Fair Dinkum!

Irish jokes have raised a laugh ever since the First Fleet, and we’ve been “taking the Mickey” ever since.

The butt of the joke was usually a genial bumpkin named “Paddy”. But in fairness, his ignorance was not due to a mental deficiency, but because of a lack of education - the English had closed all the Catholic schools in Ireland.  And nearly all of the Irish were Catholic.

As a result, thousands of uneducated yokels were crammed into convict ships, to provide free labour and cheap jokes for the burghers of Botany Bay.

A story from those days went like this: When Paddy got off the boat, blinking in the sunlight, some joker collared him, pointed inland, and told him that China lay just over the horizon. And because Sydney Cove is on the south side of the harbour, the joker was pointing towards Goulburn!

He then sold Paddy a bogus map. Faced with slavery and the lash, Paddy dreamed of a fabled land where a man could relax in silk robes and sip tea out of a china cup.

The map had a drawing of a compass in the corner. Paddy couldn’t read, but he could surely follow the arrow of a compass. He stuck it inside the crown of his shapeless hat, and, when the guards were looking the other way, scarpered for China.

Now and then he would take off his hat to check his progress, and was pleased to find that his sense of direction was faultless.

The bodgy “compass” always pointed straight ahead. That night he slept out under the endless stars, a free man at last! But in the morning he made the mistake of putting his hat on back to front. Unwittingly he retraced his steps. Eventually he found a road, and saw a hut in the distance, with a friendly curl of smoke rising from the chimney.

He knocked on the door, and to his surprise, it was opened by a well-known colonel of the New South Wales Corps.

“Begosh and beggorrem!” stammered Paddy, “top of the morning to you sir!”

“But could you be telling me, yer honour, what has brought you all the way to China?” A tall story? Far-fetched it may seem, but it is solidly based on fact.

Although in reality it was a sergeant who answered the door, and the name of the Irishman was not recorded. The Governor made the following decree; Government and General Orders 9/1/1798:  ‘Some people recently arrived from Ireland, whose ignorance has made them the sport of wicked and designing knaves, have picked up the idle story of travelling to China where they might have every comfort without the trouble of labour. Unfortunately, the Irish couldn’t read, so they continued to disappear in droves. Many were never seen again. It was reported that fifty skeletons were strewn on the outskirts of Sydney.

On a mission

To avert a mass exodus, Governor Hunter hatched a brilliant plan: he told the convicts to elect four of their number to see for themselves what lay over the horizon. Four redcoats would be provided to protect them, and a bushman to guide them back.

The party set off in the summer of 1798, with a supply of ship’s biscuits for rations. It was blistering hot. The convicts soon gave up, and all but one returned with the military escort. The guide, with one stubborn convict and a lad named John Price for company, decided to press on as far as provisions would allow.

The leader was a fascinating character named John Wilson. He was a sailor, a thief, a bushranger, and the first white man to be adopted by the Aborigines. Wilson had been convicted in Lancashire for stealing, and sent to Australia on the First Fleet.

In 1792 his sentence expired and he went bush, to live with the Aborigines. Taking the name “Bunboe,” he led them on raiding parties around the fringes of old Sydney town, and was accepted as a chief of the tribe. Eventually he became such a nuisance that the word went out; surrender or be outlawed and shot on sight.

When he gave himself up he was clad in kangaroo skins, with his chest and shoulders scarred by tribal markings. He claimed to know the country for a hundred miles around. That knowledge was put to good use. He guided several exploration parties before the Governor sent him on what must surely be the strangest quest in colonial history.

As the little party forged southward, John Price, (whose job was to record their progress in a journal), described the first recorded sightings of the wombat, koala and lyre bird.  The biscuits ran out at the junction of the Wingecaribee and Wollondilly rivers, and they were obliged to turn for home, limping back to Sydney with strips of cloth wrapped around their bleeding feet.

The expedition was considered a success. They had succeeded in failing to find China, but had discovered a very useful salt deposit. Wilson was ordered to guide another expedition, led by Quartermaster Henry Hacking, to the salt.

Hacking then went home, but history gave him credit for Wilson’s discoveries. Wilson and two others trudged on, forging a route not far from the modern Hume Highway. They rationed themselves to two biscuits a day.

They splashed across Paddy’s River and strolled past the site of Marulan. Having run out of biscuits, they agreed to climb one last mountain for a final look at the country before turning back.

On March 23, 1798, white men stood on Mount Towrang and gazed for the first time on Goulburn Plains. They were 10 kilometres east of the site of the Goulburn Post Office.

So next time you’re relaxing in silk robes, sipping tea out of a china cup, lay the newspaper aside, and ponder this dilemma: Who should we credit to for the discovery of Goulburn Plains?

Should we call him a bushranger or a con-man … an Englishman … or an Aboriginal Chief from Lancashire?

Or was it an Irishman named Paddy?