to preserve the peace and to save local lives. He therefore concocted a vivid visual demonstration: he borrowed a warrior’s shield, propped it as a target, and fired his pistol at it. Alarm erupted, both at the noise and because the ball passed clean through the shield. White does not bother to tell us what happened next (his journal is a rather shorthand affair) but Watkin Tench of the marines, with his eye for the speaking detail, does. White began to whistle ‘Marlbrooke has gone to the wars’, the tune we know as ‘We won’t get home until morning’; the locals took up the fetching little air; the panic subsided; and ‘Marlbrooke’ became a favourite item in the Australians’ expanding repertoire of borrowed songs. Six months later, with relations souring and some British blood spilt, White still trusted in the pacifying power of song when some canoes ventured to fish behind the point on which the hospital was built. After some friendly exchanges with one couple, White persuaded one of the British gentlemen with him to sing. The women in the canoes responded: they ‘either sung one of their own songs, or imitated him, in which they succeeded beyond conception’. The impromptu songfest had gone on for some time when an Englishman happened to appear with a gun and the panicked Australians paddled away. White ordered the gun set aside, his people kept right on singing, and the canoes came back to their fishing and their friendly conversation-through-song.
Some encounters were raunchier. Lieutenant Philip Gidley King of the Sirius gives an amiably binocular account of what the locals might have been seeing during his own first contact with a band of Australians. As the first man was being coaxed to approach by the offer of the usual trinkets King noted that he ‘seemed quite astonished at ye figure we cut in being cloathed’. And then, reflectively and not altogether in bad faith, ‘I think it very easy to conceive ye ridiculous figure we must appear to these poor creatures, who were perfectly naked.’ It was King who later took the direct way to resolve another mystery. Because the British were both beardless and came swaddled in ‘cloathing’ there had been baffled speculation among their hosts as to their sex: speculation which had already generated gusts of nervous laughter. Australians followed different protocols for the genders even more earnestly than did the British, so any ambiguity in this area was deeply embarrassing. Accordingly, King had one of his men unbutton and publish his privates, at which sight the locals made ‘a great shout of admiration’—or so King interpreted it. Having heard stories from the happy survivors of Tahiti’s sexual delights, he was constantly pressing for closer contact with Australian women, and on this unbuttoned occasion he had a rare triumph: he contrived to lure one girl sufficiently close to ‘apply [a] handkerchief where Eve did ye fig leaf’, and again her countrymen set up another ‘very great shout’. It seems that, whatever their cultural backgrounds, lads will be laddish.
An element of contest was mixed in with the good will. Much later, in 1790, during what can only be described as a peacemaking party (the sharing of food, a great deal of shaving and beard-clipping), the two groups, Tench tells us, ‘began to play and romp’ with each other, with one hefty Englishman contriving to lift two lean Australians at once, while they could not budge him. So not dancing this time, but a chest-to-chest, thigh-to-thigh schoolyard test of strength. John Bayley has written of ‘those moments in the past between explorers and savages, when some sort of clowning pantomime on the part of the former seems...to have evoked instant comprehension and amusement’. ‘Clowning pantomimes’ catches the mood of these early encounters exactly. Nor do I doubt the amusement. But how real was the comprehension?
MEETING THE INFORMANTS
It is a commonplace rediscovered every decade or so that individuals see what they see from their own particular perspective, and that perspectives change through time. These disenchanted days we know there are no I-am-a-camera observers, and we also know that even cameras lie. This recognition has not stopped would-be historians from piecing together snippets derived from a range of narratives, perspectives and sensibilities in chronological order, and calling the resulting ribbon patchwork ‘objective history’.
Making coherent stories out of the fragments we find lying about is a natural human inclination, and socially a necessary one, but when doing history it must be resisted. My own preferred metaphor comes from snorkelling, where at first we are uneasy interlopers, with both the flitting shapes and the social geography vague. Then, after sufficient hours of immersion, we begin to reconstruct in our minds the salient formations—the context—and to be able to follow the opalescent inhabitants as they go about their engrossing affairs—the action. This submerged world is never as clear as the airy world above, but it is the more absorbing for that.
The historians’ situation is complicated because we have to look through other people’s masks if we are to see anything of the world we want to fathom: that is, we have to read their words instead of using our own eyes. Fortunately for us, some of Governor Phillip’s senior officers entered into agreements with publishers even before they left England: John Hunter, commander of the Sirius; John White, surgeon-general to the entire expedition; and Governor Phillip himself. Judge-Advocate David Collins began his journal partly through a sense of duty and partly for private distraction, but after only a few months he had decided to keep it in a form suitable for later publication. A venturesome publisher also contracted the relatively lowly Watkin Tench, captain-lieutenant of marines, to prepare an account of his experiences in the new colony. Cook’s journals had set the style and established the taste for dramatic doings in exotic places which could be elevated to science by the inclusion of a flow of observations of curiosities encountered along the way: of birds, plants, animals and savages, usually in that order.
An unvoiced ‘we’ dominates the journals, which admit us to an unfamiliar culture: the close-knit world of serving British naval and marine officers overseas. Habituated to maintaining solidarity against lesser men, subordinates or foreign, they saw their colony-planting endeavour as unitary—‘for England’—and their individual narratives as expressions of a collective enterprise. Patriotism and caste loyalty routinely trumped competitiveness, with borrowings being generously offered and acknowledged; indeed the whole of David Collins’ second volume, published in 1802 six years after he quit the colony, was compiled from the reports of other men.
Supplementing the formal published accounts are more private narratives. There is a particular charm about journals of private record, both in the freshness of their observations and our illicit pleasure in reading what we shouldn’t. Philip Gidley King, who knew the hazards of a seafarer’s life, wrote the following words at the front of his private journal:
As I write this journal for my own satisfaction, I do beg & request, that, into whatever hands it may fall, (in case of any accidents happening to me) To give or forward it to the hands of His Excellency Governor Phillip or, in the case of his demise, to Lieut. William Dawes of the Marines, who I instruct to destroy it; if any of the materials can be of service he is perfectly welcome to them.
These sentiments neatly encapsulate the themes mentioned above. The right to privacy belonging only to the living, King’s instructions were posthumously ignored. Here is an entry from his private diary for 17 August 1788, six months after he was sent to plant a tiny settlement on Norfolk Island:
Moderate Breezes and very pleasant Weather. Sowed 1 & ½ Rood of Ground with Wheat received by the Supply—opened a cask of Beef & one of Flour, the latter of which had a large Rats nest in it & several dead young ones. This Cask came by the Supply [from Sydney] & wanted 50 lbs of the weight.
By the end of these few lines we know both King and his situation better.
Two days later he took himself off on an adventure, away from rats and housekeeping:
I went up the Cascade which is beautifull but at the same time tremenduous [sic] we had to ascend some perpendicular rocks by going from the branches of one tree to another, when arrived at the Summit, we found a very pleasant levell piece of Ground watered by the Rivulet, which supplies the Cascade & which is large and deep.
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