Show Me the Sky - Nicholas Hogg [46]
Disappointed not to greet an indigene, I asked Mr Holloway why the town seemed devoid of its original landowners. He answered by confirming the lecture of Rev. Jefferson that ‘many prefer a roof of stars to one of timber or stone’.
I too wondered if I might find the light of Heaven better than a town of drunkards and thieves, murderers and their despots?
18 March 1835
It is not unfair to say that the colonists of New South Wales are the ones wallowing in the mire of iniquity, not the aborigines – they, who despite not knowing the Saviour, live more virtuously than the superficial Christians of England.
On a ride through ‘the bush’ to preach at Richmond, accompanying the Reverends Jefferson and Thomas, I observed that the natives have little desire for religion, and services have thus been thinly attended. After preaching in a cold and leaking barn to a congregation of seven, Rev. Thomas was drawn to question, ‘Does the pitiable condition of these people prove that they are barely human, and no more beyond salvation than the kangaroos? Or simply that man without the Gospel is doomed?’
I turned away from the contempt of Rev. Thomas, and sought air beyond the stifled carriage. It was not my place to debate with him before his senior, but he should know that my brothers and sisters, those who have lived for generations with only their invented deities, are not without society, its moral codes, ceremonies, songs and stories.
It seems absurd that I have passed judgement on those not aware of their crimes. Only if the indigenes of New Holland, or Fiji, know the truth of God and then turn away, can I mark them as sinners.
19 March 1835
On return to Port Jackson I was summoned to a meeting at the Macquarie Street Chapel with Reverends Jefferson, Lilywhite, Thomas, and new member of the mission, a Rev. Collins. After making formal acquaintance with Rev. Collins, I briefly met his wife and three sons, all of who will be accompanying him to Lakemba, before the business of a replacement for the late Rev. Stevens commenced.
My heart may have sank when I learned that the Rev. Thomas would be bearing the torch of God into Fiji, but my countenance was kept free of disappointment as I held out my hand to shake his in congratulation.
I pray that a man who has pledged his life to the Lord may be blessed so.
21 March 1835
Once more we board the Caroline and make the sea our home. After nearly three weeks on the edge of this tremendous island, visiting churches and towns along the Hawkesbury Valley, and stepping the streets of Sydney, from the glories of the Botanic Gardens, to the debauched nights of convicts and soldiers at the Rocks, my anxieties for the future of the aborigines now transform to apprehension for my own people.
The few indigenes I encountered seem a people lost of spirit, and of home. Though I use the word home only as an Englishman would, for the aboriginals are not dwellers of a fixed place, and seem to have been disenfranchised by this new world suddenly upon their shores.
The lessons I have learned from this colony are warnings, a prophecy of what my people could become at the hands of foreign rulers. The men who followed in the wake of Cook came with aggrandised visions of themselves, judging the husbands of these shores a lowly and pitied tribe of the human race, lacking the intelligence to even build a house or clothe their bodies.
But if peace with the land be a measure of civilisation, a harmonic balance between man and animal, where all flourish and prosper, then it would have been the Englander deemed savage – he who has blackened the skies with soot and smoke, who crooks the backs of his children in sunless workhouses, who feeds himself fat while his brothers starve.
Virtuous and brave is the aborigine who resists the feeble vanities of his godless invaders. If only those who followed Cook had read his logbook entry on these enlightened people:
They may appear to some to be the most wretched people upon Earth, but in reality they are far more happier than we Europeans: being wholly unacquainted