Watkin Tench

If Watkin Tench were alive today he would probably have his own show on cable TV, a rollicking reality adventure hour where the dashing young blade zipped all over the world, nipping in and out of photogenic troublespots, swashing his buckle and trying his luck with the local talent. Being born in 1758 however, he had to settle for three well received books, written with a big feather and pot of Indian ink. A shame for Tench, but good for us as two of these books, his accounts of the First Fleet and the settlement of Sydney, are far and away the best written and most gripping of all the foundation journals.

Tench was an officer of His Majesty's Marines, well before the Marines had established themselves as an integral and respected part of the British military. Indeed, in those days, the British military was really more of a private mercenary outfit, with a gold stamp from the monarch of the day to provide an air of legitimacy to all of the plunderin' and pillagin' and violent oppressin' they did in the King's name. Officers purchased their ranks on the understanding that they could make good their investment in a decent little war somewhere.

It was this system which later gave rise to the problems of the Rum Corps in Sydney, a gang of well armed, greedy social climbers who saw the colony as little more than a sweet plum waiting to be plucked.

In contrast with his peers, however, Tench made his spare coin from publishing. He fought in the American War of Independence as a young lieutenant, where he was captured and exchanged in 1778. Apart from that, and a brief stint in the West Indies, he was very quiet until arriving in Sydney.

His diary of the voyage and of the first years of settlement is still read two centuries later, perhaps because of all the men who made a record of that period, his point of view, his imagination, his use of language and the things he chose to care about seem most in synch with modern sensibilities. His publishers, Debretts, picked a winner for the ages. Where other contemporary writers now come off sounding like comic opera blowhards at best, and terrible bigots and sexist pigs at worst, Tench writes with real concern for all of the lesser beings placed within his care.

The female convicts he judged only on their actions aboard the ship and in the colony, not on whatever rumours of their wickedness and licentious nature gathered around them below decks as the Fleet waited to sail. Of all the prisoners he felt duty bound to note their ‘sobriety and decency'. His fairness was quite radical for the time. In the public mind the convicts on those 11 heaving galleys sent to the far side of the world were almost inhuman scum. The modern equivalent of Tench's generosity would be a military officer writing glowingly of an Al Qaeda terrorist held prisoner under his charge.

The description of the First Fleet's voyage he rendered in the fashion of a thriller and travelogue. His trip ashore with Surgeon White, looking to get laid in Rio de Janeiro, is the earliest surviving fragment of antipodean comedy writing, and Tench's wry handling of that incident established a well deserved reputation for a measure of wit and self awareness that was almost entirely lacking in his colleagues.

Not all of the young officer's stories were as light hearted, however. One of the stand-out passages from his early work was the mesmerising narration of an expedition in the hinterland of Sydney to massacre a group of natives held responsible for the death of a gamekeeper they had speared. Tench managed to layer his version of the revenge story with different levels of meaning, almost as if he knew people reading it in the far future would be judging his actions, just as he judged them, in private at the time. The raid was mostly a failure, and reading between the lines it is possible that he set out to make it so.

It's a weird thing, to find in his books the earliest outlines of the city which now surrounds us, the first descriptions of George Street, portraits of the harbour, the emergence of the city's east-west divide in the partitioning of the camp on the first day. The poor and down beaten to the west. Officers and gentlemen to the east. It's also kind of sobering to know that long after you and I and everyone now drawing breath in Sydney is gone, somebody, somewhere in the city will still be reading Tench.

Lifeline

1758 Born in Cheshire to a dance master Dad
1776 Joins Marines, fights Americans in War of Independence
1778 Captured by French, jailed in West Indies
1787 Signs book deal, sails with First Fleet
1788 Discovers Nepean River, writes first accounts of Sydney’s Aborigines
1789 Narrative of the Expedition to Botany Bay published. Translated into four languages.
1791 Departs Australia for Plymouth, UK
1792 Account of the Settlement at Port Jackson published
1793 Fights in Napoleonic Wars, captured
1827 Retires as Lieutenant-General, dies six years later at 74

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