Free Down Under by Bill Bryson Page A

age. La Pérouse’s expression when it was explained to him that Phillip and his crew had just sailed 15,000 miles to make a prison for people who had stolen lace and ribbons, some cucumber plants and a book on Tobago, must have been one of the great looks in history, but alas there is no record of it. In any case, after an uneventful rest at Botany Bay, he departed, never to be seen again. Soon afterwards his two ships and all aboard were lost in a storm off the New Hebrides.
    Meanwhile, Phillip, seeking a more amenable location, sailed up the coast to another inlet, which Cook had noted but not explored, and ventured through the sandstone heads that form its mouth. There he discovered one of the great harbours of the world. At the point where Circular Quay now stands, he anchored his ships and started a city. It was 26 January 1788. The date would live for ever as Australia Day.
    Among the many small and interesting mysteries of Australia in its early days is where so many of its names come from. It was Cook who called the eastern coast New South Wales, and no one now has any idea why. Did he mean to signify that this would be a new Wales of the South or merely a new version of South Wales? If the latter, why just South Wales and not the whole of it? No one can say. What is certain is that he had no knownconnection to that verdant principality, southerly or otherwise.
    Sydney likewise is a curious appellation. Phillip intended the name only to apply to the cove. He meant for the town to be known as Albion, but that name never took. We know for whom Sydney was named: Thomas Townshend, first Baron Sydney, who was Home and Colonial Secretary and therefore Phillip’s immediate master. What we don’t know is why Townshend, when he was ennobled, chose Sydney as his title. The reason died with him, and the title didn’t last much longer; it was extinct by 1890. The harbour itself was called Port Jackson (it is officially still so known) after an admiralty judge, one George Jackson, who later abandoned his birth name in order to secure an inheritance from an eccentric relation and finished his life as Duckett.
    Of the roughly one thousand people who shuffled ashore, about 700 were prisoners and the rest were marines and officers, officers’ families and the governor and his staff. The exact numbers of each are not known, *4 but it hardly matters. They were all prisoners now.
    They were, to put it mildly, a curious lot. The complement included a boy of nine and a woman of eighty-two – hardly the sort of people you would invite to help you through an ordeal. Though it had been noted in London that certain skills would be desirable in such a remote situation, no one had actually acted on that observation. The party included no one proficient in the natural sciences,no master of husbandry, not a soul who had the faintest understanding of growing crops in hostile climes. The prisoners were in nearly every practical respect woeful. Among the 700 there was just one experienced fisherman and no more than five people with a working knowledge of the building trade. Phillip was by all accounts a kindly man of even temper and natural honesty, but his situation was hopeless. Confronted with a land full of plants he had never seen and knew nothing about, he recorded in despair: ‘I am without one botanist, or even an intelligent gardener.’
    Gamely, they made the best of things: they had no choice. Parties were sent into the countryside to see what they could find (essentially nothing); a government farm was set up on ground overlooking the harbour where the Botanic Gardens now stand; and attempts were made to establish friendly relations with the natives. The ‘Indians’, as they were at first generally called, were bewilderingly unpredictable. Generally friendly, they would none the less opportunistically attack settlers who ventured out of camp to fish or forage. In the first year, seventeen colonists were picked off in this way and