Storm Of Time

Preface

The fictional characters in this book are the Mannion family and household, the Prentices, Mark Harvey, Matthew Finn, Tom Towns, Dan Driver, all the natives with the exception of Pemulwy, and a few others barely mentioned. Governor Phillip’s protégé, Bennilong, did have a daughter named Dilboong, but the records suggest that she died in infancy.

The story of the colony given here is historically as accurate as I could make it, though there are certain incidents the full truth of which will probably never be known. For example, the exact details of what happened on January 26th, 1808, are obscure, though the main facts are clear enough. At a time of violent factional struggle, when party feeling runs high, truth is apt to be cavalierly treated by both sides — as our own unrestful generation well understands. The accounts given by different participants in the affair, and the evidence at Johnston’s court-martial in 1811, are full of conflicting statements about times and events. The historian, confronted by a mass of confused and contradictory evidence, can simply give both sides, and leave it to his readers to form their own conclusions; the novelist must tell a definite story, and therefore can only choose the evidence which, in his opinion, seems most plausible, taking into account the characters of the various witnesses, and the surrounding circumstances. Here one passage from Bligh’s address at the Court-martial is worthy of note: "… of all the witnesses I have called, not one has his character embarked with mine, nor is his testimony biassed by the knowledge that in protecting me he screens himself. Not so with the witnesses of Col. Johnston. If he be guilty, which of THEM does not share his crime? If he be worthy of punishment, which of them can hope for impunity?"

It has been necessary, also, to adapt, eliminate and condense, using such devices as, for instance, the telescoping of a quarrel between two Governors, which in fact spread over months, into one interview; borrowing phrases and expressions actually used in memoirs or correspondence for dialogue; or altering the circumstances — without disturbing the fact or the spirit — of a French officer’s gift to a colonial orphanage. Such devices, I hope, make a more coherent story, without doing violence to its essential historical truth.

The name of that hero of the fleece who looms so large in the colony’s early history was invariably spelt McArthur in the records of his time, but the alternative spelling, Macarthur, is so consistently used in later histories, and so much more familiar to present-day Australians, that I have used it here.

My grateful acknowledgments are due to the trustees of the Mitchell Library, Sydney, for permission to quote from manuscripts in their possession.

E.D.

BOOK I

Governor Hunter

1799

The settlement lay as if beaten down into submission under a fierce sunlight, to which the smoke from surrounding fires lent a sullen, orange glow. Denuded of its native trees, exposed to the merciless glare of midsummer, it huddled up the slope from the water’s edge, its little houses and the fences which enclosed them filmed with dust, its tiny patches of garden scorched brown, its narrow, haphazard streets almost deserted. The few larger buildings — the Governor’s house, the gaol, the hospital, the granary — served only to emphasise the general appearance of poverty. The arms of the windmill hung motionless, and inside its protective paling the Tank Stream, the colony’s water-supply, was disturbingly low. Only the harbour and the sky looked clean — two blue, brilliant, polished plates, between which the imprisoned air shimmered with heat.

After so dry a spring and summer, earlier hopes of a bountiful harvest had been disappointed. The pastures were parched, the cattle skin and bones; ponds were either dry or mere muddy shallows; great tracts of forest were blackened by fire; and still, in the outlying districts, the nights were pricked by the glow of creeping flames, and the days hazy with smoke.

Thanks to the relentless, blazing sky that spread over them day after unendurable day, the colonists knew now that the price of wheat would not be lowered after all; dysentery reduced them to a weakness from which they felt no incentive to recover; almost everyone from the Governor down to the children — restless over their pothooks in the makeshift schoolrooms — suffered from a painful inflammation of the eyes; there was never enough to eat, and what there was did not tempt the appetite in a temperature which had stood as high as 107° in the shade.

It was the 26th day of January, 1799. The little township of Sydney on the shores of Port Jackson had attained its eleventh birthday, but no celebration marked the event. Few of its inhabitants, indeed (though there were a few among them who would allow the country some virtues), regarded it as an occasion for rejoicing. It was merely another day of exile and suffering; another day to be endured.

The Governor, John Hunter, elderly and harassed, paused for a moment as he emerged from the Court House door to read the order he had issued yesterday, and which now hung on the wall facing an empty and indifferent street. He did not really want to read it, for it was the fifth that he had proclaimed upon the same subject, and in his heart he did not expect it to be more observed than the others had been. But it gave him a moment’s respite between leaving the comparative cool of indoors, and facing the cruel, yellow heat, and the walk to Government House. He was sixty-two, and tired — not only with the weight of advancing years, but with the burden of a responsibility for which he was beginning to admit (to himself if not to others) that he was inadequate.

From that September day in 1795 when he had returned to the colony as its second Governor, he had not known an hour’s freedom from anxiety. The three years between Governor Phillip’s departure and his own succession had so altered the character of the little community that each day confronted him with a fresh shock. For those years had been, under the Lieutenant-Governors Grose and Paterson, a military dictatorship; and not all the polite greetings of the officers of the New South Wales Corps could for ever blind him to the fact that a dictatorship, once firmly established, does not willingly relinquish its power.

He learned that he was expected to grant himself land, employ convicts in clearing and cultivating it, and thus acquire, as many others had done, a valuable farming property: when he made it clear that he had no such intention, and that he expected his duties as Governor fully to occupy his time, the air grew colder still. It was much more difficult now than it had been in Phillip’s time for the Governor to keep his watchful eye on the whole colony. Then it had been small, compact, an area to be inspected easily from end to end in a few hours. Now it had grown. A group of farms on the banks of the Hawkesbury were some thirty miles from Sydney as the crow flew; a chain of them extended for twenty miles along the river, and more were scattered among the various arms of the harbour. A tour of inspection was now a matter of days — tiring days for an elderly man who could find among his entourage no energetic and capable lieutenant in whom he could place undivided confidence.

He had found to his dismay that many of the minor officials and tradesmen were completely useless. It would be better, he had thought, to promote the more deserving of the emancipated convicts to some small posts of responsibility, than to pay salaries to such drones. Had not the notorious pickpocket, George Barrington, acquitted himself satisfactorily as chief constable at Parramatta?

No new land, he discovered, had been cleared for public purposes during the military interregnum, and that already in cultivation was producing little, either from the poor quality or the exhaustion of the soil. Since labour had been recklessly diverted to large private landowners, it was not surprising that the farms of these individuals were flourishing; but the cultivation of crops had far outstripped the erection of buildings, and Hunter was dismayed by the inadequacy of barns, granaries and storehouses. Indeed, except for these oases of private cultivation, comfort, and prosperity, the whole colony had seemed to be dying on its feet. Its few boats were battered and decaying, its houses and buildings in disrepair; huts which had been built in earlier days for Government purposes were now leased to private individuals; clothing was in rags, the stamp of bitterness and hunger was on the faces of convicts, ex-convicts and the poorer settlers.

Before a year passed he had realised the full difficulty of the task that confronted him. Captain David Collins, ex-Judge Advocate of the colony, and Mr. Palmer the Commissary, returning to England about this time, would, no doubt, give to the authorities there a first-hand account of the trials under which he laboured. They, in personal interviews, would surely paint a more convincing picture than he could do with his pen. They would tell — he hoped — how he was surrounded by schemers, mischief-makers, restless, ambitious, designing people who saw in his arrival a threat to their opportunities for self-enrichment. They would bear him out that the only kind of Governor who would be welcome here would be one who was prepared to fall in with all the plans of such people, be complaisant to their every demand, permit them to help themselves from the public store, and supply them with labourers to be fed and clothed at the Government’s expense. Mr. Palmer would relate — or would he? — that as custodian of the stores he had not dared to refuse to any soldier, either officer or private, whatever he might demand …

Standing now on the Court House verandah, the Governor focused his absent stare on the proclamation on the wall. He read idly:

The filthy condition which the spring water in the tanks is so often reported to be kept in, by those who live near having repeatedly broke down the paling which surrounds them, or left it open when broken by accident, for the admission of hogs, this notice …

A sharp, decisive footfall on the steps behind him, and a long streak of shadow across the stone floor, made him turn. He confronted a man in the uniform of an officer of the New South Wales Corps — a man with a direct, challenging stare, with a long, rather supercilious nose, with a mouth whose lines suggested a truculent self-assertiveness, and whose collar lifted his chin even higher than natural arrogance would have demanded. They faced each other for a moment, warily hostile. The newcomer bowed with a coldness which was matched by the Governor’s voice, as he said:

Good day, Sir.

Captain Macarthur responded with no greater warmth:

Good day, Your Excellency.

His eyes flickered from Hunter’s face to Hunter’s proclamation on the wall; the Governor’s nerves were raw, and he fancied that he saw a hint of derision in that glance. He enquired with frigid civility:

I trust Mrs. Macarthur is well?

I thank you, Sir; I am happy to say that her health is excellent.

Hunter, passing with a faint inclination of his head, stumped down the steps and out into the sunlight. A sudden heat of anger in his body made him almost indifferent to the heat of the day, but when he reached his house he was puffing slightly, and he made for the chair at his desk in the cool, dim room as for a haven.

He, at all events (though the knowledge caused him no particular elation), remembered that this was an anniversary. As he sat alone, relaxed, recovering not only his breath but his composure — which the mere sight of Captain Macarthur was enough to disturb — his memory went back to that day, eleven years ago, when he had assisted at the founding of the colony which he now governed. The thought of those years nagged at his mind, the fear of his own failure haunted him. As if to quiet it with written words, with statistics, with an official record of visible achievement, he reached for documents in which he had set forth for the enlightenment of the home authorities a statement of the colony’s laborious progress.

It seemed little enough to show for so much effort and privation, but today forced him to comparisons. Not only comparisons between a land in which, eleven years ago, agriculture was totally unknown, and in which, now, thousands of acres were producing; but also, less comfortingly, between himself then, a subordinate of whom no more was required than a loyal and faithful obedience to orders, and himself now, from whom the orders must come. From there he was forced to a further comparison — a worried suspicion that his predecessor, Arthur Phillip, had been able to command some quality as an administrator which he himself lacked. He stirred restlessly, pushed aside his return of livestock and land under cultivation, and, with his head propped on his hands, studied the statement of work executed in the previous year.

To look at it, he thought wryly, one might imagine the place to be a hive of enthusiastic industry. The tally of blacksmiths, carpenters, cutlers, coopers, sawyers, shipwrights, bricklayers, shoemakers and thatchers was accompanied by an exhaustive description of the duties they performed, and the labours they had accomplished. Even the activities of two barbers shaveing all the servants of Government, and of a single ropemaker makeing cordage out of curryjong, were faithfully chronicled. Nor were the executioner and his assistant forgotten, though their grim function was left tactfully undescribed.

It was easy enough to set it all out on paper; difficult beyond words to keep it moving in fact — to correlate human effort and material supply, to adjust community production to community need, to allow for the fact that though a man may appear as a docile unit in an official return, he is apt to be, in life, a recalcitrant individual. Though the paper might say, with misleading simplicity, three men splitti’g shingles, he, as administrator, was only too well aware that he must deal not with the cypher 3, but with Tom, an incorrigible idler, and Dick, a troublemaker, and Harry, too physically wrecked to do more than three days’ work in five.

He was roused from his gloomy reflections by a servant who came to tell him that the Reverend Mr. Johnson had arrived, and begged the indulgence of a few words with His Excellency.

His Excellency sighed. Mr. Johnson, he thought, was a worthy man, very rightly and properly shocked by the licentiousness and immorality of the colony; but he sometimes seemed to imagine that the Governor could produce chastity, sobriety, industry and godliness with the wave of a wand. He rose with a kind of depressed courtesy to greet his visitor. Mr. Johnson, too, looked dejected. He began:

I am hesitant to trespass upon Your Excellency’s valuable time …

Hunter bowed him to a chair.

You are always welcome, Mr. Johnson, he said, not altogether truthfully. In what way can I be of service to you?

I wish to see you, Sir, upon a small matter in connection with our temporary place of worship. I have but just come from there, and I find that one of the doors has been broken from its hinges — by design, I should suppose. If Your Excellency would be so good as to give orders that it be repaired before our service tomorrow …?

The Governor was thankful that nothing more troublesome was demanded of him. He could deal with doors; human beings were more difficult. He responded cordially:

By all means, Mr. Johnson. I shall have a carpenter directed to the work immediately. He added a civil enquiry: I trust your health is improved?

Mr. Johnson passed his handkerchief wearily across his hot brow. The eleven years of his sojourn in New South Wales had dealt hardly with him. Now, at forty-two, his face was sallow, and less rubicund than formerly. He had lost weight during the last few months of intolerable heat, and restless nights had smeared a darkness under his eyes. He answered heavily:

Unfortunately I cannot say that it is, Sir, nor do I expect it, so long as I remain in this climate. I am in hopes that my application for leave of absence may be granted.

Hunter looked at him thoughtfully.

You have indeed earned a rest, my friend. As I sat here before you arrived I was reflecting upon this day eleven years ago, when you and I were among those who witnessed the beginning of the colony. He added gloomily: Much has happened since then.

Mr. Johnson folded his hands upon his knees and looked solemn.

The circumstance had not escaped my memory, Sir. In my home this morning special prayers were said for the future of our little community. I prayed earnestly that grace might descend upon the profligate and the ungodly, and I most particularly entreated that the Lord in His mercy would support and strengthen Your Excellency’s endeavours.

The Governor coughed with slight embarrassment.

Very good of you, my dear Sir. I trust your intercession may bear fruit. He fiddled with the papers on the table. You, I think, are one of those who recognise the trials I have been subjected to in my attempt to perform my duty. A faint flush darkened his face. So strongly do I feel upon this subject, Mr. Johnson, that I confess I was tempted into expressions to His Grace the Duke of Portland which, had they not been justified by extreme provocation, might almost have laid me open to a charge of blasphemy.

Mr. Johnson looked stern.

You surprise me, Sir.

Hunter raised his hand reassuringly:

You will acquit me, Mr. Johnson, of any such intention. It was no more than my duty to describe at length the state of affairs existing in this place, and I freely admit that the recital of the iniquities of certain people — and of one in particular whom I am persuaded I need not name to you — so inflamed my indignation that I concluded by assuring His Grace that the Saviour Himself, were He to appear in this colony, would not be safe from their intrigues and calumnies. ‘There are people here,’ I said, ‘who would most readily prepare for His sacred head another crown of thorns, and erect another cross for His second crucifixion.’ And I told him plainly, Sir, that none more so than the person to whom I had had occasion to allude so frequently in my letter.

Mr. Johnson meditated profoundly for a moment before answering. His memory, like the Governor’s, could go back to Phillip’s regime, but, unlike the Governor’s, it could continue from there through the fateful years during which the officers of the New South Wales Corps had governed the colony in what he had once described to Hunter as a kind of military manner. He had come to this land, an earnest young man, deeply convinced of the importance of his mission; he had lived in it a confused, disillusioned and frustrated man, bewildered by the apparent ineffectiveness of his spiritual weapons — not only against the depravity and brutality of human beings, but in the face of an environment which seemed to set aside, with a monstrous indifference, every standard and custom to which he had been bred. Yet after Phillip’s departure, faced by the startling changes which had then burst upon the colony, he had felt some changes take place, too, within himself. He had had to contend, before, only with a kind of spiritual inertia, a passive resistance, an official neglect of his function which sprang rather from Phillip’s intense preoccupation with the mere effort of keeping the colony alive, than from any active opposition. Through all his confusions there had remained with him the conception of himself as the shepherd of his flock. The wolves which had threatened it then had been abstractions — ignorance, violence, immorality — and against these he neither knew, nor felt it necessary to know, any weapon save prayer. But gradually, as the colony lapsed into confusion, as the civil authority vanished, as the scramble for wealth and power became every day more open and shameless, as the poor suffered and complained, as the wealthy grew more arrogant and rapacious, he began to see the wolves in the shape of men. He had no comprehension of the forces which drove them; he believed in society as it existed, and he saw evil very simply as the devil working in unregenerate souls. Yet when he observed the devil working to such purpose that suddenly the dignity and authority of the Church were being treated with contempt, a flame of indignation and resistance was lit in him. Even now he felt his cheeks flush with anger when he remembered how the drum had beat one morning in the very middle of his discourse, and the soldiers had got up and marched away, leaving him no congregation but half a dozen convicts. The Sabbath had become a day of rioting, drunkenness, and gambling. He had even, upon one occasion, been denied access to two condemned men when he went to assist them in reconciling themselves to God. He had complained bitterly, he had even exchanged heated words with Major Grose. Nor had Captain Macarthur, as commanding officer at Parramatta, shown any regard for religious observances there, and Mr. Johnson well recalled with what indignation his colleague, Mr. Marsden, had described that gentleman’s offensive reception of his complaints. Those years were like a wound in his mind — but what more could he have done? He had prayed and he had protested. He knew of nothing else, and yet, like the Governor, he was sometimes tortured by self-doubt. He looked up rather sadly from his clasped hands, and said:

I have good reason to know, Sir, the nature of the provocations you have received. Yet when I was myself moved to complain with some warmth in a letter to my good friend the Reverend Mr. Newton, of the conduct of Major Grose, he replied with an exhortation which you, Sir, might also consider. I have the letter here. I keep it about me as a continual reminder of my duty as a Christian. Allow me, Sir …

He unfolded a deeply creased sheet of paper, and read with grave emphasis: ‘You take the best method of relieving your own mind from the remembrance of his injurious treatment, and the best method of retaliation, by praying for him.’ He put the letter away, and said humbly: I have endeavoured to act upon that noble sentiment, Sir. May I recommend it also to Your Excellency’s attention?

He stood up and prepared to take his departure. Hunter escorted him to the door.

It is indeed a noble sentiment, he said non-committally, and admirably expressed. Good-day, Mr. Johnson.

But he was frowning as he went back to his desk. He did not feel like praying for Captain Macarthur.

He had returned to this place with a feeling that he was to step into an environment which, however hard, was at least familiar; he was to inherit a function for whose performance Phillip had bequeathed him a precedent. He had left a community which was poor, which suffered hardship and deprivations, but which was cohesive, and passably disciplined; he had come back to chaos.

He had found convicts whose terms were expired hanging about the two settlements at Sydney and Parramatta, eking out a precarious livelihood in casual labour for officers or farmers. Others had taken to the woods, where they joined the natives and incited them to plunder settlers in the more isolated districts. He had found vast numbers of women who, deserted by husbands or lovers, were now a serious problem for the Government stores, and his kindly nature here conflicted painfully with his duty of maintaining the colony with as little expense as possible to the mother-country. If we estimate their merits, he had written with a touch of wistfulness, by the charming children with which they have filled the colony, they will deserve our care; but it will become a matter for the consideration of Government whether, after the father has withdrawn himself from the service of the public, his children are to continue a burthen on the public store. The soldiers, too, had numerous children whom the pay of a private was quite inadequate to support; these, too, he must feed. I cannot, he wrote helplessly, see their infants in want.

Yet he knew that all these confusions sprang from a common ill, a root evil which even now, after four years of struggle, still defied his efforts. Here was a garrison town, threatened by no enemy. Here were soldiers — but no battles to fight. The officers of the New South Wales Corps, with time hanging heavily upon their hands, and with the whole colony under their undisputed sway, had not been slow to seize their advantage. The organisation which they had built up for themselves revealed itself as so strong that the Governor hardly knew where to attack it first. It was not difficult to understand, he thought sourly, why, after Phillip’s departure, they should have occupied their farms and embarked upon their agricultural pursuits in the high spirits which Collins had described to him. For their land was freely granted; their tools and implements were supplied from the public store; they were each allowed the labour of ten convicts — fed and clothed at the Government’s expense — and could hire as many more as they wanted at those times when the gangs were not occupied with public work. Nor was money required to pay even these. For it was evident that Collins had not exaggerated when he described the prevailing desire for liquor as a mania. Where life was hard, sordid and monotonous, where freedom was a dream, where culture was unknown and nine-tenths of the people the product of poverty and oppression, rum was an escape. It was the only luxury. Those who could supply it need offer no other wages.

And the officers could supply it. Since no restrictions were placed on trading, either in liquor or in other commodities, they could buy the cargoes of American merchantmen calling at the port, or charter ships to bring from abroad goods which they bought and resold at fabulous profit. The small settlers and emancipated convicts, having nothing else to pay with, paid with their livestock, their tools, their labour, even their whole farms, and the wealth of the colony flowed steadily into a few increasingly well-lined pockets. To that small group in a poverty-stricken community which could afford the price of purchase, liquor thus became more than merchandise — it became an instrument of power. It opened a back door to gambling, robbery, blackmail, and murder. It reduced Phillip’s tight, Spartan organisation to a state of utter demoralisation. It confronted Hunter with a condition in which, as he complained: all is confusion, disorder and licentiousness, and a total inattention — nay, I might almost say, a direct disobedience — to Public Orders.

He was a peaceable man, and he had tried to effect his reforms peaceably. Yet his restoration of the civil authority, and his reinstatement of the magistrates, had been sufficient to teach him with what inveterate enmity he would be treated by those who saw their power threatened by his measures. There was no doubt that they were not entitled to the labour of so many convicts supported at the public expense; yet perhaps he himself could not have said how far the arguments he advanced to His Grace in favour of allowing them this indulgence a little longer were dictated by conviction, and how far by his anxiety not to offend them. More than half the last harvest, he explained, had been raised by the industry of these gentlemen, and the withdrawal of their convict labour would surely result in a poor crop for the coming year, and hardship for all. Moreover, he urged — having already learned something of their methods — would not those who did succeed in producing some grain take advantage of the scarcity to raise the price?

But all his tentative efforts at appeasement did not make them less hostile. He was shocked and genuinely astonished by their greed. Why could they not be content with the farms they had acquired in such advantageous circumstances? Why should they condescend to sully their hands with trade, beyond the proper disposal of their produce to the Government?

And he, the Governor, attempting to push forward with those multitudinous public works, so neglected, so urgently necessary, had found himself without labourers — hardly able, as he had plaintively informed His Grace, to call together twenty for any public purpose at Sydney.

His black brows came together in an angry frown. He was jealous of his authority as Governor — the more so, perhaps, because he felt in himself no indomitable personal strength to augment it. His resentment smouldered continually against those people who, during his absence, had not only enriched themselves by this shameful trade, but had thereby won an influence which they did not hesitate to pit, covertly, against his own. He remembered angrily the anonymous paper dropped in the streets of the town not two years ago, which had actually hinted that he himself, and his servants, were implicated in this iniquitous traffic, and his own suspicion at the time — which had now hardened into certainty — that it was no convict, no disgruntled member of the lower class who had written it. There was contempt mixed with his resentment. Soldiers, he held, should be soldiers — not tradesmen. This spirit for trade, he had written bitterly to Under Secretary King eighteen months ago, which I must ever consider in the manner it is carried on here, to be highly disgraceful to men who hold in their hand a commission signed by His Majesty, has been carried so far that it has now reached all the inferior appointments, so that it has absorbed all their time and attention, and the public duty of their respective offices are entirely neglected …

He had thought, as he wrote, of Captain John Macarthur, and he thought of him again now. Indeed, when he confronted his problems, they were apt to become personified in his mind as the figure of that busy, arrogant, self-opinionated man, with whom, before he had been six months in the colony, he had already guardedly crossed swords. And not for the last time. By the middle of the next year Macarthur had become his openly avowed antagonist, and his letters to England returned again and again to condemnation of this meddling person, this speculating individual, this man who has employed the whole of his time in this country in sowing discord, and enriching himself by means truly disgraceful, this man whose restless, ambitious and litigious disposition has been so often experienced in this country. The turbulence of the colony he ruled he felt as a continual reproach, and he strove to combat the influence of stronger-willed men than himself with a delegated authority. He clutched the King’s commission about him like a cloak, but the wind of commercial greed blew coldly beneath it. His pen continually expressed his resentment against Macarthur in bitter phrases. There is not a person in this colony, he wrote angrily, whose opinion I hold in greater contempt than I do this busybody’s.

He stood up and went across to the window, from where he could see the lately returned Norfolk lying at anchor in the cove. When fears of his own capacity as an administrator beset him, he could find some comfort in what had been accomplished during his regime in the way of exploration. It had given him great satisfaction to learn beyond a doubt from Mr. Flinders and Mr. Bass that New Holland and Van Diemen’s Land were separated by a strait; his worried expression grew benign for a moment as he gazed at the leaky, twenty-five ton sloop, built at the island whose name she bore. Yes, exploration was a simple matter, not involving the clash of opposed interests, the bewildering conflict of personalities, the underground machinations of greed and jealousy. By land or sea you plotted your course, and went; and nothing impeded you but weather, thirst, exhaustion, wild country or rough seas. He sighed. He had not, indeed, been able to undertake many of these journeys himself, pleasant as they would have seemed to him in comparison with the irksome duties which he must remain to perform at the seat of Government. Nor had he — to his indignation — found among the officers of the colony any who were willing to forsake their own private and profitable concerns for such arduous undertakings; and he remembered with a touch of nostalgia the excursions of the settlement’s early days, when not only Governor Phillip, but himself, and Tench, and Dawes, and White had struggled on foot over miles of monotonous forest to find those places where now settlers dwelt on their farms.

No, he had been, for the most part, merely the instigator and not the leader of these more recent explorations. Yet they represented solid achievement in the midst of so much failure. George Bass and Henry Hacking had done useful work in exploring inland. There had been disappointments and setbacks, but the colony’s horizon had expanded, nevertheless. The ex-convict, Wilson, and his companions had made a not inconsiderable journey. Farms fringed the river now, below Richmond Hill. All the way from Sydney to Parramatta they were scattered, and again from Parramatta to Toongabbee, and from Toongabbee to where they curved like a green horseshoe about the foot of Prospect Hill. A herd of wild cattle — descendants of two bulls and four cows lost nearly eleven years ago — at large on the rich river flats now known as the Cow Pastures, had seemed to act as a magnet to the feet of exploring parties, and on this route, all the way across the river to Mount Hunter, there were patches of country which, in good time, would repay settlement.

The colony progressed. He tried to reassure himself with this thought, but was unable to subdue the knowledge that its progression was rather like that of a bolting horse, and himself a driver whose arms ached with fruitless sawing on the reins. He remembered with bewilderment that Phillip had been able to maintain a curious, serene faith, based on no logical reason which he himself could discover. He remembered a stray phrase of the first Governor’s which, at the time, had seemed meaningless, and seemed so still. We must allow the country some influence in the moulding of affairs, Mr. Hunter. The country? He looked at it with knotted brows. Trees, rocks, water … Moulding? Surely the opposite was true? Surely the country, with its vastness, its impassivity, its droughts and its floods, was only something else to be coerced and mastered? He saw his war with environment as a just war. He was charged with building a community, and it must conform, by Heaven, to a pattern laid down for it on the other side of the world. He did not feel himself arrayed against a law of Nature, but merely against human wilfulness and material obstructions. Though the effort kill him, he must (until the happy day when Captain King arrived to release him) continue to squeeze and hammer the colony into a reproduction of an English community. They were English people, and in any latitude must remain so for ever.

Yet he was forced to admit — because the fact obtruded itself brutally upon his consciousness in every waking hour — that the community, in spite of his squeezing and hammering, was becoming not more, but less like an English community every day. The outer forms of English social organisation were there, but they were like an ill-fitting garment, uneasily worn. The urgent life beneath burst indecent holes in it, and split it vulgarly at the seams. He patched and mended and implored a more seemly deportment — in vain. He was forced into continual and unwilling compromise. Time-honoured forms of legal administration showed sudden inadequacies; social conventions, temporarily stretched to meet local conditions, alarmingly remained stretched; the immemorial layers of the English hierarchy showed a disconcerting tendency to lose their clear definition, to melt into each other like alternating stripes of wet paint. What, for instance, could be more confusing, more disruptive, than the metamorphosis of His Majesty’s officers into merchants and traders in rum? And was it to be approved that free settlers should take convict women to wife, or that emancipated convicts should wed free women? Or that the officers, both civil and military, should flaunt their mistresses quite so openly? Did not all this cause a blurring of the sharp, salutary line which should ever exist between the officer and the tradesman, the immoral and the respectable, the felon and the free? But where women were scarce, and human nature clamorous, could one do more than advocate lawful union, and wink at illicit intercourse? Yet what place in an orderly pattern could be reserved for the offspring of such unions? Did they not, with their feeble infant hands, tear large rents in the fabric of accepted social convention? Did they not — these helpless babes — fly in the face of age-old precedent by tying together classes which should have remained separate? And he was forced to stand by and see the majesty of the King in his palace, and the authority of his Parliament undermined by a morsel of humanity in a cradle …

Suddenly the complexity of his problems combined with the heat of the day to make him conscious of his bodily fatigue. There was a lethargy in his limbs, his head ached, his sixty-two years claimed a respite for self-indulgence. He would sleep for a couple of hours; later, in the cool of the evening, he would work. He turned away from the window, left the room without looking at his desk, and plodded wearily up the stairs.

One March evening, in the house of Mr. Richard Atkins, Acting Judge Advocate of the colony, a supper party was mounting in a crescendo of conviviality to that climax which Mr. Atkins’ parties invariably reached sooner or later. No ladies were present, and the six men, now that the cloth had been removed, had settled down to serious drinking. The long, heavy, rather lugubrious face of Surgeon Balmain wore an unaccustomed smile; it seemed to have arrived there without his knowledge or connivance, and to have made a sheepish smirk of itself in consequence. His large, light brown eyes, however, refused to co-operate; they were more mournful than ever, and rather bewildered, like the eyes of an anxious dog, and his heavy chin, with the hint of a cleft in it, was sunk deep into the folds of his neck-cloth. Young Matthew Flinders, his dark eyes snapping with excitement, was inclined to be argumentative; his friend, George Bass, sprawling his six feet back in his chair, his handsome face slightly flushed, was limiting his conversation to a sleepy remark now and then in corroboration of Matthew’s tales. Captain Waterhouse was leaning forward and interrupting Flinders at every opportunity. Mr. Stephen Mannion, who prided himself upon being, as an Irish gentleman, able to hold his liquor, was sitting ostentatiously upright. The immaculate white ruffles of his cravat showed no signs of dishevelment, and the brightness of his blue eyes was the only sign that he had drunk glass for glass with the others. Mr. Atkins’ eyes, however, though eloquent of bonhomie, were opaque and bleary; his greying hair was disordered, his hands unsteady, and he was already having some trouble with his speech.

Widely differing as they were in age and temperament, they were temporarily united by the mere fact of being fellow-exiles in a small and strange community. They were all — except Mr. Mannion — bound to its affairs by duty; spectators of and sometimes participants in its endless feuds and turmoils. Tidings from the world they had left, the great European world, came only at long intervals. Events which rocked that world were memories by the time news of them reached this isolated outpost months later. Their violence had shaken or shattered more than one established society during the brief eleven years of the colony’s history; a French king had fallen, Napoleon was on the march, England had been six years at war with France; Ireland was in turmoil; and as an undertone more menacing than any bark of gunfire, sounded the universal complaints of people to whom the invention of machinery and the acceleration of industrial production had meant only more bitter poverty and oppression.

These clamours reached the colony as echoes. They came less as recorded tidings in months-old newspapers than as spoken comment from the mouths of living people. Officers brought with them tales of impoverished French aristocrats, of Pitt and Fox at loggerheads, of the fashionable world turning a deaf ear to the murmurings of the poor, of a restless and seditious spirit manifesting itself in the crew of His Majesty’s ships — all the current gossip of anxious and unrestful times. Shiploads of convicts told of foetid, overcrowded gaols, of soul-and-body-destroying labour in factories and mines, of laws growing ever harsher to subdue an ever-growing discontent. Some, whose crime had been the raising of a rebellious voice, brought their resentments with them, a faint spark of intransigence, smothered but not dead.

Into the new land they came, bearing the problems of the old; against a different background there remained the same problems, but a new environment, a new set of circumstances, a new social pattern demanded a re-focusing of the spiritual vision. Life was life still, but all its customs, all its concepts, all its traditional shibboleths and contrivances here underwent a slight distortion, and an involuntary process of adjustment coloured every thought and action.

Already, in eleven years, the ill-assorted units from an older society, straggling haphazard into the new one in the making, had fallen into place; and if the places of some were curiously different from those they would have occupied in their homeland, that was merely part of the distortion which gave the whole business its vaguely macabre air, its atmosphere of unreality and impermanence.

Not one of the six men who sat around Mr. Atkins’ hospitable board thought of this life save as an interlude — a curious, temporary exile from the real world which each would turn to account for his own advantage in his own way. Captain Waterhouse, though he was not yet thirty, could look back to the foundation of the colony; he had taken part in the landing of the First Fleet, seen the first trees felled, and the first wattle-and-daub huts erected, yet even to him the life he had lived here was an incident. Mr. Balmain, too, had assisted quite literally at the birth of the colony, for he had delivered the first child to be born on the First Fleet before it had even left the shores of the motherland. But neither he, nor Mr. Atkins, with seven years’ residence behind him, regarded the colony as more than the scene of a task to be done, a professional assignment. Mr. Mannion, who had so strangely come as a visitor in 1790, and as strangely stayed, asserted more persistently than any of them, his detachment. He had bound his fortunes to the land, but not himself. He would make wealth out of its soil — but he would spend it elsewhere. This was still, after nine years, his purpose, and it had not yet occurred to him that his sons — one of them born in the colony — might think of it as home. To the two younger men it was adventure. It was inexhaustible, unexplored territory, endless uncharted seas. Neither Bass nor Flinders would accept for more than a little while any restriction of their horizon. This paltry little colony was a mere pied-à-terre, a base from which they could discover the secrets of an interminable, unknown coastline, and challenge the mysteries of an ocean.

Yet here they all were, and here they must remain for the present. The life of the little community closed about them, and they found themselves studying it, speculating about it, participating in it, contributing to it — for there was nothing else. It was so small that any clash became an uproar. Every pebble of disturbance troubled the whole pool. A brawl between two private soldiers became matter for comment even in Government House; two officers disputing could set the whole colony by the ears; the always increasing hostility between the Governor and the New South Wales Corps kept the atmosphere charged with tension. And the war between the free population and the convicts was a continuous subterranean rumble that flashed into explosion now and then with outbreaks of insubordination, and savage punishments.

On the fringe of this unstable, emotionally overcharged society, the natives moved like troubled spectres, their dark, inquisitive eyes, once clouded with bewilderment, now merely observant, alert, and calculating. They had long ago accepted it as a fact that the Bereewolgal, the men come from afar, had come to stay. They had also long ago given up whatever hope they might have cherished in earlier days of learning to understand the white man’s law. It consisted, so far as they could make out, in taking what he wanted if he could get it — and this they would have found comprehensible enough if he had not simultaneously denounced stealing as a mortal sin. Faced by such a paradox, they could only regard him as a moral outlaw, in their dealings with whom no code of ethics was applicable. They applied, instead, a simple logic. He took their hunting grounds; they would take from him in return whatever wheedling, force, guile, or theft could procure. He fought his own kind, and stole from his own kind; they would range themselves impartially upon any side which could promise them an advantage. They haunted the settlement like black wraiths, bartering fish or curios or an hour’s desultory labour for whatever they could get; and then they vanished to the silence of the forests, to their camp-fires which shone like fixed points of sanity in a disintegrating world, to their own tribes where conduct was exactly ordered, and the Law exactly understood. They left the miseries and the hatreds of the white settlement to the white men; but the white men, even with the help of alcohol and parties, could never quite escape from them.

Flinders and Waterhouse, having spent the morning serving as members of the Court of Criminal Judicature, in session to try the case of one Isaac Nichols, accused of receiving stolen goods, felt that they had earned an evening’s dissipation. In the dreary knowledge that they must tomorrow and probably for several days thereafter return to this uncongenial duty, they were now ripe for relaxation. Captain Waterhouse said belligerently:

I have heard of this animal before. I have been assured on the most unimpeachable authority that it barks like a dog.

Barks like a dog! Matthew Flinders gave a contemptuous snort of laughter, and appealed across the table to his friend and fellow-voyager. Tell this obstinate fellow, George, that the creature makes no sound but a kind of hiss …

Bass nodded lazily.

No sound but a hiss. The sibilants betrayed him, and conscious that he had said hish, he frowned and repeated with careful distinctness: A hiss, Henry. I assure you, a most unmistakable hiss.

Not, Flinders hastened to explain, that it is a savage or venomous animal. On the contrary it appeared of the most placid disposition. It suffered George to nurse it in his arms like a babe …

The company found this amusing, and Flinders, his dark eyes a-twinkle, embroidered the anecdote.

Upwards of a mile he carried it, gentlemen, dandling it like a mother, laying it over his shoulder, crooning lullabies to it …

Bass let out a good-natured growl of protest which was drowned in the hilarity. Mr. Mannion said:

There was a creature washed down the river near my property in the recent floods, Mr. Bass. I had no opportunity to dandle it — indeed I was unable to observe it at close quarters at all — but it would not surprise me if it were one of these whombats of yours.

Mr. Atkins roused himself to a conversational effort.

Floods. He looked owlishly at the table, tapping it to claim their attention. There is no moderation, my friends, in the habits of this climate. He fixed on Flinders an eye which seemed to accuse him of responsibility for the vagaries of the weather. We suffer a drought, Sir, a drought which pershish — which persists for months; we fry, Sir, it is not extravagant to say that we fry beneath a pitiless sun; we look for rain, we long for rain, we pray for rain — and what do we get, Sir?

Rain, said Flinders, and roared with laughter. Mr. Atkins cried excitedly:

We do indeed get rain! We get torrents of rain, we get floods, the Heavens open, Sir, and shed a deluge upon us …

I was not aware, Mr. Atkins, Mannion said dryly, that the Heavens had bestowed upon you here at Sydney more rain than you could use. In my part of the country, now …

The surgeon, with a spark of interest in his lethargic eyes, leaned forward across the table.

I am told, Mr. Mannion, that the natives of your district foresaw this flood, and warned the settlers of its approach. Have I been misinformed, Sir?

Mr. Mannion shrugged.

There were reports to that effect. I pay no great heed to them, or to any tales from ignorant and superstitious savages to men hardly less ignorant and superstitious than themselves.

Mr. Balmain shook his head heavily.

The natives are undoubtedly ignorant of all the arts and practices of civilisation, Mr. Mannion, yet I believe they possess a certain rude intelligence. Our late Governor, I think, would be dismayed if he were to see the decay of those friendly relations with them which he made many efforts to establish. Don’t you agree, Captain?

Waterhouse looked doubtful.

I confess I see no remedy for it. They’re an unstable and untrustworthy people. You and I, Sir, both recall the occasion when Governor Phillip was wounded by them. He always attributed it to a misunderstanding. He shrugged. He may have been right, but for myself I feel that their response to such indulgences as they received from him was, to put it mildly, disappointing. Consider the case of that turbulent rascal, Bennilong …

The surgeon made a gesture of impatience.

Bennilong! I’m tired of dressing his wounds and putting bandages round his thick head …

Does he not, Captain Waterhouse asked, furnish an illustration for my contention? No native received greater kindness or consideration; yet instead of acting to secure friendly relations between our people and his own, he has now placed himself out of favour with both, and is a continual source of ill-feeling.

Well, Balmain remarked, we see little enough of him now. I don’t recollect even hearing any report of him since some six months back, when I was told he had again been dangerously wounded by his countrymen. It’s inevitable that his ungovernable temper will bring about his death in the end — either from our muskets or from the spears of his own people. Do you find them troublesome at the Nepean, Mr. Mannion?

There have been incidents among the settlers farther down the river. The few that come about my property seem peaceable enough.

Captain Waterhouse enquired Your farm suffered no damage, I trust, in the recent floods?

None at all. Mr. Mannion glanced with some distaste at their host, who was pouring wine impartially into his glass and upon the table. I think I may say that I chose the site for my home and outhouses with some foresight, and the whole of my property is upon a rising ground. I have no fear that any flood will ever discommode me. Many of the settlers farther down, however, had to be taken off from their roof-tops in boats. And much valuable livestock and produce were swept away.

There was no loss of life, I believe? Flinders asked.

Mannion, taking the bottle which Atkins was hospitably proffering, poured himself a glass with a hand which, he observed with satisfaction, was still quite steady. He answered indifferently:

"A convict was drowned. He was one of those who came out in the Sugar Cane from Ireland; I imagine the colony suffers no great loss."

Mr. Atkins, with his glass half-way to his lips, put it down again on the table so sharply that the wine spilled on his hand. He stuttered warmly:

The Irish! D-d-damned rogues, Sir! A set of seditious scoundrels! A lawless …

He stopped dead, blinking round the table at four pairs of eyes which held an uneasy warning. He looked vaguely at Mr. Mannion, fidgeted, reddened, belched, and stammered anxiously:

Your pardon, Sir! No offence intended, Sir, towards your beautiful country, I assure you …

Mr. Mannion, his blue eyes frosty, said:

I am no friend to sedition, Mr. Atkins, whether in my countrymen or in yours. And we must not forget, Sir, he continued smoothly, that we have had among us, in Messrs. Palmer, Muir, Skirving, Margarot and Gerrald, notorious representatives of English and Scottish sedition.

Mr. Atkins conceded hastily:

Very true, Sir! Very true indeed. Though it must be acknowledged, he continued clumsily, that these gentlemen have lived very quietly among us — very retired and respectable indeed, as I’ve heard His Excellency remark …

Nevertheless, Mr. Mannion insisted coldly, such people cannot, I think, be regarded with too much suspicion. In a colony of this kind, isolated as it is, and filled with desperate characters, it is doubly necessary to be on guard against the irresponsible murmurings of discontented people. Nor, he added, am I always disposed to regard the frequent abscondings of convicts as lightly as the Governor appears to do. What is to prevent such men from joining themselves into formidable bands, and proving some day a serious threat to law and order in the community?

George Bass allowed the front legs of his chair to descend upon the floor with a bang; he laid his folded arms on the table and said:

I will tell you, Sir. Hunger. When I fell in with those seven miserable wretches who had been marooned by their companions on an island down the coast, I assure you their sole desire was to return to the settlement. They had had their fill of liberty in a land which offers no sustenance. They had contrived to exist for three months, but they were nought but scarecrows — indeed, the two I took into my boat were at death’s door. The other five … he shrugged, … well, I did what I could for them. There was no room for them in the boat. I conveyed them to the mainland, and left them with a musket, ammunition, and fishing lines — and the knowledge, Heaven help them, that the settlement was five hundred miles distant. He tilted his glass, staring sombrely into its ruby depths. If they are still alive, Mr. Mannion, he concluded grimly, they are in no mood for sedition.

Mr. Mannion frowned.

There is some truth in what you say, Mr. Bass. Nevertheless these absconders do sometimes survive — and not merely survive, but flourish. I … he broke off, drummed on the table with his fingers, and finished abruptly: I am convinced of it.

It was not what he had intended to say. The words he had bitten off were I know. For there had been a strange day nearly seven years ago when, across the flooded river near his then newly-acquired property, he had seen a convict die to save a native woman and her child. A convict who had escaped three years earlier — and who was certainly no scarecrow. It was a memory which never failed to cause him a pang of uneasiness; there had been something about the whole business which he did not understand. For this man, long supposed dead, had been the husband of Ellen Prentice, the woman whom he had taken for his housekeeper and his mistress; the father of her rebellious, red-headed, eight-year-old son, Johnny. And quite as mysteriously as the father had reappeared, the son had, almost simultaneously, vanished. There had been nothing to perturb Mannion in that; he had heartily disliked the child, as everyone had disliked him except his mother. But from time to time in the years that followed there had been curious — indications. They came mostly from the natives. Two girls whom he had experimentally introduced into his household for domestic services had shown a strange familiarity with various household tools and utensils. They had seemed quite accustomed to hammers and nails, for instance; they had understood the use of a plane without being shown; they had even manipulated with confidence door-keys, and the latches of windows …

He had concluded, at first, that they must at some time have visited the other settlers’ homes farther down the river. But no; they denied this, and the settlers, when approached, denied it too. Other natives, drifting casually about his farm, had exclaimed over his melons, his maize, his cucumbers, nodding their heads, pointing away up the river as if to say that there they had seen such things before. One, indeed, had even startled him with a word. Kookumba, he had said cheerfully. They had other English words, too. They said food, and give, and derink, and cow, and once, to his amazement, pointing to the sky, God. And all through their gibberish there recurred a word whose significance he had only lately, with a shock, suspected. Dyonn-ee.

Johnny! Great Heaven, he had thought, is it possible that that child survived? He told himself that it was not possible. Johnny had been last seen at Parramatta, a full twenty miles from the Nepean. There was no reason to suppose that he had ever been near the river. Johnny was a common name. He dismissed the thought. Yet the knowledge that there had been one lonely, unsuspected white man’s life out there in the forbidding, inhospitable forests, was like a continual warning whisper in his mind that there might be more. And if there were more? If there were many …?

He said harshly:

"There’s a dangerous feeling abroad. We live in times of great unrest. I observed its terrible effects in my own country during my late visit there. Have we not seen them also in England and Scotland, have we not witnessed the springing up overnight of clamorous associations of disaffected people, and do we not see the same poison spreading even to this remote quarter of the globe? Was not the Governor compelled only last year