Dancing With Strangers. Inga Clendinnen

and ‘game’. Meanwhile the offspring of the dogs the British brought with them, especially little terriers and spaniels, were eagerly coveted by the Australians. They were dog lovers too: their dingos were allies in the hunt and companions around the campfire. But dingos, bred to stalk flighty marsupials, did not bark. British dogs did. Through their centuries of living in agricultural settlement they had developed a strong sense of property, so they barked at strangers, especially strangers who came softly in the night. Translated to Australian conditions, those British-bred spaniels and terriers could give warning of night attacks. One of the skills of the Australian warrior was to move stealthily through the night, and kill an enemy who had mortally offended him as he lay by his own campfire.

      To each culture its own canine. The ‘mindless’ slaughter of stock and the consequent murderous reprisals which were to embitter British–Australian relations through later decades were implicit in this energetic early trade between dog lovers.

      Isolation, with desolation lurking within it, remained the temporary settlers’ worst enemy. William Bradley has left us a watercolour of the settlement at Sydney Cove in early 1788 (plate 4a): a scatter of tents, a few huts, a handful of larger structures, a flagpole—and that is all. The land constructions are given substance and focus by the two ships riding at anchor in the clear water. For officers, sailors and marines those ships spelt security even in a storm, because they breathed of home. Mind and spirit were refreshed by the clustered signs of European, indeed of British, technological ingenuity. Later, when officers condescended to play host to parties of Australian sightseers, leading them around the assemblage of cunning arrangements which constitute a ship, they were offended to find the tourists thoroughly bored, coming alive only when weapons or animal skins stimulated their curiosity. But if for these men the sea was an open highway back to home and England, by February 1789 the big ships had all sailed away, and even the faithful Supply was gone on a mission to Norfolk Island. The settlers were left with only the poor fruits of their own labour: huts, tents, a canvas house for the governor, some scars in the earth, some trees felled. With the harbour empty, Sydney Cove must have seemed to cling to the edge of the world.