Some time during 1790, with life in the colony harsh and getting harsher, White found solace with a young convict woman, Rachel Turner, first his housekeeper, later his mistress. Rachel bore him a son in September 1793. He was proud of his boy, and when he returned to England on the Daedalus in December 1794 he took his fifteen-month-old child with him, and found him a loving carer in the sister of his old friend Lieutenant Henry Waterhouse, which indicates how close-knit the friendships wrought in the course of colonial tours of duty were. Meanwhile White’s convict mistress, presumably aided by his good offices, had landed on her feet: in 1797 she was granted a special dispensation from the governor succeeding Phillip to marry a free settler, and together they went on to become one of the most prosperous couples in the colony. White himself did not marry until 1799, and then he brought his natural son into his growing household. Andrew Douglas White continued a source of pride to his father, joining the Royal Engineers and fighting at Waterloo. Then early in 1823, a year after his father’s death, the young man travelled back to Sydney to be reunited with his mother, now a respectable colonial matron. Clearly the meeting was a success: Andrew Douglas later willed his mother his cherished Waterloo medal.
White’s enthusiasm for the fauna of the new continent was evident from first contact, but how did this brusque, warm-tempered man respond to its human inhabitants? He was, as we might expect, charmed by the women. Out on an expedition with the governor late in August 1788, the British fell in with a large party of Australians at Manly Cove, and the women, who seemed to stand ‘in very great dread’ of their menfolk, were coaxed into accepting gifts: ‘Every gentleman,’ White tells us, ‘singled out a female and presented her with some trinkets...’ Commenting appreciatively that ‘many of the women were strait, well-formed, and lively’, White decked his chosen girl with strips of cloth torn from his pocket and neck handkerchiefs. Then, ‘having nothing left except the buttons of my coat, on her admiring them, I cut them away, and with a piece of string tied them round her waist’. Chivalrous indeed, with the weather chill and not the least prospect of any more buttons. ‘Thus ornamented,’ White continues happily, ‘and thus delighted with her new acquirements, she turned from me with a look of inexpressible archness.’ He was more than content with the exchange.
For all his stay, White would display a good eye for details of Australian behaviour and an easy tolerance in matters of race. In the autumn of 1789, when the Australians were ravaged by a smallpox epidemic, White did his best to save some of the afflicted, and took a survivor, a six-year-old boy called Nanbaree, into his household. He was content to keep Nanbaree on a very light rein, leaving him free to visit his kin at will, to sustain his duties to them and to fulfil his ritual obligations as required. Throughout his life, Nanbaree was to move between the two worlds with more confidence and at less personal cost than any of his Australian contemporaries.
From his first days in the colony White deeply enjoyed tramping through the bush taking pot-shots at novel animals and birds. He made what he insisted was an ‘excellent soup’ out of a white cockatoo and a couple of crows, and he was delighted to discover that the ‘New Holland Cassowary’, the bird we call the emu, tasted ‘not unlike tender young beef’. He had begun collecting specimens on behalf of a friend, but the favour flowered into a passion, and he quickly became a dedicated naturalist himself. His journal covered only the first ten months of his time at Sydney, with the first edition being published in 1791, only a year after Tench’s engaging narrative and the weightier compilation from Phillip’s dispatches titled The Voyage of Governor Phillip to Botany Bay. The White volume was angled towards a particular market: the growing band of amateur natural scientists. Its title declared its ambition: Journal of a Voyage to New South Wales with Sixty-five Plates of Non Descript Animals, Birds, Lizards, Serpents, curious Cones of trees and other natural Productions by John White Esq., Surgeon General to the Settlement. Those sixty-five plates must have taken some organisation. Despite his powers of exact observation (for evidence see any one of his bird descriptions), White lacked the coordination of hand and eye of a draughtsman, and had to corral any available talent to secure his illustrations.
However—there is a strange absence from White’s accounts of the local birds, and from the accounts of his fellow diarists too. None of them describes the extraordinary noises made by so many Australian birds: no reference to the souls-in-torment shrieking of the sulphur-crested cockatoo or the kookaburra’s mad Mrs Rochester laugh; no reference to the vocal pyrotechnics of the rufous whistler—although Tench does allow that ‘in the woods are various little songsters, whose notes are equally sweet and plaintive’. Most insulting of all, while Collins gives a careful description of the feathers of the lyrebird, which he thought a type of bird-of-paradise, he fails to mention its golden voice. Did no one bother to listen? (It is evening and roosting time now, and the racket outside is tremendous.) Did sounds not interest classifying scientists? Or is it that we only ‘hear’ the birdsongs of our youth?
JUDGE-ADVOCATE DAVID COLLINS
David Collins, also thirty years old in 1788, accepted the post of judge-advocate in the new colony when his useful but undistinguished career in the Marine Corps was interrupted by the ending of the American war. Within months he also became Phillip’s secretary and, in time, his friend, although never, I think, his confidant. Phillip was by nature and policy a secretive man.
Collins had minimal legal experience, but he was a man of steady intelligence and conventional mind, and discharged his judicial duties to the satisfaction of his more reasonable colleagues. Such duties in a convict colony must have been onerous enough, but Collins was a prodigious worker, choosing to take his position as secretary to mean he should keep a quasi-official chronicle of events suitable for later publication. As early as July 1788 George Worgan knew Collins was preparing such a narrative, and in a letter to his brother declared he stood ready to recommend it ‘in preference to any other, because from his Genius I am certain it will be the most Entertaining, Animating, Correct and satisfactory of any that may appear’.
Worgan was of a sardonic turn of mind, especially when writing to his brother, so there may be a joke here. From what Collins has left on the page it is difficult to imagine him ‘entertaining’ or ‘animating’. His aim, it seems, was to be Master of Plod. But he was as ‘correct’ as human frailty allows, and profoundly ‘satisfactory’ in a range of ways: for example, without him we would never know the favourite petty derelictions of convicts, and so could not know which deprivations chafed them most. Professionally close-mouthed regarding trouble between officers, his occasional rumbles against the obnoxious Major Ross are the more revealing. And we could not know the enigmatic Phillip half so well if we did not have this big, solid fellow always at his heels, providing his own commentary on Phillip’s sometimes ambiguous actions.
During the colony’s infant years, Collins found the climate, land and problems of supply so intractable that he had little faith in its survival. Nonetheless he enumerated every new building, whether prison, provisions shed, windmill or granary, and soberly redrew the map of material progress at the end of each month. His favourite metaphors for growth came from agriculture. It was a vegetable growth he looked for, with steady expansion and increasingly rich fruits the sure reward of postponed gratification and systematic labour. I think this was one reason why he found convicts so repellent. Content merely to scratch the soil so that precious seeds withered, seeming to lack any sense of communal responsibility, they were also incurably improvident, gobbling their weekly rations and then living from day to day by thieving from their fellows.
Paradoxically, he was at least as offended by evidence of convict solidarity: ‘There was such a tenderness in these people to each other’s guilt, such an acquaintance with vice and the different degrees of it, that unless they were detected in the fact, it was generally next to impossible to bring an offence home to them.’ Six months of close contact was enough to persuade him that, a very few individuals excepted, convicts were a race apart and crime the convict soul made visible: irremediably feckless, with no inner discipline and no recognition of consequences.