A Commonwealth of Thieves

by Thomas Keneally

  A visible sign of the compact was in the making. A brick house was built for Bennelong, as requested, on the eastern point of Sydney Cove, Tubowgulle. Bennelong had chosen the place himself, according to Tench. “Rather to please him, a brick house of twelve feet square was built for his use, and for that of his countrymen as might choose to reside in it, on a point of land fixed upon by himself.” He had got his shield too—it had been double-cased with tin and represented an exponential leap for Eora weaponry. Of Bennelong's new stature with both whites and Eora, Tench observed, “He had lately become a man of so much dignity and consequence, that it was not always easy to obtain his company.” The point chosen by him for his residence had significance—given its position at the head of the cove (where the Sydney Opera House now stands), it could be seen as a symbol of Eora title to the place. It was almost certainly seen that way by Bennelong, and all Barangaroo's warnings went for nothing.

  twenty-two

  BY MID-1790, COLLINS would write that native women would barter sex with convicts for a loaf of bread, a blanket, or a shirt. “Several girls who were protected in the settlement had not any objection to passing the night on board of ships.” They would try to conceal the gifts given them by sailors, thus, said Collins, learning shame. Europeans seemed both attracted and repelled by the indigenous women—there were complaints about the odour of their flesh, anointed with fish oils to drive off insects. Yet even Arthur Phillip was not immune from their allure. One of the native women, noted Phillip, had “pleasing features … had she been in a European settlement, no one would have doubted her being a Mulatto Jewess.”

  The natives shared with the British lower classes a full-blown willingness to beat their wives, although spirited women like Barangaroo hit back, giving Bennelong a severe gash on the forehead to go with his ritual wounds. Outside his hut at Tubowgulle, Bennelong would severely beat Barangaroo for breaking a fishing spear and a woomera, or throwing stick, and she needed to be taken to White's hospital across the stream for sutures.

  Phillip observed a tender moment between Bennelong and Barangaroo when she complained of a pain in the belly. “I went to the fire and sat down with her husband who, notwithstanding his beating her occasionally, seemed to express great sorrow on seeing her ill, and after blowing on his hand, he warmed it, and then applied it to the part affected, beginning at the same time a song, which was probably calculated for the occasion.” A bystander offered him a piece of flannel he could use to make his hand warm. “He continued his song, always keeping his mouth very close to the part affected, and frequently stopping to blow on it, making a noise after blowing in imitation of the barking of a dog.” In the end they sent for the surgeon, who treated her with tincture of rhubarb, which worked to give her relief.

  But the standing of Bennelong, at least in Captain Tench's view, suffered further damage from his behaviour towards his second and younger wife, Karubarabulu, the young woman from the north side of Botany Bay who, despite the earlier battles over her, had now come to live at Tubowgulle. One day in November, Bennelong came to the governor's residence and presented himself to Phillip. Holding a hatchet, and trying out the sharpness of it, he told Phillip that he intended to put Karubarabulu to death immediately. Bennelong believed Karubarabulu had committed adultery, which 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. But Phillip was alarmed enough to take his secretary, Captain Collins, and Sergeant Scott, the orderly, with him to observe proceedings. On the road from Government House down to Tubowgulle, Bennelong continued to speak 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 themselves relatively comfortable with the idea of hitting errant women with walking sticks.

  Karubarabulu was seated at the communal fire outside the hut with the 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, a sign that they considered Bennelong entitled to his vengeance. Phillip and the officers noticed that the more they restrained Bennelong, the more the other male Aborigines present 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 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 pleaded that he might be allowed to accompany her so that he also would be away from Bennelong's rage. “She is now my property,” Bennelong told Tench. “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.” He told the governor that he would follow her 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 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 Bennelong 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 White, outraged by the damage he had done to Karubarabulu, would assassinate him by night.

  The argument was sorted out, however, and soon he 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, across the barrier of racial incomprehension, entertained and tolerated 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 window, even grabbing some of Bennelong's spears to launch at the offender, 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 anymore and was now “very good.” Phillip reluctantly let her go and looked down from his hill towards Tubowgulle, the headland where Bennelong's hut lay, outside which fires burned and from which cries and conversation and arguments could again be heard. All violent domestic quarrels have their aspects of dark comedy and excess, and to what extent this brawl was characteristic of native society is hard to fathom.

  The behaviour of the governor's chief huntsman, John McEntire, had not been changed by Phillip's wounding, and so the long list of infringements of which he was guilty in Eora eyes, and in which he continued, had not been absolved. 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.

  Phillip would later observe an initiation ceremony during which native elders crawled on their hands and knees with a stick stuck through a waistband and lying across their backs like the tail of a native dog. When McEntire turned and shot the dingo dead, he was assuming the role of an initiated man, and another crime was added to the mortal list.

  Preparations were made amongst the Eora for his punishment. For Phillip was amazed to observe that Bennelong entertained at his hut for some nights the man name
d Pemulwuy who he had previously told Phillip and others was his enemy. Near the shores of Botany Bay Bennelong had fought a ritual battle with the father of a desirable girl, and although he claimed to have won the contest, his passions ran high against Pemulwuy, the girl's kinsman, who must have taken some part that annoyed Bennelong. The woman was Karubarabulu—a Bediagal kins-woman of Pemulwuy—and Bennelong had desired to take her as a second wife.

  Men like Pemulwuy became carradhys, or as one scholar puts it, “Aboriginal men of high degree,” by being selected in childhood for their piercing, flecked eyes and precocious air of authority. Throughout eastern Australia there are 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 cult heroes and sky beings, Gulambre or 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. In all this, as in Western rites of preparation for the priesthood, fasting and endurance and time spent alone before the candidate went through initiations 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 the chants that accompanied its application 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 Aboriginals.

  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. But it was McEntire's lifeblood Pemulwuy would apply himself to.

  On 9 December, a sergeant of marines took three convict huntsmen, including McEntire, down to the north arm of Botany Bay to shoot game. They settled down in a hide of boughs to wait for the kangaroos to emerge at dusk. 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 knew Pemulwuy from earlier expeditions. The sergeant and the other convicts noticed that “he had been lately among us” as “was evidenced from his being newly shaved.” 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. As McEntire advanced to greet him, Pemulwuy retreated a little, jumped on a fallen log, and with great sudden energy 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 the other 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 away at Parramatta 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, for example, and McEntire. Phillip detailed a sentry to wake Captain Watkin Tench, and as Tench walked up the hill 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, battle was close.

  He met a grimly and uncharacteristically enraged Phillip, who instructed Watkin to lead a punitive party of armed marines. Excited by the accounts of the two convicts and sergeant who had been with McEntire, 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 for the purpose. But teased and annoyed by the ambiguity of native manners, Phillip argued that no signal “of amity or invitation” should be made to the natives, and if made by any native was to be ignored.

  In explaining his tough policy, Phillip told Tench that since the British had arrived seventeen people had been killed or wounded by the natives, and he looked upon the Bediagal clan, who lived on the north side of Botany Bay, as the principal aggressors. Phillip was convinced the natives did not fear death individually, but what they particularly dreaded 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,’ he added, ‘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.’” He complained that Bennelong and Colby had promised to bring in Pemulwuy, but they had failed to do so and were now engaged on other tasks. Bennelong, “instead of directing his steps to Botany Bay, crossed the harbour in his canoe, in order to draw the fore-teeth of some of the young men.”

  Indeed, for the sometimes hated Cameraigal, Bennelong was now acting the part of distinguished visitor for an initiation ceremony. As for Colby, he had gone off in his canoe and was “loitering about the look-out house” on South Head. “I am resolved to execute the prisoners who may be brought in,” said Phillip, “in the most public and exemplary manner, in the presence of as many of their countrymen as can be collected, after having explained the cause of such punishment, and my fixed determination to repeat it, whenever any future breach of good conduct on their side shall render it necessary.”

  The governor at this point asked Watkin for his opinion, 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 occur, 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. The expedition was to set out at 4 a.m. on the humid morning of 14 December. Tench included the New South Wales Corps's urbane Captain Hill in the group. He had also chosen Lieutenants Pouldon of the marines and Dawes, the astronomer.

  Lieutenant Dawes was conscience-stricken about the objectives of the expedition and spoke with the Reverend Johnson about its morality. Even though in Chesapeake Bay he had been wounded by the French in alliance with the revolutionary Americans, Dawes saw himself above all as a student of people, a surveyor of surfaces and skies, not as a combat soldier. He had spent a great deal of time putting together his dictionary of the Eora, who liked him greatly. Above all, he admired Patyegarang, an Aboriginal girl of about fifteen 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 that he was either 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. And Matigarabangun naigaba, we shall sleep separate. Nyimang candle, Mr. D. Put out the candle, Mr. Dawes.

  It was Patyegarang who inter
preted the motives of her people to Dawes. A white man had been wounded some days before in 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 men angry? Inyan ngalwi. Because the white men settled here. And then, further, said Patyegarang, Gunin, the guns.

  These exchanges must have played a large part in Dawes's refusal to hunt the natives. On the day the expedition was ordered, he wrote a letter to his superior officer, Captain James Campbell, in which he refused to take part in the expedition. Dawes was an officer who had corresponded with William Wilberforce, renowned leader of the campaign against slavery, and the objectives of this mission were abhorrent to him. Campbell could not persuade Dawes to change his mind and the two of them brought the letter to Phillip, who “took pains to point out the consequences of his being put under arrest.” Phillip told Dawes he was guilty of “unofficerlike behaviour” and threatened him with a court-martial. 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.