To the surprise of the British, despite his promises Baneelon was not there, but after an hour of amicable exchanges they were directed to the beach where they found him fishing—or pretending to fish—with Barangaroo. Again, Baneelon was initially shy; again this looks very like properly remote conduct from an offended party.
Was Baneelon especially cautious because his conduct of negotiation with these potential allies was being assessed by higher authorities, not known to the British but embodied in the person of the thoughtful stranger? Baneelon was young to claim political consequence, especially when his prominence was the result of the accident of his capture and captivity. We would expect his performance to be watched, even directed, by older, wiser heads. We are given a handful of hints as to the durability of such an invisible hierarchy. For example, the convict-artist Thomas Watling, arrived at Sydney late in 1792, casually mentions a ‘poet’ who passed through the settlement ‘and held forth to several hundreds of his countrymen, who after kindly entreating, escorted him to some other bourne, to further promulgate his composition’. Who was this wandering bard, travelling so freely across clan boundaries? Later again David Collins remarked the respectful excitement which would be generated among youngsters in Sydney when some unremarkable old men happened to pass through the town: ‘We have been immediately informed of their arrival, and they have been pointed out to our notice in a whisper, and with an eagerness of manner which… impressed us with the idea that we were looking at persons to whom some consequence was attached…’
The British party invited Baneelon to visit the governor, who he was assured was recovering, but Baneelon indicated that the governor must first come to him, presumably to mark Phillip’s acceptance of the justice of his punishment and to conclude the episode without residue. Accordingly, a mere ten days after his spearing, Phillip painfully levered himself into a boat and went to attend on Baneelon. Then on 8 October the British again saw the signal fire, and a little fleet of British boats set out. They found what looks at this distance like a formal delegation of Baneelon, Barangaroo and another woman, and six Australian men, ‘all of whom’, Tench tells us, ‘received us with welcome except the grave-looking gentleman before mentioned, who stood aloof in his former musing posture’. This time most of the men submitted to the ministrations of the barber brought specially for the purpose. Next came not gift-giving, but a flurry of trading exchanges in which the Australians drove unusually hard bargains with their new partners. (This was the occasion the warrior refused Tench’s pleas for his spear for anything less than a hatchet.) Then, in exuberant good humour, Baneelon and three other natives, not including the grave gentleman, departed by British boat and Australian canoe to visit the governor. Given the British penchant for kidnapping, they sensibly left a hostage behind in the person of Parson Richard Johnson.
Baneelon had been especially eager for Barangaroo to come with him, but she wrathfully refused. She ‘violently opposed Baneelon’s departure’, Tench tells us, and ‘when she found persuasion vain, she had recourse to tears, scoldings and threats, stamping the ground and tearing her hair’. Then, when Baneelon remained unmoved, she furiously smashed one of his fishing spears. Presumably she disagreed with the politics of conciliation. Barangaroo was always a woman with attitude.
Arrived at Sydney, Baneelon led his little party confidently through the settlement, running happily from room to room in the governor’s house, discoursing knowledgeably on mysterious objects like candle-snuffers, and fondly kissing Phillip’s orderly sergeant—although we should note that he still recoiled when the gamekeeper McEntire tried to approach him. From that time onwards there were always Australians around the settlement, calling in at the governor’s yard for fish and bread; coveting British possessions, particularly metal ones, and occasionally making off with them; and diverting themselves watching the peculiar doings of their new allies.
Their presence rapidly became a mixed blessing. Even Tench admitted that ‘sometimes by their clamour for bread and meat (of which they now all eat very greedily) [they] are become very troublesome’, especially as the British themselves were still on painfully short rations. (The risk of famine was decisively alleviated only towards the end of June 1792.) Within a month of the reconciliation ‘every gentleman’s house [had] become a resting or sleeping place for some of them every night’, a pressure not much alleviated when the governor built Baneelon a substantial brick house at Baneelon’s earnest request and at a site of his own choosing, out on the beautiful point which now bears his name and the Opera House.
The building was completed by the end of November. In his reports Phillip was always careful to refer to this grace-and-favour dwelling as a ‘hut’, but Collins makes clear that the ‘hut’ was ‘a brick one twelve feet square, covered with tiles’, and this at a time when British soldiers and officers at Rose Hill were camping in decaying wattle-and-daub structures which offered scant protection from the weather. ‘To occupy a brick house put together with mortar formed of clay of the country and covered with tiles, became, in point of comparative comfort and convenience, an object of some importance,’ as Collins rather prissily put it.
For Phillip the house was important in binding Baneelon and his friends to the new alliance, and to give them a specified secure place. Now they could come freely to the settlement in their canoes and lounge about watching the marines drilling and convicts working as stage one in Phillip’s great experiment of civilising the nomads.
We cannot know precisely what shifts of mind or circumstance persuaded particular Australian groups to ‘come in’. It looks like a frogs-in-a-pond process as families came, saw and decided to stay for a while. Colbee made his separate peace with Phillip on 18 October in what we can now recognise as the correct way. Obligingly placing himself with his few surviving kin in an adjacent cove, he summoned the governor to him. The governor, equally obligingly, came, ‘a hatchet was, as usual, desired and given, and Colebe [sic] promised to come to dinner the next day’. Phillip was beginning to get the hang of the protocol. Early in the New Year the first corroboree for presentation before a white audience was arranged by Baneelon and Colbee, as befitted their new prominence, to celebrate and consolidate the alliance—and Britishers discovered how difficult it was to vibrate the knees at will.
Why did reconciliation come out of violence and catastrophe? I think we have been looking at a performance of conscientious magnanimity from the governor and a ceremonially ordered settlement of grievances from the Australians, played simultaneously on the same stage. I also believe that the great fact of British blood spilt on the sand extinguished accumulated native grievances, and initiated an alliance between subordinate incomers and ordinate possessors—from, of course, the Australians’ point of view.
We are indebted for the possibility of this kind of reconstruction largely to Tench, who was always ready to report everything he saw, including actions he did not understand, in detail and in scrupulous sequence. Unlike some of his colleagues, and minor inconveniences aside, he was delighted by the influx and by the new opportunities offered by intimacy: ‘During the intervals of duty our greatest source of entertainment now lay in cultivating the acquaintance of our new friends, the natives.’ By nature hopeful, he was sanguine as to outcomes. Now good will and proximity would conquer all: ‘Ever liberal of communication, no difficulty but of understanding each other subsisted between us.’
Even Tench soon had to admit that ‘inexplicable contradictions arose to bewilder our researches’. As the British got to know the Australians better, it sometimes seemed they understood them less.
OCTOBER–NOVEMBER 1790 HOUSE GUESTS
Within two months of the spearing Baneelon was dining again at the governor’s house, just as he had in the days of his captivity. At his first dinner he was promised a custom-made leather shield covered with the best tin, a gracious bending of British technology to savage purposes, to celebrate the renewed friendship. The next day a boisterous party of Aus
tralians came over to see if the shield was ready (it wasn’t), and Boorong took the opportunity to ask for the usual hatchet for each of her two brothers, also members of the party. After all, some payment was due, the British having kept her from the service of her family for the eighteen months she had spent in the household of the Reverend Johnson.
From the Australians’ point of view things were going excellently well, with compensation duly paid to the appropriate people and a decent hospitality displayed towards their kin and friends. Phillip was also happy. He had been gratified that Baneelon chose to linger with him until late in the afternoon of that first visit, when some of his family came to fetch him. At last his hope was being realised: ‘No doubt could be entertained but that they would visit the settlement as frequently as could be wished.’
Or, as it turned out, rather more often and in greater numbers than their hosts might have chosen. Provisions were depleting; there was no sign of the promised store ships; drought was withering the young crops. The settlement was also increasingly burdened by convicts too weak, old or ill to work. Collins estimated that 1790 had cost 159 lives: 143 from sickness, three absconded or lost, four executed, and nine drowned. That is a lot of deaths for so small a community to absorb.
With material and psychological strains multiplying, their new guests were making themselves rather too much at home. John Harris, arriving with the Second Fleet in June 1790 as surgeon to the New South Wales Corps, expressed a newcomer’s fierce intolerance: ‘The Whole Tribe with their Visitors have plagued us ever since [Phillip’s wounding] nor can we get rid of them. They come and go at pleasure They are very Fond of our Bread, Beef etc.’ Baneelon’s house on the point failed to relieve the pressure. When it overflowed with visitors (and more and more seemed to be coming) they simply spilled into the governor’s yard and waited cheerfully to be fed. Two youths in full ceremonial fig chose to stay in the yard to prepare for a tooth-drawing ceremony, and came back afterwards to recover; children were parked there under the governor’s care while their parents went off on essential travels unimpeded; and at least one redundant wife fetched up in the governor’s charge when her husband dumped her for another woman. Such unsought responsibilities could lead to undesired revelations: in the last case the abandoned wife left the governor’s protection after little more than a week to rejoin her husband, while the other woman, having taken up with another man, became a frequent visitor to Sydney, where, as Phillip glumly notes, ‘she was said to have granted her favours to several of the convicts’.
This was not the moral-reformation-by-example Phillip had envisioned. Australian interactions seen at close quarters could only erode his hopes for their quick integration into proper British ways of thinking and doing. Worst, and despite British disapproval, men continued to beat their women as of right, and then nonchalantly took them off to the hospital and Surgeon White to have their wounds and bruises dressed. Some women seemed to prefer this treatment to the sedate pleasures available in the colony. At the end of December a young girl had begged to be allowed to live among Phillip’s servants and under his protection, but she stayed for only a few days before, curiosity satisfied, she returned to her old life. Before she left she stripped off all her clothing, retaining only the woollen nightcap she had been given to keep her newly shaven head warm. Phillip drew the unavoidable inference: ‘She had never been under any kind of restraint, so that her going away could only proceed from a preference to the manner of life in which she had been brought up.’ Even young Boorong could not be kept within the settlement, however brutally she might be treated outside it. One day in the new year she came paddling in with another girl who had also enjoyed a spell under British protection, both of them hungry, both of them beaten around the head and shoulders. They said two men known in the colony had beaten them because they refused to sleep with them. And yet, after a couple of days of food and Surgeon White’s care, they paddled away again.
Both the girls’ freedom and their vulnerability were probably the consequence of the disruptions effected by the smallpox epidemic, exacerbated by the proximity of the British camp as an alternative resource and refuge. But Phillip was in no mood for sociological analysis, gloomily commenting, ‘Making love in this country is always prefaced by a beating, which the female seems to receive as a matter of course.’ His comment does not illuminate the case—the girls were beaten precisely because they said no—but it captures his increasing despondency.
Meanwhile, Baneelon was visiting the settlement and the governor daily, along with ‘his wife, several children’ (orphaned by the smallpox disaster?) ‘and half a dozen of their friends’, and Baneelon and Barangaroo together proved notably more trying guests than Baneelon alone. Barangaroo showed none of her husband’s sensitivity to alien protocols. A stormy soul, she expressed herself freely and, despite expressed British concern regarding modesty, insisted on going naked save for a slim bone in her nose even to the governor’s table, except once, when, fresh from a grand ceremonial occasion, she appeared in the glory of body paint. Even Baneelon, who had gone meekly clothed throughout his captivity, now often seemed to have mislaid most of his garments, or simply chose to carry them in a net around his neck.
Phillip was also to discover that the couple’s displays of affectionate concern were almost as trying as their flares of violence. When Barangaroo sat herself down by the governor’s fire and complained of a pain in her belly, Baneelon proceeded to a prolonged curing ceremony, warming his hand with his breath and applying it to the affected part while sustaining a monotonous chant occasionally interrupted by episodes of barking like a dog. The ceremony had gone on for a very long time when Phillip intervened, sent for the surgeon, and persuaded Barangaroo to take ‘a little tincture of rhubarb, which gave her relief, and so put an end to the business’—to the even greater relief, one imagines, of the governor’s household.
The governor’s yard continued to overflow with Baneelon’s friends. Outdoor livers, they were uninhibited guests. Here we have less information on some matters than I would like: for example, could they have been persuaded to use the governor’s privy? To the Australians, used to depositing natural wastes at a decent distance from the group campfires and then moving on, British privies must have seemed pestilential places, and from a genteel sniff and curl-of-the-lip in Elizabeth Macarthur’s letter to her friend Bridget Kingdon, I rather doubt they did.
David Collins, exemplary chronicler though he was, fails to record any of these disturbances and disruptions, presumably judging them to be trivial. We know of most of them only because Phillip, deep in his sea of troubles, nonetheless took the time to report them in fine detail to his bemused superiors—because they pressed upon him, but also, I think, because he intuited that these matters could be significant in their later implications.
Now I offer an account, put together from Phillip’s own recounting, of six weeks in the life of a colonial governor committed to tolerance and conciliation, from mid-November 1790, when the ‘coming in’ was fully effected, to the end of that year.
On the morning of 13 November, a Sunday, Baneelon arrived at the governor’s house accompanied by a small swarm of Australians, sixteen altogether, some of them strangers. He had been away for a couple of days visiting the tribe at Botany Bay, until recently his enemies and now, it seemed, his friends, so the strangers were probably Botany Bay people he had invited to make their first visit to the settlement, with this a guided tour of the new amenities.
It was a success, Phillip tells us. ‘Appear[ing] highly delighted with the novelties,’ the visitors settled down, lit a fire in the governor’s yard to cook their handouts of fish, and ‘sat down to breakfast in great good humour’. Barangaroo was one of the group, and Phillip was distressed to see she looked ‘very ill’ from a bad scalp wound she had just received from Baneelon for having (deliberately) broken a fish spear and a throwing stick. Phillip took his opportunity publicly to remonstrate with Baneelon for injuring this woman he
clearly loved, but to no effect: Baneelon simply said she deserved it, and when Phillip continued to press him he repeated she was bad, and therefore he had beaten her. Phillip could get no more sense from him, ‘for Baneelon either did not understand the questions put to him or was unwilling to answer them’—a not unusual experience for investigators into domestic sexual politics.
Breakfast done, the whole troupe set off to take Barangaroo and another woman whose scalp had also been laid open to the hospital, where John White obligingly dressed their wounds. Then they all trooped back to the governor’s yard.
So much for the morning. Tench was to concoct an amusing story out of what happened next, but Phillip was not amused at all. He gave a detailed report to his superiors, presumably because he sensed there were matters of consequence at stake. I have therefore resorted to some more slow-motion narrative and analysis.
Leaving his friends in the yard, Baneelon marched into the house, found the governor writing at his desk, sat down beside him, and began talking. This would be a great liberty in an Englishman, but not to Baneelon, who had no notion of the sanctity of doors, or desks, or privacy, or writing. He needed to talk with the governor on an important matter, so in he came.
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