New Angle On Old Sydney

The Month's New Reading

Although the first settlement of Sydney—and of Australia —has been treated in every possible way by historians and novelists, Dr. John Cobley has managed, even at this late date, to come up with a method entirely new.

iESEARCHING into the early his » tory of settlement in Australia a private purpose, he became so cinated by his discoveries in log )ks in old journals, diaries and yate letters, now preserved in the Iney Public Library, he decided to them into a book. Sydney Cove 18 is the result. n this the story of the year after arrival of the First Fleet is told diary form in extracts from what administrators, the soldiers and n the convicts wrote about it at time.

Tiese extracts have been so pieced ether by Cobley that they form a itinuous narrative, fascinating in If and valuable source-material for lents and other writers.

Tie First Fleet was made up of i Naval vessels, six transports and ;e store ships and the settlement t was finally established at Sydney ve consisted of approximately 750 ivicts (of whom one quarter were nen), Governor Phillip’s adminis ;ive staff and the necessary soldiers I marines to keep some sort of law I order.

"Finest Harbour"

Tie ships reached Botany Bay be en January 18 and 20, 1788, but Surgeon-General John White re ded, the bay was soon found not “merit the commendations be ved upon it by the much-lamented 3k and others”.

Vithin a few days the Governor I a party had set off, in three its, farther north along the coast explore what Cook had called >ken Bay and on the way, on Jan y 21, according to Phillip, they t into Port Jackson early in the srnoon and had the satisfaction of ling the finest harbour in the rid, in which a thousand sail of the : may ride in almost perfect se ity. . . .” n the meantime, back at Botany /, Lieut. King and others explored foreshores, looked for water and wood and with the help of trade

beads and sign language managed to establish relations with the natives.

“They wanted to know,” says King in his journal, “of what sex we were, which they explained by pointing where it was distinguishable. As they took us for women, not having our beard grown, I ordered one of the people to undeceive them in this par ticular, when they made a great shout of admiration and pointing to the shore which was but 10 yards from us, we saw a great number of Women & Girls with infant children on their shoulders, make their appearance on the beach—all in pun's naturalibus, pas meme la feuille de figeur”

The native men made it plain that women were at the visitors’ disposal should they wish, but King declined the invitation although he decided to present one of the women with a handkerchief. When one was coaxed near enough “she suffered me to apply the handkerchief where Eve did the Fig leaf”.

By January 27 all the ships of the fleet had anchored in Sydney Cove and the long weary business of estab lishing the infant colony was begun.

What strikes the reader most in this unusual way of presenting the

story through the lips of the people concerned, is not the brutality of the convict system as it has been so fre quently presented—and probably later developed—but the strength of character, sense of justice and com passion of the handful of men who were in charge of the experiment.

On a more prosaic level, the reader can also wonder at the daily tempera tures as recorded for the first nine months and which on only one occa sion went out of the low seventies.

Either thermometers worked differ ently in those days, or Sydney was having the coldest summer on record —one that these days would cause week-end ice-cream vendors to scream in anguish and swim-suit manufacturers to go broke.

Nonetheless, with the summer tem peratures at a spring-time 73 deg., some of these thick-blooded English types went to great pains to record that it was, in fact, “very hott”. (SYDNEY COVE, 1788. Published by Hodder & Stoughton Ltd. 44/9.)