A Commonwealth of Thieves (29 page)

Corroboree
was an exultant experience and Bennelong returned to Sydney full of the exhilaration of the recent Cameraigal ceremonies. He cheerily told Governor Phillip that he had met Willemering there. In Bennelong's mind this was no more remarkable than it would be to a European to mention that he had met a given judge socially. But to Phillip it seemed another instance of unreliability in Bennelong.

When Bennelong said good-bye and moved down the slope with Barangaroo and some of his clansmen to his hut at Tubowgulle, his younger wife, Karubarabulu, again left the shelter of Government house, stripping off her European gown, keeping only her nightcap because her head had been shaven, to take residence at Bennelong's house.

A
n incident was about to
occur which came close to convincing Bennelong to sever his association with Phillip, his name-swapper. Though there were no more Botany Bay military expeditions, after Christmas a raid was made by some natives who dug and stole potatoes—the natives called them
tarra,
teeth—near Lieutenant Dawes's hut. One of the Eora threw his fishing spear at a convict trying to scare the marauders away and wounded him. Led by Phillip, a small party went chasing the potato thieves, and two of them were found sitting with women by a fire. One threw a club, which the marines thought a spear, and three muskets opened fire. Both men fled, and the two women were brought in, slept the night at Government House, and left well fed the following morning.

One of the two natives fired at was wounded. A surgical party led by White and accompanied by some Sydney Cove natives went looking for him and found him lying dead next to a fire. Bark had been placed around his neck, a screen of grass and ferns covered his face, and a tree branch stripped of bark formed an arch over his body. He was covered in green boughs except for one leg. The musket ball had gone through his shoulder and cut the sub-clavian artery. He had bled to death. None of the Eora who went with the surgeon to look for him would go near him, for fear that the
mawm
spirit in him, the spirit of shock or mortal envy, would overtake them.

Bennelong was angry that death had been the punishment for the minor crime of stealing potatoes. At Government House he was plied with food, but refused to touch anything. Besides, the fruits of the earth were communally owned by his people, and here were the interlopers making a sop or a bribe out of them.

Later, Bennelong appeared at the head of a group of several warriors in a cove where one of the fishing boats was working, and took the fish while threatening the unarmed convicts and soldiers that if they resisted he would spear them. When he next saw Phillip, the governor asked an armed guard into the room during a session in which Bennelong passionately argued the case for taking the fish. Bennelong saw as justice what Phillip saw as robbery. When confronted with two of the whites who had seen him in the boats, Bennelong launched into a rambling, insolent protest, “burst into fury, and demanded who had killed Bangai [the dead Aborigine].” Then Bennelong walked out on Phillip, and as he passed the wheelwright shop in the yard, he picked up an iron hatchet and disappeared with it.

Amongst the population of Sydney Cove was an anonymous painter who produced a striking watercolour portrait of Bennelong wearing white paint while angry and mourning the news of Bangai. Both Phillip and Bennelong had now become exceptionally enraged over their dead. Phillip gave further orders that no boat should leave Sydney Cove unless it carried arms, and forbade the natives to go to the western point of the cove, where the crime of potato-stealing had occurred.

But even this breakdown of their relationship did not prevent the amiable Bennelong from stopping fishing boats to ask them how Phillip was, and to find out if the governor still intended to shoot him. On a personal level, Phillip refused Bennelong entry to Government House and placed him on the same level as the other natives.

Captain Collins had a clear grasp of the policy of “sanguinary punishments” by the natives, for “we had not yet been able to reconcile the natives to the deprivation of those parts of this harbour which we occupied. While they entertained the idea of our having dispossessed them of their residences, they must always consider us as enemies; and upon this principle, they made a point of attacking the white people whenever opportunity and safety concurred.”

twenty-three

W
HEN
L
IEUTENANT
B
ALL
of the
Supply
had been in Batavia in 1790, gathering supplies and sending Lieutenant King on his way to Whitehall on a Dutch ship, he had chartered a snow, a small, squarerigged ship which carried an additional sprit-sail mast aft of the main-mast, to bring further supplies to Sydney. Sailing in
Supply
's wake, the snow
Waaksamheyd
(
Wakefulness
), of about 300 tons, under the Dutch master Detmer Smith, lost sixteen of her Malay crew along the way from fevers that had been incubating in them as they left Batavia. A young British midshipman who travelled on the snow as Ball's representative was in a shockingly skeletal and fever-ridden condition when landed from
Waaksamheyd
in Sydney in December 1790. No one was surprised, given Batavia's repute as an unhealthy place. The snow also brought the news that the sick crew members Lieutenant Ball had left at that port as too ill to safely sail back to Sydney Cove had all died except one. As Tench eloquently wrote, “Death, to a man who has resided in Batavia, is too familiar an object to excite either terror or regret.”

The snow brought with it a cargo of rice and some beef, pork, flour, and sugar as well. By an arrangement not uncommon in food distribution to this day, the British were willing to lose 5 pounds in 100 of the rice, but after that deduction was made there was a nearly 43,000-pound deficiency in the rice Detmer Smith landed. Smith had rice and flour aboard which he claimed was his own, and then proceeded to sell to the commissary in return for money or butter.

At some stage Phillip would decide that despite Detmer Smith's chicanery, this would be a good ship to contract for taking the officers and ship's company of the
Sirius
back to England for the
pro forma
courtmartial which always followed the loss of a British naval vessel. Stranded Captain Hunter, fetched back with his crew by the
Supply
from Norfolk Island in the new year of 1791, did not think the Dutch snow was suitable, “for, anxious as I was to reach England as soon as possible, I should with much patience rather awaited the arrival of an English ship, than to have embarked under the direction, or at the disposal, of the foreigner.” Phillip, too, found dealing with Detmer Smith very hard, believing him impertinent, perverse, and crass. “The frantic, extravagant behaviour of the master of her, for a long time frustrated the conclusion of a contract. He was so totally lost to a sense of reason and propriety, as to ask for £11 per ton, monthly, for her use.”

To pressure Phillip, Smith made as if to sail with
Waaksamheyd,
but merely dropped downharbour to bushy Camp Cove and waited. At last a contract was achieved, and Hunter and the crew of
Sirius
boarded the Dutch vessel. Not all the crew would travel—perhaps Bosun Brooks and Mrs. Deborah Brooks, who had earlier enchanted Captain Phillip, remained in Sydney, though there is no evidence either way. But it was above all upon the officers that the duty lay of presenting themselves to the Admiralty and facing courtmartial for the loss of
Sirius.

Phillip wrote to the Home Secretary by way of the Dutch snow with a new request to match an earlier one he had sent, expressing a desire to return to England on account of “private affairs.” To the “matters of serious concern” he had already mentioned was added the statement that he found his health so much impaired that he was obliged “on that account” to request permission to leave the colony.

The private affairs were to do with his estranged wife, Margaret, particularly as to what his future might be in the light of any legacy she left him, or bills she expected him to meet after her death. When he left for New South Wales in 1787, he was aware she had been ill and unlikely to live many years, and he saw both benefits and horrific legal responsibilities potentially arising out of her death, if in her will she made him responsible for all the liabilities attached to the estate he had run for her at Lyndhurst. He wondered whether his future was to be one spent on halfpay, in cheese-paring gentility, or in affluence.

But in the request he gave Grenville, Secretary of State, was the added information that for the past two years, “I have never been a week free from a pain in my side, which undermines and wears me out, and though this colony is not exactly in the state in which I would have wished to have left it, another year may do much, and it is at present so fully established, that I think there cannot any longer be any doubt that it will, if settlers are sent out, answer in every respect the end proposed by government in making the settlement.”

That word “answer” had arisen again. By the same ship, Collins had told his father that “this colony, under the present system of supplying it, will never answer.” It was as if the place was being asked a question, and gave only a subtle response, which Phillip alone could hear.

The recurrent bouts of pain he sincerely complained of were due to calcium deposits in his urinary tract, a condition which was then one of the seaman's occupational hazards, because of the use of salt to preserve food. Earlier he described it as “a violent pain in my left kidney.”

Just as the
Waaksamheyd
had been about to depart, four officers, of whom the most senior was Captain Tench, who had been placed under arrest by Major Ross for bringing down an alternative sentence on Private Hunt in the colony's early days, sought to draw to Phillip's attention the fact that it was three years since the day they were placed under arrest, and that the Act of Parliament regulating the marines stipulated that no one should stand trial if on shore more than three years since the commission of the alleged offence. They still felt very heated about their arrest and about Ross's insistence that they revoke their sentence, and were “indignant at the novelty and disgrace of the situation unexampled in British military annals.” As it was possible that a promotion in the corps in which they served might have taken place since the date of the last dispatches from Britain, “there is but too much reason to dread that we may have been passed over as prisoners who had forfeited the common claim of service. Dear as promotion is to a soldier, we deem it but a secondary consideration when put in competition with the honour and preservation of our characters in the military profession.”

They asked Phillip to release them from their technical confinement, which he did, and transmit a copy of his letter doing so to the Lord Commissioners of the Admiralty. They also begged Phillip to make it clear to their Lordships that “we have not by misconduct forfeited our pretensions to their favour.”

Phillip also sent off by
Waaksamheyd
a letter to Sir Joseph Banks which rings strangely to later ears. “I am sorry that I cannot send you a head. After the ravages made by the small pox, numbers were seen in every part, but the natives burned the bodies.”

Surgeon White, too, appealed to Grenville to allow him to go home to England because of “the failure of [an] agent, who had in his hands my whole patrimony.” Naval men employed agents to mind their affairs, chase up back pay and bounty money. But with White the issue must have been resolved, since he stayed on in New South Wales for years yet.

H
UNTER
WAS
WELL
RECONCILED
to the
Waaksamheyd
by the time the Dutch ship departed. On the journey home, he undertook a policy of calling meetings of his officers and Detmer Smith—for example, to discuss their water situation, the water casks having been built from “old wormeaten staves, which had been lying exposed to the sun for more than a year.” They were to try to land on Norfolk Island on the way if they could, and were unable to because of weather, but on that short leg “we had lost by leakage full three weeks water.” Hunter and Smith veered northward, running into adverse winds again off New Caledonia, and hoped to reach Timor by a new route by sailing around the north of New Guinea, in order to avoid the fever port of Batavia on Java. It became necessary for them to go to Java, however, since contrary winds delayed them so long.

It would take Hunter and the other surviving sailors till the following year to reach Portsmouth. Their voyage was marked by Hunter's wisdom and inventiveness. He proved the exact location of the reef-girt Solomon Islands, and discovered a passage between Bougainville and Buka, a passage which would in a much later war in the twentieth century become a graveyard for Australian, American, and Japanese sailors. Twenty-two of Hunter's sailors had fever when they left Batavia, and three would die by Cape Town, where at Hunter's insistence the
Waaksamheyd
would wait sixteen weeks, until mid-January 1792, to allow recuperation.

In April that year, the snow reached Portsmouth. Hunter faced his courtmartial and was exonerated.

I
N
N
EW
S
OUTH
W
ALES
in April 1791, with the
Waaksamheyd
seen off, another exploration of the hinterland was planned. The expedition's aim was to cross the Hawkesbury River near Richmond Hill and then push on to those same western mountains whose deep canyons and cliffs had earlier turned Dawes back. Phillip had named them the Carmarthens, but everyone called them the Blue Mountains.

Apart from Phillip, Watkin Tench was one of the expeditionary group that also intended to find out whether the Hawkesbury River to the north-west and the Nepean River to the west were one and the same watercourse. Dawes, Collins, White, Colby, the youth Ballooderry, two marine sergeants, eight soldiers, and three convicts who were assessed to be good shots made up the party. Dawes steered north-west by compass, an instrument to which Colby and Ballooderry gave the title
naamora,
to see the way.

The country immediately west of Rose Hill did not much scare Colby, who said that most of the people from there, the Bidjigals, had died of the
galgalla,
smallpox. Further west still was the Hawkesbury River clan called the Booroo Berongal, and encountering one of their encampments, Colby and Ballooderry felt at risk and wanted to burn down the few shelters. They said these inland people were not trustworthy, and native huts, easily rendered of bark and brush, were reproducible compared to hunting weapons or other laboured-over implements, the stealing of which would have constituted a serious insult.

When they reached the bushy banks of the Hawkesbury River, the problems the Europeans had walking through the entangled undergrowth and their frequent falls caused amusement to Colby and his young friend. If the person who fell “shaken nigh to death” got angry with them, Üthey retorted in a moment, by calling him every opprobrious name which their language affords.” Their favourite term of insult was
gonin
patta,
an eater of human excrement.

Again, Phillip was defeated by the country and was unable to scale the Blue Mountains. Meeting some Broken Bay, Hawkesbury River Aboriginals, Tench noticed that “they spoke different dialects of the same language.” One of those they met, Yarramundi, was a great
carradhy
and, on request, treated Colby for an old wound below the left breast caused by a short, two-pronged spear. Colby began the consultation by asking for some water, and Tench gave him a cupful which he presented “with great seriousness” to Yarramundi. Yarramundi took the cup and filled his mouth with the fluid, but instead of swallowing it, threw his head into Colby's chest, “spit the water upon him; and immediately after began to suck strongly at his breast, just below the nipple. The action was repeated with great seriousness and after a time, Yarramundi pretended to take something into his mouth which he had drawn out of Colby's chest. With this he retired a few paces, put his hand to his lips, and threw into the river a stone, which I had observed him to pick up slyly, and secrete.” Returning to the fireside, Colby assured everyone that he had “received signal benefit from this operation.” He gave Yarramundi for his services some of his supper and a knitted woollen nightcap.

Everyone was impressed by the tree-climbing capacity of the Hawkesbury River natives, and a young man gave his coastal brothers Colby and Ballooderry and the gentlemen an exhibition in climbing the smooth and slippery trunks of eucalpyts, looking for possums.

Phillip was excited to tell Sir Joseph Banks later in the year about the journey and to note the difference of the Hawkesbury language from that of the coastal people—indeed, he went so far as to see them as two separate languages. Collins, on the other hand, like Tench, noticed that “our companions conversed with the river natives without apparent difficulty, each understanding or comprehending the other.” By now Colby and Ballooderry had grown uneasy amongst the inland strangers and were keen to return to known parts. They kept up a chant of “Where's Rose Hill; where? ”

I
T
WAS
TYPICAL
OF
THOSE
early explorations that bush or water or steep terraces of sandstone would defeat the part-time explorers of Sydney and Parramatta. In fact the most astounding of the journeys of this era of heroic journeying was one plotted and undertaken by the convict couple William and Mary Bryant. They wanted nothing less than to reverse, by their own will, the policy that had found them here. Their hope was to become the first to rise from their pit and appear again on the shores of the known world.