Tom Appleby is set more than 200 years in the past. The First Fleet and early years of the New South Wales colony as seen through the eyes of a chimney sweep.
           I think I've known since I was a kid that I'd write a book like Tom Appleby one day- a book that didn't follow all the myths of starving convicts and the rotting First Fleet ships, but was based on first hand accounts of what really happened.
           When I was small my mother told me bedtime stories of early Sydney - stories from the books she'd studied at university, bits from Watkin Tench's diary. She also told me stories from my great something grandmother's diary, written in those early years of the colony. The diary has been handed down from eldest daughter to eldest daughter for nearly two hundred years, and it gives a very different picture of life in the early colony from the one in the history books.
           So from a child I knew the story told in the history books at school wasn't absolutely true: the convicts transported for stealing a loaf of bread, the rotting ships of the First Fleet, the failed crops so people starved. (Apologies to all teachers for the brat in the second row who kept telling them the school text books weren't accurate!)
                       By modern standards the journey of the First Fleet from England was hellish - crowded, stinking, poor food, stale water. By the standards of the day, however, it was a miracle voyage- in a nearly eight month journey only 3% of Phillip's charges died, and those mostly from childbirth or illness they had when they came aboard, far fewer than would have died if they had stayed in prison in England, or even in the slums of London. There were no major outbreaks of disease once the ships left England.
           Phillip went to extraordinary lengths to make sure the ships were sound, that the convicts were fitted with good clothes and had as much fresh food as they could eat both before they left and at Rio and Cape Town - not the salted or dried food that was the staple for sea journeys at that time.           
           As for the barren soil- blimey Charlie, this is Sydney we're talking about. The land at Sydney Cove proved much less fertile than on the Hawkesbury or at Parramatta, and wheat especially didn't thrive there. But vegetable gardens grew abundantly, and so did maize and potatoes, vines and fruit trees. By September of the first year Captain Philip wrote to Banks in England. 'Vegetables of all kinds are in plenty in my garden and I believe very few want them but from their own neglect'
           Captain Tench also recognised that given manure the soil of the colony would grow vegetables all year round. The early gardens gave their owners massive potatoes, giant cabbages, radish, turnips, beans, peas, tomatoes, endive, melons, cucumbers, pumpkins, strawberries, rhubarb, spinach... ( The people who underestimate how much vegetable food the early colony had obviously have never lived on their vegetable garden!)
           Fruit trees bore too, and grew so quickly that the settlers were stunned: in two years apples, oranges, figs, grapes and pomegranates and possibly others were bearing fruit.
           Gardening freshly cleared ground, however, was much harder work than the colonists had expected. Though by 1790 nearly all the colonists, free or convict, had vegetable gardens, many merely scratched the soil and didn't bother carting water in dry times, or failed to add animal manure or even dig out tree roots.
           The starving colony is another myth, though there is good reason for it. For many of the colonists believed they WERE starving.                  
           Certainly the first winter was difficult and scurvy and dysentery were a problem, though the rations were eked out by the first vegetables grown in the colony, as well as wild spinach, berries, seaweeds, game and other food, though fish seemed scarce.
           But by the first summer vegetable gardens were providing abundantly, including such staples as maize and potatoes and luxuries like melons, and there was wild food too.
           Fish were plentiful in summer. There was meat from kangaroos, parrots, wallabies, emus, even though game was getting scarcer and powder for the muskets in short supply too. The colony ate crows, ducks, swans, and probably wild eggs and oysters as well.
           In fact the colonists were probably eating better than most of them ever had before - and were healthier too. The medical records show a steadily improving state of health, with improved fertility and lower death rate, very little scurvy - presumably for those who refused native fruits and wouldn't eat vegetables - and no sign of deficiency diseases like pellagra.
           How has the myth arisen?
           To begin with, the colonists WERE hungry - hungry for the food they were familiar with, in particular meat and bread. Even when food was plentiful the marines and even the convicts grumbled about having to eat fish instead of pork and beef, or maize bread instead of wheat. Despite maize growing so much better than wheat in the first years of the colony, more land was planted to wheat, simply because they craved wheat flour.
           REAL food back in those days was bread and meat - preferably roasted. You only ate vegetables as a garnish for the meat, or fish for a first course. Only the poor ate lots of veg - and even the poor might have blade of beef for Sunday dinner, and a pile of potatoes, cooked in the baker's oven.
           Thomas Turner's diary of the time (he was a not very well off shopkeeper) talked of suppers of roast mutton, with a cold veal pastie, some fried veal, a cold ham, tarts etc - and this was just at an informal meeting with friends. Another day he ate a knuckle of veal and bacon, a beef pudding and hard pudding and turnips - the only vegetables served in the entire meal!
           By modern standards the settlers at Sydney Cove expected to eat enormous amounts of varied meats three times a day, accompanied by ale or spirits, bread and tarts and puddings. Vegetables were simply not 'real food' at all.
           But there were real scarcities too - by 1790 tools were scarce, and the colony had run out of candles, new clothes and many other necessities of a 'civilised life'. This added to a feeling of isolation, of fear, of depression, a feeling that they had been cut off from the world, as indeed they had. It was depression and uncertainty that gripped the colony in these years, more than genuine hunger.
           There is another factor too. Our knowledge of those days comes from those able to read and write, who wrote letters or diaries. They were the very ones to feel hungriest for their proper diet of meat and bread, and to find eating large amounts of vegetables so wearisome that often they went without. The marines official dinners had to be foregone, for lack of meat and bread. Even Governor Phillip was trying to ensure that the colony received the supply ships they desperately needed - and not just for food. Nor could he be sure that the sporadic hunting and fishing efforts would continue to be successful. He had to paint as black a picture as possible.
           The officers - most of whom didn't want to be in Australia in the first place -were not starving, though they may have thought they were. But they were depressed and isolated and, at times, scared of what further scarcity might be to come.
Transported for Stealing a Handkerchief
           Many convicts WERE transported for just that - because if they had been convicted of the total of their thefts they would have been hung, and judges wanted to give them a chance in the colonies. So they were convicted on the smallest charge possible, so they could escape the gallows. But most were genuine criminals, given a chance of a new life in New South Wales. (And over half the convicts returned home when they had served their sentence, preferring slums and poverty to free land and hard work.)
No Trained Farmers
           Governor Phillip had been a farmer in Hampshire; many of the marines had farming backgrounds, and some of the convicts had been farm labourers, if not farmers themselves.
           Yet, many of the convicts didn't know one end of a hoe from the other; nor were they interested in tilling the land.
Most convicts, like Tom, had been educated in the morals of Newgate or the prison hulks on the Thames, where you took what you could and thought mostly of yourself or you didn't survive. They found it difficult to cooperate with each other, much less with the land.
           But some skill was there and experience too, for those who wished to take advantage of it. According to Governor Phillip in 1791, and other witnesses too, almost everyone in the colony had their own garden and many had small orchards too.
           Another good - but exaggerated -tale is of the rapes and orgies on the first night the women came ashore, but that rests on the report of a man who wasn't even there, a surgeon on board ship. Captain Tench - who WAS there - just spoke of 'licentiousness' when the men and women came together. It was probably a fairly wild party, but not the horror it has been made out to be.
           When I was a child in the 1950s my grandmother felt it was important to tell me that even though our family had been here since the early settlement, none of her ancestors had EVER been convicts.
           Actually almost ALL of her ancestors who came to Australia had been convicts. All were well off by the end of their lives- and carefully hid they had ever been convicts.
           For them, as for Tom in this book, Australia was a truly generous land.