were thoroughly drunk. Nonetheless, they were affronted the next morning to discover that during their loyal celebrations some of their tents had been looted: ‘We were astonished at the number of thefts which had been committed during the general festivity, by the villainous part of the convicts, on one another, and on some of the officers, whose servants did not keep a strict lookout after their marquees.’ White harrumphed: ‘Availing themselves thus of the particular circumstances of the day, is a strong instance of their unabated depravity and want of principle.’ A young convict would hang for the crimes he committed in the course of that festive night.
White provides the frankest account we have of officers’ drinking, and some of his own conduct implies a ready tolerance of inebriation. At another celebration in August 1788, the governor’s dinner to honour the birth of the Prince of Wales, White and William Balmain, one of his assistant surgeons, had a difference of opinion, rose from the table, went outside, and, without seconds (so avoiding the risk of bloodless reconciliation) fought a pistol duel. Ralph Clark claimed that each fired several shots at the other, but that the only injury sustained was a slight wound to Balmain’s thigh, which implies either remarkably bad marksmanship or incapacitating drunkenness. As White on a good day was capable of bringing small birds down from trees, we have to diagnose inebriation exacerbated by a warm temperament. By the end of the same year White was ready to settle another dispute with pistols, this time with an adjutant of marines, until friends managed to persuade him he was in the wrong. Phillip would need a cool head to keep such effervescent fellows in amity.
The second King’s Birthday celebrated in Sydney was marked by a play, George Farquhar’s The Recruiting Officer, watched happily by governor and officers, but acted, directed and produced by convicts—which sheds an unexpected light on convict conditions and caste relations in the new colony. Tench:
I am not ashamed to confess that the proper distribution of three or four yards of stained paper, and a dozen farthing candles stuck around the mud walls of a convict hut, failed not to diffuse general complacency on the countenances of sixty persons of various descriptions who were assembled to applaud the representation.
That is: they enjoyed it. There were more mundane pleasures to be taken in tending exotic menageries of pets like parrots or dingos or possums or lizards. The Australians’ alert, handsome dingos especially caught the dog-loving British eye. In flagrant defiance of an ‘all dogs ashore’ order Phillip had given in Portsmouth, a number of officers had brought their dogs with them on the voyage. The dogs contributed unpleasantly to the horrible crowding of shipboard life, already burdened with a Noah’s Ark of ‘useful’, meaning edible, animals, and there are indications that sailors resented cleaning up after them, more than a few fetching up overboard. On Ralph Clark’s Friendship five dogs, including his own, had mysteriously vanished over the side before the voyage was much more than half over. Soon after they landed the dog-deprived British were searching the countryside or bartering with dog-rich Australians for dingo puppies.
What happened next could have served as an early warning of deeper incompatibilities. John Hunter, studying the dingos as carefully as he studied all the creatures of the new continent, discovered them to be fatally flawed. Despite their notable good looks, they had an ineradicable propensity to kill all and any small animals. Some packs could even drag down kangaroos. Hunter writes, regretfully:
Of those [native] dogs we have had many which were taken when young, but never could we cure them of their natural ferocity; although well fed, they would at all times, but particularly in the night, fly at young pigs, chickens, or any small animal which they might be able to conquer and immediately kill and generally eat them. I had one which was a little puppy when caught, but notwithstanding I took much pains to correct and cure it of its savageness, I found it took every opportunity, which it met with, to snap off the head of a fowl, or worry a pig, and would do it in defiance of correction. They are a very good-natured animal when domesticated, but I believe it to be impossible to cure that savageness, which all I have seen seem to possess.
Governor Phillip himself supplied an assessment of this interesting animal, based on his study of a living specimen he had sent as a present to Under-Secretary Nepean:
It is very eager after its prey, and is fond of rabbits or chickens, raw, but will not touch dressed meat. From its fierceness and agility it has greatly the advantage of other animals much superior in size: for a very fine French fox-dog being put to it, in a moment it seized him by the loins, and would have put an end to his existence, had not help been at hand. With the utmost ease it is able to leap over the back of an ass, and was very near worrying one to death, having fastened on it, so that the creature was not able to disengage himself without assistance; it has also been known to run down both deer and sheep.
An impressive animal, but an alarming one. David Collins put the dilemma with his usual pragmatic economy: ‘The dogs of this country...have an invincible predilection for poultry, which the severest beatings could never repress. Some of them are very handsome.’
If it’s meat and it moves, grab it. These nomads’ dogs knew nothing of the pastoralists’ distinction between ‘stock’ and ‘game’. Meanwhile the offspring of the dogs the British brought with them, especially little terriers and spaniels, were eagerly coveted by the Australians. They were dog lovers too: their dingos were allies in the hunt and companions around the campfire. But dingos, bred to stalk flighty marsupials, did not bark. British dogs did. Through their centuries of living in agricultural settlement they had developed a strong sense of property, so they barked at strangers, especially strangers who came softly in the night. Translated to Australian conditions, those British-bred spaniels and terriers could give warning of night attacks. One of the skills of the Australian warrior was to move stealthily through the night, and kill an enemy who had mortally offended him as he lay by his own campfire.
To each culture its own canine. The ‘mindless’ slaughter of stock and the consequent murderous reprisals which were to embitter British–Australian relations through later decades were implicit in this energetic early trade between dog lovers.
Isolation, with desolation lurking within it, remained the temporary settlers’ worst enemy. William Bradley has left us a watercolour of the settlement at Sydney Cove in early 1788 (plate 4a): a scatter of tents, a few huts, a handful of larger structures, a flagpole—and that is all. The land constructions are given substance and focus by the two ships riding at anchor in the clear water. For officers, sailors and marines those ships spelt security even in a storm, because they breathed of home. Mind and spirit were refreshed by the clustered signs of European, indeed of British, technological ingenuity. Later, when officers condescended to play host to parties of Australian sightseers, leading them around the assemblage of cunning arrangements which constitute a ship, they were offended to find the tourists thoroughly bored, coming alive only when weapons or animal skins stimulated their curiosity. But if for these men the sea was an open highway back to home and England, by February 1789 the big ships had all sailed away, and even the faithful Supply was gone on a mission to Norfolk Island. The settlers were left with only the poor fruits of their own labour: huts, tents, a canvas house for the governor, some scars in the earth, some trees felled. With the harbour empty, Sydney Cove must have seemed to cling to the edge of the world.
