Dancing With Strangers - Inga Clendinnen

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and for the quick recognition of unfamiliar styles of dignity, treating the old man with a sensitive courtesy which assumed not only a common humanity, but a shared delicacy of feeling. He was in no doubt as to the political relationship between the two peoples—he had just recorded Governor Phillip landing on the north shore of the bay ‘to take possession of his new land and bring about an intercourse between its old and new masters’—but for Tench the assumption of political domination did not preclude mutual understanding and respect.

      Over the next months his view was to harden. By the completion of his first report, ‘A Narrative of the Expedition to Botany Bay’ to which a postscript was added in October 1788, with the first cheerful encounters a fading memory and contact shrunk to occasional tussles between fishing parties, his hopes of friendly exchanges had dimmed. He claimed to have come to share the bleak evaluation of Australians made by Cook eighteen years before: these were an ugly, dirty people, miserably under-equipped for life. He declared himself shocked by their lean-tos, their nakedness, the crudeness of their few tools. Nonetheless, he continued sensitive to details of their behaviour, noting, for example, the contrast between the men’s domination over their women and their egalitarianism between themselves: ‘Excepting a little tributary respect which the younger part appear to pay those more advanced in years, I never could observe any degree of subordination among them.’ The absence of visible marks of deference must have been startling for a young captain-lieutenant, whose every action was modulated by the niceties of rank.

      Then once again Tench displays his distinctive flair. The early encounters had taken place around the coves of the harbour: that is, on the Australians’ home ground, which the British, of course, assumed to be neutral, or more correctly empty, given there were no obvious permanent habitations. Only once did two old men venture into the settlement, and we wonder if staying away from guests’ camps was an Australian courtesy. Tench decided their hesitancy might have a different origin: that in the face of ‘our repeated endeavours to induce them to come among us...they either fear or despise us too much to dare be anxious for a closer connection’. ‘Fear’ was the conventional and comfortable British interpretation of native caution. But ‘despise’? Could these naked savages dare ‘despise’ officers of the British Crown? That Tench thought they might marks him as a man of unusual imaginative flexibility.

      As for himself, he took every chance he could to ‘converse’ with these interesting people. During the brief period of good will immediately after the move to Port Jackson when Australians were still frequenting the fringes of the settlement, he began collecting all the words and phrases in the local language he could. He made some surprising discoveries: for example, that it was Cook and the British who had introduced the word ‘kangaroo’ to the local people, whose word for that surprising creature was patagorang. They seemed to have started applying ‘kangaroo’ as the British word for any and all the large animals the newcomers had brought with them, excepting the familiar dog, or, as they called it, ‘dingo’. Tench deduced all this when he came upon a group of men ‘busily employed in looking at some sheep in an enclosure, and repeatedly crying out “kangaroo, kangaroo”!’ Always ready to augment innocent amusement, he was trying to point out some horses and cows at a little distance when the men’s attention was deflected by the appearance of some convict women, upon which they ‘stood at a distance of several paces, expressing very significantly the way in which they were attracted’, but ‘without offering them any insult’. This is a pleasant and, in its way, a remarkable scene. I cannot see a Spanish captain standing by while ‘savages’ openly assessed the charms of Spanish women.

      (Some of these attempts at language learning can only have compounded confusion. Tench tells us that the British had been nearly three years in Port Jackson before they realised that the native word they used as meaning ‘good’ in fact signified ‘no’, or at least demurral. The consequences are too daunting even to contemplate.)

      Tench had deeply enjoyed these fleeting encounters with Australians before the general alienation. Then on the second-last day of 1788 an Australian man was taken captive on Phillip’s orders, and Tench’s talent for personal relationships could at last come into play.

      JANUARY 1788–SPRING 1790

      SETTLING IN

      The two French ships which had followed the First Fleet into Botany Bay remained at anchor there for the best part of six weeks, which allowed for a number of polite exchanges with the British now ensconced at Port Jackson. Philip Gidley King, fluent in French, especially enjoyed the French officers’ company, their conversation and the delicacy of their manners. Without King’s journal we would know very little about this small, beautifully equipped expedition and its courteous officers: the two ships sailed out of Botany Bay into oblivion, lost somewhere in the Pacific. In the event, King had sailed even earlier, being informed by Phillip on 31 January that he was to head a tiny settlement at Norfolk Island, another even more remote site identified by Cook as promising. On the morning of 15 February King and his little band of settlers—seven free men and fifteen convicts, six of them women—embarked on the Supply, to be dumped on a beach with their baggage and provisions piled around them with orders to make a new society. Naval obedience came at a high price.

      Before he left King made the most of his time with the French. He reports the Comte de La Pérouse as notably less well disposed to the local people than was Phillip. His wariness was natural enough: at a landfall only a handful of weeks before, the expedition had lost two longboats and more than a dozen men, among them the captain of the Astrolabe and eight other officers, in a surprise attack by natives. (Up to that time they had not lost a single man.) Their assailants were islanders, probably Samoans, ‘a very strong & handsome race of men scarce one among them less than 6 Feet high, & well-sett’, who over several days had seemed perfectly friendly, and then, after what seemed to the French a trivial incident, had swung their clubs with killing effect. The French estimated that about thirty islanders fell to their guns.

      Retrospectively La Pérouse read the episode as a textbook example of ‘savagery’: of unpredictable fluctuations in mood, unpredictable eruptions of murderous violence. At Botany Bay he built a stockade around his tents, mounted two small guns, and kept his guns at the ready.

      Phillip built no stockades and he set no guards, or not against the Australians. He intended to persuade the local people that the newcomers were their friends. But his first task was to settle his own people, and once the flurry of disembarkation was over, with its inescapable disorder—the orgiastic scenes on the night of the disembarkation of the convict women have become legendary—officers, soldiers and convicts set about making themselves at home.

      First, the alien landscape had to be mapped and its strangeness tamed by naming. Spectacular landmarks were given the names of distant patrons—Pittwater, Norfolk Island—but with their duty done to the grandees, the new arrivals could celebrate themselves and their adventures—Tench’s Hill, Bradley’s Head, Collins Cove, Dawes Point. The names, used daily and inscribed in letters to kin and friends, must in time have come to seem ‘natural’. Both Phillip’s sturdy mind and conciliatory ambitions are suggested by his decision in mid-1791 to reject the wistful romanticism of Rose-Hill for the new up-river settlement in favour of the local name, Parramatta, which meant something like Where Eels Meet—that is, a place of feasting and fecundity.

      Outposts of empire are lonely places. But calendars count time at the same rate everywhere, so the settlers celebrated their first King’s Birthday on 4 June with all the pomp and alcohol they could muster. No news came from the real world: they could not know whether they were at war with France on any particular day, and these ardent patriots were to hear the King was well again before they had known he was ill. Remote though they were from the centres of action, distance brought none of the liberties remoteness can bring. The bounds of settlement were crushingly narrow. Officers could look forward to occasional ‘expeditions’ on land or on the water, but convicts were penned within settlement boundaries, unless they were given specific duties outside it. They were always being admonished for ‘straggling’—wandering in the bush without permission—which they continued to do whatever the consequences in floggings or spear wounds.

      Officers

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