His most scathing condemnations were reserved for Irish convicts, and for all convict women. But despite his animus, and despite his warmly conjugal communications with his wife Maria, Collins himself soon took a young convict girl as his mistress. At seventeen Ann Yates was sentenced to hang for stealing a bolt of printed cotton. Reprieved to transportation, she bore a child to a seaman called Theakston during the voyage out on the Lady Penrhyn. The boy was later baptised by the Reverend Johnson and given his father’s name, but Theakston sailed for China and out of Ann’s life early in May 1788. In November 1791, she bore Collins his first child, a daughter, and in June 1793 his only son, and she remained his lover for the rest of his years in the colony. They never cohabited. Yates, who in time received her freedom, continued to live in the convicts’ quarters with her children, while Collins preferred to live in the governor’s house, close by his friend and his work. Such liaisons were common—most officers had some enduring connection with convict women—but I still wonder what Collins found to say as he glided out of the governor’s house of an evening.
Collins neglected neither Ann nor his children by her. He bequeathed her a holding of 100 acres of land on the Hawkesbury when he left the colony late in 1796 to return to the embraces of his loyal wife Maria, who had assuaged her loneliness during his long absence by writing romantic novels. Ann and the two children happened to travel back to England on the same ship, probably disembarking at Liverpool on their way to Ann’s native Yorkshire. The little family of three returned to Australia in July 1799, and the children were later reunited with their father during his governorship of Tasmania.
Collins already was, or was to become, a susceptible man. Travelling to Australia in 1803, again without Maria, to establish a colony first and abortively at Port Phillip, then successfully at Hobart, he met the pretty young wife of a convict on the voyage out and became enamoured of her. The relationship scandalised Hobart Town throughout Collins’ governorship, especially given the cuckolded husband’s affable compliance, the privileges Collins granted the pair, and the trio’s relaxed conduct in public.
Collins is especially important to us because without his dutiful recording it would be difficult to trace the interactions between Australians and British in the years after the Australians decided to ‘come in’ to Sydney Town. As his passion for agricultural metaphors suggests, he was a perfect representative of the moral and material economy of European culture. It was these assumptions he brought to his analysis of the convict condition, and which he initially brought to the encounter with the very different culture and economy of the nomad people of Australia.
He began by seeing them as nuisances, as, for example, in the matter of fishing. At first, he said, they had been happy to help draw the great nets of the British, and to wait quietly for a share of the catch. (They must have been both impressed and appalled by the efficiency of British net-hauling in contrast to their hook-and-line or spearing techniques.) Then, with winter coming on and fish scarcer, a British party had been drawing in a big haul when warriors swept down and ‘took by force about half of what had been brought on shore’, while spearmen stood with spears poised for throwing. We might think that leaving half the catch to predatory uninvited guests was generous, but while Collins allowed that the natives were hungry, he saw the action as both irrational and wantonly hostile. He was as yet no readier to grant intelligent motivations to savages than he was to convicts.
His initial philosophical response to the nature of Australian existence was nonetheless surprisingly perceptive. From the beginning Collins exempted the Australians from the commitment to progress and accumulation he required of civilised men. He recognised that their way of life was timeless, reiterative rather than progressive, and his expressed hope was that even after the arrival of the British they could be left in their timeless universe ‘under a dispensation to keep them happy in their liberties’. However, precisely because their ways of thinking and being were incompatible with those of the British, they would have to continue their timeless existence elsewhere, beyond the expanding British colony (remember that in his understanding the rest of the land was ‘empty’). These people were certainly fully human, but they were also sui generis, and therefore unassimilable.
Collins was accordingly contemptuous of Phillip’s efforts to incorporate the Australians into British society over those first years, dismissing his tireless negotiations as time and energy wasted on ‘amusing ourselves with these children of ignorance’, as he grumpily put it. Better, he thought, to drive them away, and keep them away, by the judicious use of muskets. He continued to believe that separation would have been the best policy for both peoples. But as the slow years pass we watch David Collins ripen into an absorbed observer of native conduct, and a man capable of recognising, indeed of honouring, a quite different way of being.
WATKIN TENCH,
CAPTAIN-LIEUTENANT OF MARINES
Watkin Tench of the Royal Marines, unmarried but already a veteran of the American wars, was about thirty when he landed at Port Jackson. His reports from the new colony immediately outsold his loftier competitors’, and continue to outsell them today. He is one of the handful of writers who are an unshadowed pleasure to meet on the page. Through that familiar miracle of literacy where pothooks transform into personality, it is not so much his information as his presence which delights us. His parents are said to have run a dancing academy, and it tempting to think that their son’s grace on the page has something to do with a melodious, light-footed upbringing. He has the kind of charm which reaches easily across centuries. If he lacks Montaigne’s intellectual sophistication and unwavering moral clarity, he shares with him the even rarer quality of sunny self-irony.
Almost all we know of the man is here, in the two and a half hundred pages of his two books, and yet we think we know him. George Worgan dismissed him as a lightweight incapable of producing anything beyond ‘fireside chit-chat’, but it is precisely Tench’s cosy informality, together with his eye for the apparently redundant detail, which charms as it informs.
The best reason for reading Watkin Tench is that he reminds us of two important things surprisingly easy to forget: that the past was real, and that this likeable man whose words are on the page before us was actually there. In his writings Tench lives again, as he makes the people he sees around him live, especially the men and women rendered near-invisible or unintelligible in too many other accounts: the indigenous inhabitants of the Sydney region.
The great anthropologist W. E. H. Stanner, reflecting on the long alienation between European and Aboriginal Australians, believed that the grossly unequal relationship that developed in the earliest days of the colony—he says within the first five years—continued to inflict injustice and injury on generations of Aboriginal Australians to his own day. He believed that those serial injustices found their root in the British failure to comprehend, much less to tolerate, legitimate difference: an intolerance which then sustained itself in the face of a long history of practical intimacy; of long-term work and sexual relationships, even childhoods spent in one another’s company. He believed crippling incomprehension continues to rule because ‘a different tradition leaves us tongueless and earless towards this other [Aboriginal] world of meaning and significance’.
As we will see, there is much truth in that. But if Watkin Tench was initially rendered ‘tongueless and earless’ by the strangeness of the people he fell among he was never eyeless, even at the beginning, and with experience and reflection he came to hear a little of what was being said, and to tell us about it. That little is precious.
In new colonies race relations are shaped quickly, usually during the first few years of contact, and not by rational decision but by hugger-mugger accidents, casual misreadings, and unthinking responses to the abrasions inevitable during close encounters of the cultural kind. Tench was in the colony for only four years. By the time he left, in December 1791, and despite the good will of leaders on both sides, rapprochement was a fading dream, but Tench’s eager gaze and pleasure in the unfamiliar holds out the hope that, by reading him and his