The Fatal Shore

by Robert Hughes

  In 1829 the “scarcety of the Black Natives” was not so pronounced, and no savages would be allowed to interfere with growth. But the sheep were destroying the Aborigines’ food base by displacing kangaroos and other game. By the late 1820s, retaliatory raids by tribesmen against sheep had become a constant nuisance: They speared the stock and left them dead on the ground, often without eating them, as a sign of contempt; they robbed and burned outlying huts and, although frontal attacks on homesteads were rare, they kept convict shepherds in continuous terror. Out of these scattered forays, by 1829, a general strategy seemed to be emerging. The idea that they had developed “a systematic plan of attacking the settlers and their possessions,” thought Archdeacon Broughton, chairman of a committee convened in 1830 by Arthur to inquire into the causes of black hostility to white settlers, “has been but too completely verified by the events of the last two years.… It is manifest that they have lost the sense of the superiority of white men, and the dread of the effect of fire-arms.”80

  The Aborigines had learned not to attack en masse, charging into the muzzles of the settlers’ guns. Instead, they harassed the periphery of settlement, the stock-huts and shepherds’ cottages. In the first three months of 1830, there were almost thirty such incidents, involving the death of eight whites. The tribesmen set fire to thatched roofs to drive the whites into the open. They lured stockmen into the bush away from their huts where they could be more easily killed, and the undefended hut was plundered and burned. Then the blacks would melt away into the hills, where few whites could catch up with them. One settler, Gilbert Robertson, complained that there was no “effectual mode of pursuing them.… [T]hey cannot be surrounded by several parties coming upon them; they go all over the whole island; they always keep regular sentries, and pass over dangerous grounds, and by the brinks of the most dangerous precipices.” He had a low opinion of the soldiers’ ability to pursue the black marauder, declaring that they were “quite useless … they will not exert themselves.” Settlers, police and convicts did better. Sometimes they hunted tribal groups down like kangaroos, shooting them from horseback; but the efficient way to catch up with the Aborigines was to follow them by night and mark their campfire smoke in the morning. One party of five or six constables from Campbell Town, according to Robertson (although his story was indignantly denied by other whites), ambushed an encampment of natives in a gully between two cliffs and slaughtered seventy of them; and when the gunsmoke cleared, they went down among the rocks, dragged out the terrified women and children and brained them. This, he thought, put paid to the whole tribe.81

  When whites did such things, they showed necessary rigor; when Aborigines threw their spears from ambush, they proved their treachery. Whites “defended their interests,” while blacks “perpetrated atrocities” and “committed the most wanton and unprovoked acts of barbarity.” Faced with the black resistance, the settlers began sliding toward panic. Arthur, after a long and searching field trip among the agitated settlers of the outer districts that had borne the brunt of aboriginal resistance, noted a curious passivity in them. “The indifference … is quite remarkable, and strikingly manifests that people are always much more ready to complain of evils than disposed to exert themselves to overcome them.” Instead of whingeing, he thought, they should get guns and learn to use them—“the only security which can be given, unless a safety-guard were placed in every dwelling, a thing which is impossible.”82

  Arthur’s Committee for Aboriginal Affairs knew where the real blame for this ghastly situation lay, and declared that “every degree of moderation and forbearance” was due to the “ignorant, debased and unreflecting” blacks, so cruelly wronged by “miscreants who were a disgrace to our name and nation.” But on the other hand, one had to admit that “the Natives are now visiting the injuries they have received, not on the actual defenders, but on a different and totally innocent class.” This reflected Arthur’s own delusion that the only people to blame for the murder and harassment of the Aborigines were escaped convicts, sealers and other colonial trash—never the respectable settlers, who “always” showed “kindness and humanity.”83

  Some of these colonial innocents aired brisk and strong views on how to handle the blacks. “They must be captured or exterminated,” opined John Sherwin, merchant, whose house on the River Clyde near Bothwell had just been burned to the ground. He said that others (not he) had proposed setting up “decoy huts, containing flour and sugar, strongly impregnated with poison.” He claimed he did not know of any atrocities whites had done to blacks; all that was exaggeration. But if they did not take steps soon, by bringing in blacktrackers and bloodhounds from Sydney and hunting the pests down, no one could live in the bush, for “the Natives wish to have their lands to themselves.” His fellow settler George Espie wanted to see 150 armed convicts sent after the natives, with a promise of a ticket-of-leave for every two or three blacks a man brought in—“they would shoot more than they would capture.” Roderic O’Connor, a red-hot Irishman who accumulated vast estates while serving Arthur as magistrate and land commissioner, growled that armed posses of convicts might do the trick; he knew of one man named Douglas Ibbets who had wiped out half the “Eastern mob” of natives with his double-barrelled shotgun. “Some of the worst characters would be the best to send after them.” An elderly farmer named Brodribb claimed he knew of no rational cause for the blacks’ new ferocity, that most settlers treated them kindly, that he really “cannot form an idea if the Natives are displeased at our taking possession of the country”—and so on.84

  The Aborigines, in fact, were in their last frenzy of resistance. In 1828 Arthur reported to Goderich that “I have been pressingly called upon by the settlers … to adopt some measure which should free them from these troublesome assailants, and from the nuisance of their dogs.”85 He felt he had to take “some decisive step,” and he thought the most likely one was to round them all up and put them—every last Aborigine on Van Diemen’s Land—on one of the islands in Bass Strait, give them temporary rations, teach them to raise crops and so convert them by force from nomadic hunter-gatherers into a “stationary … civilization.” But he realized it would not work:

  They already complain that the white people have taken possession of their country, encroached upon their hunting grounds, and destroyed their natural food, the kangaroo; and they doubtless would be exasperated to the last degree to be banished altogether from their favourite haunts; and as they would be ill-disposed to receive instructions from their oppressors, any attempt to civilize them … must fail.86

  Besides, Arthur knew where the blame lay: “All aggression originated with the white inhabitants, and … much ought to be endured in return before the blacks are treated as an open and accredited enemy by the government.”

  So instead of sending them to a miserable death on an island, Arthur proposed an early form of apartheid to keep them out of the settled districts. His idea was to round them up and move them all to the northeast coast of Van Diemen’s Land, “the best sheltered and warmest part,” where they would be fed and clothed by the government and protected from the annihilating fury of white farmers.

  He issued a proclamation. It repeated what everyone knew: that the whites (especially convicts: shepherds, stockmen and sealers) were the first aggressors, but that now the black resistance was making “advances in art, system and method.” So ways must be found to “restrict the intercourse” between white and black “by a legislative Enactment, of a permanent nature”—putting them beyond a pale of settlement in the northeastern corner. In the meantime, there would be a line of military guard posts stationed along the confines of the settled districts, which the Aborigines must not cross:

  And I do hereby strictly command and order all Aborigines immediately to retire and depart from, and for no reason, and on no pretence, save as hereinafter provided, to re-enter such settled districts, or any portions of land cultivated and occupied by any person whomsoever, on pain of forcible expu
lsion therefrom, and such consequences as may be necessarily attendant on it.87

  This magnificently festooned slab of imperial boilerplate meant nothing to the blacks, who could not read and kept striking back against their white tormentors as best they could, while suffering the “necessarily attendant” consequences.

  So Arthur proclaimed martial law against the Aborigines in the settled center of the island. It would not extend to designated outer areas, to which he hoped the blacks would drift—the Tasman Peninsula, the northeast and southwest corners, all the country south of Mount Wellington to the ocean including Bruny Island, and the whole western coast.88 This must have seemed a fair deal to Arthur, since the “settled districts” had few kangaroos left and could not support the traditional forms of aboriginal life, whereas the areas he had exempted from martial law and hoped to push the blacks into were wild, untrammelled, unlikely ever to be settled, full of game, and constituted about half the land area of Van Diemen’s Land. But the Aborigines did not think it fair.

  Meanwhile, the whites kept slaughtering the blacks, women and children usually first, with musket and fowling piece, cutlass and ax. By 1830, there were perhaps two thousand Aborigines left alive in Van Diemen’s Land.89 Some settlers took Arthur’s proclamation of martial law as a license to kill. In February 1830 Arthur’s colonial secretary tried to recall them to a sense of measure and proportion:

  The repeated orders which have been put forth by this Government must convey the idea … that there exists a horde of savages in Van Diemen’s Land whose prowess is equal to their revengeful feelings; thereas every settler must be conscious that his foe consists of an inconsiderable number of a very feeble race, not possessing physical strength, and quite undistinguished by personal courage.90

  But the pressure on Arthur to solve the “black problem” was intense, and he must have reflected that a solution would amend his own extreme unpopularity with the colonists, for people will love an autocrat if they believe he is a savior. Suppressing the Aborigines was the only major issue on which every settler in Van Diemen’s Land was ready to work with Arthur and the military. “How cordially and entirely the whole community unite with the earnest desire of the Government!” he reported to Murray in London.91

  Reading Arthur’s reports in London, Sir George Murray, secretary of state for the colonies, had felt a tingle of premonition: “The whole race of [Van Diemen’s Land Aborigines] may, at no distant period, become extinct.… [A]ny 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 upon the character of the British Government.”92

  Arthur decided to bring every white—settlers as well as military—into one concerted effort to expel the aboriginal tribes from the settled areas of the island, where they had become such a menace to Europeans, and bottle them up in the Tasman Peninsula, between Forestier’s Neck and Eaglehawk Neck, where they could be kept imprisoned forever by a small garrison at either end. This operation was called the Black Line. He may not have expected it to succeed; it was, as Robson rightly called it, “an excellent public relations exercise to show that the highly unpopular Arthur apparently had the welfare of the colonists at heart.”93 But if he wanted to preserve any loyalty among the colonists, he had little choice. The settlements were almost hysterical with fear that the coming spring of 1830 would produce a bloodbath. The Big River and Oyster Bay tribes had become “too much enjoined in the most rancorous animosity to be spared the most vigorous measures against them.”94 In a meeting with his Executive Council late in August 1830, Arthur succumbed to the pressure and agreed to a spring offensive against the Big River and Oyster Bay tribes.

  It took the form of an immense pheasant-drive, under the command of Major Douglas of the 63rd Regiment. Every white man in Van Diemen’s Land, Arthur reported to London, joined in it “with the most zealous and cheerful alacrity.”95 The main line of hunters stretched across two-thirds of the island, from St. Patricks’ Head on the east coast to Quamby Bluff in the Western Tiers; it was supported by two flanking lines, one in the east and the other in the southwest, to catch any Aborigines who slipped by the ends of the main line. Some 2,200 men formed the Black Line—550 troops from the 17th, 57th and 63rd Regiments, 700 convicts, and the rest free settlers. They carried between them a thousand muskets, 30,000 rounds of ammunition and 300 pairs of handcuffs with which to subdue the resistant natives. Off they set on October 7, 1830: redcoats sweltering in their woollen uniforms under the load of knapsacks and muskets, mounted dragoons plodding forward in a clink of steel and a creaking of leather, stout farmers with their fowling pieces, cornstalk boys with red faces and hard eyes. Keeping the line as best they could, they surged slowly downward toward the Tasman Peninsula along paths determined for them by the officers of the Survey Department, hallooing and cursing and beating the bush for its black wraiths, firing musketry into the air and blowing bugles. Their movements, Arthur reported, were “much better executed than could have been anticipated.” At night the bush flickered with guard fires and one man in three stood sentry duty to prevent the escape of the crafty foe.”

  It took the Black Line seven weeks to converge, like the closing of a fishing net, on the peninsula. A few Aborigines were spotted, and there were some brief skirmishes; two Oyster Bay tribesmen were captured and two others shot, but Arthur was certain that the main mass of them were fleeing ahead of the Black Line toward the Tasman Peninsula. “The forces are now … moving forward in full hopes of success,” he reported from the town of Sorell on November 20, 1830.

  When the net closed, it was empty. The Black Line had caught two Aborigines, a man and a small boy. All the rest had slipped through. The enterprise had been a fiasco, and for once Arthur’s detailed and prolix reports to London became terse, almost evasive. Yet the Big River tribe had been driven into comparative seclusion beyond the Western Tiers, and the Oyster Bay tribesmen were split up and forced from their habitual territory; so, from the whites’ point of view, the episode could be called a strategic victory, even though it did not produce all the results Arthur hoped for. It also suggested that there were fewer Aborigines in the settled districts than Major Douglas had supposed.96 This did wonders for the settlers’ morale. Arthur felt he could move from a military solution to one of “pacification.” This new strategy took the mild, quietly convivial and persistent form of an emigrant house-builder from London, George Augustus Robinson (1788–1866), the “Conciliator.”97

  Robinson had been interested in the Aborigines from the moment he arrived in Van Diemen’s Land. He had a philanthropic vision: He would bring these chafed and resentful people, by mildness and understanding, into the fold of white law and religion—but not before he, unlike all previous missionaries and go-betweens, had come to understand their ways and language. In 1828, in the lull before the final desperate retaliations of the black tribes, Arthur had advertised for a man who might be able to conciliate them. Robinson had put himself forward and was accepted. He tried to evangelize the blacks on Bruny Island in 1829, but his real work began the following year, when he went on an arduous eight-month trek into the wilderness of the southwest and west coast searching for surviving tribal groups of Aborigines. He had a party with him made up of trusty convict servants, an aboriginal chief from Bruny Island named Woorrady and another from the Swanport district named Eumarrah, four black tribesmen and three women.

  One of the latter was a bright, promiscuous girl named Trucanini, about eighteen years old, also from Bruny Island.98 She was very small, only 4 feet 3 inches high, and had pronounced curly whiskers; in other respects, all white witnesses agreed, she was remarkably attractive—for an Aborigine. As a child, she had seen her mother stabbed to death in a night raid by whites; later, a sealer named John Baker had kidnapped two of her tribal sisters and her blood sister, Moorina, and taken them in slavery to the tribe of white pirates that lived on Kangaroo Island, far to the west off the coast of South Australia. He
r stepmother was abducted by the convict mutineers of the brig Cyprus and must have died as they were seeking China; she was never heard from again. Around 1828, she was crossing from the mainland to Bruny Island with several tribesmen, to one of whom she was “betrothed,” in a boat manned by two convict loggers. In mid-channel, the whites seized the black men and threw them overboard; when they grabbed for the gunwale and tried to haul themselves up, the loggers chopped their hands off and left them to sink. They then rowed her ashore and raped her. Trucanini, one would presume, had every reason to hate the whites. In fact she sought their company thereafter and was busy becoming a sealers’ moll, sterile from gonorrhea, hanging around the camps and selling herself for a handful of tea and sugar, when Robinson and his guide Woorrady persuaded her to come on their long, strange journey of “conciliation” to the remaining tribes of Van Diemen’s Land.

  They all set off in the winter of 1830, ill-equipped and badly provisioned, and suffered appalling hardships from exposure, hunger and scurvy. But they worked their way around the west coast, from Port Davey to Macquarie Harbor and thence to Cape Grim, the aptly named northwesternmost tip of Van Diemen’s Land. From there they struck east along the coast and reached Launceston early in October, just after Arthur’s Black Line had begun working south.

  Robinson was to venture upon five more such expeditions, and by the end of 1834 Robinson had made contact with every tribe and group of Aborigines left in Tasmania. Always the method was the same: opening civilities with presents and food, and a winning of the shy or hostile blacks’ confidence with the help of Woorrady and Trucanini; a compilation of their basic vocabularies; notes on their ceremonies and religious customs, as far as he could determine them; a friendly parting, and then a new visit with promises of sanctuary. If they would “come in” with him, the Conciliator told these dying and frightened remnants of their race, they would be given a safe haven where no white man would persecute them, where they would have food and clothing and peace. Slowly, the blacks followed him; and when he brought in the last of the once-feared warriors of the Big River and Oyster Bay tribes—a pathetic group of sixteen people—he was greeted like a Roman conqueror in Hobart. A colonial artist, Benjamin Duterreau, painted him posed with “his” Aborigines; the girl on the right, leading a doubtful native by one hand and pointing at Robinson with the other, is Trucanini, the arch-traitor to her race.