Hunter drew with stern devotion to accuracy. Although we might feel that his representations of, for example, the platypus or the wombat fall far short of capturing the creatures’ distinctive forms of life, we have to remember he was often drawing from a corpse or even from an emptied skin—although we have to remember too that the great George Stubbs, also working from a skin, could re-create a marvellously vivid kangaroo back in England. But Hunter’s birds are unfailingly marvellous and his written account is alive with images no one else thought to mention. Painted dancers at a little distance ‘appeared accoutred with cross belts’; others, with ‘narrow white streaks around the body, with a broad line down the middle of the back and belly, and a single stripe down each arm, thigh and leg’, gave the wearers ‘a most shocking appearance; for upon the black skin the white marks were so very conspicuous, that they were exactly like so many moving skeletons’.
Despite his artist’s eye we might judge Hunter to be unpleasantly haughty in his accounts of the Australians, rather like a squire observing the doings of a beagle pack. He was eager to control situations, and rather too fond of taking calculated liberties. One example: when on one occasion he suspected that the local women were being deliberately kept at a distance, he exerted himself to lure them closer, and was triumphant when he succeeded—or was permitted to succeed. He took little interest in Phillip’s civilising mission; he thought the Australians physically repellent because they were ‘abominably filthy’, and he describes their filthiness with his usual visual exactitude:
they never clean their skin, but it is generally smeared with the fat of such animals as they kill, and afterwards covered by every sort of dirt; sand from the sea beach, and the ashes from their fires, all adhere their greasy skin, which is never washed, except when accident, or the want of food, obliges them to go into the water.
And he gives no hint that he thought the Australians even potentially educable: when ‘passion’ overcame them, he said, ‘they act as all savages do, as madmen’.
Were this all we knew of him, we would not like him. But there was good humour in him, and male competitiveness, too. To return to dancing: Hunter was one of the white guests invited to the corroboree staged by Baneelon and Colbee early in 1791, just after the ‘coming in’. He was particularly impressed by a remarkable feat performed by the male dancers, achieved by ‘placing their feet very wide apart, and, by an extraordinary exertion of the muscles and thighs, moving the knees in a trembling and very surprising manner’. Then he adds, casually, ‘which none of us could imitate’, and suddenly we know that at some stage of the evening Hunter and other Englishmen were on their feet and in the ring, furiously wobbling their knees. I have a subliminal vision of tourists visiting indigenous territories nowadays being pulled to their feet and made to stumble through a parody of an Australian dance, to the covert giggles and overt shouts of encouragement of the locals.
Hunter also chose to report an apparently trivial episode in detail. In June 1789 ‘the Governor, Captain Collins (the judge-advocate), Captain Johnston of the Marines, Mr White, principal surgeon of the settlement, Mr Worgan, Mr Fowell and myself, from the Sirius’ plus ‘two men, all armed with muskets’, set off for Broken Bay to explore the Hawkesbury River. Notice that these imperialists had to do without the glamour and ease of horse-borne exploration, the one stallion and three mares belonging to the colony being far too precious to risk in such adventures. They had to walk, and to carry their own supplies, in this case ‘several days provisions, Water, Arms and ammunition’, and we wonder what Australian warriors, moving so lightly over the land, would have made of these grotesquely burdened travellers.
This time the tents and poles and extra provisions could be ferried to the agreed beach rendezvous by boat, and by afternoon the walkers were setting up their base camp. Then someone stumbled upon a girl, still weak from the smallpox epidemic which had swept the area a month before, crouching in the wet grass close by the camp. The whole party trooped off to look at her, scaring her even further out of her wits. Hunter reports: ‘She was very much frightened on our approaching her, and shed many tears, with piteous lamentations.’
The gentlemen went into a flurry of action. A fire was made, grass dried, birds shot, skinned and laid on the fire to broil ‘along with some fish’, and water, of which she was in great need, given her. Then they stacked up fuel for her fire, put her to bed by covering her with warm dried grass, and retired contentedly to their tents.
The next morning the girl was rather less frightened, and when the British party returned from their day’s walking late that afternoon they found she had moved to a little bark hut on the beach. Now she had a little girl with her, whom she was trying to protect from falling rain by covering her with her body. The child was, in Hunter’s bachelor opinion, ‘as fine a little infant of that age as I ever saw’, but desperately afraid of the strangers: however much they coaxed ‘it could not be prevailed on to look up; it lay with its face upon the ground, and one hand covering its eyes.’ (Note again the visual detail.) Again they plied the mother with meat, fish and fuel, this time heaping dried grass over her hut to keep her warmer, and in the morning, when they visited again, the baby was ready to hold a British hand. I hope it was Hunter’s. He has just betrayed an unexpected tenderness towards small children. Then, leaving the mother with good supplies of fuel, food and water, they set off on their expedition upriver. When they returned after a few days’ (inconclusive) exploring, their friend and her child had gone.
I cite this episode because it tells us a great deal about Hunter we would not otherwise know. It also reminds us how precarious are the edifices we build from surviving fragments from the past. Hunter might have left out the incident as trivial; or his publisher might have struck it out as behaviour unbecoming to serious-minded Britons. Instead he chose to memorialise it on the title page of the first edition of Hunter’s Historical Journal. There is the naked woman cowering with her baby in a curved grass shelter; there are the tall Englishmen standing protectively around her like a wall. The image provides no model for the future: not very much later, Australian women, and Australian babies too, would die of British bullets. Nonetheless, we have been permitted to see these men bustling about arranging for the comfort of a frightened woman.
The accident of our knowledge of this particular incident also reminds us how many other Britishers, articulate in their own time, have been retrospectively struck as dumb as Lot’s reckless wife because no record of their actions happens to survive. The ‘historical record’, with its silences, absences and evasions, accidental and deliberate, is a most imperfect mirror of ‘what happened’.
SURGEON-GENERAL JOHN WHITE
By his own account Surgeon White enjoyed playing the gallant on the voyage out. Thirty years old and unmarried, he sought the company of women, whether Dutch or Brazilian, in the ports along the way and flirted zestfully with them. In Rio he was charmed to discover that the Portuguese, reputedly a jealous race, were so delighted by compliments paid their womenfolk that they were ready to grant a delightful degree of access to them, as he discovered when a gentleman asked him to help rebind the magnificent floor-length hair he had ordered his wife to loose so the charming English officer could properly admire its abundance. While other officers on shore leave no more than glimpsed feminine shadows behind latticed windows, White spent tender hours at convent grilles in halting conversation with the lovely novices within. He enjoyed every aspect of his stay in Rio except for the lack of coffee-houses, an odd absence to claim for Brazil, especially when we know that the masters of the different vessels ‘all adjourn’d to a Coffee house to Breakfast [where] they had Coffee in great plenty, sweatmeats [sic] & a great variety of rich cakes’ after they had done their marketing, a treat they enjoyed so much they described it in detail to Arthur Bowes Smyth, cooped up on the Lady Penrhyn.
Surprisingly, White enjoyed Capetown nearly as well as exotic Rio. During three years spent in the West Indies he had been sickened by the British style of slavery: ‘The bare retrospect of the cruelties I have seen...there excites a kind of horror that chills
