by Mark Mckenna
Indigenous body marking at Port Essington was a practice that excited the curiosity of the British. Some of the marines enjoyed being asked to daub the bodies of Aboriginal people with ‘red paint’. Intrigued by the raised scars on the chests and shoulders of Aboriginal men, the Scottish surgeon Archibald Sibbald decided that he would try it for himself. He wrote:
The natives of the N. Coast have a habit of raising large swellings on their bodies … To see how it was managed I got it done to my left shoulder. The manner of doing it is as follows; they take a lancet; a sharp shell in their native state & cut two perpendicular lines, the length [the marking] is to be, they cut with a scraping motion as is done in etching … then they take different coloured earths or chalks, for instance red & white, mixed on a leaf for a palette, & getting a small stick, bite the end to make it hold like a paint brush, this they paint over the scars alternately of different colours & ascending to the number of markings to be raised.
Sibbald’s initial enthusiasm soon waned. ‘This operation of painting goes on every day, till it is large enough; but whatever may [please them] would not similarly suit a European, so I put a stop to it on the 4th day.’26
Like Sibbald, the 19-year-old naval surveyor John Sweatman was immediately drawn to Aboriginal people, envying their lifestyle—‘far happier than many who enjoy every comfort’—enjoying the sexual favours of Aboriginal women, and recognising his total dependence on Aboriginal guidance in the bush (‘I don’t know what we should have done without them’). Sweatman’s keen visual eye, already attuned to ‘wild and picturesque images of ‘native life’, was attracted to ‘the rows of fires shining at a distance through the dark trees, with black naked figures flitting about among them’. Almost every evening during his stay at Victoria, Sweatman joined Aboriginal people around their campfires, ‘the old women cooking their evening meals, the men smoking or talking and the younger people singing’, accompanied by ‘the bee-like buzzing of their bamboo instruments’, which formed the ambient soundtrack to daily life at the settlement. Sweatman’s friendship with Aboriginal people reflected the deepening bonds between the two cultures at Victoria.27
John McArthur knew that many Aboriginal people had ‘formed an attachment’ to his men. And he was touched by ‘the sensitivity and tenderness of affection’ they displayed towards one another in their daily lives. With every acknowledgement of shared emotional bonds between black and white, the awareness of shared humanity became harder to ignore. But emotion was also a marker of difference. Shocked by the excessive emotion displayed by Aboriginal people in their ‘domestic broils’ and their incessant shrieking and wailing at times of grief, some cutting their bodies and tearing their hair, McArthur resorted to Old Testament allusions of ‘demoniacal possession’: ‘I never saw anything more fearful to look at; it is sufficient to make the heart of humanity bleed for them’. For McArthur and so many British settlers in colonial Australia, to be ‘borne away’ by passion was the telltale sign of infantile savagery, while to discipline one’s emotions was a central tenet of civilised behaviour. Even Aboriginal people’s fear of social isolation—‘solitary confinement … [affects] them much in the same manner that it does children when shut up in dark closets’—pointed, they believed, to a lack of individual independence and self-discipline, two of the most celebrated qualities of nineteenth-century British character. The handful of Aboriginal men and women who learnt to live as honorary British by working as domestic servants were initially exalted as ‘reclaimed’ from a life of ‘savagery’ but were quickly disowned the moment they threw off their clothes and ‘bolted’ back to the bush.28
One young man, Neinmal, who waited on McArthur’s table wearing a ‘white jacket and waistcoat’, his hair carefully brushed and parted, impressed the British so much that he sailed to Singapore, Java and Sydney in 1845 with the Scottish naturalist John MacGillivray, before returning with Sweatman on the Bramble, and learning to read and write on the way. With fluent English, impish wit and a fine singing voice, Neinmal revelled in his new life as a roving exhibit of the ‘civilized savage’ and became ‘much attached’ to MacGillivray as well as being extremely popular with McArthur and the marines. Understandably, ‘older members of [Neinmal’s] family’ were envious of ‘the attention he received’ and resentful of his long absences from home. When a marine shot and killed an Aboriginal man accused of theft as he attempted to escape custody (the first violent death at the settlement), Aboriginal law demanded payback. Rather than choose a marine, which would have been far more dangerous, Aboriginal elders chose Neinmal because of his popularity. They knew that his loss would be much mourned by the British. When Neinmal returned to the bush one morning, he was speared and clubbed to death. As payback for his murder, his family then killed a member of his assailant’s tribe. The shooting of one Aboriginal man had led to the murder of two more men.29
For every step that broke down the chasm of cultural difference, there was a countervailing push to remind both sides of the enormity of the divide. Although there were a handful of others like him—the most celebrated being Mildun (Jack Davis), who was only a young boy at the time of the settlement and later sailed to Hong Kong and England—Neinmal was an exception. The majority of Aboriginal people preferred to keep a respectful distance from the British. As Sibbald shrewdly noted, ‘they have a language they speak to us in & another we do not understand’. McArthur too had learnt that ‘they seem averse to our learning anything concerning them, and … prefer the adoption of some of our language rather than we should acquire theirs’. While the British at Victoria tried to lure ‘the natives’ with what they saw as the tremendous advantages of civilisation, Aboriginal people remained determined to preserve their cultural integrity.30
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By 1845, the prospect of Victoria Settlement surviving was slim. Despite the arrival of more marines from England, a series of determined but gloomy dispatches from McArthur combined with reports in the Sydney press condemning the settlement as a complete failure had virtually sealed its fate. In late 1844, McArthur reminded the Colonial Office that when Botany Bay had proved unsuitable, Phillip moved to Port Jackson. Victoria, he insisted, was ‘too far up’ Port Essington, ‘cut off … from a stream of trade which is silently but certainly gliding past our front door’. The much-promised opening up of the interior to settlers had never occurred. Everything had proved a struggle—diet, physical and mental health, communication and the anticipated trade with Asia. The garrison could barely exist let alone thrive. Reluctant to forsake his intention to settle the north, New South Wales Governor George Gipps had already written to the Colonial Secretary in London suggesting that a settlement be established ‘at or near Cape York’, admitting in the same breath that the ‘advantages have not been reaped’ from Victoria Settlement. In the pages of McArthur’s notebook a more poetic verdict had been reached: ‘To the shape of a rat had this world been subjected, at the tip of its tail Victoria’s erected’.31
In December 1845 and early May 1846, McArthur’s mood was temporarily lifted by the arrival of two men, one of whom he would befriend for the next two years. The first man came not by sea but overland, emerging from the bush on horseback. On 17 December, the German explorer Ludwig Leichhardt and his party arrived in Victoria Settlement after a 14-month journey. They had travelled over five thousand kilometres from the Darling Downs in south-east Queensland in their quest to become the first overland explorers to reach Port Essington. Even today, Leichhardt’s arrival at the settlement appears little short of miraculous. After losing John Gilbert in a violent clash with ‘Aborigines’ near the Gulf of Carpentaria, he had battled on, almost failing at the last hurdle when he became lost only three days out from Port Essington, led astray by buffalo tracks. Luckily, he stumbled upon the ‘original blackfellows’ footpath’, heard their ‘cooee’ piercing the bush and followed the call. Coming upon an Aboriginal camp he was greeted by two men who spoke excellent English—‘Backi, Backi’, an old, l
ame man and ‘Rambo Rambo’, a ‘short sturdy fellow with remarkably large testicles’. For the next two days, Leichhardt was provided with food and water—‘the black-fellow showed us how we could easily take out the young shoot [of the cabbage palm] by splitting the leaves and we enjoyed a fine meal’—and led along ancient paths until his ultimate goal was finally within reach.32
Approaching the settlement from the south early on the morning of 17 December, he was led past waterholes and termite mounds, through an open forest of melaleuca, stringybark and ironwood.
After more than a year’s journey the sight that greeted him moved him to tears. Passing through the garden with its ‘fine row of coconut palms’, he was taken aback as ‘white houses’ and a ‘row of snug thatched cottages’ ‘burst suddenly’ upon him. It was Europe in miniscule, a momentary vision of all he had longed for after so many days and nights without the trappings of ‘civilization’.
Bushland close to the ruins of Victoria Settlement, 2014
They treated us with the greatest kindness and provided us with the necessary clothes and food. I was deeply moved in finding myself again in civilized society. I could scarcely speak, the words growing big with tears and emotion. And even now, thinking that I have been enabled by a kind providence to perform such a journey with no small means, my heart sobs with gratitude within me.33
Leichhardt had arrived at the height of the wet season, his skin irritated by scores of pus-inflamed boils—‘appearing at the joint of the knee, at the loins, buttocks, anus [and] elbow’—his eyes clogged by conjunctivitis. After the initial relief subsided he saw the settlement as a ‘lonely, solitary place’ sustained largely by the sheer determination of that ‘rara avis’, John McArthur. Leichhardt was anxious to return to Sydney where he had long been given up as dead. A lament for his party’s ‘bleaching bones in the deserts of central Australia’ had already been ‘published and set to music’. Four weeks later he found passage on the Heroine to Sydney, sailing down the east coast dreaming of his father—‘silent and melancholy, his complexion sallow’—and his ‘love of a girl’ he knew could ‘never be found embodied in real life’. When he arrived in Sydney he was greeted as a national hero, his triumphant overland trek to Port Essington fuelling yet another flurry of wildly ambitious schemes to develop the north, despite the fact that the settlement at Port Essington already appeared doomed. Until the entire continent could be claimed as ‘civilised’, colonial Australia could not imagine itself secure.34
In Sydney, Leichhardt gave great encouragement to an Italian priest who was about to board the Heroine for its return journey to Port Essington. He was an unlikely passenger. Although the British government had promised Catholic missions the same support as their Protestant counterparts in Australia, they had not expected that Port Essington would be high on Rome’s list of priorities. At only thirty-three, Father Angelo Confalonieri was Australia’s first Catholic missionary in northern Australia. Given the august title ‘Vicar Apostolic of Port Essington’ by his superiors in Rome, he eventually arrived at Victoria dressed in rags and clutching his crucifix after the Heroine was wrecked on a reef in Torres Strait during its return passage. His journey had been long and arduous. After leaving his home near Lake Garda and studying to be a missionary at Propaganda Fide, the Vatican institute for evangelisation in Rome, he travelled via Lyon, Paris and London in 1845 in an effort to recruit more priests to his mission and secure financial support. In September that year he sailed from London with more than twenty Irish, French and Italian missionaries bound for Perth, Sydney and Port Essington. Their mission was to realise Pope Gregory XVI’s intention to evangelise the Australian continent. Like his counterparts in the Colonial Office in London, Gregory ruled a vast empire. From his Vatican office he carved the map of Australia into spheres of Catholic influence and had the related documents filed under ‘Oceania’. Bishop Brady was to preside over the ‘diocese’ of Perth, Angelo Confalonieri, Port Essington and Northern Australia, while another priest was appointed ‘Vicar of King George Sound’ in south-west Australia. It was another form of magical possession, assumed rather than negotiated and blissfully ignorant of the practical difficulties of placing territories ten times the size of Italy in the hands of one man.35
In lieu of knowledge there was always faith. By all accounts Father Angelo—the naive soldier of Christ—fervently believed that he would convert the Aboriginal people of Port Essington to Christianity. Tossed into the sea when his ship struck the reef and dragged to safety by Nelson, the captain’s ‘great Newfoundland dog’, he lost his two Irish assistants, James Fagan and Nicholas Hogan, and all of his worldly possessions. God, he believed, had saved him for one reason: so that he might carry out his mission to save the souls of the ‘poor and naked savages’ in the ‘forests’ of northern Australia before ‘a Protestant mission’ could ‘establish itself’ there. Writing to church authorities in Sydney only three days after he arrived, Angelo told the story of his shipwreck and miraculous survival, pleading for a pair of ‘spectacles’—‘my short sightedness is so great that I can hardly perceive objects until I touch them’—a ‘breviary, some books of devotion’, an ‘altar-stone’ and the ‘necessary sacred vestments’ that would allow him to say Mass. He was convinced that he faced ‘a terrible probation of a whole year replete with fatigue, misery, and danger’. Desperate for funds and material support, he was also adept at dramatising his plight: ‘alone, abandoned upon these inhospitable shores—without money, without aid, without clothes, without hopes, pale and emaciated, almost torn to pieces by the breakers—the poor Don Angelo lives as it were by miracle’. As a young priest (if his hagiographer can be believed) he had spent months walking alone in the Italian and Swiss Alps with little protective clothing and few provisions. In order to pass the test of physical and mental endurance to prepare for his life as a missionary, he attempted to emulate his Saviour’s ordeal of forty days and nights in the desert. Trekking in the Alps, where village inns were usually within reach, would prove almost luxurious compared to the travails of life at Port Essington.36
Because Angelo had lost all his papers in the shipwreck, McArthur had to take him on trust. Heartened by the priest’s enthusiasm, he provided labourers—both his own tradesmen and Aboriginal men—to build him a small house at ‘Black Rock near the entrance of the harbour’, 25 kilometres removed from the settlement. Angelo referred to it as his ‘little shack’. This situation would allow Angelo to be undisturbed in his effort to ‘live among the savages, and thus learn their language, and observe their customs and manners’. To walk along the low-lying, red-rock shoreline at the harbour’s entrance today is to understand something of the isolation Angelo experienced. Writing to Propaganda Fide at the Vatican from the almost preposterous address ‘North Australia, Port Essington’, he complained regularly of ‘immensa distanza, e difficile communicazione’. Rome was an eternity away.37
McArthur kept Angelo supplied with ‘food and clothing’ from the ‘Government stores’, although by all accounts, self-sufficiency was not his forte. Years of having had his meals placed in front of him had left Angelo unprepared for life alone. Sweatman was amused: ‘in all worldly matters he was … ignorant & helpless’, especially in ‘domestic matters … when he had his flour, he did not know how to mix or cook it! He was a terrible beggar too, and pestered us without ceasing, though always in the most polite language and with a thousand apologies’.38
To gain the trust of Aboriginal people, Angelo ‘lived wholly in their manner’, including eating ‘roots’ and ‘half-cooked possums with entrails’. He was often seen with Aboriginal people wandering through the bush, sometimes far inland, ‘notebook in hand’, aided in his efforts by a young Aboriginal boy, ‘Jim Crow’, who served as his ‘interpreter’ and occasionally waited on his table. Once he had the confidence of Aboriginal people, he offered to take ‘care of their children’, teaching them to ‘repeat prayers in Latin’. He saw immediately that he had more chance of indoctri
nating them than he had of converting their parents. An outstanding linguist, Angelo ‘mastered their language’, boasting to his superiors that ‘after having spent a year of almost continuous, hard, miserable life in the forests together with these poor savages, I can now speak their language perfectly’. He reckoned rightly that ‘almost all speak nearly the same language … but with different dialects that are easy to understand’. Yet what he saw of their culture was merely the half-glimpsed surface gloss refracted through his own prejudices. Everything was more complicated than it seemed.39
Entrance to Port Essington harbor, 2014, close to where Father Angelo Confalonieri lived, 1846–48
He produced a map of the ‘Aboriginal Tribes of the Cobourg Peninsula’, although as linguist Bruce Birch has shown, despite the map’s value, the ‘tribal’ names Angelo recorded were actually Malay names for locations rather than Aboriginal names for groups of people. Where Angelo did succeed was in his beautifully written ‘Specimen of the Aboriginal Language or Short Conversation with the Natives of North Australia Port Essington’. When I held this document in my hands in the Vatican archives in late 2014, I was immediately struck by the enormous care and pride Angelo had taken in its compilation and presentation. This was truly a work of devotion. Angelo had sent the manuscript, which he described as a ‘little essay on the language of this poor family of human beings’, from Port Essington to Propaganda Fide not only because he knew that it would be a permanent record of his work there, but because it embodied his mission and calling.40