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The Baudin Expedition and the Aborigines of ‘Botany Bay’

Recording their entry through Sydney Heads in mid-1802, the members of the Nicolas Baudin Expedition made no mention of the Aboriginal men, women and children who must have been watching from ashore or who, according to custom, most likely rowed out in canoes to meet their ships. Neither did those aboard the Naturaliste, which arrived ahead of the Géographe, express any curiosity about whether their companions, stranded ashore after their dinghy capsized in a storm, had come into contact with the Indigenous people.1 Their attention was elsewhere: they counted the other vessels sighted ahead in the port, searched for other discovery ships, and, on the quarter-deck, noted the distant sound of a nine-canon salute – the British colonists, they presumed, were celebrating St George’s Day (Breton: 4 floreal an X [24 April 1802]). As they sailed toward the colony, the Frenchmen apparently gave little thought to the Indigenous life around them. They were preoccupied, instead, with anticipation of the comforts and company to be found ahead among their fellow Europeans in Sydney-Town. To what extent did this attitude continue through the following 5-month sojourn? The expedition’s pictorial record suggests, as Margaret Sankey points out (2001: 124), that Baudin’s artists enjoyed close contact with the Aborigines of Port Jackson and came to view them with a considerable degree of empathy. However, the written records are noted for their paucity of information and brevity. The official ethnography, published by the expedition’s “observer of Man”, François Péron, is, as Jean Fornasiero et al. (2004: 380), Jean-Luc Chappey (2014: 144–149) and Bronwen Douglas (2014: 136) illustrate, distant, derogatory, and indicative of emergent racialism. On the whole, existing scholarship asserts that, yes; the voyagers demonstrated a certain lack of interest in the Aborigines of Port Jackson. Historians write of a relative ethnographic silence during these months and of views that these Aborigines were no longer in a ‘pristine’ ‘state of nature’ and that they were already ‘known’ by the British (Morphy: 148–163; Fornasiero and West-Sooby: 59–80). I have argued myself that the voyager-naturalists were both disappointed and perplexed, as they perceived these people as being in a liminal state – neither civilised nor savage (Starbuck 2013a: 81–99 and 2013b: 123–133). Much of this scholarship treats the Port-Jackson ethnographies like those produced from beach encounters; yet, as a result of their colonial context, they might well be considered as constituting a different genre. The colonial context distinctively influenced how the voyagers gathered their knowledge and what meanings they gave to it.2 To begin with, it was an existing contact zone, already active with