Monthly Archives: June 2018

The Busby family

30 Saturday Jun 2018

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Sydney Cove was chosen as the site of the colony because the harbour was a good safe haven for ships and the Tank Stream appeared to offer a good supply of water. But after 30 years of cutting down trees and creating a township, Sydney Cove was silting up, the Tank Stream was polluted and the wells were inadequate.

Happily for Sydney, over in Ireland, John Busby, an engineer and water-borer, applied to Lord Bathurst, Secretary of State for Colonial Affairs, to be employed in NSW as a surveyor and engineer. Busby had fallen on hard times as the result of a swindle, despite his fame as inventor of a bore that provided water to Leith Fort in Scotland, and a commendation from the Duke of Wellington when his water-boring technique was used in the Peninsular Wars to provide the troops with water. Lord Bathurst appointed him NSW Mineral Surveyor and Civil Engineer in 1823.

John and Sarah Busby, their sons James, John, Alexander, William and daughter Catherine arrived in Sydney on February 24 1824. Their older son George joined them later, becoming Assistant Colonial Surgeon 1826-44. Their second son James more famously became the British Resident in New Zealand 1833-40 and his and his wife’s descriptions of the signing of the Treaty of Waitangi, signed at their house in February 1840, make for rivetting reading.[i]

But it was John Busby snr, and later William, who were to make the difference in Sydney. The family’s letters and journals are collected into four weighty volumes that tell, among other things, how John and William laboured over ‘Busby’s Bore’. Work commenced in September 1827 to bring water in a tunnel from the Lachlan Swamps (now Centennial Park – you can still see ‘Busby’s Pond’ there near the Robertson Road gates) to Hyde Park. Busby’s job was complicated by his uneven access to labour. He fumes that his convict labourers are lazy and incompetent, that if not chained together they abscond to do odd jobs for other people, and that sometimes he loses them altogether when they are re-allocated to the building of the Great North Road.

The tunnel was dug from both ends simultaneously, and by 1831 water from pools and underground streams in the tunnel reached Hyde Park.

The water ran out of a pipe with a raised end, and poured into large barrels on wheels and was retailed about the city at so much per bucket full. The price varied according to the distance from the standing pipe, being sometimes 2d [pence] a bucket, sometimes 3d a bucket and even for one period of drought, 5d a bucket.[ii]

The two excavations met below the intersection of Moore Park Rd and Driver Ave. It must have been with great relief that John Busby wrote to Deas Thompson, the Colonial Secretary, on 12 January 1837 to say that the tunnel was completed. However, it was not until 1852, when his son Alexander petitioned for payment for Busby’s work on the tunnel, that a government Select Committee found that the job was well done and that Busby deserved the £333/6/8 that he was owed. They also awarded a £500 gratuity to compensate for the long wait.

 

[i]A History of the Busby Family, Vol 3. Collected letters. Viewed at Woollahra Local History Library June 2006.

[ii]Ibid. Vol 1 p289.

A story of Sydney

24 Sunday Jun 2018

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As the ferry goes on, past Double Bay, I think of Patrick White’s The Vivisector, and of its main character, Hurtle Duffield, meeting Nance Lightfoot at the seawall on Rushcutters Bay. The Vivisectoris a story of Sydney, of a world of people who are cut off from their roots and collected into Sydney – a city that doesn’t appear to nourish them, but does at least provide shelter. Hurtle is an artist, who moves from his birthplace in ‘Cox Street’, in the slums of Surry Hills, to Sunningdale in Rushcutters Bay when the Courtneys purchase and adopt him.

The geography of the city is lightly placed around the drama of Hurtle’s art, but it’s a necessary and important part of the story. As a young man, after Hurtle meets Nance Lightfoot, he lives with her in Darlinghurst or in his own apartment on George Street. After a disastrous foray into the bush (Galston Gorge?) Hurtle buys a house in Paddington, meets one of his influential bystanders, Cutbush, on the edge of the cleft in Cooper Park, Bellevue Hill, visits Boo Courtney in her house with a balustrade between it and the sea, and Hero Pavloussi in her house at Rose Bay.

The journey from Cox Street to Sunningdale, from slum boy to privileged boy, is key to Hurtle’s development, and he only seems settled when he buys his own house in ‘Flint Street’ Paddington with a yard that opens onto the Cox Street-like world of Chubb’s Lane.

Here the clothes-lines and corrugated iron took over; ladies called to one another over collapsing paling fences; the go-carts were parked and serviced, and dragged out on shrieking wheels. In the evening young girls hung around in clusters, sucking oranges, sharing fashion mags, and criticising one another’s hair as though they had been artists. There was a mingled smell of poor washing, sump oil, rotting vegetables, goatish male bodies, soggy female armpits, in Chubb’s Lane.[i]

Hurtle is born with the twentieth century, and White marks the passing of time with careful hints at the changing features of the city. The story of Hurtle’s grandfather, who ‘died of a seizure on the Parramatta Road’ (p11) and fell off his mule, is suitably pre-1900. Hurtle’s father takes him in the horse-drawn cart on his first day of school, and Hurtle notices the smell of the animals in the zoo in Moore Park (which closed in 1916). World War I breaks out, and Hurtle’s adoptive mother Mrs Courtney makes decorations for “the Allied Ball. She sold buttons for Little Belgium from a little tray in Martin Place; she sold flags for Serbia; she represented la Belle France on an evening of tableaux vivants in the Town Hall” (p144). The detail is as particular as Hurtle going to town where he eats “a sandwich in a tea-room, sprinkling the ham with some of the dry mustard provided by the management.” (p230)

 

[i]White, P. The Vivisector. Vintage 1994 p264.

Seven Bob Beach

16 Saturday Jun 2018

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As the ferry passes the entrance to Double Bay I peer in to see Seven Shillings Beach, a little beach I had read about then visited some time ago.

In her 1949 publication, Some Houses and People of New South Wales, G Nesta Griffiths describes how the beach below Redleafcame to be named Seven Shillings Beach, citing information from Miss Dora Busby, granddaughter of the Mr and Mrs Busby mentioned:

The aboriginal owner of the fishing rights was Gurrah, whose lubra, Nancy, was a sister of Sophie, who lived near the spring at Vaucluse. When Mr Busby bought Redleaf, Gurrah lived just outside their fence, and they had continual trouble with members of the tribe. Mrs Busby tried to buy their fishing rights, and offered them blankets, clothes and flour. At last Gurrah said he would sell for seven shillings. Mrs Busby was afraid this would only be spent on rum, and tried to persuade Gurrah to take more useful goods. At last so many fowls and eggs were stolen that she gave Gurrah the money, and the tribe moved up to what is now the Ronagarden, on Victoria Road.[i]

I find a typed correction inside the back cover of the edition of Nesta Griffiths’ book held in the Mitchell Library. Written by Miss Dora Busby, it notes that she was told by her grandmother that Gurrah’s ‘lubra’ was Emma, not Nancy; that ‘When Mr Walker built Redleaf, Gurrah lived just outside the fence in a ti-tree lean-to’; and that ‘Both from him [Gurrah] and from members of the tribe which lived in the camp where Ronanow stands, the Walkers suffered a good deal of trouble one way and another.’ It was Mrs Walker who offered to buy Gurrah’s ‘fishing rights off the beach’ and that, ‘He and his Emma joined her sister Sophie at ‘Sophie’s camp’ at Vaucluse, and when Emma died he buried her in Double Bay.’

What is fascinating about this passage for me is what it hints at: Gurrah and a ‘tribe’ – or even two ‘tribes’ – lived on Sydney Harbour in the 1870s. They were living enough of a traditional life to be regarded as ‘owning the fishing rights’. A tradition of use and habitation was acknowledged, even if it wasn’t respected. Another Aboriginal woman, Sophie, lived nearby. Where did the second ‘tribe’ move to after being dispossessed when Ronawas built in 1883?

After reading about this transaction I wanted to see the location for myself so, on a mid-winter’s day, I headed to Seven Shillings Beach (or ‘Seven Bob Beach’ as my mother-in-law told me it was called by the locals). Frustrated in my attempts to reach it by road, every possible access point blocked by gates and driveways and security-fenced houses, I parked in the Woollahra Council carpark and walked down. The council building is the old Redleafhouse, and I can see why the lady of the house wanted those pesky Aborigines out of the way – they would definitely have interrupted her view of sun-tipped waves and crisp white sand when she walked between the columns of her verandah. However, to suggest that she had ‘suffered’ in any way at the hands of the Aboriginal people is astonishing, colonial hyperbole.

[i]Griffiths, G N. Some Houses and People of New South Wales. Ure Smith, Sydney, 1949, p131.

Walking the harbour

10 Sunday Jun 2018

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As the ferry crosses the heads, calm today, no lurching up and down, we leave the Quarantine Station behind on North Head and towards the lollipop-stripes lighthouse on South Head. I’m on the left-hand side of the ferry so I’m looking south, travelling past Watson’s Bay as we turn to head down the harbour. The little footbridge at Parsley Bay stands out white against the dark crevice of the narrow bay. Then Nielsen Park and, in the mouth of Rose Bay, Shark Island. The crowded headland of Point Piper heralds the entrance to Double Bay, Clark Island stands out from Darling Point and the corner rounds to Rushcutters Bay, full of tall-masted boats as bare as the trees behind them. We hurry past Woolloomoolloo – just one grey navy ship today – Fort Denison and Mrs Macquarie’s Point. Farm Cove, the Botanic Gardens and boom – Bennelong Point and the Opera House. The ferry slows to turn left before the Harbour Bridge, negotiating the watery traffic to enter Circular Quay.

These are the bays Teresa Hawkins walked in For Love Alone, where every park, every shadow, every tram shelter was full of the ‘semitones and broken whispers’[i]of lovers. For Teresa Hawkins, the main character in Christina Stead’s novel, For Love Alone, life with her family at Watson’s Bay revolves around water. Harbour water, seawater, cliffs and sand and boats. Teresa longs to join the fishermen; she longs to be the woman she saw with them, tending a boiling pot of fish, with the men bringing her wood for the fire.[ii]The water, the lapping, ceaseless water, is as restless as Teresa herself as she struggles with life as a young woman in the early 1930s. The ferry provides transport into town, company and gossip. It’s what her sister Kitty runs for in escaping her life as the family’s unpaid housekeeper. It’s the viewing platform for social proprieties – only the girls who are engaged can sew for their trousseau on the ferry. It takes Teresa to work every day so she can earn enough money to leave, to go to England.

These are the roads Hurtle Duffield, the main character in Patrick White’s The Vivisector, walked after dinner parties at Boo Courtney’s, or after visiting his lover Hero Pavloussi. Past the streets of Rose Bay and Bellevue Hill that would be shelled by Japanese submarines on 7 June 1942. Past Cranbrook, school for Patrick White and a plethora of other Whites, co-founded by Patrick’s father, home and death-place of Patrick’s great-uncle, James White. Past ‘Cinta’ in Lindsay Ave Darling Point, home of Dorothea Mackellar from the 1930s to 1968.

At Rushcutters Bay Hurtle Duffield would have turned off New South Head Rd to go up to his house in Paddington. If he’d turned the other way, towards the harbour, he might have found himself at Lulworth House, a nursing home in Roslyn Gardens where Patrick White’s partner, Manoly Lascaris, died in 2003 and site of the house where Patrick White himself lived as a child from 1916. Lulworth, according to David Marr, was the inspiration for all of White’s descriptions of harbourside houses,[iii]but when I read about the Whites at Cranbrook between 1873 and 1890, their race season ball ‘one of the great social events of the year’[iv]and their house full of rare china and European art, I can’t help wondering if some of that inheritance also found its way to the ears of the quiet, self-absorbed little boy.

 

[i]Stead, C. For Love Alone. Virago, 1978 p63. First published by Peter Davies Ltd, 1945.

[ii]Stead, C. For Love Alone. Virago, 1978 p62. First published by Peter Davies Ltd, 1945.

[iii]Marr, D. Patrick White: A Life. Vintage 1991, caption to plate 12.

[iv]From ‘Beautiful Sydney’ 1895-6, quoted in ‘Cranbrook: the first fifty years’, AC Child, nd.

Trade and the city

02 Saturday Jun 2018

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It was trade that turned NSW from a prison camp into a thriving colony.  The very early years of the colony are typified by a sense of waiting on the edge of the world – waiting for the next ship to arrive with news of home, and supplies of food. In April 1790 Watkin Tench wrote:

… on the present ration the public stores contained salt meat sufficient to serve until the 2ndof July, flour until the 20thof August and rice, or peas in lieu of it, until the 1stof October. … When the age of this provision is recollected, its inadequacy will more strikingly appear. The pork and rice were brought with us from England. The pork had been slated between three and four years, and every grain of rice was a moving body from the inhabitants lodged within it.[i]

Crops failed and cattle strayed. Penal colonies on penal colonies were established to punish offenders who reoffended. Unable or unwilling to understand the food growing in the land around them, it was the establishment of working farms and trade lines that made the colonists less dependent on England for supplies. While many in the NSW Corps made fortunes through their produce and their trading, they were the people in those early years who had access to the farms, through grants of land, tools, seeds and convict labour. They also had access to money – or at least sources of credit in England – through their own pay, and through payments made to them by the Commissariat Store. They could ask their agents in England to send them goods paid for by their pay; they could sell goods (wheat, meat, maize etc) to the Commissariat Store in Sydney and be paid by Treasury Bills, again drawn on the banks in London and redeemable there to buy more goods.

Arguments about whether the officers were exploitative monopolists, pragmatic opportunists or altruistic life-savers invite analysis of Sydney’s development as if it was a city that reinvented the wheel. But look at the heritage of most of Sydney’s colonisers. In 1788, when the ‘town’ of Sydney housed a little over 1000 people in tents and huts, London was heading towards being the largest city in the world. It took that crown away from Peking in 1825 and in 1841 the census revealed that London had become the first city in the world with over 2 million inhabitants. London was a classic ‘merchants’ city’ that grew up to meet the needs of its people and surrounding areas. (This is as opposed to a ‘princes’ city’ that is developed to showcase the ruler’s wealth and might – for example, Rome as constructed by the popes, reliant on the tributes of its adherents for its survival.) A ‘merchants’ city’, according to John Reader in his book Cities,[ii]is the more robust form. A city built on trade is run by a group of people who have an interest in its survival. They make money from its functions and existence, and they will build up those functions to improve their own chances. It’s a vindication of capitalism that this should be the case, but neither the self-interest of the prince or the proclamations of the state build as strong a city.

John Reader argues that merchants and cities were entwined from the earliest days. Proto-merchants, he reasons, came from the very earliest cities and moved out into the countryside, trading their pottery and baskets, which then allowed farmers to create agricultural surpluses – no point in creating a surplus if you can’t store it in something impermeable like a pottery jar. These surpluses were created for hard times, but also for further trade. In time, these farmers could move away from subsistence living and use their (collective) spare time to develop new arts and technologies – and more cities.

So to criticise the early traders in Sydney for trying to make their fortunes is to deny the very basis of capitalism and of the traditions of the British people. Merchants trade in order to make money – that is their motivating force. They don’t trade to feed the hungry or to provide the homeless with shelter.

 

[i]Two classic tales of Australian exploration. Tim Flannery (ed). Text Publishing, 2002, p122.

[ii]Cities, John Reader. William Heinemann 2004