From the Edge Read online

  This is number one hundred and seventy-one

  in the second numbered series

  of the Miegunyah Volumes

  made possible by the Miegunyah Fund

  established by bequests under the wills of

  Sir Russell and Lady Grimwade.

  ‘Miegunyah’ was the home of

  Mab and Russell Grimwade

  from 1911 to 1955.

  Mark McKenna is one of Australia’s leading historians. His most recent book, An Eye for Eternity: The life of Manning Clark (MUP) won five national awards. He is also the author of Looking for Blackfellas’ Point: An Australian History of Place (UNSW Press), which won the Book of the Year and the Douglas Stewart Prize for Non-Fiction in the 2003 NSW Premier’s Literary Awards. McKenna’s essays, reviews and political commentary have appeared in The Monthly, Meanjin, ABR, The Sydney Morning Herald, The Age and The Australian.

  ‘McKenna’s telling of early frontier stories captures the multiplicity of perspectives and meanings present in our continent’s complex past. His story is anchored in the landscape and brought alive through a rich sense of place. The account that unfolds is one of invasion and conflict, but also of reconciliation; it is a rediscovery of history which offers possibilities of national understanding and rebirth.’

  NOEL PEARSON

  ‘With characteristic brilliance Mark McKenna wrenches neglected or unknown histories from the edges of our continent and our consciousness to create entirely new national landscapes. McKenna transmutes these forgotten stories into the purest gold. This is a book that will haunt your memory and ignite your dreams of what Australia once was and might yet become.’

  IAIN McCALMAN

  FROM

  THE EDGE

  Australia’s Lost Histories

  MARK

  McKENNA

  THE MIEGUNYAH PRESS

  An imprint of Melbourne University Publishing Limited

  Level 1, 715 Swanston Street, Carlton, Victoria 3053, Australia

  [email protected]

  www.mup.com.au

  First published 2016

  Text and photographs unless stated © Mark McKenna, 2016

  Design and typography © Melbourne University Publishing Limited, 2016

  This book is copyright. Apart from any use permitted under the Copyright Act 1968 and subsequent amendments, no part may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted by any means or process whatsoever without the prior written permission of the publishers.

  Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people are respectfully advised that photographs of deceased people appear in this book and may cause distress.

  Every attempt has been made to locate the copyright holders for material quoted in this book. Any person or organisation that may have been overlooked or misattributed may contact the publisher.

  Cover design by John Canty Design

  Typeset in Bembo 11.5/15pt by Cannon Typesetting

  Printed in China by 1010 Printing International Ltd

  National Library of Australia Cataloguing-in-Publication entry

  McKenna, Mark, 1959– author.

  From the edge: Australia’s lost histories/Mark McKenna.

  9780522862591 (paperback)

  9780522862607 (ebook)

  First contact of aboriginal peoples with Westerners—Australia.

  Shipwreck survival—Australia—History.

  Aboriginal Australians—First contact with Europeans.

  Australia—History

  994.02

  This research was supported under Australian Research Council’s Future Fellowships Scheme.

  For Fiona, Siobhan and Claire McKenna

  Contents

  Eyeing the Country

  1 Walking the Edge: South-East Australia, 1797

  2 ‘World’s End’: Port Essington, Cobourg Peninsula, West Arnhem Land

  3 ‘Hip Bone Sticking Out’: Murujuga and the Legacy of the Pilbara Frontier

  4 On Grassy Hill: Gangaar (Cooktown), North Queensland

  Notes

  Acknowledgements

  Index

  ‘No single story can ever explain itself: this enigma at the heart of story is itself a story. Stories produce offspring, genetic splinters of themselves, hapless embodiments of their original inability to tell the whole tale.’

  James Wood

  The Nearest Thing to Life

  Satellite image of Botany Bay, New South Wales, 2004, Jesse Allen, Digital Globe

  Eyeing the Country

  THE VIEW THROUGH the departure lounge windows at Sydney Airport looks across the docking bays to runways in the near distance. The flat expanse of the tarmac shimmers in the heat. Bare and uncluttered, placeless and free, this wide-open road seems to stretch all the way to the horizon.

  Airports do not give up their history easily. Like the 40 million people who passed through Sydney Airport in 2015, we move quickly through these limbos of arrival and departure on our way to the places that matter with little thought for what was there before the sea of asphalt was laid down. The past is buried beneath a landscape that has been reshaped so dramatically, it bears little resemblance to its original state in the late eighteenth century; in the case of Sydney Airport—a stream dammed, a river diverted, a harbour dredged and land reclaimed—wetlands have become runways.

  Interred beneath the runways and the sea are the sites of some of the first encounters between Indigenous Australians and British marines and convicts; places where they approached one another with ‘emotions of pleasure, astonishment, curiosity & timidity’—exchanging gifts and gestures of introduction, touching hair, skin and clothes—each searching tentatively for proof of the other’s humanity. As the planes take off to the south, they climb over Kamay, otherwise known as Botany Bay. Here, in April 1770, Joseph Banks, naturalist on board James Cook’s Endeavour, marvelled at the night-time vista on the water, when the bay was illuminated by the ‘moving lights’ of the tiny cooking fires burning on flat stones in the bellies of the Gweagal women’s bark canoes.1

  Entering Botany Bay on an almost windless, blue-sky day, Banks and Cook noticed a thin column of smoke rising into the air. From the deck of the Endeavour, they directed their ‘glasses’ towards the southern shore where they saw ‘about 10 people’ who left their fires as the ship approached and ‘retired’ to a more elevated point to observe their visitors from a safer distance. Cook soon hoisted the boats out with the intention of landing. As the Endeavour stood offshore, Banks lifted his telescope to observe the country and its people at closer quarters. Since he had left England almost two years earlier, ‘perhaps for Ever’, this had always been his first way of seeing the places and people he encountered: the telescopic eye. Standing on deck, little more than a kilometre offshore, Banks spied a group of Gweagal men gathered ‘on the rocks opposite the ship, threatening and menacing with their pikes and swords’. With a telescope that provided magnification fifteen to twenty times greater than the naked eye, he could easily make out the ‘broad strokes’ of white paint that covered their bodies. The bold patterns over their ‘breasts and backs’ reminded him of soldiers’ ‘cross belts’. He could see them ‘distinctly’: they were naked, their faces dusted over with the same white paint, the white tips of their spears glistening in the sun. Later, two men disputed the visitors’ right to land, ‘waving’ them ‘to be gone’, before several rounds of musket fire and the wounding of at least one Gweagal man finally forced them to retreat.2

  From the moment Banks first saw Aboriginal people through his telescope a few days earlier at Murramarang Point, some three hundred kilometres south of present-day Sydney, he doubted the truth of what his ‘glasses’ revealed to him. Struck as he was by the remarkable clarity of the air and lig
ht in ‘this southern hemisphere’, he discerned five ‘people’ on the beach who appeared through his ‘glasses … to be enormously black’. He wondered if William Dampier’s adverse description of the ‘Indians’ whom he had met on Australia’s west coast almost a century earlier had influenced what he now believed he saw through his telescope. ‘So far did the prejudices which we had built on Dampier’s account influence us that we fancied we could see their Colour when we could scarce distinguish whether or not they were men’.3 When he finally came ashore on the southern shores of Botany Bay, Banks spat on his finger and rubbed the dirt-covered skin of one Gweagal man to see whether his blackness could not be washed away.4

  The telescope was ‘the first instrument to extend one of the human senses’. The main scientific objective of Cook’s first Pacific voyage—observing the transit of Venus in 1769—was carried out with the aid of a mounted, reflecting telescope. Five years before the Endeavour set sail from England, the development of a new hand-held, achromatic telescope, which used three glass elements instead of two, reduced the distortion associated with earlier designs. The result was a portable device with far greater resolution, one that produced an image that was no longer blurred by a coloured fringe.5 ‘Spyglasses’, ‘opera glasses’ and telescopes of all kinds were all the rage in late eighteenth-century London, enabling a way of seeing that allowed both intimacy and distance.6

  When Banks and Cook came ashore at Botany Bay the watchers became the watched. Walking through the bush and coming upon the campsites of Aboriginal people, Banks was surprised to find them deserted. Little did he realise that they were scrutinising his party’s every move. Nor could he understand how they perceived him. Aboriginal oral history of Cook’s landing, told originally by Kurnell woman Biddy Coolman in the 1840s and recorded in 1905, remembered the violence of the encounter. ‘They all run away: two fellows stand; Cook shot them in the legs; and they run away too!’ When Aboriginal people first saw the sailors climbing ‘up the masts’ of the Endeavour they thought they were possums. The ship appeared to them like a ‘floating island’. Believing as they did in a power greater than themselves—‘something over them’—they saw the white men as ‘the devil’, a malevolent ancestor returned from the dead.7 All of these things were naturally lost to those on board the Endeavour. Their view was radically different.

  As Banks looked through his telescope at Botany Bay, the faces and bodies of Aboriginal men and women filled the frame, like museum exhibits in a glass case. The country was scanned and quickly assessed for its utility. The gaze was at once authoritative and acquisitive, empirical and scientific, one that placed itself above both ‘natives’ and nature. The telescope allowed Banks to spy the personal features of the Gweagal on shore without any obligation of human contact on his part, and to survey the land without setting foot on it. The same technology that had allowed him to see the soprano’s facial expressions at the opera he attended in London shortly before his departure from Plymouth in August 1768, now allowed him to see Aboriginal people on the beaches of ‘New Holland’.8

  In 1790, when Governor Arthur Phillip had established a settlement of marines and convicts at Sydney Cove after quickly deciding to abandon Botany Bay in 1788, British telescopes were turned in the opposite direction. Desperate for the arrival of further supplies and craving ‘intercourse with civilized society’, Lieutenant Colonel Watkin Tench described an observation post that was constructed on South Head at Port Jackson. There, ‘on the summit of the hill, every morning from daylight until the sun sunk’, they lifted their telescopes, searching every speck on the waves of the ‘vast’ Pacific Ocean in the hope of sighting a ship from England. The telescopes that the British had turned initially on the land of their ‘discovery’ soon became instruments of longing: their most trusted means of disproving the mirages of both land and sea in a country that so often deceived their senses.9

  ____________

  In late 2014, I visited Kamay Botany Bay National Park. Standing close to the spot where Cook’s party forced their way ashore at Kurnell, I looked north across the water towards the airport, watching as the planes took off in quick succession above me. Below them a parade of massive container ships were being towed out to sea. At that moment I thought of Banks out on the bay—one eye closed, his other flush against the eyepiece as he searched the shoreline—and I saw for the first time how his telescopic eye was the precursor to our contemporary way of seeing the country. The telescope, much like the camera and Google Earth, zooms in and isolates the object of vision. It allows us to see in fine detail what is within the frame, at the same time as it disconnects that detail from its surroundings and cuts off our peripheral vision.

  As Banks’s telescopic eye saw the land and its people as objects of scientific study, so our satellite eye further shatters the boundaries of time and place and allows us to command places into view without soiling our feet. We can see everything without going anywhere. And we compartmentalise places: some for leisure, some for conservation, some for plundering and profit, some for nation-making and some simply to tick off as ‘done’. Like Joseph Banks’s ‘glasses’, our all-seeing satellite eye can ‘deceive us in many things’.10

  ‘We saw, indeed, only the sea coast’, reflected Banks, ‘what the immense tract of inland country may produce is to us totally unknown’.11 As soon as the Endeavour was anchored in Botany Bay in April 1770, the Australian continent was linked to Europe and the British imperial world. Like the destinations of the planes banking above me at Kurnell, those links were global but also highly selective. In linking our coastal fringe with the wider world, we have skirted around the edge or flown over much of the continent, establishing connections with some places and completely ignoring others. Our global networks and economies throw a vast shadow over the places, people and histories that do not concern them. Our view is at once all encompassing and blinkered. Too often, we fail to ask: what lies outside the frame? What places and histories lie beyond our angle of vision?

  Australians think they know their history. But the truth is that much of it remains unknown. Our colonial perspective is just beginning to recede. We have only recently discovered the richness and mystery of our Indigenous histories and cultures and the extraordinary regional diversity that so much of our nation-making and popular history making has unintentionally worked to disguise. Since the demise in the 1960s of the idea of Australia as a ‘British’ society, we have tried, sometimes desperately, to agree on an alternative national narrative. Eternally preoccupied with questions of national identity and formation—Where and when was the nation born? How has the nation performed on the ‘world stage’? What is uniquely Australian?—we have failed to embed our national story in the histories on our own soil. This is nothing less than a failure of our historical imagination.

  Delivering a public lecture in London in 2013, novelist Tim Winton lamented the extent to which ‘Australia the place is constantly overshadowed by Australia the national idea, Australia the economic enterprise’. In our rush to anchor the nation with a binding national history, whether that be Anzac Day, Federation, immigration or economic prosperity, we have lost sight of the ‘specifics of place’, of the geographical, cultural and historical diversity that constitute Australia ‘the place’.12

  Only when we shift our gaze beyond the Sydney–Melbourne–Canberra axis to the north, centre and far west of the continent, to the ‘out there’, the ‘middle of nowhere’, the back country and the Indigenous heartland, do we begin to understand the truly distinctive nature of our histories and patterns of belonging over time. Our view needs to be at once broader and more intimate. Imagine a map of Australia without state and territory borders, one that revealed the different ‘countries’ within the nation—Arnhem Land, Kakadu, the Kimberley, the Pilbara, the Mallee, the Monaro, Central Australia, and so the list goes on—one that was a meeting point between our Indigenous ‘Countries’ and the overlay of regional associations that have come in the wake of Europ
ean settlement: a map of shared country. To understand place is to understand perspective, a particular way of seeing and being in the world, uniquely shaped by geography, climate, economy, culture and nature. Perhaps we would understand Australia differently—its craving for a foundational history that will inspire and unify the nation, its alienated federal democracy, its boom and bust economy and its hardline attitude to asylum seekers—if we started from the ground up, from the local and the regional perspective.13

  Few of us today will live and die in one place. We move from one suburb, town or city to another, sometimes several times in our lives. Our attachment to place—refracted through personal experience and shards of memory—is individual, varied and multi-layered. A street corner, a city park, a backyard, the memory of a childhood home, the once-glimpsed view from a hill overlooking Florence, a farm paddock or a desert drive; all of these memories of place can imprint themselves indelibly on our hearts and minds. We belong where we feel at home. Yet in our ever-increasing mobility, there is a patent dilemma. ‘One of modernity’s most distinctive tensions’, writes Robert Macfarlane, is ‘between mobility and displacement on the one hand, and dwelling and belonging on the other—with the former becoming ubiquitous and the latter becoming lost (if ever it had been possible) and reconfigured as nostalgia’.14 While we travel to seek the culturally authentic and the different, the economic forces that drive globalisation simultaneously work to break these differences down. The cities of Sydney and Melbourne have more in common with London and New York than they do with Broome, Alice Springs or Darwin. Yet in the face of the irrepressible forces of globalisation, the survival of cultural difference and the particular inflections of place take on even greater importance. Place and, more specifically, the qualities of place, are not merely villages, towns and cities, they are also paths and roads, deserts and forests, rivers and oceans, light and colour, sound and space as well as the fictive and intangible—places that are invented, remembered, sometimes not even visited save in our imaginations.