Dancing with Strangers

by Inga Clendinnen

  They found only the grey, death-haunted bush. One man died of exhaustion on the third day out. Then natives attacked, killing another man and wounding others. There was no food: only hunger, terror, death. Over the next days some came tottering back, found by people from the camp or stumbling in alone, and the bones of others would be discovered from time to time. Tench’s response reveals how different his sensibility is from ours. He talks with four of these desolate creatures, lying on their hospital mattresses, waiting for their floggings, and makes them the butt of an Irish joke.

  When he visited the ‘Chinese travellers’ Tench knew he would be leaving for home in a matter of days, but he drew no comparisons between his situation and theirs. Always tender to abstract notions of ‘liberty’, his intuitive sympathy failed when he considered the convict condition, foundering on the rocks of convention and caste.

  As we would expect, Tench saved his most important subject for the last: his attempt at a scientific description of the Australians. Baneelon had obligingly allowed himself to be measured; now we know the girth of his thigh, his leg at the small, his belly. Tench describes the precise texture of Australian hair, approves the typical Australian profile, deplores the typical Australian smell. It is a dutiful account, but it lacks his usual flair—until he begins to celebrate those ‘large black eyes’ with their ‘long sweepy lashes’, and suddenly a girl looks shyly from the page. It is here, on the verge of leaving forever, that he at last tells us about the girl Gooreedeeana and her gentle beauty.

  He briskly reverts to duty by raising the key British question to determine the Australians’ level of civility: do these people believe in a superior invisible power? He concludes (strenuously massaging the evidence) that they do. He acknowledges that as a race they stand high on the scale of savagery: although ‘they may perhaps dispute the right of precedency with the Hottentots or the shivering tribes who inhabit the shores of Magellan’, they are deficient in those twin signs of civility, the wearing of clothes and the cultivation of the earth. He sums up, with the awkwardness pomposity always imposes on him: ‘A less enlightened state we shall exclaim can hardly exist.’

  Then he abandons puffy generalisation for accounts of individuals, and the text takes fire. He memorialises the kindness of Arabanoo, the wit of Baneelon, the steady affability of Colbee. He celebrates the ingenuity of Australian tools and Australian skill in using them. He is baffled as to why their curiosity is so uneven—why they care nothing for the tools and techniques of farming and building—but he acknowledges their expertise in everything to do with the hunt or with battle, and he notes that while they lack surgeons their wounds heal clean and fast. As to character: while he cannot defend ‘their levity, their fickleness, their passionate extravagance of character’, he insists on their loyalty, especially to those British they have cause to love, and we think that Tench was among them.

  He admits finding their songs tedious and their dances alarming, but vehemently defends Australians on another key issue for the British, their honourable conduct in war: ‘Unlike all other Indians, they never carry out operations at night, or seek to destroy by ambush and surprise.’ Pursuing the comparison with American Indians, viewed by the British as singularly treacherous, Tench lauds the Australians’ ‘ardent fearless character [which] seeks fair and open combat only’, so conveniently forgetting those stealthy midnight assassinations.

  There were some things about Australian society he did not see. Australian structures of thought, of religion, of deference and hierarchy, quite escaped him. He never grasped the respect owed to age or accumulated ritual experience. And he could not see British society at all. He did not think to contrast the freedom and the material equality achieved by Australians living around Sydney Cove against the oppression, inequality and unrelenting toil he had just been describing in his own society, where order was sustained by the whip, and the sanctity of property required that some of his countrymen should die by the noose to preserve it.

  The lack of fit between these visions is beautifully if inadvertently dramatised in the sketch Mr White, Harris and Laing with a party of soldiers, probably by the hand of the prolific ‘Port Jackson Painter’ (plate 7). To the left, three tall, behatted Britishers, every bit of their bodies covered except their hands and faces, muskets in hand, stand around naked Australians, some of them connubially entwined, lounging on the grass around a fire. To the right an Australian warrior, identified in a pencilled note as ‘Colebee’ (not ‘our’ Colbee but a Botany Bay warrior of the same name) is sitting peaceably on a log, spear propped beside him, gazing off slightly to the right. Meanwhile a dozen red-coated marines are sweating their way in their hot, tight uniforms through close-order drill behind the strict example of their sergeant. They are so tight packed, so rigid, that they look like a line of cardboard cut-outs, ready to topple at a breath.

  Thanks to Tench’s eager eye and honest pen, I think we can sometimes glimpse the view from the log.

  DECEMBER 1792 PHILLIP GOES HOME

  Unlike the Australians they saw moving freely among them, convicts had to endure a strict regime of physical labour, and suffer the ‘cruel discipline’ of the ‘merciless wretches’ who were their supervisors. There could be no personal dignity, no blow-for-blow retaliation for them. Now more were choosing the hardship and the freedom of the bush, fleeing the settlement not in search of a phantom ‘China’, but to join the bushrangers; the runaways who occasionally co-operated with the ‘wild’ Australians and participated in their depredations.

  Hunger was securely alleviated only in July 1792, six months before Phillip’s departure, first with the arrival of the Atlantic from Calcutta, and then the Britannia from London, with two more store ships in her wake. By the end of August rations had been restored to a bare adequacy, and Richard Atkins, newly arrived and deeply shocked by the miserable condition of the people (‘the convicts dying very fast, merely through want of nourishment…O shame, shame’) soon noticed a major drop in the crime rate. By October the maize crop was beginning to yield, and the ships continued to arrive. Their arrival brought not only supplies but opportunity for a new crime: men plundered each others’ hidden stores of money to buy their passage back to England.

  Through all Phillip’s time in office the colony’s suffering was largely due to the neglect of the colonial authorities. As David Collins had observed, recording yet another downward adjustment of the rations:

  It was impossible to make the deduction without reflecting that the established ration would have been adequate to every want; the pleas of hunger could not have been advanced as the motive and excuse for thefts; and disease would not have met so powerful an ally in its ravages among the debilitated and emaciated objects which the gaols had crowded into transports, and the transports had landed in these settlements.

  The case of the Pitt, arriving in February 1792, three months after the departure of Tench and his marines, is exemplary of the mix of neglect, cheese-paring and stupidity inflicted on the colony. Assuming the colony to be adequately supplied with flour, she had brought only salt provisions for her cargo of more than 350 convicts, many of them ill. To find the space to install the fully constructed frame of a forty-ton vessel (at last their masters had heard the colonists’ call for another workhorse ship) she had simply left behind ‘all the Clothing, Stores and some Provisions, which were intended to be sent in her, except for a few Shoes, and some Leather’. David Collins’ fury was only lightly disguised as sarcasm as he recounted the series of accidents which had provided the colony with a single ship’s carpenter capable of masquerading as a qualified shipwright long enough to turn the frame into a useable ship:

  A person who came out to this country in the capacity of a carpenter’s mate on board the Sirius, having been left behind when that vessel sailed for England, offered his services to put together the vessel that arrived in frame on the Pitt; and being deemed sufficiently qualified as a shipwright, he was engaged at two shillings per diem and his p
rovisions to set her up. Her keel was accordingly laid down on blocks placed for the purpose near the landing-place on the east side.

  Then—this equable man is beginning to snarl—‘as this person was the only shipwright in the colony, the vessel would have much sooner rendered the services which were required of her’ (replacing the indispensable Supply) ‘had she been put together, coppered, and sent out manned and officered from England; by these means too the colony would have received many articles which were of necessity shut out of the Pitt to make room for her stowage’.

  This was mismanagement to the point of malice. Even Phillip’s self-command must have faltered. But he refused to despair, continuing to write optimistic letters to Sir Joseph Banks and Lord Sydney advising them to ignore ill reports of the colony, and enclosing an independent report ‘made by a man who was bred a Gardener’ on the great potential of the soil of the colony. He also included elegantly selective images which evoked a little paradise of kine and vine: ‘The few cattle we have grow exceedingly fat…all our fruit trees thrive well, and I have this year gathered about three hundred pounds of very fine grapes.’ Nor was the vision wholly illusory: Major Grose, arriving in March 1792 and the man who would succeed Phillip, could enthuse that instead of the rock he had been told to expect he found himself in an Eden, ‘surrounded by gardens that flourish and produce fruit of every description’, where all that could be desired was ‘one ship freighted with corn and black cattle’. By September 1795, Elizabeth Macarthur was confiding to her friend Bridget Kingdon that, when the capture of a ship off the coast of Brazil had left them with no news from Europe for twelve months, many colonists ‘firmly believed that a revolution or some national calamity had befallen Great Britain & believed that we should be left together to ourselves until things at home had resumed some degree of order’. Elizabeth then proceeded to so radiant an account of the productivity of the soil that we have to assume that the prospect of having to survive independent of the mother country’s support did not much alarm her. A change indeed, over a mere seven years. Two months after that, in November 1795, the two bulls and four cows lost from the infant settlement in July 1788 were found again, multiplied to ‘a fine herd upwards of forty in number’. Major Grose would have his black cattle after all.

  By the last months of 1792, with his health failing fast, Phillip knew he must take ship for England. The colony he handed over to Grose would survive, even thrive, materially. But it would not be the society he had dreamed of. Along with the influx of newcomers and the amelioration of supply came the opportunity to subvert Phillip’s conscientious democratisation of rations: Grose sought Phillip’s official approval for a plan by which the Britannia would bring cattle and comforts for the men he commanded, the New South Wales Corps, beyond the ‘reduced and unwholesome’ rations available from the public store. True to his principles, Phillip refused his approval, but he could not prevent what became the first private enterprise in the colony. Grose also demanded that his officers be granted land, together with the convicts to work it. Again Phillip refused; there were already too few convicts to serve the public interest. But his vision would not prevail. The spirit of free enterprise and of faction had been imported into the colony along with the New South Wales Corps.

  Grose initiated his revolution almost before Phillip’s ship had cleared the heads. The military hierarchy took over the civil administration first at Parramatta, then at Sydney; on the second issue of rations after the governor’s departure the convict ration was reduced vis-à-vis that issued to free men. Settlers began selling the breeding stock Phillip had freely given them to officers eager to establish their own herds. And Lieutenant-Governor Grose joyfully purchased ‘seven thousand five hundred and ninety-seven gallons of (new American) spirits at four shillings and sixpence per gallon’, as David Collins icily records, from an American ship which had put in to Sydney Harbour, as its master declared, merely for wood and water. The spirits were to be traded at the commissary. Soon spirits would become the new currency, and intoxication, even among convicts, rampant. Sydney also fought its first serious bushfire.

  By the time of his leaving Phillip must also have known that his grand enterprise of civilising the Australians and integrating them into British economy and society would not succeed, not least because of the locals’ stubborn refusal to see their condition as impoverished. But affection and hope prevailed over experience. When Phillip left for England he took with him his durable friend Baneelon and the ‘good-tempered lively lad’ Imeerawanyee, who had been living for much of the time in the governor’s house: ‘Two men,’ Collins tells us, ‘very much attached to his person; and who withstood at the moment of departure the united distress of their wives, and the dismal lamentations of their friends.’ Imeerawanyee would die in that strange cold country. After three years there, Baneelon would return, to find his own country transformed.

  DECEMBER 1793 AND AFTER COLLINS GOES HOME

  As early as the end of 1791 David Collins was being pressed by his family to come home on the Gorgon with Tench and his friends. Both family affection and family finances urgently required his presence. Collins had to explain to his father that he could not. Much as they longed to embrace him—much as he longed to embrace them—there were insurmountable objections. The first was formal: he had not been officially relieved of his post, which could only be done from England. The next two were personal. If he were to leave on the Gorgon he would have to take ship with Major Ross, and this he absolutely refused to do. ‘I would not sail were wealth and honours to attend me when I landed,’ he writes, and we are reminded how vast animosity can grow within the narrow confines of a colony. But love could grow there, too. The man who earlier had viewed Phillip with scepticism, especially for what he saw as his impetuous romanticism regarding the Australians, wrote to his father in October 1791: ‘I could not reconcile it in my mind to leave Governor Phillip, with whom I have now lived so long that I am blended in every concern of his.’

  Now Phillip was gone, along with the rest of his old comrades, and Collins was left to deal with new men and different ways. The officers of the New South Wales Corps were seizing every chance to enrich themselves collectively, individually, and often enough fraudulently. Collins had little to say in his journal about their doings, beyond noting their endless squabbles. Along with Phillip had gone some of his old compulsion to record. Now he was ready to accept some things as constant. He thought the convicts, apart from the few who had become effective farmers, remained hopelessly depraved, with no possibility of moral reform. If the more ignorant persisted in their fantasies of China-over-the-river despite the scarecrows that came tottering back with tales of companions starved or speared in the bush, the realists knew that escape by land was impossible and that the sea was the road to liberty. They were always stowing away on ships, to be discovered, or not discovered. Others, especially after William Bryant’s brilliant getaway in 1791, made off in small boats. So many boats were being hijacked by late 1797, the year after Collins went home, that Governor Hunter had to order any boat left unguarded at night, or with oars, rudders, masts or sails on board, be burnt.

  And now harder men were being dumped in Sydney, among them Irishmen shipped straight from rebellious Ireland to Botany Bay; men who thought of themselves as political prisoners, and who arrived and remained intractable. Collins had always despised the Irish. Back on 13 July 1791, he had taken pleasure reporting that ‘Patrick Burn, a person employed to shoot for the commanding officer of the marine detachment, died…and the hut what he had lived in was burnt down in the night a few hours after his decease by the carelessness of the people, who were Irish and were sitting up with the corpse, which was with much difficulty saved from the flames, and not until it was much scorched’. Unstated: the mourners were not only Irish, but drunk. The tone is more condescending than outraged. Compare it with his reporting, admittedly at second hand, of a later incident in a maize field at a government farm in April 1798. Exciti
ng rumours had been circulating among the convicts of French warships about to descend on the settlements, to destroy them, liberate the convicts and repatriate them to Europe and to freedom (so much for British patriotism). Collins reports:

  One refractory fellow, while working with a numerous gang in Toongabbie, threw down his hoe, advanced before the rest, and gave three cheers for liberty. This for a while seemed well-received; but a magistrate fortunately being at hand, the business was put an end to, by securing the advocate for liberty, tying him up in the field, and giving him a severe flogging.

  A very physical response to a metaphysical cry made in a paddock at the edge of the world. (Note too Collins’ confidence of the docility of the local representative of the law.) Later again, after an account of a bungled escape attempt in January 1798 which collapsed into desperate betrayals and abandonments as it unravelled: