Convicts and very bad Geography
Nobody really tries very hard to get into the minds of the convicts who arrived in Australia in the eighteenth century. It fascinates me. Did they have any idea where they were going? Given that most of them would have had little or no education did they have any sense of Geography? What was life like? It must have been like being sent to the Moon or Mars. Strange animals? Strange trees and vegetation?
This occurred to me when I was writing up the towns in the Southern Highlands south-west of Sydney. One of the first European explorers of the area was John Wilson.
Now Wilson was a real piece of work. He deserves to loom large in Australian history but he has been forgotten. He was convicted in October 1785, at Wigan, Lancashire, England, of having stolen 'nine yards of cotton cloth called velveret, of the value of tenpence', and sentenced to transportation for seven years. Yes. You read that correctly. He stole cloth worth ten pence. Ten pence! And he was sentenced to seven years. And the English believe their legal system is wonderful!
He reached Port Jackson with the First Fleet in January 1788. Soon after his term expired Wilson, who had formerly been a mariner, took to the bush and lived with the local First Nation people, possibly at intervals, for several years. He may have been, as David Collins said, 'a wild, idle young man who preferred living among the natives to earning the wages of honest industry'; but in so doing he lived 'the hard way', and in his wanderings he acquired an extensive knowledge of much of the country within 100 miles of Sydney.
He established good relations with the locals, to whom he was 'Bun-bo-e', and “so definitely did he become a member of a particular band that his body, clad only in a kangaroo skin, was heavily scarred by tribal markings.”
Wilson’s moment of fame came in January 1798. Some of the Irish convicts in Sydney Town had developed a rather fanciful and foolish notion (but always remember they were no experts at Geography) that a 'New World' of white people lived about 200 miles south-west of Sydney.
They were determined to head off into the bush, walk the 200 miles, escape from the hardships of convict life and live happily ever after in this ‘New World’ settlement. Australia’s first would-be hippies! And similarly deluded.
Governor John Hunter, in order to 'save worthless lives', sent off four of these wide-eyed Irish dreamers with John Wilson as guide to see what could be found. He was confident they would find nothing and that the foolish idea of a ‘New World’ would be knocked on the head.
The Irishmen soon grew tired of the enterprise and returned to Port Jackson, but Wilson and two companions pushed on into unknown country. One of Wilson's two colleagues was John Price, aged 19, who had come to Australia as Hunter's servant.
Price kept a journal of the expedition, and this record, given by Hunter to Sir Joseph Banks and later acquired by the Mitchell Library in Sydney, indicates that the three explorers reached the Wingecarribee River, more than 100 miles south-west of Parramatta, endured severe privations and were saved only by Wilson's bushcraft.
The diary contains the first record of the shooting of a lyrebird, taken by Price on 26 January 1798, and the first written reference, on the same day, to the existence of the 'cullawine' (koala).
Why do we not remember and celebrate John Wilson? He was the first man to explore the Southern Highlands and, in the process, he discovered there were no hippies living there.
Check out Fitzroy Falls at
AUSSIETOWNS.COM.AU
Fitzroy Falls, NSW - Aussie Towns
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