Leviathan (20 page)

With no effective constraints, growth spurted ahead in fits of uncontrolled demolition and construction which would make a modern developer weep with envy. Rough log cabins were haphazardly replaced by small brick cottages. Shingles and tiles took the place of reeds and straw. Barracks, storehouses and wharves occupied easier ground on the western reach of the cove, whilst the convicts' simple huts spread promiscuously on the heights above. When Malaspina's expedition arrived in 1793, the Spaniard expected to see rapid progress towards civilization but the vista disappointed him. He described ‘land ill-cleared, fields little worked, wretched houses, and everywhere the marks of oppression and disgust'. Sydney, the hub of English commerce and administration in the Pacific, contained about 300 houses by his reckoning, a third of them still roofed with straw. They clustered together in apparent disorder, although Malaspina was assured everything had been arranged according to Phillip's grand plan. ‘I managed to examine it,' he remarked dryly, ‘and do not know how it operates …'

It operated to enrich the officers of the corps. In the years after Phillip's departure the military handed itself land grants and convict labour like cigars and port at a thumpingly debauched regimental piss-up. So profligate was the diversion of public resources to private ends that when the First Fleet's John Hunter returned to the colony as governor in September of 1795, he complained that he could scarcely round up twenty convicts from a population of thousands. The rest had been diverted into the personal service of the colony's leading lights. There was ‘scarcely a pound of salt provisions in the store'; not one barn or granary had been built to hold the increasingly large harvest; the government's boats had ‘gone to ruin and decay'; numberless houses, once public property, had been leased into private hands; and the roads had fallen into such disrepair that they were often useless.

Neither Hunter nor his successor, Philip Gidley King, were able to take the measure of the corps. They were caught between the leverage of men like the warrior-capitalist John Macarthur, and the indifference of a home government preoccupied by great power politics on the Continent. Hunter managed some running repairs, despatching work gangs to the oyster beds to gather shells for plastering the town's buildings against the elements. But it was a dilatory business, and when a string of violent storms fell on Sydney in June 1799, they thoroughly smashed the place, demolishing windmills, church towers, and private homes. Hunter was forced to virtually plead for the help of the town's leading citizens and officers in rebuilding. They readily gave their agreement, then withheld any significant material support. Hunter was only too aware of how much power had slipped from the governor's hands since the time of Phillip. Writing to the Duke of Portland a month after the devastation, he glumly described his failure to curb the rapacious dealings of the corps by way of public orders: ‘you will see, my Lord, that where I must depend for their due execution on persons interested in their failure, how little is to be expected from such Orders'.

When Governor King arrived to replace the vanquished Hunter, he came packing a determination that ‘the public shall not be cheated; and … the King's authority shall not be insulted'. His mission was not a pleasant one, he wrote to Sir Joseph Banks:

Much of his energy, like Hunter's, went into the continuing struggle against the trading elite's ‘monopoly and extortion'. Suffering from the labour shortages and restricted budgets of his predecessors, there was little scope for King to radically redesign the fabric of the town's man-made environment. He built a church, jail and brewery at Parramatta, and flour mills, a tannery, a guardhouse and bridge, amongst other sundry works, in Sydney itself. Private capital went into Campbell's Wharf – the best in the country when completed in 1803 – whilst the town's finest buildings, such as Captain William Kent's Palladian mansion, Simeon Lord's four-storey townhouse and Robert Campbell's colonnaded Indian bungalow, were all commissioned by wealthy merchants.

Meanwhile a growing population pushed further up the reaches of the Tank Stream, along the road out to the brick fields. Difficult topography helped sandwich the advance between high ridge lines running back from the Rocks and Government House. Within that conduit the destruction of any forest remnants accelerated. In 1802 a visiting Frenchman, Charles Leseur, prepared a map of the settlement which identified 260 houses. This number had increased to nearly 700 within two years as cross-streets like Hunter and King emerged from the arbitrary confluence of design and circumstance which shaped the city's framework. As Peter Bridges points out in
Foundations of Identity
, his elegant study of early Sydney, despite the steadily increasing number of private buildings which transformed empty lots and isolated shanties into continuous rows of terraces, the town ‘still had a down-at-heel appearance'.

Captain Colnett of HMS
Glatton
arrived in March 1803 to be grossly underwhelmed by this zircon in the crown of Empire. The poverty of the soil was obvious, the town looked like nothing more ‘than a miserable Portuguese settlement', and some lazy swine had heightened this picture of dilapidation by allowing the flagstaff ‘on what was called a battery' to lean at least thirty degrees from the perpendicular. Colnett, who cultivated a serious feud with King during his stay in the port, lacerated the Governor for the poor state of his post. Although his opinions aren't always to be trusted, his observations of the port's decrepit condition sit comfortably alongside King's own complaints. The arrangements for watering his ship were eccentric at best, with Colnett forced to send a party over five kilometres away to fill three hundred tonnes worth of water casks. The casks then had to be rolled across hundreds of metres of mud flats and left, half submerged, in the stinking ooze until the tide rose high enough to float them off to the boat. The reservoirs which Phillip had cut into the Tank Stream's sandstone banks were full of silt. The wharf in front of the hospital at the Rocks was hopeless; a boat drawing more than a foot of water couldn't rest beside it at low tide. The Governor's Wharf on the other side was even worse, with no capacity to land goods of any weight. The
Glatton
's seamen were forced to throw barrels of wine over the side of their launch and swim them to shore. Mooring chains lay rusting on the tidal flats and Colnett compared the dockyard on the north shore to a dog kennel. He confirmed that the only decent wharfing facility belonged to Robert Campbell, and it was in peril from the colony's gunpowder magazine which was kept nearby in an old hulk, swinging at anchor amidst open fires and crowded moorings.

Colnett was wrong in dumping the blame for this parlous state of affairs solely in King's lap. He'd proved much more effective at reining in the corps and its fellow travellers than had Hunter, and he was constrained by London's refusal to commit adequate resources to the colony or even to send him the sort of convicts who would be of most use. Despite his problems King did push through a major reform which laid a foundation for rational growth – of a sort – in the future. Much of the land within the limits of the town had been leased, bought, traded and sold with only the most cursory records being kept. In some cases a packet of land had changed owners a number of times by mere word of mouth. King ordered a town survey and created a register of leases and ownership, the first time any real order had been imposed on the frenzied derangement of Sydney's property market since Governor Phillip left.

Despite benefiting enormously from the regulation of property relations, the town's power elite refused to call a cease-fire in their sniping campaign against the Governor. He had curtailed the worst excesses of the corps, but their rancour hadn't been quelled, only forced underground. When their champion, John Macarthur, returned in triumph from banishment to England, the bell was tolling for King. If the British Government were hoping his replacement would make a better fist of ruling the anarchic outpost, they were to be sorely disappointed. If you were looking for someone to inflame the already aggravated situation, Captain William Bligh of the
Bounty
was your man.

The only Australian leader to be deposed by an armed uprising, he was initially warmly welcomed by the men who had seen off both Hunter and King. The popular image of Bligh is that of a stunted, foul-mouthed ogre with axes in his eyes, stalking the quarterdeck of the
Bounty
and being unconscionably rude to Fletcher Christian. In fact, Bligh's early period in the colony went well, even though he was a reformer cut from the same cloth as King. The causes of the coup which eventually unseated him were numerous, rooted in both systemic failure and personality clashes, but Bligh's vigorous prosecution of Governor Phillip's orders regarding leases inside the town certainly contributed. He demanded that any houses occupying Crown land should be vacated and demolished, but rather than treading softly on very dangerous terrain he cursed and swore and succumbed to violent fits of anger when challenged. His actions preserved a huge slice of the city, which now forms the Domain, Hyde Park and the Botanic Gardens, but it antagonised the same powerful interests that had destroyed his predecessors. For their part, the officers of the corps were to discover that their move against him, although immediately successful, contained the seeds of their own destruction, delivering to the colony a governor who was both willing and able to force their submission.

 

Lachlan Macquarie hailed from the risibly named Island of Mull in the Argyleshire Hebrides. His ancestors, chiefs of the Clan Guarie, had lorded it over the small isle of Ulva for some 900 years and bred from their fierce line a hard-set, self-willing soldier who distinguished himself in battle against the French in Egypt, the Dutch at Cochin and Colombo, and all sorts of uppity natives in India. In 1807, returning from the subcontinent, he was almost drowned in the Persian Gulf on his way to Basra. There, upon discovering that war had erupted between Turkey and the Czar, he collected despatches from Baghdad and struck off across Russia to St Petersburg and thence to London. Lachlan Macquarie was not a man to baulk at putting the slipper into a gang of mutinous rummies in Sydney.

On 1 January 1810, his first day in the governor's mansion, Macquarie issued a proclamation damning the renegades who had overthrown the King's last representative and announcing His Majesty's ‘high displeasure and disapprobation' of their outrageous conduct. Three days later he put the corps to the sword, proclaiming that anyone appointed to public office since Bligh's removal were themselves to be removed and replaced by those they had usurped. Any grants of land or stock, or leases of houses made to officers of the corps in the same period were now null and void. The mutineers were to hand over all official papers, records and documents, along with any public money, stores or provisions. Any trials, arrests and investigations which had taken place since the mutiny were themselves declared illegal. Stripped of its power and wealth, the corps was sent packing a few months later, ironically in the same naval convoy that carried poor old Bligh back to England.

Shameless greedheads they may have been, but the exertions of the corps did leave one positive legacy. Thanks largely to their villainous efforts, the human garbage dump envisioned by the punishment freaks of the 1780s had been transformed into a rising entrepot. For all its shortcomings and in the face of economic recession at home, Port Jackson had become the transit point for an increasing flow of colonial trade. Bullock drays tottering with loads of barley and wheat creaked and rumbled down George Street, raising billows of dust as they weaved around giant ruts and washouts in which packs of dogs fell upon unwary half-feral goats. Coastal packets plied the harbour with maize from the Hawkesbury or coal and limestone from Broken Bay. They dropped anchor off Campbell's Wharf next to Calcutta traders which sat low in the water, weighed down with spars of Indian timber and Chinese sandalwood, with hogsheads of
bêche-de-mer
, with salt pork and fish oil, cedar and barley, with sugar and tea and thousands of barrels of wine and spirits. American whalers called in on their way to and from the east coast of New Zealand; during one week three sealers arrived from there with 45 000 skins.

There were just over 6000 people resident in Sydney when Lachlan and Elizabeth Macquarie stepped ashore to review an honour guard of the 102nd Regiment. A salute boomed from the cannon of their ship and was answered by the guns on Dawes Point. Their new home stood out in the amphitheatre of the cove. It was still one of the biggest structures in the town, although the grand houses and stores of a few wealthy merchants dominated the bay's western shore, whilst two windmills and the intimidating bulk of Fort Phillip held the ridge above. Like a clutch of seashells scattered by a child's careless hand, the remaining cottages, their whitewashed features startling in the sun, either bunched up on the steep, rocky slopes above the western wharves or played themselves out in a thin, random scatter south along the line of George Street and the Tank Stream.

It was a pleasant enough vision of bucolic charm, but between the idea and reality fell the shadow. In Macquarie's first letter home he reported that the barracks were so decayed the 73rd Regiment had to be encamped in the fields at Grose Farm (where Sydney University now lies). The hospital was in a ruinous state, completely unfit for receiving the sick, and the colony's two boats were so rotten as to be useless. The occupants of those picturesque little cottages threw their offal and excrement directly into the streets, where it sat and baked in the sun until washed into the Tank Stream by a downpour or snaffled up by wandering pigs. After rain the streets were impassable and during it they could be lethal. A man and wife were drowned in Pitt Street in 1807 after being swept into a deep gutter during a storm. The Parramatta road, which Macquarie thought barely worthy of the name, was ineffectually kept in repair by an order which required travellers to collect rubble from the brick fields to dump into potholes so deep they could cripple a horse.