A Postcard from Narrm

Abstract

I write from Narrm, as the land is known by local First Peoples—the Wurundjeri of the Kulin nation. It was “settled” as Melbourne, often designated “the most liveable city in the world,” though the Wurundjeri may be among those who dispute that designation, given that Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander [ASTI] people are “proportionally... the most incarcerated people on the planet” and remain “the poorest, sickest, and in every way most disadvantaged members of contemporary Australian society.” In 1803, the convict ship Calcutta sailed nearby, and some of its crew were the first known Europeans to have set shore, on October 16. They were fifteen years later than others who had landed far away in Sydney Cove, among whom was the chaplain with the First Fleet, Richard Johnson, who presided at the first Christian service in the Great South Land on February 3, 1788. We know that Johnson had the 1662 Book of Common Prayer (BCP) with him and that the pages with the order for holy communion were “torn from turning.” The Bible most likely arrived on land inscribed on the bodies of various convicts, many of whom sported tattoos—for example, “Fools mock at sin” (Proverbs 14:9) and “Prepare to meet thy God” (Amos 4:2). For his part, Johnson had an illustrated King James Version (KJV), and among the goods carried on the ships were 100 KJVs, 400 New Testaments, 200 copies of the Sermon on the Mount, and 500 Psalters. While some early convicts used at least some of these scriptures to make cards for gambling and for rolling cigarettes, Johnson found a psalm for the first sermon on land: Psalm 116:12, about “the Lord’s bounty.” The chaplain onboard Calcutta, Richard Knopwood, chose another psalm for his sermon, which was part of the first Christian worship near Narrm. He opted for Psalm 107, and focused on the last part, on “understanding the loving mercy” of the Eternal. Knopwood’s choice may have been influenced by a vignette in the long story psalm about “they that go down to the sea in ships” (v. 23). We know something about the early days of settlement around Melbourne because of the extant writing of the second-in-command on Calcutta, James Tuckey. This includes his notes on encounter with and opinions about the naked (barring face-paint), unarmed (at least at first), yet “hostile” and “savage” local people. They were, Tuckey wrote, not just “stupidly devoid of curiosity” but lacking in a sense of right and wrong and altogether “disagreeable neighbours.” Some, he added, were so “abominably beastly, that it required the strongest stomach to look upon them without nausea.” Worse still, Tuckey’s writing also records killings. His diary provides some evidence about the first wave of deaths in what within decades decimated the local population. When First Peoples were not in the firing line, they were felled by diseases brought by the colonizers—