1788

1788
By Watkin Tench
Edited by Tim Flannery
Text Publishing £24/AUS $25.95

In 1787, as Britain’s First Fleet prepared to sail to Australia to establish the first settlement, publishers in London commissioned several senior British naval officers, as well as the appointed governor, to write on the venture. The first to make it into print, however, was Watkin Tench, an idealistic captain-lieutenant, aged about 30. The son of two dancing teachers in Chester, he produced two beautifully observed “interim reports”, A Narrative of the Expedition to Botany Bay and A Complete Account of the Settlement at Port Jackson (now renamed 1788), which became bestsellers in five languages and remain compelling and surprising.

Tench, who was fictionalised in Eleanor Dark’s novel The Timeless Land, Thomas Keneally’s The Playmaker and Timberlake Wertenbaker’s play Our Country’s Good, sailed to Australia in a party of 212 marines and 775 convicts, landing after a 36-week voyage via Brazil at Botany Bay, just south of modern Sydney. Perhaps inevitably he is wary at first. The continent is vast and impenetrable; water is scarce; and the indigenous people, whom he calls “Indians”, strike him as “indolent indifferent savages”, as well as “more numerous” than he was expecting.

Yet Tench is also struck by their gentleness and curiosity, their “loss to know (probably from our want of beards) of what sex we were”, and in time he makes great efforts to communicate, making friends among them. “Man is the same in Pall Mall as in the wilderness of New South Wales,” he wrote. He even learns their language during his three years here.

Indeed it’s thanks to Tench that “dingo”, which “resembles the fox dog of England”, and a host of other words entered the Australian-English language. And it was not only etymology and anthropology that fascinated him. He was an equally keen naturalist, and the book is full of descriptions of animals, birds and flora.

His writing is also vivid in its evocation of the hardship, horror and cruelty of life there. And his view of the future of Australia is ultimately pessimistic, not that he seeks to judge. For his role, he concludes, was to “detail facts” and “connect events by undisturbed narration. I leave to others the task of anticipating glorious, or gloomy, consequences from the establishment of a colony.”