‘We were never able to form any connections with them’: the problem of the unwanted gift

Captain Cook remarked in his Journal entry for 30 April 1770, in respect to an encounter on that day with indigenous Australians:

In addition to his and others’ opinion that Australian Aborigines simply ‘roamed over’ the land, rather than using it productively, another objection arising from Cook’s report in regard to recognising indigenous Australians’ possible claims and entitlement to compensation for their coming displacement by European settlers was as to their apparent reluctance to engage in any form of exchange or trade:

The conclusions made by Cook and BanksFootnote ² on the basis of their contact with only a small number of indigenous Australians from the Gweagal tribe of the Tharawal (or Dharawal) clan in respect to the apparent ‘backwardness’ of these ‘natives’ as to the basics of trade and agriculture, and therefore their lack of any claim to the territory they inhabited, informed the British decision to establish a penal colony in Australia, rather than in West Africa, where they had originally intended to do so (Pybus, Reference Pybus2008; Keneally, Reference Keneally2005). There is, of course, an important difference between knowing nothing of trade and refusing to engage in trade. Indigenous Australians’ ‘ownership’ of land was, as we have noted above, of a nature that was not freely negotiable. The idea of ‘trading’ this relationship to ‘country’ for some cheap, and not particularly useful, ‘goods’ with strangers would not have occurred to the first Australians. It was simply unthinkable.

The nature of these gifts and the context in which they were offered were almost certain to excite distrust and suspicion on the part of the intended recipients. It is not that the first Australians whom Captain Cook and his party encountered did not understand the nature of gifts and reciprocation. It was rather that they consciously refused these offerings for quite rational reasons. They were no doubt rightfully suspicious of accepting these offerings without an understanding of the nature of the reciprocation sought. The purposes attached to the giving of gifts and the nature of reciprocation implicit in such ‘altruism’ by total strangers was unknown, and thus the ‘gift’ was quite properly rejected until information on the nature of the expected reciprocation was forthcoming.

In his classic study of the gift, Marcel Mauss notes in respect to ‘kula trade’ in the Trobriand Islands how ‘the act of giving itself assumes very solemn forms: the thing received is disclaimed and mistrusted; it is only taken for a moment, after it has been cast at one’s feet’ (Mauss, Reference Mauss1922/1990. p. 23). What is clear is that at least in such trade the nature of the object or objects being traded are significant, either spiritually or otherwise, and the manner in which the traded item is given and received is crucial to the success of the transaction. It was not a lack of understanding on the part of the Aborigines of the principles of exchange which led to the failure of Cook and Phillip’sFootnote ³ attempts at gift giving. Rather it was the clumsy and inappropriate way in which they went about these attempted exchanges. Amongst indigenous Australians themselves there was a strong tradition of gift exchange when different groups encountered each other or came together for major ceremonial occasions. Such exchanges sometimes served the practical function of allowing for the exchange of items of scarcity in particular regions for those which were scarce in another. Items such as ochre and specific woods used in making weapons were exchanged on such occasions. However, such exchanges were not in the nature of ‘trade’, at least in the sense understood by European cultures at the time of Cook’s or the First Fleet’s landing. In such exchanges amongst indigenous Australians the act of giving was always more important than the gift itself. It was often the case that objects that were essentially identical in their utilitarian form (e.g. shield for shield, spear for spear, etc.) were exchanged on such occasions for the symbolic value of the ‘transaction’, rather than serving any utilitarian purpose or need (Nicholson, Reference Nicholson2007, pp. 16–17).

Meetings of different tribes in large corroborees also, of course, performed the purpose of allowing for the exchange of less tangible gifts – such as the ‘gift’ of a story or a song. In such exchange relationships:

Intangibles such as dreamtime stories were also part of a limited exchange between different groups. However, only certain aspects of dreamtime stories could be told to those belonging to other groups. Even then these stories could only be ‘exchanged’ as between particular ritual leaders of rank, and even then only in very specific circumstances. The right to show (yurtininpa – to ‘reveal’ or ‘make visible’) a ceremony was in the hands of those who in Western notions of territory might be called the ‘owners’ of that country (especially those from that Dreaming) and their relatives (Myers, Reference Myers2002, p. 39):

The circumstances of these gift exchanges with Macassans and amongst indigenous Australians were, however, vastly different from those attempted by Cook and his party upon their arrival in Botany Bay or by Phillip when he arrived with the First Fleet. In the case of the Macassans these items were traded in return for being permitted by the local indigenes to visit peaceably Australian shores on an annual basis to engage in trepanging. These visitors made no permanent claim to settlement, but rather engaged in trade to secure annual visiting rights.

These Maccassans, unlike Cook and his party, acknowledged the ownership of the land by the local populace. Nor did they seek to make permanent settlements in the area of their annual visits. There was also apparently some degree of ‘intermarriage’ between the visitors and local women. It also appears that the visiting Macassan trepangers may even possibly have converted a number of Australian aborigines to Islam during their annual visits, though whether such conversions occurred in the period prior to European colonisation is controversial (Berndt and Berndt, Reference Berndt and Berndt1949: MacKnight, Reference Macknight1976; Nelson, Reference Nelson2008). Further, during this period before European colonisation, there were significant exchanges of religious and ceremonial practices between ‘Marege’ (the Sulawesian’s name for the parts of northern Arnhem land which they regularly visited) and those of Sulawesi, resulting in strong religious and ceremonial ties between ‘Marege’ and Sulawesi, which were first outlined in the Berndts’ anthropological work of the 1930s and 1940s (Berndt and Berndt, Reference Berndt and Berndt1949).

Donaldson has remarked in respect to these exchanges with other cultures prior to the Europeans’ arrival in Australia the following:

We might conclude from the above that in order for gifts to be meaningful they must have some practical or symbolic import for their intended recipients, and that the expected nature of reciprocation be clearly understood. In the case of Cook, Phillip and other European visitors neither was the case. The goods offered held no interest to indigenous Australians either symbolically or for their utility. Also, the nature of the expected reciprocation was unclear to them. Amongst indigenous Australians in their trade with the Macassans there was a series of rituals surrounding the acceptance of a gift and agreement to the expected reciprocation. There was, however, no apparent ritual attached to the attempted gift-giving by the Europeans, which would no doubt have puzzled the intended recipients.

As we now can see, Captain Cook’s puzzlement at the locals’ reluctance to engage in trade was, of course, based on a particular notion of human engagement premised on exchange, whereas indigenous Australians almost certainly saw this attempted engagement by these uninvited arrivals in a very different light. There were a number of quite rational reasons why they wanted these arrivals gone, and why they did not wish to touch any of the items left out by Cook and his crew. Doreen Mellor, in a paper on indigenous impressions of Cook and his party, has remarked:

It is also revealing to consider the way in which Captain Cook has been woven into indigenous narratives subsequent to his party’s arrival in Botany Bay two and a bit centuries ago. In the film Too Many Captain Cooks, the narrative turns on the indigenous view that, in following in the ‘footsteps’ of the original Captain Cook, white settlers (who the indigenous characters in the film refer to collectively as ‘Captain Cooks’) and their descendants had ‘a choice’ in their acceptance or rejection of indigenous knowledge, the ultimate gift that might be bestowed by Aboriginal Australians. In the dreaming story of Captain Cook told by Paddy Wainburranga, an elder of the Rembarranga people, it is thus not the ‘first’ Captain Cook who committed a wrong, but rather those ‘Captain Cooks’ who subsequently arrived on Australian shores:

Mapping and exploring the continent

In Heart of Darkness, Joseph Conrad’s character, Marlowe, remarks that:

Jeanne van Eeden, in an article on the ‘colonial gaze’, remarks in a similar vein on the manner in which European explorers and settlers considered the ‘empty areas’ on the maps prepared by European cartographers as devoid of civilisation and ‘ripe for the taking’, irrespective of whether empirical observation proved this prior assumption wrong:

In 1867, my great-great-grandfather, Frederick John Byerley, the then government Engineer for Roads for the Northern Division, Queensland, edited a narrative of the first major expedition of European settlers into northwestern Queensland. This was a journey into one of the apparently ‘blank spaces’ so desired by Marlowe and remarked upon by van Eeden as constitutive of ‘space as a blank text’ which, by its unnamed cartographic character, obliterated the presence of indigenous people in the actual ‘place’ being represented. This expedition into northwestern Queensland was led by the Jardine brothers to search for land suitable for pastoral purposes, and to chart the location of sources of fresh water in this vast territory. In the course of this ‘expedition’, over a hundred ‘hostile natives’ were killed. The description of this journey is unsettling in many ways. One of the most perturbing aspects of this narrative is the manner in which it describes encounters with and killing of indigenous inhabitants in the areas being traversed as both ‘necessary’ and ‘valorous’.

Rather than asking permission to cross this territory, or to exchange gifts with the local inhabitants, or enquire where areas of spiritual significance might be located so as not to disrupt or desecrate these areas, the brothers Jardine and their party seemed to prefer shooting the local inhabitants on sight in their search for water and suitable pastoral land. Frederick Byerley intones the ‘daring and bravery’ of the brothers Jardine in surviving their ‘ordeals’ during this expedition, and the ‘service they rendered’ in paving the way for the subsequent opening up of the lands they had traversed for commercial exploitation:

Instead of admiring the resilience and knowledge of the indigenous population of the area in which they were travelling, and their ability to thrive in such an apparently harsh environment, the Jardine brothers and their party instead chose to ignore the benefits which this local ‘bush knowledge’ might have provided them in their ‘quest’. They also appear to have shown little appreciation of the reasons for the ‘hostility’ of the ‘natives’ to their presence. However, as they made no effort to engage meaningfully with the indigenous ‘owners’ of this territory, in what way was this resistance really ‘unprovoked’, or even understood as such by the Jardines?

In Byerley’s account of the so-called ‘Battle of Mitchell’, we can observe the nature of the encounters of these ‘explorers’ with the indigenous population of the areas they were passing through on their journey of ‘discovery’:

The notion that the long-term inhabitants of this space might be rightfully defending their territory from ‘invaders’, or that there might be something morally ‘wrong’ in the wholesale slaughter of the inhabitants of this territory did not, however, apparently trouble the Jardine brothers and their party. They seemingly considered that they had an entitlement to pass through this territory unmolested by ‘savages’ and to kill at will those who resisted their passage:

Whilst the Jardine brothers’ expedition was perhaps exceptional in its savagery in dealing with indigenous Australians encountered en route, it nonetheless exposes the thin veneer of legality attendant to the ‘settlement’ of much of northern Queensland. Aboriginal inhabitants during the period the Jardine expedition blundered its way northwards were not simply the original inhabitants of the territory, but were also ‘British subjects’, supposedly entitled to the same protections as white settlers. However, despite this status and the protection it theoretically provided:

The upshot of this indiscriminate slaughter was the appointment by the Government of Queensland in 1896 of Archbishop Archibald Meston as Royal Commissioner. In his Report on the Aborigines of North Queensland he wrote: ‘The treatment of the Cape York people was a shame to our common humanity.’ He continued: ‘Their manifest joy at assurances of safety is pathetic beyond expression. God knows they were in need of it.’ Aboriginal people met him ‘like hunted wild beasts, having lived for years in a state of absolute terror’ (Meston, Reference Meston1896, pp. 1–4).

Tim Flannery has, in the introduction to his compilation of material on and by Australian explorers of the colonial period, noted the following regarding the Jardine brothers’ expedition:

One might question in respect of such instances of murder and cruelty to indigenous Australians the apparent absence of ‘the law’. We have observed earlier the manner in which Aboriginal Australians who had resisted white authority and led resistance actions against the incursions into traditional lands of white settlers were hunted down and killed as murderers or outlaws. However, in the case of parties of whites, such as the Jardines, who killed Aborigines indiscriminately, there was rarely or ever any consequences attached to their actions by the legal system. One might possibly understand this in the early years of the colonies in Australia as a consequence of the scarcity in remote regions of any representatives of ‘the law’. However, the ‘Wild Time’, in which killings of indigenous Australians occurred unpunished, continued well into the twentieth century, far beyond the period in which the ‘excuse’ of ‘remoteness’ could credibly be invoked to explain the failure of the legal system to deal with those who killed or brutalised indigenous Australians:

Aborigines have themselves documented these atrocities and passed them on as stories from generation to generation. Art has, more recently, provided an outlet for a number of these stories. In talking of her work, ‘Mistake Creek’, Charlene Carrington, one of the ‘new wave’ of indigenous artists in the Kimberley region of Western Australia, describes the story which lay behind her painting:

Other Aboriginal artists, many of whom are not generally regarded as overtly political painters, have also incorporated similar atrocities against indigenous Australians into their works. Ngamarliny (Freddie Timms) was another prominent Aboriginal artist from a traditional background who sought, on occasion, to make political statements in his work. After his passing, at an event in commemoration of his artistic contributions, Dirrmingali (his sister) said to the (predominantly white) audience:

Whilst at one level these artists and others want their work to act as a literal record of atrocities committed in the past, there is also a deeper level to much of this work in recording the psychic disruption of indigenous life brought about by European colonisation. These artists therefore reflect in their work interpretations of the ‘vertigo in living’, which Bill Stanner referred to in his essay on ‘The Dreaming’. What he was referring to was not solely the killing of Aborigines, which certainly occurred all over the continent, but also the attempted annihilation of a way of life, and the consequent spiritual vacuum left in its wake. What is indeed remarkable is the resilience of indigenous Australians in the face of this reign of terror.

From the middle of the nineteenth century there was no longer any serious suggestion that one of the aims of colonisation in Australia was to imbue a sense of industriousness amongst the indigenous population; this was now replaced by an assertion of ‘the right’ to expropriate the land from the indigenous inhabitants of Australia on the basis of their ‘improvidence’ in failing to harness the resources at their disposal. The claims of the indigenous population to any rights over the land or the resources of this land were now regarded as non-existent. Boaventura De Santos Sousa has observed in regard to this non-recognition of the claims of native populations to their lands and their traditional ways of living that:

Whether considering the indigenes of Australia as being anima nullius, or relying on the later ‘scientific assessment’ of Darwin that races such as the Fuegians and the Australian Aborigines were the backward remnants of a prior developmental stage of civilisation doomed to extinction, there appears little such peoples might have done to prevent the appropriation of their land without compensation. International law of the period simply did not recognise the claims of such peoples to the lands which they inhabited. The merits of the adaptivity of such peoples to a harsh environment such as that in Australia, which they had managed to tend for millennia before the arrival of Europeans, went unrecognised. So did the very appropriateness of their social organisation to the conditions applying in Australia. The aridity of much of the landscape, the vagaries of the climate, and the need to be mobile so as to shift in accord with seasonal sources of food meant that indigenous Australians organised their culture around small bands of twenty to thirty people, which for important ceremonial events would come together with other bands to engage in festivals, fights and rites.

William Stanner notes the incredible ‘efficiency’ of indigenous society with a holistic balance between the demands of material and social welfare. Stanner also notes the ingenuity of the implements utilised by Australian Aborigines for hunting, pared back in their simplicity and thus allowing for the maximum mobility in Australia’s arid and difficult terrain, where excess weight and complexity was not a virtue. Stanner continues:

The simplicity of indigenous Australians’ equipment and the balance in their lives between the social and the material needs of life were, however, not seen by Cook and later arrivals as a virtue, but rather as proof of their primitivity, and later as a rationale for denying their ‘rights’ to compensation for the loss of their lands, and perhaps even more importantly, in denying moral responsibility for the destruction of their traditional way of life.

By the early nineteenth century there was a hardening of opinion in favour of the view that Australian Aborigines had no rights to compensation for their displacement as, so the argument went, they in essence had never ‘occupied’ the land as such, as they hadn’t inhabited it, but simply had ‘ranged over it’. Richard Windeyer, a prominent Sydney barrister of the period, asserted in a public lecture in 1842 on the ‘rights of the Aborigine of Australia’ that indigenous Australians ‘never tilled the soil, or enclosed it, or cleared any portion of it, or planted a single tree, or grain or root’ and thus could not claim any ownership of the land they had inhabited. Aboriginal occupation, according to Windeyer, did not, ‘by the law of nature, establish any title to the substance of the soil’ (Reynolds, Reference Reynolds1998, pp. 20–21).

In his final short book, The Other, the great Polish journalist and travel writer Ryzard Kapuścińki extols the importance of our encounters with ‘The Other’ in arriving at our own Selfhood (Kapuścińki, Reference Kapuścińki2008). Drawing principally on the philosophical writings of Emmanuel Lévinas and Jósef Tischner, Kapuścińki observes that the important, indeed crucial, aspect of such an encounter is in engaging in dialogue:

What is striking about Australian colonisation is the initial preparedness to broach a dialogue, to engage in attempts to reach an understanding of ‘the other’, followed afterwards by a total breakdown in this, upon which attempts at dialogue largely ceased. Whilst some members of Captain Cook’s party, such as Watkin Tench (who also was later a member of the First Fleet), were clearly at pains to understand the Aboriginal languages they encountered, to strike up a dialogue with the native population and to cultivate an understanding between the new arrivals and the first Australians, this concern to understand the ‘other’ was not, however, shared by other early European arrivals in Australia. Dialogue began to falter, and then collapsed pretty much in its entirety after the arrival of the First Fleet. A dialogical abyss was thereby formed between Native Australians and the ever-growing numbers of European arrivals.

Homesickness for a foreign country

The rupture in Aboriginal society in Australia caused by European colonisation was profound. However, the impulse that drove European settlers to affect this rupture was not simply economic. It also had a more metaphysical dimension. This drive to shape the colonisation of Australia in particular ways was driven by a need amongst these settlers from Great Britain and other parts of Europe to reassert the bond between land and self that had been ruptured in the ‘old country’. This impulse to try and ‘start anew’ and rebuild the ‘homeland’ which had been lost elsewhere was, however, particularly in the case of Australia, combined with a darker impulse, one which drew strongly on the sort of sado-masochistic fantasy world described by Octave Mirbeau in Le Jardin des supplices (‘The Torture Garden’) in which life in the colonies gave much freer reign to one’s innate savagery, one’s elemental self, than was possible at ‘home’.

Renato Rosaldo, in his exploration of imperialist nostalgia, notes the following as to the manner in which the release of this pent-up ‘desire’ in the colonies is coupled with a ‘mission’ to ‘civilise’ these new lands and their inhabitants. However, such a release of desire and innate savagery wreaks destruction on the indigenous peoples of these colonised lands, which, in turn, gives rise to nostalgia for what is now an irrecoverable past and the stability it provided:

In her recent examination of some of these issues, Jennifer Wenzel has noted how this longing on the part of ‘agents of colonialism’ described by Rosaldo for ‘the very forms of life they intentionally altered’, is a desire that performs the strange double movement of transforming change experienced by another into one’s own loss, whilst at the same time obscuring one’s own complicity in that change (Wenzel, Reference Wenzel2006, p. 7).

Similarly, in John Zilcosky’s examination of Franz Kafka’s peculiar fascination with travel, the manner in which colonisation and travel are constituted by a nostalgic longing for an imagined lost homeland is explored. Reclaiming a space in which the utopian promise of the homeland can be resuscitated is, according to Zilcosky, a core characteristic of colonisation. However, the difficulty with this process of reinvention of an idealised homeland in colonised space is that, as Rosaldo has noted: ‘imperialist nostalgia revolves around a paradox…somebody deliberately alters a form of life, and then regrets things are not as they were before intervention’ (Zilcosky, Reference zilcosky2003, pp. 34–36).

Whilst Jeanne Pierre Purry had declared the right of ‘civilised’ colonists to take the lands of ‘savages’, his suggestion was that this would also be of benefit to the dispossessed insofar as ‘the establishment of a good European Colony would provide for them all sorts of benefits and advantages’ (Magliazzo, Reference Magliazzo2002, p. 27). This, however, is made nonsensical in the context of Australian settlement. In these early years of European settlement the indigenous population were treated by many as little more than ‘vermin’, rather than as reasoning human beings (Collingwood-Whittick, Reference Collingwood-whittick2000). Henry Reynolds cites a certain ‘Fidelis’, a recurring correspondent to the Sydney Gazette in these early years of settlement, who stated in a letter to the paper that any attempt to ‘reason’ with indigenous Australians as to the dispossession of their lands was pointless since such negotiation ‘would be attended with as much success as would the application of eloquence to subdue or command any kind of undomesticated cattle’ (Reynolds, Reference Reynolds1998. p. 4).

Writing in the early 1840s, explorer Edward John Eyre commented that European settlers attempting to expel indigenous people from their ancestral lands regarded Aborigines as ‘intruders in their own country…vermin that infest the land’ (Eyre, Reference Eyre1845, p. 171). When defending their position, many colonists asserted that Aborigines had no legal or moral claim to the land, since they had never owned or used it productively. The Sydney Gazette and Sydney Morning Herald, for example, claimed that Aborigines were merely ‘wanderers’, who ‘bestowed no labour on the land’ and had no real property sense – ‘This vast country was to them a common’ (Mitchell, Reference Mitchell2004).

By the middle of the nineteenth century there was a general consensus amongst the colonial population that the Australian Aborigines were a dying race. Many saw their continued presence on tribal lands as an impediment to further development, and as a consequence vast numbers of people were moved off their ancestral lands into camps and settlements in areas that had little connection with their tribal origins. The ‘classic’ Australian text that most strongly articulates the contradictory nostalgic impulse referred to above is Daisy Bates’s The Passing of the Aborigines Reference Bates(1938). Not only is there expressed in this text a yearning for a ‘past’ that has been irretrievably altered, but also an accompanying denial that the majority of the living descendants of the original inhabitants of Australia were any longer ‘aboriginal’ in the ‘true sense’ of the word. They were now regarded by Bates and many others as a ‘doomed race’, needing to be protected like infants. The popular phrase of the time was ‘soothing the dying pillow’ of the Aborigine.

In spite of her fascination with their way of life, and professed knowledge of Aboriginal religious beliefs, Bates nonetheless was convinced that the Australian Aborigines were a ‘doomed race’ for whom she could do little other than make their final days as a race as comfortable as possible. She therefore considered that a major part of her ‘mission’ was to record as much as she could about them and their beliefs before they disappeared altogether. However, she had a narrow view of who was to be regarded Aboriginal and who not. She vehemently dismissed people of part Aboriginal descent as ‘worthless’, and accordingly wrote: ‘As to the half-castes, however early they may be taken and trained, with very few exceptions, the only good half-caste is a dead one’ (Perth Sunday Times, 12 June 1921).

In his ‘Introduction’ to Daisy Bates’s book The Passing of the Aborigine, Arthur Mee, a popular children’s adventure book writer of the period, appears to suggest that without her ‘assistance’ and solicitations on their behalf, this ‘dying’ race (which had apparently managed to both survive and to flourish for 20,000 to 30,000 years before the European settlement of Australia) would be even more abject:

By the early twentieth century Aboriginal Australians had in many ways lost autonomy over their lives and were indeed in shock, having been consigned to a ‘vertigo in living’. They were alternatively being killed by white Australians or infantilised by them. They were also, by the early twentieth century, considered a ‘dying race’ to be coddled and ‘protected’. At the same time as this process of ‘protection’ was being implemented, their ‘rights’ and autonomy were being ever more completely stripped away from them, community by community, individual by individual.