The Fatal Shore Page 3
At the time of white invasion, men had been living in Australia for at least 30,000 years. They had moved into the continent during the Pleistocene epoch. This migration happened at about the same time as the first wave of human migrations from Asia into the unpeopled expanse of North America, across the now sunken land-bridge between Russia and Alaska.
The first Australians also came from Asia. When they discovered Australia, the continent was perhaps a quarter larger than it now is. In the Pleistocene epoch the level of the Pacific was between 400 and 600 feet lower than it is today. One could walk from southern Australia into Tasmania, which was not yet an island. The Sahul Shelf, that shallow ledge of ocean floor whose waters separate Australia from New Guinea was dry land; Australia, New Guinea and possibly sections of the New Hebrides formed one landmass. By trial and error, accumulated over many human generations, it would then have been possible to get from Southeast Asia into Australia (via the Celebes and Borneo) across islands sprinkled on the sea like stepping-stones. Much of this voyage would have been done by eyeball navigation to coasts that the immigrants could have seen from their starting point; there would have been a few sea voyages of more than 50 miles, but not too many; but there was no direct route. In the words of the historian Geoffrey Blainey, “Australia was merely the chance terminus of a series of voyages and migrations.”9 But the moment when the first man stepped ashore from his frail chip of a canoe on the northwestern coast of Pleistocene Australia should rightly be seen as one of the hinges of human history: it was the first time Homo sapiens had ever colonized by sea.
Apart from their northern origin, no one knows who these Pleistocene colonists were or whence they emerged.10 Whoever they were, they gradually spread south, east and west across the continent, killing giant kangaroos as they went, bringing with them their imported half-wild dogs, whose descendants are the dingoes. Their first campsites were drowned by the waters of the Timor Sea and the Gulf of Carpenteria, which rose so fast between 13,000 and 16,000 B.C. that the coast moved inland at a rate of three miles a year.11 The oldest known northern campsites were pitched 22,000 years ago at Oenpelli, 150 miles east of Darwin.
But the southward march was under way long before that. By 30,000 B.C. there were well-established tribes eating crayfish and emu eggs beside the now arid basin of Lake Mungo, in southeastern Australia; they were perhaps the world’s first people to practice cremation, and the pellets of ocher placed as offerings in a Mungo grave suggest that they had some idea of the survival of consciousness after death.12 By about 20,000 B.C. the Aborigines had reached Sydney Harbor. Others were prizing flint nodules from the limestone walls of Koonalda Cave, under the Nullarbor Plain on the extreme southern rim of the continent. There, in the darkness, they scratched crude patterns on the walls that may be the first works of art ever made in the southern hemisphere—the merest graffiti, compared to the later achievements of aboriginal rock-painting, but clear evidence of some primal artistic intent. Two thousand years later, the Aborigines had left their shell-middens, flint chips, bone points and charcoal in nearly every habitable part of the continent. The colonization was achieved, and a membrane of human culture had been stretched over the vast terrain.
But it was exceedingly thin. When the First Fleet arrived, there were perhaps 300,000 Aborigines in the whole of Australia—a continental average of one person to ten square miles. The density of local populations, however, varied a great deal. Probably less than 20,000 people wandered in the 300,000-square-mile tract of dry limestone plain and saltbush desert between the Great Australian Bight and the Tropic of Capricorn, a place where even the crows are said to fly backwards to keep the dust out of their eyes. On the coast, where there was more food and a higher rainfall, the land could support more people. Phillip, after a few months on Sydney Harbor, reckoned that the areas of the Cumberland Plain he had explored sustained about 1,500 blacks; this rough guess yields a density of about 3 people per square mile.
The Australians divided themselves in tribes. They had no notion of private property, but they were intensely territorial, linked to the ancestral area by hunting customs and totemism. Hundreds of tribes existed at the time of white invasion—perhaps as many as 900, although the more likely figure is about 500. The tribe did not have a king, or a charismatic leader, or even a formal council. It was linked together by a common religion, by language and by an intricate web of family relationships; it had no writing, but instead a complex structure of spoken and sung myth whose arcana were gradually passed on by elders to the younger men. Geographical features could cause splits in tribal language. Thus in the area of Sydney, the ancestral territory of the Iora tribe—who roamed over about 700 square miles, from Pittwater to Botany Bay—was cut in half by Sydney Harbor itself; so that the “hordes” or tribal subgroups on the north and south sides of the harbor, the Cameragal and the Kadigal, spoke two distinct languages. For them, the harbor formed a linguistic chasm as wide as the English Channel.13 In 1791, as white settlement was pushing out past Windsor and the Hawkesbury River, Governor Phillip was surprised to find on its banks
people who made use of several words we could not understand, and it soon appear’d that they had a language different from that used by the natives we have hitherto been acquainted with. They did not call the Moon Yan-re-dah but Con-do-in, and they called the Penis Bud-da, which our natives call Ga-diay.14
These were the Daruk, who ranged over a territory of about 2,300 square miles from the coast north of Iora territory to the Katoomba-Blackheath area of the Blue Mountains in the south. The Daruk, the Iora and the Tarawal (whose territory began on the south shore of Botany Bay) were the three tribes with whom the white settlers of Australia first had to deal.
Watkin Tench (1758–1833), a young officer of marines on the transport Charlotte, was struck by the ease with which the tribes understood one another. He supposed that the Daruk language was only a dialect of Iora, “though each in speaking preferred its own [tongue].”15 In fact, the variety of aboriginal language arose from the tight social structure of the tribes, their specified restricted territories, and their more-or-less fixed patterns of movement in relation to other tribal boundaries. These factors encouraged each tribe to keep its own language intact, while nomadism forced them to learn others. Compared to some inland tribes, who routinely exchanged goods (flint axes, baler shell ornaments, lumps of ocher for body painting and other local commodities) along trade routes as long as 1,000 miles, the Iora were provincial. They could not understand languages spoken 50 miles away. Their main diet was fish, and they had no reason to leave the coast. They held their territories—the Cameragal and the Walumedegal along the north shore of the harbor, the Boorogegal on Bradley Head, the Kadigal around what is now Circular Quay and the Botanical Gardens—as they had held them for centuries.
Their main food source was the sea. The women of the tribe twisted fishing lines from pounded bark fiber and made hooks from the turban shell. But since such hooks were brittle and the line weak, the Aborigines fished in pairs—a woman led the hooked fish in as gently as possible, while a man stood ready to spear the fish as soon as it got within range. At the ends of the fish-spears were three or four prongs of wallaby or bird bone, ground sharp and set in gum resin.
The Iora fished from canoes. These they made by cutting a long oval of bark from a suitable eucalypt and binding its ends together to make bow and stern. The old, scarred “canoe trees” were a common sight around the harbor a hundred years ago, but none remain today. The gunwale was reinforced with a pliable stick, sewn on with vegetable fiber. Shorter sticks, jammed athwartships, served as spreaders. The cracks and seams were then caulked with clay or gum resin. The Aborigines kept fire burning on a pat of wet clay on the bottom of the hull, so that they could grill and eat their fish at sea. Compared to an American Indian birch canoe, they were unstable craft and wretchedly crude, “by far the worst canoes I ever saw or heard of,” in the view of William Bradley, who was first lieutenant on Sirius.
They had neither outriggers nor sails (the Iora were ignorant of weaving); low in the water, they flexed with every ripple and leaked like sieves. Nevertheless, the Iora handled them skillfully. “I have seen them paddle through a a large surf,” Bradley noted, “without oversetting or taking in more water than if rowing in smooth water.” The frailty of these craft suited the Iora’s nomadic way of life; they were easy to carry and just as easy to replace. A tribesman could slap one together in a day.16
The Iora also ate immense quantities of shellfish, mainly oysters, which were gathered by women. Middens of white shells lay at the entrances of scores of sandstone caves along the harbor shores. Bennelong Point, where the Sydney Opera House now stands, was first named Lime-burners’ Point by the colonists because it was mantled in a deposit of mollusc shells, built up over thousands of years of uninterrupted gorging.* Gathered again (this time by white convict women) and burned in a kiln, these shells provided the lime for Sydney’s first mortar.
The Iora were not wholly dependent on the sea for their diet. They also hunted on land, though rarely with boomerangs. Boomerangs have to fly without obstruction and so were weapons for open grassland and desert, not for the sclerophyll forests where the Iora lived. Probably their role in providing food for the Sydney blacks was insignificant. Rather, the staple hunting weapons were the spear, the stone axe and the fire-stick.17
The Ioras’ hunting spears, unlike their fish-gigs, were one-pointed and tipped with a variety of materials—usually fire-hardened wood, but also bones and flints and sometimes a shark tooth. John White, a surgeon on board the transport Charlotte, noted that a skilled hunter-warrior threw his spear with formidable accuracy and power, “thirty or forty yards with an unerring precision,” although throws of twice that length were recorded. They were flung with a spear-thrower or woomera, a stick with a peg in one end that fitted the butt of the spear and acted as an extension of the hunter’s arm, like the thong of a sling. With this equipment, a small group of hunters could bring down anything from a bandicoot to an emu. They knocked birds out of the trees with stones or trapped them by dexterity and yogic self-control: “A native will in the heat of the sun lay down asleep, holding a bit of fish in his hand; the bird seeing the bait, seizes on the fish, and the native then catches it.”18
By any standards, the Aborigines were technologically weak but manually adept. They had not invented the bow-and-arrow, but they had exquisite skill as stalkers, trackers and mimics. A competent hunter needs to be able to read every displacement of a leaf or scuffed print in the dust. He must freeze in mid-step and stand unblinking on one leg for half an hour, waiting for a goanna to work up the courage to come all the way out of its log. He must know how to pick up a blacksnake by the tail and crack its head off, as one cracks a whip. He must climb like a cat, shinnying up the gum trees to raid the wild bees’ honey or chop some befuddled nocturnal possum from its hole with a stone axe. Above all, the hunter needed to know every detail of animal life in his territory—migratory patterns, feeding habits, nesting, shelter, mating. Only thus could a small nomadic group survive.
The same was true in the vegetable kingdom, which was the province of women. Like all other known Australian tribes, the Iora forced a rigid sexual division of labor between male hunters and female gatherers. Colonists in the 1790s do not say much about Iora plant-gathering, perhaps because the work of men, even of low savages, seemed more interesting than that of women; thus, one cannot judge the importance plant food had in the Iora diet. We can deduce from the available evidence, however, that the Iora had no conception of agriculture. They neither sowed nor reaped; they appear to have wrought no changes on the face of the country. They were seen as culturally static primitives lightly wandering in an ecologically static landscape, which seemed to eliminate any claims they might have had to prior ownership. To some eighteenth- and nineteenth-century eyes, this invalidated them as human beings.
However, the crude aboriginal technology did wreak changes on the landscape and fauna, for it included fire. Everywhere the tribes went, they carried firesticks and burned many square miles of bushland. They set fire to hollow trees and clubbed the possums and lizards as they scrambled out; they incinerated swathes of bush to drive terrified marsupials onto the waiting spears.
Bushfire and drought are the traditional nightmares of bush life. A bushfire driven by a high wind through dry summer forest is an appalling spectacle: a wreathing cliff of flame moving forward at thirty miles an hour, igniting treetop after treetop like a chain of magnesium flares. Bushfire is the natural enemy of property. But the black Australians had no property and did not hesitate to burn off a few square miles of territory just to catch a dozen goannas and marsupial rats, at the cost of destroying all slow-moving animals within that area.
Fire, to the Iora, was shelter. That was part of the necessary logic of their life, since to survive at all the small knots of family groups that made up the tribe had to range easily and rapidly over a wide area, feeding as they went; and that made the idea of solid, permanent dwellings inconceivable. To them, the hearth was of far greater significance than the home. A firestick made the hearth portable. But they had never had to invent a portable house (i.e., a tent). They were far more backward than any Bedouin or Plains Indian. They used what they could find: the sandstone caves of the harbor shores, with sheets of bark propped up to form crude “humpies.” “Their ignorance of building,” remarked John Hunter, second captain on Sirius,
is very amply compensated for by the kindness of nature in the remarkable softness of the rocks, which encompass the sea coast … They are constantly crumbling away … and this continual decay leaves caves of considerable dimensions: some I have seen that would lodge forty or fifty people, and, in a case of necessity, we should think ourselves not badly lodged [in one] for a night.19
He was putting the cart before the horse: It was not that the Iora lived in caves because they could not build huts, but rather that they chose not to build huts because they had caves. Another colonial observer grasped why the natives had no architecture a European could recognize:
… Those who build the bark huts are very few compared to the whole. Generally speaking, they prefer the ready made habitations they find in the rocks, which perfectly accords with the roving manner in which they live, for they never stay long in one situation, and as they travel in tribes together, even making the bark huts would engage them more time than they would be happy on one spot.20
Caves and bark humpies are drafty places and it gets cold on the harbor at night. The Iora therefore slept huddled together close to their ever-smoldering campfires, and accidental burns were common. The debris of possum skins, fishbones and wallaby guts scattered around the entrance brought swarms of flies and insects, for the tribal “hygiene” of the nomads consisted simply of walking away from their rubbish and excreta (an ancient habit that would have catastrophic results for their marginal descendants, detribalized and trapped in their ghetto shacks on the fringes of white communities a generation or two later). Wherever they went they were plagued by mosquitoes, against which they employed the deterrent of fish oil: “It is by no means uncommon to see the entrails of fish frying upon their heads in the sun, till the oil runs over their face and body. This unguent is deemed by them of so much importance, that children even of two years old are taught the use of it.”21 Since the Iora never washed, they spent their lives coated with a mixture of rancid fish oil, animal grease, ocher, beach sand, dust and sweat. They were filthy and funky in the extreme. But their stamina and muscular development were superb, and, because there was no sugar (except for the rare treat of wild honey) and little starch in their diet, they had excellent teeth—unlike the white invaders.
No property, no money or any other visible medium of exchange; no surplus or means of storing it, hence not even the barest rudiment of the idea of capital; no outside trade, no farming, no domestic animals except half-wild camp dingoes; no houses, clothes, pottery or metal; no div
ision between leisure and labor, only a ceaseless grubbing and chasing for subsistence foods. Certainly the Iora failed most of the conventional tests of white Georgian culture. They did not even appear to have the social divisions that had been observed in other tribal societies such as those in America or Tahiti. Where were the aboriginal kings, their nobles, their priests, their slaves? They did not exist. Although elders enjoyed special respect as the bearers of accumulated tribal myth and lore, they had no special authority over their juniors, once those juniors had reached manhood and been fully initiated; and the idea of hereditary castes was inconceivable to the Aborigines, who lived in a state approaching that of primitive communism. But if the Aborigines lacked firm hierarchical instincts, what was to be respected in their society? What, in short, was “noble” about these “savages”? The Tahitians could be seen as the last survivors of the classical Golden Age; with their fine canoes and intricate ornaments, strict rankings and plentiful supply of free coconuts, they clearly had superfluity, the paradisiacal ancestor of property, as well as strong class instincts to back it up.