‘Cooeing to the natives’1: Thomas Baines’ encounters with the Other on the North Australian Expedition, 1855–1857

Abstract

In 1855, both the British government and the Royal Geographical Society (RGS) commissioned the Australian explorer Augustus Charles Gregory to undertake an ambitious exploration of Australia's interior. Thomas Baines, artist and explorer, fresh from a stint in the Cape Colony as war artist to Major-General Henry Somerset in the frontier wars in the Eastern Cape, offered his services to the proposed North Australian Expedition (NAE). This article traces Baines’ part in the expedition, engages with the intercultural communication attempted between Baines and the Aboriginal people encountered along the way, and situates these encounters historically from a postcolonial perspective. On the NAE, evidence of'othering' in describing the indigenous Australians encountered is evident, and yet great tolerance on the part of Gregory, and curiosity on the part of Baines, are also shown. Sources of evidence for these encounters are primarily the diaries Baines kept of the expedition (housed in the Mitchell Library, Sydney), his sketches and paintings made on the NAE, and an annotated maritime map (housed at the Royal Geographical Society, London). Despite occasional hostilities and fears, it is the ‘cooeing’ between the two cultural groups that is dominant and echoes down to us today as a reminder of the efforts these people together made to understand something of each other in an interregnum time of race relations.