The crew of the Endeavour sighted Australia at first light on April 19, 1770. As the ship skirted the east coast, Banks recorded in his journal his first mixed impressions of the continent:
April 20 1770
The countrey this morn rose in gentle sloping hills which had the appearance of the highest fertility, every hill seemd to be cloth’d with trees of no mean size ...
April 25 1770
The countrey tho in general well enough clothd appeard in some places bare; it resembled in my imagination the back of a lean Cow, covered in general with long hair, but nevertheless where her scraggy hip bones have stuck out further than they ought accidental rubbs and knocks have entirely bard them of their share of covering. (Banks, 1771)
In his overview, ‘Some account of that part of New Holland now called New South Wales’, he claimed:
For the whole length of coast which we saild along there was a sameness to be observd in the face of the countrey very uncommon; barren it may justly be calld and in a very high degree, that at least that we saw ... upon the Whole the fertile soils Bears no kind of Proportion to that which seems by nature doomed to everlasting Barrenness.
Upon the whole New Holland, tho in every respect the most barren countrey I have seen, is not so bad but that between the productions of sea and Land a company of People who should have the misfortune of being shipwreckd upon it might support themselves, even by the resources that we have seen. Undoubtedly a longer stay and visiting different parts would discover even more.
(Banks, 1771)
In spite of this less-than-enthusiastic review, by 1779 Banks was back in London, arguing vociferously before a House of Commons Committee for the development of a penal colony in New South Wales.
Cook was more enthusiastic from the first and his descriptions of Botany Bay were to haunt the later colonists: “The whole Country or at least great part of it might be cultivated without being oblig’d to cut down a single tree ... [we found] a deep black Soil which we thought was capable of produceing any kind of grain”. (Day, 1996: 25)
Cook was wrong. Banks, the botanist, was more correct in his analysis of the country, but he had given crucial support to the bid for a colony, counteracting any hesitations he may have voiced in his earlier writings. So it was with Cook’s amateur assessment of the agricultural potential of the lushly named Botany Bay that the First Fleet set out on its initial step towards the colonisation of an entire continent.
In The Fatal Shore, Robert Hughes describes the disappointment awaiting Phillip and his officers as they sailed into Botany Bay:
Everything they had been told about it, even the testimony of Cook’s log, was wrong. They had expected grassland with deep black soil and well-spaced trees, where crops could be planted without clearing; an ample source of building-stone; a protected anchorage.
But what Captain Phillip saw from the deck as his ship rounded Point Solander and hauled into Botany Bay on Friday, January 18, 1788, was a flat heath of paperbark scrub and gray-green eucalypts, stretching featurelessly away under the grinding white light of that Australian summer. The dry buzzing monotony of the landscape did not match Cook’s account. (1986: 84)
This disappointment, and the sudden appearance of the ill-fated French squadron commanded by La Perouse, sent Phillip fleeing to nearby Port Jackson, which he later jubilantly described to Lord Sydney as “the finest harbour in the world”. (Hughes, 1986: 87)
Yet throughout the early months and years, the sensation persisted that the colonists had been tricked, or perhaps deluded, not just by the accounts of Cook and Banks, but by a countryside that was filled with strange and wonderful apparitions, and features that pretended to be one thing while being something else. As Brian Elliott claims, “the early colonists found themselves committed to it before they had come to understand it” (1967: 5) and the process of understanding took several years to develop. In the meantime, it was often the sensation of having been thrust sight unseen into a totally new environment that led to wonder, suspicion or even a sense of betrayal.
In April 1788, Watkin Tench felt able to pronounce that:
The general face of the country is certainly pleasing, being diversified with gentle ascents, and little winding valleys, covered for the most part with large spreading trees which afford a succession of leaves in all seasons. In those places where trees are scarce a variety of flowering shrubs abound, most of them new to an European and surpassing in beauty, fragrance and number, all I ever saw in an uncultivated states. (1789: 70)
But by December 1790 Tench’s tune (and temper) had changed, and he too was shaking a rhetorical fist at Cook:
We had passed through the country which the discoverers of Botany Bay extol as ‘some of the finest meadows in the world’. The meadows, instead of grass, are covered with high coarse rushes, growing in a rotten spongy bog, into which we were plunged knee-deep at every step. [Tench adds a footnote which reads: “The words which are quoted may be found in Mr Cook’s first voyage and form part of his description of Botany Bay. It has often fallen to my lot to traverse these fabled plains; and many a bitter execration have I heard poured on those travellers, who could so faithlessly relate what they saw.”] (1789: 176)
Moorehead has explained some of the duplicity of the landscape to which the colonists tried to become accustomed:
There is a strange quality in the Australian landscape. To a European and especially an English eye it is, at first, lacking in freshness and greenness; the light is too harsh, the trees too thin and sparse, the ground too hard and there are no soft outlines anywhere. Desiccation seems to be the theme, a pitiless drying-out of all sap and moisture, and monotonous is the favourite adjective for the bush: monotonous and therefore worthless. It is a country for the ants. But then on closer acquaintance one begins to perceive that, very silently and slowly, life is going on here at another level ... (1966: 133)
Some colonists searched for the gentleman’s park hinted at by Cook, and pursued by following generations of colonists, poets and painters, perhaps understanding how the great sea captain could have been deceived by the land he viewed from the safety of the Endeavour.
George B Worgan wrote in June of 1788:
Here, a romantic rocky craggy Precipice, over which a little purling Stream makes a Cascade. There, a soft vivid-green, shady Lawn attracts your eye. Such are the prepossessing Appearances which the country that forms Port Jackson presents ... [H]appy were it for the Colony, if such appearances were not so delusive.
(Hughes, 1986: 92)
Yet, even that first year, Arthur Bowes looked for the Romantic garden so popular in the 18th century and found it:
... the finest terrs’s, lawns and grottos, with distinct plantations of the tallest and most stately trees I ever saw in any nobleman’s grounds in England.
(Smith, 1960: 134)
In spite of the ‘shock of the new’, Phillip continued to be optimistic, and began the task of organising the fledgling settlement and attempting to ensure its survival:
There are few things more pleasing than the contemplation of order and useful arrangement, arising gradually out of tumult and confusion; and perhaps this satisfaction cannot anywhere be more fully enjoyed than where a settlement of civilised people is fixing itself upon a newly discovered or savage coast.
(Day, 1996: 50)
He prepared grand plans for the layout of the settlement (“Extent of empire demands grandeur of design”, pronounced Tench grandly) and the colonists set to work, attempting to bring the soil and the unfamiliar elements under some sort of control. Many early attempts at mastering the land failed, and an increasing disillusionment, and the bleak reality of starvation marked the first years of settlement.
The normally optimistic Tench resorted to references to Milton’s brink of Hell in describing the country seen on one of his marches outside the settlement:
Here we paused, surveying ‘the wild abyss; pondering our voyage’. Before us lay the trackless, immeasureable desert, in awful silence. (Tench, 1789: 111)
Even the honour of having a geographical feature named Tench’s Prospect Mount by Phillip did little to improve his outlook: he described it as “this pile of desolation on which, like the fallen angel on top of the Niphates, we stood contemplating our nether Eden”. (Tench, 1789: 191)
The disparity of reactions amongst the colonists (the normally optimistic Tench’s change of heart is a prime example) mean that it is not possible to paint a consensus of the initial responses to the landscape. The colony itself was a collection of people from wildly different backgrounds and temperaments. Many of them had never lived in any rural setting before, let alone a countryside without any of the support systems familiar to the English: there were no roads, inns, bakeries or blacksmiths; no shelter nor reliable food supplies. For people used to living in a noisy and sprawling metropolis such as London or Newcastle, regardless of their class or income levels, the shores of Port Jackson must surely have been an enormous and terrifying change. No wonder the continent appeared empty, and the population sparse.