Nanberry (27 page)

Thomas received another grant of land of 470 acres in 1799, with more convict labour to work it, but he still worked as a master boatbuilder. By 1807 he had 1,920 acres. He stopped working as a boatbuilder and moved to his property and new grand house, Moorebank, on the Georges River. His business interests grew more and more varied and he travelled twice to England, shipping sheep. He was appointed magistrate for Georges River and then in 1821 for the entire Cumberland County. Moore and Governor Macquarie worked together to found the town of Liverpool and Macquarie even stayed at the Moores' house and encouraged settlers to the area. Moore helped start the Bank of New South Wales (now Westpac), a savings bank in Liverpool, as well as a branch of the British and Foreign Bible Society, and helped in relief efforts when floods destroyed farmers' crops. He also contributed to building a church school, as well as the first Roman Catholic chapel and Presbyterian church, even though he was a devout Anglican, with daily prayers for his entire household.

He seems to have had no children apart from his stepson, Andrew. Rachel was about thirty-five when they married, and although a thirty-five-year-old today may have children, Rachel had been through many years of extreme physical hardship. It is quite likely that by then she wasn't able to get safely pregnant.

Thomas Moore, too, was an extraordinary man, one who took all the opportunities this land offered him, and one who gave selflessly to others too.

Colonial records and spelling

Back in the late 1700s gentlemen and ladies were taught to write, but correct spelling wasn't particularly important. Even well-educated men might spell someone's name three different ways on one page, and not think anything of it. (There were few well-educated women. Well-off girls were taught to read and write simple books, and music, drawing and dancing and often French. Females' ‘small brains' weren't expected to manage much more.)

This makes it difficult to track down people in old records. Many of the records of that time no longer exist, or were never made at the time. Many marriages and births were never recorded. Some, like a few of my ancestors, deliberately lied about where they had come from and their convict pasts, or changed their names. And — like today — sometimes people deliberately made false records or just made mistakes.

The English

I have referred to the colonists as English in this book, rather than British, even though a few were Irish or Scottish or Welsh, Native American or African. This is because the culture, law and customs of the colony at that time were English. It wasn't until many more Irish and Welsh were transported — sometimes because of rebellion against the English — that they became a major influence on Australian culture. The later Highland clearances — whole villages turned out of their homes and their houses burnt so that absentee English landlords could use their clan lands — and increasing Scottish poverty again affected Australia at a later period than the one in which this book is set.

Aboriginal languages and lands

In these days of cars, bridges and harbour tunnels, it's hard to realise just how vast the area around Sydney Harbour must once have been. Groups like the Cadigal, Dharug and Guringai each had their own land. They were more than clans, but not separate nations as we think of nations now — they had much of their language and customs in common, and joined together for ceremonies or feasts, and certainly spread news of events like the arrival of the colonists at Botany Bay. They seemed to have been known as the ‘Eora' or ‘people' even before smallpox killed so many of them.

The ‘Aboriginal' words I've used in this book were those written down by English people from 1788 to 1820. This means they are almost certainly not very accurate. But as with so many of the incidents in this book, I chose to rely on the written records of the time, balanced with what I know of Indigenous tradition and history.

The peoples of Indigenous Australia had no written phonetic language — a phonetic language has symbols for sounds, so you can sound out new words from what's written down; ‘b', ‘oo' and ‘k' will be ‘book' even if you don't know what a book is. The Indigenous nations did have many written symbols, but a symbol doesn't tell you how it's pronounced. The Indigenous nations had no written history either, although they had a very strong and accurate oral history tradition. But when the nations were destroyed by disease and occupation of their lands many of the oral histories died with their custodians.

Leaving your sick or dead behind

The incident where Nanberry and his family are left, ill and dying, sounds callous. But it was also a necessary form of survival, and not just in Aboriginal Australia at that time.

Nowadays we are so used to quarantine areas in hospitals and masks, gloves and suits to protect health workers from infection (although they may not always work) that we forget that even a few hundred years ago lepers wore bells to warn everyone to stay away from them. Sufferers of viruses, such as smallpox, and the plague were simply shut up alone in their homes to die or recover. Probably many more died from lack of water and care than the disease.

Nanberry's clan must have realised that this was a new and deadly illness. The only chance to stop it spreading was to leave the sick behind. There were isolation huts at the colony's hospital, so Surgeon White had places he could safely keep the sufferers. He, too, may well have had either a mild form of smallpox, or more likely, been inoculated with it so that he didn't expect to catch it again, and so wouldn't infect the colony.

Why didn't the colonists die of smallpox?

This is one of history's mysteries. It was a new disease to the Indigenous people, one they had no resistance to. Many in the colony would have already survived the disease, or its relative cowpox, been inoculated or were the children of those who had natural immunity. But it was to be expected that some of the children, at least, would have been sick. Smallpox outbreaks in England still caused many to die.

Many theories have been put forward. This is my own — which I formulated with no medical qualifications, but a lot of reading on the subject. It is possible that the disease wasn't smallpox at all, but a far more virulent form of cowpox than the English had ever seen.

Bad cases of cowpox can look like smallpox. (In the 1930s the cases were still sometimes confused, even by doctors in England.) Most English cowherds in those days carried cowpox and just about everyone in the colony would have had a chance to be
infected by it at some stage. (There was even a herd of cows in the middle of London to provide fresh milk.)

The early colony did have cows and the children in the colony would have been exposed to cowpox too. Cowpox was usually a very mild disease, but it did give a fair immunity to smallpox.

None of the Indigenous nations would ever have had contact with cowpox — even the traders from Indonesia and Asia wouldn't have had cows. I wonder if the dreaded ‘smallpox' wasn't cowpox, striking an unprotected group of people with incredible severity. But, as I said, that is just my own theory — and I am no medical expert.

Oyster shells

Nanberry comments in the book that the white-ghost women gather oysters but take only the shells, leaving the meat behind. The shells were collected in the early colony to be ground up to make lime. This was used to cement bricks to make walls, and create a ‘limewash' to waterproof both brick and ‘wattle-and-daub' houses. However, the oysters may well have been eaten by the women too — they were one of the native foods that prevented the colonists from starving even though supply ships hadn't come. The fact that enough shells were collected to make limewash meant that there were enormous quantities of oysters all around the harbour. (There still were in the 1960s and 70s.)

Early colonial houses

There are probably no houses left in Australia from the period 1788 to 1800 and, although there are a few that may have been built back then, there are also good arguments that those houses were either rebuilt or enormously modified later. This is mostly because the colony's first houses were made either from cabbage-tree logs — easy to cut down but quickly rotted — or ‘wattle-and-daub' — walls made of the trunks of small trees with mud
pushed in between them that also slowly succumbed to rot and rainstorms. Even the first brick houses didn't last long, as the bricks and their tile roofs soon crumbled — the earliest colonial bricks were very poorly made.

Our earliest long-lasting major colonial buildings — often of stone — were built in Governor Macquarie's time, mostly of sandstone, and it is these that Andrew White would have seen when he finally came back to Australia.

Colonial and Eora medicine

Much of British medicine at the time was as likely to kill you as cure you — amputation, bloodletting, purgatives, arsenic, large doses of wine. But as a navy surgeon John White would have been very experienced at dealing with severe wounds, crushed limbs, etc. He would also have understood how often careful nursing and care during an illness can mean that the patient recovers.

But White was also a visionary. He was the one who insisted on the convicts having fresh fruit and vegetables — in those days most people, including doctors, thought fresh fruit was actually harmful, especially for children. He also collected and trialled Indigenous remedies, finding some extremely successful.

Two of these were bloodwood sap and eucalyptus oil. Both were used in colonial times for a variety of illnesses, but it's now known that using eucalyptus oil medicinally can lead to liver problems, so I haven't given details of how either were used in case someone tries to follow the old practices.

Thanks to the hard work of Governor Phillip and Surgeon White, the early colonists were relatively disease free until the arrival of the Second Fleet. From then on each convict ship that arrived also brought more illness to the colony. The ‘First Fleeters' suffered from scurvy, especially those who refused to eat vegetables, or whose teeth were too bad to chew them, as well as accidents, injuries, tooth problems and the dangers from
child-bearing, but until the Second Fleet arrived Australia was regarded as an extremely healthy place to live — if you were white.

Sarsaparilla tea

This was made from
Indigofera australis
, an Australian native shrub. It only tasted very vaguely like real sarsaparilla, but Surgeon White had the flowers harvested in late winter and early spring, and dried for tea. European sarsaparilla was supposed to be good for the digestion and some illnesses, and Surgeon White may have hoped that the native version would be good for them too. I've tried making tea from
Indigofera australis
flowers. It's pretty tasteless, but didn't make me sick. Don't try it, though, in case it has long-term toxic effects.

The New South Wales Corps

The ‘Rum Corps' was as bad as I have shown it to be in this book. It was made up of men with sometimes little or no military experience or training. (In those days you, or your family, paid money so you could become an army officer. In the navy, on the other hand, a man with no money could be promoted on merit, although even then having wealthy or influential friends or family was usually necessary too.)

All of the New South Wales Corps volunteered to come to what they would have regarded as literally the ends of the earth. It was a job that attracted criminals and men who could get no better work.

The Rum Corps put most of their energy into getting land and money for themselves and their friends — and making sure that the colonial government didn't interfere with them. But on the other hand, their efforts to get rich — their farms, their stores, their shipping ventures — also made the colony prosperous. Some of the Rum Corps members, too, were good men who
didn't have the courage to stand up to their more criminal comrades — or had the good sense not to.

The possum

The possum in this book is a common brushtail possum (
Trichosurus vulpecula
), as that is the one best resembling the descriptions of Surgeon White.

Brushtail possums are one of the few bush creatures that have happily adapted to gardens — and love to live in roof and ceiling spaces too.

Brushtail possums spend a lot of their time in trees (or your ceiling) but will also feed on the ground, unlike other possums like ringtails and sugar gliders. They can use their front paws like small hands, and grip with their tail too.

Brushtails eat almost anything — though much of that food may not be good for them. (Like the food many humans choose to eat.) Possums will take food from garbage bins, eat the fruit or blossoms from your trees, and munch through everything left out on your bird table. Their favourite foods though — here, anyway — seem to be apple leaves and shoots, loquat fruit and flowers, young Sydney blue gum leaves and leaf tips. They also eat quite a few snails.

A friend once rang me to complain that a possum had just arrived at her dining table and eaten all the tabouli, but still looked hungry. What should she give it next?

In other words, possums are very, very adaptable — and delightful companions if you don't mind stroppy shrieks outside the window and thumps on the roof. But as Surgeon White found, possums can never be made into pets — just like any wild animal. You can be on familiar terms with the possums in your garden, but never try to pat them, or cuddle them, even if they were hand-raised orphans.

The early colony at Port Jackson

The First Fleet was the longest expedition of its size in history, eleven ships with 1,487 people travelling 15,063 miles. Why on earth did England send a fleet of convicts right around the world?

The British needed a base in the southern hemisphere to supply their ships so they could trade with India, China, Korea and Japan, and to buy furs from the northwest American coast. They also needed a supply base in case the war with Holland meant English ships could no longer be resupplied at Cape Town in South Africa. As well, it looked as though the French were preparing for a war to drive the English out of India.