by Mark Mckenna
CHAPTER TWO
‘World’s End’: Port Essington, Cobourg Peninsula, West Arnhem Land
THEIR FIRST THOUGHT was of England. The sight of the chalk-white cliffs reminded them of home: visions of Dover in the Arafura Sea. But any trace of familiarity would soon be shattered. Even for those among them who knew New South Wales, this was another country. From here, Sydney, more than four thousand kilometres to the south, seemed as far away as London. The place they would dub ‘World’s End’ had its own suffocating rhythms: the air thick and heavy, the sea warm to touch, the mangroves putrid and impenetrable, the heat oppressive, the mosquitoes and white ants voracious. They were always under attack.1
The white cliffs of ‘home’, Port Essington, 2014
In the dry season, from April to late August, the south-easterlies provided some relief. But from the end of September when the winds eased, a stifling stillness and humidity descended. The isolation they experienced was not only one of distance. Everything was out of alignment: the seasons, the climate and every element of the natural world. Even their bodies seemed ill adjusted—the perspiration that poured daily from their skin, the inevitable rashes and fevers, the languorous days and the long, sleepless nights. As white men and women in Australia’s tropical north, they felt and lived out of place.
Here, at Port Essington, on the tip of the Cobourg Peninsula in West Arnhem Land between 1838 and 1849, a small band of British officials and marines attempted to found a garrison in the far north of the continent. They were trying for the third time. Spurred on by fears that the Dutch or the French would settle Australia’s northern coastline, two earlier attempts by Britain to ‘check-mate’ their imperial rivals—at Fort Dundas on Melville Island (1824–29), and Raffles Bay on the north-eastern end of the Cobourg Peninsula (1827–29)—had failed miserably. The question of whether foreign powers could take possession of points on the coast of Australia was ‘much debated at the time’. In 1824, uncertain of its sovereignty over northern Australia, the British government sent the 38-year-old Captain James Gordon Bremer of the Royal Navy, a veteran of the Battle of Trafalgar, to take possession at Port Essington. Bremer sailed up the east coast of Australia from Sydney, passing through the Torres Strait before heading along the north coast, his crew amazed by the ‘immense body of light’ that emanated from the ‘natives’ burning of Country, the evening glow so bright that it made everything ‘perfectly visible’ for miles around.2
When Bremer arrived at Port Essington on 20 September, he took possession through the customary rituals, which, in the proud words of his ship’s purser, Henry Ennis, saw vast swathes of foreign territories ‘turned, as it were by magic, into … British settlement[s]’. Marines were landed on shore, a tall, ‘conspicuous tree’ was ‘cleaned round for the occasion’, a ‘new’ Union Jack was nailed to it and the proclamation read loudly. Bremer took possession of ‘the north coast of New Holland, or Australia … between the meridian of 129 [degrees] and 135 [degrees] east of Greenwich, with all the bays, rivers, harbours, creeks, &c. in, and all the islands laying off … in the name and in the right of His Most Excellent Majesty George the Fourth, King of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland’. ‘Three volleys’ were fired, the ‘colours saluted’, and ‘three hearty cheers’ roared, before Bremer’s ship, the Tamar, replied with a royal salute of twenty-one guns.3
Such was the manner in which pieces of Australia were gradually spirited away under British law. Hundreds of thousands of square kilometres of Aboriginal lands—Bremer effectively extended the western border of New South Wales to the current border between Western Australia and the Northern Territory—became the property of the Crown through exuberant incantation. It was miraculous. Possession of Country occurred without knowledge of Country and without any need to negotiate with its Indigenous owners. By sending Bremer to the north coast of the continent, Britain was effectively admitting that in order to successfully ward off rival European powers, its possession of the country needed to be asserted anew in different parts of the continent. Australia was not founded in one moment; rather, it was possessed in an ad hoc, piecemeal fashion, the arms of British law seizing the continent gradually over several decades.
Unable to find sufficient water at Port Essington, Bremer sailed on to establish Fort Dundas on Melville Island, where he hoisted the colours on 21 October, the anniversary of the Battle of Trafalgar, and ‘gave dinner on board for eighteen’, washed down with ‘bumpers of claret’. Before he departed from Port Essington, his lieutenant, John Septimus Roe, who had accompanied Phillip Parker King in the Mermaid in April 1818 and later became the first Surveyor-General of Western Australia, buried a bottle ‘containing a parchment with an account of our having taken possession of that part of the country for the British Crown’. Deep in the same hole and around the fireplace they had used, Roe left coins ‘to show [they] had been there’ before giving ‘Ilamarryi’—the narrow strip of land that divided the inner and outer harbours—the somewhat prosaic name of ‘Point Record’. They believed the country was now theirs. But taking legal possession was one thing, conquering territory quite another. On the shores of Port Essington in 1824, Bremer’s possession of the country existed on paper only.4
During the handful of days Bremer’s party spent at Port Essington in September 1824, they saw no ‘Aborigines’, only countless ‘birds of a beautiful plumage’. Yet there seems little doubt that from elevated positions across the water, not far from where Bremer would ultimately establish Victoria Settlement in 1838, Aboriginal people watched the movements of his ship and crew with hushed curiosity, just as they had observed King’s Mermaid six years earlier. Then, when King had tried to explore ‘an opening in the mangroves’, they had screamed ‘loudly in angry threatening voices’ and showered his men with spears and stones. The sight of Bremer’s ship anchored offshore was not unprecedented. From the early seventeenth century they had heard reports of Dutch ships passing along the coast, one of which, Nieuw Holland, entered Port Essington in 1705. Bremer’s Tamar was merely another white bird that would appear for a few days and be gone, perhaps returning generations into the future.5
Fourteen years later, in late August 1838, as Bremer’s four ships—Britomart, Orontes, Alligator and the chartered schooner Essington—stood in Sydney Harbour loading their equipment and stores in preparation for founding the garrison at Port Essington, the captain and his crew were addressed by the city’s leading merchants, among them Robert Campbell, former owner of the Sydney Cove and esteemed member of the New South Wales Legislative Council. On the deck of the Alligator, Campbell and his colleagues told Bremer of their hopes for the settlement ‘in the wilds of Australia’ and how it would surely become a booming port for ‘trade with the Islands of the Eastern Archipelago’, no doubt filling their pockets with rivers of cash for years to come. For now, they refrained from investment until settlers were granted access to land. Newspaper editorials imagined a port that would become ‘one of the most important centres of civilization and Christianisation in the known world’, and a ‘half-way house for future steam boats from Sydney to Calcutta’. Bremer had the good sense to remind them of the ‘difficulties and privations’ that were ‘inseparable’ from a position such as Port Essington. Well prepared, he carried a ready-made settlement in the holds of his ships—cows, sheep, pigs, poultry, ‘giant kangaroo dogs’ and several prefabricated buildings that could be erected quickly on arrival—although things did not begin well when, ominously, a punt ferrying the building materials for the church sunk in the harbour, delaying his departure by several days.6
When Bremer finally arrived for the second time on the shores of Port Essington in October 1838 with thirty-six Royal Marines, he carried the expectations not only of the British Admiralty but also of Sydney’s political class, many of whom saw him as the founder of a new Singapore—a thriving ‘emporium’ that would one day become the capital of northern Australia. They believed that the garrison would flourish as lands in
the interior were gradually opened up to thousands of free settlers. It would also serve as a safe haven for ships passing through the Coral Sea and Torres Strait. In honour of his ‘Virgin Queen’, who had ascended to the throne little more than one year earlier, Bremer named the settlement Victoria. Along the shoreline of a harbour ‘sufficiently spacious to contain all the ships in the world’, he could see the tamarind trees that marked the campsites of Makassan fishermen, evidence of just some of the trade he hoped to cultivate in the years ahead. Yet within a matter of months it became clear that without a dramatic influx of free settlers, any suggestion of an expanding colony was little more than fantasy.7
For most Australians, the story of Victoria Settlement is largely unknown. Except for historians of Australia’s north and those who reside in the Northern Territory, it occupies a minor footnote in the history of colonisation. Like the bottle buried in the sand by John Septimus Roe in 1824, it is yet to be discovered as a failed founding moment in Australia’s historical imagination. Failure is certainly not the reason for forgetting. Australians have remembered and even celebrated failures, Gallipoli being the prime example. But the story of the 11-year-long struggle to establish Victoria Settlement is much more than an ill-conceived venture plagued by environmental disasters that was never given sufficient backing by the imperial government. More than two decades before Darwin was founded and at a time when the British settlements in Port Phillip, Adelaide and Perth were still in their infancy, the settlement at Port Essington carried the first wave of countless dreams of developing Australia’s north, and it said much about the shifting strategies of British colonisation. The eyes of Bremer’s garrison were turned outwards to Asia and the Pacific while the vast continent at its back remained an ocean of obscurity.
The British were the last to arrive at Port Essington. From the early eighteenth century, Aboriginal people had been accustomed to the annual visits of Makassan fishermen from Sulawesi as they exploited Australia’s northern coastline for pearl and turtle shells and trepang (otherwise known as sea slug or bêche-de-mer), an exotic delicacy prized as an aphrodisiac in China. Long recognised as one of the most important trepang sites on the Australian coast, Port Essington usually received the Makassans in December. They often anchored at ‘Point Record’ and stayed until March or April, attracting Aboriginal people from up and down the coast and far inland. As well as items of trade such as textiles, rice, tobacco, Dutch gin, iron knives and tomahawks, they brought with them prefabricated ‘hut panels of woven cane’, which they used as living quarters and smoke houses. Eager to travel, Aboriginal men had long sailed with the Makassans to Indonesia and far beyond, sometimes living away from home for several years. Languages, ideas, goods and blood—Dutch, Malay, Timorese and Papuan—had mingled with Indigenous cultures in the north for generations. This was a littoral world of cross-cultural contact and long established trade networks in which the British would largely remain outside observers—an intricate web of land and sea that was already founded and storied in deep time.8
The local land-owning Aboriginal group at Victoria was the Majurnbalmi clan, who spoke Garig as well as the languages of neighbouring Cobourg clans with whom they intermarried and collaborated, such as Iwaidja, Wurruku and Marrku. They also spoke Makassarese, pidgin Malay and pidgin English, which they had learnt during the brief British settlement at Raffles Bay. Long before Bremer arrived, the country around Victoria Settlement was multicultural and multilingual. Consequently, no single term accurately identifies the Aboriginal people who lived at Port Essington in 1838. Our instinctive need for one tidy tribal name falls short. The society was complex, its networks of association and cultural knowledge intricate and extensive, understood by only a handful of outsiders nearly two hundred years later.9
News of the Makassans and the lands to the north of the Arafura Sea travelled inland. In the rock shelters of the Arnhem Land escarpment, where the extraordinary galleries of Aboriginal art had existed for thousands of years, diamond designs and ‘parallel, horizontal and vertical blocks’ were inspired by the decorative patterns found in Indonesian textiles, while sketches of Dutch ships had graced the same walls centuries before Bremer arrived to found Victoria Settlement in 1838. The north coast of Australia, which the Makassans called ‘Marege’, was a vast tapestry of Indigenous Countries, each connected to the wider world and bearing its own distinctive cultural traditions and spirit of place. In Arnhem Land alone there were more than twenty different language groups when the British arrived, many of them already infiltrated by European and Makassan words. Over four hundred Indigenous place names on the Cobourg Peninsula bear testament to the intricate knowledge of Country honed, practised and maintained over millennia by its Aboriginal inhabitants whose languages today have largely fallen into disuse.10
From the ruins of Victoria Settlement, the remains of the jetty visible in the distance, 2014
Like William Clark’s epic trek through the Indigenous territories of south-east Australia in 1797, the story at the heart of Victoria Settlement is the meeting between the Indigenous people of the Cobourg Peninsula and those who came to take possession of their land. Their contact was different from almost everywhere else in Australia. Because the British made no attempt to settle the inland and the garrison remained relatively small and vulnerable, Aboriginal people were largely free from the threat of losing their land. The relative absence of violence created an unusual laboratory of mutual fascination and cultural exchange. At its forefront was a diverse cast of European drop-ins: Royal Marines, scientists, carpenters, blacksmiths, surgeons, naturalists, artists, gardeners, linguists, buccaneers, explorers and missionaries. All of them were drawn to understand Indigenous language and culture, to gain even the smallest insight into another way of being in the world.
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In the ‘grey’ light of the morning of 27 October 1838, the Alligator sailed into Port Essington harbour. The sense of anticipation coupled with the awareness that those on board were about to found a new British settlement silenced everyone. All hands stood on deck ‘occupied with [their] own thoughts’, looking ‘anxiously’ across the water to ‘catch a glimpse of the spot’ where Bremer would disgorge the contents of his Noah’s Ark and pitch camp.
On the voyage north from Sydney, Bremer’s ‘draughtsman and linguist’, 25-year-old George Augustus Earl, stayed out each night ‘leaning over the hammock nettings’, wondering if he would live to see Australia’s northern shores ‘occupied by a busy people’. Now, as the land ‘clothed in open forest’ came slowly into view, he noticed a group of Aboriginal people camped on the beach. But the scene before him was not what he had expected. They were ‘dressed up in all sorts of fantastic finery which they had obtained from the crew’ of the schooner Essington which had arrived ten days earlier. Wearing the clothes of English gentlemen was their reward for helping the Essington’s commander to off-load the frame of the church. In the deluded eyes of its chief sponsor, Bishop of Australia William Grant Broughton, the church would quickly become the epicentre of ‘Christianity in the Arafura Sea’.11
As the Alligator came closer to shore, two Aboriginal men approached the ship in a canoe. On board, Earl watched as the elder man, ‘Langari’, delivered a ‘long address, shedding many tears and frequently touching his shoulders with both hands in a sort of half embrace’, while the younger man, ‘Wanji-wanji’, stood in ‘a state of intense fright’, his teeth chattering, his eyes ‘rolling about in agony of alarm’. The two men had come from nearby Raffles Bay and had known Captain Collet Barker, the commandant of the short-lived settlement there in the late 1820s. Barker had established warm relations with the Aboriginal people after his predecessor, Captain Henry Smyth, in a frenzied reprisal attack, had killed up to thirty men, women and children. In the few months before the settlement was abandoned, Barker camped with them and joined in performances of their songs and dance in an effort to regain their trust. It was no coincidence that Langari and Wanji-wanji, who be
lieved Bremer to be Barker returned, wished to be dressed in European clothes as they had done on so many occasions when Barker lived among them nine years earlier. Because of the previous settlement at Raffles Bay, Aboriginal people at Port Essington had far more experience of the British than Bremer’s marines had of them. They knew the brute force of British arms—at Raffles Bay, Smyth had fired an 18-pounder cannon at them—and they knew the pleasures of cross-cultural friendship and exchange. Most of Bremer’s party, however, had joined the expedition in Plymouth and had only limited or second-hand knowledge of ‘Aborigines’. In the months that followed, it was the new arrivals that would have the most to learn.12
Like Bremer, Earl was an irrepressible enthusiast for the future prospects of the settlement. Appointed as the government’s official ‘interpreter’, his task was to familiarise himself with the ‘native’ languages and people at Port Essington. Young, curious, possessed of a razor-sharp intellect and a wry sense of humour, he was also keenly aware of the challenge of persuading others to his point of view. In a typically candid moment before leaving Sydney, he flippantly remarked that apart from Bremer, commander of the Royal Marines Captain John McArthur, himself and one or two others, ‘not a soul among us appears to care much whether we succeed or not’. As they loaded the provisions and cargo, many men told him how much they feared the long periods of isolation ahead. For those accustomed to life in London or Sydney, the prospect of living indefinitely in a tiny community thousands of kilometres from the nearest British settlement filled them with dread. Now they were here, Earl immediately saw how the necessity of providing the basic means of survival—clearing trees, shooting game, planting seedlings and erecting buildings—helped to keep those fears at bay. Keeping busy was the answer to stress and anxiety, filling every waking hour with work until there was only one thing to do at the end of the day—collapse into an exhausted heap. And so it proved at Port Essington, at least initially.