Thicker Than Water: History, Secrets and Guilt: A Memoir. Cal Flyn
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He used his last scraps to prepare himself for the worst, and to reassert his faith. If it is thy holy will to call me Lord, grant that all who are dear to me may be forever united in thy kingdom. Thy will be done and may I be submissive to it.
He was resigned to his fate, whatever it might be. He crammed his last entry into the bottom corner of the page on 22 December 1837, still a month’s journey from Sydney: It is a beautiful day.
The Minerva finally staggered into port on 23 January 1838. ‘THE FEVER SHIP’, as Lang’s newspaper the Colonist greeted it, had by then lost fourteen to typhus fever, while eighty-six of the 198 steerage passengers had contracted the disease, including the surgeon, who was in ‘a dangerous state’.
At that time it was not known how typhus was spread (via lice), but an inspector saw enough to attribute the cause of the sickness to the ‘overcrowded state of the ’tween decks’, where the steerage passengers slept crammed together. ‘I am informed,’ he added, ‘that when the vessel left Scotland, the space between decks was [also] crowded to excess with lumber, which was made a receptacle of refuse provision, and filth of every description.’
McMillan and all the others travelling in the cabins had escaped its grip, but were obliged to spend three weeks in quarantine on board the ship, under a yellow flag in Spring Cove, before they were finally allowed to disembark.
Arrival in Sydney would have been a shock to the system for a good Presbyterian boy from Skye. In 1838 the colony was celebrating its fiftieth anniversary, but while Sydney and Parramatta were now under stable government, the rougher edges maintained a lawless, frontierland air. Around a third of the population still were serving prisoners but, in terms of numbers, the dominant group was now the former convicts who had served out their sentences. Unable to afford the return fare, they were marooned indefinitely in a continent-sized prison. Many were now pursuing their own interests, searching for suitable land on the margins of the colony
There, conversation tended towards the coarse, and justice towards the brutal. Survival required cunning and self-interest, with little call for manners or sympathy for one’s fellows. New arrivals often wrote home shocked by the discovery of how the realities of Antipodean life had robbed the colonists of human decency.
The very earliest arrivals had had the worst time of it. They had been dispatched from Britain in 1787 as a matter of urgency after the American Declaration of Independence in 1776 halted transportation of convicts there, generating enormous pressure on British jails. In Westminster, politicians watched with concern as elderly vessels were anchored in the Thames for use as prison ships, and convened an emergency parliamentary investigation: where could all these convicts go?
Evidence submitted by those aboard Captain Cook’s expedition in 1770 – the first European encounter with Australia’s eastern seaboard – was enough to convince the desperate policy-makers to send a fleet of boats carrying around 1,500 passengers, roughly half of whom were convicts, to establish what is now Sydney.
Incredibly, due to the time constraints, these reluctant colonists were sent out without any further reconnaissance. It took a gruelling eight months to reach Botany Bay, the proposed site of the new settlement, and perhaps another ten minutes after that to realise that this was not the green and pleasant land so stirringly evoked by Cook’s botanist in the oak-panelled committee rooms of the Palace of Westminster, but instead a dry and alien habitat where the plants were unrecognisable, the soil arid, the climate treacherous and the animals unknown and often venomous.
They might have arrived on the surface of Mars for all they knew or understood about their new environment, and they were woefully ill-suited to master it. As the art critic and historian Robert Hughes has explained, ‘The colony that would have to raise its own crops in unknown soil had only one professional gardener, and he was a raw youth of twenty. It would need tons of fish, but had only one fisherman. There were only two brickmakers, two bricklayers and a mason for all the houses that would need building [and] no sawyers.’
It was, to put things mildly, a very uncomfortable few years for those first arrivals, who struggled by on starvation rations as their crops failed year after year. Watkin Tench, an officer whose account of the colony’s founding was published by Debrett’s, wrote of those first, desperate months: ‘Famine … was approaching with giant strides, and gloom and dejection overspread every countenance. Men abandoned themselves to the most desponding reflections.’
The arrival of these incompetent pioneers had been met with surprising good humour by the local Aboriginal population. The Eora people, who populated the Sydney basin, had made some show of aggression on first contact, gathering in great numbers on the clifftops to brandish their spears and chant threateningly. (‘Warra warra,’ they shouted. ‘Warra warra.’ Go away.) But they were intrigued by the new arrivals, and soon came down to investigate, leading to a scene of some geniality. ‘They came round ye boats & many little things were given them,’ the future governor Philip Gidley King recorded in his journal. ‘Hatts was more particularised by them, their admiration of which they expressed by very loud shouts, whenever one of us pulled our hatts off.’
This initial bonhomie would soon give way to anger and resentment as boatload upon boatload of the British began to arrive: the Second Fleet in June 1790, the Third Fleet in July of the next year. Thus began the trickle, which became the flood. In all, 825 convict ships were sent to Australia, averaging around two hundred prisoners aboard each. These white interlopers spread inland from Port Jackson like a plague, occupying the most fertile land and encroaching upon a culture that had successfully existed in its present form for tens of thousands of years.
It is impossible to overstate the disruptive effects that these settlers would go on to have upon the lives of the Aboriginal people. Of these, disease would be the most devastating, jumping from tribe to tribe, racing across the continent far in advance of even the most adventurous Europeans. Of the Aboriginal nations of south-east Australia, only the Gunai people of what became Gippsland and their neighbours the Ngarico avoided the smallpox epidemics that cut down their countrymen like scythes, first in 1789 and again between 1829 and 1831. They were probably saved by their hostile outlook and lack of interaction with rival tribes. How sad, then, that they would be so devastated by the Gippsland pioneers led by Angus McMillan.
Today’s Sydney, with its clean, breezy streets, gleaming skyscrapers and iconic harbour, is unrecognisable from the fleapit that McMillan encountered, but it is still a mecca for travellers and immigrants. Arrivals at Central Station are faced with a street of towering youth hostels and hotels, while nearby George Street, where dim sum and noodle restaurants vastly outnumber any other type of shop – apart from, perhaps, the backpackers’ travel agents offering budget tours – has a distinctly international feel.
I stopped there overnight, still brooding on the future that beckoned to the serious young man I had encountered in the journals. But I felt calm. I had direction again – I was back on a path he had beaten before me. From his arrival at the quayside, he turned inland into the dry interior, and set about learning the skills for life in the fledgling colony.
I paused just long enough to take in the sights – but like Angus, I wasn’t stopping long. I was off in search of cowboy country.
4
The train line from Sydney wended through mangrove swamps and bays toothed with sharp island outcrops before twisting in on itself and heading north-west into the dry interior.
I had booked onto the New South Wales railway as I would a plane: handed over ID, checked in my luggage, printed out a boarding ticket in advance. The whole aesthetic evoked 1960s air travel: wide, blocky reclining seats, cup holders, metal ashtrays carved into cubby holes in the walls. The buffet car served hot canteen lunches: roast chicken with vegetables or spaghetti bolognaise, $9 each and served in foil-covered TV-dinner trays, ordered from the conductor before 11 a.m. and picked up in person at noon.
My carriage