Dancing with Strangers by Inga Clendinnen

Author:Inga Clendinnen
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: The Text Publishing Company
Published: 2017-07-27T16:00:00+00:00

AUSTRALIAN SEXUAL POLITICS

How violent were Australian men toward their women? The answer has to be: ‘Very.’ When Baneelon was boasting of his exploits in ‘love and war’ soon after his capture he vividly enacted the various histories of his many battle scars, but failed to explain one on the back of his hand. When he was asked about it he laughed, and said, Tench reports, that he had suffered it when he was ‘carrying off a lady of another tribe by force’. She bit him, he ‘knocked her down, and beat her until she was insensible, and covered in blood’. And then he took his pleasure. We might think Baneelon was choosing to embroider reality, but too many other accounts report violent rape as commonplace. Collins came to believe that the usual way to get ‘wives’ was to steal them: to seize them, beat them, and then drag them home and rape them. This kind of conduct towards the enemy is not unusual in warrior societies, where the seizing and raping of enemy women seems to be an established male sport. But sexual assaults could happen even within the group: the split lip Baneelon wore not long after his return from England was a gift from his friend Colbee when, lacking a woman of his own, Baneelon assaulted Colbee’s wife. What is more puzzling to us and more shocking to the British was the violence men directed against women within the immediate family, particularly their wives.

Trying to penetrate the dynamics of the sexual politics of a different society is a risky enterprise for the outsider, especially when the society is in demographic upheaval and political flux. We are also always more sensitive to ‘disreputable’ conduct between others than the taken-for-granted interactions in our own social world. The Spaniard Malaspina, visiting the Sydney colony in the autumn of 1793, when early licence had been increasingly replaced by law, was nonetheless shocked by British males’ ferocity both to each other and to their women—whom he also thought ‘great whores’, save for the wives of a few respectable officials. It is true that some British men beat, raped, even killed women, especially convict women. Even the meagre sources we have yield a formidable list of reported and prosecuted sexual and physical assaults. But British violence was typically expressed by fists and feet, and tended to happen when the perpetrator, and the victim too, were in private and in drink.

What the newcomers saw as remarkable—what I think would be remarkable anywhere—were the blows Australian men publicly, casually, dealt their women for trivial offences, and their ready resort to weapons. Their women were, literally, browbeaten. Tench, who was not given to jumping to conclusions, reported that ‘the women are in all respects treated with savage barbarity…When an Indian is provoked by a woman, he either spears her or knocks her down on the spot. On this occasion he always strikes on the head, using indiscriminately a hatchet, a club or any other weapon which may chance to be in his hand.

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