The Reef: A Passionate History: The Great Barrier Reef from Captain Cook to Climate Change (17 page)

Native huts, Evans Bay, Cape York, Novr. 1849.
Watercolor. In
Narrative of the
Voyage of H.M.S. Rattlesnake: Vol. I
(Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales)

Such was Brierly’s commitment to learning the local dialects and getting to know the Reef peoples that he spent hours sitting cross-legged in the sand, gossiping as he collected and memorized vocabularies. Though he was an upper-class Victorian Englishman, nothing about the natives’ habits or values seemed to faze him. He was happy to joke, clown, and play tricks with the young men; he strolled unarmed with spear-carrying warriors into the bush; he sweated for hours in the blazing heat to capture his black friends’ likenesses on paper; he threw himself into uproarious games with the children; he sampled the most challenging of foods on offer; and he joined energetically in dances, songs, egg hunts, and spear-throwing competitions. He also showed genuine admiration for the men’s ability to track and catch the near-invisible molluscs lying in the soft tidal mudflats and shallow water ripples, and he praised the women’s intimate knowledge of the whereabouts, among a tangle of brush and stones, of delicious bush fruits and yams.
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Brierly became so popular among the clan that he had a brotherlike relationship (
cotaiga
) with three young men, as well as the patronage and friendship of many seniors. The latter included an older woman called Baki, his “self-constituted mother,” who boasted a much younger husband and exercised marked authority over all the clan groups at Evans Bay. Brierly thought her a fount of good sense. He nicknamed her “Queen Baki,” showered her with gifts, invited her on board the ship to meet the captain, and responded to her enthusiastic embraces with reciprocal affection and good humor.
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*   *   *

How Oswald Brierly became so open-minded is unclear: such freedom from racial condescension was rare in Britain and the colonies, and aboard the
Rattlesnake
. Although the ship’s two naturalists, Huxley and MacGillivray, showed a keen interest in ethnography, even they had been prejudiced against the Barrier Reef by the negative publicity of Eliza Fraser’s “captivity” and the
Charles Eaton
massacre, which had prompted the survey expeditions of both the
Fly
and the
Rattlesnake
. There was nothing, either, about Brierly’s background to suggest social unorthodoxy. He was born in Chester in 1817 to an old English upper-middle-class family, and his father, a doctor and amateur artist, had encouraged the boy’s education at a London art school, where an interest in ships led him to specialize in maritime art.

An associated passion for sailing had then led him to Australia, and it was while managing an isolated pastoral and whaling business for five years at Twofold Bay in New South Wales that he first came to know Aboriginal people. He sketched their portraits, landscapes, and boats, and made several friends among the Aboriginal whalers, whose company helped him survive the solitude.
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To make such intimate connections, he’d needed to cross the barriers of language, something Brierly tried to do wherever he traveled. His journal shows him going to inordinate trouble to capture the exact linguistic meanings and pronunciations of both Gudang and Kaurareg dialects, including sometimes pretending deafness so that difficult words would be repeated slowly and loudly in his ears.
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His love of sailing was another factor in his fascination with the native peoples he met at Evans Bay. Brierly’s journal is filled with sketches of the rudders, hulls, rigging, and ornamentation of their giant sailing canoes. So dazzled was he by the workmanship and “graceful form” of one such boat, the
Kyee Mareeni
, or
Big Shadow
, owned by a Kaurareg elder named Manu, that it became his boating ideal: “I had long admired but never till now seen anything that realized so much the idea of beauty.” He sketched the craft over and over, and it was later to feature in both an oil painting and a wall mural of his. The sight of the Kaurareg vessels drifting by in the still evening waters of the northern Barrier Reef touched his deepest aesthetic instincts: “As they drew the canoes in the water and left the white sandy beach, they were swept slowly downwards by the current and soon became lost in the dark reflections of the rocks and hanging foliage of the side of the island. A broken light made by their paddles in the water … at times just indicated their place in the dark shadow.”
21

Brierly’s artistic ambitions are a further clue as to why he pushed so hard to get beneath the surface of the Aboriginal and Islander peoples he met. His writings and sketches contain minutely observed details of the physical appearances, personalities, and idiosyncrasies of friends like his young
cotaig
, Belidi. He strove to capture subtleties of character—exactly the opposite impulse of his artist counterpart on the HMS
Fly
, Harden Melville, who’d thought “savages” suitable only for comic caricature. Such crass attitudes provoked Brierly to advise would-be painters like his friend Thomas Huxley “to record what actually passes under your observation—any characteristic traits or circumstances which transpire under your eyes should be written down while the impression is fresh and as quickly after their occurrences as opportunity may allow—in doing this you will be constantly surprised to find the savage so utterly different from what your preconceived ideas would make him.”
22

Prince Wales’s Island Canoe “Bruwan.”
In
Sketches on Board the H.M.S Rattlesnake. Made during the Coastal Survey of the Passage between the Great Barrier Reef and the East Coast of Australia, ca. 1848
by Oswald W. B. Brierly
(Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales)

For the same reason, Brierly was meticulous about capturing the exact words, inflections, and meanings of the linguistically confused Giom-cum-Barbara Thompson. Early on in their shipboard interviews—when her recall of English was limited and she, an illiterate woman of eighteen, seemed shy of the rather grand figure of the captain’s companion—he prompted her gently with specific questions about the everyday life of the clan. His method was to transcribe “with as little deviation as possible from her own words and mode of expression. And to ensure its accuracy I … read it over carefully to her several times, making any slight alterations in pencil before finally writing it all in.” Sometimes he would also return to particular accounts after several weeks, to see whether her recollections or perspective had changed in the interim.
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The ultimate credit for the quality of the information supplied must of course go to Barbara herself. Brierly thought her “remarkably observing,” and illiteracy probably sharpened her powers of recall. Even cynical Tom Huxley and abrasive Jock MacGillivray praised her intelligence, honesty, and courage. And because her attitude to the Kaurareg combined a broad sympathy with a slightly conflicting wish—as we’ll see—to convey some degree of emotional distance, she generally gave Brierly a balanced evaluation of clan life and culture.
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Her greatest knowledge, naturally, was of everyday work patterns and the social relations of the women. She recounted their modes of childbirth and nurture, including the vogue for massaging the head of every newborn baby into the beautiful elongated shape of a remora fish, and described their methods of making baskets, mats, grass skirts, and fish traps using the leaves of the indispensable pandanus plant. She listed their modes of treating illness with bush medicines and controlled bleedings, and explained the intricate network of kinship structure and family relationships, outlining taboos and norms as well as the more mundane interactions between husbands, wives, children, and lovers.

The island of Muralag, with its rocky soil, scrubby vegetation, and single coconut tree, made foraging a challenge for the Kaurareg women. Barbara described for Brierly their role as collectors, preparers, and cooks of varying foods in accordance with the two great seasonal shifts of the year. During the dry season (
iboud
), from June to October, when the southeast trade winds prevailed and turtles, fruits, and fish were relatively abundant, the clan would travel to other islands or mainland spots where the men would hunt and the women would search for yams (
coti
), shellfish, and water. Bladders of turtle oil were then mixed with crushed yams to make a much prized and portable mash (
mabouchie
). In each camp the women would dig large ovens, lining them with stones, for cooking turtle and dugong. They then carved and arranged these delicacies in elaborate patterns of distribution according to age, status, and gender, leaving nothing unused.

From December to April, during the great wet of the northwestern monsoon (
kuki
), the clan would gather in regular camps near sources of edible mangrove pods, which the women would prepare in a mash mixed with wild beans called
beu
. At this time, when turtles and dugong were scarce, the Kaurareg experienced a relatively static and claustrophobic period, crouching “like hens” in long narrow huts, enduring weeks of incessant tropical rain and occasional bouts of fever (
doopoo
).
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Although she had lived in that world as a mere ghost, Barbara also managed to open up windows into masculine life. She gave Brierly glimpses of the secret rituals of boyhood initiations, and of sorcerer (
mydallager
) curses and magic. She described the different forms of hut building; Kaurareg patterns of trading, diplomacy, and warfare with other Islander and mainland clans; and the cherished skills of canoe building and sailing. She knew the techniques of weapon making and ornamentation, fire clearing, and yam cultivation, and the smart ways of trapping fish in stone weirs and creek nets. She knew, too, the cunning skills needed for finding and killing dugong and turtle. The latter, at which Boroto excelled, included attaching magical potions to canoe prows to entice green turtle (
soolah
) to the surface, and an ingenious practice of using live remora sucker fish (
gapoo
) threaded on thin rope. The fish were tossed back into the water to locate flatback turtles by clamping onto their shells.

Specifically quizzed by Brierly, Barbara described in detail the clan’s elaborate death and mortuary rituals. She recounted myths of the Kaurareg’s origins, rich foundational stories that blended human and animal elements, and she told the spiritual stories associated with sacred local places and objects. She talked of the modes of singing, dancing, and game playing, citing satirical songs composed about visiting white sailors and their ghost ships.
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Some of her revelations must have shocked even the tolerant Brierly, but whether she was telling him of the awful injuries that some husbands inflicted on their wives or the practice of smothering girl babies who’d been conceived before marriage, he recorded her matter-of-fact words without emphasis or comment. Barbara showed no reticence about describing cannibalistic rituals performed on the decapitated and baked heads of tribal enemies. She told the gruesome story of a revenge raid by Kaurareg warriors against the Gumakudin. It had been well deserved, she said: the Kaurareg’s much hated and feared mainland rivals had, without any provocation and “in such a sly way,” killed and mutilated a senior Kaurareg man—the father of Boroto—on a lonely Muralag beach. In celebration of the successful retaliation, which resulted in the warriors bringing home six fresh heads, “[our warriors] took the eyes and then cut the flesh from round the eyes, the men who cut it passing bits round to the rest. When they eat it they would throw their heads back with their mouths open, holding the bit ready to drop in, [and] call out to their wives,
Areen
,
idoo eenama
, ‘Our food, look at it.’”
27

Later, as Barbara became more fluent and confident, Brierly encouraged her to relate stories at her own pace and length. Many of her revelations flew in the face of what most Europeans believed they knew about native Reef peoples. Anyone who’d read of Eliza Fraser’s torments or the
Charles Eaton
massacre would have expected tales of animality: lack of family affection, indifference to beauty, preoccupation with material goods, and intellectual and moral nihilism. Barbara, by contrast, took for granted that personal relationships within the Kaurareg could be harsh or loving, depending on individual personality and circumstance. She gave examples of the anguished remorse shown by some men who’d mistreated their wives, and of the retributions exacted from them for doing so. She amplified Brierly’s impressions of the clan’s caring attitude toward children, and told of the solicitous way Old Sallali had looked after his wife Aburda when she was pregnant. Barbara spoke of the doting pride of a young man called Dowoothoo in the abilities and status of his senior wife, Baki—“a pattern,” Brierly noted dryly, “to husbands all over the world.”
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