First published in Great Britain in 2005 by
Canongate Books Ltd, 14 High Street,
Edinburgh EH1 1TE
Originally published in Australia in 2003 by
The Text Publishing Company, Melbourne
Copyright © Inga Clendinnen, 2003
The moral right of the author has been asserted
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available on request from the British Library
ISBN 978 1 84195 699 2
eISBN 978 0 85786 763 6
Design by Chong
Map by Tony Fankhauser
Typeset in Granjon 12.2/17 by J&M Typesetting
This digital edition first published in 2012 by Canongate Books
For Anastasia and for Gilchrist
PREFACE TO THE UK EDITION
Late in January 1788 a British fleet made landfall at ‘Botany Bay’ and then at ‘Port Jackson’, on the south-east coast of Australia. Their cargo was convicts; their task to create a self-sufficient society on those remote, unpropitious shores.
The expedition was led by Commander Arthur Phillip of the Royal Navy. Phillip was a most unusual imperialist. Like most of his officers he was a child of the English Enlightenment: scientific in observation, critical in analysis, fastidious in record. Unlike most of his fellows, he was also a restless, even reckless, thinker. In recognition of the colony’s isolation he had been given close to absolute power. Within the settlement he would use that power with judgement and finesse. When he went home at the end of his five-year term, he knew the colony would survive.
A subsidiary requirement of settlement, little pressed, was dearer to his heart. He was determined to establish his colony at the least possible cost to the people whose lands he was entering. He wanted nothing material from them: he brought both provisions and labour with him, while the slice of land the British occupied was uncultivated, and consequently, he thought, there for the taking. What he wanted from the Aboriginal Australians was a rarer commodity: their trust. Phillip believed that all men, whatever their colour or custom would, after a period of tutelage, recognise the benefits of civilisation encapsulated in the moral beauty of British law – a law, as we now realise and as Phillip did not, evolved from centuries of agrarian and pastoral pursuits and pivoting on the twin principles of the protection of property and the rights of the individual.
The people Phillip and his men met on the harbour beaches were nomads, moving lightly over their land, carrying with them few possessions beyond an intricate law forged out of millennia of experience of human survival in Australia, that driest, most recalcitrant of continents.
The British passion for scrupulous documentation provides a detailed record of what happened next.
Acknowledgments
I thank the staff at the Borchardt Library, La Trobe University, and at Townsville Regional Library, whose kindness went well beyond duty.
I thank Michael Heyward at Text for luring me into this adventure in the first place. He promised I would enjoy myself, and I have. He has proved yet again an incomparable editor.
I thank my old colleagues at La Trobe University History Department for their continuing affection and interest over the years, especially Alan Frost, John Hirst and Richard Broome for generous aid and comfort.
I thank the host of writers who will find no acknowledgment in the text, but who have filled my days and shaped my thinking over the years.
And I thank Miss Cantwell, third-grade teacher at Newtown and Chilwell State School sixty years ago, who finally managed to teach me to read.
Man proceeds in a fog. But when he looks back to judge people of the past, he sees no fog on their path. From his present, which was their far-away future, their path looks perfectly clear to him, good visibility all the way. Looking back he sees the path, he sees the people proceeding, he sees their mistakes, but not the fog.
Milan Kundera
CONTENTS
