The doomed attempt to claim Australia's north for the British Empire

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In 1838, the British came to colonise northern Australia. Doomed to fail, they sailed home 11 years later. And as they left, the local Indigenous people didn't celebrate — they wept.

The ruins of Port Essington are incredibly remote, even today.

From Darwin, you drive south-east for a few hours, through Kakadu National Park and into Arnhem Land.

Then you take a left on an unsealed road towards Garig Gunak Barlu National Park, a huge peninsula that bends back towards Indonesia.

Today, this country is home to five different Indigenous clans, who all speak the same language: Iwaidja.

But even after a day in a four-wheel drive, you've still got a long way to go.

Next you need to cross Port Essington — a harbour so big the British boasted it could hold all the ships in the world.

On the other side, on a cliff overlooking a white sand beach, are the stone ruins of the settlement a small group of British marines called home from 1838 to 1849.

They had come to colonise — but ultimately it was they who would be challenged and changed.

"There are some amazing stories of Aboriginal people and the British treating each other with respect," says Don Christophersen.

A member of the Muran clan of Western Arnhem Land, he has spent years researching the history of Port Essington.

"It just goes to show that, all those years ago, we could get on without killing each other," he says.

'A forgotten place'

The stone ruins are eerie, surrounded on all sides by dense eucalypt forest.

The haunting cries of black cockatoos fill the humid air.

"It's got the feel of a forgotten place," says Mark McKenna, Professor of History at the University of Sydney.

The Port Essington settlement was an attempt to claim Australia's north for the British Crown.

"The intention was to assert British sovereignty in the north of Australia, and to make it clear to other imperial powers that Britain was going to defend its claim" Professor McKenna says.

"It was empire," agrees Jared Archibald, curator of Territory history at the Museum and Art Gallery of the Northern Territory.

"And they weren't talking about this from an Aboriginal point of view.

"'We have taken this land and everyone else — the Dutch, the French, whoever — you're too late, it's ours'."

The British had ambitions of Port Essington becoming a bustling trading port, connecting Australia with trade routes to its north.

"Many ships from Australia were destined for Asian ports," Professor McKenna says, "and there was a sense that if Britain was to develop Australia economically, it needed to have a trade hub, a new Singapore".

The British also hoped to benefit from the lucrative trade in trepang, or sea cucumber, which had brought Macassan fishermen from modern day Indonesia to Port Essington for centuries.

Doomed from the beginning

In October 1838, 36 Royal Marines, and a few of their wives and children, sailed into Port Essington.

It was the third attempt by the British to claim northern Australia.

In the 1820s, there were two short-lived settlements — Fort Dundas on Melville Island, and Fort Wellington at nearby Raffles Bay on the mainland.

This time, the British were determined to succeed, but the settlement seemed doomed from the beginning.

A year after the British arrived, a cyclone destroyed almost all of the buildings in the fledgling settlement.

The marines, led by Commandant John McArthur, struggled to adapt to life in the tropics.

"Indigenous people of that region lived very well," says Nicholas Evans, Professor of Linguistics at the Australian National University.

"Billabongs full of barramundi, lots of different wild yams.

"Then these poor old Brits turned up with their flour and their maggots, and their hardtack and bully beef, strutting around under the midday tropical in their heavy uniforms."

Mr Archibald says "it was another world".

"These are all English people either from England or from southern Australia, coming into a climate that is just so different," he says.

The settlement was plagued by disease, and many marines died of malaria and fever.

"At one point the Commandant joked darkly that the graves in the cemetery would outnumber the people who were left living there," Professor McKenna says.

The settlement showed no sign of becoming a booming trading port.

The Makassans kept coming to harvest sea cucumbers, but they only traded with the Dutch, and the harbour was too far from established trade routes in Asia.

The British government decided not to authorise the colonisation of Port Essington, which meant the settlement would remain a naval settlement, just a strategic outpost to ward off other colonial powers.

From repulsion to respect

Unlike elsewhere in Australia, the settlement at Port Essington was not marked by widespread violence or massacres.

"The British settlement was small, and they weren't making incursions into Aboriginal territory," Professor McKenna says.

"So the whole encounter was much more peaceful."

Professor McKenna says British journals of the time reveal initial "repulsion and rejection" of traditional Aboriginal culture — which quickly turned into fascination and respect.

"The journals end up becoming full of detailed observations of Aboriginal cultural practices," he says.

"They are starting to perceive the intricacy, the knowledge, the craft, the skill of those Aboriginal people.

"That experience at close quarters caused them to start asking questions about their own culture and its alleged superiority.

"Because as they could see, Aboriginal people were living in this environment effortlessly, and they were learning from them how to live."

But Christophersen notes that this closeness also brought terrible disease to their country.

"Yes, we didn't have the frontier violence but we had the sickness, and it was just as devastating," he says.

'World's End'

By late 1844, the British marines had spent six years living in Port Essington.

In his letters to the Colonial Office, Commandant John MacArthur began dropping hints about moving the settlement somewhere better.

He even signed off his letters with the address 'Port Essington, World's End'.

"Can you imagine that for an address?" laughs Professor McKenna.

"It's a preposterous address.

"You get a sense of the exile, the loneliness this man would have felt."

By the following year, it seemed clear that the settlement at Port Essington would fail.

And yet it wasn't until late 1849 that the settlement was finally abandoned.

Upon learning the news, Indigenous women are reported to have "showed their grief by cutting their heads and faces with sharp flints".

For Christophersen, this demonstrates the depth of the relationship between his people and the British.

"You would have thought Aboriginal people would have said 'They brought all this sickness, we lost so many people'," he says.

"But they still wanted them to stay.

"If people are going to stand on the beach and cry for you, and have sorrow in their hearts, they must have had a good relationship."

Over the next three weeks, McArthur and the marines packed up.

"They eventually left not really staking their claim in any real sense to that part of Australia," Professor McKenna says.

"The British were defeated."

But their time spent with Aboriginal people would stay with them.

As their ship sailed away, the crew performed dances they had learnt at Port Essington.

"They loved these dances so much that they imitated them on the deck of the ship for weeks on end," Professor McKenna says.

"That's a wonderful example of how Europeans could be mesmerised by Indigenous culture and how it changed their own sense of themselves."

Traditional owners Heidi Mildadme Cooper and Frederick Baird are thankful that the Port Essington settlement failed.

"Me and my family often sit back here, at the entrance of Port Essington," Baird says.

"We often wonder, we could be sitting looking back towards Darwin.

"But because the settlement was abandoned, we're sitting back at our homeland and we're looking at pristine wilderness.

"And we're so happy that it's remained just as the bush like it should be."

"It's a beautiful place, my grandmother's country," adds Cooper.

For Christophersen, the history of Port Essington is a story Australians need more than ever.

He says it offers lessons for a mainstream Australia still struggling to understand Indigenous people and culture.

"The English have been here for centuries, and they've had trouble understanding who we are as a people, understanding our language, our culture, and our connection to country," he says.

"How is that today, centuries after we met, we're still teaching each other about ourselves?"

It is also a reminder, he says, that bridges can be built between cultures.

"At times, there was great humanity shown between Aboriginal people and the English," he says.

"And we need to tell those stories of great humanity — not just the stories of how we kill each other, but the stories of how we help each other."

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Topics: indigenous-aboriginal-and-torres-strait-islander, community-and-society, indigenous-culture, colonialism, history, geography, australia, nt, united-kingdom, england

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