We don’t know what arrangements Dawes made with Patyegarang’s kin, but there can be no doubt that during his time in the colony Dawes’ sympathies swung from the British and towards the Australians. When Phillip ordered him out on a punitive expedition against the Australians after an ambush-murder, Dawes refused until this ‘truly religious’ young man was coaxed into submission by the chaplain. Dawes then formally notified Phillip that he would never obey such an order again. Phillip, who had no patience with recalcitrant junior officers, forced him to quit the colony in December 1791 with the marines who had opted to go home. Dawes had applied to stay for three more years. Left to himself, I wonder if he would ever have left.
His departure cost us access to the local language as it was spoken at the time of contact. It possibly also cost us a brilliant ethnography, although his tender conscience might not have allowed him to open the local people to easier communication, and so to more disruptive exploitations.
Dawes must have been an attractive fellow, as these brooding, solitary types often are. Tench cheerfully acknowledged his intellectual superiority, loved him wholeheartedly, and did his best to coax him out on exploring trips with him. Young, bored Mrs Elizabeth Macarthur, for a time the only lady in the settlement except for dull Mrs Johnson, frequently found herself walking the distance to his observatory to seek his instruction, first in astronomy, his particular passion, and then, when that proved beyond her capacities, in the less taxing science of botany. She lamented in a letter to a friend that ‘he is so much engaged by the stars that to mortal eyes he is not always visible’. We note that the scraps of his tender little vocabulary have mainly to do with the night or times of rain, when officers’ wives were unlikely to drop by.
Now for an example of the kind of enigmatic episode which keeps historians modest. Two convicts attempted to hide on the Gorgon, the ship which would take Tench and his fellows home at the end of 1791. They were detected before it sailed and brought back to the settlement. Such escape attempts were common. But Collins notes that a convict woman was also thought to have concealed herself on the ship. She was not there. Instead she ‘was found disguised in men’s apparel in the native’s hut on the east point of the cove’—that is, at Baneelon’s house. We can understand the ‘men’s apparel’, a sensible disguise where a British woman could not move around without attracting notice. But what was she doing at Baneelon’s house? Until I read this meek little sentence I had thought of both the house and the point as effectively Australian territory, unfrequented even by British males except by invitation. So why had she taken refuge there, so dressed? Could she have had a liaison with an Australian man? A conspiratorial friendship with an Australian woman? This time I can’t even guess what might have been going on.
AUSTRALIAN SEXUAL POLITICS
How violent were Australian men toward their women? The answer has to be: ‘Very.’ When Baneelon was boasting of his exploits in ‘love and war’ soon after his capture he vividly enacted the various histories of his many battle scars, but failed to explain one on the back of his hand. When he was asked about it he laughed, and said, Tench reports, that he had suffered it when he was ‘carrying off a lady of another tribe by force’. She bit him, he ‘knocked her down, and beat her until she was insensible, and covered in blood’. And then he took his pleasure. We might think Baneelon was choosing to embroider reality, but too many other accounts report violent rape as commonplace. Collins came to believe that the usual way to get ‘wives’ was to steal them: to seize them, beat them, and then drag them home and rape them. This kind of conduct towards the enemy is not unusual in warrior societies, where the seizing and raping of enemy women seems to be an established male sport. But sexual assaults could happen even within the group: the split lip Baneelon wore not long after his return from England was a gift from his friend Colbee when, lacking a woman of his own, Baneelon assaulted Colbee’s wife. What is more puzzling to us and more shocking to the British was the violence men directed against women within the immediate family, particularly their wives.
Trying to penetrate the dynamics of the sexual politics of a different society is a risky enterprise for the outsider, especially when the society is in demographic upheaval and political flux. We are also always more sensitive to ‘disreputable’ conduct between others than the taken-for-granted interactions in our own social world. The Spaniard Malaspina, visiting the Sydney colony in the autumn of 1793, when early licence had been increasingly replaced by law, was nonetheless shocked by British males’ ferocity both to each other and to their women—whom he also thought ‘great whores’, save for the wives of a few respectable officials. It is true that some British men beat, raped, even killed women, especially convict women. Even the meagre sources we have yield a formidable list of reported and prosecuted sexual and physical assaults. But British violence was typically expressed by fists and feet, and tended to happen when the perpetrator, and the victim too, were in private and in drink.
What the newcomers saw as remarkable—what I think would be remarkable anywhere—were the blows Australian men publicly, casually, dealt their women for trivial offences, and their ready resort to weapons. Their women were, literally, browbeaten. Tench, who was not given to jumping to conclusions, reported that ‘the women are in all respects treated with savage barbarity…When an Indian is provoked by a woman, he either spears her or knocks her down on the spot. On this occasion he always strikes on the head, using indiscriminately a hatchet, a club or any other weapon which may chance to be in his hand.’ The provocation could be so slight as to be invisible to the alien eye, and ill-treatment seemed to have little to do with the victim’s temperament. Tench quickly identified Baneelon’s Barangaroo as a shrew, and the beatings she received did not much trouble him, but Colbee, ‘in other respects a good-tempered merry fellow’, treated his sweet-natured Daringa with equal brutality, and showed off her scars with pride. Nor was the brutality tempered by circumstance: Colbee beat Daringa savagely when she was big with child, and Baneelon gave Barangaroo a severe beating on the very morning she gave birth.
We might have expected such displays to be muted inside the newcomers’ settlement, and that women known to the colonists would enjoy some immunity, especially in view of the Australians’ general courtesy in respecting British sensibilities. That did not happen. Even when Baneelon and his friends had taken up near-permanent residence within the settlement, spending a large part of each week there, men would casually club their wives, and as casually take them to the hospital for White and his assistants to dress their wounds. As we have seen, remonstrance had no effect: when Phillip chided Baneelon for laying Barangaroo’s head open because she had in fury broken a fish-gig and a throwing stick, he replied firmly that ‘she was bad, and therefore he had beat her’. And that was that. In September 1794, after six years of contact, Collins noted that Baneelon’s sister and the wife of Imeerawanyee, after both men had sailed away to England with Phillip, ‘wish[ed] to withdraw from the cruelty which they, along with others of their sex, experienced from their countrymen’. They were granted permission to sail to Norfolk Island on the Daedalus to live under the protection of the island’s lieutenant-governor. After enduring close to a year without the protection of their men, withdrawal from their home society must have seemed their only remedy.
As for female violence: while women sometimes mimicked their menfolk in tribal fights, even throwing the occasional feeble spear, their role was to lend vocal, not physical support. There was a strong social inhibition against a female striking any male, while boys were encouraged to hit little girls and even their own mothers with impunity. Occasionally the sources mention women fighting between themselves. Certainly women of different tribes were thought to use witchcraft against each other: when the girl Boorong returned from her own people, she explained that she was ill because Cameragal women had deliberately urinated on a path she had to cross. Women inflicted punitive beatings on females who offended them, as when y
oung girls unlucky enough to have attracted the attention of husbands were drubbed by jealous wives. Consider again the conduct of the girl first assaulted by Baneelon in front of Phillip, and then by Barangaroo. She made no attempt to protect herself from either attack. Her main concern seemed to be to take her punishment—and then be allowed to rejoin the group.
Of course all was not blood and tears. David Collins records a pretty picnic scene or, as he put it, ‘a family party’ on a beach, with one of Baneelon’s sisters and his younger wife paddling their canoes back to shore, singing in rhythm with their paddles as they came, and presenting Baneelon, who had been looking after his sister’s child while she fished, with their catch, which he set about cooking. As he cooked, ‘his pretty sister War-re-weer [lay] asleep in the sun’ and the successful fisherwomen sat at their ease, one eating oysters, the other suckling the baby she had retrieved from its uncle’s care.
It is indeed a charming scene, and it is tempting to sentimentalise it. But Collins also tells us in another passage that women were compelled ‘to sit in their canoe, exposed to the fervour of the midday sun, hour after hour, chanting their little song, and inviting the fish beneath them to take their bait; for without a sufficient quantity to make a meal for their tyrants, who were lying asleep at their ease, they would meet but a rude reception at their landing’. Had Baneelon’s women returned empty-handed, we have to assume that the scene would have been less pretty.
We know a little about Warreweer. She had either not married ‘out’ or her husband had chosen to come to live with her kin, where her irascible brother’s company might have afforded her unusual security. She was fortunate in her husband ‘Collins’, a man the British considered both braver and more gentle than most of his compatriots. These two seem to have loved each other with explicit tenderness; British observers were touched by Warreweer’s devoted care during her husband’s slow recovery from a particularly dangerous spear wound. In August 1798 pretty, loving Warreweer was murdered in what looked like a payback killing. Revenge killings always fell most conveniently on women and children.
How to explain so much violence against women? Feminists would remind us that these women were essential to the family economy, and worked longer hours than the men. The glamour surrounding hunting and its attendant physical skills might contribute to female suppression, but the people living around the harbour were coast-dwelling fisherfolk; while the larger animals were hunted, they were not a major food source. Women, as collectors of vegetables and the most persistent fish-seekers, were the most reliable providers. Couples also fished co-operatively. The husband and his wives (he usually had two, one senior, one junior) could seem happily interdependent, spending whole days together in what looked to lonely Britishers like enviable family harmony. Tench could identify couples long before he fathomed other Australian relationships. Baneelon and Barangaroo seemed close to inseparable. They clearly enjoyed each other’s company: Collins reports he often saw them together ‘feasting and enjoying themselves’ on the island the Australians called Me-mel, and the British Goat Island. Collins also tells us that husbands had a small but essential role to play in the woman-dominated business of childbirth. Although they were never present at the event, it was their job to shape the little ‘knife’ used to cut the umbilical cord.
Furthermore, however thoroughly the metaphor of subduing an enemy suffused warrior accounts of sexual encounters, and however subdued most women (excepting always Barangaroo) appeared in the company of their husbands, the glimpses we have of their behaviour as a group show them to be anything but reticent. In their first encounters with the British their lively, not to say provocative, behaviour when they were at a distance contrasts with their timidity when coaxed to approach one by one. As we have seen, after the ‘coming in’ some women moved independently through the settlement, and some came to exchange sexual favours with soldiers, sailors and convicts for goods, without any visible intervention from their men. Collins also gives us reason to think that at least some women after contact were ready to treat men’s business lightly: when he expressed a desire for some of the teeth he had seen knocked out at the climax of the great four-yearly male puberty ceremony, Baneelon’s sister and Colbee’s Daringa secretly gave him the three which had been entrusted to them, and which they should have handed over to the Cameragal. Why? We do not know—except that Daringa was eager that one of the teeth, Nanbaree’s, should be sent to Surgeon White, who had raised the boy and had quit the colony the previous year. Furthermore the women seemed to fear only physical, not supernatural, retribution.
The Australians tended to exogamy, usually finding their wives outside their own group. That is rarely healthy for women, so being removed from the protection of their kin. But, on the evidence we have, even kinsfolk did not intervene in husbands’ brutality. Wives under sexual assault might scream for their husbands, but Boladeree, husband of the girl clubbed by Baneelon in the display of ‘justice’ which so shocked Phillip, was a silent onlooker during the attack, despite his evident tenderness for the victim. Note, too, that the victim did not cry out. She only tried to shield her head. Given such silences, I think we have to assume a compelling, shared understanding of a network of rights, liberties and infringements simply invisible to us.
Despite some British talk about their gentle, even passive, natures, Australians around the harbour sustained a tough warrior culture. British eye-witness accounts are thick with descriptions of pre-planned battles between antagonistic groups, with hard blows given and received and much blood shed. Through time, and as his own fascination grew, Collins gives us deepening access to the protocols of the warrior culture. Baneelon’s British-made leather- and-tin shield had pleased him deeply, but on his next meeting with Phillip he claimed to have lost it. Collins tells us that ‘in fact it had been taken from him by the people of the North Shore district’, presumably the Cameragal, who seem to have had jurisdiction in these matters, and who destroyed it, ‘it being deemed unfair to cover himself with such a guard’. Such were the rules governing what could look to the British like homicidal free-for-alls.
After years of absorbed watching, Collins concluded that combat was the single most important activity in Australian men’s lives:
The procuring of food really seems to be but a secondary business with…men. The management of the spear and shield, dexterity in throwing the various clubs they have in use among them, agility in either attacking or defending, and a display of the constancy with which they endure pain, appearing to rank first among their concerns in life.
We might be among the Plains Indians. As if he sensed a connection, Collins went directly on to describe the pitiable condition of women, who ‘are accustomed to bear on their heads the traces of the superiority of the males, with which they dignify them almost as soon as they find strength in the arm to imprint the mark’. He described some women with ‘more scars upon their shorn heads, cut in every direction, than could well be distinguished and counted’.
He also acknowledged, with some puzzlement, that women had their particular roles in men’s battles, proceeding to a detailed account of the opening ceremony of a well-advertised combat between the Sydney clans and clans from the southern side of Botany Bay. Before an invited European audience, the two sides seated themselves opposite each other at the appointed place, and each warrior drank a palmful of water. After this symbolic refreshment combat was initiated by an old woman from the Botany Bay side who, ‘uttering much abusive language at the time’ ran up to Colbee (whose priority marks him as a major warrior) and struck him savagely on the head—which he had obligingly bowed for her. She then worked her way down the Sydney line, bashing each bent head, with no resistance until she came to the lad Yeranibie, who struggled with her. The old woman seemed to be getting the best of him; she’d wrenched his spear away from him when their individual struggle was engulfed in the general melée.
Had the mature warriors been demonstrating their iron self-discipline b
y publicly enduring a hard blow, on the head, from a woman—three insults in a row—without retaliation? Had young Yeranibie cracked under intolerable provocation? Or had some other cue been given which Collins simply failed to see? Collins sensibly refrained from comment, being content to describe, but his description implies that the dramatisation of sexual difference penetrated deep into the theatre of warrior power.
Within the groups, reputations for toughness, for swift-rising aggression, for determination in vengeance, brought respect. Baneelon’s radiant rages indicate that; so, we will see, does Colbee’s more deadly anger. It is calmer, gentler men like ‘Collins’ who appear unusual, and who attract British comment.
This suggests we may be looking at a familiar, depressing phenomenon. In societies where physical competition between males was habitual, flamboyant, and frequently tested in one-to-one combat and formalised battle, a man could most conveniently show how tough he was by publicly beating his wife.
My conclusion: contest cultures are uncomfortable places for both sexes.
NOVEMBER 1790 BOAT TRIP TO ROSE HILL
Phillip was trying to run a fragile convict colony by a distinctive mix of material equity and draconian discipline. He was also expending a great amount of time and scarce food in keeping his new friends happy. A week after the affair of the wounded girl, he feared another eruption. He had been told that the Cameragal had killed one of Baneelon’s kinsmen and Phillip assumed, with some trepidation, that Baneelon would seek revenge. Mysteriously, he did not. Instead he was seen out with a Cameragal party, peaceably collecting wild fruits. Equally mysteriously, a man from Botany Bay he had often declared to be his enemy was sleeping at his house, and seemed to have been there for a fortnight. Phillip thought something was brewing.
Dancing with Strangers Page 16