The Reef: A Passionate History: The Great Barrier Reef from Captain Cook to Climate Change (18 page)

Barbara poured out stories illustrating the love and care showered on her by adoptive relatives and friends. Huxley observed that the Kaurareg had “treated her quite as a pet.” Male elders, like her father Peaqui and her uncles Old Manu and Old Sallali, pampered her with the best portions of dugong and turtle, and they protected her health by persuading the womenfolk to exempt her from the heavy work of collecting food. Instead she was given the lighter duty of looking after the camp children while their mothers were working. These same senior men presented her with a yam-stocked garden on the tiny island of Nuripai, which they named after her—an exceptional honor. Brierly recorded a typical scene of avuncular affection when Old Sallali visited Barbara on the
Rattlesnake
: “[He] comes and sits cross-legged by her, talking in such kind tones to the white woman, calling her his child, and looks with quiet wonder as she displays before him all the gowns which she has been making up from cotton handkerchiefs in the piece, the only thing on board which would serve.”
29

The women—Urdzanna, Aburda, Gameena, and Baki—had been just as attentive as the menfolk to Barbara. When she was ill with
doopoo
, they bled her to reduce the pain and fever, and gave her bush medicines. If there was sometimes an affectionate condescension in their kindness, it came from her being “only a
marki
poor thing.” On the death of some of her kin, they excused her failure to demonstrate a proper depth of emotion by cutting herself and wailing for hours. Otherwise reprehensible, her behavior was forgiven because
marki
“don’t cry, they have no feeling.” After all, they were not “real people.”
30

This didn’t stop these same women from grieving piteously at Giom’s departure. She told Brierly that the women were crying for her at the camp, “as if I was dead.” During the nine weeks that she lived onboard the
Rattlesnake
before it set sail from Evans Bay, they brought daily gifts of cooked turtle eggs, yams, and woven baskets; they paddled under her cabin porthole weeping and begging her to return to Muralag. Brierly witnessed one such visit from her wistful mother, Gameena. “[She] showed the greatest joy at seeing Mrs. T. at the port and stood up in the canoe till she might take hold of her hand, which she kissed with great affection, at the same time showing a shell which had belonged to Mrs. T. while on land … in which she had bored a hole and now wore round her neck as a remembrance, saying
Giom
,
ye noosa eena –
‘Giom, this is yours’ and at the same time kissing it.”
31

So proud was the whole clan of Giom, in fact, that they’d been prepared on one occasion to risk a war by hiding her from an armada of sixteen Badu war canoes. These had arrived uninvited on Muralag one evening, intent on abducting the young
marki naroka
to their island. The sinister fleet carried two hundred warriors, most of whom had bows, spears, and bamboo beheading knives. The Badu leaders’ glib claim that they’d come “for pleasure, on a sort of pleasing party” fooled nobody. They flourished gifts of turtle for Giom, and their leaders asked immediately to be taken to “shake hands” with this “
kwari guri
—strange creature.”

A Badu woman named Nuadji, who’d been sent ahead as an envoy, quietly took Giom aside and whispered a secret pitch from the Badu. Unlike “stony Muralag,” Nuadji said, the island of Badu was blessed with abundant coconuts and bananas. If Giom moved there, she would be fed lavishly and even given the rare gift of
ogada
, or totemic status, to protect her from any unwelcome advances from men.
32

Eventually it emerged that what the Badu really wanted was to marry her to their own resident
marki
, a sailor they called Weenie or Gienow. Probably of Malay or Portuguese extraction, he had arrived on Badu after a shipwreck some ten years earlier, whereupon he was adopted and protected, and as a result was said to be “owned” by two brothers. He quickly became indispensable among the larger community for his skill as a repairer of canoes.

When Weenie later visited Muralag without an accompanying war party, he explained to Giom that he was happy living with the Badu and hoped never to leave them. But as a
marki
he was not permitted to marry formally within the clan. Several older widowed women were allowed to live with him, and even to bear his children, but many of the married Badu men remained suspicious of his intentions toward their wives. If he were to marry Giom, such jealousies would be allayed, for, as he gestured to her, “we are like the same people.” She warmed to the tall, middle-aged castaway with a pockmarked face and gentle manners, yet she didn’t want to leave her Kaurareg people for an unknown and possibly bloodthirsty new clan.

Nuadji’s eagerness to lure Giom to Badu Island led her to let slip the visitors’ plans, which included a willingness to slaughter Giom’s Kaurareg family to secure her transfer. “[Nuadji] said if I would say that I would go, they would bring canoes over to me in spite of the Kauraregs and kill some of them besides. I was very much frightened when she told me this [and] would not go with her.” With the help of friends, Giom hid among the rocks and brush on the other side of the island, and despite the strenuous efforts of the Badu to intimidate the clan into giving her up, the flotilla eventually had to leave empty-handed, two nights later.
33

*   *   *

Crusty Jock MacGillivray, who understood both Scots idiom and the Kaurareg language better than any of the other sailors on the
Rattlesnake
, including Brierly, added in his journal account of the voyage a startling variant to Barbara’s story. Her most insistent and aggressive protector was the warrior Boroto, who as one of her rescuers had earned the status of adoptive brother. Barbara called all three of her black rescuers, in her strong Scottish accent, “my boothers,” but MacGillivray claimed to have learned through shipboard conversations with Boroto that he was more than this. “One of these blacks, Boroto by name, took possession of the woman [Mrs. Thompson] as his share of the plunder,” he recorded in his usual blunt fashion; “she was compelled to live with him, but was well treated by all the men…”
34

Boroto pleaded continually with Barbara to leave the
Rattlesnake
and return home, prompting MacGillivray to elaborate: “Her friend Boroto, the nature of the intimacy with whom was not at first understood, after in vain attempting by smooth words and fair promises to induce her to go back with him, left the ship in a rage, and we were not sorry to get rid of so impudent and troublesome a visitor as he had become. Previous to leaving, he had threatened that, should he or any of his friends ever catch his faithless spouse on shore, they would take off her head to carry back with them to Múralug.”
35

David Moore, the splendid anthropologist/editor who published Brierly’s manuscript notes in 1979, believes that MacGillivray misinterpreted Boroto, but he gives no good reason for this assumption. True, Barbara at one point denied having a Kaurareg “husband,” though she was likely using this term in the formal sense of a spouse sanctioned by the clan, and her statement did not therefore preclude her having been Boroto’s long-term lover. Technically she couldn’t marry within the clan because in the Torres Strait this seems to have been a privilege denied to
marki
s (as attested by Weenie). If Barbara and Boroto had formed a sexual relationship, then it could only have been an unorthodox one, similar to the situation of Weenie on Badu.
36

Other evidence reinforces MacGillivray’s claim about Barbara’s relationship with Boroto. The young warrior was a frequent topic of her conversations with Brierly, often in a way that implied intimacy. She certainly spent more time in Boroto’s company than with any other young man. In Brierly’s transcripts, it is noticeable that she sometimes adopted an ironic, dare one say spousal, tone when recounting some of Boroto’s antics: how, for example, he’d tried to prevent her making contact with an earlier visitation of white traders, how he’d accused her of fatally weakening his European clasp knife by showing that it could be closed and opened, and how he’d passed out on Evans Bay after inhaling European tobacco into his “stomach.”
37

But Boroto was also described both by Barbara and others as physically powerful and accomplished. He was, Brierly said, quite “a wag,” with the gift of the gab and a penchant for making lecherous jokes. At the same time neither Barbara nor Brierly ascribed to him any native wife or child—omissions all the odder because Boroto was a formidably influential and wealthy figure within the clan. The fact that Giom lived with Boroto’s older brother Gunage and his wife, Urdzanna, rather than with her own father’s family, is also significant. Both brothers were big men in the clan, and it was they who led the raiding party against the mainland Gumakudin who’d murdered and mutilated their father.

Boroto, an esteemed turtle hunter with prized expertise in making magic to entice green turtle to the surface, was also a skillful boatman, a successful trader, and one of only three men on Muralag who owned a yam garden. Despite his youth he was held in high regard by the elders of the Kaurareg, as was indicated by his key role in conducting mortuary rituals, and still more by his status as one of the clan’s three feared
mydallager
s. Concern to not offend Boroto could have been one of the reasons that the Kaurareg were so reluctant to allow Barbara to return to her people. Being a
mydallager
, she claimed, gave Boroto the ability to curse and kill anyone he chose with impunity—“then when the body is found there will be no inquiry. They will only say, ‘It’s the mydallager.’” Fortunately for her, she never actually saw him exercise this alarming power.
38

Barbara also told Brierly several times that Boroto had shortly before become entangled in an affair with an older widow called Yurie, a woman who, according to Barbara, had conducted a long, sly campaign to seduce him. Mutual jealousy seems to have caused a simmering feud between the two women, which flared into open conflict on at least one occasion. Barbara gave a long, exultant account of having thrashed the predatory widow in a fight. One day, for no apparent reason, Yurie had suddenly thrown a large shell filled with water at her when she was cooking.

“I ran after her,” Barbara recounted, “and, as she stooped down to pick up a stick, I caught her by the hair from behind and struck her about the face. She could not do anything at all with her hands, only cried out, ‘
Giom, warmera
[let go],
Giom warmera
.’ None of the people took her part, but they called out to me
Giom perkee
—‘Strike, Giom, Strike.’ They said I was a stranger among them, and the woman should not hurt me.”

The fact that even Yurie’s daughter supported Barbara on this occasion, and that the castaway’s father, Peaqui, had to be restrained from dashing into the fray and removing the widow’s head with his freshly sharpened beheading knife, suggests that the clan believed Barbara to have right very much on her side. Perhaps her eagerness to join the
marki
ship was also prompted, at least in part, by some bitterness at her partner’s infidelity.
39

Finally, there is a curious story that Barbara told Brierly about a child, to whom she ascribed no specific parents. A clan elder named Qui Qui had the responsibility of naming newborn babies, basing this on “trees or birds or anything he fancies.” One particular name was exceptional enough to prompt Brierly to comment: “He [Qui Qui] must be an old wag in his way, to judge by the following name; first child—Outzie = muddy water.” Brierly, unusually for him, did not name the parents of this mysterious “first” child either.
40

*   *   *

We can well imagine why a young Scottish woman in that era, only eighteen years old and on the brink of returning to her family in Sydney, would want to suppress any possible suggestion that she’d been living for five years as a black man’s lover, and perhaps given birth to a child by him. To admit as much would have generated a scandal to top the persisting storm over Eliza Fraser’s six weeks with the Kabi Kabi people. Barbara’s relationship with Boroto would have made her a social pariah in Sydney, or at the very least an object of prurient fascination.
41

It would not be surprising if, during her five months of interviews on the voyage home, Barbara had at some point decided to take the kindly Brierly into her confidence, begging his silence. Or perhaps Brierly, in his chivalric way, guessed at her relationship with Boroto but avoided asking or recording anything that might compromise his vulnerable young informant. It’s even possible that, thanks to Boroto’s shipboard antics, all the senior officers of the
Rattlesnake
were aware of the relationship and chose to keep a tactful silence—all, that is, but the notoriously tactless Jock MacGillivray.
42

A pact of confidentiality between Brierly and Barbara would partly explain another puzzle: why the redemptive story of her life with the Kaurareg Islanders of the Barrier Reef sank into immediate oblivion. By the time the
Rattlesnake
berthed in Sydney in early February 1850, Barbara had recovered both her mastery of English and her health. She was, MacGillivray said, “handed over to her parents … in excellent condition.” The
Brisbane Courier
had published a short account of the story even before the
Rattlesnake
completed its voyage, but the
Sydney Morning Herald
, which might have been expected to make much more of the sensational story, produced only a cryptic factual description of the young castaway’s five-year sojourn with the Kaurareg.
43

Sanitized in this way, the young working-class girl’s story probably appeared too positive for many colonial tastes and too boring to be newsworthy to other papers. Perhaps, too, Captain Owen Stanley, Oswald Brierly, and the other European officers of the
Rattlesnake
managed to exercise some kind of muting influence on the Sydney paper, thus protecting Barbara. But if they did, it was at the expense of providing a significant counterweight to the burgeoning myth of savagery among the peoples of the Barrier Reef.