Billy Blue: A Legend of Early Sydney

As January 1988 draws nearer, and with it the inevitable re-examination of Australia's national identity, past and present, it is to be hoped that bicentennial junketings will find some opportunity to remember William Blue, the 'Old Commodore', who died in Sydney in 1834. For his remarkable life not only gave birth to a Sydney legend which has resurfaced a little recently, but also challenges some assumptions about modern Australia having been created as a lily-white nation. That assumption has already been challenged for some years now by a new tendency to stress the importance of Aborigines during the colonial period. But it is still largely taken for granted that the incomers who conquered and disinherited the Aborigines were all white.

But Billy Blue, who arrived in Australia on board the transport Minorca in 1801 as a convict, was a Black man. Nor was he the only such to be transported. The author's own research has uncovered hundreds of such individuals transported to New South Wales, and preliminary indications suggest that hundreds more were transported to Tasmania. Many, like Blue, were members of the quite large Black population of late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Britain. Others were convicted in and transported from places as far apart as the West Indies, St Helena, the Cape Colony and Mauritius. Historians of convict society have not noticed them even as a not insignificant minority among the white majority of transportees, perhaps because the myth of 'White Australia' has proved too strong even for those who have disliked that aspect of Australia's past. One or two of them rate a brief mention, as does Billy Blue himself in Russel Ward's The Australian Legend, or the Chartist William Cuffay in George Rude's Protest and Punishment.

Billy Blue's origins remain obscure. This is undoubtedly in part a consequence of the remarkable Billy Blue legend, which was still flourishing in Sydney earlier in this century. He was a colourful character, whose escapades epitomised w hat had come to be regarded as very Australian virtues of independence, tenacious defence of what he saw as his rights against powerful opponents, and loyalty to his mates, including those in trouble with the law. But the man was black, a fact it was perhaps hard for early twentieth-century Australians to swallow. He was often recalled, in those years, in press and magazine articles in Sydney, and variously described as pure white (!), an East Indian (i.e. not all that black), a West Indian or a North American. One such source, which seems to have been based on contact with some of his many descendants, states he was born in New York.

Black he undoubtedly was. The evidence for this is beyond doubt, even though a generally valuable and well-researched piece on him by a modern Sydney local historian, Meg Swords, argues itself into the position that he was a West Indian (perfectly likely, for many Blacks in late eighteenth-century England were) but 'must have been' of Carib Indian origin. Let us take the testimony of one who knew him, and is recognised by historians as an exceptionally acute observer of Australia in the 1820s and 1830s. Alexander Harris' Settlers and Convicts (London, 1847) explains his surname, in line with an archaic linguistic usage, as 'so called, I suppose, because he was a very black black'. This may not be the origin of his name, but it is certainly an unequivocal description. It is backed up by a number of contemporary portrayals of him, the most remarkable of which is a portrait painted in 1834 by an artist called East, and now in the Mitchell Library, Sydney. This is a sensitive and dignified full-length portrait in the formal medium of oils, though there are also more comical popular prints dating from the same period. The fact that he was a sufficiently well-known character to be a subject for popular prints is itself evidence that he became something of a legend in his own lifetime. But the portrait suggests that to the discerning he seemed also an altogether more serious character than the comical old man of the prints. Indeed, one leading authority on the portrayal of Black people in western art, David Dabydeen, has suggested to the author that this is a quite exceptional work in this genre, avoiding the usual categories of stereotyping. It does, however, seem delicately to hint at his convict and much travelled past. Blue carries in his right hand a long staff with a ribbon threaded around it, which is perhaps a hint at the caduceus, the emblem of Mercury, god of thieves and travellers.

In the money-mad New South Wales of the 1830s, when great fortunes were being made out of pastoralism and booming wool exports at buoyant prices, the 'Old Commodore' stood for other values. This was recognised in the long and remarkably affectionate obituary of him in the Sydney Gazette - a rarity for an emancipee of his very modest means and social status. In a reference to a conviction for smuggling 120 gallons of rum in 1818, the Gazette ironically remarked:

Ian Duffield is a senior lecturer in history at the University of Edinburgh and author of Australia’s Black Convicts, Cambridge University Press.