Beginning

As We Were In The

Brilliant Nordhoff-Hall Story of Australia's Botany Bay

“T>OTANY BAY,” by Charles Nordhoff £> and James Norman Hall, is an Australian story with an American accent. (Published by Chapman and Hall, London. Colonial edition, 11/6.) The authors who gave us “Mutiny on the Bounty,” “No More Gas,” and several others, in novel and film form, have now produced a brilliantly written book about Australia’s birth —a subject worthy of their skill. Both men are permanent residents of Tahiti.

The story is told by Hugh Tallant—

American-born son of a pioneer Mary land family. The Tallants are loyalists and, in the War of Independence, father and eldest son are killed, the family estates are confiscated, and Hugh and his mother escape to Canada to await the granting of the compensation promised all Loyalists by the English Government.

Hugh, later, proceeds to England to inquire further into the proposed scheme of settling these uprooted Americans on the east coast of New Holland, at Cap tain Cook’s recently discovered Botany Bay. The scheme comes to nothing.

Neither does compensation materialise.

A couple of years pass and Hugh, with his slender resources gone, and fed to the teeth with the dithering policy of the cheese-paring committees who are evidently bent on whittling down the claims of the American Loyalists, takes to highway robbery, in a desperate effort to earn enough money to pay his pas sage back to Canada and his dying mother. He is caught and sentenced to transportation for life to Botany Bay, which —the American colonies gone—the Government has decided to utilise as a dumping ground for the clogged prisons and hulks of England. He sails in the first convoy of 11 ships, in charge of Captain Arthur Phillip—one of the 800 felons, the great majority of whom are the scum of Newgate prison, and so seeped in crime, disease and depravity

that they are beyond betterment.

“We had no reason to hope that we were to make this voyage in any com fort,” says the narrator. “But, as I halted at the foot of the ladder and peered into the semi-darkness of the ’tween-decks, my heart sank at the thought of the weeks and months of confinement in store for us in that stifling hole. Each man was allowed eighteen inches of space, and there were no outside ports to this dungeon; what light and air we received came through a single hatchway.”

After an eight months’ voyage, in January, 1787. the coast of New South Wales was sighted. But the shores of Botany Bay proved unsuitable and the felon pioneers were moved around to Sydney Cove—which Cook had sailed past in 1770, not realising that behind that narrow entrance lay one of the finest natural harbours in the world.

Here, on the shores of Sydney Cove, Governor Phillip had the thankless, heart-breaking task of founding a col ony. “Even if New South Wales proved a paradise,” says Hugh, “such a company as ours might well starve to death. Many were scarcely above the brutes in intelli gence. None had the qualities needed for colonists, and neither the will nor the capacity to acquire them.”

But here, willy-nilly, the foundations of Australia were laid, and out of the scum and sweepings of England, in a great open land of golden sunshine, emerged a few souls who had the neces sary spirit, endurance and forethought to see the land as one of promise and to devote themselves to its progress.

Hugh was one of these hardy spirits and, after years of vicissitude and much unadulterated hell, he won his way to freedom and his chosen way of life.

The Nordhoff and Hall portrayal of the England of that period—its poverty, filth, corruption and crime—and the social and economic system that produced any thing like Newgate prison and the prison hulks, is shattering. And they have given us the atmosphere of Australia as it might well have been in those dim days of the first convict fleet, when the foun dation for Australia’s peculiar variety of freedom was laid. It is a story that some Australian should have written—but no Australian reader will find any jarring incongruities in the story as presented

by these two brilliant Americans.

Judy

Tudor.