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A second transportation
A view of Sydney on Norfolk Island by John Eyre, c 1805. The first settlement on Norfolk Island was named after its parent town in New South Wales. Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales. Call number V8/Norf I/1
The early colony of Norfolk Island
Just three weeks after European colonists arrived in Port Jackson, New South Wales, a small group of convicts and officials underwent a second transportation – to uninhabited Norfolk Island, more than 1,600 kilometres away, where the endemic flora and fauna soon bore the brunt of this sudden human influx. The following extract is from the new book Australia & the Pacific: A history by Ian Hoskins.
THE PLACE THE TRANSPORTEES INHABITED was very different from the one they left. The soil covering the ancient sandstone of Port Jackson was barren compared to the ‘luxurious’ younger loam on Norfolk. But where Sydney had a huge, safe waterway, the island offered only perilously exposed bays. The former was made over millennia as three waterways cut through the old stone and created a valley which filled with sea water after the last glacial melt. Norfolk Island was the peak of a volcanic mount. There were small coral reefs but the place was either too young or too far south for a protective ring of coral like those surrounding the Tahitian and other Pacific islands.
Norfolk supported a jungle of rainforest and pine, ‘choaked up with underwood’, and thickets of the flax that James Cook described. Islands are ideal incubators for species variation, as Charles Darwin later discovered on the Galapagos group. Consequently, the Norfolk Island pine was different from that which grew on other Pacific islands. The palm Rhopalostylis baueri occurred only there and on one of the Kermadec Islands. The flax plant, Phormium tenax, grew also in New Zealand but not in Australia. Botanists debate over whether or not it is native to Norfolk. It may have been delivered by birds or by the Polynesians who arrived hundreds of years earlier. There was a sub-species of Boobook owl, related to that on New Zealand, and a petrel, possibly a sub-species of Pterodroma solandri. That bird, about the size of a large pigeon, came to nest in burrows on the island’s highest peak – which the colonists named Mount Pitt – each March. The petrels ranged across the entire north Pacific from Japan to the Aleutian Islands, tucking their webbed feet beneath their tails and soaring like Shearwaters just above the sea. They could alight on the waves, ‘pattering’ in a manner that gave them their name, petrel – after St Peter, the apostle who walked on water. Legs suited to ocean landings and take-offs were less useful on land, where the birds were barely able to support their own weight. So, the petrels of Norfolk crash-landed and did their best to crawl to a burrow, lay an egg and nurture their single chick. John Hunter described a mountain so riddled with holes that walking up it was difficult. The petrels’ feeding range was great but they only bred on the safely uninhabited Norfolk and nearby Lord Howe islands. Consequently, they came in the hundreds of thousands to a sanctuary without predators except, perhaps, the Pacific rat.
The balanced cycle which had developed over millennia ended in 1789 when the breeding season coincided with the arrival of the colonists. The sudden presence of so many birds, vulnerable on their land legs and unused to predation, was a boon to settlers who had yet to harvest their first crops. The birds’ misfortune was the colonists’ good luck and the slaughter for food began almost immediately. Such was its rapacity that Ralph Clark, one of the officers, was moved to keep a tally in his daily journal. The numbers kept climbing in the journal’s margin. By mid-July 1790 Clark had counted 172,184 birds killed. The actual figure was undoubtedly much higher as not all kills were reported. Added to this was egg gathering and habitat destruction so that there was no chance of population renewal. The last Norfolk petrel was probably dead by 1800. Just as they can nurture diversity by virtue of their isolation, island environments are quickly destroyed with sudden impacts such as the arrival of predators, both human and non-human. Then they turn from sanctuary to abattoir. The petrel may not have been the island’s first extinction. A ‘ground dove’, which John Hunter painted around 1790, was never recorded again. This may have been the ‘pigeon’ which Hunter noted in 1788 was ‘so tame that we knocked them down with sticks’. On his second visit in 1791 Hunter found that the local cabbage palm had already been ‘almost destroyed’ by clearing, presumably with dire consequences for the parrots that depended upon its fruit. The last of a local species of kaka, related to two others in New Zealand, reportedly died in a cage in London in 1851. The great ornithologist and illustrator John Gould saw one of these parrots, tame and uncaged, hopping about a Sydney house in 1838. He did not draw or paint it so its features are known only through brief descriptions. The colonists called the petrel the ‘Mount Pitt Bird’, after its breeding site, and the ‘Bird of Providence’ for the role it played in sustaining them. Given Norfolk’s important part in alleviating conditions in Sydney, both by lessening the burden and eventually providing food for the mainland, it might be argued that the petrel rescued the larger colony. It was perhaps the first of innumerable and terrible ecological costs paid so that Britain’s Pacific outpost might survive and prosper. The seals of Bass Strait, the Pacific Ocean’s Southern Right and Sperm whales and Fiji’s sandalwood would all follow soon enough. Such was the wholesale destruction of birds and habitat that Major Ross [the Lieutenant-Governor of Norfolk Island] introduced laws to prevent over-harvesting. Ross’s impulse was to both preserve a valuable resource and prevent unnecessary cruelty. Live birds were being eviscerated to extract their single egg, which some Islanders enjoyed more than their flesh, then left to die. Upon discovering this, Ross amended the law to forbid killing birds ‘Cruely and Wantenly’. His sentiment, shared by other officers, reflected the rise in empathy for living things which, in 18th-century Britain, paralleled that for fellow human beings. In the mid-1700s poets and philosophers began challenging the long-held disregard for animal suffering – the ‘cruelty of indifference’ as described in Keith Thomas’s pioneering study. This was one of the lessons of Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s 1798 poem The Rime of the Ancient Mariner in which the pointless slaying of an albatross leads to the becalming of a ship in the Pacific and the subsequent loss of the entire company bar the mariner. That Coleridge had earlier addressed an ass as his ‘brother’ in verse is further evidence of the changing mindset. Laws would follow poetic revelations more gradually in the 19th century. But, as the historian Tim Bonyhady has argued, Ross’s legal moves against indifferent cruelty on Norfolk predated legal measures in England, which itself led Europe in animal welfare. On that small Pacific island, where the environmental impacts of humans were immediately obvious, the connection between ‘man and the natural world’ – again a quote from Thomas – was clear enough to warrant codifying a conservation and humanitarian ethic.
Such was the wholesale destruction of birds and habitat that Major Ross introduced laws to prevent over-harvesting
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01 Cordyline obtecta, commonly known as the Norfolk Island cabbage tree, from Flora of Norfolk Island, 1790s, attributed to John Doody. This plant, native to the island, was almost wiped out by clearing in the first few years of settlement. Dixson Library, State Library of New State Wales. Call number SAFE/ DL PXX 1
02 This painting of the Norfolk Island ground dove by John Hunter is the only known image of the species. From an album of watercolour drawings of Australian natural history, owned by Robert Anderson Seton, c 1800. Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales. Call number SAFE/ PXA 914
Phormium tanax [tenax], from Flora of Norfolk Island, 1790s, attributed to John Doody. Dixson Library, State Library of New State Wales. Call number SAFE/ DL PXX 1
The fate of the Norfolk petrel, however, suggests Ross’s regulation was largely ignored. That in itself is interesting, for this was a penal colony – part of Robert Hughes’s dreadful gulag. One might assume a lieutenant governor’s will was easily enforced by the threat and delivery of punishment. Clearly there were many transgressions; convicts were hunting birds and collecting eggs to easily fill an empty stomach or simply because they preferred the taste of the tender fishflavoured flesh and yolk to other meals on offer. The comparison with the bleak reality of salt pork rations in Port Jackson could not be starker. Ross’s island regime was noteworthy for other reasons. He represented, in the words of Alan Atkinson, ‘the other way for European Australia, the alternative to Phillip’s way’. At Port Jackson the governor had instituted a strict, though not arbitrary or simply sadistic, hierarchy. He was a benign despot who took seriously the instructions that stipulated everything produced by convict labour was to be considered public property. Phillip was sparing in his allocation of land. He did not make the first grants until February 1792, just months before he left. Confronted immediately by an unsuitable site at Botany Bay, and an ongoing food crisis at Port Jackson, Phillip’s priority was survival. The governor did not act beyond the authority granted him but Ralph Clark, the man who later tallied the bird kill on Norfolk, was surprised when the commission was read out before everyone at Sydney Cove: ‘I never herd of any one Single Person having So great a Power in Vested in him as the Governor …’ That private remark is a glimpse into the popular understanding of power and authority and the willingness to question it. It was a faint echo perhaps of the debates that had led to the American colonists parting company with the ‘tyrannical’ King George, who they felt had trampled their established rights and freedoms 14 years earlier. Robert Ross governed differently. Though often portrayed as a difficult man, Clark described him warmly and in terms of a friend. Ross certainly accommodated the frailties of his junior officer, both before and during their shared experience on Norfolk Island. In his close reading of the colonial power plays, Atkinson has called Ross a ‘talker’ rather than an administrator, someone who sought personal confidence and returned good will and obedience with trust. But his was a personal exercise of power so that perceptions of betrayal were also taken badly. The different approach to governing was displayed as soon as the company of colonists landed on Norfolk, after HMS Sirius had been wrecked delivering them to the rocky wave-swept coast there. Amidst this catastrophe Ross declared martial law. Knowing this exceeded his powers, he sought the compliance of both free people and convicts with ‘voluntary oaths’ of obedience beneath the king’s colours. As Atkinson has noted, it was the only time that an ‘entire community’ in Australia would take part in ‘a fundamental act of government’ before the passage of universal suffrage in the colony of South Australia more than a century later. The paradox of martial law introduced by consensus has perhaps served to disguise the novelty of the action. Ross followed this by allocating land to groups of convicts to farm as if it were their own. The intent was to instil a sense that all had a stake in the success of the venture – to ‘cultivate’, in his own words, ‘a desire of settling for life’. The echoes here of Robinson Crusoe and his successor on that fictional Pacific island are clear.
The experiment came to an end in November 1791 when Ross was relieved of his command by the man he had replaced, Philip Gidley King – returned to Norfolk as lieutenant governor, having spent three months in England. A ‘prot.g.’ [protegée] of Phillip, King was an administrator of lists and central control. In Atkinson’s words, he had ‘aimed to prune’ the ‘spirit of commonwealth’ seeded by Ross. On Norfolk he closed a newly opened theatre because of an incident of violence. He reduced the membership of the Settlers and Landholders Society, which the Islanders themselves had established in 1793 with a view to regulating prices and providing mutual benefit. King found the levelling spirit of the age ‘insidious’. Yet faced with a population that was growing naturally and through migration from the mainland, the lieutenant governor also encouraged individual self-reliance by allocating land to convicts to work in their own time. They built schools, and by 1796, 75 children were in attendance. The younger ones knew only the island as their home.
Dr Ian Hoskins has worked as an academic, public historian and museum curator in Sydney for 25 years. Since 2003 he has been the North Sydney Council Historian.
For reasons of space, footnotes have been omitted from this extract. The images used here do not feature in the book. A review of this book appears on pages 85–87.
