As Baneelon’s star declined, Colbee’s was steadily rising. Colbee is an interesting figure. He had been a prisoner of the British for only a week, but from the moment of renewed contact he had moved smoothly in Baneelon’s wake. Within days of Baneelon being given his hatchets and received into Sydney and the governor’s house, Colbee and his immediate kin made their approach, and were accepted in too; while Baneelon failed to coerce Barangaroo into bearing her child inside the British hospital, Colbee brought his wife and a baby only two or three days old all the way from Botany Bay to present his child to the governor, and Daringa and her baby quickly became the darlings of Elizabeth Macarthur, who fed them regularly and spoke of them tenderly. Colbee kept a sure footing in both camps, perhaps because he was never tempted to make any accommodation to British values, but remained always a tribal man. He was able to pull off at least two night assassinations of men who had offended him, winning applause from his fellows, and without losing credit among the British. Collins admiringly noted that in one such exploit Colbee had gently lifted aside a child asleep on the intended victim’s chest, speared the man, and then, with the killing accomplished, carried the child back to Sydney to be cared for. He beat women at least as often as Baneelon, and with less provocation, beating Boorong ferociously and, as we have seen, spearing a girl at the request of her angry husband. As a warrior and a kinsman, Colbee could be relied upon—while somehow he retained his reputation among the British for being a steady, good-tempered fellow. For me he has come to be an Australian Collins, ready for genial coexistence, but with no desire for conversion in either direction.
Collins himself reports another tangled episode in December 1797, three months after Baneelon had refused to face tribal justice. Colbee had put himself outside Australian law by a major breach of warrior etiquette. In the thick of a desperate one-to-one combat his opponent’s shield had come away from its handle, and as he bent to pick it up Colbee had clubbed him once, and then again. This was in the warrior code a reprehensible action, and Colbee fled. But he could not run far enough: even while the man still lingered, Colbee and a kinsman were severely beaten by the victim’s people; when he died the kin sought formal revenge. The body had been buried ‘by the side of the public road, below the military barracks’ (note the confident use of what we would think of as core British territory) and a large body of Australians gathered at the grave ‘breathing revenge’. Privileged status among the whites might lend brief protection, but it could not cancel tribal obligations and affiliations: Colbee’s kinsman Nanbaree (the lad raised in Surgeon White’s household), who had unwisely approached the scene, was grabbed and beaten, and rescued only ‘by the appearance of a soldier who had been sent to the place with him’.
It was clear the vendetta would not stop until Colbee yielded himself up to justice. So he did. Meeting with the offended kin and their friends near the barracks, presumably close by the grave site, Colbee put up a sturdy fight, but he could not prevail against such numbers and, we might want to add, such anger at so rank an offence. Soon he was on the ground, with death a club’s length away. And then ‘several soldiers rushed in, and prevented them putting him to death where he lay’; they ‘lifted him from the ground, and between them bore him into the barracks’.
Did the soldiers intervene through personal friendship, or were they simply offended by a murderous brawl being staged on their doorstep? What happened next was even more mysterious. Baneelon had played a major role in the young man’s burial, which suggests at least a courtesy kin relationship, but he had taken no part in the attack on Colbee. Armed, ‘unencumbered by clothing of any kind’, he had been ‘a silent spectator of the tumultuous scene’—until the soldiers rushed in to extricate the fallen Colbee. And suddenly Baneelon was enraged. He hurled his spear at a soldier, wounding him horribly. The soldiers would have killed him on the spot but for a British official who ‘interfered and brought him away, boiling with the most savage rage; for he had received a blow on the head with the butt-end of a musket’. Baneelon was held overnight, as much ‘to prevent the mischief with which he threatened the white people, as to save him from the anger of the military, and on the following morning he quitted town’. Collins implies that from this point on Baneelon became a pariah among his own people: ‘The natives who had so constantly resided and received so many comforts in the settlement were now afraid to appear in the town, believing that, like themselves, we would punish all for the misconduct of one.’
Why had Baneelon hurled that fatal spear, and at a soldier, too? Because of the intolerable intrusion into properly conducted tribal justice? If so, there is an irony here. He had himself actively begged protection from Hunter only a year before, when he claimed a great body of Australians was assembled near the brickfields on the edge of the settlement swearing to kill him in retaliation for the death of a man near Botany Bay; a killing Baneelon insisted he had not done. The governor had yielded to his pleas: he sent him back with some of the military to inform the assembled Australians that he was innocent of the killing, that the governor would not allow him to be ill-treated, and that he would drive them away from Sydney if they should attempt any violence against him. Collins recalled that ‘many of them were much alarmed when they saw in what manner and by whom he was attended; and to be driven from a place whence they derived so many comforts, and so much shelter in bad weather, would have been severely felt by most of them’. By invoking British protection to avoid the consequences of his actions, Baneelon had placed himself beyond the reach of tribal law, and forfeited the respect of his own people.
We might have expected that the recollection of his own dependence on British power would mitigate Baneelon’s fury at the soldiers’ intervention, but clearly it did not. Perhaps our own circumstances always look special. And why should he have been so enraged by the musket-butt blow on the head? Because it was an illegal intervention by an outsider? Because it was a foul blow delivered from behind, with an inappropriate weapon? Because it was the kind of blow only women should suffer? We cannot know. We only know that ‘this most insolent and troublesome savage’, as Collins was now ready to call him, had fallen into a blind rage and speared a soldier, in British eyes a cardinal sin, and that this time there would be no reconciliation. This time, he would remain disaffected. When finally readmitted to the town, he drank more, stalking the Sydney streets defiantly naked, carrying his spear and threatening violence against the governor. Who simply closed his doors to him.
It was at about this time that the last of the great initiation ceremonies was held at the traditional meeting place at Middle Harbour. Presumably the complex reciprocities needed to sustain such supra-group ceremonies were finally fracturing under the strains of the British presence.
Thereafter Baneelon, with his anger and his anguish, simply drops from British notice. He did not die until 1813. On 3 January of that year an obituary appeared in the Sydney Gazette, and we hear the official British summary of the meaning of his life:
The principal officers of the government had for many years endeavoured, by the kindest of usage, to wean him from his original habits and draw him into a relish for civilised life; but every effort was in vain exerted and for the last few years he has been but little noticed. His propensity to drunkenness was inordinate; and when in that state he was insolent, menacing and overbearing. In fact, he was a thorough savage, not to be warped from the form and character that nature gave him by all the efforts that mankind could use.
Baneelon, that fluent, perceptive man, memorialised in death as an unchanged, unchanging icon of ‘the savage’. At our greater distance he is a both a more dynamic and more tragic figure. His constant endeavour was to establish his clan, as embodied in his person, in an enduring reciprocal relationship with the British—the relationship of profitable intimacy and mutual forbearance Phillip, for a time, seemed to offer. Early in his captivity he gave Phillip the name Be-anna; Phillip had responded by calling him Dooroow, son. Thereafter Baneelo
n consistently read what were to Phillip mildly sentimental professions of regard as the recognition of coercive kinship obligations; and time and again he was brutally disappointed. The early history of their relationship was studded with frustrations and disappointments as Phillip refused his clear duty to support Baneelon, and Baneelon’s people, against their enemies.
During Baneelon’s English sojourn the claim of his clan to special privileges was submerged into the socially depressed category of ‘native’. Only a few individuals continued to be privileged, and they were privileged as individuals, regardless of tribe. For Baneelon this was betrayal. I suspect that the soldiers’ intervention to save Colbee affronted him on both the political and the individual level: for its arrogant disruption of the proper execution of tribal law, but also its reminder that Colbee, once his friend, always his rival, could count on personal protection from the whites, too.
Over the last years of his life Baneelon abandoned the British in his heart, as they had long abandoned him in the world. At fifty he fumed his way to an outcast’s grave. He should have died earlier, in the days of hope.
1830 BUNGAREE
A man from the Broken Bay tribe the whites called Bungaree was to prove more successful than Baneelon in managing the quicksilver experience of being a colonised black male. He was early known as an excellent man with boats. Matthew Flinders chose him to be part of his northern explorations in mid-1799, and again in 1802 when the Investigator set out to circumnavigate the continent. On that second voyage Bungaree had Nanbaree, now a young man, as companion. Flinders found himself relying on Bungaree for his skills as a seafarer and fish-taker, his tact in negotiating with newly met Australians, and for his steady good humour. A year later and back on land it was Bungaree’s warrior skills which were being celebrated, the Sydney Gazette commending him for the killing force of his boomerang during a fight at Farm Cove, and also for his ‘courtesy’, surely an odd quality to remark in a battle. Presumably they meant his scrupulous observance of the warrior combat code. Later again he was one of the men selected for Governor Macquarie’s doomed experiment of turning nomads into farmers, with specially selected Australians having huts built for them on little slices of land and being provided with tools, seeds and animals. Two years after the unlamented death of the irremediably ‘savage’ Baneelon, the Governor’s Lady herself presented Bungaree, in his new role as Chief of the Farmers, with ‘a Breeding Sow and 7 pigs—and also a pair of Muscovy Ducks—together with Suits of Clothes for his Wife and Daughter’: a poignant echo of Phillip’s dream of seeing the Australians settled, clothed and self-supporting.
The dream was again disappointed. Bungaree and his people abandoned the nascent farms, ate, sold or lost the animals, and stripped the huts of saleable items. The one gift they prized was a boat. They used it to catch fish to peddle in Sydney Town.
In the same year the governor recognised the vitality of Bungaree’s authority by investing him with a metal chest ornament proclaiming him to be ‘BOONGAREE—Chief of the Broken Bay Tribe—1815’.
Macquarie continued to distinguish his self-created ‘chief’. In February 1822, on the day before he was to leave for England, the governor went to visit Bungaree at Pittwater, taking the incoming governor Thomas Brisbane with him. Macquarie feasted Bungaree and his people, and then presented him with ‘an old Suit of General’s uniforms to dress him out as Chief’, perhaps in genial mockery, perhaps in recognition of his role as mediator between the races. There was some reality in the title: in 1824, when the Frenchman d’Urville was recording his impressions of Sydney, he watched Bungaree lead his people into battle against another tribe, and was impressed by Australians’ skill with the boomerang.
A remarkably flexible career, to be put together by a man who had lived through ‘interesting times’, as the old Chinese curse has it. But Bungaree was ageing and his alcohol addiction worsening. The protean man was transforming again, this time into chronically drunken ‘King Bungaree’, a figure of fun in a plumed hat and a British jacket, with a brass plate around his neck which now proclaimed him ‘Bungaree, King of Sydney Cove’. He would have himself rowed out in a decrepit whaleboat to welcome newcomers to Sydney, collect his kingly ‘tax’, and then divide the spoils in the form of drink among his disreputable followers. It seems that Bungaree, ‘whose good disposition, and open and manly conduct’ had won him Flinders’ enduring regard, had been extinguished by the alcoholic clown. He fell seriously ill in 1830, was restored to fragile health in the Sydney General Hospital, and thereafter received a full ration from the government. For a time he was cared for in the house of a Catholic priest, but he died among his own people at Garden Island in November 1830.
What had happened to this man, who had accommodated so flexibly to the colonial regime, expanding the narrow role allocated to Australians within it to something like autonomy? Why did the disciplined seafarer fall victim to alcohol and indulgent contempt? Why was alcohol so lethal a solvent of Australian social bonds and individual dignity, which had seemed the central passions of their lives? In those first encounters on the beach most Australians had shunned the wine or rum pressed on them—except for Baneelon. Restless for glory in this as in so much else, he was soon quaffing wine with all the flourishes with which white gentlemen surrounded it. The general refusal did not last. The Europeans discovered the only lures which could coax services from the Australians were flour, sugar, tea—and alcohol and tobacco. The Russian navigator Bellingshausen, who met Bungaree and his rowdy entourage in 1820, noted that ‘the magic charms of drink and tobacco’ had attracted swarms of Australians to Sydney Town, and had become indispensable to them, so they ‘willingly become hewers of wood and drawers of water for the sake of tobacco and spirits,’ and we remember Dampier’s frustration with his intransigent ‘savages’. Yet Bungaree, and others—too many others—seemed to tumble suddenly into a condition of obsessive addiction: an addiction remarked on and jeered at even in that society of obsessive European drinkers.
The drinking may have been a symptom of the multiple losses incurred under the new imposed system. Perhaps, after the eruption of smallpox and of venereal diseases and the malignant erosion of other imported diseases; after the cognitive shocks of trying to fathom the true nature and intentions of these powerful, chronically unreliable intruders, alcohol provided a fast passport to the familiar and well-loved place they had once achieved through the slow preparation and joyful performance of ceremony: a broad avenue to the sacred. In other better documented countries (I am thinking of my own territory of sixteenth-century Mexico under the blows of Spanish colonisation) we watch the decay of formal traditional ceremonial life as the conditions necessary to sustain it disintegrated, then the inflow of alcohol to fill the void—and then the quick slide into the abyss. We also see that the ‘hopelessness, powerlessness, poverty and…confusion’ diagnosed by Stanner two centuries after contact were already evident by the second decade after European intrusion.
Captain Bellingshausen was puzzled by the tension between Bungaree’s earlier reputation as a multi-skilled seafarer, and the broken-down figure he saw before him. He was sufficiently moved by the puzzle to describe the shape of the life the older Bungaree had created for himself, in which we discern a patchwork of fragments drawn from the old and from the new. With the clowning and begging done, Bungaree and his makeshift clan would go out fishing, exchange their catch for rum and tobacco, and row back to their camps on the north shore. The Russian remembered that ‘they had to pass near our ships, and every evening they came back drunk, shouting savagely and uttering threats: and often their quarrels with each other ended in a fight…’ (I am writing these words just before Christmas. Other people’s parties often sound very like brawls.)
The Russian’s observations raise another teasing possibility. We notice that Bungaree managed to keep his people together, and free from white supervision, in desperately oppressive circumstances. Not long after the ‘coming in’ and the Australians
’ adoption of what the British called begging as a technique of survival, they began preening in bits of European gear. They were also often drunk. To British observers they were pathetic inebriates, miming a glory forever beyond them. But given their passion for mimicry and their rapturous imitations of European absurdities, might not the strutting and preening have functioned as an impromptu secular corroboree, a running Australian joke on the British, invisible to its victims, radiantly clear to its perpetrators? There were few roles open to warriors under British rule. Baneelon found himself thrust into a suicidal performance of ‘irreconcilable savage’. Did Bungaree choose ‘tolerated clown’? Look again at the poise and the ironic flourish of Augustus Earle’s representation of Bungaree (plate 8). Bungaree’s beautifully florid performances won some goods, money and a modicum of freedom from the whites, while it parodied European pretensions before an appreciative Australian audience.
However complex the Australians’ accommodations, and despite moments of affection and good will, the die was now cast. The years of negotiation and hopeful experiment were gone, along with most of the people, black and white, who had lived through them. As all young colonies do, Sydney regularly lost its memory with the old hands going home, and newcomers entering what they took to be an unchanging colonial reality. As drunken Australians fought, danced and shouted in the streets of the town, most Britishers came to think they had always been like that, and Augustus Earle could reliably supplement his income by representing the Australians as clownish caricatures.
Bungaree died in 1830. A year before, on 7 July 1829, which is a wintry month in Sydney, the Sydney Gazette reported an apparition. Citizens walking through the Government Domain had been startled to see an Australian man ‘in a state of perfect nudity, with the exception of his old cocked hat, graced with a red feather’. The spectre of Baneelon, returned in a comic hat. He was identified as ‘the veteran native Chief, Bungaree’.
Dancing with Strangers Page 26