A History of the World (58 page)

Jared Diamond argues that, had the European colonization not happened in 1788, aboriginal Australians ‘might within a few thousand years have become food producers, tending ponds of domesticated fish and growing domesticated Australian yams and small-seeded grasses’.
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In other words, within several thousand years of today, they might have advanced as far as the people of Catalhoyuk had, 7,500 years ago. Those apparently tiny differences of flora, fauna and climate have produced human divergences of an awesome kind. Cut off from the rest of human history, the Australians had their own ways of understanding the world, their own entirely different stories, rituals, art and mental maps.

When the first European ships arrived off their coast, they thought them floating islands inhabited by the white-skinned ghosts of their ancestors. The wigs and long hair of the sailors made them assume they were women. When the British sailors dropped their trousers to show they were male, the aboriginals offered them women in the hope that, satisfied, they would leave. The mutual incomprehension was vaster than the oceans separating these people.

So Bennelong became a time-traveller, moving between prehistoric
times and the industrial world. He had been kidnapped because the British colony in what is now Sydney was struggling to understand this new world. Its governor, Arthur Phillip, hoped to communicate with the natives, to learn how to stop them attacking his people and stealing things. He needed to explain that the British had arrived peacefully, but for good. There would have to be a translator. ‘Baneelon’, as one of the soldiers called him, would be the go-between. When he arrived at the British stockade, this soldier reported, he was ‘of good stature and stoutly made’.
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He was also amazingly scarred. He had had smallpox, a scourge brought to Australia by earlier convicts and sailors; but he also had scars on his head, and the marks of spears that had passed through his arm and a leg. Half a thumb was missing and he had a strange scar on the back of his hand. ‘Love and war seemed his favourite pursuits; in both of which he had suffered severely.’ Bennelong sang, danced and capered, but seemed oddly unwilling to explain the wound on his hand. Eventually he confessed: it came from the teeth of a woman of another tribe whom he was carrying away by force.

Bennelong’s story shows also how European attitudes to ‘savages’ would veer from one extreme to the other in a remarkably short time. Fewer than twenty years before the colonization of Australia by convicts and their guards began, the natives had been admired by Captain Cook and his famous naturalist-helper, Sir Joseph Banks, when Cook ‘discovered’ the coast of New South Wales. This was the age of the ‘noble savage’, a term first used in the 1670s but a key idea in the later Enlightenment. ‘Savage’ simply meant ‘wild’, and thinkers such as the Earl of Shaftesbury had argued that mankind was naturally moral – the primitive people being discovered by explorers might look different, and wear no clothes, but they could be as good, or better, than any civilized Christian. Bennelong’s lust for women of rival tribes and his readiness to use violence against them were a warning against idealizing such people: yet before long, far from that being the danger, Europeans were seeing natives as subhuman, and even hunting them for sport.

To understand other people and places; or to possess them?

For the eighteenth-century European explorers, the noble instinct and the greedy one became inextricably tangled. New animals, new
plants and new societies caught the imagination. Naturalists, botanists, surveyors set out aboard armed ships whose flags would later be planted on beaches and headlands, territory being claimed as the property of distant kings – a George or a Louis. Yet to start with, many of these explorers were more open-minded than the later history of empire might lead us to expect. Thus Captain James Cook, when he first encountered the aboriginal people of Australia in 1770, was carrying warnings from the president of the Royal Society in London to be patient with any natives and remember that ‘shedding one drop of the blood of these people is a crime of the highest nature . . . they are the natural, and in the strictest sense of the word, the legal possessors of the several regions they inhabit’. Such people had the right to repel invaders.
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Yet Cook also had secret orders to claim new lands in the name of King George – a glaring inconsistency.

Cook’s first impression of the Australians would have pleased the most idealistic European philosophers. He was much struck by their vigour, their health and their clean, lice-free hair; and by their lack of interest in material objects, not simply clothes: ‘The same indifference which prevented them from buying what we had, prevented them also from attempting to steal.’
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He thought they were happy in not knowing ‘the superfluous but necessary’ conveniences of Europe. Cook, who had struggled his way to his position from a poor Yorkshire family, also liked the equality of their society: ‘They covet not magnificent houses, household stuff, etc, they live in a warm and fine climate, and enjoy a very wholesome air, so that they have very little need of clothing.’
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It seemed a kind of paradise.

Cook and his sailors had arrived across the Pacific from Tahiti, where his ship the
Endeavour
had stopped for three months and where they had found an even more stunning paradise, a land which seemed to them a place of sexual freedom and innocence. With Cook was the aristocratic Banks, then just twenty-six. Banks had indulged himself with the local women and also learned some of the Tahitian language, studied the customs, and ended up identifying himself so closely with native life on the island that he danced ritual mourning dances stark-naked, his body coated with charcoal and white wood-ash, alongside a witch-doctor, two naked women and a boy. The Tahitians seemed to the British, and to French explorers who had preceded them, to be an almost ideally savage people – savage in a good way.

Banks was a radically open-minded product of the Enlightenment, ready to enjoy Tahitian roast dog, to admire their strange water sport, surfing, and to admit that their bodies were plucked and clean, and even that their favoured coconut oil improved with familiarity: ‘Surely rancid as their oil is, it must be preferred to the odoriferous perfume of toes and armpits so frequent in Europe.’
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So the first British contact with the aboriginal people of the eastern coast of Australia was cautiously friendly. Cook, Banks and the ship’s officers found it hard to make themselves understood and impossible to trade with the good-looking men and boys on the beaches, who were scarred from fights but appeared free of any disease. The land seemed balmy and relatively empty, as well as rich in unknown plants and strange animals, many of them the sort that hop. The word ‘Australia’ was not then generally used – it refers to the Latin for ‘southern’ and had appeared on early maps as a possible unknown landmass, or had perhaps originated from a Spanish explorer, who named a place he believed to exist after his then monarch, Philip III, whose family was Austrian.

But the coastline that Cook called New Wales, and New South Wales, would stay vividly clear in Banks’s imagination when he came home. He was a farmer as well as a botanist, and he believed the soil and water of the rim of Australia would be easily cultivable by European farmers, to support oxen, sheep and wheat. And as wealthy landowner and scientist, Banks became an influential figure in Georgian London. He was a member of the King’s Privy Council, of the Royal Society and of a mass of other learned bodies. The nude cavorter of Tahiti grew into the potato-shaped potentate of Piccadilly; the tousle-headed adventurer and collector became the spider at the centre of a web of botanical and learned debates; and he was appointed George III’s adviser on his Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew. So it was hardly a surprise that Parliament turned to him when looking for a place to send convicts.

This had become an urgent problem. With a fast-growing urban population and a criminal ‘bloody code’ which at one point listed 220 crimes punishable by hanging, Britain needed an alternative way of dealing with her convicts. Public opinion was becoming queasier about the practice of killing the poorest, including hanging children, even for small thefts. During the sixty years from 1770, around 35,000
people were sentenced to death but only 7,000 or so were actually hanged.
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British prisons were few and foul. To many, transporting the convicted by boat somewhere else seemed the humanitarian alternative. Before the loss of Britain’s American colonies, some sixty thousand felons had been sent there to work on the land for a few years, until they had earned their freedom. Once the United States’ independence closed off that option, felons were instead held in disgusting dismasted old hulks off the Thames. This was a dangerous and impractical long-term answer, however, and ministers were forced to look for another penal colony.

Banks suggested Australia. Here, as in America, British felons could make a new land flower, and then enjoy their freedom. ‘Botany Bay’, named by Cook after Banks’s enthusiasm for plant-hunting, was chosen as the site. In May 1787 the ‘First Fleet’ of eleven ships, carrying 775 convicts – 192 of them women – plus 645 soldiers, officials and family members, set out for a gruelling thirty-six-week journey. The convicts had been sentenced for a range of small crimes, almost all involving theft – from clothes, watches and food to repeated burglary. (Transportation for political crimes, particularly Fenian rebellion, would come later.) Thus the first of 165,000 convicts arrived in Australia on 20 January 1788. The practice was finally abolished in the 1850s, just ahead of the far greater migration that was the Australian gold rush.

In charge of the First Fleet was an admirer and correspondent of Banks’s, the professional seaman Arthur Phillip. He quickly realized that Botany Bay was considerably less inviting than its name suggested, and transferred the new colony to nearby Port Jackson (naming the cove where they first stayed ‘Sydney’, after Lord Sydney, the home secretary under whose orders he was acting). The natives, however, were not friendly. They had greeted the first settlers with cries of ‘
Warra, warra, warra!
’, meaning ‘Go away, go away, go away!’.
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When, instead, the colonists started to build huts, they faced periodic attacks and harassment by some of the fifteen hundred people already living in the area, clans of the Eora people.

Phillip was an ambitious multilingual sailor from a poor family who saw himself as a modern Enlightenment man. He had been in correspondence with Banks, and had no intention of merely running a vast prison. He insisted on the rule of law and the eventual
emancipation of the convict settlers, promising that in New South Wales there would be ‘no slavery’. It was a tough beginning, however, which at times brought the new colony close to starvation. Lashed and harangued, and very occasionally hanged after all, the unwilling farmers survived on the rations brought out with them and occasionally replenished by British supply ships, while they learned to cultivate the land and tend herds of those other shipboard migrants, cows.

London, rather more worried about the wars with the French, seemed to have forgotten about them, but eventually further fleets and more convicts arrived, and the colony grew.

As to the aboriginal people, furious and puzzled by the invaders, Phillip wanted them well treated. Kill them, he told the soldiers and settlers, and you will hang. His orders from the king were that he reach out to the native people – that he ‘endeavour, by every possible means, to open an intercourse with the natives, and to conciliate their affections, enjoining all subjects to live in amity and kindness with them’.
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This would have been all very well, had the clans of the area been willing simply to give up their excellent harbour and fishing grounds. They were not willing. One of Phillip’s officers, a marine captain called Watkin Tench, wrote that they ‘seemed studiously to avoid us, either from fear, jealousy, or hatred. When they met with unarmed stragglers, they sometimes killed, and sometimes wounded them.’ Tench came to think that the aboriginals were in fact people of ‘humanity and generosity’ who were only responding to ‘unprovoked outrages’ by the whites.
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Some kind of communication had to be opened up; hence the capture of Bennelong, a married man in his mid-twenties from the Wangal clan.

Bennelong stayed for six months and developed a close relationship with Phillip, calling him ‘father’ and giving him a native name, before disappearing back into the bush.

Once free, he persuaded Phillip to come to meet him while his people were celebrating the grounding of a whale. Probably as a matter of honour, he then had the governor speared in the shoulder by a ‘wise man’. Thomas Keneally, the Australian historian, argues that this was the natural consequence of the aboriginal custom of punishment by spear-throwing, and in Bennelong’s mind Phillip was being punished ‘for all of it: the fish and game stolen; the presumption of
the Britons in camping permanently without permission; the stolen weaponry and nets . . . the random shooting of natives; the curse of smallpox; the mysterious genital infections of women and then of men’. Showing remarkable understanding, however, Phillip ordered there to be no retaliation, and when he eventually recovered from the serious wound, repaired his friendship with Bennelong and oversaw a period of better relations between colonizers and natives. But it would not last.

In 1792 when Phillip returned home, Bennelong and an aboriginal youth came too, rather as native Americans such as the princess Pocahontas had been brought over in earlier times. When Bennelong was paraded around London and taken to the theatre, to court and to provincial towns, he does not seem to have attracted anything like the attention earlier ‘savages’ had, perhaps because the novelty value was wearing off. Or perhaps it was because New South Wales was already being seen as a grimly practical dumping-ground for unwanted Britons, rather than as an exotic paradise.