First Contact Part 3 - Trade & Women
Once the initial shock and novelty of ‘First Contact’ had subsided, the Aboriginal tribes and Colonial explorers and settlers then began that most important aspect of mankind’s, cultural evolution - Trade and the exchange of goods and services. Tobacco, sugar, flour, steel-axes and clothing were exchanged for women, local knowledge, labour and access to the land.
To set the scene as to how this trade may have looked, between the stone-age Aboriginal people and the ‘modern’ explorers, settlers and, in Australia’s case as well, the sealers of Bass Strait, at the time of ‘First Contact’ in colonial Australia, we have put together a film clip.
The film footage is from the 1930’s (coupled with some 1980’s commentary and interviews) which shows trading encounters, a short time after ‘First Contact’, between isolated tribes in the Highlands of New Guinea and three, ‘white’ Australian gold prospectors, who are travelling with a party of some 90 New Guinean porters.
We believe that this film clip is an excellent proxy for how Aboriginal tribes (with the Highland tribes as proxies) may have undertaken trade in their women with the European explorers, settlers and sealers (using the three Australians as proxies) during the period of ‘First Contact’ in Colonial Australia.
As indicated in the film clip, new foreign goods had a powerful attraction to Indigenous peoples who were being exposed to them for the very first time, and the case in colonial Australia was no different.
“…Aborigines told the anthropologist W.E.H. Stanner that their, ‘appetites for tobacco and to a lesser extent for tea became so intense that nether man nor woman could bear to be without’ and as a result, ’individuals, families and parties of friends simply went away to places where the avidly desired things could be obtained’ - Partington, G., Making Sense of History, Xlibris LLC, 2013, P83.
Henry Reynolds agreed,
‘European goods like steel axes and knives; pieces of iron, tins, cloth and glass were all eagerly sought and used by the Aboriginal tribes even before contact had been made with settlers…Western food, tobacco and alcohol also exerted a tremendous attraction.” - quoted in, Partington, G., Making Sense of History, Xlibris LLC, 2013, P83.
The willingness, indeed the eagerness, shown by the New Guinean men to trade their wive’s sexual favours with the Australian prospectors in exchange for goods, such as the highly esteemed and desired shells, is a repeat of what was also recorded in the history of the settlement of Australia.
The historian, Henry Reynolds provides many such examples, of Aboriginal men trading in the sexual favours of their women, in his book, The Other Side of the Frontier, Penguin Books, 1995 ed.
Henry Reynolds, an Australian historian specializing in the frontier conflict between European settlers in Australia and indigenous Australians.
Professor Reynolds writes,
‘Many Aboriginal groups discovered that prostitution provided a more certain return than…hunting and gathering. In some places a large and lucrative trade developed and especially around the northern coasts where prostitution became one of the essential service industries supporting the pearling fleets…
…The trading with young girls is very profitable to the natives…as for one nights debauchery from ten shillings to two pounds ten is paid in rations and clothing…
Money and food earned by the women was shared in the fringe camps allowing most of the men to avoid the need to labour for the Europeans [and] to make a living in ease and idleness.’ - ibid. p146.
‘..[I]ndigenous entrepreneurs…Waimara and James were the ‘bosses’ who organised labour for the luggers and women for the crews.’ -ibid. p146-147.
‘…Aboriginal women may have gone to European men willingly and actually sought them out …to gain access to the many attractive possessions of the Europeans.’ - ibid. p133.
Lyndall Ryan, an Australian academic and historian of relations between Tasmanian Aborigines and white settlers in Tasmania.
Mannalargenna - an Aboriginal Slaver? - see here
Leading academic on Aboriginal, Australian and Feminist history, Professor Lyndall Ryan, describes in her book, The Aboriginal Tasmanians, the “First Contact” between sealers and the local Aboriginal peoples on the North coast of Tasmania.
Professor Ryan writes of the sealers, who came from Sydney, the United States and Britain from 1804 onwards.
…“[their] visits coincided with the Aborigines’ summer pilgrimage to the coast for mutton birds, seals, and birds and their eggs. Most Aboriginal groups were at first cautious of these visitors, but it was not long before they were willing to exchange seal and kangaroo skins for tobacco, flour, and tea.
This contact intensified when the Aborigines offered women in an attempt to incorporate the visitors into their own society. When the sealers reciprocated by offering dogs, the means were provided for mutually advantageous interaction…
By 1810 the North East [Aboriginal] people had begun to gather each November at strategic points along the north-east coast…in anticipation of the dealers’ arrival. After their appearance, usually in a whaleboat containing four to six men, a dance would be held, a conference would take place, and an arrangement would be made for a number of women to accompany the sealers for the season. Some women came from the host band, while others were abducted from other bands and sold to the dealers for dogs, muttonbirds, and flour...
Once the economic value of Aboriginal women in catching seals was exploited by the sealers, the economy and society of the North East people changed. They now remained on the coast for the whole summer instead of moving inland to hunt kangaroos. In winter they [the Aboriginal people] went in search of other bands and tribes along the coast to abduct their women.
The power and influence of individual leaders like Mannalargenna…also increased. He led many raids for women on other bands, negotiated with sealers, and quickly saw the value of European dogs to the Aboriginal economy and gift exchange system.” - Lyndall Ryan, The Aboriginal Tasmanians (UQP, 1982 reprint, p69 – 71).
To get a feel (a very gut-wrenching one at that) of how a young Aboriginal girl may have felt, when she was traded by her family with a rough American sealer in exchange for a dog and some flour, we have found a film clip of a child-bride in an African village being sent, against her will, to her new husband’s family in, as Professor Ryan might say, “an attempt to incorporate the husband’s family into their own family.”
Quite coincidently, this African tribe also has the custom of smearing their bodies all over with grease and ochre as did the Tasmanian Aborigines.
This Aboriginal trade in their women was also noted in many other colonial accounts. For example, the Tasmanian government appointed conciliator, George Augustus Robinson, believed that the ‘slave-trade’ conducted by the Aboriginal men described by Professor Ryan constituted, “the African Slave trade in miniature”. (Robinson, G.A., (Ed Plomley), Friendly Mission, 2008, 2nd Ed, p91).
Benjamin Duterrau's 1840 work, titled The Conciliation, depicts George Augustus Robinson at the centre of a group of Tasmanian Aboriginal people.(Supplied: NGA/Collection: Tasmanian Museum And Art Gallery)
One Aboriginal woman Mary, informs Robinson that she,
‘…was bought off the black men for a bag of flour and potatoes; that they took her away by force, tied her hands and feet, and put her in the boat;’ - ibid. p91
And another,
‘Fanny, who speaks English well and knows not a word of the aboriginal tongue, said…that…women…were coercively taken away by a man named Baker, a man of colour…” - ibid. p91
Robinson also meets an Aboriginal woman called Jumbo from a tribe that,
“…took black women from the natives at Port Dalrymple and sold them to sealers for dogs, mutton birds, flour etc.” - ibid. p289.
The travelling Quaker, James Backhouse also reported a,
“…case on the west coast where local Aborigines traded a fourteen-year-old girl to the pilot at Macquarie harbour in exchange for a dog” - Windschuttle, K., The Fabrication of Aboriginal History, Vol 1, Van Diemen’s Land, Macleay Press, 2002, p383.
Tarenorerer, also known as Walyer
Tarenorerer, also known as Walyer, was born in 1800 near Emu Bay in Van Diemen’s Land, and was from the Tommeginne tribe. As a teenager, she was taken captive by Aboriginal slavers of the Port Sorell region and sold as a slave to the sealers on the North coast - Australian Dictionary of Biography.
Historian Josephine Flood, adds that she may gone willing to join the sealers after having,
‘“…as a girl ,her back broken by an Aboriginal man who was trying to kill her with a club. To escape his threats, she later joined sealers in Bass Strait.”
- Flood, J., The Original Australians, 2019, p91-92
However, not surprisingly perhaps, many of the Aboriginal women preferred to live with the sealers rather than their own Aboriginal husbands. Indeed, H. Ling Roth quotes two authors who,
“…had several opportunities of learning from the females [Tasmanian Aboriginal women], that their husbands act towards them with considerable harshness and tyranny. These women are known sometimes to run away from that state of bondage and oppression to which they say their husbands subject them. In these cases they will attach themselves to the English sailors…
They give their European protectors to understand that their own husbands make them carry all their lumber, force them out to hunt and then preform all manner of work; and that they find their situations greatly improved by attaching themselves to the sealing gangs.” - Ling Roth, H. The Aborigines of Tasmania, Halifax, 1899 ed. p 114-115.
As for those Tasmanian Aboriginal women who weren’t being traded with the sealers by their husbands or fathers, they could generally only look forward to a life of domestic drudgery, where
“Hard labour is the matrimonial inheritance of the poor gin [woman]. In travelling, the task of carrying her infant, the food, and all the worldly goods and chattels of the family, devolved on the wretched woman : whilst her lord, with head erect, unburdened except with the spear, the shield and the waddie, walked proudly in advance of his frail tottering slave.’” - Lloyd, G. T., Thirty-three Years in Tasmania and Victoria, 1862, 2019 facsimile p44).
“[The men] did not allow their wives to participate in the sport [of hunting]. They acted only as drudges to carry their spears and game; but the fishing (for shellfish only…) was resigned wholly to them. The men considered it beneath them and left it, and all other troublesome services, to them, who in nine cases out of ten, were no better than slaves.” - Calder J.A.I quoted in Ling Roth, H., The Aborigines of Tasmania, Halifax, 1899, p114
To our modern eyes, the following photographs look somewhat confronting and exploitative. But maybe that’s just the way the world was in those days and, in our modern delicateness, we may be judging both sides of the trade too harshly. Just maybe, both parties were expressing their agency in the way they saw fit and both were willing, trading parties.
The women traded their labour, and possibly sexual services, in exchange for food, clothing, shelter and access to a wider, modern world for themselves and their children, that was considerably easier and safer compared to the vagaries of a hunter-gatherer lifestyle, and the harsh treatment that they might experience from their Aboriginal men.
So who are we, a century or more later, to pass judgement and lay blame, or feel guilt, shame or anger on behalf of another?
A settler and ‘his’ Aboriginal women.
Explorers and ‘their’ Aboriginal women.
ps: A comment on our main photograph on this blog-post:
An Aboriginal woman backs away from a white man holding a gun on Bentinck Island, Queensland, in 1901. Picture from the book ‘North Of Capricorn — The Untold Story of Australia’s North’ by Henry Reynolds. Source:News Corp Australia
Our cover image for this blog-post, is a photograph taken in 1901 on Bentinck Island in the Gulf of Carpentaria. It shows a Kaiadilt woman hesitantly approaching (or cowering? or backing away? or ready to flee? - take your pick!), a ‘white’ man with a hidden gun by his side.
The image is used in a number of internet articles (in a very ‘doctored’ form, as shown here) and even books by Henry Reynolds (in a less ‘doctored’ form, but nevertheless still ‘doctored’) to reinforce the meme that “First Contact’ invariably involved armed ‘white’ man molesting Aboriginal woman. A classic ‘black-armed band’ view of our history.
Well, in this case, that is not the whole story at all, which we will explain in a subsequent blog-post.
