Red O'Shaughnessy by J.H.M. Abbott — Read

THE transport Admiral Gambier's arrival in Port Jackson had been expected for a short while before she passed between the Heads, a fishing-boat having sighted her south of Botany Bay on the evening before her arrival. As a consequence, the Naval Officer--Harbor Master and Collector of Customs--had boarded her in Watson's Bay almost immediately after her entrance on the following morning, so that she was but little delayed by the usual business incidental to a vessel's arrival in the port. Leave had been given her to proceed at once to her allotted anchorage off the town of Sydney, and at midday, as has been recorded in the previous chapter, she dropped anchor in the mouth of the little bay round the head of which clustered the quaint village that was the capital of New South Wales in 1812.

When Red O'Shaughnessy made his first acquaintance with the little town he was to know so well in the future, and whose growth into something better than it was in 1812 he was to witness in the coming years, it was a primitive place indeed. A description of the conditions then obtaining in it, written by an authority on the Macquarie period--Mr. J. P. McGuanne--gives us some idea of the community into the midst of which the young Irishman was about to make intrusion. It refers specifically to the year 1816, but may very well stand as a brief description of the social aspect of New South Wales at the time when Red O'Shaughnessy landed in the country.