I now turn to narrative history, to stories about encounters between particular Aboriginal people and outsiders during three voyages. My main focus is the young Englishman Matthew Flinders, then second lieutenant on HMS Reliance. In six expeditions between 1795 and 1799, some in open boats, Flinders and his friend George Bass (1771–1803?), the ship’s surgeon, between them explored half the east coast of New Holland, from Hervey Bay (Queensland) to Westernport (Victoria), plus Van Diemen’s Land.^[30] I discuss episodes during their joint visit to Van Diemen’s Land in December 1798 and during Flinders’s fifteen-day stay at Moreton Bay (Queensland) in July 1799 accompanied by Bungaree, a Broken Bay man who became the key protagonist in what ensued.

The texts used are undoubtedly both ethnocentric and élitist. They comprise contemporary journals and later, more polished narratives: manuscript copies, seemingly abridged, of Flinders’s journals of his two voyages;^[31] accounts of the same voyages “taken from” the journals of Bass and Flinders and published in volume two of An Account of the English Colony in New South Wales by the Marine lieutenant-colonel David Collins, who had been judge-advocate and colonial secretary at Port Jackson and would be the founder and lieutenant-governor of Hobart Town; Flinders's brief coastal Observations published in 1801 to accompany the charts of his early surveys; and, finally, the long historical introduction to his Voyage to Terra Australis, on “Prior Discoveries”.^[32]

The third voyage, mentioned only briefly for comparative purposes, is that of the Frenchman Nicolas Baudin (1754–1803), who explored western and southern New Holland on the Géographe and the Naturaliste in 1801–03, in direct competition with Flinders, who was then surveying the New Holland coast in HMS Investigator. I refer to an episode during the French visit to southeastern Van Diemen’s Land in early 1802, drawing on Baudin’s shipboard journal (1974), a contemporary official report by Baudin (1978), and the later published narrative of the voyage by the young naturalist François Péron (1775–1810).^[33]