Red coat, blue jacket, black skin: Aboriginal men and clothing in early New South Wales

Abstract

In 1819 a group of Aboriginal men from the Nepean River and the Blue Mountains came to Sydney, where they met some of the Frenchmen from the corvette Uranie. The French visitors were on a voyage of scientific discovery, and had planned a journey across the Blue Mountains. Most likely the Aboriginal men had agreed to act as their guides. Artist Alphonse Pellion sketched them at their camp on the edge of Sydney, and his drawings show that they were all wearing jackets or coats. Tara and Peroa, from the Nepean River, were not wearing trousers. Neither, probably, were the others-the engravings made from Pellion's sketches show them only from the waist up, and the Frenchmen noted with some shock that this was the usual manner of dress for the Aboriginal men in Sydney. 2 Images of Aboriginal men wearing jackets or coats without trousers are common in colonial paintings from the late 1810s and in the 1820s. Whether the warriors in these pictures stand resplendent in silver braided scarlet, or slouch insouciant in torn, ill-fitting coats, most historians have interpreted the garments as sure signs of the low status of Aboriginal people in settler society. The jackets are indicative of a people reduced to beggary and drunkenness, of cultural annihilation, of a people without hope. These interpretations reach unbroken back to the responses of new or visiting colonists of the 1820s and 1830s (older colonists knew better). Around 1838 an anonymous rhymester-probably Baptist Minister and temperance advocate John Saunders-scribbled a poem at the bottom of an ugly caricature of Aboriginal people drinking and fighting. The third verse directly links the jackets with alcohol, violence and degeneration: Now we see the end, these sans culottes Decked with white mans cast off coats Display their love in blows One Gin with rum is stupefied The second sups the infernal tide Till basest passion glows 3 1 Thanks to Tim Rowse and Brad Manera and two anonymous readers for their invaluable advice on this paper.