Writings

Our mixed beginnings

(The Australian, 1 October 1998)

Of the 1373 men, women and children who landed with the First Fleet, approximately 20 per cent were non-English. In addition to the Irish, Scots, Welsh, Channel Islanders, North Americans, Swedes, Norwegian, French, Germans, Dutch, Portuguese and Jews, there were Madagascans, Africans, Jamaicans and other West Indian representatives.

In his First Fleet journal, 1788, now available in paperback, Watkin Tench wrote of the encounter of the Port Jackson Aboriginal people with the black convicts: "At some of our first interviews, we had several droll instances of their mistaking the Africans we had brought with us for their own countrymen." In fact, as many as 20 black convicts, men and women, eventually stepped ashore from the six convict transports.

The founders of Australia, a Biographical Dictionary of the First Fleet, by Molly Gillen, is the first biographical dictionary of the First Fleet. Mrs Gillen brings to life, through well-researched material, the stories of each person, both before and after their arrival in Australia. She gives convicts, crew and jailers the same status: they were all founders.

Until its 1989 publication, the tendency had been to concentrate on the leadership of the fleet and to ignore the diversity of persons and the convicts. This is no longer possible, although the book has been virtually ignored in the mainstream media.

Gillen's stories provide fresh insight into the make-up of the penal colony. Take, for example, John Randall, a black American who, on April 14, 1785, was sentenced at Manchester Quarter Sessions to transportation for seven years for stealing a steel watch chain. He served two years of the sentence on the Ceres hulk before being mustered on board the Alexander for transportation. On February 21, 1788, he married Esther Howard and they shared a hut with John Mosely, also black. Esther having died on October 11, 1789, Randall then married Mary Butler – who had arrived on the second fleet – at Parramatta in 1790 and they had three children.

An Irish political exile, Joseph Holt, gave an intriguing picture of Randall, who "was about six feet high, well-made and straight. He played on the flute and tambour".

As Gillen relates, at least half of the people who came in the First Fleet – including marines and their families, ships' crews, Arthur Phillip, Tench and as many as 230 convicts – did not remain as settlers.

Thomas Chadwick, a black convict, chose to leave. He had been tried at the Old Bailey and sentenced to seven years transportation for stealing cucumbers from a garden in Hanover Square. Caught in the act, he told his captor, who had been losing a lot of cucumbers that London summer, that he had been born in the West Indies.

He, too, wound up on one of the notorious prison hulks before he was shipped to New South Wales. On release he farmed 30 acres. Then in May 1794, with five other male ex-convicts and one woman, he left the colony on the whaler William for Peru. It seems likely, therefore, that there are many Peruvian descendants of the First Fleeters.

Visitors to the Sydney Jewish Museum will find a permanent display dedicated to the place of that community's First Fleeters in Australia's heritage. According to Gillen, there were about 18. In fact, the only portrait we have of a convict arriving with Philip is that of Esther Abrahams. At 16, she "was convicted on 30th August, 1786 at the Old Bailey for theft of some black lace… She may well have been innocent, no one saw her take the goods."

Abrahams arrived with one child, born in Newgate prison: 50 children in all travelled on or were born aboard ship. In 1814, by which time she had had seven children to him, Abrahams married firstly lieutenant George Johnston. "Briefly, in 1808, she was effectively wife of the self-appointed lieutenant governor, when Johnston took power after the mutiny against Bligh."

In the same week as the arrival of the First Fleet in Botany Bay, to everyone's amazement, two French ships, under the command of La Perouse, arrived. On board were six Chinese sailors, remembered on a memorial at La Perouse in Sydney.

It was as though, at the birth of modern multiracial Australia, all the world sent representatives for a unique beginning, unmatched by any other country.

No one can read these stories without having to change their preoccupations and prejudices. Eventually, a rewriting of First Fleet stories for schools and some acknowledgement of the early cultural and racial diversity, in museums – besides that of the Sydney Jewish Museum – will have to take place.