Penguin Books Australia

The Arrival

1849

Before anything else, there were the rumours. They began along the waterfront, among the warehouses, the shipyards and loading docks, and from there sped to the Whaler's Arms in Windmill Street, and the lag's jetty on Jack the Miller's point. Before the day was out they were circulating all over the town; through the markets, the factories and mills of Sussex Street, the drawing rooms of palatial harbourside homes, in the gaols and on Gallows Hill.

Initially there was doubt, for this had become a place disposed to gossip and hearsay. Trade was booming, and the port grown in stature with its influx of ships; not only the East India Company vessels now, but from all over the world, from the Americas, Spain and Portugal, from the Cape of Good Hope and Rio. With their cargoes they brought countless rumours, many of them influenced by the vicissitudes of the long voyage and embellished by distance.

But these seemed different. Soft as whispers on the wind, they had a disturbing authenticity.

There was talk, they said. It was being considered.

London was contemplating, speculating.

People ridiculed it. Unthinkable, after all this time – in this day and age. Yet the talk persisted, grew like a warning.

London was considering the idea of bringing back convict transportation.

Matthew Conway heard it from one of the turnkeys in the old prison, where he was making his rounds to collect the week's news. The prison, the original town lock-up, lay at the foot of

Middlesex Lane, below the labyrinth of hillside streets known as The Rocks. It sheltered behind an arched entrance, a deception that promised graceful Georgian architecture, but delivered instead a shabby ruin, old, damp and beset by termites. Its demolition had been ordered some eight years earlier, yet still it stood here, a remnant of the polluted past. In tiny unventilated rooms prisoners were fettered without distinction; hardened criminals alongside those yet to face judgement; murderers, thieves and debtors all receiving equal treatment when it came to rations and cruelty.

The gaoler was dismissive of the rumours.

'Load of bollocks, if you ask me,' he said. 'Bleedin' place is too full of prattle. People ain't got nothin' better to do.'

Matthew copied out the lists of impending court cases, the verdicts and penalties already decided, noted that a hanging was to take place at noon on Friday, and left the place with relief. There was no one in the stocks on Essex Street, or it would have drawn an eager crowd. The stocks and pillory were considered diversions second only to a public execution, among those who thronged to such entertainments.

He made his way over the arched stone bridge that crossed the Tank Stream. Long before he was born, in the days when this had been a stockade town, the stream had run freely, a vigorous spring of fresh water amid thriving ferns and wattle trees. He had seen a painting of it as it had once been. But now the lush foliage was all gone, chopped down to make way for gentlemen's homes in Bridge Street, and the water was sluggish and turbid, contaminated by years of use as a public laundry, and the daily discharge of chamber pots.

Fortunately, new springs had been located to supply drinking water as the city continued to expand – for it had trebled in size since his school days, thrusting out to new districts way beyond the Surry Hills and past the farms of Paddington. Matthew knew the rapid growth was inevitable, but hoped not everywhere would be destroyed by progress as thoroughly as this once forested glade.

Wherever he went in the course of the day he heard the same rumours. The first scepticism turned to speculation. By nightfall, everyone was talking about it.

'They'd be insane,' Sean Geraghty said in his pub down by the quay, and his early evening drinkers all nodded sagely.

'They would,' said Pat Murphy. 'They would and all.'

He ordered another pint of mother-in-law, which was a blend of old and bitter.

'But on the other hand,' Geraghty said, pumping the beer, 'when did a bit of insanity stop the British from their mad ways?'

They all took another drink, while thinking of that.

Night fell on torn sails, far out at sea. The vessel was slow, bluntbowed, like a North Sea collier with a high, square stern and dorsal windows. The prevailing wind that had followed them across the Bight and through Bass Strait had turned to the south, becoming first a squall and then, the barometer dropping, a hard gale with driving rain. With the onset of dark, off Cape Howe, the storm was whipping the waves into a frenzy, but the ship rode them, rolling and falling in the ocean troughs, a torment to the wretched cargo in the crowded lower holds who had been seasick since Gravesend, but safely afloat despite the broken bowsprit and the shredded topgallant. The fore and the main masts were still holding, and most of the canvas had been secured before the worst of the storm had struck.

Down below, the old transport was taking water. It was to be expected. They had been a hundred and fifty-eight days at sea, seventy-one of them without landfall since leaving the Cape, and she was an elderly ship, a cheap purchase like so many of her ilk, badly in need of a dry dock and hot tar patches, for she was riddled with teredo worms. In the bilges, up to their knees in freezing water, those of the crew sent to inspect the damage relayed messages aloft that the pumps were losing the battle, while they cursed the night, the storm, the stink of the unwashed, seasick human cargo, and swore to Christ this would be their last voyage.

On the pitching deck a worried first mate wished he could see the stars, and hoped to God his skipper knew what he was about. This blow was a real bastard, as bad as any he'd sailed through; he was acutely aware that somewhere on their lee side in the black night and the boiling sea, there were reefs that would slice this exhausted and rat-infested old coal carrier into scraps of driftwood.

Early next day, rumour became fact. One of Benjamin Boyd's whaling fleet from Twofold Bay, with the flamboyant Boyd himself at its helm, entered harbour in a grey dawn and tied up at the wharves below Bunker's Hill. It was a situation made for a man who relished the limelight, and within an hour an excited crowd was at the quay. Boyd climbed on a platform of fishing crates, so all could see him and hear what he had to say.

'Listen to me,' he shouted.

'We're listening. You say something,' a Currency Lad in his distinctive garb shouted back, and the crowd laughed.

Boyd, ignoring this, proceeded to hush them with his news. He told them another of his whalers down in Bass Strait had laid up alongside a clipper carrying a consignment of grain from Liverpool, and there had been an exchange of visits by longboat. The master of the speedy clipper reported that out of Cape Town, in the Indian Ocean, they had overtaken an old tub, a Whitby merchantman named the Peveril Bay, which was being used as a convict transport and was bound for Eastern Australia. For Sydney.

The news was weeks old; it had been delayed while his ships went south to fish their quota of whales. Even though the vessel was slow and ponderous, she should be arriving within a matter of days. She was carrying two hundred and forty prisoners, and the expectation was there'd soon be other convict transports following, once this one was safely berthed and had discharged its cargo.

Amid the clamour of outrage that followed, Boyd continued to make himself heard. It was his moment, and he intended to use it.

'It's a scandal,' he shouted. 'They've broken faith with us. The whole lot of 'em. Lord Grey, Gladstone, Queen Victoria herself.'

'For shame,' a woman rebuked him. 'Not the Queen.'

'No, not Her Majesty,' a man supported her, amid growing murmurs of agreement.

'Her Ministers have done this – in her name,' Boyd insisted. 'Ten years ago they abolished transportation. We're not going to stand for having this country turned back into a prison.'

'What can we do about it?' The voice came from the crowd, and immediately there was a barrage of answers.

'Blockade the harbour.'

'Sink the bastard.'

'Revolt,' came a shout, and this cry was taken up by others. Revolt! Revolt! people began to chant in a unified chorus of dissent.

The roar of it brought others hurrying towards the wharf. The news was already circulating out to the more remote parts of the town.

'If the Yankees can do it, we can.'

'That's it. We'll have a Boston tea party!'

'Bugger Boston! We'll stir up our own Sydney stink!'

The crowd laughed; the anger and excitement was contagious.

'Break ties with England.'

'Make them take back their poxy scum.'

'Let's all agree on one thing,' Boyd shouted. 'No more British crime or criminals here. This place was declared a city years ago. We're not going to let them turn it back into a gaol.'

By the next day, Boyd's news had reached Parramatta and the Nepean, and people were converging on Sydney to protest. The speed with which it spread was driven by outrage, given impetus by disbelief and resentment. A society which had already celebrated its sixtieth anniversary, had recently been granted the status of a city and begun to shed what many considered the stain of its convict origin, was suddenly and without warning consigned back to the lowly status of a penal colony. The arrogant lack of consultation was the ultimate insult.

The Colonial Secretary, Earl Grey, was burnt in effigy. Wild threats were bandied about. A deputation went to wait on the governor to inform him that the colony was in uproar.

The wind had howled relentlessly all night. Driving rain as lethal as buckshot lashed the deck and rigging. The mizzen boom had broken loose, yards were smashed, and the aft mast was splintering ominously. The first mate felt more afraid than in his whole career of thirty years at sea.

His captain was mad. There was no doubting his courage, but it was a wild venture; the whole voyage was a gamble, cursed from the day they raised anchor at Gravesend and followed the river out past East Tilbury and Sheerness into the North Sea. They had had no luck. The weather had been vicious off the Bay of Biscay, and incessant storms had followed them down past Tenerife to the Cape of Good Hope.

The expedition was ill-advised.

The ship was overladen with convicts and manned by a sparse and inexperienced crew. Someone had tried to restrict costs, and had risked lives. Someone – no doubt safely ashore, and planning to grow rich on this venture – had put them all in peril.

The dawn brought them no relief; the early light was a grim pewter-grey, the sea a cauldron of treacherous white caps. All morning the hatches remained firmly battened down, despite the excessive heat and putrid damp below, for without covers there was every likelihood the towering waves sweeping the decks would fill the ship, and the men and women in the crowded holds below would drown. At least that way would be swift. If they went much further in these conditions, the poor wretches might begin to die for lack of ventilation.

The first mate had no idea how long it might be before they reached harbour. He had never made this voyage before. He knew, because the Captain had told him, that within the next few days they would pass the sandy arms of land encircling Botany Bay, and soon after that, on a course due north, would see steepled rocky headlands like giant entrance gates to the harbour of Port Jackson.

Home, the Captain called it. In one of their rare moments of familiarity he had confided he'd been born there. As a first generation Australian, he was proud to be what they called a Currency Lad.