A Commonwealth of Thieves (38 page)

When governor of New South Wales, Captain John Hunter wrote, “Some of the very dregs of those who have been sent here [as] convicts are now in possession of their horses and chaise, servants, and other symbols of wealth.” Entrepreneurial convicts increasingly served and worked with the ever more powerful officer corps: “Not wishing to soil their gentility by too blatant a descent into the marketplace, they [the officers] permitted the retail trade to fall into the hands of ambitious and able (if uneducated) men with no gentility to lose. By doing so they made affluent those who would oust them from their position of privilege.”

One such ambitious and able man was Henry Kable. In 1796, Kable become head constable and gaoler of Sydney Cove, and in 1797 was granted a license to operate an inn in the Rocks area of Sydney. He was also one of a syndicate of twelve which the governor authorised to build a boat for coastal trading. He was dismissed as head constable in 1802 for trying illegally to import pigs from a visiting ship, for he was by then a trader, and he also invested after 1800 in the sealing industry and became a partner with another former convict, James Underwood, in a boat-building business.

Later, these two would form a business association with the most successful of all convict merchants, Simeon Lord, the Manchester cloth-thief who had arrived in Sydney in 1791. Their complicated tradings in whaling, sealing, sandalwood, and wholesale and retail commerce would break down by 1809, and create a welter of litigation which would continue until 1819.

But for Kable, as for Mary Reibey, his land holdings were his ultimate security. He had been granted two farms at Petersham Hill on the Parramatta River and ultimately owned four farms around Sydney, five along the Hawkesbury, and 300 acres west of Sydney in the area known as the Cow Pastures, as well as a house and storehouses in Sydney. In 1811 Kable's house in lower George Street, Sydney, would be advertised for lease in these terms: “Convenient and extensive premises … comprising a commodious dwelling house, with detached kitchen and out-offices, good stable, large granaries, roomy and substantial storehouses, a front retail warehouse, good cellarage and every other convenience suited to a commercial house, the whole in complete repair, and unrivalled in point of situation.”

Henry Kable had used a cross to represent his name on his wedding certificate. His sons were highly literate, and though Henry Kable Jr. would severely injure his right arm during the launch of one of his father's ships in May 1803, it would not blunt his cleverness. In 1822, he was able to address a petition to the governor, Sir Thomas Brisbane, seeking “a grant of land, and the requisite indulgences as allowed to settlers of respectability.” The request was refused, though young Kable asserted that “his aged father [was] some years unfortunately embarrassed in his circumstances, in consequences of unavoidable mercantile losses at sea.”

Later in life, Kable and his wife, Susannah, moved to the area named Windsor on the Nepean River, where Kable ran a store and a brewery. His business interests and his land holdings declined, but they lived comfortably enough and reared ten children. Henry had transferred most of his wealth to his son, Henry Jr., the baby of Norwich gaol, to make it safe against claims from Simeon Lord, and the young man went on to become a successful businessman. Another of Henry and Susannah's sons, James, was murdered by Malay pirates in the Straits of Malacca, piloting one of his father's boats back from China. A third son, John, became a famous boxer in the 1820s. Susannah Kable died in November 1825, but Henry lived on another twenty-one years and died in March 1846. His army of descendants are prominent in Australian society.

Nanbaree, the Eora boy who survived the smallpox epidemic, served as a seaman on HMS
Reliance,
and in 1803 was for a time with Lieutenant Matthew Flinders, circumnavigator of Australia, on the
Investigator
. He died aged about forty in July 1821 at Kissing Point, at the home of the convict innkeeper James Squires, and was buried in the same grave as Bennelong.

Pemulwuy, the executioner of the huntsman McEntire, went on opposing white settlement with his son Tedbury, and in 1795 they were blamed for leading raids on farms north of Parramatta. In March 1797, a punitive party of New South Wales Corps troops and freed convicts pursued about a hundred natives to the outskirts of Parramatta, but found themselves in turn “followed by a large body of natives, headed by Pemulwuy, a riotous and troublesome savage.” A number of the soldiers and settlers, turning back, tried to seize Pemulwuy, “who, in a great rage, threatened to spear the first man who dared to approach him, and actually did throw a spear at one of the soldiers.”

The soldiers opened fire. “Pemulwuy, who had received seven buckshot in his head and different parts of his body, was taken ill to the hospital.” He escaped and was seen in his home country near Botany Bay, an iron still fixed to his leg. Collins reported that an Aboriginal mythology had grown up around Pemulwuy. “Both he and they entertained an opinion that, from his having been frequently wounded, he could not be killed by our firearms. Through this fancied security, he was said to be the head of every party that attacked the maize grounds.” Pemulwuy was still at large in November 1801, when Governor King outlawed him, it being believed that he had aligned himself with two escaped convicts, William Knight and Thomas Thrush, in murderous raids upon homesteads. When he was at last hunted down and shot, Governor King sent his head to Sir Joseph Banks for passing on to his German colleague, Professor Blumenbach. Tedbury fought on and, though wounded, seems to have been alive as late as 1810.

Bennelong and Yemmerrawanne had an ambiguous experience in Britain. The
Atlantic
reached the Thames on 22 May 1793 and the
London
Packet
of 29 May was quick to express an opinion, perhaps common among returning officers and marines, which would condemn Aborigines to a lowly status in law and cultivated British perception. “That instinct which teaches to propagate and preserve the species, they possess in common with the beasts of the field, and seem exactly on a par with them in respect to any further knowledge of, or attachment to kindred. This circumstance has given rise to the well founded conjecture that these people form a lower order of the human race.” Two days after arrival, Bennelong and Yemmerrawanne were presented at court by Phillip, though there are no records in the correspondence of George III on what impact the two natives had upon him during a brief levee. The cold of England dispirited Bennelong, who was unjustly described by some press as “the Cannibal King,” and gave Yemmerrawanne congestive illness. The extent to which Phillip involved himself in their English experience is not known. The two of them were seen, dressed as English gentlemen, gazing into a shop window in St. James's Street. They yearned for New South Wales. Yemmerrawanne would die of pneumonia in Essex in early 1794 and suffer the fate of being buried not in ancestral ground, but in a cemetery at Eltham. Hunter got Bennelong aboard the ship
Reliance
in August 1794, but it did not sail until early 1795, and Hunter confessed his concerns for Bennelong's health and broken spirit. Surgeon George Bass, in whose honour the as yet uncharted strait between Van Diemen's Land and the mainland would be named, helped treat Bennelong for his chest illness.

When he landed in Sydney in September 1795, Bennelong made a splash and settled down again at his house at Tubowgulle. But his young wife, Karubarabulu, who had taken up with another man in his absence, disdained him. He found himself fully accepted neither by the new administration in Sydney Cove nor by his own people, and in two years had become “so fond of drinking that he lost no opportunity of being intoxicated.” He suffered further serious ritual wounds, perhaps as a result of the violence liquor evoked from him. As late as 1805 he was engaged in combat with Colby over Karubarabulu. By the time he died at Kissing Point on the Parramatta River in 1813, the
Sydney Gazette,
New South Wales's first newspaper, wrote, “Of this veteran champion of the native tribe little favourable can be said. His voyage to and benevolent treatment in Britain produced no change whatever in his manners and inclinations, which were naturally barbarous and ferocious.” But his name lives on in modern Australia, not least because the Sydney Opera House stands on Tubowgulle, Bennelong Point.

That good friend of Bennelong's Watkin Tench, the genial diarist, would be engaged in the long war against France, spending six months as a prisoner of war, then typically publishing a book,
Letters from France,
about the experience. Exchanged with a French officer, he served the rest of the war in the Channel fleet, rising to the rank of major-general by the time Napoleon fell. On half-pay for three years, he returned to the active list as commander of the Plymouth Division, retiring as a lieutenant-general in 1821. He and his wife had no children but adopted those of Mrs. Tench's sister. His
Narrative of the Expedition to Botany Bay
and
A
Complete Account of the Settlement at Port Jackson
were published in 1789 and 1793. One can imagine him during his times ashore as the sort of charming, good-natured, cultivated fellow who would bring the light and warmth of his character to Jane Austen–esque drawing rooms.

Captain Philip Gidley King would be governor of New South Wales from 1800, and thus faced the great problem of the monopolist traffickers in liquor, generally members of the New South Wales or Rum Corps. D'Arcy Wentworth, back from Norfolk Island, had entered that market also. King has been described as being “rather over-excited at the time of the Irish conspiracy in 1804,” and indeed, having received many transported United Irishmen from the rebellion in Ireland of 1798, he treated them with a provocative brutality over a number of years and suppressed their uprising in 1804 with a ferocity of hangings and floggings which will always stand to his shame. Not that he did not pay with his own health, for he returned to England in 1808 very ill, and died soon thereafter. His sons by Ann Innett and his wife and all but one of his four daughters lived to adulthood and many married into colonial families, including the Macarthur family.

Ann Innett herself would marry the emancipist farmer Richard Robertson, supposed horse-thief, and be granted 30 acres of the Northern Boundary farms in 1794. In 1804, as governor, King would grant her an absolute pardon. She later ran a butchery with her husband, continuing to manage it after he left for England, sailing off herself for the near-forgotten homeland in March 1820. If the Reverend Johnson had hoped for a more piety-respecting administration under Major Grose, he was disappointed. “I can't pass over this business,” wrote Grose, “without observing that Mr. Johnson is one of the people called Methodists, [and] is a very troublesome, discontented character.” In 1793 Johnson received 100 acres at Kissing Point on the Parramatta River in return for relinquishing his claim to a glebe, that is, a church-farm. Though he made a reputation as an orchardist, he did not return to England as a wealthy colonist when he left New South Wales in late 1800. A monument was ultimately erected to him in St. Mary Aldermary, London, stating that he was a former rector there and had died in 1827, aged seventy-four years. Mary Johnson lived until 1831.

John and Elizabeth Macarthur, who had travelled in squalid, loud, and smelly cubbyholes to reach New South Wales, would begin to be rewarded for their troubles with grants of land and favours from Major Grose. Macarthur would build a fortune not only out of land and trade but through his development of world-beating Australian fleeces from his merino flocks at the Cow Pastures south-west of Sydney. Litigious and rebellious, he would involve himself in the overthrow of Governor Bligh and would perforce leave the colony for some years to avoid the legal consequences of that rebellion, trusting his affairs to his capable wife. Macarthur would live until 1835 and be survived by Elizabeth, and by sons prominent in early New South Wales politics.

Ralph Clark, having returned to England with considerable joy even though placed on half-pay, was soon back on active service against the French. His beloved Betsy Alicia died in 1794 giving birth to a stillborn child. In the same year his son, a midshipman, was serving with Ralph on a British warship in the West Indies and perished below of yellow fever the same day Ralph Clark himself was shot dead on deck by a French sniper. His only remaining family were the convict Mary Brenham and her daughter, Alicia, christened in Sydney on 16 December 1791.

Major George Johnston, paramour of the Cockney Esther Abrahams, ruthlessly suppressed the uprising of United Irishmen in New South Wales in 1804, and survived the opprobrium of having overthrown Bligh, though he had to face a court-martial in England and be deprived of his rank. In 1814, he regularised his marriage to Esther. He enjoyed great success as a farmer and grazier in New South Wales, and he and his wife are buried together in a family vault designed by the convict architect Francis Greenway.

After his bitter exile on Norfolk Island, D'Arcy Wentworth returned to Sydney in 1796 and would ultimately rise to become principal surgeon of the Civil Medical Department in 1809. He was appointed a justice of the peace and would sit on the Governor's Court. A commissioner of the first turnpike road to Parramatta, he was also treasurer of the police fund, which received three-quarters of colonial revenue. Governor Bligh had him arrested in 1808 for misusing the labour of sick convicts for his private advantage. Wentworth was understandably sympathetic to the rebels, such as Macarthur and Johnston, who overthrew Bligh that year.

He involved himself in victualling and clothing patients in colonial hospitals, and in 1810, in conjunction with two other businessmen, he contracted to build Sydney Hospital for Governor Macquarie in return for a monopoly on the rum trade. Wentworth claimed to have lost money due to the expense of building this two-hundred-person hospital, but his trade in rum and other interests would make him perhaps the richest man in the colony. In 1816 he would help establish the Bank of New South Wales, of which he was the original director and the second largest shareholder. Wentworth's brushes with the Old Bailey, and his alliance with the convict woman Catherine Crowley, tended to somewhat isolate him in his fine house on the road to Parramatta, yet when he emerged for social events he was much beloved by fashionable Sydney. Dying at his estate, Homebush, in 1827, he was described in the
Sydney Monitor
as “a lover of freedom; a consistent steady friend of the people; a kind and liberal master; a just and humane magistrate; a steady friend and an honest man.” His son with the turned-in eye would ride his father's horses to victory in the races at Hyde Park—a barracks square near the source of the Tank Stream—and would be, with two other settlers, the first of the Britons to cross the Blue Mountains and see the illimitable inner plain. As a colonial statesman, William Charles Wentworth saw Australia not as a potential American-style republic, as some of his contemporaries did, but “a new Britannia in another world.” A Tory to the extent many New South Wales democrats would mock, he was a leader in achieving constitutional government in New South Wales.