London Gazette, October 1789. including article War-Office, Corps of Foot for NSW.
Excert from London Gazette showing Ensign John M’Arthur to be promoted to Lieutenant
A Corps of Foot for NSW
October 20th, 2020DARK MATTER – ‘McMafia’ MACARTHUR & ‘FIERY INDIAN RUM’ THE TEETOTALLER’S DRUG OF CHOICE FOR OTHERS
January 19th, 2021Sydney – June 1790: ‘On a high bluff, called South-head, at the entrance of the harbour…every morning from daylight until the sun sunk, did we sweep the horizon, in the hope of seeing a sail.
No communication whatever having passed with our native country since the 13th May 1787 the day of our departure from Portsmouth….The misery and horror of such a situation cannot be imparted even by those who have suffered under it’. Marine Captain Watkin Tench, Sydney’s First Four Years, ed. L.F. Fitzhardinge, Angus and Robertson, 1961
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‘Until, the year 1823 the government of New South Wales was vested entirely in the Governor who worked under the control of the Secretary of State for the Home Department.
He was an autocrat, wielding the widest powers, amenable to no criticism but than of the Minister [13,000 miles (21,000 km) away] in England’. Professor Ernest Scott, A Short History of Australia, Oxford University Press, Melbourne, 1953
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London – January 1790: ‘I am commanded to signify to you the King’s pleasure that directions be immediately given for the embarkation of the Corps raised for service in New South Wales and commanded by Major Grose’. Right Hon.W.W. Grenville to Secretary of War, London, 20 January 1790
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‘It does not appear that Grose’s antecedents had qualified him in any way for the performance of gubernatorial functions. He had been trained from his youth to arms and was essentially and only a soldier’. M.H. Bladen, Journal Royal Australian Historical Society, Vol. I
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‘[Grose] had not been many hours in charge before [13 December 1792] he introduced into the Government of the colony the same system, and very much the same forms, which prevailed in his regiment…From this period, the ascendancy of the military dates. They became an aristocracy’ .Bladen. op.cit.
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‘It was a great misfortune that this period of military rule occurred because in the course of it the colony was brought to degradation by drink, corruption, and general iniquity, which required years to mitigate’. Ernest Scott. op.cit.
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‘For the length of the interregnum the British Government was greatly at fault’. J.J. Achmutty, John Hunter, Australian Dictionary of Biography See: A Black Hole the First Interregnum December 1792-September 1795
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‘Military power was the most decisive fact about the early settlements; it was the frame within which everything else happened’. R. Connell and T.H. Irving, Class Structure in Australian History, Documents, Narrative and Argument, 1987
Sydney – 1790, June: The first contingent, one hundred and fifteen (115) ,Officers NCOs and ORs of the New South Wales Corps, reached Sydney in June 1790.
Major Francis Grose their commander remained in England to recruit sufficient numbers to meet establishment requirement.
Lieutenant John Macarthur, an ambitious self-centred junior Corps Officer, took advantage of deep dissensions among his fellow officers and moved swiftly to fill the power vacuum created by Grose’s absence. See: The Switch 1790 – Context – War With France 1793-1815
Sydney -1792, 14 February: Pitt a convict transport with three hundred (300) male prisoners reached Sydney on Valentine’s Day 1792. The Pitt also brought Major Grose with an additional two hundred (200) infantry troops.
AN UGLY WAR – BRITAIN VERSUS ‘THE OTHER’
December 31st, 2020‘The territory of England is too small for its population. She requires a monopoly of the four [4] corners of the globe to enable her to exist. War procures this monopoly, because it gives England the right of destruction at sea’. Napoleon, cited Jonathan Holslag, A Political History of the World, 3000 Years of War and Peace, Pelican, 2018
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‘Phillip was authorised to see to the defence of the colony…Military and police raids against dissenting Aboriginal groups lasted from the eighteenth to the twentieth centuries.
These raids [‘kill 6… bring in the heads’] had commenced by December [14] 1790′. Professor Bruce Kercher, History of Law in Australia, Allen and Unwin, 1995
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‘Dawes whose duty it was to go out with that party [14 December] refused that duty by letter’. Professor G. Arnold Wood, Journal of the Royal Australian Historical Society Vol. X, 1924, Part 1
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‘From 1788 there had been continuous disputation between the civil power represented by the autocratic uniformed naval governors and the military’. John McMahon, Not a Rum Rebellion But a Military Insurrection, Journal of the Royal Australian Historical Society, Vol. 92, 2006
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1790 – September 7, Manly Beach: A ‘tremendous monster’ stranded on Manly Beach. Aborigines greeted the seasonal return of their totem with ‘rapture’. After an extremely lean winter the whale flagged the promise of coming abundance.See: Manly Location, Location, Location
The stranding however proved a tipping point for ‘further mischief’ that can be linked to the near annihilation of a free people, Australia’s First Nations’ Peoples. See: Arthur’s Algorithm – ‘infuse universal terror’ open – sesame
Governor Arthur Phillip’s career in the Royal Navy had began harpooning whales in the Arctic. Now (1790) armed with a pistol, dirk’ and a bottle or two of fine French reds he was rowed across to Manly where he met up again with the warrior Bennalong.
‘[The governor] uncorked a bottle, and poured out a glass of it, which the other [Bennelong] drank off with his former marks of relish and good humour, giving for a toast, as he had been taught “the King”. Marine Captain Watkin Tench, Sydney’s First Four Years, ed. L.F. Fitzhardinge, Angus and Robertson, 1961
A little way off a group of ‘other’ Aborigines stood watching this strange pantomime.
MACHIAVELLIAN MACARTHUR POST GOVERNOR PHILLIP
December 31st, 2020‘From 1788 there had been continuous disputation between the civil power represented by the autocratic uniformed naval governors and the military’. John McMahon, Not a Rum Rebellion But A Military Insurrection, Journal of the Royal Australian Historical Society. Vol. 92, 2006
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‘A knowledge of the position of the military and their immediate friends occupied from 1792-1810, affords a key to the whole history of the colony; and without this knowledge many important transactions, affecting the civil, social and political interests of the community would appear almost incomprehensible’. Samuel Bennett, Australian Discovery and Colonisation Vol. 1 to 1800, Facsimile Edition, 1981.
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‘There are two kinds of error: those of commission, doing something that should not be done, and those of omission, not doing something that should be done. The latter are much more serious than, the former’. Kenneth Hopper and William Hopper, The Puritan Gift, Forward Professor Russell Lincoln Ackoff, I.B. Tauris, New York,
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‘For the length of the [first] interregnum [1792-1795] the British government was greatly at fault’. J.J. Auchmuty, Hunter, Australian Dictionary of Biography
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‘His [Hunter’s] commission as captain-general and governor-in-chief was dated 6 February 1794 [he] did not sail until 25 February 1795…arrived [Sydney] 7 September 1795 and assumed office four days later’. Auchmuty. op.cit.
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Following repeated requests for repatriation Governor Arthur Phillip RN received approval to return to England.
Sydney – 1792, December 12: Phillip departed Sydney for England at the end of 1792 in the Atlantic taking Bennalong and Yemmerrawannie a younger warrior with him.
By default after Governor Phillip’s departure ‘the plenitude of power’ Britain vested in its naval governors fell into the hands of the military exposing the First Australians to the brutality of the New South Wales ‘Rum’ Corps. See: Arthur’s Algorithm – Infuse Universal Terror – Open Sesame
Shortly after reaching England Phillip resigned Governorship of New South Wales. His successor, the First Fleet’s courageous Captain John Hunter RN, was not commissioned until 6th of February 1794. See Proximity Not Distance Drove Britain’s Invasion of New Holland.
ARTHUR PHILLIP’S NEW HOLLAND – ‘FROM CAPE YORK TO SOUTH CAPE’ A SPECIAL PROJECT
December 8th, 2020London -1786, October 12: ‘To Captain Arthur Phillip; ‘reposing especial trust and confidence in your loyalty, courage, and experience in military affairs, do, by these presents constitute and appoint you to be Governor of our territory called New South Wales…from the northern extremity…called Cape York…to the southern extremity…South Cape’. Court of St. James, By Command, His Majesty’s [George III] – 12 October 1786, Historical Records of New South Wales, Vol. 1
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‘Four [4] companies of marines landed [1788] with the first Europeans…Twenty five [25 regiments of British infantry served in the colonies between 1790 and 1870…[they] participated in the great struggle at the heart of the European conquest of this continent’. Dr. Peter Stanley, The Remote Garrison, the British Army n Australia, Kangaroo Press, 1964
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Sydney Cove – 12 December, 1790: ‘At headquarters…the governor pitched up me [Tench] to execute the…command…those natives who reside near the head of Botany Bay…put ten [10] to death…bring in the heads of the slain [and] two [2] prisoners.
I am resolved to execute [them] in the most public and exemplary manner in the presence of as many of their countrymen as can be collected……and my fixed determination to repeat it whenever any future breach of good conduct on their side, shall render it necessary’. His Excellency Governor Arthur Phillip, Orders to Marine Captain Watkin Tench. Governor Phillip, cited Tench, Sydney’s First Four Years, ed. L.F. Fitzhardinge, Angus and Robertson, 1961
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‘Military and police raids against dissenting Aboriginal groups lasted from the eighteenth to the twentieth centuries…These raids had commenced by December 1790‘. Professor Bruce Kercher, History of Law in Australia, Allen and Unwin, 1995.
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United Kingdom – 3 April 1889: Privy Council Cooper V Stuart [1889] 14 AC, Lord Watson, Lord Fitzgerald, Lord Hobhouse, Lord MacNaghton, Sir William Grove ruled ‘it [New South Wales] was peacefully annexed to the British Dominion’. Professor Bruce Kercher, An Unruly Child, History of Law in Australia, Allen and Unwin, 1995
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Portsmouth – May 1787: Captain Arthur Phillip RN, commander of a large expeditionary force of eleven (11) ships, known in Britain and Australia as the ‘First Fleet’ sailed from Portsmouth, England on 13 May 1787 bound for the invasion of New Holland now Australia.
New Holland – 18/20 January 1788: All ‘First Fleet’ vessels, after eight (8) months voyaging 13,000 miles (21,000 km) of ‘imperfectly explored oceans’ by way of Spanish Tenerife, Portuguese Rio and Dutch Cape Town, were safely at anchor in Botany Bay.
Botany Bay: HMS Supply, smaller of the two (2) king’s ships with Phillip aboard, was first to arrive. He immediately assessed Botany Bay, ‘so very wide open’ -difficult to defend unsuitable therefore for permanent settlement.
21 January: Next morning, armed with Captain James Cook’s charts from April 1770, he set out with Captain Hunter commander of the fleet’s flagship HMS Sirius with surveyors to investigate the surrounding country-side.
Port Jackson: Later that day, nine (9) miles (14km) north of the initial beachhead, one (1) of the group’s (3) cutters came across Cook’s notation, an entry ‘a quarter mile across’ into Port Jackson’.
‘Here’ Phillip wrote ‘a Thousand Ships of the Line may ride in perfect security’.
22 January: The following day the English rowed around its vast harbour. From a myriad inlets and bays hep chose a ‘snug’ deep-water cove; ‘so close to the shore that at very small expense quays may be made in which the largest ships may unload’.
Sydney Cove: Phillip ‘honoured’ [it] with the name Sydney’. See: Botany Bay , Lord Sydney , Arthur Phillip & ‘Christopher Robin’ Mark 2
23 January: ‘We returned to Botany Bay on the third day’ with news. The ‘First Fleet’ had found a home. ‘It was determined the evacuation of Botany Bay should commence the next morning’. Tench. ibid.
LIEUTENANT WILLIAM DAWES – THE ‘ETERNAL FLAME’ & THE SHOCK OF THE NEW SOUTH WALES CORPS
December 8th, 2020‘When leaving Botany Bay [for Sydney Cove 25 January 1788] Phillip noticed two French ships in the offing….there would seem to be “some justification for the saying that England won Australia by six days”. Edward Jenks, History of the Australian Colonies, cited H.E. Egerton, A short History of British Colonial Policy, Methuen, London 1928
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‘Our wealth and power in India is their [France ] great and constant object of jealously; and they will never miss an opportunity of attempting to wrest it out of our hands’. Sir James Harris cited, Michael Pembroke, Arthur Phillip Sailor Mercenary Governor Spy, Hardie Grant Books. Melbourne, London, 2013
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‘English clockmaker John Harrison, a mechanical genius who pioneered the science of portable precision timekeeping…invented a clock that would carry the true time from the home port, like an eternal flame, to any remote corner of the world’. Dava Sobel, Longitude, Fourth Estate, 1998
Harrison H-4 Chronometer
‘Military and police raids against dissenting Aboriginal groups lasted from the eighteenth to the twentieth centuries…These raids had commenced by [on 14th] December 1790’. Professor Bruce Bruce Kercher, An Unruly Child, A History of Law in Australia, Allen & Unwin, 1995.
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‘Bring in six [6] of those natives who reside near the head of Botany Bay; or if that should be found impracticable, to put that n umber [6] to death…bring back the heads of the slain’. Governor Arthur Phillip RN, General Orders to Marine Captain Watkin Tench, 13 December 1790. Cited Tench, Sydney’s First Four Years, L. F. Fitzhardinge, Angus and Robertson, Sydney 1961
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‘Lieutenant William Dawes whose tour of duty it was to go out with that party refused that duty by letter’. Professor G.A. Wood, Lieutenant William Dawes and Captain Watkin Tench, Royal Australian Historical Society Journal; Vol. 10, Part 1, 1924
Australia knows little of the ‘eternal flame’ or the remarkable role it played in the invasion of New Holland, and dispossession of its First Peoples.
Warranne – 26 January 1788: K I – a faithful replica of John Harrison’s H-4 a ‘sea-going pocket watch’, given by Astronomer Royal Nevil Maskelyne into the care of marine Lieutenant William Dawes, fetched up at one particular ‘remote corner of the world’ – Sydney Cove – aboard HMS Supply one (1) of the First Fleet’s eleven (11) ships.
It was the essential ingredient in both the survival of the British invaders and near destruction of Australia’s First Nations’ Peoples.
‘He [Dawes] was the scholar of the [First Fleet] expedition, man of letters and man of science, explorer, mapmaker, student of language of anthropology, teacher and philanthropist’. Professor G. Arnold Wood, Journal of the Royal Australian Historical Society Vol. X, 1924, Part 1
However, aside from Daniel Rooke, Kate Grenville’s star-struck cardboard cut-out hero of The Lieutenant, non-indigenous Australians know almost nothing of him.
‘Dawes whose tour of duty it was to go out with that [14 December 1790] party [refused that duty by letter’. Wood. ibid.
Australia either knows nothing of, or turns a blind eye, on Lieutenant Dawes’ pivotal role in revealing the how ,why and wherefore of the ‘war nasty and decidedly lacking in glory’ Britain waged against Australia’s First Nations’ Peoples. See: The Big Switch
SHOCK AND AWE – ‘INFUSE UNIVERSAL TERROR’ ‘MY MEN HEARD A CHILD CRY’
November 25th, 2020Sydney Cove – 1790 June 1 : ‘We had now been [thirty-six] months from England in which long period …we had been entirely cut off, no communication whatever having passed with our native country since the 13th May, 1787, the day of our departure from Portsmouth.
Here on the summit of the hill, every morning from daylight until the sun sunk, did we sweep the horizon, in hope of seeing a sail…at every fleeting speck which arose from the bosom of the sea, the heart bounded’. Marine Captain Watkin Tench, Sydney’s First Four Years, ed. L.F. Fitzhardige, Angus and Robertson, Sydney 1961
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Sydney – 1790, June 3: ‘Great change came with the Second Fleet of the first companies of the New South Wales Corps.[among them] Lieutenant John Macarthur – a central figure in the military ‘mafia’ which quickly established itself as Australia’s first governing and property owning elite’. Nigel Rigby, Peter Van Der Merwe & Glyn Williams, National Maritime Museum Greenwich, Pacific Explorations, Voyages of Discovery from Captain Cook’s Endeavour to the Beagle, Bloomsbury, Adlard Coles, 2018
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Sydney Headquarters – 1790, December 13: ‘The governor pitched upon me [Tench] to execute the…command…those natives who reside near the head of Botany Bay….put ten [10] to death…bring in the heads of the slain [and] two [2] prisoners to execute in the most most public and exemplary manner;…my fixed determination to repeat it, whenever any future breach of good conduct on their side, shall render it necessary’. His Excellency Governor Arthur Phillip RN, General Orders to Marine Captain Watkin Tench
A TETHERED GOAT – JOHN McENTIRE- DECEMBER 1790
October 27th, 2020Sydney – 1790 January 1: ‘Since we first arrived at this distant country [January 1788] all this while we have been as it were buried alive, never having the opportunity to hear from our friends…our hopes are now almost vanished’. Reverend Richard Johnson, 9 April 1790‘. Jack Egan, Buried Alive, Eyewitness accounts of the making of a nation 1788-92, Allen and Unwin, Sydney 1999
June 1790 Flags Up…a ship with London on her stern’.
On the 3rd of June 1790, two (2) months after ‘hope [had] now almost vanished’– the cry ‘Flags Up’ rang out. Lady Juliana with two hundred and twenty six (226) ‘useless’ women prisoners broke the terrible isolation.
She was first of four (4) vessels that made up the second fleet Britain’s Grim Armada .By the end of June 1790 Alexander, Scarborough Suprize the fleet’s death ships arrived with approximately one thousand (1000) men.
One hundred and fifteen (115) officers and other ranks, first contingent of the New South Wales Corps of Infantry guarded the prisoners during the voyage.
London Gazette Extract
‘The great change came in the arrival with the Second Fleet of the first companies of the New South Wales Corps’. Nigel Rigby, Peter van der Merwse, Glyn Williams. Pacific Explorations, Voyages of Discovery from Captain Cook’s Endeavour to the Beagle, Bloomsbury, Adlard Coles, London, 2018
Just six (6) months later; ‘military and police raids against dissenting Aboriginal groups lasted from the eighteenth to the twentieth centuries. These raids had commenced by December 1790’. Professor Bruce Kercher, An Unruly Child, A History of Law in Australia, Allen and Unwin, 1995