A Commonwealth of Thieves (37 page)

I
N HIS LAST DAYS
in Sydney, soldiers, convicts, and servants carried Phillip's baggage down from his two-storey Government House past its garden and the edge of public farmland to the government wharf on the east side of Sydney Cove. When Phillip himself came down on 11 December, dressed for departure, full of unrecorded impulses and thoughts, unsure of his future but fairly sure of the survival of New South Wales's curious society, the red-coated New South Wales Corps under Major Grose presented arms. They dipped their colours and did him honour. Grose, whom Phillip got on with, would take over the management of New South Wales until the next governor arrived. (It would turn out to be John Hunter, former captain of
Sirius,
Phillip's Scots friend. )

Phillip must have hoped that, leaving a place so little understood by the world at large that it would always seem to others to be out of the known universe, he would have a chance to advance towards greater responsibility and higher glory. But in fact it was with the children of his convict, free, and military settlers, whom he was pleased to wave off, that his name would achieve its immortality. Though greater formal honours awaited him, his chief remembrance would be in this cove, in this harbour, and in the continent beyond. And even so, his abiding presence in the imagination would be more akin to that of a great totem than that of breathing flesh. He would not glisten for the children of this and other generations, he would not glow with the amiability or deeds of a Washington, a Jefferson, a Lafayette. He did not seek or achieve civic affection. He would forever be a colourless secular saint, the apostle of the deities Cook and Banks. He would be lodged not in our imaginations, but rather in our calculations of the meaning of the continent and its society forever. Yet his spirit, pragmatic and thorough, is still visible in Australia.

Thus the New South Wales Corps, which would acquire a questionable reputation, earned or not, saluted Phillip as he passed in his clouds of gravity.

O
NE OF THE MOST INTENSE
fears of the natives was, and would remain, that figures like Phillip would attract men and women out of their accustomed circuits and spirit them away from this world which for the Eora was the centre of things, the sole habitable universe. And it was happening with Bennelong and Yemmerrawanne, “two men who were much attached to his person; and who withstood at the moment of their departure the united distress of their wives, and the dismal lamentations of their friends, to accompany him to England.” They knew no map for where they were going, only that it was
outer,
at an unspeakable distance, and that it was a region of incomprehensible darkness. Bennelong's interest in Phillip would lead him profoundly away, and the risk that he could belong to neither world was one he bore relatively lightly on this high summer day as he sniffed the aroma of the eucalypts, tinged with smoke from western bushfires, and went aboard the
Atlantic.
It is likely that many of his people thought he was under an enchantment and thus vitiated forever. Some might have thought also that Abaroo's ultimate rejection of Yemmerrawanne as a suitor could have added to that handsome youth's readiness to travel with his kinsman Bennelong.

Early the next morning the
Atlantic
dropped down-harbour in semidarkness, past the now familiar sandstone headlands and dun bush, and took Phillip away from New South Wales, forever. The desert interior of the continent conjured a summer south-westerly to send him out of Eora land, past the Cameraigal headlands of the north shore towards a last sight of the beach at Manly, where he had taken the chief wound of his incumbency. As he left it, the state of the colony seemed far better than at any time since the settlement was made.

At Christmas, “Phillip gave every mess a joint of fresh pork and some pumpkin and half a pint of spirits to each man to celebrate the redeemer's natal day.” In January, off Cape Horn, “there were a great many islands of ice,” and many squalls, but rapid progress. They made Rio in February in time for Easty to express disapproval of the “grand and magnificent” Romish behaviour of candles, and statues of heads of patriarchs, and the Virgins at crossroads which people appealed to, “instead of looking to Jesus Christ as a complete Saviour of the world.”

They celebrated the crossing of the Equator with the normal ceremonies, Bennelong and Yemmerrawanne being alarmed to see Neptune appear over the side of the ship. Within days, “David Thompson fell overboard and drowned, Private Jackson died of a violent purging”: two men who had survived strange waters to die in more accustomed ones. Finally, Bennelong and Yemmerrawanne stepped ashore with Phillip at Falmouth towards the end of May 1793, to catch the London stagecoach. It was their turn to enter a mystery.

epilogue

S
OME OF
P
HILLIP'S CONVICTS
, a minority, would return to Britain, a few by escape, some on their own resources, a small number as crew members. Elizabeth Barnsley, for example,
Lady Juliana
's Queen of Sheba, would first be reunited with her husband when he arrived as a result of his stealing a trunk off the Wiltshire, Bath, and Bristol coach loading at Holborn. For a time the couple found themselves on Norfolk Island, and Thomas, once his time was up, travelled back to Sydney to raise money by gambling, musical performance, or trading for the cause of taking his family back to England. He succeeded, since soon after Elizabeth and their two children joined Thomas in Parramatta in 1794, the flamboyant pair disappeared from the New South Wales record, returned to Britain.

Characteristic of many others, however, were Bloodworth the brickmaker and Sarah Bellamy. In 1790, Sarah became James Bloodworth's common-law wife, marriage being impossible because it was well known he was married in England. Bloodworth was the architect in the construction of the two-storey, six-room building which became the governor's house, and a range of other public buildings. In December 1790 Phillip pardoned four selected convicts, of whom James Bloodworth was one. But return to England was not possible until his full term expired. The next year he was appointed building superintendent of New South Wales with an excellent salary of £50 per year, and Phillip praised the “pain he had taken to teach the art of brick-making and brick-laying, and his conduct was exemplary.” With some help from Harry Brewer, he built a soldiers' barracks, a clock tower, and houses for the surveyor general and judge-advocate.

Sarah Bellamy lost a second son in infancy, but then six more children were born to her and Bloodworth. Of Sarah's eight children, four survived to adulthood. In 1794 Major Grose would grant 50 acres to James and 20 acres to Sarah. They later added 200 acres to their property. Interestingly, Bloodworth stood as an Englishman by the King who had transported him, and served as a sergeant in the Sydney Loyal Association, a militia brought into being by the arrival of Scottish Republicans and United Irish prisoners from the 1798 uprising in Ireland. He died at the age of forty-five in 1804, virtually insolvent, though with many people owing him money. In 1805, his wife, Sarah, rented a room in her house to a lodger on condition he would teach her children to read and write. In the Female Register compiled by the censorious Reverend Samuel Marsden, it is said of her cohabitation with Bloodworth that “no relationship could have been more respectable, devoted or tenacious than theirs.” And in the census of 1828 she was one of only nineteen women still surviving from the great voyage of 1787. Sarah died in Lane Cove, Port Jackson, on 4 February 1843, aged seventy-three.

The Australian Adam, James Ruse, sold his land at Parramatta in 1793, and toyed with using £40 he thus acquired to return to England. He decided instead to settle on the Hawkesbury, but by 1801 was in hardship, having mortgaged his property because the region had not yielded as well as everyone had hoped. Indeed poverty, caused by the distance from Sydney and Parramatta, the uncertain market for produce, and frequent flooding, was the normal condition of smallholders of that area at the time. He tried to supplement his poor returns by running a gambling school at his farm, but the authorities clamped down on that. Using his friendship with Henry Kable, he apprenticed his sturdy colonial son, also named James, to the company of Kable and Underwood. In 1809, Ruse moved to the south-west of Sydney, a region around newly settled Bankstown, and then to the Windsor district, where he farmed into the 1820s. By 1828 he was working as well as an overseer at a large farm at Minto. In his advanced years, he joined the Catholic Church, and died a year later in 1837. Even though he had never been a wealthy farmer, his gravestone at Campbell town would show he was aware of his primary place in the Sydney experiment:

Sacred to the memory of james Ruse who departed this life sep 5 in the year of Houre Lord 1837. Natef of Cornwall and arrived in this coleney by the Forst Fleet, aged 77.

My mother reread me tenderly
With me she took much paines
And when I arrived in this coelney I sowd the forst grains
And now with my heavenly father I hope for ever to remain.

Mullens, Irish will-forger, having married Charles Peat, one of the founders of the convict night watch, was by 1802 the owner of a grant of 30 acres and the mother of four children. She would live into the second decade of the nineteenth century. Nellie Kerwin, the woman who ran a house of accommodation and had also forged a sailor's will, quickly married once she arrived in Sydney, but her new husband, Henry Palmer, a thief of fine glass, sent to Norfolk Island, was killed by a falling tree four months later. Kerwin was considered a reliable woman and travelled, perhaps as a servant, on
Supply
with the crew of wrecked
Sirius
back to Sydney, living in Parramatta for a time before returning to Norfolk Island. She may have continued her career as a bumboater, a broker, and moneylender for sailors in Sydney and Norfolk Island, even while serving her sentence. Now, with the resources to travel to England, she would have been the rare case of a convict woman returning home to the children she had left behind at transportation. At last she embarked for England via India in October 1793, on a ship named the
Sugar Cane.

Olivia Gascoigne, one of the well-behaved convicts whom Phillip sent to Norfolk Island in 1788, married Nathaniel Lucas, a freed convict, or as people began to call such expirees, an emancipist. During a storm on Norfolk Island they suffered “the unspeakable misfortune” of losing their twin daughters when a Norfolk pine tree fell on their house. In 1805 they left the island and returned to Sydney, where Lucas worked as a builder. When Olivia died in October 1820, she left eleven children and her sons were carrying on Nathaniel's business. Lucas himself, after building many government structures, had taken his own life in 1818.

There had been a number of military-convict alliances among the early settlers. Originally sentenced for stealing from a man who had refused to sleep with her, Sara Burdo, one of
Lady Penrhyn
's midwives, married Private Isaac Archer in 1794, and they later settled at Field of Mars, an area along the Parramatta River put aside for marine land grants. By 1802 they had six children. Sara farmed with her husband and continued to act as a colonial midwife, and by 1828 was living in comfort in Clarence Street, Sydney. She would die in July 1834. Her history is only one of many which raises the tormented question of whether the female convicts of the early fleets were “loose women” or matriarchs. In some cases it would seem that they were both at various stages of their lives. The new penal settlement and its cruelties could destroy some unwillingly landed there, yet, with its peculiar flexibilities, could also allow women of enterprise to find an honourable place for themselves in the new society.

The dismissal of colonial women as “wanton” or as “vile baggages” seems to have derived from the British press, and from clergymen who considered all common-law marriages to involve “a concubine.” Compared to British society, New South Wales countenanced or at least tolerated many marriages which transcended class barriers.

Catherine Heyland, who had escaped burning at the stake for forgery, established herself as an energetic woman on Norfolk Island and was given land in her own name. She lived with John Foley, a First Fleet marine turned farmer, and prospered so adequately that by June 1805, the couple could employ an educated convict, John Grant, to work for them and teach their two boys. The relationship was a strong one, and the family nursed Grant back to health once when he was flogged, and again after he had been exiled for sixteen weeks on a small island off Norfolk. In 1807, the Foleys moved to Van Diemen's Land. Catherine Heyland, once marked for a gruesome death, died peacefully on 18 October 1824, aged seventy-nine years.

The convict lock-wizard Frazier and his wife, Eleanor Redchester, had two sons in New South Wales before Frazier died at Concord on the Parramatta River from the effects of hard drinking in June 1791. Eleanor formed a partnership with William Morgan, a former soldier, and they had six children. But they quarrelled over land and the ownership of certain pigs. She would outlive him and prosper, dying on her land at Concord in November 1840.

The children Captain David Collins had by the convict woman Ann, or Nancy, Yeates were Marianne Letitia, born in November 1790, and three years later, George Reynolds. When the last marine detachment left in the
Atlantic,
Collins remained as judge-advocate. He left the colony for the first time in the
Britannia
in 1796. In December 1794 he had been granted 100 acres of land on the south side of Sydney Harbour, and it is believed that he assigned the grant to Ann Yeates. Collins applied to resume active duty in the marines but since there was discrimination against officers who served lengthy periods in staff appointments, he would have lost eight years seniority. He chose ultimately to remain on the inactive list, although he was promoted brevet lieutenant-colonel in January 1798. After the publication of his
History of the Settlement of New South Wales,
he was chosen as head of a new penal settlement in the Port Phillip or Melbourne area, and was transferred to Van Diemen's Land in 1803.

He died insolvent and suddenly in 1810, leaving his widow, Maria, in England, in straitened circumstances. He had by then formed an association with a sixteen-year-old Norfolk Island–born girl, Margaret Eddington, the daughter of a convict. Eddington bore him two children.

His former mistress, Ann Yeates, and her children had returned to England in the
Britannia,
but reemigrated to the colony in the
Albion
in 1799. She married the convict John Grant, who was to work for Catherine Heyland, in November 1800. George Reynolds Yeates entered the navy in 1807 under the name of Collins and rose to the rank of lieutenant.

The case of Private William Dempsey, one of the marines who in October 1791 decided to remain in New South Wales as a settler, is interesting in the light of comments that those who remained were chiefly influenced by attachments to unsatisfactory women convicts. Dempsey had been the victim of an attack by marine Private Joseph Hunt in 1788, in the famous court-martial that split the officer corps. At Norfolk Island, farming sixteen acres at Cascade Stream, Phillipsburg, he was by 1794 selling grain to the public stores, and the same year married a young
Lady Juliana
convict, Jane Tyler. She had been seventeen when sentenced to death at the Old Bailey in April 1787 for stealing money from her master, a Gray's Inn Lane victualler, and was one of the seven women who caused a sensation by refusing the King's offer of pardon on condition of transportation for life. “I will never accept of it to go abroad,” she had declared.

In 1807 Jane and Dempsey moved to Van Diemen's Land, which offered more spacious possibilities for land ownership. Though childless, they adopted an Aboriginal girl, Mary Dempsey. William Dempsey would die in 1837, and his wife in 1840.

Mary Haydock, Major Grose's teenage nursemaid, married Thomas Reibey, the former East India Company official, in 1794. The Reibeys became involved in farming on the Hawkesbury River and in the cargo business, coming to specialise in transporting coal from the nascent colonial mines, as well as cedar, furs, and skins. By 1809 the Reibeys' ships were trading to the Pacific islands, China, and India. Thomas Reibey's death in 1811 left canny Mary in sole control of the business and of their seven children. She acquired ships in her own name and enlarged her warehousing and shipping enterprises. In 1820 she was able to travel back to Lancashire on her own ship, the
Admiral Cockburn,
visiting the scene of her childhood mistake with her daughters Celia and Eliza. She did not retire from business until nearly 1830, and lived off her extensive property holdings in what was by then the city of Sydney, a city many of whose more elegant commercial sites she had herself built. She would die in her house at Newtown in 1855.

James Larra, a convict who reached New South Wales with the Second Fleet on the hungry
Scarborough,
was a Cockney Jew who began the most famed colonial restaurant serving beef, lamb, and seafood, and located at Parramatta. Larra would live until 1839 and was buried in the Jewish section of Devonshire Street Cemetery, Sydney.

The famous Irish pickpocket George Barrington was conditionally pardoned in 1792, the condition being that he never return to Britain. In 1796, Governor John Hunter made his pardon absolute and appointed him chief constable at Parramatta. He acquired two 30-acre land grants at Parramatta and bought 50 acres on the Hawkesbury. In 1800, an “infirmity” overcame him. People associated it with his heavy drinking and his guilt over misuse of government property, but it proved to be lunacy. He died at Christmastide, 1804. It turned out that hardly any of the countless works written in his name and published in Britain came from his pen. Nor did he ever receive any form of payment for them.