Australian History For Dummies. Alex McDermott

Australian History For Dummies

too open and the land without good fresh water — and they soon relocated to Sydney Cove, in Port Jackson, where modern-day Sydney now stands.

The human material: Who were these people?

The First Fleet had arrived in NSW. So far so good. But now the hard work began. What sort of material did Captain Phillip have to work with here? Well. The human material wasn’t great, actually. While convicts arriving in early NSW were a mixed bag — including first-time offenders, ‘fall guys’, people in regular work, and those from the country and from Ireland (who were often transported for nothing much at all) — the main core of the convicts were career crims.

Most of the convicts under Phillip’s charge, and the bulk of convicts for the subsequent decades, were predominantly from urban areas, and many were from the criminal subculture. Through the 18th century, people had moved (or been moved) off the land and away from the traditional rural order, and many had drifted into the major cities. As the town populations burgeoned, so too did the criminal underworld, and among Phillip’s founding settlers were card-carrying members of it. More than half the criminals transported for the next 80 years came from cities, with nearly a third before 1819 coming from London.

Many of the convicts were literate criminals, such as forgers and embezzlers. Others were petty thieves (more than 80 per cent of convicts overall were transported for some kind of theft), burglars, horse-, cattle- and sheep-stealers (many were members of professional gangs), shoplifters, pickpockets and (the real convict royals) the occasional highwayman. Largely, the convicts were either professional thieves, living off their wits and enjoying their gains while they could, or itinerant tramps and wanderers, notoriously ‘improvident’, pugnacious, restless, big fans of egalitarianism (no differences between thieves) and with a love of independence (no bosses thanks).

In summer, these career criminals tramped around the countryside, haunting fairs, market days and race meetings, stealing chickens from gardens and sleeping under hedges. They were often drunk, and would have been prime candidates for any Gamblers Anonymous meeting. Although the line ‘honour among thieves’ was regularly trotted out, they tended to show little mutual trust, thieving from each other, dobbing each other in with the authorities after a fight or an argument, and frequently turning witness for the Crown in a trial and giving evidence against associates. If you think they probably weren’t ideal material to start a colony with, after the first couple of months Phillip would have emphatically agreed.

A negative character reference didn’t particularly distinguish the convicts from most of the other people who had accompanied them out to NSW — namely, the marines and soldiers. People sometimes make the mistake of thinking of these two groups as occupying rigidly differentiated categories. The opposite was usually the case. Today’s soldier was tomorrow’s crim: Today, you’re a soldier defending His Majesty’s best interests in a pitched battle on Bunker Hill in Boston as part of the American War of Independence; tomorrow, you’re demobbed in Portsmouth with little money and no livelihood, and happen to walk past a shop stocked with expensive linen and calicos and spy that the wares are invitingly unattended and unsupervised. Before you know it, you’re bound for Botany Bay, old son.

Holding Out at Sydney

Once the First Fleet had arrived in what would become Sydney, Captain Phillip tried to get the convicts to work, which didn’t go too well. Taken out of 18th-century London criminal subculture, dumped down in an alien wilderness, and expected to toil each day to establish crops and a settlement wasn’t their idea of smart living. They wandered off whenever they could, threw away tools into the bush, and generally behaved like grumpy contestants on an episode of Big Brother.

The assumption on the part of Lord Sydney in the Colonial Office in London had been that the convicts’ main punishment was exile — that once they’d been transported and had arrived in NSW, they’d be ‘free on the ground’. ‘Not on your life!’ said Arthur Phillip (or something similar). ‘You can see how little they do as servants of the Crown. Can you imagine what a disaster it would be if they were left to their own devices?’ So he insisted that the convicts should work on public farms under guard, and he continued to coerce, cajole and browbeat them. Neither of these two moves met with much success.

Using convicts as guards

Phillip had his problems getting convicts to work in the new settlement at Sydney, but the convicts weren’t the only troublesome bunch. Phillip’s other big problem was the officers and soldier marines.

The soldiers refused to guard the convicts, insisting it wasn’t their job because they weren’t prison wardens. The ensuing discussion must have been something like the following: ‘You’re kidding?’(from Arthur Phillip). ‘Can’t you at least keep an eye on them? Encourage them to till the soil a little more enthusiastically?’ ‘Nope’ (delivered flatly, from the soldiers). ‘We’re officers and soldiers. We’re here to protect you from foreign attack, or put down uprisings. Anything else is most definitively Not Our Problem.’

So Phillip was forced to appoint convicts as overseers, which made for a strange situation (prisoners guarding prisoners), but was nothing compared to when Phillip was forced by necessity to make convicts nightwatchmen and constables. This meant, of course, that soon enough you had convict constables arresting marines doing wrong. The officers flipped, but Phillip’s sympathy was, shall I say, not greatly discernible.

Phillip wrote to Britain with complaints — the convicts wouldn’t farm and the soldiers wouldn’t guard — and asked that Britain start sending out free settlers, arguing he could provide each settler with convicts as labourers. From his comfortable digs in Soho Square, Sir Joseph Banks (the botanist who had sailed with Cook and had pushed for the settlement of NSW in the first place) thought this was a terrific thing to do. He urged the government to send out free families, and to give them land grants, ten convicts and four years’ support. Both Phillip and Banks were ignored, however, and the plan went nowhere. As time went on, it became more and more clear that the people sent out on the First Fleet would be the kind of material the new colony had to work with. The colony would sink or swim with these most dubious elements of Georgian Britain.

Issuing ultimatums (and being ignored)

With no free settlers forthcoming from Britain, Phillip had to try to make the most of the convicts and marines he was stuck with in NSW. To do this, he tried threats, issuing the convicts with an ultimatum: No work, no eat. Rations would be given only to those who put in. The convicts called his bluff. ‘What?’ they said (or something similar). ‘You’re going to just let us all starve, are you? The government is just going to send us out here, to the other side of the world, and leave us to die?’

The convicts who arrived on the First Fleet weren’t left to die — the Governor couldn’t let that happen to convict settlers he’d been charged with looking after (and the convicts knew it) — but starvation did become a real threat. In 1789, a British ship en route to the colony with supplies struck an iceberg and sank. The great risks involved with establishing a settlement in a remote part of the world with no pre-existing shipping or trade routes became more and more apparent with each passing day as famine loomed. By early 1790, the colony’s supplies had dwindled alarmingly.

Soldiering on regardless

In addition to the difficulties with the criminals and the marines, the ground Phillip

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