A Commonwealth of Thieves (21 page)

In the face of Ross's negativity, Ruse would symbolise the resourceful agriculturalist and be a living validation of the idea that the Australian earth was, after all, compliantly fruitful. Phillip's investment of government resources in him was wide-ranging and tipped the scales in Ruse's favour, starting him off with livestock and ultimately building him a brick house.

Not all of Ruse's industry and energy, however, could fully prevail over the recalcitrant, leached-down, and grudging earth along the Parramatta River, and he would later move to the more remote floodplain areas along the Hawkesbury. At the time he got his land grant, there were others Phillip was willing to free and put to the task of sustaining New South Wales. But that was not to happen until he saw what befell this young Cornishman, and how he set about the task.

The other experiment which had been in abeyance was the Aboriginal diplomatic experiment which had ended with Arabanoo's death. Tench says that in making a further capture of natives, Phillip needed, amongst other things, to know “whether or not the country possessed any resources, by which life might be prolonged.”

Reliable Lieutenant Bradley of the
Sirius
was sent out with two boats to capture natives, a task he found distasteful. Northwards, at Manly Cove, he found a number of natives on the beach, and in the prow of one of the cutters, a seaman held up fish, tempting two robust men, a mature fellow and a young man, into the shallows. “They eagerly took the fish,” wrote Lieutenant Bradley. “They were dancing together when the signal was given by me, and the two poor devils were seized and handed into the boat in an instant.” The two captured happened not to be local natives but two formidable visitors from the south side of Port Jackson. Both of them fought ferociously to get away from the melee of soldiers, sailors, and convicts, but they were up against numbers, and soon shackles were on them. The other natives rushed from the bush and gathered on both headlands of the cove, shaking their spears and clubs.

Bradley wrote, “The noise of the men, crying and screaming of the women and children, together with the situation of the two miserable wretches in our possession was really a most distressing scene.” The captives were howling out for help, but the boat pulled away. It was a bad day's business, Bradley thought, “by far the most unpleasant service I was ever ordered to execute.” He illustrated his journal with a memorable picture of the capture.

At the governor's wharf at Sydney Cove, a crowd gathered to see the natives brought ashore, just as they had gathered to see Arabanoo. The boy Nanbaree, who had survived the smallpox and who now lived at the hospital, where White had given him the name of Andrew Snape Hamond Douglas White (to honour White's former naval captain, who had recommended him for the chief surgical job in the colony), shouted “Colby” to the older of the two men and “Bennelong” to the younger. He had often told Surgeon White about fabled Colby, who was his uncle. Both men still bristled with resistance.

Woolawarre Bennelong (this being just one of many alternative spellings of his name) was judged by Tench to be about twenty-six years old, of good stature and sturdy appearance, “with a bold intrepid countenance, which bespoke defiance and revenge.” He was a man of lively, passionate, sociable, humorous character, and was well advanced in ritual knowledge, ritual being the fuel and physics of his world, what kept it in place, what kept it so lovable and abundant. He did not quite have the
gravitas
and the power of eye to be a full-fledged
carrahdy,
a doctor of high degree, a curer and ritual punishment man. He did not seek solitude or penance. But he was well liked around the harbour, even on its northern shores and beaches, and southwards too, around the shallow shores of Botany Bay, where people lived who were related to him by marriage, language, and the great rituals of corroboree dance and other secret, communal ceremonies. Sometimes, it would be discovered, he fornicated with their women and bravely stood up under a rain of ritual punishment spears and took his scars and was proud of them. He had an ambiguous relationship with his least favourite relatives, the Cameraigal of the north shore, whose women he nonetheless also had a weakness for and in whose country he was at various times permitted to hunt, fish, socialise, and join in corroboree—that is, take part in dances which preserved and sustained and continued the earth made by hero ancestors. Bennelong had a range of names in a society where people carried many names, and some of his others were Boinda, Bundabunda, and Wogetrowey.

Colby was perhaps thirty, more intractable, somewhat shorter but athletic-looking, and “better fitted for purposes of activity,” observed Tench. They had both survived the smallpox— “indeed Collbee's face was very thickly imprinted with the marks of it.” Hunter would claim Colby was “a chief of the Cadigal,” the Sydney Cove clan, and Midshipman Fowell called him “the principal one of the two,” and said that his full name was Gringerry Kibba Colby.
Kibba,
or
gibba,
was Eora for “rock,” and would enter the settlers' English before long—the children of the convicts and the free being commonly accused, in this settlement and beyond, of “chucking gibbas” at each other. Colby
was
a rock, and behaved with strong resistance.

Both natives were taken up to the governor's residence. It was the first time Bennelong and Arthur Phillip saw each other eye to eye, a meeting as fateful and defining as that between Cortés and Montezuma, or Pizarro and Atahualpa. Bennelong and Phillip in particular were mutually enchanted and attracted, and both Bennelong and Colby could see through the deference other white people offered him that Phillip was the supreme elder—
Be-anna,
Father, as Arabanoo had called him.

Phillip knew that as with Arabanoo he would need to restrain the two natives to stop them running away. A convict was assigned to each of the men until they should become reconciled to their capture.

Banks had written in the journal of his voyage with Cook about the capture of Tupia, a Polynesian high priest. “I do not know why I may not keep him as a curiosity, as well as some of my neighbours do lions and tigers at a larger expense than he will probably put me to.” Phillip's motives were perhaps equally as proprietary, but somewhat more elevated.

Nonetheless, the means used to detain the two men were in their way severe—they were tied at night to their keepers by both ankle chain and rope, and slept with them in a locked hut. At this treatment, Colby yielded no gesture of reconciliation. He planned escape. Bennelong, “though haughty,” not only got on well with the Europeans but enjoyed the experience of doing so, and was his people's first enthusiastic anthropologist. Beneath his conviviality was a desire to work out how and what these people meant, and perhaps how to appease them and even make them go away.

After attempting to escape many times, Colby managed it on the night of 12 December 1789, while eating supper with Bennelong and their two minders. Colby was at the door, sitting just on the outside of the hut, and had some rations for his supper, “which he pretended to be employed about … the end of his rope was in the hands of his keeper within; whilst those on the inside were thus amused, he drew the splice of his rope from the shackle and in a moment was over the paling of a yard and out of sight … he carried off his whole wardrobe.” This was bad news for his minder. The convict who had been given charge of Colby received 100 lashes for “excessive carelessness and want of attention.”

Bennelong had been trying to slip his shackle too, and now became much alarmed, expecting punishment or to be put to death, but after two or three days he became quite composed again. He boarded the
Sirius
without the smallest apprehension for his safety. “He looked with attention at every part of the ship and expressed much astonishment particularly at the cables.” Bennelong was thus quickly revived by his interest in Phillip and the others. He was considered a family member, if a tethered one. Phillip took him with Nanbaree to the look-out post and signal station on the south head of the harbour, which had been established the December before. Bennelong still wore his leg shackle and despite it was able to put on a display of strength and accuracy by throwing a spear nearly 300 feet against a strong wind “with great force and exactness.” On the way back the boat stopped near Rose Bay, a cove east of Sydney Cove, and from the boat, Bennelong called to a native woman ashore he was fond of—a visiting Cameraigal named Barangaroo. Barangaroo and other women waded out and talked, and told Bennelong that Colby was fishing on the other side of the hill, but had been unable to remove the shackle from his leg. The Europeans certainly got to know of Bennelong's highest order of recreation:
boon-alliey
—kissing women.

A
CAPTIVE BY NIGHT
, B
ENNELONG
had the freedom of the governor's house by day. At Phillip's table, wrote Watkin Tench, Bennelong was quick to make clear to Phillip how many of his people had died of the smallpox epidemic the previous year—he claimed that one in two had perished. Unlike Arabanoo, Tench observed, Bennelong became immediately fond of “our viands” and would drink spirits without reluctance, which Colby and Arabanoo had not done. A deadly appetite was thus imbued in Bennelong. But for the moment, wine and spirits did not seem to have a more perceptible impact on him than they did on any one of the gentlemen who sat around him. He liked turtle, too, which he had never eaten before, but which the
Supply
had brought from Lord Howe Island. “He acquired knowledge, both of our manners and language, faster than his predecessor had done.” He would sing and dance and caper, and talked about all the customs of his country in a mixture of rudimentary English and Eora on his side, and rudimentary Eora and English on Tench's and Phillip's. “Love and war seemed his favourite pursuits,” wrote Tench, “in both of which he had suffered severely. His head was disfigured by several scars; a spear had passed through his arm and another through his leg; half of one of his thumbs was carried away, and the mark of a wound appeared on the back of his hand.” But they served as a map of his adventures, and as well as telling the stories of his exploits, an exercise he loved greatly, he was also explaining a concept of blood justice, and preparing the European mind for the idea that they too might need graciously to receive similar wounds for their crimes. The plunders and even the occupation of earth by the Europeans violated the land. Bennelong hoped they could be taught that fact. It might have been one of the reasons he stayed so long in Sydney Cove, and risked his soul.

“But the wound on the back of your hand, Baneelon!” Tench asked him. “How did you get that?” As quoted by Tench, Bennelong laughed and told him it was received in carrying off a lady of the Cameraigal on the north shore of Sydney Harbour, across from Sydney Cove. “I was dragging her away; she cried aloud, and stuck her teeth in me.”

“And what did you do then?”

“I knocked her down and beat her till she was insensible, and covered with blood.”

The story—Tench intending it to be more amusing than it seems to us—is credible despite the presence of that non-Eora word “insensible.” Bennelong frequently asked the governor to accompany him with the marines in order to punish and even obliterate the Cameraigal, with whom he had both passionate connection and passionate grievance. As for the governor, as well as sometimes calling him
Be-anna,
Bennelong exchanged his own honorific
Woolawarre
with him, calling him by that name, and thus being entitled to call himself “Governor.” The exchange of names was meant to do both parties great honour and convey closeness of soul.
Woolawarre
could have been a significant name in other ways too, for it seems to derive from the Eora words for “Milky Way” and “depart”—Phillip being one who had departed the stars. Phillip told the former Home Secretary Lord Sydney in a letter that he hoped Bennelong “will soon be able to inform us of their customs and manners.”

As part of his British training, Bennelong was required to appear at the governor's table in trousers and a red kersey jacket, and Phillip was anxious to make him dependent on clothing. On Sundays the native wore a suit of buff yellow nankeen from China. He was not the least awkward in eating or in performing actions of bowing, drinking healths, and returning thanks, all of which he did with a “scrupulous exactitude.” He would raise his glass and drink a toast to “the King,” a term which Bennelong associated ever after with a glass of wine. Gentlemen tried an experiment on him by mixing brandy and water instead of wine and water, “but he instantly finds the trick out, and on this occasion he is angry.”

He spoke much of the Cameraigal women,
Cameraigalleons,
as he called them. They were not so much enemy women, but certainly the women of rivals, and were alluring to Bennelong, especially the woman named Barangaroo, who he said had him under a spell. This glamour of the foreign and the owned might have led to behaviour appalling in European eyes, but it was one of the mechanisms by which ancient societies avoided incest, by marrying out of their family group.

The Europeans had brought with them from the history of the Americas and of European incursions into the Pacific a concept of tribes and chieftains, and attempting to categorise the New South Wales natives in those terms, found it a difficult task. There were no individual chieftains in Aboriginal society, though groups of elders, men and women, held much collective knowledge and power. There were perhaps two dozen or more clans that participated in the common language of the Sydney area. From the south head of Port Jackson to Sydney Cove, and southwards towards Botany Bay, the people were called Cadi and the tribe was the Cadigal, and Colby was an important man amongst that group. (The ending
gal
meant “country.”) On the south side of the harbour from Sydney Cove westwards, the tribe were the Wangal, of whom Bennelong was a member. On the opposite, northern, shore of the Parramatta River from the Wangal lived the tribe called the Wallumattagal. Then, on the broader reaches of northern Port Jackson were the Cameraigal, and at Manly the Gayimai, whom Colby and Bennelong had been visiting when captured. These neat divisions merely scratch the surface of the complexity of clans and families and geography. At particular times they all visited each other's territory, and were connected by favours, gestures, swapped names, marriage, ceremonies, and ritual knowledge of how to sustain their shared earth and the known world given them by the adventures of their hero ancestors.