Such early encounters probably resonated well beyond their brief occurrence. Indigenous people would no doubt have talked about them among themselves. Each event of this kind is likely to have been reported in particular ways by those who were present. We are unable to know exactly what their reports were like or how varied they were. But we may assume they would gradually have become part of regular accounts to others who had not yet seen explorers or other colonials, perhaps involving interpretation of the clothes, animals, and other aspects of the outsiders’ behavior. Where violence occurred—and it often did, as further discussed below—this would have also been reported in some form.
For a considerable time, in different parts of Australia, there would continue to be people who had never seen outsiders such as these Europeans. But that was to change, as was the range of responses. “First” moments were platforms for subsequent ones. Phillip Parker King of the British Royal Navy in 1821 was greeted by Aborigines in a harbor at King George’s Sound on the south coast of the present Western Australia by “Indians … hallooing and waiving to us” (Shellam 2009:4). This bold greeting, so different from nonrecognition, has to be understood in the knowledge that these people had been visited the year before by another ship, from which they had learned the word “water” from the Port Jackson (Sydney) language (ibid., 5) on the other side of the continent. The area had also been briefly visited by explorers George Vancouver in 1791, Matthew Flinders in 1801 and 1802, who went inland and met Aboriginal groups, and French navigator Nicolas Baudin in 1803, who found a sealer brig in a bay. The question that we might be able to answer is not: when was first contact here? But: what variable responses emerge and go forward from early encounter?
Earlier in this chapter, I discussed some approaches to first contact in which indigenous “culture” resulted in at least temporary alignment of Europeans with indigenous gods. To consider culture as a spectrum of action and disposition of which actors are more and less aware enables us to imagine forms of first response as at various points on the spectrum; it also suggests that responses would, correspondingly, be more and less likely to change if and when interaction continues and depending on the course it takes. Such encounters are nothing if not “historical,” and so the notion of what is “cultural” in them needs to be flexible. Let us experiment with some of these ideas by considering what seems to have been a much more widely remarked commonplace of colonial contact in Australia—the idea that whites were ancestors or returned ghosts.
Were We Dead?
In many cases of colonial contact, outsiders seem to have been identified with out-of-the-ordinary beings. In the case of Hernán Cortés, Todorov’s typecase in Mexico, the conquistador is said to have been taken to be a returning god, and this to have rendered the Mexicans incapable of response. We also saw an identification of Cook with Lono in Hawaii. In North America, something different is commonly recorded: first European arrivals are cast by narrators as already foretold in story or legend (Ramsey 1983; Miller 1985). Perhaps casting encounter in this way mitigated the shock of impact or had the effect of attributing power or distinction to the foretellers.10
Indigenous people, not universally but very commonly across the Australian continent, first applied to Europeans words that otherwise referred to “ghost,” “spirit” of the dead (also, sometimes, terms the principal meaning of which was “white”). This suggests that, to some degree, they cast the new arrivals in terms of the persons and spirits of their imaginative and cosmological peripheries, mainly the dead. A mapping of terms for (Pama-Nyungan) Australian languages reveals their continent-wide distribution. The pattern is also common in other11 languages of the continent, including in the region of my own field experience. We have a few explicit accounts of this sort of identification.
George Grey—soldier, explorer, colonial governor in Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa—led two (fairly disastrous) expeditions into uncharted country in northwest Australia (presently Western Australia) in 1837 and 1839. He was observant, but also much assisted by an accompanying Nyungar Aborigine (from the southwest area of present Western Australia), Kaiber, who undoubtedly helped him understand a good deal in their interactions with indigenous people as they moved across country. Grey (1841: vol. 2, p. 129; see also p. 363) mentions a man, apparently one just encountering whites for the first time, asking him repeatedly in the “Swan River language” (i.e., Nyungar, near present Perth, Western Australia), “Were we dead?” The asker apparently took it to be quite possible that the dead may have human form and be able to engage with others and answer such questions. There are many clear instances of indigenous people having made an identification of this kind in early contact, on the basis of an understanding that ghosts and ancestral beings (with whom arriving colonials were often first identified) could exist in the same space-time with living people.12 But notice that, though evidently presupposing such an identification, in the situation of encounter, which he clearly takes to be extraordinary, the man is moved to ask, “Were we dead?”—questioning the identification directly of a being who, he supposes, may be of this kind. The query “Were we dead?” is also a kind of meta-question as to whether these creatures belonged to a category of “spirit” usually referred to by that term, already imaginatively prefigured? Possibly, but it is hard to know how consistent ideas about spirits of the dead may have been. It is important, in any case, to see this as the man’s questioning matters previously assumed as commonplace but probably rarely put to such a salient, startling practical test.
Figure 2. Map of Australia showing distribution of “ghost” and “ancestor” terms in Pama-Nyungan languages. CartoGIS, Australian National University. Courtesy of Claire Bowern at Yale University Pama-Nyungan Laboratory.
It seems that identifications often did not remain at the level of a broad category of ancestral spirits, but were person specific. In another place, Grey (1841: vol. 1, pp. 300–302) recounts how an old man (north of Perth, and belonging to an apparently newly contacted group) gazed at him with great curiosity, then went off to fetch his wife, who, “throwing her arms round me, cried bitterly, her head resting on my breast…. At last the old lady, emboldened by my submission, deliberately kissed me on each cheek, just in the manner a French woman would have done; she then cried a little more, and at length relieving me, assured me that I was the ghost of her son.” Again, Grey was no doubt assisted by local interpreters in understanding this fairly intricate message.
These stories evoke the interacting parties’ differing perspectives. The old man (and woman) look at Grey, see him as their son because of his appearance and on the basis of acceptance of the possibility of the dead appearing among them, and they communicate this to him. Notice that difference in “color” was not prohibitive to their identification of Grey; in fact, they may have expected “ghosts” to be somewhat pallid. They seem to have seen other similarities, perhaps in features. Identification of a newly arrived European as ancestor might appear preposterous to readers who imagine racial difference would prevent the identification of personalities across such a solid-seeming barrier—to say nothing of the underlying notion involved, that a personality may resurface later in time as another individual.13 Grey wrote that he was loath to disabuse them of their notion; he left the conviction with them, or at least did