The Reef: A Passionate History: The Great Barrier Reef from Captain Cook to Climate Change (16 page)

Knowing that some of the Kaurareg, including another of her rescuers, Boroto, would be opposed to her visiting the ship lest she decided to stay, Giom asked her guardian and sister, a senior woman called Urdzanna with whom she lived, whether she could go. The Kaurareg thought of Giom as a trophy. Her presence brought them status, but being a ghost, she was not completely one of them. Pretending to be ill and in urgent need of medicine from her fellow
marki
on the ship, Giom promised to bring Urdzanna a knife from the sailors. She assured Urdzanna’s husband Gunage, a wealthy and influential boat owner, that she had no intention of staying on the ship, and was given permission to go.
2

Next morning at eight o’clock, the expedition set off in four large sailing canoes. Giom rode with the boat’s owner, Old Sallali, his wife Old Aburda, and their three grown-up children—two sons and a daughter. The strongest of their paddlers was Boroto, a burly young warrior who, as well as being one of Giom’s rescuers was also Gunage’s younger brother. Because there was no breeze, the fleet drifted, and the men scanned the unruffled surface of the water for signs of turtle, which were liable to be copulating at this time of year. Soon a single turtle was sighted and captured, after the excitement of which the fleet headed to a small sandy beach on the mainland where their Gudang friends had lit fires to welcome them in.

As soon as they landed, at about eight o’clock in the evening, the Gudang huddled around, talking excitedly about the knives,
bissikara
(biscuits), and shirts that could be obtained from the
marki
. The Gudang recommended that the Kaurareg base themselves on the adjacent island of Wamalag (York Island), a standard meeting place for traders which had the additional advantage of six good water holes. The island also looked over to Podaga, where the
marki
congregated each day.

That night on Wamalag, Giom couldn’t sleep for excitement and nervousness: “I had not eaten anything scarcely for two days for thinking of the vessel, how I should get off.” Lying on a soft pile of grass and her woven mat, she listened to the noises of the men talking and joking around the fire. Boroto and a few friends were smoking native tobacco in their long bamboo pipes and intermittently toppling over on the beach in a stupefied heap. Other men chattered incessantly about the prospects of trading with the
marki
, while others again were sleeping in their canoes for fear of being surprised by enemies.
3

Around 2:00 a.m., a sudden scare swept through the camp when one of the elders was visited by a prophetic dream that they were about to be massacred by their ruthless mainland enemies the “Yegillies” (Gumakudin clan). Most of the Kaurareg, including Giom, leaped into their canoes and paddled away from shore. Returning when the scare had abated, Giom ate some roasted turtle eggs and at last fell asleep.

Early the next day, after the men had gone off in the canoes to hunt turtle again, a woman friend agreed to accompany Giom up a hill on the eastern side of the island so that she could look out at the ghost ship. Again the castaway found herself quizzed about whether she intended to stay with the
marki
, and she reiterated her need for medicine, adding the reassurance that “I was too black. They would not have me now.” Later in the day, when the men returned with a good catch of turtle, they handed it to the women to cook, then went back to their canoes to visit the ship. Giom, ordered by the senior women to remain behind to help with the cooking, was told she might be allowed to go to the ship the next day. Once the canoes were gone Giom began to cry, asking a friend crossly “what they meant at keeping me back from my people.”
4

Clambering up a rock behind the camp, Giom began angrily stripping pandanus leaves with a piece of sharpened hoop iron, recalling a melancholy occasion some years earlier when she’d failed to get a passing ship to stop, even though it was nearby and the sailors on deck could obviously see her. Evidently thinking she was a native woman, they ignored her, and as the ship disappeared Giom lay down by a water hole and wept, for hours, until night fell.
5

Still, when the Kaurareg men returned that evening, she was heartened that they could talk of nothing but the
marki
ship and the booty they’d obtained. Thomagugu, her thoughtful brother, gave her a gift of a small pipe with a picture of a ship on it that looked like a man-of-war. The rest of the men began to quarrel over which of them should receive the reward for taking Giom to the ship the next day, until Thomagugu silenced them with an angry reminder that he was the one who’d held her up in the water when she was drowning.

Yet even this sharpened interest in obtaining
marki
goods did nothing to precipitate action. The next day passed exactly like the last, except that this time when the men returned from hunting, Old Aburda, the only senior woman who could serve as a chaperone, delayed Giom’s visit a further day because she felt too tired for the short voyage across the strait. Giom now pinned all her hopes on Thomagugu and his wife: he’d always said she would one day be allowed to go back to her people, “but most of the men and women said that I should die amongst them.”
6

The following day, October 16, stretched out with the same agonizing slowness. While the men were hunting, Giom busied herself collecting wood, heating stones on a fire, and cutting up turtle for baking. When the canoes returned she bathed in the sea in preparation for a visit to the ship. She had just finished making a shade shelter in the sand for Aburda, when the old lady suddenly walked down to the water’s edge and called her to look at some white men who were shooting birds over at Podaga. Seeing this, the Kaurareg men jumped into their canoes and headed for the beach.

Giom begged Aburda and a few other women to go with her, but they were too afraid of the sporadic gunfire, as indeed were many of the men. Soon the Kaurareg canoes were already halfway across the small strait, and only a single Gudang canoe, carrying Thomagugu, remained. Even this vessel had pulled out so far from shore that Giom had to wade out up to her breasts to catch it. Grabbing onto the side, she was pulled along out of her depth until the skipper, Old Den, hauled her aboard: “I came off in such a hurry and was so frightened that I left my basket and large
dadjee
[grass skirt] and everything just as it lay [on the shore].”
7

After beaching at their usual mainland spot, the Kaurareg men walked straight to Podaga, where some white men were washing clothes at the water holes. Straggling behind with Thomagugu and a few others, Giom came across a group of mainland Aborigines walking along with four white men, but she was so browned and blistered by the sun that they strolled past her without noticing. Summoning her courage, she called out to them in English, “I am a white woman, why do you leave me?”
8

Abruptly the sailors gathered around. “Thomagugu began to talk to them before I could speak, telling them in his own talk how I had been wrecked and how he had taken me up out of the water. I stopped him and said, ‘
komi arragi arragi atzir nathya krongipa
’—Friend, hold your tongue, I know what they are saying.” Gathering that she was a Scottish girl called Barbara Thompson who’d been shipwrecked and rescued by the natives, the sailors yelled out to another man at the water hole, “Scott, Scott, come here. Here’s a Scotch girl.”

[Scott] took hold of my hand and led me along to where the men were washing. He was like a guard to me. I could not understand the other men as I could him. When we reached the washing place, he took me into the bush and with another man … washed me and combed my hair, and dressed me in two shirts, one below as a petticoat, the other over my shoulders. I was so ashamed when I got to the washing place that I did not notice what men were there. But this Scott was a friend to all of them. He took hold of me so bravelike. As I went along I could hardly speak for crying.
9

On that afternoon of October 16, 1849, Oswald Brierly, a thirty-one-year-old artist on the British survey vessel HMS
Rattlesnake
, was practicing shooting with a few shipboard friends on the beach at Evans Bay when an officer suddenly ran up to them, shouting that “the blacks have brought a white woman up to the beach.”
10

Without waiting to hear more, Brierly sprinted to where he could see a mixed group of Aborigines and sailors gathered around a woman aged, he guessed, about twenty. (She was probably eighteen, but looked older.) She’d been given two shirts to wear, having appeared at the water hole naked, “with the exception of a narrow fringe of leaves in front.”
11

That evening Brierly took up the rest of the story in his journal. “She sat on the bank with her head hanging down and had a tin plate with some meat and a knife and fork, which the men had given her on her knees before her. One Black sat close to her with his arm passed behind her, two others were standing close to her. Her manner was very curious and she replied to our questions something in the manner of a person just waking from a deep sleep.”
12

Barbara answered his queries in a halting mixture of Kaurareg and English, drumming her forehead in anguish. “I forgot English since I saw my country. I sing the song I knew when I lay down at night, to remember it.” The sailors nevertheless gathered that she was the daughter of a Sydney tinsmith, and that her husband had drowned on a reef when their cutter was shipwrecked.

When quizzed by Brierly whether she wanted to stay with her clan or join the ship, she replied, “I am a Christian,” explaining incoherently, “I saw my people today. I sat on the island all day looking at the ship. I said tomorrow
kusta kalloo
and with your people. And I told them [the Kaurareg] lies to make them take me in the vessel. I saw my country people in their little boats—
arawa gool
.”
13

As Barbara was rowed out to the ship on a jolly boat, accompanied by a very insistent Boroto, among others, Brierly picked his way through her garbled mixture of Kaurareg and English to learn the essence of her story. Her family had migrated from Aberdeen to Sydney while Barbara was a child. When still a girl she eloped with a sailor to Queensland, and the two of them, along with some other sailors, had been trying to salvage whale oil from an old wreck in the Torres Strait when they were shipwrecked themselves. Her husband and the other sailors had drowned, but she’d been rescued by turtle hunters from Muralag, who’d looked after her well. After that she’d been adopted by the Kaurareg, with whom she’d lived for the past five years.

When the jolly boat reached the
Rattlesnake
, Captain Owen Stanley welcomed the young woman warmly, despite his private trepidations about having her on his ship. He fed her apple pie, gave her a cabin segregated from the rest of the sailors, and had the doctor tend her burns and infected eyes. Thomas Huxley and John MacGillivray, the ship’s inquisitive young naturalists, who both thought the castaway “not bad looking,” managed to question her briefly. But Captain Stanley made it clear that Mrs. Thompson would in future dine only with him and Brierly. The artist would also have the exclusive right to visit her cabin to conduct interviews.
14

Nobody was surprised at this news: Oswald Brierly hailed from the same gentry circles as the captain, and he’d been invited onboard the
Rattlesnake
as Stanley’s personal friend and companion. Brierly himself put the situation more tactfully: “myself having no duty [aboard] the ship, I could divert what I chose to writing down her accounts and employ a larger part of every day to writing down whatever she remembered of her island life and the [customs] of the natives.”
15

There was also a cogent practical reason for allocating Brierly the role of interviewer. During the relatively short period that the artist had been aboard the
Rattlesnake
, he’d built up an exceptional rapport with local native peoples. While his companions’ occupations consisted of surveying or natural-history projects, “mine,” he wrote, “was to indulge my fancy for talking to the natives and to gain if possible some ideas of their peculiarities of [mien] and appearances, etc, an employment which on board has received the name of ‘niggerizing.’”
16

Brierly’s fascination with Indigenous people and culture went well beyond the standard Enlightenment vogue for collecting taxonomies and artifacts. He seemed to admire the Aborigines, and to like many of them individually as “friends.” In the short time since the
Rattlesnake
had landed at Evans Bay, he’d made a strong impression on the mixed communities of mainland Gudang Aborigines and visiting Torres Strait Islanders from Nagi (Mount Ernest) and Muralag. These groups gathered annually at the neutral ground of Evans Bay to trade food and artifacts and to hunt for turtle during the last weeks of the bountiful dry season before the onset of the testing northwest monsoon.

Brierly’s amiable personality, long thin face, and distinctive beard had earned him immediate recognition among the locals as the
marki
of a dead Kulkalaig man (of Mount Ernest Island) named Atarrka or Tarrka. It was a name and role that the artist readily adopted, and now his ghostly status gave him a special kinship with the young castaway.