Leviathan (19 page)

Famine and disease sapped the energy of the settlement for these works during the first years. In the few months before work commenced on Phillip's house, hundreds had fallen ill and taken to their cots and tents. Everyone left standing was assigned to scrounging for food or building a large timber hospital. However, these early troubles actually turned out to be something of a left-handed gift because when the bulk of the Second Fleet arrived that hospital became the centre of colonial activity. By then, June of 1790, Phillip had split his command, sending one detachment to colonise Norfolk Island and another up river to establish a farm on the relatively fertile alluvial plains at Parramatta, or Rose Hill as it was first known. Unlike Sydney, which simply grew up around the contours of the first tents and the local topography, Rose Hill was planned. Phillip laid out a wide central street, running west from the riverbank to a small cottage he built as a second governor's residence. Large free-standing huts were run up on either side of the thoroughfare, each separated from its neighbour by up to eighteen metres. Phillip was mindful of the immediate dangers of fire spreading through the satellite township, but he also had one eye to the future by leaving plenty of room for uncluttered development. He had drawn up similarly ambitious plans for Sydney Cove but, anticipating two centuries of unplanned, untrammelled growth, these died a lingering death over the next twenty years, taking another governor, William Bligh, down with them.

When the
Lady Juliana
rolled through the heads in June, the population of Sydney Cove was much diminished by these developments. Over 200 convicts and marines had sailed for Norfolk. Hundreds more were wrestling with the vagaries of the local soil and climate on farms up the Parramatta River. The harbourside town was a quiet place, where sickly administrators bent over their papers, brick-makers tended their kilns and a few sawyers their tools. The camp, according to George Worgan, had a ‘villatick' appearance. Many tents and humpies remained, especially among the boulders above the white beaches of the western headland, but they were outnumbered by thatched huts with little gardens struggling along behind wobbly picket fences. The tenor of the town was grim. Real hunger pinched at the guts of everyone from the Governor down. Thin rations were cut and cut again. Depression and lassitude, the boundary riders of starvation, were given free rein in the minds and journals of the officers. In March 1790, after
Sirius
and
Supply
left for Norfolk Island, Collins wrote:

For the usually cheery Watkin Tench they were ‘days of despair' when ‘the hearts of men sunk'. Glowering storm clouds, fat with cold rain hung low in the sky, occasionally bursting over the hamlet, destroying huts, washing out the foundations of larger buildings, and ‘filling up every trench and cavity which had been dug about the settlement'. A small boy fell into a flooded clay pit and drowned. Starving thieves braved execution to steal melons and pumpkins from ruined gardens. In April, just a few days after yet another reduction in the rations and working hours, the
Supply
returned with news that the
Sirius
had been wrecked.

All hopes rested on the horizon, but no relief appeared over the next two months. One young man wrote home describing poor wretches gazing ardently out to sea whilst starving mothers wept ‘upon the infants at the breast'. Little surprise then that when the signal flags for a strange ship where hoisted in the afternoon of 3 June women ran into the streets with babies in their arms ‘congratulating each other and kissing their infants with the most passionate and extravagant marks of fondness'. Marines wrung each others hand's, unable to speak, tears streaming down their faces. The news first burst on Watkin Tench ‘like meridian splendor on a blind man'.

The colony had not been forgotten, just dreadfully unlucky. A supply ship called the
Guardian
had struck an iceberg off South Africa the previous December and been forced to return to the Cape. It was a great loss. The ship had been hauling tonnes of flour and meat, along with livestock, clothing, medical supplies, fruit trees and farming equipment. Twenty-five convict farmers and tradesmen had been aboard the
Guardian
with seven overseers. Two were drowned, more were missing and the balance had been detained at the Cape.
Juliana
brought some of the stores salvaged from the wreck but she also arrived with nearly 250 female convicts and news of another 1000 convicts on the way. Collins was mortified to find ‘a cargo so unnecessary and unprofitable' as the women dumped on the colony. But the stores they brought alleviated some the town's suffering and the women were to prove much easier to assimilate than the Second Fleeters who followed them.

Unlike the First Fleet, which rode well under the firm hand of Phillip, the second suffered from uncertain lines of command and slipshod organisation. The voyage of the
Juliana
, which left well before the rest of the fleet, had been overseen by William Richards, the same contractor who had outfitted the First. Unfortunately for the bulk of the Second Fleet convicts, the capable Richards was replaced as contractor by the slave traders Camden, Calvert and King, who were more concerned with turning a profit on the voyage than delivering healthy prisoners. Their charges were shackled in heavy irons, confined below decks, and fed a diet almost totally lacking in vitamin C and calcium. Fist fights and pistol duels erupted between the ships' captains and the officers of the New South Wales Corps, who had been embarked with the convicts.

By the time the transports
Surprize
,
Neptune
and
Scarborough
dropped anchor in Port Jackson, nearly one third of their passengers were dead and most of the survivors were sick; men, women and children unable to walk or even stand, hoisted from stinking beds and flung over the side of the ships like baggage. Some fainted at the first breath of fresh air, others died. The Reverend Richard Johnson described them lying on the shore, many unable to stir, some dragging themselves up the banks on their hands and knees, some carried on the backs of others. They were wretched scarecrow characters, with hollow cheeks, dark sunken eyes and sticks for limbs, covered in sores and ulcers and caked-on layers of excrement. Corpses, tossed from the transports on the very last leg of the voyage, bobbed up and down the length of the harbour, their obscene, bloated forms washing up on the foreshores to balloon out and burst as putrescent gasses rumbled inside them. At night, above the moans of the dying, dingoes could be heard tearing apart bodies hastily consigned to a mass grave dug near the present site of Wynyard Station. Tents reappeared around the Rocks as the hospital filled to capacity and beyond. Surgeon White's medical staff, themselves hard-pressed to survive just a few weeks earlier, now had 500 potential deathbeds to attend. Rampant scurvy was the least of their worries, with fever, violent diarrhoea and possibly typhoid to contend with. Wine, oatmeal and vinegar were the best medicines on offer at first as groups of relatively healthy First Fleet convicts were sent into the woods to search for acid berries, native spinach, sarsparilla and cabbage tree leaves.

Sydney's population had jumped from 591 in April to 1715 by July. Even if the newcomers had been in good shape, her sinews would have torn trying to accommodate such growth. Elizabeth Macarthur, who arrived with the Second Fleet, thought the place completely wretched when she disembarked.

This was not a settlement equipped to cope with an invasion of the living dead. Phillip sent most of the healthy Second Fleeters – which largely meant Richards'
Juliana
women – out to the newly established village at Rose Hill. Another consignment was shipped off to Norfolk Island in August. As the sick lists grew shorter, through death or recovery, the city's greatest crisis since its foundation gradually ebbed back to manageable proportions.

One of the more pressing problems was water. The arrival of the Second Fleet coincided with the climatic chaos of yet another El Niño event. Elizabeth Macarthur wrote that December and January had been hotter than she could describe, infinitely worse than the fiercest summer day back home. Breezes brought no relief, only hellish hot gales which forced everyone to shut themselves up inside their makeshift cottages, trying ‘to the utmost of our power to exclude every breath of air'. She had seen little rain since arriving and the soil of her garden was completely ‘burnt up'. In March 1791, with the colony still struggling to accommodate its population explosion, Phillip wrote to England that rain had been so scarce since the
Juliana
arrived that most of the springs in the harbour had dried up. The little stream which divided the settlement at the Cove was ‘much diminished', although still sufficient for cooking. The weather was only partly to blame. Land clearing by the English had shattered the frail architecture of sandstone and vegetation which delivered the rill of sweet spring water from its catchment around the heights of Hyde Park and down through the valley now covered by Pitt and George Streets. Fringed by acacias, wild spinach, flowers and ferns, it meandered for nearly two kilometres around ‘shelving rocks and pearly white sand beds'. Phillip had imposed an eighteenth century green ban on clearing scrub within fifteen metres of the banks but the decline had begun and the fall was inevitable. It is best summarised by PR Stephensen in his history of the harbour.

The settlers tried to augment their precarious water supply even as they so efficiently destroyed it. Phillip had a paling fence erected alongside the stream to prevent hungry stock from eating the shrubs on the banks and befouling the water. He then had deep tanks cut into the sandstone to catch and hold thousands of litres of water, as insurance against the droughts and baffling tricks of the local weather. These engineering works, which gave the Tank Stream its name, sufficed for a time. But they filled with silt and sand as erosion denuded the parched and exposed landscape beyond the paling fence. When Phillip left the colony at the end of 1792, worn down by his burdens, power ebbed away from the governor's mansion, drawn to the twin poles of the officer class and the port's emerging trade barons who, more often than not, were one and the same.

 

The rambunctious, two-fisted rogues of the newly formed New South Wales Corps who had arrived with the survivors of the Second Fleet disembarked at Sydney Cove, squinted in the harsh unfamiliar light and, as their dark-adapted eyes slowly adjusted, they saw laid out before them an opportunity for plunder unmatched in the Empire. Here lay a world for the taking. Its indolent, backward indigenes could offer no resistance. They fled when anyone pointed a shovel at them, let alone a musket. Malaspina was right. Their fields would be laid waste, their huts overrun, their women violated and their lives snatched away. And when they were gone, those fields would be tended by a limitless workforce of state-supplied white slaves. You could say that when Phillip's ship sailed into the sea mists, bound for England in December of 1792, that all of the New South Wales Corps' Christmases were about to come at once.

With no real check on their power or appetites, the corps was pretty much free to do as it pleased; and it pleased more than a few of them to build their homes on the verdant slopes of the Tank Stream, to catch the breezes and views and give their livestock easy access to water and food. Hungry pigs and goats quickly broke through those fences which hadn't been torn down by their owners, stripped the banks of foliage and polluted the town's water supply with their prodigious output of faeces and urine. In addition to brazenly disobeying the orders Phillip had given to protect the water supply, the corps also flouted his town planning directions. Just before leaving, Phillip had drawn a line between the head of Woolloomooloo Bay, to the east of the cove, and Cockle Bay (which we know as Darling Harbour) to the west. Within this area, which constitutes most of the modern city's CBD, no land was to be granted or leased and all housing was to remain the property of the Crown. By this order Phillip hoped to ensure the orderly development of what would become one of the leading cities of the world. Unfortunately, the corps had as much respect for his claim on this land as they did for the Iora's. Under his immediate successors, Major Grose and Colonel Paterson, the degradation of the Tank Stream proceeded in tandem with the alienation of public land in the centre of the town.