Australians: Origins to Eureka: 1

by Thomas Keneally

  There is a perhaps unconscious comedy in Tench’s description. ‘At length, a sergeant of grenadiers stuck fast, and declared himself incapable of moving either forward or backwards . . . “I find it impossible to move; I am sinking” resounded on every side.’ The rope intended to go round the wrists of captured natives had to be used to drag the sergeant of grenadiers free. With their mud-smirched uniforms, the inglorious military pressed round the head of the creek and on to the village. Tench, dividing his party into three so that they could attack from all sides, sent the troops rushing amongst the huts to find them absolutely empty. And now, unless the marines set out for camp at once, the river estuaries they had crossed since the point where they left their supplies and bags would be cut off till nightfall. The struggle back exhausted many soldiers, their physical condition undermined by dietary deficiencies.

  Meanwhile, the wounded Irish gamekeeper was still well enough to walk around the hospital. Though many had spoken to McEntire about the appropriateness of openly confessing any injuries he had done the natives, just in case he needed soon to face God, ‘he steadily denied . . . having ever fired at them but once, and then only in defence of his own life, which he thought in danger’. He died quite suddenly on 20 January 1791. The surgeons did an autopsy and found pieces of stone and shell inside the lobe of the left lung. Along with the magic which had been sung into them, they had contributed to the lung’s collapse.

  After missing all the drama of the two expeditions, Bennelong had returned to Sydney with Barangaroo from the Cameraigal ceremonies across the harbour. Phillip saw that Barangaroo’s body was exceptionally painted to mark the ritual importance of herself and her husband, red ochre colouring her cheeks, nose, upper lip and small of her back, while dots of white clay spotted the skin under her eyes. Bennelong and Barangaroo proudly wore crowns of rushes and reed bands around their arms. Barangaroo was, after all, a Cameraigal woman, and had returned to her people with her distinguished husband to be made a fuss of. Amongst the initiates was the youth named Yemmerrawanne, he who aspired to marry Abaroo. The initiates had each had a snake-like black streak painted on his chest, and his front tooth knocked out. Yemmerrawanne had lost a piece of his jawbone along with his incisor.

  In Collins’s journal, the preparations for the knocking out of a tooth are both illustrated and graphically described. The elders danced until one of them fell suddenly to the ground, seemingly in a state of agony. The other elders continued dancing, singing loudly while one or more beat the fallen one on the back until a bone was produced from his mouth and he was free of his pain. This bone chisel would be used on one of the initiates, who believed it to have come from the elder’s body. Then one by one the other senior men threw themselves on the ground in this manner, and in each case a bone to be used the following day to remove an initiate’s tooth was produced.

  For the ceremony, the young initiate, surrounded by spear- and shield-carrying elders, was seated on a kneeling relative’s shoulders and the tooth was extracted by a man holding a chisel of bone in his left hand and a striking stone in his right. Collins acquired the name for this tooth-excising ceremony—erah-ba-diang, jaw-hurting. Amongst all the names initiated men carried, some too secret to be uttered to the Europeans, there was added after this ceremony the title kebarrah, meaning a man whose teeth had been knocked out by a rock.

  Bennelong, returned to Sydney, was full of the exhilaration of the recent Cameraigal ceremonies. Corroboree—the Eora word was carabbara or carribere— was an exultant experience, described by Tench as dances consisting ‘of short parts, or acts, accompanied with frequent vociferations, and a kind of hissing or whizzing noise; they commonly end with a loud rapid shout, and after a short respite, are renewed’. Bodies were decorated with white for the dance, and there were waving lines from head to foot, crossbars, spirals or zebra-type stripes. The eyes were often surrounded by large white circles. There were occasional dances of romance as well—Nanbaree and Abaroo performed one for Phillip and the officers.

  Bennelong cheerily told Governor Phillip that he had met Willemerring at the Cameraigal festival. In Bennelong’s mind this was no more remarkable than it would be to a European to mention that they had met a given judge socially. But to Phillip it seemed another instance to question Bennelong’s reliability.

  An incident was about to occur which came close to convincing Bennelong to sever his association with Phillip, his name-swapper. After Christmas a raid was made by some natives who dug and stole potatoes—the natives called them tarra, teeth—near Lieutenant Dawes’s hut. One of the Eora threw his fishing spear at a convict trying to scare the marauders away and wounded him. Led by Phillip, a small party went chasing the potato thieves, and two of them were found sitting with women by a fire. One threw a club, which the marines thought a spear, and three muskets opened fire. Both men fled, and the two women were brought in, slept the night at Government House, and left the following morning.

  One of the two natives fired at was wounded. A surgical party led by White and accompanied by some Sydney Cove natives went looking for him and found him lying dead next to a fire. Bark had been placed around his neck, a screen of grass and ferns covered his face, and a tree branch stripped of bark formed an arch over his body. The musket ball had gone through his shoulder and cut the sub-clavian artery. He had bled to death. None of the Eora who went with the surgeon to look for him would go near him, for fear that the mawm spirit in him, the spirit of shock or mortal envy, would overtake them.

  Bennelong was angry that death had been the punishment for the minor crime of stealing potatoes. At Government House he was plied with food, but refused to touch anything. The fruits of the earth were communally owned by his people, and here were the interlopers making a sop or a bribe out of them. Later, Bennelong appeared at the head of a group of several warriors in a cove where one of the fishing boats was working, and took the fish while threatening the unarmed convicts and soldiers that if they resisted he would spear them. When he next saw Phillip, the governor asked an armed guard into the room during a session in which Bennelong passionately argued the case for taking the fish. Bennelong saw as justice what Phillip saw as robbery. When confronted with two of the soldiers who had seen him from the boats, Bennelong launched into a rambling, insolent protest, ‘burst into fury, and demanded who had killed Bangai [the dead Aborigine]’. Then Bennelong walked out on Phillip, and as he passed the wheelwright shop in the yard, he picked up an iron hatchet and disappeared with it.

  Amongst the population of Sydney Cove was an anonymous painter who produced a striking watercolour portrait of Bennelong wearing white paint while angry and mourning the news of Bangai’s death. Both Phillip and Bennelong had now become exceptionally enraged over their dead. Phillip gave orders that no boat should leave Sydney Cove unless it carried arms, and forbade the natives to go to the western point of the cove, where the crime of potato stealing had occurred. This prevented them from visiting their respected friend, Lieutenant Dawes. But even this breakdown of the relationship could not stop the too-amiable Bennelong from stopping fishing boats to ask how Phillip was, and to find out if the governor intended to shoot him.

  Captain Collins had a clear grasp of the policy of ‘sanguinary punishments’ by the natives, reasoning that, ‘While they entertained the idea of our having dispossessed them of their residences, they must always consider us as enemies; and upon this principle, they made a point of attacking the white people whenever opportunity and safety concurred.’

  A SUBTLE RESPONSE

  When Lieutenant Ball of the Supply had been in Batavia in 1790, gathering supplies and sending Lieutenant King on his way to Whitehall on a Dutch ship, on Phillip’s orders he had chartered a snow, a small, square-rigged ship to bring further supplies to Sydney. Sailing in Supply’s wake, the Waaksamheyd (Wakefulness) brought with it a cargo of rice and some beef, pork, flour and sugar. By an arrangement not uncommon in emergency food distribution to this day, the British were willin
g to lose five pounds in 100 of the rice, but after that deduction was made there was nearly a 43 000 pound (79 522 kilo) deficiency in the rice Waaksamheyd’s Dutch master, Detmer Smith, landed. Smith had rice and flour aboard which he claimed were his own, and then proceeded to sell to the commissary.

  At some stage Phillip would decide that despite Detmer Smith’s chicanery, this would be a good ship to contract for taking Captain Hunter, the officers and ship’s company of the Sirius back to England for the pro forma court martial which always followed the loss of a British naval vessel. Phillip also wrote to the Home Secretary, Grenville, by way of the Dutch snow with a new request to match an earlier one he had sent, expressing a desire to return to England on account of ‘private affairs’ to do with his estranged wife, Margaret, particularly as to what his future might be in the light of any legacy she left him, or bills she expected him to meet after her death. When he had left for New South Wales in 1787, she had been ill and unlikely to live many years, and Phillip saw both potential benefits and horrific legal responsibilities arising out of her death. But in the request he sent Grenville was the added information that for the past two years, ‘I have never been a week free from a pain in my side, which undermines and wears me out, and though this colony is not exactly in the state in which I would have wished to have left it, another year may do much, and it is at present so fully established, that I think there cannot any longer be any doubt that it will, if settlers are sent out, answer in every respect the end proposed by government in making the settlement.’

  That word ‘answer’ had arisen again. Yet by the same ship, Collins told his father that ‘this colony, under the present system of supplying it, will never answer’. It was as if the place was being asked a question, and gave only a subtle response, which Phillip alone could hear.

  Phillip also sent off by Waaksamheyd a letter to Sir Joseph Banks which rings strangely to later ears but which grew from the Enlightenment’s obsession with skulls as a guide to race and character and as an index to culture. ‘The seeds etc. are on board, the flaxseed (a small cask) is marked EN [for Evan Nepean] . . . I am sorry that I cannot send you a head. After the ravages made by the smallpox, numbers were seen in every part, but the natives burned the bodies.’ Eventually Phillip was to acquire a skull—we do not know whose it was—and sent it to Banks, who in turn sent it on to Professor Johann Frederich Blumenbach of the University of Göttingen. The male skull had its front tooth missing, as Banks had warned Blumenbach would be the case, ‘according to the custom of these savages’. The skull would be used to support Blumenbach’s theory that Caucasians were the founding form of the human group, from which other races had degenerated because of climatic variations. Ultimately, the theory would be perverted by Adolf Hitler and the National Socialist Party of Germany to form the core of their racist, pan-Germanic philosophies.

  It would take Hunter and other representatives of the Sirius till the following year to reach Portsmouth. Their voyage via New Caledonia and Java was marked by Hunter’s wisdom and inventiveness. He proved the exact location of the reef-girt Solomon Islands, and discovered a passage between Bougainville and Buka, a passage which would in a much later war in the twentieth century become a graveyard for Australian, American and Japanese sailors. Twenty-two of Hunter’s sailors had fever when they left Batavia, and three would die by Cape Town, where at Hunter’s insistence the Waaksamheyd would wait sixteen weeks, until mid January 1792, to allow recuperation.

  In April that year, the snow reached Portsmouth, and Hunter faced his court martial and was exonerated.

  CHAPTER 8

  INTO THE BLUE

  In New South Wales in April 1791, with the Waaksamheyd seen off, another exploration of the hinterland was planned. The expedition’s aim was to cross the Hawkesbury River near Richmond Hill and then push on to those western mountains whose deep canyons and cliffs had earlier turned Dawes back. Phillip had named them the Carmarthens, but everyone went on calling them the Blue Mountains.

  Along with Phillip, Watkin Tench was one of the group and said they intended to find out too whether the Hawkesbury River to the north-west and the Nepean River to the west were one and the same watercourse. Dawes, Collins, White, Colby and a youth named Ballooderry, two marine sergeants, eight soldiers and three convicts who were assessed to be good shots made up the party. Dawes steered north-west by compass, an instrument to which Colby and Ballooderry gave the title naamora, to see the way.

  The country immediately west of Rose Hill did not much scare Colby, who said that most of the people from there, the Bidjigals, had died of the galgalla, smallpox. Further west still was the Hawkesbury River clan called the Booroo Berongal, and encountering one of their encampments, Colby and Ballooderry felt at risk and wanted to burn down the few shelters. When they reached the bushy banks of the Hawkesbury River, the problems the Europeans had walking through the entangled undergrowth and their frequent falls caused amusement to Colby and his young friend. If the person who fell ‘shaken nigh to death’ got angry with them, even to the governor ‘they retorted in a moment, by calling him every opprobrious name which their language affords’. Their general favourite term of insult was Gonin Patta, an eater of human excrement.

  Again, the Europeans were defeated by the country and were unable to scale the Blue Mountains, which would present themselves to early attempts as either densely wooded, dead-end canyons or else sandstone precipices with no accommodating inclines. Everyone was impressed by the tree-climbing capacity of the Hawkesbury River natives, and a young man gave his coastal brothers Colby and Ballooderry and the gentlemen an exhibition in climbing the smooth and slippery trunks of eucalpyts, looking for possums.

  Phillip was excited to tell Sir Joseph Banks later in the year about the journey and to note the difference of the Hawkesbury language from that of the coastal people—indeed, he went so far as to see them as two separate languages. By now Colby and Ballooderry had grown uneasy amongst the inland strangers and were keen to return to known parts. They kept up a chant of ‘Where’s Rose Hill; where?’ On the return journey, the explorers shot ducks which Ballooderry refused to swim for.

  It was typical of those early expeditions that bush or water or steep terraces of sandstone would defeat the part-time explorers of Sydney and Parramatta. Yet it still seems odd that the settlers remained confined to the broad dish of the Sydney Basin, and to the coastal regions which opened up to the south of Botany Bay. It is not impossible that Phillip, not expecting much of the interior, was pleased for now to have his charges limited to a finite area.

  In fact the most astounding of the journeys of this era of heroic journeying was not one undertaken on land but one plotted and undertaken by the convict couple John and Mary Bryant in the hope of becoming the first to rise from their pit and appear again on the shores of the known world.

  For the fisherman-smuggler Will Bryant, the past two years had been hard. In February 1789 he had received a sentence of 100 lashes for dealing in black-market fish. He had been kept on in the fishing service because, as Captain Collins said, ‘Notwithstanding his villainy, he was too useful a person to part with and send to a brick cart.’ Bryant burned inwardly, however. Like her husband, Mary also resented his punishment.

  Expelled with Will from their fisherman’s cottage to live in the general camp, not only did she need to listen to the mockery of fellow prisoners and references to her fallen status but was exposed to the full squalor and hardship of the Sydney Cove diet. Into such deprivation was Mary’s second child, Emmanuel, born, and baptised by the Reverend Richard Johnson on 4 April 1790. The dilemma of people like William and Mary Bryant was reflected urbanely in a slightly overstated but valid letter Surgeon White wrote in April 1790 to a dealer in hams, tongues and salt salmon in the Strand, London. ‘From what we have already seen we may conclude there is not a single article in the whole country that in the nature of things could prove of the smallest use or advantage to the Mother Country or the commercial
world. In the name of Heaven, what has the ministry been about? Surely they have quite forgotten or neglected us? . . . This is so much out of the world and tract of commerce that it could never answer.’

  When, towards the year’s end, the Waaksamheyd arrived in the wake of the Supply, Captain Detmer Smith and William Bryant made repeated contact with each other. If the English thought little of Smith, Smith was willing to return the favour and at some stage, in secrecy, sold Will Bryant a compass, a quadrant and a chart covering the route via the eastern coast of New South Wales and Torres Strait to Batavia. Then, towards the end of February 1791, Bryant called a meeting with five other convicts in his hut proposing the stealing of the boat in which he was employed. Mary was privy to these arrangements and may even have initiated them. For whatever reason—her persistence, her complete knowledge of the plot, Bryant’s affection for her and for his children—she was always considered essential to the escape. A passer-by overheard the discussion, and it was reported to the governor, who ordered that a watch be kept on Bryant.

  Because of a recent overturning of the cutter, it had been refitted at government expense with new sails, mast and oars. Bryant’s and Mary’s accumulated secret cache for their proposed escape included 100 pounds (45 kilos) of flour, 100 pounds of rice, 14 pounds (6.4 kilos) of pork, about 8 gallons (36 litres) of water, a new net, two tents, carpenter’s tools, fishing gear, some muskets and the aforesaid navigational aids. Mary Bryant had collected a little pharmaceutical kit too, including amongst it the triple-veined leaves of the native sarsaparilla (Smilax glycyiphylla). (Some of her leaves would end up, as souvenirs of her escape, all over the world.)

  As seven other convicts accompanied them, they had probably contributed to this serious accumulation of stores as well. They included Samuel Bird, saltpetre thief and a close friend of the Bryants; the Irish stonemason-cum-navigator, James Martin; the Second Fleet’s William Allen, a man in his mid forties who had stolen handkerchiefs from a shop in Norwich; Nathaniel Lilly, who had broken into a house in Sudbury with two other men; Samuel Broome (alias Butcher), a middle-aged Second Fleeter; and James Cox, a colonial cabinet-maker, who had been one of those who had skipped ship as a result of the mutiny on the Mercury in 1782. Before he left, Cox wrote a letter to his lover, Sarah Young, in the hut where he pursued his cabinet-making. The letter called on her ‘to give over the pursuits of the vices’ which, he told her, prevailed in the settlement.