Draggy Bits of Australian History: 1788 to 1795

Monday, 13 January 2002

[This post is the second part of the relaxed and comfortable Tugboat History of Australia (thanks to Gareth Parker for the title). The first part is here. It's another multi-part post, so feel free to add comments wherever you feel they will be most relevant].

The past is like a foreign country: between the highspots and major landmarks there's a lot of sometimes picturesque, but mostly boring, countryside to cover dozing uncomfortably in a cramped seat on a tourist bus. To cover this terrain the hero-historian may be forced to resort to the resources of his local library. There I found Volume I of Manning Clark's A History of Australia, which I'll be using to get through the years from 1788 to 1806, when not a lot happened, give or take the odd spot of malnutrition and debauchery.

I admit that Clark is probably not the most reliable source: he's known to have been one of those lefty "fellow traveller" types that BA Santamaria used to excoriate in his weekly sermon on Channel 9, Point of View, during the 60s and 70s and there were allegations that he was awarded the Order of Lenin. So we shall have to take much of Clark's description of the early years of the new nation of Australia (or New South Wales as it was called then) with a grain of salt. Sea salt obviously, as rock salt may be a little suspect under the circumstances.

From 1788 to 1792 the growing nation was governed by Arthur Phillip, a Keatingesque visionary who believed his mission was to lay a foundation for a prosperous free society. In this he was at odds with the convict mainstream, but like Keating he had the support of the nation's intellectual elite, the officers of the garrison. To be fair to Phillip the convicts' notion of relaxation and comfort was some distance from our modern notion: despite the efforts of the Rev Richard Johnson, they remained largely untouched by the pneuma of the Graeco-Christian tradition and preferred the Secular Humanist theft ethic to the the much more productive Calvinist work ethic. Any notion that comfort and relaxation were the evening rewards of a day's hard work, rather than a natural right, was alien to them.

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