When Charles Darwin and the Beagle arrived, only fifty years later, the colony
consisted of 23,000 people including convicts still serving their term of transportation,
emancipists, free settlers and the troops of the New South Wales Corps. Darwin went
ashore to explore the town and was impressed by the prosperity of the settlement. He
noted how a man of business, often an ex-convict, could hardly fail to make a large
fortune as a hotel licensee, shopkeeper or property speculator:
In the evening I walked through the town and returned full of admiration at the whole scene.- It is the most magnificent testimony of the power of the British nation. – My first feeling
was to congratulate myself, that I was born an Englishman. – Upon seeing more of the town
on other days, perhaps it fell a little in my estimation; but yet it is a good town; the streets
are regular, broad, clean and kept in excellent order; the houses are of a good size and the
shops excellent.
Darwin was surprised at the number of large houses just finished and the number of
new houses being built, yet everyone complained of the high rents and the difficulty
in procuring a house. Those currently living in Sydney, almost two centuries later,
will readily concur with this. Darwin took the opportunity to call on his friend and
shipmate, Conrad Martens, who had left the Beagle in Valparaiso and travelled to
Sydney on another vessel. Here he had established a studio on Bridge Street and
quickly become one of the leading artists in the colony. Both Darwin and FitzRoy
visited his studio to greet him and purchased paintings Martens had made of the
Beagle during its voyages around South America.
The Beagle was only going to be in Sydney for two weeks to resupply and compare
the longitude from their chronometers with that previously calculated for the Sydney
Observatory. Darwin wished to see as much of Australia as possible and make his own
collections of its unique flora and fauna. After only three days in town he hired a man
and two horses to take him to Bathurst, which was 190 kilometres into the interior and
an expanding pastoral centre. On the road from Sydney to Parramatta he saw chain
gangs of convicts working on public projects. He found an unsettling sight but it also
explained the rapid progress of the colony:
The most novel and not very pleasing object are the Iron gangs; or parties of Convicts, who
have committed some trifling offence in this country; they are generally dressed in yellow
and grey clothes, and working in Irons on the roads; they are guarded by sentries with loaded
arms - I believe one great means of the early prosperity of these Colonies is Government
thus being able to send large parties at once to make good means of communication nearer
the Settlers.84 Where Australia Collides with Asia
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