The White Man's Looking Glass: Aboriginal-Colonial Gender Relations at Port Jackson

Abstract

I had arrived in Sydney from Queensland via several years in Melbourne. Living at North Bondi amidst the Bicentennial hoo-ha, I found a subject that enabled me to contemplate my surrounds of rock, sea and harbour from a new angle. I first started working on Port Jackson materials as part of a new feminist history of Australia. Journals kept by members of the First Fleet led me into the intimate yet public thoughts of the earliest British intruders. They wrote as sexual beings, commenting poetically and openly on the attractions of the native women, at first hidden from their view. I was excited by the titillating evidence of past desire, surprised that past historians had turned a blind eye to it. It was easy to f ind the evidence, but interpreting this evidence of genteel courtship and aesthetic fantasies was another matter. Personally I was more familiar with the rather direct sexual overtures of post-hippydom. As a scholar I had studied the rough bravado of white stockmen in the Northern Territory. I also knew something of the differing reactions of Aboriginal women and men to white men's more recent sexual advances. But the Port Jackson Aborigines left few voices: it was all too long ago. This silence led me to concentrate more on documented white perspectives. Fortunately, cultural history has provided some fascinating studies of the sensibilities of eighteentcentury gentlemen.