Download Cassandra Pybus - King`s College London

LONDON PAPERS in
AUSTRALIAN STUDIES
No. 3
Replacing Working Papers in Australian Studies
A Touch of the Tar: African settlers in colonial Australia
and the implications for issues of Aboriginality
Cassandra Pybus
Series Editors: Carl Bridge & Susan Pfisterer
Menzies Centre for Australian Studies
King’s College London
University of London
ISBN: 1 85507 113 4
Published by the Menzies Centre for Australian Studies,
King’s College London, 28 Russell Square, London, WC1B 5DS, UK
Copyright Cassandra Pybus
Production: Kirsten McIntyre
Cover: Based on a detail from the iron-work gate, circa 1918, at the
main entrance to Australia House, London. Photograph by Meg
Mitchell; design by Wendy Bridge.
This book is copyright. Apart from any fair dealing for the purpose of
private study, research, criticism or review, as permitted under the
Copyright Act, no part may be reproduced by any process without
written permission.
First published 2001
British Library and Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN 1 85507 113 4
LONDON PAPERS in
AUSTRALIAN STUDIES
Editors
Professor Carl Bridge, Menzies Centre for Australian Studies,
King’s College London
Dr Susan Pfisterer, Menzies Centre for Australian Studies,
King’s College London
Editorial Advisory Board
Mr John Arnold, Australian Studies, Monash University
Professor Bruce Bennett, Literature, University of New South Wales
Professor Judith Brett, Politics, LaTrobe University
Dr Ian Craven, Film Studies, University of Glasgow
Professor James Crawford, Law, Jesus College, Cambridge
Dr Kate Darian-Smith, Australian Studies, University of Melbourne
Professor Warwick Gould, Institute of English Studies, London
Dr Tom Griffiths, History, Australian National University
Mr John Kinsella, Literature, Churchill College, Cambridge
Professor Brian Matthews, Literature, Victoria University
Professor Richard Nile, Australian Studies, Curtin University
Professor Guy Robinson, Geography, Kingston University
Dr Elizabeth Schafer, Theatre Studies, Royal Holloway, London
Professor Nicholas Thomas, Anthropology, Goldsmiths’ College, London
Professor James Walter, Politics, Griffith University
Professor Wray Vamplew, History, DeMontfort University
The Menzies Centre in brief
T
he Menzies Centre for Australian Studies was established at the
Institute of Commonwealth Studies, University of London, in
1982. Initially known as the Australian Studies Centre, it
assumed its present name in 1988. In 1999 the Centre became part of
King’s College London, and was endowed by the Australian Government.
Other financial support is received from the Menzies Foundation,
Monash University, P&O, Qantas, and Rio Tinto.
The Menzies Centre’s object is to promote Australian studies at
British and European universities. In its broadest manifestation, the
Centre is an Australian cultural base in London, providing a highly
regarded forum for the discussion of Australian issues. The Centre’s
conferences, seminars and briefings attract a diverse audience and help to
produce a more comprehensive, detailed and balanced perception of
Australian politics, economics, life and culture than is popularly available.
The Centre also administers a range of scholarship and fellowship
schemes which help cement intellectual links between Australia and
Britain. The Menzies Centre for Australian Studies offers an MA in
Australian History, Literature and Politics and supervises MPhils and
PhDs. It also teaches undergraduate courses in Australian history and
literature. The Menzies Centre offers, as well, an Australian bridge into
Europe, both western and eastern. Its staff are closely involved with the
British Australian Studies Association and the European Association of
Studies on Australia. In particular, Centre staff lecture throughout
Europe and offer informed advice on matters Australian to academics, the
media, the business world and governments. The Menzies Centre
publishes a newsletter three times a year, which includes news about the
Centre’s conferences, seminars and other activities, and about Australian
studies in general.
For further information contact the staff at Menzies Centre for Australian Studies
28 Russell Square, London WC1B 5DS, United Kingdom.
tel 020 7862 8854 fax 020 7580 9627
e-mail [email protected] website www.kcl.ac.uk/menzies
A Touch of the Tar: African settlers in
colonial Australia and the
implications for issues of
Aboriginality
Cassandra Pybus
T
his paper had its genesis in the anxiety-ridden Federal Court in
August 1997 where I had been giving evidence as an expert
witness in a landmark case. Two Aboriginal women had taken an
action against eleven people who had stood for the Aboriginal and Torres
Strait Islanders Commission (ATSIC) election on the grounds that they
did not meet the ATSIC definition of proof of descent from an indigenous
person or recognition by the Aboriginal community. My evidence was to the
effect that there was no historical support for the claims that these people
were descended from tribal Aboriginal people. Further, I presented my
view that in contemporary Tasmania many more people were claiming
Aboriginality than could possibly demonstrate descent from an indigenous
person. 1
The judge was clearly bemused. How then could I explain the oral
histories referred to by the respondents in which their colonial ancestor was
identified as having been black?
Quite frankly I couldn’t explain it. I was as bemused as he.
I made a stab in the dark.
‘Well, your Honour,’ I boldly volunteered, ‘there must have been other
black people in Tasmania in the early decades of the settlement’.
1
Edwina Shaw and Joanna James v’s Charles Wolf and others.
African settlers in colonial Australia
The judge looked sceptical and frowned at me over his glasses. My
aplomb faltered under his troubled gaze. Truth was, I had no idea who
these black colonists could have been or where on earth they could have
come from at the turn of the 18th century. My first clue came soon after
the court case when a friend came to see me, very excited to have suddenly
been told by her brother that she was Aboriginal.
‘We always knew there was a touch of the tar in our family’, she said.
Rather than accept this claim at face value, I sent her off to the archives.
A week later she was back, clutching print-outs of the pioneer index. She
did indeed have a black ancestor. He was a seaman, possibly a slave, from
St George Island in the Azores, who jumped ship in Launceston in the
1830s, moved south, anglicised his name and married a white woman.
I regretted that this evidence had come too late for Justice Merkel, but
it sent me off to comb Australian colonial history for any evidence of black
emigrants to the Australian colonies. In the footnotes of a recent article on
convicts I found an electrifying clue: reference to the work of Dr Ian
Duffield of Edinburgh University on the African diaspora in Britain in the
19th century. I sent Dr Duffield an email. He answered immediately
indicating that he had amassed a wealth of information about black convicts
sent to New South Wales (NSW) and Van Diemens Land (VDL)and he
was just about to come to Australia to do further research.
In a coffee shop around the corner from the colonial archives Ian
Duffield smoked furiously and talked without cease about the black
diaspora and the colour-blindness of Australian and British historians.
‘They said there couldn’t have been black convicts’, he almost shouted,
waving clouds of cigarette smoke away from our table, ‘but there were, by
Christ. And I’ve found the buggers!’ He stubbed out a cigarette and
beamed at me in triumph.
I beamed right back.
2
Cassandra Pybus
Ian Duffield’s Afro-Black convicts turned out to be just the tip of the
iceberg. In the last six months I have located over 1000 convicts and free
settlers from the African Diaspora.
Already I had begun to appreciate how such a project had the potential
to significantly alter our understanding of the racial mix of Australia and
show that the colonial race relations were more complex than the
Aboriginal/White divide which has been tacitly assumed by colonial
historians. I could see how this flawed historical reading of racial identity in
colonial Australia as being either Aboriginal or White, had complicated what
was shaping up to be a fraught social issue for Australia in the 21st century:
the question of what constituted Aboriginality.
In this paper I have selected a handful of this black cohort to give a
flavour for the multiple pathways from Africa to colonial Australia.
Very few historians, let alone the general punters, know there were at
least a dozen black convicts on the first fleet which landed at Sydney Cove
in January 1788. The most notorious was John Caesar, described by David
Collins as ‘an incorrigibly stubborn black’ who has a claim to being an
historical figure of major importance: he was Australia’s very first
bushranger. 2
Black Caesar may originally have been from Madagascar, as William
Bradley, First Lieutenant on the Sirius, believed, though I think it is
unlikely. The name Caesar suggests that this man was originally a slave,
since these classical names — Pompey, Scipio, Caesar — were commonly
bestowed on household chattel by masters keen to invest their
dehumanising economy with the cultural dignity of the Roman empire.
Almost certainly he was one of the black loyalists from North America:
runaway slaves who flocked in their tens of thousands to the British lines
2
David Collins, An Account of the English Colony in NSW: With remarks on the Dispositions,
Customs Manners etc of the Native Inhabitants of that Country, edited by Brian Fletcher, Sydney
1975, p. 57.
3
African settlers in colonial Australia
during the War of Independence and who were evacuated with the
defeated British to Nova Scotia, the West Indies and England in 1783.
I like to think Caesar was a slave of James Madison or George
Washington. The Book of Negroes which is the list of 3000 Negroes
evacuated from New York in October 1783 — understood to be only a
fraction of the total number taken away — lists several young slaves named
Caesar any of whom could be our man, one of whom was a slave of James
Madison. Likewise, the list has several slaves of George Washington who
was known to have lost some thirty five of his chattel to the British. 3
I am very much taken with the little known story found in Washington’s
papers about how this great and just father of the American republic
reacted to the British evacuation of their final stronghold in Manhattan,
just downriver from his headquarters in Tappen New York. In Washington’s
papers there is an account of a meeting he held with a deputation of slave
holders led by the Patriot governor of Virginia, complaining that during the
British evacuation of Charleston and Savanna tens of thousands of slaves
were taken away in contravention of the treaty signed in Paris. Washington
was furious and shot off a letter to the British Commander-in-Chief, Sir
Guy Carleton, reiterating that the Paris agreement between the Congress
and the Crown was most particular that there would be no removal of slaves
and any attempt to do so was a flagrant violation of the British undertaking.
There is also a letter at the same time between himself and a slave catcher
in New York asking to find his runaway slaves among Negroes in the city.
At a tense meeting between Washington and Carleton, the victorious
Washington again reiterated the treaty stipulation that patriot property,
especially the Negroes, would not be carried off. In replying, the defeated
Carleton, with exaggerated politeness, explained that several thousand
black refugees had already departed and that the national honour of the
3
Graham Russell Hodge & Susan Cook (eds), The Black Loyalist Directory, New York, 1996.
4
Cassandra Pybus
British would be kept with regard to all colours. His government intended
to keep faith with the Negroes who came into the British lines under the
protection of a British proclamation, he said. Warming to the task he told
Washington that he would construe any suggestion that the King would
‘agree to such notorious breach of public faith towards people of any
complexion’, as an unfriendly act and a slur on British honour. Washington
was furious and insisted that Carleton’s conductor violated both the letter
and the spirit of the treaty: ‘There is no honour in this, sir’ he is reported to
have shouted and stormed out. In a calmer mood Washington pressed
Carleton to meet the following day and Carleton in turn gave his word that
he would enter into an agreement to prevent further evacuation of
American-owned Negroes. On the next day however, Washington received
a pointed snub from Carleton who sent merely a letter to say that when he
came to New York he found the Negroes were free and therefore he had no
right to keep them from going anywhere in the world they wished. 4
Washington’s reaction was strangely deflated, reporting to the Governor
of Virginia that very day that ‘the cause you plead is hopeless, the slaves
which have absconded from their masters will never be returned to them.’ 5
Others were not so easily deflected. The American Congress, especially
James Madison, raged endlessly about this perfidy and tried for thirty years
to get reparations for their stolen property.
I believe at least half of the Africans on the First Fleet were Black
Loyalists, but can positively identify only one First Fleeter from the Book
of Negroes: John Mosley, a slave from Virginia evacuated to Nova Scotia as
part of the Quarter Master General’s Department. In Australia, many years
later, he wryly described himself as a having been a tobacco planter prior to
transportation.
4
John C Fitzpatrick (ed),The Writings of Washington from the Original manuscripts, 1745-1799,
Washington, 1944, vol 26, pp 400-14.
5 Washington to Harrison 6 May 1783, The Writings of Washington, vol 26, p. 401.
5
African settlers in colonial Australia
After the evacuation of 1783 those Black Loyalists who managed to get
to London — maybe as many as 5000 — lived in the African community of
London which was a spin-off from the massive transatlantic slave trade: a
desperately poor underclass of people recently freed from slavery by the
Mansfield Judgment a decade earlier. In 1786 John Caesar, aged about
twenty-two, was among the first to sign on for the bounty paid by the
Committee of the Black Poor to those willing to quit England and establish
a black community in Sierra Leone. 6 Unfortunately he was charged with
theft at the Maidstone court and sentenced to seven years transportation.
Caesar was only one of several African men who were on the First Fleet
who signed up for the Sierra Leone experiment. My supposition is that
family and friends collected the bounty in their name, and possibly on
prisoners’ behalf, in the hope they would be allowed to swap prison for
exile in Sierra Leone. 7 This notion was not such a long shot, since I have
found in the court record about 25% of the First Fleet convicts were
sentenced to transportation to Africa. Some convicts had actually been sent
to west Africa six years earlier. Ironically the ships which carried the Black
Poor to Sierra Leone and the First Fleet were provisioned alongside each
other at Portsmouth and left within days of each other.
At the foundling settlement at Sydney Cove, Caesar managed to
profoundly irritate the judge advocate, David Collins, who penned an
appraisal of this recalcitrant convict which suggests he shared much of the
mindset of slaveholders when it came to black men. Noting that Caesar was
‘reputed as the hardest working convict in the country’, and had a wellmuscled body fitted to hard labour, Collins further noted that ‘in his
intellect he did not differ widely from a brute’. As befitting a brute, Collins
6
See The Black Loyalist Directory.
Stephen Braidwood, In Black poor and White Philanthropists: London’s Blacks and the foundation of
Sierra Leone, 1786-1791, Liverpool, 1994 points out that the expedition was delayed by attempts to
get men who had signed up for the expedition out of gaol.
7
6
Cassandra Pybus
went on, ‘his appetite was ravenous for he could in one day, devour the
rations of two days.’ In a starving colony Caesar was forced to steal, to feed
his appetite Collins concluded. 8
Perhaps the need for more tucker did lead Caesar to abscond on 13 May
1789, since he headed into the bush armed with a musket and cooking pot,
but since he had also just been given a life sentence as well as 500 lashes, it
was more likely that he decided the terrors of the unknown hinterland
were less fearsome than a penal system arbitrated by David Collins. He
remained in the bush for about three weeks, stealing provisions where he
could. When Caesar was caught, in early June, he further incensed the
judge-advocate by expressing complete indifference to the idea of death,
claiming that if he were to be hung he would ‘create a laugh before he was
turned off, by playing some trick upon the executioner.’ The prospect of
execution as pantomime gave Collins pause. Hanging Caesar would not do,
he decided, as the execution of ‘a mere animal’ could have no effect as a
deterrent on others. 9 Instead Caesar was confined to fetters on Garden
Island, where he worked a vegetable garden from which he was able to
supplement his rations.
Released from his chains in December 1789, Caesar immediately helped
himself to a week’s supply of rations, stole a canoe and headed into the
bush. Some nights later he returned to steal a cooking pot, gun and
ammunition. This time he lasted in the bush for six weeks. On 30 January
1790 Collins reported Caesar had given himself up at Rose Hill, severely
weakened by multiple spear wounds. In his account of himself to Collins,
Caesar claimed to have found a stray herd of cattle being tended by
Aborigines and had been attacked while trying to drive the cattle off. A
fabrication, Collins insisted, but Watkin Tench presented a more poignant
8
9
An account of the English Colony, p. 58.
An account of the English Colony, p. 58-9.
7
African settlers in colonial Australia
explanation. He believed that Caesar had tried to ingratiate himself with
the Aborigines, but was ‘always repulsed…and forced to return in hunger
and wretchedness’. 10
After recuperation in hospital, Caesar cheated the gallows a second time
by managing to secure a pardon from Governor Phillip. Nonetheless,
Collins was able to rid himself of this troublesome ‘brute’ by sending him
to the new penal settlement at Norfolk island, where Caesar formed a
liaison with a white convict woman Ann Poore. A child, Mary Ann Poore,
was born on Norfolk Island in March 1792.
By 1793 Caesar was back in Sydney, without wife or child. Lt. Gov. King
sent him back with a boatload of convicts he considered to be dangerous or
troublesome. Since Caesar had not been in any trouble on Norfolk Island it
may be that his liaison with Anne Poore was the problem on an island
where the men outnumbered the women two to one and where a new class
of male free settlers — emancipists and ex-marines — were flexing their
muscles. At Sydney, possibly reacting to the forcible loss of his family,
Caesar proved his total incorrigibility by taking off into the bush for the
third time in July 1794, plundering farms and huts on the margins of
settlement. When captured, a month later, he was punished severely. Yet
even a savage flogging could not break the man. All the flogging in the
world would not make him better, he declared to Collins in a bravura
display of ‘exultation and contempt’. 11
Good as his word, Caesar absconded yet again by December 1795. He
was at large during a period of high tension between the colonists and the
Aborigines, which saw acts of violent retaliation on the settlers by the Eora
warrior Pemulwuy. Collins saw Caesar, ‘a savage of darker hue and as far
removed from civilisation’, as a man who might be a match for the
10
Watkin Tench, Sydney’s First four years: A Narrative of the Expedition to Botany Bay and a
complete account of the Settlement at Port Jackson, (ed by L F Fitzhardinge), Sydney 1979, p. 159.
11 An account of the English Colony, p. 319.
8
Cassandra Pybus
Aborigines, since he had schooled himself well in bushcraft during his
periods at large. So it was in 1795 that Caesar almost redeemed himself in
the Collins’ eyes with ‘his only meretricious act’: shooting and killing
Pemulwuy. 12
Wishful thinking on Collins part, as it transpired. Pemulwuy was
believed mortally wounded, yet he somehow escaped from custody,
recovered and was able to continue his campaign for several more years.
Once Pemulwuy’s miraculous recovery was appreciated, Caesar was a
marked man because of the growing band of convict bolters who followed
his example, arming themselves and taking to the bush. By January 1796
the fledgling colony was beset by an outbreak of robbery-under-arms in
what was Australia’s first outbreak of bushranging. About six men were at
large, and, in Collins’s view, Black Caesar was their model and their leader.
Caesar sent word that he was not about to give up the game and nor
would he allow himself to be taken alive, a move guaranteed to ignite the
judge-advocate’s fury. A reward of five gallons of rum was offered to anyone
who could bring him in with his arms, dead or alive. On 15 February 1796
he was ambushed and killed by two convict bounty-hunters at a place
called Liberty Plains.
In a brief, dismissive obituary to the man who had consistently given him
more trouble than any other in the settlement Collins wrote: ‘Thus ended
a man, who certainly, in life could never have been estimated at more than
one remove above the brute’. 13
Collins had the contemptuous last word on Black Caesar, who was
henceforth pretty well obliterated from the Australian story. 14 He does live
on, I believe. I have traced his daughter Mary Anne Poore to VDL where
12
An account of the English Colony, p. 371.
Ibid., p. 381.
14 Thanks to Ian Duffield for having resurrected Caesar in his 'Constructing and Reconstructing
‘Black’ Caesar', in Paul Hullah, (ed.), Romanticism and Wild Places, Edinburgh, 1999, pp. 57-93.
13
9
African settlers in colonial Australia
she arrived in 1813 with two children. She died in Newcastle in her late
thirties, but I am confident her two children went on to form relationships
and have children.
Of Caesar’s fellow African First Fleeters most notable were John Randall
(another Black Loyalist) and John Martin. They kept their noses clean and
both got adjoining land grants of 50 acres at Parramatta. John Randall’s
mulatto daughter Mary married John Martin and they had 13 children.
Another of Randall’s daughters, Frances, married an African man named
John Aiken who came to the colony as a ship’s carpenter aboard the Marquis
Conwallis on 11th February 1796. They too had many descendants. In the
cases of both these African-Australian families, some of their descendants
have married into Aboriginal communities. 15
One of the many ironies of John Caesar’s life was that the fleet that was
to take him to a new life in Sierra Leone left Portsmouth at about the same
time as the First Fleet which bore him unwillingly to NSW.
While the initial settlement in Sierra Leone was a disaster, the British
prohibition of the slave trade in 1808 gave the colony a new lease of life and
new purpose as a point for manumitting and dispersing slaves taken from
intercepted slave ships. It was not entirely a philanthropic enterprise, many
of these slaves were sent directly into the West Indian army regiments
especially between 1812-1816, and later into the African regiments. 16 An
African Recruiting Establishment was set up on Bance Island which had
been a centre of slave trading. A total of 2100 boys and men were recruited
on the west African coast of whom 1800 went into for the West India
regiments. Perhaps not surprisingly these regiments had a high rate of
15
For this information I am indebted to Dr Jim Kohen author of The Darug and their Neighbours:
The traditional Aboriginal owners of the Sydney region.
16Johnson U J Asiegbu, Slavery and the Politics of Liberation: A Study of the Liberated African
Emigration and British Anti-Slavery Policy, Bristol 1969.
10
Cassandra Pybus
desertion and mutiny. 17 I have traced at least four African soldiers
transported to Australia following courts martial in the West Indies — two
of whom had tribal markings and gave Africa as their birthplace — who
were almost certainly re-captives impressed into the British army through
the manumission courts in Sierra Leone.
Equally, many recaptives were apprenticed or settled in model villages
on the Sierra Leone peninsula and by 1820 the largest proportion of the
Sierra Leone population was made up of these recaptives. In due course
some of these recaptives were also to find their way to the Australian penal
settlements. One such, James Brown, arrived in VDL in 1833 having been
convicted for seven years for stealing shoes. To the muster master taking
down his conviction he gave this mini-autobiography by way of an
explanation for his thieving: ‘I was taken when a child as a Slave from the
Congo River and sold to a Spanish Slaver. [The slave ship was] Captured
by a British King’s Ship & liberated at Sierra Leone. [I was] Brought away
from thence as servant to Mr McCormack’.
Brown’s account of himself stacks up against the historical record. John
McCormack was an Irish trader along the West African coast who in 1816
settled in Sierra Leone, pioneering its export trade in hardwood timber. By
1830 McCormack was living in London, where he must have taken James
Brown. However in 1831 he was back in Sierra Leone, without his man
Brown who may have remained in London with his wife, Maria, and two
children. McCormack’s departure might also suggest that Brown’s decline
into vagrancy and theft might have been triggered by his inability to find
adequate subsequent employment to support himself and his family. 18
17
Roger Buckley The British Army in the West Indies: society and the military in the revolutionary
age, Gainesville, 1998, pp. 216-28.
18 Ian Duffield, ‘’Stated This Offence’; High-Density Convict Micro-Narratives’, in Chain Letters;
Convict Narratives and Other Tales of Captivity edited by Lucy Frost and Hamish Maxwell-Stewart
Melbourne, 2001.
11
African settlers in colonial Australia
While it is rare to find such a direct statement of a slave past as that of
James Brown, it is safe to presume for the majority experience for black
convicts transported between 1788-1820 their formative experience had
been of slavery, be it in North America, or the West Indies, or the slave
ships intercepted. After 1820 the penal colonies VDL and NSW began to
receive a new kind of African convict: chattel slaves transported directly
from Mauritius and the Caribbean.
Bruce, a slave who arrived in NSW in 1821 had been sentenced to life in
St Vincent in the West Indies. Bruce was unusual in that the slave status of
convicts sent from British colonies was rarely stated on the official
documentation, a reflection of some kind of official squeamishness about
being complicit in the slaving business. Bruce was transported at some
considerable cost, since his master would have been compensated for the
loss of his property. In those cases where slave owners had not managed to
get their property returned, I would guess that the offence was an act of
retaliation or rebellion. Certainly that was the case for Sophie, a Malagasy
slave from Mauritius who had set fire to her mistress’ barn. She was found
guilty of a breach of her mistress’ trust — an interesting concept in a
master-slave relationship — and sentenced to death. Transportation to
NSW was a condition of her pardon. Her owner was compensated for the
worth of Sophie, and her compensation included the worth of the baby that
Sophie had given birth to while in prison. There is no record of the child
arriving in NSW. Likewise the slave Theresa, a native of Madagascar, was
transported from Mauritius in the same year, guilty of assault on her master
and child. She went to strike the child with a hoe and when her master
tried to stop her she had seized his testicles and squeezed so hard that he
fainted. She admitted her violence was retaliation for the brutal treatment
12
Cassandra Pybus
she had received. Her owner was well-compensated for the loss of his
troublesome property. 19
Attempting to kill one’s master was not an uncommon capital offence.
Two child slaves, Constance, aged eight, and Elizabeth, aged twelve, were
found guilty of trying to poison their mistress and transported to NSW for
life. Poison was a favourite weapon of rebellious slaves. Over 50% of
attempted murder and murder cases involved poison. Yet Maria, a slave
from the remote mahogany-cutting British settlements around Belize on
the Bay of Honduras, used a knife.
At first there was only an occasional trickle of slaves from the colonies,
but this traffic dramatically increased as the anti-slavery movement in
Britain grew louder and more persistent. Although the slave trade had
ended in 1808, the complete abolition of slavery in the British colonies did
not finally come until 1838. After 1830, the slave colonies, notably those in
the West Indies, sought transportation as a means to control a dangerously
restive slave population excited by rumours of impending emancipation.
Between 1830 and 1838 at least eighteen slave colonies were able to
transport hundreds of their troublesome black chattel to Australia.
Given the gathering tide of opinion in Britain in support of slave
emancipation, there was a growing sense among slaves in the Caribbean
colonies that they should strike a blow to hasten their freedom. In
December 1831 in a rebellion in Montego Bay, 60,000 Jamaican slaves did
just that. It was the largest slave rebellion in the British Empire and put
down with savage violence in January 1832. Subsequently hundreds of
slaves were vindictively condemned to death under martial law.
Alexander Simpson was convicted at a Jamaican Court Martial on 20
January 1832 of ‘making use of Seditious language, Joining and Engaging in
19
Clare Anderson, ‘Unfree Labour and Its Discontents: Transportation From Mauritius to
Australia, 1825-1845, Australian Studies, vol. 13, no. 1, 1998, pp. 116-133.
13
African settlers in colonial Australia
Conspiracy, Traitorous, Rebellious or Hostile Acts against His Majesty’s
Government and against the peace and safety of the Island’. Simpson was
sentenced ‘to Suffer death by being hung by the neck between the hours of
eight & twelve o’clock tomorrow morning in the Market place’. Unlike
three hundred and forty-four slaves executed after the rebellion, Simpson
was lucky. For whatever reason the sentence was commuted to
transportation for life. He arrived in VDL on the convict ship Jupiter, in
May 1833.
Thanks to the VDL convict records I can read Simpson’s own brief, but
powerful, account of himself. He told the Muster master his offence was:
‘Mutiny & exciting the Slaves to Rebellion. I was a slave myself’. Those
twelve words are loaded with the uncompromising defiance of a man who
may be in fetters but who has freed himself from being a slave.20
After the orgy of execution in Jamaica during the first few months of
1832, prudence combined with pressure from England encouraged white
Jamaicans to rid themselves of slave troublemakers in other ways.
Transportation was an attractive option since it permanently removed the
source of trouble, rather than incite more trouble with continuous
executions. Ian Duffield has identified thirteen of the Montego Bay rebels
transported to NSW. 21 These black rebels have been entirely ignored in the
history of Australia yet by any measure, participants in the largest slave
rebellion in British history deserve a place in the pantheon of resistance
heroes sent to the colonies of which Australians are justly proud.
In 1838 the flow of black convicts from the Caribbean slowed
dramatically following a British directive to the colonies. ‘The
transportation of Convicts from the West Indies to the Australian Colonies
... tends to multiply in New South Wales & Van Diemen's Land, a
20
For detail on Simpson see Duffield, ‘Stated This Offence’.
Ian Duffield, ‘From Slave Colonies to Penal Colonies: The West Indian Convict Transportees
to Australia’, Slavery & Abolition, 7, 1, 1986, pp. 25-45.
21
14
Cassandra Pybus
population injurious to the best interests of those rising Settlements’, was
the opinion of the Colonial office. While the additional expense involved in
transporting convicts from the Caribbean was a factor — a similar directive
was sent to the North American colonies — the decision also reflects an
anxiety about ‘race’.
22
Were black convicts seen as dangerous because they
threatened to blur the line between white and black, which was necessary
in order to dispossess and destroy the Aboriginal population; or was as it
their status as people just released from enslavement that meant they were
not suitable as eventual settlers of the new colonies?
Africans also arrived in the Australian colonies from the Cape, mostly the
local Khoi-khoi, but also some slaves and ex-slaves from Madagascar,
Guinea, Angola or Mozambique. Several dozen Khoi-khoi men were
transported from court martials in the Cape, mostly for desertion. 23 The
Khoi people, were acknowledged to make excellent soldiers and the Dutch
East India Company raised military units from the Khoi who were
particularly adept at operations in wild country. The British continued this
aspect of the Dutch regime at the Cape when they took over. Thus a large
number of Khoi were to be found in the British forces in the Cape. The
young Scipio Africanus most likely was a Khoi man ‘employed’ as a groom to
a military officer who brought him to NSW, where he fell foul of the law in
1836 and was transported to VDL. As a serial absconder, Scipio Africanus
was constantly trying to escape home to Africa and finally drowned off
Norfolk Island trying to escape. Other Khoi-khoi and Bushmen were the
majority among a group of offenders emptied out of Robbin Island in early
1830 and transported to VDL and NSW. These included Wildschut
described as ‘a very old bushman who cannot understand English’. Another
22
I am indebted to an unpublished paper by Diana Paton from the University of Newcastle for
this insight.
23 C V Malherbe, ‘Khoikhoi and the Question of Convict Transportation from the Cape, 18201845, South African Historical Journal, no. 17, 1985. pp. 19-50.
15
African settlers in colonial Australia
of Australia’s flamboyant bushrangers was a Khoi man transported from the
Cape Colony. The mid 1830s, in the period of the abolition of slavery, saw
the transportation of a number of Cape slaves with the give away names
such as Adonis and Jacob.
By no means all the black colonists came to Australia involuntarily.
Gilbert Robertson, arrived in VDL in 1822, as a free emigrant from
Scotland, accompanied by his white wife and two children. He had five
more children in VDL.
Robertson was born in Trinidad in 1794, the son of a prominent West
Indies planter, also named Gilbert Robertson and his slave mistress. In the
late 18th century, before miscegenation was viewed with horror, it was not
unthinkable for West Indian slave owners to acknowledge their male
children and to set them up with a new life in Britain. Gilbert Robertson Sr
sent his boy to Edinburgh where he served a four year apprenticeship in
agriculture. Robertson had a farm in Scotland but failed at that calling and
so in 1822 decided to try his luck in VDL, where land grants were on offer
to free settlers. When he arrived, Robertson was granted 400 acres. He also
leased another farm, yet still failure dogged him. In 1824 he was in the
debtor’s prison. Upon his release he was employed as the superintendent of
the government farm for four years where he proved difficult. When he quit
in 1828 he was granted land at Richmond. He was also appointed chief
constable. Four years later his fortunes had not improved and Robertson’s
relationship with authority was not good.
He was engaged to be editor of the Colonist newspaper in 1832 and began
to vent spleen. In 1834 he set up his own newspaper, the True Colonist and
Van Diemen’s Land Political Dispatch which he used as a platform to bitterly
critique colonial authority, notably Governor George Arthur. By 1835 he
was producing the paper as a daily, at least until he was imprisoned for libel
six months later. Robertson struggled on with the paper during his two
16
Cassandra Pybus
years his prison, but it became more and more infrequent. The True Colonist
ceased altogether in 1844.
Robertson quit VDL to become the agricultural superintendent at the
Norfolk Island penal station. His detestation of authority manifested soon
enough and after a quarrel with the commandant he quit. This time reestablishing himself in the Western District of Victoria, overseer of a
station at Colac and the editor of the Victoria Colonist and Western District
Advertiser. He died of a sudden heart attack in 1861, in the middle of a
heated political campaign which made him the most disliked man in the
Western District. Despite leaving his family in total penury, his children
however made very successful marriages with the gentry class.
It was not as a colonial newspaper man, but as the chief constable at
Richmond that Gilbert Robertson has his strongest claim on the attention
of history. In 1828 he led a ‘roving party’ to bring in Aborigines who had
been waging guerilla attacks within the settled districts of south eastern
VDL. These roving parties were supposedly part of Governor Arthur’s
humanitarian plan to reconcile Aboriginal and European claims to the land,
although in practice the men engaged had little compunction about killing
their Aboriginal quarry. Gilbert Robertson appears to have been an
exception to this rule. Although there is little doubt that he too was
motivated by the promise of land grants and complained bitterly that he
was rewarded with 1000 acres when he had been expecting twice that, he
alone appeared to understand that the people he was tracking were
engaged in a guerilla war against the invaders of their territory. The
Aborigines he told Arthur had ‘ideas of their natural rights which would
astonish most of our European statesman.’ 24
It is a measure of Robertson’s respect for the Aboriginies he captured
that they were taken alive and that Robertson argued strenuously with
24
Cassandra Pybus, Community of Thieves, Melbourne 1991, p. 65.
17
African settlers in colonial Australia
Governor Arthur that they be treated as a prisoners of war and not hung.
Early in 1829 Robertson wrote to Arthur to ask that the guerilla leader,
Eumarrah be employed by him for the purposes of negotiating with other
Aboriginal bands. At first Arthur was impressed with Robertson’s plans, but
Robertson was not the only man in the colony Arthur was paying to deal
with the Aborigines. The Hobart bricklayer George Augustus Robinson had
set up a camp for Aborigines on Bruny Island and had also proposed a series
of ‘friendly missions’ to conciliate remnant bands around Tasmania.
Robertson made the mistake of continuing his complaints about
remuneration, so on December 1829 Arthur decided to put the matter of
Aboriginal conciliation entirely in the hands George Augustus Robinson.
The Aboriginal men in Robertson’s care were transferred to Robinson to act
as guides for the first of his friendly missions to the Aboriginal people of
the west coast.
Thus began a tug of war between the two men as to who would control
the fate of the Aborigines of VDL. In 1836, when Robinson had shipped off
all the Aboriginals from mainland Tasmania to Flinders Island, Robertson
petitioned the House of Commons in VDL for compensation, insisting that
it was his plan to conciliate and remove the Aboriginals which had now
been put into effect and the Aboriginal guides he had trained for the
purpose had been transferred to Robinson who now laid claim to the credit
for Robertson’s plan. 25
Distasteful though this squabble was, Robertson’s claims about himself
have given rise to some speculation about whether the Aborigines of
Tasmania would have fared better in the scheme of things managed by a
black man. That notion could be read into in the novel about the
Tasmanian genocide by Mudrooroo Nyoongar, Dr Wooredy’s Prescription for
Enduring the Ending of the World, and it is certainly implied in his later novel
25
N.J.B. Plomley (ed.), Weep in Silence, Hobart, 1987,pp. 652-3.
18
Cassandra Pybus
on same theme, Masters of the Ghost Dreaming. However it bears
remembering that Robertson’s primary motive in getting into the
Aboriginal conciliation business was material gain and that his concerns
about the process were always couched within a complaint about his
remuneration. It would be sentimental and naive, I think, to presume that
the interaction between Aborigines and Afro-Blacks in colonial Australia
was any less fraught than with white people.
Many of the Africans who came to Australia were seamen. Sailing ships
had dreadful associations for transplanted Africans as the means by which
they were wrenched away from their African homeland to endure the
horrors of the middle passage and the misery of perpetual slavery in the
New World, yet, ironically, by the late 18th century these same ships had
become a pipeline to freedom.
One of Britain’s most distinguished ex-slaves, Olaudah Equiano, worked
as a seaman in the 1770s and his maritime earnings allowed him to buy his
own freedom. Black seamen continued to be a feature of British maritime
life, many of these being ex-slaves from North America who had joined the
Loyalist cause during the American revolution. By the same token, black
seamen made up about a quarter of the crew on American sea-going ships.
Almost all the cooks and stewards on American sea-going ships were black
and about 20% of the ordinary seamen. Sometimes these were slaves,
especially on ships originating from the Southern ports, but increasing they
were free blacks.
By 1830 the free black population of North America was concentrated in
seaport cities of New York, Baltimore, New Orleans, Charleston and
Wilmington, as well as in the seafaring towns of New England. For this
vulnerable population seafaring was one of the most common occupations.
These ‘coloured tars’ or ‘black jacks’ tended to be casual rather than career
seamen, who might sign on for one or two long voyages, especially on
whalers, where black seamen were paid an equal rate. In the whaling port
19
African settlers in colonial Australia
of Bedford alone, some 3,500 ‘black jacks’ shipped out in the first half of
the 19th century. 26
Whaling concentrated the worst elements of the maritime industry and
desertion was a weapon in the limited arsenal of the seafaring man. For the
‘black jacks’ however, desertion in any Atlantic port, or anywhere in the
Caribbean, carried the very real fear that they would be caught and
immediately re-enslaved or traded into slavery elsewhere. One thing about
the distant antipodean ports was that a black man need not fear being
caught in the illicit slave trade. These were also places where it was
thought a man might get a new start, regardless of his background. This
made Sydney and Hobart very likely places to jump ship and many sailors
did, both black and white. Sometimes American whaling ships in Hobart
found themselves entirely bereft of crew.
This is the most likely explanation for how Thomas Johnson, born in
North Carolina in 1833, came to be in Australia in the 1860s. To have been
born in North Carolina nearly thirty years before the civil war implies that
Thomas Johnson was a slave, however his wedding certificate lists the
names of his two parents and he takes his father’s name. This suggests that
Thomas Johnson’s parents may have been free blacks. The states of the
Upper South such as North Carolina had much more liberal views toward
manumission of slavery and although North Carolina’s law required an
application to the court to free a slave, it was not a rare practice. North
Carolina had many thousands of blacks who had all the legal privileges of
whites, including the right to vote, at least until 1835. 27 Many of them were
small land holders and some even had slaves themselves. Most worked as
craftsmen and artisans, as well as seamen. If Thomas Johnson was born into
such a family of freemen it would make sense that he was seaman. It would
26
See Jeffery Bolster, Black jacks: Afro-American Seamen in the Age of Sail, Cambridge Mass, 1997.
John Hope Franklin, ‘Slaves Virtually Free in Antebellum North Carolina’, in Race and
History: Selected Essays, Baton Rouge, 1989, pp 73-91.
27
20
Cassandra Pybus
make even more sense that he would seek to put down roots at the other
side of the world in the 1860s. The approach of the civil war made life very
tough for free blacks in the South and with the abolition of slavery in 1864
they lost most of their privileges and found themselves forcibly lumped in
with the newly-freed slaves who were governed by draconian ‘black codes’
which denied them any economic freedom.
Thomas Johnson appears to have made out quite well in Australia. In
1868 he married a white woman from County Clare in Ireland and had five
children. Their son, Thomas Creighton Johnson was born in York Street
Sydney in 1874. I know little about Thomas Johnson Jr who moved to the
Western Australian wheat belt near Narrogin after the death of his first
wife. In 1924 he married Elizabeth Barron the daughter of a well-to-do
pioneer pastoral family, ostracised for giving birth to an illegitimate child.
Johnson had poor luck with farming and when he died in 1937 he left
Elizabeth pregnant with her fifth child and totally destitute. Four children
were placed in care of St Joseph’s orphanage. Nine years later the fifth
child, Colin, was also placed in care at the Clontarf boys home.
Colin Johnson went on to transcend this miserable background in many
ways. As Mudrooroo Nyoongah he is internationally recognised as
Australia’s premier Aboriginal writer.
Betty Polgase daughter of Thomas Johnson and sister to Mudrooroo, is
puzzled by her younger brother’s claim to Aboriginality but it is easy
enough to understand Mudrooroo’s situation. 28 A boy from Perth’s Clontarf
Home who spent his young adult years in jail; someone who never knew his
father and who was dark skinned. What other narrative was there available
to him to explain his identity in the 1950 and 1960s, but that he was
Aboriginal? Indeed, it was an identity which was given to him by literary
establishment, in the form of Mary Durack, who wrote the introduction to
28
Victoria Laurie, ‘Identity Crisis’, Australian Magazine, July 20-21, 1996, pp 28-32.
21
African settlers in colonial Australia
his first book, Wild Cat Falling. It is she who labelled this febrile young
writer Aboriginal, not the author of the book.
A similar biography can be found for Gordon Matthews, Australia’s first
Aboriginal diplomat. He was an adopted boy, dark-skinned like Colin
Johnson, who always wondered about his identity in a world which only
seemed to allow for him to be Aboriginal. He too was given that identity by
someone else: a student counsellor at University who urged him to apply
for an Aboriginal study grant. Like Mudrooroo he has been active in the
Aboriginal community, where it was always assumed he was one of the
stolen generation.
It was a traumatic shock for him to discover that his father was Sri
Lankan. It was, Matthews confesses in his book, An Australian Son,
‘disappointing and anticlimatic’ to acquire a racial background he had never
anticipated, but far worse was the ‘anguish and torment’ which
accompanied his realisation that for a decade and a half he had claimed an
identity he had no right to claim. In some way though Matthews believes
he will always be Aboriginal. ‘I had experienced first hand what it felt like
to grow up Aboriginal in mainstream Australia’, he writes. ‘I knew about
discrimination towards indigenous Australians. I had suffered that. Like
any fundamental experience you don’t unlearn that.’ 29
Mudrooroo might say the same, although since the storm broke some six
years ago, Mudrooroo himself has remained silent on the matter of his
Aboriginal heritage. As he is well aware, indigenous identity is a highly
contested site and no-one's position is more contested that his own. His
writing has been profoundly important for Aboriginal Australia as an act
performed in the face of deracination and displacement, one which testifies
to the possibility of rebuilding, from scattered sources and fragmentary
testimonies, a workable sense of significance. As far as Aboriginal elder and
29
Gordon Matthews, An Australian Son, Melbourne 1996, p. 211.
22
Cassandra Pybus
writer Ruby Langford is concerned he doesn’t have to prove himself to
anyone. Not every one is so magnanimous. Most Aboriginal activists
reiterate that a rigorous test of genetic authenticity is an essential for an
indigenous writer.
Also under fire is Bobbie Sykes, who is determinedly ambiguous about
her black heritage, widely believed to be Afro-American, who has raised the
ire of Queensland Aboriginals for expropriating their culture and totems in
her best-selling autobiography. Still, her experience growing up fatherless
and black in Queensland put her squarely in the same situation as
Mudrooroo. Even though she was raped and left for dead by men who
believed her to be Aboriginal, this dreadful act of racial abuse not make
Sykes a person who can lay claim to the rights and privileges established for
indigenous people. 30 But then what other narrative of self-definition would
there have been for her, or for Mudrooroo?
It is one of the many tragedies of race relations in this country that we
have not allowed space for the stories of people of colour who were not
Aboriginal, especially those from the African diaspora. However in
evaluating the impact of the African diaspora it is not helpful to collapse
these settlers into the same category as the Aborigines. Africans are best
viewed as part of, not apart from, the wider colonial society.
At the very beginning Caesar and the Eora saw each other as hostile and
alien. A black ex-convict from the West Indies, John Johnstone, was one of
the men tried for the Myall Creek massacre in 1838. Suspicious Aborigines
who encountered the expedition of John Eyre in the Wimmera in January
1839 were not mollified by the presence of a black man Alexander Berry,
who was an Afro-American ex convict in Eyre party was speared in the back,
without warning, while quietly mending his trousers.
30
Roberta Sykes, Snake Circle, Sydney 2000.
23
African settlers in colonial Australia
Although there were instances of intermarriage (as there were with
European settlers), it would make a mockery of Aboriginal rights and
indigenous culture to suggest that a dark-skinned ancestor gives people the
same status, and the same rights and privileges, as the descendants of the
people who were forcibly dispossessed and subjected to genocidal regimes.
24