Philip Gidley King is the governor most Sydneysiders only know from a street sign. King Street runs right through the city, and the man it's named after was there from the very start. He came out with the First Fleet as Arthur Phillip's hand-picked lieutenant, planted the settlement on Norfolk Island a few weeks after Sydney Cove, ran that island for most of the 1790s, then came back as the third Governor of New South Wales from 1800 to 1806. In those six years he took on the rum traders, shipped John Macarthur home, put down the Castle Hill rising, let George Howe start the Sydney Gazette, sent settlers off to the Derwent and Port Dalrymple and re-opened Newcastle. The officers of the New South Wales Corps wore him down in the end, and he died in England in 1808, aged just fifty. His family stayed on, though, and the Kings and their in-laws became one of the colony's big names.
The Australian Dictionary of Biography sums him up as a man whose reputation "stands today lower than is deserved". Here's his story, from Cornwall to Parramatta and back.
A Draper's Son from Launceston
King was born at Launceston in Cornwall on 23 April 1758. His father, Philip, was a draper, and his mother's father, Gidley, was a local attorney (Wikipedia names him John Gidley of Exeter). The ADB points out that the family weren't poor, but they weren't gentry either, and later on some of his enemies in Sydney sneered that he was "not a gentleman". The navy was a way up for a boy like that.
He went to sea at twelve, as a captain's servant in HMS Swallow, on 22 December 1770. Five years in the East Indies followed, then American waters when the War of Independence broke out in 1775. He became a midshipman in the Liverpool that July and was made lieutenant in the Renown on 25 December 1778. One of the officers who examined him told his mother he was "one of the most Promising young men I have ever met".
The meeting that shaped the rest of his life came in the Channel Fleet. From 1780 he served in the Ariadne under Captain Arthur Phillip, and in 1783 he sailed to India with Phillip in the Europe. Phillip, the ADB says, "formed a high opinion of his merits".
The First Fleet and HMS Sirius
So when Phillip was given command of the Botany Bay expedition, he picked King straight away. In October 1786 King was named second lieutenant of HMS Sirius, the flagship Phillip was sailing in himself. When Phillip shifted into the faster Supply to race ahead of the main fleet, he took King with him.
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A fortnight after the fleet arrived, Phillip chose him, "as a officer of merit … whose perseverance may be depended upon", to set up a second settlement on Norfolk Island out in the Pacific.
Norfolk Island, 1788 to 1790
King sailed from Port Jackson on 14 February 1788 with a party of twenty-three, fifteen of them convicts. Getting ashore was the first problem. The island has no proper harbour, and it took until 6 March to land. Then came the work of clearing the pines, building huts and fighting off grubs, rats, salt winds and hurricanes. Wikipedia adds that early in 1789 King stopped a planned mutiny, in which some convicts meant to seize him and the other officers and escape on the next ship to call.
For all that, his reports were upbeat. There was plenty of fish, the stock did well and the soil was good, and he told Phillip the island could support "at least one hundred families". Phillip was impressed enough to keep pushing for his promotion. London's answer, in December 1789, was to make King lieutenant-governor of Norfolk Island at £250 a year.
Ann Inett, Norfolk and Sydney
One of the women in that first small party was Ann Inett, a convict from Worcestershire. She and King had two sons. The first, born on 8 January 1789, was named Norfolk, after the island. The second, born in 1790, was named Sydney. The ADB says both boys "were well cared for" by their father, and both became lieutenants in the navy. Wikipedia says Norfolk King was the first Australian-born officer in the Royal Navy and went on to command the schooner Ballahoo.
King didn't marry Ann. When he left for England in 1790 she stayed in Sydney with the boys. Wikipedia says she married another man in 1792, a match King had probably arranged, and went on to lead "a comfortable and respected life in the colony". King arranged for the two boys to be educated in England.
A Flying Trip to London and a Wife
In March 1790, the month Sirius was wrecked on Norfolk Island, Phillip sent King to England to tell the government how bad things were in the settlements. He reached London just before Christmas, saw Lord Grenville and Sir Joseph Banks, and was promoted commander on 2 March 1791.
Nine days later, on 11 March 1791, he married Anna Josepha Coombe at St Martin-in-the-Fields. She was his first cousin, born at Hatherleigh in Devon in 1765, and she was twenty-six to his thirty-three. Four days after the wedding they sailed in HMS Gorgon for the Pacific. Young William Chapman, King's protégé, came along too.
On the way out King did something typical of him. Hearing at the Cape that the colony was still short of food, he bought livestock there on his own say-so. Many of the animals died before reaching Sydney, and the Treasury dragged out the argument over who'd pay for them for years.
Lieutenant-Governor of Norfolk Island, 1791 to 1796
King was back on the island early in November 1791, and about six weeks later Anna Josepha gave birth to their son, Phillip Parker King, named after King's old captain. Their house, according to Marnie Bassett's biography of Mrs King (quoted on Wikipedia), was a "dilapidated little building twenty four feet by twelve, falling to pieces and unsafe to live in". Two daughters followed on the island: Anna Maria in 1793 and Utricia in 1795. Utricia died as a small child.
The island he came back to was a different place. Under Lieutenant-Governor Robert Ross the population had grown to nearly a thousand, and King found "discord and strife on every person's countenance". He issued new regulations in 1792, listened to the settlers (ex-marines and ex-convicts) on wages and prices, and by 1794 the island grew all its own grain and was sending surplus pigs to Sydney.
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The Maori Flax Men
London's great hope for Norfolk Island was flax, for sails and rope for the navy. Nobody on the island knew how to work the native plant, so while in England King talked the government into ordering Captain George Vancouver to bring flax-dressers from New Zealand. Two Maori men were duly kidnapped and brought to the island. The trouble was, as the ADB puts it, "they knew nothing about flax-dressing". All King could do was take them home.
He did it himself, making a ten-day visit to New Zealand in November 1793. For that he was reprimanded by Lieutenant-Governor Francis Grose and the Duke of Portland for leaving his post without permission, a reproof the ADB calls "unmerited". The same year he proposed a British settlement at the Bay of Islands.
Trouble with the Corps
This was also where King first locked horns with the New South Wales Corps. Some soldiers on the island claimed he punished them too hard and the ex-convicts too lightly. After a run-in with Mrs King's servants and a drunken soldier's insolence to King himself, things turned mutinous. King, backed by most of the Corps officers there, sent twenty of the men to Sydney for court martial. Grose, back in Sydney, censured King and gave the military illegal authority over the island's civilians. King obeyed while noting it was improper. Portland later overruled Grose, and Grose apologised, but it was a sign of things to come.
So was King's health. He had gout and chest trouble, and by December 1795 there was "much doubt" he'd recover. Governor John Hunter gave him leave, and in October 1796 he left Norfolk Island for England.
Waiting in England, 1796 to 1799
King needed a job. He told Banks his total worldly goods were little more than £1,500, and that he had "neither kept a shop or sold drams", which was a dig at the officers back in Sydney. With Phillip and Banks behind him, in 1798 he got a dormant commission to take over from Hunter if Hunter died or left the colony. He was made post-captain on 5 December 1798.
Getting there was another matter. He was meant to sail in a new ship built partly to Banks's design, with a "plant cabbin". She was hopeless, the ADB says, "utterly cranky", and when she finally sailed in August 1799 she turned back to Portsmouth at the first rough weather and was condemned. King finally left in the Speedy in November 1799 (the ADB gives 26 November; Mrs King's journal on the State Library list starts on 19 November), carrying the despatch that recalled Hunter.
Only little Elizabeth came with them. Phillip Parker and Anna Maria were left at school in England. Anna Josepha kept a diary of the five-month voyage, full of storms and gales.
Third Governor of New South Wales, 1800 to 1806
The Kings reached Port Jackson in April 1800. Hunter was in no hurry to go, and the two old shipmates fell out badly. The ADB describes an "unseemly impatience" on King's side, in letters each man thought insulting. King finally took command on 28 September 1800. He'd already written that "nothing less than a total change in the system of administration" would do. He only became governor in full title in 1802; until then he was technically lieutenant-governor. He sent Major Joseph Foveaux to run Norfolk Island in his place.
Anna Josepha became the first governor's wife to live in the colony, since Phillip had left his wife in England and Hunter was unmarried.
Taking on the Rum Trade
King's first target was the officers' grip on trade, especially spirits. He came armed with a stack of orders and issued new port and price regulations the moment he took over. He still had to let surgeons William Balmain and D'Arcy Wentworth sell 4,359 gallons of spirits they had on hand, but he cut spirit imports to about a third of the rate in Hunter's last months. He asked Calcutta and the British consuls in America to stop sending liquor, and he started building a brewery so people would have something else to drink. It didn't produce until 1804. According to the ADB, he got spirit drinking down to about two and a half bottles a month per adult man between 1801 and 1804, but illegal stills kept popping up.
He also opened a public warehouse that sold goods at only 50 per cent over cost, and tried to fix prices, wages, hours, interest rates, weights and measures and the value of the jumble of coins in use. He cut the officers' servants on the government ration from 356 to 94. By 1806 only 56 out of 646 farmers were living off the government store, compared with 110 out of 401 in 1800.
Macarthur, the Duel and the Voyage Home
That kind of thing made enemies, and the sharpest was Captain John Macarthur of the Corps. In 1801 Macarthur fought a duel with his own commanding officer, Colonel William Paterson, after a quarrel that had begun with the governor. In November 1801 King did what Hunter had done before him and sent Macarthur to England to face a court martial.
It didn't go to plan. Macarthur was never court-martialled. He resigned his commission and came back in July 1805 "in triumph", the ADB says, with an order for 5,000 acres of the best land in the colony to breed sheep.
The bad blood kept coming. Early in 1803, right after King refused to let a cargo of spirits land from the Atlas, libellous verses called "pipes" mocking him and his officials went around the town. The courts martial that followed only showed how deep the hatred ran. In May 1803 King asked for leave while the colony was investigated. London read it as a resignation and accepted it.
The Castle Hill Rising, 1804
King was nervous of the Irish prisoners, many of them sent out after the 1798 rebellion. On the night of 4 March 1804 the convicts at the Castle Hill government farm rose, and next day Major George Johnston's troops broke them at what came to be called Vinegar Hill, near Rouse Hill. King declared martial law. The ADB says he was "rather over-excited" at the time but felt safer afterwards, splitting the ringleaders among the outlying settlements. I've told the whole story in my Castle Hill page, linked below.
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Newcastle
Some of those ringleaders went north. Convicts had been digging coal at the mouth of the Hunter, and in 1801 a camp called King's Town was set up there for coal and timber. It closed within a year. In 1804 King re-opened it as a place of punishment, and the name Newcastle first appears in his commission to Lieutenant Charles Menzies on 15 March 1804. That year King also started the citadel at Fort Phillip, but the ADB calls it "rather a white elephant".
The Sydney Gazette, 1803
In March 1803 King let the government printer, George Howe, start the Sydney Gazette and New South Wales Advertiser, using the government press and type. The first issue came out on 5 March 1803, and it was Australia's first newspaper. King explained to Lord Hobart that he wanted "useful information" spread among the settlers. Wikipedia also credits him with ordering the printing of Australia's first book, the New South Wales General Standing Orders.
Orphans, Schools and Vaccine
King took a real interest in the Female Orphan School in Sydney. He was sorry he couldn't open one for boys too, but he took several day schools "under the protection of Government" and had convict boys apprenticed to trades. He paid for the orphan school, and the gaol, with a 5 per cent duty he slapped on imports in June 1802. It wasn't strictly legal, but nobody questioned it, and the ADB says it was the start of colonial revenue being spent on local needs. He also asked London to send smallpox vaccine, and that let the colony's surgeons carry out its first successful vaccinations.
He gave ex-convicts a go as well. He reminded Major Johnston that the government never meant prisoners to be consigned "to Oblivion and disgrace for ever", put men like James Meehan, Andrew Thompson and Father James Dixon into official jobs, and laid the groundwork for the ticket-of-leave system. For a time in 1803 he even let Father Dixon say Mass for the Irish convicts.
Farms, Sheep, Coal and Whales
Under King the government's flocks and herds grew five-fold. He bred the government sheep from hair to wool, imported cattle from India, started coal mining, and tried vines, tobacco, cotton, hemp and indigo. He backed the whalers and sealers, and in 1804 he encouraged the merchant Robert Campbell to ship oil and skins to London in the Lady Barlow in defiance of the East India Company's monopoly. The floods of 1806 wrecked his hope that the colony would feed itself.
At Parramatta, Wikipedia's Old Government House entry says King "appears to have set up Australia's first public botanic garden" under George Caley, Banks's plant collector.
Exploring and the French
King was a sailor, and he looked outward. In 1801 he sent Lieutenant James Grant to finish exploring Bass Strait and survey Western Port, and Lieutenant John Murray on the voyage that found Port Phillip. On land he sent Francis Barrallier on two trips, slipping round Barrallier's army duties by appointing him ambassador to the "King of the Mountains", and he backed George Caley's expeditions. King Island in Bass Strait was named in 1800 by John Black, a privateer.
Then the French turned up. On 18 June 1802 Nicolas Baudin sailed Géographe into Port Jackson with most of his crew down with scurvy, and Naturaliste came in about ten days later. King, warned by Banks that Baudin was coming, nursed the men and helped fix the ships. Baudin was moved enough to write to the French colonial governors that "Governor King has given the whole of Europe the example of a benevolence which should be known". Baudin sailed out in November 1802 and wrote warmly to King from King Island that December.
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Van Diemen's Land
King moved quickly. In 1803 he sent Lieutenant John Bowen to start a settlement on the Derwent. Bowen picked Risdon Cove on the east bank, on George Bass's advice, and the Lady Nelson anchored there on 8 September 1803. The site had poor soil and little water, and when David Collins arrived in 1804 he moved the settlement across the river to Sullivans Cove, which became Hobart. In 1804 King also sent Paterson to found a settlement at Port Dalrymple on the Tamar in the north.
Pemulwuy and the Aboriginal People
King's record with Aboriginal people is mixed. He told William Bligh that he had "ever considered" them "the real Proprietors of the Soil", refused to let them be worked as slaves, and tried to keep a "good understanding". But he also called them "very capricious" and "treacherous".
The Bidjigal warrior Pemulwuy had been resisting the settlers around Parramatta and Prospect for years. On 22 November 1801 King issued an order for him to be brought in dead or alive, with a reward. Pemulwuy was shot dead just before 2 June 1802, possibly by Henry Hacking. King lifted the order against harming Aboriginal people and let them back into the Parramatta and Prospect districts. He also had Pemulwuy's head preserved in spirits and sent it to Banks in England, with a letter calling him "a terrible pest to the colony" but "a brave and independent character".
He liked his Pacific visitors too, and welcomed Maori and Tahitian guests to Sydney.
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Recall, Bligh and the Last Voyage
King got London's acceptance of his "resignation" in June 1804, and after that, the ADB says, "his activities slowed down". He wasn't relieved until August 1806, when William Bligh arrived. Before he left, King granted Bligh 1,345 acres, and a week later Bligh granted Mrs King 690 acres in return, described as "Thanks". Both grants were improper, though the ADB says that by the standards of the day King was still "a pillar of rectitude" next to most of his officers. Eighteen months later the same Corps officers who'd beaten King overthrew Bligh in the Rum Rebellion.
King boarded the Buffalo on 15 August 1806 and "completely collapsed". The ship didn't sail until 10 February 1807, and after a stormy run round Cape Horn they reached England in November. He pushed the Colonial Office hard for a pension but died on 3 September 1808 before it came through. He was buried in the churchyard of St Nicholas, Lower Tooting, in London. His estate came to about £7,000, little more, the ADB notes, than the value of the cattle he'd claimed from the government herds.
The Family He Left Behind
Anna Josepha stayed in England until 1832, when she came back to New South Wales with Phillip Parker and went to live with Anna Maria and Hannibal Macarthur at The Vineyard. She died in 1844 and was buried at St Mary Magdalene Church there in 1844, on land Phillip Parker King had given for it.
Phillip Parker King, born on Norfolk Island in 1791, became a naval surveyor whose charts of the Australian coast were still being published by the Admiralty decades later. He commanded HMS Adventure with the Beagle surveying South America. In 1855 he became the first Australian-born rear admiral in the Royal Navy. He died at North Sydney on 26 February 1856.
Of the daughters, Anna Maria married Hannibal Hawkins Macarthur in 1812, and they settled at The Vineyard near Parramatta. Mary, born in Sydney in 1805, married Robert Lethbridge in 1826. Elizabeth married the artist Charles Runciman and stayed in England.
King was also a decent amateur artist. One of his watercolours was the basis for the William Blake engraving A Native Family of New South Wales in Hunter's 1793 journal. And there's King Street, running from Queens Square down to Darling Harbour, so the name's still under our feet every day.
Timeline
- 23 April 1758 – Born at Launceston, Cornwall
- 22 December 1770 – Joins the navy as captain's servant in HMS Swallow
- 25 December 1778 – Commissioned lieutenant in the Renown
- 1780–1783 – Serves under Arthur Phillip in the Ariadne and the Europe
- October 1786 – Named second lieutenant of HMS Sirius
- January 1788 – Arrives with the First Fleet
- 14 February 1788 – Sails for Norfolk Island with 23 people
- 6 March 1788 – Lands on Norfolk Island
- 8 January 1789 – Son Norfolk born to Ann Inett
- 1790 – Son Sydney born; King sails for England in March
- 11 March 1791 – Marries Anna Josepha Coombe at St Martin-in-the-Fields
- November 1791 – Back on Norfolk Island as lieutenant-governor
- December 1791 – Phillip Parker King born on Norfolk Island
- November 1793 – Ten-day trip to New Zealand to take the two Maori men home
- October 1796 – Leaves Norfolk Island sick with gout
- 5 December 1798 – Promoted post-captain
- November 1799 – Sails for NSW in the Speedy
- 28 September 1800 – Takes command of New South Wales
- November 1801 – Sends Macarthur to England after the duel with Paterson; orders Pemulwuy taken dead or alive
- June 1802 – Pemulwuy killed; Baudin arrives in Port Jackson; 5% import duty
- 5 March 1803 – First Sydney Gazette
- September 1803 – Bowen's party lands at Risdon Cove
- 4–5 March 1804 – Castle Hill rising and Vinegar Hill
- 15 March 1804 – Newcastle named in Menzies' commission
- 1804 – Port Dalrymple settlement founded
- July 1805 – Macarthur returns with a 5,000-acre order
- August 1806 – Bligh takes over
- 10 February 1807 – The Buffalo finally sails
- 3 September 1808 – King dies in England
- 1844 – Anna Josepha King dies at St Marys
- 26 February 1856 – Phillip Parker King dies at North Sydney
Where the Sources Disagree
- Which ship took him to Norfolk Island. Wikipedia says the party left Sydney on 14 February 1788 "on board HMS Sirius". The ADB gives the same date but doesn't name the ship.
- His grandfather. The ADB calls Gidley "a local attorney" in Launceston; Wikipedia names him John Gidley, an Exeter attorney-at-law.
- When the Speedy sailed. The ADB has King sailing on 26 November 1799. Anna Josepha's journal, as listed by the State Library and cited on Wikipedia, begins on 19 November, and Wikipedia's Anna Josepha King article says they sailed in August 1799, which is when the condemned ship first left.
- Who killed Pemulwuy. Wikipedia says he was shot "possibly" by Henry Hacking. It isn't settled.
My Earlier Posts
- The Castle Hill Rebellion – Battle of Vinegar Hill – 5 March 1804
- Arrest of Governor Bligh – The Rum Rebellion – 26 January 1808
- The Rum Rebellion – 26th January 1808
- Elizabeth Farm – Alice Street – Parramatta
- Robert Campbell – Campbell's Cove – The Rocks
- The Orphan School – George St
- Governors Of New South Wales From 1788 To 2016
- First Fleet & The Colony Of New South Wales
- Arthur Phillip – First Fleet – King George III's Instructions
- House Of Mary Putland – Governor Bligh's Daughter
Sources
- A. G. L. Shaw, 'King, Philip Gidley (1758–1808)', Australian Dictionary of Biography: https://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/king-philip-gidley-2309
- Wikipedia, 'Philip Gidley King': https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philip_Gidley_King
- Wikipedia, 'Anna Josepha King': https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anna_Josepha_King
- Wikipedia, 'Phillip Parker King': https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phillip_Parker_King
- Wikipedia, 'Pemulwuy': https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pemulwuy
- Wikipedia, 'Nicolas Baudin': https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicolas_Baudin
- Wikipedia, 'The Sydney Gazette': https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Sydney_Gazette
- Wikipedia, 'Old Government House, Parramatta': https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old_Government_House,_Parramatta
- Wikipedia, 'Risdon Cove': https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Risdon_Cove
- Wikipedia, 'History of Newcastle, New South Wales': https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Newcastle,_New_South_Wales
- Wikimedia Commons, image pages linked under each picture: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Philip_Gidley_King
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