Bennelong (part 2)

13 Monday Aug 2018

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Judge-Advocate David Collins clearly acknowledged that it wasn’t just Bennelong who could lay claim to a particular area of land:

Each family has a particular place of residence, from which is derived its distinguishing name. This is formed by adding the monosyllable Gal to the name of the place: thus the southern shore of Botany Bay is called Gwea, and the people who inhabit it style themselves Gweagal. Those who live on the north shore of Port Jackson are called Cam-mer-ray-gal, that part of the harbour being distinguished from others by the name of Cam-mer-ray[i]…

But Governor Phillip, the man who had carefully observed the Aborigines, had, within his own limitations, been positive about their courage and generosity, and in nearly every altercation assumed that the whites had been the aggressors; the man who had said, “Conciliation is the only plan intended to be pursued”[ii]returned to Britain in 1792. This left Major Francis Grose, as lieutenant-governor, in charge of the colony for two years, then Captain Paterson as administrator until John Hunter arrived as governor in September 1795. Grose “displayed no desire to follow Phillip’s practice of maintaining a close personal watch over every aspect of the settlement”.[iii]He encouraged members of the NSW Corps to trade, and to farm the land that he granted them. He opened up the Hawkesbury River area for settlement, taking the colony’s survival out of the hands of the governor and into the hands of private enterprise. It worked as a means of motivating trade and agriculture, but it removed the protection and respect for the Aborigines afforded by Phillip’s inclination, and instructions. By the time Hunter arrived the damage was done. The NSW Corps was accustomed to rule, and their rule was for personal profit. Land was for farming and making money from the proceeds – not for the Aboriginal people.

So although no-one in the very early days of the colony disputed Bennelong’s claim to custodianship of Me-mel, that claim wasn’t honoured. Me-mel became Goat Island, and it went the way of all colonised land. In the 1830s it was quarried, and the stone used to build a wharf and gunpowder complex by convicts housed firstly in the hulk Phoenix, and then on the island, in wooden ‘boxes’. They wore fetters around their ankles for the first two years and were controlled by the threat of the cat-o-nine tails. One convict was chained to a rock for several weeks in 1837. A number of Aboriginal people were also imprisoned there, separated from the whites. In 1900, during the outbreak of plague in The Rocks, Goat Island was used by the Health Department for bacteriological research. (Twelve years earlier, Rodd Island had been used for a similar purpose when a laboratory was set up to find a biological agent to combat the rabbit plague. From 1890 the laboratory was used to produce a vaccine against anthrax.) As the gunpowder complex neared completion on Goat Island, Cockatoo Island was selected as the next prison and workplace. Convicts dug silos out of the rock with hand tools, quarried sandstone for building Sydney’s edifices, and excavated the dry dock. From 1871 to 1887 there was an Industrial School and Reformatory for Girls on the island, and from 1888 to 1908 an overflow prison for Darlinghurst Gaol. Convicts also toiled away at Spectacle Island, building a Powder Magazine between 1863 and 1865 as Goat Island’s became inadequate.[iv]

These days Goat Island is a little green mound with a row of pretty stone houses. You’ll see it if it’s daytime as you come round under the bridge towards Balmain, Hunters Hill, Meadowbank or Parramatta, and you might dream of a life in the middle of the harbour.

[i]An Account of the English Colony of NSW Vol 1 by David Collins, Appendix 1. http://gutenberg.net.au/first-fleet.html

[ii]The Voyage of Governor Phillip to Botany Bay, London 1789 (facsimile edition Hutchinson 1982, p140).

[iii]ADB online. http://www.adb.online.anu.edu.au/biogs/A010444b.htm. Francis Grose.

[iv]The Islands of Sydney Harbour. Mary Shelley Clark and Jack Clark. Kangaroo Press, 2000.

Bennelong

04 Saturday Aug 2018

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Bennelong must have been a very adaptable man. Captured by the British in November 1789 he stayed in captivity, learning the English language and customs and teaching some of his own to the British – an act that seems voluntary as the man captured with him, Colbee, was able to escape almost immediately. In May 1790 Bennelong went back to his people, but returned to the settlement after Governor Phillip was speared at Manly in September – an event that Inga Clendinnen convincingly argues was a ritual spearing, designed to redress the many wrongs that the colonists had committed since settling the area.[i]

Not only was Bennelong willing to change from a life within the only framework that he and his relations had ever known – he was then willing to sail, with Phillip, and Yemmerrawannie, to England. They left Sydney in December 1792. Bennelong was presented to King George III in 1793, and didn’t return to Sydney until 1795, with Governor Hunter. Yemmerrawannie succumbed to respiratory disease in the damp British climate, but Bennelong survived, adopting the new clothes and customs that he found.

It’s hard to imagine a more courageous act than the steps taken by Bennelong and Yemmerrawannie onto the Atlantic, sailing with strangers, on a strange vessel, to a completely unknown land, when only five years earlier their physical world had been defined by what could be walked or travelled in a canoe.

Bennelong was from the Wangal people – most sources say that their territory extended from Goat Island to Auburn and Silverwater, although other sources say it starts further west at Leichhardt.  He told the colonists that Goat Island (more tunefully called Me-mel) belonged to him and his family. Judge-Advocate David Collins noted:

… Bennillong, both before he went to England and since his return, often assured me, that the island Me-mel (called by us Goat Island) close by Sydney Cove was his own property; that it was his father’s, and that he should give it to By-gone, his particular friend and companion. To this little spot he appeared much attached; and we have often seen him and his wife Ba-rang-a-roo feasting and enjoying themselves on it. He told us of other people who possessed this kind of hereditary property, which they retained undisturbed.[ii]

Bennelong’s understanding of ownership would have been very different to ours. Heather Goodall explains it as:

In Aboriginal societies, individual men and women hold particular relationships to land, inherited from parents and arising from their own conception and birth sites … Yet despite the specificity of these relationships, they do not allow automatic rights. Instead they confer obligations and responsibilities … It is the fulfilment of one’s obligations, the active embracing of responsibility, which allows a custodian to be accorded the fullest benefits of their landholding role …[iii]

So if you were barred from carrying out your responsibilities, by a fence or a gun, you would lose your whole heritage.

[i]Inga Clendinnen, Dancing with Strangers, Text Publishing, 2003.

[ii]An Account of the English Colony of NSW Vol 1 by David Collins, Appendix 1X. http://gutenberg.net.au/first-fleet.html

[iii]Heather Goodall, Invasion to Embassy: Land in Aboriginal Politics in New South Wales 1770-1972, Allen & Unwin in association with Black Books, 1996, p9.

The Harbour Bridge

22 Sunday Jul 2018

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If you come around under the bridge late in the day you may be treated to a rococo sky of billowing yellow and pink clouds. If it’s dark you’ll see the lights of Luna Park on your right, rotating and blurring in time with the screams of the riders on the Octopus and the Pirate Ship.

Of all the descriptions of Sydney harbour and its bridge, I love this one, from Marjorie Barnard.

Tens of thousands of homes look out over the harbour, every high building in the city has at least a glimpse of it. It is a playground, a waterway. The little beaches are still there, some of them seem as untouched, and the islands, at least from a distance, are as idyllic as ever. It is as beautiful as ever it was for all that the iron shackle of the bridge has been laid upon it.[i]

The Harbour Bridge’s architect, John Job Crew Bradfield, would have been shocked to hear the bridge described so harshly as an ‘iron shackle’. Not only was he providing a much-needed crossing between the northern and southern shores of the harbour, but he believed that the bridge’s ‘structural relationship to the City as a whole, and its place in the surrounding landscape must be taken into account; it must not mar the beauty of its setting.’[ii]

In 2005 I spoke to Bill Gosling about that ‘iron shackle’. Bill Gosling was born in London in 1913 and spent many years at sea on cargo ships, first coming to Sydney in 1928. Sydney was his ‘favourite port’, so he settled here in 1936, getting a job on the waterfront that lasted until he retired in 1973. When I spoke to him he was 92 and, although we didn’t know it, in the last months of his life. He sat crumpled in his chair, and the tape of our interview includes the big clock striking every quarter hour. His breath was going but his mind, his humour and his memory were sharp. There was still a strong man in that tiny frame.

On one of his trips out to Sydney, before he settled down:

… I was on a general cargo boat. We brought a lot of the steel out from England for the Harbour Bridge, which was a bit of a joke, because BHP were making steel here, every bit as good as the English steel.

Is the whole bridge made of English steel? I asked him.

No I don’t think so, but I know we brought a lot out for it. Brought a lot of steel out for the bridge. It might have been only certain sections but the steel they were making here in Australia was every bit as good. But the point was, business often takes over.[iii]

The contract for construction of the Harbour Bridge was awarded to an English firm, Dorman, Long and Co. Ltd in 1924. The calculations, designs and working drawings for the bridge were made in their London office, where staff also prepared complete lists of the materials needed from England and Australia. Iron ore from Yorkshire was made into steel plates at Dorman, Long’s works in Middlesbrough (North Yorkshire – port, Teesport), while steel rolled in Australia at BHP Newcastle used ore from Iron Knob in South Australia.

Milson’s Point was cleared to make workshops for the fabrication of steelwork for the bridge. Engineers from Dorman, Long supervised the work. The workshops were demolished in 1932 when the bridge was opened. Luna Park (1935) and the North Sydney swimming pool (1936) were built on the sites of the workshops.

 

[i][i]The Sydney Book. Written by Marjorie Barnard, drawings by Sydney Ure Smith. Ure Smith, 1947, p11.

[ii]JJC Bradfield 1929. Quoted in a caption at Bridging Sydney, an exhibition at the Museum of Sydney December 2006-April 2007.

[iii]Interview with Bill Gosling, 9 April 2005.

Catching the tram

15 Sunday Jul 2018

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The other form of transport that Sydney people loved was their trams. Not these new trams – the light rail – that have the sense to be silent and unobtrusive, but not enough character to be lovable. No, the old trams. Despite the fact that they left you exposed to the weather, they would regularly become detached from their power lines, and you needed the agility of a monkey to get on and off. Alan Waddell, a man who has walked over more of Sydney than most of us know about[i], was passionate about trams.

The most exciting trams were what we called the “toastracks”. The seats were in large compartments, each having two seats facing each other and going from one side of the tram to the other. So there was no aisle inside the tram. The conductor had to collect fares by walking along the outside board, clinging on to the railings with one hand while handling coins and tickets in the other. It wasn’t much fun for him when it was raining heavily. The other excitement was when the power poles came off the overhead wires. You could fill in time waiting for your tram by placing a one-penny coin on the tracks and watch it get flattened and spread out by the trams before yours.[ii]

A publicly-run steam tramway system began in 1879, with electric tramways on the North Shore in the 1890s and through the rest of the system in 1899. People depended on the trams, and extra trams were made available for special events. The advertisement for the procession to Waverley Cemetery in 1898 to re-inter Michael Dwyer included the information that ‘A special tram service has been procured’.[iii]Special trams were made available for holiday events, race days and royal visits.

As each line was superseded by buses, people rode the tram for the last time, from depot to depot. The last tram to Manly was in 1939, the Enfield tram route closed in 1948, Rockdale to Brighton-le-sands 1949, Botany to Matraville 1952, the last tram ran along George Street in 1958, and finally, the last trams to Maroubra and La Perouse on 25 February 1961.[iv]

Passenger numbers were falling as the number of private cars increased, and buses had the distinct advantage, for the Transport Commissioner, of being able to be operated by one person, rather than two. The incompleteness of the Transport Commissioner’s calculations is captured by Patrick White:

In the big pneumatic buses, manners from the age of trams continued to reveal themselves: old men with raised veins on the backs of their hands still felt the need to apologise …[v]

Nevertheless, despite the new pneumatic buses, passenger numbers continued to fall throughout the 1960s – the falls were attributed to increased use of cars and taxis; regional shopping centres; new housing developments not serviced by buses; and, most interestingly, a growth in television watching and a decline in night-time travel.[vi]

 

[i]See http://www.walksydneystreets.net/obituary.htm

[ii]Alan Waddell, email interview 30 March 2006

[iii]Sydney Morning Herald, May 21 1898.

[iv]‘From City to Suburb … a fifty year journey’ Greg Travers, The Sydney Tramway Museum, 1982.

[v]White, P. The Vivisector. Vintage 1994 p520.

[vi]From City to Suburb … a fifty year journey, Greg Travers, The Sydney Tramway Museum, 1982. p139

Travel by water

08 Sunday Jul 2018

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The one form of Sydney public transport that is loved – something that will never be said about the buses or trains – is the ferry. Hurtle Duffield catches a ferry twice in Patrick White’s The Vivisector, once to Kirribilli, once to Manly. He’s looking for relief from paintings that have ‘died’, and he finds it.

Alan Waddell, with a more prosaic destination, used to catch the ferry to work.

I occasionally took the Mosman ferry from Longueville wharf. The owner/skipper, Charlie, never missed a morning, no matter how thick the fog. He used to say “the thicker the fog, the less other ferries are out to run into.” He was still doing the run in peak hours well into his 80s.[i]

The water has always been an important means of transport for the people of Sydney, as well as an important source of food. Late in 1788, Watkin Tench records with his usual humility that he undertook a survey of the harbour:

in order to compute the number of canoes and inhabitants which it might contain. Sixty-seven canoes and 147 people were counted. No estimate, however, of even tolerable accuracy can be drawn from so imperfect a datum, though it was perhaps the best in our power to acquire.[ii]

When the colony extended to Rose Hill – renamed Parramatta in 1791 – transport by boat was preferable to the road. For the farms on the Hawkesbury River – the first 15 colonial farms were established on the east bank in 1794 by lieutenant-governor Francis Grose[iii]– communication between the little settlements that sprang up on both sides of the river was generally by boat, and boats were used to transport the agricultural goods that the colony soon came to depend on. On Port Jackson the boat was also the preferred means of transport, even a century after Tench’s ‘imperfect’ survey. Balmain became a popular place to live largely because of easy access to the city via the steam ferries. In 1900 there were ten different ferry wharves servicing Balmain, from Elliott St on the north side of the peninsula, round to Reynolds St on the south side.[iv]

Traffic to the north of the colony was by boat, to ports like Morpeth, until the large-scale release of land in the Hunter Valley. Land had been held back while there was a penal settlement for secondary offenders at Newcastle, but after its closure in 1822 the governor started to distribute large grants in the area, encouraging wealthy settlers to establish farms. The Great North Road was built between 1826 and 1836 by convict labourers. At its full length, it ran from its current turn-off at Parramatta Road, Five Dock, to Abbotsford, where there was a punt to take you across the Parramatta River. You can chart its course from where it comes back out of the river into Punt Road in Gladesville, onto Victoria Road as far as Ryde, then north-west up to Dural. From there it joins the Old Northern Road (the original road north) and you can follow it all the way up to Wiseman’s Ferry where there is still a punt to take you across the Hawkesbury River, and further north.

[i]email interview 23 March 2006

[ii]Tench, W. 1788. First published 1789 and 1793. Reproduced in Flannery, T, Two Classic Tales of Australian Exploration. Text Publishing, 2002, p92.

[iii]‘Exploring the Hawkesbury’ R. Ian Jack, Kangaroo Press 1986

[iv]‘Leichhardt: On the margins of the city’ Max Solling and Peter Reynolds, Allen & Unwin 1997.

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