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Dinesh / Photos

Figure 3.2

Portrait of Bennelong. Engraving by James Nagel in David Collins, “Account of the English Colony in New South Wales….. (London: T.Cadell and W. Davies, 1798), reo. Reproduced by permission of Cambridge University Library


[en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bennelong]
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Dinesh said:

It was thus that two Aboriginal men came to named in the ‘Essay on the Principle of Population: www.esp.org/books/malthus/population/malthus.pdf Bennelong and Colbee, for Malthus examplars of new world savagery. It so happened, however, that the former had journeyed across the world in 1793, from the apparent lowest stage of civilization to the center of civilization. Bennelong spent two years in and around London, enjoying the hospitality of, among other, Lord Sydney, after whom his land and water had come to be named. Thus during the years in which Malthus became a fellow Jesus College and curate of Okewood, Surrey, in which he wrote his first (unpublished) pamphlet, Bennelong of New South Wales trod Malthus’s local paths. There is no evidence that Malthus and Bennelong met, but we know that the political economist did ponder the portrait of “Georgian” Bennelong that graced the pages of Collins’s 1798 volume ~ Page 107

But civilization was not easy for the Eora man. His young countryman, Yemmerrasanie, who had traveled with him (and who die not have the dubious distinction of appearing in Malthus’s ‘Essay’), died and was buried at Eltham. Bennelong en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bennelong himself longed for home and sickened progressively in an era when homesickness -- ‘nostaliga’ -- was real in the sense of a medical diagnosis and was considered deadly, made all the more so by the knowledge of great distance. The sailor on Cook’s voyage, had felt something like it, Banks noting in September 1770 that they “were now petty far gone with the longing for home which the Physicians have gone so far as to esteem a disease under the name of Nostalgia.” Homesickness and the traumas of separation and departure affected all of the humans at this point in the world’s history, when a whole quarter of the globe opened up to more frequent and far longer oceanic voyaging. Collins wrote that when the Aboriginal men had left Sydney, they has to endure “at the moment of their departure the united distress of their wives, and the dismal lamentations of their friends.”

The years that Bennelong was in London are the years about which least is known of Malthus’s movements, but it is known that he was then composing his first but unpublished essay. On the extant fragment sis a lengthy musing on the significance of home in the context of migration. Malthus wondered what could possibly induce familiar separation, except extreme distress. Observing the rural poor around him, he wondered “what is there to attach them to life, but their evening fire-side with their families… surely no wise legislature would discourage these sentiments, and endeavour to weaken his attachment to home, unless indeed it was intended to destroy all thought and feeling among the common people, to break their spirit, and prepare them to submit patiently to any yoke that might be imposed upon them. //During his years in London, Bennelong was immeasurably better off in material terms than the poor of Okewood, of whom Malthus wrote. But his tailored outfits, doctors attention, tutor’s guidance, and plays in town proved a pale substitute for evening fireside on the shore of Sydney’s harbor. When he did return to his own shores, Bennelong himself wrote back to his English hosts: “No me go to England no more. I am at home now.” ~ Page 110

The New Worlds of Thomas Robert Malthus
3 years ago
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