Australians

by Thomas Keneally

  In the middle of the Eora celebration an expeditionary party from Sydney Cove landed, intending to travel overland to Pittwater. Bennelong, feasting with the other Aboriginals, enquired after Phillip, and expressed a desire to see the governor, with whom, after all, he had exchanged names. The only member of the European party to whom Bennelong expressed repugnance was McEntire, the huntsman, who had an evil reputation amongst the natives.

  Surgeon White observed that Bennelong bore two new wounds, one in the arm from a spear and the other a large scar over his left eye. But he insisted on putting into a boat a specially large piece of whale meat as a gift to Phillip. The gift was not ironic—far from it. It was intended to get Phillip to Manly, to the great festival of the whale.

  When the message and the blubber arrived back in Sydney, his Excellency was engaged in discussing with Bloodworth, the brick-maker, and Harry Brewer the building of a pillar on South Head to serve as a direction-finder for ships at sea. Now he gathered the weaponry immediately available, and set out in his boat to meet Bennelong. He was accompanied by Captain Collins and Lieutenant Waterhouse of the navy.

  Waterhouse was a personable young man, newly promoted to replace the insane Mr Maxwell. He had become infatuated with Elizabeth Barnes, who had come off the Lady Juliana three months before, a slightly older woman than he, and probably, as a former prostitute, more worldly. He may have been nervous making this approach to Manly with the governor, given that many thought Phillip somewhat reckless and over-trusting in his dealings with the natives. On landing, Phillip found the Eora people ‘still busily employed around the whale’. He advanced alone, with just one unarmed seaman for support, and called for Bennelong, who was mysteriously slow in coming forward. Collins and Waterhouse also landed, and Bennelong now showed himself. So did Colby.

  Bennelong seemed delighted to see his old acquaintances ‘and asked after every person he’d known in Sydney, among others the French cook and servant from whom he’d escaped, whom he’d constantly made the butt of his ridicule, by mimicking his voice, gait, and other peculiarities, all of which he again went through with his wanted exactness and drollery’. He asked particularly after a lady of the colony, surely Mrs Deborah Brooks, Phillip’s housekeeper, from whom he had once ventured to snatch a kiss. When he was told she was well, he kissed the fresh-faced Lieutenant Waterhouse whom he obviously thought had a complexion like that of the lady, and laughed uproariously. But when the governor pointed to Bennelong’s new wounds, the native became more sombre. He had received them down in the southern bay, Botany Bay, he announced, and he solemnly pointed out their contours to Phillip.

  During this conference, ‘the Indians filing off to right and left, so as in some measure to surround them’, Phillip remained calm. Bennelong, wearing by this time two jackets, one brought by Phillip and the other by Collins, introduced the governor to a number of people on the beach, including a ‘stout, corpulent native’, Willemerring. On the ground before Bennelong was a very fine barbed spear ‘of uncommon size’. The governor asked if he could have it. But Bennelong picked it up and took it away and dropped it near a place where Willemerring stood rather separate from the rest.

  Willemerring was a wise man, a carradhy, amongst other things a ritual punishment man invited in from another place, in fact the Broken Bay/Pittwater area. He struck the watching Europeans as a frightened man, and he may have been, but he may have been, rather, a tense and intent man, coiled for his task. This was the time, in Bennelong’s mind, for the governor, who had had the grace to present himself, to be punished for all of it: the fish and game stolen; the presumption of the Britons in camping permanently without permission; the stolen weaponry and nets; the stove-in canoes; the random shooting of natives; the curse of smallpox; the mysterious genital infections of women and then of their men—death, in the view of the Eora, particularly unpredictable death, being always attributable to malign magic. There was no malice on anyone’s part in this punishment, which explained why Willemerring showed all the nervousness and then unexpected decisiveness of a bridegroom. But the scales needed to be adjusted by august blood, and the most august of all was Phillip’s.

  Thinking Willemerring nervous, Phillip gamely advanced towards him, as if begging the spear. Captain Collins and Lieutenant Waterhouse followed close by. Phillip removed his own single weapon, a dirk in his belt, and threw it on the ground. Willemerring reacted by lifting the spear upright from the grass with his toes and fitting it in one movement into his throwing stick, and ‘in an instant darted it at the governor’. In the last moment before the spear was thrown, Phillip thought it more dangerous to retreat than to advance and cried out to the man, ‘Werre, Werre!

  ’ Given the force with which the spear was projected, Phillip would later describe the shock of the wound to Tench as similar to a violent blow. The barb went into the governor’s right shoulder, just above the collar bone, and ran downwards through his body, coming out his back. Willemerring looked at his handiwork long enough to ensure the spear had penetrated, and then he dashed into the woods, with miles to travel to his home ground in Pittwater.

  There was instant confusion on both sides. Bennelong and Colby both disappeared, but Phillip’s retreat was hindered by the fact that he carried in his body, pointing skyward when he was upright, a lance almost 4 metres long, the butt of it frequently striking the ground as he reeled and further lacerating the wound. ‘For God’s sake, haul out the spear,’ Phillip begged Waterhouse, who struggled but at last managed to break off the spear shaft. Another thrown spear from an enthusiastic native struck Waterhouse in the hand as he worked on the shaft. Now spears were flying thickly, as happened at such exchanges of blood, as the ordinary folk joined in the ritual event.

  Phillip was lifted, with the point of the spear protruding from his back, into his boat and brought back across the harbour, bleeding a considerable amount on the way. Since Surgeon White was still away from Sydney on the expedition to Pittwater, the Scots assistant, William Balmain, a quarrelsome man in his mid twenties, took on the task of extracting the spearhead from Phillip. There, at Government House, on a cot, his blue coat sodden with blood, lay the settlement’s pole of stability and awesome reasonableness, without whom all might be lost. But the young surgeon earned the joy of Phillip’s disciples by declaring the wound non-mortal and by safely extracting the barbed point of the spear. ‘The Governor remains in great agonies, but it is thought he will recover, though at the same time His Excellency is highly scorbutic.’

  This result would not have surprised the blubber-feasting natives of Manly Cove. They knew it was not intended to be a fatal wound, they knew the barb was meant to be extractable, and they knew Willemerring was an expert at placement. Phillip, though no doubt given laudanum for the pain, had time to order that no natives were to be fired on, unless they first were ‘the aggressors, by throwing spears’. White’s returning party was fetched back by marines with the news of Governor Phillip’s wounding. The boat crew sent to retrieve them told White and the others that Colby and Bennelong had been talking to them and had ‘pretended highly to disapprove the conduct of the man who had thrown the spear, vowing to execute vengeance upon him’. Was this a token offered to the wounded Phillip? Were the two natives striking attitudes just to please him?

  David Collins was sure that the only reason the spear was thrown was fear on the part of Willemerring that he was about to be seized and taken away. ‘The governor has always placed too great a confidence in these people . . . he had now, however, been taught a lesson which it might be presumed he would never forget.’

  In general, no one blamed Bennelong for Willemerring’s gesture. It was accepted that Willemerring acted out of personal panic, though the people from Sydney Cove found Bennelong’s behaviour typically mystifying. But if the accounts of witnesses, including Lieutenant Waterhouse, are looked at, one sees that Bennelong very clearly showed Phillip his own new scars, which his adventures and sins had merited, and that in refusing
to give Phillip the spear he asked for, and taking it away and putting it within reach of Willemerring’s foot, he had shown it possessed another ordained purpose. The forming-up of warriors in a half-circle creates an impression of a conclave of witnesses to a ritual penalty.

  And with considerable perception, in the end Phillip thought that it was a cultural manifestation, that though Bennelong probably was glad his friend and name-exchanger, the governor, had survived, there was no doubt that the natives ‘throw their spears, and take a life in their quarrels, which are very frequent, as readily as the lower class of people in England stripped to box’.

  The ritual spearing of Phillip seemed to be a new direction in Eora policy, though to put it in those terms is callous to the reality of the bewilderment of the Eora soul. There had been hope for a time that the visitors would vanish, but the ships had increased in number, coming by way of lesions in the cosmos through the gates of the great harbour. Some ships had departed, but now a number had taken their place, and the ghosts multiplied both by new ship-loads and by human generation. And although the many victims of the Second Fleet had been buried in Sydney’s earth, this decrease by death did nothing to produce a clear crisis in the camp of the whites, or provide a sign that they would be finally borne away.

  Phillip’s wound took six weeks to get better, and throughout that time, hoping to use Abaroo and Nanbaree as intermediaries, he had men out looking for Bennelong, hoping there would be reconciliation. Surgeon White was the one to track him down and saw that a momentous change had come about. Bennelong had been joined by his beloved Barangaroo, the spirited woman who had left or been divorced by Colby. Barangaroo already knew that she needed to watch Bennelong very closely, and did so. She did not seem as noticeably pleased as Bennelong to know that the governor was well. Bennelong claimed, through the interpretation of the two children, Abaroo and Nanbaree, to have beaten Willemerring as a punishment. It might have been the truth, another adjustment of universal order.

  The party asked Bennelong to help them arrange a husband for Abaroo, someone who could go to and from the settlement without causing trouble. At once, Bennelong suggested Yemmerrawanne, a slender and handsome youth about sixteen years old. He called the lad out of the people milling nearby. Yemmerrawanne offered, said Tench, ‘many blandishments which proved that he had assumed the toga virilis. But Abaroo disclaimed his advances, repeating the name of another person, who we knew was her favourite.’ On a return visit later in the day, though, Yemmerrawanne pressed his suit ‘with such warmth and solicitation, as to cause an evident alteration in the sentiments of the lady’.

  Now that the wounding of Arthur Phillip had established the principles of responsibility, Bennelong complained to Tench that his countrymen had lately been plundered of fizz-gigs, spears, the gift of a sword, and many other articles by some of the convicts and others, and said he would hand back the dirk the governor had dropped during the attack by Willemerring. The next day, after a search of the settlement, a party of officers, sailors and soldiers went down-harbour again with the collected stolen property.

  At the exchange, Tench saw an old man come forward and claim one of the fizz-gigs, ‘singling it from the bundle and taking only his own . . . and this honesty, within the circle of their society, seemed to characterise them all’. Hunting for Bennelong, they found he was grateful for the return of the materials—they still possessed some unclaimed items, one of which was a net of fishing lines, which Barangaroo now took possession of and flung defiantly around her neck. Bennelong did not return the governor’s dirk, however, and pretended not to know much about it. Perhaps it was kept for some chant to be sung into it, something to bring wisdom to Phillip, to end the calamity. Perhaps he had lost it. Watching him imbibe wine they had brought, the officers pressed him to name a day when he would come to Sydney. Bennelong said that the governor must first come and see him, ‘which we promised should be done’.

  When the governor was well, he travelled by boat down-harbour to visit Bennelong, opening his wound-inhibited arms. His apparent willingness to forgive created not always approving comment among the Europeans. But Bennelong was not ready to visit Sydney Cove yet. It was arranged that the natives would light a fire on the north shore of the harbour as a signal for the Europeans to visit them further.

  Again Phillip accepted these terms. Certainly Bennelong was the sort of wilful man who delighted in setting tests, but even so he might have been trying in a way to educate Phillip, who asked to be notified as soon as lookouts saw the signal fire. When it was seen, Phillip and the others set off in their cutters. ‘We found assembled, Baneelon [Bennelong], Barangaroo, and another young woman, and six men, all of whom received us with welcome. They had equipment with them—spears, fish gigs and lines, which they were willing to barter.’ Bennelong and his party thus attempted to create the principle on which they would make friends with the settlement. Implements and items in general should be bartered, not plundered. ‘I had brought with me an old blunted spear, which wanted repair,’ wrote Tench. A native took it, carried it to the fire, tore a piece of bone with his teeth from a fizz-gig and attached it to the spear to be repaired with yellow eucalyptus gum, which had been ‘rendered flexible by heat’. The meeting was probably considered a success by both parties, but there were major lessons on both sides which remained unlearned.

  Another day, Barangaroo, more suspicious than the impetuous, vulnerable Bennelong, did not want her husband to go to Sydney with Tench and White. She snatched up one of Bennelong’s fishing spears and broke it against rocks in protest at her lover’s gullibility. In the end, the Reverend Johnson, Abaroo and a young convict, Stockdale, remained with Barangaroo as hostages against a safe return of Bennelong and some other men. The boats and the native canoe tied up on the east side of Sydney Cove at the governor’s wharf, and then everyone set off for Phillip’s residence. There was a reunion at which Bennelong told Phillip that Willemerring was at Broken Bay. Bennelong was delighted to see the governor’s orderly sergeant, whom he kissed, and a woman who attended in the kitchen, again probably Mrs Deborah Brooks. But again he snubbed the gamekeeper McEntire. He showed his friends around Government House, explaining what various implements were for. It was now that Bennelong amused Tench by pointing to a candle-snuffer and saying, ‘Nuffer for candle’, thus avoiding the unpronounceable letter ‘s’. At last, he departed and was rowed back to Barangaroo, whom they found sitting by a fire with the Reverend Johnson, making fish hooks.

  ‘From this time our intercourse with the natives,’ wrote Tench, ‘though partially interrupted, was never broken off. We gradually continued, henceforth, to gain knowledge of their customs and policy; the only knowledge that can lead to a just estimate of national character.’ But that Bennelong might have been involved in a study of him was something not even generous Watkin mentioned.

  These gestures of equal trade and of forbearance on the part of Phillip are worth detailing because they would become less and less the spirit of future transactions between the races.

  One day in October that year, a sergeant and three soldiers were out beating the bush for an escaped convict when they met up with Bennelong and Colby and a party of other natives. Bennelong asked the sergeant to come south with him and kill a particular man, ‘well-known for having lost an eye’, the Botany Bay warrior named Pemulwuy. The soldiers joked with him, but he was serious. Down on the shores of Botany Bay he had fought a ritual battle with the father of a desirable girl, and although he claimed to have won the contest, his passions ran high against Pemulwuy, the girl’s kinsman. The Bediagal girl, named Karubarabulu, was forthright and not submissive, and Bennelong desired to take her as a second wife.

  Bennelong had a temperament which participated passionately in all these inter-clan squabbles, but the difference between himself and Pemulwuy ran deeper than mere scars. Pemulwuy stayed remote from the Europeans. He would never investigate the whites or try to work them out. He wished to exorcise them and restore
the normal world. While Bennelong was conciliatory in however puzzling a way, Pemulwuy was a hard-liner. Both would suffer unutterably for the positions they took. Pemulwuy’s was the harsher penalty, however. Outlawed by Governor King, he was shot dead by the sailor and explorer Henry Hacking in 1802. On 5 June that year King wrote to Sir Joseph Banks and told him that Pemulwuy’s head had been placed in spirits and sent to England via the Speedy. Its whereabouts are still unknown.

  *

  It seemed that a sort of compact now existed between the Eora, in the person of Bennelong, and Phillip’s invading culture. Bennelong seemed well aware of his status as chief peacemaker, the one with whom above all Phillip wanted reconciliation, and he was not above asking for material rewards for fulfilling that role. He requested a tin shield—he rightly thought it might save him many a wound—and a brick house in Sydney Cove. The mutual gifts of hatchets and spears, and the intermittent arrival and departure of Eora people in Sydney sealed the deal. Bennelong read the gifts he received from Phillip and others as personal, but also as acknowledgment of Eora rights in this country and in these waters. The officers failed to see them as equivalent exchanges, and remained half-amused by Bennelong’s demands for hatchets. They thought they were giving appeasing gifts to troublesome Aborigines, rather than sealing an informal but important treaty.

  Yet in Bennelong’s opinion, a visible sign of the compact was in the making. As demanded, a brick house was being built for him on Tubowgulle, the eastern point of Sydney Cove. Bennelong had chosen the place himself, according to Tench. ‘Rather to please him, a brick house of twelve feet [c 4 metres] square was built for his use, and for that of his countrymen as might choose to reside in it, on a point of land fixed upon by himself.’ He had got his shield too—it was double cased with tin and represented an exponential leap for Eora weaponry. Of his new stature with both whites and Eora, Tench observed, ‘He had lately become a man of so much dignity and consequence, that it was not always easy to obtain his company.’ The point chosen by him for his residence had significance—given its position at the head of the cove (where the Sydney Opera House now stands), it could be seen as a symbol of Eora title to the place. It was almost certainly seen that way by Bennelong, and all Barangaroo’s warnings went for nothing.