Similarities and contrasts between Johnson's Journey to the Western
Islands of Scotland (1775) and two books by Watkin Tench about the
first four years of white settlement at Port Jackson formed the basis of
a fascinating paper delivered by Clive Probyn as the fourth David Fleeman
Memorial Lecture on September 13 at the English Speaking Union.
The two books by Tench were A Narrative of the Expedition to Botany
Bay, 1789 and A Complete Account of the Settlement at Port Jackson,
1793.
The lecture was entitled Pall Mall and the Wilderness of New South
Wales: Samuel Johnson, Watkin Tench and "Six Degrees of Separation."
From a common viewpoint located in British (or rather, English) metropolitan
culture, it compared the encounter of each man with the savage other (the
Highland Scots and the "Indians" respectively.
Among other questions, Clive asked how the experience of meeting the savage
"other" changed the viewer himself. Although both Johnson and
Tench were familiar with Rousseau's arguments against Civilisation and
for Nature, Johnson always strenuously rejected suck propositions as socially
dangerous paradoxes.
Tench however, made an effort to cross from the world of old Europe to
the New World of Australia and learned to speak the Aboriginal language.
He also narrated several occasions when the "noble savage" impressed
him with his nobility, and therefore led him to underline certain universalist
assumptions about Humanity as such.
On other and more everyday topics, the lecture also traced the various
ways (the notionally "six" ways in Fred Schepisi's recent film
of that title) in which Johnson in Scotland and Tench in Australia were
linked, not least by a packet of Botany Bay "tea leaves" probably
given to Boswell by a grateful Mary Bryant, an escapee from the sentence
of transportation.
The lecture closed with some speculations about what Johnson might have
written about had he been able to undertake the South Seas journey, and
a brief discussion of Johnson's private and public skirmishes with another
(but European) tribe, the French.