As Bernard Smith observed, Tench’s account encapsulates the ambivalence of his time toward “the state of nature of primitive societies” (Smith 1984, 175–8). On the one hand, the state of nature was valorised as a happy stage of humanity following Bougainville’s famous Voyage autour du monde and Rousseau’s thesis; on the other, it was condemned as a state of backward heathen savagery by evangelical groups and defenders of progress and civilisation. For Smith, Tench’s account reflected the cross-currents of the time. It is important to know that Tench, writing his conclusions in 1792 on the basis of his experience of Port Jackson, was not a Rousseauist. On the respective natural physical strength of the British and the Aborigines, Tench quoted Rousseau: “Give to civilised man all his machines, and he is superior to the savage; but without these how inferior is he found on opposition, even more so than the savage in the first instance” (Tench 1793, 274), but Tench immediately added, “These are the words of Rousseau; and like many more of his positions, must be received with limitations” (274).
Tench’s anti-Rousseauist position was made even more clear later, when he mocked,
those European philosophers, whose closet speculations exalt a state of nature above a state of civilisation … [If they] could survey the phantom, which their heated imaginations have raised: possibly they might then learn, that a state of nature is, of all others, least adapted to promote the happiness of a being, capable of sublime research, and unending ratiocination: that a savage roaming for prey amidst his native deserts, is a creature deformed by all those passions, which afflict and degrade our nature, unsoftened by the influence of religion, philosophy, and legal restriction: and that the more men unite their talents, the more closely the bands of society are drawn; and civilisation advanced, inasmuch is human felicity augmented, and man fitted for his unalienable station in the universe (Tench 1793, 291).
These words are written just after an evocation of the violence and ill treatment exerted against women in Aboriginal society. This will become a “marker” for Europeans in the nineteenth century of the “rank” of a primitive society. But Tench referred also to the “vicissitudes of their climate, the lack of clothes, the precariousness of supply, the sharpness of hunger, their ignorance of cultivating the earth” (Tench, 1793, 281). In a way, increasingly common in the nineteenth century, he underlined “the lack of” (habitat, tools, agriculture, clothes) to describe the backwardness of the people on a scale of technical advancement. “If they be considered as a nation, whose general advancement and acquisitions are to be weighed, they certainly rank very low, even in the scales of the savages” (281). But this backwardness is mainly due to the context, and not to a supposed deficiency of nature in the Aborigines themselves.
Let those who have been born in more favoured lands, and who have profited by more enlightened systems, compassionate, but not despise, their destitute and obscure situation. Children of the same omniscient paternal care, let them recollect, that by the fortuitous advantage of birth alone, they possess superiority, that untaught, unaccommodated man, is the same in Pall Mall, as in the wilderness of New South Wales (1793, 293).
If Aborigines are backward because of the unfortunate context in which they live, they are by no means the “miserablest People in the World … setting aside their Human Shape … [who] differ but little from Brutes,” as the navigator Dampier put it at the end of the seventeenth century (1998 [1697], 218). On the contrary, Tench affirmed that “the Natives of New South Wales possess a considerable portion of that acumen, or sharpness of intellect, which bespeaks genius” (1793, 281). And “if they resist knowledge, and the adoption of manners and customs, differing from their own, it is because the progress of reason is not only slow, but mechanical” (281): “Of all the lessons peculiar to man, that which he learns the latest, and with the most difficulty, is reason itself” (281).[7]
Tench defended the quality of Aboriginal people – their intelligence, comprehension, ingenuity and celerity, courage and honesty, freedom of judgement. According to the categories used by the philosophers to describe society, he also defended Aboriginal societies as organised, testified to by the fact that they had principles of government based on equality (he recognised that he knew little about their law), religious beliefs, sophisticated language (he worked with Dawes on a dictionary but never finished it). The people were “divided in tribes” (Tench 1793, 285), but Tench gave little information on their names or location. Cameragal is one of the few tribal names in his account. Interestingly, he made no reference at all to property or its lack. The only “possession” he mentioned was a “fishing ground.” On the whole Tench’s observations on Aboriginal social organisation are vague. He kept, rather, to what he could easily describe – the material culture, the physical appearance, the dances and so on – then made general remarks which slotted readily into the European debate on “primitive societies.” From his experience in Port Jackson, he arrived at another set of considerations, referring mainly to the discovery of individuals, men and women with whom “he cannot but feel some share of affection” and proven to belong to humanity with all the qualities required: civility, feelings, intelligence (293).
To appreciate their general powers of mind is difficult … if from a general view we descend to particular inspection and examine individually the persons who compose this community, they will certainly rise in estimation. … In the narrative part of this work, I have endeavoured rather to detail information, than to deduce conclusions; leaving to the reader the exercise of his own judgement. The behaviour of Arabanoo, of Baneelon, of Colbee, and many others, is copiously described and assuredly he who shall make just allowance for uninstructed nature, will hardly accuse any of those persons of stupidity, or deficiency of apprehension (Tench 1793, 281).
[7] In French in the original text: “De toutes les instructions propres à l’homme, celle qu’il acquiert le plus tard, et le plus difficilement, est la raison même” (original source of quotation unknown).