They never seen a white man in their lives–this is in the early time. There was one white man must’ve got lost and he followed the Murray River down and there was a big camp and a few dark ladies went out to pick the wild-bean–they go out daily to get this wild food every day. When they went out and they looked up the river and they saw somebody moving and they got up and look again and someone was moving alright and they take it for–they call it the witchcraft man–the witchcraft man must be moving about. They left all their bean trees and they ran home to tell all the people back home in the camp–‘We saw something strange up there–It’s like a white man!–a white man!!’1
This is one of a number of traditional Aboriginal stories recorded in North Queensland a few years ago. It probably dates from the 1860s or 1870s but it has not been possible to relate it to a known historical event and the detail may have been significantly altered during a hundred years of currency. Similar stories were no doubt told in many parts of Australia during the nineteenth century, but when clans were dispersed and languages lost much of the Aboriginal record of their experience with Europeans was lost. Fragments survive; some in the written accounts of early settlers others embodied in Aboriginal oral tradition. The nineteenth century South Australian missionary George Taplin knew several men who remembered the arrival in 1830 of Sturt’s expedition at the mouth of the Murray and the terror experienced as they watched the whale-boat cross Lake Alexandrina. Coastal tribes told European confidants about the awesome appearance of the first sailing ships off hitherto desolate coasts. In 1831 G. A. Robinson noted down in his diary the childhood recollections of a Tasmanian Aborigine who as a boy had first seen a ship anchored off Maria Island (probably the Baudin-Peron expedition of 1802). His perplexed kinsmen thought it looked like a small island but were left bewildered and ran fearfully away from the sea. Swan River Aborigines described with ‘great vividness’ their impressions on seeing the first ship approach the shore. They imagined it to be some ‘huge winged monster’ and there was ‘a universal consternation’. One man ran fourteen miles inland breathlessly spreading the alarming news. Apprehension was general and women hid their children in the bush.2 A similar story was related by Port Fairy blacks who recalled that they thought sailing ships were either huge birds or trees growing in the sea. Old men in North Queensland still tell a story about the arrival of a sailing ship at Rockingham Bay:
In this Cardwell district there was many natives camped along that beach. And one morning they got up and looked out in the sea and they saw this ship was sailing out in the sea. And they wondering what this coming. It was so big!! And they watched it and watched it and watched it and gradually the ship came to the shore.3
For coastal tribes the sudden and unexpected appearance of Europeans was often an awesome event but away from the sea white men did not arrive unannounced. News of them travelled inland well in advance of the encroaching wave of settlement while straying domestic animals and an assortment of European commodities long preceded the bullock drays into the interior.
Trade routes criss-crossed Aboriginal Australia. Shells, ochre, stone artifacts, spears, woven bags, gum, pituri and many other items were ceremonially exchanged at regular meetings, often hundreds of miles from their point of origin. European commodities gradually infiltrated traditional trade routes beginning within months of earliest contact. At the first settlement on the Tamar in 1804 local blacks gave a necklace to one of the soldiers who found to his surprise a white button threaded among the shells. Robert Dawson witnessed the trade of goods on the central coast of New South Wales in the 1820s. Tribes in the interior exchanged animal skins and fur artifacts with coastal blacks who through contact with Europeans were able to reciprocate with iron axes and pieces of glass along with such traditional objects as sea shells. Late nineteenth-century explorers of the remoter areas of the continent found exotic artifacts in isolated Aboriginal camps illustrating both the importance of traditional trading networks and the increasing use of European commodities. Carnegie found pearl shells in camps 500 miles in the interior of the Western Desert along with assorted European bric-a-brac–an old iron tent peg, the lid of a tin matchbox and small pieces of glass carefully wrapped in covers of woven feathers. Warburton found a large sea-shell and an old butcher’s knife in one camp and in another two shells, a steel axe and part of an iron dray tyre. Mulligan’s Cape York expedition of 1876 came across a camp where traditional items mingled with an empty sardine box, a jam pot and a sharpened piece of inch-iron. A pioneer pearler on the northwest of Western Australia came across a small cannon in a deserted camp on an island in Vansittart Bay.
The random discoveries of explorers and pioneers illustrated a more general phenomenon. All over Australia at varying times traditional tool kits were augmented with bottles, glass, strips of cloth, pieces of greenhide, articles of clothing. Iron was particularly attractive. Aborigines were given, found, or scavenged scraps of iron and finished steel tools from camps, stations and homesteads in every district in Australia and traded them back beyond the frontier. Traditional stone artifacts were being rapidly supplanted among most Aboriginal communities even before the arrival of the first permanent white settlers. Aborigines from the far south-west of Queensland told a local pioneer that a few iron tomahawks had preceded the squatters into the district by a good thirty years. Explorers found abundant evidence of Aboriginal use of iron and steel in places well beyond the reach of European settlement. Near the farthest point of his 1846 expedition into central Queensland Mitchell saw a steel axe. ‘Even here’, he mused, in the heart of the interior ‘on a river utterly unheard of by white men, an iron tomahawk glittered on high in the hands of a chief’.4 Knowledge of axes may have spread even more widely than the desired objects themselves. While on his voyage around Australia in the 1820s P. P. King saw Aborigines on several parts of the coast who came down to the shore making chopping signs with their hands as if asking for European axes. Hovell met a group of blacks in central Victoria in the mid-1820s who pointed in the direction of Port Phillip indicating that they had seen white men fell trees there. Taking an axe they illustrated the way in which the Europeans had used it, ‘not forgetting the grunt or hiss which the men invariably do when they are striking anything with force’.5
Late in 1847 Edmund Kennedy was returning from an expedition along the lower, unexplored reaches of the Barcoo. As he advanced towards the outer fringes of white settlement he began to notice the increasing evidence of the European presence–at one camp a bundle of spears tied up with a piece of cotton handkerchief, then at succeeding ones a pint pot, a fragment of a blue knitted Guernsey shirt, rags, a broken hobble strap and a buckle. But as well as such material objects Aborigines often had experience of domestic animals–cattle, horses, dogs, cats, donkeys, camels and rabbits–which strayed away from centres of European settlement.
Cattle escaped from the struggling community at Sydney cove within a few weeks of the first landing and many animals subsequently followed the example of these bovine pioneers. Explorers often found their tracks and dung far out beyond the nearest European settlement. Oxley saw tracks 80 to 90 miles west of Bathurst in 1817. During an expedition of 1831 from the infant Swan River settlement over the Darling Range G. F. Moore reported finding what he coyly termed ‘symptoms of Cows’ which had already ventured into the interior.6 When deep in the central desert in 1873 Warburton met a group of Aborigines who, he concluded, had heard of cattle both by the signs they made and their ‘tolerably good imitation of lowing when they saw the camels’.7
The sudden appearance of cattle must have been a terrifying experience. A few traditional stories that have been preserved refer to the large size of the new animals, their fearsome looking horns, their bellowing and often aggressive behaviour. Davis and Bracefield, convict escapees from Moreton Bay, related that the Aborigines of the upper Brisbane Valley and Wide Bay were terrified of two stray bullocks that rampaged through their country and they clambered up nearby trees at the sound of their approach. South Australian Aborigines told the missionary George Taplin of the fear experienced when a couple of bullocks wandered into their tribal territories. They dubbed the exotic animals ‘windwityere’, or beings with spears on the head. In the south-east corner of South Australia local blacks told a story about their first sight of European animals. They were terrified by strange sounds in the night that could not be accounted for. At daylight one of the men crept out to investigate the source of the noise but came back deeply perplexed saying that he did not know what the creatures were for they could not be compared with anything seen before in their country. The whole party cautiously approached the strange creatures. ‘We had a peep through the bushes’, they later recalled:
and saw what we now know to have been sheep, cattle, and horses and a dray. The bullock’s bellowing was a terror to us. We saw the tracks of the cattle, sheep and horses, and could not imagine what it could be that made them.8
Cattle were probably the most common intruders into Aboriginal territory and consciousness but rabbits, cats, camels, donkeys and horses found their way out beyond the fringes of settlement in various parts of the continent. Both the Elder expedition of 1891–92 and that of Carnegie five years later discovered domestic cats in remote parts of the western desert. Horne and Aiston reported that a middle aged Aborigine from central Australia told them of his first meeting with a rabbit thirty years earlier. On leaving his camp one morning he saw the strange animal under a bush. He ran back to get his father and several other men and they decided to kill the exotic creature. It was knocked down with boomerangs and then speared and the carcase was carried into the nearest point of European settlement to be identified.
Horses ventured out beyond European settlement as well. Leichhardt’s party saw one on the Dawson River in 1844 several hundred miles beyond the nearest stations as did McKinlay at Coopers Creek in 1861. North Queensland blacks tell a story about their forebears’ first meeting with a stray horse. The story may date back to the release of several horses by Kennedy’s expedition in 1848:
Somebody lost a horse - first time they ever saw a horse … and they got their spears and boomerangs and nulla-nullas and they chased this horse and they speared the horse and they put so many spears in the horse that the old horse fell down. And they walked up and had a look at him and they lift his head up and said, ‘What sort of creature is this?’ They never see an animal so big. They said, ‘I wonder where this animal has come from, it’s so big’.9
It is clear then that pioneers were preceded into the interior by feral animals and a range of European commodities. But what about information? How much had Aborigines learnt about the white invaders before they were caught in the onrushing tide of settlement?
There was widespread cultural exchange over large areas of Aboriginal Australia. Ceremonies, songs, dances, words and ideas all flowed back and forth along the traditional trade routes. In his late nineteenth-century study of Aboriginal life in Queensland Roth described how ideas were interchanged:
superstitions and traditions [are] handed on from district to district, and more or less modified in transit … new words and terms are picked up, and … corroborees are learnt and exchanged just like any other commodities.10
The large ceremonial gatherings of neighbouring tribes provided the venue for gossip, trade and cultural interchange. The anthropologist W. E. H. Stanner observed such a meeting while studying the Daly River tribes in the early 1930s. He noted that diffusion of ideas took place most propitiously in quiet moments punctuating the large, dramatic ceremonies, while little knots of men and women were resting under the trees or around campfires at night and the songs were chanted, ‘the myths retold, the dances rehearsed, the little technological tricks explained.11
Tribal messengers were widely used in traditional society. These ‘living newsmongers’12 travelled quickly over long distances conveying information from clan to clan. Early European observers of Aboriginal life were impressed with the speed and spread of Aboriginal communications. G. A. Robinson concluded that songs and corroborees current around Melbourne in the 1840s had arrived ‘with amazing celerity’ from as far north as the Hunter River.13 At much the same time on the far side of the continent a member of the Port Essington settlement noted that information passed so rapidly from tribe to tribe that ‘an event of any importance is known over a large extent of country in the course of a very few months’.14 Howitt made similar observations while camped near Coopers Creek in 1861. He discovered that messengers were continually coming in from up to 150 miles away with news for the local clans about the movements of McKinlay’s contemporaneous expedition. Howitt was later able to confirm the accuracy of reports that his fellow explorer had been caught in flood waters and had consequently abandoned his dray.
Castaways and convict escapees provided additional evidence about the passage of information. Davis and Bracefield reported that news of Europeans frequently passed back from the outer fringes of European settlement while James Morrell confirmed that news soon spread from tribe to tribe. Barbara Thompson found that information about white activities in the Cape York area ‘went at once throughout the islands’,15 a judgement supported by John Jardine the Government Resident at Somerset who wrote that:
the communication between the islanders and the natives of the mainland is frequent, and the rapid manner in which news is carried from tribe to tribe to great distances is astonishing. I was informed of the approach of HMS ‘Salamander’ on her last visit two days before her arrival here. Intelligence is conveyed by means of fires made to throw smoke up in different forms, or by messengers who perform long and rapid journeys.16
Did news of Europeans travel as far as their artifacts? Was the meaning and significance of information significantly altered as it passed from tribe to tribe? If shells could pass right across the continent from north to south could information do likewise? We may never have enough evidence to answer these questions satisfactorily but an interesting event was reported by Windsor-Earl in relation to the Port Essington settlement in the Northern Territory. To the surprise of the Europeans Aborigines visiting the encampment from the interior spoke of ‘white people who dwelt in the country to the south, and who built houses of stone’,17 referring, it was assumed, to the new colony in South Australia on the far side of the continent.
Explorers were often convinced that previously uncontacted Aborigines had heard of Europeans. Oxley thought it evident from the behaviour of blacks he met that they had ‘previously heard of white people’.18 Early Western Australian exploring parties used black guides to communicate with more remote tribes whose members confirmed that they had been told of the settlers, their behaviour and possessions. As news of Europeans spread a few words of pidgin English were probably carried back beyond the frontier–notably yarraman for horse, jumbuk for sheep, bula or bulloki for cattle, wheelbarrow for dray. These words and one or two others found their way into Aboriginal vocabularies from Bass Strait to Cape York and west into central Australia. Yarraman for instance, which came from the Batemans Bay dialect, was used in a large number of Aboriginal languages all over eastern Australia. In the areas around Adelaide the term pindi nanto or literally the newcomer’s or European’s kangaroo was coined as a term for horse. The diffusion of these two words–one from New South Wales, the other from South Australia–is a fascinating study. Yarraman reached central Australia from the east to be ultimately borrowed by the Walbri from their neighbours in that direction the Warramanga. But they also used the term nantu which they had borrowed from the Aranda to the south. It would seem therefore, that two currents of linguistic borrowing met and merged in the centre of the continent.
There is a little evidence from the Aboriginal side of the frontier which helps establish a link in the chain of linguistic diffusion from the Adelaide region to central Australia and beyond. In the 1920s a South Australian pioneer published an account of a series of contact stories he had collected from an old Aborigine who had grown up in the region bounded by the Flinders Ranges and Lake Frome. The old man related how:
some of the tribe lower down south had seen these strange people, and they had sent a messenger on with news that these people were making up towards their camp, and to be on the lookout for them and their wonderful nantoes19
In the early 1860s Howitt used the word nantoe when conversing with Dieri tribesmen on the shores of Lake Hope near Coopers Creek and was immediately understood. At some stage the term passed on beyond central Australia and eventually reached the far side of the continent entering the vocabulary of the Wagaidj clans around Darwin.
Europeans typically collected Aboriginal vocabularies after considerable contact, when numerous English and pidgin terms had been adopted directly from the settlers or acculturated blacks from districts of earlier settlement. This frontier pidgin has been studied by a number of writers since 1834 when L. E. Threlkeld published his pioneering work An Australian Grammar which listed over twenty ‘barbarisms introduced by sailors and stockmen’.20 But there is some evidence which suggests that prior borrowing took place from Aboriginal contacts before the arrival of Europeans. In 1846 Mitchell met a group of Aborigines on the Belyando, a locality remote from the nearest white settlement. He was amazed when the blacks exclaimed Yarraman on coming up to the expeditions’ horses. McKinlay had a similar experience in the far north-east corner of South Australia in 1861 where there was perhaps slightly more chance of prior European contact. Explorers and pioneer squatters came across Aborigines with no apparent previous contact who used the term white-fellow when speaking of the Europeans. This happened to Mitchell, Alan Macpherson and Leichhardt in different parts of Queensland in the 1840s and to Carnegie in the western desert in 1896. Mitchell commented on this phenomenon in his account of his first expedition in northern New South Wales in 1831–32:
We heard calls in various directions, and ‘whitefellow’ pronounced very loudly and distinctly. ‘Whitefellow’, or ‘white-ma’ appears to be their name … for our race, and this appellation probably accompanies the first intelligence of such strangers, to the most remote, interior region.21
Howitt provided the most substantial evidence of the diffusion of information about Europeans and of new terms to express it. He discovered that Aborigines over a wide area of central Australia were aware of the northward progress of McKinlay’s expedition of 1861. McKinlay himself was called whilprapinnaru by the blacks living on the outlying cattle stations in South Australia, an expression which meant the old-man, or leader, of the dray, or wheelbarrow as it was termed in pidgin English. Howitt discovered that the word followed McKinlay ‘on from tribe to tribe’ certainly as far as the south-west corner of Queensland along with assorted information about the expedition’s possessions and behaviour.22
News of the danger and mysterious power of firearms was almost certainly passed on to Aborigines before they came into physical contact with Europeans. Explorers often found that blacks were highly apprehensive of guns even before they had been fired. While surveying Port Phillip in 1803 Tuckey met local Aborigines who ‘signified their knowledge and fear of the effect of firearms’.23 Oxley found that blacks immediately ran off if anyone picked up a musket and would only return when it was put down ‘showing by every simple means in their power their dread of its appearance’.24 McKinlay, Stuart and Giles all reported similar reactions in remote parts of the interior. Tribesmen who met Stuart pointed meaningfully to the expeditions’ guns making loud noises with their mouths; Searcey reported that when he met a group of blacks on a remote beach in the Northern Territory one man came up, touched his revolver and said ‘Boom!, Boom!, Boom!’25 Oral history from Mornington Island confirms this picture. Roughsey related that his father heard about guns long before he had seen white men. Mainland Aborigines told him how the Europeans could kill a man ‘with thunder that sent down invisible spears to tear a hole in his body and spill his blood in the sand’.26
Linguistic evidence supports the proposition of an early diffusion of knowledge about guns. Numerous Eastern Australian languages contained terms for gun which derived from the English word musket. This suggests that the word passed from tribe to tribe quite early in the history of settlement possibly before muskets became obsolete. None of the variations of the word in question appear in lists of frontier pidgin suggesting that they evolved on the Aboriginal rather than the European side of the frontier. The geographical dispersal of musket words is impressive. They appeared in several Victorian languages–Madjgad in Wergaia and Matjkat in Wemba-Wemba–but were more common in Queensland and the Northern Territory. Marrkin was used by the Budjara around Charleville and the Gugu-Badhun five hundred kilometres away on the upper-Burdekin. Marrgin was employed by the Gugu-Yalanji on Cape York, Makini by the Kalkatungu around Cloncurry, Mugadi by the Djingili at Tennant Creek and Daly Waters, Makati by the Walbri and Mukuta by the Aranda. Variations of the same word were used by Aboriginal tribes living 1500 kilometres apart scattered over an area almost half the size of the continent.
Thus while the evidence is fragmentary and widely scattered we can gain some impression of the impact of European settlement on Aboriginal society before face to face contact had occurred. Most clans would have already been using an array of European commodities when pioneer settlers appeared even if they did not always know precisely where the new articles had come from. Feral animals would also have entered their territories–cattle, horses, dogs, cats and pigs from the earliest period; camels, rabbits and donkeys during the second half of the nineteenth century. Information about the Europeans would probably have filtered through from distant tribes especially about the power and danger of their weapons. Along with news of the whiteman a handful of new words would also have entered ancient vocabularies all over the continent.
Many of the themes discussed to this point were illustrated by the experiences of the English sailor James Morrell (there are various spellings of his name) of the ship ‘Peruvian’, wrecked on Horseshoe Reef in 1846, who lived with the Jurn and Bindal tribes of the Townsville-Bowen region for seventeen years. Morrell’s reminiscences are sketchy and he was not as sharply observant as the contemporaneous castaway Barbara Thompson, but his tribal sojourn was much longer than hers spanning the period of early contact with sea-borne visitors, the first land expeditions, the appearance of feral animals and the eventual arrival of pioneer pastoralists and native police troopers which was a prelude to Morrell giving himself up to two frontier stockmen.
Morrell’s tribesmen did not see any of the land expeditions of the 1840s–those of Leichhardt, Mitchell, Gregory–which all travelled inland along the valleys of the Burdekin and its tributaries. However, news of the European parties filtered through to Morrell as he recalled in a letter published in the Rockhampton Bulletin in 1865. But his account presents the historian with some difficulties. He maintained that two reports of European parties were received by his kinsmen in 1855 although it is by no means certain that Morrell had been able to keep track of time during his seventeen years in the bush. Nor do we know how fresh the stories were, or how altered in transit, although it is clear that some information about Europeans did come in from distant tribes.
One of the reports referred to a party of Europeans seen to the north-west, accompanied by a large number of horses and cattle. The position tallies very well with the southward route travelled by A. C. Gregory’s North Australia Expedition of 1855–56. The party set out with 50 horses and 200 sheep although the flock would have been much depleted by the time it reached Queensland. But apart from the absence of cattle the Aboriginal report measures up very well with the known facts. Morrell’s second story is much harder to pin down. The white party was said to be to the north but that eventually all but one member had grown thin and died. There does not appear to be any obvious source for this story though it may have become significantly changed in its passage down the coast. It could have referred to survivors from shipwreck for there must have been many such unrecorded misadventures; it may have related to the fate of the members of Kennedy’s disastrous 1848 expedition who starved to death at Weymouth Bay. There is a scrap of evidence suggesting that news of Kennedy’s party passed down the coast at least as far as Townsville making it likely that Morrell would have picked the story up. In the 1880s an old Aboriginal man from the Townsville district told Archibald Meston that as a young man he remembered news of an expedition coming down the coast from the north (Meston assumed it was Kennedy’s) and was able to relate considerable details about the party and its assortment of animals and equipment.
From the late 1850s news began to filter through to Morrell about the pastoral occupation of central Queensland and the violence accompanying it. A distant tribe reported that they had seen a white man with two horses who shot at a funeral party killing one of the chief mourners. But the European was subsequently caught off-guard, was set upon and killed. A short time later four cattle strayed into Morrell’s district and while he did not see them himself his tribal relatives showed him the tracks and carefully described the exotic animals mentioning their horns, teats and big ears. Morrell questioned his kinsmen closely and they said that:
three had teats and one had none; thus I understood three were cows and one was a bull. I told them they were what we ate, and they chaffed me about their great size, long tails, big ears and horns.27
With the next report the intruders were closer and even more threatening. A party of both black and white men on horseback–presumably the Native Mounted Police–had shot down a group of the Cape Upstart people with whom Morrell had previously lived. His informants had closely observed the violent newcomers, telling him about the saddles, stirrups, bridles and other accoutrements as well as the noise and smoke when the guns were fired. From this time on Morrell received almost daily reports about the Europeans till eventually stockmen arrived in his neighbourhood with a large herd of cattle. Two old women were sent out to watch the white men and report on their activities. They did the job very well for they:
brought word back that there was a large hut, and that they had seen red and white blankets hanging on the stockyard fences and heard a dog bark, and an old sheep bleating tied to a tree; they also heard the report of a gun twice; but could not see where it came from.28
A few days later Morrell approached the stockmen bringing to an end his involuntary seventeen year exile. For his Aboriginal kinsmen the events were even more portentous; many thousands of years of freedom from outside interference were coming to an abrupt and bloody end.
Morrell was one of the few Europeans who witnessed, from the other side of the frontier, the climactic moment as Aboriginal society felt the shock of the arrival of the first permanent settlers. Amongst the small group of Europeans who lived with the Aborigines only a few left any record of their experiences. But the voluminous writing of explorers contains a large amount of material useful to the scholar seeking to understand the Aboriginal response to the European invasion of their homelands.
Explorers with wide experience beyond the frontiers of European settlement were impressed by the diversity of Aboriginal reactions they encountered. Mitchell found that the ‘difference in disposition’ between tribes ‘not very remote from each other was very striking’29 while Stokes after circumnavigating the continent remarked that whereas some groups he met were ‘most kindly disposed’ to the white travellers, others manifested the ‘greatest hostility and aversion’. 30 European and Aborigine met in such a wide variety of circumstances that the historian may never be able to reduce the diversity to simple patterns of behaviour. For the foreseeable future description may have to take precedence over analysis.
It is probable that a majority of Aborigines had about as much prior notice of the European approach as Morrell’s tribesmen. Yet despite forewarning early meetings were still fraught with tension. So much about the whites–their appearance, behaviour, possessions, accompanying animals–were radically new; awesome; unexpected. News of the Europeans’ weapons and their apparent control of powerful magic compounded the fear and anxiety. Horses were a further source of anguished curiosity, with their noise and size and speed. Aborigines often asked if horses bit. Gippsland blacks told Alexander McMillan that they had originally thought that the noise of gunfire came from the horses’ nostrils. Morrell remarked that neighbouring blacks who had not had the advantage of his advice thought that horses as well as their riders could ‘speak and do mischief to them.31 Elsewhere it was thought that horse and rider were one.
Meetings with Europeans were often terrifying experiences even when violence was absent. Screaming, perspiring, shaking, involuntary urination and defecation–all the normal human reactions to extreme fear were reported at one time or another by white observers. Eyre recalled coming upon an Aboriginal camp at night and provoking a ‘wild exclamation of dismay’ accompanied by a ‘look of indescribable horror and affright’.32 P. P. King wrote of a party all members of which trembled with fright at the approach of the Europeans. Oxley met Aborigines who ‘trembled excessively’ being ‘absolutely intoxicated with fear’.33 In the western desert Carnegie thought the ‘trembling fear’ of local blacks ‘painful to witness’.34
But perhaps the most notable feature of such meetings was less the terror induced than the courage displayed by people placed in situations of extraordinary tension. This was surely the hidden, perhaps the larger part, of the heroism of Australian exploration. Explorers often recognized the psychological strength of the blacks they came into contact with. Mitchell met an old man in central Queensland who, though perspiring profusely from terror; allowed no hint of anxiety to cloud his demeanour. Austin noted in Western Australia that although the Aborigines he came across were aware of the superiority of European arms their bearing was always fearless and manly. Sturt made similar observations about blacks he fell in with in central Australia. One man in particular called forth his admiration. ‘His composure and apparent self possession’, he wrote, ‘were very remarkable’:
his whole demeanour was that of a calm and courageous man, who finding himself placed in unusual jeopardy, had determined not to be betrayed into the slightest display of fear or timidity.35
But while the courage of the men who went forward to meet the Europeans was clear it was probably surpassed by that of the young women who were frequently dispatched by their male relatives to appease the sexual appetite of the strange and threatening white men.
Attacks on exploring parties varied considerably in tactics, size and seriousness. Sometimes spears were thrown from cover–of the forest when Kennedy was transfixed, of darkness when Gilbert died. Occasionally large, well organized attacks were mounted like the one reported by Giles on his fourth expedition. But armed resistance to the explorers was less common than might have been expected owing no doubt to a prudent weighing of costs and benefits. The belief that Europeans possessed powerful and malignant magic may have been a crucial factor in limiting Aboriginal aggression. Clans were much more likely to carefully watch the Europeans than openly confront them. Indeed overlanding parties were rarely able to move across country without being seen by resident blacks and news of their movements was carried forward either by messenger or smoke signal. There are many examples of Aboriginal use of smoke signals. When Sturt’s party was crossing Lake Alexandrina blacks on a headland lit a large fire as soon as the Europeans noticed them. It was answered from every point of the compass and in less than ten minutes the party counted fourteen different fires. Mitchell reported a similar experience. A fire lit close to the party was a sequel to a whole series of others, extending in ‘telegraphic line far to the south’.36 A party which landed on the Yarrabah Peninsula in 1882 found that as they began to move back from the beach signal fires flared on every hill as far as the eye could reach. J. S. Roe reported that as his party passed across country smoke signals would suddenly rise up within a mile and a half of their line of march. Explorers may have never been out of sight, even of earshot, of local Aborigines even at times when they imagined themselves alone in the wilderness. Some sensed the ubiquitous black presence. Writing after his expedition into north-west Queensland W. O. Hodgkinson observed that the blacks were so expert at hiding that it was unsafe to ‘accept their absence from view as proof of nonexistence’. 37 Oxley, the leader of one of the earliest inland expeditions, remarked that:
it is probable that they may see us without discovering themselves, as it is much more likely for us to pass unobserved the little family of the wandering native, than that our party … should escape their sight, quickened as it is by constant exercise in procuring their daily bread.38
Europeans sensitive to their surroundings felt they were being constantly watched. When landing on apparently deserted coasts Stokes believed that the eyes of the Aborigines were always upon him and that his ‘every movement was watched’.39 Jukes cautioned that no matter how uninhabited a place might appear ‘even for days together’ the white man should always walk in the expectation that ‘a native has his eye upon you’.40 Gilbert made a similar note in his diary shortly before he was to die from a spear thrown into the camp from the encompassing and apparently unpeopled darkness. The bushman, he fatefully wrote, must never forget that although no blacks could be seen ‘they may be within a few yards of his camp closely observing every action’.41
Explorers occasionally stumbled on blacks who had been sent to watch them. Young women sentries kept up a constant surveillance of G. A. Robinson during his first expedition in Western Tasmania. Mitchell found that two women had sat in the bush throughout a cold, wet night without fire or water in order to observe his party. While on sentry duty one dark night Jukes nearly trod on an old man who with two or three others was crouching in the grass observing the camp. Expedition members who backtracked for one reason or another found clear evidence that vacated camping sites had been minutely examined and tracks followed for long distances. John Mann, a member of Leichhardt’s party of 1844–45, observed that the Aborigines ‘overturned’42 the camp sites as soon as they were vacated. Writing of the same expedition Gilbert noted the rush of blacks to search abandoned camps where they were to be seen ‘busily engaged in searching about picking up any little thing which attracted their attention’.43 Aboriginal attraction to deserted European camp sites was emphasised in the contact stories of the Flinders Range-Lake Frome clans. They referred to the arrival of an expedition which entered their country from the south–it was probably Eyre’s abortive attempt to push up into central Australia in 1840. The local blacks carefully watched the Europeans from the security of the hills but as soon as the explorers set off in the early morning they rushed into the deserted camp:
one of the chief treasures found were parts of a bottle that had got broken … every scrap of bottle was picked up and handed over to the head ‘doctor’. These same pieces were afterwards used in their rites in place of flint … Empty tins, a couple of horseshoe nails, bits of rope and twine–every scrap was picked up and taken to camp.44
Contact between explorers and Aborigines was often friendly and mutually satisfactory. The French navigator Labillardiere, for instance, wrote in praise of hospitable Tasmanians. The attentions, he observed:
lavished on us by these savages astonished us. If our paths were interrupted by heaps of dry branches, some of them walked before, and removed them to either side; they even broke off such as stretched across our way … We could not walk on the dry grass without slipping every moment … but these good savages, to prevent our falling, took hold of us by the arm, and thus supported us.45
Explorers have left accounts of many meetings when both whites and blacks behaved with decorum and sensitivity thereby reducing the tension of contact. Flinders wrote of such an occasion on the Tasmanian coast. He gave a local Aborigine a ship’s biscuit and in return accepted an old piece of whale flesh. Both parties politely put their presents in their mouths but surreptitiously spat them out when they thought the action would not be noticed.
Aborigines afforded significant assistance to white explorers in every corner of the continent supplying valuable, and at times life saving, information about waterholes and springs; fords and paths; mountain passes, easy gradients, short cuts. The West Australian explorer Austin noted the value of such intelligence when recounting his meeting with a local clan whose members gave him the name and position of all the significant places on his line of march as far as the boundaries of their country. He noted down the information and then enquired about the water, rocks, timber and feed to be found at each site. While summing up his extensive experience of Aboriginal Australia, Eyre wrote in appreciation of the hospitality so often afforded:
I have been received by them in the kindest and most friendly manner, had presents made to me of fish, kangaroo, fruit; had them accompany me for miles to point out where water was to be procured, or been assisted by them in getting at it, if from the nature of the soil or my own inexperience, I had any difficulty in doing so myself.46
How can we account for such hospitality? We may never know for certain although glimpses of the Aborigines provided by the explorers allow us to make tentative assessments of their motivation. It seems reasonable to assume that the clans themselves were often divided over the question of an appropriate policy to adopt towards travelling Europeans. On many, perhaps a majority, of occasions the decision was obviously made to watch carefully but avoid contact though this strategy was less likely to be noticed by the explorers. But the attraction of European goods provided a powerful incentive to establish friendly contact and awareness of firearms dampened enthusiasm for confrontation. The provision of guides was probably a deliberate policy to resolve the contradictory objectives of seeking access to the white men’s possessions while hastening the departure of potentially dangerous sojourners. Guides may have been additionally motivated to take Europeans on guided tours through their country thereby avoiding sites of spiritual significance. Exploring parties were aware that they were often taken on circuitous routes and usually assumed that detours were made to circumvent unseen geographical hazards. But the objectives of their hosts may have been more religious than topographical. Interest in the strangers; even the simple desire to be hospitable may have encouraged the establishment of friendly contact. From their response to white visitors it is clear that clans were proud of their country, happy to recite its deeply understood amenity and to display their profound knowledge of the environment.
How curious were the Aborigines about the European invaders? Such a question would hardly arise if Australian scholars had not so often asserted that the blacks were a uniquely passive and incurious people, an assessment recently given new authority by Blainey who argued that Aborigines reacted to the sudden appearance of whites with the ‘calm apathy’ of a people who had lived so long in isolation ‘that intruders were inconceivable’.47 But the historical record provides scant evidence for this view. While we lack detailed information about the social customs of many tribes from districts settled in the nineteenth century it is reasonable to conclude that across wide areas of Australia displays of overt curiosity were considered the height of rudeness. Among many tribes it was customary to totally ignore visitors when they first arrived in camp. Drawing on his experience at Port Phillip in the 1840s E. S. Parker observed that when:
individuals of other tribes thus arrived on a visit, the etiquette, if I may so term it, was remarkable! The visitor sat down at a little distance, but never spoke. He scarcely looked, indeed, at the parties he came to see.48
Decorum not apathy determined Aboriginal behaviour as the more perceptive explorers and settlers realized. Writing of desert Aborigines Giles remarked that ‘of course they saw us, but they most perseveringly shunned us’.49 Eyre noted the ‘innate propriety of behaviour’ exhibited by blacks in their ‘natural state’ especially in the ‘modest unassuming manner’ in which they positioned themselves to watch the Europeans and the total absence of anything that was ‘rude or offensive’.50 Sturt came across a desert Aborigine whose composure and self-possession were ‘very remarkable’ for despite the awesomeness of the meeting he was clearly determined to exhibit neither ‘astonishment nor curiosity’.51
But there were many occasions when curiosity became the over-mastering passion breaking through traditional restraint, overlaying fear and anxiety. Mitchell wrote of a group of Queensland Aborigines for whom ‘intense curiosity’ overcame ‘all the fears of such strangers’.52 Leichhardt met some old men far in the interior who:
observed with curious eye, everything we did, and made long explanations to each other of the various objects presented to their gaze. Our eating, drinking, dress, skin, combing, boiling, our blankets, straps, horses, everything in short, was new to them, and was earnestly discussed.53
Sturt found on his expedition down the Murray and Murrumbidgee that the party was obliged to submit anew to close examination by every group of Aborigines they met. They were pulled about and touched all over; their faces were felt; their fingers counted and their hands and feet measured against those of the investigators. Even the old and decrepit came down to the river to see them. ‘The lame’, Sturt wrote:
had managed to hobble along, and the blind were equally anxious to touch us. There were two or three old men stretched upon the bank, from who the last sigh seemed about to depart; yet these poor creatures evinced an anxiety to see us, and to listen to descriptions of our appearance.54
In the early years of settlement the Aborigines were often intensely interested in determining the newcomer’s gender. Clothing cloaked their sexual identity and clean shaven faces compounded the uncertainty. While surveying the coastline in 1819–20 P. P. King found blacks both curious and importunate demanding that one of his party undress and expose his genitals. Writing of the foundation of the Swan River Settlement, C. H. Fremantle noted that ‘they think young men are women and so they want them to take their trousers off’.55 G. B. Worgan, a first fleet surgeon, described another such encounter:
I must not omit mentioning a very singular Curiosity among the Men here, arising from a Doubt of what Sex we are, for from our not having, like themselves long Beards, and not seeing when they open our Shirt-Bosoms (which they do very roughly and without any Ceremony) the usual distinguishing Characteristics of Women, they start Back with Amazement, and give a Hum! with a significant look, implying. What kind of Creatures are these?!–As it was not possible for Us to satisfy their Inquisitiveness in this Particular, by the simple Words. Yes or No. We had Recourse to the Evidence of Ocular Demonstration, which made them laugh, jump and Skip in an Extravagant Manner.56
The desire to determine the sex of the Europeans may have had more important reasons than idle curiosity. Establishing the sex of a party could help explain its objectives; an all male group might presage conflict, one with women and children a more peaceful mission. Baldwin Spencer noted that in central Australia the fact that a party:
is travelling with women and children is prima-facie evidence that their intentions are not hostile, but a party of men travelling without their women-folk is always looked upon with suspicion.57
Aborigines with little previous experience of Europeans were often perplexed by their clothes and hats and footwear. It may not have been immediately apparent where the covering ended and the flesh began. Writing of his life while pioneering the Champion Bay district in Western Australia F. F. Wittenoom recalled that one wet night he pulled off his pyjama coat to dry it. A local black watching the procedure let out a shout on seeing the white skin and soon a crowd came round to witness the spectacle. Daniel Brock, a member of Sturt’s central Australian expedition of 1844 noted the interest aroused by his clothes among a group of blacks camped close to the exploration party. A curious clansman was inspecting his boots when Brock drew up his trousers exposing the white skin to the amazement of those watching, a reaction which was intensified when he drew off both his boot and his sock. The Aborigines’ reaction to European clothing was graphically related in a traditional story about the arrival of Europeans on the beach at Cardwell. The whites came ashore and offered various presents to the assembled clans. They threw clothes and blankets towards the blacks whose reactions of fears and wonder are still remembered:
and they got a big long stick and they picked it up with the stick and they couldn’t make out what that was. They thought this man was changing his skin. They said this man left his skin there. All the natives thought this man was taking his skin. They said this man has been peel himself like a snake and they got the stick and they picked it up with a stick and they looked and looked at this shirt and trousers. You know they couldn’t make out and they pick up a blanket and have a look, some pretty colours, they couldn’t make out and this fellow took his shirt out and threw it down on the ground. They see him how he took his shirt. Don’t know what colour was the shirt. But when he took his shirt and he was white they thought he change his colour when he took his shirt off. They pick up that shirt with the stick because they was too frightened to pick it up with a hand because in our custom might be something very dangerous, witchcraft.58
As they cautiously picked up the articles of clothing on the end of a long stick the Cardwell blacks illustrated the ambivalence which characterized the Aboriginal response to Europeans all over the continent, the amalgam of curiosity and fear, attraction to the new yet the resistance to change inherent in the ancient cultures of Aboriginal Australia.