Camp Cove - II

Right then, on with the history lesson. And you two, Louise and Natalie, stop chucking paper aeroplanes at the back.

Well I've finished reading Tom Keneally's The Commonwealth of Thieves and I've also read quite a lot of Sydney Cove 1788, which contains all the diary extracts from the first fleet, and since then Governor Arthur Phillip has become something of a hero in this house (flat), not least because he turns out to be one of those mysterious brooding types of blokes like the delicious Mr Darcy, but mainly because his task in settling Australia was enormous and the whole lot of them would have starved to death if he hadn't been so good at counting out rations and writing begging letters back to the British Government (though imagine writing a letter saying "help, we've only got three Weetabix between the lot of us" and knowing it would take months to reach the people who could do you another shop).

So Captain Cook sails from Britain with a crew including the famous botanist Sir Joseph Banks, and he discovers the great southern land, though there's some debate about whether the dutch explorer Abel Tasman beat him to it but seeing as I'm British, I'm duty bound to go with the Cook story.

Anyway, He eventually drops anchor in Botany Bay and after he's dealt with the savages , he starts crapping on in his diary about what a fine harbour it is and how it would be an excellent place to establish a British colony.

Only Captain Cook's in such a hurry to get out of the place, you know, what with all that spear-chucking, that he doesn't really pay attention to detail because if he had, he'd also have written about the swampy land and crappy trees and lack of deep channels for really big ships to drop anchor. Instead he beats a hasty retreat before anyone can spoil his wig and sails north up the coast, not even bothering to enter into the next two harbours he passes.

And when his diaries are published, they're edited to make the place sound better than it really is, because the publishers think nobody will ever have to go there anyway.

And then for seventeen years afterwards, no Briton sets a foot onto Australis (which means great southern land) but Botany Bay takes on a sort of mythical status and gains a reputation as some sort of far off paradise just waiting to be settled.

Meanwhile, back in Blighty, the problem with overcrowding in prisons continues and it's so bad that heaps of prisoners are holed up in rusting prison ships on the Thames and in Portsmouth Harbour, as you'll remember if you were paying attention when we went on the field trip to the Hyde Park Barracks Museum.

So they come up with the idea for the penal colony and someone pipes up about that place Captain Cook was crapping on about (only they don't say that because it's an australianism and australians haven't been invented yet).

So the first fleet sails all the way to the fabled Botany Bay with it's load of convicts and sheep and two dozen boxes of Marks and Sparks knickers, and when they finally get to Botany Bay on January 18th, they're a bit underwhelmed to say the least and Governor Phillip writes something in his diary like "I'm gonna bloody kill that Captain Cook when I see him - I sail for all these months and arrive in this bloody swamp with these trees that can't even be chopped down and made into coffee tables, for God's sake".

And with that, he sets off in longboats with a couple of friends and three days worth of food (and this must have been a task in itself in the Janaury heat, because even bread has to be kept in the fridge to stop it getting too humid) and goes to have a look at the coast further north, no doubt waving merrily at all the aborigines doing the Bondi-Coogee coastal walk on the way, then he turns left through the enormous north and south heads of Port Jackson and declares:

"We got into Port Jackson early in the afternoon, and had the satisfaction of finding the finest harbour in the world, in which a thousand sail of the line may ride in perfect security.

We'll be abandoning that Bloody Botany Bay as fast as we can load up the ships, for in reality, 'tis good only for the likes of an airport runway and some oil refineries. The plane spotters are welcome to it's pleasures"

This was the place, not Botany Bay, and after all that hard rowing they set up camp and went to sleep on one of the beaches just inside the south head of Port Jackson, a beach they named Camp Cove, one of the most gorgeous harbour beaches you'll come across.