Activity 1: Investigating the Journal

Step 1: Examine a page from the Journal

Arthur Bowes Smyth, Journal of Arthur Bowes Smyth, 1787, nla.gov.au/nla.obj-233345951

Share the fourth page of Arthur Bowes Smyth’s journal with your students. Encourage them to use their “history detective” skills to find the following information:

• What was the Lady Penrhyn?
• Can you find the list of passengers? Name one of them.
• Can you find the list of marine officers and men? Name one of them.
• How many boys were on board?
• Can you find some of the jobs listed next to people’s names? List two of these jobs.
• The lists do not include the names of most people on the Lady Penrhyn. Who else might have been on board, and why might their names have been listed separately?

Step 2: Brainstorming the purpose of the First Fleet

Using the information students gather, brainstorm why the First Fleet came to Australia. You can use Thomas Rowlandson’s artwork Convicts Embarking for Botany Bay (1800) as a visual stimulus for this discussion.

Thomas Rowlandson, Convicts embarking for Botany Bay, 1880, nla.gov.au/nla.obj-135232630

Background information

Thomas Rowlandson’s artwork depicts convicts being loaded onto a rowing boat for a long journey across the ocean. The two corpses hanging from a gibbet are a gruesome reminder of the alternative to transportation.

Activity 2: Analysing journal extracts

Step 1: Read extracts from Bowes Smyth’s journal

Read the following selected extracts from Bowes Smyth’s journal with your students, covering the period from March 1787 to January 1788:

• Friday 22 March came on board the ship at the Mother-bank near Portsmouth (page 5)
• Friday 20th a fine day with a fresh breeze—a large and beautiful rainbow seen this day about 8 o’clock without any rain preceding its appearance, which the seamen say is a sign of the wind. Several large dolphins seen astern which would not take the baits (page 33)
• Wednesday 19 a very wet day and frequent very violent squalls of wind, about 11 o’clock a.m. some person fell overboard from the Charlotte … have not learnt who fell overboard or if they were saved (page 58)
• Saturday 1st December This day one of the convicts on board our ship (Margarett Brown) scalded her foot very bad. Tis very extraordinary how very healthy the convicts on board this ship in particular, and indeed in the fleet in general have been (page 78)
• Tuesday 25 December 1787 Xmas Day We are now about two thousand miles distant from the South Cape of New Holland, or Van Diemen’s Land, or otherwise Adventure Bay, with a most noble breeze which carries us at 8½ knots per hour, which we hope will enable us to see land in about a fortnight (page 97)
• 26 January … about 7 o’clock p.m. we reach the mouth of Broken Bay, Port Jackson, and sailed up into the cove where the settlement is to be made … the finest terraces lawns and grottos with distinct plantations of the tallest and most stately trees I ever saw in any noble man’s gardens in England cannot exceed in beauty those which nature now presented to our view (page 131)

Step 2: Discuss the extracts

As a class, discuss what these extracts tell us. Ask your students:

• What challenges did people on the First Fleet face during their voyage?
• Why do you think they were trying to bait the dolphins?
• What pleasant experiences does Bowes Smyth describe in his journal?
• What was Bowes Smyth’s first impression of Sydney Cove?

Activity 3: Imagining convict experiences

The experiences of the convicts on the Lady Penrhyn would have been quite different from Bowes Smyth’s as the ship’s surgeon. Ask your students to imagine they are convicts on board the ship. Each student should write four journal entries reflecting what the convicts might have experienced during the voyage from Portsmouth to Sydney.