by Jan Morris
These dispiriting experiences, if they no longer illustrate my own feelings about the Aborigines, probably still confirm the views of most Sydneysiders – the indigenes are predictably reviled by the more racialist of the whites, and widely thought to be beyond redemption. But many citizens are sympathetic to their causes, and I imagine that few people nowadays would deny the unfairness of their destiny.
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The first words the Europeans ever heard uttered by the Sydney Aborigines were Warra! Warra!, which meant ‘Go away’. Cook himself said that all the natives apparently wanted from his men was their immediate departure. They viewed the goings-on of the new arrivals first with fear (they thought they might be devils), then with superstition (they thought they might be the ghosts of their own ancestors), then with curiosity (seeing them swarm up the riggings of their ships, they thought they might be giant possums), then with apparent indifference (David Collins, of the First Fleet, says that during the first six weeks of the settlement only two Aborigines ever bothered to visit the camp), and finally with mingled responses of opportunism, disillusionment and hostility (Phillip himself was once speared by an Aborigine, and for years there was sporadic fighting in the countryside around). The Iora seem to have behaved rather like cats, fading in and out of view, sometimes pretending not to notice events, sometimes ingratiatingly participating, sometimes scratching and spitting.
At first the British called them Indians, and thought them hardly more than animals. They seemed to have no abstract ideas. They apparently had no notion of property. They could not weave. They had never put a sail on a boat, let alone a wheel on a wagon. They had never built a hut. Their one attempt at agriculture was the cultivation of yams. They lived by hunting, by scraping shellfish off the rocks and by the most elementary methods of fishing. They went stark naked, and were smeared all over with rancid fish oil. ‘In no part of my voyages,’ wrote the botanist Joseph Cavanilles, who went to Sydney with a Spanish expedition in 1793, ‘have I seen our nature more degraded, or individuals more ugly or savage.’
Could they possibly have souls? More improbable still, could they seriously be considered, now that the Union Jack flew above their hunting-grounds and oyster-beds, to be British subjects? The convicts by and large thought not, robbing and violating the Iora without much compunction. The more imaginative of the officers recognized human qualities in them, Spartan qualities in particular, and often befriended them. There was a time, according to Captain John Hunter of HMS Sirius, when ‘every gentleman’s house was now become a resting or sleeping place for some of them every night’, and the commander of the 1793 Spanish expedition, Alessandro Malaspina, reported fastidiously that he and his officers had been guests at the same table with Aboriginal men and women ‘entirely naked and disgustingly filthy’. Watkin Tench recorded with admiration a moment when an Aboriginal woman, attending the flogging of a convict who had robbed her, broke into tears at the sight of the terrible punishment, while another woman grabbed a stick to threaten the scourger. Richard Johnson the chaplain gave his daughter, born in Sydney in 1790, the Aboriginal name of Milbah, and George Worgan, surgeon of the Sirius, summed up his own views on the natives thus: ‘active, volatile, unoffending, merry, funny, laughing, good-natured, nasty, dirty …’1
Governor Phillip’s attitudes to the Aborigines were ambiguous. Bloodthirstily though he responded when they killed his servant, he forbade retaliation when he was speared himself, and gave Manly its name in tribute to what he called the Aborigines’ ‘confident and manly bearing’. He had three tribal males kidnapped and brought to live at Government House, as he might have trapped a few kangaroos as pets. One died of smallpox, one escaped, but the third, Bennelong, became a popular member of the household and a favourite of the Governor, who built a hut for him on the point – Bennelong Point – where the Opera House now stands, and later took him on a protracted visit to England.
An unlimited supply of convict labour meant that the Aborigines were not needed as workers or servants, as indigenes generally were elsewhere in the British Empire. Nor did they pose much threat or competition to the infant colony. They could within reason be indulged. Macquarie settled sixteen families at South Head, vainly trying to make agriculturists of them, and he instituted an annual feast and corroboree at Parramatta. John Macarthur, perhaps imagining himself another Duke of Argyll, dressed some of them up in scarlet shirts, blue trousers and yellow neck-cloths, and paraded them as a private bodyguard.
Whether out of naïveté or opportunism, some of the Iora played along with these attitudes, and became well-known characters of early Sydney. A few achieved a sort of official status, and wore crescent-shaped brass breastplates as tribal representatives. The most assertive of them was Bungaree, nicknamed the King of Sydney, who habitually met ships coming into harbour dressed in a cocked hat and an admiral’s jacket, but shirtless and barefooted. Bungaree circumnavigated Australia as interpreter to the navigator Matthew Flinders in 1802, and was chosen by Macquarie to preside over the South Head farm village, together with his wives Boatman, Broomstick, Onion, Pincher and the paramount Queen Gooseberry. In his prime Bungaree was not only merry, but also dignified, and he was painted by many artists. Every Governor knew and greeted him, and Admiral Sir James Brisbane, RN, gave him that cocked hat and jacket. When he died, in 1832, his obituary occupied a full page in the Gazette.
But if he died a celebrity, he died ravaged and defeated – an alcoholic buffoon, slung around with trumpery emblems of mock-authority, greeted by all those Governors and Admirals not with real respect, but with amused condescension. One of his later portraits shows him with a basket of beer bottles at his side; the last, by the Frenchman Charles Rodius, presents a face tragically sunken, degraded and reproachful, all its humour gone. In theory, in those early years, Government policy aimed at non-interference in native affairs – royal instructions to Governors said there must be ‘no unnecessary interruption in the exercise of their several occupations’. In practice European civilization fatally interrupted all the occupations of the Iora. Its good aspects, hard enough to detect anyway in early Sydney, had little effect upon them, while its evil cruelly rotted them. Even Phillip’s friend Bennelong, having been lionized as a Noble Savage in England, returned to Sydney to die rum-soaked in 1813.
They had no chance – from the very first landing in Sydney Cove they were probably outnumbered by the newcomers, and they had no means of countering what Robert Hughes has called ‘the malignant gravitational field’ of the penal colony. How could one reconcile the mores of a settlement largely of thieves with the customs of a people who left their canoes lying around for anyone to take? Early representations of the Iora, virile and interesting in the foregrounds of watercolours, presently gave way to more contemptuous images: of drunken men, bloated degraded women, pot-bellied children, brawling, swigging liquor at street corners and begging from passers-by. Squabbles with the Europeans soon became more common, as the tribespeople came to seem less quaint and more irritating, and the Europeans turned out to be not ancestral spirits or possums, but bullying land-grabbers. Smallpox was endemic among the Iora, it seems, before the Europeans arrived; cholera, influenza and venereal diseases further decimated them. Their traditions were disregarded, their pride was destroyed, and the last successors of the Bennelongs and the Bungarees, dressed up still in the frayed remnants of their fineries, went ruined to their graves. Queen Gooseberry was last heard of begging opposite the Emu Inn in George Street, and by 1857 a man who habitually sat outside the house of the Speaker of the legislative Assembly could be pointed out as the very last survivor of the Sydney tribes; people used to throw him coins, as they passed by in their carriages.
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‘Well Mister,’ the last of the original Botany Bay Aborigines told an official investigator, ‘all black-fella gone! All this my country! Pretty place, Botany! Little piccaninny, I run about here. Plenty black-fellow then; corroboree; great fight; all canoe about. Only me left now!’<
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Sydney has never been without its Aborigines, because there has always been a steady coming and going of black people from elsewhere; but paradoxically they have become the one group of Sydneysiders who do not, like Lawrence’s workmen, look around the city as though they own it. The city has generally considered them unimprovable nuisances – the inn-sign of a pub called The Labour in Vain used to show a white man vainly scrubbing an Aborigine in a bucket of soap. In 1859 the writer F. Fowler described a group of them coming into town on the steamer from Newcastle, nearly all drank, and tumbling about the boat ‘like so many hogs’; the women gave intoxicated boxing displays while the men went around begging for money. By the 1880s black families were directed into an official camp at Circular Quay, where they were given Government rations to keep them off the streets; the compound became a spectacle of entertainment for the white people of Sydney, who went down there in their hundreds to gape at the prostitutes, the drunks and the brawlers. Then in 1895 an Aboriginal reserve was set up on the seashore at La Perouse, far from the city centre. Methodist missionaries worked hard to make Christians of its residents;1 many of its young girls went away as indentured house servants under the auspices of the State Aboriginal Protection Board; but the Aborigines did for a time re-establish an element of tribal tradition down there, living by fishing and by the desultory practice of crafts – as was reported in later years, a man might make one boomerang one day, three the next, two the day after and then take the rest of the week off. La Perouse also became in time a popular afternoon’s outing for Sydney people. The Aborigines sold them tea-sets or slippers ornamented with shells, gave them boomerang displays and mystified them with their ability to identify incoming shoals of fish by species: ‘mullet, bream, blackfish’, spotters would sing out from the headland above, and sure enough, when the boats came back with their catchy mullet, bream or blackfish were what they had caught.
The official reserve came to an end in 1931, but the Aborigines remained, living first in shacks on the beach, then in fibro houses built for them by the State, and many Sydney people of a certain age remember family housemaids from La Perouse. Today people still go out to ‘La Per’ on a Saturday afternoon to buy wooden and shell trinkets, to watch the young men throw their boomerangs, and to see the Snake Man tip his assorted reptiles out of their sacks in the sunshine, as his father tipped them out before him. By now few of the residents are full-blooded Aborigines, and the streets in which they live, where I saw the man knocked out, have a gypsy-like air to them. Windows are often covered in blankets or rugs, scavenging dogs lope here and there, rubbish blows down the sidewalks. Nevertheless if there is a traditional centre of native life in Sydney, a place where you may just imagine a link with the song-lines and the rites of initiation, it is down there on the shores of Botany Bay, in the lee of the oil refineries, windy, sandy and raw.
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Aboriginal consciousness of a more contemporary kind is concentrated in Redfern, whose name has become a metaphor for black activism in Sydney. There is no claiming that the black part of Redfern is very reassuring. Parts of the suburb are fast being gentrified, but the Aborigines’ patch of it looks like a disaster area – like a bomb site, or a no-go area of Northern Ireland. In a couple of dilapidated streets, the doors of their houses opening directly into rutted potholed roadways, a community that appears to be half-stoned, or half-drank, stares blankly at the passer-by. Some of the residents are more white than black, some more black than white, but most are classed as Aborigines, and upon them is concentrated the distrust and dislike of Sydney’s racist whites. A palpable sense of morose resentment hangs upon the air, heightened by the fact that every now and then the police raid the district in search of drags, stolen property or wanted criminals.
For half a century this has been a haven for Aboriginal drifters, but more recently it has also been the symbolic focus of a black revival movement. The world has come to recognize that there was always more to the Australian Aborigines than met the western eye, and for myself I have come to think of them, as I have come to think of Sydney itself, in an entirely new way. A proper supplement to a visit to Redfern is a trip out to the West Head, not far from that shimmering marina at Akuna Bay, to see some Aboriginal drawings on a rock there. Nobody knows for sure how old these are, but they seem to have sprung out of a society marvellously confident and exuberant. High above the sea in a clearing in the bush, they are a vivacious gallery of portraits animal and human, not at all like the patternings and eerie X-ray pictures we have come to expect of Aboriginal art. Wallabies bound, fishes squirm, birds flap, and a triumphant human figure in a tufted headdress holds a big fish in one hand, a boomerang in the other. Nothing could be further from the image of Bungaree with that wretched breastplate slung around his neck.
We realize now that, far from being the hapless incompetents the first settlers thought them, the Iora were perfectly adapted to their environment. They were superb hunters, and they had a masterly knowledge of herbal medicines and wild foods: scholars have listed eleven kinds of shellfish, thirty-two kinds of fish and seventy-four plants Aborigines ate in the Sydney region then, not to mention crustaceans, reptiles, marsupials of many kinds, innumerable birds, platypuses, grubs and bats.1 Charles Darwin, meeting a party of tribespeople in 1836, thought they showed ‘wonderful sagacity’ in the arts of survival in the bush.2 Their boats, dismissed by Lieutenant Bradley, RN, as by far the worst canoes he had ever seen or heard of, could be made in a single day, and even the Lieutenant had to admit they were wonderfully manoeuvrable. What the settlers thought of as terrible wilderness was friendly and familiar territory to the Aborigines, and it was largely by using old tribal tracks that the Europeans found their way out of the Sydney beach-head into the Australian interior. Only now are we beginning to appreciate the subtlety of the Aborigines’ spiritual ideas, their conception of land as possessor rather than possessed, their visionary grasp of the relationships between place, man and the rest of nature – the ‘incomprehensible ancient shine’ that Lawrence detected in the Aboriginal eye.
The Sydney Aborigines themselves, so bludgeoned by destiny, seem gradually to have re-awakened to a sense of their own worth. In 1938 the La Perouse community held a Day of Mourning to protest against 150 years of colonization. In 1973, when the Opera House was ceremonially opened on Bennelong Point, at the height of the festivities an Aboriginal actor appeared dramatically at the apex of the building to represent the spirit of poor Bennelong himself. In 1988, when Sydney celebrated its bicentenary, a popular graffito said INVASION DAY, 1788, and a convoy of Freedom Buses brought protesting Aborigines into town. Today, as I have only belatedly discovered, one can meet in Sydney some formidably articulate, talented and well-read blacks, confined to no ghetto, half-castes probably more often than not, but fiercely proud of their Aboriginal origins and traditions.
The Aborigines’ one claim to respect used to be the all-too-often repeated reminder that they had lived in Australia for 40,000 years, but now they are liable to speak in very different tones. They speak of secret tribal initiations; they tell tales of long-forgotten battles against the British; legends of fearless guerrilla leaders feed the Aboriginal confidence, and convince the activists that they are descended not from passive primitives, but from resistance heroes. The status of the Australian Aborigines is beyond the power of Sydney, and beyond the scope of a book about this city, but more and more I have come to feel that their presence here in some way charges the place; and finding myself greatly moved one evening during the performance of an Aborigine play, I recognized that in them above all was personified Sydney’s nagging suggestion of transience or yearning – its one glimpse of epiphany.
Yet there are very few of them – perhaps 20,000 in all – and they do not often show. To the stranger their presence is mostly embodied in memory: in place names like Allawah, Coogie or Parramatta;1 in rock carvings here and there around the harbour, often so worn by time as to be almost invisible except at sunrise
or sunset; in the reputations of a few long-dead collaborators, Bennelong, Bungaree or Jacky-Jacky, who is honoured in an inscription in St James’s Church as having ‘tended his leader Edmund Besley Court Kennedy during his fight against aborigines in 1848’; in the reputations of a boxer or two – there is actually a memorial to the most famous of them, Dave Sands, in the suburb of Glebe.
They seldom appear on the downtown streets. Rumour says that property developers are trying to force them even out of Redfern, and indeed their quarter there is so small, so ramshackle, so apparently irrelevant to the affairs of the city, that I would not be in the least surprised, when I go there another time, to find it all vanished. Occasional drunks and layabouts haunt the city’s more raffish quarters; around the harbour one sometimes sees the distant figures of black fishermen, scrambling over the rocks with strings of dangling bream, or poised statuesque at the water’s edge. Some Sydney people would not mourn if even these fragile reminders were expunged. If the Aborigines are a blot on the conscience to many citizens of the city, to others they are just a pain in the neck. ‘The only Aborigines I ever see are the ones who hang about King’s Cross,’ one gently brought-up Sydney lady told me, ‘and I hate them.’
3. Minorities
Aborigines apart, when you think of Sydneysiders you probably think first of white (or brownish) males – the image of this city is overwhelmingly masculine and European, and its attitudes are endemically mass attitudes. But of course it is never unanimous really, still less totally homogenized, and powerful social minorities stand beyond the civic stereotypes.
Demographically Sydney’s women may not be a minority, but historically, here as everywhere, they have formed an underclass. International legend has it indeed that Sydney women live in a permanently downtrodden state. Perhaps they did in the days when the mateship cult was at its apogee, between the World Wars, and when a woman’s wage was seldom more than half a man’s. Tacitly or explicitly the Sydney of those days, Slessor’s bunch-of-bananas, tram-ride Sydney, excluded women from most of its favourite public pursuits – drinking in pubs, watching cricket, playing rugby, reminiscing in servicemen’s clubs, life-saving on the beach – except in ancillary or decorative roles. Even when I first knew Sydney, the segregation of the sexes was very apparent women still being confined to ladies’ lounges in most pubs, and banished to the far end of the room at many social functions. A Sydney symptom that struck strangers then was the feminine habit of ending almost every phrase with a doubtfully interrogative inflection, as though anything a woman said was tentative, possibly rather foolish and vulnerable to mockery. Latin has an interrogative, nonne, which expects the answer yes: Sydney women’s English most decidedly expected the answer no.
