FINDING THE SILENCES: ENCOUNTERS IN THE GREG DENING ARCHIVE Abstract

Pacific historian and anthropologist Professor Greg Dening (1931-2008) was a man of many silences. A trawl through the large archive of his papers echoes with the silences that were also Greg's fascination. In Greg Dening's metaphors of beaches and islands, the silences of the encounters between Native and Stranger were compelling. In this paper, my reflection on the Dening Archive, at once both voluminous, yet enigmatic, invites an interrogation into the poetics of engagement with archive, memory and the entangled politics of personality.

Archives of the Mind

In his 2004 book Beach Crossings, Greg Dening wrote “My study is an archive of my mind, an archaeological site of my spiritual and intellectual voyaging. The books that surround me are those that have taken me on my journey. …. Then there are my files. There has never been a lecture that I have heard or given, a book that I have read, or written, not an article or a chapter or a document that has not its relic in these files” 1

French philosopher Jacques Derrida reminds us of the Greek origin of ‘archive’, arkhaeion, ‘initially a house, a domicile, an address, the residence of the superior magistrates, the archons, those who commanded’.2 Here, it might be imagined, the Greg Dening Archive, housed in the mighty vaults of the State Library, is presided over by archivist-gatekeepers. The magisterial authority of these librarian-curators determines the ordering of the Archive. In this imaginary scheme, this Archive is raw material, a collected body of facts, an artefact of ‘truth’, passively awaiting the authoritative imposition of structure, form, and meaning by its custodians. This of course is a world away from the reality; I sail with freedom through the State Library’s Dening Archive, revelling in its disorder and randomness, bringing my own sense of meaning to the collection. Like a bricolage, or an assemblage, I peruse this collection, roaming its extraordinarily creative contents. There is no orderly chronology here. As I re-assemble it to produce something new, I imagine this as the archive of Greg’s mind.

Is the archive a unitary body of knowledge, presenting a seamless, unquestioned collection of information? Or should we instead be more attentive to the ruptures we find in it, the fragmentations, the silences and the indeterminacies?

In his essay ‘The Library of Babel’, the great Argentinian writer Borges imagined a universe of labyrinthine galleries, shelves, stairways, and mirrors. In this classic imaginative story, Borges dreams of the infinite, of the infinite possibilities of seekers of knowledge. The library’s neatly bound and ordered volumes offer profound possibilities for imperfections, uncertainties, and the infallibilities that belie their surface appearances. Borges wrote “If an eternal traveller should journey in any direction, he would find after untold centuries that the same volumes are repeated in the same disorder - which, repeated, becomes order; the Order.” 3

The State Library of Victoria’s Greg Dening Archive is a large collection, some eighty boxes, acquired in 2013. There is also a substantial collection of Greg Dening papers in the University archives, which includes several boxes of correspondence, mostly from the period Greg was the Crawford Professor in the University’s History Department. But my interest is not only in what the archive contains, to see the collection as an unquestioned, and seamless source of information about Greg Dening’s life and work. I also want to understand what is absent from the collection and why; to explore the gaps, repetitions, the apparently random order of the material, and the silence.

Here then, I am faced with two major collections of Greg Dening papers, in two of Melbourne’s most important cultural institutions, separated by a busy stretch of Swanston Street: the State Library, and Melbourne University, both founded by Redmond Barry in the nineteenth century.

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Each of these collections has been shaped by their respective politics of archival acquisition, institutional politics, and management and accessioning over different periods of time.

Not a Biography of Greg Dening

The facts of Greg’s work and life are well known. There are many very fine articles and tributes written about his life and work by former students and colleagues, including Tom Griffiths, Dipesh Chakrabarty, Bronwen Douglas, David Hanlon, and Ivan Brady to name just a few. In 1994 Melbourne University’s History Department published a collection of essays edited by Donna Merwick honouring Greg’s work.4 A special issue of the journal The Contemporary Pacific, edited by his long-time colleague and friend David Hanlon at the University of Hawai’i was published in the Fall of 2009. Titled ‘Remembering Greg Dening’, it contained moving recollections by many of Greg’s former mentors, students, colleagues and friends. And of course, there is the brilliant published work of Greg, in his many books, articles and papers.

Greg was born in 1931 in Newcastle, . He received an education with the Jesuits in and Melbourne, and entered the order at the age of sixteen, and later was a priest for a while. He obtained his Master of Arts at the , and then a PhD in anthropology at Harvard. He taught at before taking up the Crawford Chair in the History Department at Melbourne University in 1971, where he remained until his retirement. The following years were very productive ones, as Greg was now free to pursue his love of research and writing, and he also ran workshops and seminars as an adjunct Professor at the ANU’s Centre for Cross-Cultural Research during these years. Together with other notable historians Donna Merwick, Rhys Isaac, Inga Clendinnen, and Bronwen Douglas, Greg was part of what became known colloquially as the ‘Melbourne School’ of ethnographic history. Greg’s award winning publications demonstrate his extraordinary imagination and innovation in writing history: Mr Bligh’s Bad Language: Passion and Theatre on the Bounty (1992); his book of essays Performances (1996); History’s Anthropology: the Death of William Gooch (1988); Readings/Writings (1988), and his last Pacific book Beach Crossings: Voyaging Across Times, Cultures and Self (2004). There were also his outstanding works on institutional histories, of the Church, and of Xavier College – further examples of Greg’s fascination with ethnographic history.

One of Greg’s former students, Tom Griffiths, now one of the leading environmental historians in , reflected that ‘all Greg’s teaching … was directed towards empowering the creative imagination of his students’.5 Griffiths suggests that ‘Greg’s advocacy of the creative imagination was shaped by his engagement with two different worlds’, and that Greg ‘liked being “in- between”, and this was another of his beaches’. These two worlds that Greg inhabited were those of the academy, and of public literary culture’.6

Yet, in the light of all that is known of Greg’s life and work, the silence of the archives echoes. Greg was always present in his writing; his style one of juxtaposing personal reflections, observations, and meta-commentaries on his writing and research. And yet, like the silences that so fascinated him, for all his passion for the performance and theatre of history for understanding the crossing beaches, cultures, disciplines, islands and oceans, he was a shy and private man, as I glean in conversations with some of those who knew him well.

MS Dening: the Silence in the Archive

I wander in search of the intriguing silence in the Greg Dening archive. Trawling through the many boxes, I find a rich body of material beyond what is known in the public record. It tells a story of the creative process of Greg’s work, of his thought processes and creative imagination, of his busy scholarly life, and of his religious life. We can learn something too of his studies at Harvard, and of his discussions with publishers, reviewers, and conference and seminar organisers. Correspondence with his wide circle of colleagues, mentors, students, friends, and acquaintances, as well as letters from people seeking advice, offering information, or simply making contact, all contribute to an

2 emerging portrait of Greg. And conversations with some of the many who knew Greg offer additional valuable insights, often informal and anecdotal.

But after all this journeying, I still find the archive puzzlingly silent on the inner person: Greg’s private thoughts, reflections, meditations remain somehow elusive. I ponder the absence of Greg’s personal letters, diaries, and journals, field notebooks of his work in the Pacific. The silence is also in that the majority of letters in the archive are those that Greg received; it is like a one-sided conversation.

These silences are compelling. Always given to reflection, Greg himself reflected on silences. He wrote in 1998, in his book Readings/ Writings, about his attempts to learn photography while preparing in 1974 to visit the Marquesas Islands:

I had crossed a beach and found what all the beach-crossers find, my own otherness. I called the book I was writing about the land and its people Islands and Beaches: Discourses on a Silent Land. By the time I had finished it, though, I did not know whether the silence was in the land or in myself. 7

Greg’s book Islands and Beaches, published in 1980, established a major new approach to Pacific history: here was ethnographic history brilliantly done. Here too was reflective history – another of Greg’s consistent passions. I find the Dening archive tells a story about the process of making Greg’s books; the research, the writing, various drafts, and his correspondence with publishers. In mid-June 1978 Greg sent his proposal for Islands and Beaches to Peter Ryan, then head of publishing at Melbourne University Press. He provided a table of contents, some draft chapters, and a plan for the rest of the book. As Greg explained to Ryan:

As I see it, I want the book not to be an anthropology of the Marquesans and a history of the Europeans but an anthropology and history of them both caught inevitably together in contact. It is a book also, which is not just a description of what was culturally different and past, but about the processes of knowing and understanding what is culturally different and past.”8

A few years later, in 1981, writing from Hawai’i, Greg wrote to colleague John Lechte, who was then in Paris immersed in French post-structuralism: “… Islands and Beaches was finally out … it was published the day we left. As far as I can see, it is a deep deep well that I’ve dropped it into and I haven’t really heard the splash yet.”9 This kind of enigmatic remark somehow was typical of Greg: his keenly felt part in the whole engaged process of producing his work, and his musing over the reception of the books.

One of my intentions in approaching the Greg Dening Archive was to seek a closer understanding of the innovative approach he developed to writing history, his distinctive way of doing ‘ethnographic history’ of cross-cultural encounters between Indigenous peoples and intruding Europeans. Greg had made it his life’s work to understand the nature of these cross-cultural encounters. He was fascinated with metaphors and aphorisms: beaches, theatre and theatricality, performance, reflection. And he crossed disciplines – history and anthropology – as the Natives and Strangers in his Marquesan ethnographic history crossed beaches and islands. But my journey through the Greg Dening archives also compelled me to do something more, to try to build a more complete picture of Dening, of his work, and of his inner life, his thinking behind the works.

Among his many works, Greg wrote about the sad fate of the young astronomer William Gooch of the ship Deadalus, who was killed by Hawai’ian warriors in 1792. He wrote about Captain Bligh and the Bounty, again weaving history and anthropology, and shifting between and among these disciplines. He wrote much on Captain Cook too. Then there is Greg the essayist, who, in his collections Performances, Readings/Writings, and Beach Crossings, interwove scenarios from his historical narratives, with reflections on his personal journeys through the worlds of theology, academia, and writing. Beach Crossings, published in 2004, just four years before his death too soon,

3 is a journey through his private life as much as it is through the worlds of islands and beaches that were his passion. In my puzzling over the silence in the archive, I am encouraged to ‘read between the lines’ of Beach Crossings. Reading between the lines, perhaps this is the way that beach crossings might eventually come to dwelling. Greg’s finely detailed, reflective histories of the Church and its institutions, were as much ethnographic, as was his methodical gathering of data on the lives and biographies of sailors and sailing ships. His ethnographic history interests found expression in his books on Xavier College, and in his 2006 book Church Alive. He described this latter as ‘a living history’ … as an ‘ethnographic description of religious experience in times of change, 1956-2006’.10

In May 1993 Greg wrote to his long-time friend and colleague, historian David Hanlon in Hawai’i:

… we are well. My book on Xavier is being launched next week. I’m quite proud of it as I did everything with its 450 pages and 330 photographs on my own computer. It was nice to have absolute control over the whole book, although a lot of work. It’s a history of the school’s first hundred years, a photographic essay of the school, and an anthropology of the living school….11

Here we also witness, in addition to Greg’s writing life, his consistent passion for anthropology’s history and history’s anthropology, his proud embracing of computer technologies. The archive also stands witness to Greg’s adoption of new computer and communications technologies, as I leaf through volumes of now faded printouts of faxed letters sent and received, and, later, much printed email correspondence.

Greg Dening’s Drafts

In my perusal of the many boxes of the Greg Dening Archive at the State Library of Victoria, I have found drafts beyond number, of Greg’s many books, chapters, and seminar and conference papers. I am reminded of a character in Philip Roth’s novel The Ghost Writer. Amy Bellette, assisting the great writer Lonoff tells the writer’s young protégé Nathan Zukerman “I’ve just found twenty- seven drafts of a single short story”. “Which story” asks Zukerman; “Life is Embarrassing” replies Amy, to which Lonoff adds “To get it wrong so many times”. The proliferation of drafts in Greg’s archive shows not that he ‘got it wrong’, but attests to the creative mind at work, and his patient, methodical work of producing the final piece. If I had another five years of Redmond Barry Fellowship, there would be value in interpreting all the annotations and editorial remarks that Greg made on each draft as they moved on their journeys towards a final, often published form – an ethnography of the production of knowledge.

Another story the Archive tells is of Greg’s role in the shaping of disciplines, in the history of Melbourne University’s history department, and across other areas of the University’s teaching. Here is his ever keen interest in cross-disciplinary dialogue, engaging and corresponding with others such as and Leonhard Adam among many, on issues of the day concerning the development of areas of study in anthropology, cultural heritage, and Pacific and Asian studies at the University.

A Life in Letters: Greg, Harry and Doug

A life can be written through correspondence: a dialogue of letters, sent and received. Tracing the trajectory of Greg’s creative thinking and writing process, witnessing in letters, the exultant and the sometimes frustrating processes of getting the great work finally to publication; and the dwelling in the aftermath, the reviews, the reception of the work. In letters, we stand witness to the life of the mind, to the whole range of emotions, from the workaday business of a prominent professional scholarly life, to deeper, occasionally melancholic reflections on it all.

Greg maintained correspondence with a wide network of academic colleagues and friends throughout his professional life. Two of his long-standing colleagues and friends were Doug Oliver

4 and Harry Maude. These men were also (with Greg) giants of Pacific history, anthropology, and administration. Anthropologist and Tahiti specialist Doug Oliver had supervised Greg’s Harvard doctoral studies, which he completed in 1967, and the two maintained a lifetime’s correspondence. Prominent Pacific administrator and historian Harry Maude was a long-time colleague and friend of Greg. In some of these exchanges of correspondence– or at least the letters Greg received from Maude and Oliver, since we find very few if any that he sent – we can see, despite some profound differences of disciplinary approach, a deep and enduring humanism and friendship.

Although their approaches to history differed - Maude was of a slightly earlier generation to Greg - both shared a commitment to the agency of Pacific peoples. In 1974 Maude wrote to Greg from to thank him for the copy of his Handbook for a course on ‘Culture Contact in the Pacific’. Maude was impressed, commenting that “I suppose that I am a bit biased in its favour from the outset since it represents the sort of cultural history that has always interested me, in contrast to the political and constitutional history of the schoolmen”. Maude had spent time during the 1930s as administrator in Kiribati and Tuvalu, a former British colony known as the Gilbert and Ellice Islands.

The uncertainties of the archive reveal themselves in surprising ways. I am looking through the collection of Greg’s personal library, currently being catalogued in the State Library’s Rare Books department. I find there, Greg’s copy of Harry Maude’s 1989 book of his edit of Arthur Grimble’s Tunguru Traditions: Writings on the Atoll Culture of the Gilbert Islands. A letter falls out from the book, in which Harry wrote:

… I never thanked you for your grand work in the Bounty as you were so itinerant on your sabbatical. But I read it through with the greatest interest and indeed made a number of comments as I went along. But alas in my recent contretemps they have disappeared, like so much else: it is difficult to find anything if you cannot see it. … In return I am sending you my latest effort, not I’m sorry to say an ethnographic history like yours, but merely the raw material for an historical ethnography.

After going blind, Harry had fortunately, with medical help, managed to recover some sight. But perhaps this letter is more telling: it may also hint at a “blind spot”, an inability to see the way Greg wrote ethnographic history.

Doug Oliver was an American anthropologist known for his long lifetime’s work on Tahitian society. He wrote to Greg in July 1996 from retirement in Hawai’i:

“I have postponed writing my gratitude (for having been sent a copy of Performances) until I had read all of its contents … literally … line by line. It is a remarkable piece, unlike anything I’ve ever read before. It tells me many things about you I had never known, nor even supposed, and makes me regret that in all of our many conversations you had never revealed the profound misgivings, approaching disdain, you have felt about the kind of anthropology some of us have spent our lives trying to do. … My first reaction is to share your misgivings, give up anthropologising (?), and spend the rest of my life reading for enjoyment, things correctly and appropriately labelled ‘fiction’. Unfortunately I find that, at 83, I cannot reform my ‘delusion’ that some ‘facts’ are not necessarily ‘fiction’. … All the above aside, your prose is a joy to read.”12

This tells too of the way Greg’s friends and colleagues responded to his highly poetic style that was consistent in Greg’s writing; while this marked him as an innovator, as a master of prose, it was also somewhat frustrating.

Another person who influenced Greg in some of his early work was historian and archaeologist John Mulvaney. Where Greg was given to poetics and imaginative turns of phrase in his history writing, Mulvaney tended to seek the comfort of ‘facts’ over ‘poetry’. Greg had participated in the late 1950s in Mulvaney’s excavation at Fromm’s Landing in South Australia. Recalling that

5 experience, Greg later wrote: “I remember standing on the bottom of the ten-foot pit, the brown/black/red bands of stratified soil all around like a 4000-year history time chart. Mulvaney could hold in the cup of his hands the micro flake artefacts that had come from this pit”. Here, as Greg told it: “I had seen the passion and commitment that had driven Mulvaney to that point. He has never been one for rhetoric and poetry in his words. Let me make the poetry for him.”13 Mulvaney acknowledged these differences with collegial charm, writing in a letter to Greg: “I have read about my lack of poetry with deep interest! I agree with you, I really live on a different planet than you lot in the post-modern world. I simply cannot think so mystically at Mungo, or elsewhere for that matter”.14

On Sailing, Shearwaters, and Oceanic Crossings: A Shearwater Guides me through the Dening Archive

A shearwater soars across the skies, skimming the oceans. To some people it is known as a muttonbird, and it figures importantly as a source of food, and in special and sacred ways to some Pacific peoples. As the shearwater dips and dives, shearing the waters and skirting the currents, I imagine it might represent the way in which I have read the Greg Dening archives, dipping and skimming, with frequent forays into the depths. Greg wrote:

"Every year in late September, if I am lucky, I can look down from the desk where I do much of my writing, across the tops of eucalyptus trees, over the beach and rocky coastline, and see for hours a long, black procession of birds snaking its way south around the headlands and into bays. ... 'Kaoha', I say to them. 'Welcome Home!'. They are the yolla - the shearwaters .... They are on the last leg of their 19,000-mile circuit of the Pacific".15

Seeing these birds as metaphors for , he wrote "These remarkable birds soar and scythe and knife their way over a vast space of sea and islands. They have time and space imprinted in their bodies. They have ways of interpreting signs that they have never seen before, in ways I cannot explain to you, nor science at all". To Greg, these birds represented Pacific islands, peoples, and crossings and journeys, as they, in his words, ‘encompassed Oceania’.16

Sailing in the Archives…Again

The shearwater and its oceanic crossings tell another story; one of fluidity, and of watery movement through disciplines, theories, texts, peoples, islands and beaches. In his book Readings/Writings, Dening wrote of a time he was ‘reading in the glow of a lamp in the gloom of the Great Reading Room of the State Library of Victoria … with a bucket behind me into which rainwater dripped from a vast height …’17 There are many paths, connections and crossings here. In May I was reading the Greg Dening Papers in the Heritage Collections Reading Room at the State Library. The power had been cut to my office, as leaks in the library’s roof were being repaired. This was during a time of sudden, heavy rain storms occurring while the Library’s great dome roof was under a large scale renovation. The alarming but amusing congruency of this water did not escape me: I was reminded of one of Greg’s sharply observed aphorisms when reflecting on his historical method, where he said ‘I do all my sailing in the archive’. But this abundance of water imagery has more profound implications. Noted writer and creative thinker Paul Carter, in various places, has argued for a shift away from what he refers to as ‘dry thinking’, the tendency to compartmentalise and bureaucratise, towards a ‘humid’ thinking, in which the key states are ones of fluidity, flow, and movement, and an organic sense of connectedness between and among things.

Towards a Theory of Eclecticism

Greg was a pioneer of reflective and engaged, critical history, seeking to foreground Indigenous agency, years before these approaches became the norm for history and anthropology. The many influences that went into the making of his work range from the Jesuit teachings – including the Spiritual Exercises of Loyola, to the French theorist Roland Barthes, to name just two of the vast array

6 of scholarship that he consumed. This wide ranging intellect is evident in the erudition of his published writings, the many boxes of his notes and lists of references in the archive, and in his personal library, which is now being catalogued in the State Library of Victoria’s Rare Books collection.

Greg was a self-professed eclectic. He wrote to his colleague John Lechte in 1981 “I continue on my eclectic way. I am sure you would be exasperated at my level of commitment to specific theoretical stances. But I see a vague glow ahead in my Pilgrim’s Progress and like to think that my eclecticism has some consistency”.18 Eclecticism was perhaps Greg’s philosophy: it was a way he fashioned his creative process. It was his quest to argue against narrow and rigid ways of doing history. Eclecticism, from the Greek eklektikos, means “to choose the best”, refers to a conceptual approach that draws from multiple ideas, influences, and style. It is to fashion something anew from this plurality. In Greg’s work this eclecticism was his sailing between and among the disciplines, an approach that in today’s world is often a matter of course.

Reading Ethnographic Encounters

“Historians never observe process. They only observe process interpreted by a text. Quite often these texts are survivors of moments instantly gone and have the feel of being primary, as being as near to the process as texted experience can be”.19

Greg wrote in his essay ‘A poetic for histories’, “We cannot describe the past independently of our knowing it, any more than we can describe the present independently of our knowing it. And, knowing it, we create it, we textualise it”.20.

In puzzling over this ‘texted’ past, I wanted to have a closer look at Greg’s way of doing history. I’ve been researching and writing about cross-cultural encounters between Aboriginal people, and British voyagers during the nineteenth century. I’m interested in the nuances and subtleties in the narratives of these encounters. I want to ‘read between the lines’ of the voyagers’ diaries, journals and letters, in order to better understand the actions and agency of the Aboriginal people as much as the intruding British. In my history-work I am especially interested in textual reading of the language and metaphors of natural history, and environmental knowledge as these are played out in the narratives of encounter. What intrigues me is to understand something of the complex entanglements between the ancient and continuing environmental knowledge and practices of the local Aboriginal people, and the various knowledges – imperial, colonial, botanical/scientific - of the British. What, I wondered, are the dynamics and dialogues and meanings of these meetings between strangers that took place on the beaches, coasts, islands and forests? It was with these questions in mind that I returned to Greg’s ‘ethnographic history’ approach. This way of reading texts of cross-cultural encounters had for a long time intrigued me, and Greg’s weaving of anthropology and history in crossing disciplines and cultures had always seemed crucial to my enterprise.

I’m writing a history of nineteenth century Aboriginal- British encounters in coastal north eastern Australia, reading narratives of exploration voyages through this region in the decades following James Cook. In these textual readings there are widely ranging scenarios of conflict, violence, and misunderstandings. There are also scenes of curiosity, puzzlement, wonder, and of cooperation. The stuff of empire’s expansion, trade and exchange also permeates many of these meetings between strangers. These narratives are saturated with signs, gestures, and the whole range of non-verbal communication. How might these be read in Greg Dening’s ethnographic history approach, engaging with his metaphors of theatre, theatricality, and reflection?

In early August 1802, Matthew Flinders had landed at Port Curtis, near the present day town of Gladstone on the coastal fringe of Australia’s tropical north east coast, on his survey journey around Australia. The botanist on Flinders’ expedition was Robert Brown, a Scotsman who eventually became the keeper of the vast Joseph Banks collections at Kew in London. Flinders and Brown, and others from the ship, including Brown’s botanical assistant, the young Kew gardener Peter Good, had

7 landed here for a spot of routine surveying and botanising, having departed northwards from Port Jackson two weeks earlier.

After some botanizing, Robert Brown had a problem. He had secured a bounty of plants, when he and his party were attacked by some local Aboriginal people. Brown wrote that ‘The attack was made with a war woop & discharge of stones: I was at this moment employ’d in putting specimens of Plants in paper & had scarcely time to collect my scatter’d paper boxes &c & make a hasty retreat.’21 The plants had been collected and the task now was to package them securely, ready for the long journey back to London. This attack by the local Aboriginal people had disrupted the botanising and surveying, and its texted narration gives play to several voices. But, as ‘texted past’ which we read in the present, the narratives also challenge us to interpret the meanings, actions, motivations, and agency of the Aboriginal people.

To unpack this encounter we can read the account of Brown, of Flinders himself, as well as that of Peter Good, who was sadly to die the following year. Flinders wrote of this encounter:

The naturalist and his companions landed at the west side of the entrance, where some Indians had assembled to look at the ship; but they retired on the approach of our gentlemen, and afterwards taking advantage of a hillock, began to throw stones at the party; nor would they desist until two or three muskets were fired over their heads, when they disappeared. There were seven bark canoes lying on the shore, and near them hung upon a tree some parts of a turtle; and scoop nets, such as those of Hervey’s Bay, were also seen.22

Here, the stone-throwing incident seems quickly passed over, as Flinders’ narrative shifts to observations on the visible signs of Aborigines’ living patterns, food procurement and material culture, and his assessment of the nature of the country. The text is at once, manners and customs reportage, as well as cartographic and geographic survey.

A third perspective on this incident comes from Peter Good, who observed canoes coming ashore. He observed:

… a number of Natives appeared making Gestures as we approached the Shore but on coming near they all run into the woods – We walked on in search of Natural History without paying any attention to them & crossed a neck of land till we found ourselves on an Arm of this large Bay – many Natives before us but would not permit us to come near them always retreating as we advanced on advancing to a little hill covered with Trees they threw a number of Stones towards us & kept among the Bushes out of sight – on our advancing up the hill they disappeared –we continued to advance till we came to the opposite side of the hill & in going down the bank the Natives gave the War Song & rushed out among the Bushes in different directions, throwing stones & sticks at us – they appeared to have no Spears we got into an open space at the bottom of the hill and fired some Muskets in the Air when they all run [sic] away as fast as they could run …..23

Peter Good has a different tone in his description of the scene. Here, the Aborigines ‘making gestures’ might be construed as giving warning. Brown had not referred to this gestural event, but it conveys a wider range of meanings than does the hostile act of throwing stones. Good’s phrase ‘in search of Natural History’ similarly opens up more possibilities for conjecture about the botanical collecting project. We cannot know if in their attempts to make the ‘acquaintance’ of the local Aborigines, Flinders’ party had in mind to specifically inquire into, or draw upon these peoples’ knowledge of the country and its ecology.

In reading these voyager narratives, it seems that, in Greg Dening’s words, the British, and the Aboriginal people – Greg’s Natives and Strangers – each ‘played out their own cultural systems in caricatured charades’.24 Greg was interested as much in what could not be read in these records of encounter, as what was there:

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“Anyone engaged in cross-cultural research will know that it is not the mountains of texts of the encounter between Indigenous people and intruding strangers that are the problem. It is the depth of the silences”

He expanded on this:

“Since the sixteenth century when the world became Native to the voyaging European Stranger, the first gesture of contact has been the gift or exchange of some cultural thing – clothing, tools, ornaments, weapons. However, the marginal space between cultures is all ambivalence, ambiguity, missed cues ….. The ethnographic moments are made for caricature in the presentation of self, and translation and transformation of the self-caricatures of the other”25

One of Greg’s enduring metaphors for interpreting these kinds of cross cultural encounters, was that of theatre. Actions are played out in dramaturgical play. Greg commented on his use of the metaphor of theatre at a roundtable in America, in 1990 in conversation with other academics:

“the advantage of theatre is that it very clearly defines the educating and learning process of reading and interpreting. The conventionality of apprehension is constantly defined in a theatrical circumstance. This is an important element in the cross-cultural area, and the other important element is that sincerity is always a problematic in theatre. It engages the interpreter, the actor, and there is always at that moment a sense of the invention of things”. 26

“I think that there is a reassurance in theatre as well. The mythologizing effect of theatre can go both ways …”

A Library Within a Library: the Greg Dening Library

Hidden within the inner sanctum of the SLV, I enter the Rare Books Room. There are treasures. On first sighting, the appearance is as the ordinariness of books on shelves. Here are utilitarian shelves; grey gunmetal of industrial shelving: a compactus of sliding bays. Roaming the shelves in search of order and meaning to the collection, I find a copy of Marshall Sahlins’ 1985 book Islands of History that the great American anthropologist had sent to his friend and colleague. Here is a rare inscription on Greg’s books, as Marshall wrote with his fond regards to Greg and Donna, “Islands … but no beaches?” In this brief note, Sahlins had perhaps also hinted at something of the enigma that was Greg Dening: always crossing beaches, but somehow never landing or dwelling..

In a volume of reflective essays by five prominent historians, Boundaries of the Past, published in 1990, compiled by Melbourne historian Bain Attwood, Greg wrote of his in-between- ness:

“I do not think it has been by accident that my major work has been about islands and beaches. I have been lured like a moth to a lamp by the problems of boundaries and the ways boundaries are made and crossed – boundaries between disciplines, boundaries between and within institutions, boundaries of creed and colour. … And I suppose I have an inordinate interest in the beachcombers of life, the in-between people. If you want my ultimate wimpish liberal philosophy to be revealed, let me say that I think it is the human condition to be in- between”.27

Finally, after all is said and done, with all the poetry and creativity in Greg’s work, a last word (but perhaps really the beginning …) comes from Manning Clark, who was among the many who wrote to congratulate Greg on taking up the Crawford Chair of History at Melbourne University in 1971. Clark wrote:

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I am very grateful that Melbourne has ignored that warning about putting new wine into old bottles, because sometimes those bottles have become so old that there is nothing left with which to contaminate the new. So pour in all you have to offer, and Melbourne will become creative again…28

1 Beach Crossings: Voyaging Across Times, Cultures and Self, Carlton, The Megunyah Press, 2004, p. 20. 2 Jacques Derrida, Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression, transl. Eric Prenowitz, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1996, p. 2 3 Jorge Luis Borges, ‘The Library of Babel’, in Collected Fictions, transl. Andrew Hurley, New York, Penguin Books, 1998, (112-118), p. 118. 4 Donna Merwick, ed, Dangerous Liaisons: Essays in Honour of Greg Dening, Parkville, History Department, the University of Melbourne, 1994. 5 Tom Griffiths, ‘History and the Creative Imagination’, History Australia 6(3), p.73.3. 6 Tom Griffiths, ‘History and the Creative Imagination’, p. 74.4. 7 Readings/Writings, Carlton, MUP, 1998, p. 10. 8 Greg Dening to Peter Ryan, June 1978, Dening Papers, SLV. 9 Greg Dening to John Lechte, 11 January 1981. Email correspondence from John Lechte, 10 July 2015. I thank John Lechte for sending me a copy of this letter. 10 Dening Papers, SLV. 11 Dening Papers, SLV. 12 Dening Papers 13 Greg Dening 14 Mulvaney to Dening, 6 August 1999, Box 45, Dening Papers, SLV 15 Beach Crossings 16 Beach Crossings, 2004: 15-16. 17 Dening, Readings/Writings, pp.110-111. 18 Greg Dening to John Lechte, 11 January 1981. 19 ‘A Murderous Settlement’ (fragment), typeset, p 108 (106-120), n.d., Dening Papers, SLV, Box 7. 20 Dening, Performances, Carlton, MUP, 1996, p.41. 21 Brown’s Diary, Thursday 5 August 1802, Vallance, Moore and Groves 2001: 238. 22 Flinders 1814 [1966] vol II: 15-16. 23 Edwards 1981: 83-84. 24 Dening, Islands and Beaches, 1980, p. 19. 25 ‘Mr Bligh and the Feather Girdle’, Carson Seminar, May 26, 1986, Box 2. 26 Roundtable of Implicit Ethnographies, Dening Papers, SLV 27 Dening, ‘….’ In Bain Attwood, Boundaries of the Past, Carlton, History Institute, Victoria, 1990, p…. 28 Dening Correspondence, Melbourne University Archives, Box ….

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