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COMMONWEALTH OF AUSTRALIA

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Course of Study: (HSY316) Cross-Cultural World History

Title of work: London papers in Australian studies, v. 87 2000

Section: Captive Aboriginal lives: Billy, Jenny, Little Toby and their companions pp. 35--, 35--57

Author of section: Roslyn Poignant

Name of Publisher: Menzies Centre for Australian Studies

CAPuffVIE ABDRffGffNAIL !LffVIES: Bff!LIL Yi JIENNYP

lUuul!E TOBY AND uH!EUfR COMJ!PANUONS *

Roslyn Poignant

An important aspect of the recovery of details of the lives of a number of Aboriginal people made captive in the late nineteenth century and removed overseas has been the search for and analysis of visual, particularly photographic sources. Although this material cannot be included in this overview of the subject, I have selected a key photograph of three Australian Aborigines, which is one of a set in the collection of the Royal Anthropological Institute, taken by Prince Roland Bonaparte and given by him to the Institute in December 18851. I propose to begin with a reading of it.

Frequently a reading may be sparked by an intersection between the point of gaze of the onlooker and that of the photographer, but it may also involve a degree of identification with the subject - a circumstance which is more likely to occur in this instance if the viewer is Aboriginal. A reading also changes over time. When I first saw these photographs they were uncaptioned, and the people photographed were unidentified. However, it was evident that they were the same three people, Billy, Jenny and Little Toby, who, two years later, were exhibited at a meeting of the Royal Anthropological lnstitute2. Bonaparte's primary motive for both taking and presenting this set of photographs to the lq.stitute and other European anthropological societies would have been to capture for the archive examples of what was considered to be a rare and vanishing type - some even believed species - of humankind. Yet this stereotypic framing is disrupted by the disturbing aura of this image; an interaction seems to have taken place between the photographer and the photographed wl:lich returns something of 'subject' to the 'object' of the photographer's camera and his gaze.

ROSLYN POIGNANT: CAPTIVE ABORIGINAL LIVES

'Billy, Jenny and Little Toby', photograph taken by Prince Roland Bonaparte, and presented by him to the Royal Anthropological Institute in December 1885. (Royal Anthropological Institute, Photographic Collection, Ref. No.

2100)

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ROSLYN POIGNANT: CAPTIVE ABORIGINAL LIVES

In the context of this paper a reading is also a narrative device and I am assuming that 'the story' behind this image is still not widely known, and that the latter's haunting quality will not only engage your sensibilities, as mine were on first sight of it, but also raise questions about these people who were the objects of Western scientific and popular curiosity. Who were they, and what was it like for them?

In this print, their Aboriginaiity combined with their troubled appearance, and their dress, all speak of dislocation. Their fringed cow-hide costumes mark them as show-people, and the clutch of boomerangs, loosely held, signifies the transformation of their hunting implements into props for performance. When it is realised that the historical moment of this photograph was November i 885, it is understandable that their expressions suggest a mix of despair and anger. For at the same time as Billy, Jenny and little Toby were being compelled to enact the role of savage other at the Folies Bergere, Jenny's husband was dying in a Paris hospital.

These Aborigines are displaced people standing in a European garden, probably the Jardin d'Acclimatation in Paris, where, from the 1870s, human exhibits supplemented the display of exotic plants and animals3. Therefore the sense of dislocation the image conveys relates not only to personal lives, but it also reflects an aspect of the disorientation of the emerging modern world. For the West's appropriation of the spaces of the new worlds through the processes of colonisation, and its absorption of savage otherness, was all part of the living fermentation that produced modernity. The content of the photograph does not allude solely either to what purported to be scientific, or to popular culture; it alerts the viewer to the interpenetration of the two.

The point in the photograph to which one's eye is drawn with a horrible fascination is the stuffed pug-dog in the foreground. Emblematic of death and embalmment it offers an absurd and cruel commentary on the Aborigines' predicament, which, for the present-day beholder, includes their incarceration in simulacrum in the archive. In an already ambiguous image the dog is the punctum (to use Barthes' terminology)4 which invites you not to believe your eyes, but to ask questions. The Aborigines' return of gaze challenged me to attempt to

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ROSLYN POIGNANT: CAPTIVE ABORIGINAL LIVES

disentangle the narrative of their actual and personal ,lives from their entrapment in a series of representations of European otherness and, in the course of the search, the story of their literal captivity emerged. It transpires that by 1885 these three were the only survivors of a group of nine Aborigines from North Queensland who had been abducted and removed overseas in 1883 by the impressario Robert A. Cunningham, an agent for Barnum and Bailey.

The exhibition of humans from the margins of the known world has a long history. The third century mosaic pavements of Piazza Armerina, Sicily, depict a caged man brought back from Africa to be shown to the Roman world. From the late eighteenth century, however, the manner and iocus of that display became progressively more structured and institutionalised. The presentation of a systematised view of the world, formulated by a positivist Science, with its land-forms and life-forms - including mankind and his products, arts and intellectual achievements - became enmeshed in a new construction of 'the world as picture'5• In the course of nineteenth century there was a shift in regard for savagery from the noble to the ignobf e end of the spectrum - perhaps beginning with the exhibition of Saartje, who was known as the Hottentot Venus. An object of both pity and derision, after her death in 1815 she was dissected by the French naturalist, Cuvier. By mid­ century the extermination of colonised peoples was rationalised as an inevitable consequence of their presumed racial inferiority, and the growing contempt for the savage was given popular currency by Charles Dickens, in his description of the exhibition of 'Pygmy Earthmen' at the Westminster Aquarium in Household Words6. As the century advanced, Barnum in America and others, such as Hagenbeck in Germany, institutionalised the display of indigenous peoples who were 'doomed to disappear', and men like the recruiter/impresario Cunningham were the suppliers who made it possible.

The Bonaparte portrait - the point from which I started my search - was for these Aborigines an ending (in a figurative, if not also a literal sense): it recorded a final appearance on the stage of the spectacle of the world as it was configured in the fairgrounds, circuses, exhibition halls, theatres and museum spaces of metropolitan North America and Europe towards the end of the nineteenth century. The German composite noun, Volkerschauen, best describes the way in which

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ROSLYN POIGNANT: CAPTIVE ABORIGINAL LIVES

troupes of indigenous peoples like these were toured. The places of performance, however, I have designated the show-space. This is meant to be more than a convenient collective noun, for it identifies this space as a site of significance, a chronotope or time/space zone - a term which, according to Clifford (following Bakhtin), denotes 'a fictional setting where historically specific relations of power become visible and certain stories can "take place"'?. In this case, the removal of these Aborigines and their transformation into show-people was a part of the larger process of emptying the land in preparation for its exploitation by the white settlers, and an outcome of the imbalance of power between coloniser and colonised. This world-wide dispersal of peoples as a consequence of European imperial enterprise meant that fragments of traditional lifeways from the exotic margins (as well as from rural areas) became embedded in the matrix of urban modernity. Within this cultural space the local and global dimensions of the narrative were encompassed. Also within it, popular culture and science, particularly the new Science of Man - Anthropology - colluded in the objectification, commodification and consumption of other. The metropolitan appetite for the exotic was insatiable.

While this account of Aboriginal lives made captive focuses on the decade which marked the confident high-point in the colonial enterprise, it is important not to lose sight of the long history of this practice. The seizing of indigenous people to act as hostages, guides arid servants was a frequent occurrence in exploration and settlement of empire, and from the first days of European presence in Australia both this activity and the abduction of Aboriginal children into service was commonplace. Many of these captives, like the young girl, Araboo, who was acquired by the Rev. Richard Johnson in July 1789, and others who were euphemistically said to have 'come in', like Bennelong who accompanied Governor Phillip to England in 1792 - and lived to return home - are known by name and are a part of white Australian histories. The stories of others, such as Bennelong's companion Yemmurrawannie who died abroad, are short and obscure, and in the course of the following century, as the genocidal assault intensified, the fate of most of its victims is lost in anonymity. The members of the Aboriginal cricket team of 1865 who were voluntary travellers overseas are known, but the identities of Aborigines who were pressed into joining the pearling fleets or seized and exhibited

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ROSLYN POIGNANT: CAPTIVE ABORIGINAL LIVES

abroad are part of the suppressed history of the frontiers.

If the Bonaparte photograph alerted me to the existence of a narrative the first problem was how �o recover it, because the action which powered the narrative had performed an objectifying function by which existential beings had been transformed into other. It has been quite difficult to assemble the scattered fragments of the simplest details of the lives of Billy, J�nny, little Toby and their companions, from a range of sources, popular and scientific, written and visual, and the most comprehensive account, recorded in Brussels by E. Houze and V. Jacques in May 1884, will be referred to in more detail later. The accompanying table (on the following page) assembles the various names by which the nine Aborigines in Cunningham's 1883 troupe were known, and the principal sources from which this information has been derived. Among these people (as with other Aboriginal tribes) there was a certain reluctance to 'telling their names'9 and some of those on this list were possibly the names of local groups.

Briefly, their ages ranged from seven to forty or fifty years. With the exception of Billy and Bob who were from Hinchinbrook Island, the majority of the group were from Palm Islands and called themselves Borkoman 10. Both groups spoke distinct, though related, languages: the former spoke Biyay (of the Wargamay language family) and the latter, Manbara11. Jenny, who was Toby's wife and little Toby's mother, was also said to have spoken a different language, and indeed it may have been a different dialect, but she certainly spoke a deferential or avoidance language. This was noted in her conversations with Sussy, and suggests that they may have stood in potential or actual parent-in­ law/child-in-law relationship to each other. Sussy was the wife of Tambo, one of the two men who died in America, and apparently she also stood in the right marriage relationship to Jimmy - but the other aspects of the group's relationships remain elusive.

I have included in the table two other groups who were toured in the same period and with whom they were sometimes confused. There was an earlier group of three from Fraser Island who were recorded on tour in Germany in 188312. And in 1892 Cunningham returned to the Townsville district and, in spite of his notoriety, was permitted to take away with him eight more Aborigines described by A. Meston as 'town

40

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ROSLYN POIGNANT: CAPTIVE ABORIGINAL LIV/ES

TABLE OF NAMES: 3 GROUPS OF CAPTIVE ABORIGINES TOURED IN 1880s

In /Europe 1883 (from Fraser Island, Queensland)

Alfred (Turano) (m) 22 yrs; Bonny (m) 18 yrs; Susanne (f} 15 yrs; source: Virchow T< l�'it ff * 'il< k 'tr W *

1883-1887? (* - from Hinchinbrook Island, the others from Palm Islands, North Queensland)

Names and Ages Listed by Source

Cumningham

Dianarali

Wangong

Corgarah

Yorembera

Telegorah

Tagarah

Tinendal

*Orininben

*Warchsinbin

Houze & Jacques (Belgium)

Tambo? (40yrs}

Tambo?

Toby/Wangong? (40·50yrs)

Jenny/Yarembera (30-40yrs)

Little Toby/ Kottiganden (7-8yrs)

Sussyffagara (18-20yrs)

Jimmyffinendal {25-30yrs)

Bob/Oritchnenben (20·25yrs)

Billy/Warutchnenben (30-35yr,s}

Virchow {Germany)

Toby/Koddigandal/ Kuttegandal (40yrs)

Jenny/Yemberi/ Yorembera (20yrs)

Telegorah (7yrs)

Tagarah (Princess} 16·18yrs

Jamesrreninderffininder/ Tinendal (20yrs)

Orininben/Orininden (20yrs)

Warrisimbol/Warchsinbin (28yrs)

note: Wangong and Yorembera resemble the names of local groups.

1892-1896? (from Townsville [one said to be 'Borgaman'])

Harry Mathews, King Bill, Dick Elliot, Tommy Landerson, Bill and his wife Jennye, William and his wife Tottie. Source: San Francisco Chronicle November 1892

3 survivors Berlin 1896: Dilgorru (King Bill); Maturra (William); Dagorri (Jenny} Source: Virchow

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ROSLYN POIGNANT: CAPTIVE ABORIGINAL LIVES

blacks', one of whom was a 'Boorgaman'13. According to a report in the San Francisco Chronicle {September 1892) they were Harry Ma.thews,King Bill, Dick Elliott, Tommy Landerson, Bill and Jennye, and William and Tottie, three of whom - Dilgorru {King Bell), Matura (William) and Dagorri (Jenny) - survived to be interviewed in Berlin in 189614.

The following reconstruction of the events involving the 1883 group, Billy, Jenny, little Toby and their companions, has been dealt with under three headings: the capture, which discusses events in Australia; the construction of savage other or the making of the professional Aboriginal performer, which deals with their journeyings in North America and Europe; and a final part concerning the apotheosis of Billy, the Australian, at the Universal Exposition in Paris in 1889. Within this framework I seek to trace what befell this particular troupe of Aboriginals, and to foreground the process by which identities were subsumed in performance and real and captive Aboriginal lives were written out of history. Before I proceed, however, I want to refer to another methodological issue.

'Captives of the Archives'; 'Captives of Discourse'

I am uncomfortably aware that these three headings continue to categorise Aborigines, if not as objects, at least as victims. But in the same way as Aboriginal resistance has been written back into history, it is possible to locate some positive elements in the stark choices which the 'dispersed' Aborigines had to make between imminent murder or going away with a seemingly powerful white protector. For those members of the several groups for whom there may have been an element of choice, their departure with Cunningham for an unknown world was a courageous step. The difficulty is to find a way of telling - to achieve a reach of the imagination - that restores the existential dimension to these people's lives.

This search for a way of telling was raised as early as 1884 by a contributor to The Queenslanderts who speculated about the different ways in which a future novelist and historian would 'treat of Aborigines'

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ROSLYN POIGNANT: CAPTIVE ABORIGINAL LIVES

whom he saw as doomed to extinction. He did not forsee that for the Aboriginal peoples the period of demographic and cultural crisis would be followed by one of political and social reconstitution in which they make their own voices heard. Today not only the relative merits of writing in fictional or factual mode are under discussion, but also the issues of accessibmty to the archives and interpretation of them. The questions are: what can be salvaged from the archives and narratives of the dominant culture - and from indigenous memory - and whose story is it anyway?

Indeed this paper itself could be seen as a continuation of non­ Aboriginal appropriation of Aboriginal narratives; a 'captured discourse' which is perpetuated because Aboriginal people remain - in Henrietta Fourmiles' words - 'captives of the archives' and are not their own 'history-tellers'16. This argument has particular relevance to this paper because there is an extensive literature on the anthropology of world fairs, museums and exhibitions in which, although it focuses on the way in which living persons were (and sometimes still are) 'displayed as if they were objects'17, its overall self-reflexivity is almost entirely directed at the exploration of alterity in relation to the Western psyche. It is hardly concerned with the indigenous existential-being­ that-is-other. A rare exception is Ken Harper's book, Give me my father's body: the life of Minik the New York Eskimo (1989)18_

Therefore I accept the Aboriginal assertion that the hegemony of the dominant culture continues to make them captives of the archives and of discourse. According to Mudrooroo Narogin, what is at stake is nothing less than than the psychological well-being and self-image of 'Aboriginal-being-in-Australia'1s. This is fragile ground to intrude upon, b.ut I would argue that. the reclaiming of this suppressed history is urgent for all of us, arid that in reconstituting a shared past there is not only room but a necessity for a plurality of histories. There is also a sense in which archives are not a source, but the product of research; frequently they are formed in the process of ferretting out evidence on the margins of history.

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ROSLYN POIGNANT: CAPTIVE ABORIGINAL LIVES

The Capture

One version of the group's capture is supplied by Cunningham himself in the pamphlet he produced in American and English editions and at least in one translation (German) where he describes its members as 'the most interesting people that have ever been seen in a civilised country'. He offers an account of 'a few of my difficulties in obtaining them' as a measure of the authenticity of his rare and savage charges. He describes how, in early 1883, his first attempts to acquire 'five fine specimens' in Port Darwin were thwarted by the local Police Inspector who told 'the blacks they would never return, which utterly scared them, and they immediately fled to the bush.' Next he chartered a cutter from Townsville, endured hardships at sea, paddled up creeks in canoes, 'and attempted to offer the creatures on shore all inducements such as tobacco, red handkerchiefs etc', but with no success. 'At last,' he states blandly, 'l succeeded in getting those that now accompany me'20. What were the details of their capture which he was so reluctant to recount?

For the answer we would need to take a brief look at the frontier era in North Queensland from 1860 to the end of the century. Broadly speaking it consisted of a number of overlapping frontiers of which the most relevant to our story is the sea-coast frontier in the vicinity of Cardwell (established 1864) and Townsville, including the adjacent offshore islands of Hinchinbrook and Palm Islands. Early in March 1872, as a reprisal against the murder of some of the castaways of the brig Maria, wrecked on Bramble reef a few weeks earlier, Hinchinbrook Island was 'cleared' of all but a handful of Aborigines by Sub-Inspector Johnstone and his troopers. According to eye-witnesses, a small girl of about seven - one of two children who survived - was publicly raped21. The depredations against the peoples of what are today island holiday resorts continued into the next decade, when the decoying and outright kidnapping for the beche-de-mer and pearling industries of the northern waters was at its height.

The taking up of land in North Queensland had been quickly followed by the railway and the telegraph, and the frontier expansion took place under the public gaze. The murder, rape, and ill-treatment of the Aborigines was widely reported not only in the newspapers of the

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ROSLYN POIGNANT: CAPTIVE ABORIGINAL LIVES

southern states but also in the local town papers. For instance, an incident such as the Hinchinbrook massacre can be followed in letters of protest in the press, through Parliamentary debates and special enquiries. In the same letter quoted above, Charles Heydon wrote ' . .. a system of slavery far more atrocious and degrading, and a system of native slaughter far more merciless and complete, are in daily operation in the British Colony of Queensland.' In 1880 The Bulletin 's front page article was headed 'The 11\(hite Man gave them lead' which claimed that 'there is hardly a man in North Queensland whose motto is not: "See a nigger and 'pot' him'". Three years later an article in the same vein, headed 'A War of Extermination', went on to assert that 'the savage dies out sooner through civilisation and conversion than by the more straightforward method of lead and rum'. It was a very public frontier.

Even official British opinion condemned the settler society, and in a report of 1883 advised against entrusting the control of 'the large numbers of black populations' of New Guinea to Queensland on the grounds that

it is impossible to converse with any average Queensland colonist, to read their newspapers, or the speeches of their legislators, without perceiving that even among the most enlightened and humane of their number, the native is regarded simply as an encumbrance on the soil, as being destitute frights, and as existing only on sufferance for which he should be gratefu1.22

The effects of the brutal kidnappings for the pearling fleets cannot be contested23 and there is one particular incident which took place in February 1882 that I wo_uld argue has direct relevance for this narrative. It was officially recorded by B. Fahey, the sub-collector of Customs at Cooktown, and it concerned a public rape of ten year old girl. She was one of a group of eighteen Aborigines of both sexes, ranging in age from nine to forty years, who had been procured 'in suspicious circumstances' from Hinchinbrook Island, Dunk Island, and the vicinity of Johnstone River in what was euphemistically called a recruiting drive. Fahey wrote that they were then divided into two groups of nine, of mixed sexes, 'after the manner of sheep ... without reference to the inclinations or feelings naturally induced by the filial or friendly instincts

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ROSLYN POIGNANT: CAPTIVE ABORIGINAL LIVES·

of the parties concerned, some of whom, I know, manifested a strong aversion to their separation.' 24

The girl was returned to Hinchinbrook and thereby probably once more separated from her kin. The rest were recruited into the pearling fleet, where (since the Act of i 880) the usual 'contract' of employment was for a year. To date it has not been possible to establish if any of these people were amongst those taken by Cunningham in the following year, 1883, but according to the Houze & Jacques interview, Tambo - who was at first 'the only one who understood and spoke English' - and his wife Sussy 'had been in relationship with the English and the American fishermen who frequented the Coral Sea and the Torres Straits·2s.

It this was not the certain history of this group, it was the pattern: Aborigines of different language groups, who were sometimes strangers or even enemies, were thrown together, arbitrarily separated from their own kin, and forced by circumstance or coercion to adopt new survival strategies by working for the white man. In the case of this group, it is possible to piece together that Toby was only accompanied by one of his wives, Jenny, and their child, little Toby; both Bob and Billy had also left behind two wives and one child; Jimmy had left a wife and two children. Sussy had no children by Tambe, but he had been a man in his forties and probably had children by his second wife26. Cunningham arrived in Sydney with his group in February 1883 and on Sunday 18 February two of them tried to make their escape. They were found, 'utterly wild', wandering in the bush near Manly, one naked, and the other wearing only a shirt, and when a Constable Leplaw tried to arrest them he was stabbed in the hand. They were gaoled at Darlinghurst until they were brought before the magistrate on the following day.

When it was discovered that these two, who were now referred to as Billy and Jimmy, belonged to a larger group, who were lodged 'in a room at the rear of the Carlton Club Hotel' by Cunningham preparatory to 'being taken to America as a speculation' it created a furore27. 'It will never do', trumpeted the Evening News, 'to have Sydney made the entrep6t of a kidnapping trade'2a. Questions were asked in Parliament, a report was called for, telegrams were exchanged with the

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Queensland Police Department and Billy was released into Cunningham's charge.

It was all over in a few days. First it was asserted that, on information from Queensland, 'the natives were aware of the nature of the agreement they had entered into with Cunningham ... [and] the intervention of the government of New South Wales, therefore was not necessary•2s. On the following day, the charge against Jimmy was dropped because, it was said, nobody could be found 'to interpret the language spoken by the accused'30. Thus matters were neatly brought to a conclusion before the departure of the next boat for San·Francisco via Auckland and Apia.

Apparently it was not so easy for Cunningham to recruit his second troupe when he returned in 1892, because according to Maston: 'The government stopped them here until Mr Cunningham gave them a bond of £500 guaranteeing their return to Queensland.' This lot were what Maston referred to as 'tame blacks who spoke English', and he considered that Cunningham would 'do no good with blacks of that type's1.

'Tame blacks' were, of course, people who had been displaced from their own territories. A.J. Vogan, an artist and newspaper correspondent, wrote extensively on the way in which the Aborigines were recruited to implement th.is policy of dispersal, and used his novel, The Black Police, published in 1890, to draw attention to 'some of the obscurer portions of Australia's shadow side; as he had witnessed them in Queensland ii;\ the 188oss2. In his correspondence with the Aboriginal Protection Society he stated that he chose fiction in order 'to command a larger and more sympathetic audience.' The work belonged to the genre

.,

of romantic novel, rather than social realist fiction. Perhaps his most enduring contribution to the discourse was the frontispiece captioned 'Queensland Squatters "Dispersing"

. Aborigines', whi.ch was widely used contemporarily and thereafter. Similarly it is his description of the Black Police which is most often quoted. He found that his critics treated his statements 'as either wilful fabrications, or as artistic embellishments' and 'that my old profession of special reporter is closed to me in consequence ... without prospect of doing the unfortunate natives any good'33• His was a minority view

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and the next stage in the settlement process brought into play what Bernard Smith has called 'the mechanisms of forgetfulness'34•

For settler Australia, the potent narrative of the frontier belongs to the captivity genre, which drew on such true stories as the shipwreck of Mrs Frazer and Barbara Thompson in Queensland, and mythical tales such as the White Woman of Gippsland in Victoria. As Kay Schaffer has argued, what was at stake was possession of the land itself35. The woman's rescue from the blacks symbolised the land's rescue from savagery. The idea of Australian Nation denied a place to the original inhabitants.

Contiguous with Cunningham's removal of the Queenslanders from Australia, accounts designed to attract new migrants to that state made this point quite explicitly. In 1886 - even before the killing had ceased - Alfred Hull hardly mentioned the previous occupants of the coastal district north of Cardwell which he described as being, until recently, a natural wilderness, which 'life, energy, and busy trade, have changed ... into the home of the refined and cultivated race for whom it was no doubt created.' He forsaw that within ten years the axeman:

will have changed this wild face of nature to waving cane and cornfields; ... and in the place of stillness which reigned there so short a time ago, there will be the sound of church bells, music, song. And this country is open to the working man - these scrubs teeming with fruit, the woods with game of every description, and the rivers full of fish; the earth only awaiting the hand of the cultivator, to produce liberally everything he requires, not only to sustain life but to enrich it. Surely there is room here for the poor starving families at home in the old country. Room1ss

The Construction of Savage Other: The Making of the Professional Aboriginal Performer

By early March, Cunningham's captive band were being initiated as performers in Auckland, with a display of boomerang-throwing. And soon they found themselves thrust into the limelight of Barnum, Bailey and Hutchinson's Greatest Show on Earth, in which they toured North America during the tenting season. Then in the winter they were displayed 'in the all the principal museums with unbounded success'37•

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This mix of public performance and ethnographic •display was to be the pattern of all future engagements of the little company.

In this decade it was in the circus, and more particularly Barnum's realisation of it, that the show-space found expression in the spectacle. The essence of the circus was a Grand· Parade of the animals and a great variety of humankind, led by a Beauty Queen, who was sometimes described as the Circassian Princess, rescued form the Infidel. (This ideal type of pure white Causasian appeared on the scene soon after the Crimean War; she was usually enacted by a girl from the slums of New York.) Together these star -performers represented Tamed _Nature, Savagery, and the Captive Maiden with her attendant company of jugglers, clowns and trick performers. The show itself was marked by simultaneity of action, both in the three circus rings and the surrounding side-shows of 'Living Curiosities' and marvels. The success of the operation depended on capturing the attention of a whole community; a cast of thousands, seen by tens of thousands, very often in the course of a single day. Advance notice in the form of handbills and giant posters summoned the crowd. The show was highly mobile, being transported in specially designed railway carriages, which enabled it to plan routes which took in the largest and most profitable towns.

In Toronto, for instance, Bjlly and his companions were displayed in the company of the major attraction, Jumbo, the elephant, together with 'Bushmen', 'Zulus', 'Nubians', 'Sioux Indian savages', and 'other weird representatives of the human family, all of whom are genuine' - or so the public was assurec:fss. Not so the 'Fijian Cannibals' whom Barnum had toured in 1872, one of whom was a woman from Virginia. Others of the so-called savage$., such as the pygmy-earthmen, had histories of abduction similar to Cunningham's group, and survived to travel the circuit for years.

The promotional pamphlet of 1872, The History of P. T. Ba.mum's Cannibals, established a genre which certainly served as a close model for Cunningham's visual and textual presentation of the 'Australian Boomerang Throwers' in his own 1884 pamphlet. The defining indicators of savagery were body mutilation such as tattooing, cannibalism and the practice of infanticide, but (in the context of the

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ROSLYN POIGNANT: CAPTIVE ABORIGINAL LIVES

sho"':-s�ace particularly) the culturally a nd geographically marginalised peoples were also likened to the physically marginalised. Cunningham's savages were presented as 'distorted in human form' ranting (ie unstable), and lacking proper speech. These characteristic� were sometimes regarded as indicators of 'beastliness' in the literal sense. Thus these pamphlets, handbills, and the shows themselves were a popular reflection of a range of scientific and fringe-scientifi� d�bates, concerning evolution, polygenesis versus monogenesis, hierarchy of race, and even inter-species miscegenation.

Up to date I have found very little evidence of how the Australian group made out in this closed community of circus performers in America. In Europe, Cunningham operated as an ·independent entrepreneur, and pre�ented his group in a variety of venues including Folies Bergere in Pans, Castan's Opticon in Berlin, and Hagenbeck's Zoo, Hamburg. Broadly speaking, there were differences between the American and European show-space. In America the performance was absorbed into spectacle, a spectacle in which the onlookers were also absorbed. In Europe, as might be expected in the metropoli of colonial powers, the engagement was of a different order; the encounter was between civilised self and savage other, as is suggested by an newspaper illu�tration of the bushmen, displayed at the Royal Aquarium in 1884, in which apparent proximity between performers and onlookers suggests a close involvement 39_ In Europe the absorption into spectacle took p�ace within the show-space of the world fair or exposition, as I have discussed below.

In a photograph taken of the Aboriginal company at Crystal Palace in March 1884, however, their representation as savages is subverted. Dressed for the show, they are relaxed, and appear to be seasoned, if perhaps a little disgruntled, performers. Something of the way in which they achieved this adjustment, and sustained themselves from the depths of their own culture can be abstracted from between the lines of the detailed report on physical characteristics, bodily measurement and cultural practices, by which positivist science attempted to contain and explain them.

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In the Anthropological Laboratory

The seven remaining Aborigines spent about a month in Brussels, in regular contact with the anthropologists, Houze and Jacques, during which time a degree of trust was established. It was fourteen months since they had left Australia and they all spoke English 'quite fluently', though in a patois, which the scientists considered to be as 'near to English as spoken by uneducated Irish'. And as soon as they realised the Europeans wanted instruction in their languages, it was they who determined the teaching methods, by use of gesture and the spontaneous naming of things about them.4o

'When we did not understand after two, three or four times,' noted the scientists, 'they would bend towards us and would repeat the word several times quietly in the ear. We quote this as proof of their intelligence and as a way of their reasoning.'41 The group thought likewise about the scientists - according to Roth's ethnographic record of practices in their home-place in Queensland, the Aborigines also regarded the ear as the site of intelligence.

There is plenty of evidence that they ciung to their own cultural practices, both in their conduct towards each other, and in their attempts to deal with the trauma of Tambo's death in America, on which occasion they folded his body in the customary manner before they could be stopped. On another occasion, however, Billy appears both to be testing the efficacy of Aboriginal practices and also trying to bridge a cultural gap. In Pittsburgh a child had died in the hotel where they were staying, and he persyaded the parents he could bring him back. He breathed air into the child's mouth, and flapped his limbs. Then he blew and spat into a small box, declaring that he had trapped the 'bad spirit'. He lay down and guarded the child until the next day. When he saw that nothing had changed, he threw the box out of the window. 42

A picture emerges of a group of Aborigines who are dignified in deportment, confident in performance of new skills as well as traditional ones, and are proud of their dress and ornamentation, as instanced by the response of Jimmy who, when asked by a lady why he passed a stick through his nose, countered: 'But why do you have holes in the ears?' 43

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Once they continued their journeyings, however, the events to which they were exposed relentlessly marked them as victims. In Belgium, physical examinations established that almost all of them were suffering from lung infections. Three more of the party died during the year spent in Germany: Bob in Chemnitz, Sussy somewhere as yet unlocated, and Jimmy - who was the clown of the group, and always thinking up new gestures and positions during the measuring sessions - died in Darmstadt on 31 May 1885. Six months later when Toby died in a Paris hospital, Topinard regretted that he had failed to obtain his body for the Broca Museum. He had also failed to grasp the traumatised state of the survivors; he considered Billy to be cold, and self-absorbed, and Jenny to be not stupefied, but stupid. Even so, he wrote: 'Her husband's death here in Paris, Mr Cunningham assures me, has not affected her. I am not convinced. There is a kind of sadness in her which could be related to that'44.

Billy, Jenny and little Toby can be tracked across Europe - from Vienna to Glasgow, and from Rome back to London. In the course of these perambulations Cunningham collected from the leading anthropologists of Europe 'certificates as to their being the true type of the race they are said to represent'45. These scientists' letters of authentication - so useful to the showman in his trade - were also accepted as guarantees of authenticity by other scientists. R. Virchow defended the public display and was explicit about the link between it and the anthropologist. He went on to urge 'for deeper questions to be put concerning the Australian Aborigine in order to inform the wider public'.46

According to the scientists, Billy and his companions were positively scared of their master, and only out of his presence did they behave with assurance. Then they were even prepared to complain bitterly about his failure to pay them. Even Cunningham's professional colleagues judged him harshly. Exactly translated, his fellow showman, Carl Hagenbeck, declared: 'This Cunningham is a big shit'47. The Aborigines' usefulness to Cunningham was almost over. By 1889 they were no longer with him and he was touring a Samoan troupe; when he abandoned them in New York, a newspaper raised a public subscription for their repatriation. In 1891 he toured a Black American Minstrel Show in Europe. The incentive for his return to

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Queensland in 1892 was the impending World Fair in Chicago the following year.

Thrust into the modem industrialised world with its reorganisation of time and space and specialisation of labour, the group's specialisation was to be professional Aborigines: they were forced to mime an imagined savagery, under the gaze of the new urban classes. For Jimmy, final confirmation of his status appeared on his death certificate where his occupation was set down as 'Australian Savage' in the Cunningham Company.

In the course of my continued search for Billy, Jenny and Little Toby, or even for what happened to their bones and bodies, I turned to the The Universal Exposition of 1889 in Paris.

The Apotheosis of Billy - The Australian

In an elegant essay on the Eiffel Tower, Barthes writes: 'The Tower looks at Paris' - in such a way that it transforms it into a 'kind of nature' - 'a new nature that is human space' - a 'passive overview' which offers itself for decipherment, which, he suggests, is what each onlooker reconstitutes in her memory as she looks, and as she imagines a history4a. Among the histories he considers, surprisingly, he neglects the constructed world that filled the show-space at the Tower's base on the occasion of its inauguration in 1889. The mix of peoples and cultures to be found there, and their commodification, prefigured the new brew of the twentieth century - and the way into this spectacle of the world was by the moving walkway.

So multilayered is the. symbolism embedded in this constructed world of the Paris Exposition that there are several possible starting points to unravel its meaning. The relevant one for my argument is the Palace of the Liberal Arts which contained four pavilions devoted to Anthropology and related subjects. Surrounding the Palace were the streets containing the Pavilions of various nations, and the reconstructed streets from the colonial towns of North Africa, and the Far East. Then, according to a popular account

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in the back settlement behind all the gorgeous finery of the pagodas and palaces . . . the ingenious French have established colonies of savages whom they are attempting to civilise. They are the genuine article and no mistake, living and working an.d amusing themselves as they and their kinsfolk do in their own country4e.

At night there were performances of eastern dancers and African drummers, and after the show - according to the cartoonist - the onlookers and the performers drifted away togetherso.

Anthropology, which was acclaimed as the modern French Science, was a main focus for the exhibition, the lay-out of which is well documented by plans and photographs. If one entered the section devoted to Anthropology at the entrance of the Pavilion nearest the Seine, one came first to the statue of the Great Buddha of Nara, from Japan, which was the meeting point for anthropologists while the exposition was in progress. To the left were the casts of two Bushmen (who had been exhibited as living people in 1884 in London). Enclosed within the pavilion in a central court were tableaux depicting stone tool makers, grain growers, builders, paper makers, metalworkers, arranged around a central tableaux of Lapps. This visualisation lent authority to a conjectural evolutionary history of mankinds1_

The eight entrances to these diverse internal spaces were flanked by pairs of decorative panels depicting a selection of racial types, one pair of which represented Esther the Hottentot, and Billy the Australian - with his dog - the latter painting being based on Bonaparte's photograph. As recorded photographically, the chamber immediately within was concerned with the comparative anatomy of man and animals. On either side of a figure of Western man with his musculature and nervous system exposed stood skeletons of a Gorilla and an Orang Otang, the whole forming an extraordinary visualisation of contemporary evolutionary views.

The panels themselves probably no longer exist, and the faded photographic record is therefore the end point of a series of representations. Billy's containment within them is analogous to his entrapment in western anthropological discourse. This fugitive image

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stands as a metaphor for the way in which he and his companions were written out of history, and the lifeless painting it reproduces totally lacks the disruptive power of the original Bonaparte photograph.

* Dedication: This paper is dedicated to 'Jimmy'/Teninderrnnendal, an unsung Aboriginal hero who died in Darmstadt, Germany, May 31st 1885. The cover picture is his portrait, taken by Carl Gunther in Berlin, from a print in the collection of La Societe de Geographie, lodged in Bibliotheque Nationale, Paris. By courtesy of the Societe.

Acknowledgements: I wish to thank Dr Paul Turnbull and Peter Mesenholler for their generosity in sharing their own researches. Warm thanks also to Terry Carlborn, Peter Berger and Monique Burg for translation of non-English texts. I acknowledge with gratitude the assistance of the staff of a number of libraries and institutions: particularly Mme M. Fontan, Bibliotheque du Musee de !'Homme; Mme F. Duclos, Bibliotheque Societe de Geographie, Bibliotheque Nationale; and Mr. M. Florin; Ms Julie Anne Wilson, Bodleian Library, Oxford; the Museum of Mankind Library, London; and in Australia: Oxley Library, and the Queensland State Archives, Brisbane; Mitchell Library and State Library ot NSW, Sydney; and Dr Noel Loos, James Cook University of North Queensland. My thanks also to Elizabeth Edwards and Dr Kate Darian-Smith for their comments, and to Professor James Walter, recent Head of SRMCAS, for encouraging me to take part in the seminar.

1 Journal of the Anthropological Institute (JAI), 'From Prince Roland Bonaparte a Collection of Photographs of New Caledonian and Australian Natives (Queensland}'. For the Library, Dec. 8th, 1885', 1886, (15), p. 422.

2 JA/, 'Exhibition of Natives of Queensland ... 26 Mar 1887', 1888, (17), p. 83. 3 P. Greenhalgh, Ephemeral Vistas: A History of the Expositions Universe/Jes,

Great Exhibitions and World Fairs, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1988, p. 86.

4 Roland Barthes ( ed), Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, (Trans. R Howard), London: Fontana, 1984, p. 27.

5 M. Heidegger, The· Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays, NewYork: Harper Torch Books, 1977, p.130.

6 Charles Dickens (ed}, 'The Noble Savage', in Household Words, London, 1853, (7), p. 337.

7 James Clifford, The Predicament of Culture, Cambridge Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1988, p.236.

B D J Mulvaney, Encounters in Space, 1988; Henry Reynolds, With the White People, Ringwood: Penguin, 1990.

9 J Cassady and R Johnstone, no 120, 'Halifax Bay', in EM Curr, The Australian Race, Melbourne, 1886, p. 425.

10 E Houze and V Jacques, 'Communications de MM. Houze et Jacques sur les Australians du Musee du Nor�. Seance du 28 Mai', Bulletin de la Societe d'Anthropo/ogie de Bruxel/es, Ill-IV, p. 107.

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1 1 R M W Dixo n and B J Blake , Handbook of Australian Languages, Amsterd am : J o h n Bejamins, 1 983, pp. 1 - 1 44, 430 -5 ; Gu rr, The Australian Race.

1 2 R Vi rch ow, 'Australier', Zeitschrift FOr Ethnologie. Sitz u n g vom 1 7 Feb ruary 1 88 3 , Verhand l u n g e n d e Berl i n e r Gesellsch aft fu r Ant h ro p o l o g i e , Et h n ol o gie u nd U rg eschichte (VBGAEU), ( 1 5) 1 883, pp. 1 90-93.

13 I am i ndebted to D r Paul Tu rnbu l l , for d i re cting my att ention to a refere n ce to Cu n n i n g h a m 's rem oval of t h i s g ro u p in an u ndated newspape r cutti ng i n Mesto n pprs O M 6 4 - 1 7 F8 , Oxley Library, cited i n u n published t h esis, W Th o rpe, - Arc h i bald Meston and t h e Abori g i n e s : I deology and practice 1 870- 1 979' , 1 984, p.60.

1 4 R V i rchow, A Voss and A Basti an , ' D rei Australi e r' , Zeitschrift Fur Ethnologie. Sitz u n g vom 1 7 October 1 896, VBGAEU, (28) 1 896, p. 528.

15 The Queenslander, 1 Mar 1 884, p. 332. 1 6 H Fourm i l e , 'Who Owns the Past? Aborig i n e s as Captives of the A rch ives',

Aboriginal History, ( 1 3 ) , 1 , 1 9 89 ; see also Robert Shaw, 'Response to Col i n J o h nson 's A rticle "Ca ptu red Discourse : Capt ured Lives'" i n Aboriginal History, ( 1 3 ) , 1 , 1 989 .

1 7 see C M H i nsley, 'The Wo rld as Market Place : C o m m odification of the Exotic at the World's Co l u mbian Expositi o n , Chicag eo , 1 893', i n Ivan Karp and Steven D Lavi n e (eds), Exhibiting Cultures:The Poetics and Politics of Museum Display, Washi ngto n , S mithso nian I nstitute P ress, 1 99 1 .

1 8 Ke n Harper, Give Me My Father's Body: The Life of Minik, The New York Eskimo, New York: Blackh ead , 1 9 89 .

1 9 M u d rooroo Narog i n , Writing from the Fringe, Melbourn e : H y l a n d House, 1 99 1 , p. 1 55.

2 0 R A C u n n i n g h a m , A History of R A Cunningham 's A ustralian Aborigines, Tatooed Cannibals, Black Trackers and Boomerang Throwers, Londo n : E l l i ott, 1 884, pp. 2-4.

2 1 H eyd o n l ette r, 1 874, in Quee nsland Legislative Cou ncil, Votes & Proceedings, (QLC, V&P) , 1 875, p. 623. I have not seen what is appare ntly the most detai led acco unt, inco rporat i n g o ral i nte rviews , in D J o nes, Cardwel/shire Story, 1 9 6 1 . See also Noel Loos, Invasion and Resistance: Aboriginal-European Relations on th e North Queensland Frontier 1 86 1 - 1 897, Canbe rra: A N U P ress, 1 98 2 , and R M W Dixon and B J Blake, Handbook of A ustralian Languages, 1 983. Howeve r, the cu m u l ative affect of reading the Parliamentary debates and press reports i s co nsiderab l e . For instance the official Police reply to Heydo n's l ette r i n the same state paper, p. 626.

22 Q LC, V&P, (2), 1 884, p. 951 . 23 F o r i nstance Q LC, V& P (2) , 1 877, p. 1 245 refers to another wel l -docu me nted

i ncident when kidnapp i n g In this area led to Abori g i nal reprisals agai nst t h e schoo n e r Douglas. Many o f th ese Incide nts a n d t h e followi ng case re ported by Fahey, sub-coll ector of Custo ms, Cooktown, are cove red in Lo os, Invasion and Resistance.

24 Q u e e nsland State A rchives, Col/A3 63, 1 385 of 1 88 2 ; Loos, Invasion and Resistance, pp. 1 30- 1 .

25 Houze and Jacques, 'Co m m u nications', p. 1 00 . 26 H ouze and Jacques, 'Com m u n ications', p p . 1 3 1 -2 . 27 NSW Parliamentary Debates, 1 883, p. 551 . 2s Evening News, 23 Feb. 1 883. 29 Sydney Morning Herald, 23 Feb. 1 883. 30 Sydney Morning Herald, 24 Feb. 1 883.

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3 1 Meston papers OM 64- 1 7 02 in Thorpe, 'Maston and the Aborigi nes', p. 60. 32 A J Voga n , The Black Police: A Story of Modern Australia, Lo ndon : Hutch i nso n

& C o . , 1 890, Preface. 33 APS Aust. G 97/A MSS B rit. Emp. 522 34 Be rnard Smith , The Spectre of Truganini, ABC Boyer Lectu res, Syd ney: ABC ,

1 9 80, p. 1 7. 35 see Kay Schaffer, 'Captivity Narratives and the Idea of "Nation"' in this collection. 36 A A H u l l , 'Quee nsland as it was and as it is', Journal of the Royal Geographical

Society, Queensland Branch, (1 ) , 1 886, p. 1 04·5 . 37 Cu n n i ng ham, A History. 38 Toronto World, 1 2 J uly 1 2, 1 884. 39 'African "Earth m e n " and the Westm i n iste r Aq uari u m ' , Newspape r cutt i n g

(sou rce u nkn own) , 20 Sept. 1 884. 40 Houze and J acques, 'Communications', p. 1 00 . 4 1 Houze and J acques, 'Co m munications', pp . 1 00-1 . 42 Ho uze and J acques, 'Com municatio ns' , p. 1 39 . 43 H o u z e a n d Jacques, 'Com mun icatio ns' , p. 1 25 . 44 p Topinard , ' P resent at'1011 d e t rois Au straliens vivants . Seance du 1 9

N ove m b re 1 885', Bulletin de la Societe d'Anthropologie de Paris, Seri es 3, p . 692.

4 5 MSS l ette r fro m P rofessor G . S e rg i , Roma, 13 Jan uary, 1 887. I n Galton pap e rs [R.A. C u n n i ng h am] 227/6 . , UCL. I am very g rateful to Dr Paul Turnbull for access to his research of this archive.

46 R Virchow , 'Austral i e r. Zeitschrift Fur Ethnologie. Sitzung vom 1 9 July 1 884. ', VBGAEU , ( 1 6), 1 884, p. 4 1 7.

4 7 H Thode-Arora, Fur funzig Pfennig um die Welt: Die Hagenbeckschen Volkerschauen, Fran kfu rt/New York: Campus Ve rlag , 1 989, p. 42.

48 1 paraphrase : Roland Barth es, 'The Eiffel Tower' , i n Selected Writings, (Susan Sontag , ed. ) , Londo n : Fontana/Collins. 1 983, p. 241 .

49 'Paris and its Exposition', Pallma.11 Gazette, Extra no. 49, 1 889. 50 L 'Exposition de Paris 1 889, Paris: lllustree A La Libraire, 1 889, vol . 1 , p. 24� . 5 1 T Wi l son , 'Anthropology at the Paris Exposition in 1 889', Report of the �at1 on_al

M u se u m , 1 890 : Exposition Universe/le lntern_ationelle df! 1 889 a !'ans. Catalogue General Offfciel. Exposition Retro_spect,ve du Tra�a1/ et c}es Sciences A n thropologiques. Section I. Anthropotogie - Eth nograph1e , Pans: L Dane{, 1 890 .

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