The Fatal Shore

by Robert Hughes

  Australia was no place for such Ovidian sentiments. The Tahitians might live like prelapsarian beings, illiterate Athenians; compared to them, the Iora were Spartans. They exemplified “hard” primitivism, and the name Phillip gave to a spot in Sydney Harbor alluded to this: “Their confidence and manly behavior,” he reported to Lord Sydney, “made me give the name of Manly Cove to this place.”22 Iora boys, like young Spartans at play, practiced incessantly with their spears and woomeras. They believed implicitly in the power of their weapons, and a touching passage in Surgeon John White’s Journal describes how one of them reacted when he demonstrated his pistol:

  He then, by signs and gestures, seemed to ask if the pistol would make a hole through him, and on being made sensible that it would, he showed not the smallest sign of fear; on the contrary he endeavoured … to impress us with an idea of the superiority of his own arms, which he applied to his breast, and by staggering and a show of falling seemed to wish us to understand that the force and effect of them was mortal and not to be resisted.23

  Skirmishing with other clans, or with foreign tribes along the frontier between tribal territories, was an inevitable fact of nomadic life. In this the Iora were probably no less bellicose than other southeastern Australian tribes, despite the often merely symbolic nature of their encounters. They had no “specialist” army. They recognized no distinction between fighters and civilians, or between hunter and warrior. Moreover, the idea that they were intrinsically violent—“savage” in behavior, as well as in looks and economy—seemed to be borne out by the harsh relationships that obtained within their clans, especially in their treatment of women.

  That hoary standby of cartoonists, the Stone Age marriage, in which the grunting Neanderthal bashes the fur-clad girl with his club and drags her off to his cave, began with classical satyrs and medieval legends of forest-dwelling Wild Men. But it was certainly amplified by the first accounts of aboriginal courtship. In a plate in the pseudonymous Barrington’s History of New South Wales, 1802, it appears for the first time in its perfect form: the muscular savage, club in hand, lugging his unconscious victim through the scrub on her back. “Their conduct to women makes them considerably inferior to the brute creation,” the author sternly and titillatingly observes:

  In obtaining a female partner the first step they take, romantic as it may seem, is to fix on some female of a tribe at enmity with their own.… The monster then stupefies her with blows, which he inflicts with his club, on her head, back, neck, and indeed every part of her body, then snatching up one of her arms, he drags her, streaming with blood from her wounds, through the woods, over stones, rocks, hills and logs, with all the violence and determination of a savage, till he reaches his tribe.24

  Obviously, the real matrimonial arrangements of the Iora were less lurid than this. Armed rape as a by-product of tribal warfare was not unknown among the Aborigines, but no tribe that had to depend entirely on border raids for its supply of women could have lasted very long. Besides, what would have been the point? There were enough Iora women for the Iora men. However, the unalterable fact of their tribal life was that women had no rights at all and could choose nothing. A girl was usually given away as soon as she was born. She was the absolute property of her kin until marriage, whereupon she became the equally helpless possession of her husband. The idea of a marriage based on romantic love was as culturally absurd to the Iora as it was to most Europeans. The purpose of betrothal was not, however, to amalgamate property, as in European custom, but to strengthen existing kinship bonds by means of reciprocal favors. It did not change a woman’s status much. Both before and after, she was merely a root-grubbing, shell-gathering chattel, whose social assets were wiry arms, prehensile toes and a vagina.

  As a mark of hospitality, wives were lent to visitors whom the Iora tribesmen wanted to honor. Warriors, before setting out on a revenge raid against some other aboriginal group, would swap their women as an expression of brotherhood. If a tribal group was about to be attacked and knew where its enemies were, it would sometimes send out a party of women in their direction; the attackers would then show that they were open to a peaceful solution by copulating with them. But if the women came back untouched, it was a signal that there was no choice but battle. A night’s exchange of wives usually capped a truce between tribes. On these occasions most kinship laws except the most sacred incest taboos were suspended. Finally, at the great ceremonies or corroborrees, which involved hours of chant and ecstatic dancing and were meant to reinforce the tribe’s identity by merging all individual egos in one communal mass, orgiastic sex played a part. However, since these affairs were rarely seen, sketchily described and never understood by the early colonists, it is impossible to say how large or how strictly prescribed a part it was.25 If a woman showed the least reluctance to be used for any of these purposes, if she seemed lazy or gave her lord and master any other cause for dissatisfaction, she would be furiously beaten or even speared.

  Fertility, the usual protection of women in settled agricultural societies, was a poor shield. A surplus of children would have impeded the Ioras’ nomadic life. On the march, each woman had to carry her infant offspring as well as food and implements. She could only manage one child in arms. That child was always weaned late; it fed from the breast until it was three or more years old, since there were no cows or goats in Australia to give substitute milk. Without their mother’s milk, the roughness of the adult diet would have starved them, as there was no way to make a thongy gobbet of barely singed wallaby meat digestible to a teething infant.

  To get rid of surplus children, the Iora, like all other Australian tribes, routinely induced abortions by giving the pregnant women herbal medicines or, when these failed, by thumping their bellies. If these measures failed, they killed the unwanted child at birth. Deformed children were smothered or strangled. If a mother died in childbirth, or while nursing a child in arms, the infant would be burned with her after the father crushed its head with a large stone.

  This ruthless weeding-out of the helpless at one end of life also took place at the other. The Iora respected their old men as repositories of tribal wisdom and religious knowledge, but the tribe would not hamper its mobility, essential to nomadic survival, by keeping the old and infirm alive after their teeth had gone and their joints had seized up.

  It was a harsh code; but it had enabled the Aborigines to survive for millennia without either extending their technology or depleting their resources. It still worked as of January 1788, although it had not the slightest chance of surviving white invasion. The most puzzling question for the whites, however, was why these people should display such a marked sense of territory while having no apparent cult of private property. What was it that bound them to the land? The colonial diarists tried as best they could, hampered by the opacity of a language they could not understand, to discover signs of a developed religion among the blacks, but they found very little to report. “We have not been able to discover,” wrote Captain Hunter, “that they have any thing like an object of adoration; neither the sun, moon nor stars seem to take up, or occupy more of their attention, than they do that of any other of the animals [sic] which inhabit this immense country.”26 Certainly they had few of the external signs of religious belief: no temples or altars or priests, no venerated images set up in public places, no evidence of sacrifice or (apart from the corroborrees) of communal prayer. In all this they differed from the Tahitians and the Maori, who were settled agricultural peoples. The Iora were not: they carried their conception of the sacred, of mythic time and ancestral origins with them as they walked. These were embodied in the landscape; every hill and valley, each kind of animal and tree, had its place in a systematic but unwritten whole. Take away this territory and they were deprived, not of “property” (an abstract idea that could be satisfied with another piece of land) but of their embodied history, their locus of myth, their “dreaming.” There was no possible way in which the accumulated tissue of symboli
c and spiritual usage represented by tribal territory could be gathered up and conferred on another tract of land by an act of will. To deprive the Aborigines of their territory, therefore, was to condemn them to spiritual death—a destruction of their past, their future and their opportunities of transcendence. But none of them could have imagined this, as they had never before been invaded. And so they must have stood, in curiosity and apprehension but without real fear, watching from the headlands as the enormous canoes with their sails like stained clouds moved up the harbor to Sydney Cove, and the anchors splashed, and the outcasts of Mother England were disgorged upon this ancestral territory to build their own prison.

  * Bennelong was an Iora tribesman, the first black to learn English, drink rum, wear clothes and eat the invaders’ strange food. He was rewarded for his curiosity with the friendship of Governor Phillip—and a small brick hut, about 12 feet square, in which he lived on the end of what is now Bennelong Point. “Love and war,” a colonial diarist noted, “were his favorite pursuits.” He went to England with Phillip in 1792 and was much feted as an exotic Noble Savage, the first native Australian to be seen in London. But he lost most of his curiosity value after a year or two, and it was not until the end of 1795 that he returned to Sydney, with the newly appointed governor, John Hunter. By then he fitted neither his old tribal world nor the carceral microcosm of the whites, whose tolerance of the blacks had begun to disintegrate after Phillip’s departure. Bennelong became increasingly sodden and pugnacious with rum, and died at the age of about 40 in 1813.

  2

  A Horse Foaled by an Acorn

  i

  MOST EDUCATED PEOPLE have felt twinges of nostalgia for Georgian England.

  We are tied to the Georgian past through artifacts that we would still like to use, given the chance. The town houses, squares, villas, gardens, paintings, silver and side tables seem to represent an “essence” of the eighteenth century, transcending “mere” politics. Since they present an uncommonly coherent image of elegance, common sense and clarity, we are apt to suppose that English society did too. But argument from design to society, like the syllogism that ascends from the particular to the general, usually goes awry. “We shall learn,” wrote one typical English exponent of this approach, “from the architecture and furniture and all other things … that nearly everybody in the eighteenth century looked forward to a continuation and an agreeable expansion of gracious fashions.”1

  “Nearly everybody”—that, until quite recently, was the conventional picture. A passing reference to violence, dirt and gin; a nod in the direction of the scaffold; a highwayman or two, a drunken judge, and some whores for local color; but the rest is all curricles and fanlights. Modern squalor is squalid but Georgian squalor is “Hogarthian,” an art form in itself.

  Yet most Englishmen and Englishwomen did not live under such roofs, sit on such chairs or eat with such forks. They did not read Johnson or Pope, for most of them could not read. Antiques say little about the English poor, that vast and as yet unorganized social mass—Samuel Johnson’s “rabble,” Edmund Burke’s “swinish multitude”—from whose discontents in the nineteenth century the English working class would shape itself. The Georgian London a modern visitor imagines was not their city. There were two such Londons, their separation symbolized by the cleavage that took place as the rich moved their residences westward from Covent Garden between 1700 and 1750, as the speculators ran up their noble squares and crescents—an absolute gulf between the new West End and the old, rotting East End of the city.

  West London had grown rationally. Its streets and squares were planned; property was secured by long leases and enforced standards of building. East London had not. It was a warren of shacks, decaying tenements, and brand-new hovels run up on short leases by jerry-builders restrained by no local ordinances. Georgian residential solidity stopped at the lower fringe of the middle class. The “rookeries” of the poor formed a labyrinth speckled with picturesque names: Turnmill Street, Cow Cross, Chick Lane, Black Boy Alley, Saffron Hill, the Spittle. West of the old City of London, the worst slum areas in the mid-eighteenth century lay around Covent Garden, St. Giles, Holborn and the older parts of Westminster. To the east, they spread through Blackfriars and beyond the Tower, by the Lower Pool and Limehouse Reach: Wapping, Shadwell, Limehouse, Ratcliffe Highway, the Jewish ghettos of Stepney and White-chapel on the north side of the Thames, the brick canyons of Southwark with its seven prisons on the south bank. Their courts and alleys were dark, tangled, narrow and choked with offal. Because men had to live near their work, tenements stood cheek by jowl with slaughterhouses and tanneries. London was judged the greatest city in the world, but also the worst smelling. Sewers still ran into open drains; the largest of these, until it was finally covered in 1765, was the Fleet Ditch. Armies of rats rose from the tenement cellars to go foraging in daylight.

  The living were so crowded that there was scarcely room to bury the dead. Around St. Martin’s, St. James’s and St. Giles-in-the-Fields, there were large open pits filled with the rotting cadavers of paupers whose friends could get them no better burial; they were called “Poor’s Holes” and remained a London commonplace until the 1790s.

  Within the rookeries, distinctions of class were seen. Their cellars were rented at 9d. or 1s. A week* to the most miserable tenants—ragpickers, bonegatherers or the swelling crowd of Irish casual laborers driven across St. George’s Channel by famine, rural collapse and the lure of the Big City. Thirty people might be found in a cellar. Before 1800 an artisan might expect to find a “cheap” furnished room in London for 2s. 6d. a week, and most London workers lived in such places with no rights of tenancy.

  To speak of an eighteenth-century “working class” as though it were a homogeneous entity, united by class-consciousness and solidarity, is both anachronistic and abstract. It is a projection of the twentieth century onto the eighteenth.

  Loyalties ran between workers in the same trade but rarely between workers as such. The variety of trades and work underwrote the complexity of this other London. It contained a huge range of occupations, and a passion for close divisions of social standing held for workers as well as for gentry. They too had their pecking orders and were bound by them. At the upper end of income and comfort, just below the independent shopkeepers, were the skilled artisans in luxury trades, regularly employed: upholsterers and joiners, watch-finishers, coach-painters or lens-grinders. At the lower end were occupations now not only lost but barely recorded: that of the “Pure-finders,” for instance, old women who collected dog-turds which they sold to tanneries for a few pence a bucket (the excrement was used as a siccative in dressing fine bookbinding leather). In between lay hundreds of occupations, seasonal or regular. None of them enjoyed any protection, since trade unions and “combinations” were instantly suppressed. There were no wage guarantees, and sweated labor was usual.

  Occupational diseases ran rampant. Sawyers went blind young, their conjunctival membranes destroyed by showers of sawdust—hence the difference of status between the “top-notcher,” or man on top of the log in the sawpit, and his partner pulling down the saw below. Metalfounders who cast the slugs for Baskerville’s elegant type died paralyzed with lead poisoning, and glassblowers’ lungs collapsed from silicosis. Hairdressers were prone to lung disease through inhaling the mineral powder used to whiten wigs. The fate of tailors, unchanged until the invention of electric light, was described by one to Henry Mayhew:

  It is not the black clothes that are trying to the sight—black is the steadiest of all colours to work at; white and all bright colours makes the eyes water after looking at ’em for any long time; but of all colours scarlet, such as is used for regimentals, is the most blinding, it seems to burn the eyeballs, and makes them ache dreadful … everything seems all of a twitter, and to keep changing its tint. There’s more military tailors blind than any others.2

  Children went to work after their sixth birthday. The Industrial Revolution did not inv
ent child labor, but it did expand and systematize the exploitation of the very young. The reign of George III saw a rising trade in orphans and pauper children, collected from the parish workhouses of London and Birmingham, who were shipped off in thousands to the new industrial centers of Derbyshire, Nottinghamshire and Lancashire. One London child-slave, Robert Blincoe, who was placed in the St. Pancras Workhouse in 1796 at the age of four and sent off with eighty other abandoned children to the Lambert cotton mill outside Nottingham, gave testimony to a Parliamentary committee on child labor some forty years later:

  Q. Do you have any children?—Three.

  Q. Do you send them to factories?—No; I would rather have them transported.… I have seen the time when two hand-vices of a pound weight each, more or less, have been screwed to my ears, at Lytton mill in Derbyshire. These are the scars still remaining behind my ears. Then three or four of us have been hung at once on a cross-beam above the machinery, hanging by our hands, without shirts or stockings. Then we used to stand up, in a skip, without our shirts, and be beaten with straps or sticks; the skip was to prevent us from running away from the straps.… Then they used to tie up a 28-pounds weight, one or two at once, according to our size, to hang down our backs, with no shirt on.3

  Doctors tended to side with their class allies, the factory-owners, and went on record again and again with their considered opinions that cotton lint, coal dust and phosphorus were harmless to the human lung, that fifteen hours at a machine in a room temperature of 85 degrees did not cause fatigue, that ten-year-olds could work a full night shift without risk of harm. Employers, naturally, resisted the very thought of reform. Some of them were cultivated men like Josiah Wedgwood, uncle to Charles Darwin and heir to his father’s great pottery in Staffordshire, who employed 387 people—13 under ten years old, 103 between ten and eighteen—in such work as dipping ware in a glaze partly composed of lead oxide, a deadly poison which, as he admitted, made them “very subject to disease,” though no more so than plumbers or painters. Yet “I have a strong opinion,” Wedgwood told the Peel Committee in 1816, “that, from all I know at present of manufactories in general, and certainly from all I know of my own, we had better be left alone.”4