Free Leviathan by John Birmingham

hundred metres from the village half an hour before sunrise. Tench split the command into three squads and ordered them to charge the settlement in perfect silence. Despite the long, tiring march through the dark and the terrifying episode at the creek bed, the marines executed his design perfectly, converging on the village from three different directions at exactly the same moment. ‘To our astonishment, however,’ wrote Tench, ‘we found not a single native at the huts; nor was a canoe to be seen on any part of the bay.’
    At first he thought they had arrived perhaps thirty minutes too late. But the camp fires were cold and no fresh food could be found. The natives, Tench concluded, had decamped a number of days earlier and had not returned. Another abject failure. Tench considered letting his disappointed men refresh themselves with a swim, but the tide was turning and if they did not leave immediately, they would be cut off from their baggage and with it food and water. Alternately running and walking, they made the creek in time, but it was hard on the men, several of whom simply collapsed and refused to go on, a telling indication of their weariness, considering the savage discipline of the British army in those days. Tench, no martinet, was mindful of their plight. He was sorry that all he could do ‘for these poor fellows was to order their comrades to carry their muskets, and to leave with them a small party of those men who were least exhausted, to assist them and hurry them on’.
    They rested through the heat of the day, continuing their mission at four in the afternoon. They marched until sunset, seeing no natives, only miles of ‘high coarse rushes, growing in a rotten spongy bog, into which [they] plunged knee-deep at every step’. One final push, in the wee hours of the next day, ended like all the others in failure and despair. Come nine in the morning they turned north to Sydney. While McEntire’s killers were not caught, the tired bitter men of Tench’s patrol did come across a group of black potato thieves on the way back. A sergeant and some privates gave chase and Tench reported that their rage at the previous days’ frustrations ‘transported them so far that, instead of capturing the offenders, they fired in among them’. Some women were captured but the men escaped.
    One of the men, a native called Bangai, was hit, a mortal wound to the shoulder. Surgeon White, on hearing of this, took three Aborigines from Sydney with him to see if he might be able to save the man. But on reaching the spot where he was last reported they were told that he had died and the body was being tended to about a mile off. They found it near a fire, covered in green boughs. The face was hidden behind a thick screen of woven grass and ferns. A strip of bark hung around the neck and a stick had been stripped and bent into an arch over the body. None of the natives who had taken White to the spot would touch the corpse, or even approach it, saying the mawn would come; literally that ‘the spirit of the deceased would seize them’, an ancient belief with some real-world efficacy, although sadly for the first inhabitants of Sydney Harbour they did not understand how much.
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    The white men who hunted the Aborigines carried a far deadlier weapon than their clumsy, single shot muskets. They stepped down from the weathered wooden decks of their ships with flintlocks and cannons but their blood and tissue were to prove much more efficient at destroying the local community. The British were crawling with viruses and bacteria against which the quarantined natives of the harbour had no defence. The men, women and children who made it across the oceans came bearing a cocktail of smallpox, syphilis, measles, whooping cough and influenza. Bred up through hundreds of years in the filthy, crowded cities of Europe, these invisible attackers fell ravenously upon their new,