Dancing with Strangers

by Inga Clendinnen

  He was out of sorts. As he talked he fingered a hatchet—a British-made hatchet, which adds piquancy to the scene to follow—which he said he was going to use to ‘kill’ a woman who had offended him. This was a seriously provocative statement given their very recent conversation about the beating of Barangaroo, and the governor expostulated. But Baneelon was not to be moved: after more talk he got up, remarked that he couldn’t stay for dinner because he was off to beat the woman, and strode towards his house, with the governor, the governor’s secretary Collins and a sergeant trailing anxiously in his wake.

  A handful of people—youths, men, women and children—were lounging on the grass outside the hut, with the girl in question lying among them, either asleep or already shielding her head. On the way the governor had contrived to substitute his own walking cane for the hatchet, and then to retrieve the walking stick too, so he must have been reasonably confident that Baneelon would not be able to do any real damage, but before the sergeant and the shocked Collins could intervene (and with the muscular speed which marked him as a warrior) Baneelon snatched up a ‘sword of the country’ and dealt the girl two savage blows on the head and shoulders.

  He seemed deranged with rage, shouting and roaring. When the whites grabbed him, his followers snatched up their spears, but then were content to watch as Baneelon screamed threats, brandished a spear at the governor, and yelled for a hatchet to finish the job on the girl. (Tench, who was not present, provides Baneelon with a splendidly melodramatic speech: ‘She is now…my property: I have ravished her by force from her tribe: and I will part with her to no person whatever, until my vengeance shall be glutted…’)

  Some sailors from the Supply, alerted by the hubbub, hastily pulled their boat ashore, picked up the unconscious girl and carried her to the boat, and thence to the hospital. Despite the uproar Phillip was cool enough to note that, with the exception of two youths, who protested, none of the Australians present tried to interfere with her removal. Nor did they seem concerned about her injury—except for one young man. He had watched the assault without making any attempt to intervene, but now he said he was her husband, and asked and was given permission to go in the boat with her. His name was Boladeree.

  With the girl whisked to safety, Baneelon and the British party, attended by an escort of Australian males of various ages, walked back to the governor’s house while the governor forcefully explained to Baneelon that if he should try to kill the girl again, or even to beat her, he would pay with his life. Baneelon, maintaining his rage, kept insisting on his right to kill her: she was, he shouted, both the child of his enemy and had herself once dared to take unfair advantage of him in battle. When chided by David Collins he dramatically mimed just where he was going to wound the girl before he cut off her head. Then he stalked off, breathing fire.

  The governor was naturally outraged by a performance which had managed to violate most British notions of proper conduct. He was also shocked that Baneelon’s followers had reached for their arms on what he thought of as British territory. He had the girl taken to his house and so under his direct protection, and when young Boladeree begged permission to stay with her, Phillip agreed—although he also noted disapprovingly that the young man had not stirred a muscle while Baneelon was making his attack. Phillip also posted an armed guard on their door, a sensible precaution given that soon afterwards a mob of Baneelon’s adherents appeared in the hospital garden demanding their victim, to be driven away only after a shouting match and a show of force from the guard. Meanwhile ‘several of the natives’, presumably better informed as to the girl’s whereabouts, came to visit her at the governor’s house, and urged she be returned to Baneelon and to Baneelon’s house. This Phillip refused to do, being persuaded she would surely be murdered.

  Baneelon sulked for two days before he appeared at the governor’s door. He responded furiously when the guard prevented him entering, but then regained his temper, and when asked he promised not to beat the girl again. He also needed the surgeon. He had beaten Barangaroo again in the interim, and she, in defiance of all protocols of proper female behaviour, had grabbed a club and whacked him back, so now both their heads needed dressing. But the thought of going to White’s hospital made him nervous: he told Phillip he was even reluctant to sleep in his own house because he feared the surgeon would come and shoot him, and he kept dashing back to the room where Phillip had persuaded him to leave his spears to demonstrate his own readiness to spear him back. Perhaps Baneelon realised that John White had a hair-trigger temper too.

  With truly astonishing patience, Phillip called the surgeon to his house, made peace between the two men, escorted them back to the hospital where the desired dressings were applied, and then went on to the surgeon’s house where the girl now lay. Baneelon spoke to her gently—upon which Barangaroo, instantly jealous, snatched up a club and made a determined effort to bash the girl herself. She desisted only when Baneelon, begged by the governor to control her, gave her a hard slap in the face. This was not what the governor had in mind, but it had the desired effect.

  The girl was then taken back to the governor’s house and, with Baneelon’s approval, was installed along with Boladeree in a maid’s room. Baneelon had realised that Phillip was seriously angry. Having got his own temper back, he offered his spears to Phillip as he entered the governor’s yard, and laid them down. Thereupon Barangaroo, infuriated by his submission, and displaying her usual magnificent disregard for political niceties, staged a demonstration of her own, sitting down on the spears and refusing to budge until she was dragged off, shrieking wildly, by an embarrassed guard. Taking away a warrior’s arms was a serious business, and Barangaroo was determined to defend her husband’s honour. Then, in a delicate gesture of trust, Baneelon himself asked the soldier for them, and handed them directly to the governor—although his men, still in possession of their own arms, still looked dangerously ready to use them.

  Then Phillip turned the whole lot of them, including the raucous Barangaroo, out of the yard, excepting only Baneelon, who took his dinner at the governor’s table with his usual good humour. He was on the point of leaving when the girl begged to be allowed to leave with him. So great was her distress that when Baneelon gave his personal guarantee she would not be hurt Phillip allowed her to go, and so eager was she to rejoin her friends that she ran ahead towards Baneelon’s house: a poor return for Phillip’s compassionate interventions.

  It had been a long few days, packed with unpredictable events and incomprehensible excitements. Even Watkin Tench’s acuity failed when he tried to fathom what had been going on. He finally classified the ‘singular circumstance’ of the girl’s wounding and its aftermath as one of those ‘inexplicable contradictions [which] arose to bewilder our researches which no ingenuity could unravel and no credulity reconcile’.

  Let us see if we can do better.

  Coolly considered, Baneelon’s violence against the girl, together with his readiness to use violence against any Britisher who got in the way, was a political disaster. It cost him the governor’s confidence, already shaken by evidence of what he saw as Baneelon’s political flightiness, with the Botany Bay enemies of yesterday become the friends of today. Why did he behave so wildly in this instance? What had happened to the quick-study mime who in captivity had picked up nuances of gesture and expression with such acuity, and responded with such flair?

  The first thing to note is that, if the British accounts make Baneelon’s behaviour sound reckless to the point of psychosis, there is nothing in his compatriots’ response to suggest that they found anything remarkable in it at all. On the contrary: they stayed out of the affair between Baneelon and the girl, and were ready to fight only when the British intervened. This looks like another cultural misunderstanding—or a whole knot of them. My guess is that, having taken possession of his house within the colony, and (reasonably) believing that Phillip recognised his and his people’s territorial autonomy—remember he had freely chosen his
own house site—Baneelon had been inviting both friends and foes to view his newly acquired land rights and his privileged relationship with the British, and also to exploit the governor’s reliable hospitality. His political influence was accordingly expanding, with even the Botany Bay people so eager to evaluate his claims and to share in his good fortune that they travelled the ten kilometres to Sydney Cove to do so. The British colony could supply both food and diversion, which were scarce commodities in their tough lives.

  I think the ‘singular circumstance’ of the girl’s near-fatal and very public wounding was triggered by Phillip’s equally public nagging in the yard that morning when he took Baneelon to task on what was, for Australians, a domestic matter. Baneelon, having brooded on that improper and insistent questioning, decided to make a public display before the British, his own people, and also the people from Botany Bay, of his autonomy, which extended in this particular matter to power over life and death. Phillip had demonstrated his own power to inflict extreme violence, with regular floggings and four hangings within the year, two in February 1790, when Baneelon had been a prisoner, and two more in late October, after the ‘coming in’. The girl, child of a personal enemy, a member of an enemy tribe, and a female who had dared to harass him during a male-to-male combat, was a legitimate target for vengeance. While Baneelon could not muster the pomp which framed Phillip’s displays of violence, he could summon both the audience and the authenticating passion to carry the scene through. I think he was saying, in that furious, staged event: ‘These are my people; this is my territory; and this is my law. I defy you to impede me.’ And when he was finally coaxed into magnanimity, he wanted that recognised too. Cross-cultural contests are not limited to dancing and wrestling matches.

  I would also like to take a moment to consider that earlier tableau when Baneelon burst in on Phillip as he wrote at his desk. Phillip was using the magic of literacy to communicate with physically remote superiors in highly abstract terms, like ‘good government’, or ‘law’, which he knew would be understood. Baneelon addressed his issues of proper conduct directly by spoken words and exemplary action, fully adequate within his face-to-face system of kin and clan. The two men might sit side by side, they might talk together—but they nonetheless inhabited quite different worlds.

  The performance with the girl pivoted on Baneelon’s understanding of warrior protocols and their relationship to the sexual politics of the Australians, which themes must now be explored. But first we need to remind ourselves of sexual politics as practised by the British.

  BRITISH SEXUAL POLITICS

  The offering of women for sexual use to cement friendship or political or economic alliance was standard practice among Australians. There is no clear evidence of that privilege being extended to the British, although as early as 1791 some women were selling their favours to convicts, presumably with the permission of their men. By 1796 the practice was common enough for David Collins, always prone to exaggeration in moral matters, to claim that more than a few Australian women were ready to exchange their ‘chastity’ for ‘a loaf of bread, a blanket, or a shirt’, and that ‘several girls who were protected in the settlement, had not any objection to passing the night on board ships, although some had learnt shame enough…to conceal, on their landing, the spoils they had procured during their stay’. Whether this was indeed ‘shame’ or a sensible precaution against robbery by Australian or British males we do not know. Or had these particular girls responded to new opportunities under the new regime by emancipating themselves from male control? I remember those fisherwomen in their canoes, keeping their first catches for themselves and their youngest children by consuming them on the spot.

  What was not at all standard was the British response to sexual encounters or, more correctly, their lack of response. While they might be ready to pay in rum or goods for the use of a woman’s body, they recognised no obligation to her male kin, finding it both more convenient and more ‘natural’ to trade directly with the women. Australian males could find themselves abruptly outside the loop, with their women likely to suffer their anger.

  As for convict women: the sexual doings which marked the disembarkation of the female convicts at Port Jackson on 6 February 1788 have become as legendary as the wild electrical storm which accompanied them. For once, and briefly, Phillip seems to have been reconciled to letting anarchy prevail, as women shrieked and men pursued them into the shadows. Remembering the determined efforts of some convict women to get into the men’s quarters during the voyage out, and the near-conjugal relationships others established with sailors, the women may have been less victimised than my phrasing suggests. The truth is that we do not know what happened during that wild night, our usually reliable informants like Tench choosing to remain discreetly silent.

  Even with a semblance of propriety restored, and despite Phillip’s best efforts, unprotected convict women could fall prey to men of all ranks. Some escaped from the melée by entering into a permanent liaison with a free man or, failing that, a convict of steady temperament or, best of all, a free man of rank of steady temperament. As we have seen, only Chaplain Johnson among the First Fleet officials had been allowed to bring his wife with him, poor lonely soul as she must have been. While Hunter and Phillip himself abstained, most senior officers (like David Collins and John White) entered into long-term relationships with convict women. The first child born into the tiny community at Norfolk Island and proudly baptised ‘Norfolk’ was the son of its commandant Philip Gidley King and a convict woman, Anne Inett, who bore him a daughter in the following year. Even the uxorious Ralph Clark acquired a convict woman and a daughter during his time on the island, and brought them back to Sydney with him.

  Such irregular children were acknowledged in the colony by being baptised under their fathers’ names, and, as with Surgeon White, some were taken back to England by their fathers for integration into polite society. I confess I find the early colony’s smooth techniques of managing sexual matters among its elite at least as opaque as the Australians’. For example: how did those delinquent officers manage their courtly duties of squiring the growing band of colonial ladies to the picnics on the harbour’s islands and inlets described by Elizabeth Macarthur? Presumably such arrangements were simply designated unspeakable and therefore invisible. Social myopia has always been a British virtue.

  Not all the officers succumbed, or not publicly. Watkin Tench was either unusually disciplined or unusually discreet in matters sexual. Tench had never been in Tahiti. His dreams were not haunted by coffee-coloured girls ‘performing a thousand lewd tricks’, as were the dreams of comrades who had visited the enchanted island, and who were accordingly deeply disappointed by Australian girls. At first Tench thought Australian girls unattractive and the old women positively alarming. He also disapproved of the convict solution, as far as we know having no truck with convict women, who were in any case too forward for his taste. What he found pleasing in women was a bashful shyness—which he was to discover, to his own and to our surprise, among some of the young women of the local tribes.

  One in particular enchanted him. She was about eighteen; she was, like handsome Barangaroo, a daughter of the Cameragal; her name was Gooreedeeana. One day she had come to his hut ‘to complain of hunger’. A married woman, she presumably was under instruction to do whatever was required to acquire provisions. Instead Tench talked gently with her, and then memorialised her as ‘excel[ling] in beauty all their females I ever saw’. He acknowledged he was moved by ‘the firmness, symmetry and the luxuriancy of her bosom’, but even more by her expression, ‘distinguished by a softness and sensibility unequalled in the rest of her countrywomen’. (We can glimpse something of what he means by looking at the photographs of four softly smiling young women in Stanner’s White Man Got No Dreaming.) Smitten, he was anxious to see if her beauty had protected her from violence. Gently examining her head, ‘with grief I found it covered by contusions and mangled by scars’. She also po
inted to a scar on her leg, sustained when ‘a man had lately dragged her by force from her home to gratify his lust’. Tench chivalrously loaded her with all the bread and salt pork he could spare, and apparently sought no more reward than being allowed to measure her. She was, he recorded, exactly five feet one and three-quarter inches tall. (We are told that Baneelon at five feet eight inches ‘towered’ over his fellows.) Tench would see her only once more, this time in a canoe with other women, ‘painted for a ball, with broad stripes of white from head to foot’. Painted, she was his lovely Gooreedeeana no more. But perhaps she visited his waking dreams and made his exile easier to bear.

  Tench’s friend William Dawes, an introspective, scholarly type, was in his fellow-lieutenant Daniel Southwell’s judgment ‘a truly religious’ young man who was nonetheless ‘without any appearance of formal sanctity’. (The Reverend Johnson was an earnest Evangelical.) Dawes, the colony’s most adept student of the physical sciences and entrusted with its astronomical observations, had chosen to take up solitary residence in the new Observatory. From his first days in the colony he had been eager to make a formal study of the local tongue and the local religion. He had done his best to teach Boorong something of his religion in the hope she would reciprocate with information regarding hers, but ‘her levity and love of play in great measure defeated his efforts’. There was another young girl with whom he established a more rewarding relationship, or so we assume from the tender passages recording their attempts at communication he stored in his language notebook. The exchanges have a pleasantly domestic and sometimes an erotic flavour. The girl Patyegarang says she is very warm: ‘I will cool myself in the rain.’ She stands naked by the fire, he desires her to put on some clothes, she replies: ‘I will get warmer quicker this way.’ Sometimes she sounds downright coquettish: in answer to the question, ‘Why don’t you learn to speak like a white man?’ she answers, ‘Because you give me everything I want without my having to ask.’ She says: ‘We will sleep separate.’ But she also teaches him a word which means ‘to warm one’s hand by the fire and then to squeeze gently the fingers of another person’. And, finally: ‘Why don’t you sleep?’ ‘Because of the candle.’