Imprisoned in Paradise
Our Country’s Good by Timberlake Wertenbaker
Theatr Clwyd, 1995
Transportation of convicted felons to far-flung outposts of the empire was less about punishment and deterrence than it was about banishing anti-social elements from the fabric of Georgian England. Up to 1776, some 30,000 convicts had been shipped across the Atlantic, but the American Revolution presented Pitt’s government with the problem of finding another sink of oblivion into which criminals could be safely jettisoned out of sight and out of mind. Captain Cook had brought back a favourable report of the fertile landscape of New South Wales following his brief visit there in 1770, and the naturalist Joseph Banks spoke enthusiastically of its climate, declaring it “similar to Toulouse in the South of France”. So Australia, or New Holland as it was still called, became the chosen land. The First Fleet which put to sea in 1787 under Captain Arthur Phillip was in effect setting out to build a prison in a paradise.
The company consisted of around 750 prisoners, of which a third were female, their sentences ranging from seven years to life. In addition there were over four hundred guards and their officers, clerks, wives and families dispersed among six transports, the guardship Sirius, and several store carriers. The flotilla made landfall at Port Jackson, later named Sydney Harbour after the Home Secretary, on 16 January 1788, at the height of the Antipodean summer. To the Aborigines watching from the shore, those first ships must have appeared as thigs literally from another world, spectacular machines of an undreamed-of complexity and power.
Phillip’s instructions from the government had been to “cultivate the affections of the natives” with “amity and kindness”, and initial contacts seemed promising. At first wary the natives quickly succumbed to the blandishments of beads, mirrors and trinkets, and a working relationship soon developed between the two groups. It was as well for the white settlers that it did. Unlike the natives, the whites had no idea how to live off the land and they were destined to struggle on the verge of starvation for several seasons. The first crop failed as the soil turned out to be much harsher than they had been led to expect, while the convict labour force were offered little incentive to work beyond the promise of the lash if they transgressed.
Fortunately for them, they were lucky in their leader. Phillip was basically a decent, resourceful man and an energetic administrator. He was convinced that this vast and virgin continent had the potential to become Britain’s greatest colony – but the Aborigines were the fly in the ointment. They respected Phillip for his material power and his obvious status among his own kind, but when the first permanent buildings were erected, marking the whites’ intention to stay, unease began to replace the Aborigines’ natural acquiescence.
A rash of petty pilfering broke out leading to skirmishes between convicts and blacks, and having started out treating the laid-back natives with friendly patronage, typical of colonisers the world over, within six months the settlers had concluded the Aborigines were “lost to all fine human feeling”. In order to impress upon them the ways of civilisation, Phillip invited the natives to witness a flogging. The few blacks who could be bothered to turn up fled the scene disgusted and terrified.
A slave settlement ruled by such brutality and rigid with social divisions could not have been more alien to the Aborigines. Rough and ready as the pioneers were, it was the natives’ total lack of sophistication in even the basics of fair-dealing that made them vulnerable and ripe for exploitation. An indolent unambitious race of hunter-gatherers, their lives had hitherto been untroubled by politics and or the influence of charismatic or ambitious chieftains. They kept no stock, ploughed no crops, built no permanent dwellings and were so technological primitive that they had not even invented the bow. But any ignorance of culture in the material European sense was compensated by lore, magic and ‘dreaming’ – and their unique relationship with the land.
In every other British colony from Virginia to Africa the natives’ claims on their territory had had to be taken into account in order to avoid wholesale war. But in Australia the Aborigines simply didn’t view land in the same way. Every hill, tree, rock and shrub had its place in the mythic whole, and ownership of it resided in collective memory and oral tradition. They had never bothered to stake out acreage because, until the whites came, there had never been any possibility of them losing it.
And there was another factor which in the long run was to prove catastrophic for the Aborigines: their tribal structure. The nomadic groups were fiercely independent, they shared no leaders or councils, and each tribe had its own language. The Iora tribe around Botany Bay were split in two by the harbour itself. Those on the north bank spoke a different dialect to those on the south, and neither could understand their neighbours who lived as little as fifty miles away. This lack of common ground precluded any kind of organised resistance against the invader, even though by the time the Aborigines as a whole woke up to the fact that they were being systematically dispossessed, it was already far too late.
In addition, they were never offered ‘slave labour’ status as there was always amole white convict manpower available to do all the work, so even these potential ‘rights’ as a colonised people were denied them. The thought of absorbing the Aborigines into society was rejected by whites of all classes. It was also conveniently assumed that as a nomadic people, one tract of land must mean as much to them as another, so they could always be moved on with impunity, if not force. Furthermore, since they appeared to have no religion in the accepted Western sense, the concepts of guilt, evidence and oaths were deemed to have no meaning for them, so it was unnecessary to offer them the recourse of justice.
In short, the Aborigines were made everyone’s scapegoat, including the convicts’, who at last had someone they could feel superior to. They resented the blacks their freedom in the bush, a resentment compounded by the bitter irony that the bush represented no such freedom for the white man. Camps were always easy to escape from; it was surviving the miles of wilderness beyond that was hard. It didn’t help that the officers used the Aborigines to track absconders. Being caught in the bush meant a flogging, as did any act of minor larceny, while a native committing a crime was – at least in the early days of peaceful co-operation – diplomatically let off. In their turn, the Aborigines despised the convicts for the degraded life they were obliged to lead.
Not that the whites of any class were living in the lap of luxury. The Second Fleet arrived in June 1790, though only three quarters had survived the voyage, and many of those who did were ill with scurvy, fever or dysentery. Things only began to pick up with the arrival of the Third Fleet the following year. Society at last came to the outback. By now there were plenty of high-born officers’ wives armed with all the latest books, news and gossip, so conversation reading music and art became established, leavening the dour struggle for mere existence. The European population now numbered some three thousand, two thirds of which were convicts, the men outnumbering the women by five to one.
The battle for economic and social power began under Major Franck Grose, Phillip’s successor as governor. Money and influence began to gravitate, as usual, to the few. Every officer who asked for it was allotted 100 acres to farm, with enough prisoner-power to make it pay. Grose also allowed these labourers to be paid in rum, so they began to work far harder than they ever had done under the threat of the lash, though the resident Reverend Richard Johnson bemoaned the fact that this new regime turned the prison camps into scenes of riotous debauch each night.
It was not long before the wholesale settlement of the land by outsiders began to drive the blacks deeper into the wilderness. Acreage was parcelled out to all-comers with the added incentive of free convict labour thrown in. In turn the hunting environment, which had always been the Aborigines’ undisputed birthright, became adulterated by the introduction of farming stock. Cattle and goats, which had been totally absent from the continent until the whites brought them in, and the merino sheep which were to be the foundation of Australia’s wealth in the 19th century, would further eat up vast areas of land.
Did any of the natives benefit at all from the invasion? At least one thought he did. In 1792, his tour of duty as governor over, Phillip had boarded the Atlantic to return to England, taking with him two Aborigines, one of whom, Bennelong, made a great hit in London as a kind of tame noble savage. In September 1795 he sailed back to the settlement with the new governor, Captain John Hunter, to show off the accoutrements of his elevation. His dress and manners were straight out of the top drawer, but once back in his homeland he quickly reverted to his old ways. He had grown to like alcohol, and accepted invitations from whites in order to get drunk. In this state he became violent, which reaction in turn cost him both the respect of the Westerners and the forbearance of his original tribe. He died, rejected by both sides, in 1813.
His story was typical. What the Aborigines didn’t have, they didn’t need. When the whites moved in and showed them what they were missing, the contact resulted in the slow but irreversible degradation of the indigenous population by the incomers. Between 1788 and 1868, when the practice of transportation was finally abolished, some 160,000 prisoners were shipped to the Antipodes. There may have been around a million Aborigines living in Australia before the whites arrived, but today, just two hundred years later, their numbers represent less than 4% of the country’s current population. The time capsule that was Australia, which had slumbered virtually undisturbed for 50,000 years, was smashed open by the axes of transported convicts, and once the fetid air of their prison hulks had got in, the place was never the same again.
PS
Like many of the articles I wrote for theatre programmes around this time, this one was greatly informed by fortuitous or timely reading. In this instance I had just recently finished Robert Hughes’s sprawling and enthralling history of early Australia, The Fatal Shore, and Clive James’s equally valuable gloss of it in an essay, A Death in Life, which he wrote for the New Yorker in 1987. (Or it might have been the other way round, Clive’s essay prompting me to read the Hughes.) But it hardly matters now, and anyway both were powerful enough to spark my sense of indignation on behalf of everyone involved. Everyone, that is, except the officers and the administrators. They chose their fate; the prisoners and the natives had not.