by Mark Mckenna
After Bremer settled on the site of the settlement immediately north of the ‘white cliffs’, roads were cut, wells sunk, tents set up, the prefabricated frames were laid out on shore, while the land for the garden was ‘enclosed’ and made ready to receive the plants from ‘Rio Janeiro’ and Sydney. Earl, who was not labouring himself, was elated to see so much activity: ‘the woods absolutely rang with the sound of the hammer and in every direction the white posts of the new buildings were seen gleaming through the trees’. So ‘addictive’ had this daily grind become, Earl noticed how the men now baulked at the suggestion of returning home, the urgent task of furnishing their ‘daily existence’ allowing them to put aside ‘all worldly consideration’.13
Assisting the British in building every block of their new Singapore were Aboriginal people: showing them their paths through the forest, leading them to their best springs, procuring them seafood (for which they traded biscuits, tobacco and clothes), ‘bringing in honey’, dragging away the branches of felled trees, ferrying supplies ashore, carrying provisions to and fro, and engaging occasionally in what the British labelled property ‘theft’ but which to them was property rightfully theirs. Although the experience of Aboriginal people on the Cobourg Peninsula with the Dutch, the Makassans and the British indicated that no visitor was likely to be a permanent presence on their lands, the ability of men such as ‘Langari’, ‘Yamaloo’, ‘Miro’, ‘One-Eye’, ‘Mingo’ and others from Raffles Bay to understand at least basic English suggests that Bremer was able to communicate his intentions: they were here to stay. In any case, the frantic construction that took place from dawn till dusk left them in little doubt. Within three months, Bremer boasted to Sir John Barrow in London that he had ‘a very admirable little town’ laid out like an English village, with thatched cottages and garden plots surrounding a main square. The storehouse, officers’ quarters, pier, church, hospital, cemetery and Government House—‘neatly painted with Venetian blinds’—were all but complete. Earl was amused by the ‘war-like appearance’ of the settlement. On ‘the edge of the white cliff’, the ‘Alligator’s eighteen-pounders’ commanded the entrance to the inner harbour, the ship’s cannons—almost ludicrously stark against the white rock—waiting for an enemy that would never materialise.14
Although the portability and relatively quick erection of prefabricated buildings was testament to the extraordinary mobility and resourcefulness that had long characterised British imperial expansion, it also revealed a cavalier indifference to the site-specific requirements of design and construction. While local Aboriginal people sheltered under simple shade structures in the dry months and ‘relatively complicated’ reed domes in the wet season, the British seemed determined to reconstruct little England in the tropics. Government House, with its small eaves, tiny windows and complete lack of ventilation, was a furnace all year round. The few marines whose wives had accompanied them were eventually housed in the ‘married quarters’, a row of ironstone Cornish cottages backed by garden plots, their dark chimneys stacked at the southern end.
In stifling humidity, the women, clothed from head to toe, stood over open fires in sauna-like conditions, pools of dignified perspiration oozing from every pore of their skin. John McArthur’s observation regarding gardening at Port Essington held for every aspect of their venture: it was a constant challenge to ‘abandon preconceived notions and prejudices’.15
Remains of the ‘Married Quarters’ at Victoria Settlement, Port Essington, 2014
The shock of the new—crocodiles devouring Bremer’s dog and tugging at men’s blankets as they slept in their hammocks, white ants finding the legs of his sofa despite him moving it daily from one corner of his tent to the next, and the sheer luxuriance of the natural environment—ensured that there were more than enough distractions in the first few months at Victoria Settlement. As Earl observed, everything possessed ‘the charm of novelty’, including Portuguese Timor and nearby islands, which were less than two weeks’ sail away and ideal for securing supplies and spreading word of the garrison that clung to the water’s edge at Port Essington. When one marine did venture inland from the settlement he was overwhelmed by the abundance of wildlife: wetland pools ‘with over 500 black swans’, wide river banks covered in palms 15 metres high, scores of flying foxes, multitudes of brightly coloured ‘parakeets’, giant crabs lurking in the mangrove swamps and the most beautiful waterlilies growing in the rivers. The intensity of colour, the richness of the light and the wild cacophony of unfamiliar forest sounds were arresting. Yet all of this paled before the curiosity and wonder they felt when contemplating Aboriginal people’s skilful exploitation of natural resources.16
From the moment Bremer’s party arrived in the harbour, they had admired the grace and dexterity with which Aboriginal people moved on land and sea. Their largest canoes, modelled on the Makassans’ and preferably hewn from the ‘kapok’ (‘wirdil’) tree, were capable of carrying up to twenty people. One of their methods for catching fish suggested magic of a kind. After they had dragged ‘whole Pandanus trees’ through the water for several minutes, possibly to disperse another plant (‘mayak’), the fish floated to the surface ‘stupefied’ by the ‘narcotic’ effects of the mayak’s poison. At other times, women waded out to collect shellfish while the men immersed themselves in the mud flats waiting silently for a water bird to land before grabbing it with their bare hands. They were equally ingenious in finding honey in the forest, identifying the branches of the appropriate tree by ‘whistling … in a peculiar manner, and thus inducing the bees to hover over their treasure-trove’. Once the swarm gathered over the hive they climbed the tree with their tomahawks and cut the branch down. To the marines who first journeyed inland, their navigational skills were mystifying. Walking through ‘thinly but beautifully wooded country’ along ‘impressive’ ancient paths connected by bridges made from palm, Aboriginal people found their way to their destination with ‘extraordinary precision’, far better than the British ‘could have done with the best compasses ever made’. Once beyond the narrow bounds of the settlement, the British were almost entirely dependent on Aboriginal bushcraft. When one of Bremer’s sailors went missing for four days, he was found on ‘the verge of death’ and taken to an Aboriginal camp where he was fed, his slashed and crippled feet ‘washed’ and other ‘charitable offices’ performed on him, before he was eventually returned to the settlement. Their generosity, skill and knowledge of the country could not be doubted. But none of this could shift the fundamental belief of the British that Aboriginal people occupied a lower scale of humanity. Despite knowing that they were clearly present before the British arrived, even someone as perceptive as Earl had his blind spot: ‘[We are] the first occupants of a new country’ he wrote triumphantly.17
Wetlands, Cobourg Peninsula, 2014
In early 1839, it appeared that the decades-long fear of French imperial ambitions in Australia was about to be realised. The French naval explorer Jules Dumont d’Urville entered Port Essington harbour in the Astrolabe and anchored close to the settlement on 7 April. On a mission to claim the South Pole for France, d’Urville devoted several months of his voyage to exploring the Pacific. He was pleased with what he found when he came ashore: ‘I came up alongside a fine jetty about 6 metres long, solidly constructed and furnished with steps to facilitate landing. On the jetty is a flagstaff from which was flying the flag of Great Britain … Government house, built entirely of wood at Port Jackson, and set on piles, offered every comfort. All the rooms were well arranged and convenient: drawing room, bedrooms, study, bathroom, lavatory, offices—all was provided’. It was clear to d’Urville that the settlement’s existence was to ward off the French and ‘mark’ the fact that the British had taken ‘possession’ of the entire continent. At the same time, he had grave doubts about Victoria’s future.
That evening, mutual suspicions were put aside when d’Urville and his officers were invited to ‘Monsieur Bremer’s table’ for dinner. Grateful f
or the invitation, d’Urville was nonetheless sceptical of his host’s ability to provide haute cuisine from the settlement’s produce alone. The thought of that, he sniffed, would be ‘woeful’. ‘But, thanks to beautiful beef, superb turkey and excellent Timorese poultry, accompanied by vintage Sauternes and Bordeaux, we had a charming dinner’. For the visitors’ entertainment, Bremer’s eldest son, Edward, performed a ‘burlesque’, miming Aboriginal dances, singing their songs and mimicking their use of the ‘woomera and spear’. One hundred and fifty years later, when the first archaeological excavations took place at Victoria Settlement, Jim Allen unearthed the Chateau Margaux seals from the bottles that were probably drunk that evening: ‘one of only four wines to be assigned the ultimate Premier Cru (first growth) status’. Nearby, in an Aboriginal midden, he discovered another glass bottle seal belonging to ‘John Alberty Bordeaux Vieux Cognac’, bottled in 1815. More a bacchanalian feast than a congress of imperial rivals in the South Pacific, the grand repas at Port Essington helped to clarify matters. When the haze from the vintage wines and tobacco smoke cleared the next morning, Bremer was convinced that the French posed no threat, while the French were glad to leave the settlement to what they were certain would be the same fate as Raffles Bay. As one of their officers acidly remarked, ‘you [British] must have a mania for colonies to drop one down in Port Essington’.18
After eight months, in June 1839, the settlement was all but established and Bremer and Earl decided to leave for Sydney, leaving Victoria under the charge of the commander of the Royal Marines, Captain John McArthur, a dogged, melancholy man who would ultimately remain in the position for the duration of the settlement. Bremer had returned to Sydney to ascertain whether the British government had finally authorised the colonisation of Port Essington. Disappointed to discover that no instructions had been issued, he persuaded New South Wales Governor George Gipps to allow ‘persons of respectability’ to occupy half-acre ‘town allotments, within a half a mile of the settlement’, and ‘suburban allotments of five acres each’, within five miles, at an annual rent of 5 shillings per half-acre, an extremely unattractive proposition to settlers who could find more permanent land offers much closer to Sydney. But Bremer would never return to Victoria to realise his plans. After taking troops to Norfolk Island to help Gipps put down a convict rebellion, he was called away by the Admiralty to take command of the East Indies station and sailed off to settle trading disputes in China. As it turned out, he was fortunate to leave.19
Any trace of hubris concerning the future of Victoria was obliterated on 25 November 1839. ‘At midnight the wind drew round to the eastward, and blew a perfect hurricane, before which nearly everything gave way; the trees came down in every part of the settlement, the marines’ houses were all blown down, the church only finished a week shared the same fate’. Two hours later, the wind shifted suddenly to the north with tremendous fury. The gardens were ‘uprooted’ and Government House was torn from its stone piers and ‘blown away from them to a distance of nine feet’. As the sea rose to ‘ten feet and a half’, the jetty and storehouses on the beach were washed away. The naval sloop HMS Pelorus was ripped from her moorings and ‘driven on shore’, her starboard side ‘buried nine feet in the mud, leaving the keel three feet clear of the ground’. Eight people were drowned. Only the hospital and officers’ mess survived unscathed. Surveying the scene in disbelief the following morning, McArthur wrote despondently that the ‘work of 12 months had been nullified in 12 hours’. Earl, returning months later, found the desolation gave the country ‘the appearance of England in the depth of winter’. The settlement had been all but wiped out.20
In the enormous effort of rebuilding Victoria, the process of adaptation was painful and slow. McArthur learnt to use the local ironwood, which although harder to work, was more resistant to white ants. Buildings were raised off the ground on 2.5-metre piles to allow for termite inspection, as in colonial Asia and Africa. The hospital was built from brick and stone. Bark cladding proved far cheaper and easier to use than weatherboards, while steep pitched roofs were far more effective against the tropical downfalls. All of this they learnt from trial and error. But there were other things that could not be adjusted so easily. For the few men and women who lived at Victoria throughout the 1840s there was a constant struggle to overcome isolation, ennui, homesickness and the very real threat of an early death. Malaria and other diseases stalked the settlement at every turn. Lieutenant George Lambrick lost his wife and two children within eighteen months. Nothing could stem the high attrition rate. As John Mulvaney calculated, the stark fact is that ‘more than 40 per cent of persons stationed [at Port Essington] either died or were invalided out’. Those who attended the regular burial services at the cemetery wondered if they would be next.21
McArthur’s correspondence, with its frequent mention of ‘great suffering’, makes for difficult reading, as does his palpable frustration with the time taken to communicate with the British government. It was impossible to make swift decisions. In the corridors of the British Admiralty and the Colonial Office, Port Essington was a strategic point on a map, a military outpost that was either to be funded and supported or abandoned. Letters to England from Victoria could take well over six months to arrive and more than a year would pass before a reply was received. In August 1843, after losing many to malaria, the settlement’s numbers were reduced to forty-six. McArthur wrote to London requesting that a relief party be sent immediately. Seventeen months later a party of fifty Royal Marines finally arrived from Dublin. The mere ‘sight of a vessel’ approaching the settlement created mixed feelings, the colour of the wax seal on the back of a long-awaited letter possibly indicating bad news from home. To break the seal and read the letter was to condense months of expectation into a rush of anticipation, ‘joy and anxiety’ before it was immediately re-read, the emotional response of the reader reaching out across distance and time to the moment when the letter was written, already more than a year gone.22
To lighten his men’s boredom and the almost prison-like claustrophobia induced by the climate, McArthur organised games with ‘bat and ball’, ‘stone gathering competitions’, sprinting races and wrestling matches, sometimes between different ships’ crews such as the Beagle and the Britomart. These tests of strength and athleticism suited the male-dominated society at Victoria, which prized physical prowess and survival skills above all else, qualities that bristled in a man such as the hunter Hutchings, a ‘huge fellow, rough and ready’, who would emerge from the forest ‘hung round with game’—geese, ducks, kangaroos and ‘handkerchiefs full of small birds’—‘his face smeared with perspiration and blood’. One escape from brutish masculinity was theatre—the most celebrated example at Port Essington took place in 1843, when four ships happened to be visiting and Captain Owen Stanley staged the play Cheap Living (written by Frederick Reynolds and first performed at Drury Lane in 1797). The prologue to the published version of the ‘farce’ explained the play’s cross-dressing: ‘you must fancy a female is really a man; Not merely conceal’d in the manly array, But a man, bona-fide, throughout the whole play’. Stanley had found an ingenious way of bringing more women into the settlement, even if only for one evening. To stage the production he painted his scenery using what he called ‘the earths of the country’, emulating the Aboriginal use of local soils. The play was staged in a converted workshop named ‘Victoria Theatre’. It was a riotous success.23
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Turkey Bush in flower, Cobourg Peninsula, 2014
There were also more serious distractions. Victoria was a highly contained and unusually fertile field of scientific observation and collection. As the only settlement in northern Australia at the time, it was visited by several naturalists and held a strong attraction for those such as John Gilbert, who lived there from 1840–41 and collected for John Gould. Some of the earliest and largest flora and fauna specimens from Australia’s north came from Port Essington. The settlement was effectively Bri
tain’s window into Australia’s tropical environment and was of ‘outstanding importance’ to Australian biology. The journals of the naturalists who visited, and many others including that of McArthur, contain valuable lists of birdlife, often with detailed descriptions of wingspan and plumage (‘flycatcher? amber colour above the beak, long black white-tipped tail, white throat … speckled breast white belly’). When the collections of fauna and flora eventually left the settlement they immediately entered an international market. The birds and mammals collected by Gilbert were unwanted by Gould and eventually sold to museums and private collectors in Britain and Europe. Aboriginal artefacts and bodily remains such as skulls and bones also found their way into British collections, traded at Victoria for tobacco, food or alcohol, or simply pilfered from burial sites, the very process of collection reflecting British racial ideology that placed Aboriginal people on a lower scale of human development.24
Many of the journals that have survived from both residents and visitors to Victoria, some written at the time and unpublished, others undoubtedly embellished before later publication, display a similar pattern in their descriptions of Aboriginal people. The author—usually a naturalist, explorer or scientist—begins with predictable prejudice: he is offended by their nakedness and complains about their unreliable work habits. They walk too slowly through the forest. They have no interest in busyness. He views them condescendingly and is convinced they are ‘savage’, ugly and harmless, with no capacity for abstract ideas and reasoning. He is struck by the fact that they seemingly fail to grow things and appear to have no care for the future. Yet the longer the writer remains at Victoria, the more he is drawn into their culture—what begins as dismissiveness slowly gives way to fascination. In some cases, entire journals are turned over to describing Aboriginal culture. Word lists are provided. Cultural practices are meticulously documented, and all the while there is a constant tension between attraction and revulsion. The more deeply the author reflects on Aboriginal culture, the more potentially threatening the experience becomes. To truly understand and admire Aboriginal culture was also to risk undermining European cultural assumptions. The experience was both immensely rich and deeply unsettling for both parties.25