While echoing Wemyss’s pleas for the Admiralty to undertake urgent navigational surveys of the Torres Strait and Barrier Reef, Curtis’s real agenda was that action be taken against the native inhabitants. Building on Wemyss again, he cited four possible solutions to the cannibal problem. The government could send a force to take possession of the islands “and then exterminate the whole of the inhabitants”; it could forcibly transfer all the islanders “to the coast of New Holland, and abandon them to their own natural resources on that vast continent”; it could “subjugate the inhabitants,” “make them tributary,” and try “to civilize and improve them”; or, finally, it could soften their sensibilities through the introduction of the gospel.37
Reverend Wemyss, a liberal man of God, had balked at genocide and favored the last course, dismissing the other three options as inhumane and unjust. He even suggested several times that the natives might have been goaded into their violence by previous bad experiences at the hands of Europeans. But his fiery plagiarist could not agree that the answer to this cannibal problem lay with missionaries, who were too soft and unworldly to cope with Reef natives. Instead, since “these islands are probably destined at no distant day to be important specks in the map of British territory,” Curtis urged the setting up of “a Civilization Society.” Organized groups of white settlers armed with mechanical and agricultural knowledge, and supported by soldiers, could domesticate the natives and “prepare their minds for the reception of gospel instruction.”38
In order to ensure that his role of stern imperial prophet was in no way undermined by the facts, Curtis took care to include only the most cursory acknowledgment of how the two young Charles Eaton survivors had been rescued from their original captors by a kindly senior man from Murray Island called “Old Duppa,” who had then adopted them into the clan. Old Duppa had treated John Ireland, now known as Wak, as his own son. The boy was given a tomahawk, a bow, and a sixty-foot canoe imported from New Guinea to fulfill his fishing and hunting needs, and he was granted his own parcel of land for cultivating yams, bananas, and coconuts. According to the boys’ rescuer, Captain Lewis, another adoptive Mer family showered little William D’Oyley with love. Known as Uass, he forgot his European mother completely and attached himself devotedly to his new parents. Sturdy and browned by the sun, the boy spoke only the native language and cried bitterly when taken from his Mer home.39
By contrast, Curtis delighted in the gothic possibilities of the Charles Eaton story. Two incidents in particular, which he cited again and again, became keystones of his text. The first was John Ireland’s account of the massacre of his fellow crewmen after they’d drifted in their half-submerged raft to Boydang Island. Curtis laced Wemyss’s rather subdued version with gorier details from the Sydney Times of November 19, 1836:
When they [those on Ireland’s raft] first landed, the natives, with that lurking treachery which appears inherent in their natures, by their gestures and deportment appeared to be friendly … The hungry and fatigued crew sat themselves down, and several of them fell asleep on the spot where they halted,—the commencement of the sleep of death! No sooner had the dastardly ruffians discovered that their victims were asleep, than a multitude fell upon them, and commenced the work of general slaughter; spears, knives, and waddies being called into active requisition, for the purpose of destruction. Having deprived the poor fellows of life, they next cut off their several heads, and then joined in a corrobery around the bleeding victims,… uttering wild and discordant yells of joy …
Ireland states that the savages … feasted upon the eyes and cheeks of the persons massacred by them belonging to the Charles Eaton. It is stated that these rude barbarians are induced to this horrible custom, from a belief that such conduct will increase in them a more intense desire after the blood of white men.40
The second ghoulish incident was the making of the skull mask, which appealed because of its diabolical nature. After taking the two boys aboard at Mer, the Isabella had set out to find and punish the perpetrators of the massacre. On reaching the cannibals’ base at Aureed Island, Captain Lewis found it deserted, but discovered what he called a “Golgotha,” or a “Temple of Skulls.” It contained an ornate mask made up of forty-five human skulls, seventeen of which later proved to be from the Charles Eaton castaways. Curtis, unaware of the exact number of skulls, supplied his own words:
The party having collected together, it was determined to enter the grotesque building, if an excavated and infernal den is worthy of such an appellation. They had not entered a moment, before the party in advance were horror-struck at beholding a large figure composed of tortoise-shells, to which were appended the skulls of several human beings. They were fixed to it by pieces of European rope, and some of the bones exhibited marks of violence, such as might have been inflicted by the force of the massive waddies, sometimes used by the natives in the work of death.… There can be no doubt, we think, but that these were the relics of the mortal remains of some of our countrymen, who have been wrecked in these terrible straits.41
Curtis declared himself well pleased with his magnum opus. In a short conclusion he summarized its achievements, among which he listed his account of “the manners and customs of the aborigines, and the natural history of the islands in which their habitations are located,” and also his moral history, which “exhibits not only a detail of the barbarity of the heathen, but also the benevolence of the Christian.” He had, he said, provided a range of expert opinions, including his own, on how to control and civilize the “barbarous natives” of that part of the world. The last page of his book carried an engraving of the cannibal mask found in the Temple of Skulls, an “emblem of barbarity” that the resourceful Curtis had worked so long and hard to prove.42
The book quickly passed through several editions, yet its author could not have imagined in his wildest dreams how influential it would ultimately become. John Curtis, Times court reporter, never intended to produce one of the foundation texts of British colonial and postcolonial culture, let alone a book that spawned a legend that still flourishes in the twenty-first century. He was in many ways a typical predatory journalist of his day: he simply wanted to concoct and sell a sentimental, racist, and sensationalist “true life story.”
The mask of skulls in John Curtis’s Shipwreck of the Stirling Castle (London: Virtue, 1838) (National Library of Australia)
Over time, the story has been recast to suit shifting concerns. In the hands of the great Australian nationalist painter Sidney Nolan, the Eliza Fraser story became a saga about a convict outsider and a ravished lady. The convict, as much as Eliza herself, became an embodiment of Australian nativism pitched against an archaic British empire. Nobel Prize–winning author Patrick White saw it as a parable about the encounter between a “civilized” Englishwoman and the elemental forces of a harsh landscape and its native peoples. A film by Tim Burstall and a musical collaboration by Peter Sculthorpe and Barbara Blackman added new nationalist inflections again. What all these permutations had in common, though, was indifference or hostility toward the Aboriginal people who had given Eliza succor so that she lived to tell the tale.
Among the earliest critics of this bias were Queensland historians Raymond Evans and Jan Walker, who in 1977 drew on archival and anthropological information to contest the case that the Kabi Kabi were motivated by cruelty. In the wake of Australia’s bicentennial year in 1988, other Europeans began to rethink the story, in a wider process of recognizing that white Australians had repressed much of their early history of Aboriginal dispossession, murder, and cultural destruction. Gillian Coote’s documentary film Island of Lies, released in 1991, was a notable example of this recognition, featuring interviews with a Badtjala woman and a long-time Fraser Island settler, both of whom believed that the story was responsible for spreading fabrications about Badtjala cannibalism for the purpose of financial gain.
The same year saw an even more remarkable work, exhibited in Sydney, by Badtjala artist Fiona F
oley. By Land and Sea I Leave Ephemeral Spirit was a haunting sequence of paintings and installations that reworked several images from Curtis’s book. One showed Eliza Fraser juxtaposed with votive candles, suggesting the sacral nature of her story for European Australians; another depicted her snagged in a rat trap, symbolizing the verminous role that the legend has played in the lives of the Kabi Kabi and in those of Aboriginal peoples generally.43
Ironically, Eliza Fraser herself did not benefit from Curtis’s nimble pen. There are unconfirmed claims that she was eventually forced into the ignominy of performing her story for a few coins in England’s fairgrounds. If so, she ended up as much a victim as the Kabi Kabi she slandered. As Fiona Foley’s use of Curtis’s book shows, his text remains the vehicle of the most toxic version of the myth, more than 150 years after it was first published. Such is the enduring influence of that sly London hack, who has much history to answer for.
4
BASTION
Joseph Jukes’s Epiphanies
THANKS IN PART TO JOHN CURTIS, cannibals were much on the mind of the British Admiralty in the spring of 1842, when it gave orders to the naval corvette the Fly to survey the northern end of the Great Barrier Reef and the surrounding waters and reefs of the Torres Strait. The Admiralty wanted particular attention paid to this area because so many British vessels trading in the South Seas or with India had come to grief trying to navigate the uncharted coral reefs and the strait’s perilous narrow entrances. Since the wreck in 1791 of the ship sent in search of the Bounty’s mutineers (the Pandora, under Captain Edwards), more than twenty further losses had been reported, but the real figure, which included scores of small trading schooners, was many times greater.1
The mounting public outcry in Britain and the Australian colonies over the “cannibalistic massacre” of those onboard the Charles Eaton gave the new mission particular urgency. In preparation for it, the officers of the Fly, which was captained by the experienced Scotsman Francis Blackwood, were made to read a series of gruesome tracts outlining “the treacherous conduct of the natives of the small islands in the Torres Strait.” The Admiralty evidently intended this exercise to sharpen the vigilance of the voyagers within this dangerous region; that it might also prejudice the officers in advance of the expedition apparently didn’t matter.2
One man, however, was determined to resist stereotyped presumptions about the Barrier Reef and its people—the ship’s thirty-one-year-old naturalist, Joseph Beete Jukes. Born into an austere but fair-minded Nonconformist family from Birmingham, Jukes had gone to Cambridge to study for a clerical career but been seduced by the extracurricular fascinations of geology. Giving up his clerical ambitions, he worked for a time as a traveling lecturer at Mechanics’ Institutes in the industrial Midlands, where teaching hardnosed workers turned him into a religious doubter and a political radical. All his life he longed for “a democratic party that … shall come in and sweep away all the relics and dregs of feudalism…, reduce the army and navy to a skeleton, remodel the law, the Church, and the whole system of government, abolish all but direct taxation, and … commence a new era in the world’s history.”3
A two-year stint in 1839–40 as a geological surveyor in Newfoundland gave him a love of the sea and a respect for the courage and resourcefulness of the Native Americans. If anything, when Jukes left England on the Fly for the Barrier Reef in April 1842, he had a marked prejudice in favor of indigenous peoples. “I have always joined in reprobating the causeless injuries sometimes inflicted by civilized, or quasi-civilized man, upon the wild tribes of savage life; and many atrocities have doubtless been committed in mere wantonness, and from brutality or indifference. I have always looked, too, with a favourable eye on what are called savages, and held a kind of preconceived sentimental affection for them, that I believe is not uncommon.”4
Actually, such affectionate feelings were much less common than Jukes realized. On May 13, 1843, soon after arriving in Australian waters, Jukes was exploring the estuary and hinterland of Wickham’s River at Cape Upstart, north of the Whitsunday Islands, with a couple of seamen and the ship’s artist. The latter, Harden Sidney Melville, went by the nickname “Griffin” and had become Jukes’s close shipboard friend. The group rowed a mile or so up the shoaling river channel, taking potshots at ducks and curlews, when around a dozen native men and women suddenly materialized on the north bank and began trotting toward them along the sandy river plain. Melville later wrote (using the third person for himself):
[T]he men came on, and Griffin will never forget that group of savages as they advanced … To compare a man to a mad dog seems odd … but that foremost savage, that black, brawny, knotty-limbed man-machine, running like an emu, and flinging up the sand with his indiarubber-like toes, foaming at the mouth, and howling, much resembled what was Griffin’s idea of a mad dog. His upper jaw was denuded of the two front incisors; his nose was transfixed by a kangaroo’s thigh-bone; the shaggy hair of his shock head was tied up into a knot with twisted native cord; his rugged limbs were covered with raised cicatrices; and his body was besmeared and begreased with filthy pigments. He shone in the sun like a piece of bright metal, and his feet came down with a heavy thud on the sand. As he ran he belched out “Ugh, ugh, ugh!” and then uttered a howl. His adornments were a fillet of grass across what claimed to be called a forehead (it was an eye-case, not a brain-case), a red smear of ochre inclosed his eyes and crossed his nose … He had a belt around his waist, a bunch of white cockatoo-feathers stuck in his hair, and carried an ugly “waddy” in his fist … Murderous-looking were all of them, with fierce, bloodshot eyes rolling wildly.
With the foam literally falling from their mouths on they came, leaped into the boat like gibbering apes, and commenced overhauling the sail, and the oars, and even the persons of the crew, uttering their outlandish jabber …5
Griffin and the sailors raised their muskets to fire, but to the young artist’s chagrin Jukes defused the situation with an uninhibited performance of clowning and dancing. Soon the warriors were laughing and imitating his buffoonery. Griffin was unimpressed: “it was noticeable,” he commented darkly, “that between the acts … the rogues showed the cruel instincts of the savage mind, to be developed so soon as the white man’s weakness had been discovered.”6
Where Griffin had seen foaming savages, Jukes described “tall, athletic men, bold and confident in their manners, with energetic gestures and loud voices.” In fact, he said, the armed warriors, whom they’d actually met a few days earlier, could hardly have been more genial: “We saluted our old friends by dancing, on which they began dancing, laughing, and singing, the others sitting still and looking on. As soon as we had dined we went ashore again, and our friends rushed down to meet us. Thomas [a young man who’d taken a shine to Jukes] came up, and embraced me several times, making a purring noise; and whenever a new face came up, he put his arm round me again, and spoke to him; introducing me, I suppose, as his particular friend. Ince, Melville, and I went with them along a path-way down the river, and both tribes followed us. They were very gentle in their manners and careful of us…”7
Interview with Natives at Wickhams River by Harden Sidney Melville. Published in Narrative of the Surveying Voyage of H.M.S. Fly by J. B. Jukes, 1847 (National Library of Australia)
True, a subsequent incident, just over a month later, did test the limits of Jukes’s tolerance. On June 25, the Fly anchored off Night Island near Cape Direction, south of the present-day Lockhart River. Some sailors from their sister survey ship, the schooner HMS Bramble, were filing down a nearby hill, having taken magnetic observations from the summit, when Jukes suddenly noticed a warrior creeping up behind the coxswain, his throwing stick hoisted ready to hurl a spear. Jukes pulled the trigger of his borrowed gun, but it misfired twice and he failed to avert the tragedy.
According to Griffin:
… poor Baily’s shriek of agony awakened the whole party to a knowledge of the murderous act. The savage, drawing himself u
p to his full height, exulted for a moment over the fiendish deed. The geologist, having recapped the piece, again pulled the trigger, and the charge exploded; but it was too late: a fatal destiny had demanded the sad sacrifice. The murderer escaped … Poor Baily, hapless victim of a barbarian’s spleen! It was a cruel fate. They broke the spear short off, for it could not be extracted. The barbed head had imbedded itself in one of the processes of the dorsal vertebra … The poor fellow lingered for a day and then died. Luckily the vessels lay too far off the coast to afford an opportunity of summary vengeance being taken on the kinsmen or countrymen of the murderer …8
Jukes himself admitted to feeling an outburst of “mixed rage and grief” against the perpetrator, as well as a suppressed impulse to exact vengeance on the whole tribe. He’d never before seen a death inflicted “in any kind of strife,” and he was shaken to the core. He was baffled, too, by the seeming irrationality of the act. Like Cook before him, and so many European travelers after, Jukes failed to associate this sudden display of Aboriginal hostility with the fact that the Fly’s sailors had just caught a swag of fish off the beaches of the clan’s estate without asking permission. Jukes’s anger over the incident lasted “many days or weeks after,” but it did eventually fade as he realized that all Aborigines could not be blamed for the act of one “cowardly” villain.9
* * *
Joseph Jukes, whom Griffin nicknamed “the geologist,” was officially charged with investigating the geological character of the Great Barrier Reef and the structure, origins, and behavior of reef-growing corals—the first scientist ever to be specifically assigned such a task.
The Reef: A Passionate History: The Great Barrier Reef from Captain Cook to Climate Change Page 9
