The First Fleet, 1788 — a colony begun on someone's country

Transcript

Bram: The first thing is the water, and the water knows me before I know myself. I am sitting low, and the world is rocking, gently, the small private rocking of a boat that is really just a skin of bark folded and tied and trusted — and there is a little fire by my feet. That is the thing my head cannot get over, even as the body treats it as nothing: a fire, a real one, a few coals on a pad of wet clay in the bottom of the canoe, close enough to warm the soles of my feet, and I am floating on deep green water with a fire between my knees and a line over the side, and none of it frightens the body at all. The hands are a woman's hands, and they are busy. They know the line, the twist of it, the little bone hook. They know exactly how much of the morning is left by the colour of the light on the headland. And the headland has a name. That is the second thing. I look up at the grey rock and the grey-green trees coming right down to the tideline, and a word rises in the body for it, easy as breath, a word that means something like the place my mother's people belong — and I look along the shore and there is another name, and another, all the way round the great blue reach of this harbour, every point and cove and beach a name, and the names are not labels. They are relations. This water is called Warrane, this cove, and the water is not empty and it is not wild and it is nobody's discovery. It is hers. She is out on it the way you or I would walk down our own street, in a little bark canoe — a nowie — with her feet warm and a fish already flapping silver against the wet floor, and she is humming, low, under her breath, and she is not afraid of anything in the world. Which is how I know it is about to happen. Because I have felt this exact stillness before, in a hundred bodies, on a hundred last mornings, and it always comes wearing the face of something ordinary. She hears it before she sees it. A sound that does not belong to the water — not a gull, not the slap of a wave, not the far laugh of that brown bird in the trees that sounds like a whole crowd of madmen. A sound like a tree groaning in a wind, except there is no wind, and it is coming from out past the Heads, from the open sea, from the direction nothing has ever come from. She stops humming. The hands go still on the line. And then it comes round the point, and my whole soul goes cold, because I know what it is and she does not. She sees — shapes. Grey shapes, standing up out of the water, taller than trees, taller than anything that should be on the sea, and they are hung all over with cloth, huge pale sheets of it spread out above them, more cloth than she has seen in her whole life, more cloth than she has a number for, cloth piled up into the sky. One. Two. She counts, because counting is what you do with your hands when your chest has gone tight — the way she counts fish, the way she counts the days of a moon. Three. Five. Eight. Eleven. Eleven of the great cloth-things, moving without paddles, standing straight into the wind in a way nothing that floats is allowed to do, sliding up her harbour, into Warrane, over the water that has a name in every yard of it. The body does not have the word. How could she. There is no word, in the oldest language on the face of the earth, for a European ship, because in sixty thousand years of living on this exact shore not one has ever come. But the body has something older than a word. The body has the animal knowledge that the shape of the morning has changed and will not change back. Every hair on the arms. The heart going like a hunted thing. She does not run — there is nowhere on the water to run to — she just holds the little canoe still with one hand flat on the surface, and watches them come, and the fire burns quietly by her feet, and somewhere in her chest a door is closing that will never, ever open again. On the shore, now, tiny at this distance, the cloth-things have stopped and folded their wings, and off the sides of them smaller shapes are dropping — boats, low boats, crawling toward the beach on legs, many-legged, and the legs are oars, dozens of them dipping and pulling, and the boats are full of pale men. They land. They spill out onto the sand of a cove that belongs to the Gadigal, her neighbours, and they start to do something to the ground — pulling, cutting, dragging at the trees. And then a stick goes up on the beach — a tall bare pole — and a piece of coloured cloth climbs it, red and white and blue, and the pale men gather under it. Muskets — a volley of them, a whole line of the pale men raising sticks to their shoulders and the sticks all speaking at once with a bang and a gout of white smoke, though she has no name for a musket either — and the birds go up screaming off every tree around the whole harbour, thousands of them, black and white and grey, and the sound rolls off the water and comes back off the rocks, and the men are cheering. Oh, my dear. Oh, I am so sorry. I know where I am now. I know the date. That cloth on the pole is a flag, and it is not the flag you are picturing — there is no red cross of Saint Patrick on it yet, that comes later — it is the King's colours of the year seventeen eighty-eight, and this is the twenty-sixth of January, and those eleven ships have come fifteen thousand miles, and the men cheering on the sand believe with their whole hearts that they have arrived at an empty place at the bottom of the world and planted the first day of something. They have not arrived at an empty place. She is right there. She can see them. Her people have been watching this water for two thousand generations, and on the rocks of the next cove a few Gadigal men have come down to the edge and are shaking their spears at the boats and calling out one word, over and over, a word the newcomers will write down in their journals and never trouble to understand — "Warra! Warra!" Go away. Go away. Go away. She does not go away. She sits on her own water with her fire and her fish and her silence, and she watches the first morning of the end of her world, and she does not have the smallest idea that that is what she is doing. And I am inside her, and I know exactly what she is doing, and I cannot tell her, and I cannot leave, and I would give an eye not to have to sit here and feel her heart and know the whole of what is coming. Come with me. You need to see how this one begins. And you need to see it from here — from the water, from the fire, from the shore that is about to be told, by men with a flag and a volley, that it never belonged to anyone at all. This is Chronicles — history, lived from the inside. Not the dates and the names cut into the monument, but the morning it actually happened, close enough to touch. We drop you into the room where the world turned, and we make you feel why it still matters now. And there's only one honest way in: to actually be there, in a body, on the day. So one traveller goes where the rest of us can't — the same soul, life after life, moving through all of history, waking inside someone who was really there. I'm the Traveller. I don't choose where I land. Every great moment in history had witnesses nobody remembers — the servant at the door, the clerk with the ledger, the cook by the fire — and when the world turns, I wake up as one of them. I can't change what happens, and I can never stay. But I see everything. Tonight I'm going to take you to a beach at the far edge of the world, on a summer morning, and I'm going to make you stand on it from both sides at once — because the thing that happened on this beach is still being argued about, hard, in the country it made, and the only way to understand the argument is to be there, in the water and on the sand, before anyone had decided what it meant. It's the founding of a whole nation. It's also the last morning of a world that had lasted sixty thousand years. It is both of those things, on the same day, and I am going to ask you to hold both. Come on. Let me set the ground first. Here is why there are eleven ships in that harbour at all, and it is one of the strangest chains of cause and effect in the whole imperial story, because it starts with Britain losing. Cast your mind back a handful of years, to 1783. Britain has just lost the American War of Independence. The thirteen colonies are gone, and with them something the British government is only now realising it depended on: a place to put its convicts. For most of a century Britain had solved the problem of its overflowing gaols by the simple expedient of shipping the people in them across the Atlantic and selling their labour in America — perhaps fifty thousand human beings, transported and sold, out of sight and out of mind. And in 1783 that door slams shut. America will not take them any more. So the convicts pile up — in the gaols, and then, when the gaols are full, in the rotting hulks of old warships moored in the Thames, floating prisons so foul that men die in them by the score. The government needs somewhere new to put its unwanted, somewhere very far away, and it remembers a name. Eighteen years earlier, Captain Cook and the botanist Joseph Banks, on the Endeavour, had sailed up an unknown eastern coast and praised a wide shallow inlet they called Botany Bay. And so, in 1786, a decision is made that will change the shape of the world: to take the poorest and most desperate people in Britain, load them onto ships, and send them eight months' sail to a coast no European has ever tried to live on, to found a gaol at the bottom of the earth. And the man given command of it is handed an instruction with a contradiction folded into its heart — he is to seize this country and plant a colony on it, and, in the very same breath, to open a friendship with the people already living there, to live with them, as the order says, in amity and kindness. Take their land. Befriend them. Nobody in London appears to notice that these two commands might not both be keepable. The man handed this contradiction was Arthur Phillip — a low-born, careful, fifty-year-old naval officer, no glory-hunter, exactly the dogged administrator such an impossible errand needed. And whether the whole scheme was only a way to empty the gaols, or also a piece of grand strategy — flax for sailcloth, tall pine for masts, a British foot planted in the Pacific before the French planted theirs — hardly mattered to the wretches about to be shipped, or to the people about to be landed upon. And now the timing, because the timing is the part the textbook sentence always leaves out. Fix this year in your mind against the world you were taught. Eighteen eighty-eight — no. Seventeen eighty-eight. It sits on the exact hinge between the two revolutions that made the modern West. The American Revolution is just over; George Washington becomes the first President of the United States the very next year. The French Revolution is one year away — the Bastille will fall in July of 1789, six months after this colony eats its first hungry Christmas. In London, King George the Third is on the throne, and this very winter he suffers his first attack of the madness that will nearly cost him his crown. In Vienna, Mozart is alive, and at the absolute height of his powers, writing his last three symphonies in the summer of this exact year — he will be dead by 1791, which will turn out to be this little colony's worst year of all. And out on the ocean, a year from now, a ship called the Bounty will mutiny — and her captain, William Bligh, a hard man who once sailed with Cook, will one day be Governor of this very place. So hold the picture: as the Bastille is about to fall, and Washington to be sworn in, and Mozart to write his final notes, a few hundred convicts and their guards are planting a gaol at the other end of the earth, and not one soul in Europe is paying the slightest attention. But somebody is paying attention. Because the beach is not empty, and it never was, and here is the fact the whole founding is built on forgetting: the people watching those ships come in have been living on this exact harbour for sixty thousand years. Sixty thousand. It is a number so large it stops meaning anything, so let me try to make it mean something — their ancestors were fishing this water while there were still mammoths, while the last ice age came and went, while the pyramids were not yet a thought in anyone's mind; theirs is, quite simply, the oldest living culture on the face of the earth, and it is not in a museum, it is out on the water in a bark canoe with a fish on the line, this morning, watching. They are called, collectively, the Eora — a word from their own language that means, more or less, the people, here. They are not one tribe but a web of related clans, each with its own country, its own stretch of land and water, its own headman, bound together by a shared language and an intricate law and a kinship so complex it would take a lifetime to learn. On the south shore of this harbour, the cove the newcomers have just landed on, are the Gadigal. Across the water on the north shore, the powerful Cammeraygal. Up the river to the west, the Burramattagal, whose good ground the colony will soon be very hungry for. They are a saltwater people. The women fish from the canoes, with a little fire aboard, exactly as our woman is doing. The men hunt and fish from the rocks with spears. Their law is carried in ceremony and song and kinship, and marked on the body itself — a young man's passage into manhood sealed by the knocking-out of a front tooth, a rite the newcomers will find savage and never once think to set beside their own gallows and their own lash. This is not a wild coast, and these are not wild people. It is one of the oldest and most intricately governed human worlds there has ever been. Their world is old, and settled, and complete, and it has a name for every headland, and it has absolutely no idea what is about to be done to it. Two worlds have just met on one beach. Only one of them knows it yet. Come on. Let me put you down in it. It starts, as these things so often do, with hunger. The first thing, this time, is that I am starving, and it is a bright and beautiful day. That is the joke the country plays on all of them, and the body I am in has stopped finding it funny. The sky is an enormous hard blue, and the light comes down like a weight, and the air is loud — not with birds you would know, but with a shrilling, sawing, metallic din out of every tree, a million insects all rubbing the same note, the sound of the heat itself. And I am swinging an axe. These are a man's hands now, an English thief's hands, cracked and blistered and not made for this, and the axe comes down on the base of one of the great grey trees — a gum, a eucalypt, though nobody here has a word for it that isn't a curse — and the tree does not care. That is the thing you have to understand about the first year, and no one who sent us here understood it: the trees fight back. The axe hits the wood and leaps — jars straight back up the arms to the teeth, because this timber is not English timber, it is hard as iron, harder, it turns the edge and cracks the helve and laughs at us, and a day's brutal work gets you a foot of raw white cut in a trunk the size of a church pillar. We are trying to clear ground for the King and the ground will not be cleared. And the soil, when we get down to it, is thin and grey and sour, and the seed wheat we carried fifteen thousand miles goes into it and comes up yellow and dies, or does not come up at all, half of it spoiled and weevilled from the voyage before it was ever sown. The two bulls and the four cows have wandered off into the endless bush and are gone — given up for lost. We are convicts, most of us. Thieves and poachers and girls who took a length of cloth. We are not farmers. And we have been set down at the far end of the earth and told to feed ourselves off a country that has decided it would rather we didn't. Near me, carrying cut brush, is a woman I will call Alice, because the body knows her a little and is careful of her. She came off the same ship. In this camp there are perhaps four men to every woman, and that arithmetic is a kind of weather that never lifts for a woman here — it sits over her every hour of every day. She has taken up with one of the marines, a guard, a slab of a man with a decent ration and a hut with a door that shuts, and the whole camp knows it and the whole camp understands it, because it is not desire, it is arithmetic; it is a roof and an extra half-pound of flour and a wall between her and the other three men, and she has done the sum the way you would do it, the way anyone would, and she does not meet my eye when she passes because there is nothing in her face she wants read. That is the part the story of this place forgets to tell — that for the women, the founding was a market in which they were the scarce coin, and the choosing was mostly done to them. She carries her brush to the pile and goes back for more, and says nothing, and the marine watches her from the shade, and the cicadas saw on, and the sun comes down like a judgment. And then, one morning a month into all this, a drum. A side-drum, rattling out over the camp, the sound that means everyone stops and everyone gathers, and we are marched into a square and made to stand, men on one side, women on the other, and between two trees they have put up a thing we have not seen here before, and my stomach drops, because I know the shape of a gallows anywhere. His name is Thomas Barrett. He is a young man, a convict like us, and his crime — the crime they are going to hang him for, one month into the founding of the whole colony — is that he stole from the stores. Butter. Peas. A little pork. Food, out of the common food, in a place where the food is already running short, and the Governor has decided, coldly and deliberately, that this is the one thing a starving camp cannot allow, and so the law that has crossed fifteen thousand miles of ocean unrolls itself here in its very first month, and it has brought its rope with it. They make another convict do the hanging — one of our own, given the job to save his own neck. Barrett stands under the tree. The chaplain prays. There is a horrible, fumbling delay, the hangman shaking so hard he cannot work, threatened until he does it, and then it is done, and a young man is turning slowly in the hot bright air over a country that does not care, and the drum has stopped, and nobody moves, and I understand, standing there in a thief's starving body, exactly what kind of place this is going to be. Not a settlement. A prison, with the sea for a wall. Here is the strange part, though. The strange part is the Governor. Because you would expect a man who hangs a boy for stealing peas to be a brute, and he is not. His name is Arthur Phillip, and I will show him to you properly before we are done, but you should meet the shape of him now, from down here, from the bottom, because from down here you can see the thing the officers can't. When the ration is cut — and it is cut, and cut again, as the months go by and no ship comes — Phillip does a thing almost no man of his rank and his age would think to do. He orders that the ration be equal. The same weight of flour, the same salt meat, for the Governor of the colony as for the lowest convict in it. He throws his own private stores — the officer's comforts he brought for himself — into the common store, to be shared. When there is not enough, there is not enough for him either. And I stand there, gnawing on the same weevilled ounces as everyone else, hating him for the boy on the tree and not able, quite, to hate him for the flour, and I feel the whole terrible contradiction of the man settle over the camp like the heat: that he is decent, genuinely decent, and that his decency is the sharp clean edge of the thing that is taking this country apart. He would be easier if he were cruel. He is not cruel. He is just here, doing his duty, with a rope in one hand and an equal loaf in the other, and both of them, somehow, part of the same job. Keep the strength to swing the axe. Do not think past the next meal. That is the whole of a convict's wisdom, and the body has it down to the bone. But I have read the far side of this year, and I know that the hunger in this camp is about to look like nothing at all — because across the water, in the coves where the fishing woman's people live, something is coming that will empty a whole world in a season, and it is already in the air. Let me pull us up out of the camp for a moment and give you the shape of what you just felt, because the hanging of Thomas Barrett is not a detail — it is the whole nature of the place, arriving early. This was a penal colony. Not a settlement of hopeful pioneers; a prison. The first structures of law it built were a store to be guarded and a gallows to guard it with, and Barrett went to the tree on the twenty-seventh of February, seventeen eighty-eight, one month and a day after the flag went up, for theft from the public stores. The law came ashore with its rope already coiled, and it hanged a man almost before it had built a wall. And the hunger you felt in that body was real, and it very nearly killed the whole enterprise. Everything that could go wrong with the food went wrong at once. The soil around Sydney Cove was thin and poor. The seed had spoiled on the long voyage. The English tools shattered on the ironhard native timber. The livestock strayed into the bush and vanished. The convicts were townspeople and thieves, not farmers, and the officers were gentlemen, and between them they could not make the ground yield. So the ration was cut, and cut again, as month after month the store-ships that were supposed to follow simply did not come. By the terrible winter of 1790 the weekly issue was down to a few pounds of worm-eaten flour and a scrap of salt pork so old and so shrunken that grown men wept over the weighing of it; they ate the ship's rats when they could catch them and reckoned them a treat; they sent the little tender off to Norfolk Island and the flagship halfway round the world to beg, and stood on the point counting the days. Some simply lay down in their huts and could not get up again. It was, by any honest measure, one of the closest brushes with total collapse in the whole history of European settlement anywhere — a colony at the far edge of the earth, a few weeks from the last of its food, with no certainty a single ship would ever come. Phillip pushed fifteen miles up the harbour to a patch of better ground at a place the Burramattagal called Burramatta — he named it Rose Hill; you know it now as Parramatta — and planted a government farm there, and it helped, but not enough, not nearly enough. For two years this colony lived one failed harvest away from simply starving to death at the bottom of the world, its equal ration shrinking in every hand, its eyes turned to the sea watching for a sail that would not appear. That is the ground the founding actually stands on: not conquest, not triumph — hunger, and stubbornness, and a Governor sharing out the last of the flour by the ounce. Hold that. Now come back down with me, across the water, to the other shore — because what happened to the Eora in the spring of 1789 is the single largest thing that happened in the whole founding, and it is the thing the founding remembers least. This time I come in gently, the way you come into a house where someone is sick. I am small. That is the first thing — the world is up high, the hands are a child's hands, and I am lying on my side on warm sand in the mouth of a rock shelter, and I am looking at the water, and the water is wrong. I do not, at first, know why it is wrong. It is beautiful — the same great blue harbour, the same grey headlands — but it is quiet. And this water is never quiet. This is a cove where the canoes go out every morning, where the women call to each other across the surface, where the children swim and the men stand on the rocks with their spears and the smoke of a dozen small fires drifts up through the trees. That is what this cove is. And this morning there is one thread of smoke, and no canoes, and no calling, and the child in whose body I am lying is listening to the silence the way you would listen to a held breath. Then I see the others. Under the overhang, in the shade, there are shapes, and the shapes are people, lying down, and they are not sleeping. There is a covering of marks on the skin of them — I will not dwell on it, the body does not want to look and neither do I — a rash gone to blisters gone to something worse, on the face, the arms, the chest, and the people under the rock are the child's people, and most of them are already dead, and the ones who are not dead soon will be. This is galgala. That is the word the child has for it, a new word, a word that did not exist in this country a season ago and now means the end of everything: the smallpox. It has come up out of nowhere — no one here has ever met it, no one here has any defence against it, it goes through these clans like fire through dry grass, and it is killing, in this one terrible autumn, something close to half of every Eora person on this harbour. Half. Whole families in a night. Whole camps. The old people who carried the law and the songs, the babies, the strong young men who fished the rocks — it does not choose, it just takes, and the canoes lie pulled up and unused because there is no one well enough to fish, and the bodies lie in the coves because there is no one left to do for them what the law requires, and the child I am is alive by pure animal accident and does not understand why the world has gone silent and will spend the rest of a short life not understanding it. I want to tell you what I do here, because it is all I can do, and it is what I always do at the places where the grief is too big for words. I go quiet. I stop narrating the feeling, because the feeling does not want a narrator, and I just let the child look, and I look with her: at the flat quiet water, at the one thread of smoke, at the pulled-up canoes, at a whole world with the people taken out of it, still beautiful, which is the unbearable part, still exactly as beautiful as it was the week before, the light just as gold on the sandstone, and no one left to see it. And then there are footsteps, and I brace the body for whatever is coming, and what is coming is mercy, of a kind, from the least likely direction. Two men come along the rocks. One is a colonist — a surgeon, in a coat, with a bag, moving carefully, out of his depth and doing what he can. And the other is an Eora man, and I feel the child recognise him, or half-recognise him, a straight-backed grave man who the newcomers, months ago, had seized off a beach and chained and tried to make into a bridge between the two peoples. His name is Arabanoo. He was their captive, and he learned their language, and against every reason he had to hate them he grew to be, of all things, gentle with them — and now here he is, freed and come back, walking into the worst place on the harbour, going from body to body under the rock, doing the things the law requires, closing the eyes, tending the few who still breathe, with the surgeon beside him handing him water. He picks up a living child — not mine; another, smaller — and carries her out into the light. He does not know, doing it, that the sickness will take him too, in a few weeks, that he will nurse the dying until he becomes one of them. He just does the next thing, and the next, in a world coming down around him, and the child in whose body I lie watches the grave kind man carry the smaller child into the sun, and something in her that had gone numb comes back, just for a moment, just enough to hurt. That is the nadir. That is the bottom of the whole story, and I want you to notice that it happens quietly, off to one side, in a cove the founding barely wrote down — no battle, no massacre you could point to, no single villain to hang it on, just a sickness and a silence and half a people gone while fifteen miles away a hungry camp of strangers weighs out its equal ration and waits for a ship. The end of a world does not always come with an army. Sometimes it comes as a quiet morning, and a cove with no canoes on it, and a child who will never know why. I have to stay up here with you a moment, out of the body, because what you just lived through is, by any measure, the largest single event in the whole story of the founding, and it is the one almost nobody tells. In April of 1789, sixteen months after the ships arrived, smallpox swept through the Aboriginal peoples of the Sydney basin and killed something like half of them in a matter of weeks. Half. The coastal clans — the Gadigal, whose cove the colony was sitting on — were effectively shattered; the officers themselves, riding and rowing around the harbour, recorded cove after cove with the dead lying unburied in the rock shelters, and wrote of the terrible, sudden emptiness of a country that had been full of people. It is a catastrophe on the scale of the great plagues of Europe, visited on a single harbour in a single season, and it broke the back of the Eora world at the exact moment that world most needed its strength. Think what a thing like that takes out of a people all at once: not only numbers, but the old ones who carry the law and the songs and the name of every headland, the mothers and fathers of small children, the strong who fish the rocks and hunt the ridges. An ancient oral culture keeps its whole library in living heads — and in one autumn a great part of that library simply died, un-copied, and could not be got back. The Eora had never met this sickness in sixty thousand years and had nothing in their blood to stand against it, and it went through the coves the way fire goes through summer grass. And where it came from is one of the genuine unsolved questions of Australian history — I will lay the pieces of the argument out for you honestly at the end, in their proper place, because it matters and because you deserve the real state of it and not a tidy answer I do not have. What is not in doubt is the effect. A people who might have met a few hundred hungry strangers on something like equal terms met them instead in the middle of losing half their number to an invisible thing that came with those strangers' arrival, whether by their hand or not. The frontier that formed after 1789 formed over a mass grave that nobody chose and nobody understood, and it hardened everything that came after. Hold that as we go back down — because the strangers, too, are about to come very close to the edge, and the sea is about to give them the worst rescue in the history of mercy. Now I am a young man in a blue coat, and I am so hungry I have stopped being able to think about anything else, and I am standing on a point of land with a spyglass, doing the thing the whole colony does now, which is watch the sea. It is June of 1790. It has been more than two years since the flag went up, and no supply ship has come — not one — in all that time. Think about that. Two years, at the end of the earth, the ration cut to a starving handful, and the one thing that could save them, a ship from home, simply never appearing over the horizon, month after month after month, until the watching itself becomes a kind of madness. Worse: in March, their own flagship, the Sirius, sent away to fetch food, was wrecked on a reef at Norfolk Island, and the news of it, when it came, went through the colony like a death, because the Sirius was the lifeline, the Sirius was the way home, and now the Sirius was so many spars on a reef a thousand miles away. The young officer whose eyes I am looking through has watched grown men weep at that news. He has watched the Governor — Phillip — take the loss of his flagship without a word, and go on cutting his own ration to match the convicts', and it has done something to the young man, that steadiness; he has started, almost against his will, to love the strange grim competent little man. And then — a bell. The lookout's bell, ringing and ringing, and a shout going up that cracks halfway through because the man shouting it has not had enough to eat to shout properly: a sail, a sail! And the whole starving colony comes stumbling down to the water, and there she is, a real ship, standing in past the Heads exactly where the fishing woman first saw the fleet, and behind her another, and another, and the young officer is laughing and crying at once and so am I, because this is it, this is rescue, this is the food and the letters and the proof that England remembers they exist — And then the boats come ashore, and the laughing stops. Because this is the Second Fleet. And the Second Fleet is a crime. The government, having sent the First Fleet under a naval officer who got almost all his people there alive, handed the second one to private contractors and paid them per convict embarked, not per convict landed — which is to say it paid them whether the convicts arrived alive or dead, and so the contractors, doing the arithmetic of the damned, starved and chained and neglected their human cargo for the whole eight-month voyage, because a dead convict cost them nothing and the food he did not eat could be sold. A quarter of the people put aboard are dead. And the ones who are not dead are being handed up out of the holds now, in front of the young officer, in front of me, and they are not men and women any more, they are things — skeletal, filthed, crawling with vermin, too weak to stand, some of them dead already in the boats and only discovered when the living were lifted off them, all of them landed on the beach in rows like the cargo the contract said they were. The young officer, who thought he had seen the worst the world had, turns aside and is sick in the sand. Moving among the rows with his sleeves rolled is the colony's surgeon, a decent overworked man named John White, kneeling to each body in turn, sorting the barely-living from the already-dead — and I watch him work, and I watch the young officer make himself go and help, and I understand that the colony that has been starving for two years, that ran down to the water mad with hope, now has to find, out of its own empty stores, the strength to nurse hundreds of dying strangers thrown up on its beach three- quarters ruined. I go quiet again here. You will have noticed I do that. I stand in the young man's horror and I do not narrate it, because these were real people with real names, most of them dead within days of finally reaching land, and they are owed silence, not commentary. But I want you to hold the shape of it, because it is the truth under the founding myth: the rescue, when it finally came, came rotten. The empire that sent these ships could send them fifteen thousand miles and could not be troubled to keep the people on them alive. And the little colony survived even this — nursed whom it could, buried the rest, and somehow did not break — and if you are looking for the reason it did not break, you keep coming back to the same unglamorous answer: a Governor who shared the flour, and a few thousand people at the bottom of the world who simply refused to lie down and die. Let me carry you across a few months and into the strangest, most important morning in the whole four years — the morning everything turns. But first you need three things in your hands. The first is that Phillip, all this while, has been desperate to open a real relationship with the Eora, and has gone about it in the worst possible way: by kidnapping. Unable to get them to come and simply talk — and why on earth would they, watching what was happening to their coves — he ordered men seized off beaches so he could feed them, dress them, learn their language, and send them back as bridges. That is how Arabanoo came to him, the gentle man you saw in the plague cove. And after Arabanoo died, Phillip did it again, and had a man named Bennelong taken — a quick, proud, brilliant Wangal man of about thirty who would matter more than anyone could have guessed. Bennelong learned the colony from the inside, charmed its officers, ate at the Governor's table, sparred with Phillip like an equal — and then, when it suited him, slipped his captivity and was gone, back to his own people, leaving the Governor half bereft, like a man whose friend has walked out mid-sentence. The second thing is that Phillip was working under a written instruction to live in amity and kindness with these people — he believed in it, personally, genuinely; he had written that there could be no slavery in a free land — and he had spent two years watching that instruction curdle in his hands into kidnappings and plague and mistrust, and he wanted, badly, to make it come true. And the third thing is that in September of 1790, word reached the town that a whale had washed up, dead, on a beach down the harbour at a place the Eora called Kayeemy, and that Bennelong and a great crowd of Eora were there feasting on it — and Phillip, hearing his lost friend was close, did a thing no sensible governor would do. He got in a boat, and he went to find him, unarmed, trusting, walking up an open beach toward a hundred warriors, holding out his empty hands. Come down onto the sand with me. This is the hinge the whole story turns on. And now I am the Governor. It is a strange body to be in. I feel it the moment I arrive — a slight body, tired, past fifty, a long face, a missing front tooth that the Eora find fascinating because they knock a tooth out too, in their own rites, and have half decided this pale chief did it for the same reasons. There is an old ache in the frame and a deeper one behind the eyes, the tiredness of a man who has carried a starving colony on his back for near three years and buried more people than he can bear to count. But under the tiredness there is something I did not expect, and it takes me a moment to name it, and then I do: it is hope. This worn, grave, dutiful man is walking up a beach toward the sound of Bennelong's voice, and he is happy. His friend is here. Perhaps, at last, the amity can be real. The beach at Kayeemy is a curve of white sand, and the dead whale lies along it like a wrecked ship, vast and reeking, and there are Eora everywhere — scores of them, cutting the meat, eating, calling, a great loud feast — and there, coming down the sand grinning, is Bennelong. And I feel Phillip's whole heart go out to him. They greet each other with real gladness, these two — the Governor and the man who walked out on him — Bennelong laughing, naming his companions, asking after people in the town by their nicknames, showing off his English, every inch the host; and Phillip, delighted, sends back to the boat for gifts, for a hatchet, for wine, and stands there in the middle of a hundred armed strangers with his hands open and his guard down, an ageing Englishman at a whale feast at the bottom of the world, thinking, this is working, we are going to be able to do this. I can feel him thinking it. I can feel exactly how much he wants it. And that is when the mood on the beach changes, the way weather changes, and neither Phillip nor I can read it fast enough. There are men here from further off, men who do not know him, and to them he is not a friend — he is one of the pale strangers whose coming has emptied the coves, whose camp holds men who seize people off beaches, and one of them is a young Bidjigal man — his name was Willemering — holding a spear, and he is frightened, and a frightened man with a spear and a wrong owed is the most dangerous thing in the world. Phillip sees him. Sees the spear come up onto the throwing-stick — the woomera, the lever of hardwood that turns a man's arm into something that can drive a spear clean through a plank. And here is the thing, the thing I feel Phillip decide in the half-second he has: he does not raise his arms to fight, and he does not turn to run. He steps forward, and he opens his hands wider, to show they are empty, to show he means no harm — because he still, even now, believes the misunderstanding can be talked down. He is wrong. The arm comes over. There is a sound I will not forget in any life — a hard wet chock — and a shaft of wood is suddenly standing out of the Governor's right shoulder, driven clean through, the barbed point out the back, and the weight of it staggers him, spins him half round, and the pain arrives a beat later like a house falling on him, and I am inside it, inside the shock and the white blindness of it, a spear through the body of the man whose eyes I am seeing through, and blood, a great deal of blood, coming fast. Muskets — this is the moment, this is the whole hinge of the whole story, hold your breath with me, because everything can go one of two ways in the next three seconds. Down at the water's edge Phillip's own men are there, marines, and they have their muskets half up, they have seen their Governor speared, their hands are going to the locks, and there are a hundred Eora on this beach, women and children among them, and if a single one of those muskets fires there will be a massacre on this sand, a volley into a crowd, and after it a war with no bottom to it. Everything the colony will be for a hundred years is balanced on this instant. And Phillip — with a spear through his shoulder, with the barb out his back, staggering, bleeding, in more pain than most men feel in a lifetime — Phillip lifts his good arm, his left arm, toward his own men, and forces out an order through his teeth. Do not fire. Hold. Hold. Do not fire on them. He is bleeding to death, as far as he knows, and the thing he spends his breath on is not revenge and not even his own life — it is stopping the volley. Hold your fire. He will be rowed back up the harbour with the spear cut off short and still in him, white as the sand, and he will give the same order from the boat, and again from his sickbed: no reprisal. No punishment. Nobody is to hunt the man down. It was — he understands this, even now, even bleeding — it was fair, by a law that is not his; a settling of a wrong; a thing owed and paid; and he will not answer it with a war. I sit inside him on the floor of that boat, holding the thing that has happened, and I feel the whole of the man come clear to me at last. This is the truth of Arthur Phillip, and it is the truth of the whole founding folded into one bleeding body: that the kindness is real — the hand going up to save the very people who speared him is not a performance, it is the deepest thing in him — and that the kindness does not, cannot, will not un-take the country. He can forbid the volley. He cannot give back the coves. He can love Bennelong and share the flour and refuse the reprisal and mean every scrap of it, and the ships will still keep coming, and the farms will still keep spreading, and the sixty-thousand-year world will still go on ending, on his watch, by his hand, with his genuine grief. The amity and the dispossession are not opposites. I understand it now, with a spear-shaft's worth of his blood on the boards. They are the front and the back of the same open hand — the hand he is holding out, right now, empty, toward the people whose country he has come to take and cannot stop taking, and would save if saving it did not mean leaving, and he will never leave. That is the reckoning. He survives the wound. He does not survive the contradiction; no one could; it is not survivable; it is just true. And the strangest thing of all — the thing that breaks my heart a little every time I turn it over — is that it works. The wound opens the door. Because Phillip does not retaliate, because the spear is answered with an open hand and not a volley, the Eora read something in it, and within weeks Bennelong and his people begin coming freely into the town, sitting at the Governor's fire, and a fragile, real, prickly peace begins — bought, of all the coins in the world, with the Governor's own blood, freely given and freely not avenged. Come up out of him with me. There is a colder current running under all this warmth, and you need to see it before you decide how you feel. So that is the hinge, and I want to name plainly what swung on it, because this is the beat where the whole moral engine of the founding shows itself. Phillip's brief was amity and kindness, and for two years it had produced its opposite — the kidnappings of Arabanoo and Bennelong, the mistrust, the plague- haunted coves. And then the spear at Kayeemy, which looked like an ambush and was almost certainly something else — a payback, a settling of accounts under Eora law for the seizings and the deaths, a wrong answered by the country's own justice — was met by Phillip not with a war but with a raised hand, and the paradox of the man produced, for once, something like peace. Bennelong came in. A brick hut was built for him on the point that still carries his name. The town and the clans began, warily, to mix. But amity is not the only Eora answer to an invasion, and here is the counter-current I promised you. Not every man on that shore was a Bennelong, willing to cross into the strangers' world and broker a life inside it. Down toward Botany Bay there was a man of the Bidjigal named Pemulwuy, and Pemulwuy had looked at the coats and the gifts and the brick hut and the equal ration and the open hand, and had come to the opposite conclusion from Bennelong entirely — that there is no amity to be had with people who are taking your country, that the kindness is just the taking wearing a gentler face, and that the only answer to an invasion is a war. Within months of Phillip's wound, Pemulwuy would put a spear into the Governor's gamekeeper, and the frontier war — the long, grinding, hundred-year resistance — would begin in earnest. Two men, two roads, one invasion: Bennelong crossing the water to make kin of the strangers, and Pemulwuy raising a spear to drive them off it. Come and stand with the soldiers sent to catch him — because the way the colony answered Pemulwuy tells you exactly how much the amity was ever really worth. Now I am a marine private, and I am carrying a musket and a hatchet and a canvas bag, and I have been told that in the bottom of my bag I am to bring back six severed heads. That is not a figure of speech. In December of 1790, Pemulwuy speared the Governor's gamekeeper, a man named McIntyre — a man the Eora seem to have particularly hated, perhaps a man who had done things in the bush the record does not fully hold — and Phillip, the same Phillip who took a spear through his own body and forbade all reprisal, made a different choice this time, because it was not his own body now, it was one of his men, and the amity had to be seen to have a limit. He ordered a punitive expedition. Go out, he said, into the country toward Botany Bay, and capture six of the Bidjigal, and if you cannot capture them, kill them, and bring back their heads in bags. And he handed the order to the last man in the colony who wanted it: to Captain Watkin Tench. I know Tench a little, through this marine's eyes, and you would like him — everyone likes Tench. He is the one who writes it all down, the humane one, the curious one, the officer forever wandering off to look at a bird or a flower or to sit and try to learn the Eora language from a child; he thinks the whole business of the frontier is a tragedy and says so, in his journals, in that dry, clear, decent voice of his. And here he is, this humane man, given an order to go and cut six heads off, and — this is the part I want you to feel — he goes. He does not refuse. He negotiates the number down a little, privately appalled, and then he leads us out, forty-odd sweating marines with hatchets and bags, into the bush, to do it. And the bush swallows us whole. This is Pemulwuy's country, and he knows it the way the fishing woman knows her water, and we know it not at all. We blunder through it in our wool coats in the heat, and the strange birds crack and ring in the trees above us — a sound like a stockman's whip, a sound like a struck bell — and there is never anyone there. We come to a swamp and half the men go in to their waists and lose their shoes in the mud. We march to where the Bidjigal are supposed to be and they are simply not, and were perhaps never, and the country closes behind us and opens ahead of us and gives us nothing. Twice we go out. Twice we come back with the bags empty and the heads still on the shoulders of men we never once saw. Pemulwuy is out there — I can feel it, the marine can feel it, Tench can feel it — Pemulwuy is watching us flounder through his home with our ridiculous bags, and he is not afraid of us, and he is right not to be, because we cannot catch him. He is a clever-man, the Eora say, a man with power in him; they will come to believe that muskets cannot kill him, and for years the evidence will seem to agree. And I stand in the marine's tired body at the end of it, scraping swamp-mud off a musket that never fired, and I understand both of these men at once, and I understand why the colony could never win. Pemulwuy has seen the whole shape of the thing more clearly, in a way, than anyone — clearer than Phillip, clearer than Bennelong. He has understood that the gifts and the amity and the open hand do not change the one fact that matters, which is that these people are not leaving and mean to have the country, and that against that fact there is nothing to do but fight, and go on fighting, and make the taking cost as much as one man in his own count…