Dancing with Strangers Page 10

  To return to those astonishing canoes: a group called ‘Tribal Warrior’ has been working recently to restore the Aboriginal maritime presence on the waters of Sydney Harbour. They can take pride in their seafaring ancestors, the iron men and women of 1788.

  The anthropologist W. E. H. Stanner directs us to another more elusive quality which might have infused the canoe contretemps for Australian watchers. He points out that traditional Australian societies achieved an enviable equilibrium of effort and return: they not only lived confidently and (usually) well in austere circumstances, but ‘sweetened existence by spiritual pursuits of life in no way concerned with mere survival…The least-cost routines [of material and social life] left free time, energy and enthusiasm to be expended—as they were, without stint—on all the things for which life could be lived when basic needs had been met: the joys of leisure, rest, song, dance, fellowship, trade, stylised fighting and the performance of religious rituals’. He sums up this complex as a talent for ‘jollifying humdrum…it seemed to be a law of Aboriginal life to embroider the unavoidable’.

  ‘Jollifying humdrum.’ The ability to see the comedy lurking in human affairs. I think many British doings must have brought rich amusement to the Australians, along with the anxiety and the anger.

  Too much emphasis on mutual misreadings can obscure a remarkable fact. There may have been an early assumption among the British that these Australian ‘savages’, who seemed barely able to cling to life in their natural state, would either withdraw or simply die out, now that a higher civilisation had arrived. But our white forefathers regarded themselves as convict-keepers rather than settlers, and as invaders not at all. There were no pitched battles between residents and incomers, but instead, as we have seen, rather touching performances of mutual good will and gift-giving, and a remarkably determined endeavour by Phillip to bring the Australians into regular contact with the settlement so they could experience the benefits of civilised life. These natives had no pigs or breadfruit to incite greed, they guarded their women well, and their spasmodic gestures of hostility posed no serious threat to the British. Phillip knew his enemy was not the Australians, but starvation.

  Unusually in colonial situations, or at least the ones I know about, for most of his five-year rule Phillip pursued an energetic policy of amity with the local population. Even more remarkably he, like many of his officers, recognised that these skinny, naked creatures were not animals in vaguely human form, but men like himself. And the Australians returned the compliment: gross and bleached as they were, impossibly inept at the basic business of living, their probably defective bodies kept wrapped and hidden from sight, the strangers were human too.

  ARABANOO

  We have seen that by the time he had dispatched his ‘Narrative’ to England in October 1788, Watkin Tench was regretfully deciding the natives of the new land were savages after all, and ‘like all other savages, are either too indolent, too indifferent or too fearful to form an attachment on easy terms with those who differ in habits or manners so widely from them’. (He unsurprisingly failed to notice that the British were experiencing much the same difficulty.) But that was because he had lost the hope of continuing contact with these fascinating people. Over the coming months he was to prove, like his friend William Dawes, not the least ‘indolent, indifferent or fearful’ in pursuit of a better understanding.

  Phillip had done his best to improve relations by trying to stamp out the trade in stolen Australian artefacts, forbidding the sale of native fishing tackle or weapons within the camp. But trouble continued: over that first year more than a dozen convicts ‘unaccountably disappeared’, others were found dead, often mutilated, while others again were found alive, but stripped and wounded as if in exemplary warning. Worse, the Australian responses were not predictable. In July 1788 two convicts had sneaked off to Botany Bay, ‘gathering vegetables’, they said, when they came upon a party of Australians, who signed to them to go back the way they had come. Instead they ran in different directions. Spears were thrown, and one man suffered two wounds. Nonetheless he plunged into the water and ‘escaped’ by swimming across a narrow arm of the bay—while ‘the natives’ (who could very easily have killed him) ‘stood on the bank laughing at him’. Then yet another Australian found him, and helped him back to the settlement. Collins also reports that despite hostile incidents some Australians were reliably friendly, one ‘family’ living in an adjoining cove being ‘visited by large parties of the convicts of both sexes on those days when they were not wanted for labour, where they danced and sung with apparent good humour, and received such presents as they could afford to make them’, which reminds us that a great deal was going on that did not appear in the records.

  Tench had first thought the Australians speared convicts in the woods for the fun of it—in ‘a spirit of malignant levity’, as he put it—but on longer reflection he came to share Phillip’s view that it was ‘the unprovoked outrages committed by unprincipled individuals’ which had led to the change from cautious friendship to dangerous aggression.

  The change had been slow, and sometimes ambiguous even to those who experienced it, but by late 1788 the situation was clear. Lieutenant Bradley regretfully reported:

  What has been experienced lately in several instanced meetings with the Natives, has occasioned me to alter those very favourable opinions I had formed of them, & however much I wished to encourage the idea of their being friendly disposed, I must acknowledge now convinced that they are only so, when they suppose we have them in our power or are well prepared by being armed. Latterly they have attacked almost every person who has met with them that has not had a musquet & have sometimes endeavoured to surprise some who had.

  Then the Australians went unequivocally on the offensive, mounting two well-executed raids canoe raids into British territory and making off with a succulent British goat each time, so showing, again in Bradley’s opinion, ‘great cunning’. The strategy was for two canoe-loads of men to swoop down on an edge of the settlement—the Observatory point in this particular case—and while one lot distracted the guard the others would spear a goat, toss the animal into a towed canoe, and make off at speed. The British could not catch them. Then a couple of weeks later, they did it again. Then a whole canoe fleet carrying more than thirty men barely failed to snatch some precious British sheep.

  Just what was going on in these occasional acts of aggression against British men (attributed, as we see, to an undifferentiated collectivity called ‘natives’) might become clearer with time. As for the raids: I think that on the evidence we have, we cannot know whether the Australians’ abduction of the animals was in retaliation for the disruption of their own hunting, or simply the taking of desirable meat from hopelessly incompetent hunters. The elegance of the strategy, however, clearly demonstrates malice aforethought, and some pleasure, too. Phillip regretfully decided that for the moment the Australians would have to be taught to keep their distance, and resorted to firearms to do the teaching.

  With alienation increasingly dramatised in ‘incidents’, he also decided on a strategy of his own. He would kidnap a couple of local men, treat them kindly, teach them English, and so at last be able to communicate the benevolence of his intentions. In view of the frightening diminution in the colony’s supplies, he also hoped to gain access to local food resources. A desperate strategy, to kidnap in order to make friends, but one with a long history in the annals of imperialism.

  Accordingly, on the second-last day of 1788 a boat under the command of Lieutenant Ball of the Supply and Lieutenant George Johnston of the marines pulled into Manly Cove, and two men were lured within reach by the offer of gifts. Then they were grabbed, and wrestled into the boat. One managed to fight free, but the other was overpowered, bound, and taken to the settlement. He was to remain there until his death from smallpox in May 1789. His name was Arabanoo.

  Arabanoo must have gone through pure terror on that first day, and then for days to come: seized
, flung into the bottom of a huge canoe, surrounded by clamouring strangers, stripped, immersed in hot water, and his skin roughly scrubbed and his hair cropped before his whole body was trussed in some strange yielding stuff. But he was, his abductors decided, of a docile, even melancholy, temperament and quickly accustomed himself to captivity. He attracted a great deal of attention over those first days, but long after his novelty wore off for other officers Arabanoo continued to enthral Watkin Tench.

  Up until now Tench had had to focus on mute material objects, like spears or bark shelters or canoes, in his quest for understanding. He had also learnt something of Australian social organisation: he had begun to identify ‘wives’ and to guess at tribal divisions or alliances from inflections of warmth or hostility between groups. But (like the rest of us) he was most hopeful of arriving at a deepened understanding through getting to know an individual.

  Tench spent a great deal of time with Arabanoo, and he learnt a great deal from him. Initially he had the usual difficulty of distinguishing individual quirks from what we would call cultural practices. One example: he was astounded at Arabanoo’s prodigious appetite for fish and meat—until he realised this was not peculiar to Arabanoo but an attribute of the nomad hunter, who cannot store what he catches. With the benefit of hindsight we can sometimes guess at things Tench could not see. For example, he knew nothing of levels of initiation or the hierarchy of knowledge in the male Australian world: he saw Arabanoo’s patterned scars, and only wondered at their ugliness. He knew Arabanoo was eager to teach him his language. He therefore judged him to be slow-witted when he would suddenly fall silent. He did not consider that Arabanoo might not have been at liberty to answer certain questions or to speak of certain things. But despite opacities and misunderstanding, Tench came to love Arabanoo, recognising him as a gentle soul, and a remarkably patient one, being especially tender with the children who constantly clamoured around him—including, presumably, Tench’s young friend from the beach—and we wonder if this warrior tolerance of children was a cultural habit, too.

  Tench also noticed another quality: a high, even touchy, sense of self-worth.

  Although of a gentle and placable temper, we early discovered that he was impatient of indignity and allowed no superiority on our part. He knew he was in our power, but the independence of his mind never forsook him…If the slightest insult were offered him, he returned it with interest.

  That is: he was gentle, but he was a man jealous of his dignity, and even in alien circumstances quick to respond to challenge. Phillip should have taken warning from that.

  Arabanoo’s capture failed to have the desired conciliatory effect. Interracial relations continued to deteriorate. In March 1789 a party of convicts marched off in a body to plunder the people at Botany Bay of their fishing tackle and spears. Black warriors routed them, killing one and wounding seven. Phillip, furious at the flouting of his orders, had the survivors flogged, and insisted that Arabanoo watch this display of the splendid impartiality of British justice. Arabanoo was sickened by it, as he was sickened by the fetters and chains convicts dragged around with them. He seemed to think that men should not be subjected to such humiliations.

  The education of Arabanoo in the ways of the British was interrupted by the eruption of diseases, first ‘the venereal’, and then, more alarmingly, smallpox—no one knew from where but they thought perhaps from the ships of La Pérouse, long since sailed away. The earnest labour of the British, especially White and his surgeons, in their seeking out and care for survivors, along with their frequent expressions of bafflement as to its origin, persuade me that the story of their deliberate infection of the locals by ‘variolous matter’ brought in by ‘doctors’ is a nonsense—especially as they had no physical access to individual natives at that early stage except for Arabanoo, who sickened only in the later stages of the epidemic. (Now it has been reasonably demonstrated that the smallpox probably came overland from the Macassan traders who cropped the trepang along the northern coasts of Australia.)

  The dimensions of the catastrophe were horribly evident. Soon black corpses were littering the beaches and the bays, and piled in the caves. Of the handful of stricken people found alive and brought into the settlement for treatment, only two, a boy called Nanbaree, about nine years old, and a fourteen-year-old girl, first called Araboo, later corrected to Boorong, survived, and were adopted into the households of Surgeon White and the Reverend Johnson.

  Arabanoo’s tenderness towards his afflicted compatriots so touched Phillip that he had his remaining fetter struck off. He did not use his new liberty to return to his own people, perhaps because too many were dead. David Collins memorialised his anguish:

  On our taking him down to the harbour to look for his former companions, those who witnessed his expression and his agony can never forget either. He looked anxiously around him in the different coves we visited; not a vestige on the sand was to be found of human foot; the excavations in the rocks were filled with the putrid bones of those who had fallen victim to the disorder; not a living person was any where to be met with…He lifted up his hands and eyes in silent agony for some time; at last he exclaimed, ‘All dead! All dead!’

  The Australians traditionally explained what we would classify as natural human deaths as the fruit of malicious sorcery. They probably began by blaming sorcery for the smallpox, until the deaths multiplied beyond the possibility of individual malice or clan anger. As far as can be judged from biologists’ analyses of skeletal remains, theirs was a society unacquainted with epidemic disease. It was also a society careful of human lives once past the vicissitudes of infancy and before the fatal dependency of extreme age. Food-getting had its risks, but not usually lethal ones, and while there were set-piece battles between rival groups and individuals where the risk of injury was high, the annihilation of the enemy was never the object: when courage had been adequately displayed on both sides and enough blood shed, the battle ended. The occasional massacre of whole campfire groups in retaliation for particular secret murders paradoxically only underlines the high value placed on the individual life. Even as late as the 1930s W. E. H. Stanner noticed that while the great battles he witnessed in the Northern Territory provided ample space for courage, skill and fortitude, and were genuinely terrifying to watch, few deaths resulted, because ‘an invisible flag of prudence floated over the field’.

  In the autumn of 1789 around Sydney Cove, deaths came in scores and hundreds. Baneelon, a later captive of Phillip’s, told him that the smallpox had killed up to half the local population. We know his fellow captive Colbee had lost all but two of his band to the disease, and had to unite with another clan. What we do not know is the effect this massive loss had either on individual survivors, or on their social practices.

  In mid-May 1789 Arabanoo died of the smallpox, and Tench and his British friends grieved for him.

  ENTER BANEELON

  John Hunter lamented the death of Arabanoo not only for personal reasons, but because it signalled the death of the hope of reconciliation. Had Arabanoo lived, ‘he could have made [his people] perfectly understand that we wished to live with them on the most friendly footing, and that we wished to promote, as much as might be in our power, their comfort and happiness’—which indicates that the British as yet had no awareness of possible conflict over land. Now, despite the weakening effects of the smallpox, ‘the same suspicious dread of our approach’ and the same acts of vengeance taken on unfortunate stragglers continued unabated. With the colony facing the prospect of starvation, Phillip decided to kidnap again. In December 1789 two men were lured into waist-deep water by the offer of fish; then seized, bound, and taken to the settlement. Their pitted faces made clear that both had survived the smallpox. The child-survivors Nanbaree and Boorong, wildly excited to see them, greeted them by name, the older man as Colbee, and the younger as Baneelon.

  In a double display of guile and athleticism Colbee managed to escape after a week’s captivity, with an ir
on fetter on his leg as memento of his time among the British, but Baneelon was to remain a captive for the best part of five months. A very cheerful captive: John Hunter, with his informed interest in the effects of rank on behaviour, thought Baneelon ‘much more chearful after Co-al-by’s absence, which confirmed our conjecture, and the children’s account, that he was a man more distinguished in his tribe than Ba-na-lang’.

  Why ‘Baneelon’ instead of the familiar ‘Bennelong’? The issue of correct naming across cultural boundaries is a painful one, and too often symptomatic of a wider incomprehension. Surgeon White noted that, at the time of his capture, ‘this native had no less than five names, viz. “Baneelon, Wollewarre, Boinba, Bunde-bunda, Wogé trowey”’. He also noted that ‘he likes best to be called by the second’. Tench confirms that at first the captured man called himself ‘Wolarawaree’, and bestowed that name on the governor. Years later David Collins would set down his patiently accumulated information on how Australian names were given, and how they might be taken away. Names might claim real or fictive kin relationships, as when Baneelon gave Phillip the name Be-anna, ‘father’, while having Phillip call him ‘son’. Some names were temporary, marking transient states and statuses. Individuals might exchange names to express affection, and then call each other by yet another name to celebrate the exchange. After death the name of the deceased ceased to be spoken, so those who had shared the name took another. (Before you dismiss all this as ridiculous and unworkable, list the number of names you have gone by throughout the course of your life, beginning with your baby name or names.) The British outsiders had no understanding of the complex social meanings stored within their captive’s array of names. ‘Baneelon’ or ‘Bennilong’ or ‘Ba-na-lang’ was what they chose to call him—an uncertain sequence of sounds designating an individual, stripped of kin and social and ritual relationships, stripped of gender, stripped of status. (We learn from Tench that Baneelon meant ‘Great Fish’. He also tells us that Baneelon ‘has been seen to kill more than twenty fish by this method [of spearing from a canoe] in an afternoon’, so it is possible ‘Baneelon’ was a feat-name.)