A Commonwealth of Thieves

by Thomas Keneally

  Three sergeants and forty privates made up the rank and file of this 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 daylight 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. “A contest between heavy-armed Europeans,” said one commentator, “and naked unencumbered Indians, was too unequal to last long.”

  Phillip took comfort from the fact that some local natives at the hospital already knew the name of the killer, Pemulwuy, and were upset to see McEntire in this condition. Phillip read their sympathy as unconditional, whereas they might have felt awed to find themselves in the presence of a walking dead man.

  After Tench's military expedition set out, the governor had tried to stop Colby going to Botany Bay, offering him a blanket, a hatchet, a jacket to distract him. On top of that, he 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 5 pounds 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. In the native gunyas or huts, they found nothing except fishing spears, fizgigs, which they left untouched. Some canoes were seen and possibly fired on, because we know that 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 300 yards from land. Since it was not practicable at that distance to shoot him or seize him, Tench decided to ignore him. But the native himself did not ignore the party. He 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 wanted familiarity and unconcern.” In theory, his head 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 reenacted for them the agony and cries of the woman. In fact, he was having exactly the blunting effect on the expedition he probably wanted to have. The longer he talked and used his dramatic tricks, the harder it became for them to consider killing him.

  Overnight he vanished. The next day the British party resumed their dispirited march and camped at three in the afternoon by a freshwater swamp: “after a day of severe fatigue, to pass a nice night of restless inquietude, when weariness is denied repose by swarms of mosquitoes and sandflies.” Fortunately for Tench and the other soldiers, the mosquitoes of New South Wales carried neither malaria nor yellow fever. But the next day, “after wading breast-high through two arms of the sea, as broad as the Thames at Westminster,” they were glad to find themselves at 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, and he did not seem to have blamed Tench for failure, since, wrote Watkin, “the ‘painful pre-eminence’ again devolved on me.” This time the party pretended they were setting off for Broken Bay to punish Willemering. Since the moon was full, they would move by night, to avoid the heat of the day. Crossing the broad estuaries of Cook's 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, 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; and just after, Ensign Prentice and I felt ourselves in a similar predicament close together. ‘I find it impossible to move; I am sinking,’ resounded on every side.” At length the soldiers not yet embarked on the creek cut boughs of trees and threw them to the men that were stuck, but it took half an hour to drag some out. 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 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 night. The struggle back exhausted many soldiers, their physical condition undermined by dietary deficiencies. They made another attack on the village in the following small hours, with the same results, and so marched back to Sydney, relieved at their own failure.

  Meanwhile, the wounded Irish gamekeeper was still well enough to walk around the hospital. Though many had spoken to McEntire about the appropriateness of openly confessing any injuries he had done the natives, just in case he needed soon to face God, “he steadily denied … having ever fired at them but once, and then only in defence of his own life, which he thought in danger.” And yet those Eora who watched from the fringes of bush or were permitted in the town despite the edict against it knew that he was a walking dead man. He died quite suddenly on 20 January. The surgeons did an autopsy and found pieces of stone and shells inside the left lobe of the lung. Along with the magic which had been sung into them, they had contributed to the lung's collapse.

  After missing all the drama of the two expeditions, Bennelong had by now returned to Sydney with Barangaroo from Cameraigal country across the harbour. He had been asked to officiate at certain ceremonies there—knocking out the front teeth of initiates and raising various scars on the skin of the young men. Phillip saw that Barangaroo's body was exceptionally painted to mark the ritual importance of herself and her husband, red ochre colouring her cheeks, nose, upper lip, and small of the back, while dots of white clay spotted the skin under her eyes. Bennelong and Barangaroo proudly wore crowns of rushes and reed bands around their arms. Barangaroo was after all a Cameraigal woman, and had returned to her people with her distinguished husband to be made a fuss of. Bennelong showed Phillip a throwing stick which had been specially designed to remove the teeth of the initiates. Two friends of Governor Phillip were amongst their number: the youth named Yemmerrawanne and another youth who had lived at Governor Phillip's house, probably Ballooderry (whose name meant “leather-jacket,” a type of fish). Each had had a snake-like black streak painted on his chest, and his front tooth knocked out. In fact, Yemmerrawanne had lost a piece of his jawbone along with his incisor.

  The removal of a tooth, the upper incisor, was a rite which ancient skulls recovered throughout Australia would prove to be millen
nia-old. In Collin's journal, the preparations for the knocking out of a tooth are both illustrated and graphically described. The elders danced until one of them fell suddenly to the ground, seemingly in a state of agony. The other elders continued dancing, singing loudly while one or more beat the fallen one on the back until a bone was produced from his mouth and he was free of his pain. This bone chisel would be used on one of the initiates, who thus believed it to have come from the elder's body. Then one by one the other senior men threw themselves on the ground in this manner, and in each case a bone to be used the following day to remove an initiate's tooth was produced.

  For the ceremony, the young initiate, surrounded by spear- and shield-carrying elders, was seated on a kneeling relative's shoulders and the tooth was extracted by a man holding a chisel of bone in his left hand and a striking stone in his right. Collins acquired the name for this tooth-excising ceremony—erah-ba-diang, jaw-hurting. Amongst all the names initiated men carried, some too secret to be uttered to the Europeans, there was added after this ceremony the title kebarrah, a man whose teeth had been knocked out by a rock. The associated words, gibber or kibber, meaning a stone, had already been picked up by the English speakers of New South Wales. Another word which would long survive in Australian English was corroboree, which came from the Eora carabbara or carribere, the ritual involving singing and dancing.

  “Full of seeming confusion, yet regular and systematic,” Watkin Tench wrote of corroboree, “their wild gesticulations, and frantic distortions of body, are calculated rather to terrify, than delight, a spectator. These dances consist of short parts, or acts, accompanied with frequent vociferations, and a kind of hissing or whizzing noise; they commonly end with a loud rapid shout, and after a short respite, are renewed.” Bodies were decorated with white for the dance, and there were waving lines from head to foot, crossbars, spirals, or zebra-type stripes. The eyes were often surrounded by large white circles. There were occasional dances of romance as well—Nanbaree and Abaroo performed one for Phillip and the officers.

  Corroboree was an exultant experience and Bennelong returned to Sydney full of the exhilaration of the recent Cameraigal ceremonies. He cheerily told Governor Phillip that he had met Willemering there. In Bennelong's mind this was no more remarkable than it would be to a European to mention that he had met a given judge socially. But to Phillip it seemed another instance of unreliability in Bennelong.

  When Bennelong said good-bye and moved down the slope with Barangaroo and some of his clansmen to his hut at Tubowgulle, his younger wife, Karubarabulu, again left the shelter of Government house, stripping off her European gown, keeping only her nightcap because her head had been shaven, to take residence at Bennelong's house.

  An incident was about to occur which came close to convincing Bennelong to sever his association with Phillip, his name-swapper. Though there were no more Botany Bay military expeditions, after Christmas a raid was made by some natives who dug and stole potatoes—the natives called them tarra, teeth—near Lieutenant Dawes's hut. One of the Eora threw his fishing spear at a convict trying to scare the marauders away and wounded him. Led by Phillip, a small party went chasing the potato thieves, and two of them were found sitting with women by a fire. One threw a club, which the marines thought a spear, and three muskets opened fire. Both men fled, and the two women were brought in, slept the night at Government House, and left well fed the following morning.

  One of the two natives fired at was wounded. A surgical party led by White and accompanied by some Sydney Cove natives went looking for him and found him lying dead next to a fire. Bark had been placed around his neck, a screen of grass and ferns covered his face, and a tree branch stripped of bark formed an arch over his body. He was covered in green boughs except for one leg. The musket ball had gone through his shoulder and cut the sub-clavian artery. He had bled to death. None of the Eora who went with the surgeon to look for him would go near him, for fear that the mawm spirit in him, the spirit of shock or mortal envy, would overtake them.

  Bennelong was angry that death had been the punishment for the minor crime of stealing potatoes. At Government House he was plied with food, but refused to touch anything. Besides, the fruits of the earth were communally owned by his people, and here were the interlopers making a sop or a bribe out of them.

  Later, Bennelong appeared at the head of a group of several warriors in a cove where one of the fishing boats was working, and took the fish while threatening the unarmed convicts and soldiers that if they resisted he would spear them. When he next saw Phillip, the governor asked an armed guard into the room during a session in which Bennelong passionately argued the case for taking the fish. Bennelong saw as justice what Phillip saw as robbery. When confronted with two of the whites who had seen him in the boats, Bennelong launched into a rambling, insolent protest, “burst into fury, and demanded who had killed Bangai [the dead Aborigine].” Then Bennelong walked out on Phillip, and as he passed the wheelwright shop in the yard, he picked up an iron hatchet and disappeared with it.

  Amongst the population of Sydney Cove was an anonymous painter who produced a striking watercolour portrait of Bennelong wearing white paint while angry and mourning the news of Bangai. Both Phillip and Bennelong had now become exceptionally enraged over their dead. Phillip gave further orders that no boat should leave Sydney Cove unless it carried arms, and forbade the natives to go to the western point of the cove, where the crime of potato-stealing had occurred.

  But even this breakdown of their relationship did not prevent the amiable Bennelong from stopping fishing boats to ask them how Phillip was, and to find out if the governor still intended to shoot him. On a personal level, Phillip refused Bennelong entry to Government House and placed him on the same level as the other natives.

  Captain Collins had a clear grasp of the policy of “sanguinary punishments” by the natives, for “we had not yet been able to reconcile the natives to the deprivation of those parts of this harbour which we occupied. While they entertained the idea of our having dispossessed them of their residences, they must always consider us as enemies; and upon this principle, they made a point of attacking the white people whenever opportunity and safety concurred.”

  twenty-three

  WHEN LIEUTENANT BALL of the Supply had been in Batavia in 1790, gathering supplies and sending Lieutenant King on his way to Whitehall on a Dutch ship, he had chartered a snow, a small, squarerigged ship which carried an additional sprit-sail mast aft of the main-mast, to bring further supplies to Sydney. Sailing in Supply's wake, the snow Waaksamheyd (Wakefulness), of about 300 tons, under the Dutch master Detmer Smith, lost sixteen of her Malay crew along the way from fevers that had been incubating in them as they left Batavia. A young British midshipman who travelled on the snow as Ball's representative was in a shockingly skeletal and fever-ridden condition when landed from Waaksamheyd in Sydney in December 1790. No one was surprised, given Batavia's repute as an unhealthy place. The snow also brought the news that the sick crew members Lieutenant Ball had left at that port as too ill to safely sail back to Sydney Cove had all died except one. As Tench eloquently wrote, “Death, to a man who has resided in Batavia, is too familiar an object to excite either terror or regret.”

  The snow brought with it a cargo of rice and some beef, pork, flour, and sugar as well. By an arrangement not uncommon in food distribution to this day, the British were willing to lose 5 pounds in 100 of the rice, but after that deduction was made there was a nearly 43,000-pound deficiency in the rice Detmer Smith landed. Smith had rice and flour aboard which he claimed was his own, and then proceeded to sell to the commissary in return for money or butter.

  At some stage Phillip would decide that despite Detmer Smith's chicanery, this would be a good ship to contract for taking the officers and ship's company of the Sirius back to England for the pro forma courtmartial which always followed the loss of a British naval vessel. Stranded Captain Hunter, fetched back with his crew by the Supply
from Norfolk Island in the new year of 1791, did not think the Dutch snow was suitable, “for, anxious as I was to reach England as soon as possible, I should with much patience rather awaited the arrival of an English ship, than to have embarked under the direction, or at the disposal, of the foreigner.” Phillip, too, found dealing with Detmer Smith very hard, believing him impertinent, perverse, and crass. “The frantic, extravagant behaviour of the master of her, for a long time frustrated the conclusion of a contract. He was so totally lost to a sense of reason and propriety, as to ask for £11 per ton, monthly, for her use.”

  To pressure Phillip, Smith made as if to sail with Waaksamheyd, but merely dropped downharbour to bushy Camp Cove and waited. At last a contract was achieved, and Hunter and the crew of Sirius boarded the Dutch vessel. Not all the crew would travel—perhaps Bosun Brooks and Mrs. Deborah Brooks, who had earlier enchanted Captain Phillip, remained in Sydney, though there is no evidence either way. But it was above all upon the officers that the duty lay of presenting themselves to the Admiralty and facing courtmartial for the loss of Sirius.

  Phillip wrote to the Home Secretary by way of the Dutch snow with a new request to match an earlier one he had sent, expressing a desire to return to England on account of “private affairs.” To the “matters of serious concern” he had already mentioned was added the statement that he found his health so much impaired that he was obliged “on that account” to request permission to leave the colony.

  The private affairs were to do with his estranged wife, Margaret, particularly as to what his future might be in the light of any legacy she left him, or bills she expected him to meet after her death. When he left for New South Wales in 1787, he was aware she had been ill and unlikely to live many years, and he saw both benefits and horrific legal responsibilities potentially arising out of her death, if in her will she made him responsible for all the liabilities attached to the estate he had run for her at Lyndhurst. He wondered whether his future was to be one spent on halfpay, in cheese-paring gentility, or in affluence.