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  Well, nothing pleases the English eye more than an alien landscape with a nod to well-known features back home. King, aware how hungry the British Navy was for wood for new masts and flax for its ropes and sails after years of constant war, wrote to Lord Hobart extolling Port Phillip Bay’s assets. A few months later the explorer Matthew Flinders would find the same, a place that had ‘a pleasing and, in many parts, a fertile appearance’.

  But what Collins doesn’t know – he hasn’t seen many of these later reports – is that there is an abundance of fresh water to the northern end of the bay, a river that, 30 years later, will become the site of a village. Had he asked Woodriff and the Calcutta to keep sailing straight ahead after entering the bay they might have found it. But no, they went right. And now, as he swats flies away in the heat, Port Phillip Bay seems to Collins the last place on earth an empire would want for an outpost.

  Well, thank the Lord that James Hingston Tuckey is still about. Takes a great deal to dull the shine of the man’s ever-present optimism. As the Calcutta entered the bay and Collins saw only misery lining the shores, Tuckey was overcome by the sight: ‘… we were presented with a picture highly contrasted with the scene we had lately contemplated: an expanse of water bounded in many places only by the horizon and unruffled as the bosom of polluted innocence, presented itself to the charmed eye which roamed over it in silent admiration. The nearer shores, along which the ship glided at the distance of a mile, afforded the most exquisite scenery and recalled the idea of “nature in the world’s first spring …”’

  Best stop him right there because Collins, if he hasn’t already tired of Tuckey’s endless cheerfulness, has a job for him. Tuckey is to take a small party and boat and head off on an exploratory trip around the bay to see whether a better option than Sullivan Bay exists.

  It starts well: Tuckey and his party have several peaceful encounters with the local Aboriginals. Presents of blankets and beads are handed over and Tuckey insists all guns are kept back in the boat out of view. ‘They appeared to have a perfect knowledge of the use of fire arms and … they seemed terrified even at the sight of them,’ he will record in his journal.

  But as they travel north-west toward a plain that reaches to the horizon they see almost 200 Aboriginals gathering with ‘obviously hostile intentions’. Three of them step nervously forward to receive gifts of fish and bread. The presents appear to have calmed any tensions, so Tuckey leaves a crew on shore and takes the boat further up the bay to continue his survey. But while he is gone things quickly sour; the natives return with reinforcements and an apparent chief being carried on the shoulders of two others. They surround the small group of men on the beach, steal a tomahawk, an axe and a saw and by the time Tuckey returns bedlam has broken out.

  An Aboriginal seizes the master’s mate, holding him fast in his arms.

  ‘Fire, sir,’ pleads the mate, ‘for God’s sake, fire!’

  Two musket volleys are fired over Aboriginal heads. They do nothing to disperse the angry crowd. Tuckey dispenses any thought of a peaceful resolution, almost as quickly as he discards his lyrical prose: ‘Four muskets with buck shot, and the fowling pieces of the gentlemen with small shot, were now fired among them and from a general howl, many were supposed to be struck.

  ‘This discharge created a general panic and, leaving their cloaks behind, they ran in every direction among the trees.’ But Tuckey, the closet anthropologist, is never far from the surface. ‘A very great difference was observed in the comparative cleanliness of these savages,’ he writes, ‘some of them were so abominably beastly that it required the strongest stomach to look on them without nausea, while others were sufficiently cleanly to be viewed without disgust.’

  The feeling appears to be mutual. Tuckey tries to calm the situation, laying down his gun and moving slowly toward the man he regards as a chief, whose head is adorned ‘with a coronet of the wing feathers of the swan, very neatly arranged and which had a pleasing effect’. He offers him a cloak and a necklace but the chief remains angry at the intrusion of these white outsiders, ‘his spear appeared every moment upon the point of quitting his hand’.

  Within moments the army of natives begin rushing down the hill, shouting and flourishing their spears, whooping and hollering as loudly as the damn French. ‘Our people were immediately drawn up and ordered to present their muskets loaded with ball … it was deemed absolutely necessary for our own safety to prove the power of our fire arms before they came near enough to injure us with their spears; selecting one of the foremost, who appeared to be the most violent … three muskets were fired at him at fifty yards distance, two of which took effect and he fell dead on the spot.’

  Tuckey’s party hurry to their boat and return to Sullivan Bay to brief Collins, who is already close to deciding he does not want to remain here. Tuckey’s report helps him make up his mind. Collins has already begun talking about packing up and heading further south to Van Diemen’s Land, where a small detachment from Port Jackson has already set up a camp. Some of the free settlers he is charged with supervising have told him they would prefer to stay and farm the land in a valley behind the bay. ‘I am sorry to observe that in general they are a necessitous and worthless set of people,’ Collins writes in a letter back to London.

  There is nothing but darkness everywhere Collins looks. There are the useless convicts like you, even if your bricklaying skills are finally being used as you put together a store for the settlement’s ammunition. Others have already escaped, or tried to, proving yet again the unrelenting stupidity of the criminal class. There is Daniel Woodriff, the skipper of the Calcutta, who has just told Collins he will soon be departing for Port Jackson before returning to England, leaving Collins with just the Ocean and its reduced capacity to haul almost 500 people south to Van Diemen’s Land. Not only that, but under Collins’ command is an undermanned and largely worthless group of marines who seem more intent on drinking and squabbling than keeping the peace.

  And to top it all off there is that infernal Tuckey, wandering about on his carpet of perfumed rose petals, his enthusiasm never waning, his optimism shining warmly in any direction he turns.

  So let’s take one more look at him. It will be the last time we see him as the Calcutta prepares to leave. Even two centuries later it will be easy to picture him sitting on the carriage of a gun in front of the camp, prim and buttoned up, perhaps his chin resting reflectively in the palm of his only good hand, contemplating ‘with succeeding emotions of pity, laughter and astonishment the scene before me’.

  The convicts are at work. ‘When I viewed so many of my fellow men, sunk, some of them from a rank equal or superior to my own, and by their crimes degraded to a level with the basest of mankind; when I saw them naked, wading to their shoulders in water to unlade the boats while a burning sun struck its Meridien rays upon their uncovered heads, or yoked to and sweating under a timber carriage, the wheels of which were sunk tip to the axle in sand, I considered their hapless lot, and the remembrance of their vices was for a moment absorbed in the greatness of their punishment.’

  He’s not finished, yet. Never is. Have you been watching him, William? He’s now worked himself into such a lather that he begins to speak aloud, spouting with great enthusiasm a line from William Cowper, one of the forerunners of the Romantic poetry movement and a writer even Coleridge rates as the best modern poet of the era.

  Tis liberty alone that gives the flower

  Of fleeting life its lustre and perfume

  And we are weeds without it.

  Well, he’s not wrong. It’s all about liberty. Always has been with you. And thoughts of escape are never far from your mind.

  10

  DARING ESCAPE UNDER A FULL MOON

  You’re going to forget a great deal as you become an older man. The English language, for one thing. But that won’t really matter. Being a man of few words you’ve never had any great passion for it, never really felt the need to push it to its limits the way
men like Tuckey do. You’ll also forget much about your childhood and even your memories of your time on the prison hulks will slowly recede.

  But you won’t forget tonight, will you?

  The moon, near full, low in the western sky. The silence of the camp. The tightness in your gut and the panic that sets in when you realise you are being chased by men with guns. How the bush suddenly comes alive with screams and shouts and the sound of musket fire as you and Will Marmon and four others are hunted down like animals. Those red-coated marines are cursing and they want to put a musket ball right through the back of your head. Some of them have had to put down their rum; others probably have a scantily dressed woman convict in their tent who is wondering where in hell everyone has gone.

  Of course you will remember this night. Many years later you will concede it was a stupid idea, hatched by men so lacking in geographical knowledge they thought Sydney was just a few miles to the north and China just a brisk walk from there. ‘The attempt was little short of madness,’ you will say, ‘for there was before me the chances of being retaken and probable death or other dreadful punishment.’

  It’s not as though you haven’t known what happens to convicts who decide to do a runner from Sullivan Bay. In the last few weeks up to a dozen of them have fled, including that annoying, Classics-spouting George Lee. Well, Lee will never be seen again. His mate, David Gibson, wandered back into camp more than a week later, a ‘mere skeleton from his privations in the bush’. Some have been recaptured more than 60 miles away and are happy to return and be tied to the flogging post rather than endure another night on the run.

  But despite all this – and all the warnings the Lieutenant-Governor kept pumping out of that little second-hand printing press down near the beach – you insisted on doing it. On Christmas Eve when revelries were in full swing Daniel McAllenan (Irishman, horse stealer) broke into the commissary’s tent and stole a gun. The theft alerted Collins that something might be in the air and so he doubled up on the night patrols and increased perimeter security around the camp. That wasn’t so much of a problem for you – as a bricklayer you had been given special privileges, including a tent on the edge of the settlement.

  Just after 9 pm you and Will Marmon and McAllenan, along with several others, launch your escape. The night is suddenly plunged into a maelstrom of noise and chaos. There’s a loud shot and some shouts. One of your group, Charles Shore, has been wounded, a pellet lodging in his stomach. They will send a wagon to collect him soon, but the pursuit will continue.

  And you? Those huge feet are propelling you through the bush at an almighty pace. ‘After running the greater part of the first three or four hours to make our escape more certain, we halted for rest and refreshment,’ you will recall. ‘We were now fairly launched on our perilous voyage and it became necessary to reflect on our position and to examine our resources.’

  Let’s see. What do you have there? Apart from the gun there’s an old iron kettle, a very small collection of tin pots – what is this, an escape party or a group of jam-preserving enthusiasts? – and barely two or three days’ worth of rations. The next morning you come face to face with a tribe of spear-carrying Aboriginals, but they depart fairly quickly after you fire a warning shot from the gun.

  Still, the enormity of your plight begins to set in. It doesn’t take long before McAllenan, taking the gun from you, begins to have second thoughts and turns to make the long journey back to the settlement. Even your mate, Marmon, is struggling. He might be fit but scurvy is starting to slow him down and, not long after, he says farewell, the whipping post back in Sullivan Bay far preferable to this.

  But there’s no way you’re going back. You and two others – most likely George Pye, a sheep stealer from Nottingham, and James Taylor, who stole a horse in Lancaster and joined you on the hulks at Langstone – push on. The heat gives way to a cold change sweeping in from the south bringing heavy rain and an abrupt drop in temperature. You come to a river – perhaps the one that Collins should have discovered two months ago when the Calcutta first made its way into the bay – and, being the strongest swimmer, help the other two to cross it.

  The days are long and your rations are running out. You have almost completed a full circuit of the bay – more than a hundred miles. But surely the nights are the worst. For a small group of ignorant Englishmen constantly looking over their shoulders for pursuers, listening to the creaking of old gum trees and surrounded by the sheer melancholic emptiness of the country around you, the desolation is almost suffocating.

  Say what you like about David Collins, but don’t say the man does not have a temper when he is pushed far enough. On New Year’s Eve – several days after your escape – the Lieutenant-Governor has Matthew Power hunched over the printing press publishing his latest missive to the Sullivan Bay camp. He cannot, he says, but ‘pity the delusion which some of the prisoners labour under, in thinking that they can exist when deprived of the assistance of government. Their madness will be manifest to themselves when they shall feel, too late, that they have wrought their own ruin. After those who have absconded he shall make no further search, certain that they must soon return or perish by famine.’

  As if constant desertions are not enough, Collins has an even greater problem on his hands. Since Christmas there has been growing drunkenness and – far worse for a man who has lived with a reverential respect for authority – insolence. He has had two marines arrested, suspected of plotting a mutiny, and sentenced them to 900 lashes.

  It is by far the most brutal punishment handed out since leaving Portsmouth back in April. Collins demands everyone gather in the parade ground shortly after seven in the morning. Two floggers – one right-handed, the other left-handed – carry out the Lieutenant-Governor’s orders. Skin and blood soon cover the ground. The doctor on duty will stop one of the floggings after 500 lashes, the other after 700. Days later, when the skin has healed, the pair will be hauled back for the remainder.

  Collins is running out of patience. He wants to leave this place and head south before he has a complete insurrection on his hands. His hunch that some of the convicts will return is correct. McAllenan has stumbled into the settlement and handed back the stolen gun.

  It prompts another notice to the camp. ‘The Lieut. Governor hopes the return of … McAllenan will have convinced the prisoners of the misery that must ever attend those who are mad enough to abscond from the settlement. To warn them from making an attempt of a similar nature they are informed that, although this man left his companions on the fifth day after their departure hence, they all began to feel the effects of their imprudence, and more of them would have returned had they not dreaded the punishment which they were conscious they deserved … their provisions were nearly expended and they had no resources. They lived in constant dread of the natives, by whose hands it is more than probable they have by this time perished.’

  Well, not quite. There are three battling hunger and fear. But you’re still running. You have long since left the place they will one day call Melbourne and moved south-west, down through the You Yang hills, discovering a small bay connected to Port Phillip where you eat shellfish that affects ‘us all very seriously’. After 10 days on the run you reach the opposite side of the bay and can see the Ocean – you mistake it for the Calcutta – at anchor.

  By this time Pye and Taylor have had enough. But none of you can possibly swim the handful of miles across the bay and through such rough water. So you set about making signals – ‘by lighting fires at night and hoisting our shirts on trees and poles by day’.

  At one stage a small boat leaves the Ocean and begins making its way toward the beach. ‘Although the dread of punishment was naturally great,’ you will recall years later, ‘… the fear of starvation exceeded it, and they anxiously waited her arrival to deliver themselves up, indulging anticipations of being … forgiven by the governor.’

  But that boat soon turns around and you are left there on the beach, clothes
torn, faces browned and hollow, stomachs empty. But don’t forget something, William. You still have hope. A man can always hope.

  David Collins is fuming. The man is like a dog at a bone. All of these escapes … why, it’s a slight against his own character. He is still astonished that men he has treated so fairly would choose to flagrantly thumb their noses at him and leave the settlement. It’s blatant ingratitude – that’s what it is. And now the frustration of the last few months – indeed, the past 20 years of a life filled with disappointment – begins to spill over.

  It’s time for another notice to the settlement. ‘How is it possible that strong hardy men who were always able to consume even more than the liberal allowance of provisions which is issued to them, can exist in a country where nowhere affords a supply to the traveller?’ Collins asks.

  ‘The lieutenant governor can by no means account for this strange desertion of the people; were they ill-treated, scantily-fed, badly clothed or wrought beyond their ability, he should attribute it to these causes. But as the reverse is the case he is at a loss to discover the motive.’ And with that Collins issues a warning to those who may be thinking about helping others to escape. ‘It is his fixed determination to punish them with greater severity than he would the infatuated wretches themselves. He is concerned that the several prisoners who are now absent must be left to perish, as by McAllenan’s account they are beyond the reach of every effort he might make to recall them to their duty.’

  Collins will hear no more about the absconders. You’re dead to him – you, Pye and Taylor. Collins has a new colony to establish. In Sydney, the NSW Governor has agreed he should head south to Van Diemen’s Land and now he must supervise the loading of the Ocean with the remaining provisions before it slips anchor at the end of January.