There were the immediate pleasures of local conviviality. From their first days in the colony gentlemen were deploring the convict passion for rum and the wickednesses they would commit to get it, but not only the lower orders were addicted to alcohol. Surgeon White gives a genial description of the toasts drunk during that first extravagant King’s Birthday. The lower orders had been catered for: the governor had issued every soldier a pint of porter in addition to his usual allowance of rum-and-water grog, and to every convict a half pint of rum ‘that they might all drink his Majesty’s health’. Then the gentlemen settled to their pleasures. After the midday gun salutes the officers attended the governor in his house, and sat down to dinner to the pleasant accompaniment of the band playing ‘God Save the King’ followed by ‘several marches’. Worgan gives us the menu: they ate ‘mutton, pork, ducks, fowls, fish, kanguroo, sallads, pies and preserved fruits’: foods handsomely outside the usual salted or dried rations. Then the cloth was removed, and they had the toasts. White lists them: ‘His Majesty’s health was drank with three cheers. The prince of Wales, the Queen and royal family, the Cumberland family, and his Royal Highness Prince Henry William...his Majesty’s ministers were next given.’ Then, the obligatory public toasts drunk, they began on the private and the particular, with the governor opening the new round with a toast to their own ‘Cumberland County’, the first British-style county in the new world, existing as yet only in the mind, but, as Phillip proudly declared, ‘the largest in the world’. Its name, he said, would be ‘Albion’.
So the toasts continued. Worgan (these surgeons seem to have been devoted drinkers) recorded the officers drank ‘PORT, LISBON, MADEIRA, TENERIFFE and good Old English PORTER’ (his capitals), which ‘went merrily round in bumpers’ through a long afternoon. Then, after joining in the democratic jubilation around a great bonfire, the officers went back to the governor’s house for supper and a night-cap or three. We have to assume that by bedtime most of them were thoroughly drunk. Nonetheless, they were affronted the next morning to discover that during their loyal celebrations some of their tents had been looted: ‘We were astonished at the number of thefts which had been committed during the general festivity, by the villainous part of the convicts, on one another, and on some of the officers, whose servants did not keep a strict lookout after their marquees.’ White harrumphed: ‘Availing themselves thus of the particular circumstances of the day, is a strong instance of their unabated depravity and want of principle.’ A young convict would hang for the crimes he committed in the course of that festive night.
White provides the frankest account we have of officers’ drinking, and some of his own conduct implies a ready tolerance of inebriation. At another celebration in August 1788, the governor’s dinner to honour the birth of the Prince of Wales, White and William Balmain, one of his assistant surgeons, had a difference of opinion, rose from the table, went outside, and, without seconds (so avoiding the risk of bloodless reconciliation) fought a pistol duel. Ralph Clark claimed that each fired several shots at the other, but that the only injury sustained was a slight wound to Balmain’s thigh, which implies either remarkably bad marksmanship or incapacitating drunkenness. As White on a good day was capable of bringing small birds down from trees, we have to diagnose inebriation exacerbated by a warm temperament. By the end of the same year White was ready to settle another dispute with pistols, this time with an adjutant of marines, until friends managed to persuade him he was in the wrong. Phillip would need a cool head to keep such effervescent fellows in amity.
The second King’s Birthday celebrated in Sydney was marked by a play, George Farquhar’s The Recruiting Officer, watched happily by governor and officers, but acted, directed and produced by convicts—which sheds an unexpected light on convict conditions and caste relations in the new colony. Tench:
I am not ashamed to confess that the proper distribution of three or four yards of stained paper, and a dozen farthing candles stuck around the mud walls of a convict hut, failed not to diffuse general complacency on the countenances of sixty persons of various descriptions who were assembled to applaud the representation.
That is: they enjoyed it. There were more mundane pleasures to be taken in tending exotic menageries of pets like parrots or dingos or possums or lizards. The Australians’ alert, handsome dingos especially caught the dog-loving British eye. In flagrant defiance of an ‘all dogs ashore’ order Phillip had given in Portsmouth, a number of officers had brought their dogs with them on the voyage. The dogs contributed unpleasantly to the horrible crowding of shipboard life, already burdened with a Noah’s Ark of ‘useful’, meaning edible, animals, and there are indications that sailors resented cleaning up after them, more than a few fetching up overboard. On Ralph Clark’s Friendship five dogs, including his own, had mysteriously vanished over the side before the voyage was much more than half over. Soon after they landed the dog-deprived British were searching the countryside or bartering with dog-rich Australians for dingo puppies.
What happened next could have served as an early warning of deeper incompatibilities. John Hunter, studying the dingos as carefully as he studied all the creatures of the new continent, discovered them to be fatally flawed. Despite their notable good looks, they had an ineradicable propensity to kill all and any small animals. Some packs could even drag down kangaroos. Hunter writes, regretfully:
Of those [native] dogs we have had many which were taken when young, but never could we cure them of their natural ferocity; although well fed, they would at all times, but particularly in the night, fly at young pigs, chickens, or any small animal which they might be able to conquer and immediately kill and generally eat them. I had one which was a little puppy when caught, but notwithstanding I took much pains to correct and cure it of its savageness, I found it took every opportunity, which it met with, to snap off the head of a fowl, or worry a pig, and would do it in defiance of correction. They are a very good-natured animal when domesticated, but I believe it to be impossible to cure that savageness, which all I have seen seem to possess.
Governor Phillip himself supplied an assessment of this interesting animal, based on his study of a living specimen he had sent as a present to Under-Secretary Nepean:
It is very eager after its prey, and is fond of rabbits or chickens, raw, but will not touch dressed meat. From its fierceness and agility it has greatly the advantage of other animals much superior in size: for a very fine French fox-dog being put to it, in a moment it seized him by the loins, and would have put an end to his existence, had not help been at hand. With the utmost ease it is able to leap over the back of an ass, and was very near worrying one to death, having fastened on it, so that the creature was not able to disengage himself without assistance; it has also been known to run down both deer and sheep.
An impressive animal, but an alarming one. David Collins put the dilemma with his usual pragmatic economy: ‘The