Dancing with Strangers Read online

  Official instructions, however utopian, have a longer life than the stories drawn from hard experience. Governor Phillip brought a determination verging on obstinacy to the business of persuading the local population to friendship; a determination rare, possibly unique, in the gruff annals of imperialism. He pursued Morton’s strategies from refusing to use guns, even at the cost of taking casualties, down to the detail of the ribbons and looking-glasses. (It is true that he also resorted to kidnap to convey his benevolent intentions, but that rough way to useful intercourse predates Columbus.) In a letter probably written in the July of that first hectic year of 1788 he gave the following detailed observations on the local inhabitants. (The capitals might imply pomposity to us, but not to a contemporary):

  The Natives are far more numerous than expected, I reckon from fourteen to sixteen hundred in this Harbour, Broken Bay, and Botany Bay, and once [we fell in with] Two hundred and twelve Men in one part…The Women are constantly employed in the Canoes where I have seen them big with Child, and with very young Infants at their Breasts, they seem less fond of ornaments than the men. And I have [never?] seen them with their hair Ornamented with the Teeth of Dogs […] etc. as the Hair of the Men is frequently Ornamented.

  I have reason to think that the Men do not want personal Courage [,] they readily place a confidence and appear to be a friendly and inoffensive people unless made Angry and which the most trifling circumstance does at times. Three convicts have been killed by them in the Woods and I have no doubt but that the Convicts were the [aggressors?].

  They…are fond of any very Soft Musick, and will attend to singing any of the Words which they very readily repeat. But I know very little at present of the people. They never come into the Camp, and I have had few hours to seek them out. There are several roots which they Eat, and I have seen the Bones of the Kangurroo and flying Squirrel at the entrance to their huts, but Fish is their principal support which on these Shores is very scarce and I believe many of them are Starving.

  Contrast this with Darwin’s dismissive diagnoses regarding the Tierra del Fuegian ‘savages’ a mere fifty years later. Phillip grants no gulf in nature. We are still in the dawn of the world, with friendship between unlike peoples a blossoming hope—given the universality of reason and local good will.

  Phillip was further disarmed by his first meetings with Australians, when his calm, weaponless advance and the offering of gifts led to the consummation of hand meeting hand in The Handshake, to him a universal pledge of peace and friendship. (That same experiment could turn out differently. The historian Greg Dening tells a story of a British officer who was powerfully offended when another native on another beach grasped his extended hand, turned it over to see if it had anything in it—and then let it drop. The Britisher crossly concluded that these were an unpleasantly avaricious people.)

  Phillip’s serene account of the Australians’ response to the British presence is obliquely confirmed by the gleeful descriptions George Worgan provided his brother in a letter written a month later. Worgan told of a string of meetings with locals whom he described as behaving like excited children at a Christmas party, holding out their hands for their presents, laughing heartily, jumping ‘extravagantly’, and whooping with pleasure as they examined the clothes, hats and hair of the newcomers. They also allowed themselves to be tricked out in ‘different coloured Papers, and Fools’-Caps which pleased them mightily’. Even allowing for Worgan’s determined jocularity these still look like astonishingly amiable meetings, incorporating startling hands-on intimacies. Worgan describes ‘a Fellow’ picking up a quill and ‘trying to poke it through my Nose and two or three other Gentlemen’s’, as he checked to see whether their nasal septums were pierced or not, and then giving up and ‘shewing Us that he could not wear it in his own, and shaking his head’.

  Phillip, reading these scenes not with Worgan’s irony but for the trusting good will he thought he saw demonstrated, was confirmed in his chosen policy. That policy and his personal example would keep the British and the local men on sufficiently peaceful terms for as long as they were under his eye. But he could not control attitudes. Here is a paragraph from Worgan, again to his brother, on what he really thought about the new people, beginning with his estimation of the charms of their women.

  ‘It must be merely from the Curiosity, to see how they would behave…that one would be induced to touch one of Them, for they are Ugly to Disgust, in their countenances and stink of Fish-Oil and Smoke, most sweetly.’ They are shapely enough; he allows that if some of them were cleaned up they might excite lust ‘even in the frigid breast of a philosopher’, but in their natural state the fish-oil and soot would keep more than philosophers away. He concludes: ‘To sum up the Qualities Personal and mental…they appear to be an Active, Volatile, Unoffending, Happy, Merry, Funny, Laughing, Good-natured, Nasty Dirty, race of human Creatures as ever lived in a state of Savageness.’ (Worgan’s italics throughout.) He knew these people to be ‘savages’, and therefore creatures utterly unlike himself.

  Pragmatic David Collins recognised the fish oil to be a sensible protection against both the ferocious local mosquitoes and the cold. Nonetheless he acknowledged that ‘the oil, together with the perspiration from their bodies, produces, in hot weather, a most horrible stench’ (the British had made landfall in late January, on the brink of the hottest month). He recorded he had seen some natives ‘with the entrails of fish frying in the burning sun upon their heads, until the oil ran down over their foreheads’. Later we will see that the first thing the British did with their kidnap victims was to dump them in a tub, crop their hair and give them a thorough scrubbing before stuffing them into shirts, trousers and jackets. We can’t know what the victims thought about any of this, only that they were terrified. It is also likely that the Australians found the stink of unwashed British flesh sweating in unwashed woollen clothing in Sydney heat at least as repellent, but in such encounters it is the literate who do all the complaining.

  Less contemptuous and more curious observers than Worgan, and less complacent ones than Phillip, could be baffled as to Australian intentions. Surgeon John White had this to say about an unexpected and potentially dangerous encounter with ‘about three hundred natives’ at Botany Bay on 1 June:

  This was the greatest number of the natives we had ever seen together since our coming among them. What could be the cause of their assembling in such great numbers gave rise to a variety of conjectures. Some thought they were going to war among themselves. Others conjectured that some of them had been concerned in the murder of our men, notwithstanding we did not meet with the smallest trace to countenance such an opinion, and that, fearing we should revenge it, they had formed this convention in order to defend themselves against us. Others imagined that the assemblage might be occasioned by a burial, a marriage, or some religious meeting.

  ‘A burial, a marriage, or some religious meeting’—or perhaps a preparation for war. It was certainly a deeply uncanny situation. It is against this background of casual contempt and intelligent anxiety that we have to locate Phillip’s determined optimism. From the beginning, and remarkably, he recognised the Australians’ wants and expressions to be as powerfully felt as his own, and as we will see he acknowledged some conflicts. But he also remained persuaded of something not at all evident: that in time the Australians would inevitably come to recognise the benefits of the British presence among them, not only in material matters, but in the unique, incomparable gift of British law.

  First, for things material. Phillip:

  It is undeniably certain that to teach the shivering savage how to clothe his body, and to shelter himself completely from the cold and wet, and to put into the hands of men, ready to perish one half of the year with hunger, the means of procuring constant and abundant provision, must confer upon them benefits of the highest value and importance.

  Phillip did not regard this conviction as prior and ideological, but as the fruits of observation. He ha
d watched these people suffer hunger when fish supplies dropped off in colder weather. He noted the meagreness of their vegetable resources, and how long and painfully the women laboured to collect and prepare them. He watched them in bad weather, and knew they suffered: ‘While they have not made any attempt towards clothing themselves, they are by no means insensible to the cold, and appear very much to dislike the rain. During a shower they have been observed to cover their heads with pieces of bark, and to shiver exceedingly.’ His response was typically direct. He decided that the moment he established good contact with these poor cold savages he would introduce them to the benefits of clothing. He therefore requested the immediate dispatch from England of ‘a supply of frocks and jackets to distribute among them’, urging that the garments be made long and loose ‘so they would be useful to both men and women’.

  Phillip, unlike some of his compatriots, acknowledged that sensibilities might differ between the races. He noted, for example, one Australian’s disgust at the smell of salt pork lingering on his fingers after he had touched a piece. He thought such differences to be trivial and ephemeral, and that civilising savages would be easy because, as rational beings, they would readily recognise the superiority of British material and moral arrangements. Like most of us, Phillip believed his home culture to be universally advantageous and desirable. Furthermore, he believed it to be universally applicable and therefore transportable; that it could flourish in any clime. The irony of this vision, given the total British dependence on imported supplies and their near-starvation in a milieu where Australians had survived for millennia, quite escaped him. I doubt it escaped the Australians.

  Every Britisher thought their superiority manifest in their possessions, especially their manufactured goods—clothing, guns, tools—but also what Tench calls ‘toys’: the baubles brought to charm and disarm the natives. All of the officers and some of the men had brought stocks of such objects to barter for native artefacts, which were enjoying a vogue at home since the voyages of the great, good, and martyred Captain Cook.

  The model for pacification through trade had been established in Tahiti, that terrestrial Paradise. There Cook had seen an earth so spontaneously productive that ‘in the article of food those people may almost be said to be exempt from the curse of our forefathers; scarcely can it be said that they earn their bread with the sweat of their brow, benevolent nature hath not only supply’d them with necessarys but with abundance of superfluities’. The human population also seemed blessed with superfluities of physical grace and natural intelligence. Immediately recognising the desirability of European goods, they leapt into enthusiastic trade, happily exchanging warm female flesh and a wondrous variety of fresh foods for European products, especially iron nails. (The British ships, surreptitiously denailed, were soon in danger of falling apart.)

  The responsiveness of these delightful savages had given their new trading partners a reassuring illusion of the ‘naturalness’ of trans-cultural understanding. The sturdiness of Tahitians’ appetite for British goods—‘red and yellow cloth, some tomahawks, axes, knives, scissors, shirts, jackets, etc.’—together with the convenience of a ‘king’ ready to accept the personal reward of ‘a mantle and some other articles of dress decorated with red feathers, together with six muskets and some ammunition’, meant that as early as 1801 such items could be shipped to Tahiti from infant Sydney in full confidence that they would be exchanged for the pork the British hungered for.

  After such encounters with village-dwelling agriculturalists long familiar with the benefit of trade, naked nomads—lacking pigs, fruits and kings, and cautiously frugal with their women—had to come as something of a disappointment, even to men uncorrupted by the mellow exchanges of Tahiti. These people did not covet the trinkets the British waggled at them. They seemed to lack a proper passion for novelties. Gifts of ribbons and neck-cloths were accepted, worn for a day, then hung on a bush and forgotten. They seemed also to regard most British foods as inedible. Nor did these natives have an ‘abundance of superfluities’ of their own available for exchange: it quickly became clear that every one of their hand-crafted multipurpose possessions was essential for the daily business of surviving, and was duly cherished. They coveted only those British products which replicated the functions of their own tools, like metal hatchets or fishhooks. Tench himself, engaging in his first day of serious trading, found that a man whose spear he wanted would part with it only in exchange for a hatchet, and Tench had to have himself rowed all the way back to Sydney from the northern shore of the harbour to get him one.

  The British should have paid more attention to the experiences of their predecessors. A hundred years before Cook, William Dampier visited the north-western coast of Australia and met some of the inhabitants. He did not stay long—not more than two months—but that was time enough to identify some disturbing characteristics of these particular natives. He could define them only by the negatives of all the things they did not have: no clothes, no houses, no beds, no gods; no sheep, no poultry, no cultivated foods. And no decorum, either: they lived, he said, in heaps, twenty or thirty men, women and children piled together, sharing what they ate and eating what they could find. They were, in his opinion, ‘the miserablest People in the World’.

  However, despite all the negatives they seemed amiable enough, and with his experience of the docile workers of the islands behind him, Dampier thought they might as well be put to useful work. This is what happened next:

  We had found some Wells of Water here and intended to carry 2 or 3 barrels of it aboard. But as it was somewhat troublesome to carry it to the Canoes, we thought to have got these Men to carry it for us. And therefore we gave them some old Clothes: to one, a pair of old Breeches; to another, a ragged Shirt; to the third, a Jacket that was scarce worth owning, which would have been very acceptable in some of the places where we had been…We put them on them, thinking that this finery would have brought them to work heartily for us. And having filled our Water in small long Barrels, about six Gallons in each…we brought our new Servants to the Wells, and put a barrel on each of their Shoulders for them to carry to the Canoe.

  So there they were, appropriately laden. Then came an unexpected difficulty:

  …all the signs we could make were to no purpose, for they stood like Statues without motion, and grinned like so many Monkeys, staring one upon another. For these poor Creatures do not seem accustomed to carrying Burdens, and I believe that one of our Ship-boys of ten years old would carry as much as one of them. So we were forced to carry our Water ourselves. They very fairly put the Clothes off again, and laid them down as if Clothes were only for working in. I did not perceive they had any great liking for them at first.

  No talent for work, no taste for European clothing, and no admiration for ‘anything we had’. We seem to hear the echo of ghostly black laughter rising from the page. This brief encounter set the tone for later ones: Australian incomprehension in the face of European exhortations, an obstinate disinclination to covet European goods, and an absolute refusal to embrace their predestined roles as hewers of wood or, in this case, haulers of water. Nomads have their own ways of managing the world.

  One thing is clear to us. These radically modest local wants, which led to such confusion over what constituted grounds for legitimate exchange, ensured that in Australia trade could never become the Grand Pacifier it had proved elsewhere.

  Phillip had read Dampier. What he seems to have remembered best was Dampier’s comment that many of the men were lacking the upper right incisor. He happened to have lost that same tooth himself in some long-ago accident. He did not know how much that would matter, and he did not take the Dampier lesson regarding Australian recalcitrance at all. How could he, given the strength of his convictions regarding ‘savage teachability’?

  Consider his account of an early trans-racial meeting at Port Jackson. His strategy of mimed trust and the offer of gifts seemed to be working as well there as it had in Botany Ba
y, so confirming, as he thought, the excellence of his diplomatic technique. (Oddly, it rarely occurred to the British that the Australians might be in communication with each other, with information about the white men running before them. Like imperialists earlier and later, they tended to take each meeting as de novo and ‘the natives’ as perennially innocent.) At the Port Jackson meeting Phillip was particularly delighted to find a man fascinated by his first sight of an iron pot full of boiling water. Phillip reports:

  He…went on with me to examine what was boiling in the pot, and exprest his admiration in a manner that made me believe he intended to profit from what he saw, and which I made him understand he might very easily do by the help of some oyster shells…by these hints, added to his own observation, he would be able to introduce the art of boiling among his countrymen.

  The art of boiling introduced to Australia by Phillip’s solemn dumb-show. I suppose teachers everywhere tend to overestimate the effectiveness of their teaching, if only to avoid despair.

  But it was the moral challenge which most enthralled him. Given that these Australians were intelligent beings, capable of reciprocating trust and assessing consequences, they were also capable of being ‘civilised’ in the fullest (British) sense. Being fully confident that British superiority must have been obvious to all parties, he was able to interpret what were probably displays of Australian insouciance or tolerant courtesies extended to uncouth strangers as admiring recognitions of superiority. Experience kept confirming his reading, as experience will. One example: at the cove he had named Manly to mark his high estimation of the impressive men he met there, a noisy group of Australians who had been ‘very troublesome when we were preparing our dinner’ quietly subsided when he drew a circle in the sand and gestured that they should stay outside it, so that he and his officers could eat in peace. They sat in silence outside the circle; the British ate. Phillip took this as ‘another proof of how tractable these people are, when no injury or insult is offered, and when proper means are used to influence the simplicity of their minds’. That they might have been shocked into silence by the ignorance of these extraordinary guests, who sat down without invitation, and who then gobbled their food with no hint of sharing even between each other, much less with their hosts, did not occur to him. How could it? Phillip knew nothing of nomad protocols of food-sharing.