Conclusions
Motive Conclusion
It becomes evident, on the application of cultural and religious methods of historical scrutiny, that there was more to Gellibrand and his Associates than mere tawdry gestures. The so-called Batman treaty needs to be looked at, not so much as a literal act of law, nor as an act of greed, but as a act of meeting and goodwill, and the beginning of a conversation across far-reaching divides between peoples. There is, actually, likely to be a form of religious embrace in the motivations on both sides.
The archives are full of cultural clues that have hardly been read as yet on the religious or the aboriginal side. There is native perspective to go on; the record of the acts and attitudes of the men represent a frontier mind in sway at and after those treaty-making times. ‘Motivation is a persisting tendency’. There certainly is an appropriateness to seeing Gellibrand as a person of religious cause, and his ‘supreme sacrifice’ at the frontier [1] arising from what Geertz calls a ‘chronic inclination to perform certain sorts of acts.’ Motive ‘flamboyant courage’ consists in ‘propensities such as to fast in the wilderness[2] - so also, to cross to the other at the frontiers.[3]
The Aborigines had known (of) the whites for two generations. From 1798 till 1835. If they had not experienced them, they had heard accounts of the depredations of sealers, tan-barkers and whalers along their coasts. They had also known brief encounters of goodwill,[4] as well as the long goodwill in the presence of William Buckley - a tribesman among their distant kin. They had lost women, or traded women, or been cajoled into gratuitous concurrence in trading women.
When Batman said that he wanted to come with his own wife and seven daughters,[5] bringing flocks and herds, and families with the flocks and herds of his associates, including Gellibrand, his wife and seven children, they might well have been likely to have seen it as the answer to a problem they had long discussed in the pre-dawn vociferation[6] around the campfires as an opportunity not to be missed, maybe, even as an embrace of whitemen and Batman’s five alien ‘mainmait’ Parramatta blacks, to come within the name-exchanging and relationships as kin or namesakes across the various cultural divides. Their embrace of the other is a proto-Australian hospitality.
There is a factor of uncertainty about frontiers, a factor of uncertainty which certain activist religion embraces. Such ‘believers’ go to this frontier: some as warriors, as missionaries, all as change agents. For the coalface of culture is something of the coalface of religion, as it is the coalface of the human condition in economy, society, politics and philosophy.
This is where worlds met and the chasms that need bridging also have depths that can plummet to the radical primordials where chaos, value and law met, (can still meet), to sink or swim, to a bloodbath, or to regroup in new formations of identity - or settlement.[7]
Leichardt! Burke & Wills! Gallipoli!: our stories of Greatness in Failure are part of the making of Australia. No Greater failure exists than the Failure of the treaty of 1935 in Dutigalla. Yet, as Clemenceau says, its outcome is open. This noble failure deserves far greater attention. Maybe Australia is born there... and in like places.
Men like Beruke and Billibolary[8] were part of this noble failure on the aboriginal side. The suffering of many Aboriginal peoples can be seen in this light. Most of them came to an untimely end in the courageous risks of the cross-cultural jeopardy, often humbly and nobly accepting the ‘lived praxis’[9] of their sacrifices at the frontier.
Gellibrand, and Batman, both came, in this cross-cultural venture, to an untimely end,[10] a danger the intuitive Buckley sensed early enough to avoid. These ‘Failures’ of the Treaty ! are even more important than those of Burke & Wills, or Gallipoli, because they are about reconciliation as well as about the nobility of becoming. Craig Robertson is heir to the Robertson~Buckley[11] embrace of a two-parented Australia.
Another literary Australian of a pioneering frontier family has traced these geo-historical-spiritual landscapes. White has this last word: “True knowledge only comes of death by torture in the country of the mind,” (for to entreat with the other does, of necessity, embrace a kind of death). “The mystery of life is not solved by success, which is an end in itself, but by failure, in perpetual struggle, in becoming.”[12]
[1] See Appendix IV. for an account of what the aborigines said happened to Gellibrand.
[2] pp 96 ~ Geertz Clifford, The Interpretation of Cultures
[3] Geertz Ibid pp 97 ‘ Motives have a directional cast, they describe a certain overall course, towards certain, usually temporary, consummations...motives persist for more or less extended periods of time.’
[4] - Flinders in Corio, Collins’s better men, Hume at Lara, Grimes at the Yarra, Hovell overland from Western Port. See Appendix IV for a full early account of the attitude of Gellibrand or his Associates.
[5] Batman ~ Expedition From Van Diemen’s Land to Port Phillip pp 2
[6] Kenneth Liberman op cit ~ Understanding interaction in central Australia - An ethnomethodological study of Australian Aboriginal People pp 3 Melbourne Routledge & Kegan Paul. 1985 Note: Liberman’s Chapter 6: ‘The hermeneutics of intercultural communication’ is most relevant to the interpretations of frontier historical material.
[7] Geertz op cit pp 100 There are at least three points where chaos - a tumult of events which lack not just interpretations by interpretability - threatens to break in upon man: at the limits of his analytic capacities, at the limits of his powers of endurance, and at the limits of his moral insight. Bafflement, suffering, and a sense of ethical paradox are all, of they become intense enough or are sustained long enough, radical challenges to the proposition that life is comprehensible and that we can, by taking thought, orient ourselves effectively within it - challenges with which religion, however primitive which hopes to persist must attempt somehow to cope. ~ The Interpretation Of Cultures
[8] Marie Fels deals with his cross-cultural adaptions at some length. [Good Men and True]
[9] Liberman op cit: ‘Understanding as the hermeneutic work of actual participants in intercultural interaction is a lived praxis addressed to ‘a matter talked about’ ... in the course of the interaction.’ p 174
[10] See Appendix IV. for an early 1840s cross-cultural account of what happened to Gellibrand in 1837
[11] Craig Robertson: Buckley’s Hope. Gellibrand’s record shows the young man, Robertson, carrying Gellibrand’s burden of provisions (p.11) cleaning out and refreshing a native well (p.14) and also being supported by him when lame -‘I hobbled along with the assistance of Mr.Robertson’ (p.15) in Bride.
[12] Patrick White. Voss
It becomes evident, on the application of cultural and religious methods of historical scrutiny, that there was more to Gellibrand and his Associates than mere tawdry gestures. The so-called Batman treaty needs to be looked at, not so much as a literal act of law, nor as an act of greed, but as a act of meeting and goodwill, and the beginning of a conversation across far-reaching divides between peoples. There is, actually, likely to be a form of religious embrace in the motivations on both sides.
The archives are full of cultural clues that have hardly been read as yet on the religious or the aboriginal side. There is native perspective to go on; the record of the acts and attitudes of the men represent a frontier mind in sway at and after those treaty-making times. ‘Motivation is a persisting tendency’. There certainly is an appropriateness to seeing Gellibrand as a person of religious cause, and his ‘supreme sacrifice’ at the frontier [1] arising from what Geertz calls a ‘chronic inclination to perform certain sorts of acts.’ Motive ‘flamboyant courage’ consists in ‘propensities such as to fast in the wilderness[2] - so also, to cross to the other at the frontiers.[3]
The Aborigines had known (of) the whites for two generations. From 1798 till 1835. If they had not experienced them, they had heard accounts of the depredations of sealers, tan-barkers and whalers along their coasts. They had also known brief encounters of goodwill,[4] as well as the long goodwill in the presence of William Buckley - a tribesman among their distant kin. They had lost women, or traded women, or been cajoled into gratuitous concurrence in trading women.
When Batman said that he wanted to come with his own wife and seven daughters,[5] bringing flocks and herds, and families with the flocks and herds of his associates, including Gellibrand, his wife and seven children, they might well have been likely to have seen it as the answer to a problem they had long discussed in the pre-dawn vociferation[6] around the campfires as an opportunity not to be missed, maybe, even as an embrace of whitemen and Batman’s five alien ‘mainmait’ Parramatta blacks, to come within the name-exchanging and relationships as kin or namesakes across the various cultural divides. Their embrace of the other is a proto-Australian hospitality.
There is a factor of uncertainty about frontiers, a factor of uncertainty which certain activist religion embraces. Such ‘believers’ go to this frontier: some as warriors, as missionaries, all as change agents. For the coalface of culture is something of the coalface of religion, as it is the coalface of the human condition in economy, society, politics and philosophy.
This is where worlds met and the chasms that need bridging also have depths that can plummet to the radical primordials where chaos, value and law met, (can still meet), to sink or swim, to a bloodbath, or to regroup in new formations of identity - or settlement.[7]
Leichardt! Burke & Wills! Gallipoli!: our stories of Greatness in Failure are part of the making of Australia. No Greater failure exists than the Failure of the treaty of 1935 in Dutigalla. Yet, as Clemenceau says, its outcome is open. This noble failure deserves far greater attention. Maybe Australia is born there... and in like places.
Men like Beruke and Billibolary[8] were part of this noble failure on the aboriginal side. The suffering of many Aboriginal peoples can be seen in this light. Most of them came to an untimely end in the courageous risks of the cross-cultural jeopardy, often humbly and nobly accepting the ‘lived praxis’[9] of their sacrifices at the frontier.
Gellibrand, and Batman, both came, in this cross-cultural venture, to an untimely end,[10] a danger the intuitive Buckley sensed early enough to avoid. These ‘Failures’ of the Treaty ! are even more important than those of Burke & Wills, or Gallipoli, because they are about reconciliation as well as about the nobility of becoming. Craig Robertson is heir to the Robertson~Buckley[11] embrace of a two-parented Australia.
Another literary Australian of a pioneering frontier family has traced these geo-historical-spiritual landscapes. White has this last word: “True knowledge only comes of death by torture in the country of the mind,” (for to entreat with the other does, of necessity, embrace a kind of death). “The mystery of life is not solved by success, which is an end in itself, but by failure, in perpetual struggle, in becoming.”[12]
THE END
Copyright © Wayne David Knoll October 2001
[1] See Appendix IV. for an account of what the aborigines said happened to Gellibrand.
[2] pp 96 ~ Geertz Clifford, The Interpretation of Cultures
[3] Geertz Ibid pp 97 ‘ Motives have a directional cast, they describe a certain overall course, towards certain, usually temporary, consummations...motives persist for more or less extended periods of time.’
[4] - Flinders in Corio, Collins’s better men, Hume at Lara, Grimes at the Yarra, Hovell overland from Western Port. See Appendix IV for a full early account of the attitude of Gellibrand or his Associates.
[5] Batman ~ Expedition From Van Diemen’s Land to Port Phillip pp 2
[6] Kenneth Liberman op cit ~ Understanding interaction in central Australia - An ethnomethodological study of Australian Aboriginal People pp 3 Melbourne Routledge & Kegan Paul. 1985 Note: Liberman’s Chapter 6: ‘The hermeneutics of intercultural communication’ is most relevant to the interpretations of frontier historical material.
[7] Geertz op cit pp 100 There are at least three points where chaos - a tumult of events which lack not just interpretations by interpretability - threatens to break in upon man: at the limits of his analytic capacities, at the limits of his powers of endurance, and at the limits of his moral insight. Bafflement, suffering, and a sense of ethical paradox are all, of they become intense enough or are sustained long enough, radical challenges to the proposition that life is comprehensible and that we can, by taking thought, orient ourselves effectively within it - challenges with which religion, however primitive which hopes to persist must attempt somehow to cope. ~ The Interpretation Of Cultures
[8] Marie Fels deals with his cross-cultural adaptions at some length. [Good Men and True]
[9] Liberman op cit: ‘Understanding as the hermeneutic work of actual participants in intercultural interaction is a lived praxis addressed to ‘a matter talked about’ ... in the course of the interaction.’ p 174
[10] See Appendix IV. for an early 1840s cross-cultural account of what happened to Gellibrand in 1837
[11] Craig Robertson: Buckley’s Hope. Gellibrand’s record shows the young man, Robertson, carrying Gellibrand’s burden of provisions (p.11) cleaning out and refreshing a native well (p.14) and also being supported by him when lame -‘I hobbled along with the assistance of Mr.Robertson’ (p.15) in Bride.
[12] Patrick White. Voss
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