1
i
IN 1787, the twenty-eighth year of the reign of King George III, the British Government sent a fleet to colonize Australia.
Never had a colony been founded so far from its parent state, or in such ignorance of the land it occupied. There had been no reconnaissance. In 1770 Captain James Cook had made landfall on the unexplored east coast of this utterly enigmatic continent, stopped for a short while at a place named Botany Bay and gone north again. Since then, no ship had called: not a word, not an observation, for seventeen years, each one of which was exactly like the thousands that had preceded it, locked in its historical immensity of blue heat, bush, sandstone and the measured booming of glassy Pacific rollers.
Now this coast was to witness a new colonial experiment, never tried before, not repeated since. An unexplored continent would become a jail. The space around it, the very air and sea, the whole transparent labyrinth of the South Pacific, would become a wall 14,000 miles thick.
The late eighteenth century abounded in schemes of social goodness thrown off by its burgeoning sense of revolution. But here, the process was to be reversed: not Utopia, but Dystopia; not Rousseau’s natural man moving in moral grace amid free social contracts, but man coerced, exiled, deracinated, in chains. Other parts of the Pacific, especially Tahiti, might seem to confirm Rousseau. But the intellectual patrons of Australia, in its first colonial years, were Hobbes and Sade.
In their most sanguine moments, the authorities hoped that it would eventually swallow a whole class—the “criminal class,” whose existence was one of the prime sociological beliefs of late Georgian and early Victorian England. Australia was settled to defend English property not from the frog-eating invader across the Channel but from the marauder within. English lawmakers wished not only to get rid of the “criminal class” but if possible to forget about it. Australia was a cloaca, invisible, its contents filthy and unnameable. Jeremy Bentham, inveighing against the “thief-colony” in 1812, argued that transportation
was indeed a measure of experiment . . . but the subject-matter of experiment was, in this case, a peculiarly commodious one; a set of animae viles, a sort of excrementitious mass, that could be projected, and accordingly was projected—projected, and as it should seem purposely—as far out of sight as possible.1
To most Englishmen this place seemed not just a mutant society but another planet—an exiled world, summed up in its popular name, “Botany Bay.” It was remote and anomalous to its white creators. It was strange but close, as the unconscious to the conscious mind. There was as yet no such thing as “Australian” history or culture. For its first forty years, everything that happened in the thief-colony was English. In the whole period of convict transportation, the Crown shipped more than 160,000 men, women and children (due to defects in the records, the true number will never be precisely known) in bondage to Australia.2 This was the largest forced exile of citizens at the behest of a European government in pre-modern history. Nothing in earlier penology compares with it. In Australia, England drew the sketch for our own century’s vaster and more terrible fresco of repression, the Gulag. No other country had such a birth, and its pangs may be said to have begun on the afternoon of January 26, 1788, when a fleet of eleven vessels carrying 1,030 people, including 548 male and 188 female convicts, under the command of Captain Arthur Phillip in his flagship Sirius, entered Port Jackson or, as it would presently be called, Sydney Harbor.
ii
ONE MAY LIKEN this moment to the breaking open of a capsule. Upon the harbor the ships were now entering, European history had left no mark at all. Until the swollen sails and curvetting bows of the British fleet came round South Head, there were no dates. The Aborigines and the fauna around them had possessed the landscape since time immemorial, and no other human eye had seen them. Now the protective glass of distance broke, in an instant, never to be restored.
To imagine the place, one should begin at North Head, the upper mandible of the harbor. Here, Australia stops; its plates of sandstone break off like a biscuit whose crumbs, the size of cottages, lie jumbled 250 feet below, at the surging ultramarine rim of the Pacific. A ragged wall of creamy-brown sandstone, fretted by the incessant wind, runs north to a glazed horizon. To the east, the Pacific begins its 7,000-mile arc toward South America. Long swells grind into the cliff in a boiling white lather, flinging veils of water a hundred feet into the air. At the meetings of its ancient planes of rock, sea and sky—mass, energy and light—one can grasp why the Aborigines called North Head Boree, “the enduring one.”
The sandstone is the bone and root of the coast. On top of the cliff, the soil is thin and the scrub sparse. There are banksia bushes, with their sawtooth-edge leaves and dried seed-cones like multiple, jabbering mouths. Against this austere gray-green, the occasional red or blue scribble of a flower looks startling. But further back to the west, the sandstone ledges dip down into the harbor, separating it into scores of inlets. In 1788 these sheltered coves were densely wooded. The largest trees were eucalypts: red gums, angophoras, scribbly gums and a dozen others. Until the late eighteenth century no European had ever seen a eucalypt, and very strange they must have looked, with their strings of hanging, halfshed bark, their smooth wrinkling joints (like armpits, elbows or crotches), their fluent gesticulations and haze of perennial foliage. Not evergreens, but evergrays: the soft, spatially deceitful background color of the Australian bush, monotonous-looking at first sight but rippling with nuance to the acclimatized eye.
In the gullies, where streams of water slid from pool to pool leaving beards of rusty algae on their sandstone lips, giant cabbage-tree palms grew, their damp shade supporting a host of ferns and mosses. Yellow sprays of mimosa flashed in the sun along the ridges, and there were stands of blackboy trees, their dry spear of a stalk shooting up from a drooping hackle of fronds.
Most of the ground was sandy and thin, but parts of the harbor foreshores held, to the relief of Captain John Hunter, Phillip’s second-in-command,
tolerable land . . . which may be cultivated without waiting for its being cleared of wood; for the trees stand very wide of one another, and have no underwood; in short, the woods . . . resemble a deer park, as much as if they had been intended for such a purpose.3
The comparison of the harbor landscape with an English park is one of the more common, if startling, descriptive resources of First Fleet diarists. Partly it came from their habit of resorting to familiar European stereotypes to deal with the unfamiliar appearance of things Australian; thus it took at least two decades for colonial watercolorists to get the gum trees right, so that they did not look like English oaks or elms.4 Partly, no doubt, it arose from the simple fact that any land looks like Eden after months at sea. But it also had a basis in fact, since the landscape was often burned by aboriginal hunters; their firesticks kept the big trees isolated and promoted the growth of grass.
So there was a mingled note of relief and aesthetic pleasure in Arthur Bowes Smyth’s journal entry for January 26, 1788, as his transport Lady Penrhyn glided up the harbor, past the dangerous reef with outlying rocks that would later be called the Sow and Pigs, past the tilting, wind gnarled, peach-colored sandstone ledges of Vaucluse and Parsley Bay, toward the wide, light-flushed notch of water now spanned by the Sydney Harbor Bridge:
The finest terras’s, lawns and grottos, with distinct plantations of the tallest and most stately trees I ever saw in any nobleman’s ground in England, cannot excel in beauty those wh. Nature now presented to our view. The singing of the various birds among the trees, and the flight of the numerous parraquets, lorrequets, cockatoos, and maccaws, made all around appear like an enchantment; the stupendous rocks from the summit of the hills and down to the very water’s edge hang’g over in a most awful way from above, and form’g the most commodious quays by the water, beggard all description.5
He was wrong about macaws, which do not exist in Australia. But the density and range of bird life along the harbor was still amazing. Several dozen kinds of parrot thronged the harbor bush: Galahs, baldeyed Corellas, pink Leadbeater’s Cockatoos, black Funereal Cockatoos, down through the rainbow-colored lorikeets and rosellas to the tiny, seed eating budgerigars which, when disturbed, flew up in green clouds so dense that they cast long rippling shadows on the ground. The Sulphur-Crested Cockatoos, Cacatua galerita, were the most spectacular—big birds with hoarse squalling voices, chalk-white plumage (dusted with yellow under the wedge-shaped tail), beaks the color of slate, obsidian eyes, and an insouciant lick of yellow feathers curling back from the head. When excited, they would flirt their crests erect into nimbi of golden spokes like Aztec headdresses. These raucous dandies assembled in flocks of hundreds which, settling on a dead gum tree, would cover its silvery limbs in what seemed to be a thick blooming of white flowers; until, at the moment of alarm, the blossoms would re-form into birds and return screeching into the sky.
The Galahs, smaller cockatoos, had gray backs, white crests and fronts of the most delicate, intense dusty pink, like the center of a Bourbon rose; so that a flock of them passing against the opaline horizon would seem to change color—pink flicking to gray and back to pink again—as it changed direction, uttering small grating cries like the creak of rusty hinges.
The exuberance of bird life around the harbor was balanced by the stillness and secrecy of the ground. Nothing about Australian animals was obvious. Many of them were camouflaged fossils, throwbacks that crept, slid, waddled or bounded through the dry brush. In them, the legends of antipodean inversion seemed to be made harmless flesh. Their remote ancestors had evolved in isolation ever since the Australian continent broke off from Antarctica, about 40 million years ago.6
One of these creatures, a small macropod called a wallaby, had already been shot and collected by Sir Joseph Banks far north of Sydney Harbor, as the Endeavour lay beached and holed among the coral mazes of the Great Barrier Reef in June 1770. It was skinned and taken to England, where it was stuffed by a London taxidermist and given to the great animal painter George Stubbs to have its portrait made. “Called by the natives Kangooroo,” Captain Cook noted in his journal, it moved “by hoping or jumping 7 or 8 feet at each hop upon its hind legs only. . . . The skin is cover’d with a short hairy fur of a dark Mouse or Grey Colour. Excepting the head and ears which I thought something like a Hare’s, it bears no sort of resemblance to any European animal I ever saw.”7When Phillip arrived in Sydney Harbor, the one certain thing he knew about the language of the “Indians” was that they called this creature a kangaroo. But because their language bore no resemblance to that of the tribe Cook had encountered so far to the north, the Sydney Aborigines assumed that “kangaroo” was the white intruders’ word for the ordinary familiar animal they themselves had always known as a patagarang.
Half a dozen kinds of patagarang lived around the harbor, nibbling its wiry grass and appearing silently, like fawn wraiths, among the guttered shelves of the fern-gullies. The silvery-coated Eastern Gray kangaroo, Macropus giganteus, moved in flocks of dozens; “the noise they make,” a colonial diarist was to note, “is a faint bleat, querulous, but not easy to describe.” Other species ranged down in size from the timid rock wallabies to the tiny, ratlike Potoroo.
The kangaroos were not the only oddities of this landscape. Koalas clambered through the gum-tree branches or sprawled sedately in the comfortable forks munching their bunches of leaves. These were not the winsome, cuddly teddy bears of the Qantas commercial, but slow, irritable, aldermanic creatures with furry ears and a boot-heel nose, which ate two pounds of fresh gum leaves a day and, when captured, scratched furiously and drenched the offending hand with eucalyptus-scented piss. Indeed they were not bears at all (any more than the moon-spotted “native cat” was a cat, or the bandy-rumped Tasmanian Wolf a canine) but nocturnal marsupials with no clear relationship to any other animal, living or fossil. After sundown, their trees were filled with the thumping, scrabbling and chittering of other nocturnals—fat brushtailed possums, ringtails and sugar-gliders, which had wide furry airfoils slung between their fore and hind feet and parachuted from tree to tree in wobbly swoops. Like true Arcadians, these creatures lived by sucking sweet nectar from bush flowers.
The oldest and most bizarre of the mammals were, however, the platypus and the echidna. Both were exceedingly primitive, stuck at an intermediate point of evolution between reptiles and mammals. They were monotremes: the same orifice served them interchangeably for mating, excretion and egg-laying. The echidna, or spiny anteater, looked vaguely like a European hedgehog, but the resemblance was not even quill-deep: its elegant yellow-and-brown spines were actually a kind of fur, though of the most formalized sort. It laid eggs like a bird but carried them about in a pouch under its belly. It was very shortsighted but had an acute sense of smell and could sniff out the ants’ odor of formic acid through yards of air or inches of sun-hardened earth. It had a beak rather than jaws—an open tube from which a whip of pink, sticky tongue almost as long as its body would shoot into the ants’ nest. When threatened, the echidna would curl into a ball of bristles or put its head down and start to dig with its prodigiously strong claws, burying itself within moments.
The platypus, on the other hand, was an amphibian: the sole survivor of its prehistoric family, the Ornithorhynchidae or bird-beaked mammals. It had a bill and webbed feet like a duck, a tail like a beaver and exquisitely glossy, oil-rich fur. Like a tiny seal, it had a generous layer of fat under the skin, for it was too primitive to regulate its own body temperature. In a tunnel burrowed in the mud of a creek bank, the female platypus would lay a clutch of leathery, ancient-looking eggs and suckle her young when they hatched—not with teats, but through enlarged pores on her belly which she scratched until milk oozed forth. Most of a platypus’s life had to be spent foraging on the streambed for worms and insects, since it ate rather more than its own weight in food a day and had a metabolic rate like a blast furnace. Hold one of these frantic little fossils (avoiding the hind legs, which carry a poison spur, like many “cute” things in Australia) and it seems to be all heart, pumping and quivering.
Wombats—lumbering, eighty-pound marsupials resembling squat, blunt-skulled bears—dug their meandering catacombs beneath the soil; bandicoots peeked from holes; the landscape was alive, but secretively so. Here in the Australian bush one needed to look, and look again, before glimpsing the gray koala camouflaged against the fleshy gray burl of its gum tree. The voices of the animals tended to be out of all proportion to their size. Just as space was drained of perspective by the random, flickering transparency of the trees, so it was hard to guess where sounds originated. The throbbing croak of the cicada on a branch ten feet away might seem to be coming from all around. It was hard to sneak up on these creatures of the harbor shores. The bush, baked tawny and bronze by the summer heat, its ground surface mantled in a crackling skin of dry gum leaves, grasses and fallen strips of eucalyptus bark, was like a stretched drum, a delicate resonator that informed every animal of each approach.
There was little sense of menace in this parliament of creatures. The only large meat-eating animal was the dingo, the “native dog” imported to Australia long ago by migrating Aborigines. Even the dragon of the bush, a carrion-eating monitor lizard known as a goanna, would rush up a tree when approached and cling there, its throat puffed out in soundless alarm, until the intruder went away. The only universal predator was man.
iii
A STATIC CULTURE, frozen by its immemorial primitivism, unchanged in an unchanging landscape—such until quite recently was, and for many people still is, the common idea of the Australian Aborigines. It grows from several roots: myths about the Noble Savage, misreadings of aboriginal technology, traditional racism and ignorance of Australian prehistory. It is, in fact, quite false; but in the experience of white city-dwellers there is little to contradict it. Nobody can guess how Sydney Harbor began to unfold itself to its white prisoners on January 26, 1788, just by subtracting the poultice of brick, steel and tar from its headlands, pulling down the Harbor Bridge and the Opera House and populating the beaches with black stick figures waving spears. The changes have been too radical for that. Yet the effort to perceive the landscape and its people as they were is worth making, for it bears on one of the chief myths of early colonial history as understood and taught up to about 1960. This was the idea, promulgated by the early settlers and inherited from the nineteenth century, that the First Fleet sailed into an “empty” continent, speckled with primitive animals and hardly less primitive men, so that the “fittest” inevitably triumphed. Thus the destruction of the Australian Aborigines was rationalized as natural law. “Nothing can stay the dying away of the Aboriginal race, which Providence has only allowed to hold the land until replaced by a finer race,” remarked a settler in 1849.8
But the first white Australian settlers were so conspicuously unfit for survival in the new land that they lived on the edge of starvation in the midst of what seemed natural abundance to the Aborigines. They had practically no idea of what they could eat or how to get it. Most of the First Fleet convicts had not moved ten miles from their place of birth and had never seen the sea before they were clapped in irons and thrust on the transports. They were as lost in Australia as an Aborigine would have been in a London “rookery.” The tribesmen they encountered were so well adapted to their landscape that their standard of nutrition was probably higher than that of most Europeans in 1788. To the whites, convict and officer alike, Sydney Harbor was the end of the earth. But to the Aborigines it was the center. The landscape and its elusive resources, not yet named by the whites, stood between the two cultures, showing each group its utter unlikeness to the other.
At the time of white invasion, men had been living in Australia for at least 30,000 years. They had moved into the continent during the Pleistocene epoch. This migration happened at about the same time as the first wave of human migrations from Asia into the unpeopled expanse of North America, across the now sunken land-bridge between Russia and Alaska.
The first Australians also came from Asia. When they discovered Australia, the continent was perhaps a quarter larger than it now is. In the Pleistocene epoch the level of the Pacific was between 400 and 600 feet lower than it is today. One could walk from southern Australia into Tasmania, which was not yet an island. The Sahul Shelf, that shallow ledge of ocean floor whose waters separate Australia from New Guinea was dry land; Australia, New Guinea and possibly sections of the New Hebrides formed one landmass. By trial and error, accumulated over many human generations, it would then have been possible to get from Southeast Asia into Australia (via the Celebes and Borneo) across islands sprinkled on the sea like stepping-stones. Much of this voyage would have been done by eyeball navigation to coasts that the immigrants could have seen from their starting point; there would have been a few sea voyages of more than 50 miles, but not too many; but there was no direct route. In the words of the historian Geoffrey Blainey, “Australia was merely the chance terminus of a series of voyages and migrations.”9 But the moment when the first man stepped ashore from his frail chip of a canoe on the northwestern coast of Pleistocene Australia should rightly be seen as one of the hinges of human history: it was the first time Homo sapiens had ever colonized by sea.
Apart from their northern origin, no one knows who these Pleistocene colonists were or whence they emerged.10 Whoever they were, they gradually spread south, east and west across the continent, killing giant kangaroos as they went, bringing with them their imported half-wild dogs, whose descendants are the dingoes. Their first campsites were drowned by the waters of the Timor Sea and the Gulf of Carpenteria, which rose so fast between 13,000 and 16,000 B.C. that the coast moved inland at a rate of three miles a year.11 The oldest known northern campsites were pitched 22,000 years ago at Oenpelli, 150 miles east of Darwin.
But the southward march was under way long before that. By 30,000 B.C. there were well-established tribes eating crayfish and emu eggs beside the now arid basin of Lake Mungo, in southeastern Australia; they were perhaps the world’s first people to practice cremation, and the pellets of ocher placed as offerings in a Mungo grave suggest that they had some idea of the survival of consciousness after death.12 By about 20,000 B.C. the Aborigines had reached Sydney Harbor. Others were prizing flint nodules from the limestone walls of Koonalda Cave, under the Nullarbor Plain on the extreme southern rim of the continent. There, in the darkness, they scratched crude patterns on the walls that may be the first works of art ever made in the southern hemisphere—the merest graffiti, compared to the later achievements of aboriginal rock-painting, but clear evidence of some primal artistic intent. Two thousand years later, the Aborigines had left their shell-middens, flint chips, bone points and charcoal in nearly every habitable part of the continent. The colonization was achieved, and a membrane of human culture had been stretched over the vast terrain.
But it was exceedingly thin. When the First Fleet arrived, there were perhaps 300,000 Aborigines in the whole of Australia—a continental average of one person to ten square miles. The density of local populations, however, varied a great deal. Probably less than 20,000 people wandered in the 300,000-square-mile tract of dry limestone plain and saltbush desert between the Great Australian Bight and the Tropic of Capricorn, a place where even the crows are said to fly backwards to keep the dust out of their eyes. On the coast, where there was more food and a higher rainfall, the land could support more people. Phillip, after a few months on Sydney Harbor, reckoned that the areas of the Cumberland Plain he had explored sustained about 1,500 blacks; this rough guess yields a density of about 3 people per square mile.
The Australians divided themselves in tribes. They had no notion of private property, but they were intensely territorial, linked to the ancestral area by hunting customs and totemism. Hundreds of tribes existed at the time of white invasion—perhaps as many as 900, although the more likely figure is about 500. The tribe did not have a king, or a charismatic leader, or even a formal council. It was linked together by a common religion, by language and by an intricate web of family relationships; it had no writing, but instead a complex structure of spoken and sung myth whose arcana were gradually passed on by elders to the younger men. Geographical features could cause splits in tribal language. Thus in the area of Sydney, the ancestral territory of the Iora tribe—who roamed over about 700 square miles, from Pittwater to Botany Bay—was cut in half by Sydney Harbor itself; so that the “hordes” or tribal subgroups on the north and south sides of the harbor, the Cameragal and the Kadigal, spoke two distinct languages. For them, the harbor formed a linguistic chasm as wide as the English Channel.13 In 1791, as white settlement was pushing out past Windsor and the Hawkesbury River, Governor Phillip was surprised to find on its banks
people who made use of several words we could not understand, and it soon appear’d that they had a language different from that used by the natives we have hitherto been acquainted with. They did not call the Moon Yan-re-dah but Con-do-in, and they called the Penis Bud-da, which our natives call Ga-diay.14
These were the Daruk, who ranged over a territory of about 2,300 square miles from the coast north of Iora territory to the Katoomba—Blackheath area of the Blue Mountains in the south. The Daruk, the Iora and the Tarawal (whose territory began on the south shore of Botany Bay) were the three tribes with whom the white settlers of Australia first had to deal.
Watkin Tench (1758–1833), a young officer of marines on the transport Charlotte, was struck by the ease with which the tribes understood one another. He supposed that the Daruk language was only a dialect of Iora, “though each in speaking preferred its own [tongue].”15 In fact, the variety of aboriginal language arose from the tight social structure of the tribes, their specified restricted territories, and their more-or-less fixed patterns of movement in relation to other tribal boundaries. These factors encouraged each tribe to keep its own language intact, while nomadism forced them to learn others. Compared to some inland tribes, who routinely exchanged goods (flint axes, baler shell ornaments, lumps of ocher for body painting and other local commodities) along trade routes as long as 1,000 miles, the Iora were provincial. They could not understand languages spoken 50 miles away. Their main diet was fish, and they had no reason to leave the coast. They held their territories—the Cameragal and the Walumedegal along the north shore of the harbor, the Boorogegal on Bradley Head, the Kadigal around what is now Circular Quay and the Botanical Gardens—as they had held them for centuries.
Their main food source was the sea. The women of the tribe twisted fishing lines from pounded bark fiber and made hooks from the turban shell. But since such hooks were brittle and the line weak, the Aborigines fished in pairs—a woman led the hooked fish in as gently as possible, while a man stood ready to spear the fish as soon as it got within range. At the ends of the fish-spears were three or four prongs of wallaby or bird bone, ground sharp and set in gum resin.
The Iora fished from canoes. These they made by cutting a long oval of bark from a suitable eucalypt and binding its ends together to make bow and stern. The old, scarred “canoe trees” were a common sight around the harbor a hundred years ago, but none remain today. The gunwale was reinforced with a pliable stick, sewn on with vegetable fiber. Shorter sticks, jammed athwartships, served as spreaders. The cracks and seams were then caulked with clay or gum resin. The Aborigines kept fire burning on a pat of wet clay on the bottom of the hull, so that they could grill and eat their fish at sea. Compared to an American Indian birch canoe, they were unstable craft and wretchedly crude, “by far the worst canoes I ever saw or heard of,” in the view of William Bradley, who was first lieutenant on Sirius. They had neither outriggers nor sails (the Iora were ignorant of weaving); low in the water, they flexed with every ripple and leaked like sieves. Nevertheless, the Iora handled them skillfully. “I have seen them paddle through a a large surf,” Bradley noted, “without oversetting or taking in more water than if rowing in smooth water.” The frailty of these craft suited the Iora’s nomadic way of life; they were easy to carry and just as easy to replace. A tribesman could slap one together in a day.16
The Iora also ate immense quantities of shellfish, mainly oysters, which were gathered by women. Middens of white shells lay at the entrances of scores of sandstone caves along the harbor shores. Bennelong Point, where the Sydney Opera House now stands, was first named Lime-burners’ Point by the colonists because it was mantled in a deposit of mollusc shells, built up over thousands of years of uninterrupted gorging.* Gathered again (this time by white convict women) and burned in a kiln, these shells provided the lime for Sydney’s first mortar.
The Iora were not wholly dependent on the sea for their diet. They also hunted on land, though rarely with boomerangs. Boomerangs have to fly without obstruction and so were weapons for open grassland and desert, not for the sclerophyll forests where the Iora lived. Probably their role in providing food for the Sydney blacks was insignificant. Rather, the staple hunting weapons were the spear, the stone axe and the firestick.17
The Ioras’ hunting spears, unlike their fish-gigs, were one-pointed and tipped with a variety of materials—usually fire-hardened wood, but also bones and flints and sometimes a shark tooth. John White, a surgeon on board the transport Charlotte, noted that a skilled hunter-warrior threw his spear with formidable accuracy and power, “thirty or forty yards with an unerring precision,” although throws of twice that length were recorded. They were flung with a spear-thrower or woomera, a stick with a peg in one end that fitted the butt of the spear and acted as an extension of the hunter’s arm, like the thong of a sling. With this equipment, a small group of hunters could bring down anything from a bandicoot to an emu. They knocked birds out of the trees with stones or trapped them by dexterity and yogic self-control: “A native will in the heat of the sun lay down asleep, holding a bit of fish in his hand; the bird seeing the bait, seizes on the fish, and the native then catches it.”18
By any standards, the Aborigines were technologically weak but manually adept. They had not invented the bow-and-arrow, but they had exquisite skill as stalkers, trackers and mimics. A competent hunter needs to be able to read every displacement of a leaf or scuffed print in the dust. He must freeze in mid-step and stand unblinking on one leg for half an hour, waiting for a goanna to work up the courage to come all the way out of its log. He must know how to pick up a blacksnake by the tail and crack its head off, as one cracks a whip. He must climb like a cat, shinnying up the gum trees to raid the wild bees’ honey or chop some befuddled nocturnal possum from its hole with a stone axe. Above all, the hunter needed to know every detail of animal life in his territory—migratory patterns, feeding habits, nesting, shelter, mating. Only thus could a small nomadic group survive.
The same was true in the vegetable kingdom, which was the province of women. Like all other known Australian tribes, the Iora forced a rigid sexual division of labor between male hunters and female gatherers. Colonists in the 1790s do not say much about Iora plant-gathering, perhaps because the work of men, even of low savages, seemed more interesting than that of women; thus, one cannot judge the importance plant food had in the Iora diet. We can deduce from the available evidence, however, that the Iora had no conception of agriculture. They neither sowed nor reaped; they appear to have wrought no changes on the face of the country. They were seen as culturally static primitives lightly wandering in an ecologically static landscape, which seemed to eliminate any claims they might have had to prior ownership. To some eighteenth- and nineteenth-century eyes, this invalidated them as human beings.
However, the crude aboriginal technology did wreak changes on the landscape and fauna, for it included fire. Everywhere the tribes went, they carried firesticks and burned many square miles of bushland. They set fire to hollow trees and clubbed the possums and lizards as they scrambled out; they incinerated swathes of bush to drive terrified marsupials onto the waiting spears.
Bushfire and drought are the traditional nightmares of bush life. A bushfire driven by a high wind through dry summer forest is an appalling spectacle: a wreathing cliff of flame moving forward at thirty miles an hour, igniting treetop after treetop like a chain of magnesium flares. Bushfire is the natural enemy of property. But the black Australians had no property and did not hesitate to burn off a few square miles of territory just to catch a dozen goannas and marsupial rats, at the cost of destroying all slow-moving animals within that area.
Fire, to the Iora, was shelter. That was part of the necessary logic of their life, since to survive at all the small knots of family groups that made up the tribe had to range easily and rapidly over a wide area, feeding as they went; and that made the idea of solid, permanent dwellings inconceivable. To them, the hearth was of far greater significance than the home. A firestick made the hearth portable. But they had never had to invent a portable house (i.e., a tent). They were far more backward than any Bedouin or Plains Indian. They used what they could find: the sandstone caves of the harbor shores, with sheets of bark propped up to form crude “humpies.” “Their ignorance of building,” remarked John Hunter, second captain on Sirius,
is very amply compensated for by the kindness of nature in the remarkable softness of the rocks, which encompass the sea coast . . . They are constantly crumbling away . . . and this continual decay leaves caves of considerable dimensions: some I have seen that would lodge forty or fifty people, and, in a case of necessity, we should think ourselves not badly lodged [in one] for a night.19
He was putting the cart before the horse: It was not that the Iora lived in caves because they could not build huts, but rather that they chose not to build huts because they had caves. Another colonial observer grasped why the natives had no architecture a European could recognize:
. . . Those who build the bark huts are very few compared to the whole. Generally speaking, they prefer the ready made habitations they find in the rocks, which perfectly accords with the roving manner in which they live, for they never stay long in one situation, and as they travel in tribes together, even making the bark huts would engage them more time than they would be happy on one spot.20
Caves and bark humpies are drafty places and it gets cold on the harbor at night. The lora therefore slept huddled together close to their ever-smoldering campfires, and accidental burns were common. The debris of possum skins, fishbones and wallaby guts scattered around the entrance brought swarms of flies and insects, for the tribal “hygiene” of the nomads consisted simply of walking away from their rubbish and excreta (an ancient habit that would have catastrophic results for their marginal descendants, detribalized and trapped in their ghetto shacks on the fringes of white communities a generation or two later). Wherever they went they were plagued by mosquitoes, against which they employed the deterrent of fish oil: “It is by no means uncommon to see the entrails of fish frying upon their heads in the sun, till the oil runs over their face and body. This unguent is deemed by them of so much importance, that children even of two years old are taught the use of it.”21 Since the lora never washed, they spent their lives coated with a mixture of rancid fish oil, animal grease, ocher, beach sand, dust and sweat. They were filthy and funky in the extreme. But their stamina and muscular development were superb, and, because there was no sugar (except for the rare treat of wild honey) and little starch in their diet, they had excellent teeth—unlike the white invaders.
No property, no money or any other visible medium of exchange; no surplus or means of storing it, hence not even the barest rudiment of the idea of capital; no outside trade, no farming, no domestic animals except half-wild camp dingoes; no houses, clothes, pottery or metal; no division between leisure and labor, only a ceaseless grubbing and chasing for subsistence foods. Certainly the lora failed most of the conventional tests of white Georgian culture. They did not even appear to have the social divisions that had been observed in other tribal societies such as those in America or Tahiti. Where were the aboriginal kings, their nobles, their priests, their slaves? They did not exist. Although elders enjoyed special respect as the bearers of accumulated tribal myth and lore, they had no special authority over their juniors, once those juniors had reached manhood and been fully initiated; and the idea of hereditary castes was inconceivable to the Aborigines, who lived in a state approaching that of primitive communism. But if the Aborigines lacked firm hierarchical instincts, what was to be respected in their society? What, in short, was “noble” about these “savages”? The Tahitians could be seen as the last survivors of the classical Golden Age; with their fine canoes and intricate ornaments, strict rankings and plentiful supply of free coconuts, they clearly had superfluity, the paradisiacal ancestor of property, as well as strong class instincts to back it up.
Australia was no place for such Ovidian sentiments. The Tahitians might live like prelapsarian beings, illiterate Athenians; compared to them, the Iora were Spartans. They exemplified “hard” primitivism, and the name Phillip gave to a spot in Sydney Harbor alluded to this: “Their confidence and manly behavior,” he reported to Lord Sydney, “made me give the name of Manly Cove to this place.”22 Iora boys, like young Spartans at play, practiced incessantly with their spears and woomeras. They believed implicitly in the power of their weapons, and a touching passage in Surgeon John White’s Journal describes how one of them reacted when he demonstrated his pistol:
He then, by signs and gestures, seemed to ask if the pistol would make a hole through him, and on being made sensible that it would, he showed not the smallest sign of fear; on the contrary he endeavoured . . . to impress us with an idea of the superiority of his own arms, which he applied to his breast, and by staggering and a show of falling seemed to wish us to understand that the force and effect of them was mortal and not to be resisted.23
Skirmishing with other clans, or with foreign tribes along the frontier between tribal territories, was an inevitable fact of nomadic life. In this the Iora were probably no less bellicose than other southeastern Australian tribes, despite the often merely symbolic nature of their encounters. They had no “specialist” army. They recognized no distinction between fighters and civilians, or between hunter and warrior. Moreover, the idea that they were intrinsically violent—“savage” in behavior, as well as in looks and economy—seemed to be borne out by the harsh relationships that obtained within their clans, especially in their treatment of women.
That hoary standby of cartoonists, the Stone Age marriage, in which the grunting Neanderthal bashes the fur-clad girl with his club and drags her off to his cave, began with classical satyrs and medieval legends of forest-dwelling Wild Men. But it was certainly amplified by the first accounts of aboriginal courtship. In a plate in the pseudonymous Barrington’s History of New South Wales, 1802, it appears for the first time in its perfect form: the muscular savage, club in hand, lugging his unconscious victim through the scrub on her back. “Their conduct to women makes them considerably inferior to the brute creation,” the author sternly and titillatingly observes:
In obtaining a female partner the first step they take, romantic as it may seem, is to fix on some female of a tribe at enmity with their own. . . . The monster then stupefies her with blows, which he inflicts with his club, on her head, back, neck, and indeed every part of her body, then snatching up one of her arms, he drags her, streaming with blood from her wounds, through the woods, over stones, rocks, hills and logs, with all the violence and determination of a savage, till he reaches his tribe.24
Obviously, the real matrimonial arrangements of the Iora were less lurid than this. Armed rape as a by-product of tribal warfare was not unknown among the Aborigines, but no tribe that had to depend entirely on border raids for its supply of women could have lasted very long. Besides, what would have been the point? There were enough Iora women for the Iora men. However, the unalterable fact of their tribal life was that women had no rights at all and could choose nothing. A girl was usually given away as soon as she was born. She was the absolute property of her kin until marriage, whereupon she became the equally helpless possession of her husband. The idea of a marriage based on romantic love was as culturally absurd to the Iora as it was to most Europeans. The purpose of betrothal was not, however, to amalgamate property, as in European custom, but to strengthen existing kinship bonds by means of reciprocal favors. It did not change a woman’s status much. Both before and after, she was merely a root-grubbing, shellgathering chattel, whose social assets were wiry arms, prehensile toes and a vagina.
As a mark of hospitality, wives were lent to visitors whom the Iora tribesmen wanted to honor. Warriors, before setting out on a revenge raid against some other aboriginal group, would swap their women as an expression of brotherhood. If a tribal group was about to be attacked and knew where its enemies were, it would sometimes send out a party of women in their direction; the attackers would then show that they were open to a peaceful solution by copulating with them. But if the women came back untouched, it was a signal that there was no choice but battle. A night’s exchange of wives usually capped a truce between tribes. On these occasions most kinship laws except the most sacred incest taboos were suspended. Finally, at the great ceremonies or corroborrees, which involved hours of chant and ecstatic dancing and were meant to reinforce the tribe’s identity by merging all individual egos in one communal mass, orgiastic sex played a part. However, since these affairs were rarely seen, sketchily described and never understood by the early colonists, it is impossible to say how large or how strictly prescribed a part it was.25 If a woman showed the least reluctance to be used for any of these purposes, if she seemed lazy or gave her lord and master any other cause for dissatisfaction, she would be furiously beaten or even speared.
Fertility, the usual protection of women in settled agricultural societies, was a poor shield. A surplus of children would have impeded the Ioras’ nomadic life. On the march, each woman had to carry her infant offspring as well as food and implements. She could only manage one child in arms. That child was always weaned late; it fed from the breast until it was three or more years old, since there were no cows or goats in Australia to give substitute milk. Without their mother’s milk, the roughness of the adult diet would have starved them, as there was no way to make a thongy gobbet of barely singed wallaby meat digestible to a teething infant.
To get rid of surplus children, the lora, like all other Australian tribes, routinely induced abortions by giving the pregnant women herbal medicines or, when these failed, by thumping their bellies. If these measures failed, they killed the unwanted child at birth. Deformed children were smothered or strangled. If a mother died in childbirth, or while nursing a child in arms, the infant would be burned with her after the father crushed its head with a large stone.
This ruthless weeding-out of the helpless at one end of life also took place at the other. The Iora respected their old men as repositories of tribal wisdom and religious knowledge, but the tribe would not hamper its mobility, essential to nomadic survival, by keeping the old and infirm alive after their teeth had gone and their joints had seized up.
It was a harsh code; but it had enabled the Aborigines to survive for millennia without either extending their technology or depleting their resources. It still worked as of January 1788, although it had not the slightest chance of surviving white invasion. The most puzzling question for the whites, however, was why these people should display such a marked sense of territory while having no apparent cult of private property. What was it that bound them to the land? The colonial diarists tried as best they could, hampered by the opacity of a language they could not understand, to discover signs of a developed religion among the blacks, but they found very little to report. “We have not been able to discover,” wrote Captain Hunter, “that they have any thing like an object of adoration; neither the sun, moon nor stars seem to take up, or occupy more of their attention, than they do that of any other of the animals [sic] which inhabit this immense country.”26 Certainly they had few of the external signs of religious belief: no temples or altars or priests, no venerated images set up in public places, no evidence of sacrifice or (apart from the corroborrees) of communal prayer. In all this they differed from the Tahitians and the Maori, who were settled agricultural peoples. The lora were not: they carried their conception of the sacred, of mythic time and ancestral origins with them as they walked. These were embodied in the landscape; every hill and valley, each kind of animal and tree, had its place in a systematic but unwritten whole. Take away this territory and they were deprived, not of “property” (an abstract idea that could be satisfied with another piece of land) but of their embodied history, their locus of myth, their “dreaming.” There was no possible way in which the accumulated tissue of symbolic and spiritual usage represented by tribal territory could be gathered up and conferred on another tract of land by an act of will. To deprive the Aborigines of their territory, therefore, was to condemn them to spiritual death—a destruction of their past, their future and their opportunities of transcendence. But none of them could have imagined this, as they had never before been invaded. And so they must have stood, in curiosity and apprehension but without real fear, watching from the headlands as the enormous canoes with their sails like stained clouds moved up the harbor to Sydney Cove, and the anchors splashed, and the outcasts of Mother England were disgorged upon this ancestral territory to build their own prison.