Before the Dreaming, the Australian continent was a flat, featureless place, devoid of life. Then giant beings came down from the sky, came from across the sea and emerged from within the earth. With their arrival, the Dreaming began, and life was born. In the north of Australia, the Junkawal sisters gave birth to humanity. In central Australia, Itikawara broke the marriage laws and as punishment was turned into stone, forever entombed in the landscape.
On the east coast, Biami shaped the landscape, and when his work was complete, he stepped onto a mountain and back into the sky. As they moved across the land, their giant bodies shaped the earth, creating rivers and mountain ranges. In everything they touched, they left their essence. Making the landscape sacred to those who honor the dreaming the first Australians If you think about the ancient civilizations that Europeans look to Such as the dynasties of the pharaohs in Egypt Then even they are young compared to the period when humans were coming to Australia The first Australians number more than 250 tribes, each with their own language, laws and territorial boundaries.
A civilisation encompassing the entire continent. We've had this debate about Australia was a terra nullius and it was a wasted landscape and people hadn't used it and hadn't farmed it. They've discovered that in fact it's probably supported about 1.6 billion lives. And that's how productive Aboriginal people were able to make this part of the Earth, which has the most irregular and unreliable rainfall, and the driest continent on Earth. 80,000 years, 100,000 years, doesn't matter whether it's 60,000 years, it's an incredible length of time.
It's the longest living civilisation on Earth, and if you can't learn something from a people that successful then you're really defying your own intelligence. Just over 200 years ago without warning strangers arrive. They appear on the east coast at a place called Boerong. The strangers name it Sydney. They are about to come face to face with the first Australians.
A young Narrikan who spends his days on the beach will become the toast of English society. Pemulwuy will reject diplomacy and declare the first war on Australian soil, believing he cannot be killed by firearms. Windridine will also become a wanted man when his family is murdered over a handful of potatoes.
This is the story of the first Australians and the events that shaped the nation when the strangers came to stay. It's impossible not to have hoped that there'd be some sort of evolution of a society which was tolerant of difference, but which sustained everyone. It is a summer's night on the 25th of January, 1788. Eleven giant ships enter the harbour.
On board are over 1,300 people. More than half are convicts, the rest are soldiers. The people on board are ordered to remain there until dawn.
They've traveled for nearly eight months from England to this unknown land. Around the harbour, the first Australians light fires and they yell from their canoes for these apparitions to go away. They thought they was the devil when they landed first.
They did not know what to make of them. When they saw them going up the mast, they thought they was possums. Marut, Gamigal people. At first light, the order is given for the convict men and women to disembark.
And for Aboriginal people, can you imagine? Suddenly there are 11 ships. Are these strange people wearing clothes? Funny hats? They have guns?
What are these people up to? Why are they here? How long are they going to stay?
Why did they come to my country? Why don't they go somewhere else? Are they spirits? Very strange.
There's this very curious and very touching attempt to come together and to comprehend. So you have these extraordinary scenes within two or three days of landing of Britishers and Aborigines dancing together. 29th of January 1788 They pointed with their sticks to the boat landing place and met us in the most cheerful manner.
Shouting and dancing, these people mixed with ours and all hands danced together. William Bradley, First Lieutenant. And all we've got to go on are the paintings done by a young naval lieutenant called Bradley. And he has these enchanting paintings of redcoats and Aboriginal men indeed dancing together. They're hand in hand.
They seem to be dancing. A sort of... Playground encounter, if you like, when you're trying to check each other out. The first Australians can't work out if these visitors are men or women, as their clothing covers them like a strange skin. Finally, an officer is challenged to submit to the country's very first immigration procedure.
He has a wig, he has leotards on. They ask him to take his pants off, which he declined and made a sailor do it. Arthur Phillip, Captain of the First Fleet, leads the newcomers ashore.
After an unremarkable career of 30 years in the Navy, he is dragged from retirement and appointed Governor of a place nearly 60 times the size of England. Governor Phillip was in a rather unique situation when he came to Sydney because he had one of his front teeth missing and it was the same tooth that was knocked out during the male initiation ceremony. On my showing them that I lacked... a front tooth it occasioned a general clamor and I thought gave me some little merit in their opinion Arthur Philip governor the local people would have thought here is a man who's initiated here is an elder a senior person so this is somebody we can negotiate with this is somebody we can talk to because he has shared at least one of our ceremonies he's missing his front tooth been along in his early twenties also carries the mark of a man He has passed through the sacred initiation ceremonies, which complete his formal training. He's married and lives in Wongal territory, where he dines on oysters and crayfish, and sleeps under the stars on one of the most spectacular beaches in the world.
We're everywhere. The spirit of Biami can be felt in the wind and his voice can be heard as thunder as Biami moves across the sky. Philip has spent a year in London preparing for the journey and like Noah, he gathers together humans, animals and supplies. There are 44 sheep, 4 cows, 1 bull, his own greyhounds, tents, farming equipment, wine and seeds.
Philip has also taken on board 700 hatchets, 74,000 nails, 50 pickaxes and 700 clamp knives. All this he takes to win over the first destroyer. ...Australians according to his instructions. These instructions also direct Philip to occupy the land of the first Australians, which they now see as British territory. Instructions for our well-beloved Arthur Philip, Esquire, Governor of New South Wales.
You are to endeavour, by every possible means, to open an intercourse with the natives and to conciliate their affections. In joining all our subjects to live in amity and kindness with them, Lord Sydney, Secretary for the Home Department. The Home Office was rather good at issuing orders controlling the interactions of the British with any natives they encountered.
They put a great deal of time and thought into it, and most of them were absolutely utopian. On the ground, it wasn't like that. The justification for taking the land was that Aboriginal people were animals. And to engage with people on an individual basis and to acknowledge the history of those people meant that they were people.
What they wanted was to set up... A Britishness here, that was for Britons, and that's exactly what drove them to do the things they did. Immediately he orders trees be chopped down and the land to be cleared. They erect tents and...
area for the convict women separate from the men, a blacksmith, the hospital and a store. Invisible to Philip are the clearly defined territories of the Sydney clans. On the north shore are the Baragagal and Gamaragal lands, and on the south the Biribirigal, the Gadigal and Benalong's people, the Wongal.
All men are equal. These ideas were there, sitting there, and Brisbane went off and said, no, these people are inferior. We can own this land.
That assumption was inhumane. They did incomprehensible things and they treated each other with vile cruelty. The first Australians are quickly learning about this military society from a distance. They realise that the men wearing red are armed and are to be avoided. Aboriginal people watching must have been horrified.
Within the space of a week or so, there were 1,100 people in their country and they would have been outnumbered. Before Philip can conciliate the affections of the natives, in 1789, disaster strikes. An extraordinary calamity was now observed among the natives. Repeated accounts brought by our boats of finding bodies of the Indians in all the coves and inlets of the harbour.
Pustules, similar to those occasioned by smallpox, were thickly spread on the bodies. But how a disease could at once have introduced itself, and then spread so widely, seemed inexplicable. What content.
How did it come to Australia? I think there's such a debate and there's such speculation that we can't know definitively but in my own mind it's clear that it came with the First Fleet. It's sometimes said, more often believed, that the smallpox was let loose by the British. at that point in time to destroy the possibility of Aboriginal resistance.
I simply can't comprehend that notion at all. In all the accounts there is bewilderment, despair, horror in the British accounts as they see that smallpox is loose among the native population. The excavations in the rocks were filled with putrid bodies who had fallen victims to the disorder.
Not a living person was anywhere to be met with. It seems as if flying from the contagion, they had left the dead to bury the dead. He lifted up his hands and eyes in silent agony for some time.
At last he exclaimed, all dead, all dead. And then hung his head in mournful silence. David Collins, judge advocate.
None of the whites are affected by it, as they are immune to it. England were masters, and the first masters of germ warfare. They've already released it through India.
They tried it in the Americas. They released it in the West Indies. And they brought it here. Some say it came from the north of the continent, bought by Macassan fishermen and arrived coincidentally just after the British.
Whatever the source, it wipes out the great majority of the first Australians in the Sydney region. Terrified, some survivors flee from the epidemic and carry the disease further. where it makes its remorseless journey from clan to clan.
This is all my country. Nice country. When I little fellow, plenty black fellow. Plenty gin.
Plenty pickaninny. Great corroboree. Plenty fight. Hey, all gone now.
All gone. Only me left to walk about. My route.
Gamigal Nation. Benelon survives. On the 25th of November 1789, a boat sets out from the British camp towards him and the remnants of his people, with the intention of capturing them.
The two poor devils were seized and handed into the boat in an instant. The noise of the men, crying and screaming of the women and children, together with the situation of the two miserable wretches in our possession, was really our most distressing scene. It was by far the most unpleasant service I was ever ordered to execute.
William Bradley, First Lieutenant. Ben Along is one of two men abducted and taken, bound in ropes, to Government House, to be executed. meet Philip. He believed it was essential to establish some communication with these people who fled before him. Therefore he did what other imperialists have done before him.
He thought he'd kidnapped someone. So he would then have an interpreter and someone who could explain to his own people Philip's benevolent intention. The poor fellows, I'm told, exhibited the strongest marks of terror and consternation, believing they were certainly meant to be sacrificed. He starts to bring Aboriginal people in, in this case coercively, as if they're prisoners, to be there at his convenience rather than him going... to them and involving them in a process of change.
For Philip, change was to be imposed. cleaned and closed their astonishment at everything they saw was amazing a new world was unfolded to their view at once Elizabeth Arthur settler despite being locked up Ben long is dressed in specially created silk suits his charms quickly engaged government house society and he entertains his captors by imitating them and toasting the king He quickly threw off all reserve. His powers of mind were certainly far above mediocrity. He acquired knowledge, both of our manners and language.
He willingly communicated information, sang, danced and capered, told us all the customs of his country and all the details of his family economy. They are universally fearful of spirits. They call a spirit Mourn. They often scruple to approach a corpse, saying that the Mourn will seize them and that it fastens upon them in the night when asleep.
When asked where their deceased friends are, they always point to the skies. What content. Benelon finds common ground in more earthly practices, explaining that Benelon... ...means to kiss, which of course the first Australians also like to do. I think they were both strategically learning as much about each other as they possibly could.
I think they needed each other, but Philip needed Bennelong more than Bennelong needed Philip, for sure. In fact, Philip and Bennelong developed a surprisingly intimate and touching relationship. He calls Philip Beanna, father, and Philip calls him son.
Because something we have to remember is that the smallpox has gone through. You know, the old rules have been damaged. How do you keep... the old shapes of authority after that terrible decimation. Benalong was meant to be a mediator between the clans and between government and the colony, the colonists, but I don't think it worked out that way.
In April 1790, the shackle is removed from Benalong's leg. At 2am on the morning of the 3rd of May, Benalong wakes his guard and tells him he is sick. The unsuspecting guard opens the door to let him out. But once outside, Bennelong strips off his English clothes and leaps the paling fence to freedom, disappearing into the night. Philip is in despair.
Our native has left us, and that at a time when he appeared to be happy and contented. This too is unlucky, as we have all the ceremony to go over again with another. I think that man's leaving has proved that nothing will make these people amends for the loss of their liberty. Arthur Phillip, Governor.
Phillip sends his men to bring him back. And when the officers call from their boats for Bennelong, Bennelong! the women laugh and mimic them. Bennelong!
He has returned to his former way of life. Bennelong avoids Philip for several months until the 7th of September 1790 when Philip discovers the first Australians are at a whale feast and that Bennelong is amongst them. As Governor Philip had always been desirous of meeting with this man and had sought an opportunity from the day he left his house he went to the spot where he had been seen. Philip is absolutely determined to establish friendly contact again.
He needs it, he wants it and he also feels it. Benelong entices Philip into a circle of warriors. Captain Sutter illustrates the moment in his sketchbook as Philip is surrounded on the beach.
Benalong introduces Philip to a Karaji, a clever man. Philip thinks he's being asked to make friends with the other warrior, so he puts down his arms and walks towards him with his hands out. The native, stepping back with his right leg, threw the spear with great violence, and it struck against Governor Phillip's collarbone, which had entered, and the barb came out close to the third vertebrae of the back.
The behavior of Ben Long could not be accounted for. He never attempted to interfere when the man took the spear up, or said a single word to prevent him from throwing it. A bewildered Philip has been punished in a ritual known as payback.
Whatever Benelon and his people saw Philip's crime to be, Philip is wounded and the score is settled. The spearing of Governor Phillip suggested that where he was speared, where it got him, that was payback, so in fact it's a harsh way to say it, but they were trying to tell him that they liked him. If they had intended to kill him, they would have killed him. They merely wounded him, and I think certainly it was a sign that they...
I wanted Philip to be aware that he shouldn't cross the line. He shouldn't go too far with his own capacity to exact blood. He absolutely prohibited any vengeance at all.
all being taken. You know, he didn't know just what had happened, what the mechanisms of it were, because he didn't know anything like enough about Aboriginal political culture. But he knew enough to have a sense that this had been a formalised occasion and that somehow he'd muffed his lines. Philip tries to woo Bennelong back to Government House, but Bennelong plays hard to get.
A month passes before Bennelong finally concedes to Philip's pleas. Bennelong and his wife are greeted like celebrities on their return. On hearing of their arrival, such numbers flock to see them.
When we reached the governor's house, Bennelong expressed honest joy to see his old friend and appeared pleased that he had recovered of his wound. Bennelong said, seemed to consider himself quite at home, running from room to room with his companions and introducing them to his old friends, particularly the governor's orderly sergeant, whom he kissed with great affection. What contentch! It is a turning point in relations, and now the first Australians, taking Bennelong's lead, flock into the settlement.
They visit the governors and walk the streets of Sydney town, and many move in with the settlers. They were frequently visited by many of the natives, some of whom daily came to the barracks. All of them were very fond of bread, and they now found the advantage of coming amongst the settlers. Arthur Philip, Governor. Of the many Europeans who were fascinated with the first Australians, Lieutenant Dawes becomes one of the most familiar.
In his out-of-the-way observatory, he meets the first Australians on their own terms. Dawes was a very religious young man, we're told. He was also a very aloof and solitary young man.
He was an expert astronomer. He managed to establish intimate relationships with a young Aboriginal girl called Padiyagarang. We shall sleep separate.
You winked at me. To warm one's hands by the fire and then squeeze gently the fingers of another person. There's this interaction which is on a much more relaxed and friendly basis and it allows for an understanding of each other's culture, an understanding of what the requirements are from each other's perspective, what the obligations are in each other's culture.
Patty Ugarang teaches him her language and in return he teaches her to read and write English. Get up, Papua New York. I shall not become white. This was said by Pachigarang after I told her that if she would wash herself often, she would become white. The same time, throwing down her towel in despair.
William Dawes. There's no doubt that theirs was a tender relationship. Whether it was physical is, I don't know, but tender it certainly was. She was a person who actively was involved in this interrelationship with Dawes, so it's not a question of her just being a subject or someone who was investigated by Dawes.
It was a genuine relationship. The interaction between the settlers and the first Australians is steadily improving until the 10th of December 1790, when Philip's gamekeeper, a man called McIntyre, is fatally wounded. He staggers into the settlement with a death spear through his body. His killer is Pemulwuy, meaning man of earth.
He has a blemish in his left eye, a sign that he is a Karaji, a sorcerer or clever man. Pemawoy was another man like Ben Long, who was fully an adult, initiated, armed, had clearly been engaged. He raged in skirmishes before, some feuding, some warfare, who can know, but he was clearly by no means a stranger to violence. McIntyre was speared with what's called a death spear. This is a long hunting spear which is armed with two rows of stone flakes.
And once these two rows were mounted with resin on the head of the spear, when the spear went into a person, the barbs dislodged and remained inside. So the person would ultimately die. It is said that Pemawoy was seen at Bennelongs just before the murder and that they may have conspired to serve McIntyre his retribution.
It seems highly likely that McIntyre was shooting Aborigines as he was out hunting animals. He was a gamekeeper, shooting food for the governor and for other officers. The attitude of Bennelong towards him and other Aboriginal people in the colony and indeed from some of his own statements shortly before his death, it seems highly likely that he was regularly killing Aboriginal people and so it was almost certainly payback. On his deathbed, McIntyre calls for a priest in order to confess his sins.
The poor wretch now began to utter the most dreadful exclamations. accuse himself of crimes of the deepest eye accompanied with such expressions of his despair of God's mercy as are too terrible to repeat. What contention.
This was the turning point. Philip became enraged. The natives will be made severe examples of whenever any man is wounded by them. But this will be done in a manner which may satisfy them. That it is a punishment inflicted on them for their own bad conduct.
Philip asks Benalong to find Pemawoy. But Benalong and his people are glad to see the last of McIntyre. This fellow that's been killed, McIntyre. He's a gamesman and he's a gardener.
They can't understand why Philip is so angry. I think Philip was under a lot of stress. His living standards were becoming worse and worse.
The colony was becoming perilously close to starvation. And this must have been an incident of enormous proportions, perhaps blown out of proportion for Philip. Our party are to be ready to march tomorrow morning at daylight in order to bring in six of those natives who reside near the head of Botany Bay. Or if that should be found to be impracticable, to put that number to death.
Arthur Philip, Governor. William Dawes and his colleague Watkin Tench are ordered to lead the revenge party. Tench, similar to Dawes, has befriended the First Australians. He expresses his disgust at the order in his journal. At four o'clock on the morning of the 14th December 1790, we marched with three days'provision, ropes to bind our prisoners with, and hatchets and bags to cut off and contain the heads of the slain.
Watkin Tench. Off they go. As he says, heavily encumbered Europeans in pursuit of native Indians, as he always calls them because of his time in America, on their home ground. Yet they're somehow meant to entrap them or encircle them or catch them.
They're carrying 60 pounds on their back. They're in these big red-hot coats. Big boots trying to go through the bush.
On his own turf, Pemawoy eludes the officers with ease. Philip cannot accept he has been outmanoeuvred. Dawes refuses to participate when Philip orders them to go out yet again. It's a very strange performance from a cool-headed man. All that happens on a second expedition is that a number of them nearly drown themselves in quicksand.
By November 1791, after governing for three years, Philip is exhausted by the extraordinary effort of establishing the colony and he resigns due to his ill health. Despite Dawes wanting to stay, Philip orders him to leave. In his final weeks, Dawes truly discovers how he and his people are perceived. I then told her that a white man had been wounded some days ago.
And asked her why the black men did it. Gulara. Minyan Gulara Iora.
Inyam Ngalaway, white man. With Dawes departure, Pachigarang, his friend and confidant, disappears from the written record. Perhaps returning to her country, or some say she even sailed to Calcutta, hoping to follow Dawes.
Philip has succeeded in conciliating the affections of at least one of the natives. Bennelong willingly boards the ship with Philip, and he takes with him his young friend, Yemawarany. All very well for Bennelong, but not his wife, who smashes his spears as he sails into the distance.
With the governor there embarked, voluntarily and cheerfully, two natives of this country, Benelon and Yemawarani, who withstood, at the moment of their departure, the united distress of their wives, to accompany him to England, a place that they well knew was at a great distance from them. David Collins, judge advocate. Imagine the idea. of him travelling back with the English to wherever it was that they came from with no idea if he would ever come home and he wanted to know where they came from.
He wanted to know if they were gods or men. For Bennelong, it is like arriving on another planet. Governor Phillip has brought home with him two of the natives of New Holland, a man and a boy, and brought them to town. The Atlantic also has on board four kangaroos, lively and healthy, and some other animals peculiar to that country, the London packet.
He was their trophy. Bennelong was the ultimate trophy to prove that they'd created a colony, had befriended the natives and brought a native back to court to exhibit Bennelong in the same way that the returning Roman soldiers exhibited lions and tigers and elephants and gold and trinkets. The day after their arrival in London, Bennelong and Yemawarany are fitted with clothing worn by gentlemen of society.
Bill's paid by Mr Waterhouse on the account of two natives. Two pairs of knee buckles, three shillings. Two pair of gloves, four shillings. A boat for the natives bathing, two shillings.
He's like a dancing bear. Everyone wants to talk to him, everyone wants to poke him, everyone wants to rub his skin. He's a curiosity.
Two sooty natives of New South Wales went to the Houses of Parliament, where they were introduced to several persons of consequence. The Oracle and Public Advertiser, 19th of April, 1794. He'd arrived in a society that was so utterly different from his own, which nevertheless he managed to infiltrate, to manipulate. On taking his leave, Benalong asked the Prime Minister for permission to kiss his fair daughter's hand, to which her father agreed.
The young lady held out a hand encased in a glove. Bennelong, however, declared in a loud, firm voice, Madame, I receive permission to kiss your hand, not your glove. Two years on, the novelty of Bennelong has worn off.
His young friend, Yemawarany, after suffering for many months with pneumonia, has died. A world away from his country and people. In memory of Emma Waranyi. A native of New South Wales who died the 18th May 1794 in the 19th year of his age.
Ben Long is depressed, alone and on the verge of dying himself as he waits in the hull of a ship through a freezing English winter, hoping to set sail for home. He is unaware of the fate that has befallen his people back in Sydney. With Philip now out of the way, military officers take over and begin granting land to their mates.
The land grab has begun, and seeking better farming lands to support their growing population, the newcomers push out beyond Bennelong's territory. Following rivers, they move south and west, into Bidiagal, Inland Darug and Gundungara territory. Their first target is the fertile riverbanks where they replace the native yam beds with their own crops of corn.
With their livelihood at stake, the first Australians fight back. Pemulwuy unleashes his fury at their trespass into his territory. The papers report his raids and his name once more spreads fear amongst the settlers. He had them frightened to death, them fellas out there. He could be a mile away from them, set the scrub on fire.
He knew which way the winds were going to go. He knew how the fire would run. And he'd burn them out. And he wouldn't have to be within cooey of them.
Buried all the crops between Parramatta and Sydney Cove and broke the legs on sheep and cattle so they couldn't sustain their farms. In their attacks, they conducted themselves with much art. but where that failed they had recourse to force and on the least appearance of resistance made use of their spears or clubs David Collins, judge advocate whether it was a grudge whether he wanted revenge, whether he wanted to drive the British out, we can't precisely know, but somewhere in there lies the answer. We were followed by a large body of natives, headed by Pemulwuy, a riotous and troublesome savage, who in a great rage threatened to spear the first man that dared to approach him, and actually did throw a spear at one of the soldiers. Last week the government sent 60 soldiers to kill all they could meet with. They seized a native boy, who had lived with a settler, and made him discover where his parents and relations concealed themselves.
They came upon them unarmed and unexpected, killed five and wounded many more. The dead they hang on gibbets. The people killed were unfortunately the most friendly of the blacks, and one of them more than once saved the life of a white man, Reverend Thomas Fish Prime.
The ideas of self-preservation and having farms here and all these things were very romantic in the mind of contemporary white people because they love hearing that kind of history. What they don't like is the Aboriginal perspective that says that Aboriginal people were protecting their land and they did it continually. An open war seemed about this time to have commenced between the natives and the settlers.
David Collins, Judge Advocate. 1802, Pimowys killed, head cut off. It's taken back to the colony, Sydney. There it's put in a jar, like a pickle jar, with alcohol. It's put on the next boat and it's taken back to England.
Taking heads to England and sending them across to other places in Europe was in fact the ultimate insult. It was not only insulting to the... People whose heads were removed, but it was insulting to their families and relatives who were left without having the capacity to carry out the ceremonies that they needed to satisfactorily complete the requirements of burial or cremation or whatever else was needed.
Taking his head, showing it in the streets, taking it back to England was... Not just a war trophy, but a sign that they had finally conquered the Aborigines. Pemulwuy's head arrives in London and is placed at the Royal College of Surgeons Museum.
It is soon lost amongst the thousands of specimens gathered from around the world. We need the power of him to put it to rest once and for all. After Pemulwuy's death, the British believe the war of resistance has ended.
But Pemulwuy is now a martyr and his influence spreads to others. We have to look at the ways in which Europeans acted. Did they make an effort to do what they were supposed to do? Is there any evidence that they were building a humanity, building a partnership?
And the answer to that is no. I think those first three years are a heartbreaking time because you see people of curiosity, goodwill, trying to comprehend each other. For a while, it looked like that something was possible here, which hadn't happened anywhere else, that something remarkable might have been achieved.
And that dawn closed catastrophically and quickly within a few years. Benalong arrives back in Sydney and immediately takes up residence in Government House, perhaps expecting a hero's welcome. On his first appearance, he conducted himself with a polished familiarity towards his sisters and other relations.
But to his acquaintance, he was distant and quite the man of consequence. David Collins, Judge Advocate. His own country, his own society is absolutely transformed and his own position in it has vanished. Because this is a period of very fast change and he can never reclaim that position of authority again.
Sir, hope all are well in England. I live at the governor's. I have not a wife. Another black man took her away. He speared me in the back.
You can watch him being drained of prestige. It's very painful to watch. Madame, I want stockings.
Thank you, Madame. Send me two pair stockings. Send me some shoes. To pay, please, sir. Benalong.
He takes to drink? In Fury, he stalks through the streets of Sydney naked with his spears, threatening to kill the governor. You know, it's a... He is a man driven to the limits of endurance by the disappointments and the confusions and the ambitions he has felt.
His whole society is on its last legs. Alcohol's taken hold. Aboriginal people have become fringe dwellers in Sydney town and despised and hated.
Eventually they were hunted away from the houses and were left living in the streets, drinking rum. Rum was used from the earliest times to lull the convicts into drunken stupidity and indeed it was in my opinion used as an enticement with Aboriginal people to addict them to the effects of alcohol and to gain some control over them. Benalong had become so fond of drink that when any officers invited him to their houses, he was eager to be intoxicated. And in that state was so savage and violent as to be capable of any mischief.
Governor John Sutter. Benalong eventually turns his back on Government House. Returning to his own people.
When Aboriginal people are actually materially, emotionally, physically, philosophically equal to whites, they're not interested in what the white fellows have got to offer. They're not interested and they reject it. For some time after his return, it is true, he assumed the manners, the dress and consequence of a European. But since his return to New South Wales, he has subsequently taken to the woods again, returned to his old habits, and now lives in the same manner as those who have never mixed with the civilised world.
David Minyan The Europeans of the colony will not forgive Bennelong for choosing his life over theirs. Bennelong died on Sunday morning at Kissing Point. Of this veteran champion of the native tribe, little favourable can be said. His voyage to and benevolent treatment in Great Brisbane produced no change whatever in his manners and inclinations, which were naturally barbarous and ferocious. In fact, he was a thorough savage.
But to the tribe Benelon was leading at the time of his death, he was a different man. I had a portrait of Bennelong which I showed his kindred which had been taken in England in my pocket at the time. I took it out and showed it to them.
When they looked upon his features, they were astonished and wept aloud. It is Bennelong, they cried. He was our brother and our friend, Reverend Lee.
A peacemaker and a leader, the first of his people to see the newcomer's world, Bennelong is largely forgotten. He dies, being regarded, he's given an epitaph of being an irreconcilable savage, and to see that light-footed man, that man of so much political skill and resilience, so reduced, is, I think, tragic. With Sydney conquered, the land grab moves west.
The only natural obstacle in their path is the Blue Mountains. Some convicts believe that just over the mountains lies China and many die trying to find a way over. It takes the settlers 25 years to find a way of crossing the Blue Mountains using an Aboriginal trade route. But it is not the mountains they are interested in, rather the endless pastures that lay beyond.
Well William Sutter, he was my great great great grandfather. When he came across the mountains he was only 17 years old so he would have been filled with ambition to try and you know make his mark. and to try and grow whatever they had for their family.
Being young in a new area, it must have been a very exciting time for him because he had all the energy to go ahead and do things. And it must have just been like you could just see the whole world out there or what he thought was a whole new world. As they move inland, the settlers are observed by the people who live here.
They stumble onto one of Australia's biggest tribes, the Wiradjuri. Windridine is a young warrior when the newcomers first arrive in his territory. They call him Saturday. He was a fairly fiery bloke too from what I understand because actually the first part of his name means fire. He was fairly calm trying to get on with the British.
When they first came there, he was a very, very family orientated sort of fellow, but also strong with his culture and things like that. I feel pretty, very proud, you know, that I'm descended back to him. William Sutter arrives in Windridineine's country in 1822 with his father George.
They are guided to land with good water by the Wiradjuri people. They call their station Brucedale. William is left in charge with instructions from his father to treat the local Wiradjuri with kindness and respect.
He takes the instructions to heart more than any other and he learns to speak the Wiradjuri language. They would have come to a place with absolutely nothing, no house, no fences or anything and probably not a lot of cleared land. So it's been in the family right from when it was an original land grant. The land grant is a And I'm the sixth generation on it now.
The country is opened up to anyone who can pay to settle there by the new governor, Sir Thomas Brisbane. But he does not find time to explain this to the Wiradjuri people. As governing goes, this is not a spectacular success.
So the idea then... in the minds of the British were that they could simply go over the mountains if they could do that and own everything out there. At the time, all the governors, you know, they gave land to the white settlers.
And, yeah, we just took it. It was as simple as that. Like, there wasn't any treaties signed to say, well, you know, like, there was recognition of prior ownership.
You had these people come across the mountains and just set up a town and declared it a town and then just started clearing the land and taking over everything. But, you know, the Wurundjeri people were left basically starving in their own land. The Wiradjuri watch as the land is cleared of trees.
Trees have special meaning for the Wiradjuri, who carve into their bark to mark graveyards and sacred initiation sites they call Bora grounds. It's just a tree to other people's language, to us it's part of our being. And this would have enraged the Wurundjeri people about that they were knocking down these sacred objects that were part of their belief system. These natives have some imperfect ideas of property and the right of possession.
They say all wild animals are theirs, the tame or cultivated ones are ours. Whatever springs spontaneously from the earth, or without labour, is theirs also. Things produced by art and labour are the white fellows, as they call us. George Sutter.
There was an incident that started a whole lot of the conflict in Bathurst, where there was a potato farmer at Kelso, where he was growing potatoes, and he had offered the Aboriginals some potatoes. And they tasted them, and they must have tasted really nice. because they came back later and they were actually digging them up. So they went in to help themselves with more and this fellow took offence to it. They went and shot most of Winderheim's family.
And so his anger just sort of come out of him and he rallied up his people to take these people on. He... Figured out, well we've got to fight these people a different way. Our... Our rules of engagement, our rules of sorting out disputes, are out the window now.
He decided that he'd actually go to war with the local farms and he was seeking revenge for what had happened. So Windridine Iron actually turned up at Brewstow where William was. Our hut was one day surrounded by a large party of blacks fully equipped for war, under the leadership of their great fierce chief and warrior, named by the whites, Saturday. There was no means of resisting. and so my father, then a lad of 18 years, met them fearlessly at the door.
He spoke to them in their own language in such a manner as not to let them suppose he anticipated any evil from them. They consulted in an undertone and departed as suddenly and noiselessly as they came. They never molested man or beast of my father's, William Sutter, Jr.
William met with him and spoke to him in the original language and saying that he had nothing to do with the killings. He probably would have said that he was appalled with what was going on and he didn't want anything to do with what the white people were doing. And so Windridineine probably would have accepted that and they disappeared that night and they were one of the few families that never ever got attacked.
Windridineine chooses his next target carefully. It is the home of Samuel Terry who has built his farm on Obora ground and is also rumoured to have fed the Wiradjuri poison. On the estate of Mr Terry William, three poor men have been destroyed by natives. When the hapless men were killed, the Sable murderers then proceeded to break up and destroy every article of convenience about the place. Windridine then continues on to another two stations, horribly killing yet more men, burning to the ground their huts and scattering and slaughtering their sheep.
In one month alone, 13 white stockmen are killed and many others are abandoning their properties in fear of the warudjuri. No one is safe in this climate of terror. The newcomers retaliate with grim results. One of the largest holders of sheep in the colony maintained at a public meeting at Bathurst that the best thing that could be done would be to shoot all the blacks and manure the ground with their carcasses, which was all the good they were fit for.
It was recommended likewise that the women and children should especially be shot as the most certain method of getting rid of the race. Shortly after this declaration, martial law was proclaimed. And sad was the havoc made upon the tribes at Bathurst. Large number were driven into a swamp, and mounted police rode round and round and shot them off indiscriminately, until they were all destroyed.
Forty-five heads were collected and boiled down for the sake of the skulls. Reverend Throgheld. The declaration of martial law means that the Wiradjuri are now facing the full force of British military expeditions and settler punitive parties against them.
Just imagine on a rural property half a dozen troopers, mountain horses come galloping in into the homestead and there's two Aboriginal women and five kids. Who they just catch sight of. What do they do?
But imagine the language. Imagine a few shots over their head. Imagine the raucous laughter as those women scurry, absolutely terror-stricken, down to the creek and disappear as fast as they possibly can, grabbing up the kids under each arm, running out, screaming, their heads off, thinking, oh Christ, they're going to come and kill us all now. A party went out in quest of the natives, but the only horde they fell in with comprised three women, and without questioning the propriety of such a step, immediately dispatched the poor unoffending creatures, notwithstanding they were females.
Five white storekeepers are charged with manslaughter for killing the women, but are found not guilty. After a couple of months of this full-on attack, Wiradjuri realised they can no longer sustain their resistance. In October and November, Wiradjuri leaders start coming into Bathurst and start asking for peace.
It is not Governor Brisbane who resolves this conflict. Windridine decides to make a peace to stop the bloodshed. It takes him 17 days to walk from Bathurst, across the Blue Mountains and into Parramatta, leading 130 warriors. To attend the annual native feast, the whites come out in force to see this fabled figure and they are impressed.
He is the finest looking native we have seen in this part of the country, which combined with a noble looking countenance and piercing eye, are calculated to impress the beholder towards a character who has been so much dreaded by the Bathurst settler. Saturday is, without doubt. The most manly black native we have ever beheld. A fact pretty generally acknowledged by the numbers that saw him. Windridine attends the native feast with the word peace stuck in his hat.
I am most happy to report to your lordship that Saturday, the great and most warlike chieftain, has been with me to receive his pardon, and that he with most of his tribe... attended the annual conference, Governor Brisbane. But he would have walked into Parramatta with his head held high and his warriors standing tall too behind him, sort of not showing any sort of signs of, you know, well, we're defeated, but, you know, we're still a proud people. And so he wouldn't have liked to have done it, but he would have had to have done it to save the rest of his people from around the Bathurst area. Windridineain lives out the rest of his days in Wiradjuri country.
He frequently visits and lives at Bruisedale. On his death, Windridineain is wrapped in his possum skin cloak and buried in his traditional land on the Sutter's property where he remains today. The country's got to recognise the hurt that our people went through and even some of their people went through, which is within their descendancy, who do not want to even recognise or even want to even talk about those things that happened to them or what their families were involved in.
So it's not a blame game thing I don't think anymore, it's just... Now we need to heal and then move on. 200 years on, the first Australians, and those that came after them, are still working out issues over land and how to live together.
George Sutter writes his final recollection. of his friend they had called Saturday. I was much amused the other day, a fine winter's day, to see Saturday and his tribe and friends seated on the ground in groups of men and women, and seeming to be enjoying their singing and making joyful noises for hours. I give my opinion.
The cause of the disturbances between us and the Aborigines is the cruel conduct of some of our people. The natives are really fond of the white people. I have always been friendly to them.
We have never suffered the smallest injury from them. George Sutter. I think there's a friendship which was very, very important.
And that's what saved William. Otherwise, you know, we might not be here today. The Oh