Dancing with Strangers

by Inga Clendinnen

  It seems that what is judged reprehensible violence is a cultural matter. We are disconcerted that men like Watkin Tench or John White—men we judge to be kind, men we have come to like, men who in some sense we think of as forebears—could watch those hangings and floggings unmoved. Australians were horrified, too.

  All we can be sure of is that after such sanctioned displays, whether of flogging or wife-bashing, both sides were left goggling at each other across a cultural chasm. Every society is adept at looking past its own forms of violence, and reserving its outrage for the violence of others.

  20 JANUARY–FEBRUARY 1791 POTATO THIEVES

  I have taken time investigating the likely thinking behind Phillip’s two punitive expeditions because a man’s reputation depends on it, and reputation is all the dead possess. However, while I have little doubt that his actions were calculated to achieve the outcomes I have suggested, they may have had a psychological dimension as well.

  By ‘coming in’ the Australians had lost both mystery and status. They could no longer be considered even potentially useful to the colony’s well-being: instead they were a present burden on it. Over the last few weeks Phillip had suffered them as engaging but unruly guests who had disappointed his early hopes. They were also taking up altogether too much of his time, and intruding in the well-guarded quiet of his house. And, with increased familiarity, their behaviour only seemed more baffling.

  We have all felt the exhaustion which can suddenly invade when we are navigating the uncertainties of living among foreigners. Phillip had a talent for careful watching, reflection and (even more unusual) a degree of self-scrutiny, as when he realised that his own inept persistence had contributed to his near-fatal spearing. But now he was a sick man, often in pain. The cruel December heat was made crueller by the fires the Australians had set to burn all around. The British were running out of food: there was no sign of the longed-for ships; as supplies ran out his people were being forced into native ways, making fishing lines from the stringy bark of trees, and the soldiers sometimes drilled barefoot. The colony for which he was uniquely responsible seemed to have been abandoned by those people at home duty-bound to sustain it. The emptiness of the harbour bore heavily on everyone, but it must have borne heaviest on Phillip.

  He sustained a professional calm in public, as he had been trained to do, but we cannot infer from this man’s public performance the dynamics of his inner life. Given his situation, given his isolation, it is possible he was suddenly disgusted with the whole tense business of studying alien actions, and the struggle to interpret alien intentions. The calculation of the gamekeeper’s ambush may have liberated him into violence: a violence which would obliterate those exhausting ambiguities and the endless puzzling over motives. We have seen the refraction of a similar frustration in Baneelon’s outbreaks of fury at Phillip’s refusal to respond to what Baneelon saw as clear obligations owed between friends and allies: the swift and unequivocal lending of direct physical aid against enemies coupled with a respectful appreciation of one’s ally’s autonomous authority. Why should Phillip not have grown weary too? And the summer had barely begun.

  What happened next might have been trivial anywhere except in the famished colony. One night in late December three Australians who had been ‘pretty constant visitors at Sydney for some weeks’, and who should therefore have known better, were caught pilfering potatoes from a settler’s garden. Worse, when the irate owner tried to chase them away one of them hurled a fish spear at him. The convict crime of garden-robbing, punished by major floggings, deprivations of rations and, if accompanied by violence, by death, was now being practised by Australians on British territory. Phillip was also informed that some of the Australians frequenting the settlement area had turned from begging to extortion; that they might burst in on anyone who happened to be alone in a hut, and demand food. This was not what Phillip had had in mind.

  Accordingly he sent a sergeant and six soldiers to apprehend the potato-stealers; then rounded up a few officers and followed himself, which suggests the depth of his concern. Soon they came upon a fire with the two men and a couple of women and a child sitting around it (roasting the purloined potatoes?). There was a flurry of confused action, a club, thought at the time to be a spear, was thrown; muskets were fired. Both men, one of them bleeding, escaped, but the women and the child were captured and brought back to the governor’s house. There, to Phillip’s distaste (he had hoped for more sensibility), the captives settled down comfortably in a shed to sleep, and went off next morning after their breakfast of bread and fish.

  Throughout these events the heat was killing. We know that on 27 December the mercury stood at 32 degrees Celsius in the shade.

  The governor’s feelings were further abraded when Baneelon, just back from a tooth-evulsion initiation ceremony with the Cameragals, his sworn enemies on the night of the locked door only a fortnight before, but now his best friends, cheerfully acknowledged that he had slept alongside the very warrior who had speared the governor. He seemed to have no recollection of his promises to avenge the spearing. Phillip must have felt himself wounded afresh, especially as this amnesia was being displayed by a man he needed to trust. This was also the night that Barangaroo appeared at the governor’s table in her ceremonial paint, and the girl who had placed herself under his protection chose to take her worsted nightcap and rejoin her people.

  With the New Year came worse news. Baneelon, chancing upon two colonists fishing from their boat, had confiscated their catch. He did not use violence, but he had his spears in his canoe along with his wife and sister, while the anglers were unarmed. Yet when Phillip charged Baneelon with the fish shakedown, he blandly denied it. Australians denied guilt as a matter of course, because both the degree of guilt and the limits of responsibility in the particular case were matters to be settled by negotiation, or, if sufficiently serious, by ordeal, but those routine denials, made even when ‘guilt’ seemed transparent, were shocking to the British, who placed a high value on honesty and oaths. Phillip must have been outraged by that flat denial. When he confronted Baneelon with his victims he thought that Baneelon merely blustered, but fortunately for us he was careful to report just what was said. Baneelon, said Phillip,

  entered into a long conversation, the purpose of which was an endeavour to justify himself, and this he did with an insolence which explained itself very clearly. He frequently mentioned the man who had been wounded, and threatened revenge; but, appearing to recollect himself, he offered the governor his hand. When it was not accepted, he grew violent, and seemed inclined to make use of his stick.

  The governor responded by calling a guard into the room.

  We think we hear Baneelon the clan warrior speaking here, possibly even placatingly. He knew, as Phillip at this point did not, that the wounded potato-stealer had died of his wound. A warrior was dead: there was therefore a right to compensation, on which the catch of fish was a down-payment. But the man had provoked the wound which killed him, so further compensation would be a matter of negotiation. Unsurprisingly, Phillip heard Baneelon’s explosion of angry, urgent speech as ‘the height of savage insolence’ which would have been ‘immediately punished in any other person’.

  Not only Baneelon’s anger but his distress was clear. He would threaten violence one moment and make to shake the governor’s hand the next, calling him Be-anna, ‘Father’, as he had in the innocent days when neither man saw the cultural chasm yawning at their feet. Phillip, touched by the recurrence of that Be-anna—shouted from some distance, as was customary in Australian public statements of grievance—responded as an Englishman desiring conciliation would. He beckoned him closer. And Baneelon reacted as if mortally insulted—because his formal recitation of legitimate wrongs had been discourteously interrupted? He turned, left at a furious run, and as he passed the (unattended) wheelwright’s shop he dashed in, snatched up a hatchet, and made off with it.

  Was this last gesture the wanton insult, the
direct blow to the face, Phillip took it to be? Or was the hatchet the second instalment of compensation due for the death of a man, and taken by right and by force? Their poor shared words were inadequate to sustain discussions of moral and legal maters at this level of delicacy. It was only after Baneelon had made his furious exit that the governor learnt that this had indeed been a matter of death. John White, accompanied by Nanbaree and Imeerawanyee, had gone out to look for the wounded man. They found his corpse instead. It had not been buried or burnt, but lay with the face carefully concealed but the body covered only by a few branches, perhaps because the spirit had not yet been avenged. A fire burned nearby.

  With Baneelon’s flight the tragedy of mistaken meanings was, for the moment, over; but the affectionate bonds forged between the two men during Baneelon’s captivity, when each could act out his own understanding of right and proper conduct under the benevolent, uncomprehending gaze of the other, were shredded. From now on both men would remain persuaded of the righteousness of their own cause, and despair at the wilful opacity of the other. From now on, negotiation on seriously divisive political issues would surely fail.

  There were immediate consequences. Henceforth no Australian was to be permitted to go to the western point of the cove, where the potato thefts had occurred. Now the colony would be demarcated on racial lines, with the appearance of an Australian on what had previously been shared ground defined as a defiance of British law.

  Meanwhile John McEntire, after a momentary ‘recovery’, died, just as the Australians said he would, the autopsy revealing the full malevolence of the spear which had killed him. Water was dangerously short; the weather continued close and sultry. The Australians were firing the scrub for miles around, so that men coughed and wept in the smoke, and parakeets and fruit bats fell from the choking sky. Worry over depleting provisions had forced Phillip into a bad bargain with the rapacious master of a Dutch vessel who was to ferry the men of the shipwrecked Sirius back to England, which would mean the loss of their company, but a saving on supplies.

  A month later, after inquiring anxiously at the fishing boats as to the governor’s mood—and after earnestly swearing another man had taken the hatchet, which was as close as he could come to an apology—Baneelon returned to the governor’s yard, apparently chastened. He was given the usual bread and fish, but he was not permitted to enter the house. Phillip tells us that he ‘appeared to feel his degradation’, although he ‘repeated his visits very often’, probably through need. The British had been providing most of his and his family’s food for the best part of three months. With mutual trust perhaps terminally damaged, a potentially fatal dependency had been born.

  Baneelon’s fall from grace appeared not to trouble his friends. During his disappearance Australians had continued to make themselves at home in the governor’s yard. In atomistic Australian politics, quarrels of this kind were personal matters. His rival Colbee, who might have thought to replace him as hinge-man with the British, brought his wife and a baby not more than two or three days old the ten kilometres from Botany Bay, where Daringa had borne her, to present the child to the governor at Government House two days before Christmas 1790. Daringa commandeered a hair from an English officer’s head to wrap around the little finger on the baby’s left hand to effect its amputation through attrition, and when the traditional method worked too slowly, she called upon the surgeon to finish the job with a knife.

  There are other glimpses of the casual mingling of British and local lives during that long summer. On 28 February 1791 an English cutter was hit by a rain squall when out fishing. It filled with water and listed, the crew members who could swim made their escape, and one who could not was saved by a few Australians, Baneelon prominent among them. The Australians then salvaged the boat and its gear. We are casually told that Baneelon’s sister, also in the fishing boat, ‘had [her] two children on her shoulders in a moment, and swam on shore with them’, while a young girl companion made it on her own.

  What was this little band of females doing in the British working boat in the first place? This was a specialist fishing boat, skippered by the convict William Bryant, a fisherman by trade, who had been appointed full-time fisherman to the hungry settlement. He lost that position early in 1789 for selling fish on his own account, being rewarded for his enterprise with a hundred lashes and his and his family’s eviction from their comfortable hut, but he continued to work in the boat and was soon in charge again. There can only be one boss in a fishing boat: a wisdom which transcends place, time and the dictates of justice. Why did he clutter valuable space with a native woman and three children, two of them infants? I suspect he had formed a fisherman’s alliance with Baneelon’s sister, who exchanged her local knowledge regarding fish movements and local habits in return for transport to the less accessible fishing spots. Naturally she took her children with her, along with a young girl learning this essential female craft. There must have been many such trans-cultural arrangements inside the colony, all of which we miss if we keep our eyes too firmly fixed on the governor’s yard.

  (Bryant was accustomed to having young children around, having two of his own. He was also a man of resource: a month after the swamping he, his wife, his children and four other convicts escaped in a six-oared boat, well provisioned by systematic theft, and set out for Batavia sixteen or seventeen hundred leagues away. They made it to Timor, where the Dutch arrested them. Bryant had good cause to risk so desperate a remedy. He was convinced he had served out his term, but Phillip, lacking the papers necessary to authenticate his claim, refused to acknowledge his change of status.)

  Baneelon’s rescue work after the capsize brought him back into favour, or at least through the governor’s door and into his house. But now I suspect a new, if subterranean, political contest was emerging. Phillip noted, wryly, that ‘in consequence of this reconciliation, the number of visitors greatly increased, the governor’s yard being their head quarters’. This suggests Baneelon was making an all-out effort to consolidate his position. It was essential that he continue to demonstrate that he could extract special privileges from the whites, which could then be deployed to his own and his compatriots’ advantage—that he had the governor in his pocket. He was about to make another determined effort to inveigle Phillip more deeply into a kin relationship and possibly to establish a more secure claim to land. Barangaroo was at last pregnant, and to him. He would involve the governor in the birth of his first child.

  So the slow days passed. Coping with the Australians might absorb a great deal of Phillip’s time, but it constituted only a fraction of his work and worries. Rations had to be reduced yet again; the sudden downpour which let us glimpse native women and children together with British convicts in the same sinking boat had no more than mitigated the drought. He had little leisure, and less privacy. We have only a few glimpses of how he spent his few moments of relaxation during those hot months, and they are touching. Phillip had chosen to take other local guests into his house. He was already caring for a dingo pup and three spoilt baby kangaroos; later he would manage to keep a tribe of baby emus alive for five weeks. Now a female fruit bat, another victim of the unnatural summer heat, had joined his household. It would ‘hang by one leg a whole day without changing its position’, he tells us, ‘with its breast neatly covered by one of its wings, [and] it ate whatever was offered to it, lapping out of the hand like a cat’. Phillip remarks that it was especially partial to boiled rice. Feeling his quiet little bat softly lapping his palm must have been one of the governor’s few reliable pleasures.

  There was also the possibility of legitimate respite from domestic eruptions and the determined criminality of settlers and convicts. It was part of the governor’s duty to map new areas for possible settlement. He could always escape domestic troubles, and go out on an expedition.

  21 APRIL 1791 EXPEDITION

  One of Phillip’s officers’ most cherished duties was to explore ‘into the interior parts of the count
ry’, and the governor, despite his age, despite the burdens of office, despite his uncertain health, usually chose to go with them, along with most of the colony’s senior men. The expeditions were tough going, with every man save the governor having to lug his own provisions, the land baffling to the eye and punishing underfoot and the outcomes always less than impressive, but compared with the anxious tedium of life within the settlement they were fine adventures. The left-at-homes were accordingly resentful.

  Arthur Bowes Smyth, the chronically disaffected surgeon of the Lady Penrhyn, recorded his vehement disapproval of one ‘excursion up the country’ Phillip chose to take a mere five weeks after landfall, when ‘Anarchy & Confusion’ prevailed in the infant settlement, with the chaplain sick and a sailor gone missing, the natives brewing mischief, and the ‘Audacity of the Convicts both Men & Women arrived at such a pitch as…not to be equalled, I believe, by any set of Villains in any other Spot upon the Globe’. This is Bowes Smyth’s curt entry for Sunday, 2 April 1788: ‘This morning. Early the Governor set out in a Boat wt. his Aid de Camp [sic] &ca. upon another Excurtion up the Country, & means to stay 4 or 5 days.’ On the 9th: ‘The Governor return’d in perfect health, and as wise as he set out, having made no discovery of the smallest importance.’

  Less than a week later, on 15 April 1788, Phillip was off again to explore the rivers and lagoons behind Manly Cove. He arrived home on the evening of the eighteenth only to be off again on the twenty-second, this time provisioned for seven days out, with ‘every individual carrying his own allowance of bread, beef, rum, and water’, along with ‘the additional weight of spare shoes, shirts, trowsers, together with a great coat, or scotch plaid, for the purpose of sleeping in’. The six soldiers in the entourage were left to shoulder the tents and poles and the two camp kettles. Assistant Surgeon Worgan, who much enjoyed his own less ambitious excursions, commented: ‘Had you seen them, they would put you in Mind of a Gang of Travelling Gypsies.’ And this raggle-taggle crew was parading itself within a house-of-cards hierarchy which set high value on genteel appearances, gentlemen’s exemption from sweaty labour, and high-minded devotion to local duty. Worgan and Bowes Smyth were possibly the more disaffected because Surgeon White was often a happy member of such sorties, fleeing cramped misery and rotting bodies to wander about potting exotic birds, ‘for science’, he would have said. (It turned out to be a particularly arduous venture, with the governor suffering his first attack of the acute pains in the lower body which would disable him before he left the colony.)