Bulletin

Issue: October 2005

News

Reappraising First Fleet farmers

First Fleet convicts were incapable as farmers and nearly starved to death on 'a fatal shore' due to primitive agriculture and administrative incompetence in mounting the First Fleet.

Mr McGillivery on his farm.

This belief has been almost universally held by historians studying the establishment of the convict colony in New South Wales in 1788. This orthodox view is incorrect.

Some First Fleeters who stepped ashore at Port Jackson had sound agricultural knowledge. The colony's initial farming practices were sensible and appropriate for the circumstances and extremely well planned and executed.

This is the view of somebody soundly qualified from both an agricultural and historical perspective, La Trobe University history teaching fellow and associate lecturer, Mr Angus McGillivery.

In his PhD research, Mr McGillivery combined the skills of a practical working farmer with those of an academic historian to investigate the agricultural practices of our first settlers between 1788 and 1810.

As well as teaching history and preparing his PhD thesis, Mr McGillivery is an arable and livestock farmer at Garvoc in Victoria's Western District.

His research was literally 'down to earth' - to the extent that he sampled and analysed soil from the sites of the first farming endeavours. In addition, he analysed the lists of seeds and plants that arrived with the First Fleet, and examined the tools and husbandry methods of convict workers and settlers. He found that the soil of the settlements matched the agriculture equipped for the new colony.

Mr McGillivery claims in his thesis, entitled Agricultural Imperialism in the Antipodes, that despite initial despondency and drought, a bountiful and secure agricultural hinterland was in the making.

'Within five years of the arrival of the First Fleet, convict settlers, mixed agriculture and imperial designs had transformed a “rude, wild country into a pleasant garden”,' Mr McGillivery said.

'It also fulfilled the major aim of the Admiralty. As a planned self-sufficient maritime settlement, Port Jackson developed its capacity to produce a surplus of seamen's greens to help prevent scurvy, essential for a distant port and naval base.'

It became an assured resource of refreshment and maritime provisions necessary for Britain to 'effectively occupy' the oceanic territory of New South Wales and thereby integrate the development of a global empire.

In other words, as well as feeding themselves, the early farmers helped effect Britain's maritime self-sufficiency and supremacy in the New World of the Pacific.

Mr McGillivery says there were several competent agriculturalists on the First Fleet, one of them being Henry Dodd, Governor Phillip's experienced farm servant.

Historians have traditionally criticised not only the selection of farm sites, but also the basic hand tools that were used.

The location of the first farm, where the Royal Botanical Garden now stands facing Farm Cove, has been especially criticised because the soil was shallow and sandy.

However, such easily cleared light sandy loam soil suited the production of vegetable crops necessary to supplement the two years of rations the settlers brought with them.

Far from being a sign of backwardness or incompetence, the labour intensive methods of hand hoeing and sowing seed were based on the 'improved husbandry' of cottage gardening and mixed farming. This husbandry well suited the ample supply of convict labour needing to be gainfully employed.

This kind of agriculture was efficient in cultivating quickly a surplus of fresh food and antiscorbutics required by nearly 1,500 people who had voyaged 1,200 miles.

Such farming methods had been planned well in advance as the variety of seeds and plants taken to New South Wales illustrates. Sir Joseph Banks, who had visited the area with James Cook, selected the seeds and plants that proved ideal for Governor Phillip's First Fleet farmers.