TWO WORLDS MEET
On the beaches and rocky outcrops of Sydney Harbour, the Eora people and their neighbours hunted and fished for thousands of years. In fact, someone travelling around the harbour in Aboriginal times would have encountered several different peoples. Each group maintained its own distinct set of spiritual beliefs, or 'Dreaming'. And each spoke their own language - these included Dharug, Dharawal, Gundungurra and Kurringgai. This linguistic diversity existed across New South Wales (NSW) - indeed, across the entire
continent.
The Aborigines' world was challenged on 19 April 1770, when Lieutenant James Cook of the British Navy climbed onto the deck of his ship Endeavour and saw a miraculous sight. In the gentle light of dawn, a vast uncharted country of wooded hills and gentle valleys had appeared across the ocean.
Ten days later, he dropped anchor in a bay and went ashore, where he was met warily by the local people. The ship's scientists were so excited by the unfamiliar plants they found there that Cook named the place 'Botany Bay'. But the Aborigines were alarmed by the intrusion. As Cook noted in his journal, 'All they seemed to want was for us to be gone.
A COLONY OF THIEVES
In 1788, the English were back to stay. They numbered 751 ragtag convicts and children, and around 250 soldiers, officials and their wives. 'I'his motley 'First Fleet' was under the command of a diligent naval <'lIptain named Arthur Phillip. Unimpressed by Cook's marshy Botany lillY, Phillip was delighted to discover a magnificent harbour just a few IIJiles up the coast. There, on a small cove, in the land of the Eora people, Ph illip established a British penal settlement. He renamed the place after I he British Home Secretary, Lord Sydney. The date of the landing was 26 January 1788, an occasion remembered each year with a public holiday known as 'Australia Day'.
The fact that a national holiday commemorates the arrival of a party of prisoners may seem inglorious - but it helps explain both the egalitarianism and the sense of irony that sometimes accompany expressions of nationalism in Australia. Robert Hughes' bestseller, The Fatal Shore (1987), depicts convict Australia as a terrifying 'Gulag' where Britain tormented rebels, vagrants and criminals. But other historians point out that powerful men in London saw transportation as a scheme for giving prisoners a new and useful life. Indeed, with Phillip's encouragement, many convicts soon earned their 'ticket of leave', a kind of parole that gave them their freedom throughout the colony and the right to seek work on their own behalf.
But the convict system could be savage. Women (who were outnumbered five to one) lived under constant threat of sexual exploitation. Female convicts who offended their gaolers languished in the depressing 'female factories'. As the Eora people saw, to their horror, male convict re-offenders were cruelly flogged or even hanged. (Just six weeks after the landing, Phillip hanged a 17-year-old boy named John Barrett on the shores of Sydney Cove, for stealing food.)
The British government had instructed Governor Phillip to treat the local Aborigines 'with amity and kindness'.
But he could do nothing to stop the lethal impact of European diseases, including syphilis, smallpox and the 'flu, on the local populations. Alcohol and the poor British diet also took their toll. His attempts to befriend Aborigines, notably an adventurous man named Bennelong, ended sadly, with Bennelong himself dying of alcoholism and loneliness. The Sydney Opera House stands on a tongue of land that bears his name, Bennelong Point.
MACQUARIE
By the early 1800s, Sydney was a bustling port. A space in the bush had been cleared for vegetable gardens, new houses, warehouses and streets - and windmills seemed to occupy the top of every hill. But Phillip's plans to create a vigorous new society in Australia had come adrift. His successors at Government House had lost control to a caste of corrupt, self-serving military officers. Members of this infamous 'Rum Corps' were busily enriching themselves by controlling trade and land, and treating the convicts as their own private labour force. But in 1809 they met their match when the British government dispatched Governor Lachlan Macquarie to restore the rule of law.
An autocratic British governor may seem an unlikely hero for Australians. In fact, Macquarie transformed Sydney into a well-planned colony graced with fine civic architecture. Many of his buildings, including several designed by the convict-architect Francis Greenway, survive to this day notably the Hyde Park Barracks in Sydney's Macquarie St, where you can see Macquarie's name painted on the façade.
Macquarie was a man of progressive and civic-minded social attitudes. He championed the cause of convicts who had served their time (the 'Emancipists'), promoting many of them to significant public offices and welcoming them to his circle at Government House. This policy outraged the 'Exclusives' those members of the wealthy classes who maintained rigid British manners and accents, and old-world notions of class.
By then, many of the white children in the colony were speaking with a new, assertively Australian accent. Distinctively Australian attitudes and manners were taking shape in the streets of Sydney. In fact, the convicts of Sydney gave white Australians an important part of their mythology. For generations afterwards, Australians disowned any suggestion that there was a 'convict stain' on the pages of their own family history.
Yet, there was also a deep sympathy for the convicts. Throughout the 20th century, school children learned how Britain's Industrial Revolution had been brutal to the poor and the working class, and how convicts were often transported to Australia for such crimes as 'stealing a loaf of bread' to feed their starving children. It is a powerful image - and one that convinced generations of colonists that Australia might just prove to be a fairer place than the old country that had dealt so harshly with its underclass.
FRONTIER
The colonists were partitioned from the inland by the formidable cliffs and canyons of the 'Blue Mountains'. While some simple folk thought China lay on the other side, the sheep graziers and cattlemen dreamt of rolling farmlands in the mysterious hinterland. In 1813, when Sydney was in the grip of a drought, three graziers found a route across the barrier and discovered that the great Aboriginal territories beyond were indeed rich in grasslands.
This discovery unleashed the ambitions of the so-called 'squatters'. These were men of capital who took their flocks ever deeper into the Aboriginal territories in search of past'lres and water. In many areas, Aborigines fought against the advance, and history remembers leaders of the Aboriginal resistance such as Pemulwuy and Mosquito. At the same time, the government was anxious to monitor the activities of the squatters on the frontier, and determined to enforce the principle that the government - and no-one else - actually owned the land. To assert its authority, it dispatched expeditions of explorers, including John Oxley, Charles Sturt and Thomas Mitchell, to discover what mysteries and resources lay in the Aboriginal territories.
The Blue Mountains are part of an elevation that runs the length of eastern Australia, known, rather grandly, as the Great Dividing Range.
The rivers on the gentle, western side of the range flow inland, and the early explorers were tantalised by the mystery of where they went. As they pondered this 'riddle of the rivers', some predicted they would find a mighty Mississippi-type river, which would become the highway for Australian development.
A few believed there was a wide inland sea - a sort of Sea of Galilee - in the heart of the country. But the inland journeys of the explorers and squatters often took them into increasingly dry and arid territory.
The comparison with the United States was harsh. In America, the explorers had discovered a bountiful land, which they interpreted as an expression of God's blessing - a sign of white America's 'manifest destiny'. The Australians' journey westward was, by contrast, a journey into disappointment. Nevertheless, the sheep flourished, and the government filled its coffers I y leasing the Aboriginal territories to the squatters. The colony's income was boosted by the discovery of massive goldfields at Ophir (near Orange, p238) in 1851. The possibility of instant wealth attracted a flood of youthful !lIiners from Europe, America and China.
DEMOCRACY & GROWTH
At the same time, the colonists' agitation for a more democratic form of government reached sympathetic ears in London, and the colonists began to debate the constitution under which a parliament should operate. But the squatters were uneasy. They were now the de facto aristocracy of the colony and were determined to hang onto their political power.
This division between the urban democrats and landed conservatives was reflected in the structure of the new Parliament of New South Wales, which adopted a radical form of manhood suffrage in the lower house, while the practice of appointing the upper chamber allowed it to function as the conservative 'squatters house'.
Australia was developing an export economy based on primary production. The sheep industry expanded into the west of the state in the 1890s with the discovery of massive reserves of artesian water. At the same time, wheat, dairying and sugar were developing as major industries. NSW became an exporter of brown coal, and mining fed the smelters and industries that were developing in Newcastle and Wollongong to the immediate north and south, respectively, of Sydney.
The rapid expansion of the NSW economy since 1788 had created a continual demand for labour. Whereas England and Ireland were burdened with the misery and poverty of a 'surplus population', Australian colonists were actively encouraging migration. This single fact gave the workforce a bargaining power undreamt of in Britain. Good wages, social mobility and increasingly strong unions fed the belief that Australia might become 'the
Orking man's paradise'. Employers, on the other hand, notably the squatters, were anxious to keep wage costs low, and the appeal of cheap Asian or slander labour was irresistible.
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