The Europeans in Australia: Volume 1: The Beginning by Alan Atkinson

Author:Alan Atkinson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: NewSouth Publishing

II

There was a third possibility, one which proceeded directly from the ideals of the Enlightenment. This third option had a peculiar significance for the Europeans in Australia, and I have sketched it out in earlier chapters. The despotic, paternal benevolence of great men like Phillip, humanitarian heroes, might well (it seemed) be the answer for this country, cutting through the difficulties arising from the character of its new population, from resistant memory and from the impediments imposed by vast distance, so as to meet the demands of an up-to-date sensibility. Humanitarian methods had been shaped by a polished and highly literate culture. They were born in books, but they were carried abroad as an active, living principle by powerful and cultivated minds, such as Phillip’s. It was the founding Governor who devised the permanent blueprint for authority in the Antipodes, cutting short common inclination and living voices. He could not prevent it being complicated by other priorities, especially after his departure. Nevertheless, his successors, each in his own way, continued the Enlightenment project, by dispensing laws – with varying success – from a position of high humanitarianism. It was Philip Gidley King, however, as the rest of this chapter shows, who as Governor (1800–06) built most immediately and profoundly on what Phillip had done.

Looking back, we like to think of 26 January 1788 as the beginning of a story, the raising of a curtain. Phillip himself thought so as early as 1790, when the anniversary of the ‘Day of Landing’ was marked for the first time by the flying of the flag. But there can be no connected drama without an active, thinking audience – without an audience which knows it is an audience – and for the time being none existed. A common sense of theatre stretched no further than the playhouses at Sydney and Norfolk Island. It took about fifteen years for there to be any popular understanding of one large narrative, a chain of vicissitudes linking the Antipodean past and future. Even then not many people thought that as settlers at Botany Bay they were involved in any splendid and riveting drama, a building of nations or empires. The Aborigines thought differently, as we see by the dazzling and absolute image constructed by Bennelong, for whom the first Governor moved across the land as a type of Ancestor (Chapter 8). The Aboriginal imagination was much readier than that of the local Europeans, although time was partly to remedy the difference.

But narrative does not need to be dazzling in order to work. Imagination can be drawn to little things, to one-dimensional characters and to trivial battles. In due course, even for the Europeans, Australia began to look something like a stage for the enactment of stories. They were themselves remade as a single audience, drawn to one drama. The gaze of power was answered by the gaze of the powerless, and leading players were invested with an otherness, a magic durability – time out of time – typical of theatres.

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