Heaven's Command: An Imperial Progress (57 page)

Port Arthur was starkly insulated from the rest of Tasmania, guard posts with dogs watching the narrow spit, Eaglehawk Neck, which was the only land approach to the peninsula; but the very presence of the settlement there, with its hundreds of helpless men numbed or animalized in despair, pervaded the whole of the island, and doubtless made society everywhere else coarser by the experience of it. Many of the settlers outside were themselves emancipated convicts—very few of those freed in the Australian settlements ever went back to Britain. Nearly all the others employed convict servants. When food ran short in the early days of the settlement, convicts were allowed to go into the bush to forage for themselves: some became bush-rangers or bandits, founded a desperado tradition, and graduated often enough to be the romantic heroes of local legend. They lived with the symptoms of imprisonment—the chain gangs and the clank of irons, the terrible rumours of torture, insanity and suicide: in Hobart convict women could sometimes be seen wearing iron collars padlocked around their necks, with long iron prongs protruding each side like the horns of cattle. Society was polarized between an authoritarian establishment on the one hand and a huge criminal population on the other, and at either extreme was instinct with violence. A coat of arms suggested for the colony in 1852 was defined in rhyming heraldics as ‘Two posts standant, One beam crossant, One rope pendant, One knave on the end on’t’,
and sensitive visitors to Tasmanian homes were sometimes chilled to remember, as they sat among the samplers, the Chelsea figures, the auntly water-colours and the grand-fatherly cricket groups, that men in chains built those amiable English houses, prisoners milked the cows in those fresh white-washed dairies, and that the little daughters of the family, demure in pantaloons and hair-ribbons, were growing up in the intimate knowledge of whip and manacle.

Inevitably this harsh community, gradually spreading from its seashore settlements, came into contact with the elusive aboriginals of the forest. It was known from the start that they were there. When Tasman, the island’s discoverer, arrived off the south-east coast in 1642, his crew heard ‘certain human sounds’ and ‘sounds resembling the music of a trump or small gong’. In 1777 Captain Cook found the natives trustful and unafraid, while the Frenchmen of Nicholas Baudin’s expedition, in 1802, seem to have been enchanted by them. ‘The gentle confidence of the people in us, the affectionate evidences of benevolence which they never ceased to manifest towards us, the sincerity of their demonstrations, the frankness of their manners, the touching ingenuousness of their caresses, all concurred to excite within us sentiments of the tenderest interest’. The Europeans felt no threat from such guileless primitives: the aborigines thought the peculiar pale strangers might be the ghosts of their own dead, and perhaps welcomed their appearance as a break in the immemorial monotony of hunt, sex and corroboree.

But when the British settled in Tasmania, the relationship changed. Almost at once the original Tasmanians were defined as enemies, actual or potential, and found themselves treated more and more as predators or vermin. The free settlers wanted land, and ruthlessly drove the nomads from their seasonal hunting-grounds. The shifting riff-raff of bushrangers and sealers used the black people as they pleased, for pleasure or for bondage. By the 1820s horrible things were happening in Tasmania. Sometimes the black people were hunted just for fun, on foot or on horseback. Sometimes they were raped in passing, or abducted as mistresses, or as slaves. The
sealers of the Bass Strait islands established a slave society of their own, with harems of women, employing the well-tried disciplines of slavery—clubbing, stringing up from trees, or flogging with kangaroo-gut whips. We hear of children kidnapped as pets or servants, of a woman chained up like an animal in a shepherd’s hut, of men castrated to keep them off their own women. In one foray seventy aboriginals were killed, the men shot, the women and children dragged from crevices in the rocks to have their brains dashed out. Bushrangers used to catch aborigines in man-traps, and use them for target practice. A man called Carrotts, desiring a native woman, decapitated her aboriginal husband, hung his head around her neck, and drove her home to his shack.

It is true of course that these horrors were committed by white men of the lowest sort, many of them criminals. Even so, it was not long before almost the entire European community behaved little better towards the aborigines. The black people, in their turn, understandably responded with violence. Gone were those sentiments of tender interest. ‘I well know that these undiscriminating savages,’ wrote Governor Collins in a report to his superior on one fracas, ‘will consider every white man their Enemy.’ He was right. Despised, debased and brutalized themselves, their numbers precipitously declining, now they were often the aggressors. Stockmen were murdered. Cattle were speared. Farms were burnt. In 1827 the natives actually raided Launceston, the second town of the island.

It did not take long for the white community to convince itself that the Europeans were the aggrieved party, and soon the classic settler-native syndrome was far advanced. The gentlemen in their country houses, the rich merchants in their Hobart mansions, the local administrators preoccupied with penal affairs and orderly government—all were reaching the conclusion that life in Tasmania would be much happier if there were no Tasmanians. In language the decrees of Authority remained irreproachable, and frequently warned the colonists that they must not mistreat the natives. In intent they became ever less tolerant. The Reverend Thomas Atkins, after a visit to Van Diemen’s Land in 1837, usefully rationalized the attitude in Christian terms. It was a universal law in the Divine Government, he explained, that when savage tribes came
into collision with civilized races of men, the savages disappeared. This was because they had not complied with the divine conditions for survival—‘For God blessed them, and God said unto them, “Be fruitful and multiply, and replenish the earth and subdue it”.’

Authority could not sanction the extermination of the natives. Public opinion in England would never stomach genocide. As one Whitehall directive observed, ‘the adoption of any line of conduct having for its avowed or for its secret object the extinction of the native race could not fail to leave an indelible stain on the character of the British Government’. Anyway, God would doubtless arrange such a consummation in his own time—‘it is not unreasonable to apprehend that the whole race of these people may at no distant period become extinct’. Meanwhile, what could be arranged with a clear conscience was the removal of the entire race somewhere else. There were several suitable lesser islands around the Tasmanian coast, and extensive unsettled tracts of mainland too. ‘Really it is high time’, remarked the
Launceston
Adviser
one day, ‘they were either removed out of the Island, or driven by force of arms to the uninhabited districts”

But first they had to be found. By now they could be counted in hundreds rather than thousands, but they were a slippery will-of-the-wisp people, moving dappled through the eucalyptus groves, or blending indistinguishably with the seashore rocks. Unsuccessful attempts were made to lure them into Hobart and the paternal arms of Government: in 1830 it was decided that they must be flushed, like game upon some vast estate, methodically from their nests, and beaten before an inescapable cordon mile by mile down the length of the island into the Tasman peninsula at the bottom. There they would be rounded up and taken away to convenient reservations for ever.

Colonel George Arthur, the Governor, himself assumed command of the operation, and planned the cordon—‘the Black Line’—on the most orthodox military principles. He called upon every farm to send an able-bodied volunteer, he conscripted tickét-of-leave
men, and he mustered the three regiments of redcoats available on the island. In all some 2,500 men were engaged. In case the settlers took the operation too frivolously—some of them were after all accustomed to chase aboriginals in innocent blood-sport—the Government publicly warned the participants that it was ‘not a matter of amusement or recreation, but a cause of the most important and serious kind, in which the lives and property of the whole community are more or less at stake’. Martial law was proclaimed against the native population, and Arthur himself, ordering his charger saddled, rode away from Hobart to lead his soldiers into action.

It was perhaps the most farcical campaign in the whole history of British imperial arms. The plan called for a steady advance on a front that began by being 120 miles wide, but would narrow in the course of the action until its two flanks were united like a noose in the peninsula. No man was to be farther than sixty yards from his neighbour, and strict military precepts prevailed. Dispatches were sent back to Hobart by equerry; requisitions were signed for ammunition, food, clothing and 300 pairs of manacles; when a sceptical civilian expressed doubts to one officer about the scheme, ‘Oh’, the colonel replied, ‘this is an entirely military manoeuvre, which you as a civilian would not understand’.

Sometimes they did see an aborigine—once they briefly glimpsed a party of forty. More often they mistook clumps of trees, or black swans, or the rustle of leaves, or kangaroos, for the presence of the black people. For seven weeks the Black Line struggled down the island in increasing confusion, soaked through by incessant rains, its clothes wet and torn, its rations inadequate, its whereabouts distinctly uncertain, its soldiers and volunteers chiefly interested, after a week or two of this discomfort, in getting themselves dry, fed and settled at the next bivouac. When at last they closed upon Eaglehawk Neck, assuming that a mass of black fugitives must be moving somewhere before them into the trap of the peninsula, they found nobody there at all. Not a single aboriginal had crossed the Neck. Like ghosts the black people had slipped through the cordon, crouching in brambles while the soldiers stumbled past, or scuttling away on all fours into the shadows. The final assessment of the
operation showed that while four British soldiers had been accidentally killed in the course of it, only two of the original Tasmanians had been caught. One was a small boy, and the other very soon escaped.

Now there enters our story a resolute evangelical, George Augustus Robinson, ‘The Conciliator’, whose destiny it was to organize, when all else had foiled, the disappearance of the Tasmanian race from the face of the earth.

Robinson was a Londoner, a non-conformist builder who had emigrated to Van Diemen’s Land with his wife and seven children, and become well-known for his good works on the Hobart waterfront. He was in all ways a man of his time, a Dickensian figure transplanted from
Hard
Times
or
Dombey
and
Son
to these incongruous environments. He was infinitely pious, humourless and indefatigable—a thick-set, red-haired, florid man, whom one can imagine running some particularly grim and improving school for indigent waifs on the outskirts of Manchester, or perhaps supervising, with Mrs Robinson of course, a reformatory for London harlots. He was an uneducated man and correspondingly dogmatic, and his bent was for redemption.

He had entered the Government service as an intermediary with the natives. Out he would go into the bush, with his couple of servants, his Bible pack, and a tame native woman, Black Moll, dressed up in gay ribbons to attract attention—they called her Robinson’s decoy duck. He learnt the aboriginal language, and over many months of wanderings throughout the island he had made contact with most of the surviving tribes, and gained the confidence of many. He approached the natives kindly, often entertaining them upon his flute, and sometimes spending weeks at a time in their company: for he knew that God had called him to save them from their sinful ways, and lead them towards the truth.

This was the man to whom a baffled Government, after the fiasco of the Black Line, turned for an alternative solution. Robinson willingly accepted the charge. He undertook to persuade all the surviving Tasmanians out of the bush and into Government
control, and almost single-handed he succeeded. For five years he came and went, sometimes by boat around the coast, generally on foot with a little band of native helpers—notably Truganini, a redeemed sealer’s mistress, who was to become the most celebrated Tasmanian of all. Each year he brought out a few more aboriginals—63 in 1832, 42 in 1833, 28 in 1834—until at last there were none left in the bush at all, and the whole Tasmanian population, an entire race of human beings, was safely in the care of authority.

Robinson had approved for their final destination Flinders Island, in the Bass Strait, some forty miles north of Tasmania, and in January 1832 the first of the expatriates were shipped there. The
Hobart
Town
Courier
, whose reporter watched one party embark, declared that the aboriginals showed themselves delighted at the idea of going to the island, ‘where they would enjoy peace and plenty uninterrupted’, and their removal would greatly benefit Tasmania too. ‘The large tracts of pasture that have so long been deserted owing to their murderous attacks on the shepherds and stock huts will now be available, and a very sensible relief will be afforded to the flocks of sheep that had been withdrawn from them and pent up in inadequate ranges of pasture—a circumstance which indeed has tended materially to … keep up the price of butcher’s meat.’

Flinders was, as it happened, a singularly beautiful island, at least to northern tastes. It was a place of windswept silence, bare on its central hills but thick with aromatic foliage along its shores—like an amalgam of Orkney and Corsica. The flies and mosquitoes were troublesome, as in so many otherwise idyllic corners of Empire, but there were many butterflies, too, and bright tropic birds, and wallabies, and a constantly changing southern light. To the aboriginals, though, it looked desolate and depressing. They may have seemed happy as they boarded their ship at Hobart, smiling their child-like smiles and ‘going through feats of their wonderful dexterity’, but eye-witness accounts of their arrival at Flinders read very differently, ‘When they saw from shipboard the splendid country which they were promised, they betrayed the greatest agitation, gazing with strained eyes at the sterile shore, uttering melancholy moans, and, with arms hanging beside them, trembling with convulsive feeling. The winds were violent and cold, the rain and sleet
were penetrating and miserable … and this added to their foreboding that they were taken there to die.’