Dancing with Strangers

by Inga Clendinnen

  To the amused British the whole incident appeared to be no more than Baneelon up to his old impulsive tricks, but if they were less than delighted with their chunks of decomposing whale, it was in Australian eyes a splendid gift: a rare windfall delicacy. My guess is that if these dots were joined just a little differently, they might picture Baneelon seizing the chance to initiate political negotiations with what he took to be a placatory British offering of gifts and the promise of more, followed by his own reciprocal gift signalling his readiness to meet with the governor to resolve their differences.

  What happened next is told slightly differently in the several British reports. Historians of the episode have usually chosen to select one of the accounts—often that of Watkin Tench, who wasn’t there but who reads beautifully—to rely on, or have cobbled together bits from several mildly conflicting versions to construct a sufficiently coherent narrative. The difficulty is that while the discrepancies may be trivial, they may not be. Discrepancies need not be sinister. Even honest witnesses can disagree as to actions and sequences, as any traffic cop will tell you. But only the reconstruction of actual action-sequences can bring us closer to Australian intentions, so I must tax the reader’s patience by occasionally going into slow-motion comparisons and evaluations to get those actions and sequences straight.

  By chance the governor, out on his expedition, met the boat bearing his odoriferous present along with the friendly message from Baneelon. Eager for a rendezvous, he went to South Head to pick up some small gifts and suitable weaponry—four muskets for the men, a pistol for himself—and then continued to Manly Cove attended by Collins and his aide Lieutenant Henry Waterhouse. They found the Australians still feasting and, at least in Phillip’s account, strangely reserved: ‘Several natives appeared on the beach as the governor’s boat rowed into the bay, but on its nearer approach they retired among the trees.’

  Their reticence seems not to have troubled Phillip because he had either been told, or had privately decided, that during the earlier encounter with the hunting party Baneelon ‘seemed afraid of being retaken, and would not permit any one to come so near as to lay their hands on him’, which is a notion difficult to reconcile with the intimacies of the hair-clipping and shirt-donning. Could Baneelon really have thought himself at risk? When he and Colbee had been kidnapped they were first lured into waist-deep water and close to the boat. Indeed we recall that William Bradley, in charge of the kidnapping enterprise, states that the two men were enticed to the very side of the boat and well away from their friends on the beach by the offer of fish. He reports that the rest of the Australians and some of his crew were doing some of that mysterious ‘dancing together’ when he gave the signal and ‘the two poor devils were seized and handed into the boat in an instant’, with the rest of the crew scrambling aboard amidst ‘great crying and screaming’ from the people left on the beach and the yells of the captives. It had been a classic ‘snatch’. This time the British party was deep onshore, and Baneelon surrounded by armed tribesmen. So why the cool reception?

  The normally modest Phillip was proud of his flair for handling ‘natives’. Unlike some of his compatriots, Phillip discounted their nakedness and their unnerving exuberance because he knew them to be fully human, and therefore fully capable of recognising and reciprocating trust. As we have seen, his first encounters with the Botany Bay people had set his style: he would lay down his arms and advance alone, hands outstretched. Time and again this strategy had been rewarded when potentially hostile men had accepted his gifts, and—the epiphany—clasped his outstretched hand. After the exchange of what he took to be a universal gesture of trust he was confident that good relations, education and the beginnings of integration could follow.

  On this occasion at Manly, Phillip was explicit in his belief that ‘the best means of obtaining the confidence of a native was by example, and by placing confidence in him’. He therefore stepped ashore unarmed and alone, save for a seaman carrying beef, bread and a few other gifts, and walked forward, calling his old companion repeatedly ‘by all his names’: a nice touch of anthropological sensibility. Some men appeared in the distance, one came closer and, taking up the gifts Phillip laid on the ground, declared himself to be Baneelon. Given his sadly changed appearance, Phillip seems not to have believed him. But when the man responded to the sight of a brandished bottle of wine by calling out ‘the King’, echoing the once-familiar toast, Phillip knew that this sorry figure was indeed the once-glossy Baneelon.

  Nonetheless, the strange little dance of advance and retreat continued until Phillip and the seaman, along with a knot of armed Australians, were drawn out of the sight of the anxious men in the boat. And only then, when ‘eight or ten of the natives had placed themselves in a position to prevent Baneelon being carried off’, Phillip says—only then did Baneelon extend his hand, and allow Phillip to grasp it. Baneelon’s gesture told Phillip that his solo performance had worked, and that reconciliation had been effected. He therefore went back to the beach and fetched his two officers ashore.

  Or so Phillip tells it. An agenda guided his telling, how consciously I do not know. Phillip was about to get himself speared, and he knew, writing after the event, that Secretary Collins and most of his officers judged that to have been his own damned fault, plunging in among a people untrustworthy by nature without taking the elementary precaution of deploying some muskets. Phillip therefore had an interest in dramatising Baneelon’s mistrust first of the British hunting party, and then of Phillip himself—a mistrust only laid to rest by Phillip’s intrepid peace-making.

  Young Lieutenant Waterhouse told a different story. He said that Phillip had first parleyed with some of the Australians ‘in the nativ [sic] language’ from the boat after one identified himself as Baneelon, and that Phillip then landed alone and unarmed. Instructing Collins and Waterhouse to keep the muskets at the ready, he walked up the beach with ‘his hands and his arms open’ in hot pursuit of that symbolic handshake, calling out to the Australians who were retreating towards the line of trees. Then he too disappeared into the scrub. Later Phillip returned to the boat saying he had made contact with a man claiming to be Baneelon who ‘repeatedly called him Father and Governor’, and recruited a seaman to carry some ‘wine, beef and bread’ ashore for him, along with a couple of jackets stripped from the backs of the boat crew—gifts presumably intended to remind the runaways of the pleasures of the world they had fled. Then Phillip was back at the boat again asking Collins to come ashore to verify the men’s identity, and then the seaman came back to tell Waterhouse that Baneelon was asking for him, and he was instructed to join his superiors on the beach. Waterhouse did so, and there was a further round of hand-shakings. These two officers, along with the seaman-messenger, were to be present throughout all that followed, while both muskets and crew remained in the boat, which was kept resting on its oars.

  I take you through this little go-round to demonstrate how innocent sources can differ on apparently innocuous details, which might prove significant after all. For this sequence I choose to follow Waterhouse, not Phillip. Waterhouse was there, he had no investment in what happened, as a junior officer he was used to watching closely and getting orders straight, and (unlike Collins) he was not already antagonistic to Phillip’s conciliatory enterprise. Waterhouse’s description of Phillip’s enthusiastic trottings to and fro is plausible in the light of Phillip’s conviction that he had a particular talent for this kind of thing, which he was eager to display, especially under Collins’ sardonic eye. We can therefore conclude that, in contrast to his ready intimacy with the hunting party, Baneelon kept at a deliberate distance when the governor first landed, and had to be pursued and wooed into communication.

  Contact once made—hands once shaken—Baneelon’s usual high spirits seemed to assert themselves. Phillip reports that ‘he was very chearful, and repeatedly shook hands with them, asking for hatchets and cloaths, which were promised to be brought to him in two days’. (Note t
hat for Phillip the symbolic handshakes were much more significant than the material ‘hatchets and cloaths’.)

  Tench offers a careful hearsay report of what Baneelon did next: a startling performance-riff. Referring back to his time in captivity in happy mime, Baneelon drank wine with a flourish and gleefully recalled the names and the idiosyncrasies of every one of the people he had known in Sydney, ‘all of which’, Tench says, ‘he again went through with his wonted exactness and drollery’, even to re-enacting on the cheek of the startled Waterhouse the kiss he once snatched from a Sydney woman. On only one issue he was less forthcoming: ‘On his wounds being noticed, he coldly said he had received them at Botany Bay, but went no further into their history.’ And again he insistently demanded hatchets, with the demand again being met with promises and lesser gifts.

  What is going on here? The trick is to cultivate deliberate double vision: to retrieve from British descriptions clues as to autonomous Australian action, not the simple reaction the British ‘naturally’ assumed. I begin by wondering at that prolonged performance. Was it naive exuberance, as the British took it to be? Or was it staged to demonstrate Baneelon’s intimacy with the incomers before an attentive and possibly sceptical audience? My guess is that at this point Baneelon was pursuing a rapidly evolving political project of his own: to establish himself as the crucial hinge-man between the white men and the local tribes, and indeed as the only man capable of eliciting proper compensation for past wrongs from these ignorant intruders (remember those demands for hatchets). Baneelon’s time in captivity, which had cost him both his warrior prestige and his woman, could thus be parlayed into advantage in the ongoing struggle for political precedence, especially in the disordered circumstances following the smallpox epidemic. His initial coyness with the governor then appears not as shyness, a quality not much associated with Baneelon, but the deliberate aloofness of a man with a formal role to perform, and the successful imposition of an Australian protocol, invisible to British eyes, which required a wrongdoer to seek absolution by humbly pursuing the aloof wronged party.

  Waterhouse reports that at some stage the governor, presumably as a mark of his confidence, had asked for an unusual spear Baneelon had (in his hand? beside him?) but Baneelon ‘would not or could not understand him’ and, taking the spear, laid it down on the grass some distance away beside a warrior unknown to Phillip. He then offered the governor a throwing stick, which he accepted. As Waterhouse remembered it, it was only after Baneelon had laid the spear on the grass that the British noticed that ‘the natives now seemed to be closing around us’ (‘nineteen armed men and more in great numbers that we could not see’), and ‘the Governor said he thought we had better retreat as they formed a crescent with us at the centre’. Collins makes no mention of the business with the spear, merely sourly remarking that ‘twenty or thirty [natives were] drawing themselves into a circle around the governor and his small unarmed party (for that was literally and most inexcusably their situation)’, before the governor, belatedly awake to the danger, proposed ‘retiring to the boat by degrees’. Accordingly the little party withdrew closer to the beach.

  It was only as the governor was making his final farewells and promises of hatchets and clothing for Baneelon and Colbee—promises which Waterhouse says Baneelon ‘oft repeated…that it should not be forgot’—that ‘Baneelon pointed out and named several natives that were near, one in particular to whom the Governor presented his hand and advanced, at which he seemed frightened, seis’d the spear Baneelon had laid on the ground’—and threw it ‘with great violence’. At least in retrospect David Collins refused to be much ruffled; he thought the ‘savage’ had simply panicked in the face of Phillip’s foolish advance, and (slightly discordant, this) that the whole absurd affair would not have happened had ‘the precaution of taking even a single musket on shore been attended to’.

  Now to play my ace in this complicated game of retrieved intentions: the account of the spearing from Governor Phillip himself, which describes the action on the beach at Manly Cove from his own perspective in (as we have seen) faintly defensive detail. You will remember that his account omits the elaborate to-ing and fro-ing described by Waterhouse, and dramatises his solitary landing and his friendly pursuit of Baneelon and the rest of the Australians. He also emphasises how wary Baneelon was initially, and then how affable, with the implication that Phillip’s own relentless good will had done the trick.

  Phillip recorded the sequence of events leading up to his spearing in unwittingly revealing detail. He remembered that, after the genial meeting with Baneelon and Colbee, the British party had begun to retire to the beach when they were joined by a ‘stout, corpulent’ native who had been standing at a little distance, but who now approached them, obviously in a high state of fear, and showed them a spear wound in his back. Baneelon then displayed the two spear wounds he had received at Botany Bay, and pointed out a strange warrior standing twenty or thirty yards away. (Here we must switch to double-vision mode: what is the story being acted out here?) At some earlier point (‘in the course of this interview’) Baneelon had picked up a spear from the grass: a ‘very curious’ spear, being barbed and pointed with hard wood, not shell or stone. It excited Phillip’s collecting zeal and he asked for it, but Baneelon refused, instead taking the spear to where the stranger was standing, and throwing it down beside him. According to Phillip, Baneelon then gave the governor a common short spear taken from a nearby warrior, together with a club. Meanwhile other warriors had deployed themselves around the British party, Phillip thought for Baneelon’s security against being grabbed—but perhaps as formal witnesses to what was to follow.

  As was his affable custom Phillip began to advance on the stranger, empty hands spread. As he advanced, the man picked up a spear from the grass—the spear Baneelon had earlier shown the governor—and fixed it into his throwing stick. Phillip, believing there was ‘no reason to suppose he would throw it without the least provocation, and when he was so near those with whom our party was on such friendly terms’, continued to advance despite the warrior’s increasing agitation, shouting the words he hoped meant ‘bad, bad’. And the warrior steadied himself, drew back his arm—and threw.

  The spear took Phillip above the right collarbone, penetrated his body and, with the point glancing downwards, emerged lower down his back close to the backbone. Some of the Australians, including Baneelon, Colbee and the spearman, decamped. Others flung their spears. One spear grazed Waterhouse’s hand as he struggled to break the long spear shaft which jammed agonisingly into the sand as Phillip tried to run. Waterhouse’s fright helped him break it, they ran, and another spear landed at Collins’ feet as he neared the boat. Phillip managed to draw his pistol and fired (into the air), the men got to the boat and scrambled aboard, and with Phillip supported by the shocked Waterhouse the boat pulled away fast on the two-hour trip to Sydney Cove. During the whole incident only one British musket could be persuaded to fire.

  That is the story as constructed from the direct accounts of British participants. The co-ordinating assumption of all the authors, with the tentative exceptions of Tench and Phillip who are both prepared to acknowledge puzzlement, is twofold: ‘natives’ are irrational, and their actions are purely reactions to British actions. The implication is that the British have conscious agendas, and ‘natives’ do not. The ‘panic/accident’ hypothesis has been accepted by most historians, but its acceptance renders a great deal of the action unintelligible, unless, of course, we are content to invoke the ‘irrational savage’ stereotype. If we want to uncover the Australian strategic thinking buried in the British accounts we need first to identify the anomalies. Why had Baneelon been so genial with the hunting party, and then so aloof with Phillip, the man he had said he most wanted to see? Why the prolonged acting-out of the intimacies he had enjoyed with the Sydney whites? Why the careful public listing of the gifts he was to receive on the governor’s return, and the frequent emphatic reiteration of that list? W
as this a childish obsession with presents, as the British read it, or was Baneelon announcing to his attentive listeners a formal contract of recompense? When the governor had been summoned, he arrived much more quickly than expected. It was only as Phillip was readying himself to leave that Baneelon drew his attention to the warrior with the unusual spear. That protracted performance of intimacy would also have allowed time for a selected warrior among the many gathered for the whale-feast to prepare himself for ritual action. And why, on this occasion and this occasion only, did the Australian warriors, excepting only Baneelon and Colbee, have their spears in hand?

  If we consider only the actions and edit out the authoritative British voice-overs interpreting those actions, the ‘silent film’ strategy, Baneelon begins to look very like a master of ceremonies, not an impulsive buffoon. My conclusion is that we are looking at a formal summons, arranged by Baneelon, to a possible contest between champions but much more probably a ritual spearing, swiftly organised over a couple of hours and with representatives from the local tribes already fortuitously gathered, where Phillip would face a single spear-throw in penance for his and his people’s many offences. Having inquired into this and other events, I am coming to think that Australian politics was not tradition-bound, as sentimentalists choose to think, but flexible and opportunistic, as is often the case in societies where warrior and hunting prowess stands high.