Coming to Terms with What Isn’t There: Early Narratives of New Holland

George Barrington's Voyage to Botany Bay, ed. Suzanne Rickard (London: Leicester Univ., 2001)

John Currey, David Collins: A Colonial Life (Melbourne: Melbourne Univ., 2000)

Matthew Flinders, Terra Australis, ed. Tim Flannery (Melbourne: Text Publishing, 2000)

In The Road to Botany Bay (University of Chicago, 1987), his extraordinary discussion of the collision between historical facts and visionary convictions in the accounts of the new British settlement in Australia, Paul Carter quotes Watkin Tench, whose Narrative of the Expedition to Botany Bay (1789) was published only a year after the foundation of the colony. "The scene to an indifferent spectator," writes Tench, "at leisure to contemplate it, would have been highly picturesque and amusing." The absence of such an impartial and disinterested figure amidst the pressures of cognitive dissonance, punishment, starvation, fear, disgust, and curiosity is what Carter wishes to emphasize: "This is the point: there was no spectator, no gallery, no surveyor-like comprehension . . . and to picture their activities theatrically, according to the con-ventions of a unified viewpoint is, by a curious rhetorical trick, to efface the historical nature of the events described at the very moment their importance is . . . asserted" (p. xvi). In pursuit of a visionary logic within the unsettling experience of a landscape that seemed to possess no surface sense or Pisgah viewpoint, Major Sir Thomas Mitchell saw and named a river that failed to do what he expected rivers to do, namely, flow to the sea: it turned out that the mighty Victoria did not debouch into the Gulf of Carpentaria, as he asserted, but instead dribbled away into the desert of the hinterland, where it disappeared altogether. In the same mood Mitchell saw and named a lake "Salvator," which simply was not there. Recently this fantastic work of discovery has been attracting more attention (for example, Johannes Fabian's Out of Our Minds: Reason and Madness in the Discovery of Central Africa [University of California, 2000]). It prompts a reader in the twenty-first century to ask what the historical reality was that lurked to one side of the falsely unified viewpoints and the rhetorical tricks of these unreliable eyewitnesses. What were the facts of exotic landscapes and how were they to be known? These books attempt an answer in the case of the early European settlement of Australia.

Accounts of the first British sightings of the shoreline of what was then known as New Holland exhibit the difficulty that subsequent visitors were to confront. Basically, it was the barrenness of the coast they found so unfamiliar and so hard to digest. William Dampier, in the northwest, records a litany of absent things: water, trees, birds, beasts, ostrich eggs. On his second visit he complains, "There were no Trees, Shrubs, or Grass to be seen. . . . I saw there was no Harbour here . . . a place where there was no shelter . . . we searched for Water but could find none, nor any Houses, nor People, for they were all gone." ¹ Sailing off the southern coast Matthew Flinders reports land that is bare, surmounted by shining rock which is "still more bare." "There is neither river, inlet nor place of shelter, nor does even the worst parts of Nuyt's Land exceed it in sterility" (Flannery's edition, p. 104). On his first visit Dampier met some people, but their ugliness and poverty amazed him. Compared with them the Hottentots were gentlemen who lived in opulence, he declared. Cook tried to revise that estimate along primitivist lines, maintaining that the features of New Hollanders were "far from being disagreeable" and that their habits of life were simple and excellent. "The Natives of New-Holland . . . may appear to some to be the most wretched people on Earth, but in reality they are far more happier than we Europeans; being wholly unacquainted not only with the superfluous but the necessary Conveniences so much sought after...