Aboriginal people were quoted in the history books I was reading, but not very often. Even when they spoke English, the first Australians in those early days generally didn’t read or write it well enough to create a record. So finding out, for example, what might have been in the old man’s mind when Phillip gave him those three slight slaps was never going to be easy.
I ploughed through a couple of books by white anthropologists. They seemed obsessed with marriage rules—I read an awful lot about moieties and kin groups. It was like reading about insects or molecules: distant, unhuman. It was a long way from what was it really like?
But one book led to another, from specialised academic volumes to small-press local histories. I was starting to realise how wrong my preconceptions about Aboriginal life and culture were. That word ‘nomad’, for instance. Traditional Aboriginal people moved around, true, but within a precisely defined territory. Everyone knew exactly where the boundaries were. If strangers came onto your territory without asking permission, you were entitled to make them leave.
This wasn’t quite what I’d have called a ‘nomad’. It sounded more like the way I moved at home from the bedroom to the living room and out into the garden. I walked around, but I knew exactly where my place ended and the next-door place began, and so did everyone else.
Then there was the business of being a ‘hunter and gatherer’. Now I was learning about complicated stone fish-traps built on rivers to ensure a permanent supply of fish; about the way fruit seeds were spat into middens of shells and bones so that more trees would grow there; about breeding pairs of possums being carried to places where they were scarce. I read about how regular, systematic burning of the bush created pasture land for game.
This wasn’t quite my picture of ‘hunting and gathering’. In fact, some of it sounded very like farming.
Aboriginal culture was hard to get a clear look at. It took me a long time to work out that that was the point. In my culture, knowledge was public. Even sacred stuff was open to everyone. If you wanted to know what the Bible was about, you went along to a Bible class.
In the Aboriginal way of doing things, it seemed to be different. This was a culture in which knowledge was sacred, and sacred often meant secret. Certain people—and only certain people—had the right to certain kinds of knowledge. The stories that carried the knowledge had many levels. The elementary levels could be told to children (and white people), but there were deeper layers of meaning that few were allowed to know.
I gathered, too, that stories operated somewhat in the manner of title deeds. If you’d been told the story—the full story, not the public version—about a particular piece of country, it was part of what gave you the right to be on it.
But you didn’t own it. You could use it, you were responsible for it. You were its custodian. But as an individual you didn’t own land.
In fact, you didn’t really own anything. Food, for instance. The group got the food, and then divided it out among everyone. There seemed to be no idea of competing with each other to get more food, or more land, or a better house—the things that people competed over in my culture. Even art—the ultimate expression of the individual in my world—wasn’t the expression of an individual sensibility.
This was what Mum would call ‘an eye-opener’. No matter how much I read, I still couldn’t really get my head around it all. It was so foreign.
It took a long time to realise that that was an appropriate feeling. I was an outsider to this culture. This wasn’t knowledge you could expect to go to a book and learn. The thing was to recognise that I didn’t know.
I could see, though, how blindly I’d been embedded in my own culture. I’d never recognised it as a culture—a learned thing. I thought it was part of being human to compete for things of value. Now I saw that it was part of my group’s way of being human. In my culture, the way for the species to survive was through competition. In Aboriginal culture, on a different part of the planet, the best way to survive was through sharing and collaborating.
It started to make sense of what happened between white and black two hundred years ago. Not only did both have different systems of belief about how people should behave— they often didn’t realise that they were operating within a system of belief. Each group thought its behaviour was normal. Neither could see any kind of sense in the way the other was behaving.
The land looked empty and unclaimed to the newcomers because it had none of the familiar marks of ownership: fences, roads, houses. It was perhaps understandable that they thought they were entitled to take it up.
But from the Aboriginal point of view it must have seemed that strangers had come in and annexed the back verandah, or the kitchen, put a fence around it and defended it with guns.
You could get by without your verandah, but you might starve if the kitchen was taken, and that’s what those fertile river flats on the Hawkesbury were. When the strangers grew corn, and grazed sheep, it must have seemed reasonable to pick the corn, spear the sheep.
No wonder there’d been trouble.
I understood a lot more now, and I was glad I’d waited before speaking to Aboriginal people. If I was anxious about what kind of settler Wiseman had been, that was my own issue. I had to deal with it myself. I couldn’t ask Aboriginal people to help me with it.
But I also felt the importance of speaking, if I could, to descendants of the Aboriginal people Wiseman would have met. The story about my ancestor intersected with their stories. Talking to them wasn’t research, it was a matter of courtesy.
One of the things I’d learned in the course of my reading was that it was as useful to talk about ‘the Aboriginal people’ as it was to talk about ‘the European people’.
Where Wiseman settled was the country of the Darug. The other side of the Hawkesbury was Darkinjung country. They were different groups, with different (though related) languages.
The Darug was one of the groups which bore the full brunt of European expansion. The smallpox epidemic in 1789 killed many of them. Many of the attacks the Gazette described were made by Darug men and many of those killed would have been Darug. Those first thirty years of warfare, disease and displacement must have severely disrupted their culture.
This meant that the Darug weren’t easy to learn much about, two hundred years later. But there were descendants who were reconstructing the language and the culture. I asked around, found a contact and picked up the phone.
I expected a polite rebuff, but Auntie Edna Watson, a Darug elder, and later another descendant, John Gallard, heard me out while I tried to explain Solomon Wiseman my ancestor. My need to fill in some of the holes in the family story. My awareness that the story I was exploring wasn’t a comfortable one.
Trying to explain made me realise how little I knew what I was doing and where all this obsessive work might lead me.
As these Darug people began to speak to me I listened and scribbled, page after page. They told me some stories I knew already, others I didn’t: stories about boys thrown into the river to die, about men’s hands being cut off, about burnings and shootings.
And they told me about the yam daisies.
Yam daisies are edible tubers that used to grow in vast numbers on the river-flats. They have a yellow flower a bit like a dandelion and a cluster of tubers that—in John’s words—‘hung down like the fingers of a hand’. The Darug dug them up and ate the roots, but would re-plant one of the ‘fingers’ so there’d be a crop again the following year.
Listening to them tell me about those yam daisies, I began to realise how important they were. They were a staple of the Darug diet, the source of bulk and carbohydrate, playing the same role that potatoes did in the Irish diet. Fish and game and other plants were added to that staple but wouldn’t always have been enough on their own.
The yam daisies grew on the same rich soil that the Europeans chose for their own crops. The newcomers dug them up as weeds, and planted corn and wheat. When the Darug people came back, expecting to harvest their yam daisies, and found them replaced by other crops, they harvested them instead.
After I got off the phone I sat for a long time looking out at the front yard, trying to absorb the significance of what I’d learned.
The story of the yam daisies made sense of conflict all over the country. It was the story of settlement in miniature. One event came after another, no one understood what the other side was thinking, and at the end there was bad trouble. It was never a simple matter of right and wrong.
Thinking back to that scene with Governor Phillip and the man he’d slapped, I still didn’t understand it. But I could see now that there were whole grammars of behaviour, dictionaries of culture, that would make sense of the ‘old man’s’ actions. Things to do with the protocols of being a guest and a host, with giving and taking, with respect and authority.
I was appalled at the misunderstanding that must have happened in that moment, even though all parties had only good will towards each other. How easy it was for things to go wrong. Once they’d gone wrong, how hard to put right.
I’d lived in one kind of Australia all my life. Now I was glimpsing a different country I’d been living in too, but never seen. I’d been to Wiseman’s place. Now I had to go back again, but this time to the Aboriginal place.