Dancing with Strangers

  Collins also notes that Carradah ‘had not entirely expiated his offence, having yet another trial to undergo from some natives who had been prevented by absence from joining in the ceremonies of that evening’.

  Collins was profoundly impressed, as anyone would be. But he was bewildered by the attitude of all combatants during and after these ritualised combats:

  What rendered this sort of contest as unaccountable as it was extraordinary was, that friendship and alliance were known to subsist between several that were opposed to each other, who fought with all the ardour of bitterest enemies, and who, though wounded, pronounced the party by whom they had been hurt to be good, and brave, and their friends.

  The words we need here are not only ‘good’ and ‘brave’ and ‘friend’, but ‘trial’, and ‘expiation’, and ‘offence’. It is clear that male courage and skill were being tested; that expiation would not be achieved until all those wronged had engaged with the offender; that while the offence was individual, retaliation was tribal. It is also clear that the combat was unequal, and was meant to be—several against one. Blood was necessary, but not death. How much blood? A single wound, even a crippled hand, was not sufficient to purge Carradah’s offence. It seems there was no fixed penalty beyond that which was marked by the bystanders’ collective decision to join the combat…and then, when all involved considered honour and justice to be satisfied, to desist. The degree of injury—above all, whether it would include death—would be decided in the course of the combat.

  What Collins is showing us is a contest which echoes medieval European trials by ordeal, with the amount of retributive justice decided not by the offended parties, although they are its instrument, but by some higher source, whose judgment is revealed by the course of the action, which also signals that the offence is fully purged. Despite the yells, the blood, the violence, we are watching law at work.

  Paradoxically, it was Collins’ developing sensitivity to the web of invisible rules within which Australians lived which would lead him to repudiate his one-time friend Baneelon, who, forced to inhabit the void between two worlds, fetched up rejecting the laws of both. Collins would finally dismiss him simply, decisively, as a ‘savage’.

  Increased understanding does not necessarily entail tolerant acceptance. Within three years of his departure Phillip’s dream of a unitary commonwealth of whites and blacks living peaceably under British law was dead, as ‘wild’ Australians plundered the new settlers along the Hawkesbury and around Parramatta, and settlers and soldiers took horrible revenge. Now, with settlers and freed convicts encroaching into new areas, and with some recovery among local populations after the smallpox deaths, the contest for the land was becoming explicit. In August 1794 there were seventy settlers on the Hawkesbury flood plains. Ten months later there were close to five hundred. The spring of that year saw the first murderous ‘dispersals’ of the original inhabitants which were to scar our shared history.

  Collins sketched an early episode which prefigured many others. A settler and his servant had been ‘nearly murdered in their hut’ in a surprise attack. A few days later there was another raid, the raiders this time carrying off their victims’ ‘clothes, provisions and whatever else they could lay their hands on’. Then ‘the sufferers collected what arms they could, and following them, seven or eight of the plunderers were killed on the spot’.

  Collins knew the injustice of this vigilante ‘justice’. He knew where the blame lay:

  Whatever the settlers had suffered was entirely brought on them by their own misconduct: there was not a doubt but many natives had been wantonly fired upon; and their children, after the flight of the parents, have fallen into the settlers’ hands, they have been detained at their huts, notwithstanding the earnest entreaties of the parents for their return.

  He would put it more economically and depressively a year later in a letter to a friend recently returned to England: ‘We have little or no news. The natives at the Hawkesbury are murdering the settlers. Abbot and MacKellar with Co. soldiers are in turn murdering the natives (but it cannot be avoided…).’ As early as the autumn of 1795 Collins was ready to talk of ‘an open war’ along the Hawkesbury between Australians and settlers. Australian families were carrying out what look very like organised raids on the ripening maize. When word was received that a settler and a free labourer had been killed, troops were sent from Parramatta ‘with instructions to destroy as many as they could meet with of the wood tribe (Be-dia-gal); and, in the hope of striking terror, to erect gibbets in different places, whereupon the bodies of all they might kill were to be hung’. Black bodies hanging in the trees would mark the whites’ territory. We have come a long way from Phillip’s theatrical headhunt.

  In the event the soldiers found no bodies, which had probably been carried away by comrades. They captured only one man—a ‘cripple’, they said—five women and some children. The man managed to escape, but one of the women had a child at the breast, and the baby, wounded when the mother took a musket ball through the shoulder, died. Another of the captured women went into labour and was delivered of a boy-child, who also died.

  So the sinister dance began. When the soldiers withdrew a group of Australians attacked an isolated farm, and in accordance with their take-no-prisoners practice on revenge-raids, slaughtered the settler along with ‘a very fine child’, and severely wounded the wife before she managed to hide. From that time on soldiers were permanently stationed among the settlers. With December came a freak ice-storm—Collins reports that a day after the storm unmelted fragments were up to twenty centimetres long, and at least two fingers thick—and obliterated the disputed crops anyway.

  By early 1796, Collins’ last year in the colony, firearms had been issued to remote settlers. While it remained forbidden to fire at Australians ‘wantonly’, Hunter ruled that the settlers must come to each others’ aid when there was risk of an attack. By that act vigilantism was licensed.

  Collins’ attitudes were also hardening. He had believed that selected Australians could be tolerated inside the settlements and even make themselves useful in small ways, because inside the settlements the violence was typically between whites, or—if between blacks—battles between rival clans which the colonists treated much as we do football matches, if with less understanding of the rules. Once back in England, with the whites reporting to him ignorant of the political and social rivalries animating these clashes and therefore treating them as anarchic outbursts of violence, Collins’ views darkened, especially as he heard evil news of the doings of one-time Australian friends.

  In May 1797 a young Australian woman raised in the colony was first shockingly beaten by her husband, a man well known to Collins and also raised in the colony, and then speared to death by Colbee, who had participated in the beating. In August 1798 Baneelon’s sister Warreweer, wife to his own namesake ‘Collins’, was found murdered in what was probably a payback killing. Colbee’s kinsman Nanbaree had also been badly speared, and in the flurry of retaliatory violence which followed Colbee and Baneelon were in the forefront of the avengers. Baneelon had been seriously wounded—by treachery, Collins insisted—only to be wounded again in a mass battle.

  The killing venom of these battles persuaded Collins, or perhaps only his informants, whose views he presumably felt bound to reproduce, that the whole land was thinly populated because of the Australian taste for this kind of violence, reinforced by casual resort to abortion and infanticide: that is, that these people’s defects were chronic, innate, and cultural. Knowing, as Collins could not, how comprehensively destabilising the British presence was of the Australian social order, we wonder whether the radical reduction in resources and the imbalances of tribal power effected by that presence had exacerbated normally tempered conflict to fatality.

  In the course of his second volume Collins set down his final judgment. He knew how possessive Baneelon’s people were of their access to the settlement and their special relations with the whites;
how determined they were to repel other tribes’ efforts to establish an equivalent intimacy. They knew the value of what they enjoyed. Nonetheless, he lamented that they displayed not the least gratitude to their benefactors, nor did their jealous grip on privileges bind them to white ways. At last he was to ready to declare them incorrigible by nature, quite lacking the sense of reciprocity essential in a civil society. He writes:

  although they lived among the inhabitants of the different settlements, were kindly treated, fed and often clothed, yet they were never found to possess the smallest degree of gratitude for such favours. It is an extraordinary fact that even their children, who had been bred up among the white people, and who, from being accustomed to follow their manner of living, might be supposed to ill relish the lives of their parents, when grown up, have quitted their comfortable abodes, females as well as males, and taken to the same mode of savage living, where the supply of food was often precarious, their comforts not to be called such, and their lives perpetually in danger.

  We see a naked Boorong paddling away in her canoe, and a lad named Nanbaree running through the scrub to warn his friend Boladeree that the soldiers were after him.

  With increasingly bloody clashes over land, and with no end to the conflict in sight, Collins came to think that Phillip’s whole experiment in tolerance, continued in wizened form by Hunter and later by King, was mistaken, being derived from a wrong reading of the Australian character. His conclusion: ‘Could it have been foreseen that this was their natural temper, it would have been wiser to have kept them at a distance, and in fear, which might have been effected without so much of the severity which their conduct has sometimes compelled him to exercise towards them.’

  In retrospect we can see as Collins could not that different understandings of law placed a giant, invisible stumbling block in the way of peace between the two peoples. Three months after Collins left the colony, in December 1796, there was an event which distilled his disillusionment with ‘the savage inhabitants of the country, [who] instead of losing any part of their native ferocity of manners by an intercourse with the Europeans among whom they dwelt, seem rather to delight in exhibiting themselves as monsters of the greatest cruelty, devoid of reason, and guided solely by the impulse of the worst passions’. A little girl estimated to be six or seven years old had been ‘rescued’ from the running battles along the Hawkesbury River. The British had shot both her parents and most of her kin in a reprisal raid, but someone scooped up the child and took her back to Sydney to be cared for, where she, as Collins recorded with no trace of irony, ‘being a well-disposed child, soon became a great favourite with her protectors’. Some time later her body was found ‘in the woods near the governor’s house…speared in several places, and with both the arms cut off’. Her British protectors gathered the poor remains, gave them a Christian burial, and lamented the savagery of her compatriots.

  Collins thought the motive was jealousy: ‘As she belonged to a tribe of natives that was hostile to the Sydney people, they could not admit of her partaking in those pleasures and comforts which they derived from their residency among the colonists, and therefore inhumanly put her out of the way.’ It may have been a payback killing for some earlier offence. Her sex and her years would not exempt her from that. Orphaned by the whites, murdered by tribal enemies, she was a victim of the gulf between two unlike systems of law. Each had grievously wronged her. Neither could protect her.

  1795–1813 BANEELON RETURNED

  When Baneelon sailed for England with Phillip in December 1792, his star stood high with the governor, although we notice that Phillip also took with him Imeerawanyee. (He had planned to take Boladeree, only recently dead.) Imeerawanyee’s company mitigated Baneelon’s loneliness, but it also signalled the end of his unique status. What he hoped to achieve by that journey is obscure, but it is likely he sought to strengthen his alliance with Phillip and the British through the ordinary courtesy of visiting his friend’s home country. He had proudly shown David Collins his own ‘country’, inherited from his father: the little island he called Me-mel, named by the British Goat Island. He also told him he would in time pass it on to his friend (Baneelon had no issue). He could have had not the least notion of how far it was to the land of Phillip’s father.

  Despite some kindnesses—he was taken to London to see the King, which I think he would have enjoyed—Baneelon had a cold and lonely time of it, with that cool snuff-taking gentleman earlier mentioned providing one of his warmest memories. Both men suffered badly from homesickness, and both were often ill. Imeerawanyee died in England from a chest infection ‘when he was supposed to be about 19 years of age’, and was buried in a Kent churchyard. Baneelon finally got his longed-for passage home only in 1795, travelling back to Sydney on the Reliance with his old acquaintance John Hunter, appointed governor to replace Grose. Phillip had hoped that one or both Australians would become fluent in English during their stay, but Hunter records that despite his long exile Baneelon’s English was little improved.

  Over the seven months of the voyage Baneelon probably hoped to forge a special relationship with the incoming governor. Certainly his behaviour once home was confident to the point of arrogance, and determinedly in the British style: he appeared on the shore most elegantly clad, and publicly rebuked his sister for coming to greet him (she had run all the way from Botany Bay) without taking the time to dress. ‘He declared,’ Collins reports, ‘in a tone and with an air that seemed to expect compliance, that he would no longer suffer them to fight and cut each other’s throats, as they had done; that he should introduce peace among them, and make them love one another.’ He also required them to be ‘somewhat more cleanly in their persons, and less coarse in their manners’. So, at least, says Collins, and we might wonder how Collins understood so much of what was said. But it seems clear that Baneelon had decided to commit himself to the British account of things.

  As other expatriates have learnt since, absence does not make the Australian heart grow fonder. The first sign that he had lost prestige within his own group was that, despite his gift of a rose-coloured petticoat, jacket and gypsy bonnet, his reclaimed wife refused to stay with him. Baneelon beat her new lover with his fists in the proper British way, but he could not get her back. Another girl he grabbed took her first opportunity to escape back to her mother’s country. Thereafter Baneelon had no luck with women, being reduced to random sexual attacks which were usually foiled by their guardian menfolk, as when Colbee split his lip for molesting Colbee’s wife. His humiliation was necessarily public, and grievous. The incapacity of a mature man to keep even one woman was a painful indication of lost prestige.

  Baneelon also found that his old privileged role among the British was being usurped by younger, less ambitious men, ready to live alongside the white men, ready to take material benefit from them, but with no discernible political aspirations. Some of the new favourites were not of his kin or his territory. He must have known that his power in both camps was slipping away.

  At first he clung to his privileges, spending most of his time within the settlement, but Phillip was gone, and loneliness and celibacy must have been hard to bear. Collins tells us that after a few months he was regularly escaping the settlement for days at a time: doffing his clothes, stowing them at his house, and vanishing ‘into the woods with his sisters and other friends’.

  An episode from late 1797, two years after his return, marks the swiftness of Baneelon’s political and social decline. Collins records it almost by accident, after he has given his admiring account of a young man who (like the formidable Carradah) had faced the required ordeal for killing a man in a quarrel, and ‘stood manfully up against all their spears, and defended himself with great skill and address. Having two shields split in his hand, by the two spears passing quite through them, his friends, who were numerous, attacked his opponents, whom they disarmed, and broke their shields with many of their spears’. Thus courage was displayed, grievance satisfied
, anger purged, and key loyalties displayed and strengthened—as was proper.

  Baneelon should have faced the spears that day. A dying woman had dreamed that Baneelon had killed her, and after her death her kin accused him of achieving her death by sorcery. Some claimed he had wounded her physically before her death. Baneelon denied involvement, insisted that he didn’t even know the woman and refused to submit to the prescribed trial, either because his courage failed or (more sadly) because his confidence in both traditional laws and traditional explanations had gone.

  The interest lies in why the woman, whom Baneelon insisted he didn’t know, should have dreamt that he had injured her. Collins supplies a plausible explanation. He tells us when Baneelon was drunk in the town, as he often was, he ‘amused himself with annoying the women and insulting the men, who, from fear of offending his white friends, spared those notices of his conduct which he so often merited, and which sooner or later he would certainly meet with’. (This aggressive, disoriented behaviour is painfully familiar, in Australia and elsewhere, following on dispossession and systematic humiliation.)

  We can guess at a deeper cultural division. While his friend Hunter might be prevailed on to extricate Baneelon from a personal difficulty by having soldiers protect him from retaliation, the motive for any such intervention was purely personal and individual. It could not be parlayed into enduring political capital. Tragically, the distinction between the personal and the political so effortlessly drawn by the British was one which Baneelon, for all his swift wit, would never grasp.