SOURCE: Gibson, Ross. “Savages and Slaves: Images of Aborigines.” In The Diminishing Paradise: Changing Literary Perceptions of Australia, pp. 140-94. London: Sirius Books, 1984.

[In the following excerpt, Gibson documents European perceptions of Aborigines during the period 1770 to 1850, noting the prevailing double image of the Aborigine as either a degenerate barbarian or a noble savage.]

Why, a literature might be made out of the aboriginal all by himself … In his history, as preserved by the white man's official records, he is everything—everything that a human creature can be. He covers the entire ground. He is a coward—there are a thousand facts to prove it. He is brave—there are a thousand facts to prove it. He is treacherous—oh, beyond imagination! He is faithful, loyal, true—the white man's records supply you with a harvest of instances of it that are noble, worshipful, and pathetically beautiful.

Mark Twain, Following the Equator (1898)

We of this country, the richest in the world, just stand by and see our black compatriots wiped out. They'll be like the Noble Redman someday—noble when gone!

Xavier Herbert, Capricornia (1938)

You won't understand the country without understanding something of the original owners of it.

Xavier Herbert, Poor Fellow My Country (1975)

White Australians' attitudes to the Aborigines today are complex and ambivalent. There is nostalgia for a doomed heritage; disdain for a culture which will not or cannot readily adapt to modern urban existence; xenophobia in reaction to a race whose values are not identical to those of the suburban majority; and official patronage which purportedly protects and guides Aborigines in the modern world, but which often effectively alienates them from the rest of the Australian populace.

A similar blend of liberalism and bigotry can be discerned in the early English literature concerned with Australia. During the 1770-1850 period writers were slow to concur about the Aborigine. Some authors described a loathsome barbarian; others praised savage nobility; some could discern aspects of both character types in the one individual.

For a long time a double image of the native was set up; this complicated the image of Australia and served to reinforce the idea that the south land was a region of ambiguities and enigmas. It was only during the 1830s and 1840s that the contradictions began to be resolved. Inevitably, the development of the image of the Aborigine runs parallel to the progress of English understanding of the entire country. Australia itself has been the subject of vilification of an infernal gaol-colony, followed by extravagant praise of a new pastoral haven, until eventually a resolution of the two conflicting images was achieved in the representations of a purgatorial Australia.

The image of the Aborigine must be regarded as integral to, at the same time as it is emblematic of, any interpretations of Australia. An examination of the portrayal of the native in English literature can serve a dual purpose: one can analyse a distinctive aspect of the overall image of Australia at the same time as one “takes stock” of many of the attitudes which prevailed about Australia generally. A study of the depiction of the Aborigine can become a summary as well as a further investigation.

PART ONE: SAVAGES

Prior to Captain Cook's voyages of discovery in 1770 and the subsequent English colonisation of eastern New Holland, the image of the Australian natives, like the image of the country itself, was being formulated under the two pressures of fanciful speculation about uncharted regions and discouraging first-hand reports of a daunting real world. At one extreme there was Pedro Fernandez de Quiros's vision of “Austrialians” who were “docible and easie of mannage”¹ and who would welcome the evangelistic Spaniards to an unspoiled paradise; at the other extreme there were William Dampier's proclamations that “the inhabitants of the Country [i.e. New Holland] are the miserablest People in the world … and setting aside their human shape, they differ but little from Brutes”².

When Daniel Defoe and Jonathan Swift responded imaginatively to the idea of the south land they focused on both aspects of the image of the native. They drew attention to a certain ambivalence by describing unwelcoming primitives in the known, barren areas of New Holland at the same time as they portrayed amicable and well-provided societies in the “fantasy-lands” of the unexplored south. In fact the ambivalence had prevailed since antiquity, when commonplaces pertaining to the antipodes led people to expect the bizarre in a region where the inhabitants walked upside down and the sun shone while Europeans slept. Such conjecture, allied with vestiges of the suspicion that antipodeans could not be of Edenic lineage, gave rise to disquieting connotations of mystery. No one knew quite what to expect as Captain Cook's Endeavour sailed within sight of the east coast of New Holland. Once daily contact was established with the Aborigines from 1770 onwards, the process of resolving the ambivalences was set in train.

The era 1770 to 1850 was one of radical speculation on the nature of humanity. Major influences—recent, present, or incipient—in the history of ideas at the time were: Rousseau's social philosophy; the French Revolution; Lyell's geology; Linnaean biology and tentative theories of evolution. It was an age in which James Burnet (Lord Monboddo) and Erasmus Darwin (grandfather of Charles) postulated theories of organic development which prefigured the more comprehensive work, to come two generations later, of Robert Chambers and Charles Darwin. Burnet regarded primitive man as positive proof of links between beasts and humanity. And Darwin contended that “all animals have a similar origin, viz. from a single living filament”.³ In fact he substantiated his claim by referring to his knowledge of New South Wales:

The great variety of species of animals, which now tenant the earth, may have had their origin from the mixture of a few natural orders … Such a promiscuous intercourse of all animals is said to exist at this day in New South Wales by Captain Hunter. And that not only amongst the quadrupeds and birds of different kinds, but even amongst the fish, and, as he believes, amongst the vegetables. He speaks of an animal between the opossum and the kangaroo, from the size of a sheep to that of a rat. Many fish seemed to partake of the shark; some with a skait's head and shoulders, and the hind part of a shark; others with a shark's head and the body of a mullet; and some with a shark's head and the flat body of a sting-ray.⁴

Such unorthodox thinking affected not only the world of scientific scholarship. So, as Geoffrey Symcox has explained, circa 1770 “germinating ideas of biological evolution were being applied to society: a static model was being abandoned in favour of one which would allow for change and gradual development”.⁵

This was a period of transition in which people attempted to align themselves between polarities of thought. The contention that all that is awry with the world could be imputed to ignorance of nature's simple and permanent laws vied with the opinion that human beings can establish themselves appropriately in the world only through a conscious transcendence of their base animal nature. The concept of the great chain of being became crucial to questions about the human condition. As Arthur Lovejoy explains it:

[By] the late eighteenth century … the cosmical order was coming to be conceived not as an infinite static diversity, but as a process of increasing diversification. The Chain of Being having been temporalized, the God whose attributes it disclosed had been declared by not a few great writers to be one who manifests himself through change and becoming; nature's incessant tendency was to the production of new kinds; and the destiny of the individual was to mount through all the spires of form, in a continual self-transcendence.⁶

Inevitably, the analysis of “savage” humanity was pertinent to the entire metaphysical debate. Is pre-civilisation the most desirable state of being? Is it a condition of innocence from which reasoning people can progress? Is it simply depravity under the sway of ungovernable passions? Should civilised, rational people attempt to regain aspects of savage culture? Is “civilisation” a progression or a degeneration from “savagery”?

During these years the influence of Jean-Jacques Rousseau ranges through all literature, science and philosophy. Rousseau concentrated on the nature and nurture of humanity, and he legitimised interest in childhood and primitivism. He maintained that in the human constitution there is or has been potential for an ideal existence. Hence the Enlightenment concept of the noble savage. According to Rousseau's schema, modern humanity exists in the fourth stage of development, an era in which over-population and relative scarcity of food necessitate that human beings form social contracts and elitist classes. The supposed third stage of history—a stage which may have existed never, or only fleetingly—is envisaged as the best. It is imagined to be a period when people lived instinctively in a society in which laws and oppressive toil were not required. However, because of population growth this “golden age” is transient. Cooperative labour and trading become necessary to increase agricultural efficiency. Reason develops and is tainted with a competitive, egocentric impetus. Inevitably the collective consciousness becomes corrupted. Thus, to invoke Symcox again, “in the passage from the third period of development to the final stage of social inequality and conflict, Rousseau is in a sense secularizing and historicizing the myth of the Fall”.⁷

The original golden age did not prevail because primitive, “natural” humanity was insufficiently “enlightened” by reason. And in modern times, “enlightened” people are estranged from the natural environment:

The sweet voice of Nature is no longer an infallible guide for us, nor is the independence we have received from her a desirable state. Peace and innocence escaped us forever, even before we tasted their delights. Beyond the range of thought and feeling of the brutish men of the earliest times, and no longer within the grasp of the “enlightened” men of later periods, the happy life of the Golden Age could never really have existed for the human race. When men could have enjoyed it they were unaware of it; and when they could have understood it they had already lost it.⁸

Rousseau's implication was, “If only a society of uncivilized human beings were to exist today …” The possibilities were enticing to a person with knowledge and with a determination not to repeat the mistakes of civilised society. With the discovery and colonisation of new worlds, the noble savage ceased to be a mythical motif, and became an historical entity, conjectural but possible.

The exploration and settlement of the Americas so fired imaginations that many writers represented the Indian as a member of the ideal society. The precepts of Rousseau and the actual nature of the indigenous American were twisted in order to produce the image of the contemporary noble savage. However, it was not exclusively in America that writers located their admirable primitives. In P. L. Thorslev's words, the noble savage “began as a redskin and evolved to include Africans and South Sea Islanders, Albanians and Scotch Highlanders”.⁹ And his existence in the South Pacific seemed beyond contention after the publication and immediate popularity of Hawkesworth's Voyages, in which the Tahitians are especially praised by the various authors. It was a short and logical step from here to include the Australian Aborigine when considering “unfallen” humanity.

Rousseau did much to popularise debate on the admirable primitive, but the origins and development of the topic are obviously not restricted to the philosophes' salons. Fascination with primitivism had been part of the English literary tradition long before Dryden mused about being “free as Nature first made man / ‘Ere the base Laws of Servitude began / When wild in woods the noble Savage ran”.¹⁰ (The traditional English pastoral is an obvious precursor to this preoccupation.)

Once Rousseau had revived interest in this character from precivilisation, English writers discussed him readily, particularly with reference to the topical subject of the chain of being. According to contemporary theory, the natural hierarchy could be depicted as a linear pattern along which humanity progressed to an ideal state of rational enlightenment. To quote Richard Payne Knight:

But still, as more society's refined,
Each native impulse less affects the mind;
Instinct to intellect is slowly brought,
And vague perception methodized to thought.(11)

Once the English began to colonise Australia, the Aborigine was bound to be tested against the criteria of popular concepts of noble savagery and human perfectibility. Was the Aborigine admirable or odious; perfect and unspoiled, or immutably degraded? A new progression along the chain of being was to be enacted and analysed as an uncivilised region became “methodised” (Alexander Pope's concept is recurrently pertinent) so that English people in the age of reason might understand and control it.

The earliest and least contentious post-1770 accounts of the Aborigines are by naval officers and scientists trained in the objective observation and description extolled by the Royal Society. When James Cook and Sydney Parkinson restricted themselves to writing in the scientific mode, they recorded “responsible” accounts of the natives as anthropological specimens. Parkinson, for example, does not offer personal opinions about the desirability or otherwise of the natives' lot. Rather, aware perhaps that observation must come before interpretation, he concentrates on describing the Aborigines' physical appearance, their diet, and their artefacts.¹² Similarly, Cook's Endeavour journal evinces detachment in assessment of the natives, although he does indulge in a degree of romantic primitivism when he declares that the natives seem “happier than we”¹³ in their simple existence:

The Natives do not appear to be numberous neither do they seem to live in large bodies but dispers'd in small parties along by the water side; those I saw were about as tall as Europeans, of a very dark brown colour but not black nor had they wooly frizled hair, but black and lank much like ours. No sort of clothing or ornaments were ever seen by any of us upon any one of them.¹⁴

By way of contrast, the rendition of this passage as it appears in the authorised publication of Cook's journals (edited by John Hawkesworth) is somewhat more subjective and suggestive. Concerned more with seizing the readers' imaginations (and their florins) Hawkesworth edits and emends to produce a rather more provocative description of savage existence. The writer's imagination predominates over the scientist's eye:

All the inhabitants that we saw were stark naked: they did not appear to be numerous, nor to live in societies, but like other animals were scattered along the coast, and in the woods.¹⁵

The original subjects were the same for each account. The images presented, the hint of prurience in the description of “stark” nakedness, and the comparison of the Aborigines to animals serve to trigger off more “sensational” connotations of savagery than Cook's observations. (As Bernard Smith has pointed out, the image of the noble savage was often highlighted with a “strong erotic appeal”.¹⁶) Two different types of literature: two different types of image in the making.

Despite Cook's attempts to establish an unequivocal image of the Aborigine, it was all in vain. A consistent pattern of observations did not appear. One obvious reason for the variety of representations is that Australia is of enormous size and diversity, and that Aboriginal groups were spread across its expanse. Even so, writers usually failed to acknowledge any variety of types among the natives. It is Hawkesworth who started the trend by interpolating this assertion in the Voyages:

We also saw inhabitants upon parts of the coast very distant from each other, and there being a perfect uniformity in person and customs among them all, it is reasonable to conclude, that distance in another direction has not considerably broken it.¹⁷

Hawkesworth was aware that public interest in the Aborigine was considerable. It was to his advantage to present an image of a uniform type-character. If the public wanted exotica uncomplicated by scientific cavilling, they could be given just that. Joseph Banks's conclusions, drawn from his limited first-hand experience with the natives, are similar to Hawkesworth's. He is “struck with the uniformity of aboriginal material culture”.¹⁸ Moreover, the tendency persisted; as late as 1841 George Grey was generalising from his extensive knowledge of the Aborigines of Western Australia to claim that “we find … in Australia … the remarkable fact that the inhabitants of a tract of country nearly two thousand miles in breadth, are governed by the same institutions” of language, rites and ceremonies.¹⁹

Even the patent differences between the mainland groups viewed as a race and the Aborigines of Van Diemen's Land were most frequently disregarded. One author speaks for the majority by asserting that it is merely on “superficial observation” that these Tasmanians seem “a different race” from the mainlanders.²⁰ In the eyes of many writers the only distinction that can be drawn is the fractionally more debased standing of the islanders on the chain of being:

They are undoubtedly in the lowest possible scale of human nature, both in form and intellect. They have small hollow eyes, broad short noses, with nostrils widely distended, uncommonly large mouths, jaws elongated like the Ourang Outang, and figures scarcely more symmetrical. They are dark, short in stature, with disproportionately thin limbs and shapeless bodies, entirely naked.²¹

Writers tended to discuss “the Australian Aborigines” as consistent type-characters regardless of the fact that they were real people living in groups spread across an astonishingly various continent. For writers asserting the colonial rights of England it was best to describe natives of such lowly character that there could be no compunction about taking their land and destroying their culture. To humanitarians, of course, such an attitude was abhorrent, but it also seems to have been predominant for a time. Even with regard to religion, a weight of opinion condemned the natives. As Bernard Smith observes, “to the thoroughgoing evangelist, Aboriginals were pagan savages who (saving Christian conversion) were destined to perdition”.²² A cult of primitivism would prove influential, but it was not to be established without being challenged.

“AN UNIMPROVABLE, INCAPABLE, INERT MASS OF BRUTE …”

For many authors the position of the natives on the chain of being was beyond dispute. Writers employed by Alexander's East India Magazine, for example, were keen to justify English authority in Australia by implying that there was no point in championing the rights of a people who were barely human: “The New Hollander is the last link in the chain of humanity; with him it terminates; we grope in the dark, tracing aught beyond him”.²³

Similarly, the Quarterly Review, avowed opponent of the Whig Edinburgh Magazine, was not likely to be party to any sentimental philanthropy, for the creatures were clearly beneath respect:

In this rank of beings, even the Hottentot is superior to the original native of New South Wales, who may perhaps be justly placed in the lowest division of the scale of human kind.²⁴

Jeremy Bentham, somewhat peeved at the government's refusal to utilise his theories of the Panopticon prison at Botany Bay, was particularly severe on Aborigines in order to infer that convicts in a prison-colony could never be rehabilitated in this land where the natives, who were free, were barely human. Formulating his opinion from hearsay, he declared that the natives were a “set of brutes in human shape, the very dregs even of savage life”.²⁵

Moreover, disparagement was not the exclusive preserve of prosaic empiricists. Journalists and poets (so called) repeatedly described the native glowering at the far end of the scale of being. An anonymous pamphleteer of 1789 spoke of “Fauns and Satyrs living in hollow trees”.²⁶ And as if to prove that hateful nature can be rendered in doggerel, George Morgan penned a prize-winning poem in 1846, when the stereotype of the base savage was obviously still current:

And who is he who from the settler's gate
Now timorous shrinks and now returns to wait;
Whose narrow brow and vacant eye declare
How faint the gleam of mind reflected there;
Wild are his ways, unlike the ways of men,
Child of the woods, Australia's denizen.(27)

From this point of view, Aborigines who have not been influenced by civilisation are as debased as human beings can be.

The crucial question, once the original condition of the Aborigines was portrayed, was one of potentiality. Regardless of how low they stood, were they capable of ascending the scale? If yes, then perhaps they were still worthy of a favourable literary image, because they could be described as the raw material of an exemplary new society. If no, then there was little point in treating them as human beings, given that they could never become the peers of the English people!

The majority of the disparaging commentators were adamant that the natives were incorrigible. For corroboration, there was the celebrated case of Bennelong, the first Aboriginal character to pass into white Australian folklore. As historians recount the events, Bennelong (a prominent member of the Aboriginal community around Botany Bay) became acquainted with Governor Phillip while living in the vicinity of the garrison when he was convalescing from a bout of the smallpox which had ravaged his people. He was communicative—an entertaining raconteur, in fact—and Governor Phillip was hopeful that he could be retained both as an adviser to the English settlers and as a test case of Aboriginal perfectibility. After six months, Bennelong absconded to the bush, shunning civilisation for approximately four months until he returned in September 1790 to join in an Aboriginal feast occasioned by the beaching of a whale on the garrison shorelines.

Contemporary journal writers interpreted Bennelong's “walkabout” as proof of his permanent degeneracy. However, the exceptionally liberal Governor Phillip refused to damn him as reprobate, and continued to offer friendship, even after Phillip was speared in the shoulder after a misunderstanding at the whale-feast. Indeed, in 1792 Phillip took Bennelong and another Botany Bay Aborigine, Yemmerrawannie, with him when he returned to England. Yemmerrawannie died there, but the more durable Bennelong adapted to the climate and to the games of social intercourse, and became something of a celebrity, although “curiosity” might be an equally apposite description.

The acid test of this experiment in educability came when in 1795 Bennelong returned to Botany Bay with Governor-designate Hunter. It is at this juncture that the journalists felt themselves vindicated. For, on his return, he cast aside his civilised garb and rejoined the native community. This action is open to countless interpretations. The majority of writers read it as proof of permanent native degeneracy:

Whilst Bennelong, the Botany Bay chief, was in England, he was presented to many of the principal nobility and first families of the kingdom, and received from many of them presents of clothes and other articles, which a savage of any other country would have deemed almost inestimable. It was not so, however, with Bennelong; he was no sooner re-landed in his own country, than he forgot, or at least laid aside, all the ornaments and improvements he had reaped from his travels, and returned as if with increased relish, to all his former loathsome and savage habits.²⁸

The “responsible” scientific language of genuinely experienced observers such as Captain Cook was not commonly utilised in the popular press. Journalists relied on their imaginations as well as their sources of information—more often derivative than first-hand—in order to express an opinion about the natives. The writer took the information, filtered it through his or her own prejudices, and aligned it with the bias of the editor and/or readers to produce an image which did not necessarily concur with the reality which existed some 18,000 kilometres from Grub Street. The journalists were writing for a market. In those early years of England's “great” colonial era, the percentage of people requiring an image of a savage who deserved to be subdued was considerable.

So morally and physically repugnant are the natives painted by the denigrators, that interbreeding cannot be considered seriously. This is deemed unfortunate, because “otherwise we might at least have looked for the springing up of a nation of half-castes, which, after the lapse of a few generations, might, perhaps, have scarcely proved inferior to the European settlers”!²⁹

Even when the Alexander's East India Magazine does concede that the Aborigine may in the future be susceptible to education, the ostensible optimism is couched in such negative terms as to render the proposition ludicrous. Perfectibility can paradoxically be ascribed to the natives because of their (purportedly) undeniable deterioration after interaction with the white convict society:

What the New Hollander has become from contact with the refuse of British population is a further question. That with a larger evidence of his humanity, his fiercer and more malevolent passions have been called into action, there is no doubt. He has learned the language and the habits of the most dissolute of Europeans, but this is no argument against his capacity of improvement. On the contrary, it is a demonstration of the fact, setting to flight the hypothesis that he is an unimprovable, incapable, inert mass of brute, without an admixture of the qualities of human nature.³⁰

The question of perfectibility was continually debated. Facts such as the existence of Aboriginal languages and art were undeniable and constituted proof that despite their apparent lowliness relative to the rest of humanity, Aborigines had at some stage progressed from being a collection of self-indulgent individuals and had become a society capable of communication and organisation. Even this admission of past development was grudging, for, it was reasoned, the improvement must have been instigated by superior beings. Richard Payne Knight outlines the process in general terms:

Long unsuccessful did the savage try,
In measured notes to articulate his cry;
And e'en when some enlightened mind had taught
To join the measured sound with measured thought,
Long years elapsed ere yet one single horde
Could make each sound and sentiment accord;
Ere mimickry with memory combined,
Could catch each note, and fix it in the mind:
Instinctive mimickry, the guide of man!(31)

Certainly in the particular case of the New Hollanders it was widely assumed that they were not capable of self-improvement. James Burnet (Lord Monboddo) considers the question when he wonders how it transpired that “the New Hollanders have the use of speech”. He can “hardly believe that they have invented [their language]”, and he assumes that they have “learned it by intercourse with some other nation”.³² It is significant, therefore, that innumerable authors comment on the natives' skills of mimicry, usually as demonstrative of what is seen as their clownish temperament, but also as corroborative of their lack of creative ingenuity. Moreover, the diversity of dialects in the Aboriginal language—called by Barron Field “the thousand Babel tongues of the New Hollanders and Van Diemen's Islanders”³³—is taken as proof that the natives are incapable of refining and standardising their one humanising advantage.

For those with little faith in the Aborigines' perfectibility it seems sensible to “face the facts” as William Wickenden, for example, presents them:

But not on man's enfeebled race who stray
Amid these wilds has Nature poured the ray
Of light and sunshine o'er the darkened mind,
Or flowers of science round the spirit turned:
No—like yon cloud, tossed by the winds of Heaven,
Is his dark soul by storms of passion driven.(34)

Here is no idyllic primitivism. A typically derogatory image of the native such as that depicted by Robert Montgomery Martin refutes Rousseau's idealism:

There may not be much in the appearance, still less in the manners of the New Hollander, to excite our sympathy, for assuredly if Rousseau had visited the aborigines of New South Wales … he would not have hesitated as to whether savage or social life is to be preferred.³⁵

Similarly, Watkin Tench, ever the pragmatist aware that he is by profession an officer of a colonial peace-keeping corps, refuses to sentimentalise his opinion of the natives:

A thousand times … have I wished, that those European philosophers, whose close speculations exalt a state of nature above a state of civilization, could survey the phantom, which their heated imaginations have raised: possibly they might learn, that a state of nature is, of all others, least adapted to promote the happiness of a being, capable of sublime research, and unending ratiocination: that a savage roaming for prey amidst his native deserts, is a creature deformed by all those passions, which afflict and degrade our nature, unsoftened by the influence of religion, philosophy, and legal restriction.³⁶

Tench's imagination is ice-cool as he puts the natives in a place well below the enlightened Englishman and tacitly justifies English seizure of Aboriginal land at the same time as he subtly persuades his readers that a native is capable of any barbarity.

The “savage”, “deformed by all those passions”, is a prime subject for portrayal in gothic terms, especially to a writer like the young Winthrop Mackworth Praed, settling down to studies in civilised Cambridge:

A fiercer guiltiness, a fouler stain!
Oh! who shall sing the scene of savage strife,
Where hatred glories in the waste of life.
… The feast of death, the banquetting of blood,
When the wild warrior gazes on his foe
Convulsed beneath him in his painful throe,
And lifts the knife, and kneels him down to drain
The purple current from the quivering vein.(37)

Scenes of death-feasts and blood-banquest introduce a new but inevitable aspect to the image of the barbarous Aborigine: cannibalism. Concerning this most provocative of topics some writers could in fact avoid overreaction. J. C. Byrne's opinion is considerably more generous than many: “A great part of the known Australian tribes practise cannibalism; apparently not from any wish for human flesh itself, but as an essential rite in their ceremonies”.³⁸

But cannibalism is not a subject which writers are likely to ignore, and at this time exaggerated reports persisted long after such sensationalism ought to have been discredited. (The question of Aboriginal anthropophagy is still a vexing one. Evidence of ceremonial cannibalism among certain tribes can be cited, but it is inconclusive.) Here was a topic with which authors could scandalise at the same time as they thrilled the reading public:

According to the people of the Murray—who themselves kill boys for the sake of their fat with which to bait their fish-hooks!—the natives devour their children in times of scarcity.³⁹

Or, for further variations on a theme:

Examples have occurred of the father killing and eating his own offspring! … they have been seen to bleed themselves, make a sort of cake with the blood, and then greedily devour it.⁴⁰

If some authors were prepared to consider the Aborigines as carnivorous animals, others had no compunction in portraying them as murderers lurking in the wilderness. Characterisations developed of hateful savages intent on “deadly revenge”.⁴¹ These natives' ferocity, reportedly, was not tempered by honourable bravery: “It cannot be said that they are a war-like people, as nearly all their enemies are killed by treachery, and scarcely ever in a fair and open fight”.⁴²

Richard Howitt and G. H. Haydon, the two writers quoted immediately above, are representatives of a significant group of traveller-authors who would spend a few years working in the grazing lands of New South Wales and Victoria—sometimes working for themselves on freehold land—and who would then return to England to write about their experiences for an English public which was particularly fond of travel-literature. Inevitably such writers sympathised with the new squatter class of graziers who were developing their pastures by forcing the natives off their tribal lands. It stands to reason that the Aborigines should have reacted to this outrage with their own brand of violence; and it is also logical that writers who were in favour of the squatters' private imperialism should portray the Aborigines in as uncomplimentary a fashion as possible.

Moreover, it must not be forgotten that since 1779, with the death of James Cook in Hawaii, the murderous nature of natives from the Pacific region was readily credited, and was widely publicised in many an elegy and ode to the memory of the national hero, as well as in several paintings depicting either the slaying itself or the subsequent apotheosis of “the immortal Cook”.⁴³

The treachery of Australian natives in fact became so well “documented” that the figure of the homicidal native passed into folklore, into the broadside ballad and the sea-shanty. The versification may not be exemplary, but the message is explicit enough:

When first unto this new found place
O then that you come here
Everyone to labour you know he must repair,
To cultivate the land, all for to make it good,
But many of us our lives shall lose by the Indians from the wood …
So all you giddy lads remember this in time,
Lest you like unto us be forced in your prime
To leave your native land, and sail to Botany Bay,
Among the heathen savages for to become a prey.(44)

The Aborigine is here portrayed as the enemy, in opposition even to the convicts, the most oppressed and outcast of the whites in the colony. If there was any human being perceived to be lower than a Botany Bay convict, it was an Australian native.

All things considered, then, between 1770 and 1850 a plethora of literature portrays the Aborigine as the most ignoble of savages. Indeed, as Coral Lansbury has observed, the Australian natives must comprise, with the possible exception of the Jews, the most traduced race in all literature.⁴⁵ By slandering the Aborigines and condemning them to the base of the human hierarchy, the English author could describe them as the archetypal wild people embodying all that is taboo and repulsive in the human condition. As Hayden White explains, the folkloric “wild man” “is conventionally represented as being always present, inhabiting the immediate confines of the community”. Ever-threatening, he is “just out of sight, over the horizon, in the nearby forest, desert, mountains, or hills. He sleeps in crevices, under great trees, or in the caves of wild animals, to which he carries off helpless children, or women”.⁴⁶ For the civilised English person contemplating New South Wales the representation of the Aborigine as a “wild man” served two purposes: (a) the native could become a comprehensible embodiment of the malevolence in the harsh Australian environment, and (b) he could stand as a constant reminder of what humanity can regress to. As White expresses it, the “wild man” can be seen both as a “nemesis” and a “possible destiny”.⁴⁷

The idea of the “wild man” as a possible destiny is especially relevant in reference to Botany Bay; writers were constantly aware of the degraded nature of the convicts who could be regarded as white, English savages. Certainly the white man could become a “wild man”. The evidence was clear. However, by describing the Aborigine as especially heinous, writers were able to imply that not even the convict could fall so low. Therefore, the image of the native could also be used as a distancing device. Civilised people could feel contented that they had successfully eradicated savagery from their constitutions by comparison with genuine barbarity in a foreign wilderness.

The image of the savage was used to emphasise the relative merits of the English race. When English writers were not debasing the Aborigine, they could evince a commensurate effect by depicting the English person as inestimably high upon the scale in comparison to the “savage”. Working from this opposite perspective, if the English were characterised as a race “born to rule” in Australia, the natives were definitely to be the subjects. When it came to a contest of merit, civilisation had to prevail. Charles Darwin, for one, has no doubts about who is best fitted to survive in the south land, when he proclaims that:

Wherever the European has trod, death seems to pursue the aboriginal. We may look to the wide extent of the Americas, Polynesia, the Cape of Good Hope, and Australia, and we shall find the same result … The varieties of man seem to act on each other—the stronger always extirpating the weaker.⁴⁸

Extinction perhaps is not only inevitable; it can be construed, in Judge Barron Field's way of thinking, as benevolent justice: “Perhaps it is better that their name pass away from the earth. They will not serve, and they are too indolent and poor in spirit to become masters”.⁴⁹

Might must prevail in Australia, as it did in recent history concerning that other English colonial venture: America. Whenever Richard Howitt writes of life and adventures in Australia Felix he does so with the following attitude influencing his opinions of the natives:

The American Indians have waned away, and are become, as a people, less and less. So it must be with this inartificial and almost irreclaimable race. Rome is the dwelling of religious owls and bats—a race of dwarfs in arms, in civil and religious freedom. We are all that the greatest nations of antiquity have been, and infinitely more.⁵⁰

England in all her glory is portrayed as rightful inheritor of the earth and its subjects. Even Rousseau's premise that the savage may have been the superior raw material of perfectible humanity is invalidated when the mettle of the Australian Aborigine is tested against the quality of the English person. The critic of primitivism, once again, is Watkin Tench:

“Give to civilized man all his machines, and he is superior to the savage; but without these, how inferior is he found on opposition, even more so than the savage in the first instance.” These are the words of Rousseau; and like many more of his positions, must be received with limitation. Were an unarmed Englishman, and an unarmed New Hollander, to engage, the latter, I think, would fall.⁵¹

In this era England was progressing to world domination, and national esteem reached its zenith in the 1830s. Patrick Matthew, for example, beat the drum loudly: “A change is at hand. The reign of Queen Victoria promises to be glorious for victory over barbarism and human misery—Colonization is the means”.⁵²

Such chauvinistic ardour gives rise to questions of evangelism. After the fervent missionary campaigns waged by the English among the natives of America, Africa, the West Indies and India, it is remarkable that accounts of missionary activity in early Australia are comparatively scarce. However, the reasons are logical enough. The Aboriginal population, which had always been small, was being ravaged by disease. The city-dwelling communities, afflicted by smallpox and alcoholism, were thought to be moribund. Also, opinions about immutable Aboriginal degeneracy were widely credited. Indeed when a poorly serviced Aboriginal school was established in 1814, writers were incensed that the pupils continually escaped over the walls of the compound to join their bush-dwelling brothers and sisters. The absurdity of an attempt to confine boisterous children of a nomadic race in an enclosed space and fixed routine, all in order to teach the Golden Rule and algebra, was not acknowledged. How could these children possibly reject such charity? To the “abused” English person there seemed little point in attempting to redeem such a small number of irrevocably lost souls, if indeed the natives had souls at all.

From a liberal point of view, also, evangelism seemed pointless. The authorial persona (the “emigrant mechanic”) in Alexander Harris's Settlers and Convicts “feels inclined” to put aside all missionary efforts as “quite useless at present”. In the mechanic's opinion, “there seems something so intrinsically absurd in the nation which is robbing another of its land and its means of subsistence soliciting that other to adopt its religion”.⁵³ By way of an indictment of white society, Harris speculates about how an Aborigine would respond to an evangelist's attempts to convert him:

“You!”, he says, “you who tie one another up, and flog one another within an inch of life, for some little hasty word; you who begrudge one another enough to eat; you who deprive me of my hunting grounds, only to increase possessions for mere possessions' sake; you, a people divided into two classes the one hateful and the other contemptible, the tyrant and the slave … you teach me to be better! Me who walk the forest free, who appropriate no more than I need, who never fight but as a deeply injured man, who would not lay your bloody lash upon my dog, much less my brother”.⁵⁴

In Harris's opinion, the English had to set their own colony in order before they could presume to preach to the Aborigines.

Even in less liberal circles writers acknowledged the need for the colony to reform itself; the blackened souls of the convicts had to be reclaimed first. Only after the white community had been saved would it be possible for the pastors to expend energy on the natives. If the Aborigines happened to be improved by contact with the admirable sections of the white community, this was the best that could be done for them. Thus, in their sense of superiority, the English were being generous in domesticating the savages. Thomas Richards of the Westminster Review exemplifies this attitude when he describes “tamed” Tasmanian natives:

These individuals were enjoying every comfort of civilized life, nay, they are a sort of pets with the inhabitants of Launceston, and were fully imbued with the importance of the interest which they created.⁵⁵

The wonder, to borrow Doctor Johnson's wit, is not that the domestication is done well, but that it is done at all! Such is the condescending tone.

At their most clement, the English could be most damning. There is something more insidious about patronising toleration of incorrigible savages than there is about outright hostility and calumny. Regardless of which attitude prevailed, however, a large group of writers between 1770 and 1850 established one image of the Aborigines by depicting them consistently as objects of fear and loathing: fear because the Aborigines reminded these civilised people of a barbarous heritage; and loathing because nothing about savage culture seemed to conform to the criteria of English Christian civilisation.

“CAFFRES HAVE BLACK FACES, BUT WHITE HEARTS …”

Not all writers at this time are strictly condemnatory in their descriptions of the Aborigine. Nor are they all unreservedly adulatory of the English nation. Many interpret English society as so disconcertingly “fallen” that it is impertinent to regard an English colony overladen with convicts as far superior to the savages' community. According to this point of view, any corruption of the blacks ought to be accredited to the taint-by-association with the white society:

On coming in contact with the whites, they [the blacks] seem speedily to acquire all their vices without one of those conservative virtues which mitigate their effects and render practicable the consolidation of society. There is obstinacy mixed with dulness [sic] in the savage, there is impatience mixed with overweening pride in the civilized man.⁵⁶

Sympathy for the native even changes occasionally to admiration as several writers wonder whether to extol an Australian noble savage. William Thomas Moncrieff is just such a cautious romanticist. In Van Diemen's Land! he utilises poetic licence to its limit, as he transposes the now-legendary Bennelong (called “Ben-ni-long” in the play) in time and space to become the oratorical spokesman for a group of Aborigines in Tasmania in 1818.

The Aboriginal sub-plot of the play supplements the two plots outlined in chapter three of this book. Ben-ni-long and his band of native followers, including an apocryphal sister named Kangaree, become increasingly involved with the white community as the play progresses. When romance develops between Kangaree and Darby Ballylaggan (the Irish convict), the native tribe begin to sympathise with the new settlers, in contrast to Ben-ni-long's earlier exhortations for “Caffre revenge”. Darby marries Kangaree, sealing an honourable peace between the blacks and the newly arrived whites, and the Aborigines play a vital part in the climactic scene in which the bushrangers' murderous plan is foiled and justice and happiness are meted out in appropriate proportions.

Moncrieff's comparatively liberal attitudes are in evidence in his handling of this plot. Ben-ni-long is accorded the least prosaic language of any character in the play and is certainly represented as more sinned against than sinning. Just as Moncrieff sympathises to some extent with the convicts, naming two of the free settlers “Bolter” and “Scapetrap” in order to imply that more people than just those convicted are guilty of misdemeanours, so he sides with the natives many times when savage and civilised existence are compared. White society is criticised when Ben-ni-long recalls his experiences in England:

What saw the untaught savage—the wild chief there?—this saw he!—he saw the white man, his neighbour, poor!—distressed!—shut him in prison!—make him poorer still to make him pay!—he saw the white man hang white men, like dogs, for stealing food to save them from starvation!—but for a wife, a daughter stolen, oh, bits of shining gold are ample recompense!⁵⁷

Moncrieff attempts to emphasise the message when Kangaree chants a clumsy paraphrase of the opening two lines of William Blake's “The Little Black Boy” (“My mother bore me in the southern wild, / And I am black, but O! my soul is white”, in Songs of Innocence, 1789): “Caffres have black faces, but white hearts, but white men's faces white, their hearts black!” (p.37).

Also, Moncrieff's rendition of Ben-ni-long's return to the wilds after his sojourn in England differs from the more common, condemnatory interpretations of the actions of an unregenerate savage. In Van Diemen's Land! Ben-ni-long is obviously a character with whom the audience is meant to sympathise. His insights are to be regarded as cogent when he recounts his experiences:

Ben-ni-long, savage as he was, found white men worse; he left his country, what found he here, when he came back? he found the white man chief! he found his lands all seized, and he, their prince, the white man's slave! He threw off the fine clothes the white man gave him—left their gay feasts—shut ear to their smooth words—took to his native skins again—his hunter's fare—and wars 'gainst white men now, as white men warred 'gainst him!

[p.38]

From this point of view the savages' vengeance can be seen as righteous, and even commendable. Kangaree and the chorus dance as they sing:

White man come with fire in hand
Seize poor Caffre's native land,
… Let him fear, Black man near,
Him take dark revenge!

[p.37]

Perhaps the most informative aspect of this plot is Moncrieff's evident confusion over his own attitude to the Aborigine. At the same time as he invariably portrays Ben-ni-long as a noble spokesman of serious themes, he also exploits the Aboriginal scenes in order to present diverting local colour. The natives are dressed flamboyantly; the stage directions specify Ben-ni-long's costume as “White shirt—short trunks—brown legs and arms—scarf—Indian head-dress”, while Kangaree is to wear an “Indian striped dress”. Also, when the tribe is not singing and cavorting like spirits of the forests, they are often planning “good works”, like some antipodean approximations of Robin Hood's band of merry men. To add to the confusion, Moncrieff occasionally allows these scenes to become trite farce, as when Darby marries Kangaree and is immediately elevated to the status of “Chief Brien Boroo of Derry, chief of the Broken Head tribe” (p.42).

Moncrieff's play appears at a time when many writers concerned with Australia are exclusively condemnatory of the Aborigines; his desire to romanticise Ben-ni-long and the tribe is challenged by voluminous literature professing an opposite idea. As a writer Moncrieff is afflicted with many shortcomings, but he cannot be blamed entirely for his inconsistent attitude to the Aborigine, for the ideological climate in which he writes would confuse a better intellect than his. Moncrieff is aware that a balanced view of the relative merits of whites and blacks is required. Although Kangaree speaks of the white man's black heart, she also affirms that “some pale-face, good and kind!—better than Caffre” (p.38). Aboriginal courting worries her especially: “Pale-face take but one wife, that good—Caffre take two, that bad;—Caffre court girl with blows—beat her to make her love him, that bad” (p.38). (The courting customs are a popular topic with writers of the time. Possibly the most influential presentation of the distastefulness of Aboriginal “romance” comes in the 1803 edition of T. R. Malthus's An Essay on the Principle of Population, chapter three, “Of the Checks to Population in the Lowest Stage of Human Society”. He refers to reports of cruel treatment of Aboriginal women and children, and he condemns such behaviour as an unacceptably barbaric means of population control!) As a result of her observations Kangaree is determined to marry a white man, and the audience is persuaded (albeit with a minimum of nuance and finesse) that each society is far from perfect.

A partial resolution of Moncrieff's puzzlement over the comparative worth of civilised and savage communities in Australia comes at the denouement of the play, when Ben-ni-long engineers the capture of Michael Howe's bushranger gang. Inferring a moral from the marriage of Kangaree and Darby, Ben-ni-long proclaims that blacks and whites should co-operate rather than seek to destroy each other: “For your sakes, friends, I'll be at peace with England, will yield my lawful claims to this fair isle” (p.68).

Behind Moncrieff's confused characterisation of Aborigines in this generally confused play, there is a dissatisfaction with the simplistic portrait of the native as an entirely odious creature who crouches in degradation while the ideal English settler lives out an exemplary existence. The weaknesses of the play stem from the fact that Moncrieff is intelligent enough to realise that stereotypes of both whites and blacks in Australia are inadequate to the task of presenting the issues which are now pertinent to the English vision of the colony. But the play's flaws are also its comparative strengths. Had Moncrieff been a worse writer, the tensions and ambivalences in Van Diemen's Land! would not have been evident, and the problems of interpretation of the Aborigine, which the play highlights, would have been concealed by the application of well-worn but inflexible and flat stereotypes of the lowly savage and the righteous settler.

For authors like Moncrieff who are gifted with some self-critical faculties, the treachery of the natives is due not to untempered passions, but to a sense of just retribution and self-preservation. As Thomas Bartlett explains:

It must not be forgotten, while we are meditating on the treatment of the natives of New Holland, that their country is occupied by force—that they attempted, but in vain, to beat off the English settlers. However much this question may be mystified, it is evident that New Holland is only held by the right of might. Therefore, it is not justifiable to assert that all the evils which have been brought on the Aborigines by the settlement of the whites in their country, have arisen from the inherent depravity of their natures.⁵⁸

These writers are prepared to see good and bad in the Aborigine. They attempt to maintain a balance in their characterisations.

E. J. Eyre makes a similar point in the supplement to the second volume of his Journals. After describing his epic trek across the continent, Eyre devotes a portion of his book to an account of Aboriginal society. This section of the book is a fine study in social anthropology, in which Eyre avoids ascribing literary stereotypes to the Aborigines; rather he seeks to place the natives' behaviour in a broad historical context. He begins his inquest with an unequivocal declaration: “Could blood answer blood, perhaps for every drop of European's shed by natives, a torrent of theirs, by European hands, would crimson the earth”.⁵⁹ From this perspective he then analyses the injustices perpetrated by colonial society, such as squatters' farming and policing methods which deny Aborigines access to their lands and water-courses; he criticises the apathy of colonial administrations with regard to native affairs, and he vehemently refutes the “unfair and unwarranted assumption” that the disappearance of the natives is “the result of the natural course of events; that they are ordained by Providence, unavoidable, and not to be impeded”.⁶⁰

Eyre, like Moncrieff, cannot accept the popular stereotypes of the natives. Unlike Moncrieff, he resorts to an avowedly nonfictional means of presenting his understanding of them. Much of Eyre's account consists of “scientific” observation drawn from personal experience as he details the physiques and physical capabilities of Aborigines; as he analyses native dialects and discusses the conflicts between European and Aboriginal tribal laws; as he meticulously describes hunting and fishing methods, weapons, diet and habitation; and as he earnestly examines (and tentatively approves) the new missions which were recently set up to put Aborigines on the long road to some degree of integration with white society. All in all, Eyre's work on the Aborigines is well balanced and truly innovative, fully meriting Geoffrey Dutton's praise of it as “not only a pioneering work but an eloquent and humane plea for the rights of native peoples”.⁶¹

Works of equanimity and objectivity, however, are uncommon with regard to the Aborigine at this time, because Old World literature and language so often influenced people's vision. A tolerant and sensitive attitude towards the native people called for innovative thinking which would enable people to consider the Aborigine separately from a stereotype such as the fearsome wild man. Therefore, if writers were inclined to reject the image of the murderous savage, they were not likely to opt for a fictional rendition of the position which Eyre adopted and which Moncrieff almost achieved. Rather, they were more likely to remain “trapped” by traditional diction and literature, and to opt for the opposite stereotype of the ideal savage who roams the florid glades of a terrestrial paradise. Such writers were to set up the other aspect of the double image of the Aborigine.

“THE VERY IDEAL OF A WILD MAN, WITH ALL THE ROMANCE OF HIS AGILITY, FEROCITY, AND LOVE OF DARING …”

The favourable characterisation of the Aborigine is the result of several literary and artistic influences. To say that he is depicted as a “noble savage” is almost meaningless because that concept has been so variously interpreted and embellished. It is undeniable, however, that for many writers the native becomes a type of superman living outside the debilitating influence of civilisation, the male displaying the virtues and capabilities of all that epitomised contemporary praiseworthy masculinity. (The attitude to the Aboriginal woman is significantly different, notions of “primitive” femininity being located outside the codes of “noble savagery”.)

There was a large stock of images and characters which writers could derive from classical legend as well as from Edenic and arcadian traditions. Also the visual arts exerted a strong influence on the literary portrayal of the Australian native. Publishers' engravers were constrained by certain tenets of taste, which required that the appearance and the actions of human figures in a landscape must be as inspiring as the picturesque landscape in which they were (almost inevitably) set. One of the original formulators of this enduring sense of taste was Sir Joshua Reynolds, who had proclaimed that any human subject depicted in a painting “ought to be of some eminent instance of heroic action, or heroic suffering” so that the portrayal “powerfully strikes upon the public sympathy”.⁶² Such thinking held sway until well into the nineteenth century. As Bernard Smith has remarked, pictorial representations of lowly savages could offend propriety: “publishers, it seems, while utilizing original natural-history illustrations drawn on the spot, rejected similar drawings of native people. The rejection was due, doubtless, to a question of taste”.⁶³ Certainly the lithographed images which often accompanied the literary representations of the Australian native predisposed readers to expect verbal descriptions of an admirable primitive performing heroic or exemplary actions in a felicitous environment. And certainly there were several writers prepared to corroborate the expectations of the market.

In the literary characterisation of an exemplary native, courage is a prerequisite. In one of the early “ennobling” texts, Hawkesworth's Captain Cook marvels at the fact that two warriors greeted his landing party steadfastly in the face of overwhelming numerical odds:

They brandished their weapons, and seemed resolved to defend their coast to the uttermost, though they were but two, and we were forty. I could not but admire their courage.⁶⁴

As the image is gradually formulated, such valour is repeatedly aligned with a sense of honour and gallantry which places the Aborigine in a literary mould similar to that of a classical warrior. Adversaries respect one another as Hector did Achilles, and in the tradition of so many sons of Mars, the Goddess Venus can waylay them ruthlessly. As David Collins affirms:

Friendship and alliance were known to subsist between several that were opposed to each other, who fought with all the ardour of the bitterest of enemies, and who, though wounded, pronounced the party by whom they had been hurt to be good and brave, and their friends.⁶⁵

Similarly Watkin Tench writes of Colbee, a Botany Bay Aborigine: “Love and war seemed his favourite pursuit; in both of which he had suffered severely”.⁶⁶ Also, in this vein, Moncrieff's Ben-ni-long is a warrior whose just vengeance matches his eloquence: “Aye, let the colourless strangers fear! that have usurped our plains, and would fain extirpate our race! let them beware the Caffre's just revenge”.⁶⁷

Far from being predominantly warlike, however, the idealised Aborigine is without malice. When discussing the Aborigine's character before the advent of the Europeans the Alexander's East India Magazine paints a typical portrait tinged with sentimentality:

The New-Hollander is a savage, without the faintest tincture of the cruelty of the savage. The first impulses of his nature have ever exhibited themselves in kindliness … But he is a savage in the paucity of his wants; he has no desires, no call beyond the gratification of his present hunger and thirst.⁶⁸

As in Arcady, here is the imagined society of the ideal Aborigine, “mine” and “yours” are meaningless words. These people own nothing and everything, as George Barrington asserts:

That happiness is obliged to result from property, is by no means true, for few savages have less to call their own, than those of New South Wales, and yet they are perfectly happy; this arises from only seeking what is requisite to satisfy nature, and any thing more they will not keep.⁶⁹

Taking the fantasy of the perfect culture to its logical conclusion, Sir Thomas Mitchell earnestly evokes visions of Eden when discussing white people's transgressions on native territory:

[The Aborigines] prefer the land unbroken and free from the earliest curse pronounced against the first banished and first created man. The only kindness we could do for them, would be to let them and their wide range of territory alone; to act otherwise and profess good-will is but hypocrisy. We cannot occupy the land without producing a change, fully as great to the aborigines, as that which took place on man's fall and expulsion from Eden. They have hitherto lived utterly ignorant of the necessity for wearing fig leaves or the utility of ploughs … We bring them the punishments due to original sin even before they know the shame of nakedness.⁷⁰

Moreover, despite E. W. Landor's contention that they are the “most light-hearted, careless, and happy people in the world” and that they subsist on the produce which “happens to fall in their way”⁷¹, the model Australian savages are nothing like indolent hedonists. When survival requires exertion in the wilds the idealised Aborigine can be as ingenious, tireless and harmonised with nature as the Deerslayer character which James Fenimore Cooper was portraying in America in the 1820s:

The person of the Australian is singularly athletic, flexile, and strong. He bounds along the earth with the fleetness of the deer; the resilience of his limbs is almost fabulous; no dangers repel him; no fatigues subdue him; inured to toil, to the daily chase for a dinner, and to the perpetual companionship of the forest tribes he presents the very ideal of a wild man, with all the romance of his agility, ferocity, and love of daring.

Although native ferocity is not denied, it is presented as part of a natural violence, in accordance with the interaction of the species. When he is free from the contingencies of subsistence, the admirable savage is a gentle man with child-like desires and inclinations. Even Watkin Tench remarks on the “gentleness and humanity of … disposition” of an Aborigine in the presence of children. Such ideally portrayed natives are in complete harmony with their environment. When Thomas Mitchell becomes adulatory, he is extreme. The singing of native women and children seems to him to be the “overflowing of the animal spirits”. Free in their Edenic land, the Aborigines are “so contented and happy, that the overflowings of their hearts [are] poured forth in song! Such is human nature in a wild state!”

All through the 1770 to 1850 period such admirable natives roamed the imagined Australian landscape. They sang and danced at the same time as other writers' Aborigines murdered and pillaged and committed unspeakable rites on the fringes of colonial settlements. One of the images could not survive. The noble Aborigine was bound for extinction, but also for a canonisation of sorts.

Notes

1. Samuel Purchas, Hakluytus Posthumus or Purchas His Pilgrimes Contayning a History of the World in Sea Voyages and Land Travells by Englishmen and Others, 20 vols, MacLehose, Glasgow, 1906, vol.XVII, p.220.

2. William Dampier, A New Voyage Round the World, James Knapton, London, 1967, p.464.

3. Erasmus Darwin, Zoonomia; or, the Laws of Organic Life, 2 vols, London, 1794, vol.I, p.498.

4. Darwin, vol.I, p.499.

5. Geoffrey Symcox, “The Wild Man's Return: The Enclosed Vision of Rousseau's Discourses”, in Edward Dudley and Maximillian E. Novak (eds), The Wild Man Within. An Image in Western Thought from the Renaissance to Romanticism, University of Pittsburgh Press, Pittsburgh, 1972, p.230.

6. Arthur O. Lovejoy, The Great Chain of Being. A Study of the History of an Idea, Harvard University Press, Cambridge (Mass.), 1936, p.296.

7. Symcox, p.242.

8. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, “The General Society of the Human Race”, in G. D. H. Cole (tr. and ed.), The Social Contract and Discourses, Dent, London, 1972, p.156.

9. Peter L. Thorslev, Jr., “The Wild Man's Revenge”, in Dudley and Novak, p.282.

10. John Dryden, The Conquest of Granada by the Spaniards: In Two Parts, London, 1672, Part I, p.7.

11. Richard Payne Knight, The Progress of Civil Society. A Didactic Poem in Six Books, London, 1796, pp.12-13.

12. Sydney Parkinson, A Journal of a Voyage to the South Seas, in his Majesty's Ship, The Endeavour, London, 1773, pp.134-35.

13. J. C. Beaglehole (ed.), The Journals of Captain James Cook on His Voyages of Discovery, 4 vols, The Voyage of the Endeavour, 1768-1771, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1968, vol.I, p.399.

14. Beaglehole, vol.I, p.312.

15. John Hawkesworth (ed.), An Account of the Voyages Undertaken by the Order of his Present Majesty for Making Discoveries in the Southern Hemisphere, 3 vols, Strahan and Cadell, London, 1773, vol.III, p.506.

16. Bernard Smith, European Vision of the South Pacific 1768-1850, Oxford University Press, London, 1960, p.128, fn. 2.

17. Hawkesworth, vol.III, p.631.

18. D. J. Mulvaney, “The Australian Aborigines 1606-1929: Opinion and Fieldwork. Part I, 1606-1859”, Historical Studies: Australia and New Zealand 8, 1958, p.136.

19. George Grey, Journals of Two Expeditions of Discovery in North-West and Western Australia, During the Years 1837, 38 and 39, 2 vols, T. & W. Boone, London, 1841, vol.II, pp.219-220.

20. Anon., The Picture of Australia, Exhibiting New Holland, Van Diemen's Land, And All the Settlements, From the First at Sydney, to the Last at the Swan River, Whittaker, Treacher & Co., London, 1829, p.228.

21. Mrs Augustus Prinsep, The Journal of a Voyage from Calcutta to Van Diemen's Land, Comprising a Description of that Country, London, 1833, p.79.

22. Bernard Smith, Australian Painting 1788-1970, Oxford University Press, Melbourne, 1971, p.28.

23. Anon., “On the Aborigines of New Holland”, Alexander's East India Magazine, and Colonial … Journal 8, 1834, p.329.

24. Anon., “Flinders' Voyage to Terra Australis”, Quarterly Review 12, 1814, pp.21-22.

25. Jeremy Bentham, Letter to Lord Pelham, pamphlet circular, Westminster, 1802.

26. Anon., The History of New Holland, From its First Discovery, London, 1787, p.70. In 1808 this pamphlet was republished, with the authorship falsely attributed to George Barrington.

27. George Osborne Morgan, “Settlers in Australia: A Prize Poem, recited in the Theatre Oxford; June 24, 1846”, Oxford, 1846.

28. John Turnbull, A Voyage Round the World in the Years 1800, 1801, 1802, 1803 and 1804, 2 vols, Richard Phillips, London, 1805, vol.I, pp.74-75.

29. Anon., “The Beagle's Discoveries in Australia”, Fraser's Magazine 34, 1846, p.108.

30. Anon., “On the Aborigines of New Holland”, 8, 1834, pp.330-31.

31. Knight, pp.11-12.

32. James Burnet (Lord Monboddo), Of the Origin and Progress of Language, 6 vols, T. Cadell, London, 1773-1793, vol.I, p.285.

33. Barron Field, “On the Aborigines of New Holland and Van Diemen's Land”, in Barron Field (ed.), Geographical Memoirs on New South Wales, John Murray, London, 1825, p.210.

34. William Wickenden, “Australasia”, in his Poems by the Bard of the Forest, Sherborne, London, 1827, p.17.

35. Robert Montgomery Martin, History of Austral-asia, Whittaker and Co., London, 2nd edn, 1839, first published 1836, p.159.

36. Watkin Tench, A Complete Account of the Settlement of Port Jackson, London, 1793, p.200. Tench's opinions about the Aborigine stand despite his liberalism about other issues such as the humanitarian treatment of convicts.

37. Winthrop Mackworth Praed, Australasia. A Poem which obtained the Chancellor's Medal at the Cambridge Commencement, July, 1823, Cambridge, 1823, p.10.

38. J. C. Byrne, Twelve Years' Wanderings in the British Colonies from 1835 to 1847, 2 vols, Richard Bentley, London, 1848, vol.I, p.277.

39. George French Angas, Savage Life and Scenes in Australia and New Zealand, 2 vols, Smith, Elder & Co., London, 1847, vol.I, p.73.

40. Martin, pp.149-150.

41. Richard Howitt, Impressions of Australia Felix During Four Years Residence in that Colony, Longman, Brown, Green and Longmans, London, 1845, p.204.

42. G. H. Haydon, Five Years' Experience in Australia Felix, Hamilton, Adams and Co., London, 1846, p.106.

43. Joseph Lycett, Views in Australia, J. Souter, London, 1824, p.2.

44. Anon., “The Poor Transport's Lamentation”, in Anon., The History of Botany Bay in New Holland, London, n.d. (ca 1800), p.8.

45. Coral Lansbury, Arcady in Australia: The Evocation of Australia in Nineteenth Century English Literature, Melbourne University Press, Melbourne, 1970, p.130.

46. Hayden White, “The Forms of Wildness”, in Dudley and Novak, pp.20-21.

47. White, p.20.

48. Charles Darwin, Journal and Remarks, 1832-1836, in R. Fitz-Roy (ed.), Narrative of the Surveying Voyages of his Majesty's Ships Adventure and Beagle, Between the Years 1826 and 1836, 3 vols, London, 1839, vol.III, p.520.

49. Barron Field, “Journal of an Excursion Across the Blue Mountains of New South Wales”, in Barron Field (ed.), Geographical Memoirs on New South Wales, John Murray, London, 1825, p.435.

50. Howitt, p.286.

51. Tench, p.179.

52. Patrick Matthew, Emigration Fields. North America, The Cape, Australia, and New Zealand, Adam and Charles Black, Edinburgh, 1839, p.11.

53. Alexander Harris, Settlers and Convicts, or Recollections of Sixteen Years' Labour in the Australian Backwoods, by An Emigrant Mechanic, London, 1837, p.417.

54. Harris, Settlers and Convicts, p.342.

55. T. Richards, “Van Diemen's Land”, Westminster Review 21, 1834, p.26.

56. Anon., “The Beagle's Discoveries in Australia”, Fraser's Magazine 34, 1846, p.108.

57. William Thomas Moncrieff, Van Diemen's Land! An Operatic Drama, in Three Acts, in W. T. Moncrieff (ed.), Richardson's New Minor Drama, 4 vols, T. Richardson, London, 1831, vol.IV, p.39. All future references to Van Diemen's Land! will be to this edition and will be cited parenthetically in the text.

58. Thomas Bartlett, New Holland: Its Colonization, Productions and Resources, with Observations on the Relations Subsisting with Great Britain, Longman, Brown, Green and Longmans, London, 1843, pp.78-79.

59. Edward John Eyre, Journals of Expeditions of Discovery into Central Australia, 2 vols., T. & W. Boone, London, 1845, vol.II, p.156.

60. Eyre, vol.II, pp.157-58.

61. Geoffrey Dutton, The Hero as Murderer. The Life of Edward John Eyre, Australian Explorer and Governor of Jamaica, Collins, London, 1967, p.14.

62. Sir Joshua Reynolds, “Discourse IV”, 1771, in The Discourses, James Carpenter, London, 1842, p.53.

63. Smith, European Vision and the South Pacific, p.128.

64. Hawkesworth, vol.III, p.493. See also, the engraving taken from Sydney Parkinson's drawing of “Two of the Natives of New Holland advancing to combat”.

65. David Collins, An Account of the English Colony in New South Wales, Cadell and Davies, London, 1798, p.329.

66. Tench, p.35.

67. Moncrieff, p.37.

68. Anon., “On the Aborigines of New Holland”, 8, 1834, p.330.

69. George Barrington, The History of New South Wales, including Botany Bay. Port Jackson, Pamaratta [sic], Sydney, and all its Dependencies, Jones, London, 1802, p.24.

70. Thomas Livingstone Mitchell, Journal of an Expedition into the Interior of Tropical Australia, Longman, Brown, Green and Longmans, London, 1848, pp.65-66.

71. E. W. Landor, The Bushman, or, Life in a New Country, Bentley, London, 1847, p.52.