Then one night long after dinner Baneelon and Barangaroo appeared at the governor’s house asking to be allowed to sleep there, and offering the lame excuse that they could not sleep in their own house because there were too many people there. Baneelon, in a highly excited state, also spoke of the kinsman killed by the Cameragal, and urged Phillip to take his soldiers and kill every one of them. When he and Barangaroo finally retired to sleep in a back room, he begged Phillip to lock them in, and to keep the key in his pocket.
Nothing more happened during the night, but I doubt Phillip slept well, wondering what tribal broils he was importing into the heart of a colony where survival depended on the maintenance of strict social order.
By the last months of 1790 Phillip was in full educational mode. He was far from well. A man of fifty, he had taken a bad fall on an early expedition out from the settlement which seems to have brought on a chronic illness, probably of the kidneys, because afterwards he was prone to crippling pains in the side, lower back and loins. He had also been speared, grievously, and his daily harassments were multiple. Nonetheless, ailing as he was, harassed as he was, he remained intent on displaying the beauty of the principles of natural justice enshrined in British law, and the security they would surely bring all who embraced them. He also believed that, given time, the natives would come to cherish what he thought of as British ways: to shun impulsive violence, to act honourably and justly; to value the comfort, elegance and modesty embodied in clothing; and above all to relinquish their harsh and socially untidy hand-to-mouth existence in the bush.
Over those weeks of late spring evidence was accumulating that his hopes were utopian. He had watched while the girl Boorong chose to exchange her easy life in the settlement for, as it seemed to him, sexual assaults, beatings and hunger. Men and women alike could be given clothing one day and return naked the next. And now Baneelon stripped before he went into the bush.
Even more disturbingly for Phillip, a man who prized his word, he was coming to recognise Baneelon was an easy liar, lying sometimes for advantage, sometimes to please, and sometimes, it seemed, for no reason at all, or none that Phillip could fathom. Domestic proximity had also taught him that these cheerful, ebullient, likeable people were alarmingly violent in words and deeds, and yet eerily resilient, with the violence seeming to leave no residue of resentment.
But despite disappointments he retained his faith in his new friends’ humanity, and continued to believe that, given enough time and care, they could be soothed and smoothed into civility. That determined indulgence would sorely tax his patience.
For example: in late November, with a small house built for his accommodation at Rose Hill completed, Phillip decided to stay there overnight. Baneelon, Colbee and two other Australian men made clear they very much wanted to go with him. Phillip was probably using one of his small six-oared cutters to make the trip to Rose Hill, so there was little space for passengers, but he agreed—only to find himself entangled in yet another marital squabble. With the boat and its all-male passengers already embarked, Baneelon had run to get his cloak from his house, but was ‘delayed by his wife’, as Phillip demurely puts it. It was only as the boat was pulling out of the cove that he came scrambling back over the rocks of the point under a barrage of abuse from the pursuing Barangaroo. As he swung into the boat, shouting he would be gone for only one night, she ran to her new canoe, drove the paddles through the bottom, flung them into the water, and headed back at a run to Baneelon’s house, ‘presumably to do more damage’, as the startled Phillip put it.
Barangaroo’s fury was not to be trifled with. Phillip tactfully offered to put Baneelon back on shore, Baneelon gratefully accepted, and as he ran to rescue the rest of his possessions the trip at last got under way. Phillip, recording that the three other Australians in the boat had kept their mouths firmly shut throughout the entire performance, commented that ‘none of these people have ever been seen to interfere with what did not immediately concern them’.
The three visitors dined lavishly at Rose Hill, but were so insistent that they had to go home that Phillip had his boatmen row them to Sydney the next morning. When the boat came back he was astonished to see that Barangaroo and Baneelon had somehow got themselves aboard. Both were in the highest of spirits, and Barangaroo’s head was miraculously intact. Again they dined long and festively. Then Barangaroo said she wanted to go home, Baneelon said she’d cry if he didn’t take her, and the governor felt obliged to order the boat down again that evening, to return for him the next day. Six journeys back and forth instead of two, purely to indulge his new friends. There is no record of how the boatmen felt about all those extra hours of hard rowing.
Then on 10 December 1790 there came a seriously sinister event. Phillip’s convict gamekeeper John McEntire was badly wounded in a surprise attack in the bush.
18 DECEMBER 1790 HEADHUNT
In pursuit of his heroic policy of conciliation Phillip had demonstrated himself time and again to be a singularly level-headed man, but when McEntire was half-carried, half-dragged by his two companions into the settlement, he seemed level-headed no longer.
McEntire had been out hunting twenty kilometres from the settlement with three other men. They had been sleeping through the heat of the afternoon in a bough hut (an interesting accommodation to local conditions) when they were woken by a noise, and when they investigated four Australian men leapt up and ran away. McEntire, recognising one of them, told his companions to wait, laid his own gun aside, called out to the men, and began walking after them. Then one of the Australians turned, jumped onto a log, coolly scanned the (now unarmed) whites, and hurled his spear at the gamekeeper, with terrible effect. His three friends barely managed to drag him, bleeding heavily with the spear buried in his chest, back to the settlement.
It was, transparently, an ambush. If the sleek wooden spear used for spearing the governor had done little internal damage, this spear was murderous. It penetrated deeply into McEntire’s body before the point jammed into a rib, but it would never emerge cleanly. Heavily barbed, with sharp fragments of red stone attached to the barbs by resin, it was designed to shatter inside the body. This spearhead could not be withdrawn without massive injury, infection and death. Colbee, having examined the wound, told the surgeons not to try to remove it. He also declared that the gamekeeper would surely die; which, after lingering for miserable weeks and after a phantom recovery, he did.
Phillip was persuaded that this killing was political, not personal, largely because McEntire, a Catholic, swore on what was to be his deathbed that he had never wronged an Australian. Recalling Baneelon’s loathing of the man, I think he had done something, and something Australians regarded as deeply vile. As gamekeeper, McEntire was free to move through the bush and could offer insult as he chose. He was also constantly poaching game, using a gun, that most unsporting weapon, to compensate for his lack of stalking skills, and so driving game away from more skilled hunters.
Australians around the settlement immediately identified the tribe by the spear, and named the culprit: a man called Pemulwuy, from the Botany Bay tribe.
Phillip was puzzled by the identification. He knew the Botany Bay people had been dangerous ever since the days of La Pérouse, but Baneelon had assured him that during his recent visit to Botany Bay he had effected a reconciliation: that ‘they had danced, and that one of the tribe had sung a song, the subject of which was his house, the governor, and the white men of Sydney’. He also told Phillip that both the Botany Bay tribe and the Cameragal had agreed to throw no more spears at the white men. Phillip also knew there had been men and women from Botany Bay among the visitors to the governor’s yard on the day of Baneelon’s attack on the girl. Had Baneelon simply overestimated or exaggerated his influence? Or was Pemulwuy leading a break-away movement committed to a policy of confrontation? Phillip did not know. Even more disquietingly, while Colbee and Baneelon had both earnestly promised to deliver up the assassin, neither showed the le
ast inclination to do so. Within a day of the ambush Colbee was off amusing himself at South Head, while Baneelon vanished for more than a week on ritual business among the Cameragal.
This time Phillip had the name of the individual perpetrator, but this time he abandoned his determination to punish only individuals. This time the whole tribe would pay. The policy change was due in part to an authentic anthropological insight. It was tribal strength these warriors cared about, and diminution in tribal strength would shake them as nothing else would: ‘Nothing but a severe example, and the fear of having all the tribes who resided near the settlement destroyed, would have the desired effect.’ Phillip also knew that the British would not discriminate between either individuals or tribes if any more whites were attacked. And he was weary of the increasing number of unprovoked assaults on inoffensive people moving through the bush. He had hoped the ‘coming in’ had put an end to the violence. Now, after months of tolerance, he thought it ‘absolutely necessary’ to put a stop to it.
He therefore decided to send out a punitive expedition against the Botany Bay tribe, identified as the ‘principal aggressors’ against the whites largely because Baneelon had told him so. Two men were to be captured and brought back for public execution. The expedition was also to bring back the heads of ten men—any ten men—in the sacks provided, presumably for public display. All spears seized were to be broken, and left on the ground. Phillip was adamant that women, children and other possessions were not to be tampered with. He seems not to have wondered how the women and children would survive, with their hunters and protectors dead.
The man he chose to lead the expedition was Captain Watkin Tench.
Tench was somehow able to persuade Phillip to reduce the punitive levy to six heads or six captives taken, with two to be hanged on delivery, and set off at the front of what he calls, with fine deadpan humour, a ‘terrific procession’ of more than fifty men at 4 a.m. on the morning of 14 December. The men were in their heavy woollen uniforms (remember Sydney’s climate in December), and draped with provisions and muskets and ropes for the prisoners, along with bags for the heads and hatchets for the head-taking. Tench continues, still gloriously solemn: ‘After having walked in various directions until four o’clock in the afternoon without seeing a native, we halted for the night.’ The next morning they got lost, got found again by stumbling onto the sea-shore, and sighted five ‘Indians’ ‘whom we attempted to surround’—and who promptly ran away. Tench reports that ‘we’ (all fifty of them?) ‘pursued, but a contest between heavily-armed Europeans, fettered by ligatures, and naked unencumbered Indians, was too unequal to last long’. True, but it is a pleasure to contemplate. The weary men then tried to creep up on ‘a little village’ of five huts, only to see its occupants leaving at speed by canoe.
Tench had been instructed to refrain from all conversation with Australians, even friendly ones: this was to be a terrific expedition indeed, with its punitive purpose grimly evident. He was accordingly embarrassed when the soldiery got back to their baggage to spot a solitary man tranquilly spear-fishing in shallow water about 300 metres from the beach. Tench decided to ignore him—after all, the man was too far away to kill or capture—but the Australian hallooed cheerfully and came loping up to the troop. It was their old friend Colbee, who ‘joined us at once with his wonted familiarity and unconcern’. When they asked where Pemulwuy was, Colbee waved vaguely towards the south, and said he was long gone.
Colbee then ate, drank and snoozed along with his friends until they set off in the early afternoon for the trek back to the settlement, spending another tormented night beside a sandfly- and mosquito-ridden swamp on the way, while he, presumably, went back to his fishing.
Or perhaps not. Tench informs us that this was Colbee’s second meal in twenty-four hours at British expense. Back in the settlement the day before he had announced his intention of pursuing the punitive expedition, to see what fell out. Failing to dissuade him, anxious that he not be embroiled, but unwilling to use force to restrain him now that trust was the order of the day, Phillip decided to nobble him: despite the shortage of rations he would feed him so gargantuan a meal he would be put safely to post-prandial sleep. Colbee ate hugely (a whole large snapper), called for more (‘at least five pounds of bread and beef’), leapt up, rubbed his stomach, and strode away to catch up with the fun. Again we see black laughter rising like smoke from the page.
The hot, weary and well-bitten expedition trudged back to Sydney, only to be ordered out again a week later with the unfortunate Tench again in command. This time a slightly smaller force began the march in moonlight, to avoid the worst heat of the day, with the aim of surprising the same village they had failed to surprise the week before. Leaving their heavy knapsacks behind and with their cartouche boxes tied on the tops of their heads to keep them dry, they managed to cross the fords of the northern arm of Botany Bay. Then they came upon a creek. It was wide, but with the tide out it looked reasonably dry—until they were well embarked on the crossing, when the stuff under their feet turned to quicksand, or, more correctly, to slow mud. It was only after terrifying struggles and the real threat of drowning that a soldier cried out for those not yet stuck to cut boughs from trees and throw them to the men (now including Tench) who were sinking. They pulled the last of the men free with the ropes brought to bind their intended captives. Immersion in the mud had rendered half of their weapons unserviceable.
Undefeated, they divided into three parties, and half an hour before dawn rushed the target ‘village’—to find it uninhabited. It looked to have been abandoned for a long time. And then, with some of the men exhausted and barely able to keep up, they had to make a dash back to their knapsacks and provisions to beat the incoming tide. They wandered about through another dawn before returning, muddy and grumpy, to Sydney. This time they had not sighted a single Australian.
The punitive expedition displayed a large element of farce. But a dangerous step had been taken. Phillip had been told by witnesses he knew to be less than reliable that a Botany Bay warrior called Pemulwuy had speared the unsavoury McEntire. He had proceeded to convert an unproven individual charge into a collective capital offence—for Australians. In time settlers would seize on his example. From now on, Australians suspected of anti-social acts would be outside the protection of British law. Are we then looking (as is often claimed) at the birth of a racist policy?
I doubt it. If we look closely we notice several odd things about that famous expedition. First, the formally authorised violence was hedged about by a bristle of restrictions. The orders made clear that soldiers alone were permitted to fire on Australians, and then only if directly ordered to do so or in self-defence. Phillip had no intention of tolerating, much less encouraging, white vigilantism. The soldiers were also instructed that at all times the specific reason for the punitive action had to be made clear, which, given the state of verbal communication at this stage of contact, was a tall order. He also reminded everyone within earshot that all Australian property, so often pilfered by convicts and soldiers for sale back in Britain, was sacrosanct, and enjoyed the full protection of British law.
The expedition was also out of character. Phillip had borne his own spearing three months before with admirable anthropological cool. While he had not the least doubt that he and his compatriots were the legitimate new lords of the soil, he was ready to gamble a great deal of time, patience and personal suffering to bring about friendship with the local tribes. He had been anxious to persuade the people to come into the settlement, to live under British law, and to absorb the benefits of British civilisation: indeed he twice resorted to kidnapping to secure a go-between to bring about a peaceful outcome, and against the odds the extreme gamble worked: he had bagged the wily Baneelon. He had also hoped a rapprochement would put an end to the Australians’ apparently casual spearing of convicts. Seventeen Britishers, nearly all of them unarmed, had been speared since first contact, some of them fatally, yet to this point
Phillip had steadfastly refused to retaliate, insisting that the attacks must have been provoked by convict misconduct.
With the McEntire spearing he knew his strategy had failed. A friendly accommodation had been reached with the local Australians only a handful of weeks before, yet that friendship had not put an end to the violence. And this attack was notably more sinister than those before it, being a deliberate and murderous assault on a man skilled in the bush, and who normally carried a gun. (The British took comfort in believing that Australians were terrified of guns.) McEntire had also been acting under Phillip’s orders when he was attacked: he was ‘his’ man. Furthermore, in Phillip’s thinking the gamekeeper had a perfect right to be where he was, hunting game in the bush. Phillip’s Australian friends had named the spearman, made soothing noises about bringing him in—and shown not the least inclination to do so. Justice had to be done; and both Australians and British had to be brought to respect the rule of law. So what to do?
What Phillip did was order out the expedition—and select Watkin Tench to lead it. Tench was famously sympathetic to the local people. Phillip also condescended to ask Tench’s advice regarding the reprisals. As we would expect, Tench softened the terms, urging that the British should content themselves with capturing six men, some of whom would suffer exemplary capital punishment in public, while others could be released when their lesson in British justice was well-learnt. Phillip refined Tench’s suggestions further: if the agreed tally of six men could not be captured, six were to be shot, while if six were captured he would hang two and send the rest to Norfolk Island. The sum was straightforward. If Tench used muskets six men might die; if he refrained from using muskets—if the focus was on capture, not killing—only two. Phillip knew his man. Tench would be loath to shoot.
Dancing with Strangers Page 17