“A fortnight passed before enough tents and huts were ready for the female convicts. On February 6 their disembarkation began, and all through the day the longboats plied between the transports and the cove, carrying their freight of women. Those who had decent clothes had put on all their finery: “Some few among them,” noted Bowes Smyth”, heartily glad to have them off his ship, “might be said to be well dressed.” The last of them landed by six in the evening. It was a squally day, and thunderheads were piled up in livid cliffs above the Pacific; as dusk fell, the weather burst. Tents blew away; within minutes the whole encampment was a rain-lashed bog.
The women floundered to and fro, draggled as muddy chickens under a pump, pursued by male convicts intent on raping them. One lightning bolt split a tree and killed several sheep and a pig beneath it. Meanwhile, most of the sailors on Lady Penrhyn applied to her master, Captain William Sever, for an extra ration of rum “to make merry upon the women quitting the ship.” Out came the pannikins, down went the rum, and before long the drunken tars went off to join the convicts in pursuit of the women, so that, Bowes remarked, “it is beyond my abilities to give a just description of the scene of debauchery and riot that ensued during the night.”
It was the first bush party in Australia, with “some swearing, others quarreling, others singing–not in the least regarding the tempest, tho’ so violent that the thunder shook the ship exceeding anything I have ever before had a conception of.” And as the couples rutted between the rocks, guts burning from the harsh Brazilian aguardiente, their clothes slimy with red clay, the sexual history of colonial Australia may fairly be said to have begun”[1]
