Dancing with Strangers

by Inga Clendinnen

  I have chosen to call this man by the unfamiliar version ‘Baneelon’ (the spelling Watkin Tench bestowed on him) to help us keep in mind what was so casually swept away, and so that we might escape the freight of banalities time has placed on the word ‘Bennelong’.

  We have seen the temptation of confusing individual and cultural qualities in the matter of Arabanoo’s prodigious appetite. Generalising from individuals to groups has similar perils. Baneelon was a very different character from the reflective and melancholy Arabanoo. Young (he was guessed to be about twenty-six), tough and touchy, he would have been flamboyant in any society. Stanner, always attracted to dignified characters, dismissed him as ‘a mercurial upstart’, which is a common judgment. I think most commentators have seriously underestimated him, and Colbee too.

  I am puzzled by the relationship between these two men, and also by some oddities about the mode of their capture. Here is William Bradley’s account of what happened, giving us not only a close account of the events, but some insight into Bradley himself.

  Wednesday 25th [November 1789] Governor Phillip judging it necessary that a Native should be taken by force, (no endeavour to persuade them to come among us having succeeded) I was ordered on this service, having the Master, two petty officers & a Boat’s crew with me in one of the Governor’s boats: as we went down the harbour we got some fish from the boats that lay off the [?] arm fishing, I proceeded up that arm in which we saw a great number of Natives on both sides & several landed on the beach at the [sth?] Cove hauling their Canoes up after them; As we got near the upper part of the [?] cove, we held two large fish up to them & had the good luck to draw two of them away from a very large party by this bait, these people came round the rocks where they left their spears & met us on the beach near the boat and at a distance from their companions sufficient to promise success without losing any lives, they eagerly took the fish, four of the crew were kept in the boat which was…backed close to the beach where the natives and the rest of our people were, they were dancing together when the signal was given by me, and the two poor devils were seized & handed into the boat in an instant. The Natives who were very numerous all round us, on seeing us seize those two, immediately advanced with their spears and clubs, but we were too quick for them, being out of reach before they got to that point of the beach where the boat lay, they were entering on the beach just as everybody was in the boat and as she did not take the ground we pulled immediately out without having occasion to fire a musket. The noise of the men, crying & screaming of the women and the children together with the situation of the two miserable wretches in our possession was really a most distressing scene: they were much terrified, one of them particularly so, the other frequently called out to those on shore apparently very much enraged with them.

  …It gave me great satisfaction to find by the children [Boorong and Nanbaree] that neither of them had Wife or Family, who would feel their loss, or to be distressed by their being taken away.

  It was by far the most unpleasant service I ever was ordered to execute.

  Bradley’s generous distress is evident. But there are peculiarities about the events he describes so carefully. Arabanoo had been lured out to a British boat and seized, with his people horrified onlookers. What possessed Colbee and Baneelon to wade out to a British boat baited with grins and a couple of dangled fish? I do not suggest that they wanted to be captured, but were they perhaps playing a game of dare with the British, for the delectation of their fellows on the beach? Was this an act of competitive daring that went wrong? These two were always rivals. We will be looking at the capture in more detail in the next chapter, but we notice that Colbee made his escape with insulting ease, despite his fettered leg, within the week while Baneelon stayed put. For the last few weeks his captivity, with his own fetter removed, seems close to voluntary. He escaped with dispatch at a moment of his own choosing. Certainly Phillip did not expect him to run, and ordered his steward, Baneelon’s keeper, flogged for neglect of duty.

  At the least we have to accept that Baneelon adjusted to his captive state remarkably well. Quickly throwing off the wariness Watkin Tench thought natural for a man in his situation, he feasted without caution on unfamiliar foods and drank the strongest liquors ‘with eager marks of delight and enjoyment’. For all of his stay with the British he remained exuberantly experimental, ready to tackle whatever these peculiar strangers had to offer.

  Baneelon was also determined to communicate even without benefit of a shared language. There was none of Arabanoo’s reserve: Tench reports that Baneelon ‘sang, danced and capered, told us all the customs of his country and all the details of his family economy’. ‘Very early’ he bestowed on Governor Phillip his own tribal name and adopted his, and took to calling him ‘father’. And whenever he thought of his enemies from the tribe of the Cameragal on the north shore of the harbour ‘he never failed…to solicit the governor to accompany him, with a body of soldiers, in order that he might exterminate this hated name’.

  He was also notably eager to impress. A man of fine physique, he brimmed with stories of his prowess in battle and of his sexual exploits, which to his listeners often sounded like another form of war. (Later we will hear the story behind a crescent scar on his hand.) At a later time his volatility would disquiet the British as they came to see him as alarmingly unpredictable, but it seems to have been tolerated, even relied on, by his fellows, and was rebuked by violence only when he went too far. I am reminded of the tolerance extended to restless, aggressive young males among the Plains Indians—for as long as these qualities served the group. Then, if the difficult individual accumulated too many transgressions, he would be abruptly exiled from the tribe.

  Collins says Baneelon was a Wanghal. We do not know how his tribe fared during the smallpox epidemic. All we know is that both he and Colbee, who was a Cadigal, survived it and wore its scars on their skins. We can be sure that its ravages must have necessitated a radical redrawing of old political arrangements. Those relations had always been tense. As Tim Flannery crisply puts it, ‘the relations between the groups seem to have alternated between feasting and fighting’. After the disruptions of the smallpox they must have been in disarray.

  My guess is that Baneelon had decided on trying for an alliance with the strangers shortly after his capture. (He might have toyed with the idea even earlier.) Under this hypothesis most of his actions and reactions can be explained, not least that tireless boasting of his sexual and fighting prowess: if he aspired to prominence among his people in this time of dizzying change, where traditional wisdom seemed of little avail, it was the virtues of young manhood he would need to dramatise. In action he was both a fast learner and a highly conscious performer. During his captivity his swift adoption of British manners, especially his extravagant courtesies to the females in the colony, prove his quick eye for style. Later, when he sailed back to England with Phillip, one of the few things we know of his three lonely years there is that he was especially struck by the performance of one lordly old gentleman, who glanced up as Baneelon and his entourage swept into a room—and then turned aside in an exquisitely calculated display of indifference to take a pinch of snuff and call for the bottle. Baneelon appreciated social theatricality in all its forms.

  Baneelon’s use of clothing was to become an important indicator of his state of mind. Arabanoo had learnt the perils of clothing early. After his capture, after his bath, after he had been put into a shirt, he backed close to a fire for the reassurance of familiar warmth on his skin. His shirt-tail caught alight. He suffered terrifying seconds as the flames licked his back before they could be quenched. He was thereafter wary of clothing, but to please his hosts he learnt to tolerate it. Baneelon, with his sense of cultural styles, recognised the British use of different cloths and colours to mark status, and happily accepted the distinction lent his person by formal garments. He was especially proud of the bright red jacket with silver epaulettes he wore on dress occasions. John
Hunter suggests Phillip’s very different interest when he reports that while Phillip put Baneelon into genteel nankeen on Sundays, his everyday dress, however hot the weather, was trousers and jacket in thick red kersey, ‘so he may be so sensible of the cold as not to be able to go without cloaths’. Phillip’s very basic strategy was to develop a physical dependence on warmth—and then to inculcate psychological notions of modesty in a man who felt no ‘natural’ shame. Baneelon’s understanding of the language of dress was altogether more sophisticated.

  Then in May 1790, after five months’ captivity, Baneelon made off. Writing to Banks a couple of months after the escape, Phillip remarked that ‘our native has left us…and that too is unlucky for we have all the ceremony to go over again with another’. He concluded that ‘that Man’s leaving us proves that nothing will make these people amends for the loss of their liberty’. Passion for freedom might have been fed by a more carnal motive. Baneelon’s captivity had been celibate. He probably wanted a woman, and there were none available to him in the settlement. Boorong told Phillip ‘he had gone after a Woman he had often mentioned’. She may have been the good-looking woman Bradley recalled exchanging words with Baneelon from a beach when they had been out on one of their boat expeditions together. Baneelon had tried to coax her into the boat with him; she had refused. Her name was Barangaroo.

  Other appetites were also going unsatisfied. Food supplies even for this pampered prisoner, and even though supplemented by a special allowance of fish and corn, had dropped to famine levels. (For the next months, starvation would be a serious prospect for the colony.) Baneelon was not philosophical about being put on short rations. He presumably could not understand the perversity of doling out miserable allowances and leaving beasts uneaten while warriors, especially guests, were left to starve. Tench records that prior to his escape the want of food had been making Baneelon ‘furious and melancholy’. Tench sums up: ‘We knew not how to keep him and yet were unwilling to part with him.’

  Then Baneelon resolved the dilemma by slipping away to rejoin his own people.

  SEPTEMBER 1790 SPEARING THE GOVERNOR

  The first serious steps towards reconciliation were taken, like earlier friendly meetings, on the relatively neutral setting of a beach, with exit lines for both parties open to sea and to land. They began with an apparent catastrophe: the spearing of Governor Phillip at Manly Cove on 7 September 1790.

  The spearing has become an iconic moment in Australian history. The slim wooden spearhead which pierced the governor’s flesh might still exist somewhere, and haunts the dreams of museum-keepers who long to display this object which magically unites our first British governor with the continent’s original inhabitants. Not many years later the spearhead would speak to its interrogators in a double tongue: of the chronic flightiness of ‘savages’, but also of their ‘natural’ ability to recognise the moral authority of personal valour and of Christian blood spilt in voluntary sacrifice. Icons speak in many tongues, which is what makes them icons.

  *

  At the time, the mystery embodied in the bloodied spear point was that almost immediately after the spearing the Australians around Sydney Cove decided to ‘come in’ to the settlement to make their peace with the interlopers. David Collins, normally a sensibly sceptical fellow, cheerfully inscribed the astonishing non sequitur in his journal-of-record: ‘This accident gave cause to the opening of communication between the natives of this country and the settlement, which, although attended by such an unpromising beginning, it was hoped would be followed by good consequences.’ What Collins is offering us is a secular miracle, Enlightenment style: first the ‘accidental’ spearing, then the submission, then the beginning of the civilising process.

  And there, effectively, the matter has been allowed to rest: we contemplate the spearhead, we wonder at the event, we marvel at the outcome. However psychologically incoherent, the story at the mythic level is a curiously satisfying one—and who, after all, looks for sense in icons or savages?

  I prefer more coherent explanations, especially when they concern the actions of peoples who are being dismissed as savages. What was really going on? In this as in earlier encounters our British informants were like infants squinting through a keyhole: they could see only some of the action, and what they heard was largely unintelligible babble. They could not know what conversations and other, subtler communications were taking place before their eyes, much less offstage; they did not know where, whom and what to watch. The best we can hope to find in the British eye-witness reports, made before the events were subjected to the moulding pressures of myth-making, are join-the-dots narratives plotted in terms of British expectations of both themselves and the ‘natives’: ‘We happened to notice the following events, which we think are probably connected in this way.’ If we re-examine the dots in the several accounts of this famously enigmatic spearing, looking to see if they can be joined differently, we might establish a more satisfying account of Australian actions and reactions.

  The first part of the story is uncontentious. Since Baneelon’s escape four months before there had been no contact with the Australians beyond the occasional spearing of unarmed convict stragglers in the bush, and increasingly angry brushes over fishing catches. There is fair agreement between the British reports as to what happened next. A great party of Australians, numbering perhaps two hundred people, and therefore necessarily including people from several tribes (this is after the decimation of the smallpox epidemic) had gathered at Manly beach to feast on the putrefying flesh of a whale carcass washed ashore there. Baneelon and Colbee were among them. A boatload of British on a hunting expedition to Broken Bay, including John White and Nanbaree, saw the feasters and began to pull into the cove. Nanbaree had picked up some English during his eighteen months in the colony, how much we don’t know. As the boat approached the beach, a number of Australians picked up their spears, but Nanbaree reassured them in their own tongue. Then John White called out Baneelon’s name, and first Baneelon and then Colbee stepped forward from the ruck and genially welcomed their old friend. The oarsmen pulled the boat ashore, and White, Nanbaree and others of the British party joined the people on the beach, the men clustering around them while the women and children kept their usual cautious distance.

  A conversation is about to start, so it is well to consider the likely accuracy of what we are about to hear. Any investigation into early cultural encounters is bedevilled by uncertainties as to the adequacy of communication. Initially each side can only interpret the actions and intentions of the other in accordance with their own dictionaries of gesture expressed in a kind of dumb-show (remember Morton’s vocabulary of signs). Communication by spoken words is negligible, and typically even more defective than the hopeful speakers assume. It is difficult to keep in mind that strangers do not grasp the meaning of your own familiar words, especially when loudly, slowly spoken. Despite the fluent conversations unblushingly recorded in the British accounts, we have to accept that even after several years of association most communications between the races living cheek-by-jowl around Sydney were managed by sign language eked out with a kind of pidgin English. All the British were impressed by the Australian talent for word-mimicry, a talent probably developed from their diplomatic need to fake polite fluency in the tongues of neighbouring language groups, but even when they got the sounds right, we cannot know how much of the sense was comprehended. As the indispensable David Collins was to put it in September 1796, a full six years after the events on the beach:

  By slow degrees we began mutually to be pleased with, and to understand each other. Language, indeed, is out of the question; for at the time of writing this, nothing but a barbarous mixture of English with the Port Jackson dialect is spoken by either party, and it must be added, that even in this the natives have the advantage, comprehending, with much greater aptness than we can pretend to, everything they hear us say.

  To return to Manly Cove, with Nanbaree translating: reminded o
f the governor, Baneelon spoke of Phillip affectionately. He was especially delighted to hear that Phillip was nearby on an expedition to South Head. Baneelon had clearly fallen on hard times, being ‘greatly emaciated’ and sporting a couple of new scars, one on the fleshy part of the arm and one above the left eye. He also seemed to have lost his favourite woman Barangaroo to Colbee, which might explain his emaciation, women supplying men with most of their fish diet. But Baneelon was quickly his old animated self, asking very earnestly for hatchets, and readily accepting shirts, knives and a few handkerchiefs. The only tense moment came when a convict gamekeeper or, more correctly, game-shooter called McEntire tried to help him don a shirt (during his months of freedom he seemed to have lost the knack), and Baneelon recoiled with extraordinary revulsion. But his loathing seemed to relate only to that individual; when Baneelon begged the use of a razor to shave his beard in the British way, and was offered scissors instead, he set to clipping his hair with every sign of happiness. Furthermore, when he was told that the governor was anxious to see him, Baneelon said he would wait for him for two days before seeking Phillip out, and when the British finally departed he insisted on giving them several chunks of the decomposing whale, with the biggest lump designated his personal gift to the governor.