Bennelong & Phillip: a history unravelled
The story of the extended encounter between Bennelong and Governor Arthur Phillip has been mined often over the past few decades. This has been part of the historical re-exploration of the British colonisation of Sydney Cove and the responses of local Aboriginal peoples. Can anything new be learned? Resoundingly: ‘yes’ is my answer, having immersed myself in this very readable book.
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Bennelong & Phillip: a history unravelled
KATE FULLAGAR | 2023
Kate Fullagar writes the history of these two men backwards, beginning with their deaths and burials in 1813 and 1814, and analysis of their wives and next of kin who survived them. She then plots events towards and beyond their births, revealing their defining characteristics and the unfolding changes that shaped the respective worlds they were born into. Fullagar does this to better understand the context of each man’s life, and the relative importance of the time they spent together.
She also wants to break free from the idea of continual progress, in itself a European narrative form that shaped the idea of British colonisation and, more specifically, Governor Phillip’s own rationalism. As Fullagar observes, European historians have helped to ‘license imperial injustices by presenting them as the necessary if sad cost of modernity itself’, a historiographical project that took off in earnest not long after the two men’s deaths. Going backwards may not bring us closer to how Bennelong and his people understood time and the past, Fullagar admits, but at least it sets his and Phillip’s histories into an ‘equally unfamiliar framing’.
Going backwards takes some additional effort for the reader (I occasionally found myself wanting to turn the pages right to left – to recapture a conventional chronology) but most of it is productive in the way Fullagar hopes: you engage in her project of suspending time and carefully applying interpretation.
Bennelong and Phillip were intensely engaged with each other for about six years between November 1789, when Bennelong and Colebee were taken prisoner on Phillip’s orders, and early 1795, when Bennelong left Phillip in England and returned home. This combined biography of two intersecting lifetimes finds deep resonances that go beyond this short period and put it into perspective – both on the personal scale and on the larger stage, as Fullagar advances her ongoing project of drawing out and contextualising cross-cultural exchanges in the context of British expansionism.
Bennelong and Phillip largely built and maintained their relationship in Eora Country and in and around London, where Fullagar examines the perspectives each man gained of the other’s world. The book also looks towards a more global view than that of those two poles. The two men also met (or crossed) gazes via Rio de Janeiro and British India, through the trial of Warren Hastings. Aboard the Atlantic on his journey to the northern hemisphere, and the Reliance on the return journey, Bennelong was immersed in the close circles of patronage that shaped Phillip’s life and career as a man dedicated to naval service (the engine of British imperialism). Fullagar observes that Bennelong may have found these close interweavings of families, albeit spread across the globe, remarkably similar to his own clan structures, and notes that he also left his mark there, with cultural exchanges documented by several shipboard companions.
Fullagar finds two men who, notwithstanding some mistakes and diversions, stayed true to themselves. Phillip, in brief, was dedicated to the service of a particular vision of British imperialism; Bennelong was committed to the continuation and resilience of Eora lifeways, laws and cultural systems.
A strong thread in the book is Fullagar’s reading of women into Bennelong’s and Phillip’s lives. She listens attentively to Phillip’s connections with, and separation from, women, with much of his life lived in the homosocial world of ship and naval service, as well as his related ideas about the proper role and place of women. She also takes careful note of Bennelong’s three marriages and relationships with his sisters. Seeking a history with women in it, when they are documented sporadically as bit-players, Fullagar re-reads some of the documented events, such as Bennelong’s wounding and then marriage to Kurubarabula in late 1790, to find a story in which women are part of the Eora political world. Phillip’s and his officers’ confused responses to these events come from a place where women are separated from the public sphere.
Fullagar also seeks to understand both men’s wider cultural worlds. With Phillip, the current ideas are well-documented, though Fullagar still ascribes particular positions to Phillip as an individual with some circumspection. For example, she sees it as important to examine, but hard to place, Phillip’s own thoughts on the European collection of, and trade in, human remains. With Bennelong it is more difficult, especially within Fullagar’s acknowledged limitations as a settler historian. For example, she meditates briefly on Bennelong’s connection with whales. He summoned Phillip to a whale feast, and commemorated the death of his wife Barrangaroo at a similar feast. Bennelong’s totem has been documented as a ‘large fish’, and she wonders whether perhaps this fish was the whale. She strikes a good balance between acknowledging that her interpretation may not be right, while remaining committed to showing what historians should be looking and listening for to have a fuller picture.
The result of Fullagar’s contextual reading is a nuanced and questioning view of the détente – or easing of relations – between Eora peoples and the colony from October 1790. She shows how Bennelong and Phillip played leading roles in navigating serious conflicts during that period to maintain equilibrium, including the spearing (which was eventually fatal) of Phillip’s gamekeeper John McEntire near Kamay-Botany Bay. Around this incident, she argues, both men made significant diplomatic mistakes, but can be seen to have learned from them as they exercised a range of approaches to the shifting situation. They maintained general peace in the following three years.
Bennelong and Phillip offers a re-interpretation of the turn of the British away from negotiating a treaty with the Eora and surrounding Aboriginal peoples following Phillip’s departure from the governorship. Fullagar builds on her previous work in The Savage Visit (2012), where it is clear that British imperial policy was shifting in the last decades of the eighteenth century from its former emphasis on gaining territories legally. Phillip, however, still had other New World precedents firmly in mind, and was expecting that Bennelong and Yemmerawanne would be received in England as envoys, who may meet with the sovereign and discuss formal arrangements for claiming land. Of course, Fullagar notes, Bennelong and Yemmerawanne may have rejected any terms offered. That no such discussions took place, with no acknowledgement of Eora sovereignty offered, highlights afresh how far Australia has to go to arrive at recognition and conciliation.
Bennelong & Phillip: a history unravelled is published by Scribner.
Reviewer: Emma Dortins, PHA (NSW & ACT)