The civil noise of empire

Abstract

On 4 June 1788, the infant colony in Sydney Cove was treated to a rare sonic celebration. The ‘First Fleet’ that brought the first convict ‘colonists’ to establish a permanent British colony in New Holland (Australia) had been at Sydney for just over five months. David Blackburn, the Master aboard HMS Supply, one of the two ships then at anchor, wrote that: ‘No Cannon had ever been fired since our arrival on the Coast … but on that day being “His Majesty’s Birth Day,” the two ships ‘fir’d a salute of 21 Cannon Each – at Sun Rise, Mid Day and at Sun Set.’ 1 Daniel Southwell, a deck officer of HMS Sirius, who seems to have been ashore on the day, noted that such noises formed part of the usual celebrations of the monarch’s birth day ‘with great state and solemnity, and large bonfires,’ all of which ‘must have frightened’ the natives. 2 For Southwell, the sound of celebration was comprehensible only to the colonists. The sound of ceremonial gunfire was a marker of possession and of shared meaning inaccessible to the Indigenous people, who, he supposed, could hear the sounds of celebration only as frightening noise.