LIEUTENANT WILLIAM DAWES – THE ‘ETERNAL FLAME’ & THE SHOCK OF THE NEW SOUTH WALES CORPS
Wednesday, September 6th, 2017‘He [Dawes] was the scholar of the [First Fleet] expedition, man of letters and man of science, explorer, mapmaker, student of language of anthropology, teacher and philanthropist’. Professor G.A. Wood, Lieutenant William Dawes and Captain Watkin Tench, Royal Australian Historical Society Journal, Vol. 19, Part 1, 1924
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While Indigenous Australia knows of Marine Lieutenant William Dawes non-indigenous Australia ‘and from all the lands on earth we come’ know almost nothing of Dawes or of the ‘eternal flame’ and the remarkable role it played in the invasion of New Holland and the dispossession of its First Peoples?
‘English clockmaker John Harrison, a mechanical genius who pioneered the science of portable precision timekeeping…invented a clock that would carry the true time from the home port, like an eternal flame, to any remote corner of the world’. Dava Sobel, Longitude, Fourth Estate, 1998
It fetched up at one particular ‘remote corner of the world’ aboard HMS Supply one (1) of eleven (11) ‘First Fleet’ ships.
Warranne – Sydney Cove: 26 January 1788: K I – a faithful replica of John Harrison’s H-4 a ‘sea-going pocket watch’, was given into Dawe’s care by Britain’s Astronomer Royal Rev. Nevil Maskelyne
‘When leaving Botany Bay [for Sydney Cove 25 January 1788] Phillip noticed [La Perouse with] two French ships in the offing….there would seem to be “some justification for the saying that England won Australia by six days”. Edward Jenks, History of the Australian Colonies, cited H.E. Egerton, A short History of British Colonial Policy, Methuen, London 1928
1788 – Norfolk Island, 14 February: Three (3) weeks later K-1 left Sydney in HMS Supply to occupy Norfolk Island, in order to prevent La Perouse, ‘hanging around at Botany Bay’ claiming it for France.
1788 – Africa, 2 October on Sirius sailed to Cape Town for food.
1789 – Sydney, 8 May Sirius returned with 127,000 lbs. of flour; ‘after an absence of 219 days of which lay in Table Bay Cape of Good Hope, so that, although during the voyage we had fairly gone around the world, we had only been 168 days in describing that circles…makes it [Port Jackson] an important Post should it ever be necessary to carry…war in those seas…Coast of Chile and Peru’. [John] Hunter, Journal Transactions at Port Jackson and Norfolk Island. ?????
1790 – Norfolk Island, 6 March on Sirius to Norfolk Island with 50% of Sydney’s starving population.
1790 – 17 March: K-1 was removed from Sirius before she sank after striking a submerged reef off Norfolk Island.
1790 -Sydney, 6 April returned to Sydney on HMS Supply.
1790 – Jakarta, 17 April on Supply sailed to Batavia.
1790 – Sydney, 17 October arrived in Sydney on Supply from Jakarta where Lieutenant Ball had chartered a Dutch ship Waaksamheyd to bring tonnes of supplies to Sydney as soon as possible.
1790 – Sydney, 16 December Waaksamheyd arrived from Jakarta
Together ‘the man of science’ and the ‘pocket-watch’ that ‘wrested the world’s whereabouts from the stars’ can play a pivotal role in revealing the how ,why and wherefore of the ‘war nasty and decidedly lacking in glory’ Britain waged against Australia’s First Nations’ Peoples.
‘The decision to colonise New South Wales cannot be isolated from the strategic imperatives of the world’s first global struggle, the Seven Years’ War (1757-1763). . Jeffrey Grey, A Military History of Australia, Third ed. Cambridge University Press, 2008