How often does it start with gifts and lies? One of the first encounters between Port Phillip’s original inhabitants and white men takes place just a year and a half before the Calcutta sails into the bay. The Lady Nelson is an 80-ton brig sent from Port Jackson to explore the still unknown lands to the south. She is an odd-looking ship constructed to work shallow waterways, commissioned ‘for the purpose of prosecuting the discovery and survey of the unknown parts of the coast of New Holland’. As a result she sits low in the water, in part because of four extra brass guns fitted shortly before her departure in early 1800. On her way to the colony she had sailed out of Dead Man’s Dock and into the Thames and so strange did she look sailors on nearby ships ridiculed her as ‘his majesty’s tinderbox’.
But despite her looks the Lady Nelson proves to be a rugged and reliable explorer. She has already mapped much of Bass Strait and its islands and acting lieutenant John Murray, a Scotsman who had been the mate on her original voyage to Sydney, has now been ordered to return and investigate the large bay and its surrounding country.
It does not take long for the first encounter between Europeans and the Kulin people to go wrong. In early 1802, a month after its first attempt fails, the Lady Nelson manages to navigate the turbulent rip at the mouth of the bay and Murray finds himself in a ‘fine harbor of large extent’. On one of his first nights Murray sees fires burning on nearby land and decides to send a small boat and crew toward shore in hope of making contact.
They take gifts of white dress shirts, wrapped with a fib. ‘I sent the launch with Mr Bowen and four hands armed to see if any natives were here,’ Murray will write in his journal. ‘… before the boat was halfway on shore we had the satisfaction of seeing 18 or 20 men and boys come out of the wood and seat themselves down on a green bank waiting the approach of our boat, with which I sent some shirts and other trifles to give them. The boat accordingly landed in the midst of them and a friendly intercourse took place with dancing on both sides …
‘They wished much to know what our arms were and their use and did not seem entirely to believe Mr Bowen that they were only walking sticks.’
The next day Murray sends ashore one of the youngest members of his crew, a boy called Brabyn, to win the confidence of some of the younger members of the tribe. From the deck of the Lady Nelson, Murray watches Brabyn give the young men handkerchiefs and dress them in shirts and trousers. He is soon joined on land by more of Murray’s crew.
And then things turn ugly.
Brabyn turns and looks toward a clump of trees and sees a man ‘in the very act of throwing a spear’. Behind him a large group of warriors suddenly appear, also with spears poised.
‘The boy immediately cried out to Mr Bowen – who was at that very time in the act of serving out bread to all the party he was sitting among – that he would be speared. But before the words were out of his mouth a spear of the most dangerous kind was thrown at and did not escape Moss by a yard … in an instant the whole of the treacherous body that Mr Bowen and four of our people were sitting in the midst of opened out to the right and left.’
It is an old-fashioned ambush. There are screams and shouts as long spears hurtle toward the Lady Nelson’s men. One of the crew fires a gun but this only creates a small panic among the warriors.
And so, says Murray, ‘our party was obliged to teach them by fatal experience the effect of our walking sticks.
‘The first fire made them run and one received two balls between his shoulders … the second fire they all set off with astonishing speed and most likely one received a mortal wound. Before another piece was fired Mr Bowen laid hold of one of their number and held on till three of our people came up and also grappled him: strange to tell he made such violent struggles as to get away from all. Now did the contents of the officer’s piece bring him up, although one ball passed through his arm and the other in his side.
‘He was traced a good distance by his blood … thus did treachery and unprovoked attack meet with its just punishment and at the same time taught us a useful lesson to be more cautious in future.’
Murray considers the natives around this bay to be similar in size and height to those he has seen in Sydney: ‘… their understanding better though for they easily made out our signs when it answered their purposes or inclination. When it did not they could be dull enough. They were all clothed in opossum skins … I concluded they live entirely inland and if we may judge from the number of their fires and other marks this part of the country is not thin of inhabitants.’
Chastened by the encounter, Murray continues the expedition around the bay, avoiding further contact. Three weeks later the Lady Nelson prepares to sail back home. But first, in the time-honoured tradition, Murray assembles the crew on deck at eight in the morning on the 8th of March in the Year of Our Lord, 1802, and hoists the colours of the kingdom of Great Britain.
‘… under a discharge of three volleys of small arms and artillery the port was taken possession of in the name of his sacred majesty George the Third of Great Britain and Ireland, King etc etc …’
Murray adds one more important note: ‘Served double allowance of grog’.
Collisions between cultures are nothing new. It has been happening throughout millennia, from the time when those stubborn Homo sapiens first came face to face with the Neanderthals, through to Columbus’ arrival in the new world and his subsequent brutalisation of the local people. By the late 18th and early 19th century, encounters between Indigenous people and outsiders have become an even more lop-sided equation; gunpowder against sticks and stones, supported by even heavier artillery of smallpox and venereal microbes.
The chasm between Australia’s Aboriginals and the British will be vast and almost without common ground. On one side of this gulf: the Dreaming, a universe where time flows in many directions, where tribes of hunter-gatherers live within a land imbued with sorcery and mysticism and the unmistakable signs of their ancestors. On the other: the Enlightenment, with its tribes of scientific rationalists wielding measuring instruments and mathematical formulae and an unchallengeable belief in the superiority of civilised man.
These two disparate worlds will scrape against one another for the first time in 1770 as the Endeavour under the command of Lieutenant James Cook sails along the east coast of Australia on the final leg of its history-making three-year voyage of discovery through the Pacific.
Cook is sailing with a set of ‘hints’ or instructions handed to him by James Douglas, the Earl of Morton and president of the Royal Society, which has supplied much of the funding for the voyage. It includes advice to ‘exercise the utmost patience and forbearance with respect to the natives of the several lands where the ship may touch … to have it still in view that shedding the blood of those people is a crime of the highest nature – they are all human creatures, the work of the same omnipotent Author, equally under his care with the most polished European, perhaps less offensive, more entitled to his favour’.
The Earl also provides advice that, even centuries later, will be remarkable for its time: ‘They are the natural and in the strictest sense of the word, the legal possessors of the several regions they inhabit. No European nation has a right to occupy any part of their country, or settle among them without their voluntary consent.’
So much for the ‘hints’. The Endeavour has just sailed around New Zealand after visiting Tahiti to record the 1769 transit of Venus across the sun. After dropping anchor near a river on its north island, an encounter with the local Maori had ended with the killing of a warrior with spirals of ‘tattaou’ on his cheeks and nose. The first Australian Aboriginal tribe Cook encounters will be the Gweagal people and that meeting will set the tone for all future conflict – a rock thrown at the English, who have not sought permission to enter tribal land, is immediately answered by musket fire that strikes a Gweagal man on his legs.
This is a time when Europeans, confronting a new era of machines and technology, cling to a romantic fantasy of naked brutes uncorrupted by modern civilisation, the ‘Noble Savage’ who lives in harmony with the land and whose soul is untainted by material ambition and the accumulation of wealth. The closest the crew of the Endeavour has come to finding this pure breed of man was in Tahiti. What specimens they turned out to be: graceful and lithe and ever so lusty, their libidos no doubt driven by the tropical heat and their Garden of Eden surrounds. At the urging of his young botanist, Joseph Banks, Cook had taken on board a man called Tupaia, said to be the most gifted of all Tahitian navigators. If these white-skinned men and their marvellous ship fascinated Tupaia, he felt in no way inferior.
He was … well … noble.
‘He was a shrewd, sensible, ingenious man,’ Cook writes in his journal, ‘but proud and obstinate which often made his situation on board both disagreeable to himself and those about him.’
Tupaia proves invaluable as an interpreter and diplomat during the journey around New Zealand. But he is as mystified by Australia’s Aboriginals as the white men. Unlike the Maori, whose songs, traditions and language share Pacific ties with the Tahitians, Tupaia finds Australia’s Aboriginals almost as unknowable as the rest of the Endeavour’s crew.
From the deck of the Endeavour, Banks watches an old woman and three children emerge from the woods and make their way toward several huts near the beach: ‘She carried several pieces of stick and the children also had their little burthens; when she came to the house three more younger children came out of one of them to meet her. She often looked at the ship but expressed neither surprise nor concern.’
Banks is flummoxed. He is a man of science, a true son of the Enlightenment, a collector and identifier of new species, a rational fellow constantly in awe at how the good Lord has clothed nature in such a complex manner. His role in life is to uncover God’s signature, to show how His hand has forged this world. Surely this sense of wonder, this air of inquisitiveness, is a trait of all civilised people. Yet these Aboriginals seem to be lacking as much in curiosity as they are in clothing – ‘the women did not copy our mother Eve even in the fig leaf’.
But the watchers are being watched. The English do not know that their arrival is already being recorded, not in journals or written form, but in an oral tradition that has existed for more than 50,000 years, long before the first modern humans had ever reached Britain. Stories are already being passed from clan to clan about the arrival of a ‘big bird’ filled with small scampering creatures crawling all over its body; other tales tell of a large canoe carrying the spirits of ancestors, white figures they will call Murrangurk or wawu-ngay.
The gulf between the two worlds will be too large for any shared understanding. ‘We thence concluded not much in favour of our future friends,’ writes Banks, a sentiment mirrored throughout the next century in the journals and reports of explorers and early settlers on the Australian frontier. To them, the Aboriginals are indifferent and even lazy, preferring to lie about rather than be industrious and tend to the land.
The land. The Australian soil, more than language and customs, will become the starkest difference between the two cultures. To the British, this new world will bring to mind a saying that becomes popular in London society in the early 1800s. The Prince of Wales is one of the first to employ it: ‘Girls are not to my taste,’ he will say. ‘I don’t like lamb, but mutton dressed as lamb!’
From the deck of the Endeavour the eastern coastline offers a tranquil vista that reminds many of the patchwork quilts of fields and cultivated lands back home. ‘The woods are free from underwood of every kind and the trees are at such a distance from one another that the whole country, or at least a great part of it, might be cultivated without being obliged to cut down a single tree,’ writes Cook in May 1770.
Moving north he sees little to dampen his enthusiasm, noting in August that ‘the mountains or hills are chequered with woods and lawns’.
Banks, never one to avoid a clumsy metaphor, will write that ‘the country tho in general well enough clothed, appeared in some places bare. It resembled in my imagination the back of a lean cow, covered in general with long hair, but nevertheless where her scraggy hip bones have stuck out further than they ought, accidental rubs and knocks have entirely bared them of their share of covering.’
The view from the Endeavour is largely optimistic. But the British will soon learn that this fertile coast is simply a green curtain disguising a dry and arid heartland. It is mutton dressed up as lamb, an ancient crone with some hurriedly applied make-up. Within days of the arrival of the First Fleet, Englishmen are stunned to discover that much of it will defy the plough; the unyielding clays and sandy soils are enough to make the most stubborn bastard cry. It will be a difficult lesson to learn: the earth did not yield to brute force; you had to find a way to live and work within its limits. And those limits are severe. Even the four predictable seasons back home that English farmers could rely on arriving almost to the day defy prediction.
When the Calcutta arrives in Port Phillip on the cusp of a new summer its passengers are astonished by the severe and abrupt changes in the weather; days of unrelenting heat driven by dry northerly winds broken within minutes by bursts of bone-chilling Antarctic air and squalls of icy rain. It was so typical of the luck of David Collins that he chose to enter Port Phillip Bay and turn right to find poor sandy soils and little water. Had he simply gone left by pushing to the west and further north he would have found more water and some of the most fertile land in the world, enriched 40 million years earlier by constant volcanic eruptions.
But that was the story of this unpredictable country. Water becomes such a lottery that a man, moving inland in some places, will find that annual rainfall can drop by an inch for every mile he travels. And so the British quickly conclude that Australia’s Aboriginals remain locked in a Stone Age with little hope of progressing toward an agricultural state for a very simple reason; they are far too primitive and managing this land requires a sophistication far beyond their means.
A view that you, William, quickly discover is mistaken.