Dancing with Strangers

by Inga Clendinnen

  As the colony’s circumstances deteriorated, exploration became not a pleasant if arduous duty, but a necessity, undertaken in the hope of finding food for immediate survival. Tench reports that on 2 April 1791, with the gardens ‘destitute of vegetables’ after a long drought, rations were reduced to ‘three pounds of rice, three pounds of flour and three pounds of pork per week’ per man. In mid-April, Phillip led a large expedition out from Rose Hill to explore the land around the Hawkesbury.

  The plan was to cross the Hawkesbury River opposite Richmond Hill and settle once and for all the question of whether the ‘Hawkesbury’ and the ‘Nepean’ were the one river. This time, fortunately for us, Tench was a member of the team, which comprised the three senior officials in the colony, Phillip, Collins and White; Collins’ servant; three gamekeepers; Tench and Tench’s friend and expert navigator William Dawes; two sergeants, eight privates and two Australians: Colbee and young Boladeree, husband to the rescued girl, and a likeable, easy-going fellow who was now more or less living at the governor’s house. (Baneelon, returned to qualified favour, had been anxious to come, but Tench tells us ‘his wife would not permit it’.) The British wanted the Australians along for their local knowledge, their bushcraft and their hunting skills, and they cheerfully agreed when they were promised plentiful provisions and that the expedition would not stay out too long. The two enjoyed special privileges. Every man except the governor was burdened with a full knapsack with provisions, a gun, blanket and canteen. So heavy were the packs that on the first day out a soldier collapsed under the hard going, and a friend ‘strong as a packhorse’ had to carry his knapsack for him. Meanwhile the Australians skipped merrily along with their little knapsacks, ‘laughing to excess’ when an unhappy Britisher stumbled or fell, as they very often did. ‘Our perplexities,’ Tench dourly observed, ‘afforded them an endless fund of merriment and derision.’

  Expectations regarding the Australians’ dazzling bushcraft were disappointed early. When only a very short distance out from Rose Hill they confessed themselves hopelessly lost, and if asked for ‘Rose Hill’ would unerringly point in the wrong direction. As the days passed they clung ever closer to Dawes, because only Dawes, with his compass and his step-counter, seemed to know where he was. Neither did they fulfil their intended role as hunters enriching the explorers’ diet with fresh meat. Initially they had been ready to swim for the ducks the British guns occasionally brought down, but then they went on strike, pointing out that the British ate the ducks while they had to content themselves with the odd crow. If the British wanted ducks, they could swim for them.

  Nor were they accomplished campers. Tench noted that on arrival at a chosen camp site the Australians were as lilies of the field. ‘Their laziness appeared strongly when we halted, for they refused to draw water or cleave wood to make a fire; but as soon as it was kindled (having first well stuffed themselves) they lay down before it and fell asleep.’ Meanwhile the British, having made and fed the fire, broken out the rations, cooked and cleaned up afterwards, had to set about the business of erecting their shelters for the night. A nomad’s streamlined travelling style has its advantages.

  On the third day out, with the British exhausted and their enthusiasm well blunted, they were supremely irritated when after a particularly gruelling march their ‘sable companions’ on no grounds whatever exploded into a wild fit of high spirits, eating hugely, staging imaginary fights, hunting imaginary kangaroos, dancing and leaping about, and taking special delight in miming the more spectacular British slips and stumbles of the day ‘with inimitable drollery’. We hear Stanner’s sepulchral murmur of the Australian talent for ‘jollifying humdrum’.

  And they complained, quietly at first, then more vociferously as the days passed, as they were taken further and further away from their home territory. They also showed themselves to be completely lacking in British-style fortitude. ‘Where’s Rose Hill? Where?’ they wailed, as the deprivations of the camp diet and the terror of alien country depressed them ever more darkly. They had expected the expedition to turn up opportunities for serious hunting, especially the ducks and kangaroos they rarely tasted at home. They had not allowed for British single-mindedness: Phillip reported that while ‘ducks were seen in great numbers…the party seldom got a shot’ as they kept up their gruelling pace. Both Australians kept warning of the dangerous hostility of local natives, and were confounded when the people encountered were unfailingly friendly. One genial old man paddling his canoe upstream to the best site for collecting hatchet stones, and already known to Colbee, went so far as to quit his canoe to guide the travellers to an easier walking track. Then he and his son camped snugly beside them with his little family just over the river, probably because, having to pass through other people’s territory, they felt safer in the company of the powerful strangers. His tribe specialised in possum-hunting, with the men thinking nothing of shinning up trees which rose twenty metres or more before they began to branch, and the old man provided an impromptu demonstration of his tree-climbing skills in exchange for a biscuit. Tench remembers him ‘laughing immoderately’ as he leapt up the sleek straight trunk, chopping toe-holds as he went.

  That night the old man and his son performed a ritual ‘curing’ on Colbee, drawing out the pain of an old wound, with the senior man rewarded with Colbee’s worsted nightcap and a good part of his supper. Then, after most of the party except the watchful Phillip had fallen asleep, Colbee gave the old man a detailed account of Sydney Cove and Rose Hill. Phillip noted that ‘in this history, names were as particularly attended to as if their hearers had been intimately acquainted with every person who was mentioned’, and we wonder whether this information was part of a political transaction. (Was the ‘curing’ indeed impromptu, or had the apparently fortuitous meeting somehow been arranged?)

  In his account Tench transformed hardships and confusions into a comedy of human foibles, white and black. The more analytic Phillip told the same story, but he noticed quite different elements within it, and again took the opportunity to reflect on what he saw as disturbing anomalies in the Australians’ conduct. Why had Colbee and Boladeree insisted that every one of the tribes through whose territory they passed was ‘bad’? Why had they set about demolishing a little hunting hut they came upon, and why were they ‘much displeased’ when he stopped them? Phillip could understand the caution—but why the aggression? When he had asked them to make contact with a solitary hunter heard hallooing for his dog—a hunter whose small son bravely approached the whites while the father stood watching from the trees—they urgently requested ‘the serjeant, in whom they always placed great confidence, to take his gun and go with them’; a request Phillip naturally rejected. Why would they want a man with a gun?

  He was also puzzled by the affability, even the generosity, of Australians once met with and properly ‘introduced’—the affability, we might assume, of good hosts whose proprietary rights had been acknowledged by passing guests. Phillip could not be expected to infer the strict territoriality of these apparently casual wanderers, any more than he could have comprehended the contrary pulls of the pleasures and the dangers of travel, as when his Australian friends who had been so eager to make the boat trip with him to Rose Hill then fretted to go home. To his credit, he did not dismiss their fluctuating moods as simply foolish or feckless, but carefully recorded the apparent anomalies in their conduct with the patience of the anthropologist he was learning to be.

  Phillip was also learning that ‘reliable’ Australians might have their own agendas. Baneelon’s furious outbursts continued to bewilder him, but he was ready to risk an interpretation of what Colbee and Boladeree were up to on this wearisome expedition. The pair:

  had at first supposed that Governor Phillip and his party came from the settlement to kill ducks and patagarongs [kangaroos]; but finding they did not stop at the places where those animals were seen in any numbers, they were at a loss to know why the journey was taken; and though they had hit
herto behaved exceedingly well, yet, as they now began to be tired of a journey which yielded them no sort of advantage, they endeavoured to persuade the governor to return, saying it was a great way to the place where the stone hatchets were to be procured, and that they must come in a boat.

  The detail Phillip provides lets us develop his interpretation a little further. These fish-eaters had looked forward not only to great hunting, but possibly great fighting, too, as they pushed into unfamiliar territory with the armed whites at their side. But if neither fresh meat nor raiding was the object, then these most peculiar people must surely be after hatchet stones. Why else walk your feet off and risk ambush blundering around in someone else’s territory?

  The haze of confusions attending this expedition have allowed us to glimpse something of a crucial matter normally veiled from us: the nature of Australian attachment to the land. Let me offer another accidental fragment from the record. In February 1791 the Supply had gone to Norfolk Island carrying a detachment of the New South Wales Corps. They took with them a little Australian boy called Bondel. He was an orphan: his father ‘had been killed in battle and his mother bitten in two by a shark’, Tench tells us, and the child had become deeply attached to Captain Hill, commander of the detachment. When the Supply returned a few weeks later Tench reports that his kinfolk eagerly asked after him, ‘and on being told that the place he had gone to afforded plenty of birds and other good fare, innumerable volunteers presented themselves to follow him, so great was their confidence in us and so little hold on them had the amor patriae’.

  ‘So little hold on them had the amor patriae.’ So little love for their homeland. A tempting conclusion, but a false one. These were a people accustomed to journeying, especially when food was short—and then returning, as Baneelon would later return from distant England. His Australian companion would die there—distant places were known to be dangerous, and rife with sorcery—but their allure was powerful, so long as ultimate return was guaranteed.

  To return to the expedition. Again, two quite different ways of understanding the world had walked side by side, had amused and annoyed each other, had eaten, talked and slept alongside each other, each having only the slightest comprehension of the other’s motives and expectations.

  On one issue, however, the Australians’ views were transparent. They were tired of the hardships of the journey, and deeply aware of the novel comforts waiting them back in Sydney. When it began to rain their disaffection was complete: Colbee said his wife and child would be crying for him, and Boladeree ‘lost all patience when the rain began, telling the governor that there were good houses at Sydney and Rose Hill, but that they had no house now, no fish, no melon, of which fruit the natives were very fond’. Phillip believed they would have abandoned the expedition altogether had they been sure they could have found their way home alone. They were vastly relieved when the weary party turned back after only five days out (they had carried provisions for ten), and with the mystery of the rivers still unsolved. So ended British fantasies of exploiting intrepid Australian bushmanship.

  A month later Tench and Dawes, accompanied only by a ‘trusty sergeant’ and a private soldier, set off again and settled the matter of the rivers once and for all. The two turned out to be one.

  JUNE–DECEMBER 1791 CRIME & PUNISHMENT: BOLADEREE

  Phillip returned from his expedition refreshed, but with his problems unsolved. With the colony still hovering dangerously close to famine and the drought continuing, rations had to be reduced yet again, and while a sudden abundance of fish at the head of the harbour drew some Australians away from the settlement, their broils continued to disturb Phillip’s peace.

  On 8 May 1791 Baneelon and Colbee and their wives had taken their usual wine and dishes of tea at the governor’s house, and were thought to have retired to Baneelon’s house at the point. Then in the dead of night Phillip was woken by the screams of the girl he had rescued from Baneelon’s vengeance, who was sleeping in a shed in the governor’s yard. Baneelon, Colbee and two other men had hidden in the yard before the gate was locked for the night, and now were trying to break into the shed, with the intention, the girl said to her rescuers, of raping her. To avoid more trouble the guard had sensibly let the would-be kidnappers escape over the fence, but Phillip was, understandably, furious, both about the deliberate deception and the disgraceful motive. ‘These men,’ he coldly observed, ‘had left their own wives by their fires.’

  When the pair next came to the governor’s house Colbee blamed Baneelon; when the governor rebuked Baneelon, he sulked. Nor was he in the least penitent: when Phillip told him that ‘the soldiers would shoot him if he ever came again to take any woman away’, Baneelon angrily replied that if they tried he would spear them.

  Bewilderingly, Baneelon seemed to think he had right on his side. He also said he was hungry, indicating his growing dependence on British supplies. The governor, not wanting him taking revenge for any further humiliation, ordered him fed. He also warned him that if he tried to invade the house or yard in the night again he would be shot, and in his hearing ordered his guard to fire on anyone attempting to scale the palings at night. From that time on Phillip also discouraged women from sleeping in the yard without their husbands, so closing the first women’s refuge in Sydney.

  What had Baneelon been up to? He and Colbee had not heedlessly tumbled back in lust and in their cups: Phillip kept an abstemious house, except for remarkable occasions like King’s Birthdays. Baneelon had also recruited those two extra men. I think Colbee was telling no more than the truth when he ‘blamed Baneelon’. In my view this was a raid organised by Baneelon to demonstrate his continuing authority over the person of the girl improperly removed from his jurisdiction. (Did he also expect her to be so conscious of her transgressions that she would submit to being hoisted over the wall in silence?) Her abduction by night from under the governor’s nose and her subsequent gang-rape would also have economically demonstrated the autonomy of Australian law, and would have won Baneelon significant prestige in the concealed world of tribal politics. Had it come off it would have been a warrior feat worthy of being memorialised in song, or even by the award of a special name. The ‘deception’ which so upset Phillip, then the silent slither through the night and over the fence, would only have added lustre in Australian eyes, where stealth and courage were celebrated, especially when demonstrated in the dangerous dark. In failure Baneelon remained unapologetic, and, as his confused, angry conversation with Phillip suggests, intransigent regarding his authority over the girl.

  There had been another odd incident a couple of months before which might or might not have had political meaning. In February 1791, not long after the consolidation of the alliance between Baneelon’s clan and the British, the signal colours at the flagpole at South Head, which had been flying unmolested for more than a year, were stolen, cut up, and used to bedeck some of the canoes darting about the harbour. Had the tribes come to realise these fragments of cloth were dear to the British, and their taking an act of defiance of the accommodations reached across the water? Did they simply covet the bright cloth as decoration? The meaning of the action, transparent to them, remained opaque to the British, as it does to us, but it makes me wonder if Baneelon’s abduction attempt might not have been designed to demonstrate his independence within the broad terms of the British alliance.

  Whatever his intentions, Baneelon’s actions had unhappy consequences. Now Phillip drew his first permanent domestic boundary. Henceforth the governor’s yard would be closed to unauthorised visitors at night; henceforth Baneelon would enter the governor’s house only by invitation.

  The most formidable challenge to Phillip’s authority over what he saw as British territory was to come from an unexpected direction. Phillip enjoyed Boladeree’s company sufficiently to take him on the expedition out from Rose Hill. Indeed he liked him so well he was planning to take back him back to England with him. He was especially pleased by a trade Boladeree ha
d initiated, peddling the fish he took in the harbour to the settlers at Rose Hill in exchange for vegetables, rice and bread. This was exactly the kind of mutually advantageous interaction Phillip had dreamt of. Then in June 1791 a little mob of convicts put an end to the trade by destroying Boladeree’s new, cherished canoe, and he began his helpless slide in the nets of British law.

  After finding his canoe wrecked Boladeree appeared at the governor’s house at Rose Hill incandescent with rage, armed and painted for war, and (courteously, properly) proclaiming his determination to take revenge on white men, even up to their leader. Phillip, seeing the depth of his anger, undertook to kill the offenders himself, and when they were seized had Boladeree watch them flogged. He also assured him, falsely, that one had been hanged. (Honesty is an early casualty in trans-cultural exchanges.) With justice done to his own satisfaction, he gave Boladeree a few small gifts, and thought the matter ended. He also thought he had exacted Boladeree’s promise that he would not spear anyone in revenge, which reminds us of the inadequacies still bedevilling language communications.