Australia Day special: Arthur Phillip, captain of a nation
This was no invasion scene. The most ambitious social experiment ever began with a display of wrinkled British genitalia.
This was no invasion scene. This was a First Fleet sailor standing on the finest coastline in the world, dropping his pants to show Australia’s first inhabitants he was a man and not a woman or a god. Another brief moment of practical humility and goodwill conceived 230 years ago by the deep-thinking captain standing passively adjacent to the curious display of wrinkled British man junk. Captain Arthur Phillip had safely led 1420 souls aboard a fleet of 11 ships 17,000 nautical miles across deadly seas in the most extraordinary and treacherous flotilla voyage in history.
By January 20, 1788, the ships of Phillip’s mighty First Fleet had been reunited in Botany Bay. The intrepid captain’s concerns had switched immediately from survival at sea to life in Oz. He was thinking about food. He was thinking about shelter. He was thinking about friendship, a notion of a shared humanity so perfectly realised in that moment two meeting races — those sea-spent Poms and the Eora people of coastal Sydney — bonded over the male copulatory organ and all the earthly trouble carried within it.
“At those initial meetings, the first Eora priority appears to have been to establish the strangers’ sex — men dealt with men,” says Grace Karskens, a University of NSW ethnography historian and world authority on early colonial Australia. “The (British) had no beards and they did not appear to have male sex organs. Once he grasped the question, Phillip instructed a sailor to drop his pants at one meeting — in response a great shout went up from the Eora warriors.”
‘When others called for retribution, Phillip called for understanding’
Phillip had come to Australia with a vision for a great nation, a place of peace and prosperity open to all the vast continent’s inhabitants, old and new, he hoped might build a life within its shimmering borders. He was ridiculed by peers for this vision but he held to it. “There shall be no slavery in a free land,” he fiercely declared, almost 40 years before slavery was abolished in Britain.
He believed something wondrous could emerge from the prison colony he was burdened with building by order of King George III — the most ambitious social experiment ever to be conducted and, against all odds, succeed. Arthur Phillip believed he could turn a monumental historical negative — 780 criminals exiled from home constructing “a commonwealth of thieves” — into something close to the grand and evolving positive that is Australia in the year 2018.
This was no invasion scene. This was Phillip in September 1790, in Manly Cove, near-fatally speared in the shoulder while attempting to communicate with a group of indigenous Australians feasting on a dead whale. When others called for retribution, Phillip called for understanding.
Two hundred years later, one of this young nation’s most esteemed legal figures, Geoffrey Robertson QC, described that man as “the first and finest white Australian” who set a “standard of decency and justice for which we should express gratitude”.
An avid Phillip scholar, Robertson has lobbied for decades to have the oft-overlooked captain’s remains — believed to be resting in the grounds of a church in Bath — repatriated to Sydney’s Botanic Gardens, overlooking, says Robertson, “what Phillip was first to describe as the world’s finest harbour”. “As a nation, we probably owe more to him than to any other single person. Quite literally, our founding father.”
“Change the date!” wrote a faceless spray-painter last year across a Hyde Park statue of Captain James Cook, the man who mapped the coast of NSW 18 years before Phillip raised the flag of Great Britain in Sydney Cove on January 26, 1788. Six months before the Hyde Park vandalism, research marketing agency Review Partners conducted a survey asking 1043 Australians to identify the historical event celebrated annually on Australia Day. Only 43 per cent connected the date with the arrival of the First Fleet at Sydney Cove, with one in five saying the day marked Cook’s discovery of Australia’s east coast and a small but puzzling 2 per cent who said the day recognised an important battle in World War I. But maybe fewer still would associate Australia Day with the spirit of growth, unity and possibility that Arthur Phillip possessed that day he stood beneath that raised flag; the moral vision that carried him from Portsmouth to Rio de Janeiro, from the Cape of Good Hope to Botany Bay and on to Sydney Cove; that hope-filled vision that was, alas, eventually broken by the brutal realities of his impossible mission.
Today, The Weekend Australian launches a six-part illustrated newspaper series — a “graphic serial” — that tells the story of Arthur Phillip and the First Fleet’s epic journey to Australia Day. Running over six days and ending on Friday, January 26, “The First Fleet: A Graphic Journal” uses existing First Fleet journal manuscripts — of the 11 known manuscripts in existence, nine are held in the Mitchell and Dixson library collections of the State Library of NSW — to bring this world-changing odyssey to life for a new generation of Australians through the art of Eric Lobbecke and the voices of the men and women who found themselves part of this majestic fleet sailing into history. Some 1420 souls bound by circumstance and fate. Bound for glory and tragedy, hardship and hope. Bound for Botany Bay.
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PART 1: Told through the eyes of Australia’s youngest convict, eight-year-old John Hudson, this is the First Fleet as you’ve never seen it.
PART 2: The fleet sets sail from England, a young child, would-be mutineers and a convict planning escape aboard.
PART 3: Becalmed on stifling oceans, officers record their low opinions of the female convicts and order hellish punishments for four of them.
PART 4: After a hellish, storm-tossed voyage, Arthur Phillip brings his ships into Botany Bay.
PART 5: Confronted by the limitations of Botany Bay, the First Fleet leader rowed north and discovered a body of water beyond his dreams.
PART 6: Arthur Phillip had a brilliantly simple idea for turning the colony from a prison to a community.
