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CHAPTER I
Governor Phillip and the Establishment

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THE first British settlement in New Holland was planted on 26 January 1788 beside a little rivulet, known later as the Tank Stream, on Sydney Cove, Port Jackson. It was not scenic beauty that attracted the sailors, but the prime necessities of a seafaring people—sheltered anchorage and fresh water. Ages earlier, larger streams had carved out the deep valleys drowned under Port Jackson. The headwaters of those streams had been captured in some great earth change by the Nepean-Hawkesbury river-system. Thus the harbour formed by their submergence had escaped silt. Deep water slept in all its hundred bays and arms.

But the plain behind lacked a fit scene for immediate agriculture, the hard labour to which the convicts brought by the First Fleet had been condemned; and it was walled off from the rest of the Continent by the Blue Mountain cliffs. Till the mountains were crossed it was a port without a hinterland.* The great sandstone gorges thirty miles westward of the harbour beat back inland exploration for a quarter of a century. Possibly the officials of a colony that was primarily a prison cared no more than the aborigines to know what lay beyond the ranges. Like the aborigines, who obtained a sparse living from fish, game and roots, they clung to the harbour shores.

[* See T. G. Taylor's article on "Economic Geography" in the Australian Encyclopaedia, vol. I (third edition), pp. 504 et seq. and the larger works it epitomizes, e.g. Australia, Physiographic and Economic.]

The only denizens of the virgin land were primitive hunting tribes who, by restriction of their numbers and by elaborate taboos, had adjusted their hunting to the supply of game. No competition with other races or cultures had narrowed their fields and enforced pasture or agriculture, the domestication of animals and plants in chosen spots. The intruders found a forest-clad country—unkempt, uncanny and unknown.

Prisoners, emancipists and officer-settlers tilled a few areas of alluvial soil which they found chiefly along the Hawkesbury valley. The best of these, however, were liable to sudden devastation by the flood-waters which the Nepean-Hawkesbury system hurled seaward along one narrow valley. As their harvests were swept away almost as often as not, the exiles found their main support in the stores and clothing brought from overseas and served out by the naval captains still in command. Unlucky delays in re-victualling the little white population made equal rations an established rule of early Sydney.

This was unfortunate. It confirmed in economic childishness that first company of marines and convicts. Neither criminals nor warders make a positive contribution to the social economy of production and exchange. In early Sydney this special department of British life was separated, isolated and given the appearance of a new community. But it proved difficult to introduce into it the main activities of a self-providing society. The First Fleet had been sent primarily to rid Britain of a troublesome accumulation of criminals. That good riddance was the dominant motive is plain enough. Several of the early batches of prisoners were sent without any record of individuals' terms of imprisonment. If any thought was given to their employment at the Antipodes, it was of the vaguest character. Perhaps the reports about Botany Bay made by Captain Cook and Sir Joseph Banks led the officials to expect an immediate and abundant return from cultivation of the soil.

Governor Phillip's instructions bade him treat "the productions of all descriptions acquired by the labour of the convicts as a public stock".* Part of this he might use for the subsistence of the convicts and of his civil and military establishment "The remainder of such productions you will reserve as a provision for a further number of convicts who will shortly follow you." But Cook's fertile meadows at Botany Bay proved to be sodden rush flats, and around Port Jackson Phillip found neither the land nor the men needed for instant and energetic tillage.

[* Historical Records of Australia, series I, vol. I, pp. 11-12, Governor Phillip's Instructions.]

As far as eye could reach the country appeared "one continued wood". Trees "so large that the removing them off the ground after they are cut is the greater part of the labour" cumbered the whole country. Difficulties with his human material proved greater still. The convicts, numbering 717 at the landing, 529 being males, were the sweepings of the prison hulks. Artificers and useful hands had been retained in Britain. "The sending of the disordered and helpless", wrote Phillip, "clears the gaols and may ease the parishes from which they are sent, but if the practice is continued, this settlement will remain for years a burthen to the mother country." ** His sinister charges were woefully unlike "farmers and emigrants who have been used to labour and who reap the fruits of their own industry. . . . Amongst the convicts we have . . . many who are helpless and a deadweight on the settlement. . . . Those who have not been brought up to hard work, which are by far the greatest part, bear it badly. They shrink from it the moment the eye of the overseer is turned from them".

[** H. R. of A. series I, vol. I, p. 197, Phillip to Grenville, 17 July 1790.]

The eye of the overseer was universally needed. The convicts were not led by the ordinary motives to honest industry—they had therefore to be driven. Phillip had counted on the loyal aid of the officers of the Royal Marines who had come as guard over the convicts. To his chagrin the officers, led by the lieutenant-governor Major Robert Ross, "declined any interference with the convicts, except when they are employed for their own particular service". The marines, they argued, had been sent as a garrison; their duty as guard over the convicts ceased at the landing. It was the first Australian strike, and one on the part of the directing class. They even objected to forming a court of criminal jurisdiction, an essential service in such a community. "Here", Phillip reported, "are only convicts to attend to convicts and who in general fear to exert any authority." Productive labour around Sydney broke down at once. In six months only eight or ten acres could be sown with wheat and barley. Even on these tiny patches the harvest failed: the seed had been over-heated on the voyage out. The sharing of the ship's stores continued, providing an effortless subsistence all too easily accepted by thieves and warders. The cult of energetic production had to make headway against this institution of paternalism.

In 1789 Phillip transferred the essay in public agriculture to Rose Hill or Parramatta, where, at the head of one branch of the harbour, he had found an open fertile area. But the change of soil did not mend matters. Under the only reliable supervisor, Henry Edward Dodd, a free man who had come as Phillip's personal servant, a hundred convicts raised 200 bushels of wheat, 60 of barley and small quantities of oats, flax and Indian corn. All of this was preserved for seed, and as Dodd would not contemplate remaining as a settler, the problems of food-supply and of supervising convict labour were not solved. In every despatch Phillip wrote of his need of continued supplies and of competent superintendents. "Men have been found"—this was in July 1790—"who answer the purpose of preventing their straggling from their work, but none of them are equal to the charge of directing the labour of a number of convicts with whom most of them are linked by crimes they would not wish to have brought forward." A time-expired convict, James Ruse, had been given in 1789 an acre of ground and a hut at Rose Hill "in order to know in what time a man might be able to cultivate a sufficient quantity of ground to support himself". His thorough tillage convinced Phillip that the colony would support itself on its own produce as soon as free settlers with convict servants worked for their own hand on their own land.

The attempt to grow food supplies by public agriculture brought the colony to the very brink of collapse by starvation. Phillip's careful plans for the expedition had made the voyage out a remarkably healthy one, but his foresight as a ship's captain could hardly be expected to extend to the needs and functions of a farming community at the Antipodes. No ploughs had been brought. Ground cleared by cutting down the big trees and "grubbing out" the smaller ones was hand-tilled between the stumps, with spade and hoe, a method the honesty of which could be ensured only by watching every stroke. Ruse said of his farm, "I dug in the ashes, and then hoed it, never doing more than eight or perhaps nine rods in a day, by which means it was not like the government farm, just scratched over, but properly done". Phillip's workmen were all too likely to quarrel with their tools, and those sent with the transports seem to have been of the poorest sort. "Bad tools", wrote Phillip in November 1791, "are of no kind of use. Two or three hundred iron frying pans will be a saving of spades. For cross-cut saws, axes, iron-pots and combs we are much distressed."

As herdsmen the convicts were of even less use. Phillip's instructions warned him to take the utmost care of the livestock, for breeding purposes. "The settlement will be amply supplied with vegetable productions and most likely with fish." But the convict herdsmen allowed the cattle to wander off into the bush and get lost. The forty-four sheep brought by the First Fleet also disappeared one by one, the losses being ascribed to dingoes and native spears.

With crops insufficient for seed at the next planting, with livestock disappearing into the bush, Governor Phillip, though he did not doubt "but that this country will prove the most valuable acquisition Great Britain ever made", had good cause to reflect that "no country offers less assistance to the first settlers, nor could be more disadvantageously placed with respect to support from the mother country, on which for a few years we must entirely depend".*

[* H.R. of A. series I, vol. I, p. 51. The poor equipment may have been in part deliberate. W. Eden in a History of New Holland, 1787, wrote of the convict as "a forlorn hope", "a fair subject of hazardous experiments". "Offended justice in consigning him to the inhospitable shore of New Holland does not mean thereby to seat him for his life on a bed of roses."]

Phillip's early warnings prompted British officials to send him relief, but unluckily their first attempt to do so miscarried. The 'Guardian', a new fast-sailing 44-gun ship, sailed in June 1789 with two years' provisions for the settlement, clothing, sails and cordage, medicines, blankets, tools and agricultural implements. Having added plants and stock to her priceless cargo at the Cape, she should have arrived about the end of January or early in February 1790. "At that period the large quantity of livestock in the colony",** as it seemed to the Judge Advocate, "was daily increasing; the people required for labour were, comparatively with their present state,*** strong and healthy, . . . the ration of provisions would have been increased to the full allowance; and the tillage of the ground consequently proceeded with in that spirit which must be exerted to the utmost before the settlement could render itself independent of the mother country for subsistence." Alas! On 23 December, after leaving Cape Town, the Guardian' collided with an iceberg. With great difficulty the gallant Riou worked her back to that port.

[** D. Collins' Account of the English, Colony in New South Wales, p. 84.]

[*** These reflections seem to have been written in June 1790.]

At Sydney her non-arrival and the rapidly approaching exhaustion of the 1787 salt pork and flour prompted Phillip to put his people on half rations.* He had somewhat earlier sent off the 'Sirius' to Cape Town for flour. Field labour had to be suspended through sheer weakness. The surviving sheep and cattle were eaten. It became a struggle to survive, hardly different, save in the hope of succour from overseas, from that of the aborigines around them.** Little flour was to be had at Cape Town. The 'Sirius' was sent on a second voyage to China, but en route she was wrecked off Norfolk Island whither she had taken a detachment of 300 convicts and 70 marines. The smaller store-ship 'Supply' was then despatched to Batavia. Some convicts sent into the bush to shoot kangaroos reported, after three weeks, that they had shot only three. In each fishing boat armed guards were set to prevent the complete plundering of the catch.

[* As to the scale of rations at various dates see H.R. of A. series I, vol. I, p. 44 et passim, vol. II, p. 358, and T. A. Coghlan, Labour and Industry in Australia, vol. I, pp. 55, 60, 62.]

[** What the early settlers thought of the aborigines may best be gathered from Phillip's despatch to Sydney of 13 May 1788, H.R. of A. series I, vol. I, pp. 24 et seq.; Early Records of the Macarthurs, pp. 33, 37; D. Collins, op. cit. passim.]

At last, on 3 June 1790, two months after the 'Supply's' departure, the long delay was explained by the arrival of a transport, the 'Lady Juliana'. She brought an "unnecessary and unprofitable cargo" of 222 female convicts mostly "loaded with the infirmities incident to old age" and "never likely to be other than a burthen to the settlement". But, as full counterpoise, came word of the 'Guardian's' stores salvaged at Cape Town and of other store-ships well on the way. A fortnight later, 20 June, the welcome signal of a ship in sight flew again at South Head, and in came the 'Justinian' heavily laden with stores. At the very end of the voyage each of these ships had passed through a critical moment. "The 'Lady Juliana', in standing into the harbour with a strong southerly wind, got so close to the North Head that nothing saved that ship but the set of the tide." *** The 'Justinian', on 2 June, in the same heavy rain and wind, "unexpectedly saw the land under her lee and was obliged to anchor on the coast, very fortunately so near the rocks that the return of the sea prevented her riding any great strain on her cable. Had those two ships been lost", wrote the stoical Governor, "the colony must have suffered very severely indeed". The relief was of brief duration. Hard on the heels of the 'Justinian' came the Second Fleet of convict transports—the 'Surprize', 'Scarborough' and 'Neptune'—and out of them landed a ghastly company of sick and dying. "Great numbers were slung over the ship's side in the same manner, as they would sling a cask. Some died upon deck, and others in the boat before they reached the shore. There were landed not less than 486 sick." * The voyage, especially aboard the 'Neptune', had been badly found and abominably managed. By scurvy and "low fever" there died on board that ship 158 out of her 502 convicts. On the 'Surprize' 36 died out of 256, and on the 'Scarborough' 73 out of 259. Fifty more died within a month of landing. "It would be a want of duty", reported Phillip, "not to say that it was occasioned by the contractors having crowded too many on board those ships, and from their being too much confined during the passage." On 17 July 1790, three weeks later, he wrote of 450 sick "and many not reckoned as sick have barely strength to attend to themselves. When the last ships arrived we had not sixty sick in the colony".**

[*** Phillip to Nepean, 29 March 1792, H.R. of A. series I, vol. I, p. 347.]

[* Rev. R. Johnson to Mr Thornton, quoted in J. H. L. Cumpston and F. McCallum's History of Intestinal Infections (Commonwealth Department of Health), p. 34.]

[** The Rev. Johnson adds some reflections on the "astonishing villany of these wretched people. . . . When any of them were near dying and had something given them as bread or 'lillipie' (flour and water boiled together), or any other necessaries, the person next to him or others would catch the bread out of his hand, and with an oath say that he was going to die and that therefore it would be of no service to him. No sooner would the breath be out of any of their bodies than others would watch them and strip them entirely naked. Instead of alleviating the distresses of each other, the weakest were sure to go to the wall. In the night, which at this time is very cold, and especially this would be felt in the tents, where they had nothing but grass to lay on (sic) and a blanket amongst four of them, he that was the strongest of the four would take the whole blanket to himself and leave the rest quite naked". Loc. cit. p. 36.]

Finally, to dash all plans of making the colony self-supporting by agriculture, came drought of a duration and intensity unknown in English experience. The seed sown in 1790 was barely recovered at harvest. In November 1791 Phillip had to feed and clothe 2570 male and 608 female convicts and 161 children. What wonder that his main thought was for a reserve stock of provisions to meet any future emergency due to a wrecked store-ship? "When the stores may permit the issuing of the established ration, the weekly expence according to our present numbers will be: Of flour 30,560 lb., of beef and pork 21,010 lb., of peas 179 bushels, of butter 1,432 lb., and our numbers will be increasing."

Was ever a member of the versatile race of ships' captains called upon to bear such a responsibility as his? In husbanding these stores he pitted his almost solitary will against thefts by convicts and marines alike. The former "were ever on the watch to commit depredations on the unwary, during the hours when they were at large, and never suffered an opportunity to escape them".*** "Of the provisions issued on the Saturday the major part of the convicts had none left on the Tuesday night." **** By issuing them on Wednesday and Saturday, and later daily, "the days which would otherwise pass in hunger, or in thieving from the few who were more provident", were "divided" and finally eliminated. Then the broken wards of a key found in the store-house padlock led to the detection of a conspiracy among the guard there. Seven of them had systematically looted it of liquor and provisions. The one on "sentry go" would admit two or more of the gang who could procure what they wanted even though the patrols visited the store while they were there. For the door was kept locked and the sentinel stood alert and vigilant at his post. But one night, after eight months of immunity, the key broke. All the culprits were executed, yet some of them had been held in high esteem by their officers. Such were Phillip's underlings. Against the depredations of rats he strove incessantly, but they defeated every attempt to clear the stores. The warping of timber, cut green and of necessity used before it was seasoned, made every building insecure.

[*** D. Collins, op. cit. p. 81.]

[**** D. Collins, op. cit. p. 65 and p. 30.]

Each of the benevolent despots, from Phillip to Macquarie, groaned under the load of responsibilities which the prison communism heaped upon his shoulders, but none with more reason than the first.* His command was a mere dump for human rubbish. Such was the misery of existence there that, out of sheer pity for the proposed victims, Phillip refused to correct the disproportion of the sexes by sending ships to take women from the Pacific Islands, as bidden by his instructions. Efforts to escape made by convicts were so determined that two men and a woman reached Timor in an open boat. Several parties set out to walk through the bush to China. Bass, when exploring, came upon a starving band of Irish escapees. He shared his dwindling rations with them and they parted, not without tears. But from the face of death they would not go back with him to Sydney.

[* Cf. Philip Gidley King to Under-Secretary J. King, 3 May 1800, H.R. of A. series I, vol. II, p. 505.]

Yet Governor Phillip, as even Macquarie was later to recognize, "with slender resources accomplished much". Not only did he house his charges and establish the beginnings of government with civil and criminal courts. His ration system, based on a central commissariat-store, was the economic last ditch, communism,** but it sufficed to hold off wholesale death by famine. Before the 'Justinian' brought relief the ration consisted of 2½ lb. of flour, 2 lb. of rice and 2 lb. of salt pork per week, without trimmings.*** The Governor refused to draw more for his own table, "wishing that if a convict complained, he might see that want was not unfelt, even at Government House".**** By 1792, however, he had spent his strength, and in December, broken in health, he set out for England.

[** Cf. Gustav Cassel, Theory of Social Economy, vol. I, p. 72.]

[*** David Collins, op. cit. p. 46, tells of a herb called by the convicts "sweet tea" and held in great estimation amongst them: "The leaves of it being boiled they obtained a beverage not unlike liquorice in taste". Rapid consumption soon made it scarce.]

[**** D. Collins, op. cit. p. 80.]

It was not a simple problem to convert this forlorn crew of exiles into a free community providing for itself. As instructed, Phillip made land grants to time-expired convicts, free even of quit-rent for the first ten years. Thirty acres were offered to each single man, 50 to the married men and to additional acres for each child. Fresh regulations, dated August 1789, allowed him to grant discharged soldiers 80 acres each, and free settlers 130 acres. But he soon found that to give a man land did not ensure his productive use of it "Many inconveniences" attended the business. "With some the sole object in becoming settlers is that of being their own masters, and with others the object is to raise as much money as will pay their passage to England." At his instance, later governors were directed to make all grants non-transferable for five years.***** Another "inconvenience" of small farming near Sydney was revealed in his request (17 July 1790) for permission to establish settlers in detached areas "where the stock will be less liable to suffer from the depredations which may be expected from the soldier and the convict and against which there is no security".

[***** H.R. of A. series I, vol. I, p. 441, Dundas to Grose, 31 (sic) June 1793. Governor King improved on this by making grants to infant children which could not be transferred until they came of age.]

Governor Phillip granted only 3389 acres in all. Neither legal restrictions nor isolation made the "settlers from convicts" better able to read the riddle of agriculture in a climate fruitful at times but fatally capricious. General Orders did not govern the weather nor direct the colonists' labours with foresight and imagination. These qualities came to the colony, however, in the person of an "ensign in the New South Wales Corps".

Among those who bore the torments of the Second Fleet's voyage were detachments of this force, which had been raised for the special purpose of relieving Major Ross and his Royal Marines from the task of superintendence to which they had objected. The New South Wales Corps were not a picked force, save perhaps in an evil sense. Governor Hunter described them as "soldiers from the Savoy (the military prison) and other characters who have been considered disgraceful in every other regiment in His Majesty's service".* In the Colony they stultified the efforts of every naval governor and kept the whole community in turmoil as long as they remained there.

[* H.R. of A. series I, vol. I p. 574, Hunter to Portland, to Aug. 1796.]

The prime mover in these doings was invariably John McArthur. Though born in Devon, he was the son of a Jacobite of the '45. His father's brothers, it was said, had all been slain at Culloden, and the sole survivor had fled for a time to the West Indies. At John's birth, his father was an army agent at Plymouth, and in his service, no doubt, John learned about trade. Entering the army in 1782, he retired on half-pay at the peace of 1783, practised farming and read for the law. Then marriage and "every reasonable expectation of reaping the most material advantages" ** led him to join the New South Wales Corps.

[** Early Records of Macarthurs of Camden, p. 2, Mrs John Macarthur to her mother, Mrs Veale.]

Even before Governor Philip's departure, McArthur was eager to play the "spirited proprietor" and to develop, as was then the vogue in Britain, a capitalistic agriculture. He proposed to Phillip that he should retire from the Corps on half-pay and on the condition that he should be granted land and the labour of convicts to till it. Phillip had in 1790 recommended the assignment of convicts to free settlers, but now he hesitated. "I am very far from wishing to throw the smallest obstacles in the way of officers obtaining grants of land" he told Dundas in October 1792,*** "but in the present state of this colony the numbers employed on the public buildings, in procuring the materials and in other occupations equally necessary, does not leave more than four hundred and fifty for agriculture. From that number those convicts must be taken who are to be given to officers or settlers, which will increase the number of those who do not labour for the public, and lessen those who are to furnish the colony with the necessaries of life." The assumption that private settlers could contribute nothing to the Colony's supplies was born in Phillip's mind, perhaps, out of the feeble efforts of the expirees. But the alternative of relying on prisoners' tillage of Crown land continued to prove a delusive one. Dundas, in despatches dated to January and 14 July 1792,**** gave Phillip a free hand to grant land, assign convicts and issue provisions to officers and others who became settlers "provided the allotments are made not with a view to a temporary but an established settlement thereon".

[*** H.R. of A. series I, vol. I, p. 383.]

[**** H.R. of A. series I, vol. I, pp. 328, 365.]

These instructions, and the relaxation of control which occurs in every despotism at a change of rulers, opened the way in December 1792 to a new economic policy.

An Economic History of Australia

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