Dancing with Strangers

by Inga Clendinnen

  On Baneelon’s flight, Phillip to Banks, July 1790, Frost, ‘The Papers of Arthur Phillip (1738–1814)’.

  SPEARING THE GOVERNOR

  For Collins’ account of the spearing, Collins, Account, 1, p. 111.

  For the non-sequitur, Collins, Account, 1, pp. 111–12.

  Elizabeth Macarthur, The Journals and Letters of Elizabeth Macarthur, introduced and transcribed by Joy N. Hughes, Historic Houses Trust of New South Wales, 1984: Elizabeth Macarthur to Bridget Kingdon, 7 March 1791, pp. 28–30.

  On language, Collins Account, 1, Appendix: General Remarks, p. 451.

  For Phillip’s account of the spearing and its aftermath, ‘Narratives from the Official Despatches of Governor Phillip’, Phillip in Hunter, chaps. 17–23, pp. 305–14.

  For the Bradley kidnap, Bradley, A Voyage, p. 183.

  For the Waterhouse account, Bradley, The Journal, Sydney, 1969, pp. 225–30.

  For Tench, 1788, pp. 134–40.

  For Collins’ account, Collins, Account, 1.

  For the spear-deflecting techniques, Hunter, An Historical Journal, p. 39. For Collins’ awed description of the ritual spearing of the warrior Carradah, where everyone knew their parts and played them superbly, see Collins, Account, 1, pp. 275–6.

  For Stanner’s comment, White Man Got No Dreaming, p. 174; for Phillip’s final analysis, Phillip in Hunter, Historical Journal, p. 308.

  Consider also Keith Vincent Smith’s interesting hypothesis in his Bennelong: The Coming In of the Eora, Sydney Cove, 1788–1792, Kangaroo Press (Simon and Schuster), East Roseville, 2001. While Smith constructs his narrative of the spearing from discordant sources, he recognises that the spearing was masterminded by Baneelon, arguing that the motive was a personal payback. I think my argument clings more closely to the complicated contours of events. See also Keith Willey’s elegant retrieval of events in his When the Sky Fell Down: The Destruction of the Tribes of the Sydney Region 1788–1850s, Collins, Sydney and London, 1979. While Willey is sensitive to the opacities blurring our understanding of Australian action, and while he acknowledges that the parleys between the British and Baneelon and his party would have looked very like a progressive peace conference from an Australian point of view, he describes the ‘coming-in’ after the spearing as a ‘surrender’ (p. 116).

  For the reactions of the Australians from around Rose Hill, Tench, 1778, p. 140; Collins, Account, 1, p. 112, and Phillip in Hunter, p. 312.

  For the Port Jackson Painter: Bernard Smith has emphasised that the ‘Port Jackson Painter’ is more properly identified as a cluster of stylistic traits rather than an individual, but allows Henry Brewer, an accomplished draughtsman and ‘an old friend of Governor Phillip [who had] acted as a clerk for him on several of his ships’, to be a major contributor to the collective. Bernard Smith, European Vision and the South Pacific, 2nd ed., Oxford University Press, Melbourne, 1989, p. 347, n. 6. As well as a painter Brewer was a director of the Night Watch, Provost-Marshal of the courts and a devoted drinker.

  ‘COMING IN’

  For the hair-clipping and the romping, Collins, Account, 1, p. 452; for the reconciliation in general, Tench, 1778, pp. 141–50. Tench, who was present at the second meeting if not at the first, habitually uses the collective ‘we’, whether present or not.

  For the hints of the survival of the traditional Australian hierarchy, Thomas Watling, Letters from an Exile at Botany Bay, to his Aunt in Dumfries, 1794, quoted in Bernard Smith (ed.), Documents on Art and Taste in Australia, p. 13, and Collins, Account, 1, p. 452.

  On Baneelon’s ‘hut’, Tench, 1778, p. 160, Collins, Account, 1, p. 71, p. 117, and Phillip in Hunter, p. 316 and passim. For the formal reconciliation with Colbee, Phillip in Hunter, p. 314.

  HOUSE GUESTS

  For the population figures, Collins, Account, 1, p. 120; for John Harris, quoted Alan Frost, Arthur Phillip: His Voyaging, p. 195.

  On privies and their alternatives: Captain James Campbell of the Marines, writing to his friend Dr William Farr in Plymouth in March 1791 (in a letter which aches with loneliness, and also with disillusionment) describes the miraculous reconciliation which followed on Phillip’s spearing: ‘The natives have, almost ever since, appeared perfectly reconciled with us, and, which they never did before, are now, morning, noon & night—men, women and children, and all without even Madam Eve’s covering, rambling about our huts.’ Campbell, who was of a very different temper than Tench, added ‘the more we see of them, the more we are convinced of their being the most abject of the human race yet met with.’ Then he carries on about the contemptible canoes (‘like ducks in the water’). And then he proceeds to the Australians’ ‘filthiness’. ‘…they are the filthiest of all God’s creatures for, when they lay down to sleep, which they do like so many Pigs one upon the other, should any of the calls of nature disturb them at that time, they discharge whatever it is, without moving from the spot’. Campbell knew nothing of the human and suprahuman dangers lurking in the dark beyond the firelight. He comments that when nine-year-old Nanbaree came back from visiting his kin, ‘The poor little fellow was, from top to toe, all over besmirched, saying, when asked the cause by Mr White, that the…“Natives” did it while he was asleep among them.’ This tells us something about Captain Campbell. It tells us even more about Surgeon White. Capt. James Campbell to Dr William Farr, 24 March 1791, facsimile copy in State Library of New South Wales, ML Doc. 1174. Original in the British Library, London, in the papers of William Farr, MS 37060, ff. 68–71. My thanks to Alan Frost for the reference.

  For the troubles with Baneelon, Phillip in Hunter, pp. 316–34. See p. 344 for the comment about the woman ‘granting favours’ to convicts. This is the first explicit mention of convict–Australian sexual relations of which I am aware. For Tench’s dramatised version of the episode, Tench, 1788, pp. 160–4.

  BRITISH SEXUAL POLITICS

  For the Australian girls going on board ship, Collins, Account, 1, Appendix V; for the woman convict discovered in men’s clothing, Collins, Account, 1 p. 159.

  For Gooreedeeana, Tench, 1788, p. 244, p. 246–7.

  On Dawes: to follow the life of this reluctant imperialist in an imperialist age a little further; L. F. Fitzhardinge tells us that Dawes had intended to return to New South Wales ‘either with an official appointment or as a settler’, but that he was persuaded to go instead as first governor to Sierra Leone, the colony for liberated slaves established by an abolitionist company in the aftermath of the American War of Independence. There he remained until 1796, a lion on behalf of his adopted people. Then, after a breakdown in health, he removed to the West Indies in 1823. By 1827 he was living in Antigua, and his old friend Watkin Tench, now lieutenant-general in the Army and colonel of the Royal Marines, was warmly supporting his application for compensation for his service as Officer of Engineers and Artillery back in Port Jackson, when they had been young together. Dawes died in Antigua in 1837. He was a man most at home on the fringes of empire—and looking outwards. Fitzhardinge, Tench, Sydney’s First Four Years, xix-xx, pp. 82–3, n. 1; p. 331, n. 51. See also Australian Dictionary of Biography entry for William Dawes.

  For William Dawes and Patyegarang, Daniel Southwell, quoted Fitzhardinge p. 118, n. 7; Dawes, quoted Flannery, The Birth of Sydney, pp. 112–15. Copies of the Dawes notebooks are held in the Mitchell Library. For more on Dawes and Patyegarang see Keith Vincent Smith, Bennelong, pp. 108–9.

  For wistful Elizabeth Macarthur, The Journals and Letters, letter to Bridget Kingdon, 7 March 1791.

  AUSTRALIAN SEXUAL POLITICS

  I do not suggest this is a universal law—what is, among humans? For a different ordering in a warrior society of habituated impulses and political relations between the sexes, see my Aztecs: An Interpretation, Cambridge University Press, London and New York, 1991.

  For Baneelon’s boasting, Tench, 1788, p. 118; for other styles of assault, 261–4; for Baneelon’s attack on Colbee’s woman, and his punishment, Collins, Account, 1, p. 390
, and his Appendix V (‘Courtship and marriage’) passim; for Barangaroo’s pre-parturition beating, Collins, Account, 1, footnote p. 465; and for the pitiable condition of women in general, Collins, Account, 1, pp. 485–6; for damage to skulls, male and female, p. 497; for the two Australian women who chose to go to Norfolk Island, p. 327.

  For British offences against women see, e.g., Collins, Account, 2, p. 3.

  For Boorong and the witches, Collins, Account, 1, App. VII, p. 494.

  For the picnic, Collins, Account, 1, App. VI, p. 493; for Warreweer’s murder, 2, p. 89; for Me-mel, 1, p. 497; for the teeth, 1, p. 483.

  For warrior protocols, Collins, Account, 1, App. VI, passim. See also his moving homage to the Cameragal ‘Carradah’ enduring a ritual spearing, December 1793, 1, pp. 275–6.

  BOAT TRIP TO ROSE HILL

  For Phillip’s boats, see Nagle, The Nagle Journal; for the events, Phillip in Hunter, pp. 325–6.

  HEADHUNT

  For Phillip’s account of the McEntire spearing and its consequences, see Phillip in Hunter, Journal, pp. 326 et seq.

  For Tench’s account of his expeditions and Colbee’s ruse, see Tench, 1788, pp. 168–76.

  For engrossing investigations into the rhetorical dimensions of late eighteenth-century British law see Douglas Hay et al., Albion’s Fatal Tree, Allen Lane, London, 1975.

  For Collins’ opinion of the affair, Collins, Account, 1, p. 119.

  ON DISCIPLINE

  For Phillip’s thoughts regarding the uses of Polynesians for punishment and reward, Phillip, quoted Willey, When the Sky Fell Down, p. 41.

  For Nagle’s report of Phillip’s shipboard speech, Nagle, Journal pp. 85–6.

  For the hanging of the six marines, Tench, 1788, p. 102; Collins, Account, 1, pp. 48–51, 72; on the trial and its aftermath, Jonathan Easty, Memorandum of the Transactions of a Voyage from England to Botany Bay, 1787–1793: A First Fleet Journal by John Easty, Private Marine, Trustees of the Public Library of New South Wales, Sydney, 1965, p. 111.

  For Joseph Hunt’s floggings, Collins, Account, 1, p. 46; for the Botany Bay convicts, Collins, Account, 1, pp. 47–8. For a detailed, vivid and very horrible eye-witness account by an ex-Irish rebel, Joseph Holt, of the flogging of four ‘rebel’ convicts, two receiving one hundred lashes apiece, and two three hundred lashes, see Flannery, The Birth of Sydney, pp. 171–3.

  For Tench’s involvement in the stealing-through-hunger case, and his eye-witness account of a death by starvation, Tench, 1778, p. 125.

  On British law, Douglas Hay et al., Albion’s Fatal Tree, esp. chapters 1 and 2.

  On shipboard punishments Marcus Rediker, Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1987, e.g. p. 226, and N. A. M. Rodgers, The Wooden World: An Anatomy of the Georgian Navy, Collins, London, 1986. The most penetrating discussion of flogging and all forms of discipline at sea remains Greg Dening, Mr Bligh’s Bad Language, Cambridge University Press, Melbourne, 1992. See esp. pp. 113–56, and for the German armourer, p. 114.

  For Phillip to Dundas 2 October 1792 see Egan, Buried Alive, p. 296.

  For a rich account of what happened later to convicts in Australia, see Robert Hughes, The Fatal Shore: A History of the Transportation of Convicts to Australia 1787–1868, The Harvill Press, London, 1986, passim.

  POTATO THIEVES

  For the barefoot guards, Flannery, The Birth of Sydney, p. 99.

  For the potato thieves, Phillip in Hunter, pp. 331–2. For the confrontation over the fish, Phillip in Hunter, pp. 333–4.

  For John White and his Australian friends finding the corpse, and its condition, Tench, 1788, p. 177; for the mishap with the fishing boat, Phillip in Hunter, p. 338.

  For the flying fox, Phillip in Hunter, p. 337; for the emu chicks, p. 361. Tench remembered the emu chicks, or ‘cassowaries’ as he called them, as living for only a few days. Tench, 1788, p. 240.

  EXPEDITION

  For Bowes Smyth, Journal, pp. 76–8.

  ‘I enjoy these little rambles, and I think you would. However, I think it is hardly worth your while to come and try them.’ George Worgan to his brother, quoted Egan, Buried Alive, p. 59.

  For the governor’s illness on the early expedition, White, Journal, p. 127.

  My reconstruction of the expedition rests on Tench and Phillip. For Phillip’s account, see Phillip in Hunter, pp. 340–8; for Tench’s, 1788, pp. 185–99. Tench is clear that ‘our two natives carried each his pack, but its weight was inconsiderable, most of their provisions being in the knapsacks of the soldiers and gamekeepers’. By contrast Phillip claims that the Australians ‘carried their own provisions’. Why insist on so small a matter? Because Phillip feared critical comment? Having white men carry provisions for black men would scandalise readers back in Britain. Is this another of Phillip’s politic rearrangements of the truth?

  CRIME & PUNISHMENT: BOLADEREE

  For the attempted kidnap-rape, see Phillip in Hunter, pp. 314, 316, 350.

  For the flagpole colours, Collins, Account, 1, p. 122.

  For Boladeree, Phillip in Hunter, pp. 353–9, p. 374; Collins, Account, 1, pp. 137–9, 146, 499–502 (Collins calls him ‘Balloodery’).

  On the suit of clothes in payment for the canoe, Collins, Account, 1, p. 148.

  BARANGAROO

  On reductions in the rations, Phillip in Hunter, pp. 348–9.

  For Collins on Barangaroo, Warreweer and birthing practices, Collins, Account, 1, Appendix VI, pp. 464–5. For a different reading of the British women’s intervention with Warreweer, and the claim that Barangaroo shared Baneelon’s political interest in bearing her child at Government House, see Patricia Grimshaw et al., Creating a Nation, chapter 1, McPhee Gribble, Ringwood, 1994, and Ann McGrath, ‘Birthplaces Revisited’ in Ross Gibson, ed., Exchanges: Cross-cultural Encounters in Australia and the Pacific, Historic Houses Trust of New South Wales, Sydney, 1996, pp. 219–42.

  On Barangaroo’s nakedness, Tench, 1788, pp. 142–3; Phillip in Hunter, p. 332.

  On noses and bones, Phillip in Hunter, p. 317 et seq. Collins claims that some girls had their septums bored, Collins, Account, 1, p. 458.

  For the funerals, Collins, Account, 1, pp. 500–4.

  For the bestowal of names and their implications, Collins, Account, 1, p. 452.

  For a possible confusion: Colbee’s wife Daringa, who had exchanged names with Barangaroo, and whom Collins seems to confuse with the girl dead in childbirth, lived at least to 1792, when the convict artist Thomas Watling sketched her.

  TENCH GOES HOME

  For Tench’s farewell survey, Tench, 1788, pp. 212–26.

  For the monster cabbage, Collins, Account, 1, p. 74.

  For Tench’s spell as a prisoner-of-war of the French ‘between the month of November 1794, and the month of May 1795’, see his Letters from Revolutionary France, edited by Gavin Edwards, University of Wales Press, Cardiff, 2001. Piquantly, Tench’s Australian ‘Narrative’, which had appeared in England in 1789, appeared in Paris in a French edition (Relation de une expédition a la Bay Botanique) in that same year. Edwards generously provides us with the French editor’s introduction in which he praises the experiment of the English (‘these people, who we would do better to copy in their political conduct than their fashions’) in reforming their criminals, and in putting them to use.

  For convicts and repentance, Tench, 1788, p. 66, pp. 68–9; for the Chinese Travellers, pp. 211–12.

  For his considered reflections on the convict condition, pp. 268–71.

  PHILLIP GOES HOME

  On rations, e.g., Collins, Account, 1, p. 188, pp. 202–3. For Atkins’ comments see Egan, Buried Alive, pp. 285, 295.

  On the Pitt, John Palmer, purser to the Sirius, quoted Cobley, Sydney Cove, 1792, p. 219; Collins, Account, 1, pp. 168–72.

  On the changing state of the colony, Phillip quoted Cobley, Sydney Cove, 1792, pp. 241–3; Grose to Nepean, H. R. N. S. W., vol. 1, part 2, p. 613; Elizabeth Macarthur, Journals and Letters,
p. 40; Collins, Account, 1, pp. 211–19, p. 365.

  For Baneelon and Imeerawanyee, Collins, Account, 1, p. 211.

  COLLINS GOES HOME

  For convicts and boats, Collins, Account, 2, p. 39.

  On Irish convicts, Collins, Account, 2, p. 77, p. 56.

  For alcohol and for Black Caesar, Collins, Account, 1, pp. 363, 375–7, 380; for Caesar’s ambush killing by bounty hunters, p. 381.

  For Pinchgut and the corpse, Collins, Account, 2, p. 7.

  For the killing of the missionary and the posthumous dissection, Collins, Account, 2, p. 156.

  For convict ‘aboriginalisation’, see e.g. Collins, Account, 2, pp. 88, 102–3.

  For early conviviality between Australians and some convicts, Collins, Account, 1, p. 29.

  For Watling, ‘Letters from at Exile at Botany Bay’, pp. 10–15.

  COLLINS RECONSIDERS

  For the initiation ceremony, Collins, Account, 1, App. VI, esp. p. 446. Despite his respect for the Australians, Collins makes a strangely myopic remark regarding the ceremony’s timing: ‘As they have no idea of numbers beyond three, and of course have no regular computation of time, this [coincidence in time of the ceremonies] can only be ascribed to chance, particularly as the season could not much share in their choice, February being one of the hot months.’ A ‘coincidence’ indeed.

  For Carradah’s magnificent defence, Collins, Account, 1, pp. 275–6. See also his account of another trial-by-spear reported to him after he had left the colony in Collins, Account, 2, p. 34.

  For attacks on the settlers, their retaliation and Collins’ response, Collins, Account, 1, pp. 348–9; 2, p. 9. Alan Frost, ‘The growth of settlement’, Art of Australia, p. 129; Collins, Account, 1, pp. 326–7, and for a horrible episode of torture and murder then denied, 1, pp. 329–30. For the tit-for-tat killings, Account, 2, pp. 348–9; for Hunter’s ruling, Collins, Account, 1, pp. 382–3. For the Australian fights and British theories about the thinness of the Australian population, Collins, Account, 2, pp. 89–90; for his repudiation of Phillip’s policy of conciliation, Collins, Account, 2, pp. 256.