Left: Elizabeth Macarthur, a less perturbed figure than her husband the Perturbator. (‘Elizabeth Macarthur’, ca 1820, by unknown artist. Dixson Gallery, State Library of New South Wales DG223) Right: John Macarthur. The hunger, suspicion, combativeness and restless energy seem evident in this face, and even the ‘basilisk [serpent] eyes’ of which Governor King accused him. (‘John Macarthur’, ca 1820, by an unknown artist. Dixson Gallery, State Library of New South Wales DG222)
Esther Abrahams, as the affluent and mature wife of the soldier George Johnston and a woman respected even by Exclusives. An East End Jewish girl sentenced at about fifteen for shoplifting, she had a child in Newgate prison before being sent to New South Wales aboard the First Fleet. Such transformation from felon to matriarch was not uncommon in New South Wales. (Courtesy of Leichhardt Council Local History collection. Reproduced from copy held in their collection)
The famous cartoon, unreliable as it is, which has told against Bligh for more than two hundred years. Was he in the room destroying or concealing documents, or was he really, in the full pomp of uniform, under the bed? Commissioned by Sergeant Whittle, this watercolour shows Corporal Michael Marlborough dragging out the governor. The officer on the right is Lieutenant Minchin. All the mutineers have legs like dancers, but Bligh is more grossly rendered. (‘The arrest of Governor Bligh’, attributed to Sergeant William Minchin. State Library of New South Wales/The Bridgeman Art Library/ photolibrary.com)
The watercolour, ‘Costume of the Australasians’, is remarkable for the social inclusiveness of colonial society it shows. Two men of substance greet each other on the left, and on the far-right a ‘canary’, a convict in yellow, carries his burden. Many visitors mention blue dungaree coats or suits which two men in the picture seem to be wearing. (‘Costume of the Australasians’, ca 1818, by Edward Close, watercolour. Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales)
Detail of Port Jackson. The Eora still assert ownership, but that great northern European machine, the flour mill, is evident and permanent in the distance. In the mid-ground are the northern European animals, future wealth on hard hoofs, on whose behalf the Eora and other language groups will lose all. (Detail ‘Part of the harbour of Port Jackson, and the country between Sydney and the Blue Mountains, New South Wales’ drawn by Major Taylor, 48 Regt., engraved by R Havell & Son, published 1823. National Library of Australia, nla.pic-an5577467
A good-natured London aquatint of 1823 shows a beautiful harbour and a town in good order in which even the convicts working on rocks on the left seem energetic in paying their debt to the law’s majesty. This image is at odds with the reports of Commissioner Bigge, then being published, and New South Wales’s reputation as a maelstrom of depravity which involved all the figures in this landscape. (‘The entrance of Port Jackson and part of the town of Sydney, New South Wales’ drawn by Major Taylor, 48 Regt., engraved by R Havell &Son, published 1823. National Library of Australia, nla.pic-an5575513)
Left: George Barrington was such a renowned gentleman pickpocket that his very name became a brand, and after his transportation in 1791, unscrupulous publishers continued to issue tales of his adventures, many of them purporting to be written by him. In fact, he was a haunted soul and chief constable at Parramatta. (‘Barrington picking the pocket of J Brown Esqr’, 1790, etching. National Library of Australia, nla.pic-an9454411) Right: The London radical Dr Maurice Margarot, one of the ‘Scottish Martyrs’ arrested for inflammatory speeches at a British Convention in Scotland. In Sydney with his wife, Citizen Margarot was a plague to an increasingly testy, alcoholic and frightened Governor King. (‘Maurice Margarot’, 1794, engraving. National Library of Australia, nla.pic-an9727349)
The passionate United Irishman General Joseph Holt, a bugbear for Governor King and under suspicion of planning the slaughter of the administration and its friends. To temper him, King made him attend floggings of more junior United Irish convicts. (‘Gen. Holt, the leader of the Irish rebels’, 184?-, engraving. National Library of Australia, nla. pic-an9648506)
Three of the seven splendid and ostracised daughters of Wentworth and his wife Sarah, an illegitimate child of convicts. Thus Wentworth passed on his lack of belonging and his repute to a new generation. (‘The Three Graces’, Hans Julius Gruder, 1868, Vaucluse House Collection, Historic Houses Trust of NSW)
The young radical, Wentworth, scourge of colonial pretension, edgy about his parentage, jealous for the repute of father and his nation, always the outsider, and ultimately to be transformed by increasing wealth into an equally turbulent Tory. (‘William Charles Wentworth’, ca 1848, copy of lithograph. Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales SPF P1/W )
Governor Ralph Darling, who manages to resemble a martinet and man of vengeance in this portrait painted before he left Britain to take New South Wales in hand. (‘Portrait of Ralph Darling, Governor of New South Wales, 1825-1831’, 1825 by John Linnell, oil on wood panel. National Library of Australia, nla.pic-an3291077)
The young poet from Ulladulla, Henry Kendall, nationalist and friend of republicans and Chartists, who would fight so gallantly to discern an Australian muse and to assert that one could be a man of letters in New South Wales. This face is unmarred by the destitution, alcoholism and lunacy which lie ahead. (‘Henry Kendall as a young poet’. Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales Pic.Acc.6510)
Left: Young Henry Parkes, the Chartist ivory-turner, poor businessman, but orator so accomplished he could stand atop an omnibus and galvanise a crowd on the subject of ending transportation. (‘Sir Henry Parkes’, ca 1853. Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales PXA 345, 19a) Right: Daniel Deniehy was the brilliant child of Irish convicts, dazzling in spiky oratory and the inventor of the phrase ‘bunyip aristocracy’ to describe Tory dreams of an Australian House of Lords. The New South Wales constitution would end his republican dream, and alcoholism would mar his life. (‘Daniel Deniehy’, ca 1860 photograph. Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales, SPF P1/D(BM))
Henry Parkes, darling of progressives and sworn to fight the conservatives over the New South Wales constitution, born aloft by admirers after winning a seat in the Legislative Council. (‘Henry Parkes, Esq, carried in triumph to the Empire office’, Illustrated Sydney News 6 May 1854. Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales TN115)
Hobart’s first house and its livestock, 1806. It was inhabited by GP Harris, a surveyor set the task by David Collins of surveying and assessing the geographically complex Hobart region. (‘GP Harris, cottage, Hobart Town, VD Land, Aug.1806’, watercolour. National Library of Australia, nla.pic-an5380489)
The artist John Richardson Glover emigrated to Van Diemen’s Land in his sixties to join his sons. He describes this sketch as being of the artist ‘after labour with the pencil, invigorating his fundamentals and enjoying the wit of the convict servants in their hut’. (‘A young artist after labour...’, 1835 by John Glover, drawing in sketchbook ‘Van Diemen’s Land’. National Library of Australia, nla.pic-an4623117)
The Irish convict mess orderlies turning up at the cooking shack or coppers on deck found that the cook frequently complained of not being able to work out how to divide the reduced amounts of meat between all the messes. The prisoners appealed to Lieutenant Blow, and he told them to elect one of their own to stand beside the second mate during the weighing. The prisoners also complained to Ensign Cummings of the New South Wales Corps, who in turn asked Lieutenant Blow to intervene, but Blow merely replied, ‘My dear fellow, what can I do?’
Magistrates in New South Wales to whom the convicts complained after landing would eventually find that the rations stipulated in the contract with Camden, Calvert and King had not been supplied, that frauds had been committed, and that those who should have seen that the full ration was served had failed to exercise their authority. The magistrates passed the matter on to Phillip, who wrote in his dispatch to the Home Secretary, ‘I doubt if I have the power of inflicting a punishment adequ
ate to the crime.’
Little is known about the first Irish convict ship, Queen, precisely because it would be so long before their sentencing papers caught up with the prisoners she carried. But if Queen’s convicts were like later Irish shiploads, the crimes of the women were at least in part motivated by want when the potatoes gave out in the spring, and shoplifting and theft became an option for those who needed cash or goods to trade for oatmeal. A certain number of the males, about two dozen, were members of an Irish peasant secret society, the Defenders, who had arisen as local groups to protect Catholics against the raids of a similar Protestant organisation named the Peep-of-Day Boys. Many landlords disapproved of the radical, house-burning tendencies of the Peep-of-Day Boys, especially in the Armagh area, where raids and murders of Catholics and burning of cabins and farmhouses occurred throughout the mid 1780s. Some Protestant landlords even advised their Catholic tenants to arm themselves, despite it being illegal for a Catholic to own or carry a firearm. Public sentiment on both sides of the sectarian chasm at first had some sympathy for the men who called themselves Defenders. Feelings deepened, however, when Defenders moved to the offensive against suspected Peep-of-Day-ers, or became vocal, or when they refused to buy any goods from or trade with any business which had Peep-of-Day connections or sympathies.
These people who owned so little were bolstered by enduring myths of the kind which grow amongst the defeated. In their eyes, Christ was their fellow-sufferer and was close to them, and would in the end exalt them, confounding their enemies and destroying the British apparatus of landlord and magistrate. Peasant myths arose which depicted the Irish armed with nothing but cornstalks turning back the armies of England. Such desperately held hopes came to New South Wales with the two dozen or so Defenders and their numerous sympathisers aboard Queen.
The forerunner of this Third Fleet, the little Mary Ann with her female convicts aboard, appeared off Sydney on the morning of 9 July 1791. She had made the quickest passage yet—four months and sixteen days. But the captain, Mark Munro, not only had no private letters aboard, ‘but had not brought a single newspaper’. The officers on the Mary Ann could tell Tench, however—that there was ‘No war; the fleet’s dismantled.’
The women disembarking from Mary Ann were all very healthy and spoke highly of the treatment they had received from Munro. Tench thought that Captain Munro should be praised. ‘The advocates of humanity are not yet become too numerous: but those who practise its divine precepts, however humble and unnoticed be their station, ought not to sink into obscurity, unrecorded and unpraised, with the vile monsters who deride misery, and fatten on calamity.’ The Mary Ann, which carried sufficient stores to enable two extra pounds (c 1 kilo) of rice a week to appear on the colony’s humble plates also brought the happy news that the store ship Gorgon was definitely on the way.
It also brought instructions for the governor confirming British policy that though those convicts who had served their period of transportation were not to be compelled to remain in the colony if they could somehow get home, ‘no temptation’ should be offered to induce them to quit it. So the mere prison camp was being transmuted into a society, one which operated not only by fear of punishment but by desired and embraced civil pieties. A founding element of New South Wales, and of the embryo nation it would make, was the practical inability of most time-served convicts to leave—the more the population of convicts built up, the more limited the means became of working a passage back home or accompanying a returning gentleman as a time-served servant. This meant that for many of the convicts, in no sense was New South Wales the chosen land. It was a netherworld where people got stuck, and having served time became, willy-nilly, citizens of New South Wales.
A later governor (William Bligh) would call the children born in New South Wales ‘National Children’, but it was an administrative, not a visionary term. Now, with varying degrees of reluctance and acceptance, further time-served convicts moved out during that July of 1791 with their ‘national children’ to their authorised land grants around Parramatta.
The ships which arrived after Mary Ann did not maintain her high standards of care for prisoners. The convicts who were landed sick would have been interested to see the native Bennelong at the hospital, being treated for a form of scabies, which had struck the natives that winter. The surgeons were trying to heal him with applications of sulphur. Bennelong resembled, said Phillip, ‘a perfect Lazarus’.
The Salamander’s convicts complained loudly that they had not had proper attention paid them. Phillip needed nonetheless to send the ship and her master on to Norfolk Island with convicts, stores and provisions. The majority of the convicts retained on the mainland were sent to Parramatta, employed to open up new ground at a short distance from the settlement.
The slow Admiral Barrington and her crew and convicts had suffered a hard time in the Southern Ocean and even off the New South Wales coast, where she was dragged out to sea by a ferocious southerly gale. She had suffered 36 deaths on the passage to Sydney, which she reached on 16 October 1791. The living filled White’s hospital.
Mrs Parker, the wife of Captain John Parker of the Gorgon, took the trouble when that store ship finally arrived in Sydney to visit the convicts of the Third Fleet then in hospital. She was shocked to find herself ‘surrounded by mere skeletons of men—in every bed, and on every side, lay the dying and the dead. Horrid spectacle! It makes me shudder when I reflect that it will not be the last exhibition of this kind of human misery that will take place in this country, whilst the present method of transporting these miserable wretches is pursued.’
In these same grim vessels two convicts arrived in New South Wales who would later become notable entrepreneurs. Simeon Lord was significantly a convicted thief of linen who, once landed, acted as a servant to a captain in the New South Wales Corps. He would later become one of the emancipated convict front men who would retail goods purchased by the officers of the corps. Another entrepreneur in the making, a young felon named James Underwood, would go into the shipping business with Henry Kable. But their glory days were some time off yet.
*
In the midst of all the ill-run, profit-driven ships of the Third Fleet, the store ship Gorgon had appeared. ‘I will not say that we contemplated its approach with mingled sensations,’ wrote Tench, by now a veteran of such arrivals. ‘We hailed it with rapture and exultation.’ Gorgon contained six months’ full provisions for about nine hundred people. Lieutenant King, having returned to England to be married, arrived back on the Gorgon with the new rank of commander, accompanied by his wife Anna Josepha Coombe, a generous-spirited woman who would look to the welfare of his children by the convict Ann Innett as well as to that of the child she herself was carrying. Obviously King had been frank about his colonial relationship before marrying Anna Josepha between successful conferences with Sir Joseph Banks, Grenville and Nepean. He had returned with assurances about ongoing support for New South Wales, and these he passed on to Arthur Phillip.
Indeed, an extraordinary validating device had arrived on the Gorgon, and been delivered to Phillip’s office at Government House. It was the Great Seal of New South Wales. On the obverse were the King’s arms with the royal titles in the margin; on the reverse, an image of convicts landing at Botany Bay, greeted by the goddess Industry. Surrounded by her symbols, a bale of merchandise, a beehive, a pickaxe and a shovel, she releases them from their fetters and points to oxen ploughing, and to a town rising on the summit of a hill with a fort for its protection. In the bay, the masts of a ship are to be seen. In the margin lie the words Sigillum. Nov. Camb. Aust., Seal of New South Wales; and for a motto, Sic Fortis Etruria Crevit, ‘In this way Tuscany grew strong’—a reference to Tuscany having once received the criminals of other places.
A BRAND NAME OF CRIME
From the modest brig Active, part of the Third Fleet, came Sydney’s first genuine celebrity criminal, an Irishman named George Barrington. D’Arcy Wentworth had been a con
siderable gentleman of the road, but Barrington was a brand name of crime, like Jesse James, Ned Kelly, Dick Turpin or Al Capone. His origins were, as people said then, mysterious, which was almost a synonym for Irish. He was sent to Dublin Grammar School where he stabbed another boy in a fight, was flogged, and in response stole money and ran away. Joining a band of strolling players, he was taught by an expert actor/pickpocket, who took him to London as his protégé. In 1773, his senior partner was transported to North America.
As his own operator, George Barrington achieved the status of prince of pickpockets, living splendidly despite having to spend a year in the hulks. The victims of his confidence tricks and ‘lifting’ skills included the Russian Prince Orlow, from whose pocket, at Covent Garden Theatre, he managed to steal a snuffbox inlaid with diamonds and said to be worth £30 000. Various peers of the realm were caught out by Barrington, and some of ‘the brightest luminaries in the globe of London’. Tried at the Old Bailey in September 1790 for stealing a gold watch and chain at the Enfield racecourse, he was sentenced to transportation for the light term of seven years. The press reported that he had tried to console other rogues in the general wards of Newgate about the fact that they were all to be sent to a country where the natives had no pockets to pick.
After his transportation, his name remained in use in British true crime pamphlets and chapbooks. Having been the generic gentleman pickpocket, he became the generic redeemed thief, and the idea of New South Wales as a place of redemption for deficient Britons gained great currency. In 1793, a small but popular tract named An Impartial and Circumstantial Narrative of the Present State of Botany Bay, and in 1802, The History of New South Wales, would be published under his name, but may or may not have come from his hand. In the second, more credible book, he is quoted as saying that the appearance of the convicts at the time his ship arrived was truly deplorable, ‘the generality of them being emaciated by disease, foul air, etc’.