This group of perhaps more symbolic than substantial importance was rowed along the Parramatta River to choose land, and settled some eleven kilometres west of Sydney behind a screen of mangroves in an area which was thereafter known as Liberty Plains, near present-day Homebush. Here Rose was awarded 80 acres (32.4 hectares), and later a further 120 (48.6 hectares). The choice is puzzling, since Liberty Plains was a low-lying area of swamps and lagoons, and its tidal sediments held no nutrients. Maybe Rose was over-influenced by Major Grose in the matter. But soon he repented and moved with his family further west to the farmlands around Prospect Hill, and then to the richer alluvial country along the Hawkesbury River at Wilberforce.
Rose and his wife, Jane Topp, were models of sober and inconspicuous industry. Jane, delivered of an Australian son and daughter, lived to see her grandchildren’s children, and when she died in 1827 was said to be Australia’s first great-grandmother.
BENNELONG RETURNS
In December 1794, Grose returned to England for health reasons, leaving the penal settlement for some months in the hands of the equally amenable and malleable Captain William Paterson, Commandant of the New South Wales Corps. The sixty-year-old bachelor and former captain of the Sirius, John Hunter, returned to the colony as governor aboard the Reliance on 7 September 1795. He brought with him a few barrels of provisions, a town clock and the parts of a windmill for assembly ashore, and plenty of advice on how to sort out the military officers. Also aboard was the returning Sydney native and familiar of Phillip’s, Bennelong. When Bennelong went aboard the Reliance at Deptford after two years in England, he had been suffering a bad congestion of the kind that had sent his fellow Sydney native Yemmerrawanne to a grave in Eltham. Hunter wrote that ‘disappointment’ in England had broken Bennelong’s spirit. Whether he meant that in leaving his charges to endure a hard winter in some solitude Phillip had let his spiritual brother Bennelong down, we do not know. But enthusiastic young Surgeon George Bass kept Bennelong warm and alive aboard Reliance, and the spring weather off the Azores restored him.
Captain Collins described Bennelong, returned to Sydney, as conducting himself with a polished familiarity towards his sisters and other relations but being distant and quite the man of consequence to his acquaintances. He announced to the Aborigines of Sydney that he would no longer let them fi ght and cut each other’s throats as had happened in the past. He would introduce peace amongst them and make them love each other. He also wanted them to be better mannered when they appeared at Government House. He seemed embarrassed by ‘some little indelicacies’ in his sister Carrangarang, who had rushed up from Botany Bay to greet him, carrying a little nephew on her back, but having ‘left her habiliments behind her’. At table at the white stucco Government House above Sydney Cove, he showed the greatest propriety. But he wanted to track down his former second wife, Karubarabulu, and was upset to hear she was living with a man named Caruey, who had inflicted bitter wounds on a Botany Bay native to establish his permanent title to her. Bennelong sought out the couple and presented Karubarabulu with an elegant rose-coloured petticoat and jacket made of a coarse stuff, accompanied with a gypsy bonnet of the same colour, and for a time she deserted her lover and followed her former husband. But she confused the Europeans when, within a few days, they saw her walking naked about town. Bennelong fought for her and according to one account beat Caruey severely at Rose Bay, using ‘his fists instead of the weapons of his country’, obviously a medium of combat he had picked up as a temporary Englishman. Whoever won, Bennelong could not restrain Karubarabulu from returning to the younger man. Indeed, Bennelong himself was away from Government House for long periods, leaving his London clothes behind, returning to resume them when he chose and to toast the King with John Hunter.
After his return, perhaps under suspicion that he might have acquired new powers during his absence, Bennelong was commonly accused of causing, by magic, the deaths of Eora people (which appeared, to the Europeans, to be due to natural causes). He was accused, for example, of causing the death of a woman who had reported to others in the camp that she had dreamed that Bennelong had killed her. Sorry ceremonies—minor battles between the clan of the accused and the clan of the deceased—continued. The women who attended them would howl and cry, but then become enraged at the sight of blood, dancing and beating their sides with their arms. Thus the cultural politics of Aboriginal life continued, and despite his speech to his brethren on his return from England, Bennelong became involved.
In December 1797, Colby, the friend of Bennelong, and a young man called Yeranibe faced each other in town and attacked one another with clubs. Yeranibe’s shield fell from his grasp, and while he was stooping to pick it up Colby struck him on the head. While he was down, despite the risk of being called geerun, or coward, and the likelihood that the friends of the young man would pursue him, Colby hit him again, and then ran away. Yeranibe was looked after by some of the Europeans, but died after six days. Colby spent the time leading up to his young victim’s death south of the settlement in the company of friends and relatives. Meanwhile, near town, as a song of lamentation was being sung for the dying Yeranibe by his female relatives, his clansmen suddenly started up and seized their weapons and went off to hunt for Colby. Finding him, they beat him severely, intending to kill him outright when the boy died.
By the side of the road below the military barracks Yeranibe was buried the next day. Every Aboriginal at the funeral seemed determined that Colby must die. In fact a young man related to Colby had to be saved by a soldier from being executed on the spot. Colby realised that he must either submit to ‘the trial usual on such occasions’ or live in continual fear ‘of being taken off by a midnight murder and a single hand.’ He decided to face the relatives of Yeranibe, but in town. In that way, he might be able to use his military friends as a brake on the anger of Yeranibe’s clan. On the nominated day, Colby presented himself at the rendezvous, near the barracks on the western ridge of Sydney Cove. ‘The rage and violence’ shown by the friends of Yeranibe overpowered Colby, and when he fell and a group of Yeranibe’s kinsmen rushed in to finish him with their spears, several soldiers stepped in, lifted Colby and took him into the barracks.
Bennelong had been present but had not taken any part in proceedings. The impression was that though he could not neglect turning up in some capacity, he had no stomach for the argument. He was armed, however, and when the soldiers stepped in he suddenly became enraged, like a referee who saw a violation of rules, and threw a spear which entered a soldier’s back and came out close to the navel. Bennelong was dragged away by the new provost-marshal, an onlooker full of rage at the soldiers who had begun clubbing him with musket butts and inflicted a wound on his head.
The principles of Aboriginal justice would always confuse the British, and the sight of a fellow soldier transfixed with Bennelong’s spear (the wound fortunately healed) was not a good way to invite tolerant interest. Bennelong showed little gratitude at being saved from the anger of the military, and next morning he disappeared. He had become, in Collins’s eyes, ‘a most insolent and troublesome savage’. He was heard to declare that he intended to spear Governor Hunter whenever he saw him, but that proved to be blather.
The normal picture of Bennelong’s life promoted by European writers—both Bennelong’s contemporaries and of the present day—has him entering a decline, becoming addicted to liquor, and losing his influence with his people.
Indeed, when he died in 1813 on the grounds of the freed convict brewer James Squire at Kissing Point, north-west of Sydney Cove, the Sydney Gazette wrote, ‘Of this veteran champion of the native tribe little favourable can be said. His voyage and benevolent treatment in Britain produced no change whatever in his manners and inclinations, which were naturally barbarous and ferocious.’
Yet at the time of his death, he was surrounded by at least a hundred kinsmen, which did not indicate a man rejected by his people. As late as 1805, he was now quarrelling with Col
by over Karubarabulu, but the fact that his love of that Botany Bay Aboriginal woman was not necessarily requited did not of itself involve a decline. Was the Sydney Gazette’s judgment accurate, or did it bespeak attitude more than reality? Was the Sydney Gazette aggrieved that, after an early attempt, despite the advantages of having encountered British society, Bennelong had not moved amongst his people as an apostle of European culture? Since he seems to have become a heavy drinker—like many of the Europeans in the Sydney Basin, yet perhaps more tragically given his previous lack of exposure to liquor—he has sometimes been depicted as an archetype of his peoples’ tragedy.
Bennelong’s son, born of Barangaroo, in some respects followed his father’s lead, and shared his curious, sociable nature. He was adopted by the Reverend William Walker, a popular Methodist minister with an interest in the Aboriginals at Blacktown, south-west of Sydney Cove, and elsewhere, and christened Thomas Walker Coke. He would die at the age of about twenty.
In Hunter’s time, and then later in Governor King’s, Pemulwuy was still at large and leading his relatives and the western natives (the Dharug people) in the wooded regions of the Sydney Basin. He was energetic in razing maize fields, and one party of his warriors came in so close to Sydney that his followers wounded a convict travelling from the brickfield huts on the town’s verge to a local farm on business. By 1798 he had decided that because he had been frequently shot at but never severely wounded, he could not be killed by English firearms.
The Hawkesbury Aborigines were similarly at war. An open boat travelling from the Hawkesbury loaded with Indian corn for Port Jackson was overrun while still in the river by Aborigines, a number of whom were killed. It was the second such boat attacked in this way, in what could be considered, in European terms, piracy.
In Sydney, the authorities knew Pemulwuy’s resistance was buoyed by what Collins described in 1795 as ‘ill and impolitic conduct’ on the part of some of the settlers towards the natives. Pemulwuy’s warriors had told a young convict they had made friends with that they intended to execute three of the settlers— Michael Doyle, Robert Forrester, a First Fleet thief, and William Nixon—and had attacked two others mistaking them for Doyle and Forrester. The young Englishman, John Wilson, to whom this plan of vengeance was mentioned was remarkably trusted by the various Sydney Aboriginal groups. A former sailor, he had been sentenced to seven years transportation in 1785 for stealing ‘nine yards of cotton cloth called velveret of the value of tenpence’. Now he was an emancipist, a free or time-served former convict, but even while he was serving his sentence it was noticed he had a special relationship with the Sydney clans. Achieving his freedom, he began to spend most of his time with them, and such behaviour was repellent enough to his betters for them to consider him ‘a wild idle young man’. The authorities had nonetheless used him in excursions to the west, north and south, and he had invented a patois halfway between Eora and English. The Sydney Aboriginals had given him a name—Bun-bo-e. He wore kangaroo skins—not entirely uncommon among the Europeans— and his body was scarred with ritual markings as noticeably as the bodies of tribespeople. Seeing him entering their lives like a man under an enchantment, the Sydney natives must have regretted that it was this young sailor alone whose soul they had caught, who had remembered that in an earlier life he had been one of them. They must have hoped that the others might ultimately find their true natures and follow Wilson, Bun-bo-e, into the real life.
The government was fearful that he might tell the Sydney natives about the vulnerability of Sydney and Parramatta, so in February 1795 they sent him on an expedition to Port Stephens with a young surveyor, Charles Grimes. Here he stepped in on a confrontation with the natives and, talking to them in Eora, saved Grimes from being speared. The Port Stephens natives had already heard good things of Wilson by news passed up the coast via the Hawkesbury Aborigines, and his ritual markings were eloquent to them.
Others did not find living as an Aboriginal so easy. The escaped Parramatta convict John Tarwood and his three mates, who had stolen a boat in 1791 and lived in the Port Stephens hinterland, surrendered in 1795 to a passing ship, despite having survived with the Aborigines and having had wives allotted them. The natives, according to Tarwood, believed that they were the spirits of ancestors fallen in battle and returned from the sea, and one native appeared firmly to believe that his father had come back in the person of one of them and took the man to the spot where his body had been burned. It seemed that the bits of the Eora language they had picked up were not understood by the Port Stephens people, except for one boy, Wurgan, whose mother came from Sydney.
Though Tarwood and his friends returned gratefully, even to embrace European-style punishment, ultimately preferring to do that rather than live amongst natives they said were gentle and courteous to them, over coming years John Wilson continued to straddle two realities and to attract suspicion for seeming to prefer the nomadic life over the settled. He may have been motivated by sexual opportunism, but it was not as if Aboriginal society offered greater chances of gratifi cation than did Sydney itself.
The next time he turned up in Sydney, in 1797, Wilson wore nothing but an apron formed from a kangaroo skin, and told people that the scarifying of his shoulders and breast had been very painful. Interviewed by the governor, he described pastures to the south-west. Hunter decided to use this knowledge, though Collins doubted that Wilson had been, as he claimed, a hundred miles (160 kilometres) in every direction from the settlement. Exploration would prove he was telling the truth.
In January 1798, when a number of newly arrived Irish prisoners seemed ready, like the prisoners of the Queen earlier in the decade, to escape and seek what they believed to be a new world of white people, situated this time not north of the Hawkesbury but about two hundred miles (320 kilometres) south-west of Sydney, Governor Hunter, in order to ‘save worthless lives’, sent off four of these Irish, under an armed guard and with Wilson as guide, to show them that no such deliverance awaited them. The Irishmen soon grew tired of the tangled and spiky bush and returned with the soldiers to Port Jackson, but Wilson and two companions, one of them John Price, a trusted servant of the governor, pushed on into country unknown to Europeans. In the south-west, the Great Dividing Range, which hemmed in the Sydney Basin, retreated westwards, and the three explorers were able to reach the Wingecarribee River, more than 160 kilometres south-west of Parramatta. Wilson’s two companions suffered great discomfort and exhaustion in the bush, and were saved by Wilson’s bushcraft—his ability to navigate and hunt. The journal of Price, Hunter’s servant who accompanied Wilson, was forwarded to Sir Joseph Banks, since it has the fi rst record of the shooting of a lyrebird and the first written reference to the ‘cullawine’ (koala).
Governor Hunter was impressed enough to send Wilson and two other men back into the same country, and this time the expedition reached Mount Towrang, on the ridge above the site of what would become the town of Goulburn.
Despite the leverage these discoveries gave Wilson in the European community, by 1799 he reverted to ‘the wildlife’, and the following year was killed by an angry Aboriginal male when he attempted to take a young woman for what Collins referred to as his ‘exclusive accommodation’. It was not the fi rst time Wilson had been caught trying to coerce women, some of them extremely young by modern standards. But this not uncommon cause of death amongst Aboriginal males closed out the life of the first European to attempt to live in a way his contemporaries considered savage.
POLITICALS
Though the Irish Defenders would have certainly considered their crimes as political, the authorities chose not to. The first prisoners all parties agreed on as being political and therefore dangerous were a group of fi ve named the Scottish Martyrs—not all of them Scottish, but so named for the place of their arrest and trial. They were representatives of the thousands of men and women who promoted in Britain the ideals of the American and French Revolutions, and Hunter and, later, Governor King found t
hem an administrative annoyance and suspected them of subversion.
In the 1790s, Britain had been swept by radical ‘corresponding societies’, men and women spreading revolutionary concepts through the mails, with even members of the Royal Navy—turbulent, unpaid, infected by the ideas of the United Irishmen and the French—participating in the passion. It ultimately meant that New South Wales was due to receive a few heroes rather than thieves.
The Scottish Martyrs were sentenced to transportation in 1794. One of them, William Skirving, had been educated at Edinburgh University, a prosperous farmer’s son. In the 1790s he became secretary of the recently formed Scottish Association of the Friends of the People, and helped to organise a series of meetings in Edinburgh which were attended by radical members of the association from all over Britain and which government spies also attended. The Friends of the People had been an almost respectable Whig body founded by Charles Grey, the future prime minister, Lord John Russell and Richard Sheridan, the Irish playwright. But it had in the eyes of government taken on too much French Jacobin (that is, revolutionary) coloration. Its radicalism was directed in large part at the sin of landlordism, the hunger of the masses, general inequality before the law, and republicanism. In December 1793, Skirving was arrested in Scotland with John Gerrald and Dr Maurice Margarot, who had come up from England for the meetings. At his trial for sedition Skirving was accused of distributing political pamphlets and imitating ‘the proceedings of the French Convention’ by calling other group members ‘Citizen’. He was found guilty after the judge directed the jury to consider sedition as ‘violating the peace and order of society’. Although sympathetic parliamentarians argued against his sentence of fourteen years in the House of Commons, Skirving was transported.
Dr Maurice Margarot and John Gerrald received similar sentences, as did Thomas Fyshe Palmer, who had written the offending pamphlets. Dr Margarot was something of a star radical, son of a French wine merchant, head of the London Corresponding Society, and though approaching his fi fties, sturdy and keen-eyed. He had crossed to Paris in September 1792 to attend the National Convention, to which he extended his congratulations on the execution of Louis XVI. Pamphlets he wrote urged fiscal and electoral reform, shorter parliaments and a broader franchise. Margarot’s trial generated mob demonstrations in his favour outside the Edinburgh court. His young fellow delegate to Scotland, John Gerrald, was the son of a West Indies plantation owner. His friends believed he would not survive transportation, because he suffered from consumption.