Dancing with Strangers

by Inga Clendinnen

  After the hectic engagements of Phillip’s time, the social gulf between the races had been fixed. But multiple interactions and influences continued. We remember that even in the first days, when we were firmly told of convicts’ fear and loathing for Australians, we would also see that some sought each other’s company, like that family in the bay adjacent to Sydney where convicts and Australians made merry together, and a scatter of other glimpses of trans-racial trust and affection. Pleasure was taken in each other’s company. A series of foreign travellers would comment on the relaxed style of black–white relations in and around Sydney, as they would on the curious persistence, beyond the towns, of the Australians’ independent way of life.

  To end, as we began, with Charles Darwin, this time in 1836, in New South Wales, somewhere between Sydney and Bathurst. This is what he saw late one afternoon:

  At sunset, a party of a score or more of the black aborigines passed by, each carrying, in their accustomed manner, a bundle of spears and other weapons…They were all partly clothed, and several could speak a little English: their countenances were good-humoured and pleasant, and they appeared far from being such utterly degraded beings as they have usually been represented. In their own arts they are admirable…In tracking animals or men they show the most marvellous sagacity; and I heard of several of their remarks which manifested considerable acuteness, they will not, however, cultivate the ground, or build houses and remain stationary, or even take the trouble of tending a flock of sheep when given them…It is very curious thus to see in the midst of a civilised people, a set of harmless savages wandering about without knowing where they shall sleep at night, and gaining their livelihood by hunting in the woods.

  He also notes, regretfully, the unequal contest over the land, and points to a consequence: the Australians’ infants are dying because of the difficulty, in these changed times, of procuring sufficient food, ‘so their wandering habits increase…and the population, without any apparent death from famine, is repressed in a manner extremely sudden’.

  So the Australians walk on to their unknown camp, and their uncertain future. For a while longer they would dance their dances, but now they would dance alone.

  1839–40 ENTER MRS CHARLES MEREDITH

  Nearly forty years after Watkin Tench had quit the colony an Englishwoman, upper class, cool, and free from the least desire to flatter the colonials, came to Sydney with her husband. Already recognised as a poet of some note, she wrote elegant literary letters to beguile the time and her friends at home, mainly by astonishing them with the crudity of life in Australia.

  The main tale she has to tell is of colonists’ drunkenness. Men, women and near-children all drank with ferocious determination. She was especially impressed by the inebriation, regardless of age, sex or time of day, among all those ‘keeping a public’. Her explanation points to the colonists’ natural indolence: ‘Idleness and drinking are such besetting sins, and money to provide them both so easily earned by “keeping a public” in this Colony, that nothing demanding bodily exertion is attempted.’ She tells eye-stretching stories about some of the inns she encountered along her way between Sydney and Bathurst just three years after Darwin, and we think how differently individuals travel (Darwin ate, slept, and tranquilly moved on). Mrs Meredith also intersperses her horror stories with heartfelt abuse for the trailblazing explorer Major Mitchell and his taste for the picturesque as his road clambered painfully up and over the very ‘summits of hills, while level valleys lay within a few hundred feet’. ‘Prospects’ can come at a high price in time and comfort.

  But it is ‘the demoralising passion for rum’ which most offended her: ‘No threats, no bribe, no punishments avail to keep the besotted creatures from the dram bottle.’ Even young chambermaids would snatch a swig of eau de cologne or lavender-water or anything else they thought might contain spirits if it were left within their reach. After a squalid breakfast in a squalid public house—‘nice sweet milk poured into a dirty glass’ by a ‘stupid, dirty, half-dressed, slipshod woman’ in a house still full of unmade beds and clothes lying about at ten o’clock in the morning!—she commented: ‘This universal addiction to drink, and the consequent neglect of all industry and decency, are truly shocking.’ The only exceptions to the general rule, she thought, were the families of poor English emigrants, who clung to the frugalities, industry and virtues of home. Mrs Meredith accordingly shunned local whites as servants, choosing to employ only sober, respectable, respectful persons from England, not yet corrupted by the colonials.

  She had little sustained contact with Aboriginal Australians, whom she called ‘Aborigines’ or ‘natives’ (she reserves the word ‘Australian’ for locally-bred whites), but she was, like Tench, curious about them and like him, although quite lacking his imaginative sympathy, she had a good eye. Her general summation dents the stereotype. She saw them as a cheerful bunch, stubbornly refusing the white man’s gifts of garments, steady labour, and a sensible frugality; and demonstrating instead an irresponsible preference for their own feckless ways. Nonetheless, she regarded them more highly than she did most of the local whites. The native taste for strong drink was eclipsed by white excesses, and they usually drank to rowdy cheerfulness, not sodden inebriation. She heard them singing, and found their songs to have more melody and variety than those of the Maori, ‘which surprised me, as the latter people are so immeasurably superior to the natives of New South Wales in everything else’. (She had seen quite a few Maori in Sydney; by the 1820s a useful trade in flax and timber had been established with New Zealand, so despite their penchant for eating people Maori were judged to be fine, sensible folk.) She acknowledged that the civilising process among the Australian natives was moving slowly, if it moved at all, especially in the matter of housing. While they took grateful shelter in weatherproof European houses during downpours, they flatly refused to build any dwellings for themselves, being content to risk the weather and ‘raise a few strips of bark slantingly against a tree’, with the result looking, to Mrs Meredith’s untutored eye, no more than ‘accidental heaps of bark’.

  As for clothing: she noticed how well native men looked in coachmen’s livery, which she thought showed off their splendidly erect postures to advantage, and we remember William Bradley’s comment made during the first month after his landing: ‘They walk very upright, and very much with their hands behind them’, a stance designed to display the masculine chest to advantage. Mrs Meredith also noted the men’s particular talent for managing horses, which made them stylish and efficient coachmen even over long tough journeys like that between Sydney and Adelaide. Then follows a now-familiar lament: once they got home even the most stylish and efficient refused to stay in service, and neither example nor exhortation nor vanity nor shame could keep them in their clothes: ‘Even after a sojourn of many months with Europeans, and in a comparatively civilised state, they invariably return to their old habits, and relinquish their smart and comfortable clothes for the corrobbory [sic] costume of nudity and pipe-clay.’

  She also noticed something else: male pride in physical prowess. Aborigines shinning up trees after possums seemed to leap upwards: they would make tiny notches in the bark ‘just large enough to rest the end of the big toe’, and up they would go—and we flash back to Phillip and his intrepid bushwalkers marvelling at the agile old man leaping up the tree on the Hawkesbury. On horseback, a European skill ‘which many of them do, well and fearlessly’, ‘they never put the flat foot in the stirrup, but only lay hold of it with the great toe’, so dramatising natural balance. These men clearly exulted in displays of prowess and courage.

  Mrs Meredith was also astonished by their talent for mimicry, ‘one learn[ing] to waltz very correctly in a few minutes’ (shades of Darwin) while:

  the slightest peculiarity of face or figure never escapes their observation, so that in speaking of any person you know, though his name be not mentioned, their accurate impersonation of his gait, expressions of countenance, or
any oddity of manner, is so complete as to leave no doubt of the identity.

  Fifty years of white presence had only sharpened that passionate, gleeful talent for re-presentation.

  A less attractive quality also remained noticeable. The men’s mistreatment of their women drove her to a fury of underlinings:

  Female children are sometimes ‘promised’ in infancy to their future husbands (frequently decrepit old men), and others appear to be taken by means of force and ill-usage, as is the case among many savage nations, The men are always tyrannical, and often brutally cruel to their unfortunate wives, who really do seem to occupy as miserable and debased a position, in every respect, as it is possible for human beings to do…Severe personal chastisement is among the lesser grievances of the poor Gins.

  She goes on to tell a horrible story of a man’s pipe having been broken, by accident, by his wife—and the breaking of the culprit’s arm as punishment. She concludes: ‘These poor unhappy wretches are slaves, in every social sense.’

  Mrs Meredith also unwittingly gives us news of an enduring legacy. I am a part-time North Queenslander these days, and proud of it. But I still can’t master the local lingo, especially the way locals of all colours use the sound ‘Ay’. They can just about make a conversation out of it.

  Listen to Mrs Meredith a hundred and fifty years ago:

  The various expressions conveyed by the peculiar ‘Ay, Ay’, so constantly used by the natives in speaking, is perfectly indescribable. It is used doubtfully, interrogatively, or responsively, as the case may be, and contains in itself a whole vocabulary of meanings, which a hundred times the number of words could not convey in writing. Suppose you inquire of a native if he has seen such and such a person pass, as he had gone that way:—‘Ay, ay?’ (interrogatively.) ‘Yes, a tall man.’—‘Ay, ay’ (thoughtfully). ‘A tall man, with great whiskers.’ ‘Ay, ay (positively). Good way up cobbra, cabou grasse; ay, ay (corroboratively).’—‘Good way up cobbra’ meaning ‘head high up’, ‘grasse’ meaning hair or beard, and ‘cabou’ meaning a great deal, or very much.

  Identification achieved. This small act of reverse colonisation pleases me very much.

  EPILOGUE

  During an early and relatively benign phase of their imperial adventure the British—or rather the selection of them we have just met—chanced to encounter in Australia one of the few hunter-gatherer societies left on the earth. (Today, to my knowledge, there are none.) Despite or perhaps because of the width of the cultural chasm between the two peoples, each initially viewed the other as objects not of threat, but of curiosity and amusement; through those early encounters each came to recognise the other as fellow-humans, fully participant in a shared humanity.

  Unseen conflict lay in the path. If less peripatetic than their inland brothers, the people around Sydney Cove were nonetheless compelled to exploit the seasonal resources of all of their territories if they were to survive. During those first years, both the complexity and the fragility of the nomad economy were masked from the newcomers by local population losses and the fortuitous provision of British rations to supplement the diet of those Australians most directly affected by the British presence. Only a handful of First Fleet observers began to grasp the great fact of the Australians’ intimate dependence on what the British continued to think of as ‘wild’, indeed empty, land. And then it was too late. The British, with labour enough from convicts, would find no place for Australians in their colony-building enterprise. What they wanted was land, and they took it. Once that conflict became explicit, racial frontiers, pushing irresistibly outwards, would be marked in blood, and many Australians would die; some from British bullets, more from disease and starvation.

  Milan Kundera reminds us that we humans proceed in a fog. By coming to see the fogs through which people in other times battled in the direction they hoped was forward, we may be better able to recognise and penetrate our own. Fast-evolving colonial situations demand swift responses. Our two main protagonists, Phillip and Baneelon, were given no space for reflection, revision or even explanation of their positions. Each failed, to their own and their people’s injury, and to ours. They cannot be blamed for that failure.

  We have a duty to the people of the past: to rescue them from the falsifying simplifications we impose if we refuse to see the fog through which they were trying to make their way. W. E. H. Stanner has called the Australians ‘a high-spirited and militant people’, and it is as a high-spirited, militant people they leap from the eighteenth-century page. They should be honoured not only for their ingenious adaptation to life on this, the least manipulable continent on earth, but also for their inventive resourcefulness in dealing with the strangers. The men of the First Fleet deserve honour too, for their openness, their courage, and their stubborn curiosity. In the end, it was the depth of cultural division which defeated them, not any lack of energy, intelligence or good will.

  Every indigenous people has walked their trail of tears, but few others enjoyed that springtime of trust. Our first shared Australian story is a tragedy of animated imagination, determined friendship and painfully dying hopes. Through time and accumulated disillusionments each group, despite their domestic proximity, lost both curiosity and concern for the other, and imagination atrophied into settled mistrust. Now, with hope for reconciliation renewed over this past decade, it is time to think again about that atrophy: how it came about, and how we might climb out of it.

  Accordingly I have introduced a rather more expansive concept of culture into the discussion of race relations in this country than is currently in use. I hope I have persuaded the reader that ‘culture’ is more than a bundle of legal principles, a matter of going clothed or naked, of cherishing privacy or ignoring it, of sharing or not sharing. It is best understood as the context of our existential being: a dynamic system of shared meanings through which we communicate with our own. Because those meanings are rarely made explicit, understanding another culture’s meanings is and will always be a hazardous enterprise.

  History is not about the imposition of belated moral judgments. It is not a balm for hurt minds, either. It is a secular discipline, and in its idiosyncratic way a scientific one, based on the honest analysis of the vast, uneven, consultable record of human experience. To understand history we have to get inside episodes, which means setting ourselves to understand our subjects’ changing motivations and moods in their changing contexts, and to tracing the devious routes by which knowledge was acquired, understood, and acted upon. Only then can we hope to understand ourselves and our species better, and so manage our affairs more intelligently. If we are to arrive at a durable tolerance (and it is urgent that we should), we have only history to guide us.

  Inquiry into our confused beginnings suggests that the possibility of a decent co-existence between unlike groups must begin from the critical scrutiny of our own assumptions and values as they come under challenge. We might then be able to make informed decisions as to which uncomfortable differences we are prepared to tolerate and which we are not, rather than to attempt the wholesale reformation of what we identify as the defects of the other. A lasting tolerance builds slowly out of accretions of delicate accommodations made through time; and it comes, if it comes at all, as slow as honey.

  There remains a final mystery. Despite our long alienation, despite our merely adjacent histories, and through processes I do not yet understand, we are now more like each other than we are like any other people. We even share something of the same style of humour, which is a subtle but far-reaching affinity. Here, in this place, I think we are all Australians now.

  These [two black swans] had with very great care been brought alive to England; but unfortunately one of them soon died in moulting; and the other having, after that operation, with his health also recovered the perfect use of his wings, availed himself of the liberty they gave him… and was shot by a nobleman’s gamekeeper as it was flying across the Thames.

  David Collins, An Account of the En
glish Colony in New South Wales, 1802

  NOTES ON SOURCES

  INTRODUCTION

  There were significant territorial divisions among the Australians, with the boundaries marked by fighting, mutual feasting and ritual obligations, and the exchange of women on the established anthropological principle, ‘they are our enemies; we marry them’. The primary division was between what David Collins called ‘families’ and we might call clans, each family being named for its territory: ‘Thus the southern shore of Botany bay is called Gwea, and the people who inhabit it style themselves Gweagal [while] those who live in the north shore of Port Jackson are called Cam-mer-ray-gal.’ (I will refer to them throughout as ‘Cameragal’.) The Cameragal was the dominant tribe, the most numerous, ‘robust and muscular’, and controlled the most important male initiation rite which centred on the knocking-out of the right upper incisor. (British observers were to notice that the inland people retained their teeth, so were presumably beyond the Cameragal zone of influence.) John Hunter confirms and expands Collins’ information, and contributes his own intrepid spelling:

  The tribe of Cammera inhabit the north side of Port Jackson. The tribe of Cadi inhabits the south side, extending from the south head to Long-Cove, at which place the district of Wanne, and the tribe of Wangal, commences, expanding as far as Par-ra-mata, or Rose-Hill. The tribe of Wallumede inhabit the north shore opposite Warrane, or Sydney-Cove, and are called Walumeta. I have already observed that the space between Rose-Hill and Prospect-Hill is distinguished by four different names, although the distance is only four miles.