Australians

by Thomas Keneally

  The next morning, as a cure for his despondency, he was led across the stream and past the parade ground through the men’s and women’s camps and to the observatory and introduced to Dawes, the young astronomer, who like Collins had a scholarly interest in the natives and would soon start putting together a dictionary of the Eora language. The native could see across the water to the north side of the harbour, where on a sandstone cliff-face a great rock-pecking depiction of a sperm whale had been made by people ritually and tribally connected to him. Spotting also the smoke of a fire lit by his fellows in the northern distance, ‘he looked earnestly at it, and sighing deeply two or three times, uttered the word Gw-eè-un [fire].’ Although depressed and despairing, he consumed eight fish for breakfast, each weighing about a pound.

  This young man of subtle and soulful features fascinated Phillip. He ordered that he be taken back to Manly for a visit, so that his people could see he had not been hurt. A longboat carrying armed marines conveyed him close to shore so that he could speak to natives on the beach, or those who edgily waded close. He chatted to his people with a good humour which even survived the return to Sydney. Some of his kinsmen obviously urged him to escape, but he pointed to an iron fetter on his leg. He was taken back to Manly again two days later, but no natives came near the beach this time, so he and his keeper were let ashore to enable him to place a present of three birds into a bark basket left on the beach. He returned to the longboat without having heard a word of either acceptance or rejection. Either his clan considered him vitiated by his contact with the Europeans, or else they were frightened that he was placed on the shore as a bait to attract them, and that they would end up in his position.

  He would never be an intimate of his people again, and now he released his real name, or at least one of his names, to his captors. It was Arabanoo. The fleet’s children, still impressed by his novelty, would flock around him, and he treated them with great sensitivity—‘if he was eating, [he] offered them the choicest morsels,’ said Tench. He does not seem to have had a volatile disposition and to have been wistful and sensitive by nature. Since everyone, including Phillip, was enchanted by him, his continued presence at Government House almost became its own point. For he did not learn English quickly, at least not to the point where he could make Phillip any wiser on the grievances of the natives.

  And though he was an honoured courtier and ambassador during the day, every night Arabanoo was locked in with his convict.

  All Arabanoo’s dietary details were recorded by young Watkin Tench, whose account in part patronises Arabanoo, but who was not immune to his fascination. Arabanoo’s appetites and actions were therefore of crucial interest. Tench recorded, for example, a small excursion the native had on the Supply when it left for Norfolk Island in February 1789. Arabanoo and the governor and other gentlemen were aboard Supply simply for the journey down the harbour, but the native was in an agitated state as the vessel was lifted by the great swell of the Pacific through Port Jackson’s heads. By now he had been freed from his shackle and was as attached in friendship to Phillip and Tench and others as they were to him, yet he seemed to fear they were taking him out of the known world, and every attempt to reassure him failed. Near North Head, he lunged overboard and struck out for Manly, attempting to dive under the water, ‘at which he was known to be very expert’. But his new clothes kept him up and he was unable to get more than his head beneath the surface. Picked up, he struggled, and on board sat aside, melancholy and dispirited. His experience of having clothed himself in alien fabric that took away his power in the water served him as great proof of the inadvisability of his situation. But when the governor and his other friends descended into a boat to return to Sydney Cove and he heard them calling on him to join them, ‘his cheerfulness and alacrity of temper immediately returned and lasted during the remainder of the day. The dread of being carried away, on an element of whose boundary he could form no conception, joined to the uncertainty of our intention towards him, unquestionably caused him to act as he did,’ wrote Tench.

  Arabanoo could not mediate between the natives and the more militant members of the settlement, who turned out to be the convicts and ordinary soldiers. On 6 March 1789, sixteen convicts, feeling vengeful towards the natives, left their work at the brick kilns towards the south-west of the Sydney Cove settlement and, without permission, marched south on the track which snaked along a forested ridge above bushy coastal headlands and beaches on one side, and lagoons to the west, then down to the north side of Botany Bay. They were sick of occasional thefts and depredations, and meant to attack the Botany Bay natives and relieve them of their fishing tackle and spears. So began the first vigilante expedition in New South Wales history. ‘A body of Indians, who had probably seen them set out, and had penetrated their intention from experience, suddenly fell upon them. Our heroes were immediately routed . . . in their flight one was killed, and seven were wounded, for the most part severely.’ Those who ran back to Sydney gave the alarm, and a detachment of marines was ordered to march to the relief of the wounded, but the natives had disappeared and the detachment brought back the body of the man who was killed. At first the convicts claimed they had gone down to Botany Bay to pick sweet tea and had been assaulted without provocation by the natives, ‘with whom they had no wish to quarrel’. Gradually, their story developed holes.

  Seven of the survivors of this expedition appeared before the criminal court and were sentenced to receive each 150 lashes and wear an iron on the leg for a year, to prevent them from straggling beyond the limits prescribed to them. Tied up in front of the provisions store, they were punished (for example’s sake) before the assembled convicts. For this flaying, the governor made a point that Arabanoo should accompany him down to the triangles, and the reason for the punishment was explained to the native, both ‘the cause and the necessity of it; but he displayed on the occasion symptoms of disgust and terror only’.

  At this time, the ration had been reduced to 4 pounds (1.8 kilos) of flour, 2½ pounds of pork and 1½ pounds of rice. The need for more than that in both quantity and variety was legible in part in the curio-hunting expedition the brick-kiln men had recently engaged in. Phillip had needed, too, to reduce the convicts’ working hours: from sunrise to one o’clock now comprised their working day. As in so many other areas, Watkin Tench gives us a frank and telling example of how people lived then. ‘The pork and rice were brought with us from England: the pork had been salted between three and four years, and every grain of rice was a moving body, from the inhabitants lodged in it. We soon left off boiling the pork, as it had become so old and dry that it shrank one-half in its dimensions when so dressed. Our usual method of cooking it was to cut off the daily morsel and toast it on a fork before the fire, catching the drops which fell on a slice of bread or in a saucer of rice.’

  A shortage of pease, compacted pea porridge, deprived the inhabitants of both Sydney and Rose Hill of their chief source of vitamin B, increasing their vulnerability to infection and showing up in a hollowed-out appearance and leg ulcers. Arabanoo, however, seemed exempted from these rations. In the event he escaped back to his people, Phillip did not want the natives to know that the newcomers’ hold on New South Wales was so tenuous, so threatened by hunger.

  Phillip had in desperation already sent the Sirius to the Cape of Good Hope, stripping the ship of its cannons to allow all the more food to be stowed aboard. But Hunter’s vessel was not in the height of repair and there was no guarantee it would be back.

  WHO GAVE THE EORA THE SMALLPOX?

  The Eora were threatened in a new way too. Sergeant Scott noted on 15 April 1789 that when he went with a party to cut grass-trees for thatching he found three natives lying near a beach, a man and two boys, one of the latter dead from what looked like smallpox, and the other two very ill. It is interesting that the idea of smallpox amongst the natives aroused no great concern for their own safety amongst the Europeans. To a seaman like Arthur Phillip, scurvy wa
s of far greater concern than would be a smallpox outbreak. Though it could be lethal, smallpox was a disease the British were used to. Many Sydney Cove and Rose Hill people of all classes carried the pitted faces of survivors of the illness. The comeliest of the transported women were marked by having suffered the disease earlier in their lives. By the standards of the eighteenth century it was eminently survivable, and on top of that, it seems that from early in the century many Englishmen and women had already been inoculated against it.

  The up-to-date Surgeon White had carried with him on Phillip’s fleet a flask of ‘variolous material’, variola being the Latin name of smallpox, just in case he needed to inoculate the young against an outbreak in the penal colony. Phillip would soon check with White whether that tissue had somehow escaped its flask at the hospital and thus spread itself to the natives.

  Visiting the beach in Port Jackson where the sufferers had been seen, Phillip and his boat party found an old man stretched out on the ground while a boy of nine or ten was pouring water on his head from a shell. The boy had the lesions on his skin too. Near them lay a female child, dead, and, a little further away, her mother. ‘The body of the woman showed that famine, super-added to disease, had occasioned her death.’ Here was an acknowledgment that Eora were going hungry from the pressure the settlement was putting on their food supplies. Arabanoo worked with his hands digging sand to prepare a grave for the dead girl child. He ‘then lined the cavity completely with grass and put the body into it, covering it also with grass, and then filled the hole’. He made no provision for the woman’s body.

  The man and boy were taken back to Surgeon White’s hospital in Sydney Cove and placed in a special quarantine hut.

  Boat crews began to see dead natives everywhere, the bodies abandoned by streams and on beaches, or littering caves. The disease disqualified the victim from receiving the normal funeral rituals, it seemed. Either because the natives were too disoriented or too sick themselves, the binding up of a body with various talismanic possessions in a sort of death canoe of paperbark, or the burial in shallow earth, or ceremonial cremation—all of which were previously practised in the Sydney area—no longer occurred.

  In Surgeon White’s quarantine hut, the older native suffering from the disease kept looking into his son’s cot, ‘patted him gently on the bosom; and with dying eyes seemed to recommend him to our humanity and protection’. The boy’s name was Nanbaree, for his father, shivering, called to him out of a swollen throat. When Nanbaree’s father died, the boy is said to have surveyed the corpse without emotion and simply exclaimed, ‘Bo-ee [dead]’. It was the gracious Arabanoo who placed the old man’s body in its grave. He had been tentative about whether the body should be buried or burned, and Tench read this as his being solicitous about which ceremony would most gratify the governor. His hesitation might rather have come from the fact that he was not of the same blood as the dead man, and so was not entitled to carry out the full funeral rite. In any case, his behaviour that day, his tenderness and generosity towards the ill, persuaded Phillip to release him from his leg bracelet for good.

  Nanbaree, the boy, slowly recovered. Despite the Europeans’ grasp of the concept of quarantine, the extent of the risk Arabanoo was running in visiting him was poorly understood. Many of the children of the fleet had visited Nanbaree and another native child in hospital, and none of them caught smallpox. A native girl and boy, both about fourteen, had been brought in by the governor’s boat. The boy died after three days, but the girl recovered. The names by which she would become commonly known were Abaroo and Boorong.

  As smallpox continued to rage among the Aborigines, Arabanoo became Phillip’s liaison to the dying. Phillip was anxious that the Eora, who were in utter terror of the plague, should know the frightful disease was not his work, was not some weapon of malice or magic on his part. But the Eora had fled. Arabanoo was taken round the different coves of the harbour to try to make contact with his fellows, but the beaches were deserted. ‘There were no footprints on them, and excavations and hollows and caves in the sandstone rocks were clogged with the putrid bodies of dead natives. It seemed as if, flying from the contagion, they had left the dead to bury the dead.’ Tench watched Arabanoo lift up his hands and eyes ‘in silent agony’ and then cry, ‘All dead! All dead!’, and hang his head in grief. When he spoke, he seemed to have a word for the disease—galgalla, he called it, and so did other natives who survived it.

  Since it was known that Makassan people regularly visited far northern Australia to collect trepang, Phillip, and ultimately historians, would wonder whether smallpox could have been transmitted from the natives of the north through inter-tribal contact over a huge distance down to the south-east coast of New South Wales.

  Phillip asked the question in genuine puzzlement. The port authorities in both Rio de Janeiro and Cape Town had checked for signs of smallpox on board the fleet, and Phillip had been able to say there were none. Nor had there been any sign since. White assured him with some heat that the disease had not arisen from his flask of material, which was unbroken and secure on a shelf. Convicts did not covet it, and Aborigines had not entered White’s storehouse and taken the flask. Perhaps there had been a sufferer on the French ships, now gone?

  Or had someone amongst the gentlemen, someone who hated the natives and saw them as an unnecessary complication, somehow managed to let the disease loose on them via a blanket or piece of clothing? Experts believe the virus was unlikely to have survived the journey from England in dried crusts or clothing for more than a year. One American sailor on Supply had died of it, but he was thought to have caught it from infected Aborigines. Though the disease reached out and struck the Eora fifteen or sixteen months after the arrival of the ships, some two years after they had departed England, the Eora themselves never doubted it to be a deliberate attack.

  American experience of epidemics amongst native populations had already taught British surgeons that not all people around the globe had a similar level of immunity or resistance to diseases, and the appalling size and density of the pustules on the bodies of the dead Eora people, as well as the lightning progress of the disease amongst living natives, were noted by White and the other surgeons, indicating the natives had never before been exposed to the contagion.

  Arabanoo’s nursing of the girl Abaroo and the boy Nanbaree had been the cause of great admiration, and even when he grew ill, Tench and Phillip hoped that the symptoms came from a different cause. ‘But at length the disease burst forth with irresistible fury.’ Everything possible was done for him, given his centrality in both the affections and plans of Arthur Phillip. He allowed himself to be bled by the surgeons and took everything they had to offer. When he died on 18 May, the governor, ‘who particularly regarded him’, had him buried in the garden of the brick and stone Government House, and attended the funeral. This would not be the last sign of Phillip’s affection for the native people, and his feeling of closeness to Arabanoo must have aroused sneers, comment and rumour amongst some.

  Along with Arabanoo, an estimated two thousand Eora perished from the smallpox virus in Port Jackson. A native named Colby would later claim that only three males of his clan, the Grass-Tree clan of Cadi, survived, though he did not mention women or child survivors.

  FOOD AND MEN’S MINDS

  Among the white community with their resistance to the smallpox infestation, hunger remained the issue. By 1789 the stores were held in two buildings of brick and stone designed and built behind Government House under the supervision of a most promising convict, the bricklayer James Bloodworth, with the help of Harry Brewer, who counted builder’s clerk among his former occupations. Of Mr Commissary Andrew Miller, a shadowy and vulnerable figure who managed the supplies, Phillip would say that he fulfilled the task appointed him ‘with the strictest honour and no profit’. One morning in March 1789, Miller became aware that a long-running theft of food had taken place amongst the marine sentries, who had made copies of the official k
eys. One soldier turned King’s evidence, and named seven marines from various companies who were in the plot to loot the stores during their rotating sentry duties.

  A court martial found them all guilty of plundering the stores. Their execution, carried out on a scaffold erected between the two storehouses, not at the notorious convict hanging tree on the western side of town, was an agony for the corps of marines. Private Easty, who found it sinister that the gallows had been erected before sentence was passed, was in the ranks of marines paraded to witness the hangings. By now his coat, like that of other marines, was faded and worn, and his shoes were falling apart. But the military rituals were still maintained, and he had his Brown Bess musket ready to present arms at the solemn moment. ‘There was hardly a marine present but what shed tears, officers and men.’ And yet in a strange way the corps accepted the inevitability of this public hanging.

  Then, not long before Arabanoo was buried in Phillip’s garden, Sirius relieved the hysteria over food by reappearing on the broad sweep of Port Jackson. It had had the sort of voyage which makes the question of why any man would be a sailor a conundrum beyond our understanding. During the journey the ship’s company was afflicted with scurvy so badly that at one stage there were only thirteen sailors available to man the watch, along with the carpenter’s crew. Lieutenant Maxwell went mad off Cape Horn and ordered all sail be put on during a gale. Captain Hunter and the surgeon set to work in Cape Town to address the scurvy amongst the crew. The American seaman Nagle said that the disease was so prevalent that when men bit into an apple, pear or peach, blood from their gums would run down their chins. The best cure, he thought, was fresh mutton and vegetables, ‘and the captain allowed us to send for as much wine as we thought fit to make use of, the ship’s company recovering daily, till we were well and hearty’.