Mari Nawi: Aboriginal Odysseys

First published on 3 Aug 2010. Updated on 5 Apr 2011.

It's a rarely acknowledged fact that indigenous Australians played a major part in Australia's maritime history post-colonisation. Mari Nawi: Aboriginal Odysseys is an exhibition unearthing the names and stories of 80 Aboriginal seafarers who embarked from Port Jackson on 123 voyages between 1791 and 1850. "They're among the first circumnavigators of Australia and they went great distances," exhibition curator Keith Smith says. "This is an unwritten story."

The exhibition focuses on the Aboriginal men and women who, valued for their practical skills on the water, re-made their lives on European vessels. Realising that foreign ships were not so different from their own canoes (‘mari nawi' translates to ‘big canoes'), they became boatmen, sailors, pilots, sealers, steersmen, whalers and trackers. Featured in the exhibition is a five-metre wide reproduction of an 1804 landscape painting by convict John Eyre depicting Aboriginal canoes and a European ship on the Sydney Harbour. "It shows the coexistence of indigenous and colonial people," Smith says. "Aboriginal people really didn't relinquish their fishing rights."

The exhibition includes portraits, landscapes and ship paintings by English, French and Russian artists. "We have portraits of 30 of the Aboriginal voyagers," Smith says. "There's a pantheon of characters that no one has heard of." Among these is Bon-del, who in 1791, as 10-year-old orphan, sailed aboard His Majesty's brig Supply to Norfolk Island and in 1821 circumnavigated the continent with Captain Phillip Parker King. Other personalities include Tom Rowley, who sailed to Calcutta, Madras and New Ireland on the whaler Britannia and Bennelong, who journeyed to England in 1792.

One of the standout portraits is a rendering of Bennelong's brother-in-law, Collins, by French artist Nicolas-Martin Petit. "In 1793 Collins went on an incredible cross-pacific voyage to Vancouver and down the Californian coast," Smith says. "He stopped off in Hawaii and [met] with the local people. What was going on there is that we have pictures of people on surfboards, so he might very well have been Australia's first surfer! I often wonder what would happen when he got back and met up with Bennelong, who had returned from England and seen the Tower of London and bears and wolves. Just imagine the conversation around the campfire in Sydney between these well travelled Aborigines."

Also featured in the exhibition are rare books, objects and documents, including the 1790 journal of naval lieutenant Philip Gidley King, which includes phonetic transcriptions of Aboriginal words. There's also a petition from Boatswain Maroot, who spent a year stranded at Macquarie Island in the sub-Antarctic ocean. "It's addressed to Governor Macquarie and says something like ‘I've spent nearly two years abandoned and did more work than a white man, how can I be rewarded for this?' He received 10 pounds in recompense. He actually learnt how to deal with the authorities by doing that. Later he worried Governor Bourke so much that he gave him at 10-acre lease at Botany. He built five huts and rented them out for six pounds per week. He was really quite the entrepreneur." Joanna Lowry