Black Caesar: our first bushranger was a six-foot African man who arrived on the first fleet. What does his life tell us about the quest for identity in contemporary Australia? (essay).

The big book in Australia for 2001 was Peter Carey's True History of the Kelly Gang, a masterful portrait of our national hero which won Carey his second Booker Prize and stimulated a bonanza in Kelly myth-making. Of course, there are those who cavil at the idea of Ned Kelly as our pre-eminent national icon, but they cannot deny that Kelly is ubiquitous in contemporary Australian culture and psyche. His life and death continue to be celebrated in stage and film, novels, ballads and historical accounts while an unprecedented global audience watched a representation of Kelly's last stand at the opening of the Sydney Olympics. Even in Aboriginal Australia, Kelly has a special place. Debbie Bird Rose has shown how the Yarralin people of the Kimberley have resurrected Ned in their Dreaming as an Indigenous figure of resistance against invasion and injustice. It is the intense potency of the Kelly story of resistance that fires Peter Carey's imagination. `Kelly resonates through Australian history into the present', Carey told the New York Times. In the bushranger's short life he claims to have found `the ultimate Australian story'. Carey is breaking no new ground here, having been anticipated by a number of cultural commentators, notably Russell Ward and Robert Hughes, who read the bushranger as a manifestation of a peculiarly Australian mystique.

The bushranger story, reaching its apotheosis in the Kelly saga, is a complex amalgam of folk mythology that recovers and re-imagines the convict past and at the same time appropriates and reworks a nationalist folk mythology from Ireland. The image of the early bushranger is almost synonymous with that of the Irish convict, and his brand of resistance belongs to the historical struggle of the Irish against the English. For the prototype of the bushranger, Robert Hughes offers up a short, freckled, blond-haired, blue-eyed Irishman named John Donohue. After he was shot by police in 1830, Donohue's brief exploits in robbery-under-arms crystallised into the folk ballad that has become second only to Waltzing Matilda as our national song. Sung as `Bold Jack Donohue' on its appearance in the 1830s, the song transmuted into the archetypal bushranger ballad, `The Wild Colonial Boy'. In all its various representations the ballad celebrates a man who'd `scorn to live in slavery'. Hughes is quick to point out the resonances from Irish nationalism in this song, and certainly the references to the Irish struggle are quite overt in the original ballad, drawing a direct line between Donohue and the Irish outlaws of the eighteenth century, William Brennan, Captain Freney and Jeremiah Grant, who all entered the pantheon of Irish political heroes. Yet it is very dubious that Donahue himself had any political motivation. Hughes tells us that his only known utterance -- recorded moments before his death -- was a stream of abuse inviting the effing buggers to come and get their adjectival guts blown out. In Hughes image of `a flash, cursing, little Mick surrounded by a squad of mounted police among the gum trees' we can readily recognise the narrator of True History of the Kelly Gang.

Yet the prototype of our national icon was not this `cursing little Mick', nor even the morose Yorkshireman, Michael Howe, self-proclaimed as `governor of the rangers' in Van Diemens Land in 1817. Our first bushranger was a six-foot African man known as Black Caesar who arrived with the First Fleet in 1788. The name Caesar suggests he had been a slave, and William Bradley, First Lieutenant on the Sirius, believed that he came originally from Madagascar. While slaves from Madagascar were not sold in Britain or the West Indies in the eighteenth century, my research has shown that in the American colonies of Virginia and South Carolina, Malagasy slaves were highly prized. I think it most likely that Caesar had been a slave in a tidewater plantation of the American colonies at the time of the American Revolution.

In fact Caesar was only one of a dozen African men who made the involuntary trip to Botany Bay on that First Fleet. Who were these men and how did they fetch up in London in the 1780s, indigent, threadbare and living by their wits? My first clue came from another Afro-American man who arrived on a later transport ship. William Blue, the black ferryman, smuggler and confidant of Governor Macquarie, became an institution in the fledgling colony and it is after him that the Sydney landmark Blues Point is named. In a petition for land he presented to Governor Macquarie, Blue claimed that he fought with the British during the American Revolution. A search of the revolutionary muster roles has not specifically found William Blue, but I have found very many other Africans in the British services, in every possible department of the army. By happenchance I stumbled onto one of the better kept secrets of the American Revolution: that tens of thousands of slaves flocked to the British lines when they were promised freedom for supporting the King, precipitating the biggest single act of slave rebellion in modern history. But history is written by the victors, and American historians have to all intents and purposes written out the runaway Black Loyalists from the American Revolution story, while the British merely avert their gaze.

Curiously, I found the most detailed information about the Black Loyalists in George Washington's voluminous papers, which provided some revealing insights into how this great and just father of the American republic reacted to a catastrophe that included the defection of thirty-five of his own slaves. At a tense meeting between the victorious Washington and the defeated British Commander-in-Chief, Sir Guy Carleton, Washington insisted that there would be no removal of runaway slaves by the British and any attempt to do so was a flagrant violation of the Paris Treaty. Carleton replied that he would construe any suggestion that the King would agree to `a breach of public faith towards people of any complexion', as an unfriendly act and a slur on British honour. Following this meeting, Carleton instructed his generals to issue certificates of freedom to any Negro who could demonstrate that they had been with the British for over a year, although he did agree a record be kept of the status of all subsequent departing Negroes. This meticulous record, known as the `Book of Negroes', shows that over 3000 freed slaves departed from New York, mostly bound for Nova Scotia. It is also very clear from the account of the exchanges between Carleton and Washington that many thousands of runaway slaves departed before the `Book of Negroes' was begun. Just what happened to these Black Loyalist refugees is anybody's guess.

It is the case that by 1786 the population of blacks in England has blown out to around 20,000, many of whom were believed to be Black Loyalist refugees from America, although it is not apparent how they got to England. Also listed in the `Book of Negroes' are a small proportion listed as going to Spithead in England and these include two young men aged between 14 and 18 with the name Caesar. It is quite possible that either one of these was the John Caesar tried at Maidstone in 1787 for theft and transported to Sydney Cove. Also in the `Book of Negroes' I have located John Moseley, once the property of John Cunningham of Virginia, who was recorded as leaving for Nova Scotia in 1783, but who was arrested in Portsmouth in 1784 and sentenced to transportation for impersonating a seaman. Likewise Jahel Gordon, formerly slave to Benjamin Gordon of South Carolina, who went to Nova Scotia in 1782 but was arrested for the theft of clothing in Winchester three years later and transported for seven years. John Randall was probably recently demobilised from a British regimenf before he was tried in Manchester for stealing a watch in 1785.

At the settlement at Sydney Cove, Caesar managed to profoundly irritate the judge advocate, David Collins. Noting that `in his intellect he did not differ widely from a brute', Collins concluded Caesar was forced to steal to feed his brutish appetite and sentenced him to be flogged senseless with 500 lashes -- a terrible irony, given that this was something that would probably never have happened to Caesar had he remained a slave on a tidewater plantation. On 13 May 1789, Caesar headed into the bush armed With a musket and cooking pot, having decided, I guess, that the terrors of the unknown hinterland were less fearsome than a penal system arbitrated by David Collins. When he was caught, a few weeks later, he further incensed the judge-advocate by expressing complete indifference to the idea of death, claiming that if he were to be hung he would `create a laugh before he was turned off, by playing some trick upon the executioner'. The prospect of execution as pantomime gave Collins pause. Hanging Caesar would not do, he decided, as the execution of `a mere animal' could have no effect as a deterrent on others. Instead Caesar was confined to chains on Garden Island -- another terrible reminder of the life of bondage he had fled -- where he worked a vegetable garden from which he was able to supplement his rations.

Released from his chains in December, Caesar immediately helped himself to a week's supply of rations, stole a canoe and headed into the bush. This time he lasted in the bush for six weeks until he was forced to give himself up, severely weakened by multiple spear wounds. Watkin Tench believed that Caesar had been trying to ingratiate himself with the Aborigines, because he wanted to join with them, but he was `always repulsed ... and forced to return in hunger and wretchedness'. Caesar cheated the gallows a second time by managing to secure a pardon from the governor. Nonetheless, Collins was able to rid himself of this troublesome `brute' by sending him to the new penal settlement at Norfolk Island, where he formed a liaison with a white convict woman, Ann Poore. A child, Mary Ann Poore, was born on Norfolk Island in March 1792.

By 1793 Caesar was in Sydney, sent back with a boatload of convicts considered to be dangerous or troublesome. Since Caesar had not been in any trouble on Norfolk Island it may be that his liaison with Anne Poore was the problem on an island where the men outnumbered the women two to one, and where a new class of male free settlers were flexing their muscles. At Sydney, possibly reacting to the forcible loss of his family, Caesar proved his total incorrigibility by taking off into the bush for the third time in July 1794, plundering farms and huts on the margins of settlement. By January 1796 the fledgling colony was beset by robbery-under-arms in what was Australia's first outbreak of bushranging. About six men were at large and Black Caesar was considered to be their model and their leader. A reward of five gallons of rum was offered to anyone who could bring him in with his arms, dead or alive. On 15 February 1796 he was ambushed and killed by two convict bounty-hunters. In a brief, dismissive obituary for the man who had consistently given him more trouble than any other in the settlement Collins wrote: `Thus ended a man, who certainly, in life could never have been estimated at more than one remove above the brute'. Collins had the contemptuous last word on Black Caesar, who was henceforth pretty well obliterated from the Australian story, despite the fact that his short rebellious life so perfectly conforms to the requirements of the outlaw hero of folk myth.

How much better Caesar's act of rebellion fits the archetype of one who would `scorn to live in slavery bound down by iron chains', than a murderous horse-rustler like Ned Kelly, whose claim to political resistance was appropriated from Ireland. What a powerful foundation story Black Ceasar could provide if only we knew about him. Or if we knew about the other black convicts who followed his lead. African bushrangers have a long history in Australia. John Goff, the son of a Black Loyalist and transported in 1815, was subjected to a most brutal regime of flogging before 1825, when he escaped to lead a gang of bushrangers. Likewise Robert Abbott, a slave transported from the West Indies, was engaged in robbery-under-arms in 1838. Peter Haley, a Khoi Khoi man from the Cape who came to South Australia as an indentured servant of an army officer, went on to become notorious as a bushranger in Tasmania in the 1850s. It was in the 1860s that the Afro-bushranger was most common, with several African-American men convicted of bushranging in Victoria.

Like the hundreds of African-Americans who came to Victoria during the Gold Rush, these men were making a determined bid for freedom, since slavery was still in force in the southern and western states of America and the Fugitive Slave Law was fiercely prosecuted. Even the free black population lived in a state of dread and fear. Included among this vulnerable free population was the Johnson family of coastal North Carolina. This black family had been free since 1640 and held small farms in three different counties, yet they too felt the increased repression of blacks which preceded the Civil War in the South. Fiercely anti-slavery, the Johnson family provided many men for the Union Coloured regiments, as well as the US Navy. It is easy to understand that prior to the outbreak of hostilities, Thomas Johnson should take off from North Carolina and head to places where slavery was not an issue. Most likely he went to New York and got work on transatlantic merchant ships. In the year the Civil War began, Thomas Johnson had a berth as a cook on the ship `Matilda' from Liverpool to Port Melbourne, where he left the ship.

Unlike his compatriots driven to robbery-under-arms, Thomas Johnson appears to have made out quite well in Australia. In 1868 he married a white Irish woman and moved to Sydney where their son Thomas Johnson Jr was born in 1874. I know little about Thomas Johnson Jr except that after the death of his first wife he relocated to the Western Australian wheat belt near Narrogin. In 1924 he married Elizabeth Barron, the daughter of a well-to-do pioneer pastoral family. Johnson was already quite an old man and he had poor luck with farming. When he died in 1937 he left Elizabeth pregnant with her fifth child and totally destitute. Four children were placed in the care of St Joseph's orphanage. Nine years later the fifth child, Colin, was also placed in care at the Clontarf boys home.

Colin Johnson went on to transcend this miserable background in many ways. As Mudrooroo Nyoongah he is internationally recognised as Australia's premier Aboriginal writer. His sister, Betty Polgase, is puzzled by her younger brother's claim to Aboriginality, but it is easy enough to understand Mudrooroo's situation. A boy from the Clontarf Home who spent his young adult years in jail; someone who never knew his father and who was dark skinned. What other narrative was there available to him to explain his identity?

A similar biography can be found for Gordon Matthews, Australia's first Aboriginal diplomat. He was an adopted boy, dark-skinned like Colin Johnson, who always wondered about his identity in a world which only seemed to allow for him to be Aboriginal. Like Mudrooroo, he has been active in the Aboriginal community, where it was always assumed he was one of the stolen generation. It was a traumatic shock for him to discover that his father was Sri Lankan. It was, Matthews confesses in his book, An Australian Son, `disappointing and anticlimactic' to acquire a racial background he had never anticipated. Far worse was the `anguish and torment' that accompanied his realisation that for a decade and a half he had claimed an identity he had no right to claim. In some ways, though, Matthews believes he will always be Aboriginal. `I had experienced first hand what it felt like to grow up Aboriginal in mainstream Australia,' he writes. `I knew about discrimination towards indigenous Austrahans. I had suffered that. Like any fundamental experience you don't unlearn that.'

Mudrooroo might well say the same. Like Matthews his connection to Aboriginal Australia has been intense and his writing has been profoundly important to Aboriginal Australia as an act which testifies to the possibility of rebuilding a workable sense of significance from scattered sources and fragmentary testimonies. In an essay in 1997, he acknowledged that indigenous identity is a social construction and pointed out that for many `Aboriginal' people such a construction is not exceptional. Yet if this were once the case it is no longer so. Within the indigenous community the overwhelming opinion is that a rigorous test of genetic authenticity is essential for anyone to claim status as an Aboriginal. I first heard this point of view at the Brisbane Writers Festival in 1996 when I attended a session on indigenous writing where Mudrooroo had been replaced on the panel, although he was drinking coffee in the cafe outside. One after the other the members of the panel restated Kevin Gilbert's dictum: `Either you are Aboriginal or you are not'. I have since heard this demand for genetic authenticity repeated at almost every public event where the question of Aboriginality has been raised.

There is a harsh irony in this. In rejecting Mudrooroo's notion of Aboriginality as construct, the colonial binary of `us and `other' is maintained. Genetic markers that have been the cause of so much trouble for Aborigines in the colonial context, now re-emerge as the hallmarks of authenticity, with Aboriginal people themselves articulating the case for unique characteristics carried by the genes. This racial essentialism may be necessary to overcome the long history of identity denial. It has become crucially important for Aboriginal Australians to demonstrate a biological link to a unique cultural heritage which only they can be said to have.

We all yearn to know who we are, and that yearning is especially acute for those Australians whose genetic inheritance has somehow marked them as `other'. Nowhere is the expression of this yearning more poignant than in Bobbie Sykes's recent autobiography. Sykes yearns to be accepted as Aboriginal, but she does not know her country nor her people; she cannot say who her black father was. Her mother will not tell except to say that he was not Aboriginal. There are very strong hints that he too was an African-American. In one exchange with her mother, Sykes begged to be given some family background from which to draw her identity, only be told: `If you go back far enough, we're White Russians'. Given Sykes's dark complexion and tight curly hair she sees no point in taking her identity from her mother. `I could already imagine the startled and sympathetic looks I would draw if I proclaimed myself to be a White Russian,' she writes. `Delusional, people would whisper ...'

The need for a concrete racial identity is a perpetual nag for Sykes which overrides the pride and pleasure in her considerable achievements. Yet try as hard as she might, Sykes cannot will herself into being Aboriginal. She includes an exchange with a close friend from the Aboriginal Medical Service, Naomi Myers, where she protests:

You know I've been treated like an Aborigine all my life. I was put out of school, I've been insulted and abused, and even raped in terrible circumstances because those men thought I was an Aboriginal ...

Myers' response is devastating:

Being raped doesn't make you an Aboriginal. Even white girls get raped.

Though the statement is deeply wounding, it is not unreasonable. The terrible truth is that being raped and left for dead by men who believed her to be Aboriginal does not make Sykes a person who can lay claim to the rights and privileges established for indigenous people.

As Aboriginal identity comes under greater scrutiny there will be many more Australians found to be in the same boat as Bobbie Sykes, Gordon Matthews and Mudrooroo. At this late stage it only compounds the damage to throw about accusations of fraud. Instead we should recognise that one of the many tragedies of race relations in Australia is our failure to accord any space to the stories of people of colour who were not Aboriginal, especially those from the African diaspora. How much richer and more complex our national definition would be if we could encompass the multi-ethnic diversity of our colonial past.

Cassandra Pybus is currently Senior Research Fellow in History at the University of Tasmania. She is the author of several prize-winning books. Her latest book is Raven Road (UQP).