LITMIR.BIZ

      INTRODUCTION

      This is a telling of the story of what happened when a thousand British men and women, some of them convicts and some of them free, made a settlement on the east coast of Australia in the later years of the eighteenth century, and how they fared with the people they found there.

      My telling of it has its origins in a place, and in a person. For the place: a few years ago I took a boat trip with my husband across the top of Australia. We stopped briefly at a place called Port Essington, or ‘Victoria’, on the Cobourg Peninsula. Nowadays it is a ranger’s headquarters, but it was built and garrisoned in the first half of the nineteenth century as a fort against the French. The French didn’t come, and after about eleven years the soldiers were withdrawn.

      It is desolate country, hot, sweaty and, despite its flatness, somehow claustrophobic. The sea up there glitters like new silver, but it’s full of crocodiles. Even the tough young ranger didn’t swim, despite the heat, despite the boredom. He said the crocodiles were too crafty. If you went in at the same place twice the odds were one of them would be waiting for you, and they would pick up the sound of the splashing anyway and slide along to check out the prospects. He also warned us about the snakes, and listed some of the diseases the local mosquitoes were eager to trade for a sip of human blood. There wasn’t a lot to do. We looked through the tiny museum, peered into a couple of the dark little stone houses where the married soldiers used to live, and walked a long hot way up to the cemetery. It was a big cemetery for so small a place, spreading over a bluff. From the headstones it looked as if childbirth and infant fevers had been the big killers. No medical assistance in the 1840s, or not at Port Essington. A lot of women and children had been left behind when the soldiers pulled out.

      It was a melancholy place, and I was glad to leave it. Then I forgot about it, or thought I had. It came back when I was given a book written by a fellow with the odd name of Watkin Tench, a marine officer who came out to Australia with the First Fleet. I fell in love with Tench, as most of his readers do. He is a Boswell on the page: curious, ardent, gleefully self-mocking. He didn’t fit my image of a stiff-lipped British imperialist at all. The visit to Port Essington had made me realise that the past—those early settlements in Australia—had once been as real as the present, which is always an electrifying realisation. Before I quite knew what was happening I had started work on the remarkably accessible documentation for the early years of the British presence at Sydney Cove. Through those British sources I also met the beach nomads of Australia. My aim in what follows is to understand what happened between these un-like peoples when they met on the edge of a continent 20,000 kilometres from England.

      The imperial adventure in Australia was played out by a very small cast. A handful of British observers are our main informants as to what happened between the races during Arthur Phillip’s governorship, which began in January 1788 and effectively ended with his return to England in December 1792. In 1796 his friend and secretary David Collins also went home. Nine years is a brief time span, but in my view much of what mattered most in shaping the tone and temper of white–black relations in this country happened during those first few years of contact.

      Doing history teaches us to tolerate complexity, and to be alert to the shifting contexts of actions and experience; anthropology reminds those historians who still need to be reminded that high male politics isn’t everything, and that other cultures manage to get along using accounts of the world we find bizarre, even perverse. Historians’ main occupational hazard is being culture-insensitive, anthropologists’ is insensitivity to temporal change. Both can be insensitive to the reciprocating dynamic between action and context. Together, however, they are formidable, and in my view offer the best chance of explaining what we humans do in any particular circumstance, and why we do it. In what follows I have tried to bring the two methods together in the analysis of a number of sequential episodes, interspersed with short explanatory essays when I think the reader might need to pause for breath.

      Coming to the field of Australian history late in life and fortuitously, I did not know the archival material for the early British–Australian encounters. But the published documentation is rich and can be found in most good libraries, where it takes up not much more than one solid shelf. My hope is that readers will be stimulated to read some of that material themselves, possibly as they read this book. I promise they will be rewarded.

      The reports, journals and letters I have used are notably well ordered, with the episodes I discuss being described over a handful of pages. I have therefore consolidated the relevant references, with their appropriate page spans, at the end of each chapter. The exception is David Collins, whose combination of dogged record-keeping and occasional anecdote sometimes demanded an inelegant string of page numbers. My aim is simple: that readers be able to find the precise passage they want to check in less than a minute’s search. I would prefer, of course, the old style, with a protective bristle of footnotes hanging off every page, but now those days are gone.

      There were difficulties in deciding how to proceed. The first might seem trivial, but is not: what to call the people the British found living around what was to become Sydney Harbour. ‘Aborigine’ is anachronistic: a colonial construct crusted with later stereotypes. It also smoothes away that people’s variousness, and their sheer unexpectedness. The British called them ‘natives’ or ‘indians’ or sometimes, not always pejoratively, ‘savages’, which at least captures their strangeness and the intruders’ unease. I call them ‘Australians’, which is what they undoubtedly were, just as the British were certainly other—‘them’ as against ‘we people here’. The word ‘British’ also gave me pause, given the mix of nations among soldiers, sailors and convicts of the first fleets, but I could find no better alternative.

      Readers will be frustrated to discover that some of the most intriguing questions about the Australians cannot be answered from the ‘outsider’ sources we have. Our informants had been schooled by their professions to be scrupulous observers, but whole areas of local life, especially of thought and sensibility, remained invisible to them. Working on the Mexico of five hundred years ago I was able to retrieve something of the Indians’ thinking as to what was happening in their sacred unseen worlds from the elaborate descriptions of ritual life collected from native lords, and detailed Spanish reports of the transformations in Indian ceremonial life over the first fifty years of colonisation. That kind of reconstruction is impossible for my own country, where contact began a mere two hundred years ago, not least because after the first few years the Australians ceased to be of much interest to the British, while in Mexico the friars remained committed to

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