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Mike Hannibal wrote:

maybe it's an Australian thing but on any Saturday at our small yacht club I would see friends and others who have circumnavigated. We probably have 4 or 5 boats that have circumnavigated with a few more on their way now. We regularly sail in company with one boat and crew that have circumnavigated. In addition we have other friends further afield who have done the same.

Is this an antipodean thing? I'd be interested in other comments.

Australians generally are great travellers. Apparently tourism to Oz is restricted by the perceived great distances involved, eg; from Europe and North America, but this certainly doesn’t seem to limit excursions in the other direction. Australians are always, it seems to me, kayaking down Siberian rivers or trudging across the North or South Pole or, in a case I recently came across, serving as the worldwide head of Médecins Sans Frontières while also working as a largely unpaid physician in some African country with huge problems.

I suspect its as much a state of mind as anything else. My favourite story to illustrate this is that of Mary Reiby. She was a gutter-snipe, a street kid living by her wits from the filthy alley-ways of eighteenth century London, who was convicted of stealing a horse. She was transported as a convict to ‘Botany Bay’ as the English for a long time thought of their disposal ground for unwanted humanity at Port Jackson. She did well, opening a modest shop soon after arrival in the front room of their rented home and grew her businesses from there, despite having a sickly husband who contributed little except an ever-growing brood of children before dying. Eventually she had a chain of shops and hotels and warehouses. Stocking them was the main challenge; the infant yet growing colony lacked everything but the means of supply were limited. As a convict, then former convict, she was forbidden to leave, but that didn’t stop her from commissioning ships, engaging captains and crew, and sending these ships on (successful) shopping expeditions to, for example, China and India.

The secret of her success, once you know a little more of her story, is that unlike most women, then or now, she knew men. She understood the point of view of men; the way their little minds work, as few women ever do. In her formative years she had lived with them, she had starved and stolen and plotted and done business with them, and she had slept beside them, listening to them belch and curse and fart – expressing their minds, so to speak. What good is a horse in London? You can’t eat the thing. No, you needs must soon find yourself in the used horse business. And that word; ‘business’ is the key to this story. What is business, honest or not, but a serious game of wills and competing interests between men?

On the streets of London she had dressed and lived as a male, and was arrested, tried, and convicted as a man. It was probably the only way she could have lived that life at that time. It wasn’t until they turned hoses on the naked convicts as a crude measure of hygiene before loading them into ships that it was noticed that she wasn’t built quite like the others. This presented the authorities with a quandary. The system of justice was different for men and women; rather more lenient for women. Her family was contacted and if they had been willing to accept her back as the prodigal daughter she probably would have stayed. But it seems they had long given up on her as a bad job and would have nothing more to do with her so she sailed, another unwilling guest of His Majesty.

As Mary grew rich and became a pillar of the community she yearned, it seems, for respectability. She tended to marry off her daughters to clergymen, and managed to marry one of her grand-daughters to a bishop. When I tell my French, and thus catholic relatives this story, the idea of marrying a priest or bishop seems quite outrageous and scandalous to them, but in the Anglican (Church of England) world it implies deep family respectability and living at the pinnacle of social success.

While not all convicts were as spectacularly successful her general story was a common one, albeit usually more modestly expressed. So many of these people who were considered human detritus did well in the colony, leading quietly constructive lives, moving ahead, becoming respectable, having large families. The irony is that their guardians were notoriously venal and corrupt, and this extended all the way up to the governors, who were mostly a poor lot. Bligh of the Bounty is an example. One who was an exception was Lachlan Macquarie, and in gratitude nearly everything in New South Wales is now named Macquarie (even the dictionary where I just checked his name).

Escape from the colony wasn’t much of an option, but that didn’t stop people trying, setting off into the interior hoping China was just across the mountains. A small band of desperados, including the official fisherman in charge of the colony’s only ship’s boat (like a large rowing boat equipped with sails) and also including a woman with two small children, took off in the boat and managed to sail it to Timor. Its quite a tale, but that’s enough typing for the moment. You get the idea. The Australian expression of encouragement for this is: Have a go (ya mug)!

I think being sent to the end of the earth had a liberating influence for many, then and now. Immigrants tend to think that, having had to start from scratch and re-invent their lives, anything is now possible – as it is when you believe this and are willing to put in the effort.