Lamington National Park: The life of O’Reilly’s

Earlier this year we did a day trip to O’Reillys in the Scenic Rim and enjoyed short walks to Moran Falls and Python Rock where I took this photo below looking back to Moran Falls. Since then we’ve wanted to come back to the Lamington National Park resort and see more of its charms. The park is named for Charles Cochrane-Baillie, 2nd Baron Lamington, a prim-faced, mustachioed British politician and colonial administrator who was Governor of Queensland from 1896 to 1901, now most famous for the popular Australian sponge cake that bears his name. Appropriately we returned the week Lonely Planet’s 2022 travel guide named the Scenic Rim in the world’s top 10 tourist spots, with O’Reilly’s one of its prize destinations.

We booked three nights motel-style accommodation at the O’Reilly’s resort. The road up from Canungra is narrow and winding and it takes an hour or more to climb 35km up the hill. We took a diversion to Kamarun Lookout which has superb views over Lamington National Park and farmland below. The Romeo Lahey memorial lookout shelter, opened in 1970, recognises Lahey’s significant contribution towards Lamington becoming a national park in 1915. Lahey was an engineer and conservationist who knew Lamington’s value was in remaining “unimproved.”

Land on the northern slopes of the McPherson Ranges was thrown open in 1911 for dairy farmers. A group of Irish brothers and cousins from the Blue Mountains named O’Reilly were the only selectors. Within a year the O’Reillys opened a track to Mt Bithongabel and by 1914 tourists were paying to stay at slab huts and enjoy the scenery. After Lahey lobbied to open the national park, the O’Reillys resisted pressure to sell out and continued their own tourist venture, aided by a new road from Canungra in 1935.

The O’Reilly’s mythology began when an Airlines of Australia Stinson Model A plane disappeared on February 19, 1937 during a flight from Brisbane to Sydney with seven people aboard. Both pilots and two passengers were killed in the crash in the McPherson Ranges on the NSW border. One survivor died while attempting to aid two other survivors. The plane was missing for over a week with most searches being too far south. After a two-day hike, Bernard O’Reilly found it on March 1 after correctly guessing the aircraft failed to cross the border. Both survivors were rescued. The dramatic events brought prominence to the guesthouse. A replica of the plane stands proudly outside the resort beside a monument recreating the meeting between O’Reilly and the survivors.

In 2015 the Park celebrated 100 years since gazetting with the acknowledgement of Mick O’Reilly as Queensland’s first paid park ranger in 1915. He protected the park from illegal logging and poaching and began building tracks, a task completed by Depression-era work gangs. O’Reilly’s Resort remains strong on “pioneering ecotourism” though the numerous and admittedly cute crimson rosellas (shown) and king parrots could do with less feeding outside the cafe.

After checking in, we took a short walk around local attractions, including the treetop Booyong Walk. This 800m track is hoisted 16m above ground on nine suspension bridges. Peter O’Reilly, 86, (whose son Shane now runs the resort) had the idea for the world’s first tree top walk in 1987. A striking mararie fig tree spotted with blooming ferns and orchids was the focal point, surrounded by three suspension bridges. Due to huge public and media interest they installed an additional six bridges to avoid congestion, creating a one-way circuit.

We visited the nearby overgrown and labyrinthine botanical gardens which are neither part of O’Reilly’s nor Lamington National Park. According to an entrance sign they were established in 1966 by “Col Harman OAM and were maintained by him until his retirement from the Mountain”. The gardens are now maintained on a volunteer basis by the Green Mountains Natural History Association.

Amid the foliage I spotted this brown gerygone (gerygone mouki). The name pronounced ‘jer-IG-on-nee’, comes from Greek “the children of song”. This songster is found across eastern coastal Australia from Cooktown to Gippsland and lives in cool, subtropical rainforests and fringes, obtaining insects from leaves and branches, and sometimes captures its food in flight.

The unsettled weather that evening gave a spectacular-coloured sunset over the range to the south. We enjoyed the view with a beer before heading to the restaurant with its roaring fire, which was welcome despite it being October.

The following morning the weather cleared to give us the promised view from the motel room. We saw down to Mt Lindsay and Mt Barney and Mt Lindsay. Out of shot is Mt Warning, across the border. The caldera of the Mt Warning shield volcano eroded over 23 million years and has a diameter of over 40kms, making it the biggest erosion caldera in the southern hemisphere and one of the largest calderas on earth. Lamington spans the northern side of the caldera.

The centrepiece is the 21km border walk along the crest of the McPherson Ranges from O’Reilly’s to Binna Burra Lodge east to west. It crosses the ridges along the Queensland-NSW border on the southern end of the walk. The area is home to the Wangerriburra and Nerangballum people who used the ‘Kweebani’ (cooking) cave near Binna Burra and a traditional pathway passed through the southern section of Lamington National Park.

Barely 500m into the walk the first bird appears on the track, the brown cuckoo dove (Macropygia amboinensis). It was once called the “pheasant-tailed pigeon” because of its long tail, used as a counterbalance or support when foraging in the treetops, especially when hanging upside down or making an acrobatic manoeuvre to reach distant fruits or berries. It lives in rainforests and wet sclerophyll forests in north-eastern and eastern Queensland, and eastern coastal NSW.

A little further on, I stopped to admire the rainforest and was rewarded by a visit from this beautiful satin bowerbird (Ptilonorhynchus violaceus). This adult male has striking glossy blue-black plumage, a pale bluish white bill and a violet-blue iris, frustratingly camouflaged by a leaf in this shot I got before he quickly flew away. Another east coast rainforest bird, it is renowned for building and decorating bowers to attract females. The ground bower has two walls of sticks and is decorated with bright blue-coloured objects, used as a courtship arena in the breeding season.

We passed our first Antarctic beech (Nothofagus moorei), a reminder of Lamington’s Gondwana origins. This magnificent tree inhabits cool-temperate rainforests of northern NSW and southern Queensland up to 1500 metres. Most populations are now protected in national parks. This tree once covered Antarctica before Gondwana broke apart 180 million years ago. As the south became colder, the Antarctic Beeches moved to warmer climates. These trees grow by coppicing. The tree sends out new shoots radially from the base of the original trunk which eventually grow into clones of the parent tree forming a ring of trunks.

After 2km we branch off the Border Track to the grade four 16km-long Toolona Creek circuit. We quickly descend through the forest to Picnic Rock, a pleasant spot to sit and reflect on the natural beauty.

Nearby is Elabana Falls, the first of many waterfalls on this track. With much rain in recent days, the waterfalls are in full flow, gushing down the mountain. We were lucky with the weather early in the day, but after three hours, the heavens opened with a thunderstorm and hail. That was manageable but was a field day for segmented worms, better known as leeches, which feasted on our legs.

We pressed on to the glorious Chalahn Falls and watched the water tumbling off the mountain, cascading over mossy rocks and logs. It’s one of many creek crossings along this walk and with so much water it’s not always possible to get from one side to the other without getting wet feet. Care needs to be taken on the slippery rocks.

As we cross the creek there is a flash of blue from behind a rock, a Lamington spiny crayfish (Euastacus sulcatus). These shy crustaceans are restricted to streams bordered by rainforest and wet eucalypt forest above 300m altitude. They inhabit mountains in a crescent from Mount Tamborine to Lamington Plateau, west along McPherson Range and north via Cunningham’s Gap into the Mistake Mountains. A long lens camera was handy as it pays not to get too close. They can be aggressive, waving claws and hissing audibly, and can deliver a painful nip if handled.

The last of the great falls along this track is the one that gives its name to the creek and the walk, the Toolona Falls. The falls are divided into two, a plunge falls and a cascade. Afterwards it was a slow trudge up the hill to rejoin the Border Track at Wanungura lookout over which only clouds were visible thanks to steady rain. We climbed the peak of Mt Bithongabel (1200m) on the five kilometre trek back to the resort.

At base camp, we dried off the copious blood (leeches inject anti-clogging agent to increase bleeding) and had well-deserved showers before beer and dinner at the restaurant and an early night. We were rested and looking forward to our day 3 hike on the West Canungra Creek circuit, with a pleasing dry forecast. This is another grade 4 hike, this one 16km long which quickly veers off the Border Track northwards down the hill deep into the rainforest.

We descend past Darraboola Falls, through lush rainforest dotted with red cedar (toona ciliate) and pick up the West Canungra Creek at Yerralahla (blue pool).

We follow the West Canunga Creek for several kilometres, crossing at regular intervals. Like yesterday it was not always possible to cross without getting wet feet due to the volume of water. The creek descends into Canungra before joining the Albert River which joins the Logan River and enters Moreton Bay near Lagoon Island.

For someone used to the brown and red dirt of North West Queensland, the green hues in Lamington National Park were a sight for sore eyes. The better weather means the leeches aren’t as big a problem today, though we still pick up one or two.

There’s time for one last waterfall before we starting climbing back up, this one the Yanbacoochie Falls.

There’s a choice of return tracks to the Resort, either 5.3km via the Box Circuit Track and the Toolona Track or 5.8km via more of the Toolona Track. After an exhausting, hard and damp walk we’re happy to take the slightly shorter route home, though like yesterday it is well over six hour’s hiking. There’s one last surprise on the way home, a curious Australian king parrot (Psittacus scapularis) which got up close and personal. They range from north and central Queensland to southern Victoria and this one is used to human contact. We were warned by fellow hikers who just passed by, that it might land on your head, but this one was content to watch closely. It ended a pleasant few days of walking. We could have done without the leeches but they are part of the rich Lamington experience, and it could have been worse – such as ticks or the infamous gympie gympie stinging tree. Gondwana still lives in the Australian rainforest.

Great South Land: the Australian voyages of William Dampier

Australia’s settler history is defined by January 26, 1888, the date Arthur Phillip raised the flag at Sydney Cove to formally begin settlement. But one hundred years earlier, almost to the day, another Englishman landed on Australian shores whose accounts excited the imagination of his homeland and the sailors that followed him.

Dampier holding his book, a painting by Thomas Murray (c. 1697–1698)

Though the Dutch dominated early European adventures in Australia, the first English ship to visit was The Trial which sighted land on May 1, 1622 near North West Cape en route to the East Indies. The ship ran aground on Trial Rocks in the Monte Bello Group with survivors in longboats reaching Batavia. Captain John Daniel of the London also made a little known sketch of the Wallabi Group of the notorious Houtman Abrolhos Islands in 1681. However, the most important English arrival of the 17th century was the Cygnet. Its landfall at Pender Bay, south-west of Cape Leveque on January 4, 1688 was documented by crewman William Dampier. Dampier had a varied life as a sugar planter, timber getter, and merchant seaman and was an amateur scientist and keen observer of natural history and native peoples.

Dampier was also a buccaneer, which as Rob Mundle explains in Great South Land, an account of 17th century visits to Australia, was another word for pirate. The difference between pirates and buccaneers was the latter were sanctioned by their country to harass enemies on the high seas. Dampier said he became a pirate “more to indulge my curiosity than to get wealth”.

Dampier was born in 1651 in Somerset, the son of a tenant farmer. As a teenager he was indented to a boat captain in Weymouth. Aged 18 he travelled to Newfoundland but was “pinched with the rigour of that cold climate”. Preferring the tropics he signed on to the Indiaman John and Martha bound for Java and was “shown the ropes” – the techniques to trim, reef and haul up the sails.

Aged 21 he enlisted in the Navy and with the Third Anglo Dutch War raging he was posted to the Royal Prince. He served in the battle of Schooneveld which the English lost. Dampier fell sick requiring a year of shore leave. He went back to sea to Jamaica where he worked on plantations and hitched a lift on a ship taking logwood timber from Mexico’s Bay of Campeche to London. Logwood was valuable for its purplish-red dye and in describing his visit to Mexico, Dampier introduces a new word to the English language: “Here are poles to hang their nets on, and barbecues to dry their fish.”

Spanish pirates attacked the ship while sailing from Mexico to British Jamaica, and they made a narrow escape under fast sail. Despite nearly sinking, the voyage was profitable and Dampier quickly returned to Campeche. But a row between England and Spain crippled the industry and Dampier became a privateer. Based in Jamaica, Dampier joined crews plundering wealth from Mexico and Panama, disrupting Spanish trade with the blessing of the Royal Navy.

Dampier was tiring of the Caribbean by 1683 and sailed in the Revenge under John Cook. Like his more famous namesake a century later this Captain Cook was bound for the South Seas, via Cape Horn. There was still pirate work to be done and they took a Danish vessel carrying 60 African female slaves they afterwards called Bachelor’s Delight, which the crew transferred to, burning the Revenge.

In his travels he landed twice at Juan Fernandez Island in the Pacific, both times picking up castaways. The first time was 1684 where they found a “Moskito Indian” they called Will, marooned for three years. The second time in 1709 Dampier’s crew found Scottish castaway Alexander Selkirk marooned four years, “a man clothed in goat skins, who looked wilder than the first owners of them” as a sailor said. Selkirk’s rescue inspired Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe while Will was the prototype of Defoe’s Friday.

In January 1688 Dampier was navigator on the Cygnet under appropriately-named captain Charles Swan (whose cruelty to crew saw him replaced by John Reed in Mindanao). The pirate ship took a looping course to avoid enemy attack when it entered the Timor Sea. Dampier, a prodigious diarist, noted they came to the New Holland west coast to “see what the country would afford us”. They arrived at King Sound on January 4 where they careened to clean the hull below the waterline.

The men camped ashore where Dampier observed local flora and fauna. Like the Dutch, Dampier didn’t think much of the natives calling them “the miserablest people in the world”. Nevertheless his diary gave Europe the first detailed description of Australians, and influenced the opinions of Cook and Banks, sitting comfortably with the settler image of native inhabitants inferior even to Africans. “The Hodmadods of Monomatapa” (as Dampier called the south-west African Khoikhoi people), “though a nasty people, yet for wealth are gentlemen to these; who have no houses, and skin garments, sheep, poultry, and fruits of the earth, ostrich eggs, as the Hodmadods have; and setting aside their human shape, they differ but little from brutes. They are tall, straight-bodied, and thin, with small long limbs. They have great heads, round foreheads, and great brows. Their eyelids are always half-closed to keep the flies out of their eyes.”

Dampier emphasised Australian grotesqueness: “They have great bottle-noses, pretty full lips and wide mouths. The two fore-teeth of their upper jaw are wanting…neither have they any beards. They are long-visaged and of a very unpleasing aspect, having no graceful features in their faces.” Their only clothes were “a piece of rind of a tree, tied like a girdle about their waists, and a handful of grass” while they slept in the open in the company of “20 or 30 men, women and children”.

Dampier said their food was fish from stone weirs, broiled on coals and eaten in a group. He saw no signs of worship and they defended themselves with weapons: “Some had wooden swords, some had a sort of lances. The sword is a piece of wood shaped somewhat like a cutlass. The lance is a long straight pole sharp at one end; and hardened afterwards by heat. I saw no iron or any sort of metal.”

After two months at King Sound, navigator Dampier guided the Cygnet past the Cocos Islands to Sumatra. There he jumped ship and survived a perilous outrigger journey to Aceh where he stayed a year, joining trading missions to Malacca. He worked in India a year before finally sailing back to England in 1691 after 13 years’ absence. Little is known of his life for the next seven years though Mundle thinks he may have worked on a Spanish warship plundering French goods in the West Indies.

Dampier became famous through his writings. A New Voyage Around the World published in 1697 became an instant best-seller, translated into French, Dutch and German, creating a new genre of travel writing. In 180,000 words Dampier took readers on a exotic trip around the world. The book brought many new words into the English language besides barbecue: avocado, breadfruit, cashew, chopsticks, posse, serrated and tortilla. His book was widely consulted and influenced Coleridge’s Rime of the Ancient Mariner and Swift’s Gullivers Travels. The New Holland chapter was a highlight, despite his poor opinion of Australians.

In 1699 the book attracted the interest of the Admiralty earning Dampier his first command, a scientific expedition of New Holland and the Pacific. The Roebuck was a former warship which gave its new commander problems in the voyage. Dampier also had a difficult second-in-command Lt George Fisher, and neither man respected the other. Dampier caned Fisher for insubordination and, fearful of a mutiny, expelled him in the Brazilian port of Bahia. Leaving too late to chance Cape Horn in winter the Roebuck crossed the Cape of Good Hope arriving at the west coast of New Holland on August 1, 1699.

Dampier searched for a safe anchorage amid hazards of high winds, rocks and shoals. Eventually he found the northern tip of Dirk Hartog Island and sailed into a large sound he named Shark’s Bay (Shark Bay). Dampier saw eagles, small birds and a “sort of raccoon…and sort of iguana”. After a week they found food but no fresh water so turned north again. Around August 20 they arrived at Exmouth Gulf where he monitored strong tides and wondered if there was a way south of New Guinea to the Pacific (The English had no knowledge of Spaniard Torres’s secretive 1606 journey through the strait that now bears his name until a century later, and assumed Carpentaria was connected to New Guinea). Dampier named Rosemary Island for shrubs on the island, near the town and archipelago that now bear his name.

On August 31 they anchored and met “New Hollanders”. Dampier sent two men to “purposely catch one of them”. One was shot and a sailor speared, “(A shipmate) had a cutlass and they had wooden lances; with which, being many of them, they were too hard for him… I chased two more that were by the shore but fearing how it might be with my young man… closely engaged with them…one of them threw a lance at me, that narrowly missed me. I discharged my gun to scare them but avoided shooting any of them… the gun had little frighted them at first, yet they soon learned to despise it, tossing up their hands and crying pooh, pooh, pooh and coming on afresh with a great noise. I thought it high time to charge again and shoot one of them which I did.”

Both sides retreated with their wounded. Dampier was “very sorry for what had happened”. Despite the constant sight of smoke it was his only encounter with Indigenous people on this voyage. Dampier described a chief or “kind of prince or captain … active and courageous” and the only one painted in white paste on his face, breast and arms. Dampier dismissed them as “the same blinking creatures” as he saw 200kms further north on his first voyage.

They dug two metre wells but found no water. Heading towards King Sound which he explored in 1688 the water situation forced him to abandon plans to test his theory on the gap between New Guinea and New Holland. Instead he headed to the safety of Timor. They were not welcomed, with the Dutch suspicious after French pirates ransacked their fort two years earlier. After a standoff they were allowed to land at Kupang. They moved on to a friendlier Portuguese settlement on the island and were told the north-west monsoon was due, dashing Dampier’s hopes of circumnavigating the Great South Land. After repairs they set off at year’s end to explore the New Guinea coast which he sighted near Aiduma Island on the first day of the new century. By February 4 they rounded the north-western cape of Papua. He named St Matthias Islands for the saint’s day (February 25) and sailed past what would become New Ireland where he saw “many smokes”.

In March 1700 he found another large island becoming the first European to land on what became New Britain. He charted the Dampier Strait between New Britain and Umboi linking the Solomon Sea with the Bismarck Sea. New Holland’s east coast was tantalisingly close. But aware he could not push his luck with the weather he headed back to England via the Cape of Good Hope. The ship would not make it to the end, unstable from the beginning and battered by the journey. They got to Cape Town by year’s end and sailed up to Ascension Island. In February 1701 Dampier noted Roebuck “sprung a leak” and anchored her off the island.

As the water rose, they found a sprung plank but it was too late. The plank rotted and Dampier moved Roebuck closer to shore to save the crew and cargo. All made it to shore safely though Dampier lost most of his New Holland specimens. Ascension was uninhabited but they found water and goats left by previous travellers and, being on a shipping lane, they were picked up within a week by British ships which took them to Barbados.

Dampier hitched a lift back to England arriving in August 1701, two and a half years after he left. The inquiry into the sinking absolved him but former second-in-command George Fisher used the intervening time to prepare charges. A court martial found Dampier guilty of “very hard and cruel usage” of Fisher. He was ordered to forfeit his pay as commander of the Roebuck and declared unfit to manage another Navy vessel.

The judgement did not ruin the irrepressible Dampier. The Royal Society was delighted with the specimens that survived the sinking and Dampier described the trip in his second book A Voyage to New Holland (1703). That book also fired the European imagination with Daniel Defoe naming his own book after Dampier’s book and Swift drawing on it for Gulliver’s stay in Houyhnhnms Land. Dampier went back to sea around the world as a privateer, aged 52. There was even another voyage four years later, where they rescued Selkirk. That voyage made Dampier the first man to circumnavigate the globe three times. He died at home in London in 1715 aged 63.

His influence on European views about Australians was profound. Archaeologist John Mulvaney said Dampier’s poor opinion of the locals was biased by wet season behaviour and the fact they found no water or stores. Yet it is easy to understand how he caused a sensation. His description of Aboriginal culture is the most detailed by any visitor before Cook, with observations on group size, tooth avulsion, swimming between islands, stone fish traps and spears and clubs. Mundle says Dampier was a great seafarer, navigator, naturalist and author, though less successful as a pirate. He says the most fitting tribute was in the church in his home village of East Coker, his memorial calling him “an exact observer of all things in Earth, Sea and Air.”

Arthur Phillip: British envoy

Arthur Phillip at Botany Bay. Print by Arthur Hogg, After Francis Wheatley

Arthur Phillip is a critical figure in the development of white Australia. Anthropologist Bill Stanner said the country’s path was set in the five years after the First Fleet landed, when Phillip was the all-powerful governor. But Phillip lived for 75 years and while his Sydney experience crucial informed Australia’s story, it was a small part of his lifetime service in the British Navy. Phillip’s story is told in Michael Pembroke’s biography Sailor, Mercenary, Governor, Spy (2013).

Phillip was born in 1738, a time of growing confidence for Britain’s place in world affairs. His father was German Protestant refugee seafarer Jacob Pfeiffer who changed his name to the English-sounding Phillip. He married a London widow but disappeared a year into young Arthur’s life. Aged nine, Phillip followed his father to sea in a British naval vessel. By 13 he was one of 100 poor boys accepted in the Charity School of the Royal Hospital for Seamen in Greenwich. He learned arithmetic and navigation, skills that helped him draw landscapes and coastlines accurately later in life.

Aged 15 he enrolled on the whaling ship Fortune in a seven year apprenticeship. Phillip sailed the dangerous waters of the Arctic chasing the Greenland Right Whale close to the North Pole. In winter the Fortune plied the Mediterranean trade route carrying olive oil, currants, salt and silk. In 1755 the Seven Years War forced European nations to side with Britain or France in the first global conflict. Britain needed sailors such as James Cook who served with distinction in Canada. Phillip, then 17, abandoned his apprenticeship to sign up for the Buckingham, a ship of the line which was ordered to defend British Minorca from the French naval base force at Toulon. When the French broke off, the British unexpectedly sailed away to Gibraltar, leaving Minorca to its eventual loss. Phillip wrote to his elder sister about the battle he saw at close quarters condemning his own leader Admiral Byng for his “downright Cowardice”. Byng was court-martialed and executed, after King George II failed to exercise clemency.

Phillip served on other ships in the war, including the frigate Aurora. Frigates were versatile and quick and a good training ground for young officers. Phillip sailed to the West Indies in 1760 on the Stirling Castle where he was promoted from midshipman to fourth lieutenant. This made him a commissioned naval officer, the effect of wartime, where death and promotion came quickly. The Stirling Castle was part of the attack on Spanish Havana protected by the mighty fort El Morro. When it fell after siege, Phillip returned to England on a captured Spanish ship and made an influential ally in expedition leader Augustus Harvey.

In the 1763 peace treaty, Britain won Canada and West Indies, as well as control of the Mediterranean, and growing power in India. Phillip used the peace to marry a rich widow twice his age. He temporarily retired to become a gentleman farmer in the New Forest. The marriage lasted six years and Phillip spent five years in French wool towns as well as Toulon, home of France’s navy. It’s not clear what he was doing but he made money in the cloth trade. He held the rank of fourth lieutenant and in 1873 Hervey, then Naval Lord, called him up as an intelligence officer in France.

A year later Hervey gave his young protege leave of absence to join the Portuguese Navy in the Third Colonia War (1773-77) with Spain which led to the creation of Uruguay. Colonia on the River Plate, 2000km from Rio, was the centre of disagreement. If the Spanish controlled it, Britain would lose influence and trade in the region. Phillip was assigned to observe the Spanish and Portuguese colonies and survey thousands of miles of South America. He was also promoted to captain.

In 1776 Phillip was the commodore of naval forces at Colonia. He kept the peace, kept the sea lanes open and kept the Spanish in check. After he was ordered home, Colonia was overrun while Britain was distracted by the American war of independence. Phillip helped capture a leading Spanish ship San Agustin, which he then commanded. He gained the reputation of an officer “of great truth and very brave”. He continued to serve his true employers, the Royal Navy, with naval intelligence and careful charts. The end of the Spanish war was the end of his commission and he rejoined the Navy proper.

A new war beckoned with France over its support for the rebel American colonies. In 1778 Phillip was appointed first lieutenant and second-in-command of the Alexander in the Channel Fleet. Aged 40 in 1779, he was appointed captain and took over the Ariadne a year later. When Spain entered the war on France’s side, Phillip’s advice to the Admiralty on its South American interests was crucial though an expedition into the southern Atlantic did not eventuate. He sailed the Ariadne to Cuxhaven, Germany but the ship iced up and was saved by running onto the mud. He was stuck there for two months from late December but he used the time to recruit sailors for the Royal Navy. Once the ice cleared, he delivered German troops to England to support their Hanoverian monarch George III.

In 1782 Phillip, now 44, was appointed captain of his first line-of-battle ship, Europe. He set off for battle unaware Britain had exchanged peace declarations with France to recognise the new United States. When he arrived at Madras after 12 months at sea his orders were to go home again. The peace was looking vulnerable again and the admiralty put Phillip’s fluent French, German and Portuguese to good use as a spy to French ports including Brest and Toulon. His reports to under-secretary of the Home Office Evan Nepean were invaluable insights on the rapid expansion of the French Navy. Phillip found out about French voyages to the southern seas including Laperouse’s expedition to New Holland.

Phillip finished covert service in late 1786 to support another Nepean plan. With British jails full, pressure was growing to start a prison colony with the decision to start a settlement in New South Wales. It would also serve British interests in a global commercial network and nearby Norfolk Island would be hopefully be a source of naval materials. The deciding factor was a treaty between France and Holland with France likely to extend naval capability in the East Indies. There was also the need to confirm Cook’s conditional claim to possession of the eastern half of New Holland, especially with concerns Laperouse had the same idea.

Phillip was well known to London decision makers, Nepean, and Admiralty secretary Philip Stephens. Nepean overrode concerns of First Lord of the Admiralty Richard Howe in appointing Phillip. His familiarity with the Canaries, Rio and Cape Town ports also worked in his favour as did his farming experience. He received his commission as governor of New South Wales on October 12, 1786. His powers were formidable, authorised to govern alone without a council.

Phillip had to fit out his expedition with food, medicine, clothing and building supplies to last many years. The ships were fitted out for a long and dangerous voyage for many people unused to the sea. As he explained, the fleet could not be “sent to the extremity of the globe as (if) they would be sent to America – a six week’s passage.” He sent 800 letters and had endless discussions with the Navy Board, the Victualling Board, the Board of Ordnance, the Board of Longitude and the Sick and Hurt Board for surgeons and anti-scorbutics. Phillip knew the benefit of oranges against scurvy (the link to Vitamin C was not yet proven) and stocked up in Tenerife.

There were eleven vessels in the convoy, but only two, the Sirius and Supply, were Royal Navy vessels, and minor rated ones. The other nine were store and transport ships which needed substantial modification to carry hundreds of convicts. There were thousands of barrels stored on the lowest decks, as well as wood, coal, livestock, plants and seeds, tools and agricultural equipment, 10,000 bricks, 4200 bibles and prayer books, and a piano. The most important piece of equipment was the Board of Longitude’s chronometer to determine longitude, the same one taken by Cook on his second and third voyages, named K1 after its designer Kendall.

Phillip considered New Holland could “prove the most valuable acquisition Great Britain ever made” but that wouldn’t happen if ruled as a gulag. His job was to ensure it became a self-supporting community underpinned by the prospect of future emancipation and a simple rural society improving the land. He knew Cook was wrong to say that land was home to few Aborigines. He wanted to proceed “without having any dispute with the Natives” and persuade them to live with the colony.

The expedition set off Sunday, May 13, 1787 with 800 convicts as well as 30 children. They sailed for Tenerife facilitated by north-east trade winds. To avoid the doldrums they went south-west amid high temperatures and heavy tropical rain, which the convicts had never experienced. After two months they arrived in Rio, where Phillip was warmly welcomed as a returning hero. A month later they went south-east across the stormy South Atlantic arriving in Cape Town in mid October. They spent another month adding to the victuals but the suspicious Dutch were less welcoming than the Portuguese. It was the last hint of Europe, as they set off into the unknown.

Off the coast Phillip moved from the Sirius to the Supply taking K1. Also joining him were six artificers and convicts with carpentry and trade skills. He wanted to get to Botany Bay two weeks ahead of the convoy. They crossed the wide unbroken Southern Ocean through the Roaring Forties powered by ocean currents and constant western winds. The ships experienced heavy gales and huge seas and daily storms battered the ships. By early January Phillip arrived at the South West Cape of Van Diemen’s Land, matching Cook’s longitude recordings. They headed north to New South Wales. Despite Phillip’s plan, the entire fleet arrived at Botany Bay within two days of each other between January 18-20.

The great shock was the arrival of two more ships on January 24, Compte de Laperouse’s Astrolabe and Boussole (“compass”). The Frenchman had heard of Phillip’s expedition in Russian Kamchatka from despatch riders sent across Siberia. His orders were to investigate British actions. Phillip didn’t welcome their arrival and he ignored them as he unloaded convicts. But open, exposed, and waterless Botany Bay did not live up to Joseph Banks’ bountiful description. On January 21 Phillip took a longboat to nearby Port Jackson which looked more promising and on the 25th and 26th he moved the entire fleet into the new harbour. He sent Gidley King back to Botany to speak to Laperouse perhaps fearful the Frenchman might recognise Phillip from his spying days. King was then sent to secure Norfolk Island with a small group of marines and convicts.

Phillip was happy with his new home recording the satisfaction of “finding the finest harbour in the world”, high praise from a man familiar with Rio, Toulon and Havana. Phillip named the cove Sydney for the Home Secretary and put his men to work, erecting tents, cabbage tree huts and unloading stores. They quickly built a hospital, a marine barracks and store-houses. Phillip’s biggest problem was not the convicts or the local inhabitants but his marines under cantankerous Major Robert Ross. Ross was sullen and unhelpful while Ross’s men were recalcitrant and lawless, stealing food from public stores. Phillip had six of them hanged for stealing and he put convicts in charge of the night watch despite Ross calling it an insult to the corps.

Phillip’s egalitarianism showed with the first civil trial allowing a convict couple sue a ship’s captain for theft during the voyage. He was more patrician with his own home, a two-storey pilastered Georgian governor’s residence. His biggest priority was land cultivation with help of convict Henry Dodd (who assisted Phillip in his farming days). They found the dark loams of Rose Hill and by 1790 were producing “exceedingly good” corn.

Phillip was less successful with the Eora people, with no understanding he was destroying their hunting and fishing grounds. He kidnapped Arabanoo but learned little from the terrified young man. A more mysterious threat was smallpox which killed off half the natives in early 1789 including Arabanoo, a death which deeply affected Phillip. Frustrated by a starving colony and aloof Eora, he kidnapped two more men later that year, Colby and Bennelong. Bennelong was a success and he referred to Phillip as “father” while the latter called him “son”. But Bennelong disappeared after six months, leaving Phillip back at square one.

On September 7, 1790, Phillip was on a longboat off Manly when he spotted Bennelong among a throng at Manly Cove and insisted he go ashore against his crew’s advice. Suddenly a man launched a spear at Phillip and its wooden barb pierced a clavicle. Phillip struggled to the boat and they fled back to Sydney. His surgeons thought he was dying but the spear did not injure any major anatomical structures and he recovered within six weeks.

Bennelong then re-appeared without notice and re-settled in the Governor’s residence with his retinue. Phillip built a house for them on what became Bennelong Point (home of the Opera House). The peace was smashed again in December 1790 when warrior Pemulwuy speared Phillip’s gamekeeper John McIntyre. Unlike Phillip’s spear, this one was studded with lethal jagged stones, likely for committing some serious crime against Eora laws. Though Phillip wanted no retribution after his own spearing, this time he was furious and demanded the head of ten natives, later reduced to six. The manhunt led by marine Watkin Tench was a shambles and no one was captured, something Phillip was probably secretly happy with.

Phillip was less happy with his own health. In letters he complained of kidney inflammation and a pain in the side for more than two years. He likely had kidney stones leading to painful nights and increasing disability. In November 1791 he requested to resign his commission and repeated the request in April 1792 “as my bad state of health continues”. Finally on October 7, 1792 his request was accepted and he left the colony on December 10 just as New South Wales’s early famine eased with signs of a sustainable community.

Phillip took with him four kangaroos as well as dingoes and birds. Also accompanying him were Bennelong and his young friend Yemmerrawannie (who died in England though Bennelong returned home). They arrived in Portsmouth on May 19, 1793, almost six years since the First Fleet left the same port. There Phillip heard familiar news: England was preparing for another war with France. After recovering his health, the Admiralty recalled him to active service in 1796, aged 57. His role in the Napoleonic Wars was uneventful, patrolling the channel, blockading Cadiz port and cooling his heels in port while younger captains got the glory.

He then commanded the Hampshire Sea Fencibles, a home-based fisherman’s militia and for six years he supervised recruitment and trained volunteers. He was also ordered to review the Impress Service (press gang) requiring a long trip around all of Britain’s ports though the Navy ignored his report to fix financial irregularities. He retired in 1805 and he and third wife Isabella became part of the Bath social circle. But in February 1808 Phillip suffered a paralytic stroke losing the use of his right arm and leg.

He continued to offer advice to Australian administrators until he died of natural causes at home on August 31, 1814. He was buried at the medieval church of St Nicholas, Bathampton, near Bath. On the north wall of the church an inscription reads “Near this tablet are the remains of Arthur Phillip Esq., Admiral of the Blue, first Governor & Founder of New South Wales.” The church contains an “Australian Chapel” in the south aisle with kangaroos in stain glass windows. In nearby Bath Abbey the Australian government erected a memorial tablet to the “Founder and First Governor of Australia” to whose “Indomitable Courage, Prophetic Vision, Forbearance, Faith, Inspiration and Wisdom was due the Success of the First Settlement in Australia at Sydney 26 January 1788.”

Despite Australian homage and calls from Geoffrey Robertson for him to re-buried in Sydney, the “Admiral of the Blue” reminds us Phillip is at home in eternal rest in the West Country. ABC reporter Scott Bevan, who made a feature-length documentary in 2015 with a similar title to Pembroke’s book called Arthur Phillip: Governor, Sailor, Spy, told the Sydney Morning Herald Philip remained first and foremost an Englishman. “As much as he played this role in … shaping and helping to lay the foundations of who we are and where we’re from,” said Bevan, “he is nonetheless an Englishman and despite the crucial role he played in Australia’s history would want to remain in his native England.”