them, not only in material matters, but in the unique, incomparable gift of British law.
First, for things material. Phillip:
It is undeniably certain that to teach the shivering savage how to clothe his body, and to shelter himself completely from the cold and wet, and to put into the hands of men, ready to perish one half of the year with hunger, the means of procuring constant and abundant provision, must confer upon them benefits of the highest value and importance.
Phillip did not regard this conviction as prior and ideological, but as the fruits of observation. He had watched these people suffer hunger when fish supplies dropped off in colder weather. He noted the meagreness of their vegetable resources, and how long and painfully the women laboured to collect and prepare them. He watched them in bad weather, and knew they suffered: ‘While they have not made any attempt towards clothing themselves, they are by no means insensible to the cold, and appear very much to dislike the rain. During a shower they have been observed to cover their heads with pieces of bark, and to shiver exceedingly.’ His response was typically direct. He decided that the moment he established good contact with these poor cold savages he would introduce them to the benefits of clothing. He therefore requested the immediate dispatch from England of ‘a supply of frocks and jackets to distribute among them’, urging that the garments be made long and loose ‘so they would be useful to both men and women’.
Phillip, unlike some of his compatriots, acknowledged that sensibilities might differ between the races. He noted, for example, one Australian’s disgust at the smell of salt pork lingering on his fingers after he had touched a piece. He thought such differences to be trivial and ephemeral, and that civilising savages would be easy because, as rational beings, they would readily recognise the superiority of British material and moral arrangements. Like most of us, Phillip believed his home culture to be universally advantageous and desirable. Furthermore, he believed it to be universally applicable and therefore transportable; that it could flourish in any clime. The irony of this vision, given the total British dependence on imported supplies and their near-starvation in a milieu where Australians had survived for millennia, quite escaped him. I doubt it escaped the Australians.
Every Britisher thought their superiority manifest in their possessions, especially their manufactured goods—clothing, guns, tools—but also what Tench calls ‘toys’: the baubles brought to charm and disarm the natives. All of the officers and some of the men had brought stocks of such objects to barter for native artefacts, which were enjoying a vogue at home since the voyages of the great, good, and martyred Captain Cook.
The model for pacification through trade had been established in Tahiti, that terrestrial Paradise. There Cook had seen an earth so spontaneously productive that ‘in the article of food those people may almost be said to be exempt from the curse of our forefathers; scarcely can it be said that they earn their bread with the sweat of their brow, benevolent nature hath not only supply’d them with necessarys but with abundance of superfluities’. The human population also seemed blessed with superfluities of physical grace and natural intelligence. Immediately recognising the desirability of European goods, they leapt into enthusiastic trade, happily exchanging warm female flesh and a wondrous variety of fresh foods for European products, especially iron nails. (The British ships, surreptitiously denailed, were soon in danger of falling apart.)
The responsiveness of these delightful savages had given their new trading partners a reassuring illusion of the ‘naturalness’ of trans-cultural understanding. The sturdiness of Tahitians’ appetite for British goods—‘red and yellow cloth, some tomahawks, axes, knives, scissors, shirts, jackets, etc.’—together with the convenience of a ‘king’ ready to accept the personal reward of ‘a mantle and some other articles of dress decorated with red feathers, together with six muskets and some ammunition’, meant that as early as 1801 such items could be shipped to Tahiti from infant Sydney in full confidence that they would be exchanged for the pork the British hungered for.
After such encounters with village-dwelling agriculturalists long familiar with the benefit of trade, naked nomads—lacking pigs, fruits and kings, and cautiously frugal with their women—had to come as something of a disappointment, even to men uncorrupted by the mellow exchanges of Tahiti. These people did not covet the trinkets the British waggled at them. They seemed to lack a proper passion for novelties. Gifts of ribbons and neck-cloths were accepted, worn for a day, then hung on a bush and forgotten. They seemed also to regard most British foods as inedible. Nor did these natives have an ‘abundance of superfluities’ of their own available for exchange: it quickly became clear that every one of their hand-crafted multipurpose possessions was essential for the daily business of surviving, and was duly cherished. They coveted only those British products which replicated the functions of their own tools, like metal hatchets or fishhooks. Tench himself, engaging in his first day of serious trading, found that a man whose spear he wanted would part with it only in exchange for a hatchet, and Tench had to have himself rowed all the way back to Sydney from the northern shore of the harbour to get him one.
The British should have paid more attention to the experiences of their predecessors. A hundred years before Cook, William Dampier visited the north-western coast of Australia and met some of the inhabitants. He did not stay long—not more than two months—but that was time enough to identify some disturbing characteristics of these particular natives. He could define them only by the negatives of all the things they did not have: no clothes, no houses, no beds, no gods; no sheep, no poultry, no cultivated foods. And no decorum, either: they lived, he said, in heaps, twenty or thirty men, women and children piled together, sharing what they ate and eating what they could find. They were, in his opinion, ‘the miserablest People in the World’.
However, despite all the negatives they seemed amiable enough, and with his experience of the docile workers of the islands behind him, Dampier thought they might as well be put to useful work. This is what happened next:
We had found some Wells of Water here and intended to carry 2 or 3 barrels of it aboard. But as it was somewhat troublesome to carry it to the Canoes, we thought to have got these Men to carry it for us. And therefore we gave them some old Clothes: to one, a pair of old Breeches; to another, a ragged Shirt; to the third, a Jacket that was scarce worth owning, which would have been very acceptable in some of the places where we had been...We put them on them, thinking that this finery would have brought them to work heartily for us. And having filled our Water in small long Barrels, about six Gallons in each...we brought our new Servants to the Wells, and put a barrel on each of their Shoulders for them to carry to the Canoe.
So there they were, appropriately laden. Then came an unexpected difficulty:
...all the signs we could make were to no purpose, for they stood like Statues without motion, and grinned like so many Monkeys, staring one upon another. For these poor Creatures do not seem accustomed to carrying Burdens, and I believe that one of our Ship-boys of ten years old would carry as much as one of them. So we were forced to carry our Water ourselves. They very fairly put the Clothes off again, and laid them down as if Clothes were only for working in. I did not perceive they had any great liking for them at first.
No talent for work, no taste for European clothing, and no admiration for ‘anything we had’. We seem to hear the echo of ghostly black laughter rising from the page. This brief encounter set the tone for later ones: Australian incomprehension in the face of European exhortations, an obstinate disinclination to covet European goods, and an absolute refusal to embrace their predestined roles as hewers of wood or, in this case, haulers of water. Nomads have their own ways of managing the world.
One thing is clear to us. These radically modest local wants, which led to such confusion over what constituted grounds for legitimate exchange, ensured that in Australia trade could never become the Grand Pacifier it had proved elsewhere.
Phillip had read Dampier. What he seems to have remembered best was Dampier’s comment that many
