Dancing With Strangers - Inga Clendinnen

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Norfolk Island, although he named the child, presumably with some emotional confusion, ‘Alicia’. There are others, like Major Ross, commander of the marines, who these days exist mainly as writers of furious letters of complaint, and others again, for all we know more important to the evolving life of the colony, who do not exist for us at all because they wrote nothing, or nothing that survived. Getting into the historical record is a chancy business.

      These were impressive men. While an individual might acknowledge ignorance of a particular area (Captain Hunter allowed he didn’t know much about agriculture), the collective assumed its competence over a wide range of scientific and artistic endeavours. Some painted, most sketched, some botanised; some sang, some studied the stars; some constructed lexicons of Australian words and struggled to fathom Australian grammar; Worgan played his piano. And nearly all of them wrote: fine, flowing sentences infused with their own individual flavour, with nuances of judgment, mood and emotion effortlessly expressed. As we will see, this is true even of Marine Private Jonathan Easty, whose wildly ambitious spelling marks him as an untaught man, but one in love with words and their protean possibilities.

      The display of solidarity sustained through the hardest times is also impressive. It is true that the solidarity was to a degree self-interested. Senior officers could not afford a reputation of being unable to handle their men; junior officers needed the recommendation of their seniors for promotion. As the slow months passed there would be tensions enough in the cramped little society at Port Jackson, with every face familiar and caste divisions deep, but they are largely excluded from the public record. It is private letters which tell us most about such abrasions. When Lieutenant Daniel Southwell of the Sirius writes to his mother we hear his chagrin at being exiled and, as he thought, forgotten at the lookout at South Head for the best part of two years, from February 1790 until he went home at the end of 1791. He had to watch from the sidelines as young Lieutenant Waterhouse, more than a year his junior but always at the governor’s side, found daily opportunity to shine. (Southwell cheered up briefly when Phillip, noticing his sulks, distinguished him with marked cordiality.)

      The stress of maintaining a decent affability was also tested by cantankerous personalities like Major Ross, a social monster in any circumstances but close to intolerable in the claustrophobic confines of the settlement. We would expect him to be worse when Phillip seized the chance to send him to command Norfolk Island, but there he seems to have performed rather better. The fusses Ross provoked could not be kept out of official correspondence, but they were loyally excluded from the journals, and the loathing he inspired was revealed only in private letters. The normally discreet Collins confided to his father that he could have wished Ross drowned when a ship carrying him was wrecked on the reef at Norfolk Island, and that he would choose death rather than share a ship for the long voyage to England with the execrable major.

      For the few respectable females of the settlement social constrictions must have been even more painful. Pious Mrs Johnson was the only lady in Sydney until the arrival of lively young Elizabeth Macarthur in July 1790, and Elizabeth found her sadly dull. Later Elizabeth would lament every reduction in her tiny circle of friends when, with their terms of duty ended, her favourite officers went home: gaining Mr Worgan’s piano was no compensation for losing Mr Worgan, while the loss of Captain Tench was scarcely to be borne.

      While the letter-writers might have more immediate verve than the formal journal-keepers, it is the Big Five of Tench, White, Hunter, Collins and Phillip himself who provide us with most of our information regarding life in the young colony. This is our most reliable information too, because by publication they opened themselves and their accounts to contemporary challenge and correction.

      Initially I saw these men, members as they were of a self-conscious officer caste, as cut from much the same stern cloth, but with increasing familiarity their individual personalities insisted on asserting themselves. People always look most alike when we know them least. So let me introduce them to you.

      GOVERNOR ARTHUR PHILLIP

      Commander Arthur Phillip was a naturally cautious man, and having risen to the top of the naval hierarchy from its lowliest position (he had begun as ship’s boy), he was well-practised in presenting a controlled image in public and on the page. His personal journal has been lost, but I suspect it would not have been very personal. His style for all seasons and purposes was clear, concise and conscientiously free from flourishes or affect which, given the mass of necessary communications and the scant time he had to write them, was a sensible decision. Nearly all his writings from Sydney come to us at second hand as selections from his official dispatches made by John Hunter, who drew on Phillip’s official correspondence for the ‘narrative’ he incorporated into his An Historical Journal of Events at Sydney and at Sea 1787–1792, which appeared in 1793, or by the publisher’s scribes back in London who put together the rather more crisply titled The Voyage of Governor Phillip to Botany Bay to catch the market in 1789. It is clear from a comparison of their versions with Phillip’s extant dispatches that his scribes had sufficient respect both for the man and for official documents to follow the contours of the original texts closely. It is therefore possible to map the attention given particular topics and so to discover Phillip’s hierarchy of concerns.

      We see more of Phillip the man of action in the account of a lay outsider. Arthur Bowes Smyth, surgeon to the Lady Penrhyn, hired only for the voyage out, and as a landsman a nervous observer, thought Phillip was a hasty sailor. He noted on 10 December 1787, after Hunter had taken over the Sirius and the command of the rest of the fleet while Phillip hurried on ahead with the four fastest vessels, that the remaining seven ships kept together well, ‘as Capt. Hunter does not carry such a press of sail as the Commodore used to do’. Bowes Smyth was also distinctly disaffected when Phillip insisted on moving the whole fleet out of Botany Bay to Port Jackson on a day when the wind was up. (Phillip probably decided to overlook weather conditions and make a dash for the more favoured harbour after the astonishing arrival at Botany Bay of two ships, the Boussole and the Astrolabe, comprising an official French expedition under the command of Comte Jean de La Pérouse.) The British ships only got out of the bay with the ‘utmost difficulty & danger wt many hairsbreadth escapes’ and quite a lot of bumping into each other, ‘with everyone blaming the rashness of the Governor in insisting upon the fleets working out in such weather, & all agreed it was next to a Miracle that some of the Ships were not lost’.

      Bowes Smyth was also a touch sardonic regarding Phillip’s onshore performance. He gave a full account of the governor’s formal reading of his commission, embellished with bands and marching and the processing of colours, and then the gentlemen gathered at the centre, with the convicts around them sitting on the ground and the soldiery forming an outer circle. Listening to the commission, Bowes Smyth judged it to be ‘a more unlimited one than was ever before granted to any Governor under the British Crown’, Phillip being accorded ‘full power and authority’ to do whatever he needed to, with no requirement to take any counsel of anyone.

      Bowes Smyth reports that the governor proceeded to outline his regimen. Phillip was admirably direct. He warned the convicts that he had reason to think most of them incorrigible, and that his discipline would be accordingly stern: that anyone attempting to get into the women’s tents at night would be fired on; that if they did not work they would be let starve; that given their situation any stealing of ‘the most trifling Article of Stock or Provisions’ would be punished by death. Then came a gentler conclusion: they would not be cruelly worked, and ‘every individual shd. contribute his Share to render himself and Community at large happy and comfortable as soon as the nature of the settlement would permit it’. It was, given the circumstances, as encouraging a harangue as could be expected. But Bowes Smyth swiftly realised the governor’s court would be exclusively an officers’ club, noting crossly that only officers were invited to the governor’s tent for supper while he and the other free men come from England were left to fend for themselves.

      Nor was he impressed by Phillip’s on-shore discipline. Within a month of disembarkation he thought the convicts out of control and already carving out their own territory, the men being ‘ready to seize on any Sailors on shore who are walking near the Women’s Camp, beat them most unmercifully, & desire them to go on board’.

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