The Aboriginal Male in the Enlightenment World by Shino Konishi

Author:Shino Konishi [Konishi, Shino]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, General, Social Science, Anthropology, Cultural & Social
ISBN: 9781317322085
Google: nLk6CgAAQBAJ
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2015-10-06T03:38:08+00:00

Bestowing the Superior Language

European endeavours to teach Aboriginal men their languages illustrate how their ideas about Aboriginal people were dependent upon their evaluations of the indigenous men’s bodies. For instance some explorers supposed that the Aborigines’ command of foreign languages was affected by their physical faculties of speech. In Van Diemen’s Land Nicolas Baudin assumed that his ability to teach Aboriginal men French words was only hindered by the failure of indigenous lips, teeth and tongues to pronounce certain letters: ‘We said various words for them, which they repeated very clearly, and I was amazed, even, at the small amount of trouble that they had. However, any words in which there were “R”s and “S”s were not so easy for them’.63 Arguably though, this lesson was little more than an exercise in mimicry and did not represent real language learning. As Greenblatt suggests, the latter requires submission, which in most cases could only be elicited through physical capture, incarceration and subordination. As I have discussed, during the late eighteenth century the British First Fleet officers were best able to achieve this end through abducting Aboriginal people.

The British justified their practice of kidnapping on the grounds that it would initiate an ‘intercourse with the natives’ and further their original aim of fostering friendly relations with Aboriginal people.64 Deirdre Coleman argues that the British rationalizations of their use of force indicate the way in which they deployed chivalric discourses as ‘the velvet glove which makes the iron fist of colonization and dispossession … more palatable’.65 As we have seen, the first man to be kidnapped was Arabanoo, and before he could begin his English lessons, the British first tried to assimilate him to their mores, a process which was entirely enacted on his body. First, he was bathed, groomed and dressed in ‘a shirt, a jacket and a pair of trousers’, and his final ‘ornament’ was ‘a handcuffwith a rope attached’, a restraint which he would wear for all but the final few weeks of his five-month internment at Port Jackson.66 The distress his incarceration caused him was palpable, for his voice was ‘broken and interrupted with dismay’.67 However, over time the British thought that he became resigned to his fate, and his apparent capitulation to the British made him an ideal candidate to learn English. However, in this respect Arabanoo failed to live up to their expectations.

While Arabanoo taught the British officers a number of words from his language, the only English word that the British recorded him learning was ‘woman’.68 After his death from smallpox Tench lamented that Arabanoo ‘did not want docility, but either from the difficulty of acquiring [the English] language, from the unskilfulness of his teachers, or from some natural defect, his progress in learning it was not equal to what [the British] had expected’.69 Tench recognized that Arabanoo never completely submitted to the British: ‘Although of a gentle and placable temper, we early discovered that he was impatient of indignity and allowed no superiority on our part.

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