We know that as the governor advanced the warrior with the spear became increasingly agitated. Could this really have been from fear of being seized, with three, possibly four unarmed British and close to twenty armed warriors around, and with the British boat so far away? Either of my scenarios—a contest of champions or a punitive spearing—would explain his agitation, because both those exercises pivoted not only on a warrior’s ability to throw a spear hard and accurately, but on the recipient’s ability to evade or deflect it. It is therefore unsurprising that the warrior should have been seriously disconcerted by the white man’s steady advance. Why was he coming so close? Why didn’t he stand at the proper distance and prepare to use his club to parry? When the governor continued to advance ever deeper into his zone of critical distance, the warrior threw. He watched the spear strike (if my hypothesis is correct, probably with some incredulity: why hadn’t the white man tried to deflect it?) and withdrew, his duty done and the matter settled. And the three Britishers began their run for the boat.
The agitated Waterhouse believed they were under fatal threat during that frantic, stumbling run, with no cover from the muskets until the last few steps, and then ludicrously inadequate. I disagree, largely because not one spear after the first found its mark. To my mind that is clear evidence the spears were not thrown with intent to injure. Within a very few days of their landfall at Botany Bay the British had realised that Australian spears were alarmingly accurate over long distances. Later, showing off at South Head, Baneelon was to fling a spear a mighty ninety metres into a head wind, but lesser warriors routinely managed sixty or seventy metres with killing accuracy and force. Given that accuracy, given that force, why were none of the retreating British killed, or even wounded? It is true Waterhouse lost some skin from his hand, but that was when he was wrestling with the spear shaft, which could spoil the precision of anyone’s aim. Another spear landed, close but harmlessly, at Collins’ feet. One spear per Englishman. My view is that with the final little flurry of spears the Australians were simply celebrating their triumph in this ritual punishment, and perhaps also reminding the British of the killing power at their disposal, just as the British had fired their guns at innocent trees and propped shields to demonstrate theirs.
Now for my claim regarding the warrior’s expectation that Phillip might well evade the spear. During that first earnest evaluation of native weaponry, John Hunter had noticed that, while warriors propelled spears accurately and with ‘astonishing velocity’, ‘a man upon his guard may with much ease, either parry, or avoid them’—provided, we want to add, he had practised such skills from boyhood, as Australian children did. Hunter also examined some of the local bark shields and was impressed by their capacity to ‘turn’ a spear.
We also know from First Fleet observers, confirmed by anthropologists like W. E. H. Stanner a hundred and fifty years later, that in pitched battles between native groups injuries were always fewer than watching whites thought possible, because of the Australians’ preternatural skill in dodging. We should further note that even at such short range (given Phillip’s magnificently steadfast advance it cannot have been much more than fifteen metres), and remembering native spearmen’s notorious accuracy, the spear did not skewer Phillip through the middle but struck him high on the right shoulder: that is, on the outer edge of the body. It was not a mortal wound, but he would carry the scar to his grave. My own guess is that the wound was in the event more dangerous than intended. That crazy remorseless advance would unnerve anyone.
It is easy to become over-ingenious in interpreting the intentions lurking in other minds, but I also want to consider the nature of the spear which passed through Governor Phillip’s body. The spear ended in a sleek barbed wooden head which slipped easily through flesh, and once the barbed head had been broken off it could be withdrawn with equal ease, leaving a clean wound which would heal well. (White commented on the Australians’ remarkable capacity to heal.) Any warrior shown the weapon would have realised that. Three months later when the governor’s ‘shooter’ John McEntire—the man from whom Baneelon had recoiled—was ambushed and speared, a very different weapon was used. Was McEntire’s spear designed as an instrument of execution, while the governor’s spear was crafted for occasions when clean wounds and spillage of blood, not death, were required? Given the sophisticated differentiation of function in Australian equipment, I believe that is likely. (This triggers a memory of those four spears left in a murdered convict in the first year of contact. Given the ease of tribal and individual identification to Australian eyes, had the spears been left as a statement of responsibility and a coded explanation for the killing?)
As for that preliminary display of wounds: Phillip describes Baneelon displaying his two scars, saying he had received them at Botany Bay, and then pointing to the unnamed warrior. Had the warrior inflicted Baneelon’s wounds? When Phillip inquired into the warrior’s identity he was offered various tribal affiliations, Nanbaree saying he was from Broken Bay, while Baneelon said he was a Kayyeemy from around Manly. Later he was firmly identified as Willemerin, a curer-warrior from Botany Bay. The Botany Bay people had cause for grievance, from the early conduct of La Pérouse to depredations of convicts eager for loot and, I suspect, an escape from boredom. I conclude that the wounds Baneelon displayed so deliberately were indeed the result of ritual spearings, probably inflicted by this particular man; that what Baneelon was ‘saying’ to the governor in urgent mime was: ‘Look, this is serious business, but while you’ll be left with a formidable scar it won’t kill you.’
The British accounts agree on the disparity of the weapons distributed to the combatants: the warrior with his long spear, the governor either with a short light spear and a club or a throwing stick. It is that disparity which persuades me that what happened on the beach was no contest of champions. On one side it was an impeccable, disastrous performance of British phlegm, and on the other a punitive ritual to settle grievances accumulated against the British, possibly initiated by a tribe other than Baneelon’s, who believed themselves wronged or insulted or slighted by the whites, and who had identified Phillip as the leading warrior because of the deference accorded him, and also because of that famously absent right front tooth.
The matter was to be settled by a single spear-throw which might or might not draw blood, although it is likely that a blood flow would terminate the action more satisfactorily. Baneelon’s organisation of the affair might indicate his and his people’s acceptance of their role as Phillip’s allies, and therefore as the appropriate mediator, or his tribe’s view that they deserved reparation too. Later we will see Baneelon negotiating the return of stolen fishing gear, settling the number of hatchets and other goods required for compensation, and opening the way for his people to visit their new allies to enjoy their rightful access to coveted food supplies and other resources.
I think Baneelon believed he had fully instructed Phillip as to what was in store for him, first by holding aloof from the victim-to-be, as befits a man stage-managing so serious an event; then by showing Phillip those speaking scars; then by drawing his attention to the ceremonial spear; then setting it down beside his warrior nemesis. The attention Phillip gave the spear, his acquiescence in its being placed beside the strange warrior, and his own acceptance of a lesser weapon could well have been read as his acknowledgment and acceptance of what was to come. As any player of charades knows, the meaning of the dumb-show always seems crystal clear to the ‘speaker’, especially when the audience is as earnestly attentive as Phillip surely would have been. In the event things went slightly wrong, as they often do on ritual occasions, but the governor was successfully wounded, blood had flowed, and the way was opened for Baneelon’s people’s peaceable entry into their new allies’ settlement.
How then ought we assess Phillip’s performance? Stanner, commenting on Phillip’s handling of another cross-cultural incident, writes that he displayed ‘the mixture of calm, courage and wrongheadedness tha
t was to characterise most of his dealings with [Australians]’, but that is the wisdom of hindsight. Phillip’s personal courage and his generous, even reckless, commitment to conciliation remain impressive. To his enduring credit, he also grasped in broad what had gone wrong at Manly Cove—that there had been a disastrous confusion of understandings—and refused to permit any punitive action. Instead he engaged in an admirably cool rethinking. What had happened?
After reflection he concluded that there had been no calculated hostility: that the spearman had acted merely from ‘a momentary impulse of fear’ when he was in terror of being seized. Only one thing puzzled him. Why had Baneelon done nothing? He ‘never attempted to interfere when the man took the spear up, or said a single word to prevent him from throwing it’. Why? Finally Phillip decided that it had simply been a muddle: that ‘[Baneelon] possibly did not think the spear would be thrown’. After all, the spearing had been ‘but the business of [a] moment’. Which is exactly what it was not, but rather a carefully planned ceremonial action to restore British–Australian relations to a viable equilibrium.
In his 1796 ‘Appendix’ to his Account, Collins commented on another oddity regarding Australians: the ‘friendship and alliance…known to subsist between several who were opposed to each other, who fought with all the ardour of the bitterest enemies, and who, though wounded, pronounced the party by whom they had been hurt to be good and brave, and their friends’.
In my view, the complex crosscutting of loyalties, combined with an ambitious leap for prominence to recover the status lost during his period of captivity, adequately explains Baneelon’s apparent doubleness at Manly Cove, where he acted first as master of ceremonies and even as Phillip’s second—and then very properly dissociated himself from any responsibility for the outcome. This was not Baneelon’s quarrel. His concern was with the return of stolen goods and adequate material payment for the injuries his tribe had suffered. He later commiserated with Phillip, even claiming to have severely beaten the offending warrior, just as he had probably congratulated the surprised victor, whom he was later to acknowledge to Phillip as a ‘friend’. The ‘ritual spearing’ hypothesis also explains the affable yet oddly detached tone of inquiries as to the governor’s health made by a couple of Australians from the Rose Hill area who took the opportunity to say—now the whites had seen how very efficient Australian spears were, now that relations had been restored to a civilised balance by the bloodletting on the beach—how little they liked white men settling in their territory. Perhaps they hoped for a British withdrawal: after all, for them the score card read ‘Australians 1, British nil’.
The British took the hint, and reinforced the Rose Hill guard.
We are fortunate to have another kind of text altogether which allows us to trace the usually invisible process of the transformation of story into social myth: two paintings by the as-yet-unidentified ‘Port Jackson Painter’. Whoever he was, he was not present at Manly Cove.
The first painting is not much more than a coloured snapshot of the action as described, with Phillip well up the beach, Waterhouse wrestling with the shaft, Collins approaching the boat, a lone marine on the beach firing a musket, and the Australians in what looks like confused retreat. The second image (plate 6) compresses time in cartoon style, which suggests iconic rather than representational intentions: for example, with the governor already speared and one of his men in the act of firing his musket in a great horizontal effusion of smoke, three male natives are still sitting around their barbecue fires with their spears on the ground beside them, two armed warriors are running away, while others peek from behind trees (in the painting the trees cluster thickly, while Phillip tells us they grew twelve to fifteen metres apart). Only one warrior, one of the peekers, has his spear in anything like a throwing position. Other dark, chubby figures are tiptoeing into the trees like guilty children. Meanwhile Phillip is less than halfway down the beach, quite unattended, with the spear shaft still unbroken, Collins is gesturing from close by the boat, and Waterhouse, who from the written texts stayed close by Phillip’s side throughout, is well down the beach running towards Collins. What the painting looks like is an astute visual compromise between Phillip’s own interpretation of ‘What Happened at Manly Cove’—that there had been no settled malice and no plan; that the Australians were as shocked by the event as the British; that the whole unhappy business was an accident—and the painter’s own preferred emphasis, which falls on the heroic figure of the governor isolated on the beach.
We have the received verbal version of the spearing as evolved in the salons of Sydney Cove preserved in the long letter Elizabeth Macarthur wrote to a woman friend in March 1791, where the ‘irrational savage’ myth is cosily evoked.
The Macarthurs, arrived on the Scarborough late in June 1790, had been in Sydney for only a couple of months when the governor was wounded, but Elizabeth’s account demonstrates that by early 1791 Collins had decisively won the sotto voce contest regarding the events at Manly Cove. From the beginning the governor had ‘left no means untried to effect an intimacy’, she reports, but to no effect, because savages are childishly unpredictable: ‘They accept his presents as do Children play things; just to amuse them for a moment and then throw them away, disregarded.’ They are at once flighty and deceitful: Baneelon and Colbee had seemed to accept their captivity happily enough when Colbee ‘in a very Artful manner’ made his escape, and later Baneelon ‘took himself off without any known reason’ after having ‘appeared highly pleased with our people, and Manners’.
Encountered by chance at Manly Cove, both men had been affable and had happily exchanged gifts with their old friends, although in Elizabeth’s account stinking whale meat transforms into inoffensive whale bone. The governor had therefore landed ‘by himself, unarm’d in order to show no violence was intended’. So far so good. Then, unlike all the accounts following close on the events, Elizabeth has Baneelon immediately advancing, shaking hands with the governor, and asking for presents, with other friendly Australians clustering around them as they ‘continued to converse with much seeming friendliness’. As the governor, noticing they had walked rather far from the boat, began his leave-taking, Baneelon indicated ‘an Old looking man’ who was advancing. The governor approached the ‘Old’ man, and was speared. ‘The reason why the mischeif [sic] was done,’ Elizabeth says airily, ‘could not be learnt.’ Then, equally irrationally, the locals came swarming into the settlement, ‘with many taking up their abode among us’.
Thus ends an intellectually incoherent but emotionally satisfying story which marvellously incorporates the attributes of ‘the savage’ European colonisers manage to find everywhere—deceitfulness, impulsiveness, and casual ferocity—while the only defects the British exhibit, at least in this telling, are to be too trusting and too brave, Elizabeth Macarthur reminding us that ‘very imprudently none of the Gentlemen had the precaution to take a gun in their hand’. Nonetheless (and in the face of accumulating evidence) she remains comfortably convinced that ‘the natives are still in such fear of our fire Arms, that a single armed Man would drive an hundred natives with their spears’. Thus is reality managed in a colonial situation.
OCTOBER–NOVEMBER 1790 ‘COMING IN’
The spearing of Governor Phillip occurred on 7 September. Collins tells us that a few days after the ‘accident’, as the British agreed it was, they happened to take a great catch of salmon, and Phillip sent thirty or forty fish to Baneelon and his party, still camped on the north shore, as ‘a conciliatory gesture’. This can only have reinforced Baneelon’s confidence in both his analysis and the success of his strategy. A week later another British party spotted a small fire, again on the north shore, and found Baneelon and a small party of Australians there. ‘Much civility passed,’ Tench reports, and the two groups agreed to meet again in the same place later in the day.
The (unarmed) British duly landed, Baneelon at last got the hatchet he had been asking for, along with another lar
ge fish, and there was an eerie return to the nervous merriment of those very first meetings at Botany Bay and around the harbour beaches. Tench tells us that Baneelon called loudly for beef, bread and wine, consumed them with gusto, and then subjected himself to the British ritual of being shaved, ‘to the great admiration of his countrymen, who laughed and exclaimed at the operation’. Submitting to ordeal by froth and razor seems to have become a new-minted demonstration of trust for the Australians, as well as a neat compliment to their well-shaven friends. The men with Baneelon still flinched from the razor but allowed their beards to be scissor-clipped, and Baneelon’s woman Barangaroo, with whom he was reconciled (another sign of restored prestige?) and whom he now proudly displayed to the British, suffered having her hair combed and cut at Baneelon’s request: another pretty compliment to the British. The British even made an abortive attempt at matchmaking between Boorong, the girl raised in the pastor’s house, and a fetching lad named Imeerawanyee (in some accounts spelt ‘Yemmerrawanne’) but Boorong indicated her feelings were engaged elsewhere.
And then, Tench says, ‘we began to play and romp with them’, this time not by dancing but in trials of strength, with men competing to lift each other off the ground, a contest which the British won hands down. Baneelon complained that spears and fishing gear had been stolen from some of his people; the next day the equipment was returned to him; and we wonder how the British officers knew where to find it.
At that frolicsome second meeting Tench recorded the presence of a stranger, an affable but aloof man who, while he readily shook hands with any Britisher who approached him, stood separate from the rest ‘in a musing posture, contemplating what passed’. Tench, coveting a ‘string of bits of dried reeds’ the man was wearing around his neck, pleasantly offered his own black stock (a fashionably elaborate scarf) in exchange. The man, equally pleasantly, refused, and Tench was sufficiently impressed by his dignity to be nervous when young Imeerawanyee laughingly snatched the necklace from the man’s neck and put it around Tench’s. But the man bore the impudence with serenity, and accepted having Tench’s stock tied around his own neck. It may be his tolerance is explained by Imeerawanyee’s youth or a close kin relationship, or, just possibly, by Tench’s sensitive uneasiness.
Dancing with Strangers Page 13