On election day thoughts are naturally focused on the USA, and so I got to thinking what European colonists of Australia might have learned from their counterparts in America.
Just over 200 years before the arrival of the First Fleet in New South Wales in 1788 a group of 120 men and boys sailed from England to the east coast of America. They went by the name of the Virginia Company, licensed by Lord Cecil under the auspices of King James 1. The travellers were partly ‘gentlemen … who relative to their urban counterparts the merchants and lawyers, had not prospered in recent years’[1], a number of cashiered captains, labourers and tradesmen and boys. In return for paying their own way they were promised a share of any valuable commodities they could find. They found deer and turkeys, hares and squirrels, vines, fields planted with corn, wheat and tobacco, flowers, familiar trees, and huge strawberries. They also encountered tribes of native Americans, many though not all of whom were friendly, but they did not find any precious metals. Of the 120 who arrived only 32 colonists survived the first winter, and ‘only then because Native Americans living in the area came to their aid with food’.[2]
As more ships arrived from England so the colony – founded at Chesapeake Bay and named Jamestown – grew, but never thrived. Over the years the death rate – from disease, starvation and a lack of proper management – was around 70%. That it survived at all was thanks not to the finding of exotic minerals but to tobacco.
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Settlement at Jamestown 1607 (nasa.gov)
By contrast the First Fleet arrived at their destination in 1788 ‘with no agrarian expectations’ (to quote Michael Symons in his book One Continuous Picnic). Captain Cook had already noted that “The Land naturally produces hardly anything fit for man to eat and the Natives know nothing of Cultivation”. So the Europeans, as they were called, knew they would have to start virtually from scratch. The fact that a remarkable number of them survived despite having been left to fend for themselves for two and a half years on rations that were meant to last for two at the very most, is entirely down to the discipline and fair and steady management of Governor Phillip.
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Governor Phillip (factbook.org)
In the circumstances it’s not surprising that ‘The early arrivals brought with them the “cultural baggage” of the British Isles. They spoke, thought, dressed and hoped to eat, as they were accustomed …’ (Hence the oak veneer on the front door of Government House.) Moreover the post Industrial Revolution community was not used to growing its own food in its own back yard. They ‘failed to incorporate a single indigenous food into anything resembling an agriculture and cooking appropriate to the environment’, and so Australia ‘became the world’s earliest truly urban nation, in which many of us could no longer even recognise a tomato plant’. [3]
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Sydney Cove 1704 (sl.nsw.gov.au)
That’s not really fair on Mary Pitt and her contemporaries and immediate descendants, who after being on government stores for a year had to learn how to keep and feed themselves pretty darn quickly. It also shows a certain contempt for the culture and feeding habits of Symon’s country, especially when he goes on to quote John Douglas Pringe in Australian Accent (1958): ‘If true culture is the product of a deep and intimate relationship between a people and the soil where they have lived for centuries, then clearly Australia has none and could have none … The white man still seems an incongruous invader, huddling in cities, on the edge of this time-worn continent, building the wrong houses, wearing the wrong clothes, eating the wrong food.’ And Keith Hancock in Australia, (1930) who said Australia “has not inherited a village civilisation nor love of the soil, but she has inherited factories and factory farms and the class-war”.
In this Australia was no different to any other western country, the difference being that it did not go through what Symons terms a ‘peasant’ phase but moved directly from a hunter gatherer community to an industrialised one, with barely a break between.
True or otherwise, what is interesting about these remarks – and there are plenty more in the same vein – is how typically English they are. If you consider how much better the early European colonists of New South Wales fared than their Chesapeake counterparts (and later the Pilgrim Fathers, nearly half of whom died within months of arriving in Massachusetts), at the risk of sounding like John Howard Australians have every reason to be proud of their colonial ancestry. However, to quote a famous American playwright on another topic:
“The British Theatre has long since openly acknowledged that social criticism is entertainment, but that may be because England sees itself as basically a failure compared with America, the success. Failures tend to examine their suppositions about life; the successful are more likely to celebrate themselves as good examples.” (Arthur Miller)
If the Spanish or the Portuguese or any other European country had colonised Australia first it’s not just the food that would have been different. Australians may inhabit a country that more resembles the US than any other continent but the sense of humour and the self deprecation are entirely English. America never suffered from what Aussies call a ‘cultural cringe’, quite the opposite. (There was even a ‘biological cringe’ – even native antipodean animals were regarded as inferior in the early days by the nobs back home.)
My knowledge of American colonial history being sketchy to say the least I cannot comment on her early colonists’ treatment of the native population. Nor on anything else really, except to ponder on why it is these two countries and their populations have turned out so very differently. No doubt someone has written a PhD on the subject, in which case I’d be interested to read it.
Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.
Image may be NSFW.Clik here to view.
