diarists too. None of them describes the extraordinary noises made by so many Australian birds: no reference to the souls-in-torment shrieking of the sulphur-crested cockatoo or the kookaburra’s mad Mrs Rochester laugh; no reference to the vocal pyrotechnics of the rufous whistler—although Tench does allow that ‘in the woods are various little songsters, whose notes are equally sweet and plaintive’. Most insulting of all, while Collins gives a careful description of the feathers of the lyrebird, which he thought a type of bird-of-paradise, he fails to mention its golden voice. Did no one bother to listen? (It is evening and roosting time now, and the racket outside is tremendous.) Did sounds not interest classifying scientists? Or is it that we only ‘hear’ the birdsongs of our youth?
JUDGE-ADVOCATE DAVID COLLINS
David Collins, also thirty years old in 1788, accepted the post of judge-advocate in the new colony when his useful but undistinguished career in the Marine Corps was interrupted by the ending of the American war. Within months he also became Phillip’s secretary and, in time, his friend, although never, I think, his confidant. Phillip was by nature and policy a secretive man.
Collins had minimal legal experience, but he was a man of steady intelligence and conventional mind, and discharged his judicial duties to the satisfaction of his more reasonable colleagues. Such duties in a convict colony must have been onerous enough, but Collins was a prodigious worker, choosing to take his position as secretary to mean he should keep a quasi-official chronicle of events suitable for later publication. As early as July 1788 George Worgan knew Collins was preparing such a narrative, and in a letter to his brother declared he stood ready to recommend it ‘in preference to any other, because from his Genius I am certain it will be the most Entertaining, Animating, Correct and satisfactory of any that may appear’.
Worgan was of a sardonic turn of mind, especially when writing to his brother, so there may be a joke here. From what Collins has left on the page it is difficult to imagine him ‘entertaining’ or ‘animating’. His aim, it seems, was to be Master of Plod. But he was as ‘correct’ as human frailty allows, and profoundly ‘satisfactory’ in a range of ways: for example, without him we would never know the favourite petty derelictions of convicts, and so could not know which deprivations chafed them most. Professionally close-mouthed regarding trouble between officers, his occasional rumbles against the obnoxious Major Ross are the more revealing. And we could not know the enigmatic Phillip half so well if we did not have this big, solid fellow always at his heels, providing his own commentary on Phillip’s sometimes ambiguous actions.
During the colony’s infant years, Collins found the climate, land and problems of supply so intractable that he had little faith in its survival. Nonetheless he enumerated every new building, whether prison, provisions shed, windmill or granary, and soberly redrew the map of material progress at the end of each month. His favourite metaphors for growth came from agriculture. It was a vegetable growth he looked for, with steady expansion and increasingly rich fruits the sure reward of postponed gratification and systematic labour. I think this was one reason why he found convicts so repellent. Content merely to scratch the soil so that precious seeds withered, seeming to lack any sense of communal responsibility, they were also incurably improvident, gobbling their weekly rations and then living from day to day by thieving from their fellows.
Paradoxically, he was at least as offended by evidence of convict solidarity: ‘There was such a tenderness in these people to each other’s guilt, such an acquaintance with vice and the different degrees of it, that unless they were detected in the fact, it was generally next to impossible to bring an offence home to them.’ Six months of close contact was enough to persuade him that, a very few individuals excepted, convicts were a race apart and crime the convict soul made visible: irremediably feckless, with no inner discipline and no recognition of consequences.
His diagnosis was not, as ours might be, of class solidarity forged out of shared experience. For Collins character was not the product of circumstance. He thought what bound convicts together was their natural amorality. They were the scourings of society, and only a few had the least chance of rehabilitation.
His most scathing condemnations were reserved for Irish convicts, and for all convict women. But despite his animus, and despite his warmly conjugal communications with his wife Maria, Collins himself soon took a young convict girl as his mistress. At seventeen Ann Yates was sentenced to hang for stealing a bolt of printed cotton. Reprieved to transportation, she bore a child to a seaman called Theakston during the voyage out on the Lady Penrhyn. The boy was later baptised by the Reverend Johnson and given his father’s name, but Theakston sailed for China and out of Ann’s life early in May 1788. In November 1791, she bore Collins his first child, a daughter, and in June 1793 his only son, and she remained his lover for the rest of his years in the colony. They never cohabited. Yates, who in time received her freedom, continued to live in the convicts’ quarters with her children, while Collins preferred to live in the governor’s house, close by his friend and his work. Such liaisons were common—most officers had some enduring connection with convict women—but I still wonder what Collins found to say as he glided out of the governor’s house of an evening.
Collins neglected neither Ann nor his children by her. He bequeathed her a holding of 100 acres of land on the Hawkesbury when he left the colony late in 1796 to return to the embraces of his loyal wife Maria, who had assuaged her loneliness during his long absence by writing romantic novels. Ann and the two children happened to travel back to England on the same ship, probably disembarking at Liverpool on their way to Ann’s native Yorkshire. The little family of three returned to Australia in July 1799, and the children were later reunited with their father during his governorship of Tasmania.
Collins already was, or was to become, a susceptible man. Travelling to Australia in 1803, again without Maria, to establish a colony first and abortively at Port Phillip, then successfully at Hobart, he met the pretty young wife of a convict on the voyage out and became enamoured of her. The relationship scandalised Hobart Town throughout Collins’ governorship, especially given the cuckolded husband’s affable compliance, the privileges Collins granted the pair, and the trio’s relaxed conduct in public.
Collins is especially important to us because without his dutiful recording it would be difficult to trace the interactions between Australians and British in the years after the Australians decided to ‘come in’ to Sydney Town. As his passion for agricultural metaphors suggests, he was a perfect representative of the moral and material economy of European culture. It was these assumptions he brought to his analysis of the convict condition, and which he initially brought to the encounter with the very different culture and economy of the nomad people of Australia.
He began by seeing them as nuisances, as, for example, in the matter of fishing. At first, he said, they had been happy to help draw the great nets of the British, and to wait quietly for a share of the catch. (They must have been both impressed and appalled by the efficiency of British net-hauling in contrast to their hook-and-line or spearing techniques.) Then, with winter coming on and fish scarcer, a British party had been drawing in a big haul when warriors swept down and ‘took by force about half of what had been brought on shore’, while spearmen stood with spears poised for throwing. We might think that leaving half the catch to predatory uninvited guests was generous, but while Collins allowed that the natives were hungry, he saw the action as both irrational and wantonly hostile. He was as yet no readier to grant intelligent motivations to savages than he was to convicts.
His initial philosophical response to the nature of Australian existence was nonetheless surprisingly perceptive. From the beginning Collins exempted the Australians from the commitment to progress and accumulation he required of civilised men. He recognised that their way of life was timeless, reiterative rather than progressive, and his expressed hope was that even after the arrival of the British they could be left in their timeless universe ‘under a dispensation to keep them happy in their liberties’. However, precisely because their ways of thinking and being were
