The great counterfactual of Australian history

Taking of Colebee and Bennelong by William Bradley (25 November 1789), depicts Bennelong and another man, Colebee, being kidnapped by Arthur Phillip’s men. Source: the State Library of New South Wale,  reproduced under fair use.

In Australia, being a historian of the eighteenth century is usually considered an obscure occupation. Obscure, that is, until 26 January every year when otherwise quiet devotees of the era suddenly emerge in determined defence of one event that occurred during it. The eighteenth century haunts every discussion of Australia Day—the anniversary of the morning in 1788 that Arthur Phillip finally settled on Sydney Cove as the base for his penal colony.

The eighteenth century also haunted the 2023 debate about an Indigenous Voice to Parliament. This is because the Voice evoked treaty, or the lack thereof. And the lack of a treaty cast back suggestively, but rather shapelessly, to what didn’t happen in 1788.

This 26 January, I invite you to spend five minutes in the eighteenth century, to gain more clarity on what happened in Australia during this century, why the things that didn’t happen were absent, and what it all might mean for today.

British traditions of treaty making

In Sydney Cove in 1788 few people were more steeped in the conventions of the British empire than Arthur Phillip. At 50, he was older than most of the other Europeans there, and as a captain he had served for longer and in more sites of the empire than all of them. His naval career, begun before he was twenty, had included serving in the Mediterranean, the southern Atlantic, the Indian Ocean, and North America. It was during his stints in the latter two regions that he saw up close the usual British way of things.

This involved, overwhelmingly, colonisation by treaty – treaties over sovereignty, title, friendship, alliance, or commerce. Rarely were these agreements fair, but they did exist, with a variety of Asians and Native American groups. They occurred because British imperialists mostly felt bound to a form of Roman law which said agreements had to be forged rather than taken when dealing with any humans who showed land cultivation or permanent construction or social reason. And British imperialists also realised that colonisation through conquest was always harder and costlier than cajoling with paper.

Oftentimes, as Phillip well knew, agreements were secured by Indigenous intermediaries. These intermediaries frequently visited London to meet the reigning sovereign, negotiate terms again, or more likely confirm terms already signed. For example, in 1710 Iroquois representatives visited to secure a treaty of military alliance; in 1730 a Cherokee group arrived to confirm a treaty of commercial friendship, and in 1762 a second came to confirm a peace treaty. Each group met Whitehall officials and then toured London’s sites of might and luxury such as St Pauls Cathedral, the tower arsenal, and the Greenwich docks.

Phillip & Bennelong

A painting of Bennelong, sourced from the City of Canada Bay Local Studies Collection and reproduced under fair use.

Phillip saw for himself the traction that such an approach had granted the British, especially in India and the North American colonies, outdoing France in this game at every turn. When given his now-famous orders to “conciliate with the natives”, he doubtless had eighteenth-century precedents for treaty in mind. He would have seen that the local people of Sydney sustained, built, and ordered their world in ways similar to many other Indigenous peoples. I offer a series of points to back up my speculation that Phillip sought a treaty during his Governorship.

First, Phillip tried multiple times in his first year to broker relationships with certain Indigenous individuals. When each failed, he resorted to kidnapping. His first target, in December 1788, was the Gayamaygal man, Arabanoo. Tragically, Arabanoo sickened and died from the smallpox epidemic that broke out soon afterwards. In November 1789, Phillip ordered a second kidnapping, this time famously of a Wangal man, Bennelong. Though Phillip was happy to condone violence when it suited him, he viewed it as the least rational way to secure stability in his fledgling colony. That Phillip resorted to the violence of kidnapping reveals a sense of panic about his mandated first steps on the road to negotiation with locals.

Second, Phillip accepted a series of “humiliations” to maintain Bennelong as his potential counterpart. As the governor of an open-air prison far from Britain, Phillip had much to lose by doing so. He regularly allowed Bennelong to dine with him as an equal at his table; bowed to Bennelong’s defence of other local men when they attacked the colony; and, momentously, refrained from reprisals despite being fairly sure Bennelong had helped orchestrate his spearing at Manly Cove in September 1790.

Third, Phillip invited Bennelong to travel with him to London. Phillip was renowned for his unsociability and the trip was a huge extravagance so it is unlikely that it was undertaken without a formal process in mind. Phillip invited Bennelong because he knew many significant agreements in British imperial history involved an Indigenous envoy to London. Bennelong accepted, not to sign any treaty, but because he saw such a move as a political act – another way, like all his business with Phillip, of securing peace for his kin.

Finally, when in Britain, Phillip set Bennelong on a path that matched earlier Indigenous negotiators. He outfitted Bennelong in clothes that came to more than £3000 in today’s terms – only a palace would have warranted such apparel. And he outlined an itinerary for Bennelong that included St Paul’s Cathedral, the tower of London, Greenwich, naval premises, as well as soldier camps, palaces, spas and theatres. While Bennelong never did meet King George III, it does not prove that he was never intended to do so.

A changed international context accounts for Phillip’s failure to arrange a royal audience. Whitehall officials had aided all previous meetings between envoys and monarchs but, by 1793 those in charge of New South Wales figured that times had irrevocably changed. They knew by this point that the French, with their unprecedented revolution underway, were not going to be contenders for NSW. They knew that smallpox had done most of the offensive work they would otherwise have faced, wiping out around half of the harbour population. And they knew that after the disaster of the American Revolution, Britain would pursue a much harder line in imperial governance. For these reasons a treaty never followed in Phillip’s wake. None, however, is a reason that the governor himself appreciated during his term.

So what?

Let’s not pretend that any document Phillip or his successor would have drafted was going to guarantee just treatment for Indigenous Australians. I am not suggesting that First Nations peoples in Canada, New Zealand or the USA today enjoy just conditions because they can point to treatymaking in the past.

But since a treaty is a legal thing, a treatied past would have framed Australian Indigenous people as legal entities. In a land run theoretically by the rule of law this is not nothing. It would have eliminated at least one discourse – specifically, whether Indigenous people are recognisable in the nation or not. Instead, they would have to be recognised. A treaty might have avoided scenarios where Australians would be asked if Indigenous people were countable in a national census, say, or, if Indigenous voices could be enshrined in our leading document, the constitution.

To think seriously about the greatest counterfactual in our history – the lack of any formal conciliation – is to understand how strange and odd and rare is Australia’s situation. It would not naturalise this lack, but point to its very oddity.

The post The great counterfactual of Australian history appeared first on Australian Academy of the Humanities.