A Commonwealth of Thieves (28 page)

Indeed, for the sometimes hated Cameraigal, Bennelong was now acting the part of distinguished visitor for an initiation ceremony. As for Colby, he had gone off in his canoe and was “loitering about the look-out house” on South Head. “I am resolved to execute the prisoners who may be brought in,” said Phillip, “in the most public and exemplary manner, in the presence of as many of their countrymen as can be collected, after having explained the cause of such punishment, and my fixed determination to repeat it, whenever any future breach of good conduct on their side shall render it necessary.”

The governor at this point asked Watkin for his opinion, and the young officer suggested the capture of six might do just as well, and out of this number, a group should be set aside for retaliation if any further outrage occur, and only a portion executed immediately. The governor decided that should Watkin find it possible to take six prisoners, “I will hang two, and send the rest to Norfolk Island for a certain period, which will cause their countrymen to believe that we have dispatched them secretly.”

McEntire was not dead, indeed he seemed to be recovering at the hospital, but Phillip believed the lesson still had to be taught. The expedition was to set out at 4 a.m. on the humid morning of 14 December. Tench included the New South Wales Corps's urbane Captain Hill in the group. He had also chosen Lieutenants Pouldon of the marines and Dawes, the astronomer.

Lieutenant Dawes was conscience-stricken about the objectives of the expedition and spoke with the Reverend Johnson about its morality. Even though in Chesapeake Bay he had been wounded by the French in alliance with the revolutionary Americans, Dawes saw himself above all as a student of people, a surveyor of surfaces and skies, not as a combat soldier. He had spent a great deal of time putting together his dictionary of the Eora, who liked him greatly. Above all, he admired Patyegarang, an Aboriginal girl of about fifteen named for
pattagorang,
the large grey kangaroo, who was one of his sources for his language collection. She became his familiar and stayed in his hut as his chief language teacher, servant, and perhaps lover. The language of Patyegarang recorded by Dawes might indicate that he was either a very affectionate mentor or something more.
Nangagolang,
time for rest, Patyegarang said when the tap-to, military lights-out, was beaten from the barracks square near the head of the cove. And
Matigarabangun naigaba,
we shall sleep separate.
Nyimang candle,
Mr. D.
Put out the candle, Mr. Dawes.

It was Patyegarang who interpreted the motives of her people to Dawes. A white man had been wounded some days before in one of the areas down-harbour to Warrane, Sydney Cove, and Dawes asked her why.
Gulara,
said Patyegarang. Angry.
Minyin gulara Eora?
asked Dawes. Why are the black men angry?
Inyan ngalwi.
Because the white men settled here. And then, further, said Patyegarang,
Gunin,
the guns.

These exchanges must have played a large part in Dawes's refusal to hunt the natives. On the day the expedition was ordered, he wrote a letter to his superior officer, Captain James Campbell, in which he refused to take part in the expedition. Dawes was an officer who had corresponded with William Wilberforce, renowned leader of the campaign against slavery, and the objectives of this mission were abhorrent to him. Campbell could not persuade Dawes to change his mind and the two of them brought the letter to Phillip, who “took pains to point out the consequences of his being put under arrest.” Phillip told Dawes he was guilty of “unofficerlike behaviour” and threatened him with a court-martial. Though he ultimately agreed to go, he would later publicly declare he was “sorry he had been persuaded to comply with the order.” And though this would further outrage Phillip's feelings, Dawes refused to retract his statement.

Three sergeants and forty privates made up the rank and file of this expeditionary force, and some of the low soldiery carried the hatchets and bags for the collection of two heads. The force tramped south on a familiar track between bushy slopes and paperbark lagoons, sighting the Pacific to their left through the contours of the land. They reached the peninsula at the northern arm of Botany Bay at nine o'clock in the morning. They searched in various directions without seeing a single native, so that at four o'clock they halted for their evening camp. At daylight they marched fruitlessly in an easterly direction, then southwards, and then northwards, often beset by insects in marshy country. Back near the north head of Botany Bay they saw “five Indians” on the beach, whom Tench attempted to surround, but the five vanished. “A contest between heavy-armed Europeans,” said one commentator, “and naked unencumbered Indians, was too unequal to last long.”

Phillip took comfort from the fact that some local natives at the hospital already knew the name of the killer, Pemulwuy, and were upset to see McEntire in this condition. Phillip read their sympathy as unconditional, whereas they might have felt awed to find themselves in the presence of a walking dead man.

After Tench's military expedition set out, the governor had tried to stop Colby going to Botany Bay, offering him a blanket, a hatchet, a jacket to distract him. On top of that, he was diverted by food—the officers tried to
eat
him down. “It was hoped that he would feed so voraciously, as to render him incapable of executing his intention.” He was given a huge meal of “a light horseman” (a New South Wales fish) and 5 pounds of beef and bread. But then “he set out on his journey with such lightness and gaiety, as plainly showed him to be a stranger to the horrors of indigestion.”

He told the gentlemen he had to go south not to thwart any military expedition but to see a kinswoman, Doringa, who was about to give birth. But his chief purpose was probably to warn people, especially Pemulwuy and his own
damelian
—his namesake—the Botany Bay native who shared the name Colby.

Meanwhile, the British military force under Tench moved towards “a little village (if five huts deserved the name),” but no one was there. In the native
gunyas
or huts, they found nothing except fishing spears, fizgigs, which they left untouched. Some canoes were seen and possibly fired on, because we know that Botany Bay Colby was wounded.

Returning to their baggage, which they had left under the care of a small guard of soldiers, the party saw a native fishing in shallow water about 300 yards from land. Since it was not practicable at that distance to shoot him or seize him, Tench decided to ignore him. But the native himself did not ignore the party. He started calling various of them by name, and “in spite of our formidable array, drew nearer with unbounded confidence.” It was Colby from Sydney. Tench was under orders to ignore old native friends, but how could he shoot Colby down? Single-handedly, Colby psychologically disarmed the group “with his wanted familiarity and unconcern.” In theory, his head should have gone into one of their bags. Instead, he recounted how the day before he had been at the hospital for the amputation of a woman's leg by Surgeon White, and he reenacted for them the agony and cries of the woman. In fact, he was having exactly the blunting effect on the expedition he probably wanted to have. The longer he talked and used his dramatic tricks, the harder it became for them to consider killing him.

Overnight he vanished. The next day the British party resumed their dispirited march and camped at three in the afternoon by a freshwater swamp: “after a day of severe fatigue, to pass a nice night of restless inquietude, when weariness is denied repose by swarms of mosquitoes and sandflies.” Fortunately for Tench and the other soldiers, the mosquitoes of New South Wales carried neither malaria nor yellow fever. But the next day, “after wading breast-high through two arms of the sea, as broad as the Thames at Westminster,” they were glad to find themselves at Sydney between one and two o'clock in the afternoon. Private Easty, who had served in the expeditionary ranks, called the return to Sydney “a most tedious march as ever men went in the time.”

Phillip at once ordered a second expedition—his orders for the first had not been a matter of passion but the establishment of principle, and he did not seem to have blamed Tench for failure, since, wrote Watkin, “the ‘painful pre-eminence’ again devolved on me.” This time the party pretended they were setting off for Broken Bay to punish Willemering. Since the moon was full, they would move by night, to avoid the heat of the day. Crossing the broad estuaries of Cook's River and the swamps behind the beaches of Botany Bay, the soldiers carried their firelocks above their heads and their cartouche boxes were tied fast to the top of their hats. Pushing towards the village they had visited the first time, they met a creek which, when they tried to cross, sucked them down waist-deep into its mud.

There is a perhaps unconscious comedy in Tench's description. “At length, a sergeant of grenadiers stuck fast, and declared himself incapable of moving either forward or backwards; and just after, Ensign Prentice and I felt ourselves in a similar predicament close together. ‘I find it impossible to move; I am sinking,’ resounded on every side.” At length the soldiers not yet embarked on the creek cut boughs of trees and threw them to the men that were stuck, but it took half an hour to drag some out. The rope intended to go round the wrists of captured natives had to be used to drag the sergeant of grenadiers free.

With their mud-smirched uniforms, the military pressed round the head of the creek and on to the village. Tench, dividing his party into three so that they could attack from all sides, sent the troops rushing amongst the huts, to find them absolutely empty. And now, unless the marines set out for camp at once, the river estuaries they had crossed since the point where they left their supplies and bags would be cut off till night. The struggle back exhausted many soldiers, their physical condition undermined by dietary deficiencies. They made another attack on the village in the following small hours, with the same results, and so marched back to Sydney, relieved at their own failure.

Meanwhile, the wounded Irish gamekeeper was still well enough to walk around the hospital. Though many had spoken to McEntire about the appropriateness of openly confessing any injuries he had done the natives, just in case he needed soon to face God, “he steadily denied … having ever fired at them but once, and then only in defence of his own life, which he thought in danger.” And yet those Eora who watched from the fringes of bush or were permitted in the town despite the edict against it knew that he was a walking dead man. He died quite suddenly on 20 January. The surgeons did an autopsy and found pieces of stone and shells inside the left lobe of the lung. Along with the magic which had been sung into them, they had contributed to the lung's collapse.

After missing all the drama of the two expeditions, Bennelong had by now returned to Sydney with Barangaroo from Cameraigal country across the harbour. He had been asked to officiate at certain ceremonies there—knocking out the front teeth of initiates and raising various scars on the skin of the young men. Phillip saw that Barangaroo's body was exceptionally painted to mark the ritual importance of herself and her husband, red ochre colouring her cheeks, nose, upper lip, and small of the back, while dots of white clay spotted the skin under her eyes. Bennelong and Barangaroo proudly wore crowns of rushes and reed bands around their arms. Barangaroo was after all a Cameraigal woman, and had returned to her people with her distinguished husband to be made a fuss of. Bennelong showed Phillip a throwing stick which had been specially designed to remove the teeth of the initiates. Two friends of Governor Phillip were amongst their number: the youth named Yemmerrawanne and another youth who had lived at Governor Phillip's house, probably Ballooderry (whose name meant “leather-jacket,” a type of fish). Each had had a snake-like black streak painted on his chest, and his front tooth knocked out. In fact, Yemmerrawanne had lost a piece of his jawbone along with his incisor.

The removal of a tooth, the upper incisor, was a rite which ancient skulls recovered throughout Australia would prove to be millennia-old. In Collin's journal, the preparations for the knocking out of a tooth are both illustrated and graphically described. The elders danced until one of them fell suddenly to the ground, seemingly in a state of agony. The other elders continued dancing, singing loudly while one or more beat the fallen one on the back until a bone was produced from his mouth and he was free of his pain. This bone chisel would be used on one of the initiates, who thus believed it to have come from the elder's body. Then one by one the other senior men threw themselves on the ground in this manner, and in each case a bone to be used the following day to remove an initiate's tooth was produced.

For the ceremony, the young initiate, surrounded by spear- and shield-carrying elders, was seated on a kneeling relative's shoulders and the tooth was extracted by a man holding a chisel of bone in his left hand and a striking stone in his right. Collins acquired the name for this tooth-excising ceremony—
erah-ba-diang,
jaw-hurting. Amongst all the names initiated men carried, some too secret to be uttered to the Europeans, there was added after this ceremony the title
kebarrah,
a man whose teeth had been knocked out by a rock. The associated words,
gibber
or
kibber,
meaning a stone, had already been picked up by the English speakers of New South Wales. Another word which would long survive in Australian English was
corroboree,
which came from the Eora
carabbara
or
carribere,
the ritual involving singing and dancing.

“Full of seeming confusion, yet regular and systematic,” Watkin Tench wrote of
corroboree,
“their wild gesticulations, and frantic distortions of body, are calculated rather to terrify, than delight, a spectator. These dances consist of short parts, or acts, accompanied with frequent vociferations, and a kind of hissing or whizzing noise; they commonly end with a loud rapid shout, and after a short respite, are renewed.” Bodies were decorated with white for the dance, and there were waving lines from head to foot, crossbars, spirals, or zebra-type stripes. The eyes were often surrounded by large white circles. There were occasional dances of romance as well—Nanbaree and Abaroo performed one for Phillip and the officers.