Blog

The Josephine Ulrick Literature and Poetry prizes offer an eye-popping $20,000 to the winner in each category. Now in its tenth year, this is the first time the twenty grand prize pool has been awa...  >

Elsewhere
Ultimate Guide to Writing Better Than You Normally Do >

Other

< Back to Blog
0 Comments

Event-Grammar: The Language Notebooks of William Dawes

July 15

In 1972, a pair of slender language notebooks were rediscovered at the University of London. These eighty pages of small, limber handwriting, were the property of William Dawes, an astronomer, explorer, botanist and officer in the First Fleet. Dawes was an enigmatic character, but he was also one of the first people to establish a relationship with the local Indigenous Australians, referred to in the notebooks as the ‘Eora’. His notebooks provide a rare and oblique glimpse into the early interactions between two cultures, in particular through his relationship with a young Aboriginal girl, Patyegarang, who became his companion and linguistic partner. In the latest edition of Meanjin, Ross Gibson gives us some insight into this vast and complicated world through his essay ‘Event Grammar: The Language Notebooks of William Dawes’. A brief extract is below – you can read the essay in full on our editions page.




In January 1788 William Dawes came to Botany Bay with the First Fleet Marines. For most of the intervening years until now, he has missed out on close historical attention because his papers were presumed destroyed by family neglect and a hurricane in Antigua during the nineteenth century. But he came back into view in 1972, when a pair of slender ‘language notebooks’—eighty small pages of limber handwriting—were discovered at the University of London’s School of Oriental and African Studies.[1] In recent times Dawes and the indigenous people he encountered have loomed into brighter awareness, enhanced by the screening of the SBS television series First Australians and the publication of Kate Grenville’s novel The Lieutenant.

The language notebooks are a crucial relic of the first four years of British colonisation in Australia, demonstrating not only Dawes’ intellect but equally the bold wit of the native speakers with whom he conversed. Fragments of an unfinished heuristic, Dawes’ inscriptions have a prismatic quality. They generate multiple insights that reflect and refract in the mind of the reader, giving glimpses into vast philosophical tenets and momentous changes in societies and individuals. Bafflement abides in the notebooks too, affording the reader plenty of wonder.

In a couple of senses, this notion of ‘affordance’ is the motor of my essay. First, the notebooks afford us a means of knowing more about the ideas and emotions that were generated between the incursive and the Indigenous cultures at Sydney Cove. Second, we can work with the notebooks to understand the affordances and insufficiencies of whatever literary genre a writer might use for extracting the richness in the traces that Dawes left behind.

No matter which literary form is chosen—be it a nineteenth-century style of novel, a theatrical performance, a soundscape constructed from recorded voices, or an essay indebted to Michel de Montaigne, for instance—each mode will stimulate a different set of insights and feelings. In particular, my curiosity about the efficacy of various literary modes has strengthened now that two Dawes-inspired novels have been issued—Grenville’s and one from 1995 called Promised Lands by Jane Rogers. After pondering the Dawes material for fifteen years now, and having read the fictions inspired by them in the meantime, I can’t shake the conviction that a well-made novel must obscure the most puzzling and provocative elements in the notebooks. This is because a novelist typically deploys a long narrative arc to bring principal characters into vivid focus and the reader is encouraged to appreciate every character as an entity who is complete and singular in a represented world that tends towards resolution. While a novel can be a marvel in the way it might encourage its readers to empathise with distinctive figures, this special affordance of the form can block out other qualities of existence that are worth knowing too, crucial qualities of the world and its people, including conundrum and character-traits such as indeterminacy, multiplicity and mutability.

Which is not to ban novels as modes for imagining historical experience. How could you ignore Don DeLillo’s Libra, let’s say, as a means to know some nuances of the first Kennedy assassination? Or Herman Melville’s Pierre as a way into the beginnings of existentialism. However, some aspects of consciousness—many of which Dawes witnessed—are not susceptible to representation through novelistic empathy, particularly through the smooth structures of the classically styled novel, which Grenville and Rogers both deploy with aplomb. Their novels catch very well some insights within Dawes’ ken, but not all of them.

Dawes encountered something stranger and stronger than the individualism that was being so forcefully ratified in the bourgeois revolutions of Europe at the end of the eighteenth century, when the novel was also rising to prominence. To account for what Dawes learned, we need a mode of writing—roundabout, relational, a tad unruly—that can bring the reader closer to some more ‘dispersed’ or ‘distributed’ versions of consciousness, to a state of mind that is not biographical or Cartesian. We need a literary mode that affords the reader access to some ‘environmental’ or communal mentalities that reach beyond the bounds of sovereign subjects. The popular-romance form of the novel is not designed for such a stretch.

Might we chase something the novels have missed? Granted, every mode of writing, including my own, will show its specific affordances and insufficiencies, and no one mode will catch the full or final gist of the notebooks. So be it. Dawes’ notes can bear frequent reinterpretation.

Here, then, is one more response to the notebooks, this one in the form of an essay…




1.The original notebooks remain in the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) in London. Microfiche copies are held by the Mitchell Library in Sydney. The SOAS is negotiating to post the complete facsimile of the notebooks online as soon as possible.Back to article


 

Our Friends


 

Only the comment field is required. Omitting the ID fields increases your risk of being mistaken for spam.