1793 to 1795 1794 1795: overview
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- A Note on the Sources and Their Authors
1793 to 17951794 – 1795: OVERVIEWWhile Phillip did not proceed with settlement in 1791 because of his concerns that the farmers should be proper people; the Hawkesbury would eventually provide farmland for the infant colony. Settlement of the Hawkesbury commenced officially in 1794 within the context of the growth in power of the NSW Corps. Conflict between the settlers and Aboriginal people began almost immediately. It was exacerbated in 1795 by a drought, food shortages in the colony and an influx of new settlers, mostly officers and men of the NSW Corps. In 1795 the NSW Corps carried out at least two punitive expeditions against Aboriginal people on the Hawkesbury. As the orders authorising the second punitive expedition were not cancelled until 1800 the NSW Corps was probably very busy on the Hawkesbury frontier. A Note on the Sources and Their AuthorsIn describing the encounters on the Hawkesbury in 1794-95 there was no one on the frontier with the sensitivity or urbanity of Watkin Tench. Individual despatches, court records, private letters and books based on journals are incomplete and often conflicting. Collectively they make more sense when viewed in the contexts of Eighteenth Century patronage and the rule of the NSW Corps, separated from proper supervision, by time, distance and self-interest. Public documents were often written with a view of influence seeking and presenting the writer in the best light while hiding the business deals of the officers of the NSW Corps. Silence, omissions, denials, distortions and outright lies were, as now, standard bureaucratic literary tools. Unpleasantness was often covered quickly in case of possible repercussions such as a career put on hold or an invitation to a duel. Private journals and letters, which have been saved over the centuries and placed in the public domain, throw light onto events that officially did not exist and give insights into the character and motivations of the participants. Understanding the interaction of the settlers and Aboriginal people in 1794 and 1795 is difficult. The public records present a picture of Aboriginal people gathering around the farms, plundering the crops for food and the settlers firing on them and collecting children for hostages and forced labour. Violence escalated with the taking of blankets and stores from huts followed by the spearing of settlers and reprisals by settlers. Eventually the NSW Corps carried out a number of punitive expeditions to protect the settlers and drive Aboriginal people away. This required the establishment of a permanent garrison to secure the frontier. The written records are highly subjective and simplistic. The officers were portrayed as the hope and future of the colony. The ex-convict settlers were damned as riotous wastrels. John Wilson, perhaps the most individualistic of the convicts, was dismissed as “a wild idle young man, who, his term of transportation being expired, preferred living among the natives in the vicinity of the river, to earning wages of honest industry by working for the settlers”. Aboriginal people were presented as reacting to settlement in a pre-Darwinian romantic discourse of doomed savagery. No Aboriginal person was identified by name or voice in the records 1794-95. The collective identity of Aboriginal people was clouded by the insistence of settlers imposing their own sense of social structure upon Aboriginal people. To David Collins there were coastal Aboriginal people and “natives from the woods”. Despite these handicaps, the accounts left by David Collins and others point to diverse and complex reactions of the Aboriginal people of the Hawkesbury to the invasion of their land. The Aboriginal reaction was shaped by several events. Small pox expanded out of Sydney Harbour fracturing Aboriginal social structures across the Sydney Plain.1 Bardo Narang,2 South Creek,3 Freeman’s Reach4 and the adjoining Lowlands,5 were the heartland of Aboriginal people on the Hawkesbury and settlement there shattered their economy. Thirdly Aboriginal people may well have seen the settlers as unwelcome relatives rather than invaders. Aboriginal people observed the newcomers closely and used a variety of strategies to deal with them. From the attempt to direct the settlers southwards it is obvious that Aboriginal people on the Hawkesbury were talking to other Aboriginal people who had more contact with the settlers. Some Aboriginal people no doubt avoided the settlers. Some Aboriginal people watched the settlers. Some Aboriginal people ventured onto the farms for a variety of reasons with mixed results. Some warriors engaged in fierce conflicts with particular settlers. Some Aboriginal people strategically targeted isolated settlers in an attempt to curtail the expansion of settlement. In 1794 and 1795 encounters between Aboriginal people and settlers on the Hawkesbury were documented both publicly and privately. These sources are: The Historical Records of NSW and the Historical Records of Australia. These works contain the despatches of the British authorities to NSW and the despatches to England of the acting Governors of NSW, Grose and Paterson, and a variety of private letters. As well, the exchanges between Lieutenant-Governor King and Acting Governor Grose over the management of affairs on Norfolk Island, coupled with Portland’s censure of Grose provides valuable insights into the privileged position Grose had placed the NSW Corps and the character of Lieutenant Abbott who was to command the expedition to the Hawkesbury. Fortunately, King was a prolific letter writer and his correspondence to Nepean and Dundas contains details of Abbott’s conduct that did not enter the public record at the time. Intriguingly, a later copy of King’s private letter to Under-Secretary Nepean published by the National Library of Australia on the Internet contains a damaging comment on Abbott that was excluded from the copy published in the Historical Records of Australia. Not all historical records appear in these works. One letter cited in these works comes from the King Letters, held in the Mitchell Library. David Collins, An Account of the English Colony in New South Wales. David Collins,6 was Judge-Advocate and private secretary to Phillip, Grose, Paterson and Hunter. He retained this role until he finally left accompanied by his mistress and their children on 29 September 1796 to reunite with his wife after a decade’s absence. He published the first volume of his work in 1798 to further his career,7 which had languished after the death of his father and his chief patron. Collins’ work is invaluable, despite his circumspection. Collins was more open than Grose or Paterson regarding the conflicts with Aboriginal people. However, when it involved his fellow officers Collins was quite selective and roundabout in what he included and excluded. He did not identify Macarthur as the officer responsible for the cursory examination of Forrester in 1794. His comments on the conflict between King and Grose were muted and his concerns about the activities of Abbot and MacKelllar on the Hawkesbury were only voiced privately. Unfortunately his damning of the Hawkesbury settlers was done with a broad brush and no doubt done to highlights the virtues of the officers of the NSW Corps. As well, there are a number of less well-known documents that complement the above sources. The Bench of Magistrates Minutes of Proceedings provides us with the minutes of the “examination” of the settlers involved in the killing of an Aboriginal boy in 1794. While Collins refers to the killing in his book and is far more judgemental than the enquiry, he makes only passing reference to the “examination” which was probably carried out by John Macarthur. As well, they contain the affair of Boston’s Pig which provides insights into the roles and relationship of officers and men in the NSW Corps. While the Journal of Richard Atkins makes limited reference to events on the Hawkesbury is invaluable when read in conjunction with Collins. Atkins’ disgust with the NSW Corps experiment with slavery allows the reader to draw out the full implication of Collins’ circumspection on this and other matters. Three private letters describing the punitive expedition of June 1795, each contradicting Paterson’s despatches and Collins’s later account. They were all written in the week before Captain Raven8 took the Britannia out of Sydney Harbour on the 18th June 1795 and accompanied Paterson’s despatches. The letters are: A private letter of David Collins written on 11th June 1795. A private letter by the Reverend Thomas Fyshe Palmer, a “gentleman convict”, written on 13th June 1795. A private letter written by William Paterson to Sir Joseph Banks on 14th June 1795. In writing this account of the events of 1794 and 1795 I am indebted to four secondary works for alerting me to the existence of primary material that I had not located myself. I first read the account of the inquiry into the death of a native boy in J.E. Nagle’s, Collins, the Courts and the Colonies, Law and Society in Colonial New South Wales 1788-1796, UNSW Press, 1996. Brook and Cohen’s, The Parramatta Native Institution and the Black Town, NSW University Press, 1991, contains Fyshe Palmer’s letter of 13th of June 1795 (though it ascribes the date to the 11th). David Collin’s letter of 11th June 1795 appears in John Currey’s, David Collins A Colonial Life, The Miegunyah Press, Melbourne University Press, 2000. In that same work I saw for the first time the linkage of David Collins and the “Scottish martyrs” as documented in The Journal of Daniel Paine 1794-1797, Library of Australian History, Sydney, 1983. Jan Barkley-Jack in Hawkesbury Settlement Revealed, Rosenberg, 2009 has demonstrated the importance of the Land Grant Records in untangling what was happening on the Hawkesbury9. Directory: docs docs -> Application for acem docs -> Observational Assessment of Teaching Practices Teaching Assessment Initiative Proposal Submitted to The Teachers for a New Era project docs -> Traditional British values docs -> From Warfighters to Crimefighters: The Origins of Domestic Police Militarization docs -> Borzoi Club of America Register of Merit Program I. 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