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

Queensland Review, Feb, 2008 by Raymond Evans

Thus, when they shouted for joy and hugged John Bingle, they were not so much excessively accommodating a stranger as rejoicing over the reappearance of a departed forebear. To them, spiritual and physical realms were inter-penetrative, the unseen world of the dead both complementing and infusing the animate landscape. Whites appeared to Aborigines like former spirits in a new corporeal shape. (Their skin colour seemingly denoted their revenant nature, for they were pale like the corpses prepared for ritual burial after the dark outer skin had been stripped away to reveal the light, subcutaneous flesh beneath.) Furthermore, the red and white uniforms of the military eerily mirrored the 'white and red paint' worn on the bodies of those mourning the deceased. (43)

As Swain notes, 'the social implications of the Aboriginal construct were generous to a fault', especially when compared with 'the European ethnoclassification of Aborigines with subhuman species'. For, whereas the white concept of 'the native' was distancing and judgmental, the corresponding Aboriginal visualisation of the incomer was indulgent and incorporative. It socially enfolded rather than culturally devalued and dislodged. To quote Swain once more:

   The value of defining intruders as deceased kinfolk was that it
   provided a mechanism for expanding the pre-existing cosmologically
   and morally established social order to accommodate alien people ...
   it invited ... [the invaders] to modify their behaviour and
   (re)establish morally acceptable interactions with their former
   kin. (44)

There were two fundamental sticking-points in this metaphysical equation. First, how many incomers could it magnanimously incorporate? Second, how could the incomers be expected to respond appropriately with all the cultural and moral sanctity expected of them?

It has been assumed by various researchers that the ontological perception of Europeans as former relatives could only expand sufficiently to cover the case of small groups of new arrivals--the exploration party, a batch of shipwrecked people, escaped convicts and the like. Yet we find that as late as 1835 John Graham could secure Eliza Fraser's release from the Kabi by convincing them that she was his spirit bride, sent to rejoin him. (45) Later again, in 1841, after thousands of convicts and others had sojourned at Moreton Bay, the Reverend Eipper wrote of how the Turrbal and Ningy-Ningy, who interacted considerably with the settlement:

   seem to hold that after death they will be like whites, and that all
   white men have been blackfellows before. Since they have heard
   of England, they imagine that is the place of their regeneration and
   metamorphosis. (46)

A conceivable explanation for such ideological tenacity might lie in the aforementioned Aboriginal understanding of 'rhythmed events'--particularly, in this case, the concept of 'a self-sustaining balance' being struck between 'the spirits emanating from a site and those returning to it upon death'. (47) The mass influx of reincarnates, seemingly pouring in as if through a tear in the cosmos, could only be balanced by commensurate knowledge of an earlier loss in such comparatively large numbers. And, as we know, such a cataclysm had occurred only a generation or so previously due to the first horrific visitation of smallpox, removing so many kinfolk as mysteriously as they now seemed to be reappearing. That disease invasion was so close in time that older Aboriginal survivors still sported its scars. And a second destructive wave of this sickness would pass across the Queensland zone between 1830 and 1835. Ironically, this horrific invader-induced visitation--dubbed 'bugaram' by the local clans--possibly helped prepare the way for the later wholesale arrival of the invaders themselves, not simply by weakening tribal resistance but also culturally, in a fundamentally mystical and ontological sense.