Southern Crossings

GOVERNOR PHILLIP, his administrative staff, crews, soldiers and 750 convicts arrived to found the colony of New South Wales in January, 1788. The first of the eleven ships to sail into Botany Bay was the Supply. Natives ran along the shore flourishing their spears. We put the boats onshore near where we observed two of their canoes lying,' wrote Lieutenant King.

'They immediately got up & called to us in a menacing tone and at the same time brandishing their spears or lances. However the Governor showed them some beads and ordered a man to fasten them to the stem of the canoe. We then made signs that we wanted water, when they pointed round the point on which they stood and invited us to land there; on landing they directed us by pointing to a very fine stream of tresh water.'

A friendly enough race, it seemed, and without any very strong sense of possession of the land they lived in. It would, one imagines, have been easy to establish an amicable relationship with them. And, indeed, -for a time all went swim- mingly. Lieutenant King again:

They wanted to know of what sex we were, which they explained by pointing where it was distinguishable. As they took us for women, not having our beard grown, 1 ordered one of the people to undeceive them in this particular, when they made a great shout of admiration, and pointing to the shore, which was but ten yards from us, we saw a great number of Women & Girls, with infant children on their shoulders, make their appearance on the beach —all in puris naturalihus, pas mime la feuille de figuier. Those natives who were round the boats made signs to us to go to them & made us understand their persons were at our service.

All the written reports of encounters with natives in the first months are delightful and amusing. Phillip had given instructions that the `Indians' were not to be molested, but 'treated with every mark of friendship.' On no account were they to be fired upon.

A finer harbour than Botany Bay was dis- covered a mere sixteen miles to the north, and on January 26. possession was taken for His Majesty and the unloading of the convicts was begun. Several convicts who attempted to escape into the bush, and others who had been sent out on work parties, came back with tales of having been attacked by natives. It was believed, how- ever, that they had given provocation. Phillip found that the natives at Camp Cove, who had formerly been friendly and confident, were now unusually shy and afraid. One who did venture to approach 'pointed to some marks upon his shoulder, making signs they were caused by blows given with a stick.' In May, two convicts were found dead, one with three spears in him. Phillip took a party of men to the place where the murder had been committed. He was still of the opinion that the natives had not been the aggressors, and hoped to find evidence to support him in his belief. He was unsuccessful. There were further violent incidents, and in October a party of natives met a solitary con- vict and threw several spears at him. The Gover- nor proceeded to the spot with an armed party and, hearing the'sounds of natives in the bushes, ha,d,„„1*„awn fire upon them. By Anyv he had

reluctantly decided it was necessary to compel the natives to keep their distance from the settle- ment. It was the beginning of the eventual slaughter.

Dr. Cobley's book is based on, and for the greater part consists of extracts from, diaries and letters which he has edited to give a day-by-day account of the first year of the settlement. The journals of various officers, the letters of the Governor and other documents of the year 1788 are used to give as complete an account as pos- sible of the life of the colony. Convicts, male and female, were hanged or given up to 500

lashes for such offences as stealing a bar of soap or a pair of trousers. An eighteen-year-old youth was found guilty of stealing some sugar and bread. Five diaries refer to his execution. One, in a letter home, wrote: 'We have had another execution of a very young lad, but an old hardened offender, who, on his arrival- at the fatal tree, said he was now going to suffer a death which he had long deserved.' Here is the authentic flavour of life in this rough, lonely outpost.

Unique to Australia is a useful compendium of the more curious flora and fauna to be found there. No claim to literary worth, but lots of fascinating information for the intending visitor or migrant. Over fifty photographs, several of them in colour, many of which are beautiful (the two horned dragons confronting each other), others touristy (the atypical glamorous native girl grinding flour 'with native grindstones').

Kangaroos, wallabies, koalas, emus, kooka- burras, the European is used to the sight of these by now. But Australia is a land rich in rarities. The quokka, for instance. 1 managed to grow up in Australia ignorant of its existence, and due to an embarrassing misunderstanding, when the word was used in my presence on a recent visit to that country, I took it to be an Aussie term of endearment. Mr. Beatty dis- illusions me: the quokka, indigenous to Western Australia, is `a species of rat,' albeit rather friendly.

The very pretty flying possum, or phalanger, is a charmer. He glides along the boughs of trees by night, then leaps into space to float gracefully down to a lower tree. His coat is of soft fur, and he has eyes like the most sentimen- tal dachshund.

Australia has over 650 species of birds. Kookaburras sit on telegraph poles and laugh at you, lyrebirds mate in forest clearings and if you're very quiet you can creep up and watch them, the tawny frogmouth disguises itself as a bit of dead old tree, the gaily coloured parrots and cockatoos fly in huge raucous numbers across the sky. On Phillip Island, the fairy penguins, eight to ten inches high, put on a nightly show for the tourists:

It begins each evening with a sudden yapping puppy-like noise heard above the pounding of the surf on the beach. Suddenly a spotlight picks out a lonely little grey figure with a white front which gleams in the strong beam, swim- ming shorewards. He is buffeted and swept out of sight by the curling foam, but soon more and more of his kind appear among the breakers making slow but certain progress to the beach. Once on land the fairy penguins flap

their wings vigorously and with ceaseless chatter await the rest of their fellows. . . . Oblivious of the watching audience or the blinding glare

from the spotlights played on them, nothing seems to perturb the quaint little creatures as they march in orderly procession across the white sands and up the steep sandhills to their burrows. As they march they make a kind of barking, yapping noise.

Lizards? Snakes? (One hundred and forty species, two-thirds of them venomous.) The giant pythons, found in the extreme north of Queens- land, are over twenty feet long. The victim (kangaroo, wild pig, or man) is first crushed into an elongated shape. Then, opening its jaws to an incredible extent, the python swallows, and sleeps until its meal is digested. Digestion can take several months.

If that doesn't lure you to Terra Australis, perhaps Mr. Southall's Woomera will. This is, of course, not about anything so natural as flora and fauna, but about the rocket-range at Woomera in South Australia. Thoroughly recom- mended to those children from six to sixty who are intrigued by the mechanics of rocketry, de- terrent warfare, Security, Blue Streak. Black Knight and that kind of gibberish. Woomera, an aboriginal name given by whites to the rocket site, means `part of a weapon': that part which, applied to the end of a spear, launches it into the air with greater power.

Olaf Ruhen is a New Zealander, and in Tangaroa's Godchild he has written one of those highly poetic autobiographies full of sun and sea and sky and sex among the sand dunes. Fortunately, there's more to his book than that. He has a real feeling for the sea, more particu- larly for the South Pacific, and his prose becomes distinctly less purple when he writes about his beloved ocean and its creatures. His touch with people is less sure.

A child of the seashore, he goes to sea when he is grown up. The war comes, and he finds himself, curiously, in the Air Force, flying Lan- casters over Germany. Afterwards, back to the Pacific, where he becomes enamoured of whales. Once, alone in his schooner, he sees a huge whale at a distance. It seemed strangely motionless, so he moved in to investigate, and found that it was feeding its young one: I closed within about thirty yards when sud- denly I realised how enormous was the bulk of this whale. (I have since read, and found it easy to believe, that the tongue of the blue whale is roughly the size of an entire elephant' about two tons.) The calf was on the side nearest me, and, without disturbing it in the least, the mother turned in the water to give it the protection of her body. And when I saw that great bulk move to the consciousness of my presence I pushed the tiller over and opened the throttle and got away from that vicinity.

In the early part of the nineteenth century, there were several whales known in the South Pacific by their personal characteristics. Mr. Ruhen includes Pelorus Jack, who for years ac- companied all vessels negotiating the dangerous French Pass, though I had always heard that Jack was a dolphin. Other mammals identified

by name were `New Zealand Tom,' `Timor Jack, and 'Mocha Dick,' who, Mr. Ruhen suggests, may be the prototype of Moby Dick. He him-

self has known only friendly whales. And sea- lions and seals. One seal, who became an intimate friend, used to catch the tram from the beach to the harbour wharf, a desirable fishing spot.

The tram conductors hated him. Wouldn't pay his fares, I suppose. Well anyway, I believe it. It's because of its abundance of tales like these that Tangaroa's Godchild stands head and flip- pers above the usual books of adventure in the South Seas. Six New Zealanders, landlubber equivalents of Olaf Ruhen, set out to cross the ,Carstensz Mountains of New Guinea. The story of their almost successful attempt is told in Nawok by Philip Temple, the leader of the ex- pedition, and even his slightly schoolboyish method of telling his story can do little to dim the excitement of it. After all, it's often the overgrown schoolboys of a particularly rarefied kind that indulge in these crypto-sexual exploits. And jolly good luck to them.

CHARLES OSBORNE