Bolters, part 2 of many

Following a “native road” to freedom.

The convict system was expected to reform criminals, but reformation was to be achieved by a combination of faint promises of kindness and large amounts of cruelty. Sadly, the vague promises rarely won the convicts over, and the cruelty just made them more obstinate, or more willing to die, taking their chances on the run, generally as bushrangers.

Looking at the evidence, it is no surprise that so many convicts found the going too hard and “ran”, or as the locals called it, they bolted gaining the name “bolters”. Having bolted, the escapees had three options. They could steal a boat and try to leave Australia; they could try to get away on a ship; or they could take to the bush and survive as best they could.

Stealing a boat was fine in theory, but it had to be large enough to survive storms on a long voyage. The escapees needed a navigator, instruments and maps, tools, food and water, and lots of luck. One group escaped to Timor by boat, but for most convicts, it was too risky, and probably impossible.

Getting onto a ship was not the best of choices either, because ships were searched before they left port, as The Sydney Gazette and New South Wales Advertiser reported in 1807:

[Thomas] Shirley and another prisoner found on board the Star when about to sail, were brought before the Bench with four others taken from on board the Lucy the morning of her departure, and severally charged with having attempted to escape the colony; and the charge being fully substantiated, they were ordered 200 lashes.

So taking to the bush was an attractive choice. Most convicts were willing to explore all the options, but among those, going bush meant they could limp back to a settlement again and take their punishment if they could not make a go of it. Besides, going bush offered a bolter the option of getting onto a ship later, when all the fuss had died down. They became, in one sense or another, bushrangers.

Until about the 1860s, criminal bushrangers were usually convicts or ex-convicts. Australia was founded as a convict settlement, and somehow we imagine early Sydney as a sort of giant gaol, but the convicts in the First Fleet outnumbered their guards by a ratio of about 3 to 1. There were no cells to hold the convicts, and from the start, the colony functioned as an open gaol where convicts fended largely for themselves, and were expected to behave themselves but they were free to run away.

That said, there was nowhere to hide, except in the first days of the new colony, when nobody knew how to find their way around in the bush. Things changed when the new arrivals realised that there were tracks through the bush, and that brings us to the very first bushrangers, a term with a different meaning in the first 17 years of the colony.

First, we need some background: Botany Bay was selected because Sir Joseph Banks, an influential figure, said it had nice green meadows, which were probably distant swamps.

When the faster ships of the First Fleet reached Australia in January 1788, they anchored in Botany Bay, waiting for the other vessels to arrive. Within a day or two, some of the officers had gone ashore and examined the ground near Botany Bay. They found only sandy soil and no water supply large enough for a settlement with 1200 people in it — especially as the settlement was likely to grow in the years to come. Clearly, Botany Bay was no place to start a colony.

A boat was sent to explore a harbour just up the coast to the north. James Cook had passed the entrance to this port in 1770, without looking in, but he gave it the name Port Jackson, though today, we call it Sydney Harbour. This was a far better place for a settlement, and orders were given to move just a few miles north.

Then just as the fleet was preparing to set off for Sydney Cove, two other ships appeared out to sea. Quite a few modern Australians know that these were commanded by Jean François de Galaup, comte de Lapérouse, whose name lives on in the suburb of Laperouse on the northern side of Botany Bay. Most of them are adamant that if Lapérouse had arrived a few days earlier, we would all wear berets, speak French and eat croissants.

Nothing could be further from the truth, and the evidence is there in the records. Lieutenant Philip Gidley King, who would later be the governor of the colony, knew all about the French and Lapérouse, even before seeing the ships. He wrote in his journal that the ships flew the French flag and that one of them “… wore a chef d’escadre’s [commodore’s] pennant.” From this, he said, they realised that the ships must be La Boussole and L’Astrolabe, “… under ye orders of Monsieur de La Perouse, on discoveries.”

In other words, the English naval officers knew in advance that they might see Lapérouse’s ships at Botany Bay, and they had instructions to greet the French in a friendly way. Time was pressing though, so the First Fleet sailed for Sydney Harbour, leaving the French in Botany Bay to repair their ships and their boats, and to get fresh water and maybe some fresh meat.

There was some formal contact with the French over the next few weeks. Then Lapérouse and his ships disappeared after leaving Botany Bay, but before he sailed away, he left letters and reports to be forwarded home to France. The first British-French contact, though, was far less official than the meeting to give those papers to Governor Arthur Phillip.

The first fleet began landing its human cargo in Sydney on 26 January, 1788, and on 1 February, Lt. King and Lt. William Dawes, a marine officer, set off in a cutter, sailing north to the Heads before turning south to Botany Bay. There was a southerly wind blowing, which helped the crew at first, but they had to row all the way down the coast, once they left the harbour.

They arrived in Botany Bay at 10 am, had a friendly visit, during which Lapérouse told them of an earlier unofficial visit, made by our very first rangers of the bush: a number of convicts had already walked overland from Sydney Cove, following “the road to Botany Bay”, the clear bush tracks of the original inhabitants of Australia. The convicts had begged to be taken aboard, but the French commander had sent them off with threats, though he kindly gave them some food so they could get safely back to Sydney Cove.

Very early on, Ann Smith and a Frenchman called Peter Paris (or Parris) went missing. Surgeon John White thought a Frenchman might have found favour with Lapérouse, but he added that “… the French commodore had given his honour that he would not admit any of them on board … he [Parris] might have been concealed, through pity, by his countrymen, and carried off without the knowledge of the commanding officer”. [1]

Though these people stole nothing, the people who visited the French were bushrangers. Until about 1805, when people in Sydney spoke of bushrangers, they generally used the word differently from the way we do now. To the early colonists, bushrangers were just men who ranged the bush, finding their way through the scrub and home again, a matter that wasn’t too hard in a country that was populated and occupied by people whose feet had left easy tracks to follow.

Later white explorers often used much the same method as these first bushrangers, travelling along “native roads”, the tracks worn through the bush by generations of Indigenous feet. Meanwhile, back at Botany Bay, Lapérouse and his officers decided that what the convict visitors had done in one direction, Frenchmen could do in the other. Three of Lapérouse’s men walked over the same tracks and popped, unannounced, out of the bush at Sydney Cove.

This day 3 of the Frenchmen from the ships w’h lie in Botany Bay came here overland w’h fowling-pieces, under the pretence of shooting, but I rather think they came to take a view of the matters going on here. They have already erected a fort w’h 2 or 3 guns on shore at B. Bay. The Governor has forbid any one going over to Botany Bay. Two horses were sent over to conduct the French commodore and suit [sic] here.
— Arthur Bowes, Journal, HRNSW (2), 394.

Score one to bushrangers as way-finders — or maybe allow them to score two points, because the French had also ranged the bush! Faced with the inevitable, Phillip sent a horse over to Botany Bay, so Lapérouse could ride over in style and visit the new colony.

The old sense of ‘bushranger’ lived on. In November 1805, Governor King (as the former Lieutenant King now was) wrote to Sir Joseph Banks, describing the people he had sent out to find a way over the Blue Mountains. The men came back, complaining of rocky ground, heath and bogs, before they got tired and went back to the Hawkesbury. King told Banks:

The whole of their story is so contradictory that I should not have inserted these particulars but to prove what little confidence can be put in this class of what is locally termed bushrangers.

So in early 1805, bushrangers did not have to be thieves, robbers and runaways, but the tide was changing, and before the year’s end, the sense of “thieving scoundrel, roaming the bush” had largely replaced the earlier meaning. The old sense must have lingered alongside the new, given an 1807 Sydney Gazette and New South Wales Advertiser report, where the “bush ranger” John Campbell appears to have been living in the bush as a labourer, rather than as a robber:

Yesterday a Bench of Magistrates assembled, before whom appeared several settlers at and about the Northern Boundary, charged with having employed John Campbell, a bush ranger, in contempt of established local Regulations to the following effect, viz. “No person is to be employed unless he produce his certificate, if a freeman, or his ticket of leave if a prisoner: penalty to be levied on the employer 5£, and 2s. 6d. for each day the man has been employed.”

Yet, looking back, the man who was very definitely the first bushranger in the criminal sense, had already been dead and buried for more than 11 years.

Black Caesar is up next.

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[1] John White, Journal of a Voyage to NSW, February 8, 1788, available as http://setis.library.usyd.edu.au/ozlit/pdf/p00092.pdf, p 72.