Leviathan (18 page)

Cook and Banks viewed Botany Bay through a different prism in the autumn of 1770. The lush pastures they observed must have compared favourably with the dying fields of an English autumn. Here it seems the warm Pacific breeze promised to keep the savageries of winter at bay. Unfortunately they knew nothing of El Niño or its related Southern Oscillation. The land they saw had not suffered a severe El Niño event since 1716 – an unusually long interval – and they were seeing it at its best. Neither they nor anybody on the convict ships which followed was equipped to understand the phenomenon.

Indeed, although the first evidence of El Niño seems to have been recorded in Peru in 1525 by the expedition of the Spanish conquistador Francisco Pizarro, more than four hundred years would pass before Jacob Bjerknes, a Norwegian meteorologist working at the University of California, had the data and technology to piece the story together. Bjerknes was standing on the shoulders of a British scientist, Sir Gilbert Walker who, as head of the Indian Meteorological Service in 1904, had been handed the task of working out some way of predicting monsoons, after their failure in 1899 had led to famine on the subcontinent. In the course of his research Walker discovered a link between changes in ocean temperature and rainfall in South America. This in turn seemed to be connected to air pressure readings taken at Darwin and Tahiti. Walker's numbers seemed to indicate that as pressure rose at Tahiti it fell in the Northern Territory. He called this seesawing the Southern Oscillation and wondered at what seemed to be a weird link between these barometric changes, Australian droughts, the Asian monsoon season and mild Canadian winters. In the days before satellites, electronic ocean buoys and supercomputers Sir Gilbert was widely thought of as a crank. The idea that bushfires in New South Wales and famine in India might be related to the failure of Peruvian fishing grounds was a mad suggestion, as preposterous to all right-thinking scientists in the early twentieth century as had been Ptolemy's map to the Church in the Dark Ages. Unable to prove his theory, Walker remained convinced he would be vindicated when high atmosphere wind patterns could be routinely measured. Fifty years later Bjerknes had the wherewithal to do just that and to draw a connection between ocean temperatures, air pressure, rainfall and wind patterns. More than just a connection in fact, they were all components of the same system, the El Niño Southern Oscillation effect or ENSO.

When ENSO is not having its evil way with Australian farmers, a satellite image of the Pacific Ocean will show a huge area of warm water in the west, washing up against Indonesia; a cold tongue of nutrient-rich waters in the east, and the same trade winds which pressed hard against the canvas of HMS
Endeavour
blowing strong and true from east to west. These are thought of as ‘normal' conditions. Roughly two years out of seven, however, the pattern reverses itself and all hell breaks loose.

What happens is this. Normally the waters at the equator are warmed by the sun and moist air rises from them, cooler air is then sucked in from the subtropics in its place. The Coriolis effect, that force generated by the earth's rotation which makes water spin down the sink differently depending on whether you are north or south of the equator, kicks in. Above the equator it sends this mass of air east. Below the equator it moves west, giving rise to the trade winds. So steady and powerful are these winds they push the warm water on the surface of the Pacific Ocean left, actually piling it up against Indonesia so that the sea level is about fifty centimetres higher there. The water warms even further as it travels through the tropics, the air above it becoming saturated with moisture which rises higher and higher, only to fall on South East Asia during the yearly monsoons. The damp, warm, rising air strengthens the westerly drive of the trade winds. Its power projects way into the upper atmosphere where it shapes the flow of the jet stream, much as a rock in a fast-moving river distorts the waters which have to rush around it. The tracks of great storms are determined by the contours of this flow, the weather patterns for a huge portion of the globe riding upon its anguine, sinuous forms.

Back east meanwhile, off the coast of South America, cold water wells up from the depths to replace those warm streams which headed west. Rich in nutrients, these colder seas support abundant bird and fish life and, not incidentally, the fishermen of Peru. For years at a time they haul up nets straining with anchovies destined for the world's pizzas and pet food tins. But every now and then, around Christmas time, the nets come up empty. The warmer waves have not migrated west. They lap against the edge of the boats, which drift around on a huge bath of tepid sea water. El Niño, the Christ Child, has arrived. The gusting trade winds slacken then turn. All of that warm water heaped up on the coast of Indonesia comes rolling back across the Pacific, taking with it the moist rising air. The jet streams buckle and deform. Twelve thousand metres above sea level new highways are blasted through the atmosphere, jet streams strong enough to shoot across Central America and on across the Atlantic, strong enough to decapitate big roiling thunderheads on the east coast of the US before they can mutate into hurricanes. Monsoonal rains which would have irrigated Asia's rice paddies and Australian wheat fields now fall uselessly in mid-Pacific. Coral reefs off the Galapagos Islands die back in balmy, arid shallows. Tens of millions of boobies, cormorants and pelicans starve to death off Ecuador. Seal pups in California perish as storms flood their beaches. Malaria, dengue fever, and encephalitis spread as mosquitoes breed in stagnant pools in Sri Lanka. And in Australia farmers load their guns to cull dying stock as bushfires rage at the edge of Sydney.

Why? Because nothing lasts forever. The exchange of heat between air and water which is the engine of our weather has been described as a dance, but with one partner waltzing quietly whilst the other madly tangos. ‘Ocean temperatures drive winds; winds drive ocean currents; ocean currents redistribute heat over sea surfaces; and the new pattern of ocean temperatures drives new winds.' But air and water never find a balance ‘because the ocean moves heat around far more slowly than the atmosphere'. So El Niño is not an abnormal event. Rather it is commonplace, mundane even, except for those who have to live with it.

Tim Flannery's popular study of Australian ecology,
The Future Eaters
, describes the pattern of adaptations forced on the continent's plants and animals by the harsh reign of El Niño as ‘parsimony born of resource poverty'. Nomadism became endemic, with birds, marsupials and early humans all chasing the rains across the country. Unable to follow them, Australia's plants responded by growing short rigid leaves and small internodes and remaining relatively small in size. In turn animals adapted to these thin pickings by becoming ‘energy misers' – sitting still, like the koala, for great stretches of time, dozing through the heat of the day and paring back reproduction rates. Unprepared for such tight margins of existence, the plants in Governor Phillip's garden scarfed up all the nutrients from the poor sandy soil, then withered and died. The livestock the English had brought with them found the local weeds a poor substitute for the lush grasses of home. They either turned up their hooves from starvation or hovered on the edge of it, unable to produce enough dung to fertilise their masters' little plantations.

The strange wiry plants of the harbour also proved useless for shelter. The fleet had brought a small supply of building materials from England – some bricks and lime, lots of nails and a surfeit of window glass – in the expectation of using local materials to supplement them. But Sydney's timber proved no better than the soil and water, Surgeon White complaining that it was fit for little but burning. In a familiar refrain he thought it the worst ‘that any country or climate ever produced'. Planks cut from those few trees which looked promising quickly warped and turned brittle when sawn and exposed to the sun. Removing the trees was still hard, frustrating work. Blackbutt and red gum soared up to forty metres above the floor of the valley which climbed away from the mouth of the fresh-water stream Phillip had discovered. Without machinery or dynamite a dozen men could take a week to dig out their trunks and roots. An axeman standing at their base would often find the uppermost branches obscured by clumps of swamp mahogany and bangalay. Below them acacias, yellow tea-tree and paperbarks struggled for a foothold alongside Port Jackson figs and cabbage tree palms. This last tree at least proved useful, with a trunk which could be split into serviceable logs and planks, soft as they were. It was best woven in between tougher timber then smeared over with mud and clay to keep out the wind, a method of hovel building tracing its roots as far back as the Iron Age. Convicts also wove the palm's fronds into hats to keep the blistering southern sun off their heads, and the camp's hogs weren't averse to snacking on its pith. Rushes from the mud flats and the stalks of the blackboy were initially lashed together and thrown onto the crossbeams of the crude little huts for thatching. Later the she-oak was found to provide good roofing shingles and the women were set to whittling out thousands of them.

It was some time, however, before the tents Ralph Clark found so fetching were replaced with more permanent shelters. In fact their influence on the form of the city persists. When Phillip swept his arm around the curve of the bay, saying he wanted the convicts and marines settled on the rocky western banks while he and the officers would take the gentler, more open slopes to the east of the stream, he fixed a division between class, power and wealth which has survived to this day, with disastrous consequences for the environs of western Sydney and the lives of those born into its hardest stations. The tracks tramped into the earth between the little clutches of tents and humpies eventually became the skeleton streets around which the body of the young city would grow. The rock-and root-strewn path which made its way from the convicts' bedraggled encampment, past the marines' infinitely tidier parade square and tents, alongside the bank of the stream and then out to a desolate brick pit about a kilometre or two back from the harbour, eventually became George Street. Another trail, which veered off to the left, across a little wooden bridge over the stream to the more salubrious officers' marquees and the Governor's house, in time became Bridge Street.

Phillip gave the convicts enough leisure time to grow their own vegetables and build their own shelters, were they so inclined. Some weren't of course. Long after the first hospital had been erected, Surgeon Arndell's servant, Samuel Chinery, was still bunking down in a hollow tree nearby. Another couple of old lags named Owen and Turner lived under a rock at Millers Point. (They were well suited as flatmates – Turner had gone down for thieving, Owen for receiving.) By way of contrast, a fellow thief, James Tenchal – alias Tenninghill – took advantage of the Governor's ruling and by April of 1790 was the proud owner of a one-room home with a lockable door. It didn't stop William Chaaf, an unreformed burglar, from trying his hand though. Chaaf, who had been hired to thatch Tenchal's roof, crawled in through an incomplete section with mischief on his mind. Through his trial we learn a little of convict domestic architecture: Tenchal's windows had wooden shutters, fixed by a bolt; the straw thatching was laced to the rafters; the floor was tramped earth, and the only furniture was a table, a bed and a couple of chests. Most of the little huts were also built with hearths and chimneys, but so prone were they to catching fire that regulations were quickly passed to curb their use. Although all of the early convict dwellings were pulled down to make way for commercial development as soon as the city's economy took off, this simple style of lower-class dwelling survived until quite recently. My old friend Pat Bell, who kicked around Paddington in the 1960s, told me of visiting two-or three-room shacks in that suburb in which the floors were still just stamped earth.

Phillip's own house was a prefab unit shipped out with the fleet and thrown up in a week. It was the finest structure in the land, but that wasn't saying much. Constructed of wood and canvas, its best feature was that it didn't collapse in the first storm like many of the camp's bark lean-tos and mud huts. Like James Tenchal, Phillip dreamt of solid walls and a stout door, but being governor he had the wherewithal to make it happen much sooner and on a slightly grander scale. In May of 1788, while Phillip hunched over his first official despatch to Lord Sydney – complaining of a pain in his side from sleeping on the ground, the colony's lack of any botanical experts, the need for more females to be sent out for the men, and the inability of his canvas house to protect him from the wind and rain – a team of convicts set to work on the first permanent governor's residence. The bricks and lime brought from England were supplemented by clay bricks fired at a pit back up in the hinterland, near what would later become Central Station. Phillip's house was modest: two storeys built along stolid Georgian lines, with very little ornamentation. Although there was an abundance of rich sandstone available for building, the lack of lime for mortar restricted its use. Indeed most of the early buildings were set close to the ground with thick walls because of this. Phillip's house was a simple symmetrical arrangement with three bays gazing over his struggling garden beds down to the Cove. The centre bay was topped by a pediment, the front door by a semi-circular fanlight. (You can walk through a ghost structure of the house in the forecourt of the Museum of Sydney.) Although the view to the water from its ‘most exalted station' is now partly blocked by a hotel and office block, it doesn't take too great a leap to imagine the gulf between this first Government House and the sorry hovels of the lower orders.

Separated by more than 200 years and insulated by the comforts of the digital age, it is difficult for us to comprehend the burden shouldered by the men who raised that first substantial home. The clay which provided bricks for the house may have lain only a kilometre or so inland but it was a very different kilometre from the smooth graded roads you would take today. Sydney's furrowed brow has been smoothed by time. The land over which the convicts scrambled was infinitely more precipitous and disjointed, piled up with ragged broken ridge lines and steep hills, shot through with deep valleys and abrupt cliffs. All movement was by foot; the only power that which came from the bent backs and straining muscles of the men. And with dysentery, scurvy and starvation stalking the colony, even the strongest backs could not bend that far. Muscles fluttered and grew weak. Shoes rotted and fell away from swollen feet which struggled for purchase on stony ground. There were no beasts to pull the carts from the brick pits, so the men themselves were harnessed. A dozen of them would drag carts laden with hundreds of bricks to and from the brick fields five times a day. The terrain was so rugged that thousands of bricks were broken and pulverised during the trip. As the colony grew this sight became more common, not less. In 1793 David Collins described hundreds of men so yoked, hauling great loads of timber and stone around the town's many building sites.