The Reef: A Passionate History: The Great Barrier Reef from Captain Cook to Climate Change (12 page)

Another of Curtis’s tricks was to imply that information lifted from Wemyss’s documented sources was given to him in face-to-face interviews. He even had the effrontery to insert a passing note of thanks to “
Mr. Wemyss
, a gentleman to whom we beg to express our high obligations for the occasional assistance he has rendered us.”
35

Not all of this word surgery was purely for disguise. Curtis wanted to weld this new piece to the story of Eliza Fraser so as to produce something like a super-text with a unified structure, style, and set of aims. To achieve this, he inserted strategic cross-references between the first and second stories, most of them referring to observations and claims made by Eliza and Baxter, and designed to cover weaknesses in her account by fortifying them with the meatier material of the
Charles Eaton
story.

With this twinning, Curtis was able to extend and transform the thrust of the overall work. He could now suggest that the castaways of the
Stirling Castle
and the
Charles Eaton
were victims of a common system of terror that threatened British merchant ships along an entire region of land and sea. His book, which he’d begun as a specific defense of Eliza Fraser and the lord mayor, could be repositioned as a far-reaching exposé that demanded government action on the appalling dangers confronting Britons within the Great Barrier Reef. By lucky chance, Great Sandy Isle, the site of Eliza Fraser’s ordeal, and Boydang Island, where the massacre of the
Charles Eaton
castaways had occurred, marked the extreme southern and northern tips of the Great Barrier Reef. Scores of shipwrecked castaways generated within this vast minefield of coral, Curtis suggested, were being routinely captured, imprisoned, and subjected to fates worse than drowning. They became either the slaves or food of savage cannibals who shared proclivities to bestiality and violence. With his book, Curtis had produced a searing double indictment “of the coast, and the natives which inhabit it.”

He demanded that something drastic be done about the Torres Strait in particular.

The Straits of Torres … seem really as if they were destined to be the terror of navigators. This arises from the extreme difficulty of steering through that perilous passage, the irregular courses of the tides, the sudden manner in which storms and hurricanes arise, and the numerous shoals which are scattered in this vast expanse of water seem to bid defiance to nautical skill, and the steadiest caution. To detail the various wrecks which have happened there, that have come to our knowledge, would fill a large folio, and many a vessel has, doubtless, foundered, and been swallowed up in that insatiate gulf, of the particulars of which the world will ever remain ignorant. It is not unlikely that the sanguinary character of the natives, who massacre the survivors who fall into their hands, is the most plausible reason which can be assigned why the fates of many other hopeless vessels are never made known.
36

While echoing Wemyss’s pleas for the Admiralty to undertake urgent navigational surveys of the Torres Strait and Barrier Reef, Curtis’s real agenda was that action be taken against the native inhabitants. Building on Wemyss again, he cited four possible solutions to the cannibal problem. The government could send a force to take possession of the islands “and then exterminate the whole of the inhabitants”; it could forcibly transfer all the islanders “to the coast of New Holland, and abandon them to their own natural resources on that vast continent”; it could “subjugate the inhabitants,” “make them tributary,” and try “to civilize and improve them”; or, finally, it could soften their sensibilities through the introduction of the gospel.
37

Reverend Wemyss, a liberal man of God, had balked at genocide and favored the last course, dismissing the other three options as inhumane and unjust. He even suggested several times that the natives might have been goaded into their violence by previous bad experiences at the hands of Europeans. But his fiery plagiarist could not agree that the answer to this cannibal problem lay with missionaries, who were too soft and unworldly to cope with Reef natives. Instead, since “these islands are probably destined at no distant day to be important specks in the map of British territory,” Curtis urged the setting up of “a Civilization Society.” Organized groups of white settlers armed with mechanical and agricultural knowledge, and supported by soldiers, could domesticate the natives and “prepare their minds for the reception of gospel instruction.”
38

In order to ensure that his role of stern imperial prophet was in no way undermined by the facts, Curtis took care to include only the most cursory acknowledgment of how the two young
Charles Eaton
survivors had been rescued from their original captors by a kindly senior man from Murray Island called “Old Duppa,” who had then adopted them into the clan. Old Duppa had treated John Ireland, now known as Wak, as his own son. The boy was given a tomahawk, a bow, and a sixty-foot canoe imported from New Guinea to fulfill his fishing and hunting needs, and he was granted his own parcel of land for cultivating yams, bananas, and coconuts. According to the boys’ rescuer, Captain Lewis, another adoptive Mer family showered little William D’Oyley with love. Known as Uass, he forgot his European mother completely and attached himself devotedly to his new parents. Sturdy and browned by the sun, the boy spoke only the native language and cried bitterly when taken from his Mer home.
39

By contrast, Curtis delighted in the gothic possibilities of the
Charles Eaton
story. Two incidents in particular, which he cited again and again, became keystones of his text. The first was John Ireland’s account of the massacre of his fellow crewmen after they’d drifted in their half-submerged raft to Boydang Island. Curtis laced Wemyss’s rather subdued version with gorier details from the
Sydney Times
of November 19, 1836:

When they [those on Ireland’s raft] first landed, the natives, with that lurking treachery which appears inherent in their natures, by their gestures and deportment appeared to be friendly … The hungry and fatigued crew sat themselves down, and several of them fell asleep on the spot where they halted,—the commencement of the sleep of death! No sooner had the dastardly ruffians discovered that their victims were asleep, than a multitude fell upon them, and commenced the work of general slaughter; spears, knives, and waddies being called into active requisition, for the purpose of destruction. Having deprived the poor fellows of life, they next cut off their several heads, and then joined in a corrobery around the bleeding victims,… uttering wild and discordant yells of joy …

Ireland
states that the savages … feasted upon the eyes and cheeks of the persons massacred by them belonging to the
Charles Eaton
. It is stated that these rude barbarians are induced to this horrible custom, from a belief
that such conduct will increase in them a more intense desire after the blood of white men
.
40

The second ghoulish incident was the making of the skull mask, which appealed because of its diabolical nature. After taking the two boys aboard at Mer, the
Isabella
had set out to find and punish the perpetrators of the massacre. On reaching the cannibals’ base at Aureed Island, Captain Lewis found it deserted, but discovered what he called a “Golgotha,” or a “Temple of Skulls.” It contained an ornate mask made up of forty-five human skulls, seventeen of which later proved to be from the
Charles Eaton
castaways. Curtis, unaware of the exact number of skulls, supplied his own words:

The party having collected together, it was determined to enter the grotesque building, if an excavated and infernal den is worthy of such an appellation. They had not entered a moment, before the party in advance were horror-struck at beholding a large figure composed of tortoise-shells, to which were appended the skulls of several human beings. They were fixed to it by pieces of European rope, and some of the bones exhibited marks of violence, such as might have been inflicted by the force of the massive waddies, sometimes used by the natives in the work of death.… There can be no doubt, we think, but that these were the relics of the mortal remains of some of our countrymen, who have been wrecked in these terrible straits.
41

Curtis declared himself well pleased with his magnum opus. In a short conclusion he summarized its achievements, among which he listed his account of “the manners and customs of the aborigines, and the natural history of the islands in which their habitations are located,” and also his moral history, which “exhibits not only a detail of the barbarity of the heathen, but also the benevolence of the Christian.” He had, he said, provided a range of expert opinions, including his own, on how to control and civilize the “barbarous natives” of that part of the world. The last page of his book carried an engraving of the cannibal mask found in the Temple of Skulls, an “emblem of barbarity” that the resourceful Curtis had worked so long and hard to prove.
42

The book quickly passed through several editions, yet its author could not have imagined in his wildest dreams how influential it would ultimately become. John Curtis,
Times
court reporter, never intended to produce one of the foundation texts of British colonial and postcolonial culture, let alone a book that spawned a legend that still flourishes in the twenty-first century. He was in many ways a typical predatory journalist of his day: he simply wanted to concoct and sell a sentimental, racist, and sensationalist “true life story.”

The mask of skulls
in John Curtis’s
Shipwreck of the Stirling Castle
(London: Virtue, 1838) (National Library of Australia)

Over time, the story has been recast to suit shifting concerns. In the hands of the great Australian nationalist painter Sidney Nolan, the Eliza Fraser story became a saga about a convict outsider and a ravished lady. The convict, as much as Eliza herself, became an embodiment of Australian nativism pitched against an archaic British empire. Nobel Prize–winning author Patrick White saw it as a parable about the encounter between a “civilized” Englishwoman and the elemental forces of a harsh landscape and its native peoples. A film by Tim Burstall and a musical collaboration by Peter Sculthorpe and Barbara Blackman added new nationalist inflections again. What all these permutations had in common, though, was indifference or hostility toward the Aboriginal people who had given Eliza succor so that she lived to tell the tale.

Among the earliest critics of this bias were Queensland historians Raymond Evans and Jan Walker, who in 1977 drew on archival and anthropological information to contest the case that the Kabi Kabi were motivated by cruelty. In the wake of Australia’s bicentennial year in 1988, other Europeans began to rethink the story, in a wider process of recognizing that white Australians had repressed much of their early history of Aboriginal dispossession, murder, and cultural destruction. Gillian Coote’s documentary film
Island of Lies
, released in 1991, was a notable example of this recognition, featuring interviews with a Badtjala woman and a long-time Fraser Island settler, both of whom believed that the story was responsible for spreading fabrications about Badtjala cannibalism for the purpose of financial gain.

The same year saw an even more remarkable work, exhibited in Sydney, by Badtjala artist Fiona Foley.
By Land and Sea I Leave Ephemeral Spirit
was a haunting sequence of paintings and installations that reworked several images from Curtis’s book. One showed Eliza Fraser juxtaposed with votive candles, suggesting the sacral nature of her story for European Australians; another depicted her snagged in a rat trap, symbolizing the verminous role that the legend has played in the lives of the Kabi Kabi and in those of Aboriginal peoples generally.
43

Ironically, Eliza Fraser herself did not benefit from Curtis’s nimble pen. There are unconfirmed claims that she was eventually forced into the ignominy of performing her story for a few coins in England’s fairgrounds. If so, she ended up as much a victim as the Kabi Kabi she slandered. As Fiona Foley’s use of Curtis’s book shows, his text remains the vehicle of the most toxic version of the myth, more than 150 years after it was first published. Such is the enduring influence of that sly London hack, who has much history to answer for.

4

BASTION

Joseph Jukes’s Epiphanies

T
HANKS IN PART TO JOHN CURTIS
, cannibals were much on the mind of the British Admiralty in the spring of 1842, when it gave orders to the naval corvette the
Fly
to survey the northern end of the Great Barrier Reef and the surrounding waters and reefs of the Torres Strait. The Admiralty wanted particular attention paid to this area because so many British vessels trading in the South Seas or with India had come to grief trying to navigate the uncharted coral reefs and the strait’s perilous narrow entrances. Since the wreck in 1791 of the ship sent in search of the
Bounty
’s mutineers (the
Pandora
, under Captain Edwards), more than twenty further losses had been reported, but the real figure, which included scores of small trading schooners, was many times greater.
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