The French explorer Marion du Fresne became in 1772 the first European to meet Aboriginal Tasmanians at what is now Marion Bay east of Hobart. They were fearless, he thought, then openly curious and, as more of the French landed, hostile. There were about forty of them, completely naked, armed with spears and stones. They lit a fire at the edge of the sea and gestured to the French, perhaps warning them to stay away. Du Fresne did something quite unexpected: he instructed two sailors – big boys, well-built and very white – to undress. They went ashore naked and carrying mirrors, necklaces and other bagatelles (trinkets). The Diémenois put down their spears and began to dance, to sing and to clap their hands. They were fascinated by the whiteness of the visitors’ skins and could not leave looking at them and touching them. But when a second then a third boatload of Frenchmen neared the shore, the demeanour of the natives changed. They took up their spears and, as the French began to withdraw, threw stones after them. Muskets were fired and, after another attempt to land was opposed with spears, the French again fired, this time killing at least one man and wounding others. The Diémenois fled and were pursued, to no avail, by a detachment of about twenty French. They were not seen again.
Du Fresne was a romantic, a believer in the myth of the Good Savage. At the Bay of Islands in New Zealand, among Māori, he fondled them … he overwhelmed them with presents … Whenever he went ashore, all the savages accompanied him as though it were a day of feasting … the women, the girls, and even the children petted him. It was his greatest happiness to live in the midst of these savages: and he and twenty-six of his men died among them too after being ambushed while fishing and cutting wood. The French, under Julien Crozet, who took the expedition home, retaliated by attacking a pā on Moturoa Island and killing perhaps 250 Māori. Crozet, whose account of du Fresne’s delusion is quoted above, sounds the opposite note to that of the philosophes. I believe, he wrote, that there is amongst all the animals none more dangerous than a primitive and savage man … reason without culture is but a brutal instinct. Neither he nor du Fresne seems to have realised that the sudden change from fondling and petting to massacre and cannibalism – the Frenchmen were probably eaten – might have had a cause apart from natural savagery. Perhaps some kind of tapu had been infringed and the massacre was consequent upon that. Both Good Savage and unregenerate primitive man were fictions elaborated by Europeans; both were remote from the realities of the actual peoples encountered.
Nevertheless advice as to how to relate to them continued to be given, largely along the lines of Tasman’s instructions. But a new note is sounded in an unofficial memoir carried on Nicholas Baudin’s voyage in the first years of the nineteenth century. Joseph-Marie Degérando’s Considerations on the Various Methods to Follow in the Observations of Savage Peoples, written in 1800 as a guide for the French expedition to Australia, is referred to in the journal of François Auguste Péron, the naturalist on the voyage, who apparently had a copy with him. Degérando, a baron of Italian descent, was a jurist, philosopher and philanthropist with a particular interest in the problems of communicating with the deaf and the mute. He was a young man when he wrote his Considerations, a member of the nascent and short-lived Société des Observateurs de l’Homme. His first writings exist in a context provided by the expansion of the French under Napoleon and the armies of scholars that followed the troops into Egypt; the early nineteenth-century French expeditions to the South Seas, and especially Baudin’s, were in this sense also Napoleonic.
Degérando’s Considerations are sometimes considered the founding text of anthropology. They essay a startling new method of communication: The first means to the proper knowledge of the Savages, he wrote, is to become after a fashion like one of them; and it is by learning their language that we shall become their fellow citizens. His advice as to how to do so is detailed and clearly draws on his interest in how to talk to deaf-mutes – perhaps recalling Péreire, the expert on deaf-mutes who interviewed the Tahitian Ahutoru in 1770. Degérando distinguishes between demonstrative, descriptive and metaphorical signs in order of increasing complexity and advocates beginning with the demonstrative, essentially pointing, before progressing on to the descriptive; and only then attempting to communicate on a metaphorical level.
He wisely points out that during first contact the presence of strangers will be a source of fear to natives and that time should be allowed for astonishment, terror and anxiety to be expelled. He is aware that property rights, so often a source of conflict, are likely to be understood differently by indigenous peoples, especially if they are nomadic or exist primarily by hunting or grazing animals. Most importantly he knows that the assumptions one culture makes about the self-evident rightness of its own practices are unlikely to be shared by other peoples: Explorers historically judge the customs of savages by analogies drawn from our own customs, when in fact they are so little related to each other. This is a major advance from the standard advice given to Tasman, which was repeated more or less faithfully in the official instructions given to the succession of French voyages between 1770 and 1840; but, as ever, their application in practice was a far more difficult matter than elaboration in theory.
Degérando is a source for another powerful idea. The philosophical traveler, he wrote, sailing to the ends of the earth, is in fact traveling in time; he is exploring the past; every step he takes is the passage of an age. This elegant supposition, that when Europeans met indigenous peoples they were meeting themselves as they had been in previous ages, is persuasive even today, however wrong-headed it may be. It is also irretrievably contaminated by analogies drawn from our own customs, in this case the idea that human culture is progressive, evolutionary and proceeds from darkness towards light, from simplicity towards complexity, from a state of savage ignorance towards one of civilised knowledge. We still sometimes assume this to be the case, when in fact such evolution is apparent only in terms of technological advance. European technology, especially weapons technology, was undoubtedly superior to that of all other peoples met in the great expansion that began with the Portuguese; their cultural superiority was, and remains, questionable.
IT IS CURIOUS TO contemplate the fact that, while the British at Port Jackson and other convict bases in New Holland and environs – Port Arthur, Norfolk Island as well as Newcastle, the Brisbane River, ultimately the Swan River too – got on with the weary, often bloody work of colonisation, the French continued to map the coasts of both Australia and Tasmania and to collect an overwhelming amount of botanical, zoological and ethnographic material. After du Fresne came La Pérouse in 1788, then Bruny d’Entrecasteaux in 1792 and ’93, looking for the lost La Pérouse; Baudin followed in the early 1800s, Louis de Freycinet in 1818–19, Louis Isidore Duperrey in 1824, Hyacinthe de Bougainville (the feckless son of Louis-Antoine) the next year, Jules Dumont d’Urville in 1826 and again in 1839, with Cyrille Laplace visiting in between in 1831.
Of all of these visits the most astonishing was Nicolas Baudin’s, which took back to France an unprecedented 200,000 specimens, including samples of 2542 new animal species, more than doubling those of the known world. Among these were at least thirty live animals, some of which went to live in a private zoo established by Napoleon’s wife, the future Empress Josephine. The emus, kangaroos, black swans and other Australian birds sported in the grounds of her summer palace at Malmaison on the outskirts of Paris. Baudin, who mapped two thirds of the Australian coastline, famously met British explorer Matthew Flinders at Encounter Bay on the South Australian coast during his circumnavigation, echoing the earlier meeting of La Pérouse and the First Fleet at Botany Bay fourteen years earlier. Flinders had aboard the Investigator his friend and colleague Bungaree, a Kuringai Aboriginal who had previously accompanied him as an interpreter, guide and negotiator with local indigenous groups on his coastal surveys of New South Wales. Bungaree on this voyage became the first indigenous person known to have circumnavigated the land Flinders called Australia.
The Fren
ch explorers visited and revisited certain locations. King George Sound on the Kimberley coast was one; Swan River, where Perth now stands, another; Tasmania was a third. Indeed the French writings on Tasmania constitute in some respects an alternative history of the contact period on that island; and a commentary upon the effects of British colonial activities there. D’Entrecasteaux in 1793 wrote that the Tasmanians seem to offer the most perfect image of pristine society … Their open and smiling expression reveals a happiness that has never been troubled by intrusive thoughts and unattainable desires. Baudin spent six months there mapping the island and gathering a store of observations of, and anecdotes about, les naturels. His men sat down and ate with the Tasmanians; danced and sang with them; exchanged goods, although without full comprehension on either side as to what these exchanges meant; and fraternised with the women, most freely when their husbands were absent.
The Tasmanians were curious about French clothing and would often try to feel it, as if touching new and unfamiliar skin. They commonly attempted to feel between the Frenchmen’s legs, apparently in an attempt to discover what sex they were – it was inconceivable to them that the entire expedition should be made up only of males. When women enticed men off into the trees it was not always, as the French assumed, to have sex with them, just to ascertain that they really were not women; they were particularly interested in the beardless young. Sometimes the women would pull aside the kangaroo skins they wore at the waist, showing what lay beneath. Again the French assumed this to be an invitation but it isn’t clear from the accounts if indeed it was and, if it was, whether the offers were taken up.
But this seemingly happy and artless fraternisation was always fraught. Things could change in a moment. On one occasion a midshipman by the name of Maurouard wanted to try his strength with one of the most vigorous of these savages. The two men arm-wrestled several times, with the midshipman winning on each occasion. Then he proposed body wrestling, and won again. Afterwards, boarding a boat to go back to the ship, Maurouard was struck unexpectedly in the neck by a spear thrown from the shore. The wound was not serious but the incident perplexed the French: why had it happened? The consensus seemed to be that les naturels, bested in a trial of strength, wanted to show that they were nevertheless superior in terms of skill and cunning. The perspective of les naturels upon this event is wholly lacking and so must remain mysterious.
Baudin, who would die of tuberculosis before his voyage was over, wrote a letter to Governor King in Sydney from the island in Bass Strait that would later bear King’s name. It is dated 23 December 1802 and follows an extended stay the French had made at Port Jackson, where they had observed the precipitate decline of les naturels of that place. Baudin writes that he has never been able to conceive that there was justice and equity on the part of the Europeans in seizing … a land seen for the first time when it is inhabited by men who have not always deserved the title of savages and cannibals … not only have you to reproach yourself with an injustice in seizing the land, but also in transporting on to a soil where the crimes and diseases of Europeans were unknown all that could retard the progress of civilization …
At the time of Baudin’s visit the English had not yet brought convicts to Tasmania; the first of them would arrive from Port Jackson the following year to found Hobart Town, in part to forestall any French attempt to colonise the island. This group of forty-nine included twenty-four incorrigible convicts, eight soldiers, an overseer, a military governor, a surgeon and a dozen free settlers, half of whom were women. The first massacre occurred the following year, in 1804, when a group of Tasmanians hunting kangaroo were fired upon by the military. Kangaroo hunting became a staple of the starveling colony; it was often pursued by runaway convicts who could get a bounty for each animal killed. Later there would be a bounty on native humans too. These early bushrangers sometimes killed Tasmanians for their women or to feed their dogs; they are said to have roasted men alive. One by the name of Carrots forced a woman he took to wear her dead husband’s head suspended around her neck.
The tribes at first retreated but as more English – both settlers and convicts – arrived, many became trapped between the European settlements and hostile peoples in the interior: eight separate nations of Tasmanian Aborigines have been identified. After 1820 active resistance increased, with the taking of stock and the burning of outlying farms. The settlers responded using stratagems such as animal traps concealed in flour barrels and by shooting from trees: as if the Tasmanians were a kind of wildlife. The editor of the Colonial Times in 1826 wrote that We make no pompous display of Philanthropy … the Government must remove the natives … if not they will be hunted down like wild beasts and destroyed. In 1828 a line of military posts was built to isolate the Tasmanians on the western side of the island; and in 1830 Governor Arthur mobilised 3000 soldiers, convicts and civilian volunteers in an attempt to drive the natives away from the settled districts on to a small southeastern peninsula: the so-called Black Line War. When the trap was closed they had, ludicrously, taken just one old man and one boy. It’s possible that, even so early, only a small fraction of the pre-contact population of about 6000 indigenous people remained; subsequently those that could be found, about 300, were enticed into captivity and sent to Flinders Island in Bass Strait. When German artist Ludwig Becker painted portraits of some of these Flinders Island exiles repatriated to Oyster Bay near Port Arthur in the early 1850s, only twenty-five of the 300 remained.
In 1827 Dumont d’Urville observed that the savages shun all communication with the English. The depleted tribes which still exist have fled to the most mountainous and inaccessible parts … it is probable that within forty or fifty years this whole race will have completely disappeared. His prediction was only partly accurate; despite the bizarre idea that Tasmanians were a different species of human who could not successfully mate with Europeans, or the equally strange notion that women who had borne half-castes could no longer conceive full-blooded children, Tasmanians were not in fact civilized off the face of the earth. A 1978 report found that there were then around 5000 descendants from a mixture of ethnic groups including Tasmanian and Australian Aborigines and European and Maori stock, all of whom are eligible to claim land rights … These survivors mostly came from autonomous groups who persisted in sealing and whaling communities on other, unadministered, Bass Strait islands.
As to who les naturels had been before Europeans happened upon them, nobody really knows. A nineteenth-century consensus tended to see them, in the words of Edward Tylor, as living representatives of the Stone Age, left behind in industrial development even by the ancient tribes of the Somme and the Ouse. They were Paleolithic man, no longer a creature of philosophic inference but … a known reality. Medieval European speculation imagined antipodeans as people with dog’s heads, or faces below their shoulders, or a single large foot instead of two legs to get about upon; but the Tasmanians were an example of a people stranger than Europeans could imagine: without laws, customs, general conceptions, chieftainship, aesthetic sense, moral code or even a proper language, their meanings had to be eked out by tone, manner and gesture. If this was the childhood of the race then it was so alien and so repugnant that to some extermination did not seem inappropriate.
THIS WAS THE CONCLUSION a number of Victorian anthropologists reached. At the same time the views of the religious who had come among the heathen to convert them were different: many of the missionaries thought that native peoples were not a previous state of humanity somehow preserved through time but an example of the degeneration of the species since the Creation. For these Christian believers, the Creation was an event that had been precisely dated in time: most preferred the chronology published in 1654 by Irish Protestant cleric James Ussher, which said the event occurred on the night before 23 October 4004 BCE. Because God was good, the argument went, so was his Creation in its entirety. Humanity’s afflictions began with the Fall and continued with the Flood. Après le déluge, the three exi
sting races of people on earth descended from Noah’s three sons: Shem, Japheth and Ham. Semitic or middle peoples descended from Shem; northerners or Europeans from Japheth; southerners or blacks from Ham.
Yorkshireman Samuel Marsden, appointed second chaplain of the British colony of New South Wales on 1 January 1793, held to these beliefs and was in no doubt that the Aboriginal people he came across at Parramatta in western Sydney were descendants of Ham. Marsden was given grants of land and purchased more; his farms were worked by assigned convict labour, as was customary at the time. By 1807 he owned some 3000 acres and was actively experimenting with, among other things, sheep-breeding. He had been since 1800 principal chaplain of the colony and remained a senior officiating minister of the Church of England in New South Wales until his death in 1838. He was also a member of the bench of magistrates at Parramatta with a reputation memorialised in a phrase still current in Australia: the flogging parson. In 1802 he ordered 300 lashes each to two convicts in an attempt to force a confession as to where certain pikes were hidden; they were alleged to be weapons that would be used by Irish rebels in an attack on Sydney Town. A witness reported that flesh and skin blew in my face as it shook off the cats but neither man divulged the whereabouts of the perhaps illusory pikes. Marsden hated the Irish and despised emancipated convicts; he served Mammon as, or more, assiduously than he did God and often found himself in conflict with officialdom and private individuals both; eventually, in 1822, he was dismissed from the magistracy.
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