The responsiveness of these delightful savages had given their new trading partners a reassuring illusion of the ‘naturalness’ of trans-cultural understanding. The sturdiness of Tahitians’ appetite for British goods—‘red and yellow cloth, some tomahawks, axes, knives, scissors, shirts, jackets, etc.’—together with the convenience of a ‘king’ ready to accept the personal reward of ‘a mantle and some other articles of dress decorated with red feathers, together with six muskets and some ammunition’, meant that as early as 1801 such items could be shipped to Tahiti from infant Sydney in full confidence that they would be exchanged for the pork the British hungered for.
After such encounters with village-dwelling agriculturalists long familiar with the benefit of trade, naked nomads—lacking pigs, fruits and kings, and cautiously frugal with their women—had to come as something of a disappointment, even to men uncorrupted by the mellow exchanges of Tahiti. These people did not covet the trinkets the British waggled at them. They seemed to lack a proper passion for novelties. Gifts of ribbons and neck-cloths were accepted, worn for a day, then hung on a bush and forgotten. They seemed also to regard most British foods as inedible. Nor did these natives have an ‘abundance of superfluities’ of their own available for exchange: it quickly became clear that every one of their hand-crafted multipurpose possessions was essential for the daily business of surviving, and was duly cherished. They coveted only those British products which replicated the functions of their own tools, like metal hatchets or fishhooks. Tench himself, engaging in his first day of serious trading, found that a man whose spear he wanted would part with it only in exchange for a hatchet, and Tench had to have himself rowed all the way back to Sydney from the northern shore of the harbour to get him one.
The British should have paid more attention to the experiences of their predecessors. A hundred years before Cook, William Dampier visited the north-western coast of Australia and met some of the inhabitants. He did not stay long—not more than two months—but that was time enough to identify some disturbing characteristics of these particular natives. He could define them only by the negatives of all the things they did not have: no clothes, no houses, no beds, no gods; no sheep, no poultry, no cultivated foods. And no decorum, either: they lived, he said, in heaps, twenty or thirty men, women and children piled together, sharing what they ate and eating what they could find. They were, in his opinion, ‘the miserablest People in the World’.
However, despite all the negatives they seemed amiable enough, and with his experience of the docile workers of the islands behind him, Dampier thought they might as well be put to useful work. This is what happened next:
We had found some Wells of Water here and intended to carry 2 or 3 barrels of it aboard. But as it was somewhat troublesome to carry it to the Canoes, we thought to have got these Men to carry it for us. And therefore we gave them some old Clothes: to one, a pair of old Breeches; to another, a ragged Shirt; to the third, a Jacket that was scarce worth owning, which would have been very acceptable in some of the places where we had been...We put them on them, thinking that this finery would have brought them to work heartily for us. And having filled our Water in small long Barrels, about six Gallons in each...we brought our new Servants to the Wells, and put a barrel on each of their Shoulders for them to carry to the Canoe.
So there they were, appropriately laden. Then came an unexpected difficulty:
...all the signs we could make were to no purpose, for they stood like Statues without motion, and grinned like so many Monkeys, staring one upon another. For these poor Creatures do not seem accustomed to carrying Burdens, and I believe that one of our Ship-boys of ten years old would carry as much as one of them. So we were forced to carry our Water ourselves. They very fairly put the Clothes off again, and laid them down as if Clothes were only for working in. I did not perceive they had any great liking for them at first.
No talent for work, no taste for European clothing, and no admiration for ‘anything we had’. We seem to hear the echo of ghostly black laughter rising from the page. This brief encounter set the tone for later ones: Australian incomprehension in the face of European exhortations, an obstinate disinclination to covet European goods, and an absolute refusal to embrace their predestined roles as hewers of wood or, in this case, haulers of water. Nomads have their own ways of managing the world.
One thing is clear to us. These radically modest local wants, which led to such confusion over what constituted grounds for legitimate exchange, ensured that in Australia trade could never become the Grand Pacifier it had proved elsewhere.
Phillip had read Dampier. What he seems to have remembered best was Dampier’s comment that many of the men were lacking the upper right incisor. He happened to have lost that same tooth himself in some long-ago accident. He did not know how much that would matter, and he did not take the Dampier lesson regarding Australian recalcitrance at all. How could he, given the strength of his convictions regarding ‘savage teachability’?
Consider his account of an early trans-racial meeting at Port Jackson. His strategy of mimed trust and the offer of gifts seemed to be working as well there as it had in Botany Bay, so confirming, as he thought, the excellence of his diplomatic technique. (Oddly, it rarely occurred to the British that the Australians might be in communication with each other, with information about the white men running before them. Like imperialists earlier and later, they tended to take each meeting as de novo and ‘the natives’ as perennially innocent.) At the Port Jackson meeting Phillip was particularly delighted to find a man fascinated by his first sight of an iron pot full of boiling water. Phillip reports:
He...went on with me to examine what was boiling in the pot, and exprest his admiration in a manner that made me believe he intended to profit from what he saw, and which I made him understand he might very easily do by the help of some oyster shells...by these hints, added to his own observation, he would be able to introduce the art of boiling among his countrymen.
The art of boiling introduced to Australia by Phillip’s solemn dumb-show. I suppose teachers everywhere tend to overestimate the effectiveness of their teaching, if only to avoid despair.
But it was the moral challenge which most enthralled him. Given that these Australians were intelligent beings, capable of reciprocating trust and assessing consequences, they were also capable of being ‘civilised’ in the fullest (British) sense. Being fully confident that British superiority must have been obvious to all parties, he was able to interpret what were probably displays of Australian insouciance or tolerant courtesies extended to uncouth strangers as admiring recognitions of superiority. Experience kept confirming his reading, as experience will. One example: at the cove he had named Manly to mark his high estimation of the impressive men he met there, a noisy group of Australians who had been ‘very troublesome when we were preparing our dinner’ quietly subsided when he drew a circle in the sand and gestured that they should stay outside it, so that he and his officers could eat in peace. They sat in silence outside the circle; the British ate. Phillip took this as ‘another proof of how tractable these people are, when no injury or insult is offered, and when proper means are used to influence the simplicity of their minds’. That they might have been shocked into silence by the ignorance of these extraordinary guests, who sat down without invitation, and who then gobbled their food with no hint of sharing even between each other, much less with their hosts, did not occur to him. How could it? Phillip knew nothing of nomad protocols of food-sharing.
More damningly, and, as time was to show, most damagingly, he believed these people to be bereft of formal rules to live by, and so confidently assumed that his greatest gift to them would not be British manners or cooking techniques, desirable as they were, but the gift of British justice mediated by British law. In time he would learn, slowly, painfully, that Australians were rather less teachable than he had thought. It would be on deep disagreements regarding the moral foundation