A Commonwealth of Thieves (26 page)

On Monday, 2 May 1791, Clark “went out to Queensborough to take Richardson with me (which is the man that flogs the people), and give them as many lashes as I think they deserved.” The flogger in question was James Richardson, a young man sentenced at eighteen for highway robbery and sent out on the First Fleet. Richardson was very muscular and had been the public flogger for some months. The previous May, he had been required to lash five members of a boat crew who had concealed part of their catch, but had found himself subjected to fifty “for neglect of duty for not flogging the above five men as he ought to have done.” That is, he had not lashed them with sufficient vigour.

At Queensborough, Clark found that Katherine White and Mary Higgins had stolen corn out of the public fields. A woman in her early twenties, Katherine White had once lifted £65 in bank notes from an office in Woolwich, but the jury had soft-heartedly valued them at only 39 shillings to save her from the gallows. “When I ordered Katherine White and Mary Higgins 50 each, White could only bear 15 when she fainted away. The doctor [Wentworth] wished I would order her to be taken down which I did.”

Clark then records that Mary Tute received twenty-two of her twenty-five lashes “when she fainted away when I ordered her to be cast loose—I hope this will be a warning to the ladies out at Queensborough.” The pattern continued. Later in Ross's reign, Clark ordered another young woman to receive fifty lashes for abusing Mr. Wentworth, but she received only sixteen, “as Mr. Wentworth begged that she might be forgiven the other 34.” Clark considered the girl in question—one Sarah Lyons—a “D/B,” his code for “damned bitch.” Wentworth's tenderheartedness would not save Sarah Lyons from further floggings.

As much as these punishments were countenanced in the eighteenth century, and indeed administered to members of the armed forces with equal mercilessness, there is a growing coarseness of sensibility in Clark's journal which is an index of the effects of flogging on the entire society. What was occasional in the Royal Navy was close to daily on Norfolk Island, and obviously Wentworth did not like it. Clark's voice is the voice of a small-minded and savage authoritarianism, and there were days when Wentworth thought highway robbery was honest work beside this.

B
ACK ON THE MAINLAND
, something promising was happening. James Ruse, the governor's agricultural Adam, was fulfilling his symbolic significance on his farm in the Rose Hill area. He was no stranger to rage at what had befallen him, and liked to soften the edges of his life as a probationary felon-yeoman with gambling, talk, and drink. Phillip was willing to live with those realities. What he wanted were signs of agricultural hardihood and industry, and Ruse gave him that.

Ruse's 1790 harvest would produce a token 171/2 bushels of wheat from 11/2 acres, but by February 1791, Ruse would draw his last ration from the government store, an event of great psychological potency for Phillip, Ruse, and all the critics. By then Ruse had met and married a convict woman from the
Lady Juliana
named Elizabeth Perry. Elizabeth at twenty-one had stolen items of clothing, including a bombazine gown and shoes, from her employer, a milk vendor's wife, to whom Perry had represented herself as “a country girl just come to town.” She had been sick for the week before absconding with the goods. She claimed innocence, and argued that the clothes she was arrested in were her own, and given the shaky nature of the criminal justice system, she might indeed have been right.

The Ruse-Perry marriage rounded out the idyll. Phillip's land grant to Ruse was confirmed when in April 1791 the young convict received title to his land, the first grant issued in New South Wales. His place near the Parramatta River would become known appropriately as Experiment Farm. Elizabeth Ruse often heard her husband complain of the unsuitability of his ground at Parramatta, and he comforted himself for the smallish returns for his excessive labour and agricultural cleverness by drinking and gambling with other Parramatta convicts.

twenty-one

I
N LATE
J
ULY 1790
, the
Lady Juliana
was due to sail for China and home via Norfolk Island, and ship's steward Nicol faced being immediately separated from Sarah Whitelam, his convict woman, and the child they shared. Amidst his grief at separation, Nicol had time to observe impressionistically the high fertility of New South Wales's convict women and attribute it to the sweet tea herb
Smilax glyciphylla.
“There was an old female convict, her hair quite grey with age, her face shrivelled, who was suckling a child she had borne in the colony…. Her fecundity was ascribed to the sweet tea.” It had been a busy time for Nicol: “I saw but little of the colony, as my time was fully occupied in my duties as steward, and any moments I could spare I gave them to Sarah. The days flew on eagles' wings, for we dreaded the hour of separation which at length arrived.” Marines and soldiers were sent around Sydney Cove to bring the love-struck crew of the
Lady Juliana
from the township on board. “I offered to lose my wages, but we were short of hands … the captain could not spare a man and requested the aid of the governor. I thus was forced to leave Sarah, but we exchanged faith. She promised to remain true, and I promised to return when her time expired and bring her to England.” He wanted to stow her away, but the convicts were strictly guarded by the marines, and repeated searches were made of departing ships.

As
Lady Juliana
made ready to leave, a leviathan came to Port Jackson, a huge sperm whale which entered and became embayed within the harbour on its yearly migration from Antarctica to Hawaii. Some boat crews from the various transports went trying to hunt it, and threw harpoons its way without success. Then on a July morning it rose from the harbour deeps to smash a punt occupied by three marines and a midship-man from the look-out station on South Head. “In vain they thro' out their hats, the bags of our provisions, and the fish they had caught, in hopes to satisfy him or turn his attention. Twice the whale rose out of the deep buffeting the punt with its back.” Only one marine survived, swimming ashore to Rose Bay.

By late August, however, the whale, still trapped in the harbour, ran itself aground at Manly. The beaching of a whale was a significant event for the Eora, who gathered together on the beach from various clan areas to participate in the great meat and blubber feast. They used the sharpened shell on their
woomeras,
spear-throwers, to cut the whale flesh.

In the middle of the Eora whale-meat feast at Manly, an expeditionary party from Sydney Cove landed there. It included Surgeon John White; Captain Nicholas Nepean; the governor's shooter, John McEntire; and White's young native companion, Nanbaree. They planned to head north overland for Broken Bay to hunt. The feasters, cooking blubber and flesh at their fires, scattered at the first sight of the party, but Nanbaree got up in the boat and reassured them. Bennelong and Colby stepped down the beach to meet the group. Other natives followed. The Europeans thought Bennelong was much changed, was “so greatly emaciated, and so far disfigured by a long beard.” Colby proudly showed them that he had got rid of the iron shackle from his leg. Bennelong asked whether the visitors could provide a hatchet, which would be very helpful in speeding up the butchering of the dead whale, but Surgeon White said there were no hatchets. He gave him a shirt, and when Bennelong seemed awkward in putting it on, Surgeon White directed McEntire, the Irish huntsman, to help him. But Bennelong forbade McEntire to come near, “eyeing him ferociously and with every mark of horror and resentment.” To the Aboriginals, McEntire was one of Phillip's chief avatars of malice.

Nonetheless, Bennelong kept enquiring after Phillip, and expressing a desire to see the governor, with whom, after all, he had exchanged names. At Bennelong's request, White fetched him a pair of clippers, and Bennelong began to trim himself. Looking at the women who would not come any closer, White asked Bennelong which was his old favourite, Barangaroo, “of whom you used to speak so often? ”

“Oh,” said he, as later set down in elevated English by Tench, “she has become the wife of Colby! But I've got
Bul-la Mur-ee Dinnin
(two large women) to compensate for her loss.” White observed Bennelong bore two new wounds, one in the arm from a spear and the other a large scar over his left eye.

As the boat that was carrying the expeditioners was leaving to land them in another inlet, the natives crowded up with lumps of blubber for the governor, but by the standards of the Europeans, the meat was already putrescent. Bennelong insisted just the same on putting in a specially large piece as a gift to Phillip. The gift was not ironic. It was intended to get Phillip there, to Manly, to the great festival of the whale.

On the return to Sydney Cove with the lump of putrid whale meat, the party told the coxswain to let the governor know Bennelong was looking for him. Phillip was engaged in discussing with Bloodworth and Harry Brewer the building of a pillar on South Head to serve as a direction-finder for ships at sea. The governor could be impetuous in rearranging his affairs to accommodate the natives, but then their relationship to him was high on his agenda. Now he gathered together all the weaponry immediately available—four muskets and a pistol—and set out in his boat to meet Bennelong. He was accompanied by Captain Collins and Lieutenant Waterhouse of the navy.

On landing, Phillip found the natives “still busily employed around the whale.” He advanced alone, with just one unarmed seaman for support, and called for Bennelong, who was mysteriously slow in approaching. Collins and Waterhouse also landed, and given that Bennelong had a special liking for Collins, the native along with Colby now came forward. Bennelong was delighted to see his old acquaintances “and asked after every person he'd known in Sydney, among others the French cook and servant from whom he'd escaped, whom he'd constantly made the butt of his ridicule, by mimicking his voice, gait, and other peculiarities, all of which he again went through with his wanted exactness and drollery.” He asked particularly after a lady of the colony, surely Mrs. Deborah Brooks, Phillip's housekeeper, from whom he had once ventured to snatch a kiss. When he was told she was well, he kissed the fresh-faced Lieutenant Waterhouse, who he obviously thought had a complexion like that of the lady, and laughed uproariously. But when the governor pointed to Bennelong's new wounds, the native became more sombre. He had received them down in the southern bay, Botany Bay, he announced, and he solemnly pointed out their contours to Phillip.

The governor promised to come back in two days with hatchets and tomahawks. He had brought a bottle of wine with him—the servant was carrying it, and on Phillip's order uncorked it and poured a glass, at which Bennelong uttered the toast “The King!” and drank off the wine. During this conference, “the Indians filing off to right and left, so as in some measure to surround them,” Phillip remained calm. Bennelong, wearing by now two jackets, one brought by Phillip and the other by Collins, introduced the governor to a number of the people on the beach, including a “stout, corpulent native,” Willemering. On the ground was a very fine barbed spear “of uncommon size.” The governor asked if he could have it. But Bennelong picked it up and took it away and dropped it near a place where Willemering stood rather separate from the rest. Bennelong brought back another gift for the governor instead, a throwing stick.

Willemering was a wise man, a
carradhy,
amongst other things a ritual punishment man invited in from the Broken Bay area. He struck the watching Europeans as a frightened man, and he may have been, but he was probably more a tense and intent man, coiled for his task.

For it was time for the governor, who had had the grace to present himself, to be punished for all of it—the fish and game stolen, the presumption of the Britons in camping permanently without permission, the stolen weaponry and nets, the stove-in canoes, the random shooting of natives, the curse of smallpox, the mysterious genital infections of women and then of their men. Phillip was about to pay for all the damage which had befallen the Eora people. There was no malice on anyone's part in this punishment, which explained why Willemering showed all the nervousness and then unexpected decisiveness of a bridegroom. But the scales needed to be adjusted by august blood, and the most august of all was Phillip's. To Bennelong, Colby, and to the visiting punishment man from Broken Bay, Willemering, Phillip needed to pay for his unruly children.

Thinking Willemering was nervous, Phillip gamely advanced towards him, as if begging the spear. Captain Collins and Lieutenant Waterhouse followed close by. Phillip removed his own single weapon, a dirk in his belt, and threw it on the ground. Willemering reacted by lifting the spear upright from the grass with his toes and fitting it in one movement into his throwing stick, and “in an instant darted it at the governor.” In the last moment before the spear was thrown, Phillip thought it was more dangerous to retreat than to advance and cried out to the man,
“Werre,
Werre!”

Given the force with which the spear was projected, Phillip would later describe the shock of the wound to Tench as similar to a violent blow. The barb went into the governor's right shoulder, just above the collar bone, and ran downwards through his body, coming out his back. Willemering looked at his handiwork long enough to ensure the spear had penetrated, and then he dashed into the woods, with miles to travel to his home ground in the Pittwater–Broken Bay region.

There was instant confusion on both sides. Bennelong and Colby both disappeared, and the party of Europeans retreated as fast as they could, but Phillip's escape was hindered by the fact that he carried in his body, pointing skyward when he was upright, a lance twelve feet long, the butt of it frequently striking the ground as he reeled and further lacerating the wound. “For God's sake, haul out the spear,” Phillip begged Waterhouse, who knew it was potentially fatal to try to draw out the barb and instead tried to break off the spear shaft. Waterhouse, wrongly expecting a massacre, one eye on the advancing natives, struggled to break the thing off close to the wound and at last managed to do so. Another thrown spear from an enthusiastic native struck Waterhouse in the hand as he worked on the shaft. Now spears were flying thickly, as the laity joined in the ritual event.

Phillip was lifted with the point of the spear protruding from his back into his boat and brought across the harbour, bleeding a considerable amount on the way. “The boat had five miles to row before it reached the settlement,” wrote Collins. Indeed it had longer, for the distance was seven miles. “But the people exerting themselves to the utmost, the governor was landed and in his house in something less than two hours.” It was feared in the boat that “the sub-clavian artery” might have been punctured. Since Surgeon White was away from Sydney, his Scots assistant, William Balmain, a quarrelsome man in his mid-twenties, took on the task of extracting the spearhead from Phillip. There, at Government House, on a cot, his blue coat sodden with blood, lay the settlement's pole of stability and awesome reasonableness, without whom all was lost. As Balmain prepared his instruments, the young surgeon earned the joy of Phillip's disciples by declaring the wound non-mortal and by safely extracting the barbed point of the spear. “The governor remains in great agonies, but it is thought he will recover, though at the same time His Excellency is highly scorbutic.” The wound would heal slowly, but it
would
heal.

This result would not have surprised the blubber-feasting natives of Manly Cove. They knew it was not intended to be a fatal wound: they knew the barb was meant to be extractable, they knew Willemering was an expert at placement, they knew there were no infectious, magic-laden, glued-in fragments of bone and stone designed to stay in the wound and cause ultimate death. But to the Europeans, Phillip's recovery was a matter of rejoicing, at least for those who knew how much the settlement depended upon him. Phillip, no doubt given laudanum for the pain, had time to order that no natives were to be fired on, unless they first were “the aggressors, by throwing spears.” White's hunting party was fetched back by marines with the news of Governor Phillip's wounding. The boat crew sent to retrieve them told the party that Colby and Bennelong had been talking to them and had “pretended highly to disapprove the conduct of the man who had thrown the spear, vowing to execute vengeance upon him.” Was this a token offered to the wounded Phillip? Were the two natives striking attitudes just to please him?

David Collins was sure that the only reason the spear was thrown was fear on the part of the native Willemering that he was about to be seized and taken away. Indeed, Collins thought the spearing would not have happened if only a musket had been taken ashore with Phillip. “The governor has always placed too great a confidence in these people … he had now, however, been taught a lesson which it might be presumed he would never forget.”