On the utmost verge: race and ethnic relations at Moreton Bay, 1799-1842

Queensland Review, Feb, 2008 by Raymond Evans

There was only one open confession of Aboriginal superiority--and this was in regard to their rude physicality. In terms of physique, these dark, naked people were invariably superbly proportioned--lithe and muscular, towering substantially over the smaller, paler, less healthy Europeans who confronted them. Cunningham observed that 'the ordinary stature of the Aborigines at Moreton Bay' was 'about six feet', while the average height of the white male incomers was around 5 feet, 4 inches. (35) Additionally, Aborigines were deemed 'very athletic persons, of unusually muscular limb, and with bodies much scarified, in exceedingly good case'. Earlier, a group of Aboriginal men whom Oxley encountered at Toowong Reach were described as 'about the strongest and best made muscular men I have seen in any country'. (36) Further up the river, Lockyer found them equally 'well made: very active' and carrying spears 'eight to ten feet long'. (37) On Bribie, the description of the Jindoobarrie was much the same. Strange wrote: 'They are a very fine looking set of men, most of them six feet, and the women seldom less than five feet eight inches in height; wild, hardy and fierce, they go naked ...' (38)

In 1823, Oxley had also depicted these Bribie women, most of whom were markedly taller than the average European male, as 'far superior in personal beauty to the men, or indeed to any native of any country whom I have yet seen. Many of them are tall, straight and well-formed; and there were two in particular whose shape and features were such as no white woman need have been ashamed of.' (39)

High praise indeed! Yet emphasis on bodily superiority carried with it an implicit assumption that both mind and intellect were correspondingly inferior. Reason was the bosom companion of civilisation, whereas the sensory and sensual denoted savagery. The latter typified hedonism and ill-discipline--a lack of restraint not far removed from animalism. By contrast, the well-regulated European mind, like the clothed body, was a sign of social pre-eminence and human authority. Compared with the Englishman's rationality and emotional command, the Aborigines' impulsiveness was viewed as an index of their dangerous volatility and unpredictability. Whether they were rolling themselves in the sand 'in pure pleasure' at Stradbroke, yelling and running away from Lockyer's rowing boats on the Brisbane River, 'supposing them to be alive' and 'afraid they would bite', or 'shouting and dancing' in delighted astonishment at Bingle's sudden appearance on Bribie, their responses were interpreted as the intemperate cavortings of inferiors. (40) To the British, such behaviour implied that, at worst, its threatening excesses might require a superior application of force, just as, at best, the superior physical attributes--the muscularity of the men and the attractiveness of the females--might be turned to white advantage, as labour and sexual services were extracted.

The Aborigines, on the other hand, tended to view the diminutive, strange-looking incomers as reincarnations of departed kin. On the mainland, they were the 'mogwi'; on Moreton Island, 'targan'; and on Stradbroke, 'duggai'. (41) Because '"traditionally" all that was not localised was discarded', the cosmological explanation for the new arrivals was interlinked with the primacy of place and the fundamental Aboriginal 'understanding of rhythmed events'. To Aboriginal peoples generally, there was no other place but their place, where land and beings were inseparably enmeshed. The incomers must therefore be returning along a genealogical route rather than arriving from a trans-global locale. As Swain explains: 'While death might appear to Western interpreters as an end to a personality, it is to Aboriginal people a statement of the spiritual continuation of the Ancestral place.' (42)