Dancing with Strangers Read online

  When White unloaded his convict cargo at Sydney Cove in late January 1788, there had been a mortality rate of only one in seventeen for the whole voyage, despite its miserable beginnings. This was a remarkable feat, especially when contrasted with the human catastrophe wrought among the convicts of the Second and Third fleets by greed and neglect. (The death rate for the Second Fleet is said to have been one in four, and for the Third Fleet one in eleven.) An officer of the New South Wales Corps travelling with the Second Fleet judged that ‘the slave trade is merciful to what I have seen in this fleet’. Twenty-one months after first landing, with the health of the settlement in White’s charge, Phillip could report that there had been only seventy-two deaths, including some by execution and misadventure, and with twenty-six due to long-standing causes. Even after the mayhem of the 1790 convict fleets, and despite increasingly desperate shortages of food, blankets and supplies, White somehow kept most of the people in his charge alive and sufficiently healthy.

  Some time during 1790, with life in the colony harsh and getting harsher, White found solace with a young convict woman, Rachel Turner, first his housekeeper, later his mistress. Rachel bore him a son in September 1793. He was proud of his boy, and when he returned to England on the Daedalus in December 1794 he took his fifteen-month-old child with him, and found him a loving carer in the sister of his old friend Lieutenant Henry Waterhouse, which indicates how close-knit the friendships wrought in the course of colonial tours of duty were. Meanwhile White’s convict mistress, presumably aided by his good offices, had landed on her feet: in 1797 she was granted a special dispensation from the governor succeeding Phillip to marry a free settler, and together they went on to become one of the most prosperous couples in the colony. White himself did not marry until 1799, and then he brought his natural son into his growing household. Andrew Douglas White continued a source of pride to his father, joining the Royal Engineers and fighting at Waterloo. Then early in 1823, a year after his father’s death, the young man travelled back to Sydney to be reunited with his mother, now a respectable colonial matron. Clearly the meeting was a success: Andrew Douglas later willed his mother his cherished Waterloo medal.

  White’s enthusiasm for the fauna of the new continent was evident from first contact, but how did this brusque, warm-tempered man respond to its human inhabitants? He was, as we might expect, charmed by the women. Out on an expedition with the governor late in August 1788, the British fell in with a large party of Australians at Manly Cove, and the women, who seemed to stand ‘in very great dread’ of their menfolk, were coaxed into accepting gifts: ‘Every gentleman,’ White tells us, ‘singled out a female and presented her with some trinkets…’ Commenting appreciatively that ‘many of the women were strait, well-formed, and lively’, White decked his chosen girl with strips of cloth torn from his pocket and neck handkerchiefs. Then, ‘having nothing left except the buttons of my coat, on her admiring them, I cut them away, and with a piece of string tied them round her waist’. Chivalrous indeed, with the weather chill and not the least prospect of any more buttons. ‘Thus ornamented,’ White continues happily, ‘and thus delighted with her new acquirements, she turned from me with a look of inexpressible archness.’ He was more than content with the exchange.

  For all his stay, White would display a good eye for details of Australian behaviour and an easy tolerance in matters of race. In the autumn of 1789, when the Australians were ravaged by a smallpox epidemic, White did his best to save some of the afflicted, and took a survivor, a six-year-old boy called Nanbaree, into his household. He was content to keep Nanbaree on a very light rein, leaving him free to visit his kin at will, to sustain his duties to them and to fulfil his ritual obligations as required. Throughout his life, Nanbaree was to move between the two worlds with more confidence and at less personal cost than any of his Australian contemporaries.

  From his first days in the colony White deeply enjoyed tramping through the bush taking pot-shots at novel animals and birds. He made what he insisted was an ‘excellent soup’ out of a white cockatoo and a couple of crows, and he was delighted to discover that the ‘New Holland Cassowary’, the bird we call the emu, tasted ‘not unlike tender young beef’. He had begun collecting specimens on behalf of a friend, but the favour flowered into a passion, and he quickly became a dedicated naturalist himself. His journal covered only the first ten months of his time at Sydney, with the first edition being published in 1791, only a year after Tench’s engaging narrative and the weightier compilation from Phillip’s dispatches titled The Voyage of Governor Phillip to Botany Bay. The White volume was angled towards a particular market: the growing band of amateur natural scientists. Its title declared its ambition: Journal of a Voyage to New South Wales with Sixty-five Plates of Non Descript Animals, Birds, Lizards, Serpents, curious Cones of trees and other natural Productions by John White Esq., Surgeon General to the Settlement. Those sixty-five plates must have taken some organisation. Despite his powers of exact observation (for evidence see any one of his bird descriptions), White lacked the coordination of hand and eye of a draughtsman, and had to corral any available talent to secure his illustrations.

  However—there is a strange absence from White’s accounts of the local birds, and from the accounts of his fellow diarists too. None of them describes the extraordinary noises made by so many Australian birds: no reference to the souls-in-torment shrieking of the sulphur-crested cockatoo or the kookaburra’s Mrs Rochester laugh; no reference to the vocal pyrotechnics of the rufous whistler—although Tench does allow that ‘in the woods are various little songsters, whose notes are equally sweet and plaintive’. Most insulting of all, while Collins gives a careful description of the feathers of the lyrebird, which he thought a type of bird-of-paradise, he fails to mention its golden voice. Did no one bother to listen? (It is evening and roosting time now, and the racket outside is tremendous.) Did sounds not interest classifying scientists? Or is it that we only ‘hear’ the birdsongs of our youth?

  JUDGE-ADVOCATE DAVID COLLINS

  David Collins, also thirty years old in 1788, accepted the post of judge-advocate in the new colony when his useful but undistinguished career in the Marine Corps was interrupted by the ending of the American war. Within months he also became Phillip’s secretary and, in time, his friend, although never, I think, his confidant. Phillip was by nature and policy a secretive man.

  Collins had minimal legal experience, but he was a man of steady intelligence and conventional mind, and discharged his judicial duties to the satisfaction of his more reasonable colleagues. Such duties in a convict colony must have been onerous enough, but Collins was a prodigious worker, choosing to take his position as secretary to mean he should keep a quasi-official chronicle of events suitable for later publication. As early as July 1788 George Worgan knew Collins was preparing such a narrative, and in a letter to his brother declared he stood ready to recommend it ‘in preference to any other, because from his Genius I am certain it will be the most Entertaining, Animating, Correct and satisfactory of any that may appear’.

  Worgan was of a sardonic turn of mind, especially when writing to his brother, so there may be a joke here. From what Collins has left on the page it is difficult to imagine him ‘entertaining’ or ‘animating’. His aim, it seems, was to be Master of Plod. But he was as ‘correct’ as human frailty allows, and profoundly ‘satisfactory’ in a range of ways: for example, without him we would never know the favourite petty derelictions of convicts, and so could not know which deprivations chafed them most. Professionally close-mouthed regarding trouble between officers, his occasional rumbles against the obnoxious Major Ross are the more revealing. And we could not know the enigmatic Phillip half so well if we did not have this big, solid fellow always at his heels, providing his own commentary on Phillip’s sometimes ambiguous actions.

  During the colony’s infant years, Collins found the climate, land and problems of supply so intractable that he had little faith in its survival.
Nonetheless he enumerated every new building, whether prison, provisions shed, windmill or granary, and soberly redrew the map of material progress at the end of each month. His favourite metaphors for growth came from agriculture. It was a vegetable growth he looked for, with steady expansion and increasingly rich fruits the sure reward of postponed gratification and systematic labour. I think this was one reason why he found convicts so repellent. Content merely to scratch the soil so that precious seeds withered, seeming to lack any sense of communal responsibility, they were also incurably improvident, gobbling their weekly rations and then living from day to day by thieving from their fellows.

  Paradoxically, he was at least as offended by evidence of convict solidarity: ‘There was such a tenderness in these people to each other’s guilt, such an acquaintance with vice and the different degrees of it, that unless they were detected in the fact, it was generally next to impossible to bring an offence home to them.’ Six months of close contact was enough to persuade him that, a very few individuals excepted, convicts were a race apart and crime the convict soul made visible: irremediably feckless, with no inner discipline and no recognition of consequences.

  His diagnosis was not, as ours might be, of class solidarity forged out of shared experience. For Collins character was not the product of circumstance. He thought what bound convicts together was their natural amorality. They were the scourings of society, and only a few had the least chance of rehabilitation.

  His most scathing condemnations were reserved for Irish convicts, and for all convict women. But despite his animus, and despite his warmly conjugal communications with his wife Maria, Collins himself soon took a young convict girl as his mistress. At seventeen Ann Yates was sentenced to hang for stealing a bolt of printed cotton. Reprieved to transportation, she bore a child to a seaman called Theakston during the voyage out on the Lady Penrhyn. The boy was later baptised by the Reverend Johnson and given his father’s name, but Theakston sailed for China and out of Ann’s life early in May 1788. In November 1791, she bore Collins his first child, a daughter, and in June 1793 his only son, and she remained his lover for the rest of his years in the colony. They never cohabited. Yates, who in time received her freedom, continued to live in the convicts’ quarters with her children, while Collins preferred to live in the governor’s house, close by his friend and his work. Such liaisons were common—most officers had some enduring connection with convict women—but I still wonder what Collins found to say as he glided out of the governor’s house of an evening.

  Collins neglected neither Ann nor his children by her. He bequeathed her a holding of 100 acres of land on the Hawkesbury when he left the colony late in 1796 to return to the embraces of his loyal wife Maria, who had assuaged her loneliness during his long absence by writing romantic novels. Ann and the two children happened to travel back to England on the same ship, probably disembarking at Liverpool on their way to Ann’s native Yorkshire. The little family of three returned to Australia in July 1799, and the children were later reunited with their father during his governorship of Tasmania.

  Collins already was, or was to become, a susceptible man. Travelling to Australia in 1803, again without Maria, to establish a colony first and abortively at Port Phillip, then successfully at Hobart, he met the pretty young wife of a convict on the voyage out and became enamoured of her. The relationship scandalised Hobart Town throughout Collins’ governorship, especially given the cuckolded husband’s affable compliance, the privileges Collins granted the pair, and the trio’s relaxed conduct in public.

  Collins is especially important to us because without his dutiful recording it would be difficult to trace the interactions between Australians and British in the years after the Australians decided to ‘come in’ to Sydney Town. As his passion for agricultural metaphors suggests, he was a perfect representative of the moral and material economy of European culture. It was these assumptions he brought to his analysis of the convict condition, and which he initially brought to the encounter with the very different culture and economy of the nomad people of Australia.

  He began by seeing them as nuisances, as, for example, in the matter of fishing. At first, he said, they had been happy to help draw the great nets of the British, and to wait quietly for a share of the catch. (They must have been both impressed and appalled by the efficiency of British net-hauling in contrast to their hook-and-line or spearing techniques.) Then, with winter coming on and fish scarcer, a British party had been drawing in a big haul when warriors swept down and ‘took by force about half of what had been brought on shore’, while spearmen stood with spears poised for throwing. We might think that leaving half the catch to predatory uninvited guests was generous, but while Collins allowed that the natives were hungry, he saw the action as both irrational and wantonly hostile. He was as yet no readier to grant intelligent motivations to savages than he was to convicts.

  His initial philosophical response to the nature of Australian existence was nonetheless surprisingly perceptive. From the beginning Collins exempted the Australians from the commitment to progress and accumulation he required of civilised men. He recognised that their way of life was timeless, reiterative rather than progressive, and his expressed hope was that even after the arrival of the British they could be left in their timeless universe ‘under a dispensation to keep them happy in their liberties’. However, precisely because their ways of thinking and being were incompatible with those of the British, they would have to continue their timeless existence elsewhere, beyond the expanding British colony (remember that in his understanding the rest of the land was ‘empty’). These people were certainly fully human, but they were also sui generis, and therefore unassimilable.

  Collins was accordingly contemptuous of Phillip’s efforts to incorporate the Australians into British society over those first years, dismissing his tireless negotiations as time and energy wasted on ‘amusing ourselves with these children of ignorance’, as he grumpily put it. Better, he thought, to drive them away, and keep them away, by the judicious use of muskets. He continued to believe that separation would have been the best policy for both peoples. But as the slow years pass we watch David Collins ripen into an absorbed observer of native conduct, and a man capable of recognising, indeed of honouring, a quite different way of being.

  WATKIN TENCH, CAPTAIN-LIEUTENANT OF MARINES

  Watkin Tench of the Royal Marines, unmarried but already a veteran of the American wars, was about thirty when he landed at Port Jackson. His reports from the new colony immediately outsold his loftier competitors’, and continue to outsell them today. He is one of the handful of writers who are an unshadowed pleasure to meet on the page. Through that familiar miracle of literacy where pothooks transform into personality, it is not so much his information as his presence which delights us. His parents are said to have run a dancing academy, and it tempting to think that their son’s grace on the page has something to do with a melodious, light-footed upbringing. He has the kind of charm which reaches easily across centuries. If he lacks Montaigne’s intellectual sophistication and unwavering moral clarity, he shares with him the even rarer quality of sunny self-irony.

  Almost all we know of the man is here, in the two and a half hundred pages of his two books, and yet we think we know him. George Worgan dismissed him as a lightweight incapable of producing anything beyond ‘fireside chit-chat’, but it is precisely Tench’s cosy informality, together with his eye for the apparently redundant detail, which charms as it informs.

  The best reason for reading Watkin Tench is that he reminds us of two important things surprisingly easy to forget: that the past was real, and that this likeable man whose words are on the page before us was actually there. In his writings Tench lives again, as he makes the people he sees around him live, especially the men and women rendered near-invisible or unintelligible in too many other accounts: the indigenous inhabitants of the Sydney region.

  The great anthropologist W. E. H. Stanner, reflecting o
n the long alienation between European and Aboriginal Australians, believed that the grossly unequal relationship that developed in the earliest days of the colony—he says within the first five years—continued to inflict injustice and injury on generations of Aboriginal Australians to his own day. He believed that those serial injustices found their root in the British failure to comprehend, much less to tolerate, legitimate difference: an intolerance which then sustained itself in the face of a long history of practical intimacy; of long-term work and sexual relationships, even childhoods spent in one another’s company. He believed crippling incomprehension continues to rule because ‘a different tradition leaves us tongueless and earless towards this other [Aboriginal] world of meaning and significance’.

  As we will see, there is much truth in that. But if Watkin Tench was initially rendered ‘tongueless and earless’ by the strangeness of the people he fell among he was never eyeless, even at the beginning, and with experience and reflection he came to hear a little of what was being said, and to tell us about it. That little is precious.

  In new colonies race relations are shaped quickly, usually during the first few years of contact, and not by rational decision but by hugger-mugger accidents, casual misreadings, and unthinking responses to the abrasions inevitable during close encounters of the cultural kind. Tench was in the colony for only four years. By the time he left, in December 1791, and despite the good will of leaders on both sides, rapprochement was a fading dream, but Tench’s eager gaze and pleasure in the unfamiliar holds out the hope that, by reading him and his peers, we might be able to identify the small events, and the compounding errors, which were to have such large and finally tragic consequences.

  What made Tench incomparable among good observers is that he treated each encounter with the strangers as a detective story: ‘This is what they did. What might they have meant by doing that?’ This glinting curiosity is uniquely his. (Compare him with John Hunter, who also watches keenly, but at a condescending distance: the squire watching his beagles.) Tench always saw the Australians as fellow humans, and their conduct as therefore potentially intelligible. This focus on action is essential in ethnohistory, which is what we call history when the people we are curious about have left no easily decipherable records of their own, and when their intentions and understandings have to be constructed out of descriptions given by literate outsiders who often do not know what they are looking at (a wedding?…a war party?). At best we can hope for the documentary equivalent of a silent film shot by a fixed camera—a camera which cannot know precisely where the focus of action is. It is that alert, steady gaze that Tench grants us.