The Long Walk from Sydney to Shenzhen

Dr Darryl Bowes

A series of unusual escape events took place between 1791 and the early 1800s, during which time successive groups of Irish convicts fled into the bush around Sydney. Their desperate actions were driven by a pervasive and unlikely rumour. In A Complete Account of the Settlement at Port Jackson 1788 – 1791, Captain Watkin Tench recounted the following:

November, 1791. A very extraordinary instance of folly stimulated to desperation occurred in the beginning of this month among the convicts at Rose Hill. Twenty men and a pregnant woman...suddenly disappeared with their clothes, working tools, bedding, and their provisions for the ensuing week, which had been just issued to them. The first intelligence heard of them, was from some convict settlers, who said they had seen them pass, and had enquired whither they were bound. To which they had received for answer, “to China.” [sic][i]

 A few weeks later, after visiting the hospital at Rose Hill in early December, Tench wrote:

I saw and conversed with some of the Chinese Travellers; four of them lay here, wounded by the natives. I asked these men if they really supposed it possible to reach China: they answered, that they were certainly made to believe (they knew not how) that at a considerable distance to the northward existed a large river, which separated this country from the back part of China; and that when it should be crossed (which was practicable) they would find themselves among a copper-coloured people, who would receive and treat them kindly: they added, that on the third day of their elopement, one of the party died of fatigue; another they saw butchered by the natives.[ii]

After nearly a week wandering aimlessly in the bush, the party eventually found their way back to the settlement. Despite fatalities and serious injuries among their ranks, three of the survivors remained so convinced they had nearly reached China on the first attempt that they bolted a second time. On this occasion it is presumed all three perished.

Some historical interpretations of China Traveller escape events have cast them as the actions of ignorant and misguided individuals, but those same readings reveal an all-too-familiar strain of British condescension toward the Irish. Such readings reinforce a deeply rooted cultural prejudice and a prevailing English attitude that had long framed Irishness as synonymous with folly, stubbornness, or backwardness. These commentators have either overlooked or simply misunderstood the radical logic embedded in the events themselves. To dismiss the China Traveller acts as naïve misadventure is to miss the point and flatten the emotional and symbolic depth of what were in truth, remarkable human responses to extreme exile and disorientation.

In interview, the first China Travellers conveyed to Tench a belief: They had been “made to believe” there was a river, and that beyond it, lay China, and that there they would find non-Caucasian people “who would receive and treat them kindly”. This is an extraordinary, almost hallucinatory vision: these were Irish convicts who believed they might make their way to a place of kindness. These actions were not born of ignorance or madness. The China Traveller events were provocative and strangely lucid acts of attempted re-orientation, a reaching out not just for another place, but for other meanings. That such a myth might take root and be acted upon speaks to the deeper, unresolved psychic rupture that still haunts the shadows of the visual and existential imagination of this country.

The China Travellers’ imagined route inland was mythic; it represented a corridor of absence, and a theatre for psychic rupture. When these convicts bolted, they escaped not toward liberty but into the folds of an imaginary geography, fleeing not only their impoverished convict status but also the oppressive – and now useless – rationalities of European selfhood. To walk toward China was to rupture the logic of place, and to annul the grid of colonial order, a desperate gesture of symbolic rebellion that was equal parts delusional fantasy and startling clarity.

Whatever spark ignited the rumours about nearby China, the basis for them was probably grounded in quite respectable reasoning. Discussion and speculation among the convicts of the First Fleet during the eight month sea voyage had no doubt taken into account that after the ships took on final water and provisions at Capetown, South Africa, there followed eighty-two days in a row when the sun came up over the bow and went down astern as they travelled ten thousand kilometres to the east. To the average eighteenth century European, the countries that lay to the Far East were generically referred to as the Orient, and to many, the Orient mostly meant China.

The existence of China in the Far East had been known to Europeans since Roman times, but more widely and definitively so since the thirteenth century. We can speculate therefore, that the logic of the China Traveller convicts was posited on a simple but dangerously reductive logic: having sailed such a great distance to the East, it stood to reason that they were geographically closer to China than Europe. If one could possibly reach China – this line of reasoning might have contended – one would at least be back in civilization and on a world map that had been relatively stable for centuries, thereby reclaiming some measure of certainty as to where they were, after which one could plot a reliable course back to Europe. While the most discussed Irish fantasy escape scenarios revolved around commandeering a ship to sail back home – something that never eventuated – it makes sense that more desperate or daring individuals might entertain the idea of escape by trekking to China on foot.[1]

Collectively, the China Travellers represent a very distinct form of historical disappearance. Their journeys – unofficial, undocumented, apocryphal – exist in the outer orbit of colonial narratives. In the absence of any definitive record from the China Travellers themselves, we are left with absences: marginalia at the edges of foxed official documents, else the broad suppositions of traditional colonial commentators. But these gaps, too, are expressive. What is produced in their silence is a space where myth, trauma, and existential absurdity collide.

Their movements – convicts fleeing into the hostile interior in the belief that they might reach China – constitutes a radical breakdown of trust in European knowledge and the Enlightenment psyche. The gesture of the China Travellers is so implausible that it becomes poetic, almost sacred in its absurdity. It breaks with the rational order imposed by the colony’s legal, spatial, and ontological structures.

Where Governor Arthur Phillip saw New South Wales as a site of order, correction, and ambitious construction, the China Travellers saw instead a perforated membrane, something spatially compromised that one might challenge, push against and break through, however blindly. These actions reveal the awful extremes of exiled distress. This is perhaps what psychic collapse looks like, brought about by the trauma of transportation, a program of dehumanisation in an uncanny landscape, and existential precarity. The China Travellers were not simply misinformed peasants; they were fractured European selves reacting to the world having been unmade.

For this reason, to call them deluded is to miss the point entirely. Delusion implies a false belief within an otherwise stable framework. But these convicts were operating outside of any coherent ontology. They were simply taking “absolute action”, attempting to conjure meaning from a site of epistemic collapse. Their movement inland was less about arrival and more about clambering from a catastrophic rupture, a sinkhole, an abysmal maw that had opened and threatened to consume them: theirs was a flight from ontological annihilation.

The imagined presence of China was not a conceptual vacuum, but rather a cipher for an elsewhere. What mattered was the idea that via absurd action one might exit the penal cosmology altogether. To head inland was to attempt a symbolic annulment of European knowledge sets, to refute all maps as instruments of control and to imagine, to envision – however fleetingly – a world that might lay just beyond any cartographic border. While desperation and rumour might have fueled these escapes, a convict in thrall of this vision was at some point obligated to take existential inventory, because to take action and pursue the idea required an absolute surrender to the unknown. In fact, all such actions were reckless, bordering on suicidal. Despite this, escapes by China Travellers would continue for over a decade, and in groups of up to sixty convicts at a time. But as Tench’s original account made clear, it was from the very start an enterprise fraught with peril.

We should also bear in mind that at the time of the China Traveller escape attempts, Australia had not yet been circumnavigated and charted. The map was incomplete. This would not occur until 1803, when – by coincidence – a French expedition under Nicolas Baudin and a British expedition under Matthew Flinders accomplished the task concurrently. Even then, it took until 1811 before the French published a completed map of Nouvelle Hollande. The Flinders map was not published until 1814. It was only with these publications that rumours of an imagined land bridge to Asia were categorically scotched: Australia was now known to be an island continent, and the full extent of convict exile and isolation was now also definitively established.

Against this backdrop of limited geographical knowledge, it is interesting that elsewhere in the reports quoted, Tench should note the ridicule to which the first China Traveller convicts were subjected subsequent to their failed escape. For even as these escape events were taking place, the Governor was surrounded by gentlemen busy cultivating cartographic fantasies of their own, predicting the existence of a great inland sea somewhere beyond the Blue Mountains to the west. But when Europeans crossed the Great Dividing Range in 1814, the mythic sea failed to materialise. Speculating that it must lie still further westward, this fantasy was sustained for decades.

We might also want to consider the possibility that the absurd risk-taking behaviors of the China Travellers foreshadow the celebrated anti-authoritarian “larrikinism” that would come to be mythologized in later historic events. These include the often performative defiant actions of the Kelly Gang during the Kelly Outbreak, as well as the unruly behaviours of ANZAC troops in Egypt and at Gallipoli during the First World War. The China Travellers audacious actions can perhaps be seen as the earliest – if often overlooked – precursor to an existential ambivalence and anti-authoritarian streak that many Australians still like to think contours the national image. That the China Travellers provided a compelling template for the ‘true Australian’ type of the late nineteenth century is beyond doubt. Russell Ward noted:

…that the distinctively Australian ethos which developed before 1851, sprang primarily from convict, working class, Irish and native-born sources, and that it was associated particularly with up-country life. In all these respects the first bushrangers were more ‘Australian’ than anybody else…., if bushmen were the ‘true Australians’, runaway convicts were the first of the genus.[iii]

Finally, the forays of the China Travellers should not be thought of as navigational errors, nor misreadings of a difficult and unfamiliar landscape, but rather as a cosmological rupture. There is a limit to how much confusion, homesickness, longing, mourning, and brutality one can tolerate without psychic distortion and breakdown. What value might be ascribed faltering European reason under such unreasonable and indifferent conditions? How might one be expected to react to a ‘new’ world that refused to be disciplined into any kind of coherent meaning? What happens to the average European man or woman when forcibly exiled to an unknown land of indignant locals and inverted climate, unfamiliar – even alien – flora and fauna, and with unknown stars in the nighttime sky? How might they react to a world in which they are stripped of social identity, arbitrarily punished, and made to realize their inherited knowledge and epistemologies possess little to no interpretative power, and no reasonable purchase on their new reality? Would such an individual not begin to slip into ontological crisis, manifesting first as psychological, and then spiritual collapse?

In the face of just such a rupture, the Irish China Traveller convicts conjured and sustained a collective, creative, and hopeful fantasy, which historically reads as a kind of absurd expression of poetic resistance. They risked their lives to pursue a vision that was fragile, improbable, and yet almost candescent in its humanity. It was a dream of transcendance, of an escape first to a place of human kindness, and perhaps later to a longed for homecoming.

But Australia’s historical archive is haunted by the same ontological crisis expressing itself in far darker ways. Within the convict and settler colonial record are numerous accounts of bestiality, hetero and homosexual rape, child abuse, massacres, cannibalism, delirium tremens, madness, and spiritual collapse, all of which is to say the exiled European soul stripped of existential orientation, context, and meaning, frequently responded to psychic despair and dissolution with acts of appalling depravity. And it is just such documented injuries upon national consciousness that motivated author Henry Lawson to write in 1887: “It may be urged that the early history of Australia is for the most part better left unknown.”[iv]