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Waterside Press - Michael Crowley

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112 pages

English

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Description

A highly original narrative of exile and survival from rural England to New South Wales and the Tasman Sea filling a gap in the literature of transportation and dramatising a key period in British penal history.

Sujets

Historical fiction

Informations

Publié par	Waterside Press
Date de parution	20 juin 2018
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9781910979570
Langue	English
Poids de l'ouvrage	1 Mo

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,0748€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

Extrait

The Stony Ground
The Remembered Life of Convict James Ruse
Michael Crowley
Copyright and publication details
The Stony Ground: The Remembered Life of Convict James Ruse
Michael Crowley
ISBN 978-1-909976-57-3 (Paperback)
ISBN 978-1-910979-57-0 (Epub E-book)
ISBN 978-1-910979-58-7 (Adobe E-book)
Copyright © 2018 This work is the copyright of Michael Crowley. All intellectual property and associated rights are hereby asserted and reserved by the author in full compliance with UK, European and international law. No part of this book may be copied, reproduced, stored in any retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, including in hard copy or via the internet, without the prior written permission of the publishers to whom all such rights have been assigned worldwide.
Cover design © 2018 Waterside Press by www.gibgob.com. Sketch and description of the Settlement at Sydney Cove, Port Jackson in the County of Cumberland taken by a transported convict on the 16th of April, 1788, which was not quite three months after Commodore Phillip landed there, courtesy of the National Library of Australia.
Printed by Lightning Source.
Main UK distributor Gardners Books, 1 Whittle Drive, Eastbourne, East Sussex, BN23 6QH . Tel: +44 (0)1323 521777; sales@gardners.com ; www.gardners.com
North American distribution Ingram Book Company, One Ingram Blvd, La Vergne, TN 37086, USA. Tel: (+1) 615 793 5000; inquiry@ingramcontent.com
Australian distribution Waterside Press can arrange local delivery in Australia for any customers unable to source books direct from Ingrams there.
Cataloguing-In-Publication Data A catalogue record can be had from the British Library.
e-book The Stony Ground: The Remembered Life of Convict James Ruse is available as an ebook and also to subscribers of Ebrary, Ebsco, Myilibrary and Dawsonera.
Published 2018 by
Waterside Press Ltd
Sherfield Gables
Sherfield on Loddon, Hook
Hampshire RG27 0JG.
Telephone +44(0)1256 882250
Online catalogue WatersidePress.co.uk
Email enquiries@watersidepress.co.uk
Table of Contents
Acknowledgements iv
Preface v
About the author vi
Dedication ix The Hunt 11 Snared 15 Seized 21 My Dungeon 29 The Island 33 Judgement 37 Belly of the Whale 43 Servant of Servants 51 Lust of his Eyes 61 Eye for Eye 65 Farewell 77 Exodus 85 The Sacred Place 99 New Albion 103 The Stony Ground 113 The Good Ground 125 The Flight 141 What is Thy Country? 145 Homeland 157 The Beast of the Field 171 The Deluge 179 The Wrought Sea 187
Acknowledgements
The Stony Ground received time to write support from Arts Council England, and I would particularly like to thank my mentor, Andy Croft. His guidance, editorial support and encouragement helped the development and completion of this book. There are too many invaluable sources of research to mention in full, but I must express my thanks to Janice Ruse Huntington for her short book My Mother Reread Me Tenderly: The Life of James Ruse (Possum, 1988), in which she gathered and presented all official records pertaining to her ancestor. I would also like to thank the staff at the Mitchell Library, Sydney, who were so helpful during my research.
Michael Crowley
West Yorkshire, June 2018
Preface
James Ruse, born 1759, was a Cornish farm labourer who at the age of twenty-three was sentenced to seven years’ transportation to New South Wales for stealing two silver watches. He was one among the eight hundred or so convicts shipped by the First Fleet to Botany Bay in May 1787. He became, arguably, the most important convict of that fleet or any other.
He was the first European ashore in January 1788, carrying the officers onto the beach, among the first convicts emancipated, and the first individual to be given a land grant on the continent. He was Australia’s first self-sufficient farmer, his land ownership placing him at the apex of a conflict with indigenous peoples which on the Hawkesbury River escalated to a war.
Whether it was fortune or design that put James Ruse at so many significant moments of the infant colony, he was also cursed by man and nature. He was reduced, as he would have seen it, to years of perilous seal-hunting along the coasts of New South Wales and New Zealand, including a mysteriously ill-fated expedition aboard the Speedwell in 1805. While there are many remarkable convict stories from the First Fleet his life more than most was lived at the frontier of history, his own survival bound-up with the fate of the colony itself.
Today in Parramatta, New South Wales, there is a seven kilometre long highway and a high school named after James Ruse. There is not much in the way of biography to be found though, for the world of a convict settler was not a recorded one. What follows is a fictionalised account constructed around the historical records; it is James’ story to himself, in his own words: the voice of one of England’s rural poor, common land enclosed, sent across the world to enclose the land of others. It is one of many lost voices and it calls-out to be re-imagined.
About the author
Michael Crowley is a writer and dramatist who has worked in theatre, youth theatre, prisons and, most recently, with the British Army. He lives in West Yorkshire.
Also by Michael Crowley:
Drama The Man They Couldn’t Hang (Waterside Press)
Poetry Close to Home; First Fleet
Non Fiction Behind the Lines: Creative Writing with Offenders and People at Risk (Waterside Press)
Fiction Nowhere to Run
You can find out more about his work at www.michaelcrowley.co.uk
‘Another colonial sealing vessel, the Speedwell of eighteen tons owned by John Grono, a name afterwards to be famous in New Zealand sealing, had been stranded in October 1804. She was got off by Andrew Thompson the ship owner, and in the second week of August, 1805, he sent her on a sealing expedition to the coast of New Zealand. From this voyage, she returned in September 1806, fairly successful in procuring seals, but unfortunate in losing three men. The scene of the catastrophe is not stated.’
Murihiku: A History of the South Island of New Zealand and the Islands Adjacent and Lying to the South, from 1642 to 1835 , Robert McNab
Dedication
For Rosa
The stories we tell are always about ourselves.
The Talmud
Chapter 1
The Hunt
The Tasman Sea, 1805
‘This is the hunting ground boys, here.’ Captain Evans’ stubby forefinger tapped at some dots on a map. McIntyre tilted his head, wondering how much land we were looking at.
‘We will hunt along this chain, an island every month or so. Then all the way round the larger island to the west. Then home boys, full to the brim.’
The image of the mainland looked like a jagged potato. The larger island to the south was shaped like a pear.
‘That island there, how far is it?’ asked Scottish Jack.
‘That’s the mainland there, so it’s that far,’ insisted the captain. ‘We’ll just cut through the strait, head south.’
‘Begging your pardon captain,’ said McIntyre, ‘but where did you get this map from?’
‘Never flaming mind where I got it from, it’s where we’re going.’
The captain took another sip of his rum. I had seen maps and charts, newly made, in the governor’s tent at the cove, in the hand of Lieutenant Dawes on the Supply . They were delicate things, the lines of ink as fine as hair, the coastline flowing like a riverbank, the land shaded a faint rose. This one looked like it had been fashioned by a child, the child being Evan Evans, captain of the Speedwell , our patched up, shrunken schooner. A squat Welshman, he was the only one of us comfortable in a cabin. He was bullish and ill-tempered; his voice hoarse from years of shouting into the wind. By then he was too fond of the rum to run a ship and we were always an unsteady vessel, from the moment we set sail. He put his glass down on the edge of the map.
‘This island here is where you’ll start right. I’d say there’ll be a good ten mile of seals laying on a plate for you.’
‘Aye and there might be some Maori warriors too, who for some strange reason think that the seals belong to them,’ said Scottish Jack.
‘It’s the end of the earth. There’s no-one there, seals and birds that’s all.’
‘You think my people are savages, but they know how to make boats. And that stretch of water … you’re sure it’s there?’
Scottish Jack had said his piece, leaving the captain no choice.
‘I know it to be there even if you don’t, because one of my people has been through it. We go where I say we go. The owner pays me to get him skins and that’s where they are. You don’t want to go? I’ll drop you off first landfall. You can go back to your own people, whoever they imagine they are.’
Scottish Jack was the son of a whaler and a Maori woman. Her Maori man had been killed and Scottish Jack, as his mother called him, had Maori brothers, knew the language and the ways, but he chose to go sealing with white men. I had been hunting with him before, around Van Diemen’s Land, but the waters there were bleeding dry. The captain shifted his stare back to the map.
‘I’ll head west to these islands, come back to pick you up with a pile of skins. Then we all work the main island.’
‘How long captain will we be on the rocks for?’
‘A month at a time. But you know the way it works Ruse. It’s not the weeks or the days, it’s the skins. If you don’t have enough skins when I come back, and there’s seals sat around, we all stay put until we do.’
‘We could do with a fourth man,’ I ventured.
‘Why?’
‘We could work in pairs, a rookery a piece. Still leaves you with five.’
‘Oh right, and one of them’s a cabin boy.’ He put his hand to his brow. ‘Take Williams then.’
‘Christ,’ said McIntyre, taking his pipe out of his mouth, ‘a few months sleeping in a cave with him, seals might not be the only thing I’m skinning.’
The captain’s eyes were off the map and on us.
‘You’ll have a lifeboat and a rifle. But don’t shoot a seal or go anywhere until I find you, understood?’
With that, he rub