Free Down Under by Bill Bryson Page B

scores more wounded, including Governor Phillip himself, who approached an Aborigine at Manly Cove in an attempt to converse and, to his consternation, had a spear thrust into his shoulder and out the back. (He recovered.)
    Nearly everything was against them. They had no waterproof clothes to keep out the rain and no mortar to make buildings; no ploughs with which to till fields and no draught animals to pull the ploughs that they didn’t have. The ground everywhere seemed cursed with an ‘unconquerable sterility’. Such crops as managed to push through the soil were, more often than not, stolen under cover ofdarkness – by marines as often as by prisoners. For years, both groups would want not just for food but for nearly every basic commodity one could name: shoes, blankets, tobacco, nails, paper, ink, groundsheets, saddlery – whatever, in short, required manufacture. The soldiers did their best to evaluate their resources, but most had little idea of what they were looking for when they went after it, or at when they found it. The historian Glen McLaren quotes one report from a soldier sent to the Hunter River valley to see what might be there. ‘The soil is black,’ the soldier wrote hopefully, ‘but mixed with a sort of sand or marly substance. Fish also are plenty, and I suppose, from their leaping, are of the trout kind.’
    Development was further set back by the need to rely on prisoners, who clearly lacked any basis for devotion beyond self-interest. The cannier ones soon learned to lie their way to softer duties. One fellow named Hutchinson, coming across some scientific apparatus that had been packed away in one of the holds, persuaded his superiors that he knew all there was to know about dyestuffs, and spent months conducting elaborate experiments with beakers and scales, until it gradually became apparent that he didn’t have the faintest idea what he was doing. When they couldn’t fool their masters the prisoners could often fool their fellows. For years there existed an illicit commerce in which newly arrived convicts were sold maps showing them how to walk to China. Up to sixty at a time fled their captivity in the belief that that magically accommodating land lay just the other side of a vaguely distant river.
    By 1790, the government farm had been abandoned and, with no sign of relief from England, they were desperately dependent on their dwindling supplies. It wasn’tjust that the food was short, but by now years old and barely edible, the rice so full of weevily grubs that ‘every grain . . . was a moving body’, as Watkin Tench queasily noted. At the height of their crisis they awoke one morning to find that half a dozen of their remaining cattle had wandered off, not to be seen again. These were seriously at-risk settlers.
    There was at times a kind of endearing quality to their hopelessness. When Aborigines killed a convict named McEntire, Governor Phillip in an uncharacteristic fury (this was not long after he had been speared himself) dispatched a band of marines on a punitive expedition with orders to bring back six heads – any six. The marines tramped about in the bush for a few days, but managed to capture just one Aborigine, and he was released when it was realized he was a friend. In the end they captured no one and the matter seems to have been quietly forgotten.
    Exhausted by the stresses, Phillip was called home after four years, and retired to Bath. Apart from founding Sydney, he had one other notable achievement. In 1814, he managed to die by falling from a wheelchair and out of an upstairs window.
II
    It is impossible in the frappaccino heaven that is modern Sydney to get the slightest sense of what life was like in those early years. Partly this is for the obvious reason that things have moved on a bit. Where, 200 years ago, there stood rude huts and sagging tents, today there rises a great and comely city, a transformation so total that it is impossible to see both ends