Australians

by Thomas Keneally

  BENNELONG’S MARRIAGES

  The standing of Bennelong, at least in Captain Tench’s view, suffered damage from his behaviour towards his second, new and younger wife, Karubarabulu, the young woman from the north side of Botany Bay who, despite the earlier battles over her, had come to live at Tubowgulle, in Bennelong’s brick house. One day in November 1790, Bennelong came to the governor’s residence and presented himself to Phillip—he seemed to be able to get an interview any time he liked. Holding a hatchet, and trying out the sharpness of it, he told Phillip that he intended to put Karubarabulu to death immediately. Bennelong believed she had committed adultery, and that this gave him the right to bludgeon her to death, and his visit to Government House beforehand was a warning to Phillip not to interfere in laws that were none of his business. Phillip was alarmed enough to set off for Tubowgulle with Bennelong, and to take his secretary, Captain Collins and Sergeant Scott the orderly with him. On the road from Government House down to Tubowgulle, Bennelong spoke wildly and incoherently and ‘manifested such extravagant marks of fury and revenge’ that his hatchet was taken away from him, and a walking stick was given to him instead. After all, English males were relatively comfortable with the idea of hitting errant women with walking sticks.

  Karubarabulu was seated at the communal fire outside the hut with some other natives. Bennelong, snatching a sword from one of the soldiers, ran at her and gave her two severe wounds on the head, and one on the shoulder. The Europeans rushed in and grabbed him, but the other natives remained quiet witnesses, as if they considered Bennelong entitled to his vengeance. Phillip and the officers noticed that the more they restrained Bennelong, the more the other male Aborigines began to arm themselves, as if to support Bennelong’s right to what he was doing.

  Fortunately the Supply was in the intimate cove—on Phillip’s orders, it was immediately hailed and a boat with armed sailors was sent ashore, and Karubarabulu was hustled away on this across the cove to the hospital. A young native came up and begged to be taken into the boat also. He claimed to be her lawful husband, which she declared he was, and begged that he might be allowed on board the ship’s boat so that he would be away from Bennelong’s rage. ‘She is now my property,’ Tench has Bennelong saying, like a character in an eighteenth-century melodrama. ‘I have ravished her by force from her tribe: and I will part with her to no person whatever, until my vengeance shall be glutted.’ Bennelong told the governor and others that he would follow Karubarabulu to the hospital and kill her. Phillip told him that if he did, he would be shot at once, but he treated this threat ‘with disdain’.

  A number of natives visited the girl in hospital and ‘they all appeared very desirous that she might return to the house, though they must have known that she would be killed; and, what is not to be accounted for, the girl herself seemed desirous of going’. After an absence of two days, Bennelong—cooling off and perhaps concerned for his relationship with Phillip—came back to Phillip’s house and told him he would not beat the girl any further. He himself had a new husbandly shoulder wound from an argument with Barangaroo. His wife and he should go to Surgeon White’s hospital and have their wounds dressed, Phillip suggested. But he would not go because he believed Surgeon White would shoot him, and he refused to stay in the settlement in his house because he had come to believe that White, outraged by the damage he had done to Karubarabulu, would assassinate him by night.

  The argument was sorted out, however, and soon Bennelong was over in the hospital to have a plaster applied to his shoulder. Once this was done he visited Karubarabulu, and to Barangaroo’s outrage took Karubarabulu by the hand and spoke softly to her.

  Thus Bennelong’s ménage à trois remained turbulent. It is remarkable the way Phillip entertained it. Karubarabulu was at last taken to the governor’s house so that she could be safe. From the Government House yard, Barangaroo stood hurling curses up at the girl’s room, and she grabbed some of Bennelong’s spears to launch at the window and had to be disarmed of them by the marine guards at the gate. But in the evening, when Bennelong was leaving to go back to his hut, the girl Karubarabulu, on whom the governor had lavished such care, demanded that she go too, for a messenger had come saying that Barangaroo would not beat her any more and was now ‘very good’.

  Bennelong continued to confuse the officers with his signals. On the one hand he said a relative had been killed by the Cameraigal, but then was seen on the north shore picking wild fruit with members of that group. And then on 21 November, Bennelong and Barangaroo as a couple pleaded with Phillip to give them protection in his house. The governor did so. Bennelong told Phillip the Cameraigal had killed one of his ‘brothers’, a friend or relation, and had burned his body. When Phillip said he would send soldiers to punish them, Bennelong was all in favour of such action. The expedition, however, never took place, as it was contrary to Phillip’s principles to interfere in tribal tensions.

  MCENTIRE’S ENCHANTED SPEAR

  What brought a new line from Phillip in his dealings with the Aborigines was the murder of his chief huntsman, John McEntire. McEntire, sentenced in Durham, having crossed from Ireland as deck cargo to work on the British harvest, was hated by the Eora but much liked by the gentlemen, including Surgeon White, whom he often accompanied on excursions into the bush to shoot down bird specimens which would ultimately be rendered by a convict artist and appear in White’s applauded journal. The long list of infringements of which he was guilty in Eora eyes, including the slaughter of animals the natives considered dedicated by ancestors for their use alone, had not been absolved by Phillip’s wounding. On one occasion, when he was hunting, the natives had set one of the indigenous dogs, a dingo, on him, and he had shot it, contrary to the rule of the world that only an initiated male could kill a dingo. McEntire, unlike Phillip, did not have the missing tooth of an initiate.

  Preparations were made amongst the Eora for his punishment. Phillip was amazed at this stage to observe that Bennelong entertained at his hut for some nights the man named Pemulwuy, whom he had previously told Phillip and others was his enemy in terms of love. Pemulwuy was a carradhy, or as one scholar puts it, a man of high degree, selected in childhood for his piercing, flecked eyes and precocious air of authority. Throughout eastern Australia there were many initiations, processes and tests for the making of a carradhy. The candidate was often thrown on a fire while in a state of trance, or hurled into a sacred waterhole. Prayers were recited by the initiate and the elders to the most important clan heroes and sky beings, Gulambre and Daramulan, as the candidate was brought out of the water or fire. The elders woke the candidate from his trance by laying their hands on his shoulders, and he was given quartz crystals to swallow and an individual totem to help him cure people. As in Western rites of preparation for the priesthood, fasting and endurance and time spent alone before the candidate went through initiation were considered important.

  A carradhy always played a leading part in the rituals of the Dreamtime, for which he was painted with arm blood or red ochre sanctified by chants as it was applied to the skin. All the crises of Aboriginal life were dealt with by magic, by rituals, by spells and by the sacramental paraphernalia owned by the carradhys. The carradhys also interpreted dreams, which were taken very seriously by Aborigines (as by later Europeans). In every generation of Aborigines there seemed to be young men who combined an interest in ritual knowledge with eyes of extraordinary power and a capacity to interpret the dreams of other members of the group.

  The powers exercised by carradhys were sometimes symbolised externally by the handling of bones or of crystals of quartz or other rare stones. It was believed carradhys were capable of eroding a human being while he slept by extracting fat from within his body without making a mark. Pemulwuy had a deformed foot which enabled him to make confusing tracks, and the particular characteristics of the eyes, including a strange fleck in his left eye, which went with his office.

  It was McEntire’s life-blood Pemulwuy would a
pply himself to. On 9 December 1790, a sergeant of marines took a number of convict huntsmen, including McEntire, down to the north arm of Botany Bay to shoot game. They settled down in a hide of boughs to sleep. At about one o’clock in the afternoon the party was awoken by a noise outside the hide, and saw five natives creeping towards them. The sergeant was alarmed but McEntire said, ‘Don’t be afraid, I know them.’

  Indeed he did but his knowledge seems to have included contempt. He knew Pemulwuy from earlier expeditions. As McEntire advanced, Pemulwuy hurled his spear into McEntire’s side. McEntire declared, ‘I am a dead man.’ One of the party broke off the shaft of the spear and another two took up their guns and futilely chased the natives. Then they carried McEntire back to Sydney Cove and got him to the hospital early the next morning. The governor was at Parra-matta at the time, but was shocked by the news on his return.

  One of Phillip’s characteristics was sometimes to invest affection and unremitting loyalty in people of flawed character who were effective in a limited range of skills; Harry Brewer was one example, and McEntire another. Phillip detailed a sentry to wake the ever loyal Captain Tench. As Tench walked up the hill to Government House in the still, pre-dawn cool of a summer’s night, he may have had a sense that for the first time in his Sydney experience, Mars was calling and battle was close.

  He met a Phillip who was uncharacteristically enraged. He instructed Watkin to lead a punitive party of armed marines. The governor at first envisaged that Tench’s party would track down a group of natives, put two of them instantly to death and bring in ten hostages for execution in town. None of these were to be women or children, and though all weapons that were encountered were to be destroyed, no other property was to be touched. After prisoners had been taken, all communication, even with those natives ‘with whom we were in habits of intercourse, was to be avoided’.

  Tench was horrified to hear that his party was required to cut off and bring in the heads of the two slain—hatchets and bags would be supplied. In explaining his tough policy, Phillip told Tench that what the natives particularly feared was to lose numbers relative to the other native groups. He had delayed using violent measures because of his belief that ‘in every former instance of hostility, they had acted either from having received injury, or from misapprehension. “The latter of these causes,” added he, “I attribute my own wound; but in this business of McEntire, I am fully persuaded that they were unprovoked, and the barbarity of their conduct admits of no extenuation . . . I am resolved to execute the prisoners who may be brought in in the most public and exemplary manner, in the presence of as many of their countrymen as can be collected.”

  ’ The governor at this point asked Watkin for his thoughts, and the young officer suggested the capture of six might do just as well, and out of this number, a group should be set aside for retaliation if any further outrage occurred, and only a portion executed immediately. The governor decided that should Watkin find it possible to take six prisoners, ‘I will hang two, and send the rest to Norfolk Island for a certain period, which will cause their countrymen to believe that we have dispatched them secretly.’

  McEntire was not dead; indeed he seemed to be recovering at the hospital, but Phillip believed the lesson still had to be taught. On that issue, he met dissent from an officer who greatly respected him.

  Lieutenant Dawes was conscience-stricken about the objectives of the expedition and spoke with his friend the Reverend Johnson about its morality. Dawes, though having bravely borne a wound in the American wars, saw himself above all as a student of peoples, a surveyor of surfaces and skies, not as a combat soldier. He had corresponded with William Wilberforce, the renowned leader of the campaign against slavery, and the objectives of Phillip’s mission were abhorrent to him. In Sydney Cove he had spent a great deal of time putting together a dictionary of the Eora, a people who liked him greatly, and whom he, in return, admired. Above all, he admired Patyegarang, an Aboriginal girl of about fifteen years named for Pattagorang, the large grey kangaroo, who was one of his sources for his language collection. She became his familiar and stayed in his hut as his chief language teacher, servant and perhaps lover. The language of Patyegarang recorded by Dawes might indicate either that he was a very affectionate mentor or something more. Nangagolang, time for rest, Patyegarang said when the tap-to, military lights-out, was beaten from the barracks square near the head of the cove. Matigarabangun Naigaba, we shall sleep separate. And Nyimang candle Mr D, Put out the candle, Mr Dawes.

  It was Patyegarang who interpreted the motives of her people to Dawes. A white man had been wounded some days before in coming from one of the areas down-harbour to Warrane, Sydney Cove, and Dawes asked her why. Gulara, said Patyegarang. Angry. Minyin gulara Eora? asked Dawes. Why are the black people angry? Inyan ngalwi. Because the white people settled here. And further, said Patyegarang, Gunin, the guns.

  These exchanges must have played a large part in Dawes’s refusal to hunt the natives. Phillip told Dawes he was guilty of ‘unofficerlike behaviour’ and threatened him with a court martial. But Dawes simply refused to submit to one.

  Though he ultimately agreed to go, he would later publicly declare he was ‘sorry he had been persuaded to comply with the order’. And though this would further outrage Phillip’s feelings, Dawes refused to retract his statement.

  The expedition was to set out at 4 a.m. on the humid morning of 14 December. Tactful Tench included the New South Wales Corps’s urbane Captain Hill in the group. Three sergeants and forty privates made up the rank and file of this first expeditionary force, and some of the low soldiery carried the hatchets and bags for the collection of two heads. The force tramped south on a familiar track between bushy slopes and paperbark lagoons, sighting the Pacific to their left through the contours of the land. They reached the peninsula at the northern arm of Botany Bay at nine o’clock in the morning. They searched in various directions without seeing a single native, so that at four o’clock they halted for their evening camp. At daybreak they marched fruitlessly in an easterly direction, then southwards, and then northwards, often beset by insects in marshy country. Back near the north head of Botany Bay they saw ‘five Indians’ on the beach, whom Tench attempted to surround, but the five vanished.

  After Tench’s military expedition set out, the governor had tried to stop Colby going to Botany Bay, offering him a blanket, a hatchet and a jacket to distract him. On top of that, Colby was diverted by food—the officers tried to eat him down. ‘It was hoped that he would feed so voraciously as to render him incapable of executing his intention.’ He was given a huge meal of ‘a light horseman’ (a New South Wales fish) and five pounds (2.3 kilos) of beef and bread. But then ‘he set out on his journey with such lightness and gaiety as plainly showed him to be a stranger to the horrors of indigestion’. He told the gentlemen he had to go south not to thwart any military expedition, but to see a kinswoman, Doringa, who was about to give birth. But his chief purpose was probably to warn people, especially Pemulwuy and his own damelian (his namesake), the Botany Bay native who shared the name Colby.

  Meanwhile, the British military force under Tench moved towards ‘a little village (if five huts deserved the name)’, but no one was there. Some canoes were seen and possibly fired on, because we know that the native known as Botany Bay Colby was wounded. Returning to their baggage, which they had left under the care of a small guard of soldiers, the party saw a native fishing in shallow water about three hundred metres from land. Tench seems to have been relieved that it was not practicable at that distance to shoot him or seize him, so decided to ignore him. But the native himself did not ignore the party. He turned and started calling various of them by name, and ‘in spite of our formidable array, drew nearer with unbounded confidence’. It was Colby from Sydney. Tench was under orders to ignore old native friends, but how could he shoot Colby down? Single-handedly, Colby psychologically disarmed the group ‘with his wonted familiarity and unconcern’. In theory, his he
ad should have gone into one of their bags. Instead, he recounted how the day before he had been at the hospital for the amputation of a woman’s leg by Surgeon White, and he re-enacted for them the agony and cries of the woman.

  Overnight he vanished. The British party waded swamps and swore at mosquitoes for the better part of two days before returning to Sydney between one and two o’clock in the afternoon. Private Easty, who had served in the expeditionary ranks, called the return to Sydney ‘a most tedious march as ever men went in the time’. Phillip at once ordered a second expedition—his orders for the first had not been a matter of passion but the establishment of principle. He does not seem to have blamed Tench for its failure, since, wrote Watkin, ‘the “painful pre-eminence” again devolved on me’. This time the party pretended they were setting off north for Broken Bay to punish Willemerring, but would instead head south once more. Since the moon was full, they would move by night, to avoid the heat of the day. Crossing the broad estuaries of Cooks River and the swamps behind the beaches of Botany Bay, the soldiers carried their firelocks above their heads and their cartouche boxes were tied fast to the top of their hats. Pushing towards the village they had visited the first time, they met a creek which, when they tried to cross it, sucked them down waist-deep into its mud.

  There is a perhaps unconscious comedy in Tench’s description. ‘At length, a sergeant of grenadiers stuck fast, and declared himself incapable of moving either forward or backwards . . . “I find it impossible to move; I am sinking” resounded on every side.’ The rope intended to go round the wrists of captured natives had to be used to drag the sergeant of grenadiers free. With their mud-smirched uniforms, the inglorious military pressed round the head of the creek and on to the village. Tench, dividing his party into three so that they could attack from all sides, sent the troops rushing amongst the huts to find them absolutely empty. And now, unless the marines set out for camp at once, the river estuaries they had crossed since the point where they left their supplies and bags would be cut off till nightfall. The struggle back exhausted many soldiers, their physical condition undermined by dietary deficiencies.