INTRODUCTION

When I began researching this book I believed that first contacts between European explorers and Aboriginal people were momentous encounters, unutterably changing the lives of those involved. I agreed then with Henry Reynolds who has recently exclaimed of the extraordinary encounters in Tasmania that Nothing would ever be the same again.1 My initial intention was to expound the political ramifications of first contact, and suggest how these encounters could illuminate complex discourses on race relations, imperialism and colonization. I planned to explain how these encounters offered insights into the historical trajectory that followed. In my desire to construct a vivid history I was mindful of contact narratives which relate dramatic scenes of mayhem and bloodshed or else depict the diplomacy of two cultures coming together. Over the course of my research, however, my thinking changed. What crystallized the thinking behind this project was a particular incident concerning James Cook. Cook has been both idealized and vilified for his impact on Antipodean history, be it through his incredible navigational discoveries or as a rapacious harbinger of colonization.2 But I had a different Cook in mind. Upon his very first opportunity to make landfall in New Holland and meet the Aboriginal people of Botany Bay, hitherto unseen by European eyes, he decided to defer this epochal moment in Australian history, preferring instead to wait until [a]fter dinner. Perhaps, his nonchalance emulated the indifference that Aboriginal people had displayed at the Europeans arrival in the bay, for they scarce[ly] lifted their eyes from their employment as the Endeavour sailed by.3 Neither the Europeans nor Aboriginal peoples actions suggest that they believed their worlds would never be the same again. In fact, many of the European explorers exchanges with Aboriginal people could be construed as mundane, concerning practical matters such as the search for a safe landing spot and water, or else eliciting seemingly trivial ethnographic information such as the Aboriginal word for breaking wind.4 This is not to say that there were no dramatic encounters between explorers and Aboriginal people, for there were certainly meetings which led to violence and tragic deaths, or provided new insights into the nature of indigenous life. Such encounters
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contributed to Enlightenment theories about mankind, human variation and the nature of so-called savage society. There were also undoubtedly moments of mutual understanding and comprehension between Aboriginal people and European explorers, as well as moments where they expressed feelings of wonder, bemusement and scorn towards one another. Yet, the vast majority of the explorers accounts of Aboriginal people prosaically describe what they looked like and how they lived. Europeans documented what Aboriginal people ate, where they slept, what kinds of manufactures they made and even, as the curious-minded William Anderson and Jacques-Felix-Emmanuel Hamelin both documented, how indigenous men stood while relieving themselves.5 These descriptions of ordinary activities tend to be left out of the histories, in favour of accounts which reflect broader political concerns, such as Aboriginal land tenure, diplomatic protocols and rituals, and gender relations.6 But such accounts are pregnant with significance and reward detailed study. Explorer accounts of the mundane and quotidian challenge teleological histories because they illustrate that first encounters were not between imperial invaders and indigenous victims in waiting, with both enacting preordained roles. Instead, these meetings, often tense, sometimes perplexing, and occasionally convivial, were between men, with their vulnerabilities, egotism and aggressive propensities. This is because during the eighteenth century women were usually left at home, be that a European dwelling or an Aboriginal shelter out of the explorers sight. Moreover, they were meetings between men with more immediate concerns than empire, such as the need for sustenance, and anxieties over how to safeguard themselves from harm. Neither the European nor Aboriginal men consistently held the upper hand in these exchanges, as both were ultimately held hostage to the needs of their bodies and their failure to fully comprehend the motives and intentions of the other. At the same time, it was the mutually recognized frailties and pleasures of the body, and the curiosity kindled by their encounters, which enabled European and Aboriginal men brief moments of connection. These included miming acts of bodily elimination, laughing at the others lack of body hair, physical strength, agility, or apparent sexual vigour, and touching, scrutinizing, grooming and adorning one anothers bodies. Hence, first contacts can be read as embodied encounters, as the body was crucial in facilitating first exchanges between Aboriginal and European people. Indeed the term contact means to touch, and it was through using their bodies as a medium of communication that the Europeans engaged with Aboriginal people and attempted to learn more of their physiology and mores. Further, to differing degrees, the explorers were also influenced by various aspects of Enlightenment thought, including the proliferation of scientific and anthropological discourses on the body.7 New empirical sciences such as anatomy enabled closer and seemingly more sophisticated scrutiny of the human body, and recent tax-

Introduction

onomies created ostensibly objective ways of cataloguing and ordering bodies.8 Further, new institutions and media were also developed to regulate and disseminate how corporeal appetites should be controlled and disciplined.9 Finally, and most significantly, Enlightenment ideas about the state of nature provoked intense speculation on the corporeal superiority of the savage man compared to the civilized man, as well as sympathetic and relativist defences of indigenous peoples in the wake of European imperialism and slavery.

The Aboriginal Male in the Enlightenment World

This book also investigates how Australian Aboriginal men, through their encounters with eighteenth-century explorers, were brought within the ambit of the Enlightenment world. My focus on European representations of the Aboriginal male is not only a consequence of most eighteenth-century crosscultural encounters being between men. It is also because European perceptions and representations of Aboriginal people were mediated by the explorers masculine preoccupations. The explorers accounts are imbued with competitive distinctions between the Aboriginal men and their ideal selves, that is, civilized, chivalrous and physically superior. In the evaluations of Aboriginal mens physical appearance, capabilities and comportment there is an unspoken, and at times overt, comparison with the Europeans own looks, intelligence, civility and talents. Even the explorers brief interactions with Aboriginal women were refracted through the presumptions of the brutal gender inequalities of savage societies and their own superior sense of chivalry, sexual allure, and self-control. However, in an era still influenced by Rousseaus idealization of natural man and Diderots critique of sexual repression and social inequality, not all accounts portrayed Aboriginal men as inferior. Antoine-Raymond-Joseph Bruny dEntrecasteaux, for example, observed Aboriginal fathers in Van Diemens Land gently chastise their children, and declared that primordial natural affection [was] alive in them in all its purity and intensity; he exclaimed how much civilized people could learn from this school of nature!10 Thus the explorers accounts of Aboriginal men were not uniformly critical or derogatory, and even sentimentalized Aboriginal men as superior to distant European fathers. In fact many of the explorers accounts of Aboriginal men were more contradictory and unstable than most histories suggest. European descriptions of their more praiseworthy attributes were, however, often fleeting or embedded within more critical evaluations. In contrast to much of the scholarly literature which reads the sources as prefiguring colonialist and racist ideology, I will attentively reconstruct these more sympathetic evaluations as in some respects symptomatic of the Enlightenments ambivalence towards the non-European world.

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This book encompasses the long eighteenth century, charting successive European maritime explorers representations of the Aboriginal male body, that is, their descriptions of both the bodys various parts such as skin and hair, how the Aboriginal male body was used in the pursuit of war, subsistence and sexual pleasure, and what the explorers diverse experiments revealed about the Aboriginal bodys sensory capacities and physical strength. It considers the impact of diverse Enlightenment philosophies on the explorers expectations and perceptions of Aboriginal men. In particular I analyse the impact of eighteenth-century ideas concerning natural and cultured peoples, human variation, the nature of savage languages, and the universality of war and conflict on European observations of Aboriginal people in the wake of early contact. My approach benefits from the extensive research undertaken on the exploration of Australia, which, since the late nineteenth-century has unearthed and made readily available important Dutch, British, French and Spanish explorer texts.11 Typically, studies of individual explorers, expeditions, or the voyagers of particular nations, recount the histories in sequential episodic narratives, and can be light on interpretation. Consequently, many studies in this perennially popular historical genre smooth out and flatten the complexities of early cross-cultural encounters, in order to construct more clear-cut narratives of the European explorers achievements and exploits.12 As Maria Nugent has observed, this inattention to the explorers interactions with Aboriginal people is a peculiarly Australian phenomenon, in contrast to the Pacific scholarship.13 I have also attempted an approach different from that of ethnohistorical and post-colonial historical studies which draw on early European accounts of Australia either to speculate on the nature of pre-colonial Aboriginal life or to examine the emergence of racial discourses. The desire of ethnohistorical narratives to recreate the pre-colonial Aboriginal world through European texts often results in a failure to contextualize adequately the eighteenth-century accounts, that is, to consider their cultural biases, amour propre and reified expectations of encountering a savage society.14 On the other hand, post-colonial discourse analyses which focus on the development of racial theories risk ignoring indigenous agency and presenting Aboriginal people as little more than ciphers in the development of European discourses of the other.15 By contrast my concern is not solely with European observations of Aboriginal men, but also with how the explorers interpreted the various ways they touched and engaged with the Aboriginal men, and how they responded to Aboriginal mens scrutiny of, and physical intercourse with them. Keenly attentive to the intellectual climate that informed the European explorers observations and conjectures, I detail how Eurocentric assumptions were often absurdly insufficient when confronted with the complexity of Aboriginal culture and agency. I address some of the lacunae in this scholarship by closely analysing the ambivalences and contradictions

Introduction

in explorer representations of indigenous people. I offer a thick description of an archive of tropes, conceits and genres, usually rendered incidental to more straightforward narrations of the life and experiences of European explorers.

The Expeditions
The history of European contacts with Australian Aboriginal people began in the early seventeenth century with the landing of the Duyfken at Cape York in 1606. The Dutch pinnace was captained by Willem Janszoon and was commissioned by the Dutch East India Company, or VOC, to investigate the rumours of trade opportunities and gold lying to the southeast of the Spice Islands.16 All we know of this very first encounter is that the Duyfken sailed into what the Dutch called Fly Bay, and the captain sent a boat to explore an unnamed waterway, which became known as Batavia River. Here the sailors were attacked by a volley of spears and one of their men was killed. The only record of the Aboriginal people was that they were wild, cruel, black and barbarous men who killed some of [the VOCs] sailors.17 Subsequent European landings would contribute little more to the European picture of Aboriginal people. The only exception to this was the landing of English buccaneer William Dampier off the north-west coast in 1688 and again in 1699. He briefly encountered Aboriginal people at King Sound and La Grange Bay, but found that they offered nothing desirable for the European trader, and his attempts to extract some service from them in the form of carrying water barrels was a dismal failure. His evaluation that they were the miserablest People in the World, along with his blunt descriptions of their bodies and material culture, were well remembered by later explorers who sought to either prove or refute his accounts.18 It was not until the eighteenth-century that the European interactions with, and descriptions of, indigenous peoples became more fully developed and heterogeneous, as this was when advancements in knowledge were incorporated into the goals of the voyages of discovery. From this time the expeditions crews included naturalists, botanists, zoologists, proto-anthropologists, artists, many of them familiar with different philosophical approaches to the study of man. These voyages of discovery also had wealthy patrons such as the state, the admiralty or scientific societies, so they could afford to conduct more leisurely explorations, and indulge interests which would not necessarily return great financial reward.19 Between 1770 and 1803 more than twenty European expeditions landed in Australia, but only a handful had meaningful contact with Aboriginal people. In 1770 James Cook charted the then unknown east coast of the continent in the Endeavour, meeting Aboriginal people at Botany Bay and Endeavour River. On board was the botanist Joseph Banks who produced a richly detailed

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overview of the Aboriginal people they encountered. On Cooks second voyage his companion ship the Adventure was separated from the Resolution, and visited Van Diemens Land in March 1773 on the way to the rendezvous point. Although they did not come face to face with any indigenous people during their brief stay at Adventure Bay, the captain, Tobias Furneaux, recorded his own speculations on the nature of the people based on the indigenous material culture he observed. Finally, Cook himself visited Adventure Bay in 1777 on his third and final great voyage, and this time met a group of Aboriginal men and women. Cooks first voyage on the Endeavour is considered to have inaugurated Anglo-Australian history as his and Bankss accounts of the land and people eventually gave rise to the First Fleet which established the first British colony at Port Jackson in 1788. The officers on the First Fleet are not usually considered within the explorer scholarship; because their aim was to establish a penal settlement, they are generally understood as the first colonists. Arguably, however, the First Fleet officers were also explorers, rather than permanent settlers, which is why I include them here. The administration and marines were mostly given four-year commissions, and many, such as the first governor Arthur Philip, left the colony in 1792. Further, during their stay in Port Jackson they explored an extensive area in New South Wales, including Broken Bay north of the harbour, and the Blue Mountains in the west. The First Fleet officers recorded their discoveries and opinions in journals, many of which were published at the time, and shaped the idea of Aboriginal people in the British popular imaginary.20 Significantly, the First Fleet officers were also in conversation with other explorers. The marine lieutenant Watkin Tench, for example, was familiar with both Dampier and Cooks accounts and countered their observations about Aboriginal people with his own, while later explorers such as Matthew Flinders cited the work of the colonys judge-advocate David Collins. The British also played host to later explorers who visited Port Jackson such as the Spanish expedition led by Alexandro Malaspina, who arrived in March 1793, and a decade later the French expedition led by Nicolas Baudin. These explorers also drew on British anecdotes and records about the Eora, Port Jacksons indigenous people, in order to augment their own observations. The establishment of the colony in Eora country meant that the First Fleet officers also had more extensive contact with Aboriginal people than other European explorers, and eventually established closer connections with particular Aboriginal men such as Arabanoo, Colebee and Bennelong, all kidnapped by the British in order to induce some kind of accord with the indigenes. The First Fleets accounts of Aboriginal people contributed knowledge and ideas to future expeditions. The final British expedition I will discuss was led by the Englishman Matthew Flinders, who was instructed by the British Admiralty to explore the southern coast of the continent. Setting off in the Investigator in 1801 he had circum-

Introduction

navigated the continent by 1803, meeting Aboriginal people at numerous points throughout his voyage. Unlike the other eighteenth-century explorers Flinders was accompanied by an Aboriginal guide, Bungaree, or Bongaree, his goodnatured Indian from Port Jackson. While he assumed that Bungaree would be able to assist in communicating with other Aboriginal people, he was surprised to find that the languages were all wholly different and Bungaree was rarely able to converse with any other Aboriginal people. He did however provide a useful reference point for Flinders in evaluating the Aboriginal men he met during his voyage: Bungaree was far more dexterous than the men at Herveys Bay, yet cut a poor figure compared to the men of Murray Island in the eastern Torres Strait.21 The French also sent their ships to chart this still largely unknown land. In March 1772, five years before Cooks visit, Marc-Joseph Marion-Dufresnes Mascarin and Marquis de Castries landed at Marion Bay in Van Diemens Land. They were on their way to Tahiti in order to return their Tahitian companion Aotourou home after he had accompanied Louis-Antoine de Bougainville back to Europe. During their four days in Van Diemens land Marion-Dufresnes men encountered Aboriginal people at North Bay, which was the first recorded European contact with the islands indigenous people, and unfortunately ended in the death of an Aboriginal man at the hands of the Europeans. Antoine-Raymond-Joseph Bruny dEntrecasteaux led the Recherche and the Esprance to southern waters in order to look for Jean-Franois de Galaup de La Prouse who had gone missing shortly after his departure from Botany Bay in 1788, and to follow up La Prouses scientific mission. DEntrecasteauxs was also a scientific expedition, supported by the Society of Natural History, and manned with a crew of 11 geographers and scientists, including the botanist Jacques-Julien Houtou de Labillardire. DEntrecasteaux visited south-east Van Diemens Land in 1792 and again in 1793. His mens depiction of indigenous people challenged the majority of European accounts by representing them in a different, more positive, light, commensurate with dEntrecasteauxs enthusiastic embrace of Rousseaus philosophy.22 Nicolas Baudins Gographe and Naturaliste sailed around the continent from 1801 to 1803, and his was to date the most sophisticated scientific expedition, amassing a vast array of floral and faunal specimens. The naturalists were given detailed instructions by Joseph-Marie de Grando and Georges Cuvier so were well versed in the latest ethnographic philosophies and methodologies, and recorded detailed descriptions of Aboriginal people, producing a fine collection of illustrations depicting individuals and scenes of indigenous life. The expeditions official chronicler, naturalist Franois Pron, recorded detailed ethnographies of Aboriginal people in Van Diemens Land. As I shall discuss, Pron is an illuminating example of an Enlightenment era philosophical traveller, as

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The Aboriginal Male in the Enlightenment World

his observations about Aboriginal people explicitly engaged with the theory of natural man proposed by Rousseau. Finally, Alexandro Malaspinas expedition was sent by the Spanish government in 1793 to investigate the Port Jackson colony and conduct scientific studies, including ethnographic studies of Aboriginal people. Malaspina realized, however, that the expeditions ability to shed light on the Eora peoples customs or rites was hindered by their deficiency in the European language of the country, English, as well as their lack of opportunities to study the indigenous people. The British, he affirmed, have already advanced in the subject as much as one could desire.23 Consequently, the Spanish accounts of Aboriginal people were limited to brief descriptions of their physical appearance and their treatment by the colonists. With this enlarged sense of exploration in mind, I analyse the European explorers encounters with Aboriginal men throughout New Holland and Van Diemens Land.

Aboriginal Australia and Indigenous Men

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At various sites dotted around the coastlines of Australia and Tasmania, then respectively known as New Holland and Van Diemens Land, the explorers came into contact with Aboriginal men, and sometimes women and children, not realizing that these individuals belonged to one of the 250-odd language groups or 500 clans which constituted Aboriginal Australia. While they gradually recognized that the Aboriginal people they encountered at different locations spoke different languages, the explorers were ignorant of just how many indigenous dialects proliferated throughout the continent. The explorers were similarly ignorant about the social, cultural and legal make-up of each clan. To the European eye, Aboriginal people possessed no trace of religion and did not worship either sun, moon or star, and were simply organized into families, the head or senior of which extracts compliance from the rest.24 The explorers did not realize that each clan possessed numerous Dreaming stories, depicting how the land was traversed and marked by the Ancestral Beings who created landforms, people, animals, plants and celestial stars. Further, that these Ancestral Beings experiences, and often the consequences of their actions, formed the basis for Aboriginal kinship systems, laws, ways of caring for Country and connecting to land, and that their exploits and travails were commemorated through song, dance and complex rituals.25 While the explorers observed that Aboriginal men and women participated in different economic spheres, and men were responsible for hunting, they also assumed that women served as the mens domestic drudges. They failed to see that Aboriginal women exercised a relative degree of independence and possessed their own Dreaming stories, rituals and sacred sites.26

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The Europeans ignorance about Aboriginal cultures and social mores was profound; most of the explorers considered the Aboriginal peoples they observed throughout the continent as more or less the same, notwithstanding a few, not insignificant differences in physical appearance and vocabulary. In most cases the Europeans did not cite the language group or clan name of the people they encountered. While it was probably the Wik people that Janszoon met at Cape Keerweer, the Tyrraddeme people that Baudins men met at Maria Island and the Nuenonne that Furneaux and then Cook met at Adventure Bay, the explorers did not actually record these names.27 The First Fleet officers are the notable exception. Through their prolonged contact with the Aboriginal people at Port Jackson and the greater Sydney area, they learned that the people referred to themselves as the Eora, and that they were divided into the Gweagal, Gadigal, Gameyegal, Wangal and Wallumedegal clans.28 Except for the Eora people, I have not named the particular Aboriginal language group the explorers met at each location as it would mainly be guesswork based on language group maps compiled later in the twentieth century. These maps are not infallible so interpreting them is no easy matter as other scholars have found.29 Further, borders were certainly permeable, and as the First Fleet officers discovered, Aboriginal people frequently travelled long distances to visit other Aboriginal people, conduct ceremonies and trade with neighbouring language groups. Consequently, at any particular time a group of Aboriginal people could comprise individuals from different language groups and clans. Further, very few Aboriginal mens names were recorded, with individuals often being described as natives, savages or Indians. Again, it is in Port Jackson where we will meet individual Aboriginal men. Of all the characters in the historical record of the colony, Marcia Langton exclaims, the Wangal man Bennelong stands out, for he was tall, strong and well built, intelligent and charismatic.30 As previously mentioned, Bennelong was kidnapped by the British, but then escaped after being held captive for five months, much to the surprise of the governor, Arthur Phillip, who believed he had forged a close relationship with the man who called him Beanna, or father. Bennelong eventually became a mediator between the Eora people and the British, and even travelled back to England with Phillip before returning once again to his homeland, believing that there was no better country in the world than his own.31 Bennelong eventually died in the colony, remembered as a drunk, and eulogized as a tragic figure, and it is only recently that his memory as a cross-cultural intermediary has been rehabilitated.

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The Aboriginal Male in the Enlightenment World

Fragmented Bodies
This is a book about embodied encounters, both enjoyable and anxiety-inducing, and their affective residue in the explorer accounts. As Elizabeth Grosz contends, human bodies have the wonderful ability, while striving for integration and cohesion, organic and psychic wholeness, to also provide for and indeed produce fragmentations, fracturings, dislocations that orient bodies and body parts towards other bodies and body parts.32 In their descriptions of the Aboriginal male, European explorers typically segmented the Aboriginal body, its physical attributes, pleasures and repulsions, activities and comportments. This was not, however, merely a function of the European desire for epistemological mastery. Rather European men themselves were frequently intrigued by the sight and smell of bodies so different from their own, and in some cases facilitated communication with Aboriginal people by celebrating the non-classical or grotesque body that displays genitalia, defecates and breaks wind. The Aboriginal Male in the Enlightenment World is organized thematically, rather than chronologically or by expedition, in order to reflect the explorers tendency to fragment the Aboriginal body in their accounts. Chapters 1 to 3 trace the explorers observations and descriptions of particular parts of the Aboriginal male body. The explorers scrutinized various body parts, and often described each separately, such as skin, hair, nose, belly, calves, eyebrows, eyes and so on. These chapters then reflect the way in which the explorers perceived the Aboriginal body, by atomizing it into discrete, observable parts which could ostensibly be better comprehended. They believed that these individual parts corresponded to, and revealed, Aboriginal mens inherent qualities, expounding their characters, temperament and intelligence, as well as their belligerent or pusillanimous drives. Fragmenting the body into these separate parts skin, hair and face allows us to explore various Enlightenment discourses about embodiment, by discretely analysing this enormous corpus of complex, interconnected and at times contradictory representations. Chapters 4 to 8 examine the explorers discussions of the Aboriginal mens roles and activities in daily life, and their speculations on how the indigenous bodies compared to their own. These chapters reflect the gradual shift in the Europeans engagement with Aboriginal men as they move from simply observing and speculating on the mens different roles and activities to more intimate levels of interaction. Chapter 4, Carnal Bodies, begins by focusing on the explorers accounts of Aboriginal mens sexual drives and brutal courtship methods, highlighting the spurious nature of these accounts, often derived from prurient speculations or hearsay evoking long-standing tropes about African and Native American sexuality. Chapters 5 and 7 explore Aboriginal mens martial practices and their alleged indolence, drawing on the explorers first-hand observation of

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Aboriginal mens activities. These chapters also reveal that there was not infrequently a gulf between what the explorers witnessed and the conclusions they drew, a complication rarely acknowledged in the scholarship. Communicating Bodies discusses the way in which European attempts to communicate with Aboriginal people drew them ever deeper into relationships with indigenous people, complicating their detached ethnographic postures. Finally, Testing Bodies examines the explorers attempts to measure and test the Aboriginal mens physical strength, agility and sensations, an experimental approach which required intimate interaction as the Europeans not always successfully sought the Aboriginal mens cooperation.

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