‘Wanton With Plenty’ Questioning Ethno-historical Constructions of Sexual Savagery in Aboriginal Societies, 1788–1803

Abstract

Louis Nowra's recently published Bad Dreaming: Aboriginal Men's Violence Against Women and Children (2007) includes an ethno-historical study of gender relations in Aboriginal ‘traditional’ society, drawing on early explorers’ observations and anthropological accounts. Inga Clendinnen likewise included a chapter on Aboriginal sexual politics in Dancing with Strangers (2003). This paper critiques their conclusions and methods, and closely analyses the same terrain—late eighteenth-century European representations of Aboriginal sexual relations. My aim is not to deny that there were instances of violence in the sexual conduct of eighteenth-century Aboriginal societies. Instead, this paper demonstrates that Nowra and Clendinnen's ethno-histories fail to present a holistic account of the myriad descriptions of Indigenous gender dynamics that permeate the European explorers’ accounts.

Notes

¹Watkin Tench, 1788: Comprising ‘A Narrative of the Expedition to Botany Bay’ and ‘A Complete Account of the Settlement at Port Jackson’, ed. Tim Flannery (Melbourne: Text Publishing, 1996 [1789 & 1793]), 261.

²William C. Sturtevant, ‘Anthropology, History, and Ethnohistory’, Ethnohistory 13, no. 1–2 (Winter–Spring, 1966): 7.

³Sturtevant, 1–51, Kenneth C. Wylie, ‘The Uses and Misuses of Ethnohistory’, Journal of Interdisciplinary History 3, no. 4 (Spring 1973): 707–20, Shepard Krech III, ‘The State of Ethnohistory’, Annual Review of Anthropology 20 (1991): 345–47, and Eric Hirsch and Charles Stewart, ‘Introduction: Ethnographies of Historicity’, History of Anthropology 16, no. 3 (September 2005): 267–69.

⁴The exceptions to this are the Melbourne School ethnohistorians such as Rhys Isaac, Greg Dening and Clendinnen in earlier works, who examine ‘clashing or changing worldviews’ in culturecontact encounters external to Australia. Kasakoff, Alice Bee (1999) ‘Is There a Place for Anthropology in Social Science History?’, Social Science History 23, 4: 540.

⁵Krech, ‘State of Ethnohistory’, 346–47, 364.

⁶Edward Said, Orientalism: Western Conceptions of the Orient (London: Penguin Books, 1978), 3.

⁷Tzvetan Todorov, The Conquest of America: The Question of the Other, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Harper and Row Publishers, 1984) and Stephen Greenblatt, Marvellous Possessions: The Wonders of the New World (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991).

⁸Greenblatt, 4–8.

⁹Ann McGrath, ‘“Modern Stone-Age Slavery”: Images of Aboriginal Labour and Sexuality’, Labour History 69 (1995): 35–36.

¹⁰Ann McGrath, ‘“The White Man's Looking Glass”: Aboriginal-Colonial Gender Relations at Port Jackson’, Australian Historical Studies 24, no. 99 (October 1990): 186–206.

¹¹Louis Nowra, Bad Dreaming: Aboriginal Men's Violence Against Women and Children (North Melbourne: Pluto Press, 2007) and Inga Clendinnen, Dancing with Strangers (Melbourne: Text Publishing, 2003).

¹²Inga Clendinnen, ‘The History Question: Who Owns the Past?’, Quarterly Essay 23 (2006).

¹³Nowra, back cover.

¹⁴Diane Bell and Topsy Napurrula Nelson, ‘Speaking About Rape is Everyone's Business’, Women's Studies International Forum 12, no. 4 (1989): 403–16. A group of Aboriginal academics refuted Bell and Nelson's claims in a letter, arguing that Bell, as a non-Indigenous woman, had no right to speak on the matter, and that Aboriginal women were more subject to racial abuse than sexual abuse. J. Huggins, J. Willmot, I. Tarrago, K. Wiletts, L. Bond, L. Holt, E. Bourke, M. Bin-Sallik, P. Fowell, J. Schmider, V. Craigie, and L. McBride-Levi, ‘Letter to the Editor’, Women's Studies International Forum 14, no. 5 (1990): 506–07. For an overview of the Bell-Huggins debate, as it has become known, see Anna Yeatman, ‘Voice and Representation in the Politics of Difference’, in Feminism and the Politics of Difference, eds S. Gunew and A. Yeatman (Sydney: Allen and Unwin, 1993), 228–45, and Aileen Moreton-Robinson, Talkin’ Up to the White Woman: Indigenous Women and Feminism (St Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 2000), 72–93.

¹⁵A number of Aboriginal academics have examined the high rate of violent incidents in Aboriginal communities and called for government action. See, for example, Boni Robertson, The Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Women's Task Force on Violence (Brisbane: The State of Queensland, 1999), and Judy Atkinson, Trauma Trails: Recreating Song Lines: The Transgenerational Effects of Trauma in Indigenous Australia (North Melbourne: Spinifex, 2002).

¹⁶Nowra, 8.

¹⁷Sarah Hopkins, ‘A Garbled Wake-up Call’, Spectrum (Sydney Morning Herald, 6 April 2007): 37, Larissa Behrendt and Nicole Watson, ‘Good Intentions are Not Enough’, Australian Literary Review, The Australian, 2 May 2007: 5, Kylie Cripps, ‘Bad Dreaming Needs Balance’, University of Melbourne Voice 1, no. 5 (14–25 May 2007), and Jo Chandler, ‘Not Just a Black Problem’, The Age, 17 March 2007: 4.

¹⁸Chandler, 4.

¹⁹John Hirst, ‘The Great Taboo’, Australian Book Review 292 (May 2007), Bennelong Society Inc., ‘Bennelong Medal Presentation for 2007 to Louis Nowra on 31 August 2007 at Victoria Hotel, Melbourne’, The Bennelong Society, http://www.bennelong.com.au/conferences/conference2007/Reevesmedal2007.php (accessed 3 September 2007).

²²Nowra, 23.

²⁰Nowra, 23.

²¹Bernard Smith, European Visions and the South Pacific 1768–1850: A Study in the History of Art and Ideas (London, Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1960).

²³Nowra, 24.

²⁷Coleman, 202–03.

²⁴Ann McGrath, ‘The Rhythm of Strangers’, The Age, 1 November 2003, Ani Fox, ‘Review: Dancing with Strangers’, Journal of World History 17, no. 4 (December 2006): 456–58, and Alan Atkinson, ‘The Charmed Circle: Review of Dancing with Strangers by Inga Clendinnen’, Australian Book Review 256 (9–10 November 2003): 9–10.

²⁵Alan Atkinson, 10, and Deirdre Coleman, ‘Inscrutable History or Incurable Romanticism? Inga Clendinnen's Dancing with Strangers’, Heat 8 (2004): 208.

²⁶Fox, 458, and Phillip Morrissey, ‘Dancing with Shadows: Erasing Aboriginal Self and Sovereignty’ in Sovereign Subjects: Indigenous Sovereignty Matters, ed. Aileen Moreton-Robinson (Crows Nest: Allen and Unwin, 2007), 69–70.

²⁸Coleman, 212.

²⁹Clendinnen, Dancing with Strangers, 163.

³⁰Inga Clendinnen, Aztecs: An Interpretation, (New York and London: Cambridge University Press, 1991).

³¹Clendinnen, Dancing with Strangers, 167.

³²Clendinnen, ‘The History Question’, 25.

³³Jennifer M. Spear, ‘“They Need Wives”: Métissage and the Regulation of Sexuality in French Louisiana, 1699–1730’, in Sex, Love, Race: Crossing Boundaries in North American History, ed. Martha Hodes (New York and London: New York University Press, 1999), 35.

³⁴Carol Blum, Strength in Numbers: Population, Reproduction, and Power in Eighteenth-Century France (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 2002), 119–20, and Jean Jacques Rousseau, Discourse on the Origin of Inequality, trans. Donald A. Cress (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, 1992 [1775]), 40.

³⁵Rousseau, 40.

³⁶Jean-François Melon, Mahmoud le Gasnévide (1730), 91, cited in Blum, 88.

³⁷Gail Bederman, Manliness and Civilization: A Cultural History of Gender and Race in the United States (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 25; Katherine George, ‘The Civilised West Looks at Primitive Africa 1400–1800: A Study in Ethnocentrism’, Isis 49 (1958): 64; and Gustav Jahoda, Images of Savages: Ancient Roots of Modern Prejudice in Western Culture (London and New York: Routledge, 1999), 30–31.

³⁸Henry Home, Lord Kames, Sketches of the History of Man, 4 vols (Edinburgh, 1788), vol. 2, 22, cited in Pat Maloney, ‘Savages in the Scottish Enlightenment's History of Desire’, Journal of the History of Sexuality 14, no. 3 (2005): 242.

³⁹Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality: Volume 1: An Introduction, trans. Robert Hurley (London: Penguin Books, 1978), 26.

⁴⁰Maloney, 237–65.

⁴¹William Robertson, History of America (Bristol, 1996 [1792]), vol. 2, 65, cited in Maloney, 249, and Kames, vol. 2, 41, 51, and 77, cited in Maloney, 249.

⁴²Anon, The Modern Part of the Universal History, 44 vols, T. Osborne etc, 1760, Vol. 5, 658–59, cited in Anne McClintock, Imperial Leather: Race, Gender and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest (New York and London: Routledge, 1995), 22.

⁴³John Millar, An Historical View of the English Government, from the Settlement of the Saxons in Britain to the Revolution in 1688 (Bristol, 1997 [1803]), vol. 4, 218, cited in Maloney, 250.

⁴⁴Louis-Antoine de Bougainville, A Voyage Round the World Performed by Order of His Most Christian Majesty, trans. Johann Reinhold Forster (London, 1772), 257, cited in Maloney, 263.

⁴⁵Christopher B. Balme, ‘Sexual Spectacles: Theatricality and the Performance of Sex in Early Encounters in the Pacific’, The Drama Review 44, no. 4 (2000): 71–72.

⁴⁶David Collins, An Account of the English Colony in New South Wales, ed. Brian Fletcher (Sydney: A.H & A.W. Reed in association with the Royal Australian Historical Society, 1975), 463.

⁴⁷Foucault, 28.

⁴⁸François Péron, ‘Conférence adressée à “Messieurs les professeurs”, décrivant les aborigènes et leurs moeurs près de Port Jackson’, No 09032, Dossier 9: Expédition aux Terres Australes Notes du Voyage, Côtes Est et Sud de la Nouvelle Hollande (auteurs divers), No. 09032, transcr. Jacqueline Bonnemains (Le Havre: Collection Lesueur, Muséum d'Histoire Naturelle du Harve, n.d.) Feuille A, recto.

⁴⁹Sebastien Le Roy engraving after Petit, Nouvelle Hollande, Port Jackson: Cérémonie preliminaire d'un marriage chez les sauvages, in Louis Claude Desaulses de Freycinet, Voyage Autour du Monde: Entrepris par Ordre du Roi … Exécuté Sur les Corvettes de S.M. l'Uranie et la Physicienne, Pendant les Années 1817, 1818, 1819 et 1820 (Paris: Chez Pillet Aîné, Imprimeur-Libraire, 1824–39).

⁵⁰John F. McLennan, Primitive Marriage (Edinburgh: A and C Black, 1865), Illustrated History of Australia (Sydney: Hamlyn, 1974), Nancy M. Williams and Lesley Jolly, ‘“From Time Immemorial?”: Gender Relations in Aboriginal Societies Before “White Contact”’, in Gender Relations in Australia: Domination and Negotiation, eds Kay Saunders and Raymond Evans (Marrickville: Harcourt Brace, 1992), 9–19, and Nowra, 13.

⁵¹Pierre Bernard Milius, Recit du Voyage aux Terres Australes par Pierre Bernard Milius, Second su le Naturaliste dans l'expedition Baudi n (1800–1804), eds Jacqueline Bonnemains and Pascale Hauguel (Le Havre: Société havraise d’études diverses, Muséum d'histoire naturelle du Havre, 1987), 48.

⁵²Collins, 463.

⁵³Collins, 463.

⁵⁴Collins, 464.

⁵⁵Collins, 492–93.

⁵⁶Clendinnen, Dancing with Strangers, 160.

⁵⁷Clendinnen, ‘The History Question’, 22.

⁵⁸Clendinnen, Dancing with Strangers, 160.

⁵⁹Clendinnen, Dancing with Strangers, 163.

⁶⁰Tench, 118.

⁶¹Clendinnen, Dancing with Strangers, 159.

⁶²Nowra, 10.

⁶⁴Inga Clendinnen, ‘Spearing the Governor’, ‘Challenging Histories: Reflections on Australian History (Special Issue), Australian Historical Studies, vol. 33, no. 118 (2002): 159.

⁶³Clendinnen, ‘The History Question’, 18 and 27.

⁶⁵Arthur Phillip, ‘Phillip's Journal’, in John Hunter, An Historical Journal of Events at Sydney and at Sea, 1787–1792, by Captain John Hunter, Commander H.M.S. Sirius, with Further Accounts by Governor Arthur Phillip, Lieutenant P.G. King, and Lieutenant H.L. Ball, ed. John Bach (Sydney: Angus and Robertson, 1968 [1793]), 324, and Phillip Gidley King, ‘Lieutenant King's Journal’, in Hunter, 275–76.

⁶⁶She explores the common trope of the Aboriginal men bullying the women, but points out that there are also accounts of the women bullying the men, but that these are ignored. McGrath, ‘Modern’, 35.

⁶⁷Tench, 262.

⁶⁸McGrath observes similar qualities in her critique of the convict George Barrington's description of Aboriginal courtship, which is remarkably reminiscent of Collins’ aforementioned account, and states that the ‘author knows what savages are like, and so does the reader, and this merely confirms what they already believe. Other stories of brutal courtship and marriage had repetitive elements and lacked detail regarding time, place and characters’. McGrath, ‘Modern’, 35.

⁶⁹Kames, 2:12–13, cited in Maloney, 256.

⁷⁰Tench, 263.

⁷¹Tench, 264.

⁷²François Péron, Voyage de découverte aux terre Australes, exécuté par ordre de Sa Majesté l'Empereur et Roi, sur les corvettes le Géographe, le Naturaliste, et la goelette le Casuarina, pendant les années 1800, 1801, 1802, 1803, et 1804, in The Baudin Expedition and the Tasmanian Aborigines, 1802, trans and ed. N.J.B. Plomley (Hobart: Blubberhead Press, 1983), 84.

⁷³François Péron, Voyage de découverte aux terre Australes, exécuté par ordre de Sa Majesté l'Empereur et Roi, sur les corvettes le Géographe, le Naturaliste, et la goelette le Casuarina, pendant les années 1800, 1801, 1802, 1803, et 1804, in The Baudin Expedition and the Tasmanian Aborigines, 1802, trans and ed. N.J.B. Plomley (Hobart: Blubberhead Press, 1983), 84–85. See also Maloney, 249–50.

⁷⁴Nicolas-Martin Petit, ‘Scene Showing Aborigines Copulating’, pencil and ink, 18 x 16 cm (Le Havre: Muséum d'Histoire Naturelle) N^o 16055, repr. in Baudin in Australian Waters: The Artwork of the French Voyage of Discovery to the Southern Lands 1800–1804, eds J. Bonnemains, E. Forsyth and B. Smith (Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1988), 98. See Shino Konishi, ‘Depicting Sexuality: A Case Study of the Baudin Expedition's Aboriginal Ethnography’, Australian Journal of French Studies XLI, no. 2, (May–August 2004): 108–11.

⁷⁵Said, Orientalism, Greenblatt, Marvellous Possessions, Gananath Obeyesekere, The Apotheosis of Captain Cook: European Mythmaking in the Pacific, 2nd ed. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997 [1992]), and Anne Salmond, Trial of the Cannibal Dog: The Remarkable Story of Captain Cook's Encounters in the South Seas (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2003).