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the land than one could own the air above the land or the rain that fell on it or the animals that lived on it. Land is so important and place is so important to tribal people that history for them is more a function of place than of time. People are associated with a particular region, the region is the centre of their world … consequently, that land is so intricately bound into the very soul of most tribal people that it’s not something that you trade back and forth. And when they were forced to trade lands in the early part of the nineteenth century, and to give up land, in order to survive, it was a very traumatic experience for them. Another thing to remember is that most of the religious beliefs of tribal people are site-specific, and by that I mean that their cosmology, the powers in their universe, are also tied to the particular area in which they live.

The settlers failed to push through this particular land deal, which was struck down by the British colonial governors. A few years later, this tension between settlers wanting land and the British Crown eager to maintain good relations with the Native American chiefs would be one of the elements that triggered the War of Independence. But independence did not make the problem go away. US state governors faced the same dilemma as their British predecessors, and they, too, had to strike down more attempts at land sales between the Wabash Company and the Piankishwa that breached existing treaties. The map and the abortive negotiations around it remain as evidence of three quite different ways of thinking about the world – those of the Native Americans, whose land it has been from time immemorial, the settlers who wanted to appropriate it, and the authorities in London, mindful of Goldsmith’s strictures, who tried to mediate a solution, but were powerless to enforce it.

89

Australian Bark Shield

Wooden shield, from Botany Bay, New South Wales, Australia

AROUND AD 1770

This is one of the most potent objects in the book, one which has become symbolically charged, freighted with layers of history, legend, global politics and race relations. It is an Aboriginal shield, one of the very first objects brought to England from Australia. It was brought here by James Cook, eight years before the fateful encounter described in Chapter 87. We know the precise date it came into Cook’s hands – 29 April 1770 – because we have written accounts of the day from Cook himself and from others who were with him. But the indigenous Australian who owned the shield did not write, which is why a history from objects can be so important: for the unnamed man confronting his first European on the shore at Botany Bay nearly 250 years ago, this shield is his statement.

Cook’s log records his arrival on the east coast of Australia, just south of the site of modern Sydney, on ‘Sunday 29th in the afternoon winds southerly and clear weather with which we stood into the bay and anchored under the south shore’. The ship anchored at what would come to be called Botany Bay, thanks to the collecting work of the botanist Joseph Banks, who travelled with Cook. The ship’s log continues:

Saw as we came in on both points of the bay several of the natives and a few huts … as we approached the shore they all made off except two men who seemed resolved to oppose our landing – as soon as I saw this I ordered the boats to lay upon their oars in order to speak to them, but this was to little purpose for neither us nor Tupia could understand one word they said … I thought they beckoned to us to come ashore, but in this we were mistaken for as soon as we put the boat in they again came to oppose us, upon which I fired a musket between the two, which had no other effect than to make them retire back where bundles of their darts lay and one of them took up a stone and threw it at us, which caused my firing a second musket load with small shot and although some of the shot struck the man, yet it had no other effect than to make him lay hold of a shield or target to defend himself.

At this point