p. 90 Burke’s prosecution of Hastings was not the anti-imperial stance that some later took it to be. Burke was an advocate of empire his whole life. The loss of Britain’s 13 American colonies in the previous decade had appalled him; he believed they had been lost due to poor management. When Burke heard of similar forms of minmanagement in British India, he leaped to curtail them, insisting that Hastings and “sulliedS and “dishonoured” Britain’s name… Bennelong and Yemmerrawanne attended Hastings’ trail at a particularly interestiung stage. Just one week earlier, on 9 April 1794, Lord Cornwallis, Hasting’s successor in India, had refuted in his testimony all of Burke’s charges, not only defending Hastings but also announcing that Britain’s name was now beloved by Indians. Burke’s case never really recovered. The House of Lords at length aquitted Hastings in favour of Prime Minister William Pitt’s ruling faction.
Although Hunter was now formally responsible for the Wangal visitors, Phillip seems to have been the driver behind their attendance at the trial. Phillip probably sided with the government’s defence of Hastings; as we’ve seen, he showed deep loyalty to Pitt’s increasingly reactionary government Benelong and Temmerrawanne could have visited the trial at any point during the previous year but only now it was turning in Pitt’s favour did they do so. As earlier events will show, Phillip was keen to demonstrate to the Indigenous guests the operation of British power at its most decisive, irrestitible and legally rationalised
p. 104-6 The most remarkable outing for Bennelong and Yemmerrawanne in October was to the Parkinson Museum in London’s Blackfriars rotunda. … Phillip probably accompanied them, knowing that Banks had deposited in the museum some of the things he’d been sending back from NSW. He may have been anxious to see eaxactly which things they were…. a teenaged medical student called Robert Jameson who happened to be visiting at the same time… He noted in his diary”… They seemed to affect a kind of cheerfulness which was far from being real. Was it the taxidermy that worried Bennelong? He had seen British officers pack off the skins of local fauna to Berewal for years,but only in slated form, not engorged with cotton and wire… Possibly it was the black club that disturned. The Yiyura believed that some objjects were imbued with special powers and could only beond to and be seen by certain people… There is a third reason… The eventual catalogue of sale indicated that the collection also contained human remains. IT listed six human foetuses, two human hands, two human skulls, an arm, a tonghue and an ear. Given the Yiyura’s known aversion to the uncovered dead body, these items alone would have turned the visitors’ stomachs. If Bennelong and Temmerrawanne suspected that these remains came from their own people, they would have felt more than wretched. .. Researcher Matthew Fishburn has recently argued that Phillip brough at least 3 Aboriginal skulls to Britain on his voyage home… in August 1793, just before this visit to the museum, Banks wrote to two of his peers in Europe that he was relived at long last to send to each of them a “Cranium of a male native of New Holand”… Fishburn is concinved that a third skulls went to the London-based anatomist John Hunter … were there more skulls… if so, they would also have gone to Banks, that powerful adviser to government … In turn, he may have deposited them in the Parkinson Museum for the public’s so-called edification.”.. the British practice of collecting human heads was not, even at the time, uncontroversial. Banks and Parkinson were on one end of an ethical spectrum; both had heard contemporaries tell them directly that the practice was in fact “the greatest of crimes”.
p. 109 “In September 1793 when Bennelong and Yemmerrawanne took the initiative to perform a song at the Mayfair residence. The only evidence we have of this recital is a single sheet of music recording the notes and words of the men’s song. They were written down by the Welsh folklorist Edward Jones… also a musician in the royal household.”
p. 112 “Phillip… was a diligent student of Britain’s history of interaction with Indigenous people and knew that since the 1600s colonial officials had been bringing Indigenous envoys from elsewhere to Briatin … the aim was to forge formal alliances with peoples who might otherwise side with Britain’s imperial competitors, such as France … suggests he thought Bennelong might serve one day, too, as a negotiator for a treaty. The question was by no means resolved for Phillip in 1793, depite many then and later thinking that it was. Philip knew from Britain’s prior experiences that treaties had to be offered to peoples who showed signs of land cultivation, or of permanent construction, or fo sustained social reason… Phillip hadn’t yet figures out that in the absence of European competition for New South Wales, those same bosses would now never be challenged on the issue.”
p. 116 Bennelong never did meet King George III. Without strong backing from the Home Affairs Office that administered the colonies, Phillip failed to secure the meeting he’d always assumed would happen.. This failure may have felt minor at the time, especially for a governor who was clearly mobing on from his colonial experience… encapsulated a momentous shift in British imperial policy … without direct threats from fellow Europeans – and also with a fresh determination to regaim all that had been lost in the American Revolution – it could set a new legal precedent regarding prior occupants of the lands it desired.”
p. 142-3 The Yiyura’s mostly intermixed world meant that all the connections Bennelong forced with the British in these years were enacted with or at least beside Indigenous women. Conversely, Britain’s custom of deparate gender sphere meant that when Phillip attempted to engage with the Yiyura he was surrounded almost entirely by men. True, there were fewer women in Phillip’s colony than men – averaging overall around 20% – but none of them exercised much power compared to men, so featured even less than might be expected… Bennelong’s wife Barangaroo died- “David Collins observed many of the events related to her death as Bennelong’s invited guest .. Bennelong had decided not to bury his wife, as was the common custom, but instead to cremate her – an honour someimtes awarded to more senior people. He invited Phillip and the surgeon John White, as well as Collins, to witness the occasion. … The next day , the same three prominent colonists were brought back to the pyre to watch Bennelong rake Barangaroo’s ashes together. Bennelong clearly wanted them to learn something about the Yiyura through this ritual, perhaps compassion. And Collins, for one, was indeed moved by the cermony, describing how Bennelong “proeced us in a sort of solemn silence, speaking to no one until he had paid Ba-rang-a-roo the last duties of a husband”… The most pressing problem for Bennelong now was how to manage his baby girl, Dilboong. The infent was still nursing. Bennelong raised the problem directly with Phillip, suggesting that he find a wetnurse for her among the convict women. No doubt bennelong could have found one among the Yiyura, which makes his act of reaching across the racial barrier significant…. We don’t know if Phillip secured… What we know more conclusively is that Phillip agreed to be the Yiyura equivalent of a British godfather to Dilboong… Bennelong attempted to cement even further the non-violent connections between peoples at the harbour. But before year’s end, Dilboon… was dead.”(1791)
p/. 157 “Phillip’s spearing in September 1790 … commentators on Bennelong … entertain the idea that rather than a random act, the spearing was the outcome of a plan by Bennelong himself. They suggest that he orchestrated it as an elaborate paycak, either for his own brutal kidnapping by Phillip in 1789 or for general incursions into Yiyura life over the three years prior. They go on to argue that this attack was why the detente could then proceed, because the slate had been wiped clean for Phillip and Bennelong.”
p. 163 – arrival of second fleet”Phillip … felt compelled to explain to the new Home Affairs Minister William Grenville that this was what happened when state-run empires contracted out their tasks to unscrupulous companies … “it was occasioned by the contractors having crowded too many on board those ships, and from their being too confined during the passage.”
p. 212 Phillip spied in pre-revolutionary France on two separate occasions. In 1786 he was paid £160 to travel to the Med town of Hyeres, close to the naval port of Toulon. This wsa a follow-up mission. A year earlier, he’d been paid £150 to travel directly to Toulon to investigate the state of French maritime rearnmament. Both times he was an employee of Evan Nepean, the under-secretary to Lord Sydney at Home Affairs.”
p. 218 Captain Cook’s Arrival “there is evidence that the observing Gweagal understood the vessel to be at least modelled on their own kind of watercraft, just in outsized proportions. As current knowledge-holder Uncle Shayne Williams discusses, the local population fomr all the way south in Dharawal Country sent smoke signals and used message sticks to convey news of the boatt’s passage; they were warning of strange people in strange vessels; they were not panicking about inexplicable spirits in fantastical creatures …. a long and powerful tradition in Western history-writing which assumed that all Indigenous people understood encounters through mythology… What Bennelong the child may instead have heard in the various tellings of Cook’s landing in 1770 was the following: On the last day, the massive nuwi sailed off up the coast, taking its 80-odd men with it. The Yiyura who watched it depart probably felt less a sense of peril or impending change and more an uneasiness about rituals undone or conventions flouted. No formal welcome had been acknowledged; so no meaningful engagement had occurrred. Materially, they had gained a swag of trinkers which did not appear to have any perceivable use… What angered the Gweagal, though, was the crew’s giant haul of fish and rays.”
p. 228 “Most of the women’s childcare responsibilities went unnoticed by the British. All did, however, remark on the women’s guiadnace of the practice that initiated female babies into girlhood. This involved tying a kangaroo sinew around the bottom joint of the baby’s lefthand little finger. After a few days of interrupted blood ciorculation, the digit shrivelled and fell off. To a man, the colonists were aghast at this procedure and most never came to any understanding of why it was gone… But all societies enact rituals to mark growth and belonging. In the colonists’ society these included circumcision, corset-drawingk trouser-lengthening and beard-trimming.”
p/ Given Phillip’s later certainty that his family coat-of-arms was the tri-camel crest of Claude-Ambrouse Philippe, Jacon could convincingly have been a descendant of Hugenot refugees wgho had once fled Catholic France to a German-speaking town and then fled again to an even staunched Protestant state. Britain experienced a particularly large influx of Germanic Protestant refugees in 1709. The British government, keen to poppulate its new territories in North America, had advertised its commitment to settling any loyal Protestant in the New World. All the same, it was not prepared for the 13,000 or so refugees who consequently flooded into London. British officials managed to send only half that number to their colonial sites; the rest stayed in London.”
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