Yet even this sharpened interest in obtaining marki goods did nothing to precipitate action. The next day passed exactly like the last, except that this time when the men returned from hunting, Old Aburda, the only senior woman who could serve as a chaperone, delayed Giom’s visit a further day because she felt too tired for the short voyage across the strait. Giom now pinned all her hopes on Thomagugu and his wife: he’d always said she would one day be allowed to go back to her people, “but most of the men and women said that I should die amongst them.”6
The following day, October 16, stretched out with the same agonizing slowness. While the men were hunting, Giom busied herself collecting wood, heating stones on a fire, and cutting up turtle for baking. When the canoes returned she bathed in the sea in preparation for a visit to the ship. She had just finished making a shade shelter in the sand for Aburda, when the old lady suddenly walked down to the water’s edge and called her to look at some white men who were shooting birds over at Podaga. Seeing this, the Kaurareg men jumped into their canoes and headed for the beach.
Giom begged Aburda and a few other women to go with her, but they were too afraid of the sporadic gunfire, as indeed were many of the men. Soon the Kaurareg canoes were already halfway across the small strait, and only a single Gudang canoe, carrying Thomagugu, remained. Even this vessel had pulled out so far from shore that Giom had to wade out up to her breasts to catch it. Grabbing onto the side, she was pulled along out of her depth until the skipper, Old Den, hauled her aboard: “I came off in such a hurry and was so frightened that I left my basket and large dadjee [grass skirt] and everything just as it lay [on the shore].”7
After beaching at their usual mainland spot, the Kaurareg men walked straight to Podaga, where some white men were washing clothes at the water holes. Straggling behind with Thomagugu and a few others, Giom came across a group of mainland Aborigines walking along with four white men, but she was so browned and blistered by the sun that they strolled past her without noticing. Summoning her courage, she called out to them in English, “I am a white woman, why do you leave me?”8
Abruptly the sailors gathered around. “Thomagugu began to talk to them before I could speak, telling them in his own talk how I had been wrecked and how he had taken me up out of the water. I stopped him and said, ‘komi arragi arragi atzir nathya krongipa’—Friend, hold your tongue, I know what they are saying.” Gathering that she was a Scottish girl called Barbara Thompson who’d been shipwrecked and rescued by the natives, the sailors yelled out to another man at the water hole, “Scott, Scott, come here. Here’s a Scotch girl.”
[Scott] took hold of my hand and led me along to where the men were washing. He was like a guard to me. I could not understand the other men as I could him. When we reached the washing place, he took me into the bush and with another man … washed me and combed my hair, and dressed me in two shirts, one below as a petticoat, the other over my shoulders. I was so ashamed when I got to the washing place that I did not notice what men were there. But this Scott was a friend to all of them. He took hold of me so bravelike. As I went along I could hardly speak for crying.9
On that afternoon of October 16, 1849, Oswald Brierly, a thirty-one-year-old artist on the British survey vessel HMS Rattlesnake, was practicing shooting with a few shipboard friends on the beach at Evans Bay when an officer suddenly ran up to them, shouting that “the blacks have brought a white woman up to the beach.”10
Without waiting to hear more, Brierly sprinted to where he could see a mixed group of Aborigines and sailors gathered around a woman aged, he guessed, about twenty. (She was probably eighteen, but looked older.) She’d been given two shirts to wear, having appeared at the water hole naked, “with the exception of a narrow fringe of leaves in front.”11
That evening Brierly took up the rest of the story in his journal. “She sat on the bank with her head hanging down and had a tin plate with some meat and a knife and fork, which the men had given her on her knees before her. One Black sat close to her with his arm passed behind her, two others were standing close to her. Her manner was very curious and she replied to our questions something in the manner of a person just waking from a deep sleep.”12
Barbara answered his queries in a halting mixture of Kaurareg and English, drumming her forehead in anguish. “I forgot English since I saw my country. I sing the song I knew when I lay down at night, to remember it.” The sailors nevertheless gathered that she was the daughter of a Sydney tinsmith, and that her husband had drowned on a reef when their cutter was shipwrecked.
When quizzed by Brierly whether she wanted to stay with her clan or join the ship, she replied, “I am a Christian,” explaining incoherently, “I saw my people today. I sat on the island all day looking at the ship. I said tomorrow kusta kalloo and with your people. And I told them [the Kaurareg] lies to make them take me in the vessel. I saw my country people in their little boats—arawa gool.”13
As Barbara was rowed out to the ship on a jolly boat, accompanied by a very insistent Boroto, among others, Brierly picked his way through her garbled mixture of Kaurareg and English to learn the essence of her story. Her family had migrated from Aberdeen to Sydney while Barbara was a child. When still a girl she eloped with a sailor to Queensland, and the two of them, along with some other sailors, had been trying to salvage whale oil from an old wreck in the Torres Strait when they were shipwrecked themselves. Her husband and the other sailors had drowned, but she’d been rescued by turtle hunters from Muralag, who’d looked after her well. After that she’d been adopted by the Kaurareg, with whom she’d lived for the past five years.
When the jolly boat reached the Rattlesnake, Captain Owen Stanley welcomed the young woman warmly, despite his private trepidations about having her on his ship. He fed her apple pie, gave her a cabin segregated from the rest of the sailors, and had the doctor tend her burns and infected eyes. Thomas Huxley and John MacGillivray, the ship’s inquisitive young naturalists, who both thought the castaway “not bad looking,” managed to question her briefly. But Captain Stanley made it clear that Mrs. Thompson would in future dine only with him and Brierly. The artist would also have the exclusive right to visit her cabin to conduct interviews.14
Nobody was surprised at this news: Oswald Brierly hailed from the same gentry circles as the captain, and he’d been invited onboard the Rattlesnake as Stanley’s personal friend and companion. Brierly himself put the situation more tactfully: “myself having no duty [aboard] the ship, I could divert what I chose to writing down her accounts and employ a larger part of every day to writing down whatever she remembered of her island life and the [customs] of the natives.”15
There was also a cogent practical reason for allocating Brierly the role of interviewer. During the relatively short period that the artist had been aboard the Rattlesnake, he’d built up an exceptional rapport with local native peoples. While his companions’ occupations consisted of surveying or natural-history projects, “mine,” he wrote, “was to indulge my fancy for talking to the natives and to gain if possible some ideas of their peculiarities of [mien] and appearances, etc, an employment which on board has received the name of ‘niggerizing.’”16
Brierly’s fascination with Indigenous people and culture went well beyond the standard Enlightenment vogue for collecting taxonomies and artifacts. He seemed to admire the Aborigines, and to like many of them individually as “friends.” In the short time since the Rattlesnake had landed at Evans Bay, he’d made a strong impression on the mixed communities of mainland Gudang Aborigines and visiting Torres Strait Islanders from Nagi (Mount Ernest) and Muralag. These groups gathered annually at the neutral ground of Evans Bay to trade food and artifacts and to hunt for turtle during the last weeks of the bountiful dry season before the onset of the testing northwest monsoon.
Brierly’s amiable personality, long thin face, and distinctive beard had earned him immediate recognition among the locals as the marki of a dead Kulkalaig man (of Mount Ernest Island) name
d Atarrka or Tarrka. It was a name and role that the artist readily adopted, and now his ghostly status gave him a special kinship with the young castaway.
Native huts, Evans Bay, Cape York, Novr. 1849. Watercolor. In Narrative of the Voyage of H.M.S. Rattlesnake: Vol. I (Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales)
Such was Brierly’s commitment to learning the local dialects and getting to know the Reef peoples that he spent hours sitting cross-legged in the sand, gossiping as he collected and memorized vocabularies. Though he was an upper-class Victorian Englishman, nothing about the natives’ habits or values seemed to faze him. He was happy to joke, clown, and play tricks with the young men; he strolled unarmed with spear-carrying warriors into the bush; he sweated for hours in the blazing heat to capture his black friends’ likenesses on paper; he threw himself into uproarious games with the children; he sampled the most challenging of foods on offer; and he joined energetically in dances, songs, egg hunts, and spear-throwing competitions. He also showed genuine admiration for the men’s ability to track and catch the near-invisible molluscs lying in the soft tidal mudflats and shallow water ripples, and he praised the women’s intimate knowledge of the whereabouts, among a tangle of brush and stones, of delicious bush fruits and yams.17
Brierly became so popular among the clan that he had a brotherlike relationship (cotaiga) with three young men, as well as the patronage and friendship of many seniors. The latter included an older woman called Baki, his “self-constituted mother,” who boasted a much younger husband and exercised marked authority over all the clan groups at Evans Bay. Brierly thought her a fount of good sense. He nicknamed her “Queen Baki,” showered her with gifts, invited her on board the ship to meet the captain, and responded to her enthusiastic embraces with reciprocal affection and good humor.18
* * *
How Oswald Brierly became so open-minded is unclear: such freedom from racial condescension was rare in Britain and the colonies, and aboard the Rattlesnake. Although the ship’s two naturalists, Huxley and MacGillivray, showed a keen interest in ethnography, even they had been prejudiced against the Barrier Reef by the negative publicity of Eliza Fraser’s “captivity” and the Charles Eaton massacre, which had prompted the survey expeditions of both the Fly and the Rattlesnake. There was nothing, either, about Brierly’s background to suggest social unorthodoxy. He was born in Chester in 1817 to an old English upper-middle-class family, and his father, a doctor and amateur artist, had encouraged the boy’s education at a London art school, where an interest in ships led him to specialize in maritime art.
An associated passion for sailing had then led him to Australia, and it was while managing an isolated pastoral and whaling business for five years at Twofold Bay in New South Wales that he first came to know Aboriginal people. He sketched their portraits, landscapes, and boats, and made several friends among the Aboriginal whalers, whose company helped him survive the solitude.19
To make such intimate connections, he’d needed to cross the barriers of language, something Brierly tried to do wherever he traveled. His journal shows him going to inordinate trouble to capture the exact linguistic meanings and pronunciations of both Gudang and Kaurareg dialects, including sometimes pretending deafness so that difficult words would be repeated slowly and loudly in his ears.20
His love of sailing was another factor in his fascination with the native peoples he met at Evans Bay. Brierly’s journal is filled with sketches of the rudders, hulls, rigging, and ornamentation of their giant sailing canoes. So dazzled was he by the workmanship and “graceful form” of one such boat, the Kyee Mareeni, or Big Shadow, owned by a Kaurareg elder named Manu, that it became his boating ideal: “I had long admired but never till now seen anything that realized so much the idea of beauty.” He sketched the craft over and over, and it was later to feature in both an oil painting and a wall mural of his. The sight of the Kaurareg vessels drifting by in the still evening waters of the northern Barrier Reef touched his deepest aesthetic instincts: “As they drew the canoes in the water and left the white sandy beach, they were swept slowly downwards by the current and soon became lost in the dark reflections of the rocks and hanging foliage of the side of the island. A broken light made by their paddles in the water … at times just indicated their place in the dark shadow.”21
Brierly’s artistic ambitions are a further clue as to why he pushed so hard to get beneath the surface of the Aboriginal and Islander peoples he met. His writings and sketches contain minutely observed details of the physical appearances, personalities, and idiosyncrasies of friends like his young cotaig, Belidi. He strove to capture subtleties of character—exactly the opposite impulse of his artist counterpart on the HMS Fly, Harden Melville, who’d thought “savages” suitable only for comic caricature. Such crass attitudes provoked Brierly to advise would-be painters like his friend Thomas Huxley “to record what actually passes under your observation—any characteristic traits or circumstances which transpire under your eyes should be written down while the impression is fresh and as quickly after their occurrences as opportunity may allow—in doing this you will be constantly surprised to find the savage so utterly different from what your preconceived ideas would make him.”22
Prince Wales’s Island Canoe “Bruwan.” In Sketches on Board the H.M.S Rattlesnake. Made during the Coastal Survey of the Passage between the Great Barrier Reef and the East Coast of Australia, ca. 1848 by Oswald W. B. Brierly (Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales)
For the same reason, Brierly was meticulous about capturing the exact words, inflections, and meanings of the linguistically confused Giom-cum-Barbara Thompson. Early on in their shipboard interviews—when her recall of English was limited and she, an illiterate woman of eighteen, seemed shy of the rather grand figure of the captain’s companion—he prompted her gently with specific questions about the everyday life of the clan. His method was to transcribe “with as little deviation as possible from her own words and mode of expression. And to ensure its accuracy I … read it over carefully to her several times, making any slight alterations in pencil before finally writing it all in.” Sometimes he would also return to particular accounts after several weeks, to see whether her recollections or perspective had changed in the interim.23
The ultimate credit for the quality of the information supplied must of course go to Barbara herself. Brierly thought her “remarkably observing,” and illiteracy probably sharpened her powers of recall. Even cynical Tom Huxley and abrasive Jock MacGillivray praised her intelligence, honesty, and courage. And because her attitude to the Kaurareg combined a broad sympathy with a slightly conflicting wish—as we’ll see—to convey some degree of emotional distance, she generally gave Brierly a balanced evaluation of clan life and culture.24
Her greatest knowledge, naturally, was of everyday work patterns and the social relations of the women. She recounted their modes of childbirth and nurture, including the vogue for massaging the head of every newborn baby into the beautiful elongated shape of a remora fish, and described their methods of making baskets, mats, grass skirts, and fish traps using the leaves of the indispensable pandanus plant. She listed their modes of treating illness with bush medicines and controlled bleedings, and explained the intricate network of kinship structure and family relationships, outlining taboos and norms as well as the more mundane interactions between husbands, wives, children, and lovers.
The island of Muralag, with its rocky soil, scrubby vegetation, and single coconut tree, made foraging a challenge for the Kaurareg women. Barbara described for Brierly their role as collectors, preparers, and cooks of varying foods in accordance with the two great seasonal shifts of the year. During the dry season (iboud), from June to October, when the southeast trade winds prevailed and turtles, fruits, and fish were relatively abundant, the clan would travel to other islands or mainland spots where the men would hunt and the women would search for yams (coti), shellfish, and water. Bladders of turtle oil were then mixed with c
rushed yams to make a much prized and portable mash (mabouchie). In each camp the women would dig large ovens, lining them with stones, for cooking turtle and dugong. They then carved and arranged these delicacies in elaborate patterns of distribution according to age, status, and gender, leaving nothing unused.
From December to April, during the great wet of the northwestern monsoon (kuki), the clan would gather in regular camps near sources of edible mangrove pods, which the women would prepare in a mash mixed with wild beans called beu. At this time, when turtles and dugong were scarce, the Kaurareg experienced a relatively static and claustrophobic period, crouching “like hens” in long narrow huts, enduring weeks of incessant tropical rain and occasional bouts of fever (doopoo).25
Although she had lived in that world as a mere ghost, Barbara also managed to open up windows into masculine life. She gave Brierly glimpses of the secret rituals of boyhood initiations, and of sorcerer (mydallager) curses and magic. She described the different forms of hut building; Kaurareg patterns of trading, diplomacy, and warfare with other Islander and mainland clans; and the cherished skills of canoe building and sailing. She knew the techniques of weapon making and ornamentation, fire clearing, and yam cultivation, and the smart ways of trapping fish in stone weirs and creek nets. She knew, too, the cunning skills needed for finding and killing dugong and turtle. The latter, at which Boroto excelled, included attaching magical potions to canoe prows to entice green turtle (soolah) to the surface, and an ingenious practice of using live remora sucker fish (gapoo) threaded on thin rope. The fish were tossed back into the water to locate flatback turtles by clamping onto their shells.
The Reef: A Passionate History: The Great Barrier Reef from Captain Cook to Climate Change Page 12