first two years of settlement were no picnic, and 1790 wasn’t much better. The Second Fleet, which arrived in June 1790, wasn’t able to do much to help NSW out of near-starvation, because many of the new arrivals were on death’s door by the time they arrived. Meanwhile the Indigenous Australians had to deal with an invasion of overwhelming numbers into their country.
Second Fleet horrors
By the time the Second Fleet arrived in June 1790, a quarter of the settlement had died. But the fleet itself, while carrying supplies, brought with them a human disaster. While the First Fleet had been well planned and supervised, the second was a story of neglect, brutality and deliberate starvation. The job of transporting the convicts had been given to private contractors, whose usual cargo was African slaves. Slaves fared slightly better, however, because with slaves came the incentive for those in charge to keep as many as possible alive to sell at the other end of the journey. Here, however, no such rule applied and the more who died, the easier the contractors’ job got.
Of the 750 convicts who actually made it to NSW, 500 were hospital cases, and the half-starved colony set to work putting up emergency hospital tents. When news got back to London, a scandal erupted, and a trial of the contractors was held. (The contractors got off.) The outcry meant that even though convicts were being transported out of sight, they weren’t completely out of mind. In future, more rigorous regulations and official supervision would ensure the vast majority transported arrived alive and in reasonable health.
The colony’s parson, Reverend Johnson, described the apocalyptic scene when the Second Fleet pulled into what would become Sydney Harbour, with people throwing the bodies of those who’d just died overboard. The bodies floated in on the tide in front of the ships, and came to rest on the rocks. On shore many of the convicts being unloaded were so weak they couldn’t walk: ‘Some creeped upon their hands and knees, and some were carried upon the backs of others’.
Going on board one of the ships, Reverend Johnson found ‘a sight truly shocking to the feelings of humanity, a great number of them lying, some half and others nearly quite naked, without either bed or bedding, unable to turn or help themselves’.
Courting disaster with the interlopers
The local Eora and Darug people had pragmatically tried to adjust to the invasion, as fear and curiosity mingled on either side of the massive cultural divide. To begin with at least, relations were more cordial than hostile. Many of the marine officers were fascinated with these people from a completely ‘new’ and previously unknown culture. The Indigenous Australians mostly got along with the officers — the young warrior men especially.
Indigenous–convict relations continued to degenerate. Aboriginal Australians, prizing warrior prowess and with a keen eye for status and prestige, largely enjoyed the company of First Fleet officers, who were for their part more curious and respectful than hostile. Convicts and Aboriginals, however, despised each other. Mutual distrust reigned, and thefts, rape and payback killings began to increase.
But the convicts themselves weren’t the great fracturing event. A year after the killings at Rushcutters Bay, a smallpox epidemic struck the settlement. Most of the white settlers had already established immunity to the disease, but the effect on Indigenous Australians was devastating. Some 50 per cent of Aboriginal people in the Sydney region died as a consequence.
Bennelong and Phillip
One of the Eora leaders, a man named Bennelong, developed a unique relationship with Governor Phillip — which is pretty amazing, because he started out by being kidnapped, on Governor Phillip’s direct orders, in November 1789.
Phillip really wanted to learn the local Aboriginal languages and get a better sense of the local customs. Essentially, he wanted to find out how he could discuss and negotiate, and, well, let’s just say that that moment in the meeting where someone points out, ‘Kidnapping people to initiate good relations with the neighbours is actually a really, incredibly stupid idea, sir’ just didn’t happen that day. The instructions from the British Government were to live harmoniously with the local tribes, and to get to know them as well. And abduction … just seemed to be the way to go about realising those aims.
Bennelong clearly wasn’t too thrilled at the prospect of becoming the Governor’s captive ambassador. He engaged, he picked up the newcomers’ language, and he filled them in on local names and peoples — and he then took off pretty much as soon as he got the chance, shortly after the leg irons had been removed and he’d gained his captors’ trust.
First, though, some sort of payback was required.
Phillip was speared at Manly Cove near Sydney, after he’d been invited there by Bennelong as he and his clan feasted on a stranded whale there. Manly was the place Bennelong had been originally abducted from, and this hardly seems a coincidence. The spear wound wasn’t fatal, but then it wasn’t meant to be. Soon after this, Bennelong re-established relations with the Governor, this time not as captive but on some sort of equality, or mutual recognition.
When
