From the Edge Read online

  Imagine the country from the outside. For many visitors from overseas, the ‘real’ Australia is not the suburbs and cities. It is where the points of difference from the rest of the industrialised world can still be found: the ‘outback’ and the bush, those places that bear little or no resemblance to urban environments the world over. As the British novelist Will Self told an Australian audience in 2015, it is the ‘physical reality’ of the country that astonishes him, its Indigenous cultures and ‘the tyranny of distance that white Australian culture is always trying to defeat’.15 Leaving Australia to live overseas, as I have done on several occasions, the ‘physical reality’ of Australia slowly rises to the surface—the sensory dimensions of place that can sometimes only be fully understood by leaving the country behind—the overwhelming intensity of light and colour and the vast, resounding spaces of an island continent that can momentarily still homesickness when felt and remembered from far away.

  At the heart of Australian history is an ongoing drama of epic proportions; the encounter between the cultures of one of the world’s most ancient people and the cultures of Britain and post-industrial Europe, and the millions of migrants from over 140 nations who have followed in their wake. An encounter that began with mutual fascination and curiosity and quickly turned to suspicion, animosity and open warfare in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, before Aboriginal people miraculously survived state and federal government policies designed to ensure their cultural annihilation, and finally established their human and cultural rights. Australia has only recently freed itself from the shackles of racism (the White Australia Policy was not dismantled until the 1960s and then only in piecemeal fashion), just as it has only recently begun to incorporate Indigenous knowledge of ‘Country’—a term that expresses both the human and the natural worlds, livelihood, culture, belonging and spirituality—into the national imagination. One of the great, unknown questions of Australia’s future is whether Australia’s Indigenous and non-Indigenous cultures will ever come together in a shared, profound understanding of the continent. The encounter that began in 1770 at Botany Bay is still being worked through. But at least one thing is clear: it is impossible to conceive of any place that is not embedded with Indigenous story. There are no empty places in Australia.

  ‘Of all the systems that are expressions of who a people are, the sharpest and clearest is their historical consciousness’, wrote the late historian Greg Dening.16 Historical consciousness—the remembering of the past and its resonance in Australia today—lies at the heart of this book. The Indigenous history that was destined for extinction at the time of Federation in 1901 ultimately came to unsettle the moral legitimacy of the Commonwealth. The gradual surfacing of the very history that had allegedly been ‘vanquished’ would come to represent the most significant shift in historical consciousness in twentieth-century Australia. For non-Indigenous Australians, this would prove to be a slow and traumatic realisation. As two generations of historians have shown, there was no history of Australia that was non-Indigenous.17 From the moment of first contact, settler history became part of Indigenous history and Indigenous history became part of settler history. ‘The songlines of the women of central Australia’, as Indigenous leader Noel Pearson so eloquently expressed, ‘are also the heritage of non-Aboriginal Australians. It is this culture that is the Iliad and Odyssey of Australia. It is these mythic stories that are Australia’s Book of Genesis’.18 In recent years, Australia has seen the history of relations between Indigenous and non-Indigenous people through the prism of mourning, shame and atonement. There has been an understandable need to ‘acknowledge’ the injustices and mistreatment of the past, and ‘move on’. If there is a danger, it is that in seeking to ‘move on’ from stories of violent dispossession and decimation of culture we will once again turn away from our colonial past. ‘Moving on’ should not be code for forgetting. As I try to show in the pages that follow, it is only by returning to this history and grounding it in ‘the specifics of place’ that we can reveal the true depth, richness and complexity of Australia’s foundation.19

  From the Edge begins with the story of the walk of seventeen men along the coast of south-east Australia in the late eighteenth century. Although I have known about this story for nearly twenty years, I have long wanted to write the story at walking pace; to slow down the action and understand the true nature of the epic journey that these men undertook. While their ordeal has been presented in potted form and memorialised locally, it has never been told with close attention to the landscape through which they moved, nor to the Aboriginal people and cultures they encountered along the way. They walked 700 kilometres through territory unexplored by Europeans long before the nation was imagined, a time when Australia was already founded as a complex mosaic of Indigenous Countries. Remarkably, one of Australia’s greatest survival stories and cross-cultural encounters has remained largely untold since 1797.

  Founding stories from the littoral edge of the Australian frontier—Port Essington on the Cobourg Peninsula in West Arnhem Land, the Burrup Peninsula in the Pilbara and Cooktown in far north Queensland—are the focus of the chapters that follow. Like the story of the walk along the coast, I was drawn to these places in particular because I slowly came to see that their histories had profound national resonance. Yet like so many other places across the Australian continent, their histories—both on the edge of the continent and on the edge of national consciousness—have yet to seep into our national mythology. Port Essington, the site of a short-lived ‘new Singapore’ in the mid-nineteenth century and yet another failed attempt to establish a British presence in Australia’s north, is one of Australia’s most revealing examples of how the frontier encounter changed Europeans as much, perhaps even more, as it changed Aboriginal people. On the Burrup Peninsula, home to both Australia’s largest development project (the North West Shelf Gas Project) and the world’s most significant and ancient collection of rock art, the region’s Indigenous history and rich cultural heritage has been largely obscured by the rush to extract every last ounce of profit from the land and sea. At Cooktown—where James Cook stayed for seven weeks in 1770 while repairing the Endeavour, and a brief gold rush 100 years later resulted in one of the most sudden, intense and violent clashes on the Australian frontier—Aboriginal elders and local historians have transformed the town’s history through their shared telling of the meeting between James Cook and the Guugu Yimithirr in 1770. In different ways, each of these histories of place positions the encounter between Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal Australians—each irrevocably altered by the other—at the heart of the nation’s creation.

  Before I began this odyssey, I thought I knew Australia. But researching and writing this book I have discovered how much I still have to learn. To know the intricacies of any place—its flora and fauna, its soil and geology, its rivers and oceans, its topography and climate, its ways and stories—takes more than a lifetime. Indigenous knowledge of the continent has been built incrementally over thousands of generations. Intimate knowledge of place comes not from ‘seeing’ but from the steady accrual of knowledge and stories over time. The myriad places and histories of Australia are inexhaustible. The country that we long perceived as a ‘land without history’ is one of the most deeply storied countries on earth. This book seeks out four of those stories in the familiar and forgotten places of Australia. It begins by way of walking. The year is 1797.

  CHAPTER ONE

  Walking the Edge: South-East Australia, 1797

  THE WILDNESS IS ancient and humbling. Seen from offshore, the island barely rises above sea level, a lonely outcrop of monumental granite and low-lying, windswept scrub that lies in a treacherous body of water off Australia’s south-east coast. On a clear day, when the white shallows appear beneath a translucent sea, it’s possible to imagine Preservation Island and the entire Furneaux Archipelago for what it is: the remains of the land bridge that once joined Tasmania to the Australian mainland some ten thousand
years ago.

  Preservation Island, Bass Strait, 2013

  Journey of the Sydney Cove, November 1796 – February 1797

  In November 2013, I came to this remote island off Tasmania’s north-east coast in search of a remarkable story of human endurance. After the wreck of the merchant ship the Sydney Cove in February 1797, this tiny island in Bass Strait—little more than three kilometres long and one kilometre wide—became the site of the first European settlement south of Sydney. Few Australians are aware of the story that unfolded from Preservation Island and even fewer are aware of its true significance.1

  The first overlanders in Australia to pass through extensive stretches of Aboriginal Country have been largely forgotten. These men experienced the most sustained contact with Aboriginal people in the early colonial period beyond Sydney. Between March and May 1797, they traversed 700 kilometres of Australia’s south-east coastline, meeting and sometimes camping with Aboriginal people from at least eight distinct language groups between northern Victoria and Sydney. Although the progress of their journey was recorded, sometimes in graphic detail, they were not funded by the state or charged with the duty of scientific discovery. In fact, most of them were not even European. The great majority of them were Bengali seamen, otherwise known at the time as ‘Lascars’.2

  The walk north, March-May 1797

  For sixty-two days, five British seamen and twelve Lascars walked through what they saw as a nameless landscape.3 Aside from the sprinkling of place names bestowed by James Cook from the deck of the Endeavour in 1770—Point Hicks, Cape Howe, Mount Dromedary, Batemans Bay, Pigeon House, Botany Bay and Port Jackson—they had no other signposts to guide them. Indeed, many of the places they left behind them remained unnamed by Europeans until figures such as George Bass and Matthew Flinders followed in their wake. In any case, they had no authority to name. They were not explorers. They moved through the landscape not to discover but to escape, not for adventure but because of misadventure. And although they walked further on Australian soil than any non-Aboriginal person had walked before them, they remain today much as they appeared to the Aboriginal people they encountered along the way—apparitions, wayfarers who have yet to walk into history.4

  ____________

  William Clark was twenty-seven when he left his hometown of Campbeltown in the Scottish highlands for Calcutta in 1796. Born into a merchant family, he quickly learnt that the sea was his escape route from this secluded port on the southern end of the Kintyre Peninsula. In the mid- to late eighteenth century, Campbeltown’s prosperity rested largely on its herring industry, blazing malt whisky and mediocre coal. In little less than fifty years it had expanded from an insignificant fishing town into a thriving port with a population of over five thousand. Nestled at the head of the loch and surrounded by the nearby islands of Arran, Islay and Jura, the crescent-shaped town that circled the bay owed its livelihood to shipowners and merchants such as Clark, Campbell & Co. who had traded there from at least the early 1790s. The merchants’ ships plied the west coasts of England and Scotland and the north-east coast of Ireland only 19 kilometres away, but they also sailed further afield to Scandinavia, Germany, France, Holland, the Americas and the West Indies. As the ever-expanding trade networks of the British Empire opened up new markets in British North America and large parts of Asia, the Scottish economy boomed and its diaspora intensified. By the late eighteenth century, Campbeltown had benefited enormously from this swelling global traffic and became a popular disembarkation point for emigrants from the Scottish Highlands to North America. There were days when well over a hundred ships stood in Campbeltown’s harbour, the din of their creaking timbers, the gulls’ cries, and a thousand sailors’ voices echoing around the bay.

  For the merchant, life at sea could easily promise more than life on the land. Poverty was still rife in the highlands in the late eighteenth century and life for most people was frugal and brutally short. Life expectancy was less than forty years. William Clark’s merchant father, William Clark senior, died in 1778 when he was in his mid-thirties. His mother, Margaret, lived only a little longer into her early forties. She had given birth to thirteen children in all, eight to William Clark senior, only three of whom survived to adulthood, and five to her second husband, of whom only two survived her death in 1788. By the time William was nineteen he had lost several brothers and sisters and both parents. Already working in his father’s shipping company, he was destined for life as a merchant. Not long after his mother’s death, William’s elder brother, John, left to trade with Robert and John Campbell in Calcutta. Encouraged by his brother’s success and lured like so many Scots before him by the flourishing opportunities abroad, William quickly followed in John’s footsteps. If his future were secure in Campbeltown, it would prove to be far more fragile abroad. With the prospect of greater wealth came greater risk. But risk was calculated differently in the 1790s. Life was a more tenuous and uncertain proposition. In their restless search for knowledge, adventure and profit, generations of British emigrants left their homeland for years at a time, never certain that they would see their families again. Leaving his sister Anna and two half-sisters behind him in Campbeltown, William had no inkling that within little more than twelve months he would be sailing to the infant British penal colony at Port Jackson (Sydney) more than sixteen thousand kilometres away.5

  When William arrived in Calcutta in 1796, the imperial city was on the cusp of a period of rapid expansion that would begin in earnest in 1798 with the appointment of the extravagant Marquess Wellesley as Governor-General. A centre of trade since the late seventeenth century when it was little more than a collection of mud huts, Calcutta had quickly taken on a grand appearance even before it became the capital of British India in 1772. The Dutch and the Danes also maintained their settlements at Chinsurah and Serampore only a few kilometres away from the British settlement at Fort William, which stood in ‘the middle of the town, on the river’s edge’. Fuelled by the enormous profits made by the East India Company’s monopoly trade in textiles, salt and opium, much of the city’s development was unplanned and haphazard. In the eyes of one new English resident entering the city at the time, it appeared ‘as if all the buildings had been thrown up in the air and stood now as they had fallen to the ground’. After sailing more than one hundred and sixty kilometres along the Hooghly River towards Calcutta, a breathtaking scene greeted Clark as he approached the British settlement that spread for 5 kilometres around the fort. As the river widened and turned ‘suddenly to the north’, a ‘stately forest of masts, vessels [and the] immense bustle of commercial business’ came into view. The banks of the river were ‘studded with elegant mansions’. Esplanade Row, which fronted the fort, appeared dream-like, ‘composed almost entirely of palaces’. These magnificent, ‘lofty, detached flat-roofed mansions’, with their elegant ‘flights of steps leading up to the entrance[s] and colonnades’, formed the heart of the ‘White Town’, the bastion of neoclassical splendour and British privilege, which stood in stark contrast to the ‘Black Town’ where the Bengalis lived in ‘low, small’, hastily erected one-storey, thatch-roofed bamboo huts crowded into ‘narrow and crooked’ streets. Into this mesmerising city of wealth, squalor and poverty built on the exploitation of the local population, Clark had come to join the growing band of private traders and profiteers that had proliferated since the partial breakup of the East India Company’s monopoly and the British government’s assumption of responsibility for the colony in 1784. Like his brother John, he had come to Calcutta to make his fortune.6

  Disembarking, William made his way from Fort William along ‘the Course’, the wide dust-ridden promenade where almost everyone in Calcutta walked in late afternoons to seek relief from the suffocating humidity that engulfed the city during the height of the wet season, before working his way down to Theatre Street, where European plays had been staged for over twenty years in the theatre built by Governor Hastings in 1775. Situated directly behind the fort, not far
from Park Street Cemetery, the agency offices of Campbell & Clark in Theatre Street were established in 1790 in the very heart of the White Town. Robert Campbell and his older brother John were in partnership with John Clark when William arrived. Despite the intensely competitive market that existed in British India, these two families of typically industrious, educated Scots, already connected through their families’ business associations at home, did not take long to display their commercial acumen. Not content with a shipping agency and their wharves and warehouses near the fort, they also owned a 6-acre rum distillery site, which by the time of William’s arrival was producing close to 10 000 gallons of spirits every month. Imported wine, beer and spirits were the agency’s stock-in-trade. There was high demand for alcoholic beverages from East India Company associates and employees in India and they found markets in the Dutch East Indies, China, Manila and Brunei, often trading spirits for tea, spices, sandalwood and textiles. Typically, an advertisement for their firm appeared in the Calcutta Gazette on 27 October 1796, not long after William’s arrival: ‘Messrs [Robert] Campbell and [William] Clark, [Merchants of Theatre St, Calcutta] Selling Madeira Wine, English Claret, Old red Port, Coniac [sic] Brandy, Jamaica Rum, Holland’s Gin and Pale Ale’.7

  Campbell and Clark were country traders—independent merchants under licence, operating separately from the British East India Company—and they were constantly on the lookout for new markets, particularly in the Pacific and South China seas. In May 1796, an opportunity arose that would ultimately change the course of both William Clark and Robert Campbell’s lives. One of the agency’s clients, Captain James Storey, who had just returned from New South Wales with the Sovereign, informed them of the enormous potential for trade with the penal colony at Port Jackson. Storey no doubt explained the illicit rum trade fostered by the New South Wales Corps and the colony’s desperate need for goods and supplies, one that could obviously be satisfied much more quickly from India than from England. Despite the initial intention of the Colonial Office that the convict colony would not trade with the East India Company’s settlements, the advantages of a trade nexus with India and China were recognised almost from the colony’s inception and the restrictions were relaxed. By May 1792, the East India Company was providing convict transports as part of its trade between Britain, India and China, while several ships in the 1790s had already left from Bengal and Bombay to supply Port Jackson. Robert Campbell, who was by far the most experienced of the agency’s partners, having traded in Calcutta since 1787, immediately seized on Storey’s intelligence and began his search for a ship and crew that could sail for Sydney. This was not so much a trade venture as a sales opportunity. Sydney in 1796 was hardly in a position to fill Campbell and Clark’s ship on its return voyage with goods in exchange. Nor was there any explicit request from the colony. In the long term, however, if they could make this first venture a success, the prospects for future trade with the fast-growing colony were promising. Eager to capitalise on the opportunity, they wasted little time.8