Leviathan (17 page)

John Hunter, who had joined the little boats of Phillip's exploratory mission, thought the northern harbour very unappealing at first. Peering in past high rugged cliffs he could see the big ocean waves which tossed them about so roughly go rolling away to break on the far shore, completely unimpeded. But when they rowed through the heads and saw the water turn south into a deep, calm, well-protected shelter, he was mollified. Dozens of little bays and inlets, all safe from the depredations of the high seas, wound away as far as he could see, while the land rising up from them appeared ‘superior in every respect to that around Botany Bay'. Phillip could envision a thousand of His Majesty's ships arrayed there in perfect safety. John White's first impression was even more hyperbolic. He described it as the finest and most extensive harbour in the universe, a port which could provide safe anchorage not just for every British ship of the line but ‘for all the navies of Europe'.

The safety offered within its enfolding arms impressed a number of diarists, not least those who left Botany Bay with the fleet's rear guard and almost came to grief within sight of their destination. Poor lonely Ralph Clark, who was so underwhelmed by their first landfall he thought the whole colony would be dead within a year if they stayed there, was almost dead within the day. Wallowing in vicious seas and contrary winds, his vessel, the
Friendship
, nearly ran onto rocks at the mouth of the bay before actually crashing into the
Prince of Wales
, then the
Charlotte
. Screams and shouts rose above the howl of the wind, the roar of wild surf and the sick-sounding crack of timber as booms were snapped off, sails torn and the carved woodwork on the
Charlotte
's stern pulverised. Clark confessed himself terrified and almost certain of drowning. After considering the barren prospects on dry land and such a close shave on the waters of Botany Bay, he found himself not surprisingly ‘much charmed' with the secure, untroubled anchorage in Port Jackson. Safely ensconced he wrote to his wife Alicia, saying he had kissed her picture and read his Bible lesson for the day, as always, before dining alone and, no doubt, reflecting on the Lord's good grace in sparing him. So taken was he with his first impressions of Sydney Cove he told Alicia he would not wish to return home, if only she and their son were with him. He also remarked, offhand, that the few small tents which had been erected on shore looked very pretty amongst the trees.

Behind Clark's relieved appreciation of the city's first nightfall we can spy a vision of an empty, pristine land which would affect European understanding of Australia in practical, poetic and often destructive ways for the next 200 years. As the Bicentennial History explains, the British were self-consciously going about ‘the great business of creation itself'. God had ‘wrought cosmos out of primordial chaos' and a rough band of criminals and jailers scrambling out of their fetid wooden boats might just do the same. White men's eyes saw no evidence of Aboriginal tillage and husbandry and thus the cove and all the continent behind it seemed ‘a Virgin Mould, undisturbed since the Creation'. The flimsy tents pitched at the edge of primordial woods, alive with weird, even monstrous life forms; the cries of unfamiliar birds; the strange fierce light of day; the cold alien stars at night, they all spoke to Clark and his contemporaries of a new Eden and a celebration of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment spirit, the belief that the story of man was one of improvement and progress. Phillip himself best expressed it when stealing a rare moment from the demands of his work to ponder its meaning. There were few things more pleasing to the Governor than contemplating ‘order and useful arrangement arising gradually out of tumult and confusion'. And nowhere was the satisfaction more felt than on a distant ‘savage coast' where a civilized people were struggling to lodge themselves.

The views of the convicts who were exiled to this savage coast weren't sought and aren't recorded but many of the officers wrestled with their creative mission. Incapable of dealing with the land on its own terms, all perceived it through a prism of past experience and inherited taste. Hunter thought the woods resembled a deer park which could be quickly stripped of wood and put under the plough. Arthur Bowes Smyth gazed around to find lawns, grottoes and plantations of tall stately trees as fine as any ‘nobleman's grounds in England'. Bowes Smyth went on to trill his enchantment with the flights of ‘parraquets, lorrequets, cockatoos, and maccaws' and his awe at the stupendous rocks hanging over the water's edge. He admitted he could not do justice to the beauty and usefulness of the many ‘commodious quays by the water'.

The references to gardens were not completely whimsical. At the time English aesthetics were being reworked in a confrontation between landscape designers and the philosophers from whom they drew their inspiration. Some of the tensions and sensitivities this produced can be found in the First Fleet writings, albeit in a less calculated fashion. If Hunter and Bowes Smyth were not personally familiar with deer parks and noblemen's grounds, they were certainly mindful of the work of men like Lancelot ‘Capability' Brown, a hugely popular and influential landscaper who favoured improving on nature's disorganised forms to impart a sense of tranquillity with simple, almost formal arrangements of ‘a small number of natural elements – a grove of trees, a pond, the slight curve of a hill'. At the end of the eighteenth century Brown's school, very much a product of the Enlightenment, was challenged by the Picturesque movement whose champions, such as Sir Uvedale Price, preferred the riots of nature. Price's gardens were described as ‘wild, dramatic, and unkempt'. The Picturesque movement, just one strand of the nineteenth century's emerging Romantic reaction against the Age of Reason, celebrated nature in all her ‘horrid graces'. Intimations of this revolution can be found in the reactions of men like Hunter, Bowes Smyth and his fellow surgeon George Worgan. The latter found within the harbour ‘a variety of Romantic views, all thrown together into sweet confusion by the careless hand of Nature … Here a romantic, rocky, craggy Precipice over which, a little swirling stream makes a cascade. There a soft vivid-green, shady Lawn attracts your eye.' Lieutenant Southwell from the
Sirius
wrote that nothing could ‘be conceived more picturesque' than the landscape of Sydney.

The harbour's Picturesque characteristics were all there – its ‘roughness, sudden variation and contrast' – but the awful truth was sinking in too: the implications of surviving in such a primitive, unpredictable environment. As taken as he was with the scenery, Southwell finished by warning that: ‘Tis greatly to be wished these appearances were not so delusive as in reality they are'. The virgin land, it transpired, was not a fertile young maiden but a withered old crone. Major Ross, the marines' cheerless commandant, wrote to London that it was the worst country in the world and it would be cheaper ‘to feed the convicts on turtle and venison at the London Tavern than be at the expence of sending them here'. For a truly melancholy sketch, however, we turn inevitably to Ralph Clark. Having written Alicia that first optimistic report of his new home, he followed it in July of 1788 with a letter in which those high hopes thudded back to earth with a plume of parched red dust. Like Hunter, Ralph also thought it ‘the poorest country in the world', and its inhabitants the most miserable set of wretches under the sun.

Alicia's husband and his fellow colonists had been rudely disavowed of their first generous impressions within days of arriving at Sydney Cove. The new-born settlement was quickly forced to grapple with two serious challenges to its survival – Australia's barren soils and its weird violent weather. The former were a result of the continent's slumber through great stretches of geological time. Without the calamitous tectonic disruptions which chewed up the crusts of other lands, Australian rocks tended to sit and bake under the sun for billions of years at a time. They were worn away very slowly by wind and water, their precious constituent minerals leached from the ground by time's plunder. In the Sydney basin this was exacerbated because the sandstone bed laid down so many hundreds of millions of years before was never going to break down into anything fertile. The potatoes and cabbages which Phillip ordered planted with all despatch either flourished for a short time before weakening and dying or simply died straightaway. With scurvy and dysentery spreading through the population, the Governor established small plantations of ginger, oranges, lemons and limes, all to no avail. There was little in the thin, swampy ground for their roots to fasten onto. The rich deposits of elements which made the soils of England so fruitful – the thick potage of nitrogen and phosphorus, the abundance of potassium, calcium, magnesium and sulphur – were missing from the sucking mud banks of Sydney Cove.

The parsimony of the soil reached beyond the wavelets lapping at the harbour's edge. Without a generous transfer of nutrients from the land to coastal and esturine waters, any hopes of supplementing a diet of salt provisions with fresh seafood proved as illusory as had hopes of establishing little English market gardens on shore. The transplanted subjects of mad King George saw vast stretches of unexploited coastline and unexplored harbour and could not help thinking of their fertile traditional fishing grounds in the North Sea and English Channel. But after initially amazing the Iora with the power of their nets, the white men soon found this source of nutriment petering out too. During the day the
Sirius
worked up and down the harbour with a large net, dragging it clean. Tench was sent out at night with a small fishing party, and despite working till after dawn and scouring dozens of bays and inlets, he barely returned with enough fish to replace the energy expended in catching them. More plentiful were the delicately flavoured oysters which could be plucked in their hundreds from the branches of mangrove trees and small rocks at the harbour's edge. However, as their shells could be ground up and fired for limestone, which the settlement lacked, the oysters' best days – like the Iora's – were behind them.

Even had the ground at Sydney Cove been more fertile, like the floodplains of the Hawkesbury River or the Hunter Valley where the colonists did eventually turn over sods of good brown earth, it may have made little difference in those early days. The fleet arrived at the height of summer, with the best growing months missed because of delays in leaving Portsmouth. Then, in 1789, with a storeship carrying sorely needed rations from England wrecked near the the Cape of Good Hope, and with the
Lady Juliana
, the first ship of the disastrous Second Fleet already under sail, drought descended and any colonists who thought they had the measure of this hard barren land were in for one of those unpleasant shocks their new home seemed so adept at providing. Temperatures climbed and milky white skin blistered and burned as El Niño turned it on for the newcomers, warning them that a strange powerful force drove the weather on this side of the globe.

It was as though Pliny's tales of mythical burning waters contained a metaphorical truth. Europeans who understood weather in terms of four reliable unvarying seasons were unprepared for the chaotic conditions of life in the southern Pacific. Here the weather was as much a plaything of chance and probability, of the vagaries of huge drifting bodies of warm sea water, as it was of the planet's regular tilting towards and away from the sun. Since this haphazard routine emerged into public consciousness as El Niño after the monstrous drought of 1982–3 it has often been referred to as an abnormal weather pattern. But there is nothing abnormal about El Niño. It has followed the same rough disordered pattern for thousands of years and is as much a part of life on the Pacific Rim as monsoons and vulcanism. However, it is only in the last fifteen years or so that we have come to understand it in anything more than a fragmentary fashion.