No fish, no house, no melons: The earliest Aboriginal guides in colonial New South Wales

Abstract

Aboriginal individuals – often men – who went with the colonists on their travels in colonial New South Wales performed various, often vital, roles. While this is well known, less attention has been paid to the ways in which relationships developed between the colonists and those guiding, or how these relationships were dependent on meeting the needs and desires of all involved. By teasing apart some of the earliest, shakiest beginnings of Aboriginal men travelling with and ‘guiding’ the colonists, this article suggests that guiding was negotiated from the outset – the product of intercultural dialogue and deliberation – and that it is a phenomenon that benefits from being more fully contextualised. There were many tasks to be completed before the expeditionary party turned in for the night. Water had to be drawn, timber chopped and supper prepared, but Colebee and Balloderry had not assisted at all. Having eaten their fill – one officer said they had ‘stuffed themselves’ – they lay down by the fire and slept.1 The naval officers had thought that these 2 Aboriginal men would prove useful to the success of their exploration, and in later decades in New South Wales, Aboriginal guides would assist travellers and explorers as cooks, hunters, stockmen and more. Yet here, during this expedition of April 1791 just west of the settlements at Sydney Cove and Rose Hill, these understandings were yet to develop. Instead, an association beset with misunderstanding was about to unfold. 1 Tench, ‘Settlement at Port Jackson’, 225. ABORIGINAL HISTORY VOL 43 2019 34 Indigenous guides and brokers have received much attention in recent years. There is a growing Australian oeuvre committed to re-examining who they were and their roles during colonial expeditions.2 In these recent considerations, the ‘hidden histories’ of exploration and Indigenous involvement form the focus, and a range of methodologies are employed to search for ways of reading Indigenous involvement, their skills, and their impact on expeditionary outcomes in heavily mediated sources. This scholarship has challenged the aura surrounding expeditionary travel, rendering it a complex affair and the position of a heroic leader highly dubious. We now know just how central the involvement of Aboriginal guides could be, and that they could make expeditionary journeys faster or frustrate their goals.3 We also know that their involvement could be strategic, that they could have their own reasons for travelling and that they could exert pressure in negotiating the terms of their engagement.4 Less attention has been paid to the ways in which relationships between Aboriginal guides and the colonists developed, or how these were dependent on the ongoing negotiation of the needs of all involved. Guiding became a key part of the intercultural social world by the 1820s, with prospectors, newly arrived immigrants, long-term settler gentlemen and more all enjoying the services of Aboriginal guides. So asking how these relationships and understandings developed – and the motivations of these guides – seem pressing questions.5 Don Baker has delivered key insights here, noting that those Aboriginal individuals who were ‘hired help’ during the expeditions of surveyor Thomas Mitchell in New South Wales in the late 1820s had ‘some degree of independence’ and set the job and the price, with the number of days agreed upon negotiated by holding up fingers.6 Similarly, Tiffany Shellam, one of the few historians to consider the origins of guiding relationships in the new and fragile cross-cultural worlds of the British military outposts on the west coast of Australia, has persuasively argued that the benefits of expeditions ‘flowed both ways’, that they were ‘collaborative accomplishments’ and that there were ‘mutual impacts’.7 Only recently has a volume appeared that seeks to centre the motivations of mobile Indigenous actors in colonial Australia and New Zealand, including the 2 For example, Blyton, ‘Harry Brown’, 63–82; Douglas, Science, Voyages, and Encounters; Jones, ‘The Theatre of Contact’; Konishi, Nugent and Shellam, Indigenous Intermediaries; Shellam et al., Brokers and Boundaries; Stanfield, ‘Looking Across’; Thomas, Expedition into Empire. 3 For example, Baker, ‘Exploring with Aborigines’, 22; McLaren, ‘Entangled Life of Goggey’; Sydney Gazette, 23 September 1804, 2. 4 Baker, ‘Exploring with Aborigines’; Shellam, ‘Manyat’s “Sole Delight”’. 5 For example, Atkinson, State of Agriculture, 64. Dunn has demonstrated that guiding in the Hunter Valley shifted over time with different waves of colonists. Dunn, ‘Aboriginal Guides’, 72–73, 79. 6 Baker, ‘Exploring with Aborigines’, 22, 37. 7 Shellam, Shaking Hands, 139.