This was an old-fashioned, hierarchical society being reinvented, or being resisted (contemporaneous with the French Revolution). In the first years, every word and every action bristled with meaning and precedent. Words matter particularly in a colonial system built on giving or receiving orders. Control is everything. Words shape outcomes and then record their ‘history’. Yet, between Indigenous and First Fleet there was no understanding of the meanings of most words on either side, apart from the most basic show-and-tell.

Kim Scott’s powerful novel That Deadman Dance (2010) gave readers a rare insight into how this kind of collision was experienced by his own people, the Noongar, in Western Australia. Now a major new book speculates upon and constructs a world within which all these encounters were played out. Words and their associated cultures lie at the centre of 26 Views of the Starburst World. The author, Ross Gibson, follows the four years spent at Sydney Cove by Royal Marine Second Lieutenant William Dawes and the small group of Aborigines with whom he came to share a remarkable relationship.

Dawes was responsible to Governor Phillip as the official astronomer, engineer, surveyor, navigator, and cartographer to the settlement. On arrival Dawes moved quickly to construct the observatory (where the south pylon of the Bridge now stands), then movedthere, out of sight and sound of the rest of the Europeans: remarkable in itself. By night he studied the movements of the heavens; by day, amidst a welter of duties, he began to study the culture and language of the Aboriginal people of the region: research undertaken with no official approval. The only detailed record of his deliberations lies in two notebooks, which contain an astonishing range of information on Indigenous language and culture. Sometimes clear, sometimes enigmatic, sometimes incomprehensible, the notebooks slowly come to life in this book as Gibson offers insights and speculations as to meanings both real and potential. Whether or not he succeeds in reimagining the real Dawes, he succeeds in revealing the immense forces and opportunities which were at play in those first years.

Gibson follows the trail that Dawes blazed as he explored the crumbling border between two great tectonic plates: the post-Enlightenment world of which Dawes was such a good example, and the much older world of the Indigenous people. Each of the twenty-six chapters casts a different light on this work and provides a glorious stream of references to many fine historians and writers. There are fascinating chapters exploring the fundamental communication problem between the speakers of a language that is only oral and speakers whose language is also written. Delivered with an easy clarity, the insights are revelatory.

Citing scholar Anne Carson, Gibson tells us that those whose language is both spoken and written tend to focus tightly on precise words for their communications: words whose meanings are largely fixed, whereas those whose language is purely oral use all their senses and surroundings. Their spoken and sung language has a constantly mutable nature, which exists only in the time it is breathed out. It is always subject to context, open to change. No use just understanding words: you have to know the precise context in which they are spoken.

Dawes, in trying to bridge that conceptual gap, may have sensed an urgency. He knew that, without writing, entire cultural histories have to be carried in human minds, and he may well have grasped the devastating cultural loss as some two-thirds of the nearby Aborigines died of smallpox and other diseases within the first years of white arrival.

The observatory had become a meeting place for Dawes and a number of the local Aborigines. As his relationships deepened, particularly with a young woman named Patyegarang, his understanding of Indigenous life broadened and he recorded it in his notebooks: ‘Simultaneously, with his clipped and enigmatic argot, he tracked his own slow-dawning comprehension about another way to be in the world. Over time he gathered overlaid glimpses of this other existence. It was an old way of living though it was new to him.’

Instead of the Enlightenment overwhelming the ancient, the reverse was happening to Dawes. Of all the First Fleet members he was the first and possibly the only one to understand the importance of Indigenous languages, the richness of living with all senses fully alive, the meaning of ‘country’, and the cultural responsibilities that go with it. Had he finished his work, who knows how he might have influenced the development of a different kind of society here, building a real settlement together with the original inhabitants. Sadly, he never did finish it, but Gibson’s book, discursive and packed with ideas, will have you thinking about his and Dawes’s ideas for a long time.