The cabin in the woods

For months after a gang of bushrangers raided his farm at Prospect Hill, Charles Bishop was anxious to find a companion to live there with him.

The outlaws had woken him at 3 o’clock one morning in March 1804, demanding that Bishop give up his weapons. When he shouted back that he would shoot anyone who entered, the front and back doors were immediately broken open and two gun barrels pointed in from each direction.

Bishop stood at his fireplace, a pistol in each hand, ‘watching right and left’. The bushrangers rushed in, overpowered him, and left with his substantial arsenal and his convict servant, whom they pressed into service. ‘If I had had a 2nd person to have stood by me,’ Bishop wrote to the governor, ‘they would have been easily dispersed.’

Little more than a year earlier, Bishop had a business partner: naval surgeon and sailor George Bass. A merchant seaman working the new markets at the edges of the East India Company’s monopoly, Bishop had crisscrossed the oceans from India and Cape Colony to China and Chile. Reaching the southern shores of Australia, he entered into the brutal sealing industry, making use of unskilled ex-convicts to beat, skin and boil down seals.

In 1798, Bass helped the navigator Matthew Flinders survey those shores, and the following year he began a commercial partnership with Bishop. Their sealing ventures were truncated in 1803 when Governor Philip King introduced controls to limit the devastation of the seal populations, and the partners turned their attention north, to Tahiti, looking to capitalise on the flourishing pork trade.
 

But Bishop was beginning to show signs of madness, and Bass left him out of his ambitious plans for an illegal trade venture to Peru. ‘Bishop’s ill health has thrown all cares & concerns upon my head both for ship & cargo,’ he complained to his wife late in 1802. Writing to his father-in-law, he was less circumspect:

Bishop has been totally useless to me and the concern for many months past, indeed ever since I left him at Otaheite in February … I shall leave him here to recover. It is more than probable he will be in the grave before I return.

Bass sailed through the Heads in February 1803 and was never heard of again.

So when Bishop met a convict of unusual refinement at Judge Advocate Richard Atkins’ house, he was warm and inviting. The convict, John Grant, had been a young bankrupt poet in Buckinghamshire, England, when he fell for a rich heiress. His neighbour, the woman’s lawyer, helped arrange her marriage to a major in the army and cast aspersions on Grant’s character. In retaliation, Grant forced a duel upon the lawyer, and shot him in the upper thigh, ruining his jacket.

For this he was sentenced to death, then granted the mercy of transportation across the seas. With a satin waistcoat and a silver creamer, a harpsichord and a violin, Grant embraced his ‘emigration’ as a second chance. He befriended the officers of the Coromandel, tried to ignore the ‘199 abominable villains’ on board, and purchased a hogshead of rum (about 250 litres) in San Salvador to use as capital to establish a merchant business in the colony.

Sydney was a dynamic place with a volatile economy, where, according to deputy judge advocate David Collins, the ‘passion for liquor operated like a mania’. The officers of the New South Wales (‘Rum’) Corps boarded ships and bought goods at wholesale before retailing them at exorbitant prices. Rum quickly became a currency, used to pay convicts for taskwork completed outside their obligatory labour. Many consequently became bibulous and obstreperous.

As part of a general campaign against spirits, King confiscated John Grant’s rum and remunerated him at a reasonable rate. This rank injustice set Grant spiralling into a wild conflict, with King and the other representatives of the Crown, and with the ‘horrid system’ of transportation, which he derided as an affront to the Magna Carta and the glorious British common law.

Grant had been at Atkins’ house seeking patrons, and found one in Bishop: a ‘gentleman of great respectability’, and a man of ‘noble mind’, as ‘open and artless as my own’. He accepted Bishop’s invitation to live with him at Prospect Hill, in a little cottage set amid the verdant forest which sprang from rich volcanic soil. It was ‘a beautiful farm’, wrote Grant, only five miles from Parramatta through the woods, perched upon the tallest outcrop in the Cumberland Basin. Grant wrote happily of his first days ‘in such a sweet House of his Here (for I am now with him!)’. He ‘sometimes went out shooting Parrots etc. (with which the Woods abound) in Company with my friend Bishop,’ using paper bark for wadding.

The cottage in the woods at Prospect Hill, overlooking the plains below, captures something striking about life in colonial Sydney. It was an ‘idyll’, filled with beauty and warmth, and it was a house of madness. If we peel back the walls and doors, the poetry rushes out, the music fades, and in their place we find the anxiety of maritime trade, the violence of the frontier, and the severance of exile.
 

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Whether it was recognised formally, like Bishop’s, or whispered and joked about, like Grant’s, madness offers a glimpse of the breakdown of men and women in the midst of the great energies being expended to begin new lives. Tracing its contours and telling its stories helps us see a place like Sydney with new eyes.