason, and was appointed surgeon to the Norfolk Island settlement. He took an active part in the Bligh rebellion. Was afterwards a magistrate. A man of great ability and eloquence, but by no means popular, being of the old fierce republican school of politics of the last generation.
- ↑ William D'Arcy Wentworth, barrister-at-law, author of a description of New South Wales, published in 1819 a work, or rather large pamphlet, chiefly political, written with great power and eloquence, which first called the attention of the reading public to the resources of New South Wales. The emancipation of New South Wales is in a great degree due to Mr, Wentworth's exertions.
- ↑ The Goodwood Park of New South Wales, where races ranking colonially with our Ascot are held annually, about eight miles from Sydney.