exploration, part jaunt, and altogether a glorious day. This time we glimpse not only his situation, but his sensibility.
Lieutenant William Bradley of the Sirius was twenty-nine years old and married, but like his brother officers was compelled to leave his wife behind in England. Establishing settlements was a masculine affair, at least for officers. Bradley wrote a professional journal enlivened by the occasional personal aside. Even more usefully, he painted a sequence of careful watercolours which provide many of the illustrations for this book.
Letters are another beguilingly informal source. Writing home must have filled many empty evenings, but it would rise to fever pitch when a ship was due to leave for England or the Cape. Then whole days could pass in writing letters, often in several copies (these men knew the perils attending long sea voyages). Despite shared experiences, the letters which survive are marvellously various in tone. Assistant-Surgeon Worgan from the Sirius had somehow contrived to bring his piano with him (he beguiled his fellow-officers with concerts in ports along the way), so he must have spent time on his music. Given the tough conditions in the new land, he must also have been much occupied by his work. Nonetheless, we see him writing vast letters to his beloved brother Dick, as if, as he wistfully says, he were sitting opposite him by the fire. His love for his distant sibling is as palpable as his loneliness. The eagerness of publishers brought the antipodean colony very close to those left at home—as its editor points out, the compilation known as An Historical Journal of the Transactions at Port Jackson and Norfolk Island, which appeared in London under John Hunter’s name at the beginning of 1793, described events to the close of 1791, a mere twelve months before. To the exiled colonists, home was very far away. Worgan reported on local affairs, he made a few scientific observations, but his main endeavour was to entertain that ghostly fraternal presence on the other side of the fire with running jokes and racy tales, especially about ‘the savages’.
Marine-Lieutenant Ralph Clark wrote to his wife Alicia about his dreams (he tenderly recalls her interpreting his dreams as they lay in bed of a morning), his longing for her, and his frequent atrocious toothaches. He did not tell her about the baby girl borne him by a convict woman in 1791 during his year at Norfolk Island, although he named the child, presumably with some emotional confusion, ‘Alicia’. There are others, like Major Ross, commander of the marines, who these days exist mainly as writers of furious letters of complaint, and others again, for all we know more important to the evolving life of the colony, who do not exist for us at all because they wrote nothing, or nothing that survived. Getting into the historical record is a chancy business.
These were impressive men. While an individual might acknowledge ignorance of a particular area (Captain Hunter allowed he didn’t know much about agriculture), the collective assumed its competence over a wide range of scientific and artistic endeavours. Some painted, most sketched, some botanised; some sang, some studied the stars; some constructed lexicons of Australian words and struggled to fathom Australian grammar; Worgan played his piano. And nearly all of them wrote: fine, flowing sentences infused with their own individual flavour, with nuances of judgment, mood and emotion effortlessly expressed. As we will see, this is true even of Marine Private Jonathan Easty, whose wildly ambitious spelling marks him as an untaught man, but one in love with words and their protean possibilities.
The display of solidarity sustained through the hardest times is also impressive. It is true that the solidarity was to a degree self-interested. Senior officers could not afford a reputation of being unable to handle their men; junior officers needed the recommendation of their seniors for promotion. As the slow months passed there would be tensions enough in the cramped little society at Port Jackson, with every face familiar and caste divisions deep, but they are largely excluded from the public record. It is private letters which tell us most about such abrasions. When Lieutenant Daniel Southwell of the Sirius writes to his mother we hear his chagrin at being exiled and, as he thought, forgotten at the lookout at South Head for the best part of two years, from February 1790 until he went home at the end of 1791. He had to watch from the sidelines as young Lieutenant Waterhouse, more than a year his junior but always at the governor’s side, found daily opportunity to shine. (Southwell cheered up briefly when Phillip, noticing his sulks, distinguished him with marked cordiality.)
The stress of maintaining a decent affability was also tested by cantankerous personalities like Major Ross, a social monster in any circumstances but close to intolerable in the claustrophobic confines of the settlement. We would expect him to be worse when Phillip seized the chance to send him to command Norfolk Island, but there he seems to have performed rather better. The fusses Ross provoked could not be kept out of official correspondence, but they were loyally excluded from the journals, and the loathing he inspired was revealed only in private letters. The normally discreet Collins confided to his father that he could have wished Ross drowned when a ship carrying him was wrecked on the reef at Norfolk Island, and that he would choose death rather than share a ship for the long voyage to England with the execrable major.
For the few respectable females of the settlement social constrictions must have been even more painful. Pious Mrs Johnson was the only lady in Sydney until the arrival of lively young Elizabeth Macarthur in July 1790, and Elizabeth found her sadly dull. Later Elizabeth would lament every reduction in her tiny circle of friends when, with their terms of duty ended, her favourite officers went home: gaining Mr Worgan’s piano was no compensation for losing Mr Worgan, while the loss of Captain Tench was scarcely to be borne.
While the letter-writers might have more immediate verve than the formal journal-keepers, it is the Big Five of Tench, White, Hunter, Collins and Phillip himself who provide us with most of our information regarding life in the young colony. This is our most reliable information too, because by publication they opened themselves and their accounts to contemporary challenge and correction.
Initially I saw these men, members as they were of a self-conscious officer caste, as cut from much the same stern cloth, but with increasing familiarity their individual personalities insisted on asserting themselves. People always look most alike when we know them least. So let me introduce them to you.
GOVERNOR ARTHUR PHILLIP
Commander Arthur Phillip was a naturally cautious man, and having risen to the top of the naval hierarchy from its lowliest position (he had begun as ship’s boy), he was well-practised in presenting a controlled image in public and on the page. His personal journal has been lost, but I suspect it would not have been very personal. His style for all seasons and purposes was clear, concise and conscientiously free from flourishes or affect which, given the mass of necessary communications and the scant time he had to write them, was a sensible decision. Nearly all his writings from Sydney come to us at second hand as selections from his official dispatches made by John Hunter, who drew on Phillip’s official correspondence for the ‘narrative’ he incorporated into his An Historical Journal of Events at Sydney and at Sea 1787–1792, which appeared in 1793, or by the publisher’s scribes back in London who put together the rather more crisply titled The Voyage of Governor Phillip to Botany Bay to catch the market in 1789. It is clear from a comparison of their versions with Phillip’s extant dispatches that his scribes had sufficient respect both for the man and for official documents to follow the contours of the original texts closely. It is therefore possible to map the attention given particular topics and so to discover Phillip’s hierarchy of concerns.
We see more of Phillip the man of action in the account of a lay outsider. Arthur Bowes Smyth, surgeon to the Lady Penrhyn, hired only for the voyage out, and as a landsman a nervous observer, thought Phillip was a hasty sailor. He noted on 10 December 1787, after Hunter had taken over the Sirius and the command of the rest of the fleet while Phillip hurried on ahead with the four fastest vessels, that the remaining seven ships kept together well, ‘as Capt. Hunter does not carry such a press of sail as the Commodore used to do’. Bowes Smyth was also distinctly disaffected when Phillip insisted on moving the whole fleet out of Botany Bay to Port Jackson on a day
