Tench then ruminates on ‘the feminine innocence, softness and modesty’ to be found ‘amidst a hoarde of roaming savages in the desert wastes of New South Wales’. At this initial meeting Tench, who would later decide she was a vixen deserving whatever she got, was charmed by Barangaroo’s bashfulness as she stood naked before an audience of grinning, yelling white men, and her grinning, yelling husband.
If we extricate ourselves from the syrup of Tench’s sentimentality and look again at the sequence of events he describes, we see something other than bashful modesty. Boorong goes to Barangaroo, and somehow persuades her to put on the weird garment we call a ‘petticoat’. She is then led over to the strangers—who laugh, shout and gesticulate at her. Barangaroo, recognising, resenting the men’s mood, strips off the alien garment which has brought her into public ridicule, and stands…blushing? or glowering? before them.
Barangaroo had taken the petticoat off for good. She would not endure that humiliation again; and she would make no more concessions to the strangers. Collins might comment on Australian women’s tactful pretence of modesty when they were in the settlement; Baneelon and Colbee might politely don genteel British clothing when dining at the governor’s table; Barangaroo went superbly naked, wearing at most that slim bone in her septum. On the one occasion she ‘dressed’ she did so Australian-style, when she came to the governor’s table direct from a major ceremony in full ceremonial fig, with the upper half of her face painted with red ochre highlighted with white pipeclay spots, and more red ochre rubbed at the small of her back.
Barangaroo had made one concession. On that long-ago September day on the beach she submitted to having her hair cut, at Baneelon’s request. That seems to have been the end of her acquiescence. On that day the girl Boorong, sent after Barangaroo to persuade her to come to the settlement, had instead been so effectively coaxed to abandon the strangers and rejoin her own people that she returned to the boat very reluctantly, and only after ‘often repeated injunctions’. And on the memorable 8 October when Baneelon prepared for his first visit to Sydney Cove, Barangaroo angrily refused to go with him, and staged a furious protest against his going.
We have seen how Baneelon’s plottings to have her bear their child in the governor’s house or, failing that, in the hospital, foundered on the rock of her stubbornness. (Could that have been the reason for her ferocious beating on the morning of the birth?) While she cheerfully exchanged her net for Phillip’s convict crochet, she did so only after taking out of it a paperbark ‘blanket’, ‘nicely folded up’, as Phillip remembered it. This was, presumably, the blanket on which the new baby was lying when Collins came upon the birth scene. If Baneelon wanted a British blanket, that was not her affair.
Not long after the birth, with her baby girl Dilboong still at the breast, Barangaroo died. Her funeral, which took place close to the end of 1791, presents its own anomalies. When the accidental outlaw Boladeree died from the illness which brought him back into the governor’s care and affection, he was buried in the governor’s garden, and coffined, poignantly enough, in one of his beloved canoes. His interment came only after elaborate ceremonial mourning which went on for the best part of a night and a day and involved ritual combats and much wailing from the women and children, and Boorong, who must have been a close kinswoman, having her head deeply gashed by Boladeree’s mother. When the corpse was at last carried to rest it was accompanied by a large escort, and shrubs were carefully cleared from the burial site ‘so that the sun might look at it as he passed’. The British made their own contribution to the obsequies: while the grave was being prepared Phillip’s drummers, at Baneelon’s request, beat out ‘several marches’.
The funeral of Colbee’s secondary wife who died in childbirth at about the same time was treated with much the same formality, with the corpse paraded through the town before it was laid in its grave with the living baby beside it. The mourning was less prolonged and less intense than the outpourings for Boladeree, but Boladeree was a well-loved young warrior dead in his prime, as well as a local hero. Women wailed for the young mother, and her death rites concluded with a shower of spears, presumably signifying her friends’ determination to seek vengeance.
Barangaroo’s funeral was an altogether more hushed affair. The governor, White and Collins attended at Baneelon’s request, along with seven Australians: Baneelon, three of his men friends, and three women, one of them his sister—and none of them, we note, Daringa. The warriors threw their spears, but there seems to have been no wailing, no flurries of mock combat, no body-painting, no self-wounding. Barangaroo’s body, wrapped in an old British blanket, was simply laid on a pyre with her basket of fishing gear beside her, and burnt. Phillip, White and Collins were present at the gathering of her ashes the next day, again at Baneelon’s invitation, with no other Australian attending. The three Englishmen watched as Baneelon scraped the ashes into a little pile, placed a log on each side of the mound, and crowned it with bark. Collins was moved to sentiment by the solemn tenderness Baneelon brought to the task; a tenderness which ‘did honour to his feelings as a man, as it seemed the result of a heartfelt affection for the object of it, of whose person nothing now remained but a piece or two of calcined bone’. Collins later reports a large formal combat (he calls them ‘funeral games’) where ‘many’ were wounded. Baneelon himself had ‘a severe contest’ with Willemerin, the Botany Bay curer who had speared Phillip, and who had failed to attend Barangaroo when Baneelon had summoned him, but this performance seems to have had as much to do with formal protocols and placating the formidable Cameragal as with personal grief.
There is another possibility in this hall-of-mirrors world: that Barangaroo’s funeral rites were muted not because of Barangaroo’s social isolation, but because of Baneelon’s ongoing ambition to impress the British, in this case with the reverent sedateness of his mourning. After all, he had watched enough British burials.
Then Baneelon took another unorthodox step. Immediately after Barangaroo’s death he solicited Phillip’s help in finding a convict woman to wet-nurse the baby: a remarkably emancipated request given that Australians did not practise wet-nursing. When Colbee’s wife died in childbirth, Colbee followed tradition by laying her living suckling child in the mother’s grave, and crushing its head with a stone. What else could he do, with no one to feed it? Yet Baneelon took the radical step of asking Phillip to find a British wet-nurse. Was this another example of his adventurous thinking as he sought to strengthen the political bond?
Long after the events I am describing here, the assiduous Collins shed oblique light on what Baneelon might have had in mind in all his approaches to the governor. Even in their stormiest moments Baneelon persisted in calling the governor Be-anna, ‘Father’. Buried in one of his long appendices Collins tells us that while Be-anna was a courtesy title bestowed on the oldest man in any group, it also had another usage:
We observed it to be frequently applied by children to men who we knew had not any children of their own. On inquiry we were informed, that in the case a father should die, the nearest kin, or some deputed friend, would take care of his children; and for this reason those children styled them, Be-anna, though in the lifetime of their natural parent. This Bennillong [sic] (the native who was some time in England) confirmed to us at the death of his first wife, by consigning the care of his infant daughter Dil-boong (who at the time of her mother’s decease was at the breast) to his friend Governor Phillip, telling him he was to become the Be-anna or Father to his little girl.
Baneelon knew Phillip had no children. So—a formal claim to adoption and its rights? Possibly; to my mind even probably. But it is possible to overemphasise the political. Little Dilboong—named, Collins tells us, for ‘a small bird which we often heard in low wet ground and in copses’—was Baneelon’s only issue. She was also his well-loved Barangaroo’s daughter. Was he desperate to save her? When Dilboong died he asked that she be buried in Phillip’s garden, where he and a couple of A
ustralian friends sat vigil for her through the night. Because these actions might strengthen his dwindling claim to intimate connection with the British, the land they occupied, the goods they possessed? Or to comfort her baby spirit?
I am left wondering at the absence of personal mourners from both parts of Barangaroo’s funeral ceremony. In life we commonly encounter her either alone or with Baneelon, sometimes in the company of children, but not of other women. Aloof in life, she remained so in death. As an outsider and a Cameragal she may have been feared as a witch. (The Cameragal had some reputation for witchcraft.) My own suspicion is that we have simply run into historians’ good or bad luck, however you choose to look at it, in that the woman who emerges most vividly from the documentation we happen to have is, simply, atypical—a natural-born loner, a natural-born rebel. That exaggeratedly erect carriage, together with the masculine nose ornament and the extreme touchiness, look like direct appropriations from the male repertoire of symbols of social domination. Even when she undertook what might be in another woman the conventional role of protecting the weapons and the honour of her man, she did so flamboyantly, as in the ferocious scene she made at the governor’s house when Baneelon yielded up his spears. Making her assault on the crumpled girl at the surgeon’s house, she was inhibited neither by the alien location nor by her scandalised British audience: she simply attacked. She quietened only when Baneelon slapped her, presumably acknowledging in this situation his authority to do so.
Phillip, deeply shocked by the violence Baneelon habitually used against her, was equally shocked by Barangaroo’s violence in the canoe-wrecking scene, and was bewildered to know ‘what inducement this woman could have had to do an act she must have known would be followed by a severe beating?’ Time and again we watch her behaving as provocatively as she was able, staging scenes and engaging in direct aggression not only against women, but against men, including British men: think of the flogger flogged, and the guard, the surgeons, the governor himself, defied on their home ground.
Presumably Baneelon liked a fierce woman: one who could challenge and match his own volatile temper. He must also have valued her beauty, as did other men. He was ready to make concessions to her: it is likely that she was ailing when he withdrew from a planned sortie to Norfolk Island in the company of its new lieutenant-governor Philip King in mid-October 1791 (we do not know the date of her death). What I admire is her intransigence. Despite the massive pressures brought to bear upon her by her warrior society, Barangaroo always remained her own woman.
NOVEMBER–DECEMBER 1791 TENCH GOES HOME
On 18 December 1791 Watkin Tench finished his tour of duty and embarked with most of his fellow marines on the Gorgon, bound for England. Great things were happening in the world. The French were still up to mischief but wreaking most of it at home, with their king losing his liberty and soon to lose his head. Tench himself would lose his liberty to them three years hence, taken captive after a battle at sea, but in those final months of 1791 his concerns remained strenuously local. He made two more expeditions with his friend Dawes, commenting time and again on the remarkable kindness of the Australians met along the way, and we wonder how much that kindness had to do with the sense and sensibility of the two young explorers. He is brief and regretful on the trouble with Boladeree, and careful to record other gratuitous acts of kindness by Australians close around Sydney. But with the arrival of the Gorgon on 21 September, he knew his departure was imminent. His last gift to us is his survey of the colony which had consumed four years of his young manhood.
He had come to view the settlement with a disillusioned eye. Sydney Town’s urban pretensions were dead: now it was no more than a depot for stores. He was not much more sanguine about Parramatta, or ‘Rose Hill’, as he still preferred to call it. Some ‘petty erections’ might masquerade as public buildings, but the so-called ‘town’ was no more than a few hundred hovels built of twigs and mud. Despite the pathetic actuality, dreams remained huge: ‘We feel consequential enough already to talk of a treasury, an admiralty, a public library, and many other edifices, which are to form part of a magnificent square.’ And the settlement was expanding physically: with the promise of free land and the financial cushion of accumulated back pay to sustain them, sixty or so marines had elected to stay on in the colony as settlers, most of them, Tench thought, because of ‘infatuated affection’ for female convicts. He hoped they wouldn’t regret their decision, and was sure that they would.
He also thought local estimations of agricultural yields to be inflated. Both soil and climate remained unfriendly, with even the hardy Indian maize not cropping reliably. Too many settlers lacked both the skills and the steady work habits to make farmers, and even experienced men were finding the soils and the seasons baffling. And the most promising and ambitious cultivator, with four convicts in his service, had decided to specialise in wine and tobacco, which Tench thought were not the most desirable products for a struggling colony.
Tench summed up the harshness of the new land in a near-biblical flourish: ‘He who looks forward to eat grapes of his own vine; and to sit under the shade of his own fig-tree, must labour in every country: here he must exert more than ordinary activity.’
The human scene was no more encouraging. In church on the eve of his departure, Tench carefully scanned the ‘several hundred convicts…present, the majority of whom I thought looked the most miserable beings in the shape of humanity, I ever beheld…they appeared to be worn down by fatigue’. He lamented the lack of a sense of community: from the first days of settlement convicts and soldiers had stolen from one another, and from the government stores as well, and they continued to steal. No community, and no compassion either: when the Second Fleet was arriving from mid-1790 and discharging its dreadful cargo of sick and decrepit convicts, dying men had their bread and their share in a blanket snatched from them by their stronger fellows. Even at Rose Hill, where long cohabitation and communal work should have generated solidarity, theft was chronic. Men returning to their miserable huts after a long day’s work might find their rations pillaged, so hunger was added to exhaustion. The spread of settlement had decreased physical security: now the more intrepid settlers were living in solitary huts or scattered hamlets, vulnerable to attack from both unreconciled Australians and the dangerous new tribe of convicts-turned-bushrangers. Sickness continued rife. A couple of weeks before he embarked Tench took a medical inventory, and found 382 people listed as sick and twenty-five men and two children dead the previous month from a ‘putrid fever’.
Perhaps Tench was looking too hard. In such circumstances improvement has to be measured in small things. Collins had been delighted to record that a few days before Christmas in 1789 Mr Dodd, the highly efficient superintendent at Rose Hill, sent a cabbage down to Sydney which weighed not much under fifteen kilos, with celebrations and congratulations all round. Tench was leaving a place where a simplified caricature of British civilisation had been set down on the edge of a wilderness: a caste system of officers and gentlemen, soldiers, free settlers, convict men and convict women. It would take time for that skeleton structure to develop a natural vital substance. Collins farewelled the marine contingent thus: ‘On board the Gorgon were embarked the marines who came from England on the first ships, as valuable a corps as any in His Majesty’s service…They were quitting a country in which they had opened and smoothed the way for their successors and from which, whatever benefit might hereafter be derived, must be derived by those who had the easy task of treading in paths previously and painfully formed by them.’ His statement stands as a fair epitaph for Tench and his fellows.
It is easy to be so seduced by Tench’s generosity of spirit as to think it was universal in application. It was not. For example, he seems to have talked little with subordinates. When Marine Private Jonathan Easty referred to ‘Captain Tench’, as he occasionally did, he did so with antiseptic impersonality. From Easty’s text we would think there were no interactions between rank
s beyond orders crisply delivered and swiftly obeyed. Could such social distance really have been sustained in the messiness of camp life, or the necessary intimacies of military and exploratory expeditions? On the evidence we have, it seems it was—except when the subordinates were drunk, which they quite often were. Then hard words might be spoken, and paid for in lashes. Keeping the skeleton of hierarchy bone-hard was a political necessity if the colony were to survive, but it was also a habit of mind.
Nor did Tench speak with convicts, unless they happened to provide diverting anecdotal material. He took convict executions easily, noting the death by hanging within a month of landfall of ‘Thomas Barrett, an old and desperate offender who died with that hardy spirit which too often is found in the worst and most abandoned class of men’ only in passing. The next convict execution, in May, also failed to move him, because the sufferer, ‘a very young man’, ‘met his fate with a hardiness and insensibility which the grossest ignorance and the most deplorable want of feeling alone could supply’. It was salutary remorse Tench wanted, and in June he got it. Two more men were hanged; they acknowledged ‘the justice of their fates’; and Tench’s pen took tender fire. He cited in full the text of the letter twenty-year-old Samuel Peyton had a friend write to Samuel’s mother. It was signed ‘from your unhappy dying son’, and oozes with elevated sentiment, and we wonder, cynically, whether young Peyton had his letter concocted in a last-ditch hope of a reprieve, which could sometimes happen after a dramatic display of remorse. We also have to suspect that Tench might be moved by an individual tragedy, but not by the general convict condition.
A final example of his perspective on hierarchy in this convict society is drawn from his last month in the colony, November 1791, when he was making his final rounds before taking ship to England. It was that frightening month of November at Rose Hill, with 382 sick and the ‘hospital’, two long thatched sheds, holding only two hundred people. Half of the invalids must have lain alone in their huts, but four hospital mattresses had been allotted to ‘a few of the Chinese travellers’, as Tench gaily dubbed them, now under arrest. Twenty Irish convicts and a pregnant woman had fled the colony early in the month in a dash for ‘China’, which they had been persuaded lay only a hundred miles away to the north. They thought they could walk there, sustaining themselves with shellfish gathered along the way. The old fantasy was still compelling: there would be a river, and on the other side a copper-coloured people who would receive them kindly and treat them well. (In this racial fantasy it is the white men, not the coloured, who are cruel.) They had suffered the slave-trade horrors of passage in the Second Fleet, and now there was only labour, starvation and death to look forward to. Who would not fear dying in that desolate place? Why not try for ‘China’?
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