A book casts a fresh eye on factors in the destruction of Aboriginal society, writes Robert Manne.
British Australia has always had problem with its foundation. For a considerable time it wrestled with the convict taint. More recently it has been haunted by the dispossession of the Aborigines.
Last week Inga Clendinnen's Dancing with Strangers (Text) was published. Its central theme is the relationship between the British and the indigenous people she calls the Australians during the colony's first five years. I cannot imagine that a more vivid or beguiling account of the origins of British Australia will ever be written. In our deadlocked national conversation about the destruction of Aboriginal society, the book seems to offer something new.
According to Clendinnen, at least in self-perception, the British arrived in Australia not as settlers, let alone invaders, but as mere "convict keepers". Immediately the question of their relations with the indigenous Australians arose. She is struck by how much goodwill, curiosity and humour existed on both sides. Sometimes this was expressed in acts of delicacy or solicitousness between the peoples. Sometimes in comic pantomime or dance.
In the longer term, two British strategies emerged. The judge-advocate, David Collins, was a separatist. He came to think that the best idea was to keep the Australians at safe distance from the convict settlement, by the judicious use of military force.
But Governor Arthur Phillip believed not only in the superiority of British civilisation but also in its eminent adaptability to the needs of all his fellow humans. If only the Australians could be drawn into contact with that civilisation - clothed, fed, educated, taught to labour, offered protection under law - they would, he believed, quickly grasp its worth. Given the problems he faced in the convict settlement's early days, Clendinnen is amazed by the energy Phillip devoted to cultivating amicable relations with the Australians. He is the British hero of her book.
To convince the Australians of the treasures of British civilisation, somewhat paradoxically, Phillip opted for a policy of kidnap. The first Australian he captured was the gentle and dignified Arabanoo, who succumbed to smallpox. The second was Bennelong, or Baneelon, as Clendinnen prefers to call him. Baneelon was exuberant, mercurial and ultimately baffling. He seemed to appreciate what the British had to offer. His relations with Phillip seemed close. Yet after five months Baneelon had fled.
Four months later, a British party encountered a large group of Australians, including Baneelon, who had gathered to eat a whale. What happened next is one of the most puzzling episodes of our early history. Phillip faced Baneelon on the beach. Baneelon enacted what was to the British an inscrutable charade. As Phillip made an approach, another Australian threw a spear, which caught Phillip in the shoulder.
Clendinnen's trade is ethno-history. On the basis of a variety of sources, she provides an ingenious interpretation of this incident. In her view, Baneelon's charade represented a bill of accumulated anti-British grievances. The throwing of the spear was an attempt to restore the troubled British-Australian relationship to equilibrium. Phillip understood none of this. However, because of his astonishing forbearance despite his wounds, after the spearing many Australians, including Baneelon - their honour satisfied - decided to "come in". Not surprisingly, things did not work out as Phillip hoped.
This coming-in was perhaps the only time in colonial Australia when the British and the Aborigines lived together in equality. We are fortunate that the period was recorded by Watkin Tench. Because of his eyewitness, in Dancing with Strangers Clendinnen has brought to life the vital spirit of this proud, humorous, volatile, martial people. It is an extraordinary achievement.
Could any peoples have been more unalike than the 18th century Britons and the Australian hunter-gatherer-warriors who tried to live together at Sydney Cove? The Australians slept in whatever residence they chose. On occasions they would arrive unexpected, demanding to be fed. Despite frequent admonitions, Baneelon's wife, the feisty Barangaroo, continued to arrive naked at the Governor's dinner table. Both peoples were astonished by what the other was capable of. The British were aghast at the violence of the Australians, particularly towards their women. The Australians were appalled at the cruelty of British punishments, the floggings and the hangings.
But the cultural misunderstandings went deeper still. At Sydney Cove two incompatible versions of life collided. The British could never understand why the Australians did not appreciate their civilisation and the protection it provided under an impersonal law. The Australians could not understand why the British disapproved of their system of justice - based on revenge, honour and complex intertribal relationships.
The longer the two peoples lived together, the more mysterious to each other did they become. Although Phillip never formally abandoned his hope of civilising the Australians, by the time he left the colony his dream of interracial harmony was dead.
Towards the end of her book, Clendinnen pushes beyond her tale - "of animated imagination, determined friendship and painfully dying hopes" - to the suggestion that things might somehow have been otherwise. Although she does not blame either Phillip or Baneelon, of them she says: "Each failed, to their own and their people's injury, and to ours." Yet surely this is wrong. Within three years of Phillip's departure the deadly cycle of interracial violence - of Aboriginal raids on British properties and British punitive reprisals - had begun. The breakdown of relations was no longer based on cultural misunderstandings but on even more intractable conflicts over land. Nothing that had occurred in the relations between the British and the Australians at Sydney Cove could have prevented the arrival of this larger struggle. Nothing could have altered the way in which it would ultimately be resolved, at the hunter-gatherers' expense. To see the rift between Phillip and Baneelon as an injury not only to them but also to us is the only occasion where well-meaning sentimentality overtakes this otherwise sober book.
The story Clendinnen tells in Dancing with Strangers is, nonetheless, of real contemporary significance. For it matters that when the British arrived in Australia they did so less in the spirit of indifference or contempt than of offered friendship and of hope.
Indigenous and non-indigenous Australians are still struggling to find a basis for reconciliation. No reconciliation is, however, possible unless we can discover a version of Australian history that can be shared. Clendinnen's wonderful book offers the most truthful and nourishing first chapter of such a history that we are ever likely to have.