Six months later, Flinders set out in the Norfolk to examine the coast north of Port Jackson, without Bass but accompanied by Bungaree,^[40] “whose good disposition and manly conduct” had attracted Flinders’s “esteem” and who for the next 30 years would be among the best-known and oft-portrayed Aborigines in the colony.^[41]

On 16 July, at a sandy point east of the mouth of Moreton Bay — Flinders’s Point Skirmish, still so named, on the southern tip of Bribie Island^[42] — Flinders and Bungaree conversed “by signs” with several apparently unarmed local men. Bungaree went ashore, also unarmed, and engaged in the first of several exchanges — his yarn belt for a kangaroo fur band — by which both parties presumably sought to establish, maintain or develop a relationship. Bungaree was the key figure in these transactions. Flinders eventually landed, armed against “treachery” with a musket, but his own efforts at exchange failed when he refused to give up his cabbage-tree hat on demand. As Flinders and Bungaree retreated to the boat, crowded from behind by the men, one tried good-humouredly to take the hat by ruse but failed. The situation then deteriorated. Firewood was thrown at the boat, fell short, and was “treated as a joke” but one man hurled a spear, which narrowly missed. Alarmed, Flinders shot at “the offender” and continued to do so through two misfires until he finally wounded him. Another man was reportedly shot in the arm by a seaman and the Aborigines fled.^[43]

Although Flinders professed satisfaction at “the great influence which the awe of a superior power has in savages”, his journal also tells another story, of ongoing apprehension and jumbled emotions: insult at the “impudent” and “very wanton attack”; regret that he had been provoked into firing; hope that it would deter further attacks by “the enemy”; anxiety nonetheless; and vulnerability because he had to remain in the bay to do his survey and repair the sloop. For five days, he cautiously avoided further contacts despite repeated Aboriginal invitations. His prudence seemed justified on 18 July when the Norfolk was assailed by “a party of natives…who appeared to be standing up in their canoes, and pulling toward them, with all their strength, in very regular order…after the manner of the South Sea islanders”. Then, as “about 20 of them were counted, and seemed to be coming on with much resolution”, the decks were cleared, the men armed, and the sloop bore away towards the attackers who had surprisingly come no closer. Flinders recounted the denouement with wry retrospective appreciation of its absurdity: “this hostile array turned out to be a few peaceable fishermen” standing on a sand flat and “driving fish into their nets”.^[44] Yet dark imaginings about savage hordes were standard fare for sailors in a region offering notorious precedents in the real or assumed fates of Cook, La Pérouse and numerous lesser figures. Flinders knew from personal experience as a midshipman with William Bligh (1754–1817) in the Torres Strait Islands in 1792, when the ships were twice attacked by men in canoes and a seaman died, how lethally unstable the equation between the “superiority of our arms” and “great differences of numbers” could be.^[45]

From 21 July, Flinders's tension gradually eased as Bungaree, “in his usual undaunted manner”, facilitated relations with the local people, who welcomed him enthusiastically but remained apprehensive of the white men, their muskets and, especially, Flinders. Hardly any women were seen. During the last two days of the visit, with the sloop detained by bad weather near Skirmish Point, the exchanges expanded to include the Europeans and featured much singing and dancing, presumably an Aboriginal strategy to pacify or control the dangerous strangers who thought they were being “entertained”. Flinders found their dancing “not ungraceful”, especially in contrast to the “clumsy” efforts of three Scottish sailors who had earlier been ordered to dance a reel without “musick” and had not impressed the local audience. Their singing was “musical and pleasing” in contrast to Bungaree's reciprocal offering, which “sounded barbarous and grating” and “annoyed his auditors” — but he was accounted “an indifferent songster, even among his own countrymen”. These “friendly interchanges” culminated in a name exchange — they called Flinders “‘Mid-ger Plindah’” and he recorded three of theirs — which he took for an important “ceremony” on the analogy of Cook's account of a similar practice at Endeavour River in 1770.^[46]

Exegesis: In a later brief history of his 15-day visit to Moreton Bay, Flinders attributed the eventual “friendly” relations to “a salutary change” induced in Aboriginal attitudes by “the effect of our fire‑arms”. But the content and wording of his own journal suggest that the most potent element in local responses to the strangers and repeated expressions of eagerness to communicate with them was Bungaree. Though he “could not understand” the Moreton Bay language, the local people persistently sought him out, while his mediatory skills were much valued by the Europeans with whom he did share a lingua franca.^[47] Flinders represented him as the key agent in three of the four exchange situations which succeeded the initial violence. On 21 July, “about six miles” from Skirmish Point, two men signalled for them to land but fled when Flinders approached, only to return when they saw Bungaree. He “made a friendly exchange” with them and went to the boat for additional items, “to make the exchange equal”.^[48] There was a more elaborate transaction four days later, with Bungaree again the main player:

On 28 July, members of the crew chopped down a tree and the noise of its fall greatly “startled” several local men. Flinders, ever pragmatic, thought it “might probably assist in giving them a higher idea of the power of their visitors”. Bungaree — “gallant and unsuspecting” according to Flinders but the second epithet is surely wrong — made amends for their fright by giving them a spear and a throwing-stick and showing them the use of the latter, of which they appeared “wholly ignorant”.^[50] I take this tutorial as a genuinely cross-cultural act which symbolized a reciprocal rather than a hierarchical relationship and belies the reified idea of the cross-cultural as a binary divide between opposed, homogenized cultures. It is likely that the Moreton Bay people took Bungaree for the leader of the expedition and the white men for his followers — which might explain why the modern town near Skirmish Point is called Bongaree and not Flinders.

Bungaree also served Flinders as a datum point in the continuation and extension of the comparative agenda previously noted with respect to Van Diemen’s Land. At the mouth of the Clarence River, en route to Moreton Bay, they had seen three large, well-built habitations which Bungaree “readily admitted…were much superior to any huts of the natives which he had before seen”. A fishing net taken from a house in Moreton Bay was “proof of the superior ingenuity of these over the natives of Port Jackson”. Their singing, too, was more complex: “not merely in the diatonic scale, descending by thirds, as at Port Jackson: the descent of this was waving, in rather a melancholy soothing strain”. On the other hand, Bungaree’s weaponry was superior and, although the inhabitants of Moreton Bay bore a general physical resemblance to those of Port Jackson, there was none “whose countenance had so little of the savage, or the symmetry of whose limbs expressed strength and agility, so much, as those of their companion Bong-ree” — a classic instance of a personal relationship transcending a demeaning stereotype.^[51]

These piecemeal contrasts were specific and empirical rather than systemic. However, at the end of the account of his stay in Moreton Bay, Flinders outlined an inductive environmentalist theory of the development of civil society which is pertinent to this paper. In his 1814 narrative, he summarized the situation thus: “They fish almost wholly with cast and setting nets, live more in society than the natives to the southward, and are much better lodged.”^[52] Here is his contemporary explanation of why this should be so as rendered by Collins, but the ideas are clearly Flinders's: