The sudden arrival of Europeans provoked more than fear and curiosity. It sparked intense and often prolonged debate as to the true nature of the white men, their origin and objectives. During the early years of settlement many blacks believed that Europeans were beings returned from the dead, an assessment confirmed by the testimony of the small group of Europeans who gained some insight into tribal attitudes and behaviour. Moorhouse, the Protector of Aborigines in South Australia, believed it was the ‘universal impression’ among blacks of that colony.1 Eyre thought the ‘general belief’ was that Europeans were ‘resuscitated natives’2 while Stokes considered the view ‘universally diffused’3 among the tribes. Writing of his experience at Port Essington Windsor-Earl noted that local clans recognized the spirits of the dead in all the strangers who visited their country. Castaways and escapees concurred, Buckley reporting that Port Phillip Aborigines were convinced that white men were Aborigines who ‘had returned to life in a different colour’.4 Thompson found on Cape York that all the local blacks thought that white men were the ‘spirits of black men come again in a new form’.5 When Davis, the Moreton Bay escapee, was ‘rescued’ by an exploring party his relatives said he was going back to join the dead. Linguistic evidence provides further confirmation. All over the continent in areas of early settlement the Aborigines applied to Europeans traditional terms meaning variously, ghost, spirit, eternal, departed, the dead. In north Queensland, settled in the second half of the nineteenth century, the same rule applied. The celebrated ethnographer W. E. Roth observed that in the many local dialects which he had recorded the same word was ‘found to do duty for a European and a deceased aboriginal’s spirit, ghost’.6
Why was this idea so pervasive? To begin with it is important to stress that far from being an example of childlike fancy or primitive irrationality this view of the European was a logical conclusion premised on important and widely shared beliefs. What were they, then? The Aboriginal cosmos was geographically limited. Most, if not all people, of the known world were kin or potentially so. Outside the circle of known, and at least partially intelligible clans, was the ‘cosmological periphery’ which had little geographical definition. A contemporary scholar has written that:
Owing to the Australian kinship system everybody is–or can be — related to everybody else. If a friendly stranger approaches a camp, he is always finally recognized as being related to someone of the group. Consequently, for the Australians, only one ‘world’ and only one ‘human society’ exist. The unknown regions outside familiar lands do not belong to the ‘world’–just as unfriendly or mysterious foreigners do not belong to the community of men, for they may be ghosts, demonic beings, or monsters.7
While the secular world was circumscribed and populated by a few hundred, or even a few thousand individuals, the realm of the spirits was wide and vibrant with life. At death the spirit left the body, and unless correct ceremonial was followed it might remain moving about tribal territory, but in the normal course of events it would return to the land of spirits which was variously in the sky, beyond the horizon, or more portentously for many coastal people, beyond the sea. The spirit world was real, tangible and ever present. It was a much more likely starting point for the white strangers than unknown, even unsuspected, countries beyond the horizon.
In many cases whites were thought to be not merely re-incarnated blacks but actually returned countrymen. This conclusion was also a perfectly logical one given acceptance of a few basic assumptions. In Aboriginal Australia individuals were thought to belong to their country by powerful spiritual bonds. The unexpected arrival of Europeans caused many to conclude that they too must have belonged to the land in question, or at least know of it, in a previous life. The West Australian pioneer G. F. Moore reported that local blacks had decided that none but those who were ‘already acquainted with the country could find their way to it’.8 Another early settler was asked if Europeans had not known of the country in an earlier existence: ‘why should you come here with your wives, your ships, your flour, your cattle? How did you know there was plenty of water?9 George Grey sensed the logic implicit in the Aboriginal viewpoint. They themselves, he wrote:
never having an idea of quitting their own land, cannot imagine others doing it;–and thus, when they see white people suddenly appear in their country, and settling themselves down in particular spots, they imagine that they must have formed an attachment for this land in some other state of existence, and hence conclude the settlers were at one period black men, and their own relations.10
Other available evidence appeared to support the view that Europeans had returned from the dead. White was a colour widely associated with death; pipe-clay was used extensively in mourning. When Daniel Brock displayed his white feet to inquisitive desert Aborigines they immediately associated the sight with death and sang a lament over him. In parts of the country corpses were peeled of the outer skin leaving them a pinkish colour reminiscent of northern European complexions. South Australian Aborigines in fact called white men grinkai the term for a peeled, pink corpse. A legend told to W. E. Roth on the Pennefeather River in north Queensland confirms the perceived link between the white complexion and the loss of the outer skin. The story concerned a boy who was playing in a lagoon and was swallowed by a big brown snake. The reptile expelled the boy in three or four days but by then he had lost his outer skin and had become a white fellow.
Coastal clans in many parts of the continent believed that at death the spirit travelled across or through the sea to offshore islands or places far over the horizon. An early West Australian settler noted that local blacks ‘inform us that the spirits of their departed traverse the great waters and then become white’.11 Aborigines from Cape Bedford on the far north-Queensland coast believed that spirits travelled east where they entered the bodies of white people. They actually called Europeans ganggal-nakawaraigo or babies coming from the east. West Australian Aborigines explained to the official Aboriginal interpreter that they attributed the pale colour of the Europeans to the influence of saltwater during the long marine journey to the land of spirits.
With apparently sound reasons for regarding Europeans as reincarnated countrymen it needed only the recognition of characteristics of appearance, mannerisms or gait to claim them as returned relatives. ‘Likeness’, Grey observed, ‘either real or imagined completed the illusion’.12 Aborigines from around Perth were said to be able to recognize several hundred colonists by their ‘countenance, voices and scars of former wounds’.13 G. W. Moore confirmed this picture. West Australian pioneers were, he wrote, frequently claimed as relatives by old people who treated them ‘according to the love they formerly bore to the individuals supposed to be recognized’. 14 Stokes referred to the case of a settler who was visited by his supposed kin twice a year though it necessitated a journey of sixty miles. Dr S. W. Viveash noted in his diary in February 1840 that the Aborigine Mignet had told him that his real name was Muswite ‘a York native who had died and jumped up a white fellow’. 15 Mrs Edward Shenton recalled that Perth Aborigines had called her grandmother Budgera saying she was a ‘black woman jumped up white woman’ and they always wanted to make friends with her.16 An early settler at Port Phillip noted that local blacks informed him that they recognized long lost relatives in the persons of white neighbours. A South Australian woman recalled that she was actually given the name of a deceased member of the local clan and nothing that she said would convince the blacks to do otherwise. Grey wrote of his experiences when claimed as the re-incarnated son of an old Aboriginal woman:
A sort of procession came up, headed by two women, down whose cheeks tears were streaming. The eldest of these came up to me, and looking for a moment at me said … ‘Yes, yes, in truth it is him’; and then throwing her arms around me, cried bitterly, her head resting on my breast; and although I was totally ignorant of what their meaning was, from mere motives of compassion, I offered no resistance to her caresses … At last the old lady, emboldened by my submission, deliberately kissed me on each cheek … she then cried a little more, and at length relieving me, assured me that I was the ghost of her son, who had sometime before been killed by a spear wound in his breast … My new mother expressed almost as much delight at my return to my family, as my real mother would have done, had I been unexpectedly restored to her.17
But while the belief in re-incarnated relatives appeared to fit some of the objective circumstances problems constantly arose which required further explanation. Eyre remarked that South Australian Aborigines of his acquaintance could not understand why the settlers did not recognize their former relatives and friends. He had, he said, often been asked why the ‘dead were so ignorant, or so forgetful so as not to know their friends’.18 Similar complaints were reported from other parts of the continent. A West Australian woman wrote in 1839 that the local blacks thought Europeans ‘fools and blockheads to have forgotten everything that happened while we were sojourning with them’.19 Fifty years later Roth found that Cape Bedford blacks wondered how and why the Europeans had ‘forgotten all about their aboriginal ancestors’.20
The same problem arose with castaways like Buckley and Thompson who on introduction to tribal society were unable to speak a word of the local languages and were totally ignorant of their hosts’ customs and manners. But with enough resilience this too could be explained. It was assumed in both cases that the traumatic experience of death and unexpected return to life had impaired the intelligence and expunged the memory. Thompson was treated with the slightly amused compassion reserved for the simple minded. Her gradual mastery of the local language was taken as a slow restoration of lost linguistic skills. Buckley was humoured and shielded in a similar way being kept out of quarrels and away from recurrent skirmishing. His kinsmen were highly amused when he was unable to eat a dog’s leg. ‘No doubt’, he later reminisced:
they thought my having died and been made white had strangely altered my taste. My not being able to talk with them they did not seem to think at all surprising–my having been made white after death, in their opinion, having made me foolish; however, they took considerable pains to teach me their language, and expressed great delight when I got hold of a sentence or even a word, so as to pronounce it somewhat correctly, they then would chuckle, and laugh and give me great praise.21
For how long did this view of the European prevail? Unfortunately, the evidence is so meagre that we must speculate. However, it is realistic to assume that the nature of the white man was a major question of debate within Aboriginal society and that the emergence of a more ‘secular’ view of the newcomers took place unevenly both between and within tribal groups. A writer in the Perth Gazette remarked in 1836 that it was impossible to dissuade the old people from their original view of the Europeans but the younger ones were beginning ‘to have their faith shaken on this point’.22 Moorhouse, the Protector of Aborigines in South Australia, sensed the shift of Aboriginal opinion. Local blacks, he wrote, were concluding that white people were ‘nothing but men’.23 There is some linguistic evidence which illustrates the changing view of the Europeans. In Miriam, the language of the Eastern Torres Strait, the original term for white-men which meant ghost or spirit was replaced by a word meaning ‘bow-men’ referring to the position characteristically taken up by white men in dinghies and luggers. Blacks from the Pennefeather River in north Queensland originally thought Europeans were spirits and called them kai-worda-ngai or bark-sap-spirits, white complexions being compared to the light colour found on the inside of bark on local trees. Eventually they concluded that the white men had nothing to do with the spirits so they dropped the relevant word Ngai and simply used the term Kai-worda on its own.
In other places attitudes to Europeans altered but ghost words survived while undergoing a subtle pejorative change to eventually mean devil, malignant spirit or simply evil doer. Having been applied to whites in one place ghost words were sometimes adopted elsewhere while the original connotations of spirituality were left behind. This seems to have taken place in central and north Queensland. The word miggloo (there are many variations) appears to have come from central Queensland where it meant both ghost and white man. But it spread throughout the north as the most common word for Europeans while losing its original meaning on the way. It is still widely used today as a derisory, even contemptuous, term for white Australian.
In areas of later settlement the illusion that Europeans were spirits may never have taken root. The ‘secular’ view probably arrived ‘ready-made’ from the other side of the frontier along with diverse information about the Europeans. This is strongly suggested by the linguistic evidence. In more remote areas there was a greater tendency for the blacks to use terms for Europeans which lacked any spiritual connotation. The widespread adoption of variants of ‘white fellow’ or ‘white man’ was symptomatic of the change in attitude. These were, after all, new words with no weight of traditional meaning, stemming from European rather than Aboriginal society. Many examples spring to mind–walpala as used around Cloncurry, white-pella on the Georgina, weilbulea along the upper Darling, waelbela among the Aranda and wapala among the Walbri. Other terms were used, sometimes conjointly with ‘whitefella’ words, referring to physical or cultural attributes of the Europeans. The Walbri had one term meaning ‘dusty coloured’ and another which meant literally a ‘house person’; the Djingili from the central Northern Territory used the generic word for red (sunburn perhaps); some Tasmanian tribes coined the term ‘ugly head’ for the white intruders.
The belief that Europeans were relatives returned from the dead had important consequences for the Aboriginal response to the invasion of their territory. It was clearly crucial in determining the fate of castaway mariners and convict bolters. Recognition meant acceptance and security, lack of it ensured death. The unexpected visitor had to be either kinsman re-incarnate or a dangerous spirit from the cosmological periphery. Davis, Morrell, Buckley and Thompson were all accepted and taken in; many others forgotten to history were no doubt killed. Davis observed perceptively that there was always considerable danger when first meeting a new tribe for ‘should no-one recognize you as a relative returned to life you are sure to be speared’.24 When he appeared before a Parliamentary Select Committee he was questioned on this point:
Mr. Watts: How did the blacks receive and treat you in the first instance?
Davis: First rate, nothing could be better.
Chairman: Knowing you to be a white man?
Davis: Yes, they took me to be the ghost of a black fellow.25
Buckley noted that when whites had been killed it was due to the fact that the blacks ‘imagined them to have been originally enemies, or belonging to tribes with whom they were hostile’.26 A traditional story from north Queensland about the first meeting with a white man details the reaction to a person who was considered a malignant spirit:
and all the boys went down and took their spears and their swords and nulla-nulla and they went up to the river and they see this white man was coming down and he was putting his hands up–was surrendering himself to them–but these natives never seen a white man in their life and they run up to him–and the blackfellows speared him because they didn’t know he was a white man. They’d never seen a white man. They speared him and they killed him there and then they left him there and they run away for their life. They said this is a witch-craft man come to destroy us and they ran away …27
Initially many Aborigines endeavoured to absorb the experience of European invasion within the framework of traditional thought. They were successful to a surprising degree. The sudden appearance of white men could be explained although something had clearly altered the familiar cosmic processes with spirits re-entering the world of men in a radically new guise. But even this could be accommodated by minds made flexible, or gullible if you will, through intimate acquaintance with, and everyday acceptance of, magic. Some followed the apparent line of logic even further assuming that they too would henceforth follow the newly established cycle of death, spirit journey and return as a white man. How widespread this belief was is difficult to say although there were numerous reports of it from pioneer settlers. The Perth Gazette for instance, noted in 1838 that it was a superstition which was ‘very general’ among local black communities.28 Another observer believed that many Aborigines were actually looking forward to death in order to ‘return with guns, arms and provisions’.29 At much the same time in Victoria the Aboriginal Protector James Dredge remarked that many local blacks thought that when they died they would ‘jump up white men’.30
One consequence of seeing Europeans as returned relatives was that they could be readily absorbed into kinship networks. This had potential advantages for Aboriginal society by defining the appropriate behaviour both by and towards the white people. It also created expectations concerning the Europeans’ obligation to share their material abundance. A Western Australian pioneer observed that the blacks had concluded that as the whites were ‘their relatives restored to them with plenty of bread and good things’ they should ‘have a right to share with us, as their law compels them to divide whatever they have’.31 Once the illusion of re-incarnation had been shattered other mechanisms were used in an endeavour to encompass settlers within the reciprocal sway of kinship. From being resurrected relatives the whites could be regarded as ‘de-facto’ kin through place of residence, sexual intimacy or mutual gift giving.
Aboriginal misconceptions about the white invader had important consequences for the early development of the Australian colonies, shielding infant and insecure settlements from latent black hostility. Perth Aborigines were asked why they speared the settlers if they genuinely looked upon them as ancestors and friends. Their answer was interesting. They said that in their view they had treated the whites with much greater consideration than would have been shown to strange blacks. If unknown Aborigines had attempted to intrude in the way the Europeans had done the local clans would ‘have done all in their power to destroy them’.32 In South Australia Moorhouse noted that as long as the Aboriginal illusions about Europeans survived they ‘seldom attacked the whites’. Consequently he wanted to preserve black misconceptions as long as possible otherwise they would come to realize that Europeans could be ‘beaten, overcome and murdered by the same means as the natives themselves’. 33 Similar views were expressed in north Queensland a generation later. The editor of the Port Denison Times remarked in 1866 that local blacks were rapidly losing a portion of the ‘awe of the white man, which is so great a safeguard to us’. He was concerned that they would ‘very soon lose ... their superstitious dread’ of the Europeans, that:
the less insight the blackfellows are allowed to get into the white man’s habits the more awe they will have of him, and the more easy they will be to manage.34
Thus the Aboriginal debate about the true nature of the white invaders, mirroring similar discussions on the European side of the frontier, had important consequences for both the settlers and the blacks themselves. But there were also many other ways in which Aboriginal society adjusted to the presence of the whites. Developments in language, music, dancing, painting and practically all aspects of material culture illustrated the linked themes of continuity and change, accommodation and resistance.
It was more common for Aborigines to learn English than for settlers to pick up indigenous dialects although there were notable exceptions. Edward Curr observed in 1880 that most blacks were accustomed from childhood to hear and often speak languages other than their own and consequently learnt new ones more readily than the average colonist. They were, he wrote, usually able to ‘quickly pick up sufficient broken English to understand what is necessary, and to make themselves understood’.35 Communication was facilitated by the use of an Australian pidgin–a melange of words from English, from Pacific creole and more especially from the dialects in use around the earliest settlements. A list of such words includes well known ‘Aboriginal’ terms like nulla-nulla, woomera, warrigal, coolamon, mia-mia, waddy, boomerang, gibber, gin, kangaroo, carbon, bail, boogery. A few dozen words like these became the linguistic core around which an Australian frontier pidgin was built with variations according to place and period. The origin of many of the words was soon forgotten and in the use of pidgin both blacks and whites laboured under ‘the mistaken idea’ that each was conversing in the other’s language as the missionary Threlkeld perceptively observed.36
Modern linguistic studies combined with Aboriginal vocabularies collected in the nineteenth century make it possible to chart some of the intellectual currents generated by contact with European society. Three basic developments can be observed–the direct adoption of European words, the creation of new ones and the expansion of old to encompass novel circumstances, objects and concepts. The adoption of English words involved more than a simple linguistic transfer. Foreign terms had to be significantly modified to assimilate to local pronunciation and orthography often producing sufficient alteration to disguise the borrowing to all but the expert ear. In some cases words were borrowed while meanings changed. Thus the Jodajoda called sheep wulubua deriving from the English word wool. Elsewhere words continued to be used in Aboriginal society after they had become archaic in English. The widespread use of musket words in the late nineteenth century and twentieth has been documented above. There are numerous examples of the expansion of traditional words to encompass new meanings. In Kalkatunga sugar was given the traditional name for honey, coins were called pebbles and writing called patterns. In Yidin the word dama which meant anything dangerous like a snake or centipede was extended to include alcohol, opium and medicines. Nineteenth century word lists contain many similar examples. Compasses were called circles in South Australia; in the Burdekin Valley watches were given the same word as the sun. In South Australia pots and kettles, through identification by shape, were given the traditional word for bottle-tree, in Victoria bottles were referred to as being emushaped. Introduced animals were sometimes given traditional names. In Gippsland European cats were given the same name as native ones, in Tasmania pigs were called wombats.
The various new formations were even more interesting. A simple device was to preface a traditional word with an expression meaning whiteman’s as in white man’s kangaroo for horse and white man’s maggots for rice. Perhaps the greatest variety was shown in the various words coined for policemen–knot maker or tier in Kalkatunga, tie up hands in Wergaren, chainman in Wade-wade, tier or binder in Yutilda, with stripes in Yidin, jumping ant in Gugu-Yalanji, octopus in Gippsland, hatturned-up in Wandwurril, the bitter ones among clans around Boroloola, and in Walbri two words expressive of a significant emotional dichotomy, angry person and elder brother.
European animals called forth a variety of new words. Rabbits were called stand up ears and white bottom in Wembaweba and long ears in Wergaga. In various other Victorian languages sheep were called soft feet and feed on ground, pigs were termed turn ground and roosters call for day. There were several examples of onomatopoeic words–boo.oo for cattle and ba.ba for sheep in Tasmania, gump-gump and neighit-neighit for horse in the Western District. A few other words illustrate the diversity of the Aboriginal linguistic response. In Kalkatunga wind-mills were called turn-turn water-fetchers while boots were termed foot-stinkers in Ngalooma. Clans around Newcastle called peaches tah-rah-kul or literally ‘to set the teeth on edge’.
Change and continuity in Aboriginal languages were paralleled by post-contact development of painting on both rock and bark. In many parts of Australia references to Europeans, their artifacts and animals can be found amid the vast assortment of traditional figures which cluster and overlap at rock-art sites. Around the northern coasts ships, recognizably rigged as schooners, praus or luggers sail incongruously through seas of alien iconography. Feral cats appear among massed marsupials on Hammersly Station; horse and bullock tracks are engraved on the walls at Goat Rock Site in Central Queensland; four horses appear on painted walls on the Cobar Pedeplain. At Laura a giant horse eleven feet long and seven-feet high bestrides the rock shelter. Rifles, revolvers and axes appear at a number of sites and here and there Europeans are depicted–on horseback, with hats and clothes. In the rock shelter near Ingaladdi waterhole in the Northern Territory a nameless drover has been immortalized driving his horses and cattle across the sandstone wall. Painting on trees or bark have generally not survived but nineteenth-century reports leave a few valuable references like the tree painting of a ship in full sail seen on the Darling Downs or the charcoal sketches of a large party of natives spearing a white man seen by G. A. Robinson in Central Victoria. A Tasmanian settler discovered that inland Aborigines were in the habit of ‘representing events by drawing on the bark of trees’. He reported that:
the march of a certain party over a country before unfrequented by us was found a short time afterwards drawn with charcoal on a piece of bark, by a tribe of natives who [had] been observed attentively watching their movements. The carts, the bullocks, the men, were distinctly represented, according to the exact numbers that really existed.37
European tunes, words and themes were gradually introduced into secular songs and corroborees. In the early 1840s G. A. Robinson discovered that ‘Italian melodies’ were being adopted by Victorian blacks; were sung by the young people with considerable ability and were passing quickly from clan to clan while J. Mathew noted a little later in Queensland that English popular songs were often woven into corroborees. A settler from the Hume River told a government inquiry in 1849 that local blacks punctuated their songs with calls of ‘Halleluyah’ and ‘Oh be Joyful’. Threlkeld heard groups around Newcastle singing and some had ‘attempted with no bad effect to imitate the sacred music of the church’.38 When out in the bush Eyre frequently lay awake to listen to Aboriginal singing. A sentence or two of English, was, he wrote, often introduced by way of direct quotation while ‘Europeans, their property, presence, and habits, are frequently the subject of these songs’.39 Corroborees were composed featuring dramatic events of settler society. Moreton Bay blacks created one about the wreck of the S.S. Sovereign in 1847. Murray River clans created one about the first steamship which sailed the inland waterway. The Rockhampton camp performed a train dance when the railway reached central Queensland; South Australian Aborigines were likewise inspired by the sight of the steam train and sang:
You see the smoke at Kapunda
The steam puffs regularly
Showing quickly, it looks like frost
It runs like running water
It blows like a spouting whale40
Barbara Thompson described a white man, or ‘ghost ship’ dance created by the Mount Ernest Islanders in Torres Strait. Two men were dressed up as Europeans with masks made from light coloured bark and rind from coconut trees. She explained that:
they don’t whiten the mask but put red on the cheeks and leave the other part their natural light yellowish colour … they rubbed white on their legs and wore shirts the white men had given them … they sing songs about ships, that they are gone away to their own land and will come again with biscuits, tobacco and knives and shirts41
Aboriginal interest in and acute observation of European animals found expression in horse and cattle dances witnessed by Europeans in a number of places during the nineteenth century. There are several accounts of the horse dance of the Tasmanians. Robinson explained how the participants crawled around the fire upon hands and knees, shook their heads, stopped and then imitated horses feeding. A second account detailed how the dancers took hold of each other’s loins, followed one another, and then simulated the prancing of the animals while a woman played the part of the driver gently tapping them with a stick as they passed. Several writers left accounts of Queensland cattle dances. The squatter G. S. Lang was most impressed with the accuracy of the imitation; the action and attitude of every individual member of the entire herd being ‘ludicrously exact’–some lay down chewing the cud, others stood scratching themselves with hind feet or horns, licking themselves or their calves while several rubbed against each other ‘in bucolic friendliness’.42
Aboriginal reactions to introduced animals is an important aspect of contact history although available evidence is scattered and inadequate. It seems appropriate to distinguish between the response to cattle and sheep, which will be discussed below, and to horses and dogs. One of the most impressive examples of successful adaption was the Tasmanian’s utilization of dogs which in a few years became important in tribal society, both for hunting and a variety of other purposes. In a remarkably short time Island blacks had learnt how to control and employ large dog packs. Robinson found that ‘the tact these people have in quieting their dogs’ was ‘truly surprising’. 43 Some lessons were undoubtedly learned from the settlers, the Launceston Advertiser reporting the discovery of several pieces of bullock-hide rope to which were attached little collars which Island blacks used for the purpose ‘of securing their dogs’.44 But there was evidence of independent adaption as well. Hunting techniques were modified, huts were sometimes enlarged to accommodate the dogs and in southern Tasmania large bark catamarans were built to enable them to be transported across estuaries and out to off-shore islands. Rhys Jones observed that the Tasmanians sought dogs avidly:
incorporating them into their culture with extraordinary rapidity. In so doing they adapted their hunting methods, and managed to make the profound social and psychological adjustments necessary in setting up an affectionate relationship with the new animal, a relationship radically different from anything that they had had with other animals.45
It was much easier for blacks to acquire European dogs than horses which were many times more valuable and therefore closely guarded. Wild horses were hard to catch and domesticate and their size and speed made them objects of awe and fear. The rapidity of pastoral expansion precluded the possibility of a gradual acquisition of the techniques of horsemanship. Yet clearly Aborigines did sometimes succeed in taking horses from the settlers or catching stray ones and then experimenting in their use. In 1883 Edward Curr published a translation of an Aboriginal song relating to such a case although it is impossible to date the piece. Yet it clearly deals with a tentative approach to horse riding:
Halloo! (a)-horse, (canst) thou wild ride?
No! of -horses I (am) afraid.
Thou why afraid?
(The) -horse (might) -throw -(me)
(my) bones (Might) -break.
Try thou, mount, (to see) whether
(he will) -buck.
Thou-indeed for-the-horses-go, we
(shall) -lie in-the-scrub, i.e., camp out.
In-a-little-while (we shall) -go, (the)
ground (is) damp at-present.46
A native police officer in Central Queensland reported seeing a group of young Aborigines experimentally riding fat wethers round a bush clearing. There are accounts from north Queensland of horses being taken and used by blacks before they had ‘come in’ to European settlement. A Flinders River squatter complained to the Queensland Government that local clans took his horses and rode them sometimes three at once, while an early Cloncurry settler remarked that ‘as an instance of their advancement by contact with the whites, the natives have discovered the adaptability of a sheet of bark as a substitute for a saddle’.47 Yet another outback squatter wrote in anguish to the Brisbane papers complaining that the blacks not only killed cattle and attacked stations but also stole the horses:
to drive the cattle to wherever they may think fit to slaughter them; a thing probably not on record before. It is well known that the blacks in this district have now in their possession five saddle horses which they put to this use.48
In 1884 a police constable found a stockyard in the bush containing two horses which were being regularly fed and ridden by the local Aborigines. A few years earlier a Queensland Native Police detachment followed a group of Aborigines who had speared a European and taken his horse. They led the animal through miles of broken country, hobbled it at night when they camped and practised riding during the day. The catching and corralling of European animals will be considered more fully below. But what of the impact of new commodities on Aboriginal material culture?
The early and widespread adoption of iron has been already mentioned. Its advantages were quickly apparent–it was hard, durable, pliable and easily sharpened and maintained in that condition. It was used for a whole range of implements and weapons–for spearheads, axes, knives and even for boomerangs. Blacks on the west coast of Tasmania collected rust from a shipwreck and after grinding and mixing with water used it as a substitute for ochre. Iron was absorbed into traditional technology and was usually hafted and secured with gum and sinews in the customary manner. It must have often been shaped and sharpened by many hours of grinding and hammering with stone tools. The Queensland explorer R. L. Jack observed that Cape York Aborigines fashioned ‘with infinite pains’ such ‘unconsidered trifles’ of old iron as shovels, broken pick heads, scraps of iron hoops, ship’s bolts, telegraph wires, nails, cartwheel tyres into weapons and implements.49 The anthropologist Donald Thomson observed that by the 1920s iron had replaced wood or bone headed harpoons in the armoury of the dugong hunters on the coast of Cape York. ‘When it is remembered’, he wrote:
that the only iron available to the native is in the form of odds and ends discarded by the white man, and that his only tools are an unlimited quantity of pumice stone or coral limestone, and perhaps an old discarded file or two, the results he achieves are often remarkable. The bush Aborigine, even after he has learned to use iron for his weapons, has no knowledge of the working of iron hot … if an iron rod, or a piece of wire is to be straightened out, this is always done cold. For the rest he depends upon his natural deftness in technological matters, and an inexhaustible patience.50
Did Aborigines elsewhere learn how to use heat when working with iron? Cape York blacks had no direct contact with European settlements. Whites arrived, if at all, by boat. It is just possible that on the vast land frontier knowledge of metal technology passed back beyond the edges of white settlement. Clans in contact with European townships or stations would have soon become aware of the importance of the blacksmith and we can assume were curious about his function and methods. But the Wiradjuri of central New South Wales seem to have been the only people to coin their own term for the blacksmith whom they called burguin mudil or literally the beater out of tomahawks. Beyond that the evidence is very scarce. Europeans occasionally found iron weapons in Aboriginal camps which they assumed had been shaped while the metal was hot but their testimony is far from conclusive.
After iron, glass was probably the most important addition to the traditional tool kit. Initially it may have been confused with quartz crystals and therefore assumed to possess magical powers, but its utilitarian properties were ultimately much more important. Glass was even more amenable than iron to the various stone-working techniques–either chipping of flakes or the grinding and sharpening of solid spearheads from thick bottle glass. But successful working in glass could only come with a great deal of experimentation with the medium and accumulation of expertise about its unique properties. Despite the widespread adoption of iron and glass in Aboriginal society there seem to have been some who refused to accept innovation, persevering with traditional stone technology. Horne and Aiston reported that in Central Australia in the early twentieth century there were a few ‘strictly conservative workers’ who used stone even for the ‘rough hewing of the boomerang’ and who refused to use bottle glass for ‘smoothing down the ridges’.51
The Aborigines were intensely interested in European goods and they expertly pilfered from explorers and pioneers. Mitchell greatly admired their deftness, explaining one technique which involved treading softly on a desired article, seizing it with the toes, passing it up the back or between the arm and side to conceal it in the arm pit or between the beard and throat. Aboriginal camps often became curiosity shops of collected European artifacts. One in Gippsland in 1841 for instance was found to contain a large variety of clothing including shirts, trousers, frocks and a Mackintosh cloak; dress material, thread, thimble, blankets, tools, bottles, the tube of a thermometer, one seal-skin hat, muskets, tomahawks, a pewter two gallon measure, pewter hand basin, camp kettle, two children’s copy books, one bible, London, Glasgow and Aberdeen newspapers.
Perhaps few clans were as successful at collecting European goods as this one. Yet contact with the settlers often led to a rapid increase in the number of possessions in any one camp, creating novel problems of transport and storage. Often the newly acquired objects were simply left behind, being too heavy and cumbersome to be carried about from camp to camp. But the unique problem seems to have called forth creative attempts to provide permanent storage of a kind probably unknown in traditional society. Three European observers provided accounts of such structures. Robinson found that Tasmanian blacks had dug a hole to secure their new possessions, had laid grass and bark at the bottom, stones and bark around the stores and a wooden structure above-ground to mark the spot. In central Queensland a generation later a squatter came across a ‘plant’ of stolen goods. Logs had been placed on the ground to provide a platform for food of all sorts as well as clothes and tools and the whole cache–a drayload and more–had been carefully roofed with bark stripped from nearby trees. An even more interesting case was discussed by William Thomas the Assistant-Protector of Aborigines at Port Phillip. In 1840 he followed up a party of Gippsland blacks who had attacked a station on the eastern fringes of European settlement. They had taken everything from the station that was moveable and on their return to their own country had constructed what Thomas termed, ‘two devices’. At the ford of a river they had cut down trees and saplings and made a bridge ‘to enable them to more rapidly convey their booty to yonder side’. On the far bank was another structure. Thomas’ description is far from clear but he called it an ‘artificial grove of saplings and tea tree’ which extended for some yards and which had been used as a depot for storing the stolen goods.52
There are two other references to modified building techniques during the period of early contact, one contemporaneous, the other resulting from recent archaeological work. Jorgenson observed in the 1820s that as the Tasmanians were increasingly forced out of the river valleys and into the mountains they began building ‘stone structures, not the least resembling the usual wigwams’.53 In western Victoria scholars have found examples of stone houses with central fireplaces which it is assumed date from the period after contact as the sites yielded such traditional relics as stone flakes admixed with broken glass and clay pipes.
Traditional patterns of cooking and eating underwent a change as well. In most parts of Australia mutton, beef and rabbit meat were added to diets diminished by the impact of settlement. Culinary practices were modified accordingly. There are numerous reports of the evacuation of large earth ovens to accommodate bullock carcases. Thomas Mitchell claimed that in the 1840s in one district of northern New South Wales ovens had been used for the consumption of up to twenty head of cattle a day. Some settlers thought that the blacks had adopted these methods after observing European boiling down works but it seems more probable that they simply adapted existing techniques for cooking the larger marsupials.
Chronic insecurity following the European invasion apparently increased the desire to preserve and stock-pile food. As old certainties vanished clans sought new ways to maintain their food supply. Beef and mutton fat was stored and carried in small bark bags or in the knotted legs and arms of European trousers and shirts. Central Australian blacks collected pieces of cow-hide which they soaked, cooked and then ground up before eating. Legs of lamb and mutton were preserved by smoking and apparently carried on walkabout for future use. A Western District pioneer reported that on raiding a local camp he found the remains of many sheep and ‘a quantity cut up in hams, which had been smoked and hung up to dry’.54 In 1865 a central Queensland squatter came across what he called ‘a perfect meat curing establishment’55 hidden in coastal mangroves. The meat had been cut up and portions of it were being smoked.
European flour rapidly won approval over the laboriously collected and prepared indigenous cereals and became one of the favoured targets for Aboriginal raids on stations, tents and drays. Traditional methods of cooking cereals merged with damper making techniques used by Europeans all over frontier Australia. In various parts of the continent blacks attempted to preserve and stockpile supplies of flour. In 1805 a European party was shown forty bushels of wheat ‘secreted in a single cavity’56 on the fringes of white settlement. The hoarders were apparently blacks and not renegade Europeans. In 1830 Tasmanian settlers found a hundredweight of flour baked into dampers in an Aboriginal camp. Queensland police came upon a camp in the rainforest near Maryborough in 1867 and discovered a three hundredweight store of sweet potatoes and a two foot pile of damper and there were similar reports from other parts of Australia. Tea and sugar were also found in Aboriginal camps. In Tasmania the frequent discovery of tea-pots would suggest that the local clans had begun to brew the beverage in the approved European manner. Tobacco was also widely disseminated on the other side of the frontier; its addictive appeal was one of the more powerful forces attracting Aborigines to European settlement. Lumholtz reported that in north Queensland tobacco was bartered, wrapped up in leaves, and was consequently ‘known among remote tribes who have never themselves come into contact with Europeans’.57 There seems no doubt that the desire to obtain tobacco drove many blacks in towards the nearest source of supply. A woman on the Etheridge gold field reported a typical incident. Two strange Aborigines suddenly appeared before her tent. They kept pointing to their mouths saying ‘toomback’ ‘toomback’. When given a supply they quickly disappeared. At much the same time in central Australia Chewings observed that ‘the craving for tobacco, in both sexes, is intense’.58
European artifacts eventually affected almost every aspect of Aboriginal life. Even the practices and possessions of the ‘clever men’ or ‘doctors’ were influenced and the new commodities joined the stones and bones which they seemingly drew from injured or diseased bodies of ailing patients. In his memoirs Simpson Newland recalled that he had seen clever men in South Australia and western New South Wales produce, as the cause of sickness, a bullock’s tooth, the bottom of a tumbler, a piece of the jawbone of a sheep, fragments of pottery. Horne and Aiston reported the case of a ‘clever man’ from central Australia who drew nails and wire out of a patient’s chest while Howitt referred to a man who attributed acute rheumatism to the fact that an enemy had put a bottle into his foot. Blacks around Echuca were said to prepare powerful magic by mixing the dried and powdered flesh of a dead man with tobacco which was then given to the unsuspecting victim to smoke. It was a common practice in traditional society to apply heat to an object belonging to an intended victim thereby causing intense pain and even death. Howitt observed that blacks on the Wimmera River successfully adjusted their methods to the new circumstances which followed white settlement. They found the kitchen chimneys of the sheep stations unrivalled places where the object in question could be subjected to prolonged heat.
Because the Aborigines sought European possessions the settlers assumed they were full of admiration for the skill of white craftsmen and the ingenuity of their manufactures. Such beliefs were central to the European presumption that Aborigines were overawed in face of settler power and material abundance. But it may not have been like that at all. Manufactured goods were not intrinsically more complex or impressive than those occurring naturally. With no experience of European methods of production Aborigines assumed that the newcomers’ possessions were organic products of an exotic natural environment. The tribal father of Davis, the Moreton Bay escapee, was given a pocket watch taken from a frontier shepherd. While it ticked he thought it was alive: when it stopped he ‘took it for a stone’.59 Thompson noted similar reactions among her Cape York hosts. Having been on board the Rattlesnake they asked her if the cups and saucers they had seen walked about like shell-fish. As she told her chronicler, O. W. Brierly, the Aborigines thought:
our bottles are shells and ask what kind of fish live in them and where they are found and wonder that there are none of them on their own beaches.60
Continuity and change thus ran like an intricate plait through the history of early contact. Aborigines were curious about Europeans, sought their artifacts and were innovative in a wide range of situations. Yet traditional beliefs and assumptions continue to display a strength and resilience resistant to even the most traumatic consequences of the invasion like firearms and epidemic diseases.
Guns were alarming weapons–they made a noise that could be equated only with thunder, could kill and injure at great distance with an unseen missile that often left a wound apparently incommensurate with the resulting injury. Running parallel with the development of tactics to avoid exposure to the lethal firepower was the endeavour to understand the secret of the new weapons. The initial assumption seems to have been that guns were magic. The oral tradition of the Flinders Range-Lake Frome people contained reference to their first experience of firearms. While they were watching the progress of an early exploration party the Europeans shot two crows and a kangaroo, all at considerable distance:
This was the most startling thing they had seen. Just the bang and there were the things dead … there was much discussion again that night as to how the kangaroo and crows were killed and what killed them. Some suggested it was muldarpie [devil] that did it; it was some years before they could solve that problem.61
The idea that guns were magical at least brought them onto familiar ground for the ‘clever men’ were almost universally thought to be able to kill at a distance by projecting missiles–quartz crystals, pebbles and the like–through the air and into the bodies of intended victims. In her study of the Euahlayi tribe Mrs K. L. Parker referred to the moolee or death dealing stone which was said to knock a person insensible or even ‘strike him dead as lightning would by an instantaneous flash’.62 R. M. Berndt described the process more precisely while discussing the survival of magical practices in the twentieth century. The clever man, he explained:
concentrated upon the victim, and moving his chest and shoulders forced the crystal up so that it passed out of his mouth and, travelling at such a velocity that it escaped the notice of other men, entering the victim.63
A related belief was that it was possible for clever men to load spears, clubs and boomerangs so that they sped straight to the chosen victim, were unavoidable, and produced paralysis on contact.
European weapons were manifestly dangerous, but not necessarily more so, or more mysterious, than the magic of powerful clever men. Perhaps the most surprising thing about guns for those with little experience of the invaders was that every white man seemed to be able to activate the magic rather than a few select ‘men of high degree’. The suggestion that European ballistics were seen in terms of traditional magic received some confirmation from the reminiscences of two elderly Aborigines recorded recently in southern inland Queensland. Both old people recalled the importance of corroborees in the camp life of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and the discipline imposed on women and children by the ‘clever men’ who had become the ‘doctors’ in the narrative. The old man recalled that ‘no-one was ever to laugh or speak at the corroboree, or the doctor there’d give them the bullit’. The old lady confirmed that ‘they’d say bullit hit you’64 if there was any defiance of taboos. Thus the ability of the clever men to kill those defying tribal lore had become closely related to the power of European firearms even down to the creation of the verb ‘to bullit’ to describe the process.
Yet the need to understand the mechanism of guns continued if only to allow the Aborigines to co-opt the European firepower. Knowledge of the range of firearms and frequency of fire was quickly learnt and may even have passed back beyond the frontier. Guns were stolen both to deny them to Europeans and to examine them more closely. Eventually some Aborigines learnt how to use and maintain stolen weapons even experimenting with local flints to provide the spark and with stones as projectiles. By the late 1820s the Tasmanian clans had mastered the mysterious weapons and their success was mirrored elsewhere. Robinson discovered that island Aborigines had hidden caches of well maintained guns which they could handle proficiently and shoot accurately. In 1832 he was shown a hollow tree armoury containing muskets which were primed, loaded and in ‘good condition with a piece of blanket thrust into the muzzle’. One of the last island blacks to be brought in from the bush had in his possession:
a very excellent carbine for the preservation of which he had made a case from the skin of the kangaroo–he stated further that numerous firearms were concealed in the woods.65
The linguistic evidence concerning guns is of limited use because the widespread adoption of ‘musket’ words concealed rather than illuminated Aboriginal thinking on the subject. But in some languages there was an obvious attempt to relate gunfire to familiar experiences or objects. Port Lincoln clans used a word for gun meaning also club or stick; those around Perth coined the term winji-bandi. G. F. Moore explained that it meant:
literally an emu leg or shank, perhaps from the thin handle part of a gun resembling in its carving the rough grains of the skin of an emu’s leg. A double-barrelled gun is described as having two mouths. A gun with a bayonet, as the gun with the spear at its nose.66
Elsewhere words were used which related gunfire to making fire by friction or to banging, rattling or echoing noises. Teichelmann reported that South Australian Aborigines called guns pandapure which appears to have been formed by joining two other words–parndendi meaning to crackle and sparkle and pure meaning a stone. James Gunther recorded that the Wiradjuri of northern New South Wales called muskets barrima from the word barrimarra which meant to get fire by rubbing. In the Gidabal dialect of northern New South Wales and southern Queensland guns were termed dululbi which derived from a word meaning rattling and echoing noises. The Aranda called bullets mukuta anna or the fruits or kernels of muskets while the Kalkatunga coined an even more graphic term for rifle which meant literally holemaker.
Aborigines clung to their own theory of illness despite the traumatic impact of introduced disease. E. S. Parker, the Assistant-Protector of Aborigines at Port Phillip, reported that the Loddon River blacks rejected the medical advice of the Government doctor despite the serious health problems facing them. They remained convinced that disease was caused by the malignant magic of distant tribes. The one exception which they would allow was venereal disease which they associated directly with sexual contact with the Europeans. More of this interesting case will be made later. G. A. Robinson met a group of Western District Aborigines in 1845 who were apprehensive about a dispute with a neighbouring tribe who, they said, had the power of inflicting a plague. They were in daily expectation of such a visitation. What little evidence we have suggests that the tribes of south-eastern Australia believed malevolent sorcery was the cause of the epidemic–probably of smallpox–which ravaged large areas of the continent in the early decades of the nineteenth century. The Wiradjuri attributed the disease to a malignant deity who lived in the south-west, down the river systems. The Euahlayi people of northern New South Wales believed that their enemies sent it in the winds ‘which hung it on the trees, over the camps, whence it dropped onto its victims’.67 In Victoria the source of the disease was believed to be the unleashing by distant tribes of the devastating power of Mindye the Rainbow Serpent. Smallpox was actually called moo-noole mindye, or monola-mindi, the dust of serpent, the skin eruptions lillipe-mindije or lillipook-mindi, the scales of the serpent. The missionary Teichelmann reported that South Australian Aborigines had a song called Nguyapalti, a smallpox song which they said was the only means of stopping the disease. They had learnt it from tribes in the east from whence the disease itself had come.
The implications of these attitudes are important. Epidemic disease –perhaps the most dramatic consequence of European invasion –was interpreted in traditional ways as being due to human agency and amenable to curative magic. The powerful sorcery of distant tribes was more awesome and devastating than anything the Europeans could do. The Aboriginal way still held the key to the great forces of the universe. These were things which few Europeans even guessed at. Belief in the power of the ‘clever men’, in their ability to impart and cure disease, to foretell the future, to embark on spirit journeys; all of these survived the invasion. The anthropologists Elkin, Berndt and Reay discovered the amazing vitality of the Aboriginal view of the world while working with fringe and mission-dwelling blacks in New South Wales and Queensland in the 1930s and 1940s one hundred years or more after the initial dispossession.
The intimate relationship with the land was a factor of great importance. On one level this was a matter of practical bush skills and profound knowledge of the environment. Aboriginal self-confidence was noted by Europeans from the earliest years of settlement. While writing about one of the first expeditions inland from Sydney Tench observed that the ‘perplexities’ of the Europeans afforded accompanying Aborigines ‘an inexhaustible fund of merriment’.68 Robinson found that his black companions were continually testing his ability to find his way in the bush because they entertained ‘but a mean opinion of the white people’s knowledge’.69 The Brisbane pioneer Tom Petrie remarked that Aborigines laughed at the inability of the whites to match them in bush skills but perhaps an even more interesting observer was Schmidt the German missionary at Moreton Bay. When giving evidence before the 1845 New South Wales Select Committee on the Condition of the Aborigines he was asked if in his experience the Aborigines were ‘conscious of inferiority’ to the Europeans or did they think their own mode of life ‘most pleasant and best’. From some of their own expressions, Schmidt remarked, ‘I judged that they consider themselves superior to us’. The exchange continued:
Do you mean that they consider themselves superior to the whole of the white race … or only convicts? To the whole; they preferred their mode of living to ours …70
Aboriginal self-confidence was not based solely on the mastery of practical skills but on the spiritual relationship with the land, the sense of belonging and responsibility for performing the increase ceremonies which ensured the proper ordering of nature, the coming of the rain and the renewal of plant and animal life. Belief in the necessity and the efficacy of increase ceremonies continued on well into the period of European settlement. Europeans brought change and damage to many local ecologies but the larger rhythms of nature remained constant and predictable to those who had learnt the signs. It remained possible despite the European presence to go on believing in the causal link between tribal ceremony and the turn of the seasons. In June 1899 W. E. Roth met a celebrated rainmaker called Ngamumarko on the McIvor River who it was widely assumed had caused the devastating cyclone of the previous March which destroyed the pearling fleet in Princess Charlotte Bay. Darling River Aborigines told Simpson Newland that ‘rain never fell without the exercise of aboriginal power, and but for them, the white man, his cattle and sheep, would perish miserably’.71 While that faith remained even the arrogant white man appeared to be the unwitting beneficiary of Aboriginal wisdom and power. That most Europeans were ignorant of the ‘secret life’ of the Aborigines merely confirmed their seemingly unquenchable faith in their own moral worth even in the midst of desperate post-contact poverty.
Aborigines were neither apathetic in face of the European invasion nor incurious about the newcomer’s lifestyle. The historical record indicates that they were not locked into a rigid unchanging culture. They showed themselves just as capable of adapting to altered circumstances as the European pioneers who were learning to strike their own balance between continuity and innovation in the new world. Yet there were aspects of Aboriginal culture and philosophy which proved remarkably resistant to change. Traditional society was, therefore, both more conservative and more innovative than standard accounts have suggested with their picture of a culture too rigid to bend collapsing suddenly and completely under the pressure of European invasion.
There may be an important clue to Aboriginal behaviour in the attitude of the Loddon River clans to the ravages of venereal infection. While continuing to believe unshakeably in the traditional theories of disease they regarded V.D. as a post-contact phenomenon due to physical contact with Europeans and, unlike other illness, amenable to white medicine. Implicit in this reaction was the acceptance of a realm of experience new to Aboriginal society outside the sway of customary belief and practice. It may have been such judgements that broke the seal of custom and opened the way for innovation, creating in the process the complex pattern of continuity and change discussed to this point. But emphasis on cultural change and adaption should not obscure the overwhelming importance of the violent conflict accompanying the invasion of the continent.