Australians

by Thomas Keneally

  In the meantime Bishop and his men began the first cropping of the rich harvest of seals in the Furneaux group, Bishop putting a group of fifteen men into Kent Bay on wild and wind-torn Cape Barren Island at the eastern end of the strait. The southern waters had for millennia been the uninterrupted feeding and breeding ground for fur seals, hair seals and elephant seals, and now a new colonial business that involved living far from control in clothing of sealskin and wallaby, on a diet of ship’s biscuit and stew made up of anything from wombat to kangaroo to cassowary to mutton bird would begin, and would have its attractions. The bludgeoning of seals, the boiling down of blubber and curing of sealskin for enormously distant markets, if tainted by the stink of putrefaction, was no worse than what men lived with aboard ship or in ill-sewered towns. The gangs scudded from island to island, killing-place to killing-place, in flimsy boats. Their calling was dangerous, but probably less so than whaling. One who certainly liked the life was Samuel Rodman Chase of Rhode Island, an American seaman who would continue his association with Vandemonian sealing for the rest of his life and who married Marianne Letitia, daughter of Van Diemen’s Land’s Lieutenant-Governor, David Collins. He would inhabit the strait until he drowned in southern waters about 1827.

  Leaving the men on Cape Barren Island in place, the Nautilus arrived back at Port Jackson on 25 December 1798 with more than five thousand sealskins. As busy as they were with Christmas, the former convicts Henry Kable and James Underwood had time to hear from Bishop.

  The next time Bishop visited Kent Bay, in January 1799, he brought back 9000 sealskins to Port Jackson. From 1799 to 1805 there were catches of three, four and five thousand seals. From about 1806, however, the harvest declined, and seals could be found only in places which were dangerous to get a boat to. The methods remained consistent: clubbing was the way of killing the fur seal but the elephant seal was stabbed in the heart so that its blood would drain away and not contaminate the blubber.

  Far to the west of the Furneaux Islands, Captain Reid of the Martha sighted Kangaroo Island at the end of 1799. Three years later, sealing was firmly established there with gangs living at Point Cowper on the east coast and on the north-west coast as well. Nearly forty years before the Europeans settled the South Australian coastline across from Kangaroo Island, the fires of the sealers were blazing near Kangaroo Head and beneath Billygoat Falls.

  Portland Bay on what would be the Victorian coast, not far from the present South Australian border, also served as a base for visiting sealers years before Captain Collins attempted a settlement at Port Phillip in 1804, the one he quickly abandoned to take his convicts and settlers to Van Diemen’s Land and the site of Hobart.

  In October 1802 Governor King mentioned in a dispatch that he had allocated exclusive rights to seal at Cape Barren Island to the merchants Kable and Underwood. From 1803 the ships of these two redeemed convicts dropped off gangs on islands, and returned later to retrieve sealskins and oil. There were dwelling huts at Kent Bay in 1804 and even a shipyard for constructing a small coastal boat.

  François Péron, the young zoologist on the French expedition of Nicolas Baudin, having lost an eye for his country in defence of the revolution, and now travelling on a scientific voyage to chart the Australian coast for French purposes, visited the sealers of Bass Strait and seemed fascinated by them. At the King Island fishery at Sea Elephant Bay he met the sailor Daniel Cooper and ten others who had been landed there from the Margaret in June 1802, and described their camp, not yet a permanent year-round settlement. The men, said Péron, lived in four huts or shanties. Daniel Cooper, their leader, occupied one of the hovels with a woman whom he had brought from Maui. A great fireplace fed day and night with tree trunks served to warm the inhabitants and cook their food. A large shed contained a huge quantity of barrels filled with oil, and there were several thousand sealskins dried and ready for shipment to China. From a butcher’s hook hung five or six cassowaries, the same number of kangaroos and two fat wombats. A big copper filled with meat had just been taken off the fire. There was no bread or biscuit when Péron and some of the other French voyagers went to dinner there, but all the sealers seemed vigorous and healthy.

  On the lee or eastern side of the New Year Islands, Péron also met twelve Englishmen employed by the Commissary General for New South Wales, Mr Palmer.

  Another early report speaks of the Bass Strait sealers as mentally deranged because of long lonely months on gale-swept islands—‘their days filled with the stench of rotting carcasses must have had some adverse effect on the minds of men already tainted with viciousness and brutality’. But that picture ignores those to whom it was the only satisfactory way of life left, and to whom a vacuum of authority was a prized environment.

  Over on the western end of the Great Australian Bight, in King George Sound, in what is now Western Australia, cropping of the seal population by visiting gangs had also begun. In February 1803, Baudin called there and met Yankee Captain Pendle of the snow Union, who was looking for seals but complained there were too few to give him a cargo. Baudin suggested he should try Kangaroo Island, which he did with more success.

  After 1804, ships’ visits to the sealers became less frequent and between 1805 and 1820 the sealers of Bass Strait became full-time residents of the islands. The Currency lad James Kelly’s evidence to the Bigge enquiry in 1820 mentioned these communities. The sealers had houses, gardens and animals, he said, and they collected mutton birds and kangaroo skins as well as sealskins. They used whaleboats to reach the seal colonies.

  James Munro, a former Londoner sent to New South Wales for the theft of calico, was changed by a religious epiphany on his way to Australia and became expert at navigating the islands of Bass Strait. From 1820 he lived on Preservation Island, and grew vegetables and bred rabbits for passing whalers and sealers. He also kept their sealskins ready for collection. He would ultimately be made a constable with power to arrest runaway convicts in the strait, and so came to act as liaison between visiting government officials and ships’ captains, and the sealers themselves.

  Most notable of these visitors was George Augustus Robinson, a pious Englishman and former engineer who sailed to the Furneaux Group in November 1830 to battle the sealers for possession of their islands, which were needed for Aboriginal re-settlement. He also wanted to repatriate the sealers’ Aboriginal women stolen from the tribes of north-east Tasmania. He would be defeated on both fronts.

  By this time, the population of sealers on Kangaroo Island sold wallaby pelts and salt from the natural lagoons there as well as sealskins. In anticipation of visiting ships, either from America or from Kable and Underwood and others, these goods would be packed on the beach. The merchants came in and took them, and left alcohol, tea and tobacco. The sealers received in kind or money a fraction—perhaps as little as one-hundredth—of what the merchants made. Kable, Underwood, Lord and others, former thieves, had learned from their betters how really to skin a cat.

  As noted, the sealers were not alone on the islands. Aboriginal women, especially those from the violently windy Cape Grim country in the north-west of Van Diemen’s Land, had been captured as sexual partners and were put to work as well since they knew how to build shelters in that region of constant wind, how to catch fish, dive for shellfish and trap wallabies. They could find birds’ eggs, and thread shoes with the sinew taken from the tails of kangaroos. The Tasmanian Aboriginal women also taught the white men how to kill mutton birds, pluck their feathers and squeeze out their oil. By the late 1820s the Bass Strait communities, including the women, were sailing into Launceston to sell mutton bird feathers (for bedspreads), and mutton bird oil for lamps. Their unions were unconsecrated and often based on violence. In 1830, Robinson met seventy-four women living with sealers, and was told of another fourteen living on Kangaroo Island.

  Penderoin, a Pennemukeer Aboriginal from Cape Grim, told Robinson that in December 1827 sealers had landed and ambushed a group of his people. One Pennemukeer man,
hiding in a tree, threw a spear at the attackers and the sealers shot him, and captured seven women, stealing them away to Kangaroo Island. A few weeks later, in January 1828, another group of sealers opened fire on the Pennemukeer from the caves on the Doughboys Rocks opposite Cape Grim. Landing, they forced the Pennemukeer at gunpoint onto a cliff edge and bound them with cord. Twelve to fourteen women were abducted that day and taken to Kangaroo Island. Since several Pennemukeer died in the raid, Pennemukeer men would later club three sealers to death.

  There were even reports of the murder and trading of Aboriginal women. A Bass Strait sealer named Mansell certainly made occasional trades in women. In the Hobart press, the Aboriginal women living with the sealers were presented as animalistic—beaten with the bludgeons used on the seals, and fed after the dogs.

  Yet sometimes these transactions were peaceable. As early as 1810 the northeast coastal Aboriginal people met up with sealers arriving in open boats. The sealers were honoured with a corroboree, and sometimes the tribal leaders would negotiate for women to go temporarily with the sealers and come back with meat and other payments in kind—dogs, flour or mutton birds. But such dealings became rarer.

  Bushrangers faced with surviving in the seemingly trackless tiers of Van Diemen’s Land, however, found exchange with the Aborigines essential. Aboriginal women could be wonderful guides to Europeans on the edges of the viable world. The bushranger James Carrot, for example, was taught by Aboriginal women to make moccasins from untanned kangaroo skin. But he also forced his Aboriginal paramour to walk in front of him wearing round her neck the head of the husband he had murdered. Michael Howe, one of the most famous Vandemonian bushrangers, had an Aboriginal partner and, like many of the early bushrangers, dressed in kangaroo skins and blackened his face, signifying that he had more in common with the natives than with British society.

  In south-eastern Van Diemen’s Land, a small-boned girl named Trukanini met George Augustus Robinson. The would-be saviour of the Vandemonian natives was appointed by the colonial government to assess their welfare and at the time, in 1829, he was trying to establish a township and haven for the Aborigines on Bruny Island, south of Hobart. Trukanini told him of a family’s obliteration: her mother had been murdered by sealers, her sister was abducted by sealers and was believed to be living on Kangaroo Island, 600 kilometres to the west. Her uncle had been shot by soldiers, and her betrothed Paraweena killed by timber-getters. She was willing to help Robinson in return for the protection of her people from the firearms of the interlopers.

  Robinson was also becoming aware of a growing and possibly fatal imbalance between male and female in the north-eastern Tasmanian Aboriginals. Some historians claim that the sealers destroyed a number of Aboriginal clans on the north coast of Tasmania through abduction of women and the associated violent conflict which tended to reduce the population of Aboriginal males, as well as, of course, removing women. But it is also ironically true that the sealers let their native wives practise and pass on ceremonial knowledge and beliefs. For all their rough-handedness, the sealers were different from other settlers in that they did not try to convert the Aborigines to Christianity or to suppress their rites.

  When the Astrolabe under the French explorer Dumont d’Urville called at Kangaroo Island in October 1826 it found a party of sealers who had landed seven months earlier in distress for food. Their mother ship, the Governor Brisbane, had been seized by the Dutch government in Batavia, but not before leaving sealing gangs at Westernport and at King George Sound as well as on Kangaroo Island.

  Yet when D’Urville offered to take them to Port Jackson, they refused. Three finally agreed to accompany him, one as a seaman, the other two as passengers. One of those who remained was a New Zealand male, and there were Aboriginal women with the party who chose to stay, whether by choice or from fear is impossible to say. The all-important boat steerers, George Thomas and William Bundy, remained. Two other sealing boats from stations along the Kangaroo Island coast turned up while the Astrolabe was there, one of the boats including an Aboriginal native from Port Jackson and the other a black American who spoke quite good French. A French expeditioner used two Tasmanian Aboriginal women in the party to draw up a Tasmanian vocabulary which would ultimately be published.

  Global politics were reaching out to contain these unofficial settlements of sealers and Aboriginal partners. In 1827, middle-aged Major Edmund Lockyer of the 57th Regiment was sent on an 84-ton (87-tonne) brig, Amity, all the way to the present Western Australia to form a settlement on King George Sound before the French could. He landed at Michaelmas Island in King George Sound on Christmas Day. There he found four Aboriginal men marooned, and returned them to the coast when he established his settlement. In the early new year a boat containing men previously dropped by a sealing ship in the Recherche group landed at the settlement. They were accompanied by two native women. They reported they were starving, having been dumped by a ship which never returned. Though Lockyer fed them he removed from their care a seven-year-old half-caste girl named Fanny, whom he sent ultimately to Sydney. As for the men, Lockyer was appalled. ‘They are a complete set of pirates going from island to island along the southern coast from Rottnest Island to Bass’s Strait in open whaleboats, having their chief resort or den at Kangaroo Island, making occasional descents on the mainland and carrying off by force native women, and when resisted make use of the firearms of which they are provided.’ Lockyer recommended that the government should enter the trade each year from November to the end of the following April, but that there should be a severe penalty for killing pups.

  Lockyer’s settlement was moved in March 1831 to Swan River, but by then the catches for sealers in King George Sound were small in any case.

  The sealers, as described by Lockyer, were thus a challenge to action for the Commissioners of the South Australian Company, who in 1836 were about to establish the province of South Australia. It was certainly convenient for them to portray the Kangaroo Island sealers as savages, from whose inroads the natives were now to be saved. A report of the South Australian Company declared, ‘The colonisation of South Australia by industrious and virtuous settlers, so far from being an invasion of the rights of the Aborigines, is a necessary preliminary to the displacement of the lawless squatters, the abandoned sailors, the runaway convicts, the pirates, the worse than savages, that now infest the coast of New Holland and perpetrate against the defenceless native crimes at which humanity revolts.’

  Yet a letter from South Australian Commissioner John Morphett in the supplement of the same report described the Kangaroo Islanders as ‘intelligent, quiet men, having spots of land under cultivation; growing a little wheat, with potatoes, turnips, and other vegetables. They have all expressed pleasure at the opportunity of entering into the relations of civilised life.’ Nor was it true that Kangaroo Island was populated by runaway convicts as, unlike the islands of Bass Strait, it did not offer convicts much chance of getting away to Britain, France or America on sailing vessels.

  As late as 7 October 1842 the Perth Gazette reported that Robert Gamble, originally from Van Diemen’s Land, was living on Bald Island, about thirty kilometres to the eastward of King George Sound, with black women and his children by them. By then, the larger island communities had fallen under the influence of government, and of the disciples of Christ.

  SOME NOTES ON MATTHEW FLINDERS

  After his circumnavigation of Van Diemen’s Land with the energetic young surgeon George Bass, Matthew Flinders returned to England in March 1800. He was quickly promoted to the command of HMS Investigator and told by the Admiralty to explore ‘the unknown coast’—the southern coast of Australia from the Port Phillip area westwards. Before he left for New South Wales, he married a parson’s daughter whom he had known since youth, and was passionate enough to try to smuggle her on board. According to one story, the Lords of the Admiralty came to inspect the Investigator and found Flinders in the cabin with his wife, Anne, on his knee. What
ever the truth of this tale, even Sir Joseph Banks chastised him and warned him that if he took Anne to New South Wales, he would lose his command.

  Flinders reached the unknown coast and began charting, and met the Frenchman Nicolas Baudin and his expedition aboard Le Géographe, who were coming westwards, at Encounter Bay in today’s South Australia. Having reached Sydney and overhauled there, the young English commander decided to circumnavigate the continent, beginning by going north and making a detailed survey of what is now the Queensland coast and the Gulf of Carpentaria. Because of its un-seaworthiness the Investigator had to be careened in Torres Strait, and was found to have rotten timbers. Flinders set his carpenters to work. To his immortal repute, he completed the circumnavigation of the continent in his flawed vessel.

  Flinders returned to England as a passenger on Porpoise in great desire of seeing Anne, but also to scout out a suitable vessel to complete aspects of the survey which the condition of the Investigator had prevented him from doing to his satisfaction and the Admiralty’s demands. But the Porpoise struck a reef on the Queensland coast and Flinders was left to navigate her cutter more than a thousand kilometres back to Sydney. This time he sailed in a schooner named the Cumberland, a small ship of 29 tons/tonnes, which was also in terrible condition. After travelling via Torres Strait, Flinders decided in the Indian Ocean to put in to Mauritius to refit, for he had a French laissez-passer, which enabled him to approach French ports. Mauritius was to do great disservice to this honest officer who was in the prime of his life and had much work to do.

  The French explorer Nicolas Baudin had written to the governor in Mauritius asking him to treat any English ship forced to moor there with kindness, given that his own ships had been welcomed into Sydney and many of his sick crew treated ashore in Sydney Cove. But the small-minded Governor de Caen imprisoned Flinders as a spy, though later letting him live in the town where he spent time working on his journals. De Caen used the fact that the Cumberland was carrying dispatches from Port Jackson as an excuse to detain Flinders even after 1806, when Napoleon gave approval for his release. De Caen justified keeping Flinders in place by suggesting that he was the forerunner of a British intention to absorb Mauritius into the British Empire. Indeed, by 1809 the British were blockading the island and its capture by them became inevitable.