From the Edge

by Mark Mckenna

  The title page was painstakingly inscribed in black, blue and red ink while the fragile manuscript, bound carefully with string, was barely more than 8 centimetres wide and 16 centimetres long. Inside, every entry was immaculately written, with subheadings brilliantly coloured in red. After listing phrases which reveal something of Angelo’s everyday transactions—‘give to me your spear and your pearls, your turtle shell, basket and I will give to you tobacco, rice and other’, ‘make fire’, ‘bring small wood’, ‘little boy come here be not afraid’, ‘I must return to my house but tomorrow morning I will return and see you’—the manuscript ends with Angelo’s raison d’être: ‘Religious Questions and Answers’.

  Who made the Sun, the Moon, the earth?

  I do not know.

  My dear child, I will tell you. God made the sun …

  Did die your Soul?

  Never

  Where will go your Soul, when your body die?

  Before God

  What for before God?

  To receive reward if it was good; and to have punishment, if it was bad. The reward will have in heaven with God, forever, and the punishment in Hell with the Devil forever.41

  Reading his exquisitely compiled manuscript and hearing of the ‘love, attachment and affection’ he was shown by Aboriginal people, Angelo’s former teachers at Propaganda Fide could be forgiven for thinking that he had succeeded in converting ‘the natives’ to Christianity. But the truth was otherwise. Aboriginal people had actually succeeded in forcing Angelo to question the purpose and effectiveness of his mission. Sweatman described how they would trick ‘the poor padre’ when he asked them for translations of the liturgy. Instead of giving him the correct word in their language they would offer him obscenities. When Angelo came to say Mass he could not understand why they ‘laughed at his sermons’. Others told of Aboriginal men and women repeating their prayers in the main square of the settlement ‘with many gestures as rather a good joke than otherwise’. Parroting prayers was not evidence of conversion. More often than not it was a way of securing ‘a bag of rice’. Indeed, Sweatman claimed that Angelo ‘despaired’ of ever succeeding. ‘Had they had any idolatry of their own, [Angelo] said, he might have rooted it out and taught them Christianity instead, but having no idea of religion whatever, he feared it would be impossible to make them understand anything about it.’ Although he had lived with them (or at least near them) and learnt some of their language, Angelo had still not grasped the importance of their Dreaming and creation stories—an oral gospel that bound the people of the past, present and future to the land and all that inhabited it.42

  In 1847, by which time his initial enthusiasm had worn thin, Angelo told McArthur that he was not making sufficient progress. His only hope, he said, ‘was to maintain and teach the children’, ideally after they were taken away from their parents. In his correspondence with church authorities in Sydney, he came close to admitting defeat: ‘their poverty and misery is so very deep, their condition is so degraded, their debasement is so terrible that it presents the hardest difficulties for the Mission’. The man who had learnt more of the closely related local Aboriginal languages (Garig and Iwaidja) than any other European at Port Essington and earnt the admiration of the majority of Aboriginal people he lived with, so much so that he was given a ‘skin name’ (‘Nagojo’) and thus adopted into their kinship system, nonetheless saw them as ‘people altogether brutale’ with ‘no understanding but for their belly’. He gave others the impression that he wanted to leave the settlement and even doubted his mission. The surgeon Crawford, who had many long conversations with Angelo, claimed that he found him ‘wholly without religious feeling’, ‘well acquainted with theology and a strong stickler for the doctrine of his church, but more like an advocate than a believer. Indeed he frequently gave occasion to doubt whether he himself gave credence to what he thought’. The longer Angelo lived with Aboriginal people at Port Essington the more his piety dissolved. It was he who was being converted.43

  In early June 1848, Lieutenant Dunbar, McArthur’s boatman, who normally delivered supplies to Angelo, ‘went down in [the] deck boat … not having heard that he was ill’. On landing at Black Rock he found him lying in his house ‘complaining of want of sleep’ and ‘headache’. Concerned, Dunbar persuaded Angelo to come back with him to the settlement hospital. Within less than a week Angelo had died, yet another victim of malaria. Second-hand accounts claimed that his last moments were ‘fearful’. He allegedly ‘denied that there was a God’. Far more likely is that the thought of dying in such a godless place as Port Essington terrified him. On 11 June, McArthur and all the officers and soldiers at the garrison attended his funeral and burial ‘with the respect due to a highly esteemed man’. McArthur, who over the previous two years had supplied him with provisions and occasionally taken his boat out to Angelo’s and dined with him, was deeply saddened by his passing. Perhaps also because his death was yet another reminder of how the climate and isolation at Victoria had claimed the lives of so many of those who originally arrived full of hope. At the time of Angelo’s death the cemetery contained nearly fifty graves. Soon the number of dead would outnumber the number of residents.44

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  At ‘daylight’ on 15 November 1848, the artist Oswald Brierly decided to ‘take a stroll’ around the settlement ‘before it became so intolerably hot’, eventually finding his way to Victoria cemetery. Brierly, who had spent the last six years managing Ben Boyd’s pastoral and whaling interests at Twofold Bay, had arrived only a week earlier on Owen Stanley’s Rattlesnake, together with John MacGillivray and the brilliant, moody, 23-year-old assistant surgeon and later renowned biologist Thomas Huxley. That morning, it took a while before Brierly realised that the fenced enclosure he had stumbled upon was the ‘burying ground of the Establishment’. ‘Forty four’ graves ‘altogether in one spot surrounded by trees’ surprised him for a settlement ‘containing so few people’. Angelo’s grave was the most recent, his name and date of death still to be inscribed on the gravestone. As the Rattlesnake entered Port Essington harbour a few days earlier, the first thing to catch Brierly’s attention was Angelo’s house at Black Rock: ‘Why there’s a house’, he exclaimed, ‘with a curtain blowing out of the window’. After learning of his death, Brierly heard from McArthur and others how ‘Don Angelo the Roman Catholic missionary’ had ‘devoted his time to acquiring [the Aborigines’] language and teaching [them] the Lord’s Prayer … but without producing the slightest change in any way’. ‘Nor’, he wrote, ‘did they show the slightest regret when he died—I saw a vocabulary which he had left. He was a man about 39—a Tyrolese’. Angelo’s ‘fearful’ last moments were burdened by the knowledge that his mission had failed.45

  Looking around the cemetery, Brierly saw that white ants had consumed the marrow of the small wooden crosses that marked many of the graves. When he touched them they crumbled to dust. ‘As the sun rose’ over the graveyard, he watched as a goanna ‘stopped with his head raised and his eye fixed upon [him]’. ‘Green ants … ran over everything’, dropping down from the trees and covering the ground on which he stood. At that moment, in the dawn’s half-light, he thought of the ‘church yard with its very records all decaying, devoured by blackness’ and felt ‘the most nervous [he had] felt anywhere’. He was glad to ‘hurry away’ from the place. Later that day, Stanley introduced him to McArthur—‘a tall, thin old man who appeared to warm up at the sight of strangers’. When Brierly walked up the verandah steps and entered McArthur’s private residence, he found a ‘large gloomy apartment lined with cedar and many squares of … [faded] calico’, which ‘hung down in shreds’. McArthur’s papers and documents were spread out on every available surface. The ‘theatrical melancholy’ that enveloped him inside reflected the air of deterioration in the ‘rickety old fort’ outside. Brierly was struck by the way in which the white ants’ activities lent the ‘appearance of Antiquity in a settlement of so few years standing’. The atmosp
here of ‘utter decay’ was unmistakable. The white ants had demolished an entire quarter of ‘Victoria Square’. It was the same when he walked over to the hospital: table legs standing in tin cans, patients’ beds constantly being moved to avoid the leaks in the roof or strung over with makeshift umbrellas, the ward presided over by a ‘tethered eagle’, a ‘tame kangaroo’ and an ornamental backdrop of ‘native spears and barks’, the patients’ droll greeting—‘a nice cool day’. Victoria had only existed for a decade and yet it appeared ancient: the long-lost remnant of a distant civilisation slowly being devoured by the tropical environment.46

  Father Angelo Confalonieri’s grave, Victoria Settlement cemetery, Port Essington, 2014

  For the nineteenth-century British imagination, which longed for deeply embedded settlement and at least the outward appearance of permanence in a colonial setting, there was something decidedly unnatural and unnerving about such images of decay. The ever-present sensation of impermanence undermined the garrison’s security. The environment appeared to deny McArthur and the marines grand statements of imperial presence. It constantly reminded them that they were interlopers—not so much colonisers as disappointed speculators. Yet at the same time as it brought them to their knees it continued to entrance them. When Brierly saw McArthur’s map of the harbour and his ‘beautiful’ sketches of the settlement, he could not help being moved: ‘it was quite pleasing to see how in this uncongenial corner of the world he had cherished his remembrance of an art’. To see how the solitary McArthur had devoted so much of his time to capturing ‘the passing effects of Sky and Shore … half caught in colour or … recorded in pencil’ inspired Brierly to record his own impressions of Port Essington.

  6 am Morning 11 Nov … Point Record and Land on the Eastern shore smoky and colourless—the settlement side on which the sun is shining is rather more clear—startling white and red Bank, water under it a Glassy calm, light currents of air passing and carrying grey colour across and Breaking the dark reflections of the Land. Jolly Boat and one of the Cutters with seaman and marines watering party going on Shore. Sun seen thro the Port Essington haze at this hour exactly resembles the attempts at Sunshine one sees in London—sun forming the centre of a smoky yellow spot of light being lost in the Surrounding haze.47

  It was a photographic record that would later be developed in Brierly’s floating studio. Employed as the Rattlesnake’s artist for Stanley’s survey of the Great Barrier Reef, the Louisiade Archipelago and part of the New Guinea coast, his journal remains one of the most revealing depictions of life at Victoria Settlement in its final years. Determined to record every scrap of knowledge regarding local Aboriginal people, Brierly provided a snapshot of their society in late 1848: describing corroborees attended by ‘about 80 people’ from ‘three different tribes’; noting the small number of elderly and large number of children (some of them ‘half cast’); watching as men mixed colours in seashells and painted baskets with chewed-down sticks for ‘brushes’; observing Aboriginal people’s consumption of seasonal food such as long-necked turtles and the nut-like bulbs of the waterlily, both of which became readily available as the swamps and floodplains dried up; and detailing their contact with the Malays, who arrived in about ‘twenty’ vessels at the end of the monsoon season and stayed for a month or more. ‘They collect tortoise shells for the Malays—which they keep hidden in the Bush—will sooner sell it to Malays than Whites. They also assist the Malays in getting the Trepangs—and sometimes accompany them in the vessels—returning the next trip—three went away this season … There have been no collisions [between Malays and Aborigines] since the establishment of the settlement—and it is thought that the presence of the whites has prevented any.’ Although Brierly had devoted countless hours to documenting Indigenous cultures on the south coast of New South Wales, he arrived at Port Essington as if he were seeing Australia for the first time and he found much that was different, particularly ‘the native mode of disposing of their dead—which is singular and different from anything I had seen amongst other Aboriginal tribes’.

  When one of their number dies the Body is carefully wrapped in Grass and Bark and laid upon a small stage or platform formed of Branches, one end resting against a tree the other being supported by two forked Branches which raise it about five feet from the ground—on this the Body is placed and left exposed to the action of the weather until the Bones whiten.48

  The body was left alone for months until the ants and birds of prey had completed their job—an offering to nature after the spirit (‘Imbarbar’) had departed. ‘The bones were then collected’ by family or friends and carried about ‘from place to place’ until they were eventually lost. Women could often be seen carrying the bones of children around the settlement in baskets. Sibbald, for example, noticed how unwanted bones were sometimes buried in the sand and covered by a small raised heap of stones. He also referred to ‘infanticide’, which he said was practised when there were twins or ‘diseased’ children: ‘the child is killed by crushing the head with a stone, the mother not being able to carry or suckle more than one’. All of these practices mystified the British. Did they revere their dead? Did they believe in life after death? In their efforts to discern whether Aboriginal people possessed spiritual beliefs they came to the conclusion that they indeed believed in evil spirits and the ‘transmigration of souls’, their dead returning as ‘Malays’. The sight of spirit beings was sometimes seen as a portent of death, as Sibbald saw firsthand: ‘an old man very well known in the colony went out fishing one day, when he came back in great alarm & said he saw two ghosts, one white & the other black, he stood stupid with terror & on looking up again they had disappeared, he had previously been unwell & he said he would soon die. He died in two days’.49

  Oswald Brierly, Native Bier, Port Essington, 1853

  For all of the sincere attempts made by the British to understand Aboriginal people at Port Essington, it was impossible to deny the gulf that separated the two cultures. The longer the British remained, coexisting on relatively peaceful terms, their failure to found their new Singapore and prove their superiority appeared all the more galling. The longer they clung to their tiny patch of cleared forest without moving inland and conquering all before them, the more they appeared to lose the very fabric of their ‘civilised’ culture. Lurking not far beneath the many descriptions of Port Essington as unsuitable for ‘European constitutions’ was a more profound existential crisis. McArthur hinted as much when he complained to the Colonial Office in 1844 that Victoria Settlement could not even ‘be viewed as a European population’, but rather as ‘a mimic Babel of the extreme East’, a place where race, language and culture were disparate and confused. With only a handful of marines and labourers in the garrison, both the Malays and Aboriginal people outnumbered the British. They arrived as the representatives of the most powerful and advanced civilisation on earth—toasting their possession of the entire north coast of the continent, quickly erecting their prefabricated buildings and mounting their guns on the headland—and yet they had degenerated into just another racial group, unable to gain even the slightest foothold. The land was ‘barren’ and unsuitable; the waters ‘sombre, dismal and monotonous’; the heat and humidity not conducive to work. Once the settlement was established there was little to do ‘beyond keeping the houses, stores, gardens &c. in order, and looking after the stock’. Busyness was replaced by siestas; roast beef by ‘Malay curry’; shoes by bare feet. They were reduced to roaming the bush like the ‘natives’ to search for food. And with a ‘great desert on one side, and islands peopled principally by savages on the other’, their isolation and vulnerability was magnified a thousand times over.50

  Many of the patients lying in their hospital beds at Victoria suffered not only from malaria but depression, or what d’Urville called ‘nostalgia’. To live in the garrison was to grapple with the loss of culture and country. Brierly noticed how the climate induced in him a ‘pent-up close feeling’ that he ‘co
uld not escape’. Not even the dogs at the settlement seemed to manage ‘the exertion of barking’. McArthur, too, felt as if he was living ‘from the world shut out’. Port Essington, he wrote sardonically on the first page of his journal, was ‘World’s End’. His notebook is full of maudlin poems in which he longs to ‘tread on English ground’. Painfully exiled from his ‘dear Kent’, McArthur’s deepest anxiety was that he might ‘never’ see his homeland ‘again’, that he would die in soil that did ‘not bear culture well’, a place where no ‘house or plough’ would ever disturb his grave. Even Thomas Huxley’s infamous denunciation of the settlement as ‘the most useless, miserable, ill-managed hole in Her Majesty’s dominions’ was an exasperated cry of recognition: in such a place as Victoria, the supposedly natural superiority of the British was exposed as fiction. Despite the fact that they longed to escape, they were haunted by the realisation that their failure to found a new Singapore was ‘a blot on the national character’.51

  Hospital ruins, Victoria Settlement, Port Essington, 2014

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  At daylight on 16 November 1848, Brierly, MacGillivray, Huxley and Stanley prepared to leave Port Essington on the Rattlesnake. Shortly after the Rattlesnake got underway, a wooden canoe manned by twelve Aboriginal men approached them from the west. Brierly could see four men ‘paddling’, ‘the rest sitting down in the canoe—their heads and shoulders only just showing above the Gunwhale’. The men were so closely packed together, Brierly feared that if it met even the smallest wave ‘she must have gone down’. The canoe pressed on, the paddlers ‘trying with all their strength to get to the ship’. But just as they succeeded in coming ‘very near’, the next ‘Board’ took the Rattlesnake away from them and the canoe turned back to shore. What explained their desperation to reach the ship? Was it last-minute trade, the giving of gifts, the wish to accompany them or simply the desire to come aboard and say goodbye? McArthur was more successful, sailing out on his decked boat and deciding to sleep on board the ship that evening, returning before the Rattlesnake sailed out of the harbour the following day. He would miss their company. The conversation on board that evening over dinner undoubtedly turned at some point to the future of Port Essington. Like McArthur, MacGillivray, Brierly, Huxley and Stanley were all convinced that the settlement should be abandoned immediately. But until the orders arrived from the British government, McArthur, who had already suffered a bout of malaria, was bound to remain there with his ailing band of marines. The time spent waiting for a decision that everyone believed to be inevitable was interminable. It would take another year before the moment finally arrived. On the evening of 12 November 1849, when Captain Henry Keppel, commander of HMS Meander, arrived in Port Essington and ‘immediately communicated’ to McArthur that he had ‘come to remove’ the settlement, the garrison rejoiced. It was as if war had ended. Although they had expected the decision, they were surprised by its immediacy. Keppel’s instructions were to ‘take all stores and personnel to Sydney’. While the marines’ wives and their children celebrated at hearing the news, Keppel watched as Aboriginal women, some of whom possibly had relationships with McArthur’s men, ‘showed their grief by cutting their heads and faces with sharp flints’.52