Dancing with Strangers

by Inga Clendinnen

  Boladeree watched Phillip punish the men to Phillip’s satisfaction, accepted the gifts—and then, when he happened upon an unarmed convict in the bush, speared him twice. The wounds were not mortal; he did not plunder the man’s possessions. He exchanged two wounds for a ruined canoe.

  Phillip immediately understood that ‘the canoe being destroyed was the cause of the attack’, especially when Boladeree’s companions readily identified him as the spearman. Meanwhile Boladeree sensibly went into hiding, as one did when tribal justice was being bruited, to give everyone time to calm down.

  The governor was chagrined at the stop put to the barter trade between white and black at Rose Hill, but he knew the real problem lay deeper. It was not, as he had first thought, that Australians had no law. After three years of watching he had come to realise the rigour of Australian law, and the passion behind its defence of individual male dignity: he commented, ‘These people set little value on their lives, and never fail to repay you in kind, whether you praise or threaten… whenever a blow is given them, be it gentle or with force, they always return in the same manner.’ The first response, prior to talk of compensation, was retaliatory physical injury. A tribe would take direct action against an offending tribe; within the tribe there would be violence between families; within the family violence between individuals. He knew that under Australian law Boladeree had done what he had to do: that despite the offenders’ punishment under British law, ‘he thought it belonged to him to punish the injury he had received’. But if in his own terms Boladeree had done the necessary and honourable thing, Phillip also knew that as governor he could not tolerate coexistence with this other law. In the territories under his administration, British law and only British law must prevail. Boladeree was accordingly declared a felon, to be captured or shot on sight.

  There followed a sequence of alarums and excursions around the harbour as Boladeree played a daring game of catch-as-catch-can with Phillip and his soldiers. Late in August 1791 the game turned serious. A retinue of Australians, some of them strangers and all en route to a dance at Botany Bay, called at the settlement, and ‘six men, with seven or eight and twenty women and children came to Governor Phillip’s house’ to be fed. They were sharing out the bread they had been given when Phillip was told ‘that [Boladeree] was on the opposite side of the cove, and that he was armed, as were most of his companions’.

  Phillip was in a dilemma. This was clearly an act of provocation. But if Boladeree and his supporters were seized while the bevy of visitors, some of them new to Sydney, were still in the yard, they might panic, and some of the men had spears. So he waited until they were fed, gave them some fishhooks, and at last they went on their way. Then he sent out a sergeant and a few armed men to apprehend the outlaw. The British party fell in with some apparently friendly Australians, one of whom suddenly tried to wrest a flintlock from a soldier. A tussle broke out, and in the ensuing fracas a warrior took a musket ball in the leg. When British reinforcements went out they found the Australians had vanished. Young Nanbaree, overhearing the soldiers’ orders, had stripped and run naked through the bush to warn his compatriots.

  The episode was troubling in every way. Violence had been offered on the fringe of the settlement by armed men, to armed men. A spear had been thrown, which was an utterly forbidden act. Phillip might also have thought he was being played with; that Boladeree’s challenge had been timed to increase the excitement of the strangers’ visit to the town. Baneelon meanwhile was displaying an impenetrable unconcern: on being told that ‘the soldiers were gone out to punish Boladeree for wounding a white man…this intelligence did not prevent him from enjoying a hearty dinner; and when he was going away he left a large bundle of spears, fiz-gigs, [fish spears] and various other articles under Governor Phillip’s care’. The next day the party of Australians who had been at the Botany Bay dance passed through again, still confident of their welcome. These people refused to generalise from the individual quarrel even to tribal politics, much less to what Phillip saw as universal principles of law. Their response to the pursuit of Boladeree demonstrated that they understood enough of British law to know that ‘nothing more was intended than to punish the person who wounded the white man, and that they would not have been fired on had not a spear been thrown at the party’. But the real lesson had not been learnt. They were treating this important affair as if it were one of their own petty feuds between individuals, not a matter of legal principle and rightful territorial authority.

  There was no solution in sight. The pursuit went on, with Boladeree always warned in time by local sympathisers, including Baneelon. And the boy Nanbaree, who had lived in Surgeon White’s house since he was nine, who had enjoyed a thousand kindnesses, now showed where his loyalties lay, gleefully skidding off to warn his compatriots of any movement by the soldiers. When he was scolded, he laughed.

  There was also a humiliating element of taunt in all this. Boladeree and his canoe would turn up in the cove, and then churn away at speed when his supporters yelled that the soldiers were coming after him as he played his daring public games with this highly unreasonable man, making visible nonsense of his preposterous claim to total authority and exclusive possession of territory he and his followers had usurped.

  And throughout all the drama Australians continued to visit the governor’s house for food and relaxation ‘with the same freedom as if nothing had happened’. Phillip must have had the unpleasant sense that he was being laughed at.

  Then, Tench tells us, ‘[Boladeree] prudently dropped all connection with us and was for a long time not seen’. He reappeared only on the eve of Tench and his fellow marines’ departure for England in December 1791. He was dangerously ill, with Baneelon and Colbee in anxious attendance. Baneelon secretly fetched John White to the ‘outlaw’ as he lay in the bush, and again we see the colour-blind compassion of White, and the depth of Australian confidence in him as a man, and as a curer. Then Baneelon begged Phillip to allow Boladeree into the hospital for treatment. And Phillip relented, ‘taking [Boladeree] by the hand, and promising that when he was recovered he should reside with him again’. In the end Phillip found the matter was personal, too.

  Boladeree entered the hospital under White’s special care on 14 December 1791. We happen to know the number of patients in the surgeon’s charge that week. David Collins tells us there were 403—plus one privileged Australian. Collins also tells us that during Boladeree’s illness Baneelon sang over him in healing ceremonies in the hospital until he was supplanted by a more senior curer hastily brought from the north shore, and again we salute White for his easy acceptance of pagan curers into his own hospital, and his recognition of their legitimate authority over their own.

  During the night Boladeree’s fever worsened, and Collins reports that ‘his friends, thinking he would be better with them, put him into a canoe’, again with no attempt at officious intervention by White. They intended to take him to the north shore, his home territory, Collins said, but ‘he died as they were carrying him over’.

  The Englishmen learnt of the death ‘by a violent clamour among the women and children’. It was confirmed by Baneelon when he came back to the town. He and the governor agreed ‘that the body should be buried in the governor’s garden’. In the afternoon of 16 December the corpse was brought over in a canoe, and deposited in a hut at the bottom of the garden. Phillip forgot his prohibition against the use of Australian arms in ‘his’ territory as warriors and a handful of women fought the ritual combats expressive of mourning. Boladeree’s body was buried with full Australian warrior honours.

  *

  Phillip had learnt a great deal through those stormy months. Now he knew that offences between Australian groups were understood as collective, not individual, and that vengeance could be legitimately pursued against any member of the other party, including the women and children. It took him longer to realise that not all punishments had to be violent; that material compensation could sometime
s resolve disputes between groups or individuals, without resort to physical vengeance. Increased understanding need not entail acceptance, but it does allow pragmatic adjustments. When in October 1791, four months after the Boladeree eruption, and with Boladeree still at large, a newly arrived seaman not yet trained to the local policy of conciliation destroyed the canoe of a native who had been invited on board his ship, he was punished for his vandalism in accordance with British law. This time, however, Phillip was careful to present the injured Australian not with the trivial gifts he had given Boladeree, but with ‘a complete set of wearing apparel as satisfaction for the injury he had done him, as well as to induce him to abandon any design of revenge…’ Earlier, he had used the local idiom of collective punishment with Tench’s abortive expedition after McEntire’s spearing. By the spring of 1791 this reflective man had come to recognise the need for compensation even in cases he would judge to be criminal, not civil. He had taken another unwilling step towards conciliation with the Australian system of justice.

  Could he have continued that process of adjustment, negotiating crises as they happened, responding to experience, adjusting the law to special cases? Perhaps. After he left in December 1792 all accommodations ended as the British adopted a simpler solution: two independent systems of law, one to regulate the subjects of the King, the other to settle Australians’ differences in accordance with their own notions of justice. Whites flocked to watch intertribal battles as a favoured entertainment, and could choose whether to be amused or scandalised by Australian intra-tribal and domestic violence. Meanwhile they visited ferocious collective punishments, often murderous, on Australians suspected of offences against whites, especially any challenge to exclusive British possession of the land. White offences against blacks would increasingly go unnoticed, and unpunished.

  BARANGAROO

  Meanwhile, the colony was beginning to do rather better than Tench allowed. If most of the livestock had been eaten during the great hunger of 1790, if prices for grain remained horribly inflated, agricultural yields were increasing as farmers came to understand the local soils, the vagaries of local weather and the most productive crops. Phillip had also sustained his determined egalitarianism: despite mutterings, especially from newly arrived officers unready to yield their customary privileges to feed a pack of convicts, he could say, with justified pride, that ‘the daily ration of provisions issued from the public stores was the same to the convict as it was to the governor’. It is true that officers could supplement their diets from their private gardens if they could keep marauding convicts out, but Phillip’s naval commitment to the physical welfare of his people, whatever their rank or status, remains impressive.

  Phillip also contrived to sustain his hospitality to the Australians, with the governor’s yard figuring as a reliable station on the food circuit, especially in times of dearth or personal emergency. Over the tense weeks of Boladeree’s exploits Baneelon had been moving to reestablish his old primacy. Despite misunderstandings, despite misdemeanours, he was accepted once again among the inner circle of Phillip’s Australian friends—although now there were other contenders for the governor’s particular favour.

  In the spring of 1791 Barangaroo was nearing her time. Her friends among the British had watched the developing pregnancy with interest. She seemed ready to incorporate British objects into her layette: Baneelon asked the governor for a British blanket for the baby, which was given to him, and when the governor coveted a fine net Barangaroo wore slung on her shoulder, she readily exchanged it for an English substitute crocheted for her on Phillip’s orders by a convict woman.

  One of Baneelon’s schemes pivoted on the unborn baby. Daringa had dutifully returned to her family and Botany Bay to bear her first child, but Barangaroo did not make the easy trip across the water to Cameragal territory. Such orthodox behaviour was no part of Baneelon’s plan—nor, as we shall see, of Barangaroo’s, either. Baneelon announced to the governor that Barangaroo would bear their first child inside the governor’s house.

  Phillip demurred. Baneelon insisted. It was only after extended discussions that Baneelon could be persuaded to agree that his baby would be born in the hospital—which, if not as desirable a birth site as the governor’s house, still represented a sturdy claim. Baneelon was determined that his child (whom he confidently predicted would be a boy) would have birth rights within the settlement, and a closer-than-fictive kin relationship with the governor.

  These interesting discussions appear to have taken place exclusively between the two men. There is no indication that Barangaroo took either part or interest in them. When her time came she bore her baby not in the governor’s house, not in the hospital, not even in or beside Baneelon’s house on the point, but alone, at a secluded place of her own choosing. David Collins happened upon her a few hours after the birth. The baby—a little reddish creature, he reported—was lying on the traditional paperbark blanket (no crocheted net, no British blanket), and the mother was gathering sticks to mend her little fire in preparation for shortening the baby’s umbilical cord. Under Collins’ fascinated gaze (which seems to have abashed her not at all) Barangaroo heated the end of a bone covered in punk, applied it again and again to the baby’s dangling cord until she judged it ‘sufficiently deadened’, and then neatly severed it with a sharp shell.

  There are peculiarities about this birth scene. We happen to have a good account of what happened when Warreweer, Baneelon’s sister, bore her first child. Warreweer’s labour came upon her in the town, where she was quickly attended by a flock of local women and some British women as well (another glimpse of informal trans-cultural mixing). Childbirth among the Australians was an all-female affair, but the British women reported to Collins exactly what happened. There were practised midwives present, they said, massaging and encouraging the mother-to-be while other women looked on. After the baby was safely delivered one of the British women was allowed to intervene. She cut the umbilical cord with scissors, and then washed the baby, to the consternation of the traditionalists, but with the mother’s consent.

  No scissors for Barangaroo, and no interference from other women either, white or black. It seems she regarded birthing as a private matter. We might think her, as an older mother, to have been as much in need of care as young Warreweer, but Barangaroo chose solitude.

  She was to die soon after the birth, either in consequence of it, or because of the beating inflicted by Baneelon which preceded it. She was a formidable woman, one of those personages who command attention at their every appearance, and she deserves an obituary, not least because her vivid personal style sheds a unique if angled light on Australian male–female relations.

  Barangaroo was a Cameragal, a daughter of the largest, toughest and most dominant tribe in the region, but I suspect her notable independence was more personal style and political decision than tribal heritage. Remember her energetic intervention when Phillip had the convict who had stolen Daringa’s fishing gear flogged before their eyes to demonstrate the muscular beauty of British justice. Daringa had wept, a fitting response in an Australian woman. Barangaroo had leapt up and proceeded to belabour the flogger. Of all the women we watch being hit by men, only Barangaroo hit back, and with a club, too. And when Baneelon offended or defied her, as in the Rose Hill boating episode, she took direct action, trashing as much of his property as she could lay her hands on. It was never wise to rouse Barangaroo. Time and again we see the tough and touchy Baneelon bow before the threat of her temper.

  She could not have been young. Phillip tells us she had two children from a previous husband before she took up with Baneelon, and that both had died. (The two children often seen with the couple were not their issue, but adoptees.) The normally reliable Collins claimed she was close to fifty when she died late in 1791, but he inferred that from the fact that she was cremated, not buried; given that she had just borne a child, I think he must have been mistaken. She was clearly sexually charismatic, compelling to Briti
sh and Australian males alike, and wore the scars of unauthorised desire, having been twice speared, once through the thigh. Even the abstemious Phillip recorded her beauty at some length: ‘[Barangaroo] is very strait and exceedingly well-made; her features are good. And though she goes naked, yet there is such an air of innocence about her that cloathing scarcely appears necessary.’ (Was this indeed ‘innocence’? Or pride?) We also notice that Barangaroo was the only woman he always named, with Boroong, ‘the girl raised in the clergyman’s house’, a poor second.

  Phillip also commented that Barangaroo ‘thought herself drest when her nose was occasionally ornamented with a small bone or a bit of stick’. The stick or bone in the nose was a male adornment, highly unusual for a woman. Phillip had seen only one other woman with her septum perforated. Yet Barangaroo wore the adornment as she chose.

  Consider now Barangaroo’s determined nakedness. Despite direct exhortation—despite the accommodations made by other Australian women to the British preference for clothing inside the settlement—Barangaroo went naked. I suspect that was an early decision. Tench paints a pretty picture of her dewy confusion on her first meeting with British men on that day of reconciliation in mid-September 1790, a week after the spearing. He reports that Barangaroo, hovering at a shy distance, resisted Baneelon’s urgings to come nearer to the male group, so Boorong was sent to coax her into approaching. Finally she did—but only after Boorong had put a petticoat on her. That did not suit the watching men at all: as Tench expansively puts it, ‘This was the prudery of the wilderness, which her husband joined us to ridicule, and we soon laughed her out of it. The petticoat was dropped, and Barangaroo stood armed cap-a-pee [head to toe] in nakedness.’