beyond the expanding British colony (remember that in his understanding the rest of the land was ‘empty’). These people were certainly fully human, but they were also sui generis, and therefore unassimilable.
Collins was accordingly contemptuous of Phillip’s efforts to incorporate the Australians into British society over those first years, dismissing his tireless negotiations as time and energy wasted on ‘amusing ourselves with these children of ignorance’, as he grumpily put it. Better, he thought, to drive them away, and keep them away, by the judicious use of muskets. He continued to believe that separation would have been the best policy for both peoples. But as the slow years pass we watch David Collins ripen into an absorbed observer of native conduct, and a man capable of recognising, indeed of honouring, a quite different way of being.
WATKIN TENCH,
CAPTAIN-LIEUTENANT OF MARINES
Watkin Tench of the Royal Marines, unmarried but already a veteran of the American wars, was about thirty when he landed at Port Jackson. His reports from the new colony immediately outsold his loftier competitors’, and continue to outsell them today. He is one of the handful of writers who are an unshadowed pleasure to meet on the page. Through that familiar miracle of literacy where pothooks transform into personality, it is not so much his information as his presence which delights us. His parents are said to have run a dancing academy, and it tempting to think that their son’s grace on the page has something to do with a melodious, light-footed upbringing. He has the kind of charm which reaches easily across centuries. If he lacks Montaigne’s intellectual sophistication and unwavering moral clarity, he shares with him the even rarer quality of sunny self-irony.
Almost all we know of the man is here, in the two and a half hundred pages of his two books, and yet we think we know him. George Worgan dismissed him as a lightweight incapable of producing anything beyond ‘fireside chit-chat’, but it is precisely Tench’s cosy informality, together with his eye for the apparently redundant detail, which charms as it informs.
The best reason for reading Watkin Tench is that he reminds us of two important things surprisingly easy to forget: that the past was real, and that this likeable man whose words are on the page before us was actually there. In his writings Tench lives again, as he makes the people he sees around him live, especially the men and women rendered near-invisible or unintelligible in too many other accounts: the indigenous inhabitants of the Sydney region.
The great anthropologist W. E. H. Stanner, reflecting on the long alienation between European and Aboriginal Australians, believed that the grossly unequal relationship that developed in the earliest days of the colony—he says within the first five years—continued to inflict injustice and injury on generations of Aboriginal Australians to his own day. He believed that those serial injustices found their root in the British failure to comprehend, much less to tolerate, legitimate difference: an intolerance which then sustained itself in the face of a long history of practical intimacy; of long-term work and sexual relationships, even childhoods spent in one another’s company. He believed crippling incomprehension continues to rule because ‘a different tradition leaves us tongueless and earless towards this other [Aboriginal] world of meaning and significance’.
As we will see, there is much truth in that. But if Watkin Tench was initially rendered ‘tongueless and earless’ by the strangeness of the people he fell among he was never eyeless, even at the beginning, and with experience and reflection he came to hear a little of what was being said, and to tell us about it. That little is precious.
In new colonies race relations are shaped quickly, usually during the first few years of contact, and not by rational decision but by hugger-mugger accidents, casual misreadings, and unthinking responses to the abrasions inevitable during close encounters of the cultural kind. Tench was in the colony for only four years. By the time he left, in December 1791, and despite the good will of leaders on both sides, rapprochement was a fading dream, but Tench’s eager gaze and pleasure in the unfamiliar holds out the hope that, by reading him and his peers, we might be able to identify the small events, and the compounding errors, which were to have such large and finally tragic consequences.
What made Tench incomparable among good observers is that he treated each encounter with the strangers as a detective story: ‘This is what they did. What might they have meant by doing that?’ This glinting curiosity is uniquely his. (Compare him with John Hunter, who also watches keenly, but at a condescending distance: the squire watching his beagles.) Tench always saw the Australians as fellow humans, and their conduct as therefore potentially intelligible. This focus on action is essential in ethnohistory, which is what we call history when the people we are curious about have left no easily decipherable records of their own, and when their intentions and understandings have to be constructed out of descriptions given by literate outsiders who often do not know what they are looking at (a wedding?...a war party?). At best we can hope for the documentary equivalent of a silent film shot by a fixed camera—a camera which cannot know precisely where the focus of action is. It is that alert, steady gaze that Tench grants us.
Tench was a marine, but his journals do not follow the naval model. It is true that on the voyage out he gives triumphantly precise measurements of latitude and new-fangled longitude, that marvellous fruit of the new science, and like any young man involved in grand affairs he brims with advice: potential settlers may buy their poultry, wines and tobacco in Tenerife, the Madeiras, the Cape of Good Hope, anywhere—but they must buy their sheep and hogs in England, and bring all their clothing, furniture and tools with them. But that was on the voyage. Once arrived in Australia he left such matters to others, nor did he bother with visual illustrations beyond a single map. While he was astonished by the weirder fauna and delighted by some of the flora, his natural tendency was towards philosophising rather than science, and his descriptions of the land’s human inhabitants come sequined with reflections and anecdotes. An example: while he, like his competitors, provided the conventional description of the physical attributes of the Australian—long-muscled, skin char-black, hair wavy, beards scant—only Tench thought to tell us that the Australians’ ‘large black eyes are universally shaded by the long thick sweepy eyelash’. He finished with a dancing-school flourish which does not quite come off—‘[the sweepy eyelash is] so much prized in appreciating beauty, that perhaps hardly any face is so homely that this aid can to some degree render interesting; and hardly any so lovely which, without it, bears not some trace of insipidity’—which leaves us slightly dizzy. But we will not forget those eyelashes.
Tench also had a sharp eye for what the anthropologists call ‘material culture’. He was especially intrigued by the Australians’ canoes, as James Cook had been in his time. In New Zealand Cook had been impressed by the ‘great ingenuity and good workmanship in the building and framing of [Maori] Boats or Canoes’, which he described as ‘long and narrow and shaped very much like a New England Whale boat’, that universal model of fine small-boat design. They were also splendidly large, the largest being capable of carrying up to one hundred men along with their arms. By contrast, he was outraged by the sheer effrontery of Australian canoes: ‘The worst I think I ever saw, they were about twelve or fourteen feet long made of one piece of the bark of a tree drawn or tied up at each end and the middle kept open by means of pieces of sticks by way of thwarts.’
Bradley of the Sirius recorded his contempt for the flimsy craft, so unlike the sleek double-hullers he knew from Tahiti—no more than a narrow strip of bark, he said, inelegant, unstable, and propelled by ludicrous paddles ‘in shape like a pudding stirrer’ held one in each hand. Nonetheless, Bradley had to allow that in these apologies for canoes the local men went astonishingly fast: sitting back on their heels with knees spread to hold out the sides, with bodies erect and paddling furiously with their pudding-stirrers, they could slice through a heavy surf (and we know how big the surf around Sydney can be) ‘without oversetting or taking in more water than in smooth seas’.
In these same horribly
