Destined to breathe free

Australia has been changing lives since 1788.

Joseph Lycett’s North View of Sidney, New South Wales (1824).

Each year on April 25, Australians celebrate the forging of the national identity in the cauldron of a distant war. Anzac Day never fails to strike an emotional chord.

On Australia Day, by contrast, we don’t really know what to feel. Ambivalence about our past as an open-air penitentiary began almost the moment convicts ceased being convicts and became emancipists; and shame over the act of indigenous dispossession that made settlement possible seems to deepen with each passing year.

These sources of disquiet should not be allowed to obscure the profound significance of the events of January 26, 1788. The settlement of Port Jackson was a social experiment without precedent, and its improbable success has much to say about human potential and the unfinished business of social pro­gress. Charles Darwin, who in 1836 stopped at Sydney on his voyage around the world in the Beagle, saw into the heart of the Australian story with an eye already attuned to species adaptation and evolution. He observed: “On the whole, as a place of punishment, the object is scarcely gained, but as a means of making men outwardly honest — of converting vagabonds, most useless in one hemisphere, into active citizens in another, and thus giving birth to a new and splendid country — a grand Centre of Civilisa­tion — it has succeeded to a degree perhaps unparalleled in history.”

Already the sons and daughters of felons in exile felt strangely blessed. Their parents had suffered the pains of separation from friends, family and home. But that was in the past. A sense of exceptionalism stirred among the native-born currency lads and lasses, a belief that here on the fringes of empire a humble person could become what they desired to be. Young men were described as tall, loose-limbed and fair, with “small features”. They made “clever and daring” sailors, were proud of their horsemanship, and willing and quick to learn a trade.

They were the children of the English working class or the issue of political prisoners from Eng­land, Ireland and Scotland. They breathed a freer, certainly a cleaner, air on the shores of Sydney Cove, despite the stench from the busy kilns of the brickworks.

The motif of the early Australian story was elevation: transportation was the machinery for transformation. This was a unique­ly constituted society dedicated to the material and moral progress of its citizens.

The process of elevation began while convicts were seeing out their terms, for in the early years of the colony the convicted felon was able, after the hours of assigned work, to earn money or goods in kind from their surplus labour. After three in the afternoon and on weekends convicts would build fences, dig ditches or apply their trade skills. Quite a bit of the money earned from these endeavours would have been spent at the taverns, but some would have been saved for the day of their emancipation. On that day the emancipated convict received a land grant and assistance from the government stores.

A few hundred convicts a year were freed before their term expired, while those with particular skills were given tickets of leave — liberated, in effect — the moment they stepped ashore. Within the first two decades of the colony’s founding the colonial office in London began to express concerns about the need to reinforce the “terror” of transportation. It had become something of a skilled mig­ration program.

The theme of elevation is echoed in an 1812 message from the better-off citizens published in The Sydney Gazette: “We are rising from the rude and unconnected state consequent and inseparable from the first efforts of colonisation.” Their fortunes were rising and so was the town.

Darwin’s talk of a grand civilisation emerging at Port Jackson was not all gushy traveller’s hyperbole. The settlement that began as a ramshackle tent village in 1788 was described as “that great America on the other side of the sphere” by Herman Melville in Moby-Dick (1851). French traveller ­Jacques Arago, on entering the Heads in 1819, wondered if ­Eu­rope hadn’t dispatched its finest architects to the Antipodes. There was really only one of any distinction, Francis Greenway, a con­victed forger.

Arago wrote to a friend at home: “Magnificent hotels, majestic mansions, houses of extraordinary taste and elegance, fountains ornamented with sculptures worthy of the chisel of our best artists, spacious and airy apartments, rich furniture, horses, carriages, and one-horse chaises of the greatest elegance, immense storehouses — would you expect to find all these, four thousand leagues from Europe? I fancied myself transported into one of our handsomest cities.”

Peter Cunningham, a surgeon-superintendent of convict ships, published an account titled Two Years in New South Wales. Written in 1822, it vividly describes a flourishing town: “Down the hollow between these ridges (supporting The Rocks on one side and Government House on the other) a small rill trickles slowly into the head of the Cove … Along this hollow, for upwards of a mile, in a westerly direction, extends our main thoroughfare (George Street), which all the other streets either run parallel to or intersect at right angles — the town thus occupying the whole of the hollow, and creeping up the gradual ascents on each side. The ridge on the left is successively crowned by the lofty-looking buildings of the horse-barracks, the colonial hospital, the convict barracks, and a fine Gothic Catholic chapel; beyond which lies the promenade of Hyde Park, flanked toward the town by a row of pretty cottages, and toward the country by a high brick-walled garden appertaining to the ­government.”

Cunningham’s account, described as “comprising sketches of the actual state of society in that colony; of its peculiar advantage to emigrants”, bears the imprint of a man bent on promoting it. But he was not blind to what readers in Britain would regard as its unsavoury features: the work gangs, dogs tethered in gardens to ward off “rogues”, and the lack of “agreeable amusements … to relieve the dull monotony of a town like Sydney”. His descriptions have a direct visual partner in convict artist Joseph Lycett’s North View of Sydney.

In his view from the north shore the town rises above a screen of native trees and shrubs that never occlude the scene. It is an image of tranquil beauty: at once urban, pastoral and maritime. Four ships lie at anchor in the harbour, three fly the Union Jack. The town basks beneath a covering of scattered clouds, gilded by a morning sun. Five windmills, the Church of St James spire, Hyde Park Barracks, the military hospital and the observatory command the heights. The cramped Rocks quarter appears to have been airbrushed from the scene; in its place is a line of orderly cottages bordered on either side by pasture.

The most striking feature of the scene is the cluster of Fort Macquarie at Bennelong Point; almost directly behind it the castellated mass of the government stables; and next to it Government House in a more aesthetically coherent state than it ever was in reality.

Any number of caveats can be added to these somewhat idealised verbal and visual accounts. Recidivism was a big enough problem to require places of secondary correction, such as Newcastle. The colony was rent by divisions between the free settlers, the emancipists, the soldiery and an indigenous population decimated by disease and dispossessed of their hunting lands.

Yet Darwin’s essential insight is bolstered by so many other observations of the colony’s early growth that it serves as a uniquely astute comment on the larger moral significance of Australia’s founding. For if society’s most desperate citizens can be reformed by a new beginning in a new world, their former debasement can be explained, in part, by the desperate circumstances from which, to their great good fortune, they had been removed. Darwin’s remarks suggest nurture, not nature, is the governing force in character formation.

The experience of the first three decades of Australian settlement feeds, in this way, the abiding questions — the big questions — of moral and political philosophy. It can be phrased in biological terms appropriate to a land of abundant natural wonders: take a poor seed, plant it in fresh soil and see how it grows.

The rising of the early colony — of the emancipist class and its offspring the currency — recalls the Child of Nature in Voltaire’s short tale L’Ingenu, who “was like one of those hardy trees which begin life in unpromising soil and throw out their roots and branches as soon as they are transplanted into a more favourable locality”. And so it was that one society’s desperate and downtrodden underclass became, as Darwin put it, another’s “active citizens”, and a new kind of civilisation was born from men and women who had narrowly escaped the gibbet.

The early Australian experience was well documented by Watkin Tench, William Collins, the regular official correspondence collected in the Historical Records of Australia, and The Sydney Gazette. But there were few visitors with a speculative cast of mind able to think through the story’s larger significance.

The wonderfully named French explorer Hyacinthe de Bougainville, son of Louis-Antoine, visited Port Jackson in 1825 as commander of an expedition to Macau, Manila and NSW. He felt certain, he reflected in his journals, that no other country was more “worthy of arresting the attention of the observer and becoming the object of the naturalist and the philosopher’s investigations”.

But it took the young Darwin, more than a decade later, to distil the moral grandeur of the early Australian story into a succinct point about the human capacity for betterment.

Almost two centuries after Darwin passed through Sydney there remains no parallel in human history for the early Australian story of mass human transformation — of elevation — from such lowly beginnings. And this makes Australia Day no mere celebration of nationalism but a story of universal moral value.

Luke Slattery is the author of Mrs M, a novel based on the lives of NSW governor Lachlan Macquarie and his wife, Elizabeth.