[intro music]
[applause]
Thank you Kate, its so great to be here. Thank you all for being here.
Hello to everybody in the foyer.
I've been inspired by Richard Gills' talk, so I'm going to start with a song.
But I am not going to sing, it's ok! One of my favourite singer/songwriters, Regina Spektor,
wrote an ethereally beautiful song called, "Samson". I don't know if anyone knows it. And it retells
the biblical story of Samson and Delilah. And Delilah sings, "beneath the sheets of paper
lie my truth". And it's a passionate truth, because Samson and Delilah are lovers.
And its true, she did cut his hair, but that stuff about bringing the colonnades down, up, never happened.
Didn't happen at all. And the reason we don't know this story is because,
Delilah says, "because the history books forgot about us, and the Bible didn't mention us, not even once!"
I just love Spektor's playful seriousness here, I love this voice of Delilah ringing
out from the dusty musty pages of the history books. And I love the way she takes on the Bible,
as though its a kind of, really, unreliable tabloid. [laughter] It's a great song.
I'm a historian. I work on the early history of Sydney, and I can tell you that sometimes
a voice like Delilah's, really does ring out from under the pages of the history books
the way hers does in the song. These are the voices from beneath. They tell us whats really going on.
They're compelling. They make my heart beat faster. Some of them haunt me.
If we could be on the edge of Sydney Harbour, somewhere around Mosman or Balls Head,
at the end of 1790, and we could listen above the sound of the waves, you would hear the
voices of Eora fisherwomen in their canoes out there on the water, and the would be singing
the fishing songs and keeping time with their paddles. But there's a long boat out there too
and its full of white men, and they're shouting, they're shouting endlessly,
"Bennelong! Bennelong!" The fisherwomen can hear them. They think
its hilarious, and they mimic the white men in their higher, thinner voices,
"Bennelong! Bennelong". The white men can hear them, and they know,
they're being mocked.
Let's go into the early town now, the camp about 1800, a few years later, 10 years later,
we're going over the log bridge, over the tank stream. We're heading up the ridge and
we're gonna look down, into the beautiful bay, of Woolloomooloo. And this is what it
looked like, a beautiful kind of bush backed bay, um, still very bucolic, and of course,
as you do, a classical mansion sitting on a cleared rise. This house belongs to the,
ah, Palmer family, and they have just scored themselves a real prize! A skilled, convict servant.
She's a woman, she's a convict it's true, she's just off the boat, but, her days
as a cross dressing horse thief are over! [laughter]
Her name is Margaret Catchpole, and she is skilled, thats why she's a prize.
She's a skilled dairy woman, she's a horse woman, she's a very intelligent person, and she has
a great sense of humour, and she's a great observer of life.
This is her. Now, we could be peering in at the kitchen window of that house, to see her
bending over at the table writing her first letter home. Now, she's not a very good writer,
we should be thankful for that because Margaret Catchpole wrote as she spoke, so her letters
meander around like an easy conversation, like she's talking to her relatives and friends back home.
And to us. And her spelling is so very, very, adventurous! And brave, that
you can hear her Suffolk accent, in what she writes, and I've actually got a copy of her
letter here which I'm gonna read to you a little of. You'll notice it's not in an envelope
because they didn't have envelopes, they used to just fold them over and fix them with sealing
wax, so thats what I've done for you. This is from her first letter, which you can see
here up on the screen also, and it's about when she arrives.
[reading with accent] "As i was goin' to be landed, on the left hand of me, it put me in mind
of a cliff! Both the housin' and likewise the hills, so as to put me in very good spirits
indeed seein' a place so much like my own native home. It is a great deal more like
England than ever I did expect to see for there is garden stuff of every kind, the gardens
are very beautiful indeed, all planted with geraniums, and they run up 7 and 8 foot high."
Geraniums? Gardens? A place like home? Ah, Excuse me, i thought this was supposed to
be hell on earth, you know, the gulag? She goes on, ah, to tell, er, Dr Stevens something
she thinks will interest him.
"The crops of wheat here is very good in this country for it produces 40 bushels per acre,
it is a very bountiful place indeed, for I understand that them that never had a child
in all their lives have some, after they come here." [laughter]
Now, Margaret writes about the beauty of the country quite a bit in her letters, in fact,
every letter has these descriptions in it, and even more about this miracle that everybody's
talking about, that women who come to Sydney who have never been able to have a child before,
become pregnant, and have babies.
Well, you might be thinking, "Hmm, that;s all very well, few human interest stories to make
dry old history a bit more interesting." [laughter] That's wrong, these stories change history.
These stories are history. These stories show us whats really going on. They invite us into
what the great historian Greg Dening called the past's own present. The past's own present.
Thats the time when people didn't know what was going to happen. It's the time when things
were undecided. When things were still uncertain, and exciting.
Imagine, we're back down on the harbour, with the Eora fisherwomen, who are they?
They are the great Eora fisherwomen of early Sydney. They are the mistresses of this harbour.
They rule these waves. Their skills in canoeing and diving and fishing and swimming are absolutely
extraordinary. They can, they can paddle these little bark canoes - which were very wobbly,
with a child in the front, a child in the back, baby at the breast, fishing, fire in the front,
cooking fish, through the largest surf. So they, you know, the British sailors
were absolutely in awe of them. They take children out in these canoes from, ah, soon
after birth, and so, the children grow up on the water, and so that means that the rhythm
of the paddles and the rocking of the canoes and the swell of the waves must have been
just as familiar to them as the solidity of the earth or their mother's heart beat.
The girls learnt to line fish, they grow from their mums and their aunties and their grandmas.
They learn the fishing song and the fishing places. They learn how to hone
a hook from the cheek of a turban shell. They learn how to burley with chewed cockle.
They learned how to snare and fish, snare and, and hook a fish. But there's more to this than
fishing, more even than that. The women, are the main food provider for the Eora families,
and, ah, so they control the food supply, and anthropologists have argued - and there
is a lot of reason to believe this - is that in a coastal areas where women control the
food supply, they can challenge the social and cultural dominance of men. So polygamy
is reduced, women and children can attend male ceremonies, and rituals, which they do
in Sydney. And it also means that women have their own spiritual probably secret and sacred,
ah, teaching places and life. And so, Sydney would have had this female Eora geography.
We've lost that geography. But I'm sure that it's centred on the harbour, their harbour.
But why are they mimicking the white men in the canoes who are shouting for Bennelong
that day in 1790? Well, we're so often told, or we assume that the continent here, and
NSW, became white space and under British law as soon as the first white fleet sloshed
onto the shores at Botany Bay. But this isn't true, because 2 years after, even 2 years
after, um, that happened, with the camps being set up at Sydney Cove, all the land around
the camp and all the waterways, they're still Aboriginal land. Unarmed whites that go into
that country, they go into it at their peril, and the Aboriginal people do not come into
this town, they avoid it. There are no communication, um, theres no links of communication between
the two groups. The camp is an insignificant speck on the rim of a vast Aboriginal continent.
Now this actually, um, tells us a lot about how the whites are thinking, because they,
um, they are very disturbed. They find this eerie, they don't know what to do. And so
they take drastic action. They kidnap a warrior to force open communication, and they kidnap
Bennelong. Who will come up on the screen in a minute, there he is. This is Bennelong,
this man was brilliant. He was a very promising protege. He learnt English fast, he wore
their clothes. He, um, he toasted the King. But, after he'd learnt everything he could
he left them. Jumped over the fence of Government House and went back to his people. Oh, no.
They were back at square one, after all that effort. So they get into the boats and they
row out into the harbour and they call his name endlessly to the impassive grey green shore.
And they hear the women's voices coming back to them, mimicking them, and laced unmistakably
with laughter. And so, we know, who holds the upper hand here in Sydney Harbour, in 1790.
But what about Margaret Catchpole? How's she going? She's going very well thank-you!
10 years after she gets here, she's arrived as a convict in chains. 10 years later she has
a little farm on the Hawkesbury, she's, ah, a nurse, a midwife in her little community
at Richmond, and she's highly esteemed by the people there, and she can't help boasting,
just a little, to the people back home. "They think of me very well. They cannot do
without me." And it's probably true.
Now, what do her letters tell us? 2 things that absolutely shine in Margaret's letters.
One is, that men are irrelevant. [laughter] They're just not there! They're really distant figures,
you know. And what the letters tell us is this is the way the women are building this colony.
Now how does that change history? Well, you know that most historical accounts
leave the women out, as though they didn't do anything, as though they're just passive
dependants, that, um, or they're those, you know, damn nuisance whores! Ah, But Margaret
tells us the truth, women are running pubs - this is my favourite picture of a convict
woman - um, they're smoking pipes - they, um, they, they set up shops, they have families,
they, they make and mend clothing - very particular about the clothing - ah, they dance, they
drink, they sing, they fight, and they flirt, and they make very cool headed decisions indeed
about who they will marry or if they will marry at all. Margaret Catchpole says that
she was not for marrying. And she's one of the special women in early, in the early colony
because she is there at the hour of greatest human need. She brings babies into the world.
She, she she nurses the sick. She lays out the the dead before they're farewelled, and laid to rest.
What price such comforts? And so the letters tell us loud and clear, that you
can't have a colony without women! And you certainly can't have a nation without women.
Now the other great strand in her letters is that she writes about country. All the time.
It's capriciousness, the wild hail storms, the floods - terrible floods that she endured.
But she also writes about it's intoxicating beauty. The wheat fields all in ear,
the great bounty of the peach trees so laden with fruit that the limbs touch the ground.
And, the babies! Always with the babies!
Again, how does that change history? Well, we are constantly told that the early settlers
hated the local environment, that they felt alienated by it and, and that they attacked it,
and that they thought everything was up-side-down and wrong. And we're told that the environment
in turn hated them, and it tried to kill them, and reject them, and withered their bodies to husks.
Not true! The settlers revelled in the local environment. This is what Margaret
Catchpole's letters are telling us. They celebrated it's bounty. They feasted, ah, they loved
the climate, they said, "Oh, we feel alive in this climate, in England we feel dead,
here we feel alive" [laughter] That's a true quote! Um, they celebrate the bounty of the
fish, and the oysters, and the, the wild fowl that they feast upon. They collect nature,
and, ah, they paint it as you see here, and they wrote poetry about it, celebrating it.
And most of all, they watch in wonder as women, sick and starved and old beyond their years,
become pregnant, and swell with new life.
What a place they had come to.
The eminent historian Alan Atkinson writes about the voices of history too, and he says,
"The past is not only a foreign country, but a region thick with competing voices,
and we who hunt among them are like half Deaf people at parties." Humbling but true.
It's true. The voices I've talked about today have often, so often been drowned out by loud and
more insistent more triumphant voices of Empire, and authority. They're the ones who write
the histories. But cup your ear, listen to the background hubbub, and in a quicksilver
moment you may catch what lies beneath. And what is really going on.
Thank you.
[applause]