by Sally Morgan
Learning to read the signs
In a discussion with one of my grandfathers, he commented that he thought Captain Cook was a man who couldn’t read the signs. He was talking about an intuitive way of knowing, a fluid and dynamic language grounded in country and linked to the wider world, that our old people are very adept at. Country is alive. The world is alive. This is the essential unchanging nature of the universe. This is the reality of life for Indigenous peoples.
‘If a man can’t read the signs, then he might get out of his depth and end up in dangerous waters. He might muck things up for other people too.’
It wasn’t until years later, when out of curiosity I delved deeper into the life and times of James Cook, that it dawned on me just how right he was.
The Unknown South Land was supposed to be a place of untold wealth and beauty—and so it was when it came to our particular southern continent, but the kind of wealth and beauty the British desired was not immediately obvious here. The Gweagal people of the Dharawal nation confronted Cook and his crew, warning them not to land, but superior weaponry won the day. When Cook and his motley crew landed in Botany Bay still searching for their own people’s lost dream, God wasn’t sitting under a gum tree singing ‘Rule Britannia’ and waiting to embrace the English with a glass of sherry and a fat cigar. No diamonds, rubies and other precious gems littered the rocks and there were no streets paved with gold or glistening marble palaces. Nor was there any smashed pottery, gold and silver coins, or beads and ribbons floating in and out on the tide. This was an ancient place, one which had never seen a group of armed European men or a ship with hundred-foot masts and great billowing white sails. Instead of vast riches, what faced Cook were giant eucalypts, clumps of grass trees, flowering banksias, brightly coloured lorikeets, noisy cockatoos, goannas, possums, bandicoots, kangaroos, and dingoes. Fat koalas were lying back in the forks of gum trees, wombats were digging and sleeping and raising their families in burrows beneath the earth, and platypuses were narrowing out tunnels in creek banks. Fresh water was streaming past the big cabbage-tree palms down in the gullies, which were alive with ferns and mosses, and the wetlands were a wonder, where all kinds of birds flew in and out to nest. The seagrass meadows, kelp forests and mudflats were home to crabs, prawns, sea dragons, molluscs and all sorts of fish. The sea mullet were plentiful, and huge stingrays hundreds of years old were sliding around in the crystal-clear water of the bay.
Unable to read the signs, all James Cook could see were too many trees and not enough paddocks. What this land needed, in his opinion, was the plough and the touch of a ‘civilising’ hand. While his crew filled barrel after barrel with fresh water, Cook trotted through the bush leaving small, neat piles of beads, nails, ribbons, combs and mirrors at any dead camp fire or empty hut he came across. These were the offerings the British normally gave to peoples they considered ‘uncivilised’. Meanwhile, the aristocratic and trigger-happy Joseph Banks, soon to be dubbed the Patron Saint of New South Wales for his ongoing support of a future British colony, was frantically collecting, gutting, shooting, skinning and preserving any plant or creature he came across in order to take them home to England as museum specimens. In years to come he would even send an order for skeletal remains of Indigenous people. Picture this then: strangers suddenly arrived and greedily hogging all the fresh water, a gun-toting scientist manically slicing and dicing, a tall man bearing strange gifts marching armed into people’s homes without any invitation. Blind to the impact of their own behaviour, they were intruding into a country where people lived by honouring the land; taking only what was needed when it was in season in order to provide sustainability for future generations. Mystified by the lack of welcome they received, Cook even had the arrogance to complain in his journal that ‘all they seem’d to want was for us to be gone.’ [103]
The ever pragmatic and wickedly humorous old grannies I have known in my life would tell me plainly that Captain Cook suffered from too much pride and not enough spiritual advice, which they would be willing to provide by way of a big stick. With a wry chuckle they might advise that if I ever went back in time I should knock him on the head with one before he could name and claim anything. If there were other people present when they made this suggestion then a hearty discussion might ensue.
One old uncle, one who had been droving to Queensland in his younger days and discussed our situation with the people over there, might sing out, ‘Captain Cook was as cunning as a shithouse rat, my girl! When he slipped his big ship in through that opening in the cliffs, he slipped his bag of dirty tricks in too.’
‘The barrel of his gun, that was his law!’ another would add. ‘It wasn’t long before the camp fires went out.’
Not to be outdone, one of the old grandfathers, who enjoyed a philosophical conversation or two, might remind me of the other problems James Cook had.
‘The poor bugger only spoke English. And English is a terrible mean language. It doesn’t have the right words or the right ideas; that’s why people get mixed up when we talk about things. They can’t understand what we’re saying. They don’t believe in spirits, so they can’t see what they’re destroying.’
‘Haa, English wasn’t all that was wrong with him,’ someone else would complain, ‘he was a robber after all! He’d push you away if he saw something shiny!’
Then another person might say thoughtfully, ‘A long time ago now, I met this Aboriginal fella from Sydney, and he reckoned Captain Cook is just like the Phantom in the Phantom comics, he’s the ghost who still walks this land.’
‘Yeah,’ one of the old grannies determined to have the last word would laugh, ‘and he’s still got that devil dog by his side! I’ve met him, you know. Every meeting I go to there’s somebody wanting something!’
I have sometimes thought back to the time before the worlds of the first peoples of this continent and the world of people like James Cook permanently collided. Thought back to the moment when Captain Arthur Phillip, lover of law, order and agriculture, arrived in the hot sultry summer of January 1788 to establish the first British colony. By then, the children who had been playing on the beach when Cook arrived were grown with families of their own, and this time from the headlands they would have seen not one, but many ships breaching the horizon: two warships, three cargo ships and six transports. For that brief moment, as two vastly different peoples gazed at each other in curiosity across a brilliantly blue watery expanse, the future lay wide open, vulnerable to the good or evil the ships would bring. What would happen when they finally crossed that sunny, dazzling distance? How would the relationships between these strangers to our shores and peoples like mine play out? What would the Australian nation of the future one day look back on and call history?
The innocent, idealistic part of me likes to believe there is hope in every moment; that the dye is never cast until the moment has passed. Perhaps even then, despite the unlawful claiming of our land, hope lingered amongst the sharp smelling eucalyptus leaves, whose vaporised oil rises beyond the bush on warm and sunny days to cast a cleansing blue haze over the land. This was such a day. Far seeing individuals are born into every nation. This causes me to believe that the possibility of forging a just future is always present, if only we have the vision, will and courage to pursue it. Unfortunately, the first governor of the land named by James Cook as New South Wales, Captain Arthur Phillip, would choose to set a cruel precedent; one which would unfold for generations to come and decimate peoples like mine. In the years to follow a campaign to instil terror through violent action in order to quell resistance would be actively pursued. It would be initiated officially and unofficially. The little documentation that later found its way into the public record would be questioned and pedantically undermined. Brutal frontier secrets would be buried in silence and denial. There would be another precedent too, one which aimed to quell the land itself and which continues to manifest today in the wanton destruction of important heritage sites and ancient rock art.
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Finding Botany Bay unsuitable, Arthur Phillip took an advance party of forty convicts and a company of marines to Sydney Cove and set about establishing an alternative site. The Judge Advocate for the new colony, David Collins later wrote:
The spot chosen for this purpose was at the head of the cove, near the run of fresh water which stole silently through a very thick wood, the stillness of which had then, for the first time since Creation, been interrupted by the rude sound of the labourer’s axe... [104]
There was no distance now between those on the land and those on the water, there were just those who honoured the country and those who wished to exploit it. In the coming months the new arrivals would catch too many fish, chop down too many trees and pollute the fresh water. Soon all that would remain of the giant forests would be the blackened stumps of ancient trees hauntingly embraced by the rising salt of a weeping land.
At the end of that first long, hot day of labouring with the axe and the saw the British downed their sweaty tools and crowded beneath the flag that had sailed with them from the motherland. After a hearty round of ‘God save the king’ and a toast to King George III and the success of the colony, Phillip again took possession of the country. In doing so, he formally began the physical dispossession of the many nations who, for millennia, had exerted authority, custodianship and ownership over the continent as a whole. It was the twenty-sixth of January, the first Australia Day, and there were no women or children present, they were still locked away on the ships. Men, their mates and their muskets would go forth to rule this new frontier. That night, red-coated marines, their guns fixed with bayonets, patrolled the ghostly moonlit perimeter. The first fleet, the first military beachhead, the first Australia Day, the first fence, the great divide.
Of things to come
These days Sydney is the business gateway to Australia and home to the Australian Securities Exchange. It is a major international tourist destination and has a population of over four million people, of whom only around one percent are Indigenous. A few kilometres south of the Sydney central business district is Botany Bay, which historians still cite as the birthplace of modern Australia. It is vastly different now from the place where James Cook first landed in 1770. The bay has been dredged and its sand dunes mined, the groundwater flowing into the bay has been poisoned by chemicals—linked to cancer—from heavy industry, and many species of plants and animals native to this area are now extinct or endangered. In the west, the story is no different. In the Pilbara, where the land of my own people lies, we are struggling to protect the plants, animals and water sources and to save the strong and special places. One of the greatest battles we face at present is protecting our ancient rock art from an unthinking and greedy alliance of government and industry. The oldest, largest and richest rock art galleries on the planet, which archaeologists say should be World Heritage listed, are found in the Pilbara, but bit by bit they are being wiped off the face of the earth by projects which government describes as being ‘in the public good’.
We all play a part in the world to come, and as the earth casts its shadow to the moon, none of us can ever truly know how far our great dreams or our crimes will take us. The era we live in now will one day be the past and the time will come when our actions will be weighed by others who will reflect on our legacy. In the tragedies and joys that unfold beyond our passing, what role will each of us have played? Is there a framework can we use then to forge meaningful and just partnerships between the new and the old, between the firstborn peoples of this land and the diversity of peoples who have been born since? What can guide and help us in protecting this most ancient and special place, this multitude of countries that together form the continent now known as Australia? If we look to all the peoples like mine, then it is clear that country has always been at the heart of every nation ever birthed here. Country makes us. This land makes us. Whether we know it or not,
We are all connected. We all exist within a nexus of relationships that link us to one another, and to all life. Everything we do affects these connections. In our different ways—we all tell the story of the world as it is, and the world as we want it to be—and in this land, stories have power. We are surrounded by the tales that shaped, and shape, this country. [105]
The possibility of good or evil, love or hate, justice or injustice, cruelty or compassion, destruction or protection, exists in every moment. But if we do not learn to read the signs wisely, then like James Cook we will find ourselves out of our depth and heading for very dangerous waters. The balance which honours and nourishes the interconnectedness of all life and ensures its ongoing creation is missing from our world. If, ‘in this land, stories have power’ then we only have to choose what story we will tell, what story we will live, what story we will pass on to the children who will one day follow in our footsteps. As we make, so we are made. The unrealised possibility of the lost mystical, magical land of Terra Australis Incognita was not its vast material wealth, but the concept of balance that it offered humankind. The dream of a thousand years came as a counterweight to plunder and privilege, a push to pursue a path of balance in order to nourish a global future where all peoples, all life, thrived. If we, as human beings, continue to cut ourselves away from the web of life, then we embrace a story that like the bitter lie of terra nullius can have only one ending—death. Far better then, to embrace a story which not only honours life, but returns it a thousandfold to all those who will come after us. We are the mothers and fathers of the future, we stand at the crossroads and behind us are our children. What will we birth here, in this ancient southern land? The land which my grandmother once told me she saw in a dream as a place where everything lived and nothing died. A place far older than she or anyone knew. A place where too many people were still walking around blind. A place of much power and many secrets, if only you had the eyes to see the awe and wonder of it all.
Endnotes
[1] Beryl Dixon, ‘Back Home to Country’.
[2] Len Collard, ‘ Kura, Yeye, boorda, “from the past, today and the future”’.
[3] Joan Winch, ‘A Feeling of Belonging’.
[4] Bob Morgan, ‘Country—A Journey to Cultural and Spiritual Healing’.
[5] A Kwaymullina, ‘Seeing the Light: Aboriginal Law, Learning and Sustainable Living in Country’, Indigenous Law Bulletin, vol. 6, no. 11, May–June 2005, p. 13.
[6] Dawn Besserab, ‘Country is Lonely’.
[7] Greg Lehman, ‘A Snake and a Seal’.
[8] A Kwaymullina, p. 12.
[9] Greg Lehman, op. cit.
[10] Jill Milroy, ‘Different Ways of Knowing: Trees Are Our Families Too’.
[11] Tjalaminu Mia, ‘Kepwaamwinberkup (Nightwell)’.
[12] Beryl Dixon, op. cit.
[13] Bill Jonas, ‘Places of Wonder and Fear’.
[14] Bob Morgan, op. cit.
[15] ibid.
[16] ibid.
[17] Pat Dudgeon, ‘The Sinking of the ’.
[18] Joan Winch, op. cit.
[19] Noel Nannup, ‘Caring for Everything’.
[20] Joan Winch, op. cit.
[21] Irene Watson, ‘De-colonising the Space: Dreaming back to Country’.
[22] Joe Boolgar Collard, ‘A Strength that Can’t be Broken’.
[23] Sally Morgan, ‘The Balance for the World’.
[24] L Secatero, in S McFadden, Chiron Communiqué, April 2007, viewed 22 July 2007. http://www.chiron-communications.com/ communique11-1.html
[25] E Crombie, ‘We are the Kupa Piti Kungka Tjuta, the Senior Aboriginal Women of Coober Pedy, South Australia’, viewed 22 July 2007, http://www.iratiwanti.org/iratiwanti.php3?page=kungkas
[26] B Neidjie, Gagadju Man Bill Neidjie: The environmental and spiritual philosophy of a senior traditional owner Kakadu National Park, Northern Territory Australia, J B Books, 2002. p. 40.
[27] The Ruddock interview was reported in The Age newspaper, 3 October 2000, p. 3.
[28] A Roach, You Have the P
ower, Harper Collins, Sydney 1994, p. 1.
[29] Mussolini Harvey in Bradley, John (trans.) Yanyuwa Country: The Yanuwa people of Borroloola tell the history of their land, Greenhouse Publications, Richmond, Victoria, 1988, p. ix.
[30] M Gilmore, ‘Old Botany Bay’, The Penguin Book of Australian Verse, Hesseltine, H (ed.), Penguin Books Australia, Ringwood Vic., 1972, p. 91.
[31] Homestead near Hunters Creek.
[32] Recently passed away.
[33] L Little Bear, L ‘Jagged Worldview Colliding’, Reclaiming Indigenous Voice and Vision, M Battiste (ed.), University of British Columbia Press, Vancouver, Canada, 2000, p. 78.
[34] ibid. note 3, p. 78.
[35] R Whitehurst, Noongar Dictionary, Noongar to English and English to Noongar, Excelsior Print, Bunbury, WA, 1992, p. 6.
[36] S Morgan, My Place, Fremantle Arts Centre Press, Fremantle, WA, 1987, p. 356.
[37] A Moreton-Robinson, Talkin’ up to the White Woman, Indigenous Women and Feminism, University of Queensland Press, Queensland, 2000, p. 19.
[38] Bardi word for white person.
[39] G Aklif, Ardiyooloon Bardi Ngannka, One Arm Point Bardi Dictionary, Kimberley Language Resource Centre, Halls Creek WA, 1999, p. 46.
