Here we find extreme ignorance, accompanied by great cunning, producing cruelty…Could it be imagined that at this day there was existing in a civilised, polished kingdom a race of beings (for they do not deserve the appellation of men) so extremely ignorant, and so little humanised as these were, compared with whom the naked savages of the mountains were an enlightened people?
We might think he was talking about the Australians. He was talking about the Irish.
These later sentiments are different in texture from those expressed in his first volume, which he had carried with him to England in manuscript form at the end of 1796. That volume, along with its twelve bulky appendices, was published in 1798, but Collins was so dedicated to his annalist’s task that he compiled a second volume from reports from the colony throughout the five-year governorship of his friend John Hunter, ending in 1800.
Collins’ second volume appeared in 1802. It makes dreary reading. Even before he left the colony Collins thought disorder was increasing, with convicts once kept under proper control enjoying disgraceful liberties, and those who had served out their terms adding dangerously to the social turmoil. Some of the freed convicts had joined the soldiery, but, not having ‘changed their principles with their condition’, they continued to embroil themselves in shameful plots and assaults. Sexual offences were becoming frequent and increasingly brutal, with gang rape now so common despite savage punishments (one man was sentenced to one thousand lashes), that a cant term, which the discreet Collins does not disclose, had been coined to further humiliate the victims. And the colony was drenched in drink: even the Sabbath, when the licensed public houses were kept closed during the hours of worship, was commonly spent ‘in every abominable act of dissipation’, and illicit stills were sprouting everywhere. When found they were immediately destroyed, ‘to the great regret of the owners, who from a bushel of wheat worth at the public store ten shillings distilled a gallon of new and poisonous spirit, which they retailed directly from the still at five shillings per quart bottle’. With a chronically thirsty public and that profit margin, we can assume the stills would keep sprouting. And already the New South Wales government was finding itself implicated in less-than-desirable activities. Black Caesar, a famous convict, repeat escapee and local legend, was loose in the bush again, with armed men about him. (The government had lost its monopoly over the possession of guns.) Black Caesar had sent a formal defiance to the custodians of law and order, saying ‘that he would neither come in, nor suffer himself to be taken alive’. It had become essential to put an end to his dangerously glamorous career. Accordingly, ‘notice was…given, that whoever should secure and bring him in with his arms should receive a reward’. The reward nominated was five gallons of spirits.
Civilisation itself seemed to be dropping away. The terror of irreversible disorder which had haunted Phillip haunted later governors, too. They responded, as he had, by elaborating punishments. In November 1796 five men, some of them convicts, some soldiers, were hanged, four for theft from the public stores, and one, Francis Morgan, for wilful murder. The court, now under the direction of Richard Atkins, the new judge-advocate, distinguished between the capital offences by embellishing the murderer’s penalty. His corpse was hung in chains on the tiny island the British called Pinchgut because they used it as a place of exile on minimal rations.
The whites took the gruesome tableau lightly, with ‘many’, Collins says regretfully, ‘inclined to make a jest of it’. The Australians were appalled: by the corpse, ‘his clothes shaking in the wind, the creaking of his irons’; by their fear that this ghost-creature ‘might have the power of taking hold of them by the throat’—and also, I think, by horror of a people who could devise and inflict so barbarous a punishment, and so casually desecrate a whole location. Thereafter they shunned the island where the blackening corpse hung, ‘which, until this time, had ever been a favourite place of resort’.
Governor Hunter’s court would mete out more obscene posthumous punishments. In 1799 a missionary gentleman, fled for his life from the ungrateful savages of Tahiti, was murdered by British savages in Australia when his skull was split by a settler, in collusion with a soldier and his wife, to extinguish a ten-pound debt. All three were hanged at the site of the crime, the house of iniquity pulled down and burnt, and the corpses of the men hung in chains before the ruins. The woman’s body was awarded a worse fate. It was handed over to the surgeons for dissection. We are left to wonder how John White, returned to England five years before, would have responded to that.
Although the time of imposed scarcity was over, convicts still in servitude were approaching an Australian insouciance regarding clothing: Collins was told that during the harvest of 1798 ‘several gangs were seen labouring in the fields, as free of clothing of any kind as the savages of the country’. Reading, we wonder whether ‘the civilising process’ was not beginning to reverse itself, with Australian example silently subverting British complacencies regarding the moral virtues of submission, modesty, property, decent housing and unremitting toil. The Australians’ sociability and their obvious preference for exciting pursuits like fishing or hunting or fighting must have been a siren song for Europeans whose lives had been spent not tilling fields, labouring for the morrow and internalising the work ethic but hunting and gathering in the London jungle. Taking to the bush might not have seemed so great a step for them. The convict taste for binge drinking, along with their improvident consumption of rations, with seven days’ rations gobbled in two and then living by scavenging, begging or borrowing until the next issue, suggests that many of these British men had never learnt the practised frugalities of the working poor, but had lived by their wits, consuming resources as they found them. Could they have been coming to share Botany Bay Colbee’s ‘demoralised’ view from the log?
This is as good a time as any to discuss the elusive issue of ‘racism’. The force and incidence of racism imported by the First Fleeters is impossible to measure with any confidence. Consider the range of attitudes even within the few members of the officer caste we have investigated. Consider also the thinness of what we can discover of convict attitudes to Australians. To some convicts, possibly to many, they were animals, to be pillaged and punished at will. Australian men responded with violence, and the dread of native attack circumscribed convict freedom more effectively than any musket-bearing guard, with a pleasurable task beyond the confines of the settlement turning in an instant into fatal terror. Later, convicts would see Australian hostages treated like pampered gentlefolk; after the official reconciliation of the last months of 1790 they had to watch as passing savages were welcomed into the governor’s house and fed in the governor’s yard, while the British-born went hungry, and worked under the threat of the lash.
The gentleman convict Thomas Watling gives literate expression to what must have been common grievances. Watling was a forger who, after taking an unauthorised vacation in Capetown on the voyage out, was recaptured and taken on to Sydney in October 1792. He remained in the colony until Governor Hunter pardoned him in 1797, when he had served eight years of his fourteen-year sentence. During his convict years he served as draughtsman and illustrator to several amateur natural scientists, among them Surgeon John White, David Collins and Hunter himself. He wrote dutifully to his loyal aunt back in Dumfries, describing the landscape, the weather, and the local animal life: the dearth of quadrupeds, the abundance of highly coloured birds and fish.
Then he moved on to the local humans. He disliked them heartily. He thought them ‘in general very straight and slim, but extremely ill-featured; and in my opinion the women more so than the men’. (Women’s appearance and conduct were commonly taken to be an index of civility.) As for their natures: ‘Irascibility, ferocity, cunning, treachery, revenge, filth and immodesty are strikingly their dark characteristics,’ while their virtues, if any, ‘are so far from conspicuous, that I have not, as yet, been able to discern them’—although he does allow they were not cannib
als, and were good mimics. He also grants they are attracted to the visual arts: ‘The natives are extremely fond of painting, and often sit hours by me when at work.’ Clearly, a few of the things these peculiar pale people did were worth studying.
Then we come to the root of his anger. Watling was writing in mid-1793. The Australians had been living in and around the settlements for months, and the one-time gentleman Watling had to watch while his betters pampered these sorry creatures:
Our governors, for they all are such, have carried philosophy, I do not say religion, to such a pitch of refinement as is surprising. Any of these savages are allowed…a freeman’s ration of provision for their idleness. They are bedecked at times, with dress which they make away with at the first opportunity, preferring the originality of nature; and they are treated with the most singular tenderness.
Meanwhile Watling and his fellow-convicts were left ill-clad, half-starved, and held to endless labour.
So says Watling, and he must have spoken for many others. Yet we know, almost by accident, that some convicts always responded differently. It is difficult to imagine the narrowness of convict life in those early years, with boredom a more savage enemy than want. With near-starvation chronic, I think it was the hopelessness embedded in the boredom which made the physical deprivation intolerable; that the wild schemes of ‘walking to China’ were concocted in response to the social and psychological anomie of convict life. Other episodes speak to the same motivation, like the Great Goldmine Scam Collins outlines: a beguiling way of beguiling the time by the exercise of old tricks, even with exposure and punishment inevitable. I also suspect the tireless internecine thieving was as much sport as necessity. But others sought escape, psychological or physical, by seeking the company of Australians. We remember those ‘large parties of convicts of both sexes’ Collins mentions regularly visiting their Australian friends as early as July of 1788. This suggests both that convict life was rather less constricted than the formal regulations implied, and that, as a category, convicts did not bear animus towards the locals. Given the swift and early spread of venereal disease among the native population we have to assume sex was one of the attractions of the social exchanges, but so, presumably, were the singing and dancing and the general conviviality of the Australian camp. Expressive good humour was a rare commodity in early convict Australia.
Later, after the ‘coming in’, the officers’ narratives naturally focused on their own interactions with the natives, but they still offer the occasional snapshot of convivial social relationships, even friendships, between particular convicts and particular Australians, like the mysterious convict woman in men’s dress taking refuge with Baneelon’s people out at the point, or the Australians who regularly caroused in the military barracks of an evening.
Collins had made his sour remark about wasting time and energy on ‘amusing ourselves with those children of ignorance’ immediately after the governor’s spearing, when Phillip’s conciliatory policy seemed to lie in tatters. When the local Australians decided to ‘come in’ to Sydney Town, Phillip’s persistence seemed vindicated, but the suddenness of their change of heart had not impressed Collins, and their exuberant behaviour once in the town only added to his dismay. Surely the convicts posed enough threats to order, without importing more trouble?
Over the years, however, we watch a moving transformation as Collins, watching, and reflecting on what he was watching, becomes our best and most sensitive informant on Australian ways of life and thought, especially in matters of justice and rights. Over those years (and it did take years) Collins became increasingly sensitive to indicators of cultural habits of mind, in time surpassing, for example, Tench, whose swift sympathy for individuals could sometimes blind him to systematic cultural differences.
COLLINS RECONSIDERS
Collins’ transformation may have been in part a reflex of his increasing isolation. Newcomers came flooding in after Phillip’s departure: newcomers with no appreciation of the changes wrought in everything, not least in the status of the native Australians. But more important than the external irritant of ignorance was his slow-dawning awareness of the first principle of anthropology: that it is possible to infer the rules underlying puzzling behaviour by close observation and analysis of that behaviour. Once he grasped that he might be able to understand what Australians were thinking from what Australians were doing, he became fascinated by those doings, especially ritualised ones, recording, for example, Australian funeral ceremonies in the kind of loving detail which allows even us latecomers to reconstruct the meanings certain actions held for those who once performed them.
There were, of course, limitations. He had no reliable bi-lingual informants to interrogate. On the eve of his leaving for England he could still comment that the language barrier remained effectively unbreached, especially on conceptual matters. Remember, too, the difficulty of translating layered cultural meanings and emotions into words even for the native speaker. Nonetheless, Collins doggedly recorded the details of his watching, attaching his devoted observations of Australian conduct as those twelve appendices to his already weighty narrative of events in the British colony. And once again we are made aware of the vulnerability of what have become for us indispensable historical materials. His publisher, faced with that huge work, and with the first spate of curiosity regarding Australia already waning, decided nonetheless to include the appendices.
One example of both the riches and the limitations: Collins provided a detailed account of a great male puberty ceremony, along with an elaborate sequence of drawings. He tells us that the ceremony was performed in late summer every four years: in February 1791, and again in February 1795, when he had watched it. His account is as detailed as a film’s shooting-script. He hazards guesses as to possible representations (‘now they are dingoes, now kangaroos’); he recognises enactments of the capture, terrorising and then comforting of the juvenile stars; he shows us the boys after their teeth have been knocked out, blood drying on their breasts and magically transformed into men, tearing back into the town driving gleefully screaming men, women and children before them. But what we are most aware of as we read is that we, like Collins, are blind and must be blind to much of what is going on before our eyes. The deeper symbolism of movement, gesture, sequence and regalia remained obscure to him, as it does to us. Here is Collins’ conclusion regarding this particular ceremony, which holds for the whole of his tenacious investigations into the Australian world of the sacred: ‘For its import I could discover very little. I made much inquiry; but could never obtain any other answer, than that it was very good; that the boys would now become brave men; that they would see well, and fight well.’ And that was all.
Where Judge-Advocate Collins excelled was in his recording and analysis of the working of tribal law. At first he had thought the Australians savages, the playthings of passion whose only law was violence. Then, as he watched graduated degrees of violence being visited on different offenders, he realised that ‘law’—a system of ranked punishment for ranked social transgressions—was indeed controlling the action. He still suspected the action was essentially expressive and arbitrary: a collective venting of emotion. And then, with more watching and longer reflection, he began to see the principles ordering the violence.
His enlightenment came through watching warriors facing the clubs and spears of tribal justice. As he watched—as he marvelled at their courage—he came to realise that these men lived under a code of honour as rigorous as any he knew: a code informed by what must have seemed to him as an educated English gentleman a classic stoicism. Towards the end of December in 1793 Collins described the execution of a punishment for murder in terms so admiring it deserves quoting in full:
The natives who lived around Sydney appeared to place the greatest confidence in us, choosing a clear spot between the town and the brickfield for the performance of any of their rites and ceremonies; and for three evenings the town had been amused with one of their spec
tacles, which might have been properly denominated a tragedy, for it was attended by a great effusion of blood. It appeared from the best account we could procure, that one or more murders having been committed in the night, the assassins, who were immediately known, were compelled, according to the custom of the country, to meet the relations of the deceased, who were to avenge their deaths by throwing spears, and drawing blood for blood. One native of the tribe of Cammeray [Cameragal], a very fine fellow named Carradah, who stabbed another in the night, but not mortally, was obliged to stand for two evenings exposed to the spears not only of the man whom he had wounded, but of several other natives. He was suffered indeed to cover himself with a bark shield, and behaved with the greatest courage and resolution. Whether his principal adversary (the wounded man) found that he possessed too much defensive skill to admit of his wounding him, or whether it was a necessary part of his punishment, was not known with any certainty; but on the second day that Carradah had been opposed to him and his party, after having received several of their spears on his shield, without sustaining any injury, he suffered the other to pin his left arm (below the elbow) to his side, without making any resistance; prevented, perhaps, by the uplifted spears of the other natives, who could have easily destroyed him, by throwing at him from different directions, Carradah stood, for some time after this, defending himself, although wounded in the arm which held the shield, until his adversaries had not a whole spear left, and had retired to collect the fragments and piece them together. On his sitting down his left hand appeared to be very much convulsed, and Mr. White was of the opinion that the spear had pierced one of the nerves. The business was renewed when they had repaired their weapons, and the fray appeared to be general, men, women, and children mingling in it, giving and receiving many severe wounds, until night put an end to their warfare.
Dancing with Strangers Page 24