Free Leviathan by John Birmingham Page B

to look to the journals of other Europeans travellers. Men such as the Spanish naval captain Alessandro Malaspina di Mulazzo who berthed in Sydney Cove between March and April 1793. His mission included preparing secret strategic reports on the state of Russian and English settlements in the Pacific. Malaspina saw Sydney primarily as a military threat. Spain, with her South American holdings, still saw the Pacific as her own private lake, and Malaspina thought that by setting up a penal colony the English were gathering a formidable collection of desperadoes who would menace the entire world with their depredations. Some might find that wryly amusing, perhaps even a little cool, but the Spaniard cut much closer to the bone when dissecting the Aborigines’ future.
    Tranquil inhabitants of its immense shores … how can you imagine at this moment that the present of a few ribbons and Trinkets, the useless gift of a few domestic animals, and astronomical observations a thousand times repeated, will very soon have brought you to a scene of blood and destruction? You will see your fields laid waste, your huts overrun, your women violated, your very lives snatched away in the flower of their youth and joys, solely to feed new Buccaneers …
    Malaspina had his own blind spot of course – the appalling record of the Spanish in the Americas – but he was right in seeing through Collins’ idyll. The peace between the old and new civilizations was a matter of brute power, not cultural refinement. ‘They keep generally good harmony with the Europeans,’ he wrote, because
    â€¦ punishment has made them cautious in this regard; there are very few tribes which do not maintain a strict subordination to the English, and the inequality in arms has extinguished or removed the discontented. The mere sight of a musket, the appearance of the uniform of a soldier, would scatter an army of natives, who with signs of peace and submission take pains to capture their goodwill …
    By 1819, when Frenchman Jacques Arago visited Sydney, he was surprised to find a fully grown city ‘of admirable design’. It seemed to Arago to have been growing for centuries rather than three short decades. He may have spent a little too much time at sea. His enthusiam for the new city led him to imagine that the ‘best architects had deserted Europe and come to New Holland to reproduce their most elegant mansions’. However, the bright march of European architecture stood in contrast to the absence of enlightened human virtue.
    Visiting an influential merchant and his family for dinner, Arago was horrified to find the family’s young ladies watching a group of Aborigines, all naked and ‘presenting all the outward signs of the most revolting misery’, drawn up to amuse the colony’s new elite with a gladiatorial contest. In Roman style it was to be a fight to the death. Covered with old scars, and armed with spears and clubs, the blacks had already been rewarded for their preliminary ‘capers and grimaces’ with some glasses of wine and brandy and a few pieces of bread which they still held under their arms. Arago watched with dawning horror as the alcohol took effect on the warriors.
    Their gestures soon became more violent and their speech more raucous, all talked at once and all shook their murderous weapons fiercely. Attracted by the uproar the master and the mistress of the house and their guests hurried to the scene and invited me to await the issue of this commotion. I agreed readily, convinced that license could go no further and almost certain that the ladies and girls would leave us alone to enjoy this sight. I was mistaken in my expectation, and on the contrary their light voices stimulated the courage or rather the ferocity of the actors. But when these poor wretches had ended the prelude to their bacchanals, their clubs, swung with greater force and skill, began to fall on nearby fences