Sign Language
Sign Language
On meeting with Batman, West says: “The natives displayed some apprehension, and signified they had already experienced injury from the English.”[1] That ‘signified’ is significant. It shows their attitude. How did they signify? Batman couldn’t speak their language. The five Parramatta blacks could not speak Woiwurrung. West has it right: they signified.
A sign language[2] grown of need for silence when hunting, was universal among aborigines. Signs of vast and elaborate complexity,[3] a diplomatic necessity for cross-border meetings, were known from Parramatta to Lombardina, and even now by whites who know aboriginal culture.[4] Body language is all such sign![5] Batman wrote: ‘My Natives [6] then made some of their friendly signals, which it appeared were understood ..My two interpreters explained to them that I had come in a vessel from the other[7] shores; that I was, though a white, a countryman[8] of theirs, and would protect them.’[9]
In another sense the signs of the times were not good. The context was one signified by bad treatment. The decision of these aboriginal men then comes of a mentalité[10] of choice made in response to a mentalité of experience. A choice to treat with a white-man in terms of embrace, attempting to cement: a. reciprocal obligations, b. possible kinship expectations, c. certainly namesake relations, with a share and part to play in the tectonic power-shifts to come, made out of both hard-won lessons and hope. It was a response to thirty-something years of mixed or lawless experience: in large part, bitter experience. Their world had already changed. White men were intruding into their realms of culture and authority with increasing ingress. This was reality, an advent; adventurers were a first globular tread of the great movements in peoples.
Some whites had met the aborigines in generosity and peace. Aborigines were not stupid, they knew that men of any group are both good and bad. They were, no doubt, more circumspect and studied in this treaty-making than history has given them credit. Gellibrand, Batman, most contact writers, credit them intelligence.[11] We have to pose the question, then, as to why they did it? Many historians since, who have regarded the treaty making as tawdry, as mere matters of trinkets for real estate, assume the aborigines were stupid. They presume them to be easily led, and easily duped. History tends to gloss the question of the causality of the aboriginal participation. There is little work that looks at the idea that they might have willingly and fore-knowingly agreed to embrace whitemen in a covenant of mutuality and lawful co-existence.
In fact, eight senior aboriginal men went so far as to carve their own culturally private and sacred marks on to bark to be included in the documentation of Treaty parchments. In this historical record we still have their sense of signing, in the signature shape of their characters, expressed in the fluid and wafted verticality of their sacred marks, impressed by copies on the treaty documents by Batman or his scribe. Generally available, and what is more, now able to be seen by females, to whom the marks were not to be shown!
I do not believe that history has honoured their aboriginal intelligence, their goodwill, nor their historical choice in what seems to be their acceptance of change, - likely not the quantum change that they had to endure - but change with respect to an embrace sharing[12] with the other, the white-man. They were not just casual players abdicating from their own tradition or history. They has been met with deliberate amnesty, charmed, communicated with, exchanged with, rearmed to be a group acting on the bridge of crossing over, between peoples, between, times and places, between ways of thinking and custom. Not under fear, not browbeaten, not oppressed into signing, but by agreement in ritual ceremony. In Batman and his frontier cross-cultural band, they met a cross-cultural party paving a way of being party to a future hoped to be with reciprocal rights and obligations. They seized on what might have been a compact of amity towards their continuance, to a life of changes and challenges, but a future hoped towards on the basis of the armed-exchanges of peace.[13]
‘It is this context that the ‘signifiers’ of the secret marks of the aboriginal elders are included on these documents. Not just secret marks but the signifiers of treaty, of agreement, of concurrence in the ritual of enaction of the symbolic, or significant meaning of the treaty in the pouring of the soil of the land into the hands by its traditional owners into the hand of agent John Batman. Gellibrand’s Legacy is in that ritual Handful of Soil,[14] become iconic[15] in Australian cross-cultural imagery as it transposes from 1835 to the 1970’s, from Dutigalla to Wave Hill,[16] from the hands of aborigines to Batman; then ‘lifted’ by Coombs[17] to Whitlam, and back to the aborigines again.[18]
[1] John West, The History of Tasmania, Hobart 1852 ( Edition of Angus and Robertson 1979)
[2] “It would perhaps, have been possible to go right across Australia from one language unit to another, using each as a jumping off point for the next. For one thing, there is often some kind of transition from one language to another, or some common basis against which differences can be understood. We say ‘ordinary’ language, ... even apart from the matter of sign language , or system of hand signs. pp 38/9
Berndt, R.M. & C.H. The World of the First Australians 1964/1985
[3] “Throughout the Western Desert , the Aborigines also employs an elaborate sign language. Kendon (1988:4) says of the culturally similar Walpiri ( whose repertoire exceeds fifteen hundred signs) and other central Australian groups that they “possess the most complex alternate sign language to have been developed.” Robert Tonkinson , The Mardu Aborigines, Fort Worth TX 1991/1978 pp 35
[4] Richard Trudgeon (Wamut) ~ Why Warriors Lie Down And Die. “ ‘You’re a funny white fella,’ he (Roy) said. ‘Why’s that?’ I asked, turning my hand over in the Yolngu questioning mode.’ Because of that,’ he said, pointing to my hand motions. ‘...What are you, Aboriginal or what?’ pp 167
[5] Trudgeon. ibid: ‘Body language speaks almost as loudly as words for Yolngu, who in fact have developed a comprehensive sign/body language. Many messages are transmitted this way. Standing where a person can just see you, for example, is like telling them you want to speak to them.’ pp 79
[6] ‘Retainers’ - employees and friends from Batman’s ‘native’ childhood in Parramatta NSW.
[7] It is interesting that Batman evokes this sense of otherness, thereby identifying with the bird-flight-skyfather-bunjil (eagle) ideas of sailing-ships, and of the arrivals in these lands of those, who, like William Buckley, may be seen as the aborigines own ancestors who have come back from the dead as whites. Note: ‘The natives have some strange ideas about death; they think that when they die the go to VanD.Land and come back white fellows.’ pp 8 Life in the Bush by a Lady 1st published ‘Chambers Miscellany of Useful and Entertaining Tracts, 1845 [facsimile: Toucan Press Guernsey, via Britain 1970]
[8] Note: Field experience tells that what the aboriginal people most want from white Australians is to be ‘Countrymen’ in hands-on love. This view is born out by Neil Murray in ‘Sing For Me, Countryman.’ It is, for Batman, as it was for Hume, a gift of bushmanship -an adaptation to the aboriginal- , then a condition inferior under colonial Englishmen, but a condition that led to the later adaptive ‘nativity’ built at one time to a popular kudos by the original Australian Natives Association. Cf: Further studies of Batman and Hume, Wills, etc. done by John Molony: The Native Born
[9] John Batman - Later he goes on: ‘They then stopped, and hesitated in proceeding, and, as I understood from the interpreters, were afraid I should take them by force and ill-use them, as some of their tribe had been already.’ Expedition from Van Diemen’s Land to Port Phillip 1835
[10] Tosh, John ~ The Main Themes : economy, society, mentality. The pursuit of history.
[11] ‘The natives are a fine race of men many of them handsome in their person and well made. They are strong and athletic very intelligent and quick in their perceptions...’ pp 31
G.T. Gellibrand Memorandum of a trip to Port Phillip 1836. in Bride ~ Letters. Vic. Pioneers.
John Batman wrote “...they certainly appear to me to be of a superior race to any Natives I have ever seen.” 1835 ~ Expedition from Van Diemen’s Land to Port Phillip. pp 4
[12] Marie Fels : Good Men and True ~ ‘To move to the question of what else policing offered them is to engage at another level of historical enquiry; it becomes not so much a question of examining the evidence of description, but rather of piecing together the fragments of information about individually named acting persons, making connections and making sense of them. In a sense , this whole book is an argument that tiny details of aboriginal lives and living are as necessary to an understanding of Australian’s past as are the tiny details of European lives and living ( although in neither case are the tiny details sufficient) There is with the whole work and argument though a specific argument, and it is this. Joining the Native Police Corps is best seen as a strategy in the direction of sharing power and authority in the Port Phillip District, in the changed environment of the powerful and permanent European presence. Beside the material things that the police could see they would get, an opportunity was put before them of becoming men of standing within the transformed world. They took it, and furthermore, they used it. They bent it back, exploiting their acquired prestige and influence to operate within traditional group politics, to such effect that while the Corps was , these men were the power-brokers with what Thomas calls the Confederacy. p 96-9
[13] John Batman‘... the principle chief then gave me his best spear to carry, and I in return gave him my gun.’ Expedition from Van Diemen’s Land to Port Phillip 1835 Letter of 25th July 1835
[14] John Batman - A. 1935 Journal, Melbourne 1856 ‘ ...handing me a portion of soil...’ pp 20.
B. Expedition from Van Diemens’ Land to Port Phillip 1835 Hobart Town 25th June 1835 ‘...each delivered to me a piece of soil for the purpose of putting me in possession thereof...’ pp 3
[15] One instance is Paul Kelly’s song about Vincent Lingiari - ‘From Little Things Big Things Come.’
[16] Photojournalism footage celebrates a picture of Whitlam pouring soil into the hand of Lingiari.
[17] I refer to Nugget Coombs long, naive, and so unfortunate, influence on Indigenous Policy* as well as the lack of any public acknowledgement it in the archetype of Port Phillip history, or of Gellibrand as the legal architect of the use this enfeoffment ritual ceremony between incoming settlers and indigenous Australians. [* See ‘The Politics of Suffering: Indigenous Policy in Australia Since The Seventies’ by Peter Sutton. A revised copy (10 April 2001) of an address given at the Australian Anthropological Society annual conference, University of Western Australia, 23 September 2000]
[18] The symbolic act of each black elder giving of a handful of their soil into Batman’s hand as required by the ancient ritual in the legal code of the enfeoffment would not have been lost to the blacks, tying law as it does to an embodying and a figuratively communicated ritual. The importance of the device which Batman used, no doubt on legal advice from Gellibrand, (a Parramatta born ‘Native’ who thinks of himself as a Countryman would only know of the practice of enfeoffment law through his eminent legal counsel), should not be underestimated. Not when we consider the regard with which we bring to the modern use of this device for which Gellibrand and Batman’s act was the precedent. For, as recommended by Nugget Combs, it was Gellibrand’s lead which Gough Whitlam followed when he handed back lands to Vincent Lingiari, by the same device; picking up a handful of Wave Hill sand and pouring it into Lingiari’s hand. Whitlam’s act carries Gellibrand’s moral weight, and the heritage of a forgotten figure, to its full embodiment as part of the history of our belonging in a legitimate act of ‘primary’ or ‘frontier’ legal theatre. If Gellibrand’s ‘Batman and the Aborigines Treaty’ was so laughable and the radical ritual of that enfeoffment law so arcane, as it has been argued, then why is it so lauded when in Whitlam’s hands? The only answer is that Gellibrand was far more radical and more significant than what he has been accounted so far.
On meeting with Batman, West says: “The natives displayed some apprehension, and signified they had already experienced injury from the English.”[1] That ‘signified’ is significant. It shows their attitude. How did they signify? Batman couldn’t speak their language. The five Parramatta blacks could not speak Woiwurrung. West has it right: they signified.
A sign language[2] grown of need for silence when hunting, was universal among aborigines. Signs of vast and elaborate complexity,[3] a diplomatic necessity for cross-border meetings, were known from Parramatta to Lombardina, and even now by whites who know aboriginal culture.[4] Body language is all such sign![5] Batman wrote: ‘My Natives [6] then made some of their friendly signals, which it appeared were understood ..My two interpreters explained to them that I had come in a vessel from the other[7] shores; that I was, though a white, a countryman[8] of theirs, and would protect them.’[9]
In another sense the signs of the times were not good. The context was one signified by bad treatment. The decision of these aboriginal men then comes of a mentalité[10] of choice made in response to a mentalité of experience. A choice to treat with a white-man in terms of embrace, attempting to cement: a. reciprocal obligations, b. possible kinship expectations, c. certainly namesake relations, with a share and part to play in the tectonic power-shifts to come, made out of both hard-won lessons and hope. It was a response to thirty-something years of mixed or lawless experience: in large part, bitter experience. Their world had already changed. White men were intruding into their realms of culture and authority with increasing ingress. This was reality, an advent; adventurers were a first globular tread of the great movements in peoples.
Some whites had met the aborigines in generosity and peace. Aborigines were not stupid, they knew that men of any group are both good and bad. They were, no doubt, more circumspect and studied in this treaty-making than history has given them credit. Gellibrand, Batman, most contact writers, credit them intelligence.[11] We have to pose the question, then, as to why they did it? Many historians since, who have regarded the treaty making as tawdry, as mere matters of trinkets for real estate, assume the aborigines were stupid. They presume them to be easily led, and easily duped. History tends to gloss the question of the causality of the aboriginal participation. There is little work that looks at the idea that they might have willingly and fore-knowingly agreed to embrace whitemen in a covenant of mutuality and lawful co-existence.
In fact, eight senior aboriginal men went so far as to carve their own culturally private and sacred marks on to bark to be included in the documentation of Treaty parchments. In this historical record we still have their sense of signing, in the signature shape of their characters, expressed in the fluid and wafted verticality of their sacred marks, impressed by copies on the treaty documents by Batman or his scribe. Generally available, and what is more, now able to be seen by females, to whom the marks were not to be shown!
I do not believe that history has honoured their aboriginal intelligence, their goodwill, nor their historical choice in what seems to be their acceptance of change, - likely not the quantum change that they had to endure - but change with respect to an embrace sharing[12] with the other, the white-man. They were not just casual players abdicating from their own tradition or history. They has been met with deliberate amnesty, charmed, communicated with, exchanged with, rearmed to be a group acting on the bridge of crossing over, between peoples, between, times and places, between ways of thinking and custom. Not under fear, not browbeaten, not oppressed into signing, but by agreement in ritual ceremony. In Batman and his frontier cross-cultural band, they met a cross-cultural party paving a way of being party to a future hoped to be with reciprocal rights and obligations. They seized on what might have been a compact of amity towards their continuance, to a life of changes and challenges, but a future hoped towards on the basis of the armed-exchanges of peace.[13]
‘It is this context that the ‘signifiers’ of the secret marks of the aboriginal elders are included on these documents. Not just secret marks but the signifiers of treaty, of agreement, of concurrence in the ritual of enaction of the symbolic, or significant meaning of the treaty in the pouring of the soil of the land into the hands by its traditional owners into the hand of agent John Batman. Gellibrand’s Legacy is in that ritual Handful of Soil,[14] become iconic[15] in Australian cross-cultural imagery as it transposes from 1835 to the 1970’s, from Dutigalla to Wave Hill,[16] from the hands of aborigines to Batman; then ‘lifted’ by Coombs[17] to Whitlam, and back to the aborigines again.[18]
[1] John West, The History of Tasmania, Hobart 1852 ( Edition of Angus and Robertson 1979)
[2] “It would perhaps, have been possible to go right across Australia from one language unit to another, using each as a jumping off point for the next. For one thing, there is often some kind of transition from one language to another, or some common basis against which differences can be understood. We say ‘ordinary’ language, ... even apart from the matter of sign language , or system of hand signs. pp 38/9
Berndt, R.M. & C.H. The World of the First Australians 1964/1985
[3] “Throughout the Western Desert , the Aborigines also employs an elaborate sign language. Kendon (1988:4) says of the culturally similar Walpiri ( whose repertoire exceeds fifteen hundred signs) and other central Australian groups that they “possess the most complex alternate sign language to have been developed.” Robert Tonkinson , The Mardu Aborigines, Fort Worth TX 1991/1978 pp 35
[4] Richard Trudgeon (Wamut) ~ Why Warriors Lie Down And Die. “ ‘You’re a funny white fella,’ he (Roy) said. ‘Why’s that?’ I asked, turning my hand over in the Yolngu questioning mode.’ Because of that,’ he said, pointing to my hand motions. ‘...What are you, Aboriginal or what?’ pp 167
[5] Trudgeon. ibid: ‘Body language speaks almost as loudly as words for Yolngu, who in fact have developed a comprehensive sign/body language. Many messages are transmitted this way. Standing where a person can just see you, for example, is like telling them you want to speak to them.’ pp 79
[6] ‘Retainers’ - employees and friends from Batman’s ‘native’ childhood in Parramatta NSW.
[7] It is interesting that Batman evokes this sense of otherness, thereby identifying with the bird-flight-skyfather-bunjil (eagle) ideas of sailing-ships, and of the arrivals in these lands of those, who, like William Buckley, may be seen as the aborigines own ancestors who have come back from the dead as whites. Note: ‘The natives have some strange ideas about death; they think that when they die the go to VanD.Land and come back white fellows.’ pp 8 Life in the Bush by a Lady 1st published ‘Chambers Miscellany of Useful and Entertaining Tracts, 1845 [facsimile: Toucan Press Guernsey, via Britain 1970]
[8] Note: Field experience tells that what the aboriginal people most want from white Australians is to be ‘Countrymen’ in hands-on love. This view is born out by Neil Murray in ‘Sing For Me, Countryman.’ It is, for Batman, as it was for Hume, a gift of bushmanship -an adaptation to the aboriginal- , then a condition inferior under colonial Englishmen, but a condition that led to the later adaptive ‘nativity’ built at one time to a popular kudos by the original Australian Natives Association. Cf: Further studies of Batman and Hume, Wills, etc. done by John Molony: The Native Born
[9] John Batman - Later he goes on: ‘They then stopped, and hesitated in proceeding, and, as I understood from the interpreters, were afraid I should take them by force and ill-use them, as some of their tribe had been already.’ Expedition from Van Diemen’s Land to Port Phillip 1835
[10] Tosh, John ~ The Main Themes : economy, society, mentality. The pursuit of history.
[11] ‘The natives are a fine race of men many of them handsome in their person and well made. They are strong and athletic very intelligent and quick in their perceptions...’ pp 31
G.T. Gellibrand Memorandum of a trip to Port Phillip 1836. in Bride ~ Letters. Vic. Pioneers.
John Batman wrote “...they certainly appear to me to be of a superior race to any Natives I have ever seen.” 1835 ~ Expedition from Van Diemen’s Land to Port Phillip. pp 4
[12] Marie Fels : Good Men and True ~ ‘To move to the question of what else policing offered them is to engage at another level of historical enquiry; it becomes not so much a question of examining the evidence of description, but rather of piecing together the fragments of information about individually named acting persons, making connections and making sense of them. In a sense , this whole book is an argument that tiny details of aboriginal lives and living are as necessary to an understanding of Australian’s past as are the tiny details of European lives and living ( although in neither case are the tiny details sufficient) There is with the whole work and argument though a specific argument, and it is this. Joining the Native Police Corps is best seen as a strategy in the direction of sharing power and authority in the Port Phillip District, in the changed environment of the powerful and permanent European presence. Beside the material things that the police could see they would get, an opportunity was put before them of becoming men of standing within the transformed world. They took it, and furthermore, they used it. They bent it back, exploiting their acquired prestige and influence to operate within traditional group politics, to such effect that while the Corps was , these men were the power-brokers with what Thomas calls the Confederacy. p 96-9
[13] John Batman‘... the principle chief then gave me his best spear to carry, and I in return gave him my gun.’ Expedition from Van Diemen’s Land to Port Phillip 1835 Letter of 25th July 1835
[14] John Batman - A. 1935 Journal, Melbourne 1856 ‘ ...handing me a portion of soil...’ pp 20.
B. Expedition from Van Diemens’ Land to Port Phillip 1835 Hobart Town 25th June 1835 ‘...each delivered to me a piece of soil for the purpose of putting me in possession thereof...’ pp 3
[15] One instance is Paul Kelly’s song about Vincent Lingiari - ‘From Little Things Big Things Come.’
[16] Photojournalism footage celebrates a picture of Whitlam pouring soil into the hand of Lingiari.
[17] I refer to Nugget Coombs long, naive, and so unfortunate, influence on Indigenous Policy* as well as the lack of any public acknowledgement it in the archetype of Port Phillip history, or of Gellibrand as the legal architect of the use this enfeoffment ritual ceremony between incoming settlers and indigenous Australians. [* See ‘The Politics of Suffering: Indigenous Policy in Australia Since The Seventies’ by Peter Sutton. A revised copy (10 April 2001) of an address given at the Australian Anthropological Society annual conference, University of Western Australia, 23 September 2000]
[18] The symbolic act of each black elder giving of a handful of their soil into Batman’s hand as required by the ancient ritual in the legal code of the enfeoffment would not have been lost to the blacks, tying law as it does to an embodying and a figuratively communicated ritual. The importance of the device which Batman used, no doubt on legal advice from Gellibrand, (a Parramatta born ‘Native’ who thinks of himself as a Countryman would only know of the practice of enfeoffment law through his eminent legal counsel), should not be underestimated. Not when we consider the regard with which we bring to the modern use of this device for which Gellibrand and Batman’s act was the precedent. For, as recommended by Nugget Combs, it was Gellibrand’s lead which Gough Whitlam followed when he handed back lands to Vincent Lingiari, by the same device; picking up a handful of Wave Hill sand and pouring it into Lingiari’s hand. Whitlam’s act carries Gellibrand’s moral weight, and the heritage of a forgotten figure, to its full embodiment as part of the history of our belonging in a legitimate act of ‘primary’ or ‘frontier’ legal theatre. If Gellibrand’s ‘Batman and the Aborigines Treaty’ was so laughable and the radical ritual of that enfeoffment law so arcane, as it has been argued, then why is it so lauded when in Whitlam’s hands? The only answer is that Gellibrand was far more radical and more significant than what he has been accounted so far.
posted by Wayne D Knoll | 5:01 PM
2 Comments:
Hi Wayne - that's really fascinating - I had no idea some Parramatta men had gone with batman to Melbourne. Batman was born in Parramatta - his name was probably pronounced Bateman - and his house has been photographed, but it is since pulled down. The Parramatta men may have been War-mul men from Prospect Hill. You have a very interesting profile - I feel like a novice compared to your writing. My blog is at http://davidpovey.blogspot.com and is about Parramatta in 1807 - I'll have to try and wangle a Batman into it! All the best, David Povey
Hullo David Povey,
Yes, Batman's Parramatta Black cohorts are very interesting. They could be the subject of a good research study. I believe they were the first blacks to ne granted land under English law in Australia (In VDL/Tasmania) before 1836, in the Kingston Valley, below Ben Lomond, southeast of Launceston as a reward for their part in catching outlaws.
Later, in Melbourne, after Batman died, they were often found in drunken and disorderly period of degradation, as if lost without a benefactor, missing their mentor, master and support, and, I know that at least one or two of them were sentenced to spend time in the public stocks on Elizabeth street which used to stand by the Melbourne GPO.
Batman refers to them as ' My Natives' or 'My Sydney Natives' and it seems they were faithful and loyal to him to a marked degree. They were instrumental in the founding of Melbourne
It was through their agency, their signing ability, that Batman met and made treaty with the Port Phillip natives. The 'Sydney NAtives' subsequently moved from VDL to Melbourne with Batman and his family.
Two of their 'names' were Bullet and Stewart. I believe their were at least four of them, and have seen reference to 'Batman's half a dozen Sydeny natives' . That six natives went off willingly with their white friend and master in the 1820s, out of their country to Van Diemens Land, and then, after that, to be involved in the only frontier treaty-making ever to occur in Australia, and to help found Melbourne, soem of them being granted land for law-abiding good deeds of derring-do in their travels, is truly remarkable.
Wayne
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