Surviving the Emergency Food Context

Abstract

This chapter is the first of four chapters that examine ‘Food across the colonial frontier’ beginning with the first contact colonization and settlement period on the eastern coasts of New South Wales, examining the collision of human need for food in the early settlements and the resultant emergency food security context thus created. Analysis suggests that there was significant starvation that occurred for both inhabitants and newcomers but for different reasons. A number of issues emerge: diminishing nutrition of both inhabitants and newcomers over time, the question of whether everyone was eating from the same sources of food, and the increase in both stealing and exchanges of food in the first contact period. This chapter focuses on the food context in the early period of colonization in Australia, for about the first 15–20 years where there was significant starvation that occurred for both inhabitants and newcomers but for different reasons. It will examine this using the lens of the emergency food security context that Goodall defines as ‘Continuity of food supply in the face of sudden disruptions’. This is a fragile, unstable period of encounter when colonial administrators, navy personnel, and their convicts arrived hungry and exhausted by long voyages into a land that did not bear any of the familiar hallmarks of the life they knew. For inhabitants living around Kundul, the impact must have been shocking. This wave of strangers, unlike previous groups of seafaring explorers, came with the intention to stay and first to build penal colonies and later settlements. All on board these vessels understood the pressing need to find food on their arrival to supplement, and eventually to replace, ship’s provisions brought from Britain. The scarcity of food, either exogenous or endogenous, was sharpest during the early period of stabilization of this and then other penal colonies and settlements.